The World Asunder

by Ian Wallace

  Dio said curt: “She’s done enough lead-up, I’ll slap you with it. In nineteen forty-eight, you sharply rejected some of your own personal ingredients, while I about the same time sharply rejected some of my personal ingredients. But both of us kept finding that those rejected ingredients kept sneaking in to haunt us. When Esther deserted me in nineteen fifty-two, I consigned those ingredients totally to Hell; and I suspect that along about the same time, you drove out your corresponding ingredients once and for all. This is weird-wild, but the coherency makes sense in the light of all the other weirdnesses. Lilith and I are agreed that your rejects and my rejects together constituted a coherently evil personality, and they took psychophysical form as Guru Kali.” The prolonged silence palpitated. Then, his voice-note almost one of relief, Rourke queried of Dio, “You are saying that Kali is different from me?”

  “I am hypothesizing this.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Honestly.”

  Quizzical query: “Which of us is the father, do you think?”

  It sent Esther into the kind of laughter which is called hysterical, and I was plenty happy-shook myself; but I was able to see Dio unsheathing teeth in a flashing grin.

  I don’t think I ever again saw Dio sheathe his teeth.

  When we all quieted, Dio volunteered to serve coffees around; we had a long way to go yet. Four seated and mugs in hand, Dio said soberly (but teeth not sheathed, please note): “It’s worse than that, maybe, Rourke. I think our purpose is to get at the nature of Kali so we can figure how to get at the person of Kali?”

  “Right,” answered Rourke—all business; edgy but basically tranquil again.

  “Here it is,” Dio said. “All these phenomena could of course be explained away in terms of Kali’s known powers. But in nineteen fifty-two, when theoretically he was an infant or just being bora, he was able to use those powers to appear for Esther and Lilith and me as a mature adult, and to project other shared illusions. And in the Mont Veillac cave, you and I independently recogized his power symbolized as of maybe twenty-five thousand b.c. or earlier in a flame-haired predatory bird, with you watching the bird; I suppose he might have changed the past to create that fresco retroactively—but even if he did, the allusion is meaningful. Well: what I am hesitating to propose—”

  “—is a sort of negative diabolism,” Rourke interjected.

  “Go ahead,” said Dio.

  Dreamily Rourke meditated aloud: “It all sounds a little bit like old Satan in whom I’ve always refused to believe. On the other hand, I’ve always believed in God, as a matter of decision about my intellect—but I’ve concluded that God’s knowledge and powers are limited to what he comes to notice, what he finds that he can deploy: unlimited potentially, but at any given time, so limited. So if I believe in God, why not in Satan? Perhaps God has rejected certain potentialities in himself, and this is the meaning of the Fall tradition, and they have taken potent form in Satan to haunt God. And Satan is perverse. He is a fiery creator; but once he has created a stable situation, he is bored by the stability, and he reacts perversely into a destroyer of that situation. Dio, you and I are comrades indeed: our rejected ingredients not only have united to form a coherent perverse personality, but that personality has combined with the perversity of ages, or maybe appears as the current avatar of the perversity of ages. And now it is about to destroy its own Earth. And we are up against that!"

  Esther gentled: “But if you are right, then it wants you to somehow defeat it. Didn’t it steal me to draw Dio here, and didn’t it do so in such a way as to draw Lilith also, and didn’t it make sure that we four would be united here? And didn’t it cry out in despair, ‘Unify me’?”

  The commodore said hard, “I conclude that all four of us are taking this weirdity to be a working hypothesis.”

  Dio nodded; Esther nodded. I don’t know what inwardly it cost them to make this affirmation; I know that it cost me a lot “Yes,” I said.

