The World Asunder

by Ian Wallace

  They were all had, though: for them, it was coming from a Rourke who had slain Kali and regained youth in the process, and the persuasion was reinforced by subvert Kali-magnetism. As objections began to come in, they in fact were mere quibbles. For instance, the voice of Ilya Sarabin cut through the babel; by voting protocol, this transmission was unilateral from Sarabin to Mallory—no other ship could hear it until all voting was done; and Sarabin, reporting his weighted crew-judgment in which higher-ranking votes counted more but not dictatorially more, introduced only a proposed caution-procedure, apart from worrying about the technology.

  One after another, the ships reported one or another variation of the Sarabin formula, except for three ships which flatly accepted the Kali-Rourke proposal and seven which flatly rejected it. Having inspected the computerized interpretation of the fleet vote, Kali-Rourke announced: “Good: you tend to like the idea, but you aren’t ready to say “go” pending three prior stages. First, get control of the technology; second, win the consent of the governments; third, if they generally agree, install the technology; finally, vote on the question of activation.

  “All right Captains, each of you be good enough to send me physically, from each of your ships, your best experts in matters pertinent to the technology: at least one from each ship. And I would suggest for your guidance that the pertinent disciplines will be: physics, astronomy, time theory, earth geology, massive space propulsion, electromagnetics, geopolitics.

  “There is no time for your designates to converge here through space; the limited thrust of their minicapsules would take as much as several hours. Be aware that I now have teleportative ability. Flag me when your people are ready, and I will bring them here.”

  I was present on the “open” deck (transparently spacer closed) during several hours of the intricate discussion. Kali-Rourke had excused Vanderkilt for other ship-duties; Esther, after an hour of it, had whispered headache to me and had retreated elsewhere.

  What I understood of it was scarcely one bit of it But eventually it came clear that while these assembled experts among them understood the sort of technology necessary to bring off such a thing, this technology was simply not available in 2002.

  Kali-Rourke said gently then, “Very well, ladies, gentlemen. In my opinion, without what I propose, Earth won’t make it to any time much in the future, Kali or no Kali But we will have to assume that Earth will survive until we can bring this off. Please stand by while I do a bit of mental time-probing.”

  Leaning far back in his swivel chair, Kali in the Rourke-body closed eyes and went into something resembling trance while the others respectfully watched him. I gazed at him quite disrespectfully, wondering whether now was the time to expose him before these experts, deciding to save my powder because nobody here would believe me.

  After a bit of this, I sensed an alien stirring in my hinter-mind: the Kali-mind was inadvertently leaking to me....

  . . . that you do see the point, Master; calm yourself, this is the only way to do it if you are to survive and feed. What delectable destructive grist, that Earth should blow because of her own endemic self-distrust! but on the other hand, what sublime creative grist that the blow-off should be followed, not by universal death with no other intelligent planet available for your feeding, but instead by space-disparate Earth-fragments writhing in their efforts to adapt their old lore to semi-incommunicado space requirements, with nothing to hold them in remote community but our spacefleet commanded by your own lieutenants! It should allow us many more centuries of sardonical fun, Master; and when we are bored with it—poof! what is left for rescue? and by then we may have found another intelligent planet....

  Repugnantly I felt a larger mind, driving, thrusting: Bring it off fast, then!

  Kali in anguish: No technology! For Hell's sake, no technology! Look, I’ve brought this to the crux, but we spoil the game if we introduce a miracle! Give me the technology in a human-believable way, even if it is only just human-believable,...

  Perhaps the strain of this exhausted me. I blanked.

  Earth-Cluster, 2677:

  “Commodore, we have an all-time-points Mayday from Earth two thousand two; it is crude but intelligible.”

  “Did you say two thousand two, Captain?”

  “Exactly, Commodore: two thousand two a.d.—Our Year Zero.”

  ‘To understate it, fascinating! That was the year of the national coning and the blow-off; our archaeological records of the era are thin indeed, I didn’t know they had tempomentation. What is the exact source?”

