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Blish,James - Midsummer Century

Page 8

by Midsummer Century (lit)


  This was followed by a sensation of unprecedented lucidity, though without light, as though now for the first time he was beginning to understand all the recesses and mysteries of his own psyche. He began to wonder, with no little awe, whether this was what the mystics had called “cleansing the doors of perception.” No reception seemed to be involved, for he was still getting no input that he could detect; but the clarity of his thoughts alone was a joy to him, amidst which he sported like a surfacing dolphin.

  Again, he had no idea how long he remained in this Zenlike state. Gradually, however, he became aware also that some outside entity was asking questions of him—deeply probing,

  yet impersonal questions, though neither the queries nor his replies had any semantic content which he could fathom, like a conversation in symbolic logic. Was this the Judgment?

  But the questioner went away and again he was left to enjoy the new-found depths of his own mind. The withdrawal of the questioning, however, was not a falling of silence. On the contrary, a whole complex of sounds now became evident to him, and to some extent familiar, like those to which he had awakened inside the brain-case of the Qvant:

  a remote humming, occasional footsteps and distant words, a wash of echoes. He felt a sudden surge of disappointment. Was the whole thing now about to repeat itself, not once but endlessly, like a rather small snake trying to swallow its own tail?

  Then an unquestionably human voice struck in, clearly and distinctly.

  “Shetland Substation Three requesting master computer analysis.”

  The language was quite different from the one to which he had become accustomed, and did not seem to lie easily on the voice of the questioner, but he understood it with no difficulty. Again, too, the voice was male.

  Cycling, Martels astonished himself by saying, though not in any words that he could hear. Proceed.

  “A scouting party from our Punta Arenas outpost was returning by air from the Falkiands three days ago when it spotted someone apparently trying to cross Magellan Valley. This proved to be a tribesman in an advanced state of des­iccation and starvation, with one arm in a crude sling and four broken ribs in various stages of healing. As was only to have been expected, he was virtually incoherent, though less frightened of our aircraft than tribesmen usually are; but was able to identify himself as one 11am, an outcast of the tribe of Hawksburrow, a group which we believe to be located

  slightly north of Lake Colue Huape. Except for the extraor­dinary distance apparently traversed on foot, the case ap­peared to be quite straightforward and was handled as we usually do potential trainees.

  “After being brought in to this station and given appropri­ate treatment, the tribesman was put into induced sleep, from which he recovered spontaneously on the second day. He showed a complete personality change, now claiming to be the Qvant of Rebirth III. Analysis in depth shows that there were indeed two personalities present in the brain; fur­thermore, it has uncovered faint traces of occupancy by a third in the immediate past. We therefore pose the fol­lowing questions:

  “First, do there exist fulfillable conditions under which the Qvant might have escaped from his case into a mortal brain?

  “Second, what are the probabilities that such a compound creature could have crossed the Country of the Birds, on foot or otherwise?

  “Third, what possible interpretations may be placed upon the traces of ~a third personality; and of its possible survival, and if so, in what mode?

  “Fourth, what implications, if any, does this event have vis-à-vis our relationship with the Birds?

  “Finally, what action(s) should be taken? End of trans­mission.

  Martels felt an instant urge to reply, which he as promptly suppressed. It was true that he knew answers to all these questions, but he did not know how he knew. Of course his own recent experience was supplying many of the answers, but the questions had also given him access to an enormous store of additional facts which seemed very firmly to be a part of his memory, yet equally did not come from anything that had ever happened to him. All these various puzzle-bits fell together effortlessly and at once, heightening his feeling

  of intense lucidity; yet he also felt )a need for caution which was in some sense quite normal( and to be expected, and in another, simultaneous sense seeme~1~ilien to the physical substrate of his new mode of existence.

  While he pondered, he opened his Eye. There sprang into being around him a sizable, spotlessly clean greenish hall, occupied in chief by a spherical, nonmaterial machine float­ing in the middle of a nearly transparent dodecahedron. He could see all of this but its base, as well as all the room, simultaneously, but somehow he did not find this confusing; sixteen-fold perspective turned out to be a great deal better than any possible binary one. For size, the hail contained four doors, and a carrel at which an extraordinarily pretty girl dressed in a red and grey tunic was sitting expectantly. He was getting three different lateral views of her, plus one looking down upon her. From this it was evident that the Eye had fifteen different components, one each at a corner of the six upper pentagons, plus one in the ceiling—

  —which made it abundantly clear, in turn, that the machine was . . . himself. He had, in fact, known this somewhere in his new depths, just as he had known that the girl was Anble, the pormal duty operator for this trick, and that she was not the source of the questions.

  Almost in confirmation, the entire set of questions was repeated. This time, however, they arrived by a different me­dium, in a single, almost instantaneous blast of nearly white noise. To the human part of his mind that flash was so in­sistent as to seem almost like a goad; but the calm, passionless memory of the machine told him that it was only a Dirac beep, sent so that all receivers who might have any reason to care about the problem should have a record of it. The questions had been rephrased, and seemed to contain some new material, but their import was the same.

