But was it a warrantable assumption, he wondered?
‘Ah, the famous question of identity,’ he said aloud.
The vodor lecture, heard many times before, became a drone. He turned it off and opened his notebook to scan one section of his notes.
‘IDENTITY AND NUMBER: The natural numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 …, are pure abstractions, lacking identity in the philosophical meaning of the word. That is to say, there is no such entity as “five”. Identity in a set of five objects appertains only to each object taken singly … “Fiveness” is a process, accomplished by matching each member of a set against members of another set (e.g. the fingers of a hand) until the set being counted is exhausted. Only material objects have identity …’
In his fevered imagination it had seemed to Naylor that he need but make one more conceptual leap and he would be there, with a sketch model of the device that would find the Milky Way Galaxy from no matter where in infinity. He believed, in fact, that he already had the primitive beginnings of the device in the thespitron. For although no physical mapping of the universe was possible, the thespitron had achieved a dramatic mapping of it, demonstrating that the cosmos was not entirely proof against definition.
But the vital leap, from a calculus of theatre to a calculus of identities, had not come, and Naylor was left wondering if he should be chiding himself for his lapse into dubious rationalist tenets.
Dammit, he thought wryly, if an enlightened master had no luck, how the devil can I?
Gloomily he wrote a footnote: ‘It may be that the question of identity is too basic to be subject to experiment, or to be susceptible to instrumentation.’
His thoughts were interrupted by the ringing of the alarm bell. The control panel flashed, signalling that the habitat was slowing down in response to danger ahead. In seconds it had reduced speed until it was cruising at only a few tens of powers of the velocity of light.
At the same time an announcement gong sounded, informing them that they had arrived within beacon range of someone else’s habitat – presumably Corngold’s.
Naylor crossed to the panel to switch off the alarm. As he did so Watson-Smythe appeared from the bedroom. He had put on a gleaming white suit which set off his good looks to perfection.
‘What a racket!’ he exclaimed genially. ‘Everything going off at once!’
Naylor was examining the dials. ‘We are approaching a matterless lake.’
‘Are we, by God?’
‘And your friend Corngold is evidently living on the shores of it. Can you think of any reason why he would do that?’
Watson-Smythe chuckled, with a hint of rancour. ‘Just the place where the swine would choose to set himself up. Discourages visitors, you see.’
‘You can say that again. Do I take it we are likely to be unwelcome? What you would call a recluse, is he?’
The younger man tugged at his lower lip. ‘Look here, old chap, if you feel uneasy about this you can just drop me off at Corngold’s and shoot off again. I don’t want to impose on you or anything.’
But by now Naylor was intrigued. ‘Oh, that’s all right. I don’t mind hanging about for a bit.’
Watson-Smythe peered out of the window. They were close to a large spiral galaxy which blazed across the field of vision and swung majestically past their line of sight.
‘We’ll get a better view on this,’ Naylor said. He pressed a small lever and at the front end of the living-room a six-foot screen unfolded, conveniently placed in relation to the control panel. He traversed the view to get an all-round picture of their surroundings. The spiral galaxy had already receded to become the average smudged point of light; in all directions the aspect was the usual one of darkness relieved by faintly luminous sleet – except, that was, for directly ahead. There, the screen of galaxies was thin. Behind that screen stretched an utter blackness: it was a specimen of that awesome phenomenon, the matterless lake.
For the distribution of matter in the universe was not, quite, uniform. It thinned and condensed a bit here and there. The non-uniformity of matter mainly manifested, however, in great holes, gaps – lakes, as they were called – where no matter was to be found at all. Although of no great size where the distances that went to make up infinity were concerned, in mundane terms the dimensions of these lakes were enormous, amounting to several trillion times the span of an Olbers’ sphere (the criterion of cosmic size in pre-Harkham times, and still used as a rough measure of magnitude).