  Rourke leaned forward, all business. “Okay, it’s a working hypothesis, let’s work on it. Dio, here is a suggestion. In late June nineteen fifty-two—I remember this dating clearly— Randolph and I were docked at Blois in our yacht the Star of Boston. Lately I had been wrestling bitterly with precisely those old rejected personality-ingredients, and off Blois I had some kind of a crisis that I don’t remember very well. Adjacent to my cabin I had an inner room where I used to go privately when I felt inward trouble in order to work it out with myself; nobody else was allowed in there. On this particular morning—I don’t remember the exact date but it was late June—I felt this old trouble coming on, and I went into privacy there. Somewhere along the line I lost consciousness, I guess; and when I awoke, I felt marvelously free and clear. This was climactic: it was when I became wholly sane, if I am wholly sane—me, myself, knowing where I was going, no inward conflicts since that have been worth shaking a stick at. All right, Dio, what do you think? Is there anything fruitful for us there-then?

  Dio answered promptly, “He’s been inviting us, and rather urgently. But if his appointed rendezvous is Blois in nineteen fifty-two, why didn’t he suck me there instead of to Mont Veillac? Especially since you were already there, and he could have pulled you back to nineteen fifty-two—” Then he held up a hand and bitterly amended, “No, I see, it’s his sense of humor, it’s the fox-and-hound game, we had to get the idea ourselves, and we had to figure out ourselves how to get to that rendezvous. Rourke, do you think you and I can teleport you and me there-then?”

  “And me?” “And me?” urged Esther and I almost simultaneously. I added, “If everybody has it potentially, guys have no monopoly—”

  “New as we are at this,” Rourke grinned, rubbing his nose, “the more the sorrier, maybe. Look, ladies, I hate to be discourteous and top secret and all, but why don’t you go freshen up for lunch while Dio and I get a couple of damn urgent man-to-man things said, and we’ll meet you in half an hour in the ward room?”

  “Come on, Esther,” I said, rising. “This time, let’s realty find the ladies’ head.”

  Underneath, it nettled me to be excluded from the man-talk; but when I made a wry crack about this to Esther, she commented that she was used to it with both men. “Besides,” she added thoughtfully, “I suspect there’s some big stuff going on there, with maybe some highly personal overtones; those two are really taken with each other, that sudden arbitrary action by Rourke in making Dio his deputy over the fleet was unprecedented in Rourke.”

  For a moment I wondered what about all this made me feel so melancholy-alone—and then I knew, and my comprehension remotely amused me at myself. Burk had been my patient, , confiding intimately personal things to me; contrariwise, the older Burk whose name was Rourke was his own man, choosing another man whom he considered his peer as repository of his most intimate concerns, which for sure had nothing to do with romantic or erotic interests; and I was out. Again: I had known Burk for a month and Dio for a week; Esther had known Dio for years and Rourke for decades and me not at all; again, I was out, lonely-awash in space and time. I had found my lost love, but so very much

  too late that he and I had nothing in common other than an extremely remote romantic-interlude memory: I was to him maybe like the aging Lotte returning to the aging Goethe in Thomas Mann’s imaginative novel, both remembering young hot blood, but she now mainly basking in the status of being the great man’s sometime lover, while he accorded her every courtesy but failed to get his love rekindled because his mind kept flying away to higher altitudes....

  Esther said gently, “Forgive me, but—can the self-pity, Doctor, each of us has her own problems, and they are smaller than theirs.”

  I said deliberately, as to a restorative slap in the face, “Thanks, I needed that.”

  We were on deck again, gazing through transparency at space-black star-punctuated, with Earth not visible at this rail. Esther said low, “Then he did try to find me.” I gazed on her, pulled out of myself, comprehending all that she
was thinking-feeling.

  I laid a hand on her hand on the rail. *Tf I am in your picture as the other woman, be sure that for Dio it was only rebound under strain, and nothing on his mind was as major as finding you, and during all our week together he has been eating himself for injustices to you. I know that he isn’t in love with me, and I—really don’t think I’m in love with him, although I respect and cherish him. I—am no competition for you, Esther, and I don’t intend to try to be.”