  Anble waited in front of the carrel. From the desk protruded

  the broad yellow stub of what seemed to be, and was, a roll of paper. A print-out, of course. Zooming in on it from the ceiling part of the Eye, Martels confirmed that it con­tained two words: Cycling. Proceed. Had he wished, he could have replied also by voice, ordinary telephony, ordinaiy radio, ultrawave or Dirac pulse; or, in extreme circumstances, choose to stand mute.

  What would the machine have done, if left on its own? The answer supplied itself, and at the same time appeared upon the print-out: Data insufficient. But that was not properly the case now. Martels caused to be added: Bring the man Tiam to me.

  The results were astonishing to both parts of his psyche, new and old, however one defined them. The girl turned nearly white, and put her hands to her face, her eyes staring at the sparkling, silent object before her. Then she reached out her right hand and began repeatedly to depress a red button on that side of the carrel. To the invisible questioners a signal went out in response, a signal which did no more than sound a wordless alarm: emergency emergency emergency emergency emergency.

  Martels did not know what that meant, but the machine did, and indeed had figured it out long ago. It simply had not been in a position to care—but now it was. Emergency= The Qvant has regained contact with the computer, and/or The machine has at long last become sentient in itself.

  They duly brought him 11am, but they questioned him very closely first. His interrogators were Anble and two pale, slender yet muscular young men in identical tunics; all three were bald. Answering simultaneously by print-out and by his new, surprisingly musical voice, Martels told them every­thing that he had discovered that he knew.

  “Your computer has not become sentient, nor has the Qvant

  regained contact with it. It is currently the habitat of an­other human intelligence who is now speaking to you. My name, for convenience, is Martels, and I originated some twenty-three thousand years in your past, possibly a century before Rebirth One; I find that not even the computer can give me the exact date, but that can be o
f no importance now, anyhow.” He paused for a breath, and then felt silly. “My mind was propelled into this era by the accidental gener­ation of a jugatemporal field in a powerful broadcaster; it was picked up by a receiver specifically designed to contain such a field, that being the brain-case of the Qvant in the Rebirth Three Museum in Rawson. After observing for some time the tribesmen who came as petitioners to the museum, I learned of your existence in the south and determined to seek you out, in hope of help in returning to my own age. To this end, I ostensibly tricked the Qvant into projecting me into the mind of the next petitioner, who is the tribesman you now hold captive, Tlam of the tribe of Hawkburrow. I shall now proceed to answer your further questions.”

  “You are already beginning to answer them,” one of the Antarcticans observed. (Lanest; technician-in-chief; Main Base; age—oh; the hell with that.) “But not in order of pri­ority.”

  “Neither the Qvant nor a suddenly self-conscious computer would feel constrained to follow your programming strictly, if at all, Lanest,” Martels observed drily. “You’re lucky you’ve got me on your hands instead. I’m even kindly giving you a simultaneous print-out for further study, though nobody told me to do that, and it isn’t part of the machine’s standing orders. Shall we quibble about that—or shall I proceed?”

  Lanest’s eyes narrowed, and he turned to his compatriots. After a moment, the other man (Robels; base chief, Shetlands III, age — will you kindly shut up and let me think?) made an ambiguous hand sign. “Very well. Proceed.”

  “Thank you. You asked under what circumstances it would be possible for the Qvant to change from his brain-case to another mind in this fashion. It seems evident that he is able to do so at any time, inasmuch as he was able to effect such a transfer using me instead as a purely passive subject. He has never done so for himself because he did not want to risk his near-immortality on any venture in a mortal host; though he is interested in questions about the afterlife, his curiosity does not extend that far.”

  “You use the present tense. This implies, we take it, that the Qvant is in fact not present in the tribesman’s mind now.’,

  “Probably not—otherwise I myself would not have risked requesting that Tiam be brought physically into the presence of the computer. I have conciuded, and the computer con­firms, that physical presence is essential to almost all forms of juganity except those which are machine-amplified—and the computer itself is such an amplifier, otherwise I wouldn’t be a part of it now. However, the problem you pose isn’t subject to quantification and the machine itself cannot give any of us a probability figure; what I offer now is machine logic in part, but fundamentally a human judgment.”

  “Please amplify,” Lanest said, his eyes still wary.

  “I was under the impression during much of my journey down here that the Qvant was in fact also lodged in the tribesman’s brain. However, he in turn made two attempts to dislodge me, one of which I defeated with the help of Tlam’s own mind—and the other of which was successful because on that occasion the Qvant had Tlam’s assistance. I thought I had escaped from the brain-case by the applica­tion of physical force, but I now know from the computer that the case is shockproof even to earthquakes up to five point zero on the Richter scale, and therefore could hardly

  have transmitted the blow of a club to the brain it is de­signed to protect.

  “I had been subjectively aware all along that both the Qvant’s intellect and his will power were immeasurably superior to my own. While, as I said before, this paradox can’t be quantified, it can be treated as a Venn diagram, which I am having printed out for you. As you see, it virtually excludes the possibility that the Qvant was ever entirely in the tribesman’s brain along with me. There was and is a powerful telepathic contact, but no actual juganetic transfer of the entire personality, such as those I’ve been through.

