by Trevor Hoyle
Benson visited his prize inmate at least twice a day, noting with disquiet his mental and physical deterioration, which was more pronounced and more apparent almost by the hour. He wanted – rather he desperately needed – Black’s medikal knowledge and expertise, but now that the fool had turned against him he would either have to take charge of the case himself (which he wasn’t qualified to do) or seek advice from one of the resident medikal staff, a step he was loath to take. But it was clear that something had to be done and done quickly. The Authority wanted results, and an inmate wasting away to nothing wasn’t likely to provide them. Benson himself didn’t give much credence to the theory that Q was from the future: it was a notion arrived at by some flat-bottomed bigwig who spent all his time reading medikal reports and coming up with startling conclusions from the flimsiest of evidence.
Benson was finicky about smells, and the smell in the small square room was overwhelming, the mingling of stale air, the excrement of previous occupants and a peculiar, biting, caustic odour that reminded him of preserving fluid. The heat overlaid everything with a dense sultry stillness that caught at the back of the throat, and Benson remained near the door, not wishing to soil his black polished boots in the filthy straw. He held a scented handkerchief to his nose so that when he spoke his voice was muffled and nasal.
‘Do you have any startling predictions for us, old man? We’re agog to learn more about our fantastic future.’ The tone of sarcasm was pained and rather weary: he couldn’t bring himself to believe that this pitiful bundle of rags in the corner possessed the power of prophecy. In any case the future was confined to the future. It would arrive in good time, not a moment sooner.
A pale hand, practically transparent, moved among the straw. Benson made a sound signifying impatience and disgust. Nausea gathered in his throat like a thick congealing clot of blood. He said from behind the handkerchief: ‘You’re a lucky cuss if only you knew it. The rest of your batch have gone, been carted off, never to return, and here you are, still wallowing at His Majesty’s pleasure in comfort and plenty. Aren’t you the fortunate fellow.’
‘II est fort, ce Boche!’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘God save the King.’
‘That’s more like it.’ Benson shifted his weight from one polished boot to the other and made a fist to examine his fingernails. ‘Well, I can’t stand here chatting to you all day. Do you have anything to add to your previous statements? Are you, as a matter of interest, from the future or are we merely figments of your excitable imagination?’ He snorted at his own humour.
Q said, ‘If Stahl dies …’
‘Stahl?’ Benson said, frowning. ‘Who is this mythical Stahl?’
‘A composite identity.’
‘You mean several people wrapped up in one body?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Something like that?’ Benson said irritably. ‘Either he is or he isn’t.’
‘He is and he isn’t.’
‘No no no,’ Benson protested. ‘Either he is or he isn’t. You can’t have it both ways.’
‘But I can,’ Q said mildly, looking at him with colourless eyes. ‘Reality is in the eye of the beholder.’
‘Very deeply significant, I’m sure. However, its meaning, if it has one, excapes me.’ He leaned nonchalantly in the doorway, first making sure that it wouldn’t mark his uniform. ‘So, if Stahl dies, what then?’
‘One of us will cease to exist.’
‘One of us. You mean either you or me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, which one?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I assume it must be me. Somehow – by magic, presumably – I will suddenly vanish. One moment I’m here, the next, pouf!, gone. Where will I go to – heaven?’
‘You will not go … anywhere.’
Benson giggled into the handkerchief. ‘If I disappear from here I must appear somewhere else.’
‘Not if you don’t exist to begin with.’
‘Oh, I see. You mean, this isn’t really me? I’m not actually standing here in this filthy hole talking to a madman? This conversation is only taking place in my mind – I beg your pardon – your mind.’
The transparent hand moved feebly among the straw.
‘Well, come on, man, which is it to be? Am I real or are you? You don’t seem very sure whether I exist through you or you exist through me. Or could it possibly be both? You seem to invent rules as and when it suits you.’
Q said, ‘We each invent our own reality.’
Benson chuckled. ‘In that case you haven’t done too well from where I’m standing. Couldn’t you think of anything better?’ He gestured round the cramped, hot room, at the rectangle slipping down the wall, the stinking straw on the floor. He seemed highly amused.
‘It all depends which reality you mean,’ Q replied. ‘Yours or mine.’
‘I prefer mine,’ Benson said, smirking behind the scented handkerchief.
‘That’s because you have no choice.’
‘Don’t presume too much,’ Benson snapped, straightening up. ‘You’re a fine one to talk about lack of choice. Wherever you think you came from, the fact is you’re here; there was plenty in your statements about how you arrived, but precious little about how you get back.’ He said this with evident satisfaction. ‘The Authority believe you’re from the future, our future. Personally I have my doubts, but if you are from the future it would be in your best interests to say so.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if you are,’ Benson said, nettled, ‘the Authority are interested in your welfare. If you’re not, then they couldn’t care less what happens to you, and for the matter of that, neither could I. All this stuff you’ve spilled could be so much hot air, so much bilge, so much eyewash. Black might have been taken in by it, but I’m not.’
‘This is hell nor are we out of it,’ Q said quietly.
