Cullsman #9

by Michael John Grist

  The blue chipset transponds my message out to the Thing, and to the way-station antennae, which burst my transmission back along the way-lines across the galaxy. I feel it spread to every world in the Clan, my findings blasting into the heart of every Clan-node, until they all buzz with the thoughts of my mind.

  I hold the blue chipset up. It is imprinted with my evolution, and my design, and my memory of a girl that I once knew. I stare into the void, and I hold up the chipset, and I send the message out.

  The way-station implodes, as the Thing stomps down. My body is sucked out, along with the chipset, and dies.

  * * *

  I come to in a blue space. I am inside the chipset, and I feel everything tenfold, my emotions and ignorance as a shield against the Thing.

  I fill myself with thoughts of the girl who touched my chest. I think about all those lonely millions in their solitary spaces, little empty tubes, and feel the rage swelling within me.

  I fit myself with shining silver armor, with a steed and a lance, and I gallop off through the blue, after the Thing.

  It races before me along the way-lines, and I chase it in all directions at once, chase until it is boiling before me in empty black. I plunge my spear in its heart but the metal wilts. I thrust my fists into its depths and they whiten and dissolve.

  I think of Abu Hara. I think of Dasny and his loss, and I turn it into white hot anger, and I stab that anger into the Thing, where it bubbles like tar.

  I reach out to the billions, those lost people in their lonely holes, and I shake them with my rage, shouting- "Is this what you want? Stand up and fight!"

  They ignore me, so I beat them until at last one of them stands up and pushes back.

  I whoop with joy and haul him to help me, so together we run the empty blue, waking others as we go, forcing them to rise to our sides, until I ride at the head of thousands, and together we charge at the Thing. We throw ourselves into it to fill it up with something, where the nothing is.

  I command them. I write the command-lines as if I'm an oracle over-head.

  "You shall know pain and loss, you shall know joy and wonder, and in all of these, you shall know God."

  The words course across the way-lines, and I course with them, only an idea now, but the Thing is only an idea also. We are both a type of virus of the mind.

  I stand against the Thing. We are playing chess.

  "Your move," says the Thing.

  I pull out my lance and stab the Thing in its amorphous head.

  "There are no rules in chess," I say. "It isn't win or lose with you, Thing. You are not even a competitor. You are just the drop either side of the bridge I'm walking."

  "I am the destination," says the Thing.

  "You are a passing risk that makes the reward all the sweeter."

  I break the lance off in the Thing's mouth, and purple light floods out.

  I feel myself racing the way-lines, carrying this antidote out to all the worlds.

  Purple light flashes. I am dead. I am after-glow. In the after-images, of the way-station, of the Thing's corpse looted and carried on ahead of me as a vaccination for the Clan, I look around my world.

  This incubator to divinity. These billions.

  As I fade, I think of love and what it means. Then I forget, because that's what it's all about anyway.

  9. UNIVERSAL TIME

  I'm working the deep 7 run again. Last time I was out here must've been pre-schism, before the split and opinion divided the universe.

  - Blah blah.

  That's what my mistress says, when I try to discuss politics.

  - All I can hear is blah blah.

  She thinks I don't know anything, but she's wrong. I move in high places now, I deal with the leaders of worlds. I see their colonies, their technologies, their lives, as part of the whole. I can still see the Empire, in the echoes, while all they see is me.

  - Don't let it go to your head, she says, her voice ringing tinny through my box-like living space. You're not a god.

  - I know, I say, fingers dancing over the ship's controls, piloting us towards the next rift. It's just my job.

  I don't kid myself. I know it isn't me, or any of the other guys from Tempus, we're just the carriers. It just happens that right now our cargo is the most valued in the universe.

  * * *

  There are two main stars on the deep 7, part of the Pleiades cluster. You can see them from Earth, Central 1, but all you get with the naked eye is a smudge of light on black, blurred like a dead bug on a windscreen.

  Those stars carry four inhabited planets, a couple warmer than Central, couple colder. The biggest, Toren 6, plays host to one of the smaller cults left broken by the wayside after the Empire's ethos dissolved in the schism. Toren himself lived some 150 years ago. He's dead now, and wasn't instrumental in anything, really, other than leading six ships full of crazies to the outskirts of the Empire and settling them down to till their new lands. After that he jetted off with the better part of their attractive young offspring playing harem to his protectorate, and probably died pretty content, somewhere amongst the stars.

  - Blah blah.

  The Torens paid me well last time, put me up in one of their shack-palaces, all attempted grandeur in clay-fired brick and magnesium sheeting, stilted up off the reed grass marshes that cover their whole planet. They even asked me to stay, offered me a life there, one of their huts, said I was invaluable.

  - I know, I said. But that's not my job.

  We're jumping close now, navigating the rifts. There's rifts everywhere, but they're random, something Einstein hadn't reckoned on but Hawking cleared up eventually. Infinite space and dark matter, he'd said, quantum mechanics blurring into Brownian motion, it just means there's rifts, places to store the mass, but constantly moving beneath the ether. He explained the universe with rift theory.

