by Ian Watson
“Ingenious—a subconscious overseer…”
Kapelka shook his head.
“Not a subconscious one, no. Jonah’s subconscious… well, as to that, there may be a whale ‘subconscious’ in the sense of the repressed, overprinted personality of the animal we captured and conditioned. Perhaps a human subconscious too—trace elements of the former man that aren’t a strong enough component of the model to register consciously.” He steepled his hands and fell silent, lost in thought.
Orlov stood up abruptly, setting the cane chair squealing against the wooden tiles. Though it was warm enough in the office, he dragged his black coat about him densely.
“I shouldn’t worry, Professor.” He rubbed his hands jubilantly. “A very heartening discussion. We have those poor Americans over a barrel,” he chuckled.
• • •
Katya Tarsky ran breathlessly through the bamboo thicket. The thin stems arched overhead, weaving a dense tunnel. Halting just before the exit into the open, in a place where she could watch the nearby house without exposing herself to view, she sank to the ground on a dry moss tussock, and tried to concentrate all her attention on the printout, scribbling on a pad she took from her overalls.
A certain number, running to several millions, had been broken down by the 370-185 into the product of its primes…
22 × 33 × 54…
Which was followed, further down the page, by certain corresponding logic symbols…
∃ Q R…
Which in turn translated into Russian as: “There is/a composite/greater than/the sum of/individual units…”
She wrote on the pad:
“The Thought Complex—definition. Refers to a situation where a number (7) of whale brains link up in parallel, generating a state of mental insight far beyond their normal powers…”
But alas, where was the music of the sea? Where was the magic of the whale’s existence that Pavel had sought so fearfully, and so deliriously? It wasn’t here in cold words, cold symbols!
The verandah door opened; an attendant wheeled out a bath-chair into the sunshine.
She didn’t want to see its occupant too closely.
Shaven-headed. Shrunken. Drooling like a baby—with as rudimentary control over his bowels as any baby.
His ears would register sounds without being able to know what they meant. Without even being able to understand that there was something to be understood; so frozen in a state of unknowing was he! So lowly in the scale of life now, that cancer halted in bewilderment at what it was bothering to attack!
She sat and wept instead of scribbling. Was he really contained in these formalities from thousands of miles away? Or was he nowhere, except in her memory?
Feet vibrated the moss behind her. A bulky mass trying to tread softly… Then Orlov thumped down beside her, and the earth rocked on impact.
“You are sad, skinny little one—”
“Why did you follow me, Comrade Orlov?”
“Why, to know about Jonah,” he protested, with wounded innocence, stretching out the hand with the amputated finger, to pat her cheek.
His coat… So huge, so blanketing—on such a warm day! To burrow… to forget…
Twenty-Two
Kimble gave a token knock on Hammond’s door before stepping inside, wondering which of the two would lose their temper first.
Spying all the newspapers and magazines spread lavishly across Paul’s desk, Richard decided most likely it would be himself. So that was what the helicopter had flown in with. Paul’s press clippings.
The crewcut individual with the bright blue tie welded round his neck must be the procurer of these scraps of megalomania fodder.
There lay Time with Paul’s face as its cover painting. And enough front pages with his features on them paper the office walls. Saint-Louis Post Dispatch, L’Osservatore Romano, Die Zeit, Chicago Daily News… five dozen papers at least.
Other lead stories—another radioactive iceberg loose off Cape Horn—the Dow Jones index dipping below the 400 mark—the anthrax epidemic in the Philippines—items of daily horror that could be summed up simply as the human race running headlong into a brick wall as thick as the rest of history, did not seem so much to have been shoved aside by Paul, as incarnated in his image.
“So you’ve made Time again!” Richard ignored Paul’s presumed courier. “It’s sort of uglier than last time. Pity. That cost a few lives at the barricade. And elsewhere! How many thousand lives will the second Nobel Prize add up to, I wonder? Ah, you’ve got UOsservatore Romano? What’s the Vatican’s view of scientific nihilism?”
Hammond smiled faintly at his own reflection multiplied before him.
“Certainly you may borrow Kimble, Mr Mercer,” he remarked in the vague direction of the man with the strangling necktie. “A word of advice, though. Don’t subject him to too much stress. As you can see, it’s very hard to maintain composure in the face of really big discoveries. Even Galileo rubbed his eyes, when he first saw the rings of Saturn. Though he opened them wide again, to his credit. Alas that public opinion wasn’t so receptive in his day—
“Richard,” he beamed, focusing at last on a human face other than his own, “it appears that your jeu d’esprit in the Worm Runners Digest has borne fruit. You’re about to become a man of the moment too, in your own way!”
“We read your piece in the Biological Psychology magazine, sir,” Mercer interposed hastily. “You may hold the key to an awkward situation. I don’t want to say too much about it right now.” He contrived a grimace at Paul, without Paul’s noticing, that heartily endeared him to Richard.
And he called the Journal by its serious title! Even if he did get the words jumbled up… Which meant—that someone had taken his article seriously? But in whatever context?
Seeing Richard on the point of asking questions, Gerry Mercer shook his head firmly, nodding towards the door. He seemed anxious to be on his way.
• • •
“Of course, we had our doubts about you,” Gerry admitted during the flight to the city. “Being one of Hammond’s men. Look what you’re responsible for—”
His gesture embraced the mad shanty town now tail-backing a couple of miles from the soldiers. Smoke drifted up from burnt-out cars up front…
“Medieval! An Idiots’ Crusade! I hear you accused him of murder, in the end?”
“He shot a man, to start a riot. I saw it. He didn’t actually hold the gun, that wouldn’t be Paul’s style. A soldier wanted to loose off a warning shot. Paul’s bitch of a wife was cockteasing some Hell’s Angel across the barbed wire, and Paul deliberately grabbed the soldier’s arm at the vital moment so the shot wouldn’t miss. I call that murder.”
“We’ve already asked the Soviet Academy of Sciences to check out some of his findings—for a price. They tally, damn it. The Russians can’t fault him…”
“It’s almost as though we have no choice—can’t observe anything else,” mused Richard, Morelli’s remarks still printed freshly on his mind. “What we observe from now on has been determined. We’ve chosen out of a whole set of possible branches of reality, so this is the branch that exists for us from now on—a branch where consensus reality equals Unreality and Despair. If he’d waited till Seattle, there might have been alternatives. But he released just enough to tease the world’s imagination—the most malign hell-bent streak in it..Somehow it seems to have changed events objectively. We’re all participators in this madness now. Do you understand me, Gerry? That a collective act of choice can change the objective world, so that even the Russians get the same signals from their radio dishes?”
“Search me.” Gerry shook his head. “It could be in the Soviet interest to promote loss of confidence in the West. They may be lying. On the other hand, why offer to let us run Hammond’s findings through this secret whale computer of theirs? Maybe it’s all a game with them. Orville Parr thinks so. My boss. Still, they’re having trouble in Eastern Europe, on account of Hammond. Catholic and J
ewish ‘dissidents’ burning Party headquarters—as a sort of way of exorcizing Atheism, I suppose. They were rioting about food prices last year. We’re both tarred with the same brush now, we and the Soviets, I guess. We need each other.”
Richard rounded on Mercer, bewildered.
“What whale computer?”
So then Gerry Mercer told him. About Georgi Nilin. About Sakhalin. About the biological computer in the ocean, code-named the Thought Complex, that the Russians apparently had access to.
“But that’s fantastic. It’s as important as Hammond’s Footsteps. No! Much more so. It’s big enough—it could save the world from this madness.”
“Equally, it could all be a fake.”
“If another intelligent species observe the Footsteps Theorem—if we can pass it over to them—they could make a different choice! They could shift the branch we’re out on, before it snaps right off!”
It was Mercer’s turn to confess bewilderment.
So Richard explained about Schrodinger’s Cat, locked up with that bottle of prussic acid with the hammer poised over it. The cat’s cage seemed a true image of the world to him at this moment. And the hammer was already in process of falling—triggered by the vibrations of Paul’s Footsteps.
Might those footsteps be unwalked—by wise beasts of the ocean who had shed their limbs a hundred million years ago? Who therefore had no need of footprints, even maybe of Gods, absent or present?
• • •
Only later on in the flight, when they’d switched from the helicopter to an executive jet and were speeding towards Hawaii en route to Hokkaido, did he think to ask how “the Agency” had got the data to pass over to the Russians—data which Hammond had deliberately refrained from publishing properly yet.
Gerry Mercer grinned.
“Good luck, mainly. I’ve only come in on the tail end of this part, but it seems the third man at your observatory—what’s his name, Berg?—has been sending it all off fast to a physicist friend in California, Avram Something or Other. Some fellow immigrant. But sub rosa—confidentially. Berg was scared of something or other unpleasant happening months ago. Maybe his name not getting connected with the work?”
“That I doubt!”
“Well, he couldn’t have foreseen all this present fuss. I guess a dose of Nazi persecution makes a man a bit paranoid. Anyhow, this Avram person’s in a sensitive area—laser fusion research—and he still has an old Momma back in Eastern Europe, you know the sort of thing. It’s routine, our people keep a casual eye on him. We logged a whole lot of mail coming from Mezapico. Then what do you know, this Avram came to us a week ago with all the data?”
“Max must have told him to,” brooded Richard, realizing how little occasion Max had ever really had to trust him. How lonely Max must have felt all these months, while Richard played around with Ruth, and was Paul’s Man. The information curdled inside him progressively, like stale milk, the more he considered it.
“Oh incidentally too, we must tell Hammond we have the data and what we’re going to do with it.”
“He doesn’t know?”
“Uh-uh. From all I hear about him, he’ll be only too happy to make out it was his own idea in the first place, if we give him that facesaver.”
“More lousy publicity.”
“Right. But that’s why I hurried you out—him not knowing yet. You see, we have to make out you gave us the data, Dr Kimble.”
“Me!”
“Sure, to cover up for your colleague Berg. We’d like to keep him where he is.”
“But Max is a free agent. You don’t keep him. It’s not your say-so whether he stays at Mezapico or not.”
“Quite. It’s Hammond’s. And Hammond would sack him if he found out who was responsible. And this Berg’s a useful ear on friend Hammond, whether he knows it or not. You don’t mind, do you? Obviously you won’t be going back to work with Hammond again. You weren’t exactly polite during the brief time I was there. But we’ll see that you’re not blackballed. A professorship someplace, we can fix it. Not that you won’t deserve it, if you help crack this business. Whale computers and variable universes—we need assistance, friend!”
Twenty-Three
At the last moment before they took off from Wakkanai for the hundred-mile hop across La Perouse Strait, Georgi Nilin broke free from Mikhail and ran to Orville Parr—who was travelling no further. Burrowing in his coat, the boy clung to him, pleading and cursing in a gabble of Russian and English. He seemed an enraged pygmy more than a little boy, or an intelligent piglet about to be slaughtered. The thin reedy voice rose to the pitch of a whistle, squealing for asylum.
Parr ruffled the child’s fair spiky hair, hugging him. Uncontrollable trembling transmitted itself through his own insulating layers of fat, and it wasn’t the dawn chill that made the boy shake.
How absurd, he thought—how pathetically tender too!—if this really is a full-grown man I’m cuddling here, giving the last love he’ll surely get. How submissive and downtrodden Mikhail seemed by comparison, accepted the handing back resignedly—the trudge to a labour camp. Maybe only as far as a pockmarked prison yard and a shallow lime-strewn grave hacked out of the rock-hard soil as his last human activity before obliteration… Damn it, he took it too submissively! He ought to be raging, like the boy. Squealing. Pleading. Not standing slumped like the eternal peasant waiting for a flogging. Shit, he had had the wit and initiative to escape in the first place!
“This thing stinks,” Parr confided to the boy. “We’re handing you back, now that we know you’re genuine, and that Mikhail, who brought you all this way for safety and a new life, won’t even raise a finger. He could at least try a get-away across the airstrip with you tucked under his arm. But if you’re so real, and he’s not genuine, then what the hell mess is this we’ve got ourselves into?”
The boy babbled helplessly against him.
“Gerry, come here a minute,” he called, his breath hanging out in a speech bubble in the chill air, words recorded implacably by the landscape…
“Gerry, if I told you this whole operation ought to be halted—that the boy’s genuine enough, but the whole thing is a rotten mistake, would you think the old man was losing his grip?”
“At this point we’re committed! It’s too late.”
Gently, Gerry detached the struggling boy from Parr’s body, little hands clutching fiercely at his overcoat, having to be unplucked finger by finger.
“Let’s hope Tom Winterburn keeps his eyes open,” offered Parr hopefully, feeling little personal hope. “Though he’s already disposed in favour of this mind-transplant caper. Herb Flynn’s a sceptic. Kimble—you say he’s pretty embittered.”
“But not about whales!” Gerry shouted over the boy’s squeals, lifting him bodily off the ground, feet kicking. “That’s the only thing that seems to matter to him at the moment… Hey, this part is kind of vile, Orville, surrendering the kid like this. Tell you what, let’s get a few drinks under our belt, as soon as the plane’s left. You on?”
“Sure,” agreed Parr dourly. “And—thanks, Gerry,” he added. “For taking the kid. I couldn’t have. I guess Enozawa’s crab fleets can set sail now.”
• • •
They were met at the administrative capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, by a voluminous Russian named Orlov, and a thin dark-haired girl called Tarsky who seemed to be doing her best to treat Orlov as a contagious disease.
Richard Kimble gazed at her in surprise, and with a joy of recognition. She was Ruth—a pained, hurt Ruth, yet without Ruth’s vacuum-like hollowness and deceptiveness. She was the soul Ruth should have had inside her. The dab of Russian lipstick she was wearing looked so cheap, and incompetently administered: aching adolescence prolonged far beyond its normal cut-off point. Any lipstick was probably hard to get hold of here. Richard found himself wishing he could have known, to bring some present for her. Lipstick, yes. Hers looked like grease to keep the cold off her chapped lips. Her hair was a beautiful c
rinkly chaos. Her eyes, so tired and sore, were nevertheless shining with a hurt and exhaustion that she’d somehow converted into a source of joy.
She was like Ruth, yet wasn’t Ruth at all. Was, rather, the authentic Ruth (whom Ruth had only poorly impersonated) which is to say, the idea, the image, the anima in Richard’s mind.
“Professor Kapelka asked me to greet you,” the girl said in accented, glutinous English. English with thick sauce added.
“So that’s our runaway?” growled Orlov.
Georgi had frozen as soon as the flight began and had to be carried off the plane in Tom Winterburn’s arms.
“He’s our responsibility,” the girl said sharply in Russian, but overheard by Winterburn. “The Institute’s. You can’t punish a six-year-old for running away.”
“Quite right, little one,” Orlov grinned. “Since he’s only a mathematical model—like Jonah, eh? How can one punish a mathematical model?”
The girl flushed and bit her lip.
“But why speak of punishments? How boorish to punish anybody, when Nilin’s escapade has brought us together with our American friends on such a splendid scientific undertaking! A rendezvous as momentous as any Salyut-Spacelab link up, eh? More so!”
Orlov shifted from Russian to English half-way through this rebuke, nodding amiably at the new arrivals.
“Mikhail, however,” he told the girl, reverting to Russian, “must at least be interviewed—surely you realize that. Perhaps found another, less sensitive task… Or maybe back to Ozerskiy with him? Who knows? It might be psychologically damaging to Nilin—Mikhail being his only friend—to be deprived…” He wagged a stubby finger at Katya Tarsky. “Yes, why not back to Ozerskiy? But first of all, a talking-to!”
A pair of waiting security men sidled up to Mikhail and said something in his ear, before marching off with him. Mikhail appeared almost bored by the proceedings. Winterburn watched his expression curiously, trying to fathom the difference between resignation and complicity.
