Far Thoughts and Pale Gods

by Greg Bear

  I said that I could. I lost three hours and returned. This round of the dance was going well; the preliminary steps, the shufflings and determinations of who would lead, who would follow.

  I walked the long corridor to the president’s inner sanctum. The young women were still shifting files. The replay was hauntingly exact. They smiled at me. I half-heartedly returned their smiles.

  The door to the president’s office opened, and there sat the fit, blue-eyed Madame President behind her desk, hands folded, prepared to accept surrender and nothing else.

  “Please sit,” she said. “What can I do for you, Mr. Sandoval?”

  “I’m taking a big risk,” I said. “You must know that I’ve been reassigned … Fired. But I feel there’s still some room for negotiation …”

  “Negotiation between who?”

  “Myself … and you,” I said.

  “Who are you representing, Mr. Sandoval? Whom do you think I represent? The council, or my binding multiple?”

  I smiled weakly. “That doesn’t matter to me, now.”

  “It matters to me. If you wish to speak to the president of the council, I’m all ears. If you wish to speak to the Task-Felder BM—”

  “I want to talk to you. I need to tell you something …”

  She lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “You’ve screwed up before, Mr. Sandoval. Apparently it’s cost you dearly. Family BMs are dens of nepotism and incompetents. Do you have your syndics’ authorization?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then it does neither of us any good for you to be here.”

  “You used me before …” I began. Real anger and nervousness added a conviction to my act I could not have faked. “I’m trying to redeem myself before our syndics, our director, and to give you a chance, some information you might want to know …”

  She looked me over shrewdly, not unkindly, wolf surveying a highly suspect meal. “Would you be willing to testify before the council? Tell them whatever you’re about to tell me?”

  Thomas was right.

  “I’d prefer not to …”

  “I will not listen to you unless you are willing to testify, in open session.”

  “Please.”

  “That’s my requirement, Mickey. It would be best if you consulted with your syndics before you went any further.” She stood to dismiss me.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll let you judge whether you want me to testify.”

  “I’ll record this as a voluntary meeting, just like the last time you were here.”

  “Fine,” I said, caving in disconsolately.

  “I’m listening.”

  “We’ve started accessing the patterns, the memories inside the heads,” I said.

  She seemed to swallow something bitter. “I hope all of you know what you’re doing,” she said slowly.

  “We’ve discovered something startling, something we didn’t expect at all …”

  “Go on,” she said.

  I told her about StarTime’s apparent bookkeeping errors, I told her about learning the names of the first two unknowns from short-term memory and other areas in the dead but intact brains.

  She showed a glimmer of half-fascinated, half disgusted interest.

  “Only a couple of days ago, we learned who the third unknown was.” I swallowed. Drew back before leaping into the abyss. “He’s Kimon Thierry. K.D. Thierry. He joined StarTime.”

  Fiona Task-Felder rocked back and forth slowly in her chair. “You’re lying,” she said softly. “That is the foulest, most ridiculous story I’ve … It’s more than I imagined you were capable of, Mr. Sandoval. I am …” She shook her head, genuinely furious, and stood up at her desk. “Get out of here.”

  I laid a slate on her desk. “I d-don’t think you should d-dismiss­ me,” I said, shaking, stuttering, teeth knocking together. My own contradictory emotions again supported my play-acting. “I’ve put together a lot of evidence, and I have recordings of Mr. Thierry’s … last moments.”

  She stared at me, at the slate. She sat again but still said nothing.

  “I can show you the evidence very quickly,” I said, and I laid out my trail of facts. The employment of the Logologists, Frederick Jones’s suit against the church, the three unknown members of the group of dead transported from Earth, our triumph in playing back and translating the last memories of each. I thought there might be other facts and remembrances clicking, meshing, in her head, but her face betrayed nothing but cold, tightly controlled rage.

  “I see nothing conclusive here, Mr. Sandoval,” she said when I had finished.

