Blish,James - Midsummer Century Read online

  Copyright © 1972 by James Bush

  All Rights Reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  A shorter version of this novel appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, April 1972

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  NOTE

  I am indebted to Rowland Bowen and Dr. John Clark, both of England, for substantial elements of my hypotheses about the nature of ESP and mystical experience, respectively. In both instances I have simply helped myself to whatever seemed useful in advancing my own notions, and my story, without hying to be rigorous about it. The theories remain their in­tellectual properties and await their own expositions of them. I am grateful to both for permission to simplify their work into fiction.

  JAMES BUSH

  Harpsden (Henley)

  Oxon, England

  1971

  PART ONE

  REBIRTFI UI

  1

  In all the ointment which the world had provided for the anointing of John Martels, D.Sc., F.R.A.S., etc., there was only one fly: There was something wrong with his telescope. Martels, unmarried and 30, was both a statistic and a bene­ficiary of what his British compatriots were bitterly calling the brain-drain, the luring of the best English minds to the United States with higher pay, lower taxes, and the apparent absence of any class system whatsoever. And he had found no reason to regret it, let alone feel guilty about it. Both his parents were dead, and as far as he was concerned, he owed the United Kingdom nothing any more.

  Of course, the advantages of living in the States were not quite so unclouded as they had been presented to him, but he had never expected anything else. Take the apparent absence of a class system, for instance: All the world knew that the blacks, the Mexicans, and the poor in general were discrimi­nated against ferociously in the States, and that political op­position of any kind to the Establishment was becoming in­creasingly dangerous. But what counted as far as he was concerned was that it was not the same sort of class system.

  Born of a working-class family in the indescribably ugly city of Doncaster, Martels had been cursed from the outset with a working-class Midlands dialect which excluded him

  from the “right” British circles as permanently and irrevocably as if he had been a smuggled Pakistani immigrant. No “public” school had been financially available to his parents to help him correct the horrible sound of his own voice; nor to give him the classical languages which in his youth had still been necessary for entry into Oxford or Cambridge.

  Instead, he had ground, kicked, bitten, and otherwise fought his way through one of the new redbrick polytechnics. Though he emerged at the end with the highest possible First in astrophysics, it was with an accent still so atrocious as to deny him admittance to any but the public side—never the lounge or saloon—of any bar in Britain.

  In the States, on the other hand, accents were regarded as purely regional, and a man’s education was judged not by his inflection but by his grammar, vocabulary, and the state of his knowledge. To be sure, Martels was disturbed by the condition of the Negro, the Mexican, and the poor, but since he was none of these things, he was not oppressed by it.

  As for political activity, that was absolutely out for Martels; he was an alien here. Were he to so much as raise a placard, regardless of what was written on it, he would lose either his passport or his citizenship.

  The money situation had worked out in very much the same way. While there was a lot more of it available here than there was in England, in places like New York they took it away from you almost faster than you could make it; but Martels was not in New York. After a brief but moderately spectacular lecture­ship as a radio astronomer at Jodrell Banks, he had been hired on as Director of Research in the field by a new but already sprawling university in the American midwest, where money went a good deal farther—and where, in addition, Negroes, Mexicans, and the poor were in invisibly short supply. He could not quite put their plight out of his mind, but at least it was easier on the conscience to have it out of sight. The

  sailplaning here wasn’t as good as it had been in the Chiltem Hills, but you can’t have everything.

  And there had been a final inducement: Sockette State had just completed construction of a radio telescope of a radically new design, a combination of mile-square dipole arrays and steerable dish with a peculiar, bowl-like glacial gouge in the landscape which made all its predecessors seem as primitive as the optical machine Galileo had filched from Hans Lippershey. The combination made it possible to mount a dish rather smaller than the one at Jodrell Banks, and involved instead a wave-guide focal point almost as big, and as skeletal, as the tubular frame of a 65-inch optical reflecting telescope. It took a startling amount of power to drive the thing—over and above the power necessary to steer it—but in theory at least, it ought to penetrate far enough around the universe to pick up the radio equivalent of the temperature at the back of Martels’ own neck.