  It earned a smile from her, and she turned to meet my eyes. “I’ve been nearly eighty years alive, with a handful of bedfellows of my own; and I certainly don’t plan to be squawky if you and my husband half my age had or will have affection and body-joy together.” Then sober: “He isn’t even my husband any more, although he doesn’t know this —and don’t tell him before I do; I divorced him unilaterally in nineteen fifty-seven, in a little principality that has such laws.”

  I said soberly, “From your note, he inferred that you would be in Paris and maybe at l’Odéon; from things omitted from your note that you would have been smart enough to include if you’d wanted, he inferred that you wished for him to come and get you. I think he’ll have inferred your divorce from your present name Mme. d'Illyria.”

  Her head went down. She said softly, “Then he’s up for grabs.”

  “I—-don’t think so. He came for you. He wants you. I was —-comfort en route.”

  She looked at me oddly. “Then—you really aren’t competition?”

  I spread hands. “Here with both Dio and Rourke, I don’t really know what I am. But as for competition with respect to Dio—with you here, if I wanted to be, how could I be?”

  “Whatever else you two may have in common, you and Dio have this in common: both of you have regained your lost loves, but both of them have suddenly become a vast number of years older than yourselves, with decades of separate experiences. That’s a great deal to have in common.”

  We thought about that.

  I told the rail, “Whatever comes of all this, I want you to know that I like and respect you. I’ll play it straight and open.”

  “Me too. Both.”

  My head came up, and I shook my hair. “To change the subject rather heavy-handedly—I wonder what the hell they’re talking about Somehow, I just don’t think it’s us.”

  Our reception in the ward room was most informally cordial. In our honor, the captain had ordered up a not-usual martini/ manhattan buffet ahead of lunch, with chilled fruit juice for a few abstainers; and the petty officers had joined us. Fresh from their man-to-man conference, Rourke was contagiously ebullient, Dio cautiously easy-smiling: whatever it had been, it had come off all right. Once we’d served ourselves drinks, Rourke called for silence and introduced us three generally; whereafter we mingled informally, at first together, then more separately. When a half hour later the captain raised her voice to suggest that we grab another drink and be seated for lunch, I felt deliciously better about the whole thing, and Esther was smilingly easy; but Dio, from being facile and winning whenever he was talking with anybody, was perceptibly moody whenever he had a moment to himself.

  We three newcomers and the commodore lunched at the captain’s table: it was Rourke’s ship, but Vanderkilt was master, and I learned that Rourke insisted on her protocol-precedence. It was therefore Captain Vanderkilt’s prerogative to guide our luncheon talk; but rather soon, after chitchat, she turned pointedly to her boss: “Anything special on your mind this noon, Rourke?”

  She was flanked at right by Rourke, at left by Dio; Rourke at right by me, Dio at left by Esther, no man between us visitor-women at this round table. Rourke responded with an appearance of lightness, mostly to the captain but generally to all of us: “Only a little metaphysical question, Clarice. How might the past be changed, do you suppose?”

  She ate a bit before answering, and it occurs to me that I haven’t described her: she was late-fortyish, tall and flatchested thin, a heavy-lipped but skin-pale black with a mannish hairdo; and about her correct dress and sharp nose and deep mahogany eyes there was an austerity which however could, as Esther and I had just learned, melt into winning easy cordiality when the situation was right. I was beginning to suspect that some such combination of operational competency with genuine social ease was a necessary attribute of rank in Rourke’s fleet....

  When she’d swallowed the bite, her return-look at Rourke was quizzical; I’d later surmise that she was remembering the Blois conclave and Ilya’s report about Kali’s past-changing for him. She remarked, “It just happens that I brought my music. Not long ago I read about such a theory in a science-fiction novel. If you don’t want to hear that kind of theory, you’d better ask somebody else or change the question, because it’s all I have to offer.”

  The Rourke-smile flashed open. “I love good science fiction! Who was the author?”

  She smiled small. “I remember his theory; isn’t that enough to ask?”

  Unexpectedly Dio urged, “Go ahead, Clarice.” They were on that basis already, after two martinis.

