by Jerry
Spiegel nodded.
“All organization is doomed, beyond the event horizon. The name means what it says. Events end there, and that’s that. All identity is wiped out, even so basic a difference as that between matter and antimatter. There is only mass and charge and spin—”
“Isn’t that sufficient to sustain a mind?” asked Liz Nielstrom, innocently.
Spiegel shook his head brusquely.
“No, even granted a stripped-down kind of existence, this too only lasts a finite time till even this residue is sucked into an infinitely small point. You cannot have a mind organized on a point. That is like angels dancing on a pinhead. Nonsense!”
“I don’t know about that,” hazarded the fat Ohashi. “Maybe relativistically speaking we can contact this mind for a hell of a long time span, though from its own point of view it is rapidly approaching extinction—”
“But what happens to this collapsed matter when it reaches an infinitely small point, I ask you? I say it must spill out someplace else in the universe. Maybe to become a quasar. Maybe to form diffuse new atoms for continuous creation. This ‘being’ must pass through this hole. He cannot stick there—even if he does exist . . .”
“And you don’t believe he does, Dr. Spiegel?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Well, Habib?” Lew Boyd demanded. “What do you have to say to that?”
Habib shrugged.
“We see the universe a different way. I have my symbols, he has his. Did BuPsych-Sec think I was lying? That wasn’t a casual chat we had about the matter!”
“I suppose not,” grudged Boyd.
“So.” And Habib retreated back into his robes again . . .”
“If there is a being in there,” Ohashi pursued, “he must have some crazy ideas by now. I presume he fell in there by accident; didn’t evolve in there. He’ll have memories from sometime of a universe of length and breadth and height, but no evidence to back this up, no reliable sense impressions. It’ll seem like a mad hallucination, a drug trip. Yet he might just be able to tell us what it’s like in there subjectively—”
“To get that information out of Black Hole,” snorted Spiegel, “is by definition impossible!”
“Maybe when one of us rides Habib in there—”
“Remember what happened to the sailor who was riding Habib last time? He died in there—and nobody knows why. I’m not riding Habib.” Carlos Bolam stared bitterly at the Arab, and Mara thought she caught the hint of another cruel smile on Habib’s lips.
“The man wasn’t properly prepared for the encounter,” Lew Boyd stated ominously. “He thought he was going to meet a mermaid back on Earth, poor bastard. But we’ll be keeping a tight eye on the trance this time.”
Despite Boyd’s grudging acceptance of Habib’s story on that occasion, neither he nor Nielstrom showed any sign of trusting the telemedium. It was soon plain to Mara that some trap was being laid for Habib, though if Habib was aware of it he showed no sign of caring.
It puzzled Mara. If BuPsych-Sec were so unsure of Habib, why had they sent him out as ship’s telemedium yet again? To the same place where a sailor had lost his life!
A couple of weeks after that discussion in the lounge, Boyd and Nielstrom were in there again interrogating the Arab, while Mara stood out in the nacelle, gazing at the redshifting stars receding from the ship and the violetshifting suns ahead of them: suns which she knew as a pure golden desert of dunes—and which she also knew, with a trace of pity, could never be seen as such by the majority of the human race. Perhaps people’s crudity and violence were brought on basically by anger at their own limitation of vision?
“You went in there, Habib,” she heard.
“In there, there is no ‘there,’ ” said Habib elusively.
“We know all about this collapse-of-geometry business, but you still went somewhere.”
“True. I went to no-where—”
“If you went to nowhere, perhaps there was nothing there?”
“True,” smirked Habib. “No-thing.”
“How do you make contact with nothing, nowhere, Habib? That’s nonsense!”
“He lives in the midst of non-sense, where even geometry has gone down the drain—”
“He? If everything else is so damned uncertain, how can you be so sure of that thing’s sex?”
“You have to use some pronoun . . .”
