by Brian Aldiss
As Bush stared at her, she grasped his hand and smiled at him. "We have known each other for a long while, Eddie Bush! My name is Wygelia Say. At this moment only, just before the birth of Norman Silverstone, we have Central Authority's permission to speak with you and your friends."
Although she spoke in English, it was not entirely easy to understand what she said, so curious was her intonation.
Disarmed though he was, Bush could not help asking, "Why did you let Silverstone die like that if you could intervene? You must have known the killer was coming."
"We think differently from you, my friend. There is human intervention, but there is also fate."
"But he was necessary!"
"You four have his ideas now. Shall I tell you what has happened in what you think of as your future? You have returned to 2093, as you call it -- we use a different system of dating -- and have announced the birth of Silverstone. Everyone is upset. Wenlock escapes with your aid. You seize a broadcasting station and start to tell people the truth. Revolutions begin -- "
She was interrupted by Howes, who came pushing angrily forward.
"You can't talk your way out of this, young lady! If you allowed Silverstone -- "
He stopped in mid-sentence. A look of puzzlement filtered slowly on to his face. Wygelia had lifted a hand in a sign towards him and uttered a few words that echoed in Bush's brain.
"What did you say?"
"It's just a special phrase -- a spell, it might be called a few centuries after your day. A degenerate version of it will be incorporated in the Wenlock discipline a few years from now. It will fill the motor areas of David Howes' brain for a few minutes, although the time will seem only a split second to him."
She turned calmly and gracefully, smiling at Borrow and Ann and introducing herself to them. Meanwhile, a change was taking place in the scene about them. The shades of dusk were creeping in; and, at the same time, the multitudes of minders from the past were gathering to watch the birth of Silverstone -- though to Bush, still saddled with his overmind, it seemed as if they were now departing, leaving the huge landscape occupied only with its own bemusing structures.
Bush moved some way apart from the others, wishing to think things out for himself. As he stood there, the great crowd dispersed. The view became empty, seeming vacant alike of scale and meaning.
At length, Ann called to him and he went back to the group. Ann and Borrow looked decidedly more cheerful; Wygelia was good for morale and had clearly said something encouraging to them. Even Howes, now recovering from his trance, looked happier than he had done for a long while.
"Wygelia's a darling," Ann said, taking Bush's arm. "She told me that for us to understand her, she has been trained for years to speak backwards! Now I really do believe that all Norman Silverstone told us was gospel truth!"
Four men from the past had materialized beside Wygelia, each dressed in a similar uniform. They carried a bier on which the body of Silverstone had been reverently laid, and now stood with it between them, awaiting a signal from Wygelia.
"You have made one more journey after you returned to 2093," she told Bush. "No, I have that mixed -- excuse me, it is still difficult to put things as you see them. You still have one more journey to make before you return to 2093. Yes! Because our birth and death signify somewhat differently to you, the ceremonies concerning them vary on either side of what our friend Silverstone rightly called the Himalayan generation. We want you to come with us and witness, as his first companions, the birth of his body -- what you will think of as his funeral, although with us it is a glad occasion." She sensed a protest in them and quickly added, "And at the same time, I will clear up any questions you may ask. Some I can answer that Silverstone will not be able to."
"We'd be glad to come," Bush said.
"Are you taking us into your world -- the past?" Borrow asked.
She shook her head. "That is not possible; nor, if it were possible, would it be permissible. In any case, we have a more suitable birthplace for Silverstone."
They prepared to inject themselves with CSD, but Wygelia waved the notion away. The Wenlock discipline needed such material aids; in her day they had more effective disciplines -- of which Wenlock's was really a degenerate memory.
She spoke to them, making a curious sign over them, and they were conspiring, riding, mind-traveling, stretching their minds at her behest, moving rapidly towards what they had learned to know as the beginning of the world.
More. They were in limbo, but thought could pass between them. Or, it was more accurate to say, they were in a limbo where they took on shapes of thought. What they thought, they momentarily were. Since they were in each other's mental flow, they had no existence except as thought-shapes.
"All mind communicates," came Wygelia's thought, spraying out to them like a great shrub in blossom. "It is by drawing on a fraction of that vast power that we can mind-travel at all. Did you never wonder where the forces behind mind-travel lurked? Once, there was a time when the race of man always communicated mind to mind, as we do at present; but now -- I mean in my day, which is separated by only a few years from yours -- humanity is past the full glory and sinking into the sunset: or the Himalayas, to use that telling phrase."
But the pallid metaphors of speech here became the thing itself, so that for a timeless moment they were embodied in the untiring myriad generations of men and women who trooped down into the dull cindery glow beyond the clouds over the highest mountains.
Ann's thoughts came small and lonely, but alive, like dancing shoes on an empty dance floor. "Wygella, you are part of the splendid reality Norman Silverstone only glimpsed!" Behind the dancing shoes trailed streamers, speaking of her admiration for the younger woman and her abilities; and behind the streamers, a silver boomerang, singing, "And I don't even feel jealous of your special relationship with Eddie."
