Anticipations

by Christopher Priest

  It would be wonderful to visit Earth again . . .

  He felt the scale of the sundial under his wrist-skin. Seventeen-thirty. Soon time to get home for his Internal. Oh, that lovely girl!—If only he knew her externally! Well, at least there was that to look forward to.

  Sighing, he turned and shook another extended hand.

  IV

  The last hand had come and gone. Maine caught the mainline home as usual, changing on to a graft and so to his own particular warren, deep among the braces of Fragrance. He hardly thought about the celebratory party which had been held in honour of his research team; his mind was on the pleasures to come.

  “How did it go, Edward?” Fabrina asked. “The party?”

  “They were all very kind. It was a nice party. They are a pleasant firm to work with.”

  “Mr Marvin Stein-Presteign?”

  “Oh, yes, even Mr Marvin was there. He had quite a conversation, as the PM forecast.”

  “Edward, did he—did he make you any kind of a donation?”

  “Well, Fabrina, he made a speech. A eulogistic speech. Said that Western Civilization was not dead yet, and that we could still show China and the coming World State a thing or two . . .” He broke off, using his sister’s visitor as an excuse to evade his sister’s interrogation. “Hello, Anna, how are you?”

  “I’m just a radioactive particle in the mind of God,” Anna Kavan said, smiling, as she came forward and kissed Edward’s cheek. “At least, so your lin tells me. Why do you keep such an old-fashioned model, a man of your standing? You could afford some of the really intelligent ones, with up-to-date religious phobias and everything.”

  “Like Fabrina, I enjoy our old lin. It’s our pet. Anything too intelligent can’t remain a pet. And the original idea of lins was to act as pet-substitutes, since live pets are not allowed in the zeepees.”

  “You’re both very eccentric,” Anna said. “And I am going back to Earth very soon, where I shall purchase a Persian cat.”

  “Some might think that was eccentric, Anna,” said Edward mildly.

  Putting on her sentient extra face, she moved to the door. “Edward, your innocence protects you from perceiving how eccentric I am. Stick to prediction and leave the squalor of human relationships to others.”

  She blew them a kiss and left.

  “What exactly did she imply?” Edward asked his sister.

  “It’s fashionable to talk in epigrams nowadays,” said Fabrina, who did not know either.

  “Pretending she’s about to go to Earth . . . People are always saying that, and they never go . . .

  Edward marched through into his own room, calling to the lin to follow him. The lin came in and stood itself against the wall until wanted, its plastic curlicues gleaming in the mock-firelight.

  Among all the clutter of Edward Maine’s hobby, which was also his Main Job, was his one extravagance. Most homapts, at least in the Superior group of zeepees, were equipped with funfaxes, for the reception of all media, including Internals. But Edward’s was a two-way funfax. He could have his partner here with him.

  Only in this vital respect had his shyness not entirely triumphed.

  When the Intern-girl entered, shown in by Fabrina with proper courtesy and just a whiff of instinctive jealousy, she wore as usual a molycomp flesh mask, so that he had few visual clues to her real personality. She was dressed in a saffron tunic, with turn-up sokdals on her feet. There were white gloves on her hands. She bowed to him.

  “You are well this week, Zenith?” he asked. Zenith was the code name they had agreed between them.

  “Perfectly, thank you. As I hope you are.”

  “Yes. And you still find happiness in your Main Job? With what is it connected?”

  “My happiness is connected with artificial seas, thank you.” Of course she assumed the Mandarin etiquette which was currently the rage on more progressive zeepees; so that she could only take her refusal to deliver a direct answer to a direct question—itself a breach of the Anonymous Internaliser contract—as far as a riddle. But the finesse she showed made him suspect that she was true Oriental.

  As to her voice, it was low, but that meant nothing, for the molycomps often spread into pseudopods around the maxillae and sometimes down into the throat, altering the pitch of the voice in an attempt to baffle concealed voice-printers, just as her gloves baffled finger-printers.

  “May I offer you an aphrohale before we go Internal?” he asked in a trembling voice. There she stood before him. He had but to reach out.

  “It is better that we both defer to the terms of the contract binding us both, don’t you think?”

  “Of course, Zenith. As you wish. Apologies.”

  Formal as a sarabande, they stepped one to one side of the funfax, one to the other. Edward pressed his face to the viewer, checking that the controls were set for his stipulated ride and the automap clued to the contracted region of her anatomy. He scarcely felt the hypodermic sting his ear lobe, or the hallucinogen course to the pleasure-centres of his hypothalamus. He had paid for a full twelve-week course with Zenith; this was week eleven; he was to venture into unknown, unvisited sectors of the girl he so terribly thought he loved only twice more.

  V

  Her thorax was a complex geography moving towards Edward through a syrup of ultraviolet. A great epidermal plain travelled beneath his view, its pitted inclines seemingly bereft of life, although the plain itself shuddered and vibrated like a wheat-field in storm. Gleaming, it rose to take in the universe; but the universe was illusion—at point of impact, the vertiginous plain melted and folded, revealing blue craters through which Edward’s viewpoint—Edward himself—penetrated.