“Why not ‘it’ ? It’s only an alien thing, in there. It isn’t human, Habib—”
“Even a thing must be allowed some dignity,” muttered Habib.
“Interesting point of view,” said Boyd.
“I don’t see that it’ll have much ‘dignity’,” Nielstrom jibed. “When you isolate a human being in a sensory deprivation tank, he soon starts hallucinating. If you keep him in there long enough, he goes insane. What is the flavor of this thing’s insanity, Habib?”
The Arab glanced down at the floor so that the haik hid his face.
He laughed.
“What flavor would you prefer? Vanilla? Chocolate? Raspberry?”
“That’s not funny,” snapped Boyd.
“Oh no, sir, I know how in earnest you are, I remember Annapolis.”
“So answer! That being’s a psychotic, isn’t it? A fragmented mind—”
“Psychosis,” said Habib stiffly, “is a judgment within a context. But he has escaped from context. Geometry itself has collapsed. Two and two don’t add up to four. The angles of a triangle may be anything from zero to infinity. It’s the Navy who are the psycho tics, from his point of view.”
Habib abruptly raised his head and grinned; he stuck his thumb in his mouth and sucked it like a child sucking a lollipop.
He pulled his thumb out with a plop. “Chocolate? Vanilla? Raspberry?” He smirked. “It’s all a question of escaping from context, isn’t it, Habib?” Boyd demanded, furiously accenting that single word “escaping” and outstaring the Arab, till Habib dropped his eyes furtively.
The Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar changed orbits at 20:00 hours to a circuit as low as they dared fly about the equator of the ergosphere, from where other stars in the sky had their light warped freakishly into long blue worm-like streaks and spirals. But they were still safe enough, orbiting faster than the escape velocity from this zone, flying in a forced curve at great expense of power rather than allowing their orbit to be dictated to them by the local gravity.
Boyd and Nielstrom were waiting for Mara and Habib in the trance room.
“Change of plan,” Liz smiled sweetly.
“New procedure,” Boyd explained. “Our little witch will inject with 2-4-P-C on her own. You, Habib, will ride with her in—”
“What in the name of—!” Habib recovered himself. “But Mara isn’t ready. What a mad thing to do!” He paced up and down between the trance couches in a fury.
“So near and yet so far, eh?” laughed Boyd, enigmatically.
Habib argued; and the more he argued, the more pleased Liz and Lew seemed to be. They taunted him again about the sailor who’d lost his life inside the Hole.
“He poured like water through a sieve, eh, Habib? I wonder if he could have been poured out, deliberately?”
“That’s impossible,” gasped Mara.
“But think, what if the rider wasn’t safe? Just imagine the implications for the Navy.”
“A million-to-one accident,” mumbled Habib, distraught. “I know I lost a rider in there. But what about the BuPsych-Sec man who rode in there after him? He didn’t get hurt.”
“He was able to switch off in time. He had the Tantric training to hold back from orgasm and withdraw when he saw there was nothing in the mirror at the end. So now you shall ride in there yourself as passenger and let us see what happens.”
The Arab stared queerly at Mara.
“Mekhtoub,” he muttered in Arabic, “it is fated. Poor little witch. May Allah be with you. May you not lose yourself, and me, in there.”
“One more thing,” added
Boyd. “We want to keep in better touch with the medium through the trip.” He indicated a slim grey machine, mounted on rubber rollers, backed up against the wall. Tendrils of wire sprouted from it, terminating in tiny suction pads.
“An electromyograph,” he said, tapping the machine, “registers the minute voltage changes in the muscles associated with speech. There’s always some element of subvocalizing in a trance. It only takes time and money to write a computer programme to make some verbal sense of these electrical effects. So we’ve finally taken the time and spent the money. The electromyograph processes its data through the ship’s main computer, so we can hear real-time speech.”
Lew Boyd patted Mara in a patronizingly amiable way.
“Give us a running commentary, won’t you, little witch, while you’re navigating your way through . . . whatever it is?”
Habib darted a look of horror at Mara—a horror she shared.
“Voyeurs!” cried Habib. “You vile peepers. That’s the only privacy we have, our symbol landscape. That’s our only dignity.”
“A pilot scheme,” smiled Boyd ingratiatingly, his hand lingering on Mara’s shoulder. “It’s our job after all . . . to know.”
There was no golden desert visible now . . .
One great dune was all she could see—curling over at the top like a frozen Hokusai wave. The Black Hole warped her mind’s view of the desert into this single, vast, static lip of sand . . .
No wonder Habib hadn’t been able to find his way to Earth when this thing hung nearby, dominating the whole field of vision. Where stars were normally spread out as endless ripples of sand, the Black Hole was a whole warped desert in itself.
She hovered by a pure mirror pool, beneath the overhang of that awful cliff, and realized she was already at the event horizon, seeing the symbol of it in her mind.
The sand dune seemed to be falling in on her perpetually, like a breaker crashing, but in this frozen landscape of the mind—beyond events—nothing moved. Nothing could move when there was no “here,” no “there.”
Somewhere inside that blank mirror was the mind she’d been sent to find.
She had the barest sensation of Habib riding her, but couldn’t get through to him to ask advice. Telemedium and rider had so little contact. Till now this had been the main consolation in being a Navy mind-whore. That, and the beauty of the desert. Now, it was frightening. She was so utterly on her own.
Another thing made her anxious. Was it she, or Habib, who was supposed to contact the mind in the mirror of the pool? Normally, it was the rider who spoke to rider. But this mirror had no rider in it. She remembered something Habib had warned her about . . . the mirror of illusion that reflects yourself, that can trap you in it . . .
She knew so little and it seemed so strange and dangerous here.
Shortly afterward, in that timeless stasis, love dawned for Mara . . .
There was a consciousness—a presence in the mirror pool. A craving for Otherness. This being seemed so alone, and could love so deep.
But how could he reach out a hand to her, when he knew nothing of length and breadth and depth? She came from beyond the event horizon—but how could anyone come from beyond that?
“How can you be?” thought the mirror pool.
He couldn’t show her his face. His body. He had none. But he could search in her mind for words and make her lips whisper them.
Mara, tom away from her Swedish village of cool forest, clear lakes, goose honk, by Earth’s Naval draft board, hadn’t really awakened till now. The past three months had been such a false, horrid nightmare.
Words formed as he found the poetry in her soul. Her words—or the Other’s. It didn’t matter.
There was emotional identity. And what’s another word for that, but Love?
He cried:
“Outside, I should like to see
Your Inside
Outside, show me your Inside!
Outside, are you brave enough?”
And she replied:
“Inside, are you brave?”
He asked:
“That I should go outside myself
Who have only myself to be in
Is that what you demand?”
“Yes!” she cried to her lover.
What did those sailors and scientists know of this? With all their brash talk of Surface Velocities equal to the Speed of Light. Of Singularities and Strangeness! What did they know of true Singularity, those trashy men! With their Kruskal Coordinates for Schwarzschild Spacetime, what did they really know! With their tin starship flying outside the Surface of Infinite Redshift, far beyond the Event Horizon—beyond this lonely pool where time had frozen—how could they establish a relationship, locked outside as they were forever?
In the Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, her body lay in a trance . . .
“The boat goes round and round,” she sang,
“In the circles of Day and Night
But never do I lose my grip upon You.
You
Shall be my oar!”
What did those wretched scientists want her to do? Interrogate this being about his state of mind and how he saw physical conditions inside a collapsed star?
“Could I
Describe Height,”
she sang, to taunt the scientists and BuPsych-Sec officers, if they were spying on her voice successfully up there,
“I would choose
A star at the head
A star at the feet
And under the feet a mirror-image
Concluding in a star.”