  I played her a tape made by Thierry when he’d been alive, in his later years. Than I played the record of his last moments, not just the short-term memories of sounds, but the visual memories, which Rho had clumsily processed and translated at Thomas’s request. Faces, oddly inhuman at first, and then fitting a pattern, being recognized; the memories not refined by the personal mind’s own interpreters; raw and immediate and therefore surprisingly crude. The office where he died, his bulky hands on the table, the twitching and shifting of his eyes from point to point in the room, difficult to follow. The fading. The end of the record.

  The president looked down at the slate, eyebrows raised, hands tightly clenched on the desktop.

  I leaned forward to retrieve the slate. She grabbed it herself, held it shakily in both hands, and suddenly threw it across the office. It banged against a foamed rock wall and caromed to the metabolic carpet.

  “It’s not a hoax,” I said. “We were shocked, as well.”

  “Get out,” she said. “Get the hell out, now.”

  I turned to leave, but before I could reach the door, she began to cry. Her shoulders slumped and she buried her face in her hands. I moved toward her to do something, to say I was sorry again, but she screamed at me to leave, and I did.

  “How did she react?” Thomas asked. I sat in his private quarters, my mind a million miles away, contemplating sins I had never imagined I would feel guilty for. He handed me a glass of terrestrial Madeira and I swallowed it neat, then looked over the cube files on his living room wall.

  “She didn’t believe me,” I said.

  “Then?”

  “I convinced her. I played the tape.”

  Thomas filled my glass again.

  “And?”

  I still would not face him.

  “Well?”

  “She began to cry,” I said.

  Thomas smiled. “Good. Then?”

  I gave him a look of puzzlement and disapproval. “She wasn’t faking it, Thomas. She was devastated.”

  “Right. What did she do next?”

  “She ordered me out of her office.”

  “No setup for a later meeting?”

  I shook my head.

  “Sounds like you really knocked a hole in her armor, Mickey.”

  “I must have,” I said solemnly.

  “Good,” Thomas said. “I think we’ve got our extra time. Go home now and get some rest. You’ve redeemed yourself a hundred times over.”

  “I feel like a shit, Thomas.”

  “You’re an honorable shit, doing only when others do unto you,” Thomas said. He offered his hand to me but I did not accept it. “This is for your family,” he reminded me, eyes flinty.

  I could not forget the tears coming, the fierce, shattering anger, the dismay and betrayal.

  “Thank you again, Micko,” Thomas said.

  “Call me Mickey, please,” I said as I left.

  Alienation without must be accompanied by alienation within; that is the law for every social level, even individuals. To harm one’s fellows, even one’s enemies, harms you, takes away some essential element from your self respect and self image. This must be the way it is when fighting a full-fledged war, I told myself, only worse. Gradually, by killing your enemies, you kill your old self. If there is room for a new self, for an extraordinary redevelopment, then you grow and become more mature, though sadder.r />
  If there is no room, you die inside or go crazy.

  Alone in my dry, warm water tank, creature comforts aplenty and mind in a state of complete misery, I played my own Shakespearean scene of endless, unvoiced soliloquy. I held a party of all my selves and we gathered to argue and fight.

  I felt badly for my anger toward Thomas. Still, he had turned me into a weapon and I had been effective, and that hurt. I learned the hard way that Fiona Task-Felder was not a heartless monster; she was a human, playing her cards as she thought they must be played, not for reasons of self-aggrandizement, but following orders.

  What effect would our news have on her superiors, the directors of the political and secular arms of the Logologist Church?

  If Thomas actually leaked the news to the public of the Triple, what would the effect be on millions of faithful Logologists?

  Logology was a personal madness expanded by chance and the laws of society into an institution, self-perpetuating, even growing with time. We could eventually tap the experiences, the memories, of the man at the fount of the madness. We could in time disillusion the members, perhaps even destroy the Church. None of this gave me the least satisfaction. I longed for the innocence I had known but not been aware of, three months past.

