by Trevor Hoyle
‘We know, within fairly precise limits, the amount of matter required to form a collapsar and then eventually Temporal Flux. This is 8.41 solar masses, and, even Pre-Colonization, the astro-physicists weren’t far wide of the mark in their calculations. Theoretically of course any object is capable of achieving Temporal Flux providing the nuclear structure has been broken down and compressed to infinite density, but in practice there is a certain critical mass below which this does not occur. Within the observable universe (our desert island) we see a large number of bodies whose mass is above the critical limit, and these will, in due course, achieve a condition of Temporal Flux. Let us now direct our gaze out to sea. We become aware immediately of the possibility that the observable universe, our island, is one of many. It is not, sine qua non unique.
‘If it is not unique, therefore, we must regard it as a finite body in a sea of infinite spacetime, a single island among many. Upon examination of our universe we find a very curious and inexplicable fact. The average density of matter in the universe is 10-29 grams per cubic centimetre. The radius of the observable universe is 1010 light-years. If, based on these figures, we calculate the critical mass and size required to achieve Temporal Flux for a body of this type we arrive at the surprising answer that the density must be 10-29 grams per cubic centimetre and the radius 1010 light-years. It is perfectly correct to surmise, then, that the observable universe is of sufficient mass and density, and within the critical (Schwarzschild) radius to achieve Temporal Flux. Though we do not know it and have no way of telling, we may already inhabit a region of Temporal Flux which may in itself be part of another universe.
‘This hypothesis can be extended indefinitely. The greater universe of which our universe forms a single region of Temporal Flux may itself be a region of Temporal Flux in another, still larger universe. And so on, ad infinitum. Conversely, the numerous Temporal Flux Centres in our own universe might contain, or lead to, other universes, each of which has regions of Temporal Flux leading to other universes which have regions of Temporal Flux leading to … So it is conceivable that the “master plan” is constructed on the lines of an infinite series of Chinese boxes, one inside the other, each universe separate and self-contained and linked, like interconnecting doors, by regions of Temporal Flux.
‘Though it might appear so at first glance, this is not at all fanciful or far-fetched. We know from our measurements and computations that the Metagalaxy should contain far more material than can be accounted for by visual and electromagnetic observation. Where is it to be found? In what hidden regions is the missing material contained?
‘We can only assume that via Temporal Flux – “down the rabbit hole”, so to speak – we shall enter into and discover those hidden regions, this accumulation of missing material. There can be no guarantees, no confident predictions; and whoever goes down the rabbit hole may never come back to tell us how right or wrong we are in our speculations.’
It was not the possibility of a multiplicity of universes which disturbed Queghan: the science of Myth Technology more or less tacitly accepted their existence. Mythographers over the years had combed the records of ancient civilizations and religions, ranging as far afield as the study of occultism, spiritualism, psychiatric case studies, Jungian texts, paranormal phenomena and UFO-ology – all in search of evidence to show that the everyday physical universe open to our senses is only one manifestation of underlying reality. Queghan could accept this; what he had difficulty in believing was Karve’s idea of the universe, our universe, as a region of Temporal Flux. It followed logically, he couldn’t refute Karve’s hypothesis; and yet the implications were, to say the least, unsettling.
The dynamics of myth and legend owed as much to intuitive insight as to analytical reasoning. It was no good accepting the validity of an argument intellectually if it wasn’t felt to be true emotionally, through the senses. Queghan’s talent – perhaps his only real contribution – lay in his instinctive recognition of a basically sound concept. Just as he possessed the sensory equipment to detect changes in someone’s mood and emotional state by minute shifts in their body chemistry, in the same way he reacted to the underlying truth or falseness of a statement, supposition or theoretical construction. But what if Karve was right? Could the universe sustain itself as a figment of the imagination?
*
That night he had a dream. In the dream he was an invisible onlooker (he was conscious of this) observing his wife and child in the garden. The child was playing on the grass, rolling a coloured ball, and, when it was rolled back, trying to stop it. But each time the child reached out he lost his balance and fell over, laughing at this and making a great game of it all.
