Orbitsville Trilogy

by Bob Shaw

  Garry Dallen, you can see for yourself the fallacious nature of that interpretation of the Ethic. As the second Ultan forced itself upon Dallen's mind he detected it as an agitated swirling current of blackness. I, in common with many of my kind, understand that we Ultans have no right to impose our will, our necessarily limited vision, upon the natural ordering of Totality. The imbalance between Regions I and II in the present cycle heralds drastic change—that is trite—but it was change which produced us and all we know. Resistance to change is wrong. Totality must evolve.

  Why tell me? The psychic pressure on Dallen was becoming intolerable. I'm only a man, and I have other…

  Chance has placed you in a unique situation, Garry Dallen. My forces are at a disadvantage in this part of this particular galaxy, and consequently I have had to proceed by stealth.

  You have learned that Orbitsville is an instrument. To nullify it I, too, constructed an instrument—one which has only to make contact with the Orbitsville shell to be absorbed into it and denature it and lock it into the Region I continuum for ever. That instrument is the physical form of the being you knew as Gerald Mathieu.

  I chose him because he wanted to terminate his own life, and because in your society he existed in circumstances which would allow him to travel to Orbitsville and approach it unobtrusively. When he killed himself by deliberately crashing his aircraft I recreated him—incorporating the physical modifications necessary for my purpose—and directed him to this point.

  Unfortunately, his approach was detected and the preparations for the translation of this sphere into the Region II universe was speeded up. In addition, enormous energies are being directed against the body of Gerald Mathieu, paralysing it, counteracting my energies.

  And now everything depends on you, Garry Dallen.

  You are at the fulcrum, at the balance point of two of the greatest personalised forces in any universe, where neither can dominate you—where your own reason, will and physical strength can decide a cosmic issue.

  Only seconds remain before the sphere is due to depart, but there is time for you to break Gerald Mathieu's hold on the line and propel his body into contact with the shell.

  I, on behalf of the Ethic, charge you with that responsibility…

  Dallen sobbed aloud as the two hemispheres of the divided universe clapped together.

  His senses were returning to normal, but he knew that the entire confrontation with the Ultans had taken place between heartbeats. A confusion of gasps and startled cries from his suit radio suggested that the watchers in the Hawkshead's airlock had shared the experience to some extent. His three companions in the centre of the extra-dimensional episode knew least of all—Cona floating in her drug-induced torpor, Mikel in his starry-eyed incomprehension; Gerald Mathieu, dead but not dead, frozen to the line which snaked upwards to…

  Dallen's breathing stopped as he saw that the shell material was a plane of green fire, its pulsations now so close together as to be almost beyond perception. The departure was imminent. There were no more reserves of time. Silvia was standing at the rim of the portal, leaning dangerously over the abyss, but restrained by Rick Renard's arms. Her lips were moving, forming words Dallen needed to hear, and her eyes were locked on his.

  "Silvia," he shouted, surging up the line towards her. Mathieu's rigid body blocked the way, the blind face grinning into his. There had been talk of a great responsibility … of forcing the instrument that was Mathieu across those last few metres of space … but would take time … and there was no more time … the shell material was as bright as the sun … burning steadily…

  No more fairness, Dallen screamed inwardly. This is for ME!

  He unclipped himself from the lifeline, from his wife's inert figure, from his son's crib. He clawed his way around Mathieu's body, frantic with haste, and launched himself upwards toward the rim of the portal. Silvia extended her arms as if to catch him…

  But Orbitsville vanished.

  He had missed Silvia by a second, and now she was separated from him by a gulf of time equal to twice the age of the universe.

  Dallen drew his knees up to his chin, closed his eyes, and went slowly tumbling into the newly created void.

