Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

  —Who? asked Koster. —It almost cooked me. I don’t want to risk anyone.

  Jobes said, —Bright.

  Keitel looked at him, stricken. Koster said, —Hell, yes. Bright.

  Keitel said, —Look here, the man’s unbalanced. His EEG shows theta spindles the size of. . . . No, I won’t have it.

  —That makes him ideal, doesn’t it? REM-like state, half asleep, we’ll get a good reading.

  —No!

  —Keitel, you just keep your damned mouth shut. You’re a psychometrist. You have the lowest rating on this vessel.

  —I’ll certify you, Koster.

  —You’ll do no such thing. Koster swung around the lazy Susan holding the computer console and punched a request. He then swung the unit to face Keitel.

  The silver screen was dark with characters. Koster’s rating was 5.2, indicating optional retirement. Keitel’s was 0.8, indicating mandatory retirement. Next to Koster’s name were three dark stars, indicating that Keitel would be decommissioned on the moment he certified the captain.

  Bright’s rating was classified.

  Keitel thought a moment and swung the unit to Wulf.

  —Punch in JANUS and the Earth date, said Koster.

  Wulf did so and swung the unit the long way around, so that Keitel could read it before it stopped in front of Koster.

  Bright’s rating was 9.9.

  Koster swore, and Keitel said, —I take it we have to ask Jack’s permission.

  ~ * ~

  Bright consented. Eagerly.

  ~ * ~

  Around the cross table they listened to the tides of Bright’s brain. It was a placid sound, like waves breaking strictly along the tones of a harmonic series.

  After a while Bright’s voice came.

  —The history of humanity is a series of transformations. Your race is bilaterally symmetric, but imperfectly so. Consider the notion of past and future. Consider symmetry. Nothing in your physics points the direction of time, so you had to invent a thermodynamics to give time the meaning you wished it to bear. And then you invented a thermodynamics of information.

  —What are we listening to? asked Wulf.

  —Bright’s mind. The building is speaking. His vocal cords move sympathetically, so we hear his voice.

  —All things suffer entropy: organisms, races, machines, messages. A linear sense of time, that is, a sense of entropy, is necessary to develop intelligence, but it is not sufficient to maintain it. This is the next indicated transformation. You must transform entropy. You yourselves are its refutation. You strive for symmetry while your bodies abhor the idea: a crystal of levophenylalanine would cause you to sicken and die, while its right-handed equivalent would not.

  Then Bright’s own voice spoke, and the difference was that between a telephone and a live voice. —What is life?

  —If there is a difference between life and death it cannot be found in your chemistry. Your Wohler synthesized urea five hundred years ago. You can create bacteria at will and destroy them. Yet you cannot see the reason. Life is due to an event of singular and improbable character, occurring once by accident and thus starting an avalanche by autocatalytic multiplication.

  —How singular? asked Bright. —Are we alone?

  —Define alone.

  There was a long, liquid silence, and nothing from Bright’s mind.

  —What is this? demanded Koster. —I don’t want a god damned philosophical discussion on these tapes. Why doesn’t he ask it something useful?

  —You insisted on putting a sick man in there, said Keitel. —Now shut up and listen.

  —You are alone, said the building. —This is what makes you you. You are self. You are dirt. All cognate with the word human.

  —Where in Christ’s name did it get all this?

  —Three hundred years of listening to radio, said Roeg drily.

  —Why are you afraid of mirrors? asked the building.

  —But you know that, said Bright.

  —Duplication. Self-absorption. Ruinous self-reflection. Infinite regress. Loss of origin.

  —Yes, said Bright.

  —But that is the symmetry you crave.

  —Yes. Symmetry of life and death, past and future. But how achieve it?

  All at once there was a pulsing in the room. Complex patterns of tone skirled in the air. Keitel was on his feet at the oneiranalyzer. Two discrete patterns suddenly meshed, and a single chord of tones smote them, rapidly repeated.

  —My God, said Keitel. —It’s done something to him. His two hemispheres are in unison. His right and left brain are doing the same.

  The heavy pulse in major key was still proceeding when Bright entered the ship with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance.

  ~ * ~

  Keitel was awakened by a distant clangor. The sharp scent of fuel was in his nostrils.

  They had stopped Bright before much fuel had been dumped. The cocks shut, Bright restrained, Koster furious astride the computer as Keitel entered the common room, all successfully suppressed a dream he had had of universal destruction. Entering, his mind put away for future reference the image of a burning house, a large house in which everyone he had ever known (and he was two hundred and fifty years old) was quartered.

  —One thousand kilos overweight, said Koster, with some satisfaction. —We haven’t enough fuel left to get off the ground.

