The Prayer Machine

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  ‘So you’re saying that scientists in G Block were merely sketching on their drawing board a process for making people old? — and that the increase in intelligence was purely pot luck?’

  ‘Pot luck. That’s right! So now tell me: do all the cases of Forenthoris show signs of having super-intelligence?’

  ‘The short answer is no.’

  ‘Then that’s it. The intelligence factor is secondary! And scientists — most of them — are pretty adept at cooking the books. They like Nobel prizes and things. So when they realized their catastrophic error they made sure that all the data to do with mangled genes — whether overt or recessive — was placed on secret file. I’ll bet you a dollar to a dime that if you tried to access any data in conflict with what this regime now thinks you’d get a no-go.’

  ‘You’re right. I’ve just tried to call up your own records.’

  ‘Well, your Puter won’t play, because a lot of people in high places may well carry a very dangerous recessive gene. No doubt they think that you can go on increasing the intelligence of the species without increasing the size of the brain cortex — a completely illogical conclusion as the autopsy on Einstein quite clearly showed — and they might even feel smug about it if their case history shows a clear genetic path dating back to G Block. The last thing a modern computer — or Puter, or whatever — would do to its bosses (or are they servants?) would be to upset the applecart by printing out the truth!’

  ‘So you’ve really come into this era to get your hands on the suppressed printout?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you can go back and reverse the position from over a hundred years ago?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And consequently produce an entirely different future from this one, the one — to you, that is — that you’re living in at this moment?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why it’s called schizophrenia. I am in a situation which shall not have ever occurred. Therefore it is fantasy.’

  Krister said, ‘And yet it will have been you who changed this … pseudo future … into the one that actually took place?’

  ‘That’s my contention.’

  ‘I must say, it’s a very interesting analysis of Phrenia. And people would have their work cut out to disprove it.’

  ‘Doesn’t it fit?’

  ‘By all the laws of raison, absolutely not. And if I published what you’ve just said I’d be hung, drawn and quartered as the ultimate heretic. But to tell you the truth I find your theory exciting and I long to tell Penta.’

  ‘Penta is your … ?’

  ‘My Entitlement. She was Narbiton’s but therein lies a story, as they used to say — didn’t they — in your era.’ He went to a cabino and got out a black box. ‘This is a now rather obsolete version of modern pseudomesh. It works — up to a point — but takes a lot of getting used to. Later versions are much simpler but it might be quite difficult to get you one. Still, you can trick an infopoint with it when you’re adept enough. But you have to be careful in asking questions because the Puter gets no thinkback from it — rather obviously since it’s not connected to your brain.’

  ‘Does proper intermesh produce feedback direct?’

  ‘Yes. Gird up thy loins, Neil. We’re going places. To be exact we’re going to where Penta is nano. It means we have to go through a Biotic Danger Zone — that’s to say we won’t be protected from the mutated antibiotics that contributed to the development of plastic cancer — but we’ll be reasonably safe in the magnecraft. And since the police are none too keen to go out of the Safety Zone we won’t be followed.’

  *

  The interior of Krister’s magnecraft was a real mess.

  Bits of sailing gear, evidently unaltered in essence since the twentieth century, were dumped haphazardly on the flooring and the back seats. The baggage compartment revealed the faint sound of jingling chains, suggesting an anchor. The back seats were littered with cleats, bits of rope and something that closely resembled an ordinary outboard engine. The whole thing smelled of creosote.

  Krister swung the magnecraft out of the parking area and lifted off. The motion felt rather like that of a hovercraft but with fewer air bumps. Krister gestured toward the debris in the back. ‘Penta can’t stand it — the mess.’

  ‘Do you get much time for sailing?’

  ‘I make time. Do you sail?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I’ve just got a fab little dinghy … I think I’d go out of my craze if I didn’t have that to fall back on.’ He thunk the selector into the required mode: Converge on sliproad, then looked ahead gloomily. ‘God’s Printout, the traffic!’