  Chapter 18

  The headquarters of the London Anima Mundi Foundation had been set up a short distance south of Winnipeg for a number of reasons, an important one being administrative convenience, it was close to Metagov Central Clearing, the largest fragment of governmental machinery remaining on Earth, and therefore was at the centre of a pre-existing communications. and transport network. A trickle of offworld traffic was coming in from the Moon, the various orbital stations and from Terranova, the single small planet which had been discovered before Orbitsville had relegated it to the status of a backwater. The level of traffic was barely enough to keep the facility alive, but that was seen as an important contribution to the Renaissance. The global picture was more encouraging than many futurologists would have predicted, but it would be a long time before there would be any reserve capacity in the technology-based industries.

  Dallen was satisfied with the location for reasons of his own, not the least being that the climate was often comparable to that of his native Orbitsville. There were days, especially in spring and fall, when the air flowing in across the high grasslands had an evocative steely purity which, taking him unawares, would cause him to tilt his head and search the skies as though he might see in them the pale blue watered silk archways of his childhood. And even in midsummer, when the temperatures were higher than he would have preferred, the air was lively and had a freshness he did not associate with Earth.

  This was a good place to bring up my son, he thought as he waited for the breakfast coffee to percolate. Good as any place you would find.

  It was a diamond-clear morning—one of a seemingly endless succession of fine mornings in that summer—yet he was acutely conscious of the date as he moved about the familiar environment of the kitchen. August 25, 2302. Only nine years had passed since Orbitsville had departed for another universe, but it had been two whole centuries since an exploration ship had slipped away from the Earth-Moon system heading for unknown space. Now the Columbus was fully stored and ready to spiral out of Polar Band One to test itself against sun-seeded infinities, and the date would be one for the history books.

  The thought of books drew Dallen from the kitchen and into the pleasant, long-windowed room he used as a study. One wall featured a custom-built rosewood case which held exactly four hundred literary works, many with antique bindings which proclaimed them to be early editions, in the centre of the case, glazed and framed, was the handwritten reading list which had been the basis of the collection. Dallen smiled as he ran his gaze over the display, taking a wholesome and pleasurable pride in having read every volume, from Chaucer right through to the major 23rd Century poets. His brain, conditioned by nine years of schooling in total recall techniques, effortlessly recreated the circumstances in which he had recovered the list…

  For protracted aching minutes after the disappearance of Orbitsville the group of people who had tried to enter Postal 36 had been too stricken to think coherently or act constructively. Dallen remembered continuing his slow-tumbling fall towards the sun, his mind a chaotic battleground for alien concepts and a crushing sense of personal loss, unable to care much about whether he was going to be lost or saved. He had teen thousands of metres away from the Hawkshead before the crewman dispatched by Captain Lessen had overtaken him and jetted them both back to safety. The ship's pressure skin, abruptly released from an invisible vise, had resealed itself within its elastic limits and the air losses were no longer a matter of urgency.

  In the days that followed Dallen had been able to lose himself in hard work, because—once the incredible truth about the sphere had been accepted—there remained the practical business of the return to Earth.

  Many starships, ranging in type from bulk carriers to passenger vessels, had been left in a vast circ
le around the sun when Orbitsville had vanished from the normal continuum. Forming part of the same circle, but in much larger numbers, had been an even wider variety of interportal ships, many of which had been en route when their destinations had ceased to exist. In some extreme cases, maintenance workers on exterior port structures had been left floating in space, clinging to sliced-off sections of docking cradles.

  The salvage operation had been facilitated by the fact that everything left behind was in a stable and tidy orbit around the sun, and was also provided with stellar heat. As a preliminary to the retreat to Earth, all personnel with only spacesuits or unpowered habitats to keep them alive had been located and rescued by small craft. Next, all ships—large and small—had gathered in a single orbiting swarm, and the interstellar vessels had taken on board every human being left in that region of space. That stage of the operation had been complicated by the arrival of twelve ships from Earth and one from Terranova, all of which had been locked in warp transfer at the time of the disappearance, but the problems had been mostly concerned with credibility and had eventually been resolved. The thesis that Orbitsville no longer existed, although astonishing, was remarkably easy to demonstrate.

