Orbit 11 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Night

  “Well, nothing, uh, complicated. Just good-bye. And we will carry on in the next universe.” Obviously, the speech had been rehearsed, but not enough.

  “Thank you, Commander Kandt,” said the voice of the first announcer, though he was on Earth and Kandt could not hear him. “I remind you again that the Seed has already begun its multibillion-year mission, but the transmissions are only now reaching us, due to the great distances involved.” The starship was on the screen again. “Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one—field on.” The starship vanished, replaced by a mirrored sphere in which the images of the searchlights could be seen, as could the distorted image of the steevee camera. “And now the plaque will be placed on the Seed.” Figures in pressure suits drifted in around the sphere, guiding three wide bands of fabric which joined at a center. The three cloth tendrils snaked around the mirrored horizon like living tendrils, almost as if they were thrusting forward the tiny men on their tips rather than being pulled by them, as if the men were specialized handling organs at the tips of the three limbs. The tips came together and were secured. The men drew back from the sphere, and a metal plaque, brightly polished but dull against the perfectly reflecting surface of the McJunkins field, was visible at the juncture of the three fabric strips.

  Cullins, Cain, and Erika realized simultaneously that the thing looked like an enormous athletic supporter. Looking at it made Erika hornier than ever.

  The sphere grew on the screen, filled it. “Our camera is closing on the plaque that has been secured to the Seed. I remind you again that the transmissions are only now . . .” The plaque filled the screen. Superimposed over a spiral nebula was the figure of a man, nude but with his crotch emasculated by a shadow. (Maybe it’s his jock strap around the Seed, Cain thought.) In his right hand was the flag of the Americas Union. In his left was an hourglass. Inscription: On this day of September 9, 2043, men of this universe set forth for a universe not yet born. “The inscription reads,” the announcer began, then read the inscription that the audience had already read. “For the first time, man has sent himself into the future that his race might not die in the collapse of the universe billions of years from now.”

  Cain suddenly gave the little twitch that signified something had occured to him. “He said ‘for the first time.’ But it might not be the first time for anyone. Suppose in the universe before this one a race put forth a Seed. Then they could exist somewhere in this universe, a race billions, maybe trillions of years old. We would be like children compared to them.”

  “If they put out a Seed before, they would probably do it again, storing their knowledge in records on the Seed or Seeds. So they would always be a universe ahead of us, universe after universe, having an edge of knowledge on us. Bad if they didn’t want to see any other races surviving the contraction periods. Uh-oh.”

  “Well?” That was Cain. Erika was sulking, silent. “The universe pulsates,” Cullins said, “so it will never have an end and it never had a beginning. So anything that could possibly happen will have happened, having had an infinite time to happen. So if anybody was going to put out a Seed, they would have done it. And if a Seed was going to succeed, say a Seed launched by the Oofians, it would have done so an infinite time ago. And the Oofians have had an infinite time to keep on surviving universe after universe, launching more Seeds each time, putting their entire population in Seeds, their population growing each cycle until it fills the universe. So why aren’t we armpit deep in Oofians on this planet? And, since we are not, why isn’t the Seed possible?”

  Cain watched the screen. They were not showing the Seed anymore. This was harder to cover than a starship takeoff. A starship keeps on traveling into empty space, going somewhere. Fade out. The Seed came instantly into being, stayed put, did nothing; and would keep doing it for many billion years.

  “If anything that can happen has happened, then somewhere along the line a race arose capable of challenging the Oofians, because of higher intelligence, say. Both races were wiped out. Or maybe every race that does this tires eventually and stops putting out Seeds.”

  “Something like that, maybe,” Cullins said. “The Seed has to work.” He began to caress Erika, too gently to suit her.

  Cain left, though they would have paid no attention to him anyway.

  * * * *

  Q: This circus is the salvation of the race?

  A: I refer you to my previous answer concerning the nobility-ignobility of ends

  versus means. Moreover, journalists and politicians have generally been the worst of the race, not the best, and this fete is of their staging. I might add that you are judging by those who have been left behind, fated to persist in their own deaths, even before the death of the universe, and not by those who have been sent into the future.

  Q: But that Erika ... she is the female companion of the instigator of the Seed but

  behaves like a nymphomaniac, caring nothing about the Seed. Why cannot he have a Brünnhilde at his side?

  A: One more question like that and I will suspect you of harboring a perverted

  desire to see women burned alive. Her behavior is hardly surprising, for she is a nymphomaniac, and one with an IQ of ninety. She meets Cullins’ needs, so there is no cause for worry. Perhaps he throws the energy that others use in creating a normal sexual relationship into fighting for the Seed. Perhaps he is incapable of a normal relationship and this is his adjustment. It is more of an adjustment than Cain has made. The main point is that you are judging them by their more pitiable failings and not by their nobler aspects.

