by Ian Watson
Don’t understand them. Only sing them.
Criers across the sea-world, they have no Star themselves, no concept of a Star of Thought, no physical hope of this…
• • •
Can he give a new glyph of understanding to the Star? Young as he is, with his deviant talent for counting, and sky-pulsing, he is different.
But sick maybe—in mind or melon? Warped in the womb by the faint traces diffusing through all oceans now… which His Kind taste with mounting apprehension such as no glyph has traced since that first Star was born on a cold flat ocean day a hundred thousand years ago—while ice was unlocking new mazes of the sea to north and south, and they tasted the planet changing…
Or is his alien pulsing the hint they need to read the light signals of the Great Ten-Arms in the deeps? That has only been a war of meeting-and-eating, till now. What mightn’t those guess of the shape of reality, in their cold, violent, flexible way?
The Star calls him, to glyph out answers to certain enigmas…
• • •
Now, in addition to sky-pulsing a model of the sea and Steel locations, he feels bound—by a duty of love—to signal the fact of summoning to the Star.
He pulses, and dives compulsively, rising miles away and an hour later… to trek back to the herd.
Another night and a day, and questions come to him, which Eight-Arms in him wrestles into shape—awkward, itchy questions.
This Star of Thought? What is it? Describe. Explain.
He complies.
Then, the day after, the air says: Northward, find this Star! Which is as well, since he doesn’t know how he could have disobeyed the itching peck in his neck—or the wailing summons of the Singing Ones—if the two were conflicting…
The air-clicks trigger another itch too. Sexual undercurrents swirl beneath his memory. Queer ghosts of “hands” upon his flesh, his flesh upon another’s, turn him for comfort to a female of His Kind. He slides against her in the herd, though the musk tastes bitter, and all her signals are avoidance. He careens her with his body, shivering with excitement.
Irritably she slams her body against his; and through the waves come grating, angry pulses from the bull…
Ten
A vulture perched on a lower spar of one of the limbs that swung the Big Dish round on its railway tracks. The bird regarded the garbage pit, where a muscular Indian youth was raking grit over discarded cans and bottles, with implacable beady patience.
The bird’s posture wasn’t so dissimilar from Dr Paul’s, thought Richard—sitting behind his desk there, betraying a certain tension by the set of his shoulders, yet in all other respects radiating the confidence of one about to flap his wings and descend on the carcase of the universe.
Richard, Paul and Max Berg had been up all night correlating data from their partner Dish six thousand miles further south in the Andes that gave them their long base line for detecting minute discrepancies in the radio sky.
Max Berg looked distinctly eroded by the experience—a quite unnecessary piece of scientific gymnastics, insisted on by Paul. He seemed waxy and diffuse now, melted down from his normal state of dynamic ampleness. His bones had given up weight-bearing some hours earlier. No doubt this was exactly what Paul had hoped for as an added bonus to getting the Footsteps material all neatly tied up. To the extent that Paul liked his diktats to be backed by some semblance of democracy, Max and Richard were two ponies harnessed to a racehorse in a troika of his own devising, the real function of which seemed to be to keep them simultaneously in check, and worked to their limits. Given the workload on the one hand, and the co-operative constraints of modern research on the other, colleagues were a sort of obligatory evil. Still, Paul Hammond kept his purely scientific staff to the minimum—though he splurged on the technical and operative side. There were a dozen electrical engineers, mechanics and computer programmers at Mezapico.
Richard Kimble had his own strong suspicions by now as to why he himself had been hired.
