Some preliminary stinging raindrops overtook us as we sped along the Riva degli Schiavoni. Way out over the water, rain was already sheeting down upon the Lido.
"Not much further, little lady!" Bernardino assured me.
We turned up the Calle delle Rasse between the twin buildings of the Royal Danieli. The narrow lane took us to Giacomo Square. Down some other Calle we hurried, and just as the clouds really opened we dodged inside the Doge's Tavern. We puffed and shook ourselves, then Bernardino led me upstairs to a private room.
The window overlooking the narrow Calle was shuttered tight. Illumination came from glass bulbs in sconces, each with a tiny bright fork of lightning captive inside. A table was set with glasses and cutlery, the starched tablecloth white as snow. Above a sideboard hung a tapestry featuring an antique war fought by men wearing suits of metal, many on horseback. I recalled the tapestry in the cabin of that schooner at Spanglestream, far away and long ago. Three men and two women stood chattering by the sideboard; they hushed as we entered. Here was another sort of conclave entirely. The five regarded me.
Bernardino beamed. "It's okay. I was right."
He was right about the meal too. A smiling though silent waiter rushed in and out discreetly, dishing it up. Mounds of tasty seafood, lobster, clam, octopus, sprats in batter. The works.
He was also right about the conversation—just as soon as I had a bit of wine inside my young frame and decided that I would converse.
Thumbnail sketches of those present:
Tessa, otherwise known as "The Contessa". She was elderly, with lively sparkling eyes and a habit of darting her head to agree with something, like a pigeon-bird pecking seed. She wore jewels and rings galore.
Prof, "The Professore", a dapper fellow in his forties; what he professed was science, though there wasn't much demand for this since machines of the Godmind did most of it.
Then there was Cesare, a burly fellow, a baritone singer at the Teatro della Fenice.
Luigi, an art restorer; he seemed sly.
And finally: Patrizia, young, dark and fiery. She described herself as their theoretician.
I soon gathered that there were several dozen others of like heart in Venezia, organized into separate self-contained “cells". Elsewhere too, in cities all across Europa, similar cells existed. This particular one was the "Doge's Tavern cell". (Oh, and a "doge" is the name for a chief magistrate of old, a city boss; no connection with four-legged barking beasts.)
Presently Luigi said to me, "Not everyone is so sure that you cherubs are aliens at all."
"That's dumb."
"Is it? It's a minority view—I don't hold it personally. I'm sure no one here does. I merely mention it. But consider: maybe the Godmind manufactures you all in its private province over in America, and fills your heads with false memories?"
I gaped at him. "Whatever for?"
"Why, to give us tame idiots the illusion that human history is still happening—if not here, then somewhere in the galaxy! Thus we won't lose heart and die out from lack of stimulus. Lack of events; lack of change."
"Huh. Nothing much changed on my world for long enough. When something big did happen, I don't know that it was such a boon!"
Bernardino said, "You must tell us how your world changed, hmm? And what part you played in that momentous event?"
"Did I say I did?" I clammed up; and ate a few clams.
"No, you didn't say." He chuckled. "But you showed it. Whatever Luigi says, / believe in you, my little visiting alien."
"And I too!" exclaimed Tessa.
A little later Prof began to profess.
He said this: "The Godmind is well known to be the end product of intelligent intuitive self-directing machines built by our ancestors. But alas, our ancestors themselves weren't too bright when it came to organizing the world. They brawled like brats, and they were on the verge of destroying this planet with incredible weapons.
It's small wonder that the Godmind decrees a quiet static world. Small wonder, either, that it ranks children above us."
"Children in appearance only," I reminded him.
"Yet appearances count, Yaleen! Centuries of admiring you starchil- dren has bred in us a certain humility, a meekness. Which suits the Godmmd perfectly. In the beginning—before it got its own act together—the Godmind must have inherited some inbuilt directives, though; just as people have behavioural instincts wired into them by evolution. Now what would its directives be? I've done research amongst the data still on access, from which I conclude that our Godmind's 'instincts' were twofold: to preserve humanity, and to enhance it. Yet there's a huge difference between preserving—and enhancing."
