Andrek became aware that Phaera had been speaking to him. “… demonstration of fundamental theory … antimatter … ursecta … attend…?”
He turned to goggle foolishly at her “Demonstration, Sister? Oh. Yes, of course. Looking forward to it.”
The priestess gazed across at Kedrys. “An astounding man, isn’t he?”
Man? thought Andrek, following her eyes to the young kentaur. He asked politely: “Are you on Kedrys’ staff?”
“Just a pair of hands,” said the priestess. “I make sure the equipment is set up and working properly. After that it’s just a question of pushing the right buttons.”
Andrek took a sip of wine. “I’m sure you do more than that.” He realized the priestess was still staring at Kedrys. He stole a covert look at her face. Her lips were half open, her cheeks flushed.
She murmured, “Does it amuse you, Don Andrek?”
“My apologies, Sister,” he said sheepishly.
“No need.” The priestess gave him a crooked smile. “Before I was a priestess, I was a female. Perhaps I am still more woman than is good for either me or the Temple.” She added, without trying to be defensive, “Genetics is studying him, too, you know. Right now, they’re having a big argument about his IQ, as to whether it’s over five hundred or over six hundred.”
“Either way, how do they explain it?” said Andrek curiously.
“It’s the combination of hand, hoof, and wing. The hominid, you know, evolved his cerebral complexity as a cybernetic feedback of his manual dexterity. If you add wings and another pair of legs, you more than triple the cranial convolutions. An incredible creature.” She sighed. “If I’m ever marooned on a deserted planet, I hope it’s with Kedrys. With his mentality, he could readily recreate the whole of civilization. And yet, here, what is he? Merely the spoiled darling of a sybaritic court.”
Andrek now became aware that Vang was speaking; was, in fact, talking across him to Phaera.
“I’m sure you realize,” the Alean was saying, with measured malice, “that your famous Kedrys does not impress everyone.” The man stabbed viciously into his meat cube. “In enlightened circles he is regarded as something of a fraud.”
Andrek found himself speculating again as to Vang’s assignment and purpose within the Great House. Some of these holy men had strange specialities. In his career he had met temple lawyers, doctors, scientists, propagandists, and even one highly skilled assassin. The monk’s face showed a hard, chill dedication. We have something in common, thought Andrek. He, the same as I, has a single purpose. Mine is my search for Omere. I wonder what his is. Whatever it is, I’d hate to get in his way. Which seems to be exactly where I am. He sighed. Here we go again. I’m going to have to talk to the seating master. Just once, I’d like not to be placed between two holy people of opposite polarities. But of course, that’s impossible. I was deliberately seated between them, because Alea and Ritornel will not sit together. He said mildly, “You feel, then, Brother Vang, that Kedrys has made no valid contributions to cosmic mechanics?”
“A few perhaps,” conceded the Alean grudgingly. “But that’s hardly the point.”
“What is the point, Brother?” demanded the priestess.
“Simply this,” replied the Alean. “He gives the praise thereof to Ritornel, whereas it is rightfully due to Alea. Whatever your Kedrys has developed, this is but the product of chance, and not of design. Therefore he has advanced science only to the extent given to him by Alea. The credit is Alea’s!”
Andrek had long held a private suspicion that each temple existed solely for the purpose of disagreeing with the other. It seemed to him that whenever one temple announced a new facet of doctrine, the other, which had theretofore given the matter no thought or concern, overnight created a noisy rebuttal showing not only the gross errors of the new doctrine, but also proving that the proposition had been stolen from them in the first place.
From the corner of his eye he saw that the priestess was sipping her wine with deadly calm. “That,” said Andrek hastily, “touches a very sore and controversial point: which is to say, does Ritornel, through his grand design, control the dice cup of Alea; or rather, does Alea, through the chance repetition of fortuitous events, delude us into thinking we participate in a predestined pattern? Perhaps tonight, we may set aside this great question, and content ourselves with the recognition that it verily exists.” He added coolly, “Furthermore, might not both of you be right?”
