Operation Chaos

by Poul Anderson

  At that we halted, the harp ceased, the eternal silence of the infinite spaces fell upon us, and the zodiac spun faster and faster until its figures blurred together and were time's wheel. What light remained lay wholly on the pastor. He stood, arms lifted, before the altar. "Hear us, O God, from Heaven Thy dwelling place," he called. "Thou knowest our desire; make it pure, we pray Thee. In Thy sight stand this man Steven and this woman Virginia, who are prepared to harrow hell as best as is granted them to, that they may confound Thine enemies and rescue an unstained child from the dungeons of the worm. Without Thine aid they have no hope. We beg Thee to allow them a guide and counselor through the wilderness of hell. If we are not worthy of an angel, we ask that Thou commend them unto Thy departed servant Nikolai Ivanovitch Lobachevsky, or whomever else may be knowledgeable in these matters as having been on earth a discoverer of them. This do we pray in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

  There was another stillness.

  Then the cross on the altar shone forth, momentarily sun-bright, and we heard one piercing, exquisite note, and I felt within me a rush of joy I can only vaguely compare to the first winning of first love. But another noise followed, as of a huge wind. The candles went out, the panes went black, we staggered when the floor shook beneath us. Svantalf screamed.

  "Ginny!" I heard myself yell. Simultaneously I was whirled down a vortex of images, memories, a bulbous-towered church on an illimitable plain, a dirt track between rows of low thatch-roofed cottages and a horseman squeaking and jingling along it with saber at belt, an iron winter that ended in thaw and watery gleams and returning bird-flocks and shy breath of green across the beechwoods, a disordered stack of books, faces, faces, hands, a woman who was my wife, a son who died too young, half of Kazan in one red blaze, the year of the cholera, the letter from Gottingen, loves, failures, blindness closing in day by slow day and none of it was me.

  A thunderclap rattled our teeth. The wind stopped, the light came back, the sense of poised forces was no more. We stood bewildered in our ordinary lives. Ginny cast herself into my arms.

  "Lyubimyets," I croaked to her, "no, darling?Gospodny pomiluie-" while the kaleidoscope gyred within me. Svartalf stood on a workbench, back arched, tail bottled, not in rage but in panic. His lips, throat, tongue writhed through a ghastly fight with sounds no cat can make. He was trying to talk.

  "What's gone wrong?" Barney roared.

  XXX

  GINNY TOOK OVER. She beckoned to the closest men. "Karlslund, Hardy, help Steve," she rapped. "Check him, Doc." I heard her fragmentarily through the chaos. My friends supported me. I reached a chair, collapsed, and fought for breath.

  My derangement was short. The recollections of another land, another time, stopped rocketing forth at random. They had been terrifying because they were strange and out of my control. Poko'y sounded in my awareness, together with Peace, and I knew they meant the same. Courage lifted. I sensed myself thinking, with overtones of both formalism and compassion:

  ?I beg your pardon, sir. This re-embodiment confused me likewise. I had not paused to reflect what a difference would be made by more than a hundred years in the far realms where I have been. A few minutes will suffice, I believe, for preliminary studies providing the informational basis for a modus vivendi that shall be tolerable to you. Rest assured that I regret any intrusion and will minimize the same. I may add, with due respect, that what I chance to learn about your private affairs will doubtless be of no special significance to one who has left the flesh behind him.

  Lobachevsky! I realized.

  Your servant, sir. Ah, yes, Steven Anton Matuchek. Will you graciously excuse me for the necessary brief interval?

  This, and the indescribable stirring of two memory sets that followed, went on at the back of my consciousness. The rest of me was again alert: uncannily so. I waved Ashman aside with an "I'm okay" and scanned the scene before me.

  In Svartalf s hysterical condition, he was dangerous to approach. Ginny tapped a basin of water at a workbench sink and threw it over him. He squalled, sprang to the floor, dashed to a corner, crouched and glowered. "Poor puss," she consoled. "I had to do that." She found a towel. "Come here to mama and we'll dry you off." He made her come to him. She squatted and rubbed his fur.

  "What got into him?" Charles asked.

  Ginny looked up. Against the red hair her face was doubly pale. "Good phrase, Admiral," she said. "Something did. I shocked his body with a drenching. The natural cat reflexes took over, and the invading spirit lost its dominance. But it's still there. As soon as it learns its psychosomatic way around, it'll try to assume control and do what it's come for."

  "Which is?"

  "I don't know. We'd better secure him."

  I rose. "No, wait," I said. "I can find out." Their eyes swiveled toward me. "You see, uh, I've got Lobachevsky."

  "What?" Karlslund protested. "His soul in yours? Can't be! The saints never?"

  I brushed past, knelt by Ginny, took Svartalf's head between my hands, and said, "Relax. Nobody wants to hurt you. My guest thinks he understands what's happened. Savvy? Nikolai Ivanovitch Lobachevsky is his name. Who are you?"

  The muscles bunched, the fangs appeared, a growing ululation swept the room. Svartalf was about to have another fit.

  ?Sir, by your leave, the thought went in me. He is not hostile. I would know if he were. He is disconcerted at what has occurred, and has merely a feline brain to think with. Evidently he is unacquainted with your language. May I endeavor to calm him?

  Russian purled and fizzled from my lips. Svartalf started, then I felt him ease a bit in my grasp. He looked and listened as intently as if I were a mousehole. When I stopped, he shook his head and mewed.

  ?So he was not of my nationality either. But he appears to have grasped our intent.

  Look, I thought, you can follow English, using my knowledge. Svartalf knows it too. Why can't his . . . inhabitant . . . do like you?

  ?I told you, sir, the feline brain is inadequate. It has nothing like a human speech-handling structure. The visiting soul must use every available cortical cell to maintain bare reason. But it can freely draw upon its terrestrial experience, thanks to the immense data storage capacity of even a diminutive mammalian body. Hence we can use what languages it knew before.

  I thought: I see. Don't underrate Svartalf. He's pure-bred from a long line of witch familiars, more intelligent than an ordinary cat. And the spells that've surrounded him through his life must've had effects.

  -Excellent. "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

  Svartalf nodded eagerly. "Meeoh," he said with an umlaut.

  "Guten Tag, gnadiger Herr. Ich bin der Mathematiker Nikolai iwanowitsch Lobatschewski, quondam Oberpfarrer zu der Kasans Universitdt in Russland je suis uotre tres humble seruiteur, Monsieur." That last was in French, as politeness called for in the earlier nineteenth century.

  "W-r-r-rar-r." Claws gestured across the floor.

  Ginny said, wide-eyed with awe: "He wants to write . . . Svartalf, listen. Don't be angry. Don't be afraid. Let him do what he will. Don't fight, help him. When this is over, you'll have more cream and sardines than you can eat. I promise. There's a good cat." She rubbed him under the chin. It didn't seem quite the proper treatment for a visiting savant, but it worked, because at last he purred.

  While she and Griswold made preparations, I concentrated on meshing with Lobachevsky. The rest stood around, shaken by what had happened and the sudden complete unknownness of the next hour. A fraction of me hearkened to their low voices.

  Charles: "Damnedest apparition of saints I ever heard of."

  Karlslund: "Admiral, please!"

  Jan ice: "Well, it's true. They shouldn't have intruded in bodies like, like demons taking possession."

  Griswold: "Maybe they had to. We did neglect to provide counter-transferral mass for inter-continuum crossing."

  Karlslund: "They aren't devils. They never required it in the past."

  Bar
ney: "Whoa. Let's think about that. A spirit or a thought can travel free between universes. Maybe that's what returned saints always were?visions, not solid bodies."

  Karlslund: "Some were positively substantial."

  Nobu: "I would guess that a saint can utilize any mass to form a body. Air, for instance, and a few pounds of dust for minerals, would provide the necessary atoms. Don't forget what he or she is, as far as we know: a soul in Heaven, which is to say one near God.

  How can he fail to gain remarkable abilities as well as spiritual eminence?from the Source of power and creativity?"

  Charles: "What ails these characters, then?"

  "Messieurs," my body said, stepping toward them, "I beg your indulgence. As yet I have not entirely accustomed myself to thinking in this corporeal manifold. Do me the honor to remember that it is unlike the one I originally inhabited. Nor have I assimilated the details of the problem which led to your request for help. Finally, while confined to human form, I have no better means than you for discovering the identity of the gentleman in the cat. I do believe I know his purpose, but let us wait, if you will, for more exact knowledge before drawing conclusions."

  "Wow," Barney breathed. "How's it feel, Steve?"

  "Not bad," I said. "Better by the minute." That was an ultimate understatement. As Lobachevsky and I got acquainted, I felt in myself, coexistent with my own thoughts and emotions, those of a being grown good and wise beyond imagining.

  Of course, I couldn't share his afterlife, nor the holiness thereof. My mortal brain and grimy soul didn't reach to it. At most, there sang at the edge of perception a peace and joy which were not static but a high eternal adventure. I did, though, have the presence of Lobachevsky the man to savor. Think of your oldest and best friend and you'll have a rough idea what that was like.

  "We should be ready now," Ginny said.

  She and Griswold had set a Ouija board on a bench, the easiest implement for a paw to operate. She perched herself on the edge, swinging legs whose shapeliness my associate noticed too, though mainly he worked out in my head the equation describing them. Svartalf took position at the gadget while I leaned across the opposite side to interrogate.

  The planchette moved in a silence broken only by breathing. It was sympathetic with a piece of chalk under a broomstick spell, that wrote large on a blackboard where everyone could see.

  ICH BIN JANOS BOLYAI VON UNGARN

  "Bolyai!" gasped Falkenberg. "God, I forgot about him! No wonder he-but how-"

  "Enchante, Monsieur," Lobachevsky said with a low bow. "Dies ist fur mich eine grosse Ehre. Ihrer Werke sint eine Inspiration fur apes." He meant it.

  Neither Bolyai nor Svartalf were to be outdone in courtliness. They stood up on his hind legs, made a reverence with paw on heart, followed with a military salute, took the planchette again and launched into a string of flowery French compliments.

  "Who is he, anyhow?" Charles hissed behind me.

  "I . . . I don't know his biography," Falkenberg answered likewise. "But I recall now, he was the morning star of the new geometry."

  "I'l1 check the library, ' Griswold offered. "These courtesies look as if they'll go on for some time."

  "Yes," Ginny said in my ear, "can't you hurry things along a bit? We're way overdue at home, you and I. And that phone call could be trouble."

  I put it to Lobachevsky, who put it to Bolyai, who wrote ABER NATUERLICH for the lack of an umlaut and gave us his assurances?at considerable length that as an Imperial officer he had learned how to act with the decisiveness that became a soldier when need existed, as it clearly did in the present instance, especially when two such charming young ladies in distress laid claim upon his honor, which honor he would maintain upon any field without flinching, as he trusted he had done in life ....

  I don't intend to mock a great man. Among us, he was a soul trying to think with the brain and feel with the nerves and glands of a tomcat. It magnified human failings and made well-nigh impossible the expression of his intellect and knightliness. We found these hinted at in the notes on him that Griswold located in encyclopedias and mathematical histories, which we read while he did his gallant best to communicate with Lobachevsky.

  Janos Bolyai was born in Hungary in 1802, when it was hardly more than a province of the Austrian Empire. His father, a noted mathematician who was a close friend of Gauss, taught him calculus and analytical mechanics before he was thirteen and enrolled him in the Royal Engineering College in Vienna at fifteen. Twenty years old, he became an officer of engineers, well known as a violinist and a swordsman dangerous to meet in a duel. In 1823 he sent to his father a draft of his Absolute Science of Space. While Gauss had anticipated some of its ideas in a general, philosophical way?unknown at the time to Bolyai, the young Hungarian had he done the first rigorous treatment of a non-Euclidean geometry, the first solid proof that space doesn't logically need to obey axioms like the one about parallel lines.

  Unfortunately, it wasn't published till 1833, and just as an appendix to a two-volume work of his father's which, being in Latin, bore the gorgeous title Tentatem Juventutem Studiosarn, in Edementa Matheseos Puree Introducendi. By then Lobachevsky had independently announced similar results. Bolyai remained obscure.

  It seemed to have discouraged him. He settled down in the same place as his father, who taught at the Reformed College of Maros-Vasahely, and- died there in 1860. His lifetime covered a rising Hungarian nationalism, Kossuth's rebellion in 1848, its failure and the reactionary oppression that followed; but the articles said nothing about his conduct or opinions. He did see the end of martial law in 1857 and the increasing liberalization afterward: though his land did not achieve full national status under the dual monarchy till seven years past his death. I wondered if his ghost had hung around that long, waiting, before it departed for wider universes.

  We found more on Lobachevsky. He was born in 1793, in Nizhni Novgorod. His mother was widowed when he was seven. She moved to Kazan and raised her boys in genteel but often desperate poverty. They won scholarships to the Gymnasium, Nikolai at the age of eight. He entered the local university at fourteen, got his master's degree at eighteen, was appointed assistant professor at twenty-one and full professor at twenty-three. Presently he had charge of the library and the museum. It was a tough distinction?both were neglected, disordered, so short of funds that he had to do most of the sheer physical labor himself?but over the years he made them a pride of Russia. In addition, while Czar Alexander lived, he was supposed to keep tabs on student politics. He managed to satisfy the government without finking; the kids adored him.

  In 1827 he became rector, head of the university. He built it up in every way, including literally; he learned architecture so he could design proper structures. In 1830, when cholera struck, he pulled the academic community through with scant mortality, by enforcing sanitation as opposed to the medieval measures taken elsewhere in Kazan. Another time a fire totalled half the town. His new observatory, his best buildings went. But he rescued the instruments and books, and two years later had restored what was lost.

  As early as 1826, he'd discussed non-Euclidean geometry. He might as well have done it in Kansas as Kazan. Word spread to western Europe with a slowness that would have driven a less patient, unegotistical man up the wall. But it did travel. When Gauss heard, he was impressed enough to get Lobachevsky elected to the Royal Society of Gottingen in 1842.

  Maybe that xenophobia, or simple spiteful jealousy?was what prompted the Czarist regime in 1846 to bounce him as rector. They let him keep his study at the university, but scant else. Heartbroken, he with drew to his mathematical work. His eyesight failed. His son died. He thought on, dictating the Pangeometry that crowned his life. In 1856, shortly after he finished the book, that life ended.

  Of course he was a saint!

  ?No, Steven Pavlovitch, you should not raise me above my worth. I stumbled and sinned more than most, I am sure. But the mercy of God has no bounds. I have been . . . it is impossible
to explain. Let us say I have been allowed to progress.

  The blackboard filled. Janice wielded an eraser and the chalk squeaked on. To those who knew French?which the Russian and the Hungarian had switched to as being more elegant than German?it gradually became clear what had happened. But I alone shared Lobachevsky's degree of comprehension. As this grew, I fretted over ways to convey it in American. Time was shrinking on us fast.

  ?Indeed, Lobachevsky answered. Brusque though contemporary manners have become (pardoranez-rnoi, je vous en prie), haste is needed, for I agree that the hour is late and the peril dire.

  Therefore I called the group to me when at last the questioning was done. Except for Ginny, who couldn't help being spectacular, and Svartalf, who sat at her feet with a human soul in his eyes, they were an unimpressive lot to see, tired, sweaty, haggard, neckties loosened or discarded, hair unkempt, cigarets in most hands. I was probably less glamorous, perched on a stool facing them. My voice grated and I'd developed a tic in one cheek. The fact that a blessed saint had joint tenancy of my body didn't much affect pain, scared, fallible me.

  "Things have got straightened out," I said. "We made a mistake. God doesn't issue personal orders to His angels and saints, at least not on our behalf. It appears, Pastor, from the form of your invocation, you understood that. But consciously or not, the rest of us assumed we're more important than we are." Lobachevsky corrected me. "No, everybody's important to Him. But there must be freedom, even for evil. And furthermore, there are considerations of?well, I guess you can't say Realpolitik. I don't know if it has earthly analogues. Roughly speaking, though, neither God nor the Adversary want to provoke an early Armageddon. For two thousand years, they've avoided direct incursions into each other's, uh, home territories, Heaven or hell. That policy's not about to be changed.