Needle in a Timestack

by Robert Silverberg

  “Your bones will join the rest here.”

  “Test me,” Lipescu said.

  Watching from aloft, Bolzano went tense. His thin body drew together like that of a chilled spider. Anything might happen now. The robot might propound riddles, like the Sphinx confronting Oedipus.

  It might demand the proofs of mathematical theorems. It might ask the translation of strange words. So they gathered, from their knowledge of what had befallen other men here. And, so it seemed, to give a wrong answer was to earn instant death.

  He and Lipescu had ransacked the libraries of the world. They had packed all knowledge, so they hoped, into their computer. It had taken months, even with multi-stage programming. The tiny shining globe of metal on Lipescu’s chest contained an infinity of answers to an infinity of questions.

  Below, there was long silence as man and robot studied one another. Then the guardian said, “Define latitude.”

  “Do you mean geographical latitude?” Lipescu asked.

  Bolzano congealed with fear. The idiot, asking for a clarification! He would die before he began!

  The robot said, “Define latitude.”

  Lipescu’s voice was calm. “The angular distance of a point on a planet’s surface north or south of the equator, as measured from the center of the planet.”

  “Which is more consonant,” the robot asked, “the minor third or the major sixth?’’

  There was a pause. Lipescu was no musician. But the computer would feed him the answer.

  “The minor third,” Lipescu said.

  Without a pause, the robot fired another question. “Name the prime numbers between 5,237 and 7,641.”

  Bolzano smiled as Lipescu handled the question with ease. So far, so good. The robot had stuck to strictly factual questions, schoolbook stuff, posing no real problems to Lipescu. And after the initial hesitation and quibble over latitude, Lipescu had seemed to grow in confidence from moment to moment. Bolzano squinted at the scanner, looking beyond the robot, through the open gate, to the helter-skelter pile of treasures. He wondered which would fall to his lot when he and Lipescu divided them, two-thirds for Lipescu, the rest for him.

  “Name the seven tragic poets of Elifora,” the robot said.

  “Domiphar, Halionis, Slegg, Hork-Sekan—”

  “The fourteen signs of the zodiac as seen from Morneez,” the robot demanded.

  “The Teeth, the Serpents, the Leaves, the Waterfall, the Blot—”

  “What is a pedicel?”

  “The stalk of an individual flower of an inflorescence.”

  “How many years did the Siege of Lamina last?”

  “Eight.”

  “What did the flower cry in the third canto of Somner’s Vehicles?”

  “‘I ache, I sob, I whimper, I die,’” Lipescu boomed.

  “Distinguish between the stamen and the pistil.”

  “The stamen is the pollen-producing organ of the flower; the pistil—”

  And so it went. Question after question. The robot was not content with the legendary three questions of mythology; it asked a dozen, and then asked more. Lipescu answered perfectly, prompted by the murmuring of the peerless compendium of knowledge strapped to his chest. Bolzano kept careful count: the big man had dealt magnificently with seventeen questions When would the robot concede defeat? When would it end its grim quiz and step aside?

  It asked an eighteenth question, pathetically easy. All it wanted was an exposition of the Pythagorean Theorem. Lipescu did not even need the computer for that. He answered, briefly, concisely, correctly. Bolzano was proud of his burly partner.

  Then the robot struck Lipescu dead.

  It happened in the flickering of an eyelid. Lipescu’s voice had ceased, and he stood there, ready for the next question, but the next question did not come. Rather, a panel in the robot’s vaulted belly slid open, and something bright and sinuous lashed out, uncoiling over the ten feet or so that separated guardian from challenger, and sliced Lipescu in half. The bright something slid back out of sight. Lipescu’s trunk toppled to one side. His massive legs remained absurdly planted for a moment; then they crumpled, and a spacesuited leg kicked once, and all was still.

  Stunned, Bolzano trembled in the loneliness of the cabin, and his lymph turned to water. What had gone wrong? Lipescu had given the proper answer to every question, and yet the robot had slain him. Why? Could the big man possibly have misphrased Pythagoras? No: Bolzano had listened. The answer had been flawless, as had the seventeen that preceded it. Seemingly the robot had lost patience with the game, then. The robot had cheated. Arbitrarily, maliciously, it had lashed out at Lipescu, punishing him for the correct answer.

