Soon after the three had been introduced, Hoagy asked the others, “How old were you when you started on the eros couch?”
“Fourteen,” answered Blake, a dark and doughy man, fluent in a dozen languages, expert in semiotics.
“Twelve,” said Jaffa. She was an astrophysicist, tall and slender, with pale skin, lilting speech, and a bright, inquisitive manner.
“How long before you were—” Hoagy let his voice trail off.
“Possessed?” said Jaffa, her green eyes glinting. “I was hooked within a few months, first on guys, then on wild landscapes, and finally on a gorgeous planet.”
“I followed the same path,” Blake said, “only it took me a year to work my way from lovers to planet.”
“This place you’ve imagined, does it feel like your real home?” Hoagy asked.
“Yes,” said Jaffa, “like a garden I’ve been kicked out of.”
“Exactly,” Blake said. “I feel I’m in exile here on Earth.”
As they compared their visions, they gradually realized they were all imagining the same planet, right down to the contours of cliffs and smell of hot stone and taste of springwater.
“Maybe the VIVA psychiatrists implanted the image,” Blake suggested.
“That’s what I used to think,” Hoagy conceded. “But there’s another possibility. Maybe our vision is a genetic inheritance, passed down from ancestors who lived on another world before they brought the seeds of life to Earth.”
Jaffa snapped her fingers. “I’ve had the same thought.”
“So myths of paradise aren’t inventions—” Blake began.
“They’re species memories,” Hoagy said.
“Eden, Elysium, Shangri-La, nirvana,” Jaffa chanted, “all of them glimpses of an actual place, somewhere out there.”
“Yes,” Hoagy said. “One of those tens of millions of E-type planets.”
“But what are the chances of finding it?” Blake asked.
“And if we do,” said Jaffa, “will it still be a paradise?”
And so the trio spoke excitedly, finishing one another’s sentences, merging ideas they had conceived in solitude. Blake held that language forms a cosmic net, which all living things are weaving with their manifold speech. Eventually, consciousness will be able to journey from galaxy to galaxy on a web of signs. Consciousness already pervades the universe, according to Jaffa, who speculated that stars and quasars were manifestations of mind, with a subjective interior as well as a physical exterior. “Matter thinks,” she said flatly. “Just look at the brain. If the brain, why not a nebula?”
Why not? Hoagy thought, even as he realized that he and his partners might only be spinning theories out of a need to believe they could actually reach the world they longed for.
The sense of being in exile from their true home bound the Alpha Trio closely, further estranging them from ordinary people. Hoagy found it difficult to speak even with his mother, when she called two weeks before the launch to wish him well.
“You must be excited,” she said.
“Yes,” was all he could answer.
“This is the last call I’m allowed to make until after . . .” Her voice broke. On the screen her face was a white smear, which he could not bring into focus.
“After I’m back?” he suggested.
“Right. After you’re back.” When he said nothing, she pleaded, “Hoagy?”
“I’m here, Mom.”
“Sweetheart, if I was wrong to get you into this . . . if anything happens to you . . . I’ll never . . .” Again she faltered. Her face on the screen crinkled with pain. “I’m sorry,” she added hastily, and hung up before he could think of anything comforting to say.
During the final week before launch, the members of Alpha Trio were kept apart, each one training in a mock-up of the warp chamber. Murmuring through headphones, psychiatrists coaxed them into deep trance, then urged them back to ordinary consciousness. “Mind sprints,” Jaffa called the exercises.
Hoagy entered trance with ease, but struggled on the return. Hearing “T-state now,” he swiftly conjured up his garden planet. Earth dwindled away behind, until he could no longer feel its pull, as he raced toward his beautiful, sumptuous globe. He recognized the oceans, the green continents, the mountain ranges, the sinuous rivers. Nearing the surface, he smelled the ozone from waterfalls, the pheromones from mating animals, the juices of burgeoning plants. He ached to land. But an instant before he touched down, the voice rang in his ear: “R-state now!” Return was torture. He had to fight against the lure of his vision, wrenching himself free, until he tumbled back into real time and found himself once more in the warp chamber. After a brief rest, he was told how many seconds he still needed to shave off his re-entry time. Then came the order, “T-state, now!” and the cycle repeated.
He was always tempted to ignore the peremptory voice that called him back. But he knew he must delay consummation, for he needed the full psychic charge of desire to keep his mind from whirling apart as he passed through the temporal dislocation of warp.
Beginning three days before launch, the training schedule was relaxed. Nutritional supplements brought Hoagy’s body up to peak strength, and injections of neurotransmitters revved his brain to a dazzling clarity. He could not help wondering how much of this treatment had been given to those earlier astronauts, who had returned broken and mad.
On the morning of launch the Alpha Trio were reunited in the warp chamber. They nodded at one another, lips tight. Once harnessed in, shoulders nearly touching in the cramped space, they went through pre-flight checks. They confirmed the targeting instructions: fourth planet of K-47 in the Great Globular Cluster of Hercules, 25,000 light years away. Time elapse, .001 seconds. For reasons the physicists still could not explain, zero-elapse passage disintegrated machines as well as minds, while times longer than a thousandth of a second accelerated the rate of metal fatigue. So the meter was set at .001, and each of the astronauts read the setting aloud.
