The Embedding

by Ian Watson

  Another window brought him face to face with Eileen.

  For a moment she failed to recognize him, he looked so thin and worn, then she flew to the kitchen door.

  “Pierre! But Chris said nothing on the phone—”

  “No?”

  They kissed lightly. Pierre held her by the shoulders to look into her eyes — which seemed older and cooler now.

  He gestured uncertainly at the other room, where the TV was playing hurdy-gurdy music.

  “I never knew — Chris didn't mention anything. I — I am right, aren't I?”

  “Yes — his name's Peter. My Chris doesn't seem to have said much—”

  “Ah — Chris has gone up to the Hospital for something. Maybe to give us a moment together?”

  • • •

  Pip floated into a corridor which carried cable-bearing pipes around the inner skin of the Globe — now they were buckled and ruptured. Further along, the corridor was pinched together by the shock wave of the explosion and its roof scraped the floor like a coalmine gallery squashed flat by subsidence.

  Nearby, a hatch had sprung open. A ladder with metre-wide spaces between the separate rungs led down to a lower level. Blocking the view drifted the body of one of the angular aliens, surrounded by a frozen pink haze.

  Pip bounced himself cautiously upward from rung to rung till he reached the dead unhuman floating in the nebula of its blood. He hauled the corpse aside. Its grey clothes — or was that stuff skin? — tore away from the chilled metal leaving a frozen layer behind.

  Pip pushed himself into a high, vaulted corridor more spacious than the first corridor had been. He shone his light around. The corridor led off in one direction along a buckled curve, vanishing out of sight. In the other direction it opened into a hallway of idle, dead machines. A second alien body hung midway between them, turning very slowly end over end. Fingers splayed out like tree twigs. Ears had burst open into grey streamers from its skull. Pip swung his body round so that the roof became the floor again, then pushed his way by gentle shoves towards the machinery. Ambassador from the world of whipped cream, he inspected these first pickings of the meal of Mind. He snapped holograms, checked his Roentgen counter.

  After ten minutes, when he couldn't make out the function of the machines, he drifted down a long rumpled ramp to a lower level still . . .

  • • •

  Sole carried the sleeping Vidya up in the lift and along the corridor. Outside the hairmesh security glass, the green barbed woods pressed a corset round the building. It was quiet.

  He unlocked the first door.

  In the interface between the two doors, Lionel Rosson stood waiting for him. He didn't seem surprised to see him, or the boy in his arms.

  “What are you up to, Chris? Sabotage? Or is it sentimentality? I suppose I ought to say welcome home to Haddon. But let's get that boy back to his proper place first, hmm? Oh, I would have wanted you back here so desperately, a week ago! But now . . . well — it's different, isn't it?”

  Sole whispered furiously:

  “I'm taking Vidya out of here. To live a real life. I'm sick of bogus science and lying politics. Projects for the advancement of Mankind! Codename after codename for bestiality — their Leapfrogs and Mulekicks. And Haddon's just as bad—”

  “What's a Leapfrog, Chris? What's a Mulekick?” Rosson asked, humouringly, keeping a wary eye on the sleeping boy, and keeping his own back to the outer door.

  “Hasn't it all been on the telly then? Flying saucers. Alien menace. All that crap. I hear it knocked the wind out of the sails of revolution in South America!”

  “You've been involved in that then, Chris? Ah well! Time enough to tell me. You've seen the injuries? You realize the boy is tranked? And needs to be, damn it!”

  “I've had my fill of needs. Political needs. Scientific needs. Humanity's needs. Bugger all needs!”

  “You don't understand the situation, Chris. Let's take Vidya downstairs again. We'll work out a strategy, hmm?”

  “Who wants a ‘strategy’?” sneered Sole.

  “We do, Chris. Things reached crisis point—”

  “You've ballsed things up, you bastard — you didn't look after Vidya!”

  Sole put the boy down on the floor gently.

  “For Chrisake, Chris, listen to me — the language programme broke down. The kids accepted the overload on short term memory up to a certain point. But it's broken down now like a dam bursting.”