  As he sank through her internscape, both magnification and rate of progress accelerated. The subcutaneous constellations of her sweat glands and adipose tissues fell upwards, entangled in pathways of vein and nerve fibre. Beyond them, barely glimpsed, were colossal geodesic structures which he recognized from previous journeys as an edifice of costal cartilege and rib—structural supports of the energy jungle he now invaded.

  The wavelength was decreasing. As if the distant superstructure was a radio telescope trained on the violence of a far nebula, he was conscious of varying densities and materials working round him. Much of this material was as hostile to him as any pulsar emitting gamma rays. Immune, he sank further down into her unknown galaxies, at once penetrator and penetrated.

  He passed unaware into the races of her thoracic aorta. There was no sensation of travelling down a tube, so congested was it, so packed with racing amorphous things—and every object packed with semi-autonomous intent. The intense ultra-violet magnification enabled him to see through the walls to vivid pulsations of energy beyond. They were at once like lightning and spaghetti. Everywhere, the disturbed and anonymous life of energy. He was merging with it. As the depth, the drug, took hold, he was no more than a rhythm in this tide of rhythmic impulses.

  The predestined course wafted him timeless through galaxies of pancreas, duodenum, kidney, where renal syphonings registered on his senses like ever-falling cascades of fire. From the boiling vat came a flood of grand spectral beings, lymphocytes and leucocytes, and the more meagre erythrocytes, pulsing yellow and mauve in colour, accompanying him down along the Amazon of the abdominal aorta and its deltaic offshoots.

  Now the light was more subdued, the pace slower, the vanquishment of time and dimension more extensive. Now he was himself astro-organic—at once estranged from himself and co-extensive with all being. Inarticulate outpourings of truth and life bathed him and radiated from him.

  Beside him among the mute arterial ways was another resence: Hers, and yet something much more enduring than Her, a calm centre, which radiated back to him in dialogue the comforts he was involuntarily pouring out. It assured him of something for which his ordinary state of being had no vocabulary—something to the effect that this microcosm of body had no more to do with the whole human being than had the macrocosm of
the starry universe, yet that both microcosm and macrocosm were intimately, intricately, non-randomly, related to the human . . . and there was a word there like psyche or soul . . . a non-existent word which possibly implied “conundrum”.

  And the Anima which teased him in a way that seemed lucid at the time—that Anima was as much of him as of her, a common spirit which perhaps, in similar circumstances, he might equally well have found in a leopard or a reindeer, a spirit born of all the mindless energy, yet itself calm, mindful.

  It led him to one of the cable-like branches of the nervous system, where obscure messages rattled past him like lighted express-trains at night, carrying news of who-knows-what to who-knows-where. In the hypogastric system, lights were as jarring as sound, until he slipped away into a less frenetic area, resting in a rococo region of ligament and ramus patterned like a feather. The impetus of his voyage was dying. He floated there in stasis, knowing that soon tides over which he had no control would bear him back again to whatever condition he had relinquished.

  At that, a sense of desolation seized him, but he threw it off in wonder at the splendid pelvic landscape surrounding him. The solemn structures among which he moved, bathed in low X-ray, had no macrocosmic equivalent, being at once gaseous formations, jungle growths, architecture. He became enclosed in a cathedral-like galactic lagoon, where nerve fibres stood out to meet him like roots of mangroves, welcoming him to the infinite confines of her vesico-uterine fold. There he stayed while a state much brighter than darkness fell, brooding like God over the measureless waters.

  VI

  When Edward found himself back to ordinary consciousness again, he was touched with disappointment. It was under the cloak of such characteristic melancholy that the girls who hired themselves out for Internals generally managed to vanish away, avoiding meeting their clients face to face.

  As he sank into a chair, soaked and exhausted, Edward saw that his hired Zenith was going.

  “One week more,” he said. He held his face with trembling hands.

  “I will return next week.”

  “Zenith—whatever your name is—stay a moment until I recover. Touch me!”

  “You know the Contract.”

  He looked at her desperately, and his gaze lit on the lin, standing silent against the wall.

  “For courtesy’s sake—for kindness—let my lin amuse you with a short tale! Lin, tell Zenith one of your stories.”

  Before Zenith could say anything, the lin spoke.

  “This story is called ‘Pacific Squalor’. New taxation caused squalor in a Pacific town. ‘Weaving mills require a pretty sponsor,’ cried the citizens atrabiliously. But an airport was built and a sparkling bucolic comedy performed. All denied attempting to pervert justice. ‘Let fate no longer lead to loneliness,’ whispered the oldest lady. So patterned windows were built.”

  “You have an old-fashioned lin,” said Zenith.

  Edward wiped the damp hair from his forehead. “You must know more about me than I about you. I am not rich.”

  “I apologize for implied criticism. The story your lin has told pleases me.”

  Every time, he had coaxed a little conversation from her. In pleasure now, he said eagerly, “It really amused you?”

  She stood before him, the molycomp mask smiling but expressionless.

  “Didn’t Anton Chekhov say that stories should not be about life as it is or as it ought to be but as it appears in dreams? Your lin’s story is of that kind.”

  “You know Chekhov’s writings?”