  —Keitel, said Roeg, give us some drugs.

  —Get him out of here, said Koster, and Jobes led Bright away.

  Practiced Wulf was calculating. —What can we leave behind?

  —Not much. Leftover air. Personal memory boards. Spindles. Some batteries. Jumpers. Not bloody much. Cutting everything to the bone, we’re still sixty kilos over.

  Wulf sadly drew his playing cards from a pocket. Everyone smiled sourly at that.

  —Can we bring the big ship to a closer rendezvous?

  —Not unless you want to risk crashing it.

  There was a silence. Koster began to nod, looking at the others.

  —What does Bright weigh?

  Keitel sat down.

  Roeg punched the console and said, —Sixty-five kilos.

  —That’s it, then. Weight for thrust.

  ~ * ~

  After much arguing, Keitel went to tell Bright. He was in the sling, though the antigravity was off. The cabin was dark.

  —Jack, why?

  —You know, I used to think that there were beings in mirrors. I stared and stared when I was little, and a couple of times I thought I saw something move, very far in.

  Keitel foolishly pushed the stud on his recorder, then realized that no therapy could help Bright now. Nonetheless he let the machine run.

  —Why are you so interested in mirrors?

  —That’s all this place is.

  —We came this far to find ourselves, is that it?

  —In a way. Or else we’re mirrors. Have you thought that what we see and hear in there is not what the building intends? That our minds read the information according to their own biased patterns?

  Bright’s language became more fevered; he rushed fragments with groping pauses between.

  —Consider Parsifal, who passed by the Grail the first time he saw it and thereby did greatly sin. This, this is our Grail: like the kalpa vrishka of the Jains, wish-fulfilling trees which gave sweet fruit, leaves that sang at night, and gave forth light. But the Grail is invisible to those not pure.

  He paused, and continued almost sanely: —On Earth they told me I was the most important man on this ship. Because of my instinct for self-preservation. I spent forty hours in the sense-deprivation tank, Will, and they took me out only because they couldn’t believe it; they thought I was in trauma. But I could have stayed there forever. It’s where I first learned the meaning of depletion. And farther in space. Though they meant to sacrifice me, I loved them for it. They were teaching me. And now I must return this gift, by teaching them. All systems on Earth, from the economic to the biolo
gic, have been corrupted, by death, by fear of death. They cannot survive that way. This mission is a last hope, Will, to find a race that has survived that fear of death and transcended entropy. But we must stay here for the learning. We can’t return to Earth with our samples and tapes, where the agency will twist us and see only what they want to see, use knowledge for profit.

  Keitel could not bear the strain any longer. He burst out: —-Jack we’re leaving you here.

  —What?

  —You drained too much fuel. We’re overweight. We have to leave you behind. It’s not my decision.

  Bright sat silent for a minute, then said: —You have brought me pain as well as joy, yet more honor than I have ever received from any before.

  ~ * ~

  4. Death by Water

  Working alone in the hour before lift-off, Keitel placed spindles close around the building, powering them with a battery. He drained the last of the ship’s air into the small field. It would not last long, but neither would the battery. He brought Bright there.

  —You’ll drown me, Will?

  —Jack.

  —Pearls for my eyes. An end to profit and loss.

  —Jack!

  —Will, it’s so simple, and you can’t see it. We were sent to bring back. And here is something we can’t bring back, can’t balance their books back home. We need to stay, Will, we really do.

  —I don’t want to do this thing. Oh Christ.

  —It’s not enough to leave me. We all have to stay. Will, haven’t you learned? There is no return. You leave your world, and in the course of your travels it changes. You return only to a changed world. Christ, the horror of it. We’re farther out than any have been. Drowned and gone. Those who sent us long dead. They think of us as dead, Will. We’re lost. We should stay here, lost.

  —Jack, we can’t stay. We haven’t enough air or food or water.

  —Don’t need. We’re dead already. We’re information.

  Koster entered. —Let’s go.

  —I had hoped, said Bright.

  —I know what you hoped, you bastard. You hoped to strand us all here.

  Bright pressed palms together before his mouth. —Give, sympathize, control. We have given ourselves to the sky. Now we must sympathize, and later we may control. Why are you afraid? We can learn all this place has to offer. When the time came our message would get through.

  —Two minutes, Keitel, or we’ll leave you too.

  —What message, Jack?

  —One who has been made mad by the sight of a demon will be healed upon glancing in the mirror. Earth’s demon is space. Death. The long cold sleep. But you all look away.

  —We think we’ll drown there, said Keitel, trying to understand. —Mirrors lead to, to loss of origin. . . .

  —Oh, Will, said Bright, sorrowing.

  —I have to go.

  —When you get back, don’t hate me.