Back came Wygelia's thought, complex as a snowflake but spinning with her humor and colored with her laughter and mischief: "You shouldn't feel jealous -- I am what you would call the granddaughter of your union with Eddie!"
And they were all full of a concerto of shapes that expressed the mixed emotions, delight, and some embarrassment and surprise -- and here some little obsidian cubes of protest -- originating from Ann and Bush, coalescing with a sort of nuptial sprightliness.
This whole amazing experience was rendered more amazing because Borrow was filling enormous multi-dimensional spaces with abstract thought, turning himself into replicated bars of mental energy that formed an enormous and transient art work; and at the same time, Howes was conducting a separate thought-exchange with Wygelia. His question, flowing like gravel, demanded to know where they were going; her answer, vivid and electric, meant: "You know we are already many thousands of millions of years beyond your present. But those of us who walk the Cryptozoic have more space than that to exercise in. We are now far beyond Phanerozoic time, and into Decompositional time, where only chemicals battle with each other for existence. You will see that Silverstone comes from the last days of the world."
And back came Howes' tiny reflection, soft and enduring as a grain of pollen: "Then we shall die . . ."
They were standing they scarcely knew where, after experiencing they scarcely knew what.
At once Howes, and then Borrow, Ann, and Bush, clutched at their throats; no oxygen was seeping through their air-leakers. They were so many geochrons back towards the end -- the beginning -- of the world, that the gases on which human life depended were now locked away in the groaning interior of the globe in non-volatile combinations.
"You are safe!" Wygelia cried, pointing at the four pallbearers. Each had erected hollow rods like aerials from the cases on their backs; these rods now fumed fiercely like half-lit torches of tar. "We have our own means of supplying oxygen and nitrogen in these barren places," she said. "We are further protected from the conditions outside by a sphere of force operating within the entropy barrier, so we are free from all harm here."
As she reassured them, they could draw the air into their lungs and take time to view their surroundings.
The Earth, sinking towards its end, was in a semi-molten state. The temperature beyond their protective sphere and beyond the entropy wall was several thousand degrees Centigrade. It seemed to be the hour of dawn, but there had surely been no proper night on this deliquescing planet. All about them was a sea of ash, patched with streaks of broken light which radiated upwards. The sea heaved; the ash was but a thin crust, covering an unending gleet of molten rock.
Their little party, with the body of Silverstone central among them, stood on the generalized floor of mind-travel which roughly coincided with the surface of an enormous slab of rock perhaps half a mile wide. Like the sea, the rock had a slow, uneasy motion; it floated like an iceberg on the magma; like an iceberg, it would dissolve and be gone.
Bush stared at the scene. No awe took him. He felt nothing. For the time being, he had filed away Wygelia's information that he would marry -- had married Ann; by some trick of mentality, all he could recall now was little Joan Bush marrying, for obscure reasons, the man who managed what had once been her father's grocery shop. The image of her, the loving arm about her father, was close to him, perhaps prompted by this new revelations of a familial relationship. Something that had no closer name than longing rose in him; he could scarcely see that her life was any less important than Earth's.
Turning to Wygelia, interrupting quite unconsciously her conversation with Ann, he said, "You followed me to many places. You knew the miners' village and Joan; you saw what happened to Herbert."
She nodded. "You began to find your real self there -- or by my terms you lost yourself."
"Am I right? By your terms, what happened in Breedale was less of a tragedy than by mine."
"In what respect?"
"You saw Herbert's end. Things grew more and more impossible for him. In the end, he could see only to cut his throat and run bleeding to die in the garden. His wife's end was as wretched. Joan -- I believe she married for money rather than for love, which would be bound to bring her nothing but sorrow. That story could be multiplied thousands of times just in her generation, couldn't it?
"Now, look at it all as it really was, without the occulting lens of the overmind! Joan would emerge from the loveless marriage and come home one day to find her father quiet in the weeds, soon to be born. Her mother would similarly come to life and her miserable pregnancy terminate in time. The man would arrive and return her little shop to her. They would all grow younger. The mine would work again, everyone would be employed. Gradually, the family would grow smaller, burdens lighter, hope greater. Joan, we presume, would sink into a happy babyhood and finally be taken into her mother, who would grow young and fair again. There'd be no tragedy and very much less distress.
"I realize now why that period I spent minding in Breedale was so vital to me. I saw how most human sin is the result of most human misery; it was misery and above all the misery of uncertainty that made me do the base acts in my life. Once rid of the overmind, you -- everyone -- can suffer no uncertainty, because you know the future. What happened to Joan, a loving creature who in the end denied love, is like a history of everyone under overmind.
"So tell me, what terrible affliction brought down the overmind on humanity? What happened on the Himalayas?"
Borrow said quietly, "I don't know what this particular experience of yours with Joan was, Eddie, but that was the question I was going to ask Silverstone -- and Wygelia. Why all this, in heaven's name, from the Stone Age men to us?"