  “I make a close and interested study of European writing . . . I mean, that is one of my Side Jobs . . . Now please excuse me—I have over-stayed my time.”

  In her tunic, her robe, her gloves, her mask, she went. Edward sat on his chair.

  “Would you like a story or a joke?” asked the lin.

  “No.”

  She had made a slip there, definitely a slip. “European writing” . . . that was not a phrase anyone of American or European stock would use about a Russian writer. Despite his French influences, Chekhov would be regarded as a European writer only by someone completely outside the European community. An Asiatic, for instance. He was more certain than ever that Zenith was Chinese. And after next week, he would never see her again. Contracts were non-renewable. The damage that Internals did to anyone submitting to them—damage that could ultimately result in death—shrouded the transactions in mystery and restriction. The Japanese, Edward recalled, had invented this ritual, investing it with all the formality of a tea-drinking ceremony.

  Much as he might dislike that formality, he saw its point. The intimacy of a person-to-person Internal was such that it had to be guarded by formula. Otherwise he, at least, would have been too shy to face the confrontation.

  “The Contract!” he said aloud. Always, he was bound by contracts, written or unwritten, whether to his firm or his sister, his landlord or his Internal-girl. With a flash of insight, Edward perceived that all men were similarly bound, whether they recogized it or not. Otherwise, his predestination machine would have no hope of working. The illusion of free will was simply a lubricant to keep the machine working smoothly.

  He couldn’t face it. Getting up, he staggered over to the aphrocoza bottle.

  VII

  The computer controlling the gyroscopes at the heart of Fragrance II kept the planetoid riding precisely in its orbit. That orbit was elliptical, with the planet Earth at one of its nodes, set at an angle of 83.45 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic, so that the sun’s energy washed ceaselessly like an ocean about the speeding body.

  In its eternal morning, Edward Maine woke to another manmade morning, accepted coffee from Fabrina (who offered it in the classical auspices stance), and staggered over to do his daily horoscope seated at the PM.

  The analytics went into action, reading his basic physiological functions, such as pulse rate, hormone level, encephalic activity, tension index, and so on, and immediately the transmitter began a print-out.

  The very first symbol on the paper caught Edward’s attention. It showed that this was to be a day of prime magnitude. He had never received that signal before, except once—on the day they had been expecting it at Callibrastics, when the breakthrough came with the application of chance laws to personal data banks.

  For a second time the analytics went into action, feeding Edward’s response level into the computer, where it would be matched against all the background data plus the new data on all local events arriving during the artificial night of Fragrance. This double-check on response levels ensured that, by gauging Edward’s current reaction to challenge, the day’s reading of event-flow would be as accurate as possible.

  The event-flow began to appear. The further ahead in the day, the less reliable the prediction. Possibility percentages were attached to each nodal event. All items were listed in likeliest chronological order, related in the PM’s usual cryptic style.

  **Key day. Surprise gift from corp mixed with contempt

  95

  View provides revelation on which future hinges

  89

  Do not attach too much importance to self

  91

  HL (Hormone Level) indicates sudden mind-change

  Unsettling news. Fogginess. Presumption leads to quarrel with sister

  85.5

  Concealed beauty leads to religious argument

  78

  Concealed beauty leads to religious argument

  78

  Lack of lobster recognition interests

  77

  Make simpler daily the beating of man’s

  Priestly contact aids welfare approach

  69

  Search yields nil result

  79

  Summary: day of interest, many new possibilities

  Edward sat looking at the print-out for a long while. Every line seemed to pose a fresh mystery, although that was the way with the PM prototype, even on a quiet day. The problem was often a simple s
emantic one: that to predict an event accurately, the terms had to be imprecise; conversely, when the terms were precise, the accuracy quota was forced down. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle ruled.

  All the same, some of the factors were mildly staggering. “Quarrel with sister”. Precise enough, but he never quarrelled with Fabrina. Then, “Do not attach too much importance to self”. This contrasted with the machine’s favourite homily, which was that Edward should attach more importance to himself. Advice instead of straight prediction generally indicated fuzzy set thinking, where the computer was unable to make any either-or evaluation, or else concealed a surprise factor determined by event-currents (in the jargon of Callibrastics) on which the computer had insufficient data. The final line sounded horribly downbeat, whereas the summary held ambiguous promise.

  One thing at least was clear. He had a challenging day ahead. He took a timid shot of aphrocoza before heading for the elevator.

  VIII

  Edward spent the first hour of the morning with a calculator, trying to work out applicable Laplace formulations for human action. Once they developed a suitable tool for handling the equilibrium and motion of human life-flow, they would have a convenient way of making the PM smaller and more marketable. Edward believed that in a non-intermeshing event world, perturbations of behaviour would be periodic rather than cumulative; if Callibrastics could achieve a field-equation to cover this reaction, an all-applicable calculus of chance would do away with most of the tedious process of physiological function-reading which at present inaugurated every day’s prediction.

  Edward was deep in the work, and enjoying it, when Sheila Wu Tun poked her elegant face up on his screen and said, “Edward, dear, would you mind going to see Mr Marvin Stein-Presteign, please?”