by Bob Shaw
I am not claiming to be God – but you may think of me that way, if you please.
"This could go on and on. I prefer Gaseous Vertebrate."
So, after much circumlocution, you are back where you started – I am the Gaseous Vertebrate.
"Are you also the Good Fairy? Did you create the artefact I knew as Orbitsville?"
At last you have asked a sensible question, one to which I can give a sensible answer. No, I did not create Orbitsville.
"Have you any objections to telling me who did?"
I have no objections at all, Jim. I am willing to provide all the knowledge you are capable of assimilating. Your mind is part of my mind at this unique moment in cosmic history. The only limits to the amount of knowledge you may gain are the limits of your own mentality.
"Did you say my mind is part of your mind?"
Let's have no rhetorical questions, Jim. You know what I said.
"But it's important to me. There are little questions as well as big questions. For instance, I would like to know why I am not afraid. I have wandered into a surrealist nightmare, and I have witnessed horrors–"
The horrors were of your own devising.
"All right, but I'm alone in what might easily be a Dali landscape with what might easily be a black statue the size of a mountain … and yet I am not afraid. Why is that?"
You are in mental space now. You exist as a mindon entity – and, as such, you are immune to all the fears which trouble a carnate being.
"I see. So that's why I can hold a conversation with a sentient black skyscraper."
There is no conversation. For the moment your mind has been encompassed by and united with my mind. You must take what you can, and make of it what you will.
"Very well then – who built Orbitsville?"
Orbitsville was devised and constructed by beings who are more highly evolved than humans. In their one direct encounter with humans they chose to call themselves Ultans. That is as good a name as any.
"Why did the Ultans construct Orbitsville?"
They did so in an attempt to alter the fate of the entire cosmos. A few of your fellow human beings have already discovered that mind is a component of matter. And it is not a minor component. In some regards it is even more significant than gravity, because its attractive force is sufficient to close the universe. Gravitation alone could not do that.
"I remember that woman … Rick Renard's wife … trying to tell me something like this."
Yes, but she was more concerned with an incidental effect – the continuance of personality after physical death. The true importance of the class of particles known as mindons lies in their cohesive power. Without the mindon/graviton component an expanding universe would continue to expand for ever. One of your fellow humans, with quite a poetical turn of mind, has stated that it is the thinker in the quietness of his study who draws the remotest galaxies back from the shores of night.
"I don't see what this has to do with Orbitsville."
The history of the cosmos could be described as a series of Big Bangs and Big Squeezes, to use the inelegant phraseology of which your scientists are so fond. At the instant of each Big Bang two universes are created – one composed of normal matter and going forward in time; the other composed of anti-matter and going backwards in time. Both universes expand to their limits, then the contraction begins, and eventually, when time has run its circular course, they are reunited and the stage is set for a new Big Bang. You will, of course, appreciate that terms such as matter and anti-matter are completely subjective.
"I'm not stupid."
There are some complications – such as tachyon and anti-tachyon universes – which I do not intend to trouble you with at this juncture.
"Very kind," Nicklin said. "Go on."
At the instant of the last Big Bang – which I believe to have been the eighteenth in the Grand Sequence – two symmetrical universes were created, as had always happened before. But their evolution did not follow the established pattern. A great asymmetry developed because – for reasons which have not made themselves apparent – intelligent life failed to evolve anywhere in the Region 2 universe.
Under those circumstances, without mindon cohesion, the Region 2 universe was destined to go on dispersing for ever – and without the contribution of its matter the nature of the next Big Bang will be radically altered. And as a consequence, the cycle of cosmic renewal will be disrupted.
Some Ultans viewed that prospect with disfavour on philosophical grounds – and they took steps to correct the great imbalance.
"They built Orbitsville!"
Yes.
"It was a mind collector! And that explains the Big Jump – Orbitsville was relocated in the anti-matter universe! When the Ultans were ready they simply moved it!"
The situation was more complex than that, because other Ultans – also motivated by philosophical considerations – opposed any meddling with the course of nature. But, basically, you are correct.
"And was that all it took to change the future of an entire universe? I'm not used to thinking on this kind of scale, but the effect of one sphere seems – to say the least of it – disproportionate."
More than one sphere was constructed, Jim. To be sure of capturing a viable stock the Ultans placed similar instruments in every galaxy of the Region I universe. Each galaxy, depending on its size, was given anywhere from eight to forty of the spheres, all of them in localities favourable to the development of intelligent life. Your race's discovery of the one you refer to as Orbitsville was not entirely fortuitous.
"But there are at least a hundred billion galaxies!" Even in his discorporate form Nicklin was humbled by the sudden insight into the extent of the Ultans' efforts to influence the shape of the space-time continuum itself. "And if you multiply that number–"
Do not concern yourself with the mathematics – suffice it to say that the Ultans pursued their misguided ambition on such a large scale that my brothers and I were obliged to move against them.