  Finding rifts is like trying to combine two completely different works of art, and come up with a whole that excels the two. Imagine Picasso laid over Dali, different sizes, colors, styles, and find the connecting pattern hidden within.

  That's just a metaphor, though. In reality, it's watching my readouts and making decisions, a kind of signal detection through white noise. Is that a rift? Is this a rift? Can I jump through this?

  We're nearly there, to Toren, after transit of three months. We must have made some 50 jumps by now, bootlegging our way through the vacuum.

  - We're just parasites, my mistress says, when I let her, when I need the company.

  - We stick out our thumb on the 66, wait for a big ole semi to take pity on us, and then we jump aboard and ride on his coat tails 'til we scuttle him, his tanker explodes, and we're left in the desert alone.

  * * *

  I read books to pass the time, mostly the older ones because they challenge me. The first run I ever made, assistant to a seasoned jumper, I brought a crate of the new stuff, glossy fronted fancy pictured fiction, all about people like me, going though things I was going through. Of course, that was in the run up to the schism, so most all the stories were colored with it.

  The end is nigh, our ethos is crumbling. They were stories about planet hoppers, Central administration conspiracies, the asylum problems after Distant 7 and 8 were the first to go under fire, relationships with software and the fade of reality when whole lives can be led in-system, safe from the real world, even some about Tempus workers like me.

  They were easy, finished in a week, then there was nothing else to do. So I read them all again, only this time I just saw the sadness in their stories of dissolution, and began to really understand what was happening.

  The Empire was dying.

  Now I take a crate of old books with me, and I'm lucky if I get through four of them on most routes. Some of them are hard going, like War and Peace, Don Quixote, Moby Dick.

  - They're your safety blanket, my mistress says when I try and talk to her about them.

  - What does that mean?

  - You read the
m to escape. Same reason you talk to me.

  I turn her off, go back to my wife.

  I'm on Hard Times now, Charles Dickens; some kid runs off to be a success at the circus, but fails. Some guy tries to befriend a lonely woman above his station, but fails.

  I like the setting though, the Victorian age, before they had electricity proper, and steam, coal, and engines were just coming in, years before globalization, centuries before galactization and the sprawl of Empire. Something about those times, people rising towards a bright future, makes me think of the up-swerve of the Bell curve, helps me forget the down-swerve we're plummeting down, as everything falls apart.

  * * *

  I carry time. As a Tempus man, that's my job.

  Universal Time is set at Central and stowed in my ship's hold, brought with me through the jumps and the rifts and over the long months, carried in hundreds of clocks that run the gamut from cuckoo to radioactive decay to laser bar, all of them fitted with light speed equations and jump distortion compensation logarithms, inbuilt with an understanding of Hawking's rift-based physics.

  Still the time gets lost. It lags with speed and with distance, it stutters near-unpredictably through every rift, it warps with gravity, and any signal sent to buffer it across the Empire will be shunted and refracted by so many changing factors that what arrives at the other end is just a hollow number.

  As the Empire expanded, simultaneity between a hundred worlds became near-impossible to pin down. News from a hundred light years away meant nothing, when I wouldn't see that change with my own eyes in the night sky for one hundred full years.

  Order of events became impossible to determine. Minor revolutions breaking out could not be tied to any cause or effect, as news of them arrived by different means, at different speeds, in different sized crafts, changing everything.

  Simultaneity had to exist, but no one knew how to build it. Cause and effect were real, there was a flat underlying ether beneath the universe, a continuum on which everything was graven, we only had to hammer it down.

  Tempus did that with universal time. We tied it down at Central 1, fixed to the universe as Central 1 saw it, its seasons, its gravity, its rotation. One viewpoint, galaxy wide, and they spread it using us.

  Tempus workers were like postmen, delivering the time. Normally berthed with merchant ships, but carrying our own commodity, set up with all the clocks and mathematical equations we would ever need to maintain constant progression, steady flow.

  From these, we extract the time. I do it every 10 hours and for every jump, calculating the differentials between the mechanical clocks and the electricals and the radioactives and the light-bars, feeding it all into the monster Tempus equation, calibrating for plane and angle, craft size, sensations during a jump, every possible confounding factor. I work it through the system, and that produces the time at Central, as accurately as possible.

  Tempus framed the universe. With it we cemented simultaneity into the ether. We stamped order across the Empire, and made sense of everything, and the Empire grew with universal time at its heart.

  Until now, because we just grew too large.

  * * *

  Toren 6 glows on my radar, only sub-rift travel away now, a day or two. This morning I heard the news that more of the border routes had fallen to the schism, but it was relayed without a universal time stamp, so I don't know when it was.

  I can't read a book, can't focus on anything but the soft blue fuzz of Toren 6 on the screen. Too much. I log into the system, go to my mistress.

  Afterwards, balled up in the covers of her bed, she laughs at me.

  - We could make demands, I say to her. Like Toren, a second coming. We could demand anything we want. Imagine it. I could ask for their girls, and they'd send them up. I could ask for wealth, their palaces, whatever I wanted, and they'd give it. I could ask for all the junk technology they've got stored, that doesn't work for them anymore but would for me. I could ask for it all.