  Q: Speaking of nobler aspects, why weren’t we shown the crew of the Seed?

  A: Because they are a very stable and dull lot.

  * * * *

  Hearts caught in midbeat, lungs in midcycle. The blood, unmoving, fills arteries and veins as if it were stone. Life processes are caught in midstride, reactions not reacting chemical equilibrium replaced by stasis. A stable and dull lot they may be, but two of the crew, a man and his wife, have spurned the festivities and retired to their quarters, where now lurks the beast with two backs. Through experience and familiarity gained long ago, and with an eye on the chronometer, they have carefully timed the conclusion of their cooperation to coincide with the launching of the Seed. A hairsbreadth away from fluid eruptions, they are now motionless, ready to greet the new universe with the oldest challenge to death. Only an instant ago they moved with careful frenzy, but now they do not move.

  * * * *

  Some of the things that Roy Cullins and, Elfred John Cain worried about:

  1) The crew of the Seed loses heart, daunted by the new universe in which they are lost, and turns the McJunkins generator back on, preferring to try the next universe. They are daunted by that universe and use the generator again, trying their luck with still another universe. Daunted by that universe, they use the generator again. . . .

  2) The universe, though oscillating, is gradually running down and each expansion is smaller than the one before and the cosmos will eventually contract and not expand again. This time, maybe. Tough luck, Seed.

  3) The universe, though oscillating, explodes more violently each time and will eventually expand without limit and never contract again. This time, maybe. Sorry about that, Seed.

  4) The Oofians are real and wait until each intelligent race put forth a Seed, then moves in and wipes out the race, colonizes the sterilized planets, and puts each Seed in a museum of Seeds.

  5) The estimated time of contraction-expansion of the universe is incorrect and the McJunkins field will collapse in the midst of the fiery contraction or explosion. Good-bye, Seed.

  6) The natural laws of the new universe will be different from this one’s and the chemical processes of human life will not be able to function. Sleep on, Seed.

  7) Men of the future will discover a way to turn off a McJunkins field, decide that the Seed is a cruel and evil waste of life, and release the crew.

  8) Exposure to
the McJunkins field makes humans sterile.

  9) The events in each universe are exactly duplicated in the one before and will be triplicated in the one after and this repetition can be extended infinitely into the past and future; and an infinite number of Cullinses and Cains have launched an infinite number of Seeds an infinite number of times before and will continue to launch them forever; and they have always failed and will always fail, for the survival of a Seed would make the next universe different from the one before, therefore a contradiction, therefore. . . .

  A crewman, to smother his nervousness, was smoking a cigarette when time stopped. Now the smoke is baroquely wreathed about him, more rigid than any metal, sculpted by the air currents which were once blown by the air conditioner until time stopped. Now, in a Now which does not cease, the air currents themselves are rigid and the fans of the air conditioner are poised. The life of the ship depends on many systems which must never stop moving. But now they do not move.

  * * * *

  The one thing that Roy Cullins and Elfred John Cain should have worried about:

  The electromagnetic radiations which man can see or detect and measure and which he has learned to use to interpret the structure of reality can carry information which causes pleasure, awe, fear, pain, despair. The radiation carrying one type of information need be no different from that carrying another. For over a year a station on Pluto had been gleaning information from quanta that came hurtling in from the farthest outposts of the realm of matter. The information existed in a normative vacuum at first, but a context would soon be supplied.

  When it was supplied, the crew of the Seed had been frozen in a perpetual Now for a little less than three years.

  When the research team published its results, several days elapsed before several popular science writers realized the significance of the discovery.

  The quanta said this: the universe does not pulsate. The gravitational potential of all the matter in the universe is not sufficient to overcome the outward kinetic energy of that matter. The nebulae will never cease their outward flight, will never come hurtling back to fuse into a new cosmic egg. And certainly there have been no previous universes that have contracted to reexplode and give birth to the present one. This universe is the only one that has ever been and the only one that ever will be.

  The Seed had been sown on barren ground.

  Cain had seriously considered suicide. He had not completely dismissed the possibility, but he wanted to communicate with Cullins, who shared the guilt. I did not do this alone, he had kept telling himself. He had thought that the sight of Cullins would underline that defense.

  Instead, he found that the sight of Cullins made it worse. This is the man I followed, he now thought. My decision. Why?

  Sometimes the banal is inevitable. “Have you heard the news?”

  “That the universe will never contract? Of course. What do you want, Jack? You have the hangdog look of somebody who needs to be forgiven. I can’t do it. Only the crew could do it. And they knew that the Seed was a risk. A step into the unknown always is.”

