Orbitsville Trilogy

by Bob Shaw

  "I was talking to Rick a little while ago," she said. "He told me what happened to your family. I'd heard about it before, but I didn't realise … I didn't connect you…"

  "It's all right. It's my problem."

  She nodded thoughtfully. "I've heard of people making a full recovery."

  "It depends on how close they were to the gun. If only the memory cells are affected it's possible for a person to be re-educated, recreated almost, in a year or so, because all the connecting networks that person built up are still intact. But if the cell connections have been damaged…"

  Dallen hesitated, shocked at finding himself discussing the subject with an outsider, and even more so by what he was about to admit to himself. "Cona and Mikel were hit at very close range. I think they're gone."

  "I'm so sorry." Silvia stared at him for a moment, shoulders slightly raised, as if coming to a decision. "Garry, I'm not trying to push Karal's ideas at you, but there's something I'd like you to see. Will you come and look?"

  "I don't mind," He said, setting his glass down.

  "Through here." Silvia led the way to the back of the studio, into a workshop which was equipped with a range of machine tools, and from there into a short corridor. At the end of it was a heavy door which she opened by thumbprinting the lock. Revealed was a large square chamber which was dominated by a rectangular transparent box resembling a display case in a museum. Suspended inside the box on near-invisible wires were six spheres of polished alloy roughly a metre in diameter. Dallen went closer to the case and saw that each sphere was surrounded by a cluster of delicate needle-like probes, all of them impinging in a direction normal to the surface. Wires from the bases of the probes converged on instrument housings on the floor beneath the case.

  "Impressive," Dallen said. "I've seen a Newton's cradle before, but not his double bed."

  "My husband and five other volunteers are surrendering their lives for this experiment," Silvia replied, making it clear that flippancy was not welcome. "The probes are not actually touching the spheres, though it looks that way. The tip of each one is ten microns from the surface. They're kept at that distance by sensors and microcontrols even if the spheres are disturbed by local vibrations or earth tremors or temperature changes. The system compensates for all natural forces."

  "What's the point of it?"

  Silvia's face was solemn. "It won't compensate for supranatural forces. Karal is planning to move the first sphere in the line when he becomes discarnate. If he is successful, as he fully expects to be, the sphere will make contact with one or more probes, and there'll be a signal."

  "I see." Dallen sought a way to conceal his instinctive scepticism. "Proof of life after death."

  "Proof that what we call death is merely a transition."

  Dallen realised that he had to be honest. "Haven't other people tried to send signals back from the quote other side unquote?"

  "They weren't physicists with a full understanding of quantum non-location and the forces involved."

  "No, but … I never heard of mindons before tonight, but I gather that if they exist at all their interaction with matter is very, very weak. How could a … discarnate entity composed of mindons hope to move a thing like that?" Dallen flicked his thumb to indicate the nearest of the massive spheres.

  "Karal teaches that mindons are somehow related to gravitons."

  "But we don't even know that gravitons exist."

  "But, but, but!" Silvia's smile was sadly messianic. "Has it ever struck you how onomatopoeic that word is?"

  "I'm in a constant state of wonderment over it," Dallen said and immediately cursed the verbal reflex which often tricked him into hurting those he had no wish to hurt, but Silvia was unaffected.

  She went straight into a discourse on nuclear physics, the gist of which was that not all fundamental interactions are common to all particles—a neutrino having just one—which opened the theoretical door for mindons having only the mental interaction plus another, as yet undemonstrated, with gravitons. The picture Dallen received was one of a dead Karal London somehow riding herd on a swarm of gravitons and guiding them across interstellar space to collide with one of the six spheres. He also gleaned that there were five other elderly disciples—-one on Orbitsville, one on the planet Terranova, three in various parts of Earth—who had similar visionary plans, each with a separate sphere as his target. It was a scenario which Dallen found quite preposterous.

  "I'm sorry," he said, 'it's too much for me. I can't believe it."