"There's practically a contradiction," chipped in Patrizia. "You can't simply preserve a living system in stasis, or else it dies out. Look at us: refugees in our own world, dispossessed of our initiative!"
"Hence," said Prof, "the role of you starchildren: continually to top up the psychic energy pool of a time-locked Earth. It's you who do the enhancing, by returning from the stars. If you didn't return, humanity would wither. The discovery of /Ta-space and the psylink allowed the Godmind to enhance and to preserve, at once; but at a cost to us. We consider that cost too high."
I shovelled some Fritto Misto dell Adriatico into my mouth and chewed the crispy lovelies. "Is life on Earth so bad?" I asked, still munching.
"It's a question of dignity," replied Tessa.
"Of liberty," Patrizia corrected her. "We wish to decide our own destinies. And we don't. We can't even make our own mistakes. We built a God for ourselves, and now we have to carry out its oh-so- benign will."
"A God as foretold by precog myth?" I mumbled.
"Pah!" snapped Cesare. "There's no such thing as 'precog'. I don't believe that our ancestors in the deep past intuited all this stuff happening. I say the Godmind just used a lot of myths and symbols to play a tune on us."
"Long ago," said Prof, "an age of religion gave way to an age of science. Yet the psychic forces of the previous age remained extremely powerful. We aren't particularly rational creatures, Yaleen— and as an aside, if the Godmind was obliged to preserve us, it would need to preserve our irrationalities too! So it kept the form, but it dumped the earlier content. Deep down, as Cesare says, humans think symbolically. Now we are just the living symbols of the past. Nothing new occurs here. Whatever is new comes from the stars, where at least you aren't ruled directly by the Godmind on account of the sheer distance. But it can still haul you home through Ka- space, like fish in a net; then serve you up for our mental feast."
"From which we depart," concluded Patrizia, "with our bellies forever empty. Those of us who still care deeply enough about human independence."
"So you see," said Bernardino, "it excites us to meet somebody who is hiding important knowledge about an enemy of the Godmind. Any enemy of the Godmind's is a friend of ours."
They all looked at me expectantly.
It must have been the wine. Or else a need for allies.
I told them: of our river and our way of life. Of the black current, and the war against the Sons. Of the Worm's head and how I had ridden it. And of how I had died.
The only major thing I held back was that I was supposed to be here on Earth as an agent of the Worm.
This narrative took some while, and it was interrupted as much by crashes of thunder as by questions. By the time I'd finished, the Doge's Tavern was closed for the night; the waiter and proprietor both joined us. My throat was as rough as an old boot in spite of many cups of capuccino coffee and glasses of aqua minerale.
"That's all," I growled at last.
"Bravo, well sung!" Cesare applauded.
"Dear child," exclaimed Tessa. "Dear cherub, a thousand blessings!"
Bernardino grinned. "That's all? Apart from the one little secret that you're keeping to yourself?"
"What secret?"
"I'd hazard a guess that it has to do with your presence here on Earth. Hmm?"
"No comment."
Prof rubbed his hands gleefully. "Ah, this is excellent. Far better than I hoped! So this Worm of yours was placed on a number of worlds long ago, as a destroyer of intelligence? An aborter of native life which might evolve? That would be very much in keeping with a mission to enhance the human race out amongst the stars. How better to pursue this mission than by strangling the competition in advance, before it even got going? Think of the destroyers that way, rather than as a set of ambushes laid for the Godmind's seedships! Maybe worms were planted on all suitable worlds—but most duly expired when their work was done!
"This would certainly explain something which has always rather puzzled me: namely why no intelligent life evolved on any of the colony worlds.
"But if this is true, two startling facts emerge. Fact number one: the Godmind is a master of time, able to send those worm creations back into the distant past of our galaxy. And fact number two: the Godmind doesn't know this."
"Eh?" said I. "How could it be a master of time and not know it?"
"Easily. Either it has not yet done this deed, nor even foreseen the doing of it . . . that's one possibility. Or else the Godmind isn't as united as we thought. Parts of it operate independently, unknown to the rest of it—just as the workings of our own subconscious mind are mostly hidden from our waking consciousness. If so, potentially it is a house divided against itself.
