Fire in the Abyss

by Stuart Gordon

  At this first meeting he and I were coldly polite. It was a difficult day, but we agreed to talk further. Mañana!

  16. Meetings with Distressed Temporal Immigrants

  The following weeks were a busy bewilderment. I had no time for dreams of Egypt. For an hour or more each day I was Outside, and met over thirty other “Baldies” computer-selected for me in a gradually extended range of nationality, religion, and era of origin. I didn’t notice that none of the five from Before Christ appeared: the thirty and more were enough to deal with. We all found it very arduous, especially those more ancient among us, and often I found it hard to keep my temper. The continual one-to-one chaperonage was maintained for some weeks, and relaxed only after the threat and frequency of physical assault and violent argument among us declined.

  At first we were as sorry a bunch of refugees as could be imagined. Shaved, suited, scanned, tricked and tested and operated on—we were mostly as alien to ourselves as to each other, with everything familiar gone, and hardly a chance to speak unsupervised or without being photoscanned. Starvation of soul and emotions while the drug-treatments and forced education all dragged on—at first we had no common spirit: it was impossible… and matters hardly improved after our red jumpsuits were changed to green. God knows why they chose red in the first place, though Ernstein said something about “the first phase of transtemporal habilitation” involving the “reawakening of your ego-image as a nucleus to attract and integrate new experience.” Whatever this means, apparently red helped it, while green, he said, “assists the flowering of your social and emotional responsiveness.”

  Very good. Dee once said something similar. Yet my “social and emotional responsiveness” was slow to flower. In those early days my temper was poor, my self-esteem zero, and my efforts at communication blighted by not knowing what on earth we were trying to discuss. It is perhaps as well that there were no other Englishmen of my era: no doubt we’d have formed an enterprising little clique. As it was, I found I had great need of Coningham’s common-sense as a bridge.

  With Azurara too I soon became, if not a fast friend, then a close acquaintance. Our positions were similar. Like myself, he needed a Modern DTI of his own race and tongue to help him. I doubt that he was as lucky as I was with Coningham in the choice the computer made for him. His initial introduction had been to Juan Battista Fernandez, an insufferably pompous Cuban landowner who’d fled from Castro straight into Vulcan: he advocated armed guards and starvation wages for workers as the best way to turn a good sugar-cane profit, and told Azurara sadly that not even the mighty U.S.A. had been able to stop “the foul tide of socialist revolution” from sweeping over his land.

  Azurara was profoundly shocked by some of the changes in the world, and so at first was L “Gilbert, they have abolished Holy Mother Church in some countries! And in others there are rogue priests who fight for this… this revolution of the people! I know you are not Catholic, Gilbert, but these people… they fight for unmentionable blasphemy! Priests of Rome!”

  Coningham’s advice to me was more deliberate. Before giving it he spoke first to John Kent, a Chicago banker from 1966, then to Jud Daraul, the black Vietnam veteran, and then to a Mexican called Rodrigo. He came to me on the lower floor of the library one day, where I sat trying to grasp Newton’s Laws of Gravity, and said: “Hmmm. From what I gather, Humphrey, most of those priests deserve medals for carrying out their Christian duty among people being treated quite outrageously. I’m no socialist—born the right side of the fence, like you—but one has to draw the line somewhere.”

  The library, on two floors, occupied half the building that also housed the chapel. On the lower floor were the stacked shelves of Ancient and Modern books, and tables, and comfortable chairs, and writing materials. Ernstein introduced me to this haven during my second walkabout, and quickly, as soon as one-to-one chaperonage was suspended, it became my practise to spend my hour or so of daily freedom in this downstairs section of the library, amongst the books.

  I had been introduced to the upstairs section too, which was an altogether different kettle of fish. It contained a computer terminal that, said Ernstein casually, “can get you just about any information you want from anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds.” It also contained the electronic games, such as Space Invaders, and other games of more conventional sort in which I sometimes indulged with Coningham, Azurara, or Herbie Pond—chess, chequers, dominoes, also Monopoly, Risk, and others of that sort. But the main business in the upstairs section was education by computer.