And in a strange way Queghan was both inside and outside the dream. He watched the dream unfolding and he was also aware that the Dream Tape at his bedside had automatically switched itself on and was recording his brain activity. He even had the presence of mind to think, ‘I shall play the tape back in the morning and find out what this means.’ In the dream, too, he wondered what it meant, watching his wife and – presumably – their child playing on the grass. It was unlike a dream, in that everything was so natural and real, the trees creaking and rustling, the faint whirr of insects, the sunlight bathing the lawn in vibrant green. His wife looked well and happy; had everything worked out all right in the end?
Then he saw the stranger on the striped lounger. The stranger was a man, unknown to him, with a long lean face and white hair, and he didn’t seem to be any particular age. He was lying back with his eyes closed, his body perfectly relaxed, his hands resting placidly in his lap. Oria looked up, smiling, and said something to the stranger. Unfortunately the dream wasn’t equipped with a soundtrack and while Queghan could see her lips plainly move he couldn’t decipher what she was saying. The stranger opened his eyes and answered her. Oria rose to her feet and went over to him: she was barefoot and her legs were brown: in contrast, the stranger was very pale, his eyes dark and deep-set. His inertness reminded Queghan of someone he knew, like having a familiar name on the tip of the tongue, and he wanted to break out of the dream so that he could bring the stranger’s identity to mind. But he was too involved in the dream and didn’t want to shatter the delicate fleeting surface.
Oria stood in front of the stranger, her toes (Queghan noted) curled in the grass and her feet turned slightly inwards, like those of a schoolgirl, which was her way of standing. She stood before him and opened her hand to reveal a small yellow flower, a buttercup. The stranger smiled and when Oria said something to him lifted his head so that she could hold the flower under his chin. She twirled it and bent forward to look for the golden reflection. At this point the image shivered and broke.
He wanted to drift back into the dream but, as usual, the harder he tried the further it receded. How much of it was precognition he didn’t know. Perhaps it was simply the random confusion of the real and the imaginary in the way that dreams weave actual memories with abstract thoughts, the repository of all the unspent neurological impulses frittering about in the brain. But there had to be an interpretation: he would transcribe the tape and isolate the main components of the dream.
In the morning he took the tape from the machine and ran it through the audiovisual Indexer. The display would allow him to plot the alpha and delta phases of sleep; but when he put the tape in the Indexer the screen remained blank. Nothing had been recorded, not the faintest trace. In a fury he wrenched the spools from the Indexer and went to the window, intending to throw them into the garden like Jack’s bag of beans. But the curtains got in the way; they tangled and frustrated him, and as he struggled with the enveloping material Oria gripped his shoulders and said, ‘Chris, Chris!’
She was holding him and he was lying in bed covered in sweat, his hands emmeshed in the covers. ‘It’s all right,’ Oria said.
Queghan looked at the Dream Tape by his bedside: the counter registered zero: he had forgotten to plug it in.
4
> Brainstorm
The airship Torremolinos moved gracefully like a fat silver cigar over the red ocean at a height of nine hundred feet, tacking south-west with the help of the trade winds. The bulk of the ship comprised an hexagonal wooden frame over which canvas had been tightly drawn and the whole assembly inflated with hydrogen fluoride, a highly unstable gas which was corrosive, poisonous and liable to ignite at the slightest spark. For this reason inflammatory materials were not allowed on board, and the passengers and crew were issued with rope-soled shoes which would cause no friction on the wooden decks and stairways.
The gondola suspended beneath the canopy on thick ropes had a complement of ten crew and thirty-five passengers, most of whom were paramilitary with a scattering of medikal personnel; for most of the passengers it was their first trip in the air, a wonderful, breathtaking experience which overcame the fear of sailing through the clouds in such a new-fangled contraption and one so unproven that even King Jimmy K (who as a rule was the first to try anything new) had declined an invitation to take a trial flight.
