by Trevor Hoyle
He smiled in his semi-waking state of tranquillity as the word appeared in his mind. Of course it had no objective, empirical meaning. ‘We each invent our own reality,’ as he had once said to someone a long time ago.
The boy was chuckling, and when Queghan opened his eyes he saw that Oria had rolled a coloured ball to him which, in narrowly evading his reach, had caused him to topple sideways on to the grass like a fat wobbly doll. He lay, helpless and out of breath with laughter, an arm and a leg waving comically as he tried to regain his balance.
Would any of this have been altered, Queghan wondered, if he and not Brenton had been selected for injection into Temporal Flux? How would the alternative scenario have read with a cast of characters shifted one to the left? In a private aside, Johann Karve had confided to him that Project Tempus was finished. His exact words had been: ‘It’s over and done with. Martin, wherever he exists, is beyond our help’. And Queghan, for all his powers of mythic projection, failed to visualize that other place: it was well and truly down the rabbit hole, through the one-way membrane, beyond the event horizon.
Oria stood before him twirling a golden flower. The grass grew between her toes. She knelt down and held the buttercup underneath his chin, saying the old nursery rhyme: ‘Do you like butter? Do you like cheese? Yes is a smile. No is a sneeze.’
The child sneezed, making them both laugh.
‘Do you think he’s a mythographer in the making?’ Oria asked.
‘God, I hope not,’ Queghan answered. ‘I wouldn’t wish that fate on my own worst enemy.’
‘Speaking of which,’ Oria said lightly, ‘I’ve invited Castel to dinner tomorrow evening.’
Queghan groaned. ‘Castel isn’t an enemy,’ he said. ‘He’s much worse: a bore.’
‘I feel sorry for him.’
‘I think you secretly desire him.’
‘Naturally; but I thought we’d agreed not to mention that.’
Queghan suddenly needed the reassurance of commonplace intimacies. His hands went around her waist and slid down inside the top of her skirt to hold the firm globes of her buttocks, the thumb of his left hand seeking the dark-brown mole on her right cheek. It was a tiny but significant landmark, one of the many which guided him through the day and proved to him the realness of his own existence. Without them he would have floundered, become lost and drifting in a grey, featureless dream.
Just as now, the human race, spreading outwards on the stepping-stones of natural and man-made planets, also clung to comforting reminders of the birth-planet which had no more substance than that of a collective racial memory. Mankind’s original home had entered mythology, become an ancient legend like Old Earth’s own legends of primitive civilizations. So in order to preserve it they had fashioned their new homes in the likeness of Old Earth, shaping the continents and oceans in its image.
On starlit nights Queghan sometimes sought out the 4th magnitude star which was the original Sun, the one that had given birth to human life. Its light still travelled across space, to be collected in the retina of his eye, even though the star itself had for a long time become dull and fat with premature old age, a red giant in the incipient stages of nuclear decay. The small speck of light he saw now was of the Sun in its prime, many centuries Pre-Colonization: he was in effect looking backwards in time to an age when human beings had just begun to heave themselves off the planet, first of all in crude flying machines and then in small pieces of space hardware. The exact point in time was impossible to define, though Queghan liked to imagine it was round about – give or take a century or two – the time of the Second World War; this appealed to the romantic aspect in his nature and made a convenient link with his specialist study of the period.
But the eerie paradox of looking backwards to the age of his ancestors never diminished or failed to thrill him. His own antecedents were alive then, carrying his blueprint in the cells of their bodies. In however bizarre a form, he had lived through that time too, been present at every stage of human evolution.
Oria said, ‘It’s starting to rain.’
The clouds had formed according to plan, shutting out the sun, and the air became suddenly chill as the light faded. Queghan shivered and experienced a twinge of pain: an ache in his left shoulder where the strange pale mark was imprinted in the flesh. He picked up the child and with his wife went up to the house.”
10
‘There Shall Be Time No Longer’
Black reached forward awkwardly and closed the folder which lay on the trestle-table. The exertion made him grunt and pant, as a mangy dog struggling on the end of a chain. The heat in the room was at the point of being unbearable; it was only made tolerable by the knowledge that one could not escape it; it filled this ghastly continent from ocean to ocean, a dense humid blanket resting immovably on the flat desert scrubland.
He eased his position slightly. Mustn’t overtax the old ticker, not in this heat. Two events had profoundly disturbed him, the second of which had compounded the first. The first event had been the arrival of the guard that morning to inform him of an unfortunate accident: the yellow shrivelled corpse of the King’s Special Envoy had been discovered in one of the interrogation cells. It was clear (there was no other explanation) that he had been bitten by a King snake. ‘These things happen,’ the guard had shrugged, while Black quickly remembered and composed his features to convey shock and disbelief with a vague suggestion of sorrow at the tragic occurrence.
‘Yes,’ he had replied at last, ‘what a tremendous shame,’ and then waited politely for the guard to complete the catalogue of horror. When he didn’t, and was about to withdraw, Black rashly inquired after the other occupant of the cell. The guard said, ‘And who would that be, sir?’ and Black said impetuously, ‘Surely he wasn’t there alone, not at that time of night. He must have been with someone.’ The guard shrugged again and made a gesture comprising two asymmetric shapes in the air. ‘We found only one corpse. His insignia identified him as an officer of the King’s Commission. Should there have been someone else?’
And now there was the report, which Black assumed could only have been compiled some hours before the ‘tragic occurrence’. It had been waiting for him on the trestle-table, lying there accusingly like a mocking jibe from beyond the grave, demanding to be read. It had at first mystified him, even made him laugh (though laughing was difficult under the circumstances) and then – as the realization dawned – confirmed his own worst fears. The worst fear of all was that Q’s crazy prediction would come to pass – and yet it hadn’t, not yet. But what had happened to the body? Q had vanished, ceased to exist, become a phantom hovering uneasily on the edge of memory. That was the first unsettling event.
The second was the reading of the report, which seemed to be saying that Brenton and not Q had been ‘injected’ into this world. If this were true it would at least explain how Q had managed to disappear from the cell: he had vanished because he had never been there in the first place. Instead Brenton had been the injectee (Brenton? Benson? Which was which?), and this being so it meant that everything Black experienced was a product of Brenton’s (Benson’s?) imagination.
But how ludicrous … he was letting this thing run away with him. He couldn’t possibly depend on Benson/Brenton for his existence, not possibly. Brenton/Benson was dead. Dead. And he was alive. (He wished the girl wouldn’t wriggle so.) To suppose that Benton/Brenson had imagined all this was to fall prey to the wildest imaginative leap of all. No, no, he would not accept it. Not when he had absolute proof (why wouldn’t she keep still when he was trying to think?) that Bentson’s/Brenon’s dying had had not the slightest effect on the reality or otherwise of his own existence.
It might equally be proposed that he, Black, was responsible for this (ha-ha) future world of ‘Queghan’ and his laughable ‘mythic projections’. Who was to say that one had the advantage over the other? Why, here, yes here, in the report – he wrenched the girl’s head aside and reached over her shoulder to g
et at the folder – this Queghan fellow had voiced the doubt of his own reality, had mooted the possibility that he himself was the product of another consciousness. Yes, here it was, in black and white: Perhaps the two separate consciousnesses – the several, an infinite number of them – are at this moment involved in this same speculation, each aware of the possible existence of the others but unable to prove or refute their actual reality.
Ha! There it was. So let the cogging swints or Benon/Breston or whoever affirm or deny that. He was as real as they were. This moaning girl bent before him across the trestle-table was the only proof required. A jerking slippery poke from the rear gave the lie to all this bladdering cod-laddle, immersing himself up to the point of total penetration and hearing the choking gulp as the force of impact knocked the breath from her lungs. With each long sucking stroke he was entering deeper and deeper, the exquisite thrill making his sweating flanks tremble: an unbearable ecstasy rising to the pitch of a scream. She was moaning, he was coming, and as it flooded from him the yellow sun disintegrated in his brain, the red ocean bubbled up inside his head, and the world dissolved before his eyes into deepest impenetrable black.
*
APPENDIX I:
Time Dilation
Time dilation – the ‘stretching’ or ‘slowing down’ of time – is a consequence of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, published in 1905. The Theory states, as a broad concept, that there is no absolute standard of reference throughout the universe; every measurement of phenomena depends upon the conditions under which the observer observes, not upon any intrinsic or objective quality which the phenomena contain. All observable results depend on the position of the observer at a certain point in spacetime, and all interpretations are equally valid and correct. In simple terms, there is no ‘objective’ reality which exists independent of an observer.
Another proposition of the Theory, which has been tested and verified, is that lightspeed, however it is measured and irrespective of source, remains constant at 300,000 kilometres per second. This would seem to defy common sense, for what it means is that if two beams of light are receding in opposite directions, we would assume the sum total of their speeds to be twice the speed of light, or 2c (where c = lightspeed). But this is not so. According to the formula
we find the answer to be c (the speed of light).
Similarly, if two spacecraft are receding from each other, both travelling at 90 per cent the speed of light, common sense would indicate that their combined speed of recession is 180 per cent the speed of light, but again this is not the case. Using the formula
(where a and b are the speeds of the two craft and c is the speed of light) we see that the total speed of their recession is less than the speed of light. In Earthbound terms this appears to be nonsense, but it is a fact which has been proven by various experiments and one that any space traveller will have to live with.
Two other effects are worth noting, concerning the mass of a moving body and its length. The faster a body travels, the more massive it becomes, compared to its mass at rest. As it approaches lightspeed the body increases in mass until at lightspeed itself the body is of infinite mass (and would require an engine of infinite power to push it forward). At the same time, the length of the object (a spacecraft, say) decreases as it approaches lightspeed. At lightspeed itself the spacecraft is of zero length, and for all practical purposes ceases to exist.