“How could that be?” demanded the Alean suspiciously.
“With Ritornel a thousand civilizations are born, flourish, and, save one, die. That one lives to recreate the next thousand. The adherents of Ritornel see the god’s recurrent, deliberate selection of one of a thousand possible life forms, such that it shall endure and survive when its nine hundred, ninety and nine neighboring cultures are dead, itself then to become the parent of the next succeeding thousand cultures. The design of the god determines the course of all life in the universe, and is completely premeditated. Alea, on the other hand, is the apotheosis of chance. And yet, when chance operates on a very large scale, the result is no longer chance, but a statistical inevitability. For example, the ‘temperature’ of a single molecule is totally a matter of chance, and is determined simply by its velocity at the moment. But the temperature of a gross volume of air is completely predictable, because this is determined by the mean velocity of billions of molecules. Thus, the random chance of Alea, operating on a cosmic scale, merges indistinguishably into the certain predictability of Ritornel. Is it not perhaps possible that there exists an overriding will that controls both chance and pattern—intrusive into even the smallest, as well as the largest, things? That controls the microscopic filament of nucleic acid as well as the universe of repeating universes? May it not be, that the tiny cell and the vast universe are inseparably intertwined, that each requires and nurtures the other?”
“Blasphemy aside,” said Vang tautly, “say rather that Alea, functioning on all scales, great and small, is the cause of All, even of those things that seem, to the infidel, to be predetermined. And in any case, surely you do not pretend that the secret of the universe is programmed—designed, if you will—into a trivial, insensate filament of DNA? That the fate of the cosmos lies locked in a cell invisibly small?”
Kedrys looked over at Vang. Despite the lack of lines about his mouth, Andrek had the impression that their speculations vastly amused him. He watched the kentaur’s face. “How many universes are made, merely that the final perfect one may emerge?” Andrek’s voice was soft, almost musing. “How many billions of hominid cells grow, that one may survive to propagate? Are we but tiny swimmers in the genetic pool of time, of universes without end? What is the great change that we await, the thing that will render obsolete not only our kind, but the sequence of universes that made us? What will be the final miracle?”
“Don Andrek.” It was Kedrys. The kentaur was speaking to him telepathically. “Don Andrek, because of your feeling for Amatar, you are entitled to know the answers, and the time is coming soon when you shall have them. But there are many things that must first come to pass, with consequences fateful to several at this table.”
As the advocate studied the great crystalline eyes, he became aware that Phaera and Vang were still arguing with each other. The kentaur’s message was apparently for him alone. Did Kedrys really know what he was talking about? He had heard that the kentaur had devised a strange electronic circuit capable of reading the future on a limited individual scale. But his own questions—and Kedrys’ reply—dealt with an infinite cosmos. He tried to conceal his skepticism as he formed the thought: “Thank you, Kedrys. I would be pleased to learn more about this.”
The strange youth merely smiled.
Andrek took a deep breath and returned to the religious wars. “It is of course impossible for a pagan such as I to define with authority either of your religions, or to differentiate one from the other.” He turned to each in turn. “I shou
ld not have tried. At best, I could provide only a personal impression.”
“Heavily biased and distorted by the pernicious influence of a professional lifetime spent in the dens of logic,” murmured the priestess.
Andrek looked at her sharply, then saw the woman’s eyes were twinkling. He smiled. “But you can speak as an expert. What is Ritornel?”
