Ching was stunned at Gorov’s insight for Gorov had put his finger squarely on that paradox which had darkened the minds of the best thinkers of the Brotherhood for centuries—until Project Prometheus had proved feasible. Ching was convinced more strongly than ever of the wisdom of removing such a man from the enemy camp—and the hope was strengthened in him that a creature with a mind like Gorov’s, a creature so dominated by brilliant logic—might very well be won over to the side of Chaos by intellectual persuasion.
“You do not disappoint me, Constantine Gorov,” Ching said. “You have given a perfect analysis of the dynamics of a closed social system. Markowitz himself would be impressed. Provided, of course, that the discussion, that the realm of Man, must always be confined to such a closed, finite system.
“But consider. … Consider the Galaxy, consider the entire universe. The universe itself is infinite, hence is intrinsically an open, Chaotic system. In such a context, an Ordered mote such as the Hegemony cannot long endure.”
“You cloud the issue!” Gorov insisted. “We’re talking about pragmatic reality, not fantasy. We’re talking about the finite habitat of Man, the Solar System, not hypothetical infinity.”
“Ah,” said Ching, “but must Man inevitably be confined to this solar system, doomed to extinction when Sol dies? Might not Man someday hatch, like a chicken from the closed egg it imagines to be the universe in its embryonic existence, The realm of Chaos and infinity—and racial immortality?”
Ching stared at the now thoughtful faces of Gorov and Johnson.
“It is time, I think,” he said, “to show you something that will shake your outlooks to the core, as it shook mine. … As it will shake the universal outlook of the entire human race.”
He spoke into the communicator. “Prepare the probe-film for immediate viewing in the auditorium.”
Boris Johnson followed Ching, Gorov and four guards out of the cavelike chamber, down a corridor to the mouth of a droptube in a fascinated daze. Something seemed to be probing at the limits of his consciousness—the answer to some question he could not quite formulate. Much of this “Theory of Social Entropy” and the exchange between Gorov and Ching had seemed incomprehensible, yet there was something about what Ching had said that seemed somehow right, more than right—obvious, self-evident. …
And as the tube’s antigravs lowered him, along with the others, toward the center of the asteroid, it all suddenly seemed to come into focus. All his life, as long as he could remember, he had hated the Hegemony without really being sure why; had been determined to destroy it with no more than the vaguest notion as to how.
But now it had been revealed to him that other men shared his feelings—men who, unlike himself, had access to the forgotten, suppressed wisdom of the past, who understood the essential nature of that which they were fighting, who knew how to fight it effectively, and, most important of all, seemed to have a grander vision of human destiny than merely the destruction of the Hegemony, who saw that overthrow as no more than the prelude to something vast and immortal.
And that, he knew, was what the Democratic League had lacked. The League had merely been against something; there was nothing that it had been for. Even “Democracy” had been thought of as only the absence of the Hegemony—the negation of a negative, not a positive vision in its own right.
But the Brotherhood had this thing called Chaos—a concept hard to grasp, elusive, he suspected, not because it was a mere word, but because of its very grandeur.
He stared at Robert Ching as they reached the bottom of the droptube and the Brotherhood leader led them down a corridor to a door in the rock wall, and he knew that he was looking at a man who had a unifying vision of the universe, of everything around him. This Chaos that was somehow the very nature of existence itself had given Ching an unerring insight into everyday reality—and the proof of that was that the Brotherhood had been able to outwit both the League and the Hegemony at every turn. Now he could begin to understand Arkady Duntov’s near-worship of Ching. It was not every man who could fully comprehend Chaos, but it was clear that Robert Ching did. If one could not understand it all oneself, there was at least something to be said for uncritically following a man who did. …
Now Ching led them into a small auditorium with a screen at the front and a projector, manned by a technician, at the rear. Wordlessly, Ching motioned them to seats, took one himself and, still without uttering a word, nodded to the technician.
And the screen before them came to life.
Johnson saw a spangle of stars against a black background, one of them growing in what seemed discontinuous jumps, showing a disc, the disc waxing, becoming ever-larger, ever-closer. …
“What you’re looking at,” Ching said, “is part of the edited film taken by an unmanned interstellar probe.”
Beside him, Johnson heard Gorov gasp. “Interstellar flight!” Gorov muttered. “A faster-than-light drive … ? Impossible! Only Schneeweiss himself was capable of … And he killed himself when those fools on the Council suppressed his work oer my objections. … Didn’t he?”
“What do you think?” Robert Ching said as the images of several assorted planets flickered across the screen, as one image finally replaced the rapid montage—the image of a green planet, a planet with oceans and white cloud cover … A planet orbiting another sun! Johnson suddenly fully realized, overcome by the wonder, the sheer fascination of it all.
Gorov was silent as the film continued to unreel. Ching too said no more as the screen began to reveal continents and vegetation and coastlines and cultivated fields. Johnson too was stone silent, hardly breathing. What was there that any man could say? He was seeing with his own eyes the most important event in human history, an event so enormous, so pregnant with infinite possibilities that it utterly staggered him. That men might someday go to the stars! A whole new solar system, eventually many new systems. … Here was a real hope for freedom, a hope based on solid objective fact, not mere wishful thinking!