  Sole growled at the foggy figure before him.

  “Bloody well leave dams bursting out of it!”

  “Sure, Chris. Anything you say. But listen, will you? The kids reverted to babbling. Not baby babbling. It was concepts, ways of thinking—”

  “Get out of my way, you. Fuck your ways of thinking.”

  “The thing is, your embedding has—”

  Sole hit Rosson in the stomach.

  “—taken place,” gasped Rosson. Sole caught hold of his mane of hair and swung his head against the wall violently till Rosson crumpled up and sagged to the floor.

  He picked Vidya up again and unlocked the outer door.

  • • •

  Pip floated into what would later be known as the First Chamber of the Brains.

  His light fell on many crystal life-support boxes — row upon row towering up to a vaulted dome. Tendrils of wires led up to them, like jungle creepers climbing trees, from the instrument panels below. Wires led into the plastic jelly that filled the boxes, where they split into a million filaments, that touched every part of what those boxes contained: naked brains — set in the jelly like fruits in a trifle.

  There were brains of many forms and sizes. Some resembled fungi. Some, corals. Some, rubbery cactus plants. Sections of spinal columns jutted below the brains, some as straight as ram-rods, others curled like drawn bows, others ripple-form like waves. Sense-organs stood out, attached to the brains on muscular cords and bony rods. A few were recognizable as eyeballs; others ambiguous. Were they for seeing light at all — or some other form of radiation?

  Pip gazed up in a mixture of awe and disgust. The set-up reminded him of a biology lab in school — pickled sea-creatures drained of colour, floating in alcohol.

  None of the life-support boxes had ruptured, though, when the Globe burst.

  He wondered — could their minds have survived inside that protective gel of theirs — quick-frozen so fast that they had no time to die, but only hibernated?

  There'd been no vital organs to rupture, no lungs to hurst. The life support systems had just suddenly cut off — and the brain had already been plunged to a temperature where all functions were suspended.

  Could cryogenics engineers from Earth restore any sort of consciousness to these creatures? Was there any chance they could reactivate the life support systems? Warm the brains up? Bring them back again?

  Maybe the shock of pseudo-dying when the cold rushed in would have been too massive for the mind to come through intact, even if a trace of consciousness still lingered.

  Yet if there was the slightest chance! Surely Humanity owed it to these prisoners, to bring them back again. And owed it to itself. As many mental sciences could stem from the contents of this chamber, as physical sciences from the machinery of the Globe.

  Such thoughts exalted him — eagle scout, PhD cum laude, veteran of the crusade for Asian freedom — as he hung there among the brains of beings from across a thousand light years, and whispered a prayer.

  Lord, may these brains be resurrectable.

  May they be raised to a new life by Ettinger Foundation engineers. To a true mind alliance, which those ghouls denied them — as they would have denied Humanity — rushing in here to pick our brains and fly off again. Please, Lord, for Humanity's sake.

  God bless the Ettinger Foundation, whispered Pip into his helmet. Bless them and help them to bring the frozen body back to life and cure it.

  It was a prayer he'd whispered many times before — his own four-year-old niece had bee
n frozen in a tube of liquid nitrogen, dead of terminal cancer, the summer before.

  Pip wept into his helmet tenderly, from sheer compassion. His torchbeam danced over the frozen brain aquarium.

  • • •

  Sole carried Vidya through the frozen fields by the same route as he'd come. Though it was the longer way round to his house, it was less public. He was less likely to meet anyone. As he walked, the cold air began to penetrate Vidya's sleep. The boy had never felt such cold before. His lips tasted it and twitched. His cheeks blushed with it. His skin crawled.

  Sole crossed the road where he'd parted from Pierre and set his eyes on the blue car parked by his house. The Volkswagen spelt mobility. Escape.

  He held the boy tight, loving him and hating all else, as the child's lips began to mumble sounds.

