by Ian Wallace
Actually I thought I might have a lot of possible answers, even assuming the realities of all three eras and others. For instance: instead of starting from a concept of noncausal past and concluding that one’s intuitions of will and choice while operating in that past are illusory and fallacious—why not go the other way, assuming the reality of one’s choice and will while operating in the past, and from that assumption changing one’s conceptions about past and future? Still again: what if in fact God has long since tracked out the general and individual patterns of all destiny, then infused souls into his robots in order to view how each soul responds to the surprises of its destiny, not realizing that it is destiny? What if free will applies only to soul-response, while all physical action is predestined? That might explain God’s toleration of Kali and even of Satan. And so on ... Only, there comes a point between girls when one girl wishes to stop appearing all-wise before the other girl, especially in an area where both girls and indeed all humans are ignorant And so I passed it with a half-grinning quip. “No answer ready. Look, Esther: there’s a thing I’ve been whimsically puzzled about, aboard the Star. When Rourke brought us back into 1952, you were still seventy-eight looking about fifty—right?” She nodded. “But in your original 1952, you were twenty-eight—right?” She nodded. "Okay: when you pled the curse—whatT’
Instead of amusing Esther, it troubled her. “Dammit, I don’t have that much cockeyed wit. Dio mentally cued me to make a diversion—and instantly I did feel it coming on—now how could I remember that feeling? It must be like bicycle riding, you never forget. And it did come! And, Lilith—look at me now!”
I peered at her in deck-dimness, and with a new quality of weird I saw and comprehended. Late-seventies Esther, who had looked fifty, now looked thirty.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Considering the biochemical intricacies, this was more cosmic than Earth’s fragmentation. . ..
Kali’s Rourke-voice called cheerily, “Hey, girls, come back starboard-amidships; we’re about to see Earth exploding. We think it will come off differently from the way we saw Contingency Omega—”
31.
Amidships, we gazed outward and downward at the Earth-agate.
Kali said conversationally, “We’ll first test-launch Barbizet—that’s a small uninhabited atoll which we’ve separately coned. Barbizet has grasses and trees; and we’ve fixed her up with test animals, including chimps, and with a number of test habitations ranging from a grass hut to a two-hundred-story high-rise, along with other acceleration-sensitive beings and structures.
“We had a compound problem: getting Barbizet airborne fast enough to avoid turbulence-damage from the ocean, yet slowly enough to avoid acceleration-damage to unprepared life and structures. We solved the problem with three more goodies from 2677. First, the repulsor engines are unlike today’s rockets: they feed on space and therefore have unlimited fuel; and so we can loft Barbizet and even a continent in as gradual or as rapid a manner as we choose. Second, all cones have inertial shields which we can adjust up to a factor of 500, which means that creatures and structures within will feel only 1/ 500th of the actual thrust And finally, when we cut all thrust after leaving Earth’s gravitational field, we can substitute artificial gravity for the inertial shielding.
“Thus, we will start by blasting Barbizet upward at ten G acceleration, which is about ninety-eight meters per second per second. However, because of the inertial shielding, creatures and structures on Barbizet will feel initial thrust of only about one-fifth G, which is like accelerating sluggishly at about four and a half miles per hour every ten seconds. We expect that Barbizet, atmosphere and surface and all the underlying crust, will be clear of the ocean in thirty-two seconds after launch, which should minimize turbulence problems. Got it?”
Esther shuddered. I said flatly, “No.”
“So be it for now,” responded cheerfully Kali-Rourke. And he issued the order: “Activate Barbizet.”
In some kind of Kali-illusion, Earth came very close to us, or us to it, with Barbizet viewed in oblique profile quite near us. The island rose up out of Earth smoothly, and the Pacific Ocean rushed turbulently in to fill, engendering monstrous clouds or Barbizet-shrouding steam out of the molten subcrust magma leaping up to meet the inpouring water.