And then he grunted aloud as the screen showed the alien city. Once more he gasped as the strange alien craft appeared in the field of vision.
Then the film was over and the screen went blank.
“Now you have seen it,” Robert Ching said. “Now you know the most important fact in all of human history. Man is no longer alone. And the film you saw was taken on the 61 Cygni system, a nearby system by Galactic standards, and the very first system we’ve probed. Consider: if we happened upon a highly developed alien civilization on our first try, how many such civilizations must exist in our Galaxy alone? Million? Billion? And how many unoccupied but habitable planets? Where is your closed system now, Gorov? Can the Hegemony even dream of controlling an entire Galaxy?”
“No …” Gorov muttered. “Yes … I see that you are right, in this new context. The Hegemony is of course predicated upon the confinement of the human race to a limited area. But if men go to the stars, if the potential habitat of the race becomes infinite, obviously the Hegemony is doomed—and I would not mourn its passing, for it would no longer be a useful, functional, social construct. A great pity. …”
“In the light of what you’ve seen, you still mourn for the Hegemony, Gorov?” Ching said. “I expected better from a man of your intellect.”
“You mistake my meaning,” Gorov said. “My loyalty was never to the Hegemony as such—when conditions change, forms must change with them. The fools on the Hegemonic Council could never understand that. My loyalty is only to the truth, the truth and that social order which serves the best interests of the greatest possible number under any given conditions. Until now, that has been the peace and prosperity secured by the Order of the Hegemony. But when conditions change, a logical man reforms his hypotheses and analyses accordingly. If I mourn anything, I mourn the fact that the Hegemony will never permit interstellar travel. Surely you realize that they would know what it would mean. A great pity—such a vast store of new knowledge awaits us out there.”
&n
bsp; “Ah,” said Ching, “but as you have seen, the Hegemony is not the only organization capable of building ships. Project Prometheus, the culmination of the three hundred year history of the Brotherhood of Assassins, is very near completion. And Project Prometheus is—”
“A starship!“ Boris Johnson suddenly exclaimed. “That weird-looking ship we saw on the way in. It’s a starship, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Robert Ching, “the Prometheus is indeed a starship. Within a month, it will depart for the 61 Cygni system. And like its namesake, when it returns from its mission, for better or for worse, the course of human culture will be altered forever. The era of the Hegemony will come to an end. Consider: when the news becomes known—and rest assured, the Brotherhood will make it known—Torrence must decide either to build starships or to attempt to suppress interstellar travel. And for purely political reasons, if Torrence takes one side, Khustov must take the other. And there is something more that you do not know. Our probe was followed back by an alien probe. Clearly, the Cygnans will soon be capable of building starships of their own. Either man will go to the stars—or the stars will come to Man. In the end, it will come to the same thing: Man will inevitably be thrust forth into the Galaxy. And that will mean the end of the Hegemony. Control will give way to freedom, and Order to Chaos—and to infinity. And you, gentlemen, will be given the opportunity of participating in this greatest of all adventures.”
Ching turned to face Johnson, and Johnson thought he saw something that was almost envy in Ching’s calm brown eyes. “You, Boris Johnson,” he said, “have earned a place on the Prometheus. Though you fought in ignorance, you fought on the side of Man, and such courage will be needed when we stand face to face with other sentient beings. Moreover, we must make it clear at the outset that the stars belong to all men, not just the Hegemony—or the Brotherhood of Assassins.”
Ching faced Constantine Gorov. “And you,” he said, “are ideally equipped to deal with non-humans. I confess that I don’t find your coldness, your lack of human emotion, an endearing quality, but your lust for pure knowledge and your brilliance will serve Man well in comprehending a totally alien civilization, in bringing about true communication with a nonhuman culture.”
Ching paused, smiled thinly. “But we believe in giving men at least a pro forma choice,” he said. “Not much of a choice, I admit, but a choice nevertheless. You will willingly choose to go on the Prometheus, gentlemen, or you will be humanely executed. The choice, such as it is, is yours. What will it be, my friends?”
Johnson’s head nodded, as much an involuntary movement as a gesture of assent. For he was quite staggered; he had been defeated, destroyed, his entire world cruelly exposed as a series of delusions—and now he was being offered a new life, one quite literally beyond his wildest dreams. For just as he had viscerally sensed the tightness, the self-evident quality of the Theory of Social Entropy without fully comprehending it, so too he instantly, instinctually realized that the opening of the Galaxy to the human race, the freedom of Man to roam a st Galaxy inhabited by countless sentient races, was the epitome of all he had ever fought for, though he had never recognized it as a possibility before.
