Cryptozoic!

by Brian Aldiss

  "'Over the centuries, the human population itself drops, and the disturbing truths of the undermind are almost buried, although occasional geniuses suspect them, so that the fourth-century Augustine almost comes within an ace of the reality.'

  "Well, my friends, such is the matter briefly. I've given it to you without much of a how and certainly no 'why,' but I know it is appalling and indigestible stuff. Before we go any farther, perhaps you would like to ask me some questions."

  Silverstone had risen to address his four companions, who had as instinctively settled themselves down among the cryptic gray forms, looking upwards into his face as they listened. When he fell silent, they all dropped their gaze to the ambiguous rock.

  Howes was first to speak. He gave a husky stage laugh and said, "So we rescued you so that you could tell the world that we've had time back to front all these years."

  "Correct. Both Bolt and Gleason want me out of the way."

  "Well, it's certainly a theory to overthrow just about any government you care to name. But this St. Augustine, he was just a nut-case, wasn't he?" And he laughed again. Bush thought that this remark of Howes showed a certain coarse limitation of his mind. But, as interpreters of Silverstone's discovery, he and Borrow would have to overcome precisely that sort of limitation. His mind ran lightly over the new prospects; they were not alien to him, and he realized with a tremor that in his own thinking the prospect of time and life flowing backwards had not been without a place. He would have to put himself intellectually on the professor's side, to help him gain the credence and comprehension of the others.

  "If the so-called future is actually the past, while the past becomes our future, Professor," he said, "this seems to give you a pivotal function. Instead of regarding you as the great discoverer of the true nature of the undermind, we should rather regard you as the great forgetter, shouldn't we?"

  "That's so -- although it might be more exact to say that with our generation the overmind clamps down with all its time-distorting properties, and I am the last to suffer from its effects."

  Borrow spoke. "Yes, I see. I think I see. And our generation bears the brunt of the distortion! Here we are, the last generation with proper mental control, scattered -- how appropriately! -- throughout time!"

  "Precisely. We are the Himalayan generation, the great hump over which the human race goes down to a future that we already know, the increasing simplification of human society and the human mind, until first individuality and then humanity itself is lost into the amorphous being of the early -- sorry, late! -- primates, tarsiers, and so on."

  But that was too much for them to digest. Realizing this, Silverstone turned to Ann and said, "You don't say anything, Ann. How do you feel about all this?"

  "I just can't believe any of it, Prof! Someone's mad around here. What are we all doing in this godforsaken hole, listening to this crazy . . . You're trying to tell me I'm sitting here getting younger rather than older?"

  Silverstone smiled. "Thank heaven it happens we have a woman with us, ready to grasp the personal applications at once. Ann, I assure you that you are growing younger, as we all are, although the revolution in thought is so great that only succeeding generations will be able to appreciate it fully. I believe you will understand all the implications much more easily if we talk about the cosmic scale first, and look at the wider universe as we can now see it through the eyes of truth, before we descend to the human scale. Are you ready for a little more exposition?"

  "I'd like a drink and something to eat first," Howes said.

  The coarse military mind again. Eagerly, Bush said, "I second that!"

  Ann jumped to her feet. "Let me have your packs, all of you, and I'll cook us a proper meal, or the best that can be managed here. It'll keep me sane while you talk!"

  "And it will afford us all relief from the twin horrors of this place and my revelations," Silverstone said. He came and sat between Borrow and Bush.

  "You don't reject it all, do you?" he asked.

  "'The time is out of joint!'" Bush quoted. "How can we reject it? It doesn't even seem to me a cursed spite that we should put it right. A lot of people may now be able to make sense of their lives."

  Silverstone gripped his arm in fierce approval, nodding violently.

  "The split second in time, the attosecond -- it's always obsessed painters, much more than anyone else," Borrow said. "If you regard the mind's distortion of time flow as sick, then the frozen time represented by the attosecond is the nearest a deluded mind can come to health. And that's what painters have mainly concentrated on: frozen time, the arrow on the point of entering St. Sebastian's side, the man with the glass half-way to his mouth, the nude trapped forever with one foot inserted in her panties."

  "The Amazon ever about to spear the tigress," Bush said.

  "Degas' ballerinas, caught in the attitudes of the attosecond," Silverstone agreed. "And you get hints of the impending change in the painters of Freud's childhood, the anecdotal or what-happened-next school."

  Bush did not want to talk about art; he needed to soak in the widest possible implications. Suddenly, he was sure of himself, almost reborn; he realized the awful uncertainties of character under which he had always labored, half-unaware, the fears and anxieties that had ticked away inside him like death watch beetles. They had gone; he hoped it was permanently. But whether permanently or not, they had left him clear to face this extraordinary and terrifying new thing. Hedged by a thousand imagined evils, this unimaginable evil, springing from the human mind and seeming to embrace the known universe, left him undismayed; yet looking about him, he saw he was the only one to stand ready for the new thing, because the others were all exhibiting symptoms of misoneism.