  ‘I thought you could just soar over the top.’

  ‘No overjumping allowed here. Though of course some stupid bastards do — without even checking whether there’s space ahead. They’re talking about introducing some kind of Test.’

  ‘How can they? When the whole process is cybernated direct from the brain, how do you devise a test? People just simply sit there — don’t they?’

  ‘And still get bashed … It would involve some kind of aptitude test. To see if people Motivate with any consideration for other people.’

  Neil glanced back at the sailing tackle. ‘Talking of Motivating, do you? — I mean … is there intermesh even for that?’

  Krister said, ‘No, not yet. If there was I wouldn’t do it. That’s what makes sailing an attractive sport. Self-reliance is getting out of date. Using my hands, Mr Prentice, is what keeps me alive.’ He scowled as some lunatic overjumped, almost fouling the front fender. ‘It gets you away from all this highspeed neurosis. You know what our biggest toll on human life is? Coronaries. Same old frustrations as you had, but far worse. Blood pressure is always high when I check business patients. They live a life of traffic jams and overloaded infopoints and something like fifty million tranquilizers a day, coast-to-coast. Sometimes you have to wait up to twenty minutes before you can even access the Puter for something as prosaic as a week’s food program.

  ‘Things haven’t changed much, evidently.’

  ‘No? That’s interesting. Long before I ever heard of a PONKM I often wondered what someone from the twentieth century would think — judging from the science fiction, all they really thought was that we wouldn’t wear neckties!’

  ‘Kin, these PONEMs … how are they controlled?’

  ‘By laser power.’

  ‘Yes, they would be. But that wasn’t what I meant. A black hole is stable as a function of time — or rather the lack of time.’

  Krister said, ‘I’m a doctor, not a physicist. What are you getting at?’

  ‘I’m just wondering whether the Regime have a better reason for banning the use of PONEMs as a time-transducer than the one they’ve given. How many PONEMs are there?’

  ‘In the West? At least twenty.’

  ‘And how often have they been used in the sense I used this one?’

  ‘Infrequently. You’d better put those sort of questions to Clare, when you meet her.’

  ‘But I’m not the first to come out of a PONEM?’

  ‘You’re the first to come out of a PONEM from the past.’

  ‘But not the future?’

  Kin nodded. ‘I’m certain it has been used for future probes.’

  ‘With what result?’

  ‘A puzzling result. No two futures are reportedly the same.’

  Neil said, ‘But then they wouldn’t be. Each time someone enters the future he can’t help but change it. So each person in rotation would find the changes made by the one before.’

  Kin shook his head and grinned. ‘That’s too much for me.’

  ‘It’s not. It’s fundamental. Suppose you went into the future, and in doing so you found — say — a dire shortage of … I dunno … anything. Soup. What happens? You come back to your own era and you say to the soup manufacturers: “by the year 2101 AD there won’t be any soup left at the present rate of soup production.” “Okay,” say the soup people, “we’ll
step it up and stockpile it.” Right? Then the next person goes into the future. But it’s no longer short of soup. Moreover there are soup spoons in daily use where before such things had been antiques. The world would be drinking soup. See?’

  ‘Then what’s the purpose of your question?’

  Neil said, ‘It’s against the rules — isn’t it? — to use a PONEM as a means of transducing oneself from one era to another — or from one Möbius path to another. Now, why? The given reason is that the Regime don’t want things changed. But supposing something much more basic were involved? Something to do with survival? Don’t forget that you can’t go through a PONEM without changing it — that’s just an extension of the point we’ve already discussed. So what happens if you change a PONEM too much?’

  ‘You’re the physicist. You tell me.’

  ‘It’s a point of philosophy as well as physics. By interschizoid reasoning, a PONEM is what you think it is. At the same time the thoughts that you think cannot leave the PONEM unchanged.’

  ‘You mean, if it only exists in your own mind?’

