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Blish,James - Midsummer Century

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by Midsummer Century (lit)

“Nothing I could understand,” Martels said, being extremely careful not to hesitate after “nothing.” Strange as it was to find himself apparently talking to himself like a split per­sonality, it was stranger still to realize that neither psyche could read the mind of the other—and, somehow, immensely important that Qvant’s opposite assumption should not be brought into question.

  “That is not surprising. Yet I sense an anomaly in yours. You have the mind of a young man, but there is an aura about it which paradoxically suggests that it is even older than mine. To which Rebirth do you belong?”

  mt~m sony, but the question is completely meaningless to “In what year were you born, then?” Qvant said, with ob­vious surprise.

  “Nineteen-fifty-five.”

  “By what style of dating?”

  “Style? I don’t understand that either. We called it A.D., Anno Domini, after the birth of Christ. Insofar as anybody could be sure, He was born about seventeen thousand years after the human race invented written records.”

  There was quite a long silence after this. Martels wondered what Qvant was thinking. For that matter, he wondered what he himself was thinking; whatever it was, it was nothing useful. He was an alien personality in someone else’s brain, and that someone else was talking nonsense to him—someone whose prisoner he was, and who also seemed to be a prisoner, though at the same time he claimed to be a sort of god, and Martels had seen him being consulted as one. .

  “I see,” Qvant said suddenly. “Without the central computer I cannot be accurate, but precision seems hardly necessary here. By your system, the present year is roughly 25,000 A.D.”

  This last shock Martels could not take. His insecurely re­embodied mind, still aquiver with the sick edginess of its escape from death, bombarded with meaningless facts, now under a new threat of death whose very nature he could not begin to comprehend, went reeling back toward the pit.

  And at the same instant, it was assaulted, with cold, word­less ferocity. Qvant was going to throw him out.

  Never before had he even dreamed it possible that a man could be thrown out of his own mind by someone else—and this was not even his own mind; here, he was the interloper. There seemed to be no way to resist, nothing that he could even grab hold of—even had he been inhabiting his own brain, he would have known no better than any other man of his

  time in what part of it his psyche resided. Qvant knew, that was evident, and was homing upon it with the mercilessness of a guided missile; and the terrible, ousting pressure was entirely emotional, without the faintest semantic cue which might have helped Martels to fight back.

  The rotting hall wavered and vanished. Once more, Martels was without sight, without hearing. By instinct alone, he dug into . . . something . . . and held hard, like a crab louse resisting being shaken off the hide of a jackal.

  The terrible battering went on and on. There was in the end nothing to cling to at all but a thought, one single thought:

  I am I. I am I. I am I.

  And then, slowly, miraculously, the attack began to subside. As before, sound returned first, the faint ambiguous echoes of the museum; and then, sight, the sight of that same stretch of wall and floor, and those same lumpy monuments to and mementos of some far past in Martels’ even farther future.

  “It appears that I cannot be rid of you yet,” Qvant said. The tone of his amplified voice seemed to hover somewhere between icy fury and equally icy amusement. “Very well; we shall hold converse, you and I. It will be a change from being an oracle to tribesmen. But sooner or later, Martels-from-the­past, sooner or later I shall catch you out—and then you will come to know the greatest thing that I do not know: what the afterlife is like. Sooner or later, Martels . . . sooner or later . . .“

  Just in time, Martels realized that the repetitions were the hypnotic prelude to a new attack. Digging into whatever it had been that he had saved himself with before, that unknown substrate of the part of this joint mind that belonged to him alone, he said with equal iciness:

  “Perhaps. You have a lot to teach me, if you will, and I’ll listen. And maybe I can teach you something, too. But I think I can also make you extremely uncomfortable, Qvant; you’ve

  just shown me two different ways to go about that. So perhaps you had better mind your manners and bear in mind that however the tribesmen see you, you’re a long way from being a god to me.”

  For answer, Qvant simply prevented Martels from saying another word. Slowly, the sun set, and the shapes in the hail squatted down into a darkness against which Martels was not even allowed to close his unowned eyes.

  3

  Martels was alive, still, which was something to be grateful for; but it was hardly a famous victory. Qvant could not throw him out—as yet—but Martels still had no control over his eyes, or their eyes, except the minimum one of changing depth of focus; and it seemed either that Qvant himself could not close the eyes, or never bothered to. Always, except when the rare petitioner came into the museum, they stared at that same damn wall and the blobby things in front of it.

  Furthermore, Qvant never slept, and therefore, neither did Martels. Whatever mechanism kept the brain going in its un­viewable case, it seemed to make sleep unnecessary, which was perhaps fortunate, since Martels had no confidence in his ability to resist another of Qvant’s attacks were he unconscious at the time.

  This was just one of many aspects of their joint existence which Martels did not understand. Obviously, some sort of perfusion pump—that persistent tiny hum at the back of his head, like a sort of tintinnus—could continuously supply oxy­gen and blood sugar, carry away lactic acid, abolish fatigue. But it was Martels’ cloudy memory that there was more to sleep than that: Dreams, for instance, were essential to clear the computer-analog that was the brain of the previous day’s programs. Perhaps mere evolution had bred that need out of

  the race, although twenty-five thousand years seemed like a prohibitively short time for so major a change.

