“A pilot scheme,” smiled Boyd ingratiatingly, his hand lingering on Mara’s shoulder. “It’s our job after all . . . to know.”
There was no golden desert visible now . . .
One great dune was all she could see—curling over at the top like a frozen Hokusai wave. The Black Hole warped her mind’s view of the desert into this single, vast, static lip of sand . . .
No wonder Habib hadn’t been able to find his way to Earth when this thing hung nearby, dominating the whole field of vision. Where stars were normally spread out as endless ripples of sand, the Black Hole was a whole warped desert in itself.
She hovered by a pure mirror pool, beneath the overhang of that awful cliff, and realized she was already at the event horizon, seeing the symbol of it in her mind.
The sand dune seemed to be falling in on her perpetually, like a breaker crashing, but in this frozen landscape of the mind—beyond events— nothing moved. Nothing could move when there was no “here,” no “there.”
Somewhere inside that blank mirror was the mind she’d been sent to find.
She had the barest sensation of Habib riding her, but couldn’t get through to him to ask advice. Telemedium and rider had so little contact. Till now this had been the main consolation in being a
Navy mind-whore. That, and the beauty of the desert. Now, it was frightening. She was so utterly on her own.
Another thing made her anxious. Was it she, or Habib, who was supposed to contact the mind in the mirror of the pool? Normally, it was the rider who spoke to rider. But this mirror had no rider in it. She remembered something Habib had warned her about . . . the mirror of illusion that reflects yourself, that can trap you in it . . .
She knew so little and it seemed so strange and dangerous here.
Shortly afterward, in that timeless stasis, love dawned for Mara . . .
There was a consciousness—a presence in the mirror pool. A craving for Otherness. This being seemed so alone, and could love so deep.
But how could he reach out a hand to her, when he knew nothing of length and breadth and depth? She came from beyond the event horizon—but how could anyone come from beyond that?
“How can you be?” thought the mirror pool.
He couldn’t show her his face. His body. He had none. But he could search in her mind for words and make her lips whisper them.
Mara, tom away from her Swedish village of cool forest, clear lakes, goose honk, by Earth’s Naval draft board, hadn’t really awakened till now. The past three months had been such a false, horrid nightmare.
Words formed as he found the poetry in her soul. Her words—or the Other’s. It didn’t matter.
There was emotional identity. And what’s another word for that, but Love?
He cried:
“Outside, I should like to see
Your Inside
Outside, show me your Inside!
Outside, are you brave enough?’’
And she replied:
“Inside, are you brave?’’
He asked:
“That I should go outside myself
Who have only myself to be in
Is that what you demand?’’
“Yes!’’ she cried to her lover.
What did those sailors and scientists know of this? With all their brash talk of Surface Velocities equal to the Speed of Light. Of Singularities and Strangeness! What did they know of true Singularity, those trashy men! With their Kruskal Coordinates for Schwarzschild Spacetime, what did they really know! With their tin starship flying outside the Surface of Infinite Redshift, far beyond the Event Horizon—beyond this lonely pool where time had frozen—how could they establish a relationship, locked outside as they were forever?
In the Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, her body lay in a trance . . .
“The boat goes round and round,” she sang,
“In the circles of Day and Night
But never do I lose my grip upon You.
You
Shall be my oar!”
What did those wretched scientists want her to do? Interrogate this being about his state of mind and how he saw physical conditions inside a collapsed star?
“Could I
Describe Height,” she sang, to taunt the scientists and Bu-Psych-Sec officers, if they were spying on her voice successfully up there,
“I would choose A star at the head A star at the feet
And under the feet a mirror-image Concluding in a star.”
They wanted to hear the secrets of a black Hole. Yet it wasn’t black at all, but a startling pearly white; shimmering, opalescent, surrounded by that yellow lip of sand like a curling shell. It was the color of mother of pearl, set in gold. They wanted to know about Length and Breadth and Height? She sang out:
“Could I describe Breadth I would choose an embrace
Because I have senses
False and primitive
And cannot grasp what really Exists
There is no Star
Where your head is
There is no middle-point
Where your feet stand
But an inch of your loveliness
I have known.”
They wanted to know about distances and measurements? She shouted joyfully at the top of her voice:
“An inch of your loveliness I have known!”
Mara felt the brush of the being’s presence on her lips. And then his image grew clearer—as though he had at last understood how to communicate himself, in his own thought forms rather than in poetry filched from her own mind. He made a clearer and clearer statement of identity. Some of it totally evaded her, presenting itself in mathematical or abstract alien symbols she had no knowledge of—forged according to an alien logic from a region where the laws of logic, and even mathematics, had been radically different from the logics devised by humans to suit a universe of elements coherently bonded together into galaxies, stars and planets. But much came through. And when he failed, his symbols hunted for some other means of resonance within her. Concepts using the raw symbolism of her own thought processes for internalizing sensations— tactile, kinesthetic, erotic sensations—took the place of words then.
In this blend of words and formalized sensations, he coded his message to her, presenting her with the Black Hole he inhabited as the essential mode of existence; the shadow cast by which constituted the “solid” universe of stars and planets.