  "Belief isn't necessary at this stage—all you have to do is accept that it's all conceivable in terms of present day physics." Silvia spoke as one repeating a creed. "A personality is a structure of mental entities, existing in mental space, and it survives destruction of the brain even though it required the brain's complex physical organisation in order to develop."

  "My brain is getting a bit overheated," Dallen said, dabbing imaginary sweat from his brow.

  "All right—here endeth the first lesson—but I warn you you'll get more of the same when you come back." Silvia walked to the door of the chamber and paused for him to join her. "If you come back."

  "I don't scare easily." You liar, he told himself, you're going weak at the knees. He was acutely aware as he walked towards her that a clearly delineated "business" phase of the encounter had ended, that they were alone, and that she was waiting in the actual doorway, which meant there would be a moment in which it would be almost impossible to avoid contact. He went to her and an instinct prompted him to extend his hands, palm outwards and fingers slightly apart, in a gesture which had meaning only for the two of them and only for that unique instant. Silvia put her hands against his, interlocking their fingers, and the warmth of her entered him and changed him. He tried to move closer, but she checked him with a slight increase of pressure.

  "Don't kiss me, Garry," she said. "I couldn't handle it."

  "Does that mean it's too soon?"

  She eyed him soberly. "I think that's what it means."

  "In that case," he said, deciding that a change of mood would be good strategy, "shall we repair to wherever people repair at a time like this?"

  Silvia nodded, looking grateful, and they walked back through the studio to the main part of the house, where she parted from him to attend other guests. Dallen's feeling of elation lasted perhaps five seconds after she was lost to view, and then—as he had known it would—there came a reaction. The predominant emotion was guilt, his constant companion in recent weeks, but now a caustic new element had been added, one he had trouble identifying. Was it in the acknowledgement of what Silvia London could do to him, his belated discovery of the difference between affection, which he had always assumed to be love, and another kind of emotion altogether—wayward and unsettling—which might really be love?"

  I ought to get out of here, he thought. I ought to get out of here right now and never come back. He turned to walk to the door and almost collided with Peter Ezzati and his wife.

  "You've been getting your indoctrination," Ezzati said gleefully. "I can tell by your face."

  "Peter!" Libby was overtly tactful. "Garry doesn't want intrusions."

  Dallen looked down at her, recalled his earlier lack of manners and forced a smile. "I'm afraid I get a bit irritable when it's past my bedtime—I must need a cocoa infusion or something."

  "I'll get you a proper drink," Ezzati said, moving away. "Scotch and water, wasn't it?"

  Dallen considered calling him back and refusing the drink and leaving immediately, then came the realisation that it was still only around ten in the evening and his chances of sleeping if he went back to his empty house were zero. It could be a good idea to spend some time with neutral and undemanding people, to wind down a little and prove to himself that he was a balanced and-mature person with complete control over his emotions.

  "I was reading a bit about probability math the other day," he said, seeking total irrelevancy. "It said that if two people lose each
other in a big department store there's no guarantee they'll ever meet up again unless one of them stands still."

  An expression of polite bafflement appeared on Libby's round face. "How interesting."

  "Yes, but if you think about it that has to be one of the most useless pieces of information ever. I mean…"

  "I've never been to a big department store," Libby said, "it must have been wonderful to visit somewhere like Macy's before they let New York go down. Something else that's been lost…"

  Dallen was unable to produce an original comment. "You win some, you lose some."

  "If that were the case things might be reasonable, but the fact is that we lose, lose, lose. Optima Thule has taken everything and given nothing back."

  In spite of his emotional disquiet, Dallen was able to interest himself in the point of view. "Aren't we taking from Optima Thule? Isn't it doing all the giving?"

  "I'm not talking about patches of grass. What has the human race done in the last two centuries? Nothing! There has been practically no progress in any of the arts. Science is static. Technology is actually slipping back a notch or two every year. Orbitsville is a sink!"

