Watson, Ian - SSC

by The Very Slow Time Machine (v1. 1)

“Then they’re not intelligent compared with us.”

  “We seem like nothing to them, Rhoda. They are reality perpetually reasserting itself in the midst of the ocean of becoming.”

  “They’re zombies. And ghouls. You’ve let your imagination run riot this time, Lob.”

  “Certainly it’s in my imagination. It’s because I have internalized them in my trance, that’s why it’s true. They have group sensitivity, you see. Empathy. They share their hero’s pain. Pain’s the only concept we really have to communicate urgently, to stop it, don’t you see? Only in this way can a name arise, of necessity, with its own internal truth. Then they can safely apply its truth to everything.

  “But they can’t name this world any other way, except by fitting themselves into their own shape; the world into its own shape, by extension. Really, it’s the same with the universe at large. Only we never dare acknowledge it. What is a universe? I ask myself. One thing, by definition. The totality of all there is. There’s nothing to compare it with. All you can do is put the thing into itself and see what it fits. They’ve got the right idea. We must attend the next dawn cooking, to hear it for ourselves.”

  “Too tricky,” warned Rhoda. “They may want to bake us this time.”

  Lob shook his head.

  “We’re quite safe, we’re invisible now. Only Clayfolk make heroes. Only they can fit into themselves. We failed.’’

  So, despite Rhoda’s qualms, we were present at j the village hearth during the next dawning when the Clayfolk swarmed to greet the light; in this instance, light from a simultaneous rising of the sun in the north-west, and gasgiant in the southeast. Amid purple mists and binary shadows we invisibles watched the spit put to use again; a dayman folded over it, the fire kindled, the clay slapped on by many fingers, the pipes stuck in his mouth and nostrils and his rectum. I held Rhoda’s hand, to comfort her.

  That cry of pain came again and again through ! the clay pipes stuck in the being’s mouth, as he ; turned, and baked, inside the clay suit: and we heard that selfsame glottal slobbery bark as had assaulted our ears since we first set foot on the Clayworld.

  “I name this reality, Pain,’’ sang Lob. “We standi at the place where the only real word is given, utterance. It is the compact of agreement. It affirms What-Is.”

  Then, in a more conversational tone, jerking his thumb at the avenue of bent-over statues, he added: “That isn’t really a road at all. Essentially it doesn’t lead anywhere; it just leads.”

  “A road must go some place!”

  “Why, Rhoda? That isn’t a highway, it’s aruJe, a series. And its statues aren’t statues, they’re definitions. Each is a fitting-into-itself. But I don’t advise we pursue the Clayfolk out along it, we mightn’t find our way back so easily . . .”

  After a time the cry died away into a sigh that might have been simply the natural passage of air through that thing on the spit. However the Clayfolk had already taken the word up, and were repeating it over and over, gesturing at everything in their world.

  “Admit it, Lob, it’s a nonsense interpretation,” insisted Rhoda while I piloted us up through the clouds towards the clarity of space. She addressed Lob harshly and petulantly, as though he was guilty of a crime. He only bowed his head and meditated.

  Then a solar system was around us once again, obeying sensible laws; and stars in their constellations and clusters; and the far smudges of galaxies. Ahead lay the mother ship; silver dragonfly with bulbous head where we had our living quarters, long slim tail terminating in the knob of the plasma drive, and wings spread to harvest the interstellar hydrogen magnetically. We all sighed with relief, even Lob.

  Later, we classified the aberrant moon as UIS—Uninhabited by an Intelligent Species; dominant native life-form a biped slug with a high degree of constructive activity, instinctively programmed. By general consent Lobsang’s version was vetoed. I think even Lob was happy to be overruled this time. We sped away to more substantial worlds, where his insights served us well enough, subsequently.

  I haven’t time to tell about his breakthrough with the fire beings of Achernar IV or the slime molds of Deneb VII. But it must have been an off-day for him, that time on the Clayworld. Yet he never quite admitted it. He had his pride—as Rhoda had hers. After all, a Sherpa had been joint-first on the summit of Everest on Earth. And the universe was our Everest now—an Everest without apparent summit.

  THE EVENT HORIZON

  For the second time in three years the starship Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar sailed for the Black Hole that was the blind eye of the binary system Epsilon Aurigae, with the Arab telemedium Habib on board.