Any Harkham traveller knew that it was fatal to penetrate any further than the outermost fringes of such a lake. Should anyone be so foolhardy as to pass out of sight of its shore (and in times past many had been) he would find it just about impossible to get out again; for the simple fact was that when not conditioned by the presence of matter, space lacked many of the properties normally associated with it. Even such elementary characteristics as direction, distance and dimension were lent to space, physicists now knew, by the signposts of matter. The depths of the lakes were out of range of these signposts, and thus it would do the velocitator rider no good merely to fix a direction and travel it in the belief that he must sooner or later strike the lake’s limit; he would be unlikely ever to do so. He was lost in an inconceivable nowhere, in space that was structureless and uninformed.
As the habitat neared the shore the lake spread and expanded before them, like a solid black wall sealing off the universe. ‘Will Corngold be in the open, do you think, or in a galaxy somewhere?’ Naylor asked.
‘I’d guess he’s snuggled away in some spiral; harder to find that way, eh?’ Watson-Smythe pointed to a cluster of galaxies ahead and to their right. ‘There’s a likely-looking bunch over there. Right on the edge of the lake, too. What do the indicators say?’
‘Looks hopeful.’ Naylor turned the habitat towards the cluster, speeding up a little. The galaxies brightened until their internal structures became visible. The beacon signal came through more strongly; soon they were close enough to get a definite fix.
Watson-Smythe’s guess had been right. They eventually found Corngold’s habitat floating just inside the outermost spiral turn of the largest member of the cluster. The habitat looked like two or three Eskimo igloos squashed together, humped and rounded. Behind it the local galaxy glittered in countless colours like a giant Christmas tree.
Watson-Smythe clapped his hands in delight. ‘Got him!’
Naylor nudged close to the structure at walking pace. The legally standardised coupling rings clinked together as he matched up the outer doors.
‘Jolly good. Time to pay a visit,’ his passenger said.
‘Shouldn’t we raise him on the communicator first?’
‘Rather not.’ Watson-Smythe made for the door, then paused, turning to him. ‘If you’d prefer to wait until … Well, just as you please.’
He first opened the inner door, then both outer doors which were conjoined now and moved as one, and then the inner door of the other habitat. Naylor wondered why he didn’t even bother to knock. Personally he would never have had the gall just to walk into someone else’s living-room.
With tentative steps he followed Watson-Smythe through the short tunnel. Bright light shone through from the other habitat. He heard a man’s voice, raised in a berating, bullying tone.
The door swung wide open.
The inside of Corngold’s dwelling reminded Naylor of an egg-shaped cave, painted bright yellow. Walls and ceiling consisted of the same ovoid curve, and lacked windows. The yellow was streaked and spattered with oil colours and unidentifiable dirt; the lower parts of the walls were piled with canvases, paintings, boxes, shelves and assorted junk. The furniture was sparse: a bare board table, a mattress, three rickety straight-backed chairs and a mouldy couch. An artist’s easel stood in the middle of the room. Against the opposite wall was the source of Corngold’s provender and probably everything else he used: a matter-bank, shiny in its moulded plastic casing.
Corngold was a fat man, a little below medium
height. He was wearing baggy flannel trousers and a green silk chemise which was square-cut about the neck and shoulders and was decorated with orange tassels. He had remarkably vivid green eyes; his hair had been cropped short, but now had grown so that it bristled like a crown of thorns.
He reminded Naylor of early Hollywood versions of Nero or Caligula. He did not, it seemed, live alone. He was in the act of brow-beating a girl, aged perhaps thirty, who for her dowdiness was as prominent as Corngold was for his brilliant green shirt. Corngold had her arm twisted behind her back, forcing her partly over. Her face wore the blank sullenness that comes from long bullying; it was totally submissive, wholly drab, the left eye slightly puffy and discoloured from a recent bruise. She did not even react to the entry of visitors.
