The Silkie

by A. E. van Vogt

  Baxter spoke again, urgently. 'Now that these beings have logic of levels, they'll be able to trigger it in you even as you're triggering it in them. Have you thought of that?'

  Since there was no defense against logic of levels, Cemp hadn't even considered it. There being no point in thinking about it, now that it had been called to his attention ... he didn't. He converted to Nijjan and projected the thought I want you to recall the moment when the message arrived telling you the lie that you were a Nijjan.'

  Between such experts as Baxter and himself, it required less than a minute to make a study of the wave patterns and to measure the subtle variations of the Nijjan version of the telepathic band of the Special People — and to superimpose on that exact band and that individual variation all two hundred and seventy-eight dichotomies, known to be the most confusing of the verbal opposites that had mentally tangled human beings since the beginning of language.

  Right-wrong ... good-bad ... justice-injustice — a living brain receiving for the first time such a madness in the time of a few seconds could go into a state of total confusion.

  At key points along that train of words, Cemp placed large, hypnotic-type command loads designed to influence the receiving Nijjan brain during the confusion: first to utilise Cemp's own previous experience to transport him through spare; and second, to set up a basic logic of levels in the receiving Nijjan brain....

  Cemp arrived — it was part of his hypnotic command to G'Tono — outside the atmosphere of G'Tono's planet. As he descended toward the surface, he saw there was a great city below and a huge ocean beside it.

  He landed on an isolated beach of that ocean where the thunder of the surf and the smell of the sea briefly enticed him. Ignoring that sudden desire for the feel of water, he walked toward the city. At the outskirts, he boldly entered the first of the odd-shaped dwellings he came to — odd in that the doorways were low and broad, and inside he had to stoop because the ceilings were less than six feet high. There were three chunky octopus-like aliens inside. But he saw them; they never saw him. Cemp manipulated the hallucinatory mechanisms of the three, whereupon they observed him as one of themselves. After studying their minds, Cemp carefully went to a nearby street, climbed up to a roof, and watched the octopus beings who went by.

  As Cemp had already correctly analysed, these beings were not dangerous to him, and they were very definitely not up to defending themselves. After reading the minds of several hundreds, Cemp did not detect a single suspicious thought. The fundamental goodness of the beings he observed decided him on his next move.

  Minutes later, he walked in on several leading members of the government, hallucinated them into seeing him as a human being, and thought at them, 'where is the one who can betray?'

  The tense creatures had drawn away from him. They did not understand the significance of his question, for they said that on Nijja no one ever betrayed anyone.

  The answer amused Cemp in a steely-grim fashion. It meant as he had suspected, that there was only one betrayal cycle in action on the entire planet — the true Nijjan as the betrayer and all these beings who must conform.

  He directed another thought. 'Has this planet always been called Nijja?'

  They knew of only one other name. Anthropological studies of their antiquity indicated that at the time the common language had begun, some indeterminate thousands of years before, the name had been Thela, meaning Home of the Brave. Nijja, on the other hand, in their language meant Home of the Pure.

  Obviously, the name would have to have a meaning in their language as well as in that of the true Nijjans. A different meaning, of course.

  'I see,' said Cemp.

  And he did see.

  With that, he asked one more question. 'where can I find the one who requires purity?'

  'Oh, you can see him only through the police.'

  Where else? thought Cemp to himself sarcastically.

  Whereupon, the exact, proper time having gone by and the exact moment for G'Tono to awaken having come, he directed a thought on the Special People telepathic band. 'I am that Silkie who confronted you after you killed my Silkie associate — and I'm sure now it was you who killed him. As I now understand it, this planet illustrates what you meant when you stated that Nijjans had no home planet in the ordinary sense. All planets controlled by a Nijjan are part of the Nijjan system — the nearest place, in other words, where a single ruling Nijjan could be located. Is that correct?'

  Along with the message, Cemp projected the thought that would trigger the logic-of-levels cycle he had set up in G'Tono's brain. Having done so, Cemp spoke again to the focal point nearly three hundred miles away. 'You'd better talk to me before it's too late.'

  Moments after that, Cemp sensed a peculiar sensation in his transmorpha system — N'Yata, he thought. He remembered Baxter's fear that he, too, might be attacked, and here it was. It interested him intensely to observe that it was the mechanism for changing form that was affected; it was not surprising, really, but nobody had known. By the time he had that thought, he had already accepted his personal disaster. From the beginning he had had to consider himself expendable.

  Cemp felt briefly sad for Joanne. He presumed that he would die, and her life would now have to go on without him. As for what might happen to the Nijjans ... Cemp felt a chill, recalling what the computer had predicted — that the Nijjan logic of levels would be bigger than what had happened to the Glis.

  Again he wondered, What could be bigger than that?

  The awareness remained with him only fleetingly. Abruptly, he didn't have time to consider anything except what was happening to him.

  * * *

  XXXII

  FOR CEMP, there was, first of all, a kaleidoscope of visual images.

  He saw Nijjan bodies and faces — if the upper part of the pyramidal shape could be considered a face. The images streamed by, not exactly silently, for thoughts came from some of them.