  "This seems to be my lecture night," Dallen said.

  "I'm sorry." Libby gave him a rueful smile and he realised he had been too quick to categorise her earlier. "I'm a romantic, you see, and for me Orbitsville is an ending, not a beginning. I can't help wondering what Garamond and all the others would have found if Orbitsville hadn't been there and they had kept on going."

  "Probably nothing."

  "Probably, but now we'll never know. There's a galaxy out there, and we turned our backs on it. Sometimes, when I'm feeling paranoic, I suspect that Orbitsville was built for that very reason."

  "Orbitsville wasn't built by anybody," Dallen said. "Only people who have never been there can think of it as an artifact… When you've actually seen the oceans and the mountains and the…" He broke off as Ezzati appeared at his side and thrust a full glass into his hand with unnecessary vigour.

  "Some of these guys have a bloody nerve," Ezzati muttered, his apple cheeks dark with anger. "I'm doing no more favours, folks—not for anybody."

  Libby was immediately sympathetic. "What happened?"

  "That young weasel Solly Hume, that's what happened! He's getting tanked up in the next room, and when I hinted to him—purely for his own good, mind you—that he was overdoing it a bit he had the gall to say I owed him fifty monits."

  "Peter, you haven't been borrowing," Libby said, looking concerned.

  "Try to talk sense, will you?" Ezzati gulped down some liquor and concentrated his attention on Dallen. "Last week I practically gave that kid Hume an obsolete computer for his stupid bloody society, and tonight he had the nerve to ask for his money back. Said its guts had been denatured or something like that. What does he expect from a gizmo that's been lying in a basement since the year dot?"

  "Perhaps he thought it would have glass tubes," Dallen said, wishing his own problems could be so trivial. "You know—hollow state technology."

  "No, it's only an old Department of Supply monitor he found on Sublevel Three. There used to be a computer centre down there. Apparently this thing was supposed to keep tabs on municipal supplies. It beats me why anybody would want to be bothered with it."

  Dallen felt the coolness return to his system, as if a door was swinging ajar.

  "You've argued yourself into a corner, darling," Libby said scornfully. "If the monitor was so boring and useless in the first place you were lucky to get fifty monits for it."

  "Yes, but…" Ezzati glared at her, unwilling to concede the point. "I'll take it back from Hume and advertise it properly. Electronic archaeology is a big thing these days, you know. As a matter of fact…" He frowned into his glass as he swirled its contents. "…I might already have another customer. I seem to remember somebody else asking me about that machine."

  "Now you're being childish," Libby said, her voice vibrant with scorn. "Admit it."

  Dallen stared frozenly at Ezzati, willing him to produce a name.

  "Perhaps you're right," Ezzati said with a shrug. "Why should I get worked up when it isn't my money that's involved? You don't get any credit for bringing the job home with you. Not around here, anyway. There was a time when I was dumb enough to believe that all it took to get a man to the top in Madison was hard work and dedication and loyalty, then I got wise to myself and … Gerald Mathieu!"

  "You got wise to yourself and Gerald Mathieu?" Libby stared at him, feigning concern, and raised her gaze to Dallen's face. "Have you any idea what my idiot husband is talking about?"

  "I'm afraid he has lost me," Dallen said, moving away in search of a place where he could be alone with his thoughts, where he could begin to draw up his plans.

  Chapter 11

  There were now only two aircraft at the disposal of Madison City's executive board, and one of them had been grounded for more than a week pending the arrival of parts. Mayor Bryceland was inclined to treat the remaining machine as his personal transport, with the result that it had taken Mathieu four anxious days to get behind its controls. He had one decent fix of felicitin in hand, but had been rationing his usage severely to obtain that slender reserve. As he fastened down the aircraft's canopy he felt tired and apprehensive, almost certain there would be a last-minute hitch to prevent his taking off.