Corngold, however, eased his grip slightly, turning indignantly as Watson-Smythe entered. ‘What the bloody hell do you mean barging in here?’ he bellowed. ‘Bugger off!’ His accent sounded northern to Naylor’s ears; Yorkshire, perhaps.
To Naylor’s faint surprise Watson-Smythe’s answering tone was cold and professional. ‘Walter Corngold? Late of 43 Denison Square?’
‘You heard me! Bugger off! This is private property!’
Watson-Smythe produced a slim Hasking stun beamer from inside his jacket. With his other hand he took a document from his pocket. ‘Watson-Smythe,’ he announced. ‘I have here a warrant for your arrest, Corngold. I’m taking you back to Earth.’
So that was it! Naylor wondered why he hadn’t guessed it before. Now that he thought of it, Watson-Smythe was almost a caricature of the type of young man one expected to find in the ‘infinity police’, as it was jocularly called – MI19, the branch of security entrusted with law enforcement among habitat travellers.
He felt amused. ‘What are the charges?’ he asked mildly.
‘Two charges,’ Watson-Smythe replied, turning his head slightly but still keeping the Hasking carefully trained on Corngold. ‘Theft, and more serious, the abduction of Lady Cadogan’s maid, who unless I am very much mistaken is the young lady you are now mistreating, Corngold. Take your hands off her at once.’
Corngold released the girl and shoved her roughly towards the couch. She plomped herself down on it and sat staring at the floor.
‘Ridiculous,’ he snorted, then added, in a voice heavy with irony: ‘Betty’s here of her own sweet will, aren’t you, dearest?’
She glanced up like a frightened mouse, darting what might have been a look of hope at Watson-Smythe. Then she retreated into herself again, nodding meekly.
Corngold sighed with satisfaction. ‘Well, that’s that, then. Sod off, the two of you, and leave us in peace.’ He strolled to the easel, picked up a brush and started to daub the canvas on it, as though he had banished them from existence.
Watson-Smythe laughed, showing clean white teeth. ‘They told me you were a bit of a character, Corngold. But you’re due for a court appearance in London just the same.’
He turned politely to Naylor. ‘Thanks for your assistance, Naylor old boy. You can cast off now if you’re so inclined, and I’ll take Corngold’s habitat back to Earth.’
‘Can’t,’ Corngold said, giving them a sideways glance. ‘My inertial navigator’s bust. I was stuck here, in fact, until you two turned up. Not that it bothers me at all.’
Watson-Smythe frowned. ‘Well …’
‘Is it a malfunction?’ Naylor queried. ‘Or just a faulty record?’
Corngold shrugged. ‘It’s buggered, I tell you.’
‘I might be able to do something with it,’ Naylor said to the MI19 agent. ‘I’ll have look at it, anyway. If it’s only the record we can simply take a copy of our own one.’
Corngold flung down his brush. ‘In that case you might as well stay to dinner. And put that gun away, for Chrissake. What do you think this is, a shooting gallery?’
‘After all, he can’t go anywhere,’ Naylor observed when Watson-Smythe wavered. ‘Without us he’ll never get home.’
‘All right.’ He returned his gun to its shoulder holster. ‘But don’t think you’re going to wriggle out of this, Corngold. Kidnapping’s a pretty serious offence.’
Corngold’s eyes twinkled. He pointed to a clock hung askew on the wall. ‘Dinner’s at nine. Don’t be late.’
Wearily Naylor slumped in his armchair in his own living-room. He had spent an hour on Corngold’s inertial navigator, enough to tell him that the gyros were precessing and the whole system would need to be re-tuned. It would be a day’s work at least and he had decided to make a fresh start tomorrow. If he couldn’t put the device in order they would all have to travel back to Earth in Naylor’s habitat – as an MI19 officer Watson-Smythe had the power to require his co-operation over that. At the moment the agent was in his bedroom, bringing his duty log up to date.
The business with the navigator had brought home anew to Naylor the desirability of inventing some different type of homing mechanism. He was becoming irritated that the problem was so intractable, and felt a fresh, if frustrating, urge to get to grips with it.