  The captain went serious-thoughtful. “The idea was that everything happening in body including brain persists indefinitely and unchangeably in space and through time. The guy said that these little events make traces which stream out through space, and they may be cut through and experienced by later people on the revolving planets—”

  Vividly it brought back our intensive speculation of last night (only last night?) about the reproduction of the Dio-fantasy in Rourke fifty years later; and I knew, and I’m sure Dio and Esther knew, that Rourke had raised the question as part of his decision-making process about a Kali-rendezvous in 1952. Now Dio incised, “Time-traces! What would cause them?”

  Frowning down, the captain raised a finger. “The author expanded, although I’d say that his idea isn’t proved or even provable. Here it is. Everything material consists of atoms which are alive and are interacting and through this interaction create all action including thought. . . . May I go on with it?”

  “Go,” softly said Rourke.

  “All right. Within each atom, the interactive tension among nuclei and electrons is such that each particle, which is not hard but is live energy, is influenced by all other particles. The electrons are relatively large and possess little mass, while the nuclei are relatively small and possess most of the mass. So far we are within physical science. Now: the idea is, that as atoms perish in the course of action, the electrons dissipate into infinite magnitude and no mass, while the nuclei condense into no magnitude and infinite mass. Look, am I giving all of you headaches?”

  “If I can follow it,” Esther suggested, “Horse can follow it, and so can Mallory and Vogel. Don’t stop.”

  With background-attention I caught Dio’s appreciative glance at Esther as Vanderkilt pressed: “Well: the—I won’t say infinitely small and massive, that’s silly, but the undetectably small and unchangeably massive perished protons form time-chains one upon another, since all action is unbroken pulsating continuity. I’m trying to find an analogy—”

  Eagerly I intervened: “Back in 1952, we recorded words and music electromagnetically on wires, and got the sounds back by playing the spooled wire through a transmitting machine. Like that, Captain?”

  She nodded vigorously. “Later, Doctor, tape recordings replaced wire recordings, and now the tapes are being pushed out by microflakes; but your idea is the best analogy. The proton-strings would be like wire recordings preserving indestructibly all past events. And these recordings could be rerun, and the events reexperienced, by a mind that knew how to get at them.”

  All right: that maybe made physical sense for dream reproduction, or for dreams as reexperiencings of past real events; but Rourke couldn’t take time to get into this aspect. He pressed, “So far so plausible—but the idea seems to make the past indestructible and therefore unchangeable. What in this theory allows for changing the past?”

  I was experiencing a queer sort of chill, but i
ts nature hadn’t yet formulated itself....

  The captain responded: “I was coming to that, in the terms of this author. In the indestructible traces of the past are if-nodes: those are places where somebody has faced a choice and could have taken one direction but instead took another. The novelist used this idea to propose that each if-node was a pregnancy for novelty, that somebody could activate a past if-node and erect a parallel track—”

  Rourke grabbed her wrist, and his face was very hard. “If a new parallel track is erected on an if-node—what happened to the original track?”

  Vanderkilt stared at him; he released her wrist and gazed at the palm of his own hand. She murmured, “Why, Commodore! I didn’t know you still cared—”

  He said gently, “Clarice, I have got to know.”

  Again she took an eating-moment. Then she told her plate: KI am perfectly aware that you are command-serious for some reason. All right. This continues to assume, for the argument, that a novelist’s idea makes physical sense. Well. When an alternate track is germinated on an if-node, remembering that this if-node and therefore the start of the alternate track occur in a bygone past, the author mentions two possibilities. One is, that the new alternate track might develop through time at the same rate as the original track had done, and therefore might be arrested and cease without ever breaking into germinal present, so that its existence would never be known or suspected. The second possibility is, that the alternate track might grow faster than the original track, might therefore break into germinality and contend with the original development until they would unify into a synthesis. But he did not mention a third possibility, which I see, and which is dismal. Shall I offer it?”