  Cemp himself seemed to be floating along in a timeless void, for each set of Nijjan thoughts came to him separate and distinct:

  'But how did he do it?'

  'What exactly is happening?'

  'Why not kill him and then solve the problem ourselves?'

  'Because we don't even know what part of the Nijjan brain was utilised for the attack, that's why. Besides, we have no proof yet that we can kill him. In this Silkie, logic of levels seems to be a time phenomenon. In us, it's of course the space thing.'

  As these thoughts and others like them whispered into Cemp's awareness, he was conscious of a developing stir in the greater distance of the Nijjan world. Other minds, at first a few, then many, then tens of thousands, turned their attention in amazement and took note of him and had their thoughts ... and were hooked into G'Tono's disaster.

  Like an anthill into which somebody has kicked deeply, the Nijjan system began to roil and churn with innumerable reactions. What they were afraid of briefly held Cemp's astonished interest — two bodies cannot occupy the same space or two spaces the same body; there was danger that this would now happen.

  More basic, the space-time continuum, though it was a self-sustaining mechanism of immense but finite complication, needed Nijjans to survive — that was the thought. So that if a Nijjan were overstimulated, space might have a reaction.

  That was how Lan Jedd had been killed a Nijjan consciously oversimulating himself had in some small, precise way elicited a reaction in the space occupied by Lan's body.

  Push at the universe, at space. A Nijjan might be affected. Push at a Nijjan; the universe would push back or adjust to the push in some fundamental way.

  What are they implying? thought Cemp, staggered. What are they saying?

  Between the universe and the Nijjans a symbiotic relation. If one was unstable, so was the other. And the Nijjans were becoming unstable.

  As Cemp's awareness reached that point, there was a flash of alarmed agreement that extended through every observing Nijjan mind. whereupon, N'Yata t
elepathed to Cemp, 'I speak for Nijja. We're in the process of being destroyed by a chain reaction. Is there anything we can do to save ourselves, any agreement we can make?

  'In us,' N'Yata continued in that desperate way, 'awareness of the connection of life to all atoms in the universe was not dulled. Somehow, in those long-ago days of the beginning of things, we automatically worked out a method of maintaining consciousness without constantly endangering ourselves. Other life forms had to attenuate or shut off direct contact with space and its contents. We Nijjans can therefore be destroyed if we are forced to a state of order from the chaos in which, alone, life can survive, and this forcing you have now done.'

  It was as far-fetched a story as Cemp had ever heard. 'You're a bunch of liars,' he said contemptuously, 'and the proof is that G'Tono could be victimised by an overflow of opposites.

  'The truth is,' he went on, 'I couldn't believe any promise you made.'

  There was a pause, brief but pregnant; finally a mental sigh from N'Yata. 'It is interesting,'. she said, resigned, 'that the one race we feared above all others — the Silkies — has now made a successful attack on us. Because of the overweening pride of countless Nijjans, we are particularly vulnerable. Each Nijjan, as he tunes in, has a logic-of-levels cycle triggered in him, and there's nothing we can do to warn him ahead of time. What you're saying is, you won't listen to any argument against this.'

  It was more than that, Cemp saw. Between these two races there was no quick way to cooperation. That would be true, he speculatively realised, even if the fate of the universe depended on it. The Nijjan destruction of Silkies had been too remorseless.

  But also, there was really nothing he could do. Logic of levels, once started, could not be interrupted. The cycle would complete in them and in him and take whatever course the logic required.

  A brain mechanism had been triggered. The pattern of that mechanism had been set ages before, and it had no other way to be.

  That was as far as his thought had time to go.

  There was an interruption. Two things happened, then, almost simultaneously.

  From N'Yata's mind to his there leaped an emotion of anguish. 'Oh, it's happening,' she said,

  'What's happening?' Cemp's mind yelled at her.

  If there was ever an answer from her, Cemp did not receive it. For at that precise instant he felt a strange, strong feeling inside him.

  That was the second event. He was on Earth with Joanne. It was at the beginning of their marriage, and there she was, and there he was, completely real both of them. Outside the sun was shining.

  It grew dark suddenly.

  That was earlier, he realised. More than a hundred years before he was born.

  This is the time change in myself, Cemp thought. Logic of levels affecting him, taking him somehow earlier in time, a kind of genetic memory journey.

  Night. A dark sky. A Silkie floated silently down from the heavens ... Cemp realised with a start that that was the first Silkie to come to Earth, the one who, it was later pretended was created in a laboratory.

  The scene, so briefly observed, yielded to a view of the city inside the Glis meteorite. There were the space Silkies, and he was there also — or so it seemed. Probably, it was his ancestor with his transmorpha cells — the DNA-RNA memory of earlier bodies.

  A space scene came next. A blue-white sun in the distance. Other Silkies around him in the darkness. A contented happiness was in all of them.

  Cemp had an impression that the time was long ago indeed, twenty or more thousand Earth years, before contact with Nijjans

  Now, a more primitive scene showed. Millions of years earlier, his impression. Something himself, but different, smaller, less intelligent, more creaturelike — clung to a small rock in space. Darkness.