Vanderkilt’s voice: “H plus thirty-two seconds; Barbizet down to magma-shield is entirely clear of ocean surface; cutting back to one G for another four hundred seconds.”
Kali, watching the lofted island, didn’t answer; and I glanced at the second hand on my wrist-stopwatch (dandy for psychometric testing). Barbizet, now clearly airborne as she emerged from the steam shroud, appeared to be gathering upward speed; abruptly she seemed to be above us, and three blue-green glowings flared at her tail....
Vanderkilt: “H plus four hundred seconds; altitude 1,306 kilometers; one G acceleration; all monitors indicate nominal launch, all systems go, life-support system intact, test structures intact, life forms responding well. Shall I continue the program?"
Kali: “Pray do.”
Vanderkilt: “I have anticipated your affirmative; acceleration has been cut back to 1/100 G; inertial shield being progressively softened.”
In an illusion-change, Earth receded swiftly, again it was a blue-white ball. “If you look sharp right down there,” said Kali pointing, “you will see a sun-glare speck which is Barbizet coming upward toward us. We’re cutting her acceleration back to minimum thrust until we slightly exceed orbital velocity; by that time she’ll still be far below us, about twenty-five thousand kilometers above Earth-surface. We will then cut all thrust and let Barbizet coast into orbit just above us at fifty-two thousand kilometers. We’ll meanwhile reduce the inertial shield to zero and then introduce artificial gravity as she clears Earth’s gravity at six thousand, eight hundred kilometers. Life and structures on Earth are used to a steady one G drag; we don’t want to reduce that very much.
“All this will take quite a while. To speed it for you, ladies, I am going to slow your subjective time by a factor of ten. Hold tight, everything will seem to rush around like an old Mack Sennett comedy with Donald Duck dialogue—”
“Rush around” understated it. Crew members blurred in, gabbled at the commodore, heard counter-gabble, blurred out; Vanderkilt’s voice jabbered unintelligible reports, Kali’s quacked back; the minute hand on my watch crawled visibly, eating up minutes like six-second intervals, while the second hand whirled manic; beside me, Esther convulsively jerked hands and feet and body, and my own hand-and-arm movements scared me with their snap; meanwhile the Barbizet glare-point grew large, resolved into Barbizet-shape, rushed upward past us at a distance which could not have exceeded twenty miles with repulsors no longer glowing....
Abruptly all was normal again. Vanderkilt was reporting with perfect intelligibility: “Barbizet has been inserted into orbit 52,000 kilometers out, all systems go.” I stopped my watch as she continued, “The appraisal is: launch successful, structures intact, life forms healthy, maintenance operating well, no malfunction anticipated at this time.”
I had stopped my watch at one hour fifty-seven minutes after launch; and the sun had perceptibly changed position.
“Good,” said Kali most quietly. “Go ahead and disintegrate Earth.” And he added to us women, “I’m slowing your perception again for all of this final phase.”
Earth exploded into hundreds of fragments dissipating from each other. Again a gabble of reporting and counter-ordering, this time involving all captains....
Normalcy cut back in. I’d have guessed the elapsed time at ten minutes or so, fifteen at most; but my stopwatch insisted that it had been, again, a bit under two hours, and the sun agreed. One by one the captains reported in. Perpignan: “France orbited nominally.” Mengrovia: “China-Indochina orbited nominally.” Kirby: “United States and Alaska and Hawaii and the West Indies orbited nominally in close contiguity.” Sarabin: “Russia-Siberia orbited nominally.” And so on until all the roll of nations h
ad been called.
Where Earth had been, there remained a small ball of restless incandescence which darkened as we watched: the exposed and cooling molten magma around the hard mantle, with all the living crust, departed aloft Never at any other time in my life, except in my youth after desperate athletic effort, has my heart so labored.
Kali now turned from Earth's remnant, looking upward to* ward the bridge, and his Rourke-face was serene. “Captain Vanderkilt, please get the attention of all captains.” Her radio transmission to them was amplified here on deck: “Now hear this all captains. Attention to the commodore. Respond. Over.”