  Whatever the answer, it could not prevent boredom, to which Qvant seemed to be entirely immune. Evidently he had vast inner resources, accumulated over centuries, with which to amuse himself through the endless days and nights; but to these, Martels had no access whatsoever. Martels concealed this fact as best he could, for it seemed increasingly important to him that Qvant’s impression that Martels could overhear some of his thoughts should be encouraged; for all his obvious power and accumulated knowledge, Qvant did not seem to suspect the totality of the mind-brain barrier between them.

  Nor would Qvant allow Martels to talk except when the two of them were alone, and mostly not even then. He seemed es­sentially incurious, or preoccupied, or both; and months went by between petitioners. Between the rare apparitions of the brown savages, the few new things Martels was able to learn were mostly negative and useless.

  He was helpless, and that was most thoroughly that. Every so often, he found himself almost wishing that this mad night­mare should end with the shattering impact of his own un­protected head upon the center of the radio-telescope dish, like that merciless story that Ambrose Bierce had written about an incident at Owl Creek Bridge.

  But occasionally there were the petitioners, and during their visits Martel listened and learned, a little. Even more rarely, Qvant had sudden, abortive bursts of loquaciousness, which were rather more productive of information, though always frustrating in the end. During one of these, Martels found him­self allowed to ask:

  “What was that business with the first tribesman that I saw

  —the one who wanted a protective ritual? Were you really about to give him some kind of rigmarole?”

  “I was, and it would not have been a rigmarole,” Qvant said.

  “It would have been an entirely functional complex of di­agrams and dances. He will come back for it in due course.”

  “But how could it possibly work?”

  “Between any two events in the universe which are topolog­ically identical there is a natural affin
ity or repulsion, which can be expressed in diagrammatic form. The relationship is dynamic, and therefore must be acted out; whether attrac­tion or repulsion occurs depends entirely upon the actions. That is the function of the dances.”

  “But that’s magic—sheer superstition!”

  “On the contrary,” Qvant said. “It is natural law, and was practiced successfully for many centuries before the principles behind it were formulated. The tribesmen understand this very well, although they would not describe it in the same terms I have. It is simply a working part of their lives. Do you think they would continue to consult me if they found that the advice that 11 gave them did not work? They are uncivilized, but they are not insane.”

  And, upon another such occasion:

  “You seem to accept the tribesmen’s belief that there is really a life after death. Why?”

  “I accept it on the evidence; the tribesmen communicate regularly and reliably with their recent ancestors. I have no personal experience in this field whatsoever, but there is also a sound theoretical basis for it.”

  “And what’s that?” Martels said.

  “The same principle which allows both of us to inhabit the same brain. The personality is a semistable electromagnetic field; to remain integrated, it requires the supplementary com­puting apparatus of a brain, as well as an energy source such as a body, or this case we live in, to keep it in its characteristic state of negative entropy. Once the field is set free by death, it loses all ability to compute and becomes subject to normal entropy losses. Hence, slowly but inevitably, it fades.”

  “Still, why have you had no personal experience of it? I should have thought that originally—”

  “The discovery,” Qvant said, in a voice suddenly remote, “is relatively recent. No such communication is possible except along the direct ancestral line, and my donors—whoever they were—had dissipated centuries before the mere possibility was known.”

  “Just exactly how old are you, anyhow?” Martels said. But Qvant would say no more.

  That conversation, however, did give Martels a little further insight into the characters of the tribesmen, and together with some other bits and scraps of evidence, a vague picture of history as well. Various references to “Rebirths” had enabled him to guess that civilization had been destroyed and rebuilt four times since his own period, but had emerged each time much changed, and each time less viable. Rebirth II had ap­parently been snuffed out by a worldwide glaciation; inevitably, Rebirth III had taken the form of a tightly organized, high-energy culture upon a small population base.

  Now, however, the whole Earth, except for the Poles, was at the height of a tropical phase. Some of the technological knowledge of Rebirth III was stifi here in the museum in which Mthels was doubly imprisoned, a fraction of it still intact and a rather larger fraction not too far decayed to be unrecoverable by close study. But the tribesmen of Rebirth IV had no use for it. Not only did they no longer understand it, but they thought it not worth understanding or salvaging. The fact that food was to be had for the picking or hunting with relative ease made machinery unnecessary to them— and their legends of what Rebirth III had been like made machinery repugnant to them as well. Their placid, deep­jungle kind of economy suited them very well.

  But there was more to it than that. Their outlook had under­gone a radical change which could only be attributed to the

  discovery of the real existence of the ghosts of their ancestors. It had become mystical, ritualistic, and in a deep sense ascetic

  —that is, they were death-oriented, or afterlife-oriented. This explained, too, the ambiguity of their attitude toward Qvant. They respected, indeed were awed by, the depth of his knowledge, and called upon it occasionally for solutions to problems which were beyond their understanding—so far be­yond as to override their fierce sense of individuality; yet worshiping him was out of the question. Toward an en­tity which had no rapport with its ancestors, had never even once experienced such a rapport, and seemed destined never to have an afterlife of its own, they could feel only pity.