  We had bought our extra time, and here it was; the Task-Felder arm of Logology was quiet. On the Triple nets, there was nary a murmur from the Earthside forces.

  Ten hours after returning from Port Yin, I left my water tank to cross the white line. William was jubilant. “You just missed Rho,” he told me as I entered the lab. “She’ll be back in an hour. I have it now, Micko. Tomorrow I’ll do the trial run. Everything’s stable—”

  “Did you find out what caused your last problem?”

  William pursed his lips as if I’d mentioned something dirty. “No,” he said. “I’d just as soon forget it. I can’t reproduce the effect now, and the QL is no help.”

  “Beware those ghosts,” I said mordantly. “They come back.”

  “You’re both so cheerful,” he said. “You’d think we were all awaiting doomsday. What did Thomas have you do, assassinate somebody?”

  “No,” I said. “Not literally.”

  “Well, try to cheer up a little—I’d like to have both of you help me tomorrow.”

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  “I’ll need more than one pair of hands, and I’ll also need official witnesses. The record-keepers aren’t emotionally satisfying; real human testimony can shake loose more grant money, I suspect, especially if you and Rho are giving the testimony to possible financiers.”

  We’ll be too controversial to squeeze dust from any financiers, I thought. “Are we going to market absolute zero?”

  “We’ll market something new and rare. Never in the history of the universe—until tomorrow—has matter been cooled and tricked to reach a temperature of zero Kelvin. It will make the nets all over the Triple, Mickey. It might even take some of the heat off Sandoval BM, if I may pun. But you know that; why are you being so pessimistic?”

  “My apologies, William.”

  “Judging from your face, you’d think we’ve already lost,” he said.

  “No. We may have won,” I said.

  “Then cheer up a little, if only to give me some breathing room in all this gloom.”

  He returned to work; I walked out on the bridge and deliberately stood between the force disorder pumps to punish my body with that fingernail-on-slate sensation.

  Rho and I joined William in the Ice Pit laboratory at eight hundred. He assigned Rho to monitoring the pumps, which he ramped to full activity. I sat watch on the refrigerators. There didn’t seem to be any real need for either Rho or I to be there. It soon became obvious we had been invited more to provide company than to help or witness.

  William was outwardly calm, inwardly very nervous, which he betrayed by short bursts of mild pique, quickly apologized for and retracted. I didn’t mind him; somehow it all made me feel better, took my mind off events outside the Ice Pit.

  We were a strange crew; Rho even more subdued than William, unaffected by the grating of the disorder pumps; I getting progressively drunker and drunker with an uncalled-for sense of separation and relief from our troubles; William making a circuit of all the equipment, ending at the highly polished Cavity containing the cells, mounted on levitation absorbers just beyond the left branch of the bridge.

  Far above us, barely visible in the spilled light from the laboratory and the bridge, hung the dark gray vault of the volcanic void, obscured by a debris net.

  At nine hundred, William’s calm cracked wide open when the QL announced another reverse in the lambda phase, and conditions within the cells that it could not interpret. “Are they the same conditions as last time?” William asked, fingers of both hands drumming the top surface of the QL.

  “The readings and energy requirements are the same,” the QL said. Rho pointed out that the force disorder pumps were showing chaotic fluctuations in their “draw” from the cells. “Has that happened before?”

  “I’ve never had the pumps ramped so high before. No, it hasn’t happened,” William explained. “QL, what would happen to our cells if we just turned off the stabilizing energy?”

  “I cannot guess,” the QL replied. It flatly refused to answer any similar questions, which irritated William.

  “You said something earlier about this possibly reflecting future events in the cells,” I reminded him. “What did you mean by that?”

  “I couldn’t think of any other explanation,” William said. “I still can’t. QL won’t confirm or deny the possibility.”

  “Yes, but what did you mean? How could that happen?”

  “If we achieved some hitherto unknown state in the cells, there could be a chronological backwash, something echoing into the past, our now.”

