by Ian Watson
“Peopled with his Angels?” sighed Max. “Why must we drag religion into every equation?”
“Because science has hitherto appeared to dethrone religion! I now reinstate it. I prove the existence of God by this scenario. For the universe is a once-off universe. Where did the Primal Egg come from in the first place? From the collapse of some previous cosmos resembling ours? Oh no! There could be no previous cycle of being, if matter is what I say it is. ‘Nothing can come of nothing’, if you insist on my quoting Shakespeare. Even a fool knows that. The collapse of our present cosmos, when it occurs, cannot possibly produce another Egg—only a ravening point of void. Nothingness to the n-th power!”
“It seems to me,” judged Max, “that you demonstrate Atheism, not Religion. I mean Atheism in the literal sense. The absence of God. Sure, He’s somewhere. Sure, He set off the Big Bang. But we’re just irrelevant to him—all our stars and galaxies.”
“Nevertheless,” Paul hammered home, “a God exists—even if not for us. Because there was only one universe ever made. He built a universe on the other side of ours! Physics and Chemistry must be entirely different over there. Logic too! Our task is to build a cosmology for that universe, now. Screw this one. That Richard should imagine this means the end of funds strikes me as amazingly shortsighted. Incidentally, no wonder that Ozma bullshit failed! There can be no radio signals from Tau Ceti or anywhere. Any advanced race has better things to do with its resources than gossiping across back fences with its neighbours.”
“Paul, getting back to this idea that a God must have created the Egg, since it can only exist once in the whole of eternity… Surely, given infinite time, anything can happen—including the spontaneous appearance of a universe?”
“My dear Max, time is a function of matter, just as space is. There’s no such thing as an ‘eternity’, waiting for events to occur some time, any more than empty space exists, waiting for a universe to fill it up.”
“So we simultaneously prove the existence of God, and that he does not exist for us,” mourned Max. “What glad tidings to announce to the world’s press! Is it wise, Paul?”
“Should stir things up a bit,” grinned Paul. “I’m getting bored with local issues. Moons, planets, milky ways. Astronomy must become the highest form of philosophy—indeed, of religion! It’s high time people had their minds torn away from petty squabbles about oil and copper and fish and things.” He laughed in a cackling, zany way, glancing briefly over his shoulder. The vulture was rooting around the rubbish pit for chicken bones now. It would be nice to imagine, thought Richard, that Paul simply hoped to induce a mood of Buddhistic resignation in the world’s inhabitants at a time when all possible futures seemed equally depleted, tawdry and mean.
Max said a few random things about what had been on the radio even that morning, while they snatched a bite of breakfast… A Japanese supertanker had been sunk by guerrilla mines in the Straits of Malacca… The anthrax epidemic, spreading from battle-torn New Guinea, had reached Celebes and Mindanao… The Australians had withdrawn their ambassador from Washington in protest at the appearance of radio-active icebergs in Antarctic waters, which the Australians laid at the door of the American Atomic Energy Commission’s waste disposal project, Operation Icebox…
Symptomatic strains on the world’s temper and sanity… But Max only succeeded in sounding irrelevant and incoherent, mentioning these. What had they got to do with cosmology?
“Can we kindly hit the hay, Paul?” he finally begged. “Some of us are human… I go along with you—give the world something else to think about… But that it must be this?” he added in a quiet undertone of horror.
“Human, all too human,” nodded Hammond gaily. “You’ve worked well, go and rest. For the reporters.”
“I may duck out of that part, Paul. I feel tired to my bones…”
• • •
“The human state,” meditated Hammond, as they got up to leave. “Before, it was our own nothingness we had to come to terms with—death. From today, it will be the nothingness of matter itself—of all this cosmos…”
“He reminds me of the Ancient Mariner,” Richard confided. “Shall we shoot that vulture and hang it round his neck?”