  Soon after being introduced to all this (and to the chapel, with its daily “interdenominational services” that I would not attend), I was visited in my room by suited experts in disciplines innumerable. Did I want instruction in: Hatha Yoga, Elementary Physics, American History, World History, Knitting, Media Interpretation, Volleyball, Basketball, Football, Musical Appreciation?—etc., etc., etc. Some of these courses were to be taught by people; but also offered were many other subjects—geology, astronomy, psychology, anthropology, botany, neotony, and God knows what else—to be computer-taught.

  I found little interest in such a cold new-fangled method, nor in the electronic games, though briefly I attended a small weekly class in the downstairs section—Philosophy Ancient And Modern: An Epistemological Rapprochement—given by a self-delighted female Sophist called Strudwick who spoke much on “the negation of the negation” and treated us as idiots. Perhaps: I understood not a thing she said, but recognised the type from my Oxford days, and quickly decamped.

  Yet by May and June it was usual to see—crouching intently in rows of red plastic chairs bolted to the floor both sides of the computer housing—up to twenty DTIs all “interfacing” at once, not with each other, but with keyboard and screen before them. These were not only the Moderns among us. Our guardians were amazed at how many of us from the “pre-industrial era” quickly “got into” worshipful relationship with High Technology, and some DTIs took up electronic academia with obsessive abandon, preparing to spend the rest of their captive lives working for Ph.D.’s in Esperanto or Romantic Poetry. Of course we were under continual pressure to “do something positive” of this sort; to “think Modern” and “relate.”

  Also, the flickering light of the screens of computer, electronic games, word-processing machines, and TV exercised hypnotic fascination over many of us. Space Invaders in particular came to obsess several people, especially Ketil Blund, a craggy Norse giant from eleventh-century Greenland, driven from his bleak steading and south into Vulcan by swift and drastic change in climate. I thought it an utter sad disgrace that such a man should have to turn from axe and plough to the dubious skill of shooting down advancing electronic blips that always get you in the end. “Good for hand-eye coordination,” said Ernstein when I asked him the purpose of this depressing game—but to Blund it became Reason for Life itself. Swearing by Odin and Thor he’d stamp about, seizing Baldies by their suited shoulders, demanding, “Try beat Blund! Try beat Blund!” And nobody could better his score, not even Jud Daraul, until one summer day amid our common crisis Utak showed superior finesse. After this humiliation Blund grew morose, muttering about going berserk.

  Utak was a short, strong, grim man from tenth-century Yucatan. Space Invaders he enjoyed as relaxation from his preoccupation with mathematics. He was skilled in manipulating symbol, having been an astronomer-priest among the Maya; Number being his sanity and madness too, as soon I’ll tell. He did not mean to destroy Blund’s only source of confidence, but it happened, and had sad consequences.

  But all these things in their proper place, for the crisis I speak of came after Circle was founded.

  Yes, great confusion, and much to learn, so that for some time I thought not at all of ancient Egypt, nor of the pre-Christian DTIs.

  Then came the day when Jud and Herbie spoke of “time-prejudice,” and Herbie alerted us by mentioning “weird dreams” he’d been having.

  Herbie Pond was tall, le
an, bony, blunt. When I first met him I was reminded immediately of the rogues who’d given me such trouble on the Swallow. He had swagger and insolent disrespect, infuriating me by calling me Humf. This I would not tolerate, and though several times after our introduction he approached me, I would not speak to him. But one day over the chessboard Coningham said: “Oh, by the way, there’s a fellow—Herbie Pond’s his name—who’d like to get to know you. Says he’s sorry if he offended you. Only trying to be friendly. Has tiptop admiration for Francis Drake and yourself. Seems a solid sort to me.”

  “He must apologise to my face!” I insisted stiffly.

  “Gilbert. Look, old chap, you must climb down a bit. I know the sort. Rough diamond. Good heart. Break you in.”