  Another scene. Billions of years. And not darkness but brightness. Where? Impossible to be sure. Inside a sun? He vaguely suspected, yes.

  It was too hot. He was flung in a titanic eruption of matter into the far blackness.

  Flung earlier.

  As he receded to an even remoter time, Cemp felt himself somehow still connected to G'Tono and to the other Nijjans, somehow held to what, for want of a better understanding, he decided was a mental relationship.

  Because of that tenuous mind connection and interaction, he was able to sense the Nijjan disaster from a safe distance in time.

  It was possible, then, that he was the only living being who, from his vantage point, witnessed the destruction of the eight-billion-light-year-in-diameter universe, of which Earth's galaxy was but one small bit of cosmic flitter.

  * * *

  XXXIII

  THE START of it was very similar to when the betrayal-win cycle in G'Tono had been triggered toward ultimate win during his second confrontation with Cemp.

  Swiftly, there came the moment when all those connected Nijjan bodies reached the dividing line between becoming ultrasmall or superlarge. But this time the victims had no choice. Winning was not involved. It was a logic-of-levels cycle, in its ultimate meaning, operating on and through innumerable individuals, each of whom had the potential for that ultimate state.

  Every rock has in it the history of the universe; every life form has evolved from a primitive state to a sophisticated one. Touch the wellspring of that evolution in a living thing — or a rock — and it has to remember.

  For the millions of Nijjans, it was the end. The process that was happening to them was not concerned with maintaining identity.

  One moment each Nijjan was a unit object, a living being, with location and mass; the next, the Nijjan brain center that had the ability to move the individual Nijjan through space tried to move him simultaneously into all spaces. Instantly, the entire Nijjan race was shredded into its members' component atoms.

  On the object level, the process scattered them, put one atom here, another there, quadrillions more in as many places.

  At the moment when all Nijjans became as large as the universe, the universe inverted, in relation to them, to its real normalcy, to the perfect order that is inherent in a dot the size of an atom, which is unaffected by other atoms.

  It was not a shrinking phenomenon. Turning inside-out was the best analogy. The collapse of a bubble.

  Cemp, who was merely tuned in to G'Tono and the others, felt his own thought expand with the doomed Nijjans to a state that was in exact proportion to the size of the universe with which the Nijjans had interacted.

  Having become, in this purely mental way, larger than space and time, Cemp mentally blinked away his dizziness and looked around him. At once he saw something in the great dark. He was distracted, and he forgot the dot that had been the universe.

  It thereupon disappeared.

  The tiny spot of light, the universe, which one moment had glowed with such brilliance, winked out and was gone.

  Cemp was aware of its vanishment with a portion of his mind, but he could not immediately turn his attention away from the sight that had made him forget.

  He was looking at the 'tree.'

  He was at such a remote viewpoint, at such a vastness in relation to all things, that, yes, he saw the golden tree.

  Presently, he forced himself to look away from that jeweled thing.

  When Cemp finally, after what seemed to be several seconds, was able to consider the disappearance of the universe once more, he thought, How long has it been gone? A thousand, a million, a trillion years or no time at all?

  Perhaps in some future when he reached this viewpoint, not by artificial projection, but by growth, he would be able to count the time elapsed in such a phenomenon.

  He was still thinking about it, bemused, when he felt an instability in his position. He thought, Oh-oh, I'm going to invert again.

  The first evidence of his unstable state was that the glorious tree disappeared. Realisation came that he probably had only moments to find the universe.

  How do you find a universe?

  As Cemp discovered, then, it was not
really a problem. The entire meaning of logic of levels was based on the certainty that all life forms at some inner root know the origin of things and that by the very nature of their structure they are balancing themselves against all other things.

  There is no moment when the tiniest insect or plant or rock or grain of sand is not interacting. The atoms at the centers of remote stars are part of that interaction.

  The problem is not whether the interaction is happening. The problem is that if one is to function, his awareness of many things had to be reduced.

  Such attenuation is not normally conscious. Hence, sensitive to many good things is automatically cut down so close to zero that in this universe, apparently only the Nijjans had retained, through all the vicissitudes of their evolution, the cellular method of space awareness and control.

  As Cemp remembered his universe, it began to interact with him, to become in essence what he knew it to be. And there it suddenly was, a dot of golden brightness.

  Cemp sensed by the interaction he continued to feel that it was still re-forming deep inside itself, responding exactly to his universal memory of it. He had a mighty thought: Before it all reverts to exactly the way it was, why don't I change it?

  Obviously, there was no time for detailed consideration. A few flash thoughts, quick judgments, snap decisions and that would be it. It was never or now. For-ever.

  The Nijjans?

  In a way, he could understand that they had felt it necessary to protect themselves and the space-time continuum by destroying races that were capable of challenging Nijjan hegemony. So they were not as guilty as he had once considered them. But the truth was, the universe did not need a race that could destroy it. It was time the place became permanent.

  Cemp refused to remember the Nijjans in his recollection of the plenum.

  So what about human beings, the Special People, and the space Silkies?

  Cemp's immediate solution — in his universe they all became Earth Silkies with the ability to change to any form and a complete willingness to play a benevolent police rôle every where in space.