"But is it not too late? I saw Orbitsville being dissolved into millions of planets, and I saw them all disappear. If they have been dispersed all over the galaxy…"
I intervened. The new planets have indeed been dispersed – but it was done under my direction. They have been seeded into the Region I galaxy from which Orbitsville came.
A new question was beginning to form somewhere in the depths of Nicklin's mind, but he shied away from it. "They've gone back?"
Yes, Jim. You see, the Ultans were wrong to impose their will, their necessarily limited view, upon the natural ordering of Totality. The imbalance between Regions 1 and 2 in the present cycle heralds great change – that is quite true – but change is the instrument of evolution. Resistance to change is wrong. Totality must be free to evolve.
"Will the Ultans be … punished?"
They will be advised and watched, but they will not be harmed. My brothers and I partake of Life, and we serve Life. The Ethic requires us to do everything in our power to ensure that no mind units are lost as a result of our actions.
"Is that why you are here? Is that why you are speaking to me?"
As I said earlier, the dialogue is entirely within your own consciousness. It is part of your private reaction to the fact that your mind is encompassed by mine while I am transferring your ship back to the Region I universe. You are interpreting the experience in your own way – for others it will be different.
"Do you mean that for them it's a religious experience? They're seeing what they believe to be God?"
They're seeing what they believe – just as you are seeing what you believe.
The question which had earlier formed itself in a part of Nicklin's consciousness tried to obtrude once more, and once more he was unable to deal with it. "Are we all going to live?"
Yes, Jim – I have plucked your little ship out of the body of my stillborn brother, and I have placed it on the surface of an eminently hospitable world in your home galaxy. You are all goin
g to live.
"Thank you, thank you." Nicklin began to feel an unaccountable sense of urgency. "Is our time together coming to an end?"
There is no time as you understand it in mental space. In one version of reality the transfer has taken a billionth of a billionth of a second; in another version of reality it has taken forty billion years.
"But the dialogue is drawing to a close."
You are reaching your limits.
"There is just one more question. Please! I must know the answer."
Across the midnight plain the dark presence seemed to stir slightly. I am listening.
"Who are you?"
But you no longer have any need to ask that question. The half-perceived entity was definitely moving now, growing taller, preparing to depart. You KNOW who I am, don't you, Jim?
"Yes," Nicklin murmured, the vessel that was his mind at last filled to brimming. "I know who you are."
CHAPTER 23
The six Curlew aircraft of Woolston Skyways were ranged in line, waiting to carry their separate loads of passengers to the regional centre of Rushport. Curlews had been chosen because of their ability to operate from unprepared grass strips. Each would take a maximum of ten people on the two-hour hop to Rushport, where they would then be put on an airliner for the 8,ooo-kilometre flight to Beachhead City.
Behind the Curlews were three smaller and faster jets belonging to the news agencies which had been first to get their people to the scene. Looming over the aircraft, making them look like toy miniatures, was the burnished coppery hull of the Tara. And beyond the ship was a lake which stretched to the horizon, its waters sewn with diamond-fire by the low morning sun.
No matter how old he lived to be, Nicklin had decided, he would never get used to a sun which traversed the sky. On the previous evening, scant hours after the Tara's return, he had watched the first sunset of his life, unable to take his eyes off the searing disk as it slid below the horizon. Like many others of the dazed and bemused pilgrims, he had spent most of the night in the open, staring at new constellations and waiting for the sun to reappear. Even though he had known in advance that it had to show itself on the opposite side of the world, the fact that it actually did so filled him with a profound wondering. The confirmation that he now lived on the outside of a sphere had come as a quasi-religious experience for one accustomed to the insularity of Orbitsville. He felt exhilarated, and dangerously exposed to the vastness of the universe, a micro-organism clinging to the surface of a ball that was hurtling through unpredictable space.
And in keeping with the diminutive size of the new world in comparison to Orbitsville, the pace of human affairs seemed to have speeded up to match the flickering, inertia-less activities of creatures whose cosmos is a drop of water…
In one instant the Tara had been drifting in deep space; in the next it had been resting on a sunlit, grassy plain.
The ship's clocks showed no lapse of time, but every individual on board – children included – had recollections of a time outside of time. From what Nicklin could gather, the common experience – unlike his own – had been a brief and wordless communion with a benign deity, one who was shrouded in white light, rendered invisible by mingling glories.
They had emerged from it as essentially the same people, with all their previous beliefs confirmed beyond all doubt. The first thing Ropp Voorsanger had done was to lead the entire company out on to the lush grass and conduct a service of thanksgiving. And never in human history could there have been a congregation so united in its unshakeable faith. After all, they had been part of a general and undeniable miracle. They had been lost, and now they were saved, and their salvation had come about through a Divine Intervention. They had been justified, as no others had ever been justified, in sending up their cry of Hallelujah!
Nicklin's experience had been unique, because he had been necessarily transformed. He had come out of it with a new set of beliefs which required him to revise his internal model of reality. Thereafter he had to acknowledge the existence of a supreme being. Giving it the name of God, or the Good Fairy, or the Gaseous Vertebrate made no difference to the central, essential fact that he could no longer live his life as a sceptic.