  At about the same distance from the bright supergiant that is the visible partner of the system as Pluto from the Sun, they reached their destination. Officers and scientists crowded the nacelle beside the lounge to stare into space at something they couldn’t see except insofar as it bent light from the background stars around itself in an annulus of secondary ghost images.

  The Hole itself was nothing—literally. Even the fabric of space was missing, there.

  A nova is fearful; a supernova, awe-inspiring. Yet their ravening energies are a creative mainspring of the galaxy, spewing out heavy elements for new stars and planets. They are positive energies. The mind can grasp them. But the Black Hole is all negative—the emptiness of the void multiplied a million times into something infinitely greedy. A star collapses under its own gravity, disappears from the universe and leaves a whirlpool of nothingness beyond it. Anything falling into the hole—no matter how well protected it is, no matter if it is powered by the energy of a thousand suns—is trapped forever. The Black Hole is Death the Conqueror.

  The Hole in the Aurigae system had already been located from Earth in the twentieth century by its periodic eclipses of its yellow supergiant partner every twenty-seven years; however it wasn’t till the mid-twenty-third that a starship brushed by it.

  Then, something more incredible than the Hole itself was found—a living being trapped inside it.

  The growth of Psionics Communications—the telemedium system—made the discovery possible. Instantaneous psi-force alone could enter a Black Hole and emerge again. But only if a mind was already present in there . . .

  In the nacelle, along with the officers and scientists, were the two political officers from Bu- Psych-Sec—the Bureau of Psychological Security—Lew Boyd and Liz Nielstrom; Habib, who had first made contact with the mind in there; and a young Swedish girl on her first starflight, Mara Glas.

  Habib stood out from the others by wearing traditional Arab costume: the haik and aba of the desert Bedouin. He wore the headdress and long full skirt with a striped white and blue mantle of camel-hair sacking pulled over it. By making a clown of himself in this way, parodying his uneducated nomad’s origin, he made himself acceptable to the others and guarded the privacy of his feelings; another strategy was his carefully cultivated gutter humor. He was that freak thing, a mind-whore; and however essential he might be for communications and psychological stability, the telemedium was a reluctant actor in a perpetual dirty joke.

  Psionics and sexual energy were the two great forces that Bu-Psych-Sec had learned to harness to bind starships safely to home-base Earth no matter how far they roamed. Through psi and sex, bonded together, Earth held her star fleet on the tightest leash, a leash rooted so deeply in the nervous system as to guarantee there would never be any defections to lotus worlds among the stars; nor more mundane lapses in her continual on-line monitoring of the farthest vessel.

  As they stood in the nacelle, Mara Glas tried telling herself for the hundredth time that this was all for the good of everyone at home on Earth, and for the stability of civilization; that Bu- Psych-Sec had designed the safest, most humanitarian system compatible with star empire. So she had been programmed to believe at any rate, by days of lectures and subliminal persuasion.

  But she never thought it would be like this, serving Earth’s starship communications system. She
never dreamed,

  Naturally, the Black Hole was fair pretext for a bout of boisterous smut, if only to mask their fear of the phenomenon. The very name carried such blatant connotations of the trance room that Mara thanked her stars she wasn’t born a Negress; felt pity for Habib’s darker-skinned soul.

  “There she blows!” crowed the chief engineer.

  Ted Ohashi, the astrophysicist from Hawaii—a mess of a man, like a third-rate Sumo wrestler gone to seed—snickered back:

  “That little mouth; she'll suck all the juice in the galaxy given half a chance."

  “A suck job, that's good, I like it," laughed Kurt Spiegel, the leonine Prussian from Hamburg's In- stitut fur Physik, boisterously. His wiry hair was swept back in a mane as though the abstractions of Physics had electrified it; though just as exciting to the man, in fact, was that other district of Hamburg around the Repperbahn, St. Pauli, where he got his relief from the enigmas of Schwarzschildian Geometry and Pauli Equations in the more down-to-earth contortions of the strippers going through their bump and grind routines for him, drunk on Schnapps, replete on bockwurst.

  Habib made a point of joining in the merriment, while Liz Nielstrom flashed a grin of pure malice at Mara for failing to join in.

  How the human race struggled against Beauty! Mara wept silently. How desperately they strove to make the Singular and Remarkable, dirty and shameful!