  “The commodore of an international fleet—he calls it the RP Fleet”

  “You aren’t pulling my leg, sir?”

  “Madam, I wouldn’t dare—it is only early afternoon.”

  “Give me the gist”

  “This commodore says that Earth is still a whole planet, but he anticipates an imminent blow-apart He has assembled his scientists; he wants technology to cone the Earth nations—he knows how to do this time-retroactively if we will give him the technology.”

  “He—wants technology to—cone the Earth-nations? from us?"

  “I know your thought Madam, and he reinforces it He warns that if we can’t help him bring this off, temporetroaction may terminate our own existence—”

  “Zerai, Zemi, I am feeling your mind and you aren’t joking, and you are too thorough for me to doubt the reality. For the love of Czaluska, blessèd be She, red alert! red alert! Command all resources! Round up all experts in the fleet and every top expert on the subplanets. I will personally coordinate this. Zemi, we have got to force-feed two thousand two with all the technical assistance they can assimilate—”

  29.

  It was five hours later when I fully came to: nobody seemed to be noticing me, so perhaps I had seemed awake like a groggy but experienced fighter. Kali-Rourke still sat among his assembled technicians; and many of them wore mentation-headsets, presumably because these people had no inbuilt brain-devices. Kali was saying, “All right, you’ve heard all that, and among us we’ve wrestled out interpretations into contemporary terms. Do you now understand all the requisite technology, or don’t you?”

  A young man, possibly as old as thirty, concised, “In my opinion, the procedures from 2677 would be entirely adequate. But even armed with their knowledge, it would take us maybe a century to construct—”

  Kali frowned: “Remember that they exist only because we did construct! I can have the necessary apparatus teletemported from 2677, and they’ve taught us how to tap into the magma-power. The big thing is that we now have the theory. Right now my most serious problem is the politics. If I were to start working on the Earth leaders a long time ago. . . . Stay put here, now; I’ll need you again within the hour.”

  Again he went into trance, and I required myself to follow; and I heard his prayer: Change it all, Master, so that Mallory has been -working on them about this for a generation and has won....

  During his trance, grotesquely they served us food. I don’t know whether I ate.

  He told the silence that greeted his self-revival: “All but seventeen small nations have agreed to the notion on my guarantees, after twenty-seven years of my retroactive lobbying just now. So we have completed Stages One and Two of the fleet vote.

  “The most recent agreement that I assured was in nineteen hundred seventy-nine, so we can operate no earlier. I know that some of you were then occupied with the problem of rescuing Venice; but if now you go back into nineteen seventy-nine, you will be mere doppelgangers for your nineteen seventy-nine selves, and with care you won’t come into contact. I have now the task of taking you all back into nineteen seventy-nine and sending you in various worldwide directions to make contact with the heads of governments and educate their experts and get the technology installed. This process has to be completed during twenty-three past years, between nineteen seventy-nine and two thousand two; whereafter we will all reconvene aboard the Ishtar in, say, three hours. If anybody has an urge
nt reason to duck this assignment, speak up now.”

  No demurrers. Whereupon Kali teleported them back to their ships for starters, and the long-short preparatory process began.

  When they had reconvened, reporting completed installations in and around and beneath all nations of Earth during a twenty-three year period, including in some national constellations chunks of ocean or satellite-nations which either had agreed or were fearfully recalcitrant, Kali-Rourke convened the captains again. This conclave took longer than any of the others, each captain insisting on hearing the full report of every scientist and philosopher and technician.

  At tiie end of it, wide-eyed Sarabin said, “The meaning of all this is spiritually changed by our own fleet-existence. Am I wrong, Commodore, or have you taken some evil Kali-idea and transmuted it into long-range Earth-good?”

  Kali adroitly evaded, “This is what all of us have done together under my leadership.” (Now why would the ultimate liar merely evade? Perhaps in his incorrigible delight with gamesmanship . . .) The commodore added, “All right: we have accomplished your first three stages; I now call for a captain-vote on the accomplishment of Stage Four—Activation.”