  Ann, having piled all their packs beside Bush, was cooking dishes over three of their cookers and adjusting their air-leaker attachments, stirring and sipping -- clearly taking refuge in small female things. Howes had his face turned from the group, marching about and scowling, maybe plotting the overthrow of Gleason -- so much simpler than the overthrow of all human thinking. Borrow: already he had pulled a notebook from a pocket in his old-fashioned two-piece, and was sketching something; the trap of using art as a refuge rather than strongpoint was open before him.

  Even Silverstone! Even he -- now he was keyed to go ahead: but who could say if his strange retreat, his dwindling, to become a member of Lennys' scruffy tersher gang, had not been as much a retreat from the demon idea he had conjured up as from the assassins of 2093?

  All this came to Bush between the space of one breath and the next. He gestured towards the Dark Woman who stood some distance away, slightly above them on her own generalized mind-travel floor, and said to Silverstone, "I like what you say about our being the Himalayan generation. There stands someone from the other side of the Himalayas -- from what in fact we must now call our past, or our race's past. I fancy she will be of help to us again, if we need her, just as she was at the Palace."

  "The past has taken an interest in me for a long while," Silverstone agreed. "I have had a man watching over me since I was adolescent; he was one of the men who intervened to save us from those brigands in Buckingham Palace."

  "We are their descendants. . . . We can mind only into the future, not the past. I wonder how long that past is?" He was thinking aloud now, "My father was fond of the clock metaphor to express man's littleness in time. You know -- the fossil record begins at nine-thirty, or whatever it is, and mankind sneaks onto the dial at five seconds to midday. Now we look at it the other way, don't we? What was reckoned to be memory becomes precognition -- and in five seconds more by that clock, mankind will be extinct -- devolved, if you like -- "

  "Evolved into simpler creatures."

  "Okay. But we don't know what happens on the other side of the clock; what you say is the past. So there's no such thing as what we called memory?"

  "Oh yes. Memory's not quite what we think it was, but it's there. For instance, the direction-finding we do in
mind-travel: ever wonder how we manage to surface where on the globe and in time we need to be?"

  "Often!"

  "You are relying on memory," Silverstone said. "For all I know, it may be inherited memory. Our archetypal dreams of falling are probably distorted memories of our predecessors' mind-travels -- some of which could have been so long they would make our excursion into the Cryptozoic look like a walk round a room! I fancy our true predecessors have had mind-travel for myriads of years. Your five seconds on the clock is as nothing compared to what the history of the human race may have been. You realize that, Bush?"

  Bush was looking at the Dark Woman. "I am realizing it," he said. He raised his finger and pointed silently. Silverstone and Borrow looked in the direction he indicated. No longer did the Dark Woman stand there alone. The Cryptozoic was full of human shadows -- shadows not from the future but the long and enigmatic past, hundreds upon hundreds of shadows of people, some more clearly defined than others, all overlapping, all silent, standing, waiting, looking.

  "It's a moment -- an historic moment -- a moment -- " Borrow stuttered.

  But Bush had seen what Howes was up to. He triggered to his feet, pulled a light-gun from his pocket as he jumped up, and confronted Howes with it.

  "Drop that ampoule, Howes! This gun will work -- I took it out of your pack a minute ago in case you tried some soldierly trick!"

  Howes said, "You're wasting time here, Bush! My job's to overturn the rebel government, not all human society. Now I've heard what's cooking, I want no part of it. I'm going back to the present -- 2O93."

  "You're staying here and listening! Drop that ampoule!"

  Partly concealed behind Ann, who had now straightened from her cookers to see what was happening, Howes had pulled a CSD ampoule from his pocket and surreptitiously rolled up his sleeve. Now he stood frozen and glared into Bush's eyes.

  Whatever he read there did not reassure him. Slowly, he opened his fingers and let the little snouted pellet fall. Bush crushed it into the floor.

  "Let's have the rest of your supply! What Silverstone is saying is more monumental than a planet full of Gleasons. If we're going back, we're going back understanding the situation we're supposed to be tackling. Right, Professor?"

  "Right, Eddie, thank you. Captain Howes, I really must ask you to be patient and hear me out."

  Howes tossed a newly opened pack of ampoules across to Bush.

  "I can be patient, Professor," he said. He squatted down on his haunches and glared at Bush. Bush stood where he was, relaxing only slightly. Ann broke the tension by offering them all soup.

  They glanced at Bush, as if awaiting a sign to start. Accepting a spoon from Ann, he nodded at Silverstone. "We'd be pleased to hear your new view of the cosmos, Professor," he said.

  Chapter 7

  WHEN THE DEAD COME TO LIFE

  "Not being a physical scientist, I cannot go too technically into this side of the matter," Silverstone said, " -- which I imagine will be a relief to all four of you. Nor have I or my associates had the chance as yet to begin any research into this side of the matter. Once we have overthrown the present totalitarian government, and scientific institutes are unshackled again, clearly all the old properties of the cosmos will be reinvestigated in the light of this staggering new knowledge.