His war on the Hegemony had been a fight for Democracy, which to him had simply meant freedom, and now he knew that the deepest meaning of freedom was not freedom from any particular tyranny or indeed from tyranny itself, but freedom to. And for men to be truly free, that “to” had to be open-ended, had to refer to every possibility that could ever exist. Freedom was the right of every man to fulfill his own private destiny, and there were at least as many destinies as there were men. Freedom was infinity. And only the stars were a concrete form of this theoretical freedom. In an infinite universe, Man would have the room to become infinite himself, and, being infinite, perhaps immortal. And he himself, personally, beyond the Hegemony at last, would at last be able to breathe free—not in some distant dream, but right here, right now!
Boris Johnson knew that he had caught a glimpse of the true, oceanic, pregnant nature of the universe, where all things were possible and all things that were possible were that infinite nature of existence that Robert Ching called Chaos.
He nodded his head again, willfully, firmly, this time. “I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll go gladly.”
“And you, Constantine Gorov?” said Robert Ching.
“You insult me,” Gorov said humorlessly. “You insult me by threatening me with death if I do not agree to accept the greatest challenge to my intellect that I could ever conceive of. Do you take me for an utter, blind fool? What sane man would refuse to accept such an opportunity? The extent of the knowledge to be gained by contact with a totally alien civilization is quite literally inconceivable, since such creatures must inevitably differ from ourselves in ways we cannot even imagine, must have formed thoughts that have never taken shape in human brains. It will be very much like emerging naked into our own civilization. We will gain millenia of new knowledge all but instantly! An unthinkable treasure. Of course I accept! What madness it would be to choose death over such knowledge!”
“I had thought that perhaps your loyalty to the Hegemony—”
“But the Hegemony is but a transient thing,” Gorov said. “A structure which I still contend has served Man well in a given context. But now the context expands, and we must expand with it. For knowledge, once gained, cannot be thrown away, even if one were mad enough to want to. Knowledge alone is immutable and immortal.”
“You have chosen well, gentlemen,” Robert Ching said. “My only regret is that I cannot go with you. But adventure is not for the old, and there will be many things to do here. The work of the Brotherhood will not be ended until all mankind is free to join you in voyaging to the stars. The Prometheus is only a beginning. Like its namesake, it will bring the fire of the gods—Chaos, infinity—to Man. But men must make of that gift something good, not evil. There will be work here for the Brotherhood as long as there is a Hegemony. … But I’m woolgathering, and there is no tifor that. We have a great deal of work to do in the next month, gentlemen. Let us begin.”
“Man reaches for life and shrinks from death; Man reaches for Victory and shrinks from defeat. Therefore, what greater paradox than triumph through death? What act can be more truly Chaotic than victory through suicide?”
—Gregor Markowitz, Chaos and
Culture
12
ARKADY DUNTOV stood in the control room of the Prometheus, in the control room of what he had gradually come to think of as his ship during this final month of preparation, the month that would at last end tomorrow.
For, at least while on the way to the 61 Cygni system, it would indeed be his ship. He was the captain, the titual leader of the expedition. Once they reached their goal, other men, even Gorov, a former enemy, would become more important, but coming and going, it was his ship.
And tomorrow, the day would come at last. The last of the supplies were being loaded, and tomorrow the full crew would come aboard and they would be on their way. Duntov ran his eyes lovingly over the now familiar controls and viewscreens.
There were really two independent control systems, one quite familiar, the other unlike that on any other ship. Each controlled one of the Prometheus’ two drive systems. For lifting-off, making planetfalls and traveling within the limits of solar systems, the ship had quite conventional antigravs and reaction drive. Only when they had crossed the orbit of Pluto could the other propulsion system, the faster than light drive, be used.
Duntov shook his head for what seemed to him like the thousandth time as he scanned the FTL controls. In the past month, he had had endless sessions with Schneeweiss; yet, while the operation of the drive was simple enough, the theory was still all but incomprehensible to him.
“The Prometheus will not actually contradict the Einsteinian equations which limit the speed of all bodies to that of light,” he remembered Schneeweiss as saying—and then taking over half an hour to explain just what th
ose equations that he had not contradicted were. “So … you see,” Schneeweiss had explained, after pointing out that according to those equations, it would take a transfinite force to accelerate a ship beyond the speed of light in what he called the ‘prime continuum,’ “we cannot exceed the speed of light in term$ of the ship’s passage through the prime space time continuum. Therefore, we escape from the prime continuum. You use the conventional drive to set a course for 61 Cygni and to build up a large conventional velocity. Then you activate the Stasis-Generator. The Prometheus, with a small volume of space surrounding it, is then enclosed in a bubble of time, or more accurately, a field in which time stops, relative to the prime continuum. Relative to the micro-continuum within the field, the ship does not exceed the speed of light, but the bubble itself moves through the prime continuum at the speed f light raised to its own power. Since the ship will have ceased to occupy a space time locus in the prime continuum, the Einsteinian equations are not violated.”
It had all been about as comprehensible as Markowitz’ Theory of Social Entropy, which Robert Ching had given him to read—which was to say that Duntov understood most of the words, without really being quite able to grasp the concepts they described.
But in both cases, the elusiveness of the concepts did not really trouble him. He knew enough to act, to carry out his orders and pilot the ship, and that was all he really had to know—perhaps all he really wanted to know. Let other men play with their theories, he thought.
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