  The vote was eighty-four to three with two abstentions.

  “Move unanimity!” tenored Volpone. And unanimity was voted, eighty-four to zero with five abstentions. After all, what were they risking? A potentially viable international space-cluster was better than a potential atom-cloud, and none of them intended to push the button....

  I stood on a hard ship’s deck behind swivel-chair-seated Commodore Kali-Mallory, wondering whether it would be piously Jewish for me to strangle him, sensing that I shouldn’t anyway until I knew where this was going, aware that it wasn’t possible anyway because he would have paralyzed me before my fingers touched his throat.

  Officers were coming and checking with Kali and going, and Kali was rotating slowly (with me staying behind him) to consider one-by-one hundreds of tri-d window-images like TV screens. Each window offered a sky-view of some different section of Earth-surface, but each surface-view was partially obscured by a complexity of 2677-imported apparatus floating above it near camera. The apparatus invariably sunlight-or moonlight-shone with metallic sheen, was thin and weirdly excresced; and from multiple points below the apparatus, an evanescent blue aurora flowed Earthward and disappeared into Earth....

  Captain Vanderkilt entered and pointed at an image where the aurora had ceased. “Sir, Captain Perpignan reports that she has completed the coning of France. As required, the convex face of the transparent but closed cone is situated an average of one thousand kilometers above Earth-surface; and the irregular conic volume angles downward-inward until it cuts the surface along the two-thousand-two borders of France, extended southward to the center line of the Mediterranean and westward to the center line of the Atlantic until it sweeps inward along the center line of La Manche to exclude the United Kingdom and Ireland. The volume continues to narrow downward-inward an average of fifty kilometers through the base of the crust, and there finally the cone is truncated to insulate it from the REM-created molten magma. This bottom shielding has been electromagnetically tested and is deemed adequately REM-resistant. Repulsors to drive and space-navigate France are installed and ready. Meanwhile more than a hundred top French officials and technicians have completed a five-year training course and are ready to mount operations instantly.

  “Thank you,” responded Kali-Rourke; “pray continue monitoring reports, notify me about every ten minutes or if something unexpected comes up.” Vanderkilt departed; Kali recommenced his slow swiveling, and it was noticeable that on one screen after another the blue aurora was dying.

  Absently Kali tossed a comment: “I considered making the force-field cones space-time cones, insulating each 2002 nation not merely in space down into the mantle but also several billion years back, on the notion that this would endow each Earth-fragment with all its historical heritage. But we simply don’t have good enough time-theory, not even in 2677; if we had done this, we might also have retroactively canceled the whole history and prehistory of animal and racial migration and evolutionary and cultural diffusion, wiping out in the process ourselves and the Earth we know—”

  He cut it off, raising a warning finger. On various screens, the captains were beginning to report in from their various national insulation-coning assignments: Colette Perpignan confirming France, Chloris Doxidoras backed by Zeno Metropoulos for Greece and the Mediterranean/Aegean Isles and Cyprus and Crete and Rhodes and Turkey, Ladyma Mengrovia for China and Indochina, Ilya Sarabin for Russia and Siberia, Joe Volpone for Italy-Sicily-Corsica, and so on....

  My eye-comer saw Esther stealing away. I stayed put; but I lost track of the reports after Volpone—presumably every quarter of Earth was covered. Kali-Rourke, working through the RP Fleet, and utilizing technology out of 2677, in 2002 had arrived at insulating Earth’s nations against the REM Device.

  Presently, unnoticed by the multiple-captain-preoccupied commodore, I stole bemused out of the cabin and went to look for Esther.

  30.

  I found her at the forward apex of what would have been the main exterior deck had it not been for the Ishtar's hull space-transparency. She leaned back against a rail, gazing above the opposite rail through that transparency at stars. Artificial deck-illumination was so dim as to be almost unnoticeable, and at first I didn’t notice an interesting new thing about Esther. Partly comforted to be in her presence, silently I leaned back against the opposite rail two meters in front of her and peered over her head at other stars.