“This is no joking matter,” snapped Max, shutting Hammond’s door upon him. “We need a really long base line for observations, to be sure. By which I mean at least one dish in Earth orbit and another on the Moon—”
“Which may be exactly what Paul hopes to create a furore for!” Richard exclaimed hotly, in a fit of righteous self-persuasion—reluctant, now, to identify himself with the defeated Max. “A new Apollo mission for mankind—”
“Earth’s hordes need such a mission?” sneered Max. “God help us.”
“Maybe Paul’s right! How else can we ensure the continuity of fundamental research? The cut-backs we’ve seen already will be fleabites to the austerities ahead. We’re only here by courtesy of Paul’s political wizardry. But even wizardry has its limits. If Paul has to become a prophet now to keep astronomy in business—”
“—then that’s all right by you?” Max’s voice, tired as it was, was contemptuous. “A new religion of a Godless universe, that proves the existence of God in another mode of being—oy veh, Paul is crazy! He thinks this will help the world? I give up. What can an old man do…?”
Max looked almost whimsical with Self-mockery, then, as he slouched off to get some sleep.
Richard walked along the corridor in the opposite direction, his mind set on images of whales and the ocean; but they failed to purify him.
He stumbled outside. The sheer glare of the Mexican daylight stunned him and rang behind his eye sockets deafeningly—the bowl of blue sky a great bell, seen from the inside.
He noticed Ruth Hammond sitting on a boulder in the shade cast by the Big Dish and loped into the shade beside her, suppressing an urge to clap his hands over his ears. She was watching a mauve lizard catch flies as they settled on an empty ravioli can.
You could measure the slow rotation of the dish, as it automatically tracked signals from one of the “footsteps”, by the snail’s pace transit of shadows across the pitted soil…
“Paul’s founding a religion for himself,” he said incoherently. “The First Church of Mystical Atheism, Scientist… Want to join it as a groupie?”
He was too tired to decide whether he was being witty or insulting. And after that there was little more to be said.
Eleven
He dreams that he’s trapped in waves of snow—a chilling softness that deafens every sound, blinds every sight. White blur, white noise… He tries to escape, racing away on breaching limbs. And sounds call to him from behind, trying to make sense. But the blood-beat in his ears slurs and erases them. The tetchy, panic beat of his blood makes a booming drum of his skull.
Those ghosts behind are called “words”…
Momentarily he halts; and opens his sensitivity up to this amorphous wilderness of the mind. Briefly, the crazy beating halts; and he almost understands those word ghosts; and why he is fleeing, and even how he accomplishes it—then into the echoing hollow in himself floods a soothing waxen oil, and he wakes to find himself wallowing in waves of sea, spouting out the acrid white wool of snow from his nostril as a bitter foam.
The dream scares him. In it, he was both seeing, and not seeing those snow waves. It was as if he was inventing the shape of snow from later knowledge that had nothing to do with his dream life…
• • •
Physically, he first remembers seeing snow, squinting from cold waters at rough barren shores blotted right down to the sea line by that whiteness, feeling his flukes wrench queerly at the sight of land, as he spy-hopped, thrashing about to try to stand and see.
Then, he bruised his brow and back, thrusting through floating boulders of hard chunky ice, to nuzzle at their snow-caps.
He was cold and hungry at that time, living off fat, and fleeing south.
And two tiny silver fish
had darted through the sky—with a twin roll and crack smacking the waters as they turned and twisted; and they might have been sparks before his eyes, if it weren’t for that sharp whipcrack of their tails! He had to roll on his side awkwardly, to see the brief flash of silver against grey. Then there was only one silver fish, and a screeching flame diving for the zone of the sea where he was.
He fled as shocks ripped through the waters, rocking ice boulders from side to side—the blow from the sky!
The surface water tasted foul, gluey and burnt. Things floated about which he nudged around, sensing that this particular “fist” was wrecked, its fingers pulled apart and broken. A limp mass of chilled flesh floated bound in soft wrappings with long streamers and a white dome of soft hair. The queer divided flukes of this beast in the water—its flukes might indeed have run through snow, on land… Familiarity rasped at him—and foreignness too.