  The logistics of assembling the return fleet had been such that Dallen had plenty of time to rescue his family's possessions from the condemned Hawkshead and transfer them to an aging but grandiose passenger liner, the Rosetta, in which they had been assigned a suite. And it had been while repacking some oddments that he had found the reading list folded and tucked into a rarely-used tobacco pouch. Cona had prepared it for his benefit three years earlier. It detailed four hundred books she regarded as important and which she had urged him to read.

  "That's purely for starters," she had said, smiling. "Just to give you some idea of where you came from and where you ought to be going."

  The old Dallen had refused the intellectual gift, inflicting unknown pain by not trying even one of the suggested books, but the new Dallen had been determined to make amends. Standing there in the special sunlight of that special morning, he touched the oiled wood of the bookcase, recognising and respecting all that remained to him of his former wife. The body which had once belonged to Cona was now inhabited by a cheerful and uncomplicated young woman who had a mental age of about thirteen and whose home was on a nearby farm owned by the Foundation. Belatedly accepting his former physician's advice, Dallen had renamed her Carol and used the name automatically in his thoughts.

  He went to visit Carol once a month and occasionally they would go horseback riding together, and he was always glad that their relationship, although pleasant, was cool and undemanding. Carol treated him as she would an uncle, sometimes enjoying his visits a lot and at others showing impatience over being dragged away from the stables. The active farming life had pared her figure down, taking years off her apparent age, with the result that when Dallen saw her from a distance there was little to remind him of his former wife—Cona Dallen doesn't live here any more—and he had learned that all grief has to fade.

  "Coffee in five minutes," he shouted, hearing the first subdued thump from the old-style percolator in the kitchen. He arranged settings for three people at the breakfast bar, then returned to the study and sat down at his desk. The computer displayed his job notes for the day, but he found it hard to concentrate on the symbols when the lawns and shrubs beyond his window were glowing with a phosphorescent nostalgic brilliance and the Columbus was circling up there beyond the atmosphere, making ready for deep space. Dallen reached for his pipe and, while filling it, allowed his thoughts to drift back over the previous nine years.

  Dwelling in the past was psychologically inadvisable for most people, but in his case it had literally become a way of life, a profession. Project Recap had been set up within weeks of his return to Earth after the Orbitsville departure, with Dallen as a principal director. In the early stages all but three of the thirty-four men and women who had witnessed and been affected by the seminal encounter with the Ultans had been part of the team, each making a unique contribution to the collective memory. The ineffable moment of wordless, mind-to-mind contact had been shared by all, but the common experience had been interpreted by individuals in different ways, modified by their intelligence, outlook and education.

  Holorecordings of the event—with their hazy images of black entities shimmering in blackness—had proved to the rest of humanity that something had happened, but it had been the very diversity of the participants' reactions which had finally eliminated all theories about mass hysteria. Doctor Glaister, for example, with her background in particle physics, had emerged from the experience with recollections which varied a great deal from Dallen's in some places, especially where the "dialogue" had touched on the relationship between mindons and gravitons. The detailed insights she had received—"cameos of cold logic, engraved in permafrost, with the black ice of eternity showing through" was how she once described them—revitalised her entire field of learning, in spite of the fact that only one in a thousand of its workers had not been translated into the Region II universe.

  The effect had been similar, though to a lesser extent, with some technical and engineering experts of the Hawkshead's crew, and it was largely as a result of their subsequent work that the exploration ship Columbia would be able to fly at close to tachyon speeds, bringing the core of the galaxy within mankind's reach. Other members of the same group had formed a cadre of inspired technocrats who, with material assistance from Terranova, were playing a vital role in the Renaissance.

  The after-effects of the unique encounter had not been uniformly beneficial, however. The three men who had not been able to participate in Project Recap had been jolted by their experience into a profound autism which still gave little sign of abating. Dallen himself, prime target for the Ultans' psychic energies, had been disturbed for weeks, prone to nightmares and loss of appetite, alternating between periods of torpor and hyperactivity. When he had learned that his work for the Project would involve repeated and full-scale mental regression to the encounter he had at first refused to cooperate in any way, and only gradually had overcome his instinctive fears. There had also been the problem of his disbelief in the essential proposition.