“Ritornel,” said Phaera, “is a ring, a cycle, an eternal return, inexorable, inviolate. For example, let us consider events at the Node. Hydrogen is formed there. Now, whether this matter is formed—as some say—as metabolic waste of the ursecta feeding on temblors and quakes is of no moment. It is formed. Slowly, over billions of years, vast clouds of hydrogen accumulate at the Node. And not just at our Node, but at all nodes between all the galaxies. And finally this hydrogen condenses into a hundred billion new stars. A new galaxy comes into existence, and the old node disappears. Meanwhile, eons have passed, and the universe has never ceased to expand. The galaxies have doubled their distances from each other, and between the galaxies, the great quakes attend the birth and development of new nodes. Life forms are born in the new galaxies, evolve, proliferate, but finally the suns grow old and cold, and the old galaxies die. It has always been thus, and it will always be thus. This is the pattern, the cycle, the Ring of Ritornel, the mega, or great, ‘O.’ ‘Omega,’ Don Andrek, and it will endure forever.”
“Do you mean,” asked Andrek, “that all this has happened before? That in a previous galaxy, billions of years ago, there was another Goris-Kard, colonized by another Terror, and another Twelve-Table with people like us, chatting idly as we are doing now?” He was genuinely incredulous.
“We think so,” said Phaera. “And not just once, but many times—perhaps an infinite number of times. Let me explain. We say, in one of our simpler chemical equations, that two hydrogen atoms unite with one of oxygen to give water. We know, from long experience, that if we bring together hydrogen and oxygen under the right conditions, we get water. And it is the same for any other chemical reaction: when we define the reactants and conditions, we thereby state the reaction product. And we cannot confine the rule to simple operations in the laboratory: it is a universal rule. It applies to every chemical, physical, and biological process at work in the universe, today, yesterday, and forever. It must follow that the brute primitive forces that eject space from the Deep thereby state the hominid, since man is the inevitable end product of the inevitable sequence of hydrogen, condensing galaxies, suns, planets, and mammalian life. And if this is so for the existing galaxies, it must have been so for all galaxies past. The hominid race has been created not just this once, but an infinite number of times, and will continue to be recreated as long as the universe continues to expand. This cycle is the Ring of Ritornel.”
“And the more it is pondered, the less credible it becomes,” said Vang grimly. “For, to accept Ritornel literally would require a belief not only that these same events will be repeated—again and again, but also would require a belief in the mythbook sagas. The Ritornellians ask you to believe that we hominids are descended from one man and one woman, who appeared on the scene by the divine intervention of Ritornel. But they don’t stop there. The difficulty is compounded when they ask us to believe further that when the hominids die out, the race will be recreated by another hominid pair.” He continued pedantically. “Granted, a cycle exists, of birth, evolution, and death. It exists by the pleasure of Alea. And it shall be by her pleasure that the Ring shall break. Our prophets know that even now, in this generation, the break has begun. A new life form shall arise, totally alien to anything in the history of any galaxy, and it shall sweep on great wings through the universe, and it will never die. By purest chance it was born, by purest chance it was preserved, and by purest chance it shall some day emerge from the Deep!”
“You mean, it is now in the Deep?” said Andrek.
“We do not know where it is,” said the Alean candidly. “Perhaps it is just as well we do not know. For if we do not know, then they”—he glared at the priestess—“do not know.”
“You speak of life, a new life, Brother Vang,” said Phaera. “But what is life? A birth, a being, and a death. It is the same for you, me, and for every mortal, whether hominid or no. It is the same for planets, and the suns that give them their short lives. It is the same for the galaxies of those suns. As long as the universe expands, so shall this Ring of Ritornel endure. Countless dead galaxies declare that this must go on forever.”
“Death declares nothing,” said Vang. “All past time is but a moment with Alea. It is within her power to create that which will break the Ring, and make the universe stand still, and to stay the hand of death. Can you deny,” snapped Vang, “that Ritornel is but static replication and predestination? To you, the whole universe is in a rut.”
“But it’s a good rut,” demurred Phaera. “You don’t know what lies in wait for civilization outside the rut. Why take a chance?”
“Any deviation would be an improvement,” insisted Vang. “We must try alternates. We must be skeptical.”
“You seem to have great faith in skepticism,” observed Phaera, calmly.