They wanted to hear the secrets of a black Hole. Yet it wasn’t black at all, but a startling pearly white; shimmering, opalescent, surrounded by that yellow lip of sand like a curling shell. It was the color of mother of pearl, set in gold. They wanted to know about Length and Breadth and Height? She sang out:
“Could I describe Breadth
I would choose an embrace
Because I have senses
False and primitive
And cannot grasp what really Exists
There is no Star
Where your head is
There is no middle-point
Where your feet stand
But an inch of your loveliness
I have known.”
They wanted to know about distances and measurements? She shouted joyfully at the top of her voice:
“An inch of your loveliness
I have known!”
Mara felt the brush of the being’s presence on her lips. And then his image grew clearer—as though he had at last understood how to communicate himself, in his own thought forms rather than in poetry filched from her own mind, He made a clearer and clearer statement of identity. Some of it totally evaded her, presenting itself in mathematical or abstract alien symbols she had no knowledge of—forged according to an alien logic from a region where the laws of logic, and even mathematics, had been radically different from the logics devised by humans to suit a universe of elements coherently bonded together into galaxies, stars and planets. But much came through. And when he failed, his symbols hunted for some other means of resonance within her. Concepts using the raw symbolism of her own thought processes for internalizing sensations—tactile, kinesthetic, erotic sensations—took the place of words then.
In this blend of words and formalized sensations, he coded his message to her, presenting her with the Black Hole he inhabited as the essential mode of existence; the shadow cast by which constituted the “solid” universe of stars and planets.
He reversed the Real and the Unreal for her, till she knew the joy of escape that Habib must have tasted three years earlier.
“Do you not know that this is the Real, the other the Unreal? Let me tell you about the origin of things . . . Mara.” His mind reached below her name for the personal symbol cluster attached to it. “Dreamspinner . . . Shapechanger . . . Lady Riding on a Stick Through the Starlit Night . . .
“The Energy Egg exploded bef
ore the start of ‘things.’ (By ‘things’ I mean stars, starships, bodies.) It was not the Birth of Things. For a very short time there was a true physical universe—” She sensed him searching her mind for measurements of time. “It lasted . . . ten to the minus forty ‘seconds,’ by and large, this universe. ! Soon—and when I conceive ‘soon,’ I conceive a time long before that universe was one ‘second’ old—all that would later be ‘matter’ had already become a near-infinity of tiny ‘black holes.’ Space and Matter march hand in hand. But how could so tiny a volume of newly created Space contain so much hatched energy? It could not grow fast enough. The only way Space could expand swiftly enough to contain the hatching was by expanding inwardly, creating a myriad holes.
That was the one and only mode that so much could exist in—holes. Each hole could be no larger than ten to the minus twenty-three ‘centimeters’—”
“Numbers so small! I can’t feel them. They mean nothing.”
“And of these tiny holes is all ‘matter’ made. Atomic particles are only a tightly bonded state of these; and in binding, these holes release huge energies. It was those energies, and their release, that powered the expansion of this thing you call ‘universe’—not the hatching of the egg itself. Do you understand, Mara?” A touchless caress indicated the curve of the Hokusai wave, beyond which was a universe of stars, starships, bodies, and matter. “That is only a para-universe—a secondary cosmos you inhabit. You have crossed over into the no-place where Reality is. Another was here. How long ago? He would have joined me but the illusion of matter dragged him back—”
“Habib . . .”
He reached below the name for its symbols: the Bedouin, the pilgrim to Mecca, the escapee from shabby caravanserais . . .
“Yes. It was him. But now you can join me. Will you join me, Mara?”
“Are you . . . God? You say you were there at the creation of things!”
“Is ‘God’ a creator of‘things’ ? I left before things began. I am not responsible for things.” She sensed anger and frustration. “Things are only shadows cast by knots in the eternal, vital void that the true universe collapsed into. This is what hatched from the egg of being, not that, out there.