  ‘No. I mean if there are two rationales. Whichever way you look at it, the answer comes out the same. If my private fear is that an unstable PONEM could wipe me out (because as a schizophrenic it’s the only means I have of communicating with the “real” world) the answer is annihilation. If — instead — we think of it as a barely controlled black hole, and if we take the proposition that I have actually come through it in some physical way, the answer is still annihilation … only this time for everybody.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because it can only mean that the two Möbius paths have come so close that I’ve jumped from one to the other. This means that the black hole must be sliding along the boundary between one sort of existence and the next … like the scissors cutting along the centre line of a twisted piece of paper. In the experiment with the scissors and paper a crisis point is reached —’

  ‘— when you’ve cut all the way around and the paper doubles its length?’

  ‘Right. So now, if we cut all the way round the black hole, there’s nothing to keep it in position. What happens? Like everything else in physics, it takes the least line of resistance. In other words it falls back down the hill — just as something on wheels will find the lowest point between two hills. Zero potential. See? The black hole runs back through time. And the further it goes, the more laser power is needed to control it. To hold it. And here’s the snag: until recently, nobody knew how to generate enough laser power to hold a black hole stable. So if it goes back in time to an era — like mine — when nothing existed that could control it, it means the PONKM wipes out everything before it’s even happened — annihilation through never having existed, as we said. To put it at its crudest, we could say that this planet would have ceased to exist in the year 1976 — and I am the medium of destruction.’

  Krister said, ‘You do realize how psychotic that sounds?’

  ‘Totally. It’s the fantasy of a madman who has to be reassured that he has to have an identity. But how does that invalidate it? It supports it! Because if it’s true that only schizophrenics can communicate — communicon, sorry — via this means they equally are the only people who can affect the issue. Therefore, what is a schizophrenic? Answer: an individual who has one foot in one Möbius path and the other in the other.’

  ‘That’s really walking the high wire.’

  ‘But you can’t fault the reasoning. To you, I’ve come from the past, via a black hole, to your present. To me, I entered the future when I set out. And as I explained, I take back — on my return — information which will inevitably change what to me would have been the future. Thus if someone else took the same trip after me he wouldn’t find his future the same as mine.’

  ‘Suppose you can’t go back?’

  ‘Then I have to send a message back.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because I’ve never left that room! I’m still lying on a couch — remember? — with Ann Marie and Jane Schuber presiding. At the moment I’m still in a totally psychotic state and cannot reach them. But that doesn’t mean to say I won’t have my moments of lucidness. During one of those I have to convince them of what is happening.’

  ‘Even though it already happened — a hundred years ago?’

  Neil said quietly, ‘But if the PONKM rolled back through time, it happened today. I’m there! And that’s what they’ve got to be warned about. Have you ever listened to an argument more psychotic than that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course not! Psychosis — up till now — has never completed the loop. It hasn’t had a language for expressing it. Why else do psychiatrists throw up their hands and describe schizophrenics as totally bizarre?’

  ‘All right. Let’s take your fantastic explanation as valid. It still leaves at least one question unanswered. You fear that the black hole will roll backward in time. What’s to prevent it from rolling forward?’

  ‘Well it can’t. How can it? The farther forward it moves, the more laser power there will be available to stop it doing so. In my era that was termed negative energy coefficient. And that process is already built in. Already what your technologists do to hold it stable is to increase the laser power. It’s like saying that you can only beat the speed of light by acquiring infinite mass.’

  ‘Relativity.’

  ‘Precisely. But in this case you’d need an infinitely large hole to beat the power that controls it … in other words, the entire universe! Obviously that stops it rolling forwards. But it can’t stop it going backwards. The further back you go, the less laser power there is. Which is where we came in.’

  Krister remained silent as the magnecraft interlocked with the westbound traffic on the motorway. Here the terrain had already become more desolate, and the sun was a scarlet disc low on the horizon.

  Krister said, ‘You talk about the extinction of an entire Galaxy like some people might discuss a forest fire.’