  Did robots cheat, Bolzano wondered? Could they act in malicious spite? No robot he knew was capable of such actions; but this robot was unlike all others.

  For a long while, Bolzano remained huddled in the cabin. The temptation was strong to blast free of orbit and head home, treasureless but alive. Yet the treasure called to him. Some suicidal impulse drove him on. Sirenlike, the robot drew him downward.

  There had to be a way to make the robot yield, Bolzano thought, as he guided his small ship down the broad barren plain. Using the computer had been a good idea, whose only defect was that it hadn’t worked. The records were uncertain, but it appeared that in the past men had died when they finally gave a wrong answer after a series of right ones. Lipescu had given no wrong answers. Yet he too had died. It was inconceivable that the robot understood some relationship of the squares on the hypotenuse and on the other two sides that was different from the relationship Lipescu had expressed

  Bolzano wondered what method would work.

  He plodded leadenly across the plain toward the gate and its guardian. The germ of an idea formed in him as he walked doggedly on.

  He was, he knew, condemned to death by his own greed. Only extreme agility of mind would save him from sharing Lipescu’s fate. Ordinary intelligence would not work. Odyssean cleverness was the only salvation.

  Bolzano approached the robot. Bones lay everywhere. Lipescu weltered in his own blood. Against that vast dead chest lay the computer, Bolzano knew. But he shrank from reaching for it. He would do without it. He looked away, unwilling to let the sight of Lipescu’s severed body interfere with the coolness of his thoughts.

  He collected his courage. The robot showed no interest in him.

  “Give ground,” Bolzano said. “I am here. I come for the treasure.”

  “Win your right to it.”

  “What must I do?”

  “Demonstrate truth,” the robot said. “Reveal inwardness. Display understanding.”

  “I am ready,” said Bolzano.

  The robot offered a question. “What is the excretory unit of the vertebrate kidney called?”

  Bolzano contemplated. He had no idea. The computer could tell him, but the computer lay strapped to fallen Lipescu. No matter. The robot wanted truth, inwardness, understanding. Lipescu had offered information. Lipescu had perished.

  “The frog in the pond,” Bolzano said, “utters an azure cry.”

  There was silence. Bolzano watched the robot’s front, waiting for the panel to slide open, the sinuous something to chop him in half.

  The robot said, “During the War of Dogs on Vanderveer IX, the embattled colonists drew up thirty-eight dogmas of defiance. Quote the third, the ninth, the twenty-second, and the thirty-fifth.”

  Bolzano pondered. This was an alien robot, product of unknown hand. How did its maker’s mind work? Did it respect knowledge? Did it treasure facts for their own sake? Or did it recognize that information is meaningless, insight a nonlogical process?

  Lipescu had been logical. He lay in pieces.

  “The mereness of pain,” Bolzano responded, “is ineffable and refreshing.”

  The robot said, “The mon
astery of Kwaisen was besieged by the soldiers of Oda Nobunaga on the third of April, 1582. What words of wisdom did the abbot utter?”

  Bolzano spoke quickly and buoyantly. “Eleven, forty-one, elephant, voluminous.”

  The last word slipped from his lips despite an effort to retrieve it. Elephants were voluminous, he thought. A fatal slip? The robot did not appear to notice.

  Sonorously, ponderously, the great machine delivered the next question.

  “What is the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere of Muldonar VII?”

  “False witness bears a swift sword,” Bolzano replied.

  The robot made an odd humming sound. Abruptly it rolled on massive treads, moving some six feet to its left. The gate of the treasure trove stood wide, beckoning.

  “You may enter,” the robot said.

  Bolzano’s heart leaped. He had won! He had gained the high prize!

  Others had failed, most recently less than an hour before, and their bones glistened on the plain. They had tried to answer the robot, sometimes giving right answers, sometimes giving wrong ones, and they had died. Bolzano lived.

  It was a miracle, he thought. Luck? Shrewdness? Some of each, he told himself. He had watched a man give eighteen right answers and die. So the accuracy of the responses did not matter to the robot. What did? Inwardness. Understanding. Truth.

  There could be inwardness and understanding and truth in random answers, Bolzano realized. Where earnest striving had failed, mockery had succeeded. He had staked his life on nonsense, and the prize was his.

  He staggered forward, into the treasure trove. Even in the light gravity, his feet were like leaden weights. Tension ebbed in him. He knelt among the treasures.