The observation porch on the lowest of the three decks gave splendid views of the terrain: the cities, towns and countryside, and now the ocean, swelling and rippling beneath them, the purple peaks caught by the wind and making a pattern of opaque rainbows, their colours mingled and muddy. The voyage would last three weeks, mostly ocean-going, and at the end of it the continent of Australasia, and Psy-Con. The passengers had settled back to relax and enjoy the trip, falling in gradually with the easy routine and slow-passing days, though Dr Mathew Black hadn’t found relaxation easy to come by. It wasn’t only his charge or the responsibility that this entailed, it was the disquieting knowledge that the Medikal Direktorate Authority had assigned two guards to accompany them, which meant that not only the deportee but Black too was under day-to-day surveillance. His preliminary report to the MRA concerning the patient – veiled and allusive as it was – had been enough to cause a flutter of alarm, the rapid outcome being that Black was instructed to accompany the patient to Psy-Con and oversee the initial stages of indoctrination. The directive had put an abrupt stop to Black’s pioneering work in Gestalt Treatment, which was annoying when the initial results had seemed so promising. Evidently the MDA thought them spurious, dangerous or subversive; new ideas, as Black continually and bitterly reminded himself, were not welcome.
On the third day he sat with Q in the observation porch, watching the slow drift of the ocean through the slanting windows. The constant twittering clamour of canaries filled the air. Further along the saloon the two uniformed guards hovered lugubriously over the proceedings, their arms folded beneath their capes like a couple of large black crows gone to roost. A ship moved on the ocean, at the apex of an arrow pointing eastwards, and when it had disappeared from view Black ventured to remark, ‘I hope you realize what a privilege it is to be deported by airship. It’s unusual for patients to receive this sort of treatment.’ His voice, even to his own ears, had a thin sneering whine to it.
‘I’m flattered,’ Q replied, ‘and suitably impressed.’
Black smiled sardonically. He felt himself incapable of saying or thinking anything that wasn’t tainted by cynicism and self-disgust. ‘I suppose this is all rather tame stuff compared with your “mythic projections” or whatever you call them.’
‘On the contrary.’ Q tried to adjust his position in the wicker chair but was hampered by the ropes binding his arms and legs. Whenever he moved too abruptly it tightened the noose around his neck. He gave up the struggle and subsided against the ropes. ‘The experience is stimulating, if a mite uncomfortable.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’ Black leaned across and slackened the noose a fraction. ‘Standard procedure.’
‘I thought it might be.’
‘Don’t be smart. I could have you locked away on the upper deck next to the gas chamber. The first sign of a leakage and you wouldn’t last thirty seconds.’
Q inclined his head towards the bamboo cages hanging from the bulkhead; they were strung all over the airship. ‘That’s the reason for the canaries, I suppose. If there’s a leak they’ll detect it and sound a warning.’
‘Yes,’ Black said testily. ‘But I imagine you would serve the same purpose just as well. You’re not immune to hydrogen fluoride, are you?’
‘Wouldn’t the Authority be rather unhappy if I was dead on arrival? I got the impression they were keen to rehabilitate me in the place you call Psy-Con.’
Black gave a cold, slow smile. ‘Do you know what Psy-Con is? Do you know what it stands for? Psychological Concentration Camp. I’m afraid rehabilitation isn’t on the program of events. It might have been mentioned, but it’s the Authority’s method of pacifying deportees prior to shipment. It calms them if they believe they’re to receive treatment.’
‘Are they ill to begin with?’
‘Of course they’re ill,’ Black snapped. ‘Why do you think we need Psy-Con if we didn’t have the people to fill it? Australasia’s a big place but it already has an inmate population of twenty-eight million. It’s a wise move, don’t you think, herding them all into one place?’
‘Are they dangerous?’