While waiting, alone beneath the stars, he had wondered if the impact on his personality could have been any greater had he been persuaded to accept the existence of the Judaic God – and not of the ultimate, non-mystical Personality.
You KNOW who I am, the Personality had said, and the uncanny thing was that Nicklin had been prepared long in advance for the revelation. He had almost reached the truth that grey wintry morning in the Beachhead office when Silvia London had preached that all matter had a mindon component, and that all that was needed for the development of an immortal personality was the existence of a sufficiently complex physical organisation, such as the human brain.
Nicklin had begun to argue that if physical complexity was all that was needed to conjure a mind into existence there was, in principle, no need to insist on a biological element. It should have been possible for any sufficiently complex organisation to develop an intelligent personality. And, taking that argument to its logical conclusion, what better candidate could there be – in the category of complex, multi-component physical structures – than a galaxy?
The concept of an intelligent galaxy was hardly new – scientific visionaries such as Firsoff had advanced it as far back as the middle of the twentieth century.
But to be confronted with the actuality!
Years would pass, Nicklin knew, before he could hope to assimilate the knowledge that he shared the stage of eternity with beings like the Ultans, so advanced and so powerful that they could presume to remodel the entire scheme of creation to their own desires. And that – as far beyond the Ultans as the Ultans were beyond humans – were what he might think of as the Galactians. They were unimaginable, incomprehensible entities, yet so life-oriented that they could concern themselves with the welfare of individual mind units.
Nicklin had to admit the remote possibility that the Tara had been positioned where it was because of some vague and tenuous paraphysical decree that matter would be drawn to its own point of origin on the old Orbitsville shell. But his new instincts told him that the Personality – which had referred to an inert Region 2 galaxy as its "stillborn brother" – had made a conscious and personal decision in the matter.
The implication was that all mind units were uniquely and individually important. They were all immortal, and would all partake in a grand scheme of evolution and assimilation which would lead to the ultimate convergence of Life. The further implication, for those receptive to it, was that no life had ever been wasted, and that…
"Good morning, Jim!" The speaker was Cham White. He and Nora had climbed the hummock which Nicklin had chosen as a vantage point, and both were breathing heavily from the exertion. "What are you doing up here?"
Nicklin waved a greeting. "It's a good place to think."
"You have more than most of us to think about, haven't you, Jim?" Nora said, a smile appearing on her gold-freckled face. "I seem to remember that you were quite the atheist in the old days."
Nicklin nodded. "As you say, Nora – I have a lot to think about."
"We came up to bid you goodbye for the time being," Cham said. "We're heading back to Beachhead and then Orangefield as soon as possible."
"You don't feel like staying on here and helping Voorsanger to found his new Holy City?"
"It was an inspiring sermon he gave this morning." Cham fingered his grimy trousers with a look of humorous distaste. "But I think I'll wait until the first hotels have been built and the plumbing put in."
"Cham White!" Nora dug him with her elbow. "That's an affront to the Lord."
"These pants are an affront to everybody – I can't wait to get changed into something decent."
"I'm off!" Nora shook Nicklin's hand, kissed him lightly on the cheek, and started down the slope.
Cham waited until she
was some distance off. "Jim, I don't know what happened between you and Zindee, and I don't want to know," he said quickly. "But I have a feeling she'd like to speak to you before we leave. Will you come down and say goodbye to her?"
Nicklin's heart began to pound. "Of course, Cham."
He walked beside Cham, his eyes scanning the various centres of activity. Lines were forming near each of the Curlews, but quite a few families had elected to remain with the Tara for the time being, and children belonging to them were darting excitedly between knots of adults. Journalists were wandering about with cameras, and civic officials from Rushport – including welfare people and a few police – were also going about duties which only they seemed to understand. The fluttery beat of an approaching helicopter added to the impression that the randomly chosen patch of open countryside had become a focus of interest for the rest of the world.
Radio communications had never been possible on the old Orbitsville, but Fleischer had been able to call up the Beachhead spaceport without any difficulty – and it was apparent that what she had said had caused a sensation, even on a world whose inhabitants should have been sated with wonders. It was just as Hepworth had predicted, Nicklin thought. Astronomical marvels were all very well for those who were interested in that kind of thing, but a hundred people magically returning from the dead was genuine, honest-to-God news.
He forgot about the overall picture as he picked out the green-clad figure of Zindee standing alone close to an orange-splashed bandanna shrub. Before Nicklin could move to prevent him, Cham veered away from his side – no doubt being tactful – leaving him to approach Zindee on his own. As he drew near she eyed him with a strangely intent speculation which, inexplicably, reminded him of his last meeting with Danea.
"Hello, Zindee," he said awkwardly. "I hear you're going home."
"Yes." Her eyes hunted over his face. "Back to Orangefield, for a while."
"That's good," he said, unable to meet her gaze. "Ah … I have to go now, Zindee. Ropp needs me on the ship."
"Why?"