  Vidya's eyes opened, and he stared blankly at the great blue vault of sky and towering skeletons of trees.

  • • •

  Eileen and Pierre came out to meet him, Pierre catching hold of her arm to stop her when he saw the boy.

  “Chris — what sort of game is this?”

  She stared at Vidya and the boy stared back, locking on her eyes disconcertingly.

  “You've brought an Indian boy back from Brazil?”

  “Chris brought nothing but himself and me. That's one of their experiments from the Unit. They usually keep them under lock and key — Chris must have flipped his lid bringing him here—”

  Inside the house, a telephone bell began to jangle.

  Pierre took his hand off Eileen's arm, belatedly.

  “Shall I answer? I can guess what it is. You mightn't realize it, Eileen, but your Chris has just torn his precious career up and thrown the pieces in the air.”

  She stared at the Frenchman in bewilderment.

  “What—?”

  “Chris has just committed a huge breach of security. Though God knows why. It doesn't look like he does—”

  Chris hugged the boy, and gazed down at him.

  “Fortunately he's healthy,” he said, as much to himself as to Eileen or Pierre. “There's nothing physically wrong with him. He's bright. Look at him taking it all in, cunning little bugger—”

  Pierre gestured questioningly at the house, where the telephone kept on ringing. But Eileen wasn't paying attention. She stared from her husband to the child in its ill-fitting clothes. Pierre shrugged and went indoors to take the call.

  “Do you mean this kid is yours, Chris?”

  “Why yes! Who's else?”

  “But . . . when? How? Is this what you dragged Pierre here to witness — this shabby domestic intrigue? This petty tit for tat. After you've been away such a time you can only produce this gesture — you petty hateful nobody!”

  Vidya stared at her face twisted by anger. His fists balled up inside his gloves. His body arched against the restraint of clothes. He writhed about like a snake in Sole's embrace as the cold air stung his face.

  Sole stared at his wife. Her outburst puzzled him. It seemed so paranoid and irrelevant. He hadn't even been away ‘such a time’ — it was less than two weeks.

  “I didn't screw some bitch foreign nurse if that's what you think! Vidya is the child of my — my mind.”

  “So Peter isn't a product of your precious mind? A cruel trick, Chris, bringing Pierre here to rub it in.”

  “That's an accident, Pierre being here. Honestly. My God, why should it be a trick?”

  “Can I see into your heart any better than you can yourself? Do I know why your subconscious needs a set-piece like this?”

  “Setpiece? What the hell are you talking about!”

  “Pierre arriving. Then your dramatic entry with your ‘real’ child in your arms. That's a child of the mind is it? I can't compete with that. What on earth is a child of the mind!”

  The boy's eyes flashed from Sole to his wife and back again. The electricity of words flowed between them, and he fed on it greedily. Sole had to hold him tighter as his limbs flexed and he twisted about in his arms. It was all emotional nonsense Eileen was talking. It didn't make sense. The idea of bringing Pierre here hadn't been that at all. It had been — generosity. An attempt to give her something, not take something away, or humiliate her.

  “I don't suppose I can stay here anyhow. Have you got the car keys? I'll have to take him somewhere else.”

  “This is beyond me. You just . . . simply . . . amaze me.”

  Sole began to feel a curious light-headedness.

  Eileen was receding into the background. The house, the car, the landscape were all changing subtly. Still there, but — different.

  He was still seeing familiar things; but seeing them as though this was the first time he had set eyes on them. The familiar things were at the same time infinitely strange and fresh. They had taken on an unsettling double life. Their colours were faded and at the same time bright. Their shapes fitted in neatly to his customary picture of things — and simultaneously were oddly distorted and foreshortened as though the rules of perspective were being interfered with.

  The house, as well as being a house, was now a giant red box of plastic bricks. The car was a Volkswagen saloon — and also a great plastic and glass spheroid of no very obvious function.

  Eileen stood before him — a flat figure posturing on a screen suspended in mid-air.