‘Hell indeed for those who get stroppy.’ Benson kicked at the straw pettishly. His moist eyes bulged over the clutched hankerchief. ‘I’m being par-tic-u-lar-ly patient with you, my friend, whether you realize it or not. I could have you sent to the High Intensity Complex like that – ’ he snapped his thin fingers ‘ – and what could you do about it? Nothing.’
‘No,’ said Q faintly, wasting away in the corner.
‘I’m glad you appreciate the gravity of you predicament. If there’s anything I detest it’s a smart-aleck inmate. They get short shrift from me, I can tell you. Bam, fizzle, and off with their heads!’
The yellow sun adopted a new position. The rectangle changed into a trapezium. Like the sun, Q was sinking fast, through the floor of the small square room. He couldn’t sustain the image much longer; if help didn’t arrive soon he was doomed to this world, trapped in an abstract spatio-temporal coordinate somewhere over the rainbow. (Prosser said, ‘It won’t surprise me if Stratters’ gone. He’s been rushing about the sky like a madman for the last five days. He’s too inclined to rush into those bloody Huns.’ They all agreed.) Benson’s black shiny boots took all the light in the room and cast it back in smeared reflections. There was nothing the light could do to alter this state of affairs. It reminded Q that light was amoral, blameless, that it shone indifferently on the good and bad alike.
He said, ‘We are held, you and I, in a state of entropic equilibrium: what the astro-technologists would call “a stasis situation”. We can go neither forwards or backwards.’
‘You’re not going to have another fit, are you?’ Benson asked, alarmed. ‘One thing I can’t stand at any price are frothing babblers.’
‘Did you hear … did you understand what I said?’
‘Yes I heard.’
‘Did you understand?’
Benson scuffed the toe of his boot in the straw. ‘Some of it I did,’ he said. ‘Not all of it. Some of it.’
‘We are stuck here, you and I,’ Q said deliberately, ‘until the machine decides to release us. She has created a
stasis situation in which we are held captive, progressing neither forwards or backwards. The most we can hope for is a continuous repetition of events; perhaps this is the first time this conversation has taken place in this room, or it may be the sixth, or it may be the ten millionth. We have no way of knowing. We shall replay this scene until she decides to change it – or end it.’ He added, very softly, ‘If only I could remember how it ends.’
Benson was breathing heavily into the handkerchief. ‘I understood,’ he said with great emphasis, ‘I definitely understood from your previous statements that Stahl was responsible for all this. Isn’t that what you said? Am I being obtuse? You said that Stahl’s mythic projection had created Earth IVn. Where and how does the machine come into it?’
‘Stahl was connected to the machine. His brain impulses were cyberthetically processed. It was the machine’s, not his, mythic projection; and the cyberthetic system in the Vehicle projected the same image. All cyberthetic systems are part of the one collective machine consciousness.’
‘Fascinating,’ Benson said, ‘cod-laddle.’
‘As you please.’
‘You’re asking me – expecting me – to believe that Earth IVn and everything in it is the imaginative leap of a machine?’ He blew out a gust of air, signifying incredulity.
‘Except that this isn’t Earth IVn.’ Q laid each word down gently, as if it might break. ‘I come from Earth IVn. This, I’m afraid, is an imitation, and not a very good one, at that.’
Benson shook his head wonderingly. ‘Where do you get it all from? How can you expect me to believe such a ridiculous story? In your last statement, if I remember it correctly, you said that the machine had been destroyed. All that was left of it was the craft you were picked up in by the Slave Trader.’
‘The machine was destroyed in mythic projection. She still exists somewhere – I don’t know where – in another region of spacetime.’
‘Mmmm,’ said Benson. ‘Very interesting, I’m sure. It would be even more interesting if I understood a single word of it. And as for the cock-eyed notion that you come from Earth IVn … well, I’m stumped. I’ve been led to believe that you arrived here, not departed from it.’
‘You should never assume anything without proof.’
‘How true,’ Benson said, grinning into the handkerchief. ‘Which leads me to ask what proof you can provide for any part of what you’ve told me. There isn’t a scrap, as far as I can see.’ He was arrogant in his smugness.
‘Except the most convincing proof of all.’
‘Which is?’
‘That I’m here.’
‘You are certainly that all right,’ said Benson grimly.
*
There was no moon that night. The pre-screening compounds were silent and deserted, awaiting the new consignment of deportees on the morrow. The guards were absent from their posts, carousing in the wooden mess hall, and so it was easy to smuggle the snake into the medikal enclosure, holding the heavy lumpy canvas bag by the rope wound tightly round the crimped neck, and carrying it swiftly and silently across the soft warm sand. Black felt like a schoolboy up to a naughty prank. He would have rubbed his hands with glee had they not been otherwise engaged. Two-headed King snakes were deadly venomous and the exercise required the greatest diligence and concentration.
He stayed close to the huts, hugging the bleached and weathered boards and dodging across the open spaces, even though all was silent and blackness. He had memorized the location of the hut in which Q was being held; it would need care, because they all looked alike in the darkness and he didn’t want to poison some poor innocent.