  The central idea was that the Ultans could be used retrospectively as a kind of sounding board for scientific and philosophical beliefs to be specially implanted in Dallen's mind. By drug-intensified hypnotic regression he would be able to meet the superhuman entities again and again, recreating a special state of consciousness, continuing to harvest or corroborate knowledge, to glean and scavenge until the law of diminishing returns made the exercise pointless.

  His scepticism had gradually faded when he discovered he had already, in association with Billie Glaister, helped change men's thinking about no less a question than the ultimate fate of the universe. Cosmologists had never been able to find enough mass in the universe, even with allowance for black holes, to guarantee that it was closed and therefore cyclic. The best they had been able to hope for was the Einstein-de Sitter model of a marginally open or flat universe, one which barely expanded but would go on doing so for ever. However, the mindon/graviton component imposed a positive curvature on spacetime, promising an infinite sequence of Big Squeezes and Big Bangs. The cosmological timescales were such that Dallen could feel little personal concern, but he could see that a cyclic universe was more pleasing to philosophers.

  Of much greater interest to him were the questions posed by the mindon science of the Renaissance. The very fact that it not only accepted personal immortality, but had it as a cornerstone, made it unlike any scientific discipline that had gone before. It was exuberant, optimistic, mystical, life-centred, full of wild cards, boasting as one of its creeds a statement hypnotically retrieved by Dallen from the Ultan encounter: it is the thinker in the quietness of his study who draws the remotest galaxies back from the shores of night.

  Dallen liked to regard himself as an integral part of the universe, and he
savoured the irony in the way in which human beings, who had until recently accepted a life expectancy of some eighty years, were now debating their prospects of surviving the next Big Bang as mindon entities.

  "Science used to be preoccupied with tacking on more and more decimal places," a colleague told him. "Now We add on bunches of zeroes."

  It had been that moral buoyancy, the powerful life-enhancing elements of mindon science, which had given Dallen the necessary incentive to join Project Recap. To the world at large the demanding aspect of his work had been the mental wear and tear caused by the periods of intensive study of abstruse subjects followed by regressions and the subsequent debriefings. Dallen had found the process intellectually harrowing, but the principal strain had been emotional—for it entailed his losing Silvia London time after time. One system of thought demanded that he regard her as having lived out her life billions of years before the oldest stars in the universe were formed; but in another—the one which was instinctive and natural to Dallen—she was vitally alive, separated from him only by some malevolent trick of cosmic geometry. And both systems had exacted their due of bitter tears.

  For months after the premature death of his mother Dallen had been haunted by fantastic dreams in which she was still alive, and on his awakening his grief had returned with almost its original force. A similar sequence occurred with Silvia. Over and over again, in the slow-motion quasi-existence of hypnotic regression, he saw her reaching her arms towards him as he flew upwards to the edge of the portal. He saw her tears and was able to read the words on her lips: I love you, I love you, I love you…

  The subsequent dreams were varied. In some he reached the portal and forced his way through the diaphragm field in time to voyage with Silvia into the Region II universe, in others she remained behind with him in the normal continuum, but—dreams being what they are, with their own laws and logics—the one that troubled him most was the one which took the threads of reality and wove them into the most fantastic, least realistic pattern. Dallen had it on the authority of the Ultans themselves that there were anywhere from eight to forty of their titanic spheres in the Milky Way system. He had also been told that the sphere known to mankind as Orbitsville had been forced to leave earlier than scheduled—which meant that the others were still located in various arms of the galaxy, still making their unhurried preparations to depart for another continuum. In the dream Dallen sailed out on a tachyon ship, found one of the remaining spheres, and entered it just in time to be transported to a Region II galaxy. And in the dream he quit the second sphere and flew with magical ease and certainty to Orbitsville, and was reunited with Silvia.