  Mara was young. With the perpetual rush to draft telemediums into the Navy, and the fewness of those with the potential among Earth’s billions, the Swedish girl was barely out of her fifteenth year before being drafted.

  One thing she didn’t know about Habib was the kind of debriefing Bu-Psych-Sec put him through after the first expedition, when he reported the existence of that mind inside the Black Hole to the incredulity of practically everyone in the Navy. They'd peeled his mind down like an onion at the Navy Hospital in Annapolis. They'd used strobe- hypno on him. Neoscopalamine. Pentathol-plus. Deepsee. It had been a harrowing, insane-making three weeks before they believed him. And it was another two years before the second expedition sailed.

  But one thing she did know about him, that no one else did, was the utter difference between the image he presented publicly of a dirty street Arab, and the sense of his mind she had whenever they’d taken the psionic trigger drug, 2-4 Psilo-C, together, to cathect with Earth across the void. Then it was like a light being switched on in a dark room, and he was a different Habib—a Bedouin of the sands, a poet, and a prophet.

  The people who rode the carrier beam of the teletrance never knew the pure beauty of the desert between the stars. All they got a sense of was the dirty urchin hanging around the oasis of far Earth, plucking at their sleeves and mumbling, “Mister, you want to buy my sister?” But Habib was the desert Bedouin too. Why did he always deny the desert beauty, out of trance?

  Maybe this was the last lesson she had to learn—the final breaking in of the foal, to insure she could be safely graduated with flying colors and posted to some star frigate by herself.

  Just then, strangely, as though he was reading her thoughts out of trance, Habib grasped her arm softly and whispered in her ear, with the voice that she’d longed to hear from his lips for the past three months—yet quietly, so that no one else could hear:

  “Compared with the void of space, Mara, whatever is the void inside that thing?”

  He asked her gently and eerily—as though the Mecca pilgrimage of their minds was at last underway and the furtive shabbiness of the caravanserais, the whores and beggary and disease, could be put behind them.

  “It is so solid a void that ‘here' and ‘there' are meaningless words. There will be no referents in there, except those you yourself manufacture, Mara . . ."

  But could she really trust this sudden shift from urchin to muezzin calling the faithful to prayer—or was it just another round in the game of cruelty?

  “It's so dense in there that it must be like swimming through stone." Habib went on murmuring in her ear. “Yet even that comparison's no good, for he has no power to swim about his dwelling place*—"

  Puzzled, Mara stared out without replying.

  The captain stepped into the nacelle a moment later—a thick-set, hard-headed grandson of Polish-German immigrants to America, who still had the air of being a peasant in from the country dressed in his best, ill-tailored suit, and who ran the ship with all the cunning and blunt persistence of the peasant making a profitable pig sale: this, alloyed to a degree or two in Astronavigation and a star or two for combatin some brushfire war in Central Africa stirred up by the draft board's “child-snatching." Immune to the wonders of space, Lodwy Rinehart barely glanced outside.

  “May I have your attention a moment? We’ll be sailing down to the ergosphere commencing twenty hundred hours—"

  Ted Ohashi gobbled nervously:

  “You mean tonight ? Maybe we should fire a few drones near that thing first, to check the stability of the ergosphere-—”

  “After three months you want to hang back another few days? Maybe you want another session with Mara Glas in case you get killed and never know those joys again, is that it? Sorry, Dr. Ohashi. Twenty hundred, we’re going right down on her up to the hilt.’’

  “Just not too close,” the fat man pleaded. “We could be sucked in, you know. Space is so bent there. No power could get us out then. Fifty nautical miles off the top of the ergosphere’s fine by me, Captain!”

  “Point taken, Dr. Ohashi,” Rinehart smiled acidly. “That’s also fine by me. ‘Up to the hilt’ was just a colorful bit of naval slang. Need I spell it out for you?”

  The German from Hamburg guffawed. “That’s good, I like it, Captain.”

  The Hawaiian snickered dutifully too then, his fat wobbling in the starlight, but he was scared.

  Mara shivered. Habib shrugged indifferently; by shrugging he hid his features in the shadow of the haik . . .

  Space presents itself to the telemedium’s mind in symbolic form. The mind can only see what it has j learned to see, and it has certainly not learned to see light-years and cosmic rays and gravity waves. Therefore space must present itself in terms of symbols learned by the brain during the cognitive processes of life on Earth.