  ‘Then you don’t believe me?’

  ‘I’m just hoping that interschizoid reasoning is wrong.’

  ‘But you’d never know if it was. If the universe blew up in — say — the year 1990, you yourself would never have been born.’

  Krister still chose to treat this as hypothetical. ‘The cardinal question being: would that matter to anyone?’

  Neil said, ‘Man’s first instinct is to survive. There must be a reason for it.’

  ‘A raison — don’t get caught with your archaic pronouncements. They show up. Let’s get off the subject. You scare me …’ Krister thunk the speed up a little and set out for the open plains. ‘You were saying that things haven’t changed much. I would have thought they’d changed unidentifiably.’

  ‘Only the superficial things. But substitute the motor car for the magnecraft, the telephone for interfono, the supermarket for — what was it?’

  ‘Food program.’

  ‘Yes. And the hairstyles, clothes and so forth, and there’s not much difference.’

  Krister said, ‘Except for whatever originated in G Block. Is that what you’re working up to?’

  ‘Yes. We didn’t have Forenthoris —’

  ‘— and you didn’t have plastic cancer.’

  Neil said, ‘But I did come across it. And so did Ann Marie. Up here — on the moor.’

  ‘You sound scared now.’

  ‘Suppose she caught it?’

  ‘How could she? The plastic dump which, according to the biography, you found together on Dartmoor belonged in the future — in other words, nano. You’ll be passing it quite soon and you’ll recognize it. But nobody can catch a disease from the future. It hasn’t happened. Has it? Even by your “interschizoid” reasoning.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Notice anything out here?’

  ‘The terrain’s familiar but the crops are different.’

  ‘Oatwheat-41. Nothing else grows, nano.’

  ‘Why not?’

  �
�The heat, for one thing.’

  ‘I didn’t notice.’

  ‘The surgery is air-conditioned. So is this mag. But out there it’s in the nineties — and this is January. In summer people have to take pills against heat-stroke. Party Members get breath-masks. Others don’t.’

  ‘Doctors?’

  Krister shook his head. The smile was ironic. ‘Not me. Too many Infringements …’

  ‘What’s Oatwheat-41?’

  ‘A mutation cereal. It can stand all the deadly DDT and other insecticides still left in the soil. We’ve learned how to grow natural corn at the village but the yield is very low.’

  ‘The village?’

  ‘You’ll see. This arid land here is a no-go area unless you harvest the Oatwheat in the two days that precede the monsoons. When the rain does come down you can see the steam. Rivers, seas, oceans are all up in the eighties, even in winter. The PONEMs disperse some of the heat into the universe but nothing like enough. Nuclear reactors are the main source of trouble, as I said.’

  ‘Then why not shut them down?’

  ‘They can’t. The Americans standardized on a light-water reactor which glues up solid inside. The only way to shut them down is to fire harpoon rods into them and this tends to crack the pressure vessel, which is all-metal. If it cracks, hairline fissures blow the things wide open. And the hotter they get, the hotter the rivers get, because heat has got to go somewhere. They pour it in the rivers. No trout, no salmon … only a few minnows in the great rivers nano.’

  ‘And radiation?’

  ‘Look at the dashboard. It’s never less than ten roentgens outside, in this area. It’ll go to wasteland soon — like Exmoor up in Somerset, where no mammal can live more than a month. You see that dump over there?’

  ‘It looks familiar.’

  Krister was pointing toward the forest. Nearby was the site Neil had discovered with Ann Marie. Neil exclaimed, ‘Plastic bugs! Even after what you’ve told me I find it hard to accept, binding it before it was there, I mean. The thought numbs me.’

  Krister said, ‘Yet it fits your own logic perfectly. If you deviate from your inter-schizoid process you’ll be lost … We’re hermetically sealed, in this craft. It’s quite safe to move in close.’ He grinned very slightly. ‘Don’t expect to see yourself with Ann Marie scrabbling about among the debris!’