Vang looked across Andrek at the priestess. His eyebrows arched warningly. “Do not mock the goddess with paradoxes.”
Andrek hastened to intervene. “But how can you both be so concerned with things that take millions of years to accomplish?” he said. “What about the here-and-now?”
“That’s exactly the point,” said Brother Vang. “Eternity is an endless series of ‘here-and-now’s.’ If we can really control one instant, we seize dominion over aeons. If we can make but one break in the Omega, Ritornel is gone forever. And when that is done, it will be the work of a moment, a chance thing accomplished ‘here-and-now’—if you will.”
“Am I to understand, then,” said Andrek, “that the two religions have absolutely nothing in common?”
“Oh, we do have one thing in common,” said Phaera. “Omega.”
“Quite so,” sniffed Vang. “It was so dynamic, they simply stole it from us. Except they have completely twisted it to their own warped thinking. They contend that, since it means the end of things, it must also mean the beginning, since to them the end is the beginning, and vice versa. Absurd, really.”
Phaera smiled. “At least we put a little drama into it. To us, Omega is the cycle of the death of old galaxies, the birth of new galaxies at the nodes, the recreation of life from the ancestral couple, then maturation, old age, and death again. We say, thus has it always been, for billions and billions of cycles, thus shall it be forever.”
Vang snorted. “You don’t really believe all that.”
Phaera shrugged, but her eyes were twinkling. “Well, I’m not too sure about that ancestral hominid couple.”
“I should think not,” declared Vang.
“Seems a bit too much hominid egocentricity involved there,” agreed Phaera slyly. “In my own personal view, the ancestral couple for the next Omega will most likely be non-hominid—say reptilian, fishy, or”—she looked over at Kedrys—“perhaps even some kind of horse.”
Vang turned on her in quick suspicion, his mouth opening and closing. Phaera smiled blandly back at him, and his face reddened slowly.
Andrek laughed uneasily. “I’m only an advocate. All this is way over my head. I—” He choked off abruptly.
From across the table a strange face was staring at him. It was Amatar, and yet it was an unknown Amatar. Despairing eyes locked with his for the briefest instant. And then Amatar smiled. So transitorily had that other face existed that he wondered whether he had imagined it. In the end, he found himself smiling back at her. But he was shaken. And like the delayed throb of deep pain, he slowly began to understand what he had seen. It was the face of death. He had been marked to die by the order of the Great House. Amatar knew, and could not tell him.
His temples were throbbing. But he smiled again at her, reassuringly, and then she turned away.
<
br /> His dinner companions had apparently noticed none of this.
The priestess touched his elbow lightly. “That music,” she murmured. “So strange, compelling.”
“Yes,” said Andrek absently. “It is the Rimor. I have heard it several times. It reminds me of something … or someone … but I cannot say what.”
Vang sniffed. “It is but a machine—merely an overly elaborate computer.”
“Then it is even the more remarkable,” said Phaera. “It seems—almost alive.”
“I understand,” said Andrek, “that when dinner is over, it will recite a new epic poem of its own composition, in the music room. About the War with Terror, I think.” He looked off toward Amatar, but she avoided his eyes.
Oberon stood up. “The steward,” he announced, “will lead you into the music room.”
Andrek pushed back his chair. “I regret I cannot attend the recital with you,” he said to the Alean, “but the Magister has asked me to attend some sort of scientific demonstration that Kedrys is giving in the laboratories. Will you excuse me…”
The Deep is not a place, although it extends in all directions without limit. Nor yet is it a time, although it exists only in the present, forever, and without end. How easy it is to say what the Deep is not!
—Andrek, in the Deep.
By special invitation, Andrek occupied the same box with Oberon, overlooking the physics amphitheater. Lyysdon, the physicist, sat on the other side of Oberon. A few selected observers were scattered in the nearby tiers of seats behind the box.
The Ring of Ritornel Page 8