“Who are you?” he’d pulsed at the tangled shape. But the small forked beast was dead. He played with it for a while,—bobbing the thing about with his brow, till the bubbles popped out, and it sank.
• • •
The fist… it could cripple him. Burn him. Boil the oil in his brow…
His body once felt that itch blaze into a fire, to show him what it is, time and again. His body remembers this blazing-up of pain, but it’s not a full memory. He didn’t live through it—as he lived that flight through snow…
Other memories of his body: the first gasp of air, the cloud of bloody froth, the side of the great mother shape… Yet he wasn’t the one who experienced it; it only filters through to him as a body-memory, not a memory of the mind.
Early joys and agonies of this body, dawning out of that foam of blood long ago, elude him; yet every waft of his fins and twist of his flukes convey awareness of them.
A strange hiatus exists between his being born, and being here. Streams of contrary Being converge on the present. So many layers of memory… such confusion…
Snow. He never saw it till much later. But now he sees it in his dream, as an experience of Before—and invents the look of it, in retrospect. Could he also invent the appearance of that “voice”, of those “words”?
Categories are twisted out of shape, to accommodate his dream. Its very flimsiness is full of a pathos that torments him, as it writhes in a womb of pre-experience, aching to be born—or else aborted mercifully.
Twelve
The single bell clanged tinnily over Mezapico, as Richard Kimble sat in the pulqueria facing a glass of lime refresco with some gin in it. Paul Hammond’s Sierra, parked obliquely, blocked the narrow street outside. A CBS team were filming locality shots of the village and Richard was their escort.
Several extra policemen had been drafted into the village from San Pedro. They sat across the way in full view at a table behind the still-wrecked wall of the comisaria, wearing fat black revolvers and playing cards. The CBS team reported a roadblock manned by soldiers beyond San Pedro towards the city, screening press and turning sightseers back. And these sightseers were many: four thousand people, at an estimate. A queer mix of illiterate Indian peasants, jobless industrial workers and middle-class families from the inflation-stricken city, American tourists and drop-outs from over the border… Their numbers were still swelling. For people didn’t go away. They just stayed there—arguing, drinking, huckstering, praying, demonstrating; but above all waiting.
The news had been out five days now, of the existence of mathematical equations proving that God existed, but that this universe was not his, only a falsehood.
• • •
Richard was wondering whether to down another mouthful of the gin fizz, which he didn’t particularly care for, having ordered at random, when a Land Rover pulled up by the Sierra and began negotiating its way round the obstacle, lurching on to the mound of debris outside the comisaria. He ran out to flag the vehicle down. A floridly elaborate red windscreen sticker identified the three occupants as PRENSA, press. A fat man was driving; beside him sat a tanned muscular type with handsomely sculptured features disfigured by a nasty scar puckering his right cheek, and a green military forage cap jammed down over short sun-bleached blond hair; in the back hunched a dark fawn-like presence which Richard didn’t properly register at first.
“I guess we can get round,” the fat man grunted, waving Richard away. Half moons of sweat eclipsed his shirt armpits.
“No, you don’t understand. I’m Dr Hammond’s assistant, Richard Kimble. I’m acting as his press officer. He’s very busy obviously. I’m down here because CBS—”
“Who did you say you were?”
“Kimble. Richard Kimble. I’ve been working with Dr Paul on the Footsteps of God hypothesis—”
“Hypothesis? Is there some doubt, then?” demanded the dark presence promptly, in a foreign accent, maybe Italian. Richard peered in at him. Saw there the soft fawn features of a Neapolitan street urchin who had sprung up mature with pasta and manhood, then somehow been tumbled back to his original form—as though he’d fallen into a washing machine, to emerge both more freshly innocent and sadly creased. Large brown eyes stared back accusingly at Richard.