He reversed the Real and the Unreal for her, till she knew the joy of escape that Habib must have tasted three years earlier.
“Do you not know that this is the Real, the other the Unreal? Let me tell you about the origin of things . . . Mara.” His mind reached below her name for the personal symbol cluster attached to it. “Dreamspinner . . . Shapechanger . . . Lady Riding on a Stick Through the Starlit Night. . .
“The Energy Egg exploded before the start of i ‘things.’ (By ‘things’ I mean stars, starships, bodies.) It was not the Birth of Things. For a very short time there was a true physical universe—” She sensed him searching her mind for measurements of time. “It lasted . . . ten to the minus forty ‘seconds,’ by and large, this universe. Soon—and when I conceive ‘soon,’ I conceive a time long before that universe was one ‘second’ old—all that would later be ‘matter’ had already become a near-infinity of tiny ‘black holes. ’ Space 1 and Matter march hand in hand. But how could so i tiny a volume of newly created Space contain so much hatched energy? It could not grow fast enough. The only way Space could expand swiftly enough to contain the hatching was by expanding inwardly, creating a myriad holes.
That was the one and only mode that so much could exist in—holes. Each hole could be no larger than ten to the minus twenty-three ‘centimeters’—”
“Numbers so small! I can’t feel them. They mean nothing.”
“And of these tiny holes is all ‘matter’ made. Atomic particles are only a tightly bonded state of these; and in binding, these holes release huge energies. It was th
ose energies, and their release, that powered the expansion of this thing you call ‘universe’—not the hatching of the egg itself. Do you understand, Mara?” A touchless caress indicated the curve of the Hokusai wave, beyond which was a universe of stars, starships, bodies, and matter. “That is only a para-universe—a secondary cosmos you inhabit. You have crossed over into the no-place where Reality is. Another was here. How long ago? He would have joined me but the illusion of matter dragged him back—”
“Habib . . .’’
He reached below the name for its symbols: the Bedouin, the pilgrim to Mecca, the escapee from shabby caravanserais . . .
“Yes. It was him. But now you can join me. Will you join me, Mara?”
“Are you . . . God? You say you were there at the creation of things!”
“Is ‘God’ a creator of‘things’? I left before things began. I am not responsible for things.” She sensed anger and frustration. “Things are only shadows cast by knots in the eternal, vital void that the true universe collapsed into. This is what hatched from the egg of being, not that, out there.
This is the true purpose of creation, not that. So join me, Mara, be free of illusion and be my bride—”
Are you a devil then? she thought fearfully. She stared at the timeless pool, tasted his faceless kisses on her cheeks, his fingerless ruffling of her hair, in that place where the Hokusai wave hung like the ultimate battlement—not penning in the chaos of the Black Hole, but resisting the weak thrust of the silt of matter that had piled up against this mind’s domain over aeons of spurious reality; stars, starships, bodies . . .
“But what are you?” she hesitated.
“I am the Lover,” the answer came. “The Allembracing. There is no loneliness. But I invite you—”
She remembered the Tantric myth of Shiva and Shakti, the sexual pair so deeply joined in eternal copulation that they did not know of their difference. Shiva and Shakti, united at first, had separated. Shakti had danced the dance of illusion to convince Shiva he was not One, but Many, creating from her womb the world of multiple objects existing in the illusory flow of time. He, then, the Void, played the role of Shakti, to the Shiva of the matter universe which she, and Habib, represented. The fact that in the myth Shakti was woman, and Shiva man, was irrelevant. “He” had been as ready to love Habib . . . as he was ready to love her. “He” was an arbitrary pronoun, at best.
Yet she sensed a terrible danger if she yielded to him, if “solid” matter was to be wooed by the original nothingness at its heart. Perhaps in a few billion years a final copulation of the “Universe” with “Void” was destined to liberate the energy to restart the cycle . . . But so soon—already?
But why should she care about danger to stars and ships and bodies? A surge of joy took hold of her. She could be the first creature of matter to live the Tantric myth right through to its end, and be truly loved, as no one else had, by this being who was not “being.”
“You are the Lover; then love me—” she whispered.
And the mind in the Black Hole gathered about. Her lips were brushed, her hair stroked, the palms of her hands traced sensuously.
The Hokusai wave itself began to tremble; not to fall in on her—rather, to roll backward, away from the still pool, towering up kilometers into the void sky . . .
Through a mist she sensed cries, orders— voices tissue-thin and torn like tatters in a storm. For the Black Hole was changing its configuration in space, gathering itself for an assault on Being and Matter; and as charged particles were sucked in toward it they sprayed the danger signal of increased outpourings of synchroton radiation and gravity pulses . . .
As he reached out to embrace her, along the line of her thoughts, tracing the yantric geometry of her teletrance back to its origin in the orbiting starship, dune and pool dissolved, and she was snatched away . . .
They had executed Emergency Return Procedure on her—a violent coitus interruptus of chemicals and sheer brute force.