  Far off to his right, its lower surface obscured by heat shimmers, was the blue-and-white hull of a space shuttle which had just landed. The churning of the hot air above the expanse of ferrocrete was so violent that Mathieu had difficulty in seeing the disembarking tourists, but it seemed to him that there were less than usual. It had already been a bad year for the hotels along Farewell Avenue—the thoroughfare which had once channeled millions of emigrants into space—and it looked as though things were going to get worse. There had to come a day, Mathieu realised, when the remote bureaucrats of Optima Thule would pull out the plug and stop subsidising the holiday pilgrimages to Earth. And when that happened he would be out of a job and would have to consider returning to his birthplace.

  The thought of venturing out among the stars, of having to spend the rest of his life on the surface of an incredibly flimsy bubble, brought the usual stab of agoraphobic dread. He began to reach for the gold pen in his inner pocket, became aware of what he was doing and returned his hand to the aircraft's control column. Far ahead of him, a quivering silvery blur at the lower edge of the sky's blue dome, was a freighter coming in from Metagov Central Clearing in Winnipeg. It gradually drifted off to one side and the on-board microprocessor advised Mathieu that it was in order for him to begin the flight.

  Deciding to do the work himself, he extended the aircraft's invisible wings to take-off configuration and increased the thrust from its drive tubes. In a matter of seconds he was soaring above the complex of disused runways which constituted most of Madison Field. He banked to the west and levelled off at only a hundred metres, aiming at the serried green ridges which were the southernmost reaches of the Appalachians. The ship's shadow raced beneath him, fringed with prismatics from sunlight which had become entangled in force-field wings.

  It came to Mathieu that this was his first time to be airborne since the City Hall incident … woman and child, crumpling, plastic doll faces with plastic doll eyes…and that he was deriving none of his customary satisfaction from the experience. Flying fast and low on manual control over the empty countryside had been one of his most biding pleasures, the perfect escape from all the pressures of identity, but on this summer morning his problems were easily keeping pace, like invisible wingmen.

  The pay-offs he had to make to run his illegal business were growing at a frightening rate, his work was suffering, women friends were reacting badly to changes in his temperment, and—looming above all else—was the responsibility for having extinguished two human personalities. There was the associated guilt … and the consequent fear of Garry Dallen, which felicitin could only alla
y for short periods … and it was hard to say which was casting the greater pall over his existence. And he had become so very, very tired…

  Mathieu opened his eyes and stared at the green wall of hillside which was tilting and expanding directly ahead of him, filling his field of view.

  Christ, I'm going to die!

  He shouted a curse as he realised where he was and what was happening to him. His hands pulled back on the control column, but the hillside kept coming at him, huge and solid and lethal, determined to reduce his body to a crimson slurry. It was aided and abetted by the laws of aerodynamics which imposed a lag between a control demand and the ship's response, and he knew only too well that the penalty for acting too late was death.

  Mathieu cringed back in the seat, eyes distended and mouth agape, as the expansion of the hillside speeded up to become a green explosion. The control column was back to its full extent, punishing the shuddering airframe, calling on the ship to do the impossible—then an edge of sky appeared.

  The horizon rocked and fell away beneath the ship's prow.

  For perhaps a minute Mathieu sat mouthing swear words, stringing them into a meaningless chant while his heart lurched and thudded like a runaway motor which was tearing itself from its mountings. Only when his breathing had retained to normal and the prickling of cold sweat had died away from his forehead and palms was he able to relax, but even then he did not feel quite safe. He glanced around the quiet-droning environment of the cockpit and had actually begun to check his instruments when it dawned on him that the new threat, the new source of danger, was in his own mind.

  An idea had been implanted, one which had been conceived during the brush with oblivion. For a single instant, in the midst of all the prayer and panic, there had been the temptation—strange, sweet and shameful—to push forward on the stick. In that split-second he could almost have gone willingly to his death, riding the crest of a dark wave.