“Observations, findings,” he corrected himself, firming up. “It’ll most likely be known as Hammond’s Theorem. There’ll be a full press briefing by Dr Paul tomorrow. That’s what we call him affectionately,” he lied, feeling myth accrue even as he spoke.
“You mean we stay in this dump till then?”
“Of course not,” Richard grinned at the driver. “There’s accommodation on site. You’ll get meals up there. Everything’s arranged.”
“Including armed guards,” said a voice from the back.
“Yes, why the heavy security?” the front passenger asked.
“I only just heard about that, in fact. I guess it’s to avoid interference. You’ll only be staying a couple of days, but tourists could keep on turning up indefinitely…”
“You need to shoot them, if they do?” insinuated that dark voice. “It’s a pre-riot situation back there. It has all the ingredients.”
“Gianfranco’s right on that score,” confirmed the fat man. “Know something, keeping folks away provokes hysteria, if anything. I must file a report on that roadblock scene, it’s crazy.”
“Oh surely you’re exaggerating,” Richard temporized. “Look, could we just stay here a while till CBS have done their bit? Then we’ll all go up together.”
“Well, seeing as you’ve found the local bar.”
“Right,” laughed Richard.
• • •
As soon as they were seated round the table inside, the Italian—whose surname was Morelli—continued talking urgently about the significance of the roadblock. He seemed obsessed by it, needling and accusing Richard Kimble…
“Only, what is the riot directed against? Your telescope, for setting up this principle of emptiness as a scientific truth? Or the emptiness in their souls? Or the emptiness in their pockets? Whatever it is, your telescope focuses it! Perfectly ordinary middle-class citizens there too. Bank clerks and tradesmen, I know the sort. A failing system, is that the key? As in Hitler’s Germany? Only, all systems are no-go now. Church. State. Communism, Fascism, Democracy. For Science to spell out this message of despair is the last straw. It isn’t just despair about resources or energy or foodstuffs this time. It’s despair in the very concept of Being. That’s the final treachery. Some vague belief in the actuality of one’s own existence was the only anchor left. Call it a man’s sense of authenticity.” He gazed levelly at Richard. “The people have been betrayed. That’s a dance of death beginning at your barricade.”
“But it isn’t my barricade!”
“Then why is it there, with soldiers?” Morelli’s eyes blazed with hatred. Richard wondered whatever had made him so virulent. Loss of faith? But faith in what?
“Some fool’s auto engine can show up as a quasar if it doesn’t have a proper suppressor fitted…”
The blond ma
n—called Ivor something—barked with laughter.
“I counted six armoured half-tracks and the best part of two platoons. That’s protecting yourself from interference? They’d strung out hundreds of yards of barbed wire on crossbars into the scrub with a little Checkpoint Charlie in the centre.” The handsome golden face with its disfiguring pucker leered at Richard. “You should have seen them prancing around encouraging photos as they let us through! What fine soldiers we are!”
“It reeks of Cecil B. de Mille, on a shoestring budget,” snarled Morelli. “It’s been fixed.”
“Those boys don’t know what they’re in for. That mob’s poised to go. I’ve a nose for these things.”
Richard mopped his brow with the back of his hand, bewildered.
“If their mood’s that ugly, I guess the telescope does need protecting.”
“I said, their mood’s ugly because they’re being frustrated,” the fat man reminded. “Otherwise they’d just troop up here and gawp, most likely. But what the hell, it’s good copy.”
The Patron—a surly thickset peasant—brought a tray of drinks: rum and soda for the Italian, warm beer for the other two.
“Hielo?” the fat man enquired hopefully. “Got any ice?”
The Patron shook his head and stalked off.
“Of course he won’t have any,” sniggered Morelli. “There’s an embargo on electrical interference, didn’t you hear? So no refrigerators.”
“That’s not true,” snapped Richard. “I resent the implication. Our technicians regularly tour the whole area fixing up God knows what gimcrack generators and other things. We even replace worn-out equipment with new for free, sometimes. We’ve got to. And it costs.”