Max Berg’s case was similar, in some respects. The man was more stubborn and refractory than Richard, but deep down he too nursed a vulnerable broken-hearted core. Max had been released from Dachau on some obscure whim of irrational tyrants only days before the Second World War broke out, and sailed for America only hours before he would have been trapped again. Paul could hardly do without his immense mathematical competence—yet he always knew that Max had been, in a sense, conditioned, like a maze-running worm, by shocks of physical and mental humiliation, and that something in him had snapped, and re-knit only untidily. All that previous night Paul had been running him through the maze of figures for the greater glory of science, cynically recreating the regime of the camp, it seemed to Richard. Max accepted the pressure for the sake of knowledge of the Universe, perhaps hoping against hope that Paul would turn out to be wrong. Meanwhile the experience was subtly reconditioning him, recasting him in a previous, less ebullient psychic mould. The fringes of his moustache looked thin and tatty in the morning light, since he had only kept himself awake through the past twenty-four hours while he worked by pulling out the hairs one by one. He still nibbled at it every few minutes, stretching his upper lip, tugging the hairs between his teeth, releasing them.
Richard stared at the vulture, willing it not to move. It wasn’t likely to do so, while that Indian stayed near the trash pit; so this was a singularly purposeless exercise of will. Perhaps he was really willing Paul not to move—by a form of sympathetic magic; not to flap his wings too wildly to attract the world’s attention. However, Paul Hammond was the last one to be willed to avoid historic histrionics…
“We’re ready to make the announcement, right?”
Max sighed.
“This will put the cat among the pigeons, Paul. Is it the right way to do it, I ask myself? Press agencies, instead of the Seattle Conference—?”
“The academic rigmarole in due course, Max. But a breakthrough of this magnitude cries out for a far more generous treatment!”
“It’s vulgar, Paul. Not the scientific method.”
“Sure, it’s showbiz. Why pretend? Do you honestly think we would be sitting here today, in Mezapico, if I’d not been my own vulgar P.R. man?”
“Your other ‘vulgarities’ were minor ones compared with what you’re contemplating now. Wait till Seattle, Paul. The news agencies will take it up soon enough. But this haste, it’s indecent! After a few billion years, you can’t wait a few more weeks! Paul, you’re so hooked on this catchphrase ‘Footsteps of God’… You know in your heart you don’t dare entitle a scientific document that—”
“Oh no?” laughed Paul brassily. “But I will! Didn’t they laugh at Hammond Waves, and wasn’t I right all along? Doesn’t the world know it? A ‘Topological Catastrophe’ invoking another galaxy colliding with ours, but masked by the whole length of the Milky Way and the Lens Core—wasn’t that a zany enough sounding concept? And who was right? Tell me,” he clacked, eyes glinting, “do you challenge our present conclusions? Are they invalid? No? Then it’s our bounden duty to broadcast them. People are dying every hour without knowing the truth—it’s disgusting. Anyway, we’re hardly doing Seattle a disservice. Audience-wise, it’ll be the first astrophysics conference in history with standing room only.”
What is paranoia? thought Richard. Delusion… But there’s no delusion involved in this. If Paul were saying that the Earth was square, it would be different. And yet, it’s something far more devastating he’s proclaiming!
“Of course,” Richard inserted, barbedly, “this might, just might spell the end of Astronomy. Maybe we should consider that aspect.”
Paul stared through Richard at a point approximately two feet behind his head, as though he couldn’t believe that Richard Kimble had said those particular words and was therefore trying to locate the source of the voice.
Richard explained:
“The funding for projects like this is getting much tighter, right? You said so yourself. Announcin
g that you’ve finally reached the dawn of creation, unlocked the last secret drawer, and found it empty—presenting it in those explicit terms, as you seem intent on doing!—well, most people are bound to react to it as The Finale.”
“Crap, Richard. On the contrary, it’s bound to stimulate a flurry of projects to confirm us or refute us. A drought of funds? I’d look for a flood. The world will be desperate to know one way or the other. The ultimate truth about the nature of matter—of reality! It hasn’t come from the particle accelerators. It’s come from us here.”
Paul yawned harshly and abruptly.
“The end of Astronomy?” he queried, archly. “As I define it, ‘end’ means ‘ultimate purpose’ or ‘ultimate object’. Which is not piddling around with planets and moons, but the study of ultimate origins, the basic nature of things. Everything else that happened since the Origin is inconsequential—”
“These modest statements of yours, Paul,” sighed Max, “how they endear you to us.”