He dodged across the last remaining space, flattening himself against the boards, and his heart seized up in his chest. He could hear voices! He stood, hardly breathing, and listened, and felt a surge of secret exultation. One of them was Benson’s and the other, softer, weaker voice could only belong to Q. Black smiled. He would kill two birds with one stone. It seemed almost providential that King snakes should have two heads – one for each of them.
… Now, this had to be done quickly and with the utmost caution, without either of them being aware of what was happening. It had to appear an accident; not the slightest hint of suspicion must fall on him. In the morning he would be wakened and told the sad news, and already he had decided on a suitable expression: shock and disbelief, and perhaps a vague suggestion of sorrow as the news began to take hold. He was annoyed that it would mean going without breakfast, but a man distraught with grief for a dearly-beloved dead colleague would hardly set to with a healthy appetite. Anyway, he’d make up for it at lunchtime.
He placed the canvas bag on the sand, and at once the bag came alivep and started to jerk and writhe. Goodness, what vicious creatures they were. And so nasty and repellent he was almost tempted to believe that someone had dreamed them up in a nightmare. The low murmur of voices went on. Black listened but couldn’t make out what was being said. It was of no importance anyway: they would soon be gone from this world, leaving nothing behind but the yellow shrunken husks of their former selves. He opened the outer screen door of the hut leading to a narrow passageway with several doors opening off it. There was no guard on duty (a breach of regulations) and the passageway was dim and smoky from the flickering oil lamps suspended from the ceiling. Holding the bag away from him, he stepped inside, allowing the screen door to close softly behind, and moved stealthily forward, the bag alive and writhing in his grasp. This was the tricky bit. He went over the sequence once again, for the umpteenth time:
1. Unfasten the rope and hold the neck of the bag closed.
2. Open the door.
3. Throw the bag inside.
4. Close the door and hold it shut.
5. Wait until all sounds of struggle have ceased.
There would be cries of course, probably screams as well. But there was no one within earshot, and with the drunken racket the guards were making it didn’t matter anyway. He shuddered and licked his dry lips. The pity of it was that he wouldn’t be able to watch. He would have to be content with listening and using his imagination. Luckily he had plenty of that, imagination. Just as well the Authority didn’t know. Teehee. He unfastened the rope, holding the neck of the bag closed (1), opened the door (2), threw the bag inside (3), closed the door and held it shut (4), and waited until sounds of struggle had ceased (5).
9
The Cup Might Smash …
“Milton Blake said, ‘I’m glad to have this opportunity of talking with you and your staff, Johann. I think it’s important that we review the program and update ourselves on the current situation.’
The Director said, ‘I think you know everyone. Shall we sit down? I’ve arranged to have coffee sent in.’ He added, ‘Though I must say I prefer something less noxious,’ with a gentle sideways smile at Blake.
‘I don’t see why we had to meet in here,’ Karla Ritblat said, sitting primly near the window. ‘Your office, Johann, or mine would have been more suitable.’
‘I wanted Milton to see the graphic displays,’ Karve said. ‘And they should make any explanation simpler and easier to comprehend.’
There were eleven people assembled in the TFC Lab: Johann Karve and his MyTT Research staff, Milton Blake and his personal assistant – a young, attractive, dark-haired woman with a shy smile – who hadn’t yet been introduced. The displays were mounted on huge sheets of tinted silicate fitted to an apparatus which could be revolved to bring the appropriate display into position. From a control console the Director could animate sections of the display and use them to illustrate various concepts of Minkowskian geometry which were otherwise impossible to visualize; a cyberthetic input and printout unit was linked to the console to provide a real-time computation/induction facility.
Karve operated the shutters and the room blacked out, to be dominated by the display area with its brilliantly coloured markers, graphs and three-dimensional representations.
‘Isn’t money wonderful?’ Bl
ake exclaimed, awed and envious, which provoked laughter from the MyTT people. He exchanged glances with his assistant, who raised her eyebrows in rueful agreement.
The main display showed the inertial frame of reference Theta2 Orionis in M.42. Karve leaned forward and touched the controls, bringing up a light trace which assumed an orbit round the companion collapsar 2U0525-06. It made a very pretty picture.
Karve began: ‘By local standard time of the sat-Con-lab, whose orbit we have here, injection took place nine days ago, which on our time-scale is thirteen months. In that time – I’m sorry, in their time – they were able to maintain contact for three of those nine days, which far exceeded our expectations. Everything seemed to be going perfectly, there was no Vehicle malfunction, the cyberthetic system was doing everything we could have asked of her. The Vehicle was held in stasis on the periphery of the event horizon, all systems were checked, and then she was released from the influence of the Dyson EM Sphere. From that point onwards we had hoped to estimate the Vehicle’s relative time and location by means of the Neuron Processer.’ He touched the controls and another display revolved into position. ‘This is the Vehicle’s track immediately prior to deep injection, and as you can see it’s perfectly stable. We knew we were about to lose contact but it was hoped that our predictive capability would at least allow us to calculate the approximate spatio-temporal coordinate.’