  “Sounds pretty speculative to me,” Rho commented.

  “It’s more than speculative, it’s desperate dust,” William said. “Without it, however, I’m lost.”

  “Have you correlated times between the changes?” Rho asked.

  “Yes,” William said, sighing.

  “Ok. Then try changing your scheduled time for achieving zero.”

  William looked across the lab at his wife, both eyebrows raised, mouth open, giving his long face a simian appearance. “What?”

  “Re-set your machines. Make the zero-moment earlier or later. And don’t change it back again.”

  William produced his most sardonic, pitying smile. “Rho, my sweet, but you’re crazier than I am.”

  “Try it,” she said.

  He swore but did as she suggested, setting his equipment for five minutes later.

  The lambda phase reversal ended. Five minutes later, it began again.

  “Christ,” he whispered. “I don’t dare touch it now.”

  “Better not,” Rho said, smiling. “What about the previous incident?”

  “It was continuous, no lapses,” he said.

  “There. You’re going to succeed, and this is a prior result, if such a thing is possible in quantum logic.”

  “QL?” William queried the thinker.

  “Time reverse circumstances are only possible if no message is communicated,” it said. “You are claiming to receive confirmation of experimental success.”

  “But success at what?” William said. “The message is completely ambiguous … We don’t know what our experiment will do to cause this condition in the past.”

  “I’m dizzy, having to think with those damned pumps going,” I said.

  “Wait until they’re completely tuned to the cells,” William warned, enjoying my discomfort. His grin bared all his teeth. He made final preparations, calling out numbers and settings to us, all superfluously. We repeated just to keep up his morale. From here on, the experiment was automatic, controlled by the QL.

  “I think the reversal will end in a few minutes,” William said, standing beside the polished Cavity. “Call it
a quantum hunch.”

  A few minutes later, the QL reported yet again the end of reversal. William nodded with mystified satisfaction. “We’re not scientists, Micko,” he said cheerily. “We’re magicians. God help us all.”

  The clocks silently counted their numbers. William walked down the bridge and made a final adjustment in the right hand pump with a small hex wrench. “Cross your fingers,” he said.

  “Is this it?” Rho asked.

  “In twenty seconds I’ll tune the pumps to the cells, then turn off the magnetic fields …”

  “Good luck,” Rho said. He turned away from her, turned back and extended his arms, folding her into them, hugging her tightly. His face shined with enthusiasm; he seemed gleeful, childlike.

  I clenched my teeth when he tuned the pumps. The sensation was trebled; my long bones seemed to become flutes piping a shrill, unmelodic quantum tune. Rho closed her eyes and groaned. “That’s atrocious,” she said.

  “It’s sweet music,” William said, shaking his head as if to rid himself of a fly. “Here goes.” He beat the seconds with his upheld finger. “Field … off.” A tiny green light flashed in the air over the main lab console, the QL’s signal.

  “Unknown phase reversal. Lambda reversal,” the QL announced.

  “God damn it all to hell!” William shrieked, stamping his foot.

  Simultaneously with his shout, there came the sound of four additional footstamps above the cavern overhead, precisely as if gigantic upstairs neighbors had jumped on a resonant floor. William held his left foot in the air, astonished by what seemed to be echoes of his anger. His expression had cycled beyond frustration, into something like expectant glee: Yes by God, what next?

  Rho’s personal slate called for her attention in a thin voice. My own slate chimed; William was not wearing his.

  “There is an emergency situation,” our slates announced simultaneously. “Emergency power reserves are in effect.” The lights dimmed and alarms went off throughout the lab. “There have been explosions in the generators supplying power to this station.”

  Rho looked at me with eyes wide, lips drawn into a line.

  The mechanical slate voices announced calmly, in unison, “There has been damage to components above the Ice Pit void, including heat radiators.” This information came from sentries around the station. Every slate in the station—and emergency speaker systems throughout the warrens and alleys—would be repeating the same information.