  Cain, in spite of his tendency to laugh off unpleasant matters, had admiration for dramatic gestures; therefore the small pistol in his coat pocket contained only one dart, which he had tipped with poison himself, rather than the usual anesthetic, and which he had intended for his own neck. At this moment he was tempted to put it to another use. “You don’t care. You’ve killed those nine people and you don’t care.”

  “Not to mention the several thousand fertilized ova. But I do care. And I didn’t murder them. They believed in the Seed, just as I did. And at that time I thought that more Seeds would come. If I had known that no more funds would be given to us, I would have been on that first Seed. But I’m not and there is nothing I can do for them. And it won’t help them if I send myself out—yes, the bulge in your jacket is obvious.”

  “Nine people, lost. They aren’t dead, but they will never live again. Nothing you say can change that. We put them there.” Cain was trembling, but from an internal cold, perhaps the absolute zero within the Seed.

  “I won’t share your guilt, Jack. We made a decision after considering all the available data, then acted on that basis. And that’s all anyone can ever do. The only alternative is not to act at all. Stop making decisions and acting on them and you’re as frozen as you would be in a McJunkins field and just as dead; and it isn’t as clean a death. We couldn’t have waited until all data was in, because there is no way that we can ever know we have it all. Even now, we don’t know that. Maybe next year more data will show that the universe pulsates, after all. Or the old steady state theory might be correct.”

  “You make the Seed sound noble!” Cain shouted. “Not now, not anymore, because it isn’t a seed, it’s a tomb. We didn’t just make a mistake because of erroneous data, Cullins. We were playing with human lives.”

  “Which you have to do throughout your life unless you live in a cave by yourself. Understand this, Jack: if I had known that the universe was not a pulsating one, I would have stopped the project at all costs, even if I had to blow up the Seed. But, without that knowledge, the project was right. Everything I did was right. And if the human race ever stops acting on the basis of what it thinks it knows, paralyzed by the fear that its knowledge may be wrong, then Homo sapiens will be making its application for membership in the dinosaur club.”

  “You really believe you were right.”

  “I do.”

  “I can’t. I’m guilty. I know I’m guilty.”

  “I know that you can’t believe it. And I’m sorry.”

  * * * *

  Q: You should know. Will the universe ever contract or will it keep expanding?

  A: No hope there. The nebulae will hurtle outward forever, even as the heat death

  overtakes them and entropy triumphs.

  Q: Perhaps some method will be found of collapsing a McJunkins field and the nine

  can be released. How about it?

  A: No such method will ever exist.

  Q: How can you know for certain?

  A: Take it from me.

  Q: Is Roy Cullins right? Was the launching of the Seed the right thing to do? Was it

  what had to be done?

  A:

  Q: Didn’t you hear me?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Aren’t you going to answer my question?

  A: No.

  * * * *

  In a dark place which is filled with light, but none for seeing, are nine figures. They do not move. They never will.

  <>

  * * * *

  Kate Wilhelm

  ON THE ROAD TO HONEYVILLE

  Father died in April. In July Mother said, “We’re going home.”

  Like that. We’re going home. Over the next four weeks, through the packing and sorting and getting rid of, and real estate people, and prospective buyers, through it all I kept coming back to those words. Montauk was home, the only one I’d known, although Eleanor said she remembered a city apartment, and Rob insisted he did too, lying, because he was only a baby when they bought the Montauk house.

  “You mean Lexington?” Rob asked.

  Horses, rolling pastures, the old Widmer farm where Grandma still lived.

  “No. I mean Salyersville.”

  I was washing dishes. Eleanor was dashing around getting ready for a date and Rob was fixing the stereo, across the counter in the family room. There was a long quiet waiting time after Mother said Salyersville. Eleanor broke it. “Why? I thought you’d have to be carried back there, words to that effect.”

  “Things change.”

  “Well, not me. I have to be in Ithaca by the end of August, and . . .”

  “Of course,” Mother said. “We’ll get you settled in school first.”

  “Are we broke?” Rob asked.

  “Not completely. Near enough. Too broke to keep this house. I’ll work, but even so . . .”

  He had a wreck the first day
of March and died April 6, and in between he had two operations and never left the hospital. I saw myself on the starched sheet, pale, hovering between life and death, the doctors thick around me, the first such case they’d ever seen. And such a pretty girl, so brave.

  “I won’t go either. Those hick schools!”

  “Rob!”

  “I won’t!”

  I turned from the sink to see her standing at the table looking at me. I knew that if I said no, too, we wouldn’t go. I knew that. She was waiting, not moving. Maybe not even breathing. And I thought, I can’t decide. I’m not old enough. I don’t understand enough. She waited, and I knew that I was afraid, not like in the movies, or from reading a horror story, not like anything I’d ever felt before. I nodded.