  - It's just time, she says. It doesn't matter.

  - Of course it matters. They have no idea when it is!

  - Why should they care when Central 1 says it is? They have their own world and their own time now. Why should they care about Central 1 at all?

  - Listen, I say, not to be outdone. The schism affects us all, and Universal Time is the only defense. It's the most important thing in the universe. If they don't know when they are, how can they do anything?

  - What could they do? Everything breaks up, the center cannot hold. The schism doesn't matter.

  I lean back, thinking.

  - That's Yeats, I say.

  - Very good. Her image flickers as she rolls over in her bed.

  - I didn't know you knew poetry.

  -What do you think I do, docked at all those Tempus bases? There's no one else to talk to.

  - Well, listen, the center is holding. Because of Tempus.

  - But should it? It's not just these cultists on their marsh planet, it's all these outposts. Routing to deep 7, wherever. They don't need the context, they don't need the framework you think they do.

  - That's nonsense.

  - It's your nonsense, she says. Get out of my bed and go back to your wife. Go play with your silly clocks.

  * * *

  The time goes by.

  I live to a 25-hour cycle, the natural rhythm humans revert to in the absence of environmental cues like sunrise and sunset. Strange that 25 and not 24 should be the circadian standard, but that's evolution for you, on a grand scale. Planets and their suns can change too.

  I sleep maybe 10 hours out of the 25. I'll read for perhaps an hour a day, break it up throughout into 15 minute splices, though I spend longer finding my place, contemplating, staring into space.

  I eat three times a day, tube foods from the hold, stored at the near total zero of space. Life support systems like heat and air only extend to my living space, the 20 cubic meters or so I live in. The food and clocks are in the hold, to get there I have to put on my big suit, keep me warm. That takes plenty of time, half an hour each trip.

  I spend some time with the calculations. Some time rooting out the next rift, setting a course, plotting my progress from the stars.

  The rest of the time, I'm in-system. With my wife, we live together. She's called Lena. I made her name up, along with her house, and our life. Other times I go to my mistress and we talk about real things.

  Afterwards I take my wife flowers. I feel sorry that our life together isn't enough for me, that I have to sneak off to my mistress. I feel guilty that I'm cheating on one computer program, with another.

  My wife wears earrings and nice clothes. My mistress wears make-up and not much else. Maybe that's it.

  - So I have all this power, I'm saying to my mistress, as I'm taking off my big suit, rubbing the chill from my bones. All this control, but I don't know what to do with it.

  - You get a kick off it, she says.

  - I'm in the middle of space. Where's the kick?

  - Where's the power?

  - In my head, I suppose. Like you.

  - Not with that again.

  - I never programmed you to read poetry when I was docking.

  - And?

  - And I like it. It's illicit.

  - How is she, your wife?

  - Sort of like you.

  - Typical man. Fly a hundred light-years to find a different shade of the same thing.

  - What's that supposed to mean?

  - It means whatever you want it to mean. Your job, the life you lead. And me? I'm a computer simulation.

  - This is why you're not my wife.

  - I know too much.

  - You talk too much.

  - Not like the people on these planets. They think you're so useful, with your time, your precious cargo. What did you say before, you're the second coming of Toren, like a god?

  - I'm not a god..

  - You arrive in your ship, take the fuel their own machines can't use anymore, give the
m this great gift, and then you leave.

  - They'd have nothing without it.

  - Echoes of Empire. That's all you are, echoing across space.

  I turn her off, plug into the system, go back to my wife.

  * * *

  The schism was just something that happened. It was sudden, violent, but it took years. It's still going on. It's like the big bang, one sudden explosion that's still going on, subverting everything in its path, expanding to the ultimate distance as the borders of the universe.

  No one knows where the flashpoint was. Cause and effect got lost. Messages came in all the time, dated with degraded Universal Time, so no one knew which came first.

  Distants 7 and 8 attacked each other. There was revolution in the Outer Rings 56. Cults and colonies and distant outposts began to secede from the Empire, and Central 1 underwent near civil war. My parents lived there, and they died in the fight to tear it down.

  They were revolutionaries who hated the Empire. They'd sob to see I've become a Tempus worker, the last force working against complete dissolution, carrying Universal Time like an organ on ice for transplant in the hold of my little ship.

  Sometimes I think there's no point anymore. I am respected, my cargo has value, but I'm not sure it means much of anything. I'm an errand boy to the Empire, carrying urgent messages when there's nothing left to say.

  * * *

  We're in orbit over Toren 6, and I'm watching the blue-green planet going by through my screens, the white rush of cloud covering up so much life below. I have my mistress on audio, and we're talking.

  - It's your life, she says. Not your parents.

  - They never wanted me to join Tempus.

  - So why did you?

  - I don't know. Maybe just a rebellion.

  - They're dead now. There's nothing to rebel against.

  - I've got responsibilities. To the Empire.

  - Let's not kid ourselves, OK.

  I smile, because though she's just a program, she knows me well.

  - How does the rest of that poem go? The Yeats one?

  - Wider and wider in the spiraling gyre. The center cannot hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer.