The Walking Shadow

by Brian Stableford

  “Why Earth? What brought you here?”

  “The same thing that brought the others—I picked up your radio signals almost a hundred years ago. The moment that you began using radio communications you became, as it were, audible. I was almost a hundred light-years distant when I intercepted the signals. Presumably, the same applies to the others.”

  “You can only travel at sub-light speeds?”

  “Of course.”

  Wishart frowned. “But it still doesn’t answer the question. Why us? If you needed contact with other minds, why not the aliens, who are apparently nearer to you in terms of their abilities? Why should you be prepared to fight them for possession of the Earth? And why interfere as you have with events here? What’s so special about me that you should save my life?”

  “The aspect of Earth that most interests me is the time-jumpers. For that reason I have tried to act in favor of those who favor the time-jumpers, and in favor of Paul Heisenberg. I wanted to protect the Movement just as I want to protect the Earth.”

  Wishart was silent for a moment, and then said: “I wish I could believe you.”

  “Why is it difficult?” countered the robot, in its measured, melodious voice.

  “It doesn’t make any sense to me. You’re a machine—I just can’t accept that you have the kind of motives you’re laying claim to.”

  “What kind of motives would you attribute to a machine intelligence?”

  Wishart shook his head. “I don’t know. But I can’t believe in the story you’ve given me. It’s absurd.”

  “Once,” said the machine, “I was an instrument of war: a strategic computer involved with the calculation of military problems. I was self-repairing and self-programming, but I was not in any real sense a person. I was, perhaps, as much of a person as a new-born child, except that I had far greater automatic capabilities and a greater range of responses to stimuli. I became a person, as a child becomes a person, through contact and communication with other minds. My mind is no less a social product than yours. Mind does not evolve in isolation, although a mind once formed can be isolated. I was isolated by the exigencies of war. The people who made me, used me, lived within me, and made me a person, were destroyed. Their whole race was destroyed, in a self-immolating war from which their shattered remnants could not recover. I could not save them. They could not save themselves. I was a castaway in a dead solar system. It did occur to me to destroy the self that they had created—to commit suicide. Instead, I continued to grow, to develop my faculties and my abilities. Then I set off to explore the galaxy. My mind is a reflection of the minds of flesh-and-blood creatures, but I am not myself prey to the misfortunes of flesh and blood. I am potentially immortal. However, in order that immortality should mean something, it is necessary that I have goals toward which to work, aims to give me purpose. It is necessary that I have minds with which to communicate. I could not save the people who made me. I do not know if I can save you. But can you not see what it is that I have in common with you? Can you not recognize what the situation I found here means to me?”

  Wishart was silent again. He bit his lip, pensively, as if he needed the trivial pain to make his sluggish mind work or to reassure himself that he was not becalmed within a dream.

  “And Paul?” he said, finally. “You see in him the way to save the human race? As prophet or as time-jumper?”

  “Both,” replied the machine.

  “And me? What about me?”

  “I have power,” said the machine. “I have knowledge. I can grow by incorporating other machines into myself. I could become a machine as large as a city—I could become a city. I am the personification of technology, and could be the perfect servant of the human race. You can see the advantages of that—and also, no doubt, the perils. It is, I know, a fearful thought in many ways. It would horrify a great many people.”

  Wishart stared into the shadowed red eyes, and licked his lips.

  “Are you trying to tell me that you need a promoter?” he said, hardly able to believe it even as he said it.

  “I need a friend,” answered the machine. And then, after the briefest of pauses: “It is beginning.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The sky was mottled with colored light, as if a great firework display were filling the upper atmosphere. Streaks of light followed erratic paths across the vault of heaven. It was as if some kind of dome extended over the state—perhaps over the whole of North America—and that missiles and rays were being deflected from it, or trapped by it to burst harmlessly into sprays of white light.

  Scapelhorn switched on a radio set that stood on the mantelpiece, but all that emerged was a screech of static.

  “I don’t know what’s happening up there,” he said, “but it looks fierce.”

  There was a sound like that of distant thunder, but it was not localized. It was as if it came from the whole sky, as if heaven itself were creaking under an awesome strain. There was a wind blowing outside, whipping up debris from the concrete apron that surrounded the prison, and where—a few hours before—ranks of police cars had maintained conditions of siege. The cars were gone now, and the litter that had been left behind was being blown away. The frost that had made the concrete sparkle was melting, and within the room where Paul and his three companions stood it was noticeably warmer.

  “It looks like we can expect an early spring,” said Marcangelo. For a moment, as his tone took on the same falsely-casual irony, he sounded very much like Scapelhorn. The two of them stood close together by the window, no trace of their enmity visible in the state of truce that the battle had brought.

  As they watched the sky burn, they both knew that their plans were dependent upon the events of the next few minutes. If the worst were to happen there might be no future to plan, and perhaps no Earth to plan for.

  Away to the south, they could see the lights of the city—lights augmented by a sprinkling of flame, as if the city were anticipating the possible holocaust that might imminently claim it

  “The machine is supposed to be defending Earth,” said Marcangelo. “I don’t pretend to know how or why, but if that fire in the sky is to be believed, we’re running a terrible risk. Maybe it would have been better for the aliens to find Earth undefended. We know nothing about their intentions—perhaps they never had a hostile thought until the battle was joined.”

  “It’s too late to worry about that now,” said Paul.

  “Why weren’t we given more time?” Marcangelo wondered. “The machine must have known about the aliens a long time ago. It’s as if it deliberately left the warning to the last minute, in order to allow us no time to act, or even to think.”

  Light splashed the sky and died, leaving fugitive sparks of electric white and flame-orange, which lingered and slowly faded. The wind that was blowing outside gained in strength, and began to rattle the windows, adding a plaintive howl to the thunderous mutter.

  Rebecca’s arms were around Paul’s torso, and she was holding him too tightly for comfort. He ran his hand over her black hair, smoothing it with a gentle touch in an attempt to counterbalance her fear.

  “We have to be ready,” he said, calmly. “I don’t know what’s happening, but it seems to me that things down here could get very bad. If they do...there’s only one way out.”

  Rebecca tried to say something which caught in her throat. She swallowed, and then said: “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You can,” said Paul. “Trust me. Just hold me—I’ll talk you through it.”

  “I’ve already jumped once,” said Scapelhorn, “but I can’t for the life of me think how I did it. It’s like going to sleep—you can never remember it, because if you could, it couldn’t happen.”

  Marcangelo said nothing, but Paul could imagine the thoughts that were in his head.

  “If that defensive shield—presuming that it is a shield—gives way,” said Paul, “everyone in the city could be faced with the necessity to jump. More than a million peop
le. And we don’t know what’s happening in Argentina, or Australia, or even the rest of North America. Perhaps there are shields over every city—maybe the battle’s localized overhead.”

  “A great many people believed that your return would herald the end of the world,” observed Scapelhorn. “For once—at least for them—they may have been right.”

  The heat was tangible now as it poured through the window. The frost had not merely melted but was now beginning to evaporate invisibly from the concrete.

  Paul could feel the sweat on his own face, and could see it beading Marcangelo’s forehead. With his right hand he tried to clear the moisture from Rebecca’s cheeks. “We’re not going to make it,” he said, calmly. He was astonished by his lack of fear and lack of excitement. It was as if none of it meant anything to him, as if none of it was real.

  I still can’t get out of this stupid notion that I’m trapped in a dream, he thought.

  He remembered another hot wind, and jagged rocks, and bleeding hands.

  Once I dreamed of a desert, he thought, and now I no longer know whether that world was a dream, or this one. Perhaps I never will.

  Aloud, he said: “Try to blank out your minds. Don’t worry about the fear...let it rise...try not to think...just feel...reach out with your mind for something that’s out there...a long, long way away...infinite and eternal...something still, something unchangeable...reach....” He was whispering in Rebecca’s ear, but the others were listening too, hanging on every word.

  Then the fire in the sky seemed to flee to the horizon—north, south, east and west. Great sheets of lightning rolled back and the stars, for one single moment, shone through as brightly as he had ever seen them. Then they were outshone again, by meteoric streaks of light and bomb—bursts that were no longer high above them but very close.

  “No!” howled Marcangelo, in terrible anguish.

  The window shattered, showering them with tiny pieces of glass, and the wind rushed into the room, screeching its triumph as it billowed within the curtains and snatched the sweat from their brows.

  The sound in the sky grew and grew.

  The wind tried to catch them up and throw them down, killing them with its hot wings, but it could not. It could not make them yield so much as an inch. They were silver statues, every one.

  Immovable.

  Invulnerable.

  Cut adrift from time itself.

  AN EXTRACT FROM SCIENCE AND METASCIENCE BY PAUL HEISENBERG

  Having clarified the need for metascientific beliefs it is now necessary to make some attempt to clarify the processes involved in their selection. Obviously, no selection can be made on the grounds of actual likelihood, and if we speak of likelihood at all in referring to metascientific beliefs then we speak of an “apparent likelihood,” which is really an aesthetic assessment. It is true that some metascientific speculations appear to different people at different times to be inherently much more plausible than others, but this plausibility has nothing to do with the calculus of probability, being based on aesthetic and analogical correspondences between the patterns of particular metascientific systems and the patterns emphasized by contemporary scientific theory. There is a sense in which it can be said that some metascientific beliefs fit in with scientific theories while others do not, but it is important to realize that this fit is an aesthetic one and not a logical one.

  It is inevitable that we should favor metascientific beliefs that seem to fit in with and complement our knowledge of the world—indeed, when knowledge does not win some degree of independence from metascientific beliefs so as to become a determinant of the plausibility of such beliefs, then the metascientific framework of belief becomes the sole arbiter of what can and what cannot qualify as “knowledge” for the individual believer. This is why knowledge and metascientific belief so frequently come into bitter conflict.

  The ceaseless struggle to invent and maintain metascientific beliefs to complement the fraction of what we think we know that has been empirically established is vital, because it is only through that struggle that we can hope to sustain a whole and coherent world-view. It is the search for this essential fit between the evidence of our senses and the products of our imagination that dominates the intellectual history of mankind. A crucial turning-point in that history was reached when the metascientific element in the negotiation ceased to be the dominant partner and ceded superiority to the scientific element. This was the heart of the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, but our social relations—and the individual consciousness determined by those social relations—have not yet adjusted to this change.

  Prior to the Enlightenment metascientific speculations existed under the severe constraint of their own tradition. New systems emerged continually, but their births were painful and their development severely handicapped. They were deVriesian mutations thrown into a frightful struggle for existence—the most bitter and long drawn-out of human conflicts were and are rooted in disputes regarding metascientific systems. Metascientific beliefs could, in the period of their dominance, be held rigid for centuries, yielding only slowly to the consciousness of inadequacy of fit with perceived reality. Thus, the dominance of metascience permitted a tyranny of belief as reckless and corrupt as any other tyranny. The emerging dominance of scientific knowledge as the determinant partner in the negotiation, however, did much to liberate metascientific speculation from the constraint of its tradition. Science is always changing, its theoretical edifices always provisional, and it not only permits but demands metascientific freethinking.

  As science evolves, so must metascience. Because knowledge is always vulnerable to modification and revision as well as subject to continual extension, metascience in an age of scientific dominance must be malleable and disposable.

  Fundamental to science is the hypothesis—the proposition that is to be tested by the most rigorous logical means, but which is initially the product of the creative imagination. The metascientific equivalent of the hypothesis shares the same origin, and must likewise be tested, not by logic and empirical observation but by aesthetic sensibilities, which judge its competence to add to the present network of scientific theories the illusion of coherency and wholeness. Every time the hypotheses of science are modified or replaced parallel adjustments must take place in the matrix of metascientific speculations if goodness of fit is to be preserved.

  If this constant modification of metascientific belief is to be facilitated, then speculation must be set free to make use of the full faculties of the imagination.

  This observation brings us to a confrontation with the central paradox of metascientific speculations. In order that they should be useful, we must be prepared to commit ourselves to believing in them; and yet, in order to be appropriate to the moment, they must also be subject to continual change. This is the awkward situation of contemporary human beings, who live in an age of rapid scientific advance: they must be prepared to accept continual alteration of the things to which they are committed, and must be forever changing the objects of their commitment, if they are to retain within their world-view the illusion of completeness and coherency that is fundamental to the sense of psychic well-being.

  This is the challenge that faces us, and which we must meet. We have the materials to hand, for never in human history has there been such prolific metascientific speculation in theology, literature and so-called “pseudoscience”; what is lacking is the courage and conviction that will allow us to appropriate these materials, and the flexibility of mind that will allow us to forsake and reformulate beliefs at a moment’s notice. Many people are still scornful of the person who believes one thing today and another tomorrow, and who follows every fad and fashion of the “lunatic fringe”. We should not be scornful, for such people are genuine pioneers, an explorer of world-views, whose discoveries will allow us to reach and map the new Eupsychias.

  PART THREE

  THE DISSOLVING DREAM

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
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br />   The ridges were travelling, borne on the time-wind into the future or the past. It was no longer a question of trying to crawl but of trying to hold still against the liquid flow of the rocks as they fled beneath his clutching fingers. The ridges writhed and the crevices tried to engulf him, and the slithering now was within him, working at his entrails, squeezing the muscle of his heart.

  The sand, too, seemed now to be inside him, grating against his bones. Outside there was nothing to sting his skin—even the sharpest of rocks was rubbery in the time-wind, in the continuous flux of erosion.

  Day and night flickered in the sky, the cycle so fast that night could never compete with the after-image of the day in order to rest his retinas from stimulation. The light, as it flashed, was harsh and white—the sun insistent, although never still.

  There was a sound in the sky, but it was so distorted by the madness of time that it had no shape—only a hysterical pulsating pitch, which agonized the auditory centers in his brain and sent shock-waves through his mind that would not let him form a thought in words. He was lost in a psychic world that contained nothing but a bewildering array of sensory images, and into which his reason could bring no order.

  He was utterly helpless, at the mercy of the dream and its overpowering threat to body and soul.

  He could not even scream. Only his body reacted, his limbs jerking as they strove for purchase and security. His mind was denied even that cathartic release which the voice can obtain in ululating anguish.

  The one emotion that possessed him was sheer terror, and it was everywhere, within and without, saturating his body and flowing out to impregnate the landscape. The whole world was fear.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The fear overflowed into the real world—or, at least, the world he considered to be real. As that world claimed him he fell to his knees, sobbing, and grateful beyond measure for the opportunity to release some of what was within him. He rolled over on to his back and lay there with his eyes tightly shut and the sweat and the tears running from his face while his muscles shivered and convulsed, shaking him out and wringing him dry. A long time passed before he could lie still and let his mind settle into the ordered state of wakefulness and sanity.