  The tapes, the sharp-eyed televector scanners, had not begun to indicate the splendor of what lay here. Bolzano stared in awe and rapture at a tiny disk, no greater in diameter than a man’s eye, on which myriad coiling lines writhed and twisted in patterns of rare beauty. He caught his breath, sobbing with the pain of perception as a gleaming marble spire, angled in mysterious swerves, came into view. Here, a bright beetle of some fragile waxy substance rested on a pedestal of yellow jade. There, a tangle of metallic cloth spurted dizzying patterns of luminescence. And over there—and beyond—and there—

  The ransom of a universe, Bolzano thought.

  It would take many trips to carry all this to his ship. Perhaps it would be better to bring the ship to the hoard, eh? He wondered, though, if he would lose his advantage if he stepped back through the gate. Was it possible that he would have to win entrance all over again? And would the robot accept his answers as willingly the second time?

  It was something he would have to chance, Bolzano decided. His nimble mind worked out a plan. He would select a dozen, two dozen of the finest treasures, as much as he could comfortably carry, and take them back to the ship. Then he would lift the ship and set it down next to the gate. If the robot raised objections about his entering, Bolzano would simply depart, taking what he had already secured. There was no point in running undue risks. When he had sold this cargo, and felt pinched for money, he could always return and try to win admission once again. Certainly, no one else would steal the hoard if he abandoned it.

  Selection, that was the key now.

  Crouching, Bolzano picked through the treasure, choosing for portability and easy marketability. The marble spire? Too big. But the coiling disk, yes, certainly, and the beetle, of course, and this small statuette of dull hue, and the cameos showing scenes no human eye had ever beheld, and this, and this, and this—

  His pulse raced. His heart thundered. He saw himself traveling from world to world, vending his wares. Collectors, museums, governments would vie with one another to have these prizes. He would let them bid each object up into the millions before he sold. And, of course, he would keep one or two for himself—or perhaps three or four—souvenirs of this great adventure.

  And someday when wealth bored him he would return and face the challenge again. And he would dare the robot to question him, and he would reply with random absurdities, demonstrating his grasp of the fundamental insight that in knowledge there is only hollow merit, and the robot would admit him once more to the treasure trove.

  Bolzano rose. He cradled his lovelies in his arms. Carefully, carefully, he thought. Turning, he made his way through the gate.

  The robot had not moved. It had shown no interest as Bolzano plundered the hoard. The small man walked calmly past it.

  The robot said, “Why have you taken those? What do you want with them?”

  Bolzano smiled. Nonchalantly he replied, “I’ve taken them because they’re beautiful. Because I want them. Is there a better reason?”

  “No,” the robot said, and the panel slid open in its ponderous black chest.

  Too late, Bolzano realized that the test had not yet ended, that the robot’s question had arisen out of no idle curiosity. And this time he had replied in earnest, speaking in rational terms.

  Bolzano shrieked. He saw the brightness coming toward him.

  Death followed instantly.

  In Entropy’s Jaws

  This is a story that I began in January 1970 and finished, after taking a little break for a winter holiday in a warmer place than the one in which I lived, early in March of that year. It was written at a time when I was still reasonably comfortable with the conventions of science fiction and had not yet entered into the period of literary and personal chaos that would complicate my life from 1973 or so through the early 1980s. And so I blithely tackled this long, complex, challenging story, which moves among changing levels of unreality and shifting zones of time, with the sort of confidence that I would later lose and be a long time regaining.

  I don’t recall much about the genesis of “In Entropy’s Jaws,” only that I wrote it for the second issue of Bob Hoskins’s paperback anthology, Infinity. Hoskins, a long-time science fiction figure whom I had known glancingly for many years, paid me well and gave me a free hand artistically, a combination that—not too surprisingly—I found irresistible, and so I did a story for each of the five issues of his anthology that appeared between 1970 and 1973. Some of my best work, too.

  Static crackles from the hazy golden cloud of airborne loudspeakers drifting just below the ceiling of the spaceliner cabin. A hiss: communications filters are opening. An impending announcement from the bridge, no doubt. Then the captain’s bland, mechanical voice: “We are approaching the Panama Canal. All passengers into their bottles until the all-clear after insertion. When we come out the far side, we’ll be travelling at eighty lights toward the Perseus relay booster. Thank you.” In John Skein’s cabin the warning globe begins to flash, dousing him with red, yellow, green light, going up and down the visible spectrum, giving him some infra– and ultra– too. Not everybody who books passage on this liner necessarily has human sensory equipment. The signal will not go out until Skein is safely in his bottle. Go on, it tells him. Get in. Get in. Panama Canal coming up.