While Hoagy listened to final instructions from the mission controller, he ran his gaze over the interior of the warp chamber, its rows of gauges and switches, its hard surfaces and warning labels. With a pang, he thought how much of his life he had spent encased in machines. If he survived this trip, maybe he would go outdoors more often. Earth must still have a few wild places. Nothing to rival his vision, of course, but small pockets of beauty here and there.
A faint whine told him the warp projectors were ramping up. Instinctively, he braced himself for super-G acceleration, even though he knew the force he was about to encounter would be nothing like gravity.
“Ready to center. Counting from sixty.”
Hoagy glanced at his partners. Blake squeezed the armrest until his knuckles turned white. Jaffa’s fingers spidered in the air, playing among life-fields only she could detect.
“Prepare for T-state,” the controller said.
The projector’s whine grew louder, and a shock sizzled along Hoagy’s spine as the warp vector strengthened.
“T-state—now!”
Warp chamber, partners, everything vanished as he leapt into trance. Immediately he was buffeted by turbulence more violent than any seizure. Gales ripped at him, twisted and tumbled him. He could feel his center loosening, giving way. It would be so easy to let go, to be torn asunder. But he clung fiercely to the vision of his garden planet, filled his mind with its glory, and at length he passed beyond the turbulence, the winds relented, and he realized the ship had passed through the timeshell. He returned to real time without being summoned.
There on the monitor was a blue planet, which the sensors confirmed as their target. Of course, it wasn’t the ancestral world that he and Jaffa and Blake had imagined, but it was lovely enough, marbled with clouds, burnished by light from its orange star. The reward for their ordeal would be to land there and search for life.
Blake’s voice came through the earphones. “Are you back?”
“Yes,” Hoagy muttered. “B
ut it was a rough passage.”
“Jaffa hasn’t come around yet.”
Hoagy looked in alarm at Jaffa, who twitched in her harness. He laid a hand on her arm and squeezed, absorbing her tremors. Presently she grew still. Her eyes slicked open. At first only the whites were visible, then the green irises. He leaned close. “Are you all right?”
“What?” Her head swiveled, surveying the warp chamber. “Where are we?”
“The other side,” Hoagy said.
Her face lit up with a smile and she grabbed his hand. “We really made it?”
“There’s our gem,” Blake said, pointing at the monitor. “Covered in liquid water, as promised. If it isn’t brimming with life, then nature missed a good chance.”
Jaffa came fully alert as she gazed at the lovely blue planet. “There’s life down there.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Blake.
“There is. I can feel it. You’ll see when we land.”
Hoagy eased himself away from her. His hand burned where she had touched him. “First,” he said, “we have to persuade the computer we’re still sane.”
They took the psychometric exam, to prove they had survived the warp with faculties intact. When each one earned a green light, they cheered.
According to the flight plan, now the engines should ease them down into the atmosphere, with Hoagy piloting them on the final descent. Instead of hearing the sizzle of plasma, however, they heard the start-up whine of the warp projector. An instant later the ship computer buzzed in their headphones: “Five minutes until transfer.”
“Destination?” Hoagy demanded.
“Earth,” the computer answered.
“Why?” said Jaffa. “Is there something wrong with our tests?”
“You have passed the tests. Now you will be returned for study.”
“But we’re supposed to land!” Blake roared.
“The bastards,” Jaffa said. “They lied to us.”
Hoagy slammed his fist on the instrument panel, where the clock was ticking down. “They never intended for us to explore. All they wanted was to see if we could pass through the timeshell without going nuts. We’re just a source of data.”
“Three minutes,” droned the computer.
“Lab rats,” Blake muttered. He said it again, louder, then he howled and his eyes rolled up and he thrashed in his harness.
Hoagy grabbed him by a shoulder. “Blake, snap out of it. We’re going to jump.”
“We can’t let him go through warp like this,” said Jaffa.
“I don’t know if we can stop it.” Hoagy scoured the instrument panel, but he could find no switch that would override the computer, which had clearly been programmed to carry out an immediate return.
“One minute.”
Between bouts of laughter, Blake muttered in languages they had never heard.
There was no time for coaxing him back.
“Thirty seconds.”
Hoagy and Jaffa exchanged despairing glances. He grasped her hand, curling his own thick fingers around her delicate ones, which could trace life’s energy in thin air. Loud enough to be heard above the countdown, he called to her, “I need you to be whole when we get back.”
Her reply was a shout. “And I need you!”
Those words and Blake’s gibberish were the last sounds Hoagy heard before leaping into trance.
The agonizing spiral back to real-time was familiar, but instead of emerging in the warp chamber, Hoagy found himself in a blazing white room, strapped to a table, with a scanner swinging back and forth over his skull.
“Tell me your name,” said a voice he recognized as that of the VIVA psychiatrist who was in charge of the timeshell experiment.
With brusque impatience, Hoagy responded to that query and to many more, until the doctor seemed satisfied.