  Beyond, a barren plateau stretched out into infinite distance, unable to terminate itself with any solid boundary. Panic mounted in him as he searched for the boundaries that ought to be there, and were not. The most he could locate was a circular zone of confused light, very far away. Or was it very far away? Or very near? He couldn't tell — and when he tried to concentrate on the problem, the world flashed in and out at him, frighteningly, growing alternately very large and very small. In that confused zone far off, lines of sight broke down and vanishing points stubbornly refused to vanish. He tried to fashion a wall out of that medley of lights and darks far off — but the wall, half-completed, flowed in at him and out again, flexing and contracting about him, as though he had been swallowed by a soft glass stomach he could see through — and the stomach walls pulsed in and out while its acids nibbled at his bare skin, licking it with a harsh invisible tongue.

  From this unbounded, menacing plateau sprung at intervals stiff towering giants, balanced upon great solitary legs, waving their hundreds of arms and thousands of fingers slackly overhead.

  Above their reach was more of the great opaque stomach — its foggy depths were coloured blue, up there. They fled away and raced towards him, compressing him to a tiny spot, then inflating him till it seemed his head would burst with thinking of it.

  Then he did an impossible thing.

  He twisted about, in fright, in his own grasp; for an instant, saw both himself holding, and himself being held — saw the Self that held him, and saw the Self he held; the two sights superimposed on one another. Almost as soon as it formed, this double vision fell apart, and the two states began to alternate separately before his horrified eyes.

  Rapidly, the two versions of Himself speeded up their substitutions of one another — quickening pace till they were flashing before his gaze like a film and producing a sickening illusion of continuity — but continuity in being two separate places at once.

  Soon the visions fused again — and he was holding on to himself, and struggling against himself, not knowing which was the true state.

  As before, the double vision shattered. He was Sole the Man staring in fear and nausea into the Boy's eyes. But these eyes swelled into deep pools. Mirrors. Saucers of glass. He could see himself reflected in them, at the same time as he saw himself through them.

  In their depths a whirlpool spun frantically on its own axis, sucking everything in to a vanishing point that never vanished but only grew fearfully dense with light — with all the sights it was seeing yet couldn't find a way to discard from attention.

  He wore the sky close as a hat. He knew the moil and coil of wisp clouds barely visi
ble in the blue, intimately. His fingers branched the branching of the trees. His tongue tasted one by one the rows of brick teeth in that closed red mouth of a house that would swallow him, swallow him. And, at the very same time, he knew he was already swallowed, by the pulsing translucent stomach of the outside world.

  This world flipped, into a new state of being.

  It fell apart from lines and solids into a pointillist chaos of dots. Bright dots and dark dots. Blue dots, red dots, green dots. No form held true. No distance held fast. New forms making use of these dots in entirely arbitrary, experimental ways, sprang into being among the overwhelming debris of sense perceptions outside of him — fought to impose themselves on the flux of being — failed. Fell apart. And new forms rose.

  A new creation was struggling to build itself out of the flood of information pouring at him. A new meaning. But all the sane, functional boundaries had dissolved and this chaos was saturated with meaning to such an extent it had lost all possibility of meaning any one thing or set of things. All appeared as of equal value.

  A terrible, physical pressure was building in him, to crystallize this saturated world out into meaning — at all costs.

  Where was the third dimension, that kept reality spaced out? This world seemed two-dimensional now — pressing tight about his eyes and ears and nose like a membrane, as packed with matter as the heart of a collapsed star. A flat sphere of dots of sense data pressing directly on to his brain, bypassing even his eyes and ears. It bound his thoughts about like a hungry womb.

  The pressure in his head became an urgent need to smash his way through this membrane — to force things to become three-dimensional again, and absorb the vast excess of data.

  And yet he was aware, instinctively, that the world he was seeing already was three-dimensional — that this two-dimensional quality was merely an agonizing illusion. Aware that he was trying to force something upon the world that could not be there in any rational universe — a dimension at right angles to this reality: somewhere to store the sheer volume of information flooding his brain and refusing to fade away.