  She said at length, ‘Tell me what has happened.”

  “Just now?”

  “No. All of it The meaning.”

  “Are you lost too?”

  “Possibly more lost than you, Lil. Tell me.”

  Sick, I summarized: “It appears that Kali and his Master have won their hellborn game with us four. They brought us together through a combination of illusion and allure and an ironical lending of their own powers to Rourke and Dio. They lolled off Rourke, but not until it was clear that the admiration of these men for each other would assure absorption of the Rourke-soul by the mind of Dio. I wish I knew how much they influenced the Rourke-Dio decision to confront Kali, with the men rashly depending on the strength of their combined powers and wills: no direct challenge of Satan has ever been known to bring other than sorrow, the best that people have ever been able to do is to erect such mighty fortresses against him that he decides to look elsewhere for his fun and games—”

  “You believe in Satan, Lilith?”

  “Serpentinely he seduced my divorced husband Adam and my wife-successor Eve. . . . No, but seriously: I am beginning to believe, a little—not necessarily in a personified Satan, any more than I necessarily believe in a personified God, but at least as a universal force-for-mischief which can become personified in a human just as God can become personified in a human.”

  “By that last, you don’t maybe mean Jesus?”

  “He got the best publicity; probably there have been others. But I think he was genuine and admirable, within human limits. I’m a Maimonides girl, myself—”

  “But whatever God is, isn’t he omnipotent Good? And if Rourke and Dio were on the side of Good, how could Kali defeat them and take command of Rourke’s fleet?”

  ‘To name one example, Jesus was on the side of Good, but the Establishment defeated him and proceeded to take over and corrupt his religion.”

  Silence. Then Esther, moody: “So then Kali gamed up the confrontation, beefed up Dio’s self-assurance that he and Rourke together could defeat Kali and indeed were defeating Kali—and then, when they tangled, it was Kali who absorbed the Rourke-Dio soul and disposed of the Dio body. And all Kali gained was the RP Fleet, which would have become his anyway through the mosaic virus and Commander Duval. So the only purpose must have been the dandy game. Some game, if you can’t lose!”

  “Not the first in history, Esther.”
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  “If I can accept all that, assuredly I have no difficulty in accepting also the facility of Kali at taking on the appearances of Dio and of Rourke: it might be hypnotism, but I could believe that it is psychophysical body-change. Only, how could Kali have materialized out of Rourke and Dio in the first place?”

  “Maybe his Master produced alternate time-tracks out of nineteen fifty-two if-nodes, Esther—even though when I witnessed it, there was a deceptive appearance of ectoplasmic materialization like a wacky medium-stance.... Look, I love you, I know your hurt, but—can we skip technicalities for now?”

  Silence. Then Esther, edgy: “Okay about that, but—what is he doing with it?”

  Gripping the rail with both hands, I stared at space. I said, “Maybe this is no more unbelievable than any of it He is slicing up Earth, to convert the planet into a mosquito cloud of subplanets inhabited by confused peoples howling for the lost past of their unity. And he is doing it to assure the existence of the future people who are helping him do it.”

  She wailed, ‘7 want Dio in 19521”

  I muttered, “I want Burk in 1952.” Then, grinning grim, I seized her wrist: “Esther—wouldn’t we have been a hell of a foursome?”

  She said low: “When is it now, Lil—1952, or 2002, or 2677, or some other when? Wait, there’s a lot more, it’s a hopelessly complex question. If it is 2677, and all the past eras referent to 2677 are mutually simultaneous and therefore not causally interrelated any longer—then why can 2677 work back in time to help Kali and RP prevent Earth from disintegrating in 2002 and so make 2677 possible? And if either 2677 or 2002 is the present—why then, back in 1952 when you and Dio took off after me—well: if already you were operating in the past, were you really operating, or were you robots being retaken through already-accomplished motions and imagining that your wills were real?” Up came her head, and she faced me squarely: “That question could go on forever, and here I chop it. Any answers, Lil?”