When Kali-Rourke spoke to them without benefit of microphone, his seriousness was impressive: “Well done, all of you, it has gone as planned. As you know, the launch of Barbizet was real. As for the balance of Earth, it was a satisfactory test-simulation: the intricate monitoring system which you have implanted assures us that an actual multicontinental launch would have every probability of working even under the most explosive conditions.
“Earth in reality is still intact except for Barbizet; but thanks to your competency and diligence, every nation is compartmentalized away from other nations in its own energy cone. As long as the planet remains intact, the peoples of Earth can intertrade and intercommunicate and even make war; but each national cone will perpetuate and propel itself separately in space if the REM Device should ever be activated. To cream the jest, every nation can now REM itself; so that if any nation should REM another nation imperiling the geological stability of Earth, every nation can activate its own survival take-off.
“This is the nearly perfect defense against the REM Device. This device can no longer destroy any nation; and by driving that nation off Earth, the aggressor will have imperiled himself and must depart Earth also.
“It is not, however, a perfect defense. The REM Device exists, nuclear weapons exist, and national paranoia exists. We cannot neutralize the REM Device, because even if all its apparatus were destroyed, the technology would still be known. Earth can be disintegrated; the controlled cataclysm which we have just tested can happen. All we have done is, to assure that such a cataclysm would not be Earth-fatal.
“I now call on all of you to address your minds to a short-range problem. Conceive that under our present arrangements, if any nation should consider nuclear attack imminent, it could either REM the enemy or REM itself or both without peril of self-destruction. How can we use this general leadership-knowledge adroitly to laugh nuclear warheads out of existence?
“After that, but also collateral with that, a pressing long-range problem. Address your minds to the possibility that the cataclysm of REM does happen. Maybe physical contiguity among the nations of Earth on a single tightening little planet has been creating and exacerbating many of our war-stresses. If this proposition is right, the nations may be collectively and individually better off if they become a system of little subplanetary spaceships each going its own way but all keeping in communion, with intervisitation privileges. An RP Fleet maintaining communication among such Earth fragments would be—serviceable, to understate it “What we have done is to make possible just such a fantasy if the necessity should arise. Our long-range duty as a fleet is to so operate among nations that the necessity will not arise. But out longer-range duty is to be ready for inter-spatial operations if the necessity should arise and the fact should transpire. Because Earth, even as a dispersed collection of space fragments, needs to continue being a community. As far as we now know—what else is there, anywhere?
“I therefore call upon all of you to make our operations under such fantasy-conditions a prime object of your realistic study. As long as you retain me in command. I will be frequently convoking you to discuss this problem; and I look for constructive input from everybody.
“The fleet condition is now Green. Captain Volpone, please carry out your preassigned mission of rescuing the Barbizet test animals. That is alL.”
Kali-Rourke finished and dropped his head, looking wan.
Inadvertently, he spotted Esther and me. He gazed at us, and he began to smile. Abruptly his face collapsed, and he bolted for his cabin.
We stared after him....
A male lieutenant emerged from his cabin and came quickly to us. “Excuse me, ladies, I have a message from the commodore. He would like for you to join him for cocktails in his cabin in about thirty minutes, and he respectfully requests a reply.”
Esther and I nodded at each other, and I said, “Thank you, Lieutenant; tell him yes for both of us.” When he had departed, though, both of us stood there, and my own thoughts grew dark, and I began to feel telepathic leakage of darkness from her.
I thought at her: He is weakened now, he is vulnerable. If we have any chance to get him, it is now.
Hesitant, she responded: He is not Only Kali. He is Rourke. He is Dio.
He has swallowed Rourke and Dio. He is all, they are nothing.
How would we get him?
Pool our powers, Esther. Do it together. The powers are inherent in every human, they are in us, he is weakened, now is the only when.
We would probably lose. He would annihilate us....
Esther—with Rourke and Dio nothing—relatively speaking, do you really care?