  So I let Herbie into my life, and a good thing I did. “Listen, Humf,” he drawled when I said I’d be his friend if only he’d stop calling me Humf, “Coningham’s a regular guy, and you could get along pretty good yourself. But you need a guy like me to show you what gives these days. I mean I know the bottom line.”

  He said when he was young he’d wanted to live in my time, “when you didn’t have none of this bureaucracy crap, and if you had the guts you could just sail off to America and go buccaneering.” Nothing I said could persuade him that my time had as many clerks and laws as this present world, and that you could no more do what you liked then than now. “Man, you don’t know what it’s like,” was his invariable response, which irritated me, but his stories about the U.S.A. in the 1920s so fascinated me, along with his own adventures, that I had to forgive him, often. Much of it seemed tumultuous and too tall for belief, but his wit never failed even in describing the Vulcan horror. “Thought it was a time-bomb, the usual sort,” he said drily. “Got this warning not to fly the stuff, but I needed the dough real bad, and I was halfway there, and… shit!”

  Herbie adopted me into a group of Moderns as low as himself, who idled much of their free time on the volleyball court between the library and East Block. As for volleyball, well, it is hard to be energetic and lithe in an immunity-suit. The nucleus of this group was Herbie, Jud Daraul, Connie Waters, Jim Gage, Jim Guerrero, Lucie Hopkins, and Clive Carlos.

  Jud was about thirty, from Detroit, another lean man, who shocked me telling how he’d “fragged” one of his officers during the war in Vietnam, stalking the man to a latrine with a grenade, and… “Naw,” he admitted, “I let the sonuvabitch live. Caught him there with his pants down and told him, ‘You gotta wise up, man. Next time you take us out on a goddamn midnight headhunting trip someone’s gonna blow yer mutha-fuckin head off!’ And he got the message, man, he got it.”

  Connie from 1973 had a freckled face and looked the sweetest thing you ever saw. I asked her what she did before Vulcan. “With a rodeo,” she said, grinning.

  “Rodeo? What’s a rodeo?”

  “I got a lot of bread for climbing in a barrel and getting rolled about by real nasty Brahma bulls.”

  If Connie amazed me, at first I thought I understood Lucie Hopkins and her frivolity. Lucie was an industrial heiress lost to Vulcan during a yacht-cruise in 1926. She prattled on about black caviar with the Rockefellers at Pocantico Hills and how she spooned with F. Scott Fitzgerald before he was famous; she had a moony face and couldn’t keep on the track of an idea for more than a second; and I thought her fluff, but events proved this an underestimation. As for Jim Gage, he was English, from Liverpool, lost at sea in 1941. He called himself a Scouser, and when he heard me talk he told me; “These days we string your sort up by the bloody neck, mate!”—then laughed and said he was joking. But I was not amused; he lacked Herbie’s charm, though he was true to his lights. Jim Guerrero had been a stoker on the U.S.S. Cyclops, which in 1918 had left Barbados with a mad captain, a mutinous crew, and a heavy load of manganese. “We were going down even before it got us,” he said. He was swarthy, usually silent, never without a pair of dice rolling between his gloved fingers. And Clive Carlos from 1956, half-Welsh and half-Mexican, had the loudest laugh I ever heard and never seemed to be downcast by anything, not even in this place.

  For some time I was not at ease with these people, and they knew it, and knew why. “Problem with you, Humf,” said Herbie, “is you’re a goddamn snob. Think you’re the Emperor, just like Lucie here thinks she’s the goddamn Empress. Just wake up and see you ain’t got no more clothes than the rest of us. Then you’ll be a regular guy, just like us.”