"You deserve an answer, and I will give it to you as simply as possible, trying to relate it in your terms," Wygelia said. She looked down at the composed face of Norman Silverstone on his bier before continuing, as if to gather strength.
"Nothing has yet been said to you of the long past of the human race -- the future as you learned to see it. But you must know that that past has been extremely long -- a dozen Cryptozoics placed on end, covering untold epochs. The growth of the overmind was a rapid thing, spread over only two or three generations.
"The overmind grew from the first serious mental disturbance we had ever known -- for we never had the history of tragedy and mental suffering and pain that you did, on your side of the Himalayas. That disturbance was brought about by the realization that the end of Earth was drawing near. You cannot imagine the powers or the glories of our race; for though you are children of ours and we children of yours, and there is no break in the succession, yet we existed under different natural laws from you, as Silverstone explained, and created with them -- well, many things you would find too miraculous to be credible, mind-travel on a formidable scale being but one of them. We were almost a perfect race -- you would say 'will be.'
"Can you imagine the bitterness such a people would experience to realize that in their great days the planet they lived on would die, and the system of which it was a part? We were not hardened as you to numberless sorrows, we did not know sorrow, and a mass-sickness -- a revulsion from time that dragged us to the brink of the catastrophe -- overtook us all.
"We think it was an evolutionary sickness. Our next generation, or in some cases the next generation but one, was born (died, as you would say) with the upper part of the mind reversed in temporal polarity, so that they perceive as you perceive, because they are you.
"And we can see now that this reversal is the greatest mercy, that -- "
"Wait, Wygelia! Bush said. " How can you call it a mercy when you admit that if we -- if the people at Breedale -- could see their lives right way round they would be happier? And so back through recorded history, through all the ancient civilizations!"
She answered him firmly, without hesitation. "I call it merciful because you have had the distraction of all your smaller pains to hide the larger pain from you."
"You can't say that! Think of Herbert Bush bursting into the garden with his throat choking blood! What more pain than that?"
"Why, the pain of being fully aware of your glorious faculties slipping away one by one, generation by generation. Of seeing the engineers constructing ever cruder engines; the governments losing their enlightenment in favor of slavery; the builders pulling down comfortable houses, building less convenient ones; the chemists degenerating into old men looking for a metal to transmute into gold; the surgeons abandoning their elaborate equipment to take up hacksaws; the citizens forgetting their scruples to run to a public hanging -- this all happens only a pathetic few generations after you four fade back into your mothers. Could you bear that? It's the senescence of an entire species! Could you bear to see the last rudiments of agriculture lost before a grubby nomadism? Could you bear to see huts exchanged for poor caves? Could you bear to see the human eye grow dull as intelligence left it?
"And then everything else begins to senesce, even the plants, even the reptiles and amphibians. With mind-travel, you have been able to see them climb out onto the land and populate it. However cynical you were, you must have taken hope and reassurance from it! But suppose you saw that process through our clear eyes! Would you not love the lumbering Permian amphibians, however crude, however incomplete, as tokens of the grandeur that had once been on Earth? And when those amphibians lumbered backwards into the mud and swamp and dwindled into finny things, would you not weep? Would you not weep when the last green pseudo-seaweed slipped back off the rocks into the warm sea for the last time? When the trilobites vanished? When life died into mud?
"That terrible process, the senescence of Earth, could never be reversed! Mankind has to go the hard way into the scuttling mindless world of the jungle, the jungle on the ineluctable tide of time has to shrink back into seaweeds, and all that was dissolved into the fire and ash we see about us. No escape -- no hope of escape! But the overmind fell like a vizor and protected mankind from realizing the full horror of his ultimate decay."
Chapter 9
GOD OF GALAXIES
They buried S
ilverstone then: or, as they had begun to see it should be, they received his body from nature -- and this mucilaginous world of flowing rock was the wildest face of nature any of them would ever gaze upon.
The force sphere was manipulated by Wygelia. The bier bearing the professor's body was set down and the sphere then distorted, so that the bier was borne into a long extension of it; the extension closed in on itself and broke off, in a manner reminiscent of a bubble of glass being blown. With the body inside it, this bubble drifted down from the mass of floating rock. It hovered over the ocean of heaving ash and then touched it. At once, a great jet, a block of liquid flame, rose high into the heavy air. The bubble flashed and disappeared. It was all over except for a great line of light that split across the glutinous waste and disappeared.
In a moved voice, Howes said, "We should have had a bugle. We should have sounded 'Last Post.'"
"'Reveille,'" Borrow corrected him.
There seemed nothing more to say. They stood gazing out over the fantastic scene. It was full day now. A strong wind was moving, calling sparks from the waste; a few more millennia and all would be fire; their island would melt like a candle in a furnace. The wind was breaking up the cloud, which had lain across the entire sky like slate strata and seemingly as solid. The strata tore away in mighty patches more reminiscent of islands than clouds, and revealed the sun.