"That," I said, "is like adding two and two together and getting twenty-two."
"Sometimes twenty-two might be the right answer. You have to learn to see things from a new perspective. A new perspective sometimes reveals the true picture, as Luigi can tell you."
"Can I?" said Luigi.
"Yes, yes, that painting of the skull and the carpet you told me of! Look at it ordinarily, and you just see a carpet. But if you tilt the picture and look at it askance the carpet becomes a human skull."
"Oh, Holbein's Ambassadors. Right."
The worms could have been sent backwards in time by the Godmind? But the Godmind didn't even know this? And most worms had done their duty, nipping competition in the bud then faithfully expiring? But a few had survived and awoken when the seedships arrived? My brain buzzed. It made a crazy kind of sense, if the end result of colonization was to be as Ambroz and his mentor Harvaz the Cognizer suspected. Death at the starting line, death at the finish!
I hadn't mentioned to my new friends what Ambroz had said. I'd been busy talking about my own world and the war and the Worm. Now I told them hoarsely of Ambroz the Exotic and of the telescope the size of the whole galaxy.
When I'd done, Prof got so excited that he knocked a glass of water over. It's remarkable how much liquid a glass holds . . . when you knock it over. A pool spread. "So, so, so," he exclaimed, thumping his fist into the palm. Everyone ignored the spillage.
Bernardino frowned. "What, kill everyone just to use their Kas for a few moments? That makes as much sense as burning down a pigsty to get a plate of pork."
"No, it does make sense," said Prof. "The Godmind can cast its fishing net in /Ta-space, but essentially, it's a thing of the physical universe, our Godmind. It doesn't control /Ta-space; it doesn't understand it. It just uses it. I'll wager it can't have a Ka-store like Yaleen's Worm. Our Godmind's bosom is empty."
"Perhaps," said Cesare, "that's what it wants to see with its telescope; if indeed it does have its eye set on building this lens, whatever the cost. It wants to see how to own A'a-space."
"Well, it would," said Prof, "If /Ta-space is the clue to what the universe is, and why there's one. /Ta-space certainly seems to be the domain of the dead. Maybe the dead are like a sort of . . . subconscious of the cosmos? Life evolves in the universe through the aeons. /Ta-space fills with more and more dead souls. So does the subconscious grow richer and deeper? If so, the real key to action may lie with the dead. Yet how can the dead ever act?"
"You're becoming metaphysical," Patrizia chided him. "Fascinatingly so, perhaps! But I say we should discuss possible action in the here and now. Yaleen has given us a lovely tool to subvert the Godmind and seize our freedom again: this threat that the Godmind means to snuff us all one day."
"One day," agreed Luigi. "One day a thousand centuries hence. How many people care about such a time-span?"
"They ought to!"
"Ought to. But do they? Do revellers worry about the hangover the next day? Or the state of their liver in twenty years' time?"
"We needn't mention the time-span. If we spread this rumour, and alert our contacts throughout Europa to spread it too, and then if a starchild should publicly denounce the Godmind—"
"Don't look at me." But of course Patrizia already was.
"Who was it who said they could shift the Earth if they had a lever long enough?" she asked.
"And somewhere to stand," Prof reminded her. "Archimedes said that."
"Maybe we have such a lever here—a lever as long as the distance from the Sun to Yaleen's star!"
"What about the Godmind controlling time?" I objected hastily. "If what Prof says about the origin of my Worm is true—"
"Your Worm?" Bernardino seized on this avidly. "Why not come completely clean with us, Yaleen?"
"Because, well . . ." (His grin broadened.) I tried to recoup. "If the Godmind controls time, damn it, what hope is there?"
"Look at it this way," said Prof. "A new perspective! If you introduce things into the past, albeit far away in space, maybe something has to vanish from the present—or change—to compensate. To preserve cause and effect. That something may well be the knowledge of what you have done. Anyway, dear cherub, you too have tricked time already. So have all starchildren who have died and been reborn here."
"How do you work that out?"