  I found it hard to take this, but their friendship was genuine, and besides, whether I liked it or not, it was true, I too was now of the lower sort. So by May I came to spend fifteen or twenty minutes each day sitting with them in a circle by the volleyball court, out in the open where microphones weren’t likely to pick us up, and speaking so that the cameras mounted on the walls wouldn’t catch our lip-movements. “Why the hell should they know what we’re talking about!” snapped Herbie. And though as yet we had nothing subversive to discuss, Ernstein and other nurses disapproved of this “flowering” of our “social and emotional responsiveness.” Ernstein began to harass me, coming upon us to demand my presence at a therapy group, or in my room to be interrogated by some new expert in socioeconomic conditions during the Reformation, or whatever. At first I accepted this reduction of my free time philosophically—but Herbie and the rest of the gang were scandalised—and one day Herbie said:

  “Humf, they screw around with all of us here, but if I were you I’d get really mad at all this goddamn time-prejudice!”

  I asked him what exactly he meant.

  “Like how Ernstein gives you a hard time for hanging out with us. See, the more Modern you are, the more so-called privileges you get, the less they bother you. They’re not interested in us guys, they already know we don’t know nothing they don’t—or that’s what they think. So we get to stay out here sunning ourselves in our suits while you’re up there drugged and getting the sixteenth century dredged outa your brain! And who’s seen any of those poor pre-Christian bastards? They’re locked up tighter than gold at Fort Knox! I mean it’s time we stopped cooperating, right?”

  “Same old race shit too,” Jud added, “What about the red folks here, and the orientals and latinos, and that Egyptian chick, and…?”

  “Yeah,” muttered Herbie, “that’s a dame I’d sure like to meet.” He pursed his lips. “Hey, I keep getting these weird dreams when I’m not quite asleep. Keep seeing pharaohs and pyramids and…”

  Then he sensed it, because he looked up and saw my face, and Jud’s, and Lucie’s, and Coningham was there too, and the expression through his faceplate was just as taken aback. We all looked at each other, The others stared at us, not understanding.

  “Hey!” Herbie whistled softly. “You mean you guys…”

  “We must not talk of it!” said I in a sharp low voice, eyeing the ground, spurred by a sudden strong sense of alarm. “Not here!”

  “I agree.” Coningham was quiet. “It would be sensible.”

  “Weird shit!” muttered Jud, “Weeeired shit!”

  “You people crazy or what?” Clive Carlos demanded, and he and Connie and Jim Gage and Jim Guerrero all looked baffled. And Coningham realised a danger I failed to see.

  “Something damned odd’s going on,” he told them squarely, disguising his mouth with his hand. “Until we know what it is, silence is best. You chaps understand?”

  That was our first hint of the Circle forming.

  “You must never try to force these things on people,” Tari told me much later. “That is the black magic, and apart from the right or wrong of it, such attempts will often rebound on the perpetrator with increased and even fatal force. The Dancer and I agreed that you all had to realise the nature of my effort for yourselves. It was up to you to admit or refuse my sendings. You, Humf, you accepted my first sendings up to the point where they disturbed you. When you became anxious you refused to admit me anymore… until you realised that you were not the only one…”

  That evening in my room, after supper,
during a wearisome interrogation about clothing fashions at Elizabeth’s Court, I asked Ernstein why I received less time Outside than Modern DTIs, why none of the Before-Christ DTIs had been seen Outside, and when would we meet them?

  Ernstein gave me a bleak eye.

  “You shouldn’t waste time with that crowd on the volleyball court, Sir Humphrey. I’m glad you’re adapting so well to modern association, but perhaps you lack the discrimination to sort the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. As to your questions, the answer, both with regard to you and the pre-Christians, lies in functional and psychological necessity. We have an extremely interesting research program developing with you, but unfortunately it is time-consuming, so please bear with us. As to the pre-Christians, we hope that three of them at least can soon start to play an active role in our daily life here.”

  Two were already doing so, but he didn’t know that, and I had scarcely more than an inkling of it. Nor did I know that Zakar-Addi the Phoenician had already followed his companion into death; nor that Othoon the Irishman would never be let out among us, for they judged him a dangerous fool who’d encourage us to resist them.

  They were right. So he did.

  That night, for the first time in more than a month, the golden tide came again, and I saw the woman’s face again. She regarded me intently, and somehow her expression brought to my mind what Herbie had said that afternoon, and our reaction, and the decision on silence. And at all this she smiled… and distinctly winked.