In order to measure time dilation on board a spacecraft – and everything will slow down, remember, including clocks and the ageing process of the astronaut – we multiply a given period (60 minutes Earthtime) by
to arrive at the following table. This has been calculated for a spacecraft which on Earth measures 100 yards in length and taking one Earth hour as the standard time interval. From this it can be seen how the various effects operate upon a spacecraft approaching the speed of light.
It should be noted that these effects upon a spacecraft approaching lightspeed are identical to those experienced by a body in a strong gravitational field. In fact, Einstein, in his General Theory of Relativity, makes no distinction between the effects of speed and those of gravitation. A Vehicle in the vicinity of a Temporal Flux Centre would, for all practical purposes, be approaching lightspeed, and thus be subject to the effects tabulated below.
Speed of ship as percentage of light speed Length of ship (yards) Mass (tons) Duration of ship-hour in minutes
(Earth = 60)
0 100.00 100.00 60.00
10 99.50 100.50 59.52
20 97.98 102.10 58.70
30 95.39 104.83 57.20
40 91.65 109.11 55
50 86.60 115.47 52.10
60 80.00 125.00 48.00
70 71.41 140.03 42.75
80 60.00 166.67 36.00
90 43.59 229.42 26.18
95 31.22 320.26 18.71
99 14.11 708.88 8.53
99.9 4.47 2,236.63 2.78
99.997 0.71 14,142.20 1.17
100 zero infinity zero
APPENDIX II:
Schwarzschild Radius (Rs)
In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild, one of the leading physicists of the time, calculated the effects a small, extremely massive body would have once it had passed below a certain critical radius – the Schwarzschild Radius (Rs). He found that it would distort spacetime so severely that nothing could ever escape its tremendous gravitational force.
Surrounding a body of this type would be the event horizon, so called because it is an absolute barrier to the outside universe, preventing any communication from inside the event horizon to the outside: not even light itself can escape.
To take a specific example, that of the Sun, how far would it have to contract before reaching the critical Schwarzschild Radius? The mathematics are as follows, where G is the gravitational constant, c is the velocity of light, and M a given mass:
Using SI units, where mass is measured in kilograms, length in metres, and time in seconds, G = 6.7 X 10-11 and c = 3 X 108 metres per second. For the Sun, M = 2 X 1080 kilograms, and using the following calculation
we find that the Sun (at present 700,000 kilometres) would have to be compressed to 3 kilometres to achieve its critical radius. By the same calculation, the entire mass of the Earth would have to be compressed into a volume less than one centimetre in radius – about the size of a marble – before entering a stage of Temporal Flux; or, as it might be known, a mini Black Hole.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the calculations used in Appendices I and II, I should like to thank Adrian Berry for permission to quote from his book The Next Ten Thousand Years (Jonathan Cape 1974); and my thanks also to Patrick Moore and Iain Nicolson for permission to use material from Black Holes in Space (Ocean Books 1974), and for their suggestion of the graphic ‘ripple’ analogy.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Conscious Universe: A theoretical concept, so far without any evidence to support it, which propounds that the 100,000 million galaxies in the observable universe constitute a single conscious intelligence, or hyper-brain.
Cosmology: The branch of metaphysics dealing with the universe and its relation to the mind.
Cyberthetic: Machine intelligence with a reasoning and deductive capability, ie a thinking machine.
Dream Tape: A means of plotting and recording (for later analysis) the varying patterns of sleep and dreaming activity by the use of a portable EEG device.
Dyson Electromagnetic Sphere: Construction of solid iron-ore asteroids which produces a one million volt electrical field to stabilize a region of Temporal Flux.
Electromagnetic Interference (EMI): A system utilizing electromagnetism and gravitational energy which permits interstellar travel by using the basic proposition of lightspeed as a constant; developed on the theories of Oliver Heavyside, nineteenth century electrical engineer.
Ernst–Ryan–Gathorne Experiment: Mathematical evidence for the acausal nature of time and the universe which demonstrates that Event A might precede Event B,
or vice versa, at one and the same time – depending on the location of the observer.
Event Horizon: The absolute barrier surrounding a Temporal Flux Centre, preventing communication of any kind with the outside universe.
High Intensity Complex: An area of Psy-Con for deportees who have been screened and classified as high-risk subversives.
Indexer: A device for inducing and measuring mind rhythms, egalpha, theta, delta, etc
Metagalaxy: A term which embraces all of Creation, ie that portion of the universe which is visible and the greater portion known as the Hidden Universe.
MetaPsychical Code: A theoretical framework which seeks to integrate all psi phenomena and human neurochemical data in one cohesive structure.
MetaPsychical Research: Similar objectives to the related science of Myth Technology but more concerned with an investigation of human neurochemistry and its connection with the ‘celestial clockwork’ of the Metagalaxy.
Mythic Projection: A state of ‘Teak Experience’ which gives an insight, almost religious in nature, into the mechanism of Creation. Known among ancient superstitious peoples as an epileptic fit.
Myth Technology: That branch of Cosmology (qv) which seeks to relate all psi phenomena and mythic projection with the four prime energy sources of the universe.
MyTT (Myth Technology Research Institute): The central organization dealing with theoretical and applied research into mythical past and future events (repositories of knowledge).