Remembering that he had left the vodor lecture unfinished, he switched on the machine again, listening closely to the evenly-intoned words, even though he knew them almost by heart.
‘The question of personal identity was raised by Locke, and later occupied the attentions of Hume and Butler. Latterly the so-called “theorem of universal identity” has gained some prominence. In this theorem, personal identity (or self-identity) is defined as having knowledge of one’s identity, a statement which also serves to define consciousness. Conscious beings are said to differ from inanimate objects only in that they have knowledge of their identity, while inanimate objects, though possessing their own identity, have no knowledge of it.
‘To be conscious, however, means to be able to perceive. But in order to perceive there must be an “identification” between the subject (self-identity, or consciousness) and the perceived object. Therefore there is a paradoxical “sharing” of identity between subject and object, similar, perhaps, to the exchange of identity once posited between electrons. This reasoning leads to the concept of a “universal identity” according to which all identity, both of conscious beings and of inanimate objects, belongs to the same universal transcendental identity, or “self”. This conclusion is a recurring one in the history of human thought, known at various times as “the infinite self”, “the transcendental self” and “the universal self” of Vedantic teachings. “I am you,” the mystic will proclaim, however impudently, meaning that the same basic identity is shared by everyone.
‘Such conceptions are not admitted by the empirical materialist philosophers, who subject them to the most withering criticism. To the empiricist, every occasion is unique; therefore its identity is unique. Hume declared that he could not even discover self-identity in himself; introspection yielded only a stream of objects in the form of percepts; a “person” is therefore a “bundle” of percepts. Neither can the fact that two entities may share a logical identity in any way compromise their basic separateness, since logic itself is not admitted as having any a priori foundation.
‘The modern British school rejects the concept of identity altogether as a mere verbalism, without objective application. Even the notion of electron identity exchange is now accepted to be a mathematical fiction, having been largely superseded by the concept of “unique velocity” which is incorporated in the Harkham velocitator. It is still applied, however, to a few quantum mechanical problems for which no other mathematical tools exist.’
Naylor rose and went to the window, gazing out at the blazing spiral galaxy which was visible over the humped shape of Corngold’s habitat. ‘Ah, the famous question of identity,’ he murmured.
He knew why the question continued to perplex him. It was because of the thespitron. The thespitron, with its unexpected tricks and properties, had blurred his feeling of self-identity, just as the identity of electrons had been blurred by the twentieth-century quantum equat
ions. And at the same time, the thoughts occurring to him attacked materialist empiricism at its weakest point: the very same question of identity.
There came to him again the image of the categories of identity, proceeding and permutating down a dark, immensely long corridor. He felt dizzy, elated. Here, in his habitat living-room, his domain was small but complete; he and the thespitron reproduced between them, on a minute scale, the ancient mystical image of created universe and observing source, of phenomenon and noumenon; even without him here to watch it, the thespitron was the transcendental machine concretised, a microcosm to reflect the macrocosm, a private universe of discourse, a mirror of infinity in a veneered cabinet.
Could the characters and worlds within the thespitron, shadows though they were, be said to possess reality? The properties of matter itself could be reduced to purely logical definitions, heretical though the operation was from the point of view of empiricism. The entities generated by the machine, obeying those same logical definitions, could never know that they lacked concrete substance.
Was there identity in the universe? Was that all there was?
Now he understood what had made him include a communication facility in the thespitron; why he had further felt impelled to talk to Frank Nayland, his near-double. He had identified himself with Nayland; he had tried to enlighten him as to the nature of his fictional world, prompted by some irrational notion that, by confronting him, he could somehow prod Nayland into having a consciousness of his own.
Who am I? Naylor wondered. Does my identity, my consciousness, belong to myself, or does it belong to this – he made a gesture taking in all that lay beyond the walls of the habitat – to infinity?
Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis Page 46