  Doubtless it occasionally occurred to a few of them that even the apparently indestructible brain-case could not be immune to something really major in the way of disasters, such as the birth of a volcano immediately under the museum itself; but Qvant had been there, insofar as their own legends could attest, forever already; and their own lives were short. The death of Qvant was not in the short-term future of which they were accustomed to think.

  Most of Qvant’s conversation, however, was far less reveal­ing. He seemed to be almost permanently in a kind of Zen state, conscious of mastery and at the same time contemptuous of it. Many of his answers to petitioners consisted only of abrupt single sentences which seemed to have no connection whatsoever with the question that had been asked. Occasion­ally, too, he would respond with a sort of parable which was not one whit more comprehensible for being longer. For ex­ample:

  “Immortal Qvant, some of our ancestors now tell us that we should clear some of the jungle and begin to sow. Others tell us to remain content with reaping. How should we resolve this conflict?”

  “When Qvant was a man, twelve students gathered upon

  a cliff-side to hear him speak. He asked of them what they would have him say that they could not hear from their own mouths. All replied at once, so that no single reply could be heard. Qvant said: ‘You have too many heads for one body,’ and pushed eleven of them over the cliff.”

  Humiliatingly for Martels, in such situations the tribesmen always seemed to understand at once whatever it was Qvant was conveying, and to go away satisfied with it. On that particular occasion, though, Martels had managed to come up with an inspired guess:

  “Obviously, agriculture can’t be revived under these condi­tions.”

  “No,” Qvant said. “But to what particular conditions do you refer?”

  “None, I don’t know anything about them. In fact, agricul­ture amidst jungle ecologies was quite common in my time. I could just somehow sense that that was what you meant.”

  Qvant said nothing further, but Martels could indeed feel, although dimly, his disturbance. Another phantom brick had been laid upon the edifice of Qvant’s belief that he had less than total privacy from Marteis.

  Of course Qvant had deduced almost immediately from the nature and phraseology of most of Martels’ questions that Martels had been some infinitely primitive equivalent of a scientist, and furthermore that Martels’ eavesdropping did not go deep enough to penetrate to Qvant’s own store of scientific knowledge. Sometimes, Qvant seemed to take a per­verse pleasure in answering Martels’ questions in this area with apparent candor and at the same time in the most useless possible terms:

  “Qvant, you keep saying you will never die. Barring ac­cidents, of course. But surely the energy source for this brain­case apparatus must have a half-life, no matter how long

  it is, and the output will fall below the minimum necessary level some day.”

  “The source is not radioactive and has no half-life. It comes from the Void, the origin—in terms of spherical trigonometry

  —of inner space.”

  “I don’t understand the terms. Or do you mean that it taps continuous creation? Has that been proven to go on?”

  This term was in turn unfamiliar to Qvant and for once he was curious enough to listen to Martels’ explanation of the “steady state” theory of Fred Hoyle.

  “No, that is nonsense,” Qvant said at the end. “Creation is both unique and cyclical. The origin of inner space is else­where, and not explicable except in terms of general juganity

  —the psychology of the wavicle.”

  “The wavicle? There’s only one?”

  “Only one, though it has a thousand aspects.”

  “And it thinks?” Martels said in astonishment.

  “No, it does not think. But it has will, and behaves accord­ingly. Understand its will, and you are the master of its behav­ior.”

&
nbsp; “But how does one tap this power, then?”

  “By meditation, initially. Thereafter, it cannot be lost.”

  “No, I mean how does the machine—”

  Silence.

  Martels was learning, but nothing he learned seemed to get him anywhere. Then, one year, a petitioner asked another question about the Birds; and when in all innocence Martels asked afterward, “What are these Birds, anyhow?” the levin­stroke of hatred and despair which stabbed out of Qvant’s mind into his own told him in an instant that he had at long last happened upon something absolutely crucial— If only he could figure out how to use it.

  4

  So obvious was the depth of Qvant’s emotions, into which were mixed still others to which Martels could put no name, that Martels expected no reply at all. But after a pause not much more than twice as long as usual, Qvant said:

  “The Birds are humanity’s doom—and mine and yours, too, eventually, my uninvited and unwelcome guest. Did you think evolution had stood still during more than twenty-three thousand years—even without considering the peak in worldwide circumambient radioactivity which preceded Re­birth One?”

  “No, of course not, Qvant. The tribesmen are obviously a genetic mixture that was unknown in my time, and naturally I assumed that there have been mutations, as well.”

  “You see nothing but surfaces,” Qvant said with steely contempt. “They show many marks of evolutionary advance and change which are beyond your observation. For a single, simple-minded example, at the beginning of Rebirth Four, when the jungle became nearly worldwide, man was still an animal who had to practice the principles of nutrition consciously, and the tribesmen of that time did not have the knowledge. As a result, no matter how much they ate—and there was never any shortage even then, not even of protein

 

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