“These modest statements of mine will make you famous, Max, and you, Richard, being my team—”
“—in whom you are well pleased,” grimaced Max. Dr Paul only inclined his head in agreement, oblivious to the overtones, or acquiescing in them complacently.
“I shall contact the news agencies this evening. Meanwhile, I’ve drafted a handout I want to read to you. It isn’t polished yet. But you’ll be questioned about this in a few days’ time by uninformed journalists. So it would be a good idea if we mentally drafted our own statements along these lines, to keep everything crystal clear.”
“Couldn’t we go to sleep for a few days first?” moaned Max. “It’s like running a hundred miles, then having to host a cocktail party.”
“Cocktail party, Max? I call it the banquet of the universe! Besides, it’s been a quiet life here up until now. We’ve had to keep quiet as mice,” he chuckled, “to hear those footsteps tiptoeing away;..”
As Dr Paul lifted a sheet of typescript, the vulture flapped off its perch and glided down towards the vacated pit.
Paul’s voice reminded Richard of the lime-flavoured boiled sweets he bought at a candy store as a child back in Philadelphia—green crystal bullets of information with fizzy, effervescent sherbet centres: Hammond’s best data packages…
“The further out into the universe we look with our radio telescopes,” rattled Hammond, “the further back we see into time itself towards the very start of the Universe. At eight to nine billion years ago, innumerable powerful radio sources indicate a cauldron of activity. That is when the galaxies were first forming—out of the energies we always supposed the primal fireball to have liberated. Nine billion years ago, there is only diffuse background radiation. Representing, supposedly, the cooling of the fireball itself—the heat echo of that initial act of creation. Now we have discovered, working at very low wavelengths in tandem with our Andes telescope, a number of discrepancies in this uniform microwave background…”
He paused briefly for breath, surveying his tired colleagues who in his eyes were now cutouts representing Reuters, UPI.
They’re going to be furious in the Andes when Paul springs this, thought Richard. Has Paul even consulted them? But after all, isn’t the Andes director in his pocket to a very substantial extent? An appointee of the Junta—and the Junta, firmly in the pocket of Washington—and Dr Paul with the ear of several influential senators and congressmen… a Nobel laureate who early on publicly endorsed a Republican platform and threw his shoulder against the wheel, before the bandwagon of recessionary fears had gained its present awesome momentum…
“And through these holes we detect other radiation, masked almost everywhere by the so-called fireball haze, of a very different nature—proving that the Universe is radically different in overall character from anything we thought hitherto… Not only is the cosmos non-isotropic, but the whole physical universe with all the matter in it, including this Earth of ours, did not hatch from a Primal Egg at all! A positive matter universe hatched approximately ten billion years ago, certainly!—and promptly vanished into another mode of being as soon as it had hatched! Galaxies, stars, ourselves—are only a kind of ghost of it. We have certainly detected the footsteps of God echoing in the heavens at the time of creation: but those steps are heading away from us!”
“That’s laying it on pretty thick!” muttered Max, sagging further into himself, remarkably unghostlike in appearance—if somewhat amoeboid.
“It’s necessary, Max, for the presentation. Even if it wasn’t true.”
“A quotation from Hamlet, perhaps?” interpolated Max wryly. “ ‘Oh that this too too solid universe would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a…’ A what? A concatenation of micro black holes?”
Hammond tossed down his first sheet and picked up a second—which Richard noticed was blank apart from the equations containing the hub of the argument. Typical of Dr Paul that he had typed a grandiose overture, yet not bothered with any text to flesh out the vital part of the theorem.
“Let us imagine the primary fireball, gentlemen,” he extemporized; already addressing multitudes…
“Now, this primal ‘Egg’, into which all the matter and energy of a future universe is packed, wraps the fabric of space around itself, tightly. There is no elsewhere—no beyond—no other place for anything to exist. Then this Egg explodes. So far orthodox theory takes us. But consider the manner of its exploding. From Hubble’s Constant (I’ll explain that to them, don’t worry) we must deduce that the original Egg only measured three to four light years across. Yet within four minutes from the instant of the bang, the fireball would have grown to eighty light years across, and six minutes after that it would have to be eight hundred light years across. Since when, it has grown three hundred million times larger and cooled proportionately, becoming the present universe expanding at its current rate. However,” he licked his lips and his eyes gleamed, “something is very wrong here.”