‘They’re a disruptive influence, they spread alarm among the populace.’ He added slyly, ‘That’s why the Authority want you out of the way. It’s people like you, people who babble, people with hallucinations, who cause all the trouble.’ When he became agitated his sibilant lisp was pronounced.
‘In that case I shall have to be careful what I say.’
‘Too late for that,’ Black said smugly. ‘You probably don’t remember, but back in the sanatorium you ranted and raved like a madman. The stuff that came out, you wouldn’t credit.’ He sat back in the chair, idly surveying the red ocean through the slanting windows. The sun was a vast yellow orb in the hazy azure sky. He said morosely, ‘They should have let me continue the experiment. Galvanology has a tremendous future in medikal science. The Authority are so damn pig-headed—’
He checked himself and glanced along the saloon: several people were dozing in wicker chairs but the two black-uniformed guards were for the moment absent. He would have to be careful, remain tight-lipped when others were near by. There was no telling who might be taking note of the conversation.
‘You regard everything I said as hallucination, then?’ Q asked. He noticed that Black’s fingernails were ragged.
‘What else? You’re cursed with too much imagination, like most of the other deportees. I wanted to purge you of all that stuff, get you to puke it out. You rambled on for hours but there must be a lot more to come out.’ He tilted back in his chair. ‘In a way it was quite an interesting story. Your mind must be a cess-pool of non-associative thoughts and random ideas. The thing I couldn’t understand was that this other realm, or whatever it was, where all this was supposed to be taking place, didn’t seem to be here on Earth IVn. It’s a syndrome I haven’t come across before—’
‘What did you say?’
Black sighed. ‘I said it was a syndrome I haven’t encountered before in my case-studies.’
‘You said “here on Earth IVn”. Is that where we are, on Earth IVn?’
Black’s face creased into a strained and weary smile. ‘If you ask questions like that they’ll put you straight into the High Intensity Complex. Psy-Con is bad enough without winding up there.’
‘Let me ask another foolish question. Why is it called Earth IVn?’
‘Why is anything called anything?’ Black said irritably. ‘Why is the ocean red, the sky azure? This is Earth IVn because it’s Earth IVn. What cod-laddle you talk.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I advise you not to ask such questions. If the Authority get to hear of them they’ll slap you in the Complex, and there’s not a gingy crole I can do to help you.’
Q then did something which infuriated Black: he smiled.
‘And don’t grin like that! They’ll think you’re a loon and feed you to the alligators, and I might just let them.’
‘Why should you want to help me, anyway?’ Q said. He tried to work his hands to restore the circulation: the skin on his wrists was pinched cruelly by the ropes. ‘Aren’t you putting yourself at risk?’
‘Maybe.’ Black looked over his shoulder. He said, ‘The Authority don’t agree, but I think your ramblings should be investigated further. There’s an element of Logik in them which I find interesting; and this “other-world” syndrome is something I haven’t heard of before.’ He paused and clicked his fingers. ‘“Other-world” syndrome. I like that.’
‘You’re beginning to believe in my mythic projections, after all. They’re not simply the ravings of a madman.’
‘Do you take me for a fool?’ Black’s thin dark face was twisted with contempt. ‘I’m a medikal doktor, not a quack. If I believed in them I’d be as crazy as you are. I’ve had patients who believed they were reincarnations of Franko, and others who thought they were second cousin to President Disraeli. Do you expect me to believe every bit of nonsense I hear?’
Q moved himself stiffly in the chair, attempting to stretch his pale thin body. He was a giant compared to Black, almost half as tall again as the slight, narrow-shouldered, lisping man.
Q said: ‘There’s one question you haven’t answered.’
‘Well?’ Black said sullenly.
‘Where am I from?’
Was there, Black wondered, a hint of amused provocation in those flat grey eyes? He decided that there wasn’t, but at the same time a great constricting gorge of fury rose up in his chest and threatened to suffocate him; he felt his grip slackening, the world sliding.
‘We know you came from the sea,’ he managed to say at last. ‘It was all in the report. The Captain of the Slave Trader was most thorough.’