"You arrive here through £«-space much faster than the ordinary universe permits anyone to travel. So the dead travel through time."
I yawned. I just couldn't stop myself. I was dead beat. After all, I was only a little girl.
"You shall have a room tonight here in the tavern," Bernardino said amiably. "Tomorrow, we'll all have lunch together, hmm? You can come as clean as this tablecloth—was, before we began." (The pool had soaked in. Crumbs were scattered about, and a couple of purple rings marked where wine glasses had stood.) "We shall decide; and act. That's why you came to Earth, isn't it?"
"Do you read minds?" I grumbled at him.
"No, only faces. And the language of the body. Right now I read that if you don't soon go to bed, you'll fall asleep in that chair."
So over lunch next day (fish soup and liver risotto) I did come clean about the Worm and me, much to my new friends' delight. Tessa even presented me with her favourite chased-gold ring—she said it was her favourite, anyway. For had I not worn a fine ring when I triumphed, Worm-wise, once before? I accepted it as a fair substitute for my lovely diamond ring, lost forever.
Over the next few weeks the conspiracy thickened. The Underground contacted cells of comrades all around Europa, in Paris, Berlin, London, Petersburg, by "phone"—the lightning speaking tube. Journals began to pick the rumour up. According to Prof, there used to be much quicker ways of spreading news around: by radio (which Ambroz had mentioned) and even by picture-radio. However, the governing Godmind had phased these methods out, as inappropriate to its design for order, calm and joy on planet Earth.
During those weeks I learned quite a bit of this-and-that: things which my Cyclopedia hadn't bothered to fill me in on. (Not that I'd asked. I hadn't known what to ask. And I hadn't wanted to alert it by too many leading questions.)
What particularly caught my attention was the system of justice on Earth—since I presumed that I would (to say the least) be committing an antisocial act by foul-mouthing the Godmind.
Patrizia explained all this to me. The name of the system was Social Grace; and its ultimate sanction against anyone who oppressed anybody else was permanent banishment to some distant place of exile, which was generally assumed to be an icecap or a desert. (Though how
, Patrizia insisted, could my proposed misdeed be regarded as "oppressive" of anyone, when it was clearly liber- atory?) In contrast to directly-administered Eeden—God's own halfbillion acres—law enforcers on the rest of the Earth were humans: Paxmen. These Paxmen advised and arbitrated, and soothed and smoothed out disputes and difficulties. Sometimes they were assisted by machines: a mech-bird or mech-hound.
Now, nobody knew of any family whose son had ever entered the Paxman Corps. Besides which, all Paxmen had a striking similarity of countenance which bespoke body-engineering. Either they were specially bred to their role, in vats; or else, as one whisper went, they were actually recruited from the ranks of ornery people who fell foul of the Paxmen: murderers, rapists, vandals, arsonists, insane devotees of weird imaginary gods, or whatever. According to the whisper, these criminals were made over in a body-vat, and had their minds changed too; this was their exile—an exile from themselves, poetic justice.
Patrizia thought this whisper unlikely to be true, since on Earth nowadays there was precious little murdering, raping, vandalizing or whatever. Luigi, who restored pictures, knew that things had been otherwise in the bad old days, back when "life was Hell". Many ancient paintings showed atrocities: burnings, lootings, butchery, rapes, people nailed up on wooden crossbars.
The pacifying hand of justice was, according to a saying, "both light and dark". It rested lightly on the world the majority of the time, caressing and gentling, barely even felt; but it could grip tightly and suddenly. And it was dark: hidden away until the moment when it popped into sight.
I myself hadn't even seen any Paxmen. I hadn't come across any of the "fingers" of the Godmind. My schedule of talks in various churches—hardly a very punishing schedule—had been arranged by the hotel management.
According to Patrizia, Paxmen had never bothered very much with the Underground in the past. Why should they? So far as I could see, the Underground hadn't done very much till now, beyond gourmandizing and theorizing—and circulating leaflets which most decent citizens promptly tossed away, as nonsense. For did not the Godmind genuinely resurrect its starchildren to the glory of Humankind? Had it not brought Heaven to Earth? It delivered the goods (as foretold by precog myth).
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