  The symbols Habib presented Mara with were those of the desert Bedouin. Perhaps, taught by someone from her own part of the world, she would have learned to see the wastelands of the arctic tundra, the icefloes of the northern seas, or endless flows of forest. But Habib presented her with the golden desert—and for this she thanked him from the bottom of her heart, for its pure beauty had a wealth of heat and color—stark as it was—that awakened her Swedish soul to life, as the brief hot summer awakened her country from its wintry melancholy once a year.

  She remembered so clearly the surprise of that first cathexis with Earth across the light-years, in company with Habib . . .

  Every Navy man had the right and duty to cathect with Earth through the ship’s telemedium. At the other end of the link would be a home-based telemedium ridden by one of Bu- Psych-Sec’s professional “Mermaids”: forging what the Reichian-Tantric adepts of Bu-Psych- Sec liked to refer to as “libidinal cathexis” with Someone Back Home, therefore with Mother Earth herself.

  The energies of the libido, bottled-up deliberately by sex depressive drugs until the time of trance, were unleashed upon the responsive nervous system of the medium in a copulation that was both physical and transmental. The energy that ejaculated thought impulses across the light-years, through a symbolic landscape of the medium’s own devising, had been called different things at different times in history. In the twentieth century Wilhelm Reich named it Or- gone Radiation. The Tantric sexual philosophers of Old India called it, more picturesquely, the Snake of Kundalini.

  Reich had built crude machines to harness and condense this sexual energy that he believed permeated space. The Tantrics used yogic asanas to twist the body into new, prolonged forms of intercourse; they used the Om chant to make the nervo
us system a hypersensitive sounding board; and hypnotized themselves with yantra diagrams to send this energy soaring out of the copulating body through the roof of the skull toward the stars—toward some subjective cosmic immensity, at least.

  Bu-Psych-Sec had rationalized and blended Reichian therapy with the Tantric art of love and yantra meditation. In its crash course for sensitizing the potential telemediums, much of this learning was force-fed hypnotically in deep sleeps from which the medium woke, haunted by erotic cosmic ghosts, to days of pep talks on such topics as “The Spaceman’s Psychological Problems” and “The Need for Cultural Unity in an Age of Translight.” Yet there could be no live test runs of the contact techniques till a novice was on his or her way, light-months from Earth with a supervisor medium, able to draw on the repressed sexuality of the crew to reach out to another medium at Bu-Psych-Sec, Annapolis. And every single trance-trip had to figure economically in terms of vital Navy information transmitted. Each crew member riding a medium was subliminally primed with data that the mermaid at the other end received the imprint of, to be retrieved by the drug Deepsee. The Annapolis data banks were thus constantly updated; and the data copied to other banks hidden deep in the Rocky Mountains. Earth’s Navy was not a string of ships, but an integrated nervous system spread out over thousands of cubic light-years.

  Yet the doctrines of Reich and Tantra would have been nothing without the development of the trance drug 2-4-Psilo-C. It was an unforeseen spin-off from Bu-Psych-Sec’s routine work on psychedelic gases for military and civil policing.

  The two crew members who were going to ride Habib and Mara’s bodies for the first liberty of the voyage stood twiddling their thumbs with sheepish sleazy grins on their faces, their anticipation of pleasure somewhat muted by the supercilious, sophisticatedly brutal aura of Lew Boyd and his assistant.

  The previous Bu-Psych-Sec officer had been more of a therapist in the Masters and Johnson line, with less of the policeman about him. This man Boyd knew his Reich and Tantra inside out, but he carried the stamp of a trouble-shooter from the moment he joined the ship, along with that enigmatic bitch Liz Nielstrom. What kind of relationship had they had been involved in before? Their degree of mental complicity indicated more than a mere working relationship. Yet they didn’t seem to have been lovers in the ordinary sense. Rather, they appeared bound together by the cruel magic of their roles, this ugly woman and this smart cop, in a mutual indifference to sex itself except as an instrument of power. Sternly they reveled in the dialectic of the twin faces of authority, the repressive and permissive, gaining their private accord from the games they could play with this psychosexual coin. For them, the galaxy was a gaming table they could amuse themselves at, with the induced Tantric orgasms of others for chips. Professional croupiers of the cosmic naval brothel they were, dedicated to seeing that the Bureau always won, and hunting endlessly for cheats. (But who could possibly cheat? And how?)