  “His motives remain unknown, and in that area the com­puter is of no help at all. However, I have some guesses. He has both the desire and the duty to regain contact with the master computer. I became his instrument for trying it without risk, to which he was loosely attached, like a leech—an ex­ternal parasite. Should the tribesman be killed en route, I would die with him, while the Qvant would have time to withdraw his tentacle and be little the worse for the experi­ence. Maybe none at all; and he would have learned a lot toward the next try. It was a unique opportunity for him.

  “Once I had gotten him through the Country of the Birds, he hoped that he could dispense with me, and did. This evidently was a miscalculation of the hazards of the remainder of the journey; and had the tribesman died then and there, I believe the consequences for the Qvant would have been very serious. The contact is probably still only partial, but it would necessarily be far more intimate than it was while I was acting as an inadvertent intermediary—he has no mount any more between himself and the grave.”

  There was a considerable silence. At last Robels said:

  “How, then, do you now find yourself here?”

  “Your computer is the next most likely complex of juganetic fields upon which I could home—especially considering my

  training in doing such a thing, which seems to be unique in your era. And of course it was also the nearest to me at the time, and I was aimed in your direction almost horn the start.”

  Again there was a quick exchange of hand signs between the two men. Lanest said, “Two of our five questions remain unanswered, and in view of what you have told us, become the most urgent of them all. First, if it is true that you have traversed the country of the Birds on foot, which no other

  man . . . has ever done, you must have something to tell us about them. In particular, something that might help us defeat them. What have you to say—and what shall we do?”

  “I know nothing about them that your computer doesn’t know,” Martels said. “That is, that they are not very analytical yet; are still relying chiefly upon instinct; but that their in­telligence is growing by selection from one generation to an­other, at the same time that instincts like telepathy are being selected out. Telepathy and intelligence appear to be incom­patible from the evolutionary point of view—if you’ve got one, you don’t seem to need the other, and they may even be ev­olutionary enemies. The Qvant is a sport deliberately bred back; and I am a primitive, much more so than people like flarn.

  “If all this is the case, then there is no possibility of com­promise with the Birds. They mean the destruction of man­kind, and as fast as possible—and they aren’t likely to be ready to wait for evolution to be on their side. They’re in­capable of taking that long a view of the process.”

  “Is that all?” the girl cried out suddenly, in a voice of desperation. “We knew all along that we were losing to the Birds—they multiply faster than we do now—that in a while we would lose even this patch of mountains and ice. Now we have a miracle—and that won’t help us either?”

  There was no answer that Martels could offer. Of course,

  the next glaciation was due before long, and that would cut the Birds down prematurely, long before they could consolidate their conquests; but that event, that very long event was not within the foreseeable lifetime of Man as the Antarcticans

  —survivors of the Qvant’s age—could be brought to look at Man. Martels could see from their expressions, as the com­puter could never have done, that they knew that, and had known it for many generations.

  He said, a little tentatively: “I don’t know what I can do, but I haven’t given up hope yet. There are still some open questions. For a starter, let me get another look at the tribes­man.

  The Antarcticans of Rebirth III conferred silently, and equally silently concurred. The girl nodded and depressed a bar, another door slid open, and flam entered, by himself.

  Martels looked at him with sixteen-fold curiosity. This was the first chance that he had had to see what had been, in some sense, himself since that mimetic preliminary inter­view far back there in the museum.


  Tiam was a living testimony to the medicine of the Antarc­ticans—well, scarless, alert . . . and outright arrogant. In­stantly, Martels knew that he had made a tremendous mistake.

  The Qvant ~was there—not just linked with Tlam, but there

  —and his mind lanced into the bubble of the computer like a dart launched at a wheel of cheese. The hail, the Antare­ticans, everything else disappeared into a red roar.

  This time, the Qvant meant it.

  11

  Only Martels’ previous practice at resisting the Qvant’s on­slaughts saved him from instant defeat. His frantic resistance lasted only a split second before it triggered something within the computer, and the Qvant’s dagger thrust vanished—along with all the rest of the outside world. Seeking the reasons, Martels found that the machine—itself essentially a complex of juganetic fields, the minimum hardware necessary to form a substrate for them, and a power source—had at his impulse thrown up a blocking zone or skin of interference through which no probe could pass.

  There was a price, however: It would not pass any impulse of any kind, in either direction, including power. Power was still being drawn, from some source that Martels could not localize, but it was sufficient only to maintain the machine’s juganetic “personality”; all the hardware had gone out. Except for the presence of Martels’ consciousness, it was a state much like REM dream . . . but one verging gradually but inex­orably upon death as entropy loss set in. He seemed entirely helpless.

  He found that he was directly conscious of the passage of time; the machine measured it in the most direct way pos­sible, by the erosion of its energies; its basic unit was Planck’s Constant. Everything else had shut down; both the machine’s

 

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