A syringe gleamed in Nielstrom’s hand. Habib lay weeping, naked, in a corner of the room, his penis a shrivelled button. He coughed, a thin smear of blood on his lips; hunched over his nakedness and bruises, gathering the energy to reach his aba and cover himself. It looked as though some urban vigilantes had caught him raping Mara and beaten him up. Mainly this was the action of the trance-cancel drug whose results showed so dramatically—a massive physiological aversion: cold turkey compressed into seconds. But perhaps, too, some gratuitous violence had been used in wrenching him away from Mara and depositing him there.
Mara hurt so badly that the pain crumpled her into a foetal ball, around a belly raped by withdrawal and not by entry. Her nipples were bee stings mounted on top of cones of soft agony like tortured snails stripped of their shells and teased with burning matches (a flicker image from Lew Boyd’s childhood sucked in during the decaying moments of the trance).
Lodwy Rinehart stood there in the room with Boyd and Nielstrom, his face blank stone.
They played tapes of her poetry back at her. The voice was slurred and smeared, barely recognizable as Mara’s, but the words were identifiable enough. At least the poetry was.
“May you rot in Hell, Boyd,” swore Habib through his tears. “May Allah use your guts for spinning yarn.”
“There’s no alien being in there, is there, Habib?”
“Of course there’s a—a being in there,” Mara gasped. “I met him. Touched him—”
“Even fell in love with him,” smirked Nielstrom.
Mara couldn’t understand what was happen- [ ing, except that it must be one more cruel effort to humiliate her.
Boyd’s lip curled in anger and contempt.
“Did you think you’d fooled us, Habib? But nobody deserts the Navy, mister—but nobody! That’s what cathexis with home is all about.”
He swung round on Mara.
“And as for you, little witch—didn’t you suspect what Habib was up to? No, I guess you didn’t, or you’d have been more scared for your sanity.”
His every word was a slap in her face, so recently brushed by love.
“I don’t understand any of it,” she moaned.
“Leave me alone—leave me to myself.”
“Ah there it is! The root of the matter exposed. To be left to yourselves. That’s what you’d like, isn’t it? But how, eh? You can’t trance-trip without a rider. That’s where the energy comes from, to jump light-years, the rider’s sexual frustrations. You keep him rooted to Earth, he keeps you rooted to the ship. The psychological security of the ship and its whole communication net rely on this interplay—”
Mara wept, at these hateful, bewildering people around her. She cried for the still pool beneath the dune . . .
“Why don’t you tell her, Habib?” Boyd sneered. “You’re supposed to be her teacher.”
“Tell her what? She knows what is down there.”
“Does she? Shall I tell her what we know? There’s an event horizon—a one-way membrane into the Black Hole. But what if a mind could perform a balancing act on the very horizon itself, eh, Habib? If you could attach yourself to the standing wave there? No more Navy duty then, Habib—you’d be able to hole up in there and forget about us.” He smiled bitterly at his own unintended pun. .
“What’s this about standing waves, Boyd?” the captain demanded. “Don’t make me play guessing games on my own ship.”
“It’s something we’ve theorized about at Bu- Psych-Sec, sir. The universe hangs together because of causal relationships. But ever since Pauli, in the twentieth century, scientists have speculated about other, alternative relationships—noncausal ones. Clearly these telemediums function because of this noncausal aspect of things. But with the explosive development of star travel, we’ve been far too busy exploiting the phenomenon efficiently at Bu-Psych-Sec, and holding society together, to do really deep research. Damn it, we’re just fighting to hold the line. You’ve got to protect society against the disruptive effects of star trav
el! Well—whereabouts in the universe do you find a tangible physical boundary between the causal and the noncausal?”
“The event horizon,” nodded Rinehart.
“On one side is the world of cause and effect,” Boyd went on effervescently. “On the other side there isn’t any meaningful framework for cause and effect to operate in. Effectively, it’s a noncausal zone. We think the friction between the two models of reality generates a kind of standing wave of what I suppose you have to call ‘probabilities.’ Strange things can happen there. And Habib saw his chance of breaking the causal chains that fasten him to his body and his rider, and the starship, and escaping. But he had to be physically close to the place—and it had to be a two-stage process—”
‘‘Boyd’s wrong—there is a Being,” gasped Habib. “It’s not me.”
“Mental mutiny?” growled Rinehart, paying no attention to the Arab’s protests. “That’s a new one for the book.”
“A particularly ingenious crime, Captain. Habib sacrificed that sailor’s life force to build himself a matrix for his mind to fix on, in there. In doing so, you could say he had to split his personality. No wonder we found so little of all this in his mind, beyond the glaring desire to escape, back there in Annapolis. Habib had covered his tracks up skilfully, like the furtive Bedouin he is. Part of his mind stayed there at the event horizon, ready to receive the rest of him, the major portion of his consciousness. But the Bu-Psych-Sec officer who rode him that second time had the sense and the training to break the trance. He pulled out, took Habib home. Bu-Psych-Sec decided we’d give him sufficient rope to hang himself. He didn’t realize the rope woule be round his ankle restraining him at the critical time! It was no use his being the rider, you see—he couldn’t make a transfer-
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