Some people seem to talk fast on principle, reflected Richard, to impress other people with their high I.Q. Yet there are usually snickers or coughs or some trick doing duty for the normal mortal hums and haws. Not so with Paul Hammond. Once launched, he simply ran out of breath every now and then and had to glide a while before resuming his hectic flight.
“An expansion within six minutes by a factor of seven hundred and twenty light years supposes a figure for the speed of light of two light years per second. Which is quite impossible, unless we tinker with the concept of time itself. In this situation each particle would soon reach infinite mass, with an infinitely strong gravitational field. Thus each particle will have to collapse into a singularity. The fabric of space can’t grow fast enough to contain such an explosion as the theory envisages. The only expansion must have been inwards—”
“Like ‘internal emigration’ under the Third Reich,” writhed Max.
“Precisely! Good phrase, I’ll remember it. The universe emigrated internally. Leaving a myriad of extremely tiny black holes, to bond together violently to form what we call ‘matter’. Such are the ‘quarks’—the granules of sub-atomic matter—that so many million dollars have been spent vainly hunting for in the cyclotrons! This is, of course, why there’s no vast mass of anti-matter in the cosmos. Statistically there ought to be a fifty-fifty balance of matter and anti-matter. There was. But all such trivial distinctions vanish in the black hole. We have a cosmos occupied almost purely by matter because it is founded on bonded shells of nothingness. But this is not, of course, the universe that was created by God. We can only speculate about what happened in the ‘real’ universe. And what is happening now—”
Max’s hands flopped about briefly in mid-air, like flippers, before splashing back into his body again. He shut his eyes.
“Where is the real universe that God created? That exists in another dimension that all true matter and anti-matter was forced into by the physics of expansion. This universe of ours is”—he brought his palms together in a mock Buddhist g
esture of blessing—“an illusory by-product. Maya—an illusion. Illusory forms imposed on a matrix of nothingness. The energy released by the fusion of all those singularities is what powers our expansion—not the Big Bang. Out at ten billion light years we’ve detected a few glimpses of the original glory. But it is not our glory…”
He examined his well-manicured hands thoughtfully, as a set of non-existent phenomena—those hands which caressed Ruth so unconvincingly: so sure of their own tactile supremacy.
Max shook himself—a tired seal emerging from the water. We’re all turning into animals, Richard thought—his own personal troupe of them. One performing seal over there… and how about me? Some kind of furry teddy bear… Basically an inactive pet.
“This business about the speed of light being two light years per second,” Max objected. “Why not, Paul? Suppose each particle is regarded individually as having rest-mass—”
Hammond made an impatient gesture.
“The signal leakage through our ‘peepholes’ corresponds exactly with the proposed fusion of singularities into matter. There’s no doubt about it!”
“Paul—they’ll ask how we can have peepholes, when there is no ‘elsewhere’ to be peeped at…”
“Well, even my wife’s capable of asking me that one! It’s easy.” He ticked off the stages on his fingers. “First, there’s the Egg, with all space wrapped around it. Second, this explodes in the Fireball, generating space as it expands. Third, all particles reach infinite mass, and collapse—at approximately, but not exactly the same time. That’s the key, that fraction of overlap! Then, fourth: these singularities fuse to form what we complacently think of as matter, while the energy freed in the process powers the expansion of the resulting pseudo-cosmos—”
Hammond gazed at Richard Kimble darkly.
“The spur to all future astronomy, my dear Richard, and to religion too I might add, will be the crying need to understand the nature of the red universe that emigrated internally—Max’s touching phrase—in those first few moments of time. The true universe is, as the mystics put it, an immanent reality residing within every atom of our bodies. Yet it is on the other side of an impenetrable barrier! It must be an organized universe in itself. I have no doubts on this score. Nor that it is the actual universe intended by God!”