  "All I want to do now is give you one or two examples of the new way we must look at things on the macrocosmic scale.

  "You realize that what man has pieced together concerning what he thought of as his past in fact concerns the future. So we know the Earth will gradually become molten and then break apart to become gas and interstellar dust dispersing from round the ageing sun.

  "We can see, too, that this event will take place in a shrinking universe. The Doppler effect is one piece of evidence for the fact that the distant stars and island galaxies are hurtling towards us, and towards the time when the whole universe rolls into a primeval -- an ultimate atom. Such will be the end of the universe. So we have the answer to questions previously hidden from us -- while of course we no longer know what we thought we knew, such as how the Earth began -- not to mention how life began.

  "You will see from this that all the basic tenets of our thought, painfully acquired over the millennia, are thus stood on their ear. Every natural law is reversed or shattered. We observed wrong, and we did not know what we were doing. All our celebrated scientific accuracy and detachment was one hundred and eighty degrees out of true. The celebrated second law of thermodynamics, for example -- we now begin to see that heat in fact passes from cooler bodies to hotter: suns are collectors of heat, rather than disseminators. Even the nature of heat thus appears changed. Energy accumulates from less organized to more highly organized bodies: piles of rust can integrate into iron rods.

  "Some of our painfully acquired scientific laws will still stand. I can't see why Boyle's law, about the volume of a gas varying inversely as the pressure when temperature is constant, should not remain intact. What can be made of relativity, I don't know. But classical mechanics are invalidated; think of Newton's first law of motion, about an object continuing in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless acted on by a second force! Imagine what the true state of affairs is! A football is lying in a field; suddenly it starts rolling, gains speed, shoots to the boot of a footballer!"

  Silverstone was interrupted by Captain Howes saying, "You're mad!"

  "Yes, I believed I was mad at first. Wenlock believed I was mad when I first tried to tell him something of my thought -- that was when we quarreled. Now I believe I am not mad. The madness is in the human generations of history."

  Howes clamped a hand in disbelief over his bald head. He said, "You're asking me to believe that from now on a beam of lasered light could shoot out of some wretch's body and into my light-gun when I press the button? You are mad! How could you ever kill anyone in such a universe?"

  "I don't see that either, I must admit," Borrow said.

  "It's extremely difficult to see, agreed," Silverstone said. "We live in a generation that is to be consumed with paradox, because we happen to be at revelation point. But, you see, you are wrong, Captain, when you say that the light will shoot out of a body into your gun from now on. I must impress on you that nothing has changed in the external world at all; it obeys the same eternal natural laws it always has done and always will do. It is only our perception that has suddenly changed, is suddenly clear. What has always happened is that light has flashed from bodies into your gun; then you have pressed the button and had the intention to do so."

  "It's mad! It's utter madness! Bush -- you can hear him! You know he's raving and things just don't happen like that!"

  Bush said, "No, I begin to see it as the professor explains it. The action happens as he says; it sounds like madness only because the perceptions of the overmind are so twisted that Newton got -- will eventually get, that is -- his law reversed. Entropy works in the opposite direction to what we expected. It also sounds crazy because we had cause and effect twisted up, for the same reason. The lawyers in the law courts had their post and propter hocs the wrong way round."

  Howes made a wide angry gesture of hopelessness. "Okay -- then if it happens the way you and Silverstone say, why don't we see it that way? "

  Sighing, the professor said, "We have explained that. Our perceptions have been strained through a distorting lens of mind, so that we saw things backwards, just as the lens of the eye actually sees everything upside-down." He turned to Borrow, who was gnawing some beef twigs Ann had passed round. "Are you grasping all this, my friend?"

  "I find this shooting business easier to grasp than the idea of the universe closing in on us. Suppose you divide the shooting up into a series of scenes like a comic strip, and number them. The first shows a dead body, horizontal; the second, body half off ground; third, body almost upright, ray coming from it; fourth, ray going back into gun; fifth, gun button being pressed; sixth, resolution forming in gun-owner's mind. Those s
ix scenes all exist in space-time -- and with our experience of mind-travel, we know they always exist, can be revisited over and over like any other event in history. Okay; they lie there like six pictures of a strip on a page. They can be read from one to six or from six to one, although only one way is the right way. Just happens we always read them the wrong way. Am I right, Professor?"

  "Yes, yes, a good analogy. We experienced them the wrong way, since our very memories were distorted. Do you see it more clearly now, Captain?"

  Howes scratched the back of his neck and shrugged. "Give me another cup of coffee, will you, Ann?"

  They had reached some sort of a pause. Silverstone and Bush looked rather hopelessly at each other. Perhaps because of tiredness, Bush's first spurt of intellectual excitement had worn thin. He had hardly touched his food. He stared grimly at the massed ranks of shadowy people about them, many of them, in the illusions of mind-travel, seeming to stand half in the ambiguously shaped rocks.