  Obediently he rises and moves across the narrow cabin toward the tapering dull-skinned steel container, two and a half meters high, that will protect him against the dimensional stresses of canal insertion. He is a tall, angular man with thin lips, a strong chin, glossy black hair that clings close to his high-vaulted skull. His skin is deeply tanned but his eyes are those of one who has been in winter for some time. This is the fiftieth year of his second go-round. He is travelling alone toward a world of the Abbondanza system, perhaps the last leg on a journey that has occupied him for several years.

  The passenger bottle swings open on its gaudy rhodium-jacketed hinge when its sensors, picking up Skein’s mass and thermal output, tell it that its protectee is within entry range. He gets in. It closes and seals, wrapping him in a seamless magnetic field. “Please be seated,” the bottle tells him softly. “Place your arms through the stasis loops and your feet in the
security platens. When you have done this the pressor fields will automatically be activated and you will be fully insulated against injury during the coming period of turbulence.” Skein, who has had plenty of experience with faster-than-light travel, has anticipated the instructions and is already in stasis. The bottle closes. “Do you wish music?” it asks him. “A book? A vision spool? Conversation?”

  “Nothing, thanks,” Skein says, and waits.

  He understands waiting very well by this time. Once he was an impatient man, but this is a thin season in his life, and it has been teaching him the arts of stoic acceptance. He will sit here with the Buddha’s own complacency until the ship is through the canal. Silent, alone, self-sufficient. If only there will be no fugues this time. Or, at least—he is negotiating the terms of his torment with his demons—at least let them not be flashforwards. If he must break loose again from the matrix of time, he prefers to be cast only into his yesterdays, never into his tomorrows.

  “We are almost into the canal now,” the bottle tells him pleasantly.

  “It’s all right. You don’t need to look after me. Just let me know when it’s safe to come out.”

  He closes his eyes. Trying to envision the ship: a fragile glimmering purple needle squirting through clinging blackness, plunging toward the celestial vortex just ahead, the maelstrom of clashing forces, the soup of contravariant tensors. The Panama Canal, so-called. Through which the liner will shortly rush, acquiring during its passage such a garland of borrowed power that it will rip itself free of the standard fourspace; it will emerge on the far side of the canal into a strange, tranquil pocket of the universe where the speed of light is the downside limiting velocity, and no one knows where the upper limit lies.

  Alarms sound in the corridor, heavy, resonant: clang, clang, clang. The dislocation is beginning. Skein is braced. What does it look like out there? Folds of glowing black velvet, furry swatches of the disrupted continuum, wrapping themselves around the ship? Titanic lightnings hammering on the hull? Laughing centaurs flashing across the twisted heavens? Despondent masks, fixed in tragic grimaces, dangling between the blurred stars? Streaks of orange, green, crimson: sick rainbows, limp, askew? In we go. Clang, clang, clang. The next phase of the voyage now begins. He thinks of his destination, holding an image of it rigidly in mind. The picture is vivid, though this is a world he has visited only in spells of temporal fugue. Too often; he has been there again and again in these moments of disorientation in time. The colors are wrong on that world. Purple sand. Blue-leaved trees. Too much manganese? Too little copper? He will forgive it its colors if it will grant him his answers. And then. Skein feels the familiar ugly throbbing at the base of his neck, as if the tip of his spine is swelling like a balloon. He curses. He tries to resist. As he feared, not even the bottle can wholly protect him against these stresses. Outside the ship the universe is being wrenched apart; some of that slips in here and throws him into a private epilepsy of the timeline. Spacetime is breaking up for him. He will go into fugue. He clings, fighting, knowing it is futile. The currents of time buffet him, knocking him a short distance into the future, then a reciprocal distance into the past, as if he is a bubble of insect spittle glued loosely to a dry reed. He cannot hold on much longer. Let it not be flashforward, he prays, wondering who it is to whom he prays. Let it not be flashforward. And he loses his grip. And shatters. And is swept in shards across time.