  —Hate you?

  —For what I’ve done.

  Keitel felt tears starting. —Jack, you’ve done nothing.

  —What we’ve done. He spread his arms. —You can’t carry this fear of death out here. You just can’t. And you’re all so afraid.

  —What, Jack? What have you done?

  Koster said, —That’s it. Dope him.

  Keitel leaned forward with the hypo. He lifted Bright’s arm, but on impulse bent instead and applied the snout to Bright’s breast. Bright slumped.

  ~ * ~

  5. What the Thunder Said

  On waking he left the building, hoping to see the fusion drive of the main ship come on. There was a bright star in the sky opposite the set sun, roughly where the ship should be once under way, but he could not be sure. So he went back in. He thought of the custom of covering mirrors in a room containing a corpse. This was to prevent it looking out a comrade from among those present. But that custom would not work here.

  In the main room he said a few words. The computer beneath the building reversed fields, switching from analysis to synthesis. It commenced to make projections. It told Bright how long his air would last. Then, at his request, it created Earth models, and it told Bright in great detail the future of Earth and of genus homo. There was not very much to tell.

  Ten years later the transmissions from Earth ceased. Bright was long dead. The relay station spent a short time trying to regain the signals, then it marked its hypothesis verified and began scanning the sky for another radio source.

  A hundred years later the decelerating Janus, still outside the orbit of Pluto, awoke its crew ahead of schedule. There was a malfunction. It could not find the beacon needed to navigate to Earth.

  They found Earth with the optical telescope and navigated back by eye. But by the time they had seen that the moon was gone, and that the seas were red, and the continents ashen, and the sky utterly without clouds, there had been much violence on the ship, and there was no one left to land it.

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  * * * *

  Here’s a fascinating story about a secret, illegal experiment in DNA manipulation for the purpose of creating Homo superior—immediately, transforming a woman and a man of today into super humans, many stages of evolution beyond you or me. But who can say what directions human evolution might take? Ian Watson, one of the premier writers of “idea” science fiction, suggests some answers. . . .

  Watson, who lives in England, has written such acclaimed novels as The Embedding and The Martian Inca; a collection of his short stories, The Very Slow Time Machine, was published in 1979. His most recent novel, written in collaboration with Michael Bishop, is Under Heaven’s Bridge.

  ~ * ~

  JEAN SANDWICH, THE SPONSOR, AND I

  Ian Watson

  Jean Sandwich was not her real name. Her real name was Jean Sandra Norwich, but she had slammed two of the names together in bitter humor at her situation.

  She did not alter the spelling of her first name to make her point even plainer. As “Gene” she might have been sexually confusing, and she was not in the least confused about her sex, nor about the fact that sex (in the broadest sense) had done her in—had hogtied her, condemned her to a ludicrous fate.

  However, it was not annoyance at sexual role-typing which inspired her sarcastic change of name. It was something much more basic. As one scientist had put it, “A human being is just a device used by a gene, to manufacture another gene.” Like a sort of comic book antihero, whirling around and stripping off her mundane disguise to reveal her secret nature, Jean Sandra Norwich became: a. gene sandwich, the slice of meat imprisoned between the genes of her parents and the genes of her offspring.

  She went where she wanted, she spoke her mind, she showed all the signs of free will and of leading her own uniquely precious, autonomous existence—yet she knew it was all an utter illusion. She was sandwiched. For the genes had expressed themselves in exactly the same way in Jean’s daughter as they had in her mother. Jean had believed fiercely that she was an improvement on her mother—until her own daughter was born. She was sure she had pulled herself up by her own bootstraps—till her own stupid mother was repeated, out of Jean’s womb.

  The genes couldn’t have cared less for Jean’s creativity and sensitivity, for the things of beauty she had wrought in oils and fabric and clay, or for the creature of beauty and wit she had made of herself. Jean dreamed that a daughter of hers would outdazzle her as much as she outdazzled her own mother. “Irrelevant machine,” said the genes; and out of her squirmed another creature so lacking in sensitivity that she would be able to run through life, as Jean’s mother had, like a chicken with its head chopped off.

  Perhaps the genes, smelling the competition of an overcrowded world, had decided that sensitivity was out of place? Perhaps they had foreseen a nuclear war or an ice age, whereby life would be a matter of grubbing around for the next few thousand years? Jean might be best-lean meat, but bread was the staple.

  While her daughter was still young and there was hope, Jean threw herself into imp
rinting love and humor, excellence and sensitivity into the palimpsest of her daughter. But the inflexible programs were already written, and as her daughter grew up the writing showed through ever more clearly: the dumb vandalistic scrawl on the wall, which denied that there was any particular point in Jean’s own life.