  At first sight, he had been as pleased with it as a father who has just bought his son a new electric train. Just trying to imagine what great events might be recorded by such an instrument was splendid. It seemed to pose only one problem:

  Thus far, it couldn’t be made to pick up anything but the local rock-and-roll station.

  There was nothing wrong with the theory, of that he was quite certain. The design was as sound as it could possibly be. So was the circuitry; he had tested that out repeatedly and intensively. The only other possibility was a flaw in the gross construction of the telescope, probably something so simple as a girder out of true in the wave guide which would distort either the field or the transmission.

  Well, there was at least one thing to be said for a redbrick university: It did nothing for either your Greek or your English, but it insisted that its physical scientists also be passable en­gineers before it let you graduate. Warming up the amplifier,

  tuning it, and cranking the gain up all the way—a setting which should have effectively relocated the campus of Sockette State in the heart of Ursa Major No. z, a cluster of galaxies half a billion light-years away—he crossed the parabolic alu­minum basketwork of the steerable antenna and scrambled up the wave guide, field strength detector in hand; awkwardly, it was too big to be put into a pocket.

  Gaining the lip of the wave guide, he sat down for a rest, feet dangling, peering down the inside of the tube. The pro­gram now was to climb clown into there slowly in a tight spiral, calling out the field intensity readings at intervals to the technicians on the floor.

  Redbrick polytechnics insist that their physical scientists also be engineers, but they neglect to turn them into steeple-jacks as well. Martels was not even wearing a hard hat. Set­tling one sneakered foot into what appeared to be a perfectly secure angle between one girder and another, he slipped and fell headlong down the inside of the tube.

  He did not even have time to scream, let alone hear the shouts of alarm from the technicians, for he lost consciousness long before he hit bottom.

  In fact, he never hit bottom at all.

  It would be possible to explain exactly and comprehensively what happened to John Martels instead, but to do so would require several pages of expressions in the metalanguage in-vented by Dr. Thor Wald, a Swedish theoretical physicist who unfortunately was not scheduled to be born until the year 2060. Suffice it to say that, thanks to the shoddy workmanship of an unknown welder, Sockette State’s radical new radio telescope did indeed have an unprecedented reach—but not in any direction that its designers had intended, or could even have conceived.
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  2

  “Ennoble me with the honor of your attention, immortal Qvant.”

  Swimming upward from blackness, Martels tried to open his eyes, and found that he could not. Nevertheless, in a moment he realized that he could see. What he saw was so totally strange to him that he tried to close his eyes again, and found he could not do that, either. He seemed, in fact, completely paralyzed; he could not even change his field of view.

  He wondered briefly if the fall had broken his neck. But that shouldn’t affect his control of his eye muscles, should it? Or of his eyelids?

  Besides, he was not in a hospital; of that much, at least, he could be sure. What was visible to him was a vast, dim hall in bad repair. There seemed to be sunlight coming from over­head, but whatever there was up there that was admitting it was not letting much through.

  He had a feeling that the place ought to be musty, but he seemed to have no sense of smell left. The voice he had heard, plus a number of small, unidentifiable echoes, told him that he could still hear, at least. He tried to open his mouth, again without result.

  There seemed to be nothing for it but to take in what little was visible and audible, and try to make as much sense as

  possible of whatever facts that brought him. What was he sitting or lying upon? Was it warm or cool? No, those senses were gone too. But at least he cUd not seem to be in any pain— though whether that meant that that sense was gone too, or that he was either drugged or repaired, couldn’t be guessed. Nor was he hungry or thirsty—again an ambiguous finding.

  About the floor of the hail within his cone of vision was a scatter of surpassingly strange artifacts. The fact that they were at various distances enabled him to establish that he could at least still change his depth of focus. Some of the ob­jects seemed to be more decayed than the hail itself. In a number of instances the state, if any, of decay was impossible to judge, because the things seemed to be sculptures or some other kind of works of art, representing he knew not what, if anything at all, for representational art had been out of fashion all his life, anyhow. Others, however, were plainly machines; and though in no case could he even guess their intended functions, he knew corrosion when he saw it. This stuff had been out of use a long, long time.

  Something was still functioning, though. He could hear the faintest of continuous hums, like a 50-cycle line noise. It seemed to come from somewhere behind him, intimately close, as though some spectral barber were applying to the back of his skull or neck a massaging device intended for the head of a gnat.

  He did not think that the place, or at least the chamber of it that he seemed to be in, was exceptionally large. If the wall that was visible to him was a side rather than an end—which of course he had no way of determining—and the remembered echoes of the voice were not misleading, then it could not be much bigger than one of the central galleries in the Alte Pinakothek, say the Rubens room. . .

  The comparison clicked neatly into place. He was in a museum of some sort. And one both without maintenance and

  completely unpopular, too, for the floor was thick with dust, and there were only a few footprints in that, and in some cases none at all, near the exhibits (if that was what they were). The footprints, he registered without understanding, were all those of bare feet.

  Then, there came that voice again, this time with rather a whining edge to it. It said:

  “Immortal Qvant, advise me, I humbly pray.”

  And with a triple shock, he heard himself replying:

  “You may obtrude yourself upon my attention, tribesman.” The shock was triple because, first of all, he had had no in­tention or sensation of either formulating the reply or of utter­ing it. Second, the voice in which it came out was most cer­tainly not his own; it was deeper, and unnaturally loud, yet seemed to be almost without resonance. Third, the language was one he had never heard before in his life, yet he seemed to understand it perfectly.

  Besides, my name is not and has never been Qvant. I don’t even have a middle initial.

  But he was given no time to speculate, for there now sidled into sight, in a sort of cringing crouch which Martels found somehow offensive, something vaguely definable as a human being. He was naked and dark brown, with what Martels judged to be a mixture of heredity and a deep tan. The naked­ness also showed him to be scrupulously clean, his arms short, his legs long, his pelvis narrow. His hair was black and crin­kled like a Negro’s, but his features were Caucasoid, except for an Asian eyelid fold, rather reminding Martels of an African bushman—an impression strengthened by his small stature. His expression, unlike his posture, was respectful, almost reverent, but not at all frightened.

  “What would you have of me now, tribesman?” Martels’ new voice said.

  “Immortal Qvant, I seek a ritual for the protection of our

  maturity ceremonies from the Birds. They have penetrated the old one, for this year many of our new young men lost their eyes to them, and some even their lives. My ancestors tell me that such a ritual was known in Rebirth Three, and is better than ours, but they cannot give me the details.”

  “Yes, it exists,” Martels’ other voice said. “And it will serve you for perhaps two to five years. But in the end, the Birds will penetrate this too. In the end, you will be forced to abandon the ceremonies.”

  “To do this would also be to surrender the afterlife!”

  “That is doubtless true, but would this necessarily be a great surrender? You need your young men here and now, to hunt, procreate, and fight the Birds. I am barred from any knowledge of the afterlife, but what gives you any assurance that it is pleasant? What satisfactions can remain for all those crowded souls?”

  In some indefinable way, Martels could tell from Qvant’s usage that “birds” was capitalized; he had caught no hint of this in the speech of the petitioner, whose expression had now changed to one of subdued horror. He noticed also that Qvant spoke to the presumable savage as anyone would address an educational equal, and that the naked man spoke in the same way. But of what use was the information? For that matter, what was Martels, presumably a man miraculously recovering from a major accident, doing in a moldering museum, help­lessly eavesdropping upon an insane conversation with a naked “tribesman” who asked quaestiones like a medieval student addressing St. Thomas Aquinas?

  “I do not know, immortal Qvant,” the petioner was saying. “But without the ceremonies, we shall have no new generations of ancestors, and memory in the afterlife fades rapidly. Who in the end should we have left to advise us but yourself?”

  “Who indeed?”

  From the faint tone of irony in his voice, Qvant had proba­

  bly intended the question to be rhetorical, bñt in any case Martels had had enough. Mustering every dyne of will power he could manage to summon, he strove to say:

  “Will somebody kindly tell me what the hell is going on here?”

  It came out, and in his own voice, though without any physi­cal sensation of speaking. And in that same unknown language, too.

  There was a moment of complete silence after the echoes died, during which Martels felt a sensation of shock which he was sure was not his own. Then the petitioner gasped and ran.

  This time, Martels’ eyes tracked, though not of his own voli­tion, following the fleeing man until he had vanished through a low, groined, sunlit doorway beyond which was what ap­peared to be a dense green forest or jungle