“How are the others?” Hoagy demanded.
“Don’t worry about the others.”
“Damn it, tell me. Is Jaffa okay? Is Blake?” A pinprick in the hollow of his elbow soon washed away his questions. This trance was a chemical one, insipid, blank.
When he was allowed to place calls the following day, Hoagy spoke first with his mother, who sobbed when she heard his voice. “I’m fine,” he assured her.
“Oh, honey, I was so worried.”
“Really, Mom. Everything’s okay. They checked me out.”
“You sound groggy.”
“They shot me up with drugs when I got back. But my mind’s clear.”
“That’s what the doctor told me,” she said. “But I needed to hear it from you.”
Unable to bear her crying, he said, “Gotta go, Mom. There’s a big meeting.”
“I’m so happy,” she breathed as he ended the call.
There really was a meeting, a debriefing session in a seminar room crammed with a couple of dozen VIVA staffers by the time he arrived. He took a seat near the door. A moment later, Jaffa sidled in and sat next to him. “Zero damage,” she confided.
“Same here,” he answered, noticing her smell, as of mint tea.
Neither mentioned Blake.
The Director, a stern, fast-talking woman, opened the session by apologizing for having deceived the Alpha Trio with the promise of landing. “We were afraid no weaker motive would carry you through, yet we couldn’t risk losing you to some mishap on the planet.”
With that formality over, she ignored Hoagy and Jaffa and proceeded to explain what the mission had revealed about the psychology of warp transfer. The lights in the room dimmed. Projected onto a giant wall screen, a graph displayed three data lines, showing changes in brain chemistry and neuronal activity in each of the astronauts as they passed twice through the timeshell, once on the way out and again on the way back. Although the data lines were labeled simply A, B, and C, it was clear which one belonged to Blake, for on the return passage the line spiked chaotically, like the seismic trace of an earthquake and aftershocks.
Using a laser, the Director pointed out that in the two records where no damage occurred, and in the outgoing phase of the third record, the peak moment when mind slipped through the timeshell coincided with a precise mix of catecholamines—principally serotonin, dopamine, and epinephrine—and a corresponding neuronal firing pattern. A murmur spread across the room as the doctors, neuroscientists, and behavioral engineers took this in.
“We should be able to reproduce this effect in any healthy brain,” the Director said, to rousing applause. She then set up two teams, one to work out the chemistry, the other to map and program the neuronal activity. “I want compounds and devices we can test on subjects within six months,” she said. “And I want astronauts prepared for safe warp travel within a year.”
The two teams gathered at opposite corners of the room and began buzzing with plans.
Hoagy leaned close to Jaffa and said, “So much for finding our planet.”
She gave him a surprised look. “You don’t think we’ll get to go out again?”
“You might, but not me. Now that they’ve figured out how to send healthy people through warp, why send an epileptic?”
“But your seizures are under control.”
“I’ve had two since we returned.”
Jaffa laid a hand on his cheek and searched his face with her jade eyes. “If you don’t go, I don’t go.”
Hoagy returned her gaze, feeling heartache for abandoning his visionary planet and gratitude for what she was offering. “I’ve been thinking there must be some wild places left here on Earth,” he said.
“There must be,” Jaffa agreed. “Let’s go look.”
The Audubon Effect
Keeva heard the eerie, strident hooting and felt the air tingle with their approach moments before she actually spied them. In a straggly V they climbed above the horizon of Aton-17, carving the violet sky, their wings blazing white as they banked over the ocean. Waves of energy rippled before them, like the advance of a storm.
“There,” she whispered, pointing a slende
r arm.
“I don’t see anything,” said LaForest, who crouched beside her in a thicket of reedlike stalks, peering through binoculars. The muck of the shore smelled like a salt marsh on Earth, fecund and sour, as Keeva imagined the original broth of life might have smelled.
“They’re headed straight for us,” she told him.
LaForest crouched lower. Though his elbows and knees bent at painful angles, he was so lanky that his coarse brown hair rose above the water plants like an abandoned nest. His gawky height made people stare at him from a distance, but few exchanged looks with him at close quarters, for he had penetrating eyes. Keeva was among those few. She delighted in his searching gaze. It shielded her from the empathic signals that flowed into her from every living thing. Where she pressed against LaForest, there in the shallows, his limbs felt like tensed springs.
Taking his bearded chin in hand, she turned his face toward the approaching V. “See how their wings catch the light?”
Under the binoculars his lips drew tight from concentration, then parted with astonishment. “Yes,” he murmured. “My God, they’re like fire. Must be a hundred of them. And hear those high-pitched calls?”
The reeds quaked from his trembling. Keeva circled an arm around his waist, fingering the bones of his hip through the taut fabric of his shimmersuit. “Be still,” she whispered. “I sense they’re coming down.”
They did come down, wings tilted, plowing to a stop and floating majestically in the calm waters of the cove, their black-billed heads lifted high on long white necks.
“What in the world are they?” Keeva asked. She recognized the bio-fields of thousands of creatures, but these were new to her.
Dancing in Dreamtime Page 21