Mind-silence. Then: Oh, Ood, no.
32.
Commodore Kali received us in Rourke’s cabin with undemonstrative warmth; the casketed Rourke-corpse was gone, the bronze plaque remained. Kali served us drinks of our choice, and sat himself in Rourke’s swivel chair with Rourke’s desk behind him, facing us.
Full of our murderous project, well propped in it, trying to mind-screen it, we sipped, studying Kali-Rourke. Burk Halloran to perfection. Moody as he watched us, but in no visible sense evil. I was marveling at this new illustration of the ways in which evil can dissemble good; I was persuading myself to be knowledgeably resistant....
After maybe the third sip, Kali spoke—persuasibly Rourke, in Rourke’s light baritone without even a hint of contralto. “Now I think I may have effectively screened off this cabin from the Master, but you never know for sure. Ladies, would you be good enough to reinforce the screening as well as you can? If you don’t know how, an undercurrent of prayer might help.”
It rather shook Esther and me: Kali proposing prayer1 to screen off Satan? We women interstared, not daring to intertelepath for fear of breaking our screen against Kali; but then it came into me that a screening off of his Master would leave Kali all the more vulnerable, and I nodded, and Esther nodded. I closed eyes and prayed in a way that I have learned, first filling my consciousness with the prayer and its all-immanent unvisualizable meaning-object, then allowing the prayer holding constant to recede into my hinter-mind so that my consciousness could attend to Kali while maintaining the prayer background-music potent....
Kali and I, then Kali and Esther, interchanged gazing.
His mind opened to us. Our hearts and our prayers faltered.
Esther was the first to respond. Then you wont He nodded slowly. We gazed entranced: there was absolutely no question—all his mind was open to us, with Dio/ Rourke individuate-fused in complete dominance and Kali reduced to a subordinate glow of power and emotion with no selfness at all....
His mind murmured: Don’t drop the prayer-screen. For a long time, maybe always, this will be precarious.
Both of us nodded slowly, gazing, enfolding comprehension. That Dio/Rourke had absorbed the Enemy-weary Kali-mind, there in the cavern of Mont Veillac. That Dio/ Rourke had resolved on the Enemy-deluding psychophysical masquerade as Kali which must perforce delude us women also because any mental leak would be perilous. That having established the delusion for an Enemy whose attention was diffuse except as it might be captured by particular people, Dio/Rourke, as part of an Enemy-ostensible Kali-plot, had assumed the young Rourke physical persona to resume command of the fleet and bring off a world-defensive coup while, down in the Mont Veillac cavern, the followers of Kali had sat idly by awaiting
orders from Kali.
The orders would be, to drop the REM operation for now and return to worship in the worldwide Kali movement: since Kali had interested the Enemy in longer-range game, Alaska and the rest of Earth were reprieved for now. The Enemy would keep maliciously prodding the ambitious-fearful leaders of the powers, while the Kali movement (with Dio/Rourke occasionally appearing before them in the Kali-persona and here and there granting an impossible wish or two) would keep soothing the powers with the false security of the REM Treaty; meanwhile RP would maintain world community, ready to move the same task into space when in a week or a hundred years the inevitable blow-off would come. . . .
We pondered it. I mused to him: It is beautiful and devious, worthy of either of you and superbly of both of you. I would only suggest that as long as you continue to present the psychic face of Kali to the Enemy, you are a vulnerable double-agent, far more vulnerable to the Enemy than other men are.
Esther’s quick correction: The Enemy is no stranger to Dio. And consequently perhaps Dio/Rourke is even less vulnerable than most men are.
After that, for a while, our three minds—or was it four? —blended in mutual love and support I was the first for whom it palled, my restless mind could not hold it my incorrigibly practical mind began introducing ego-future concerns mingled with nostalgia. (But all the time, my insulating prayer continued.) He and she turned to me, worried. I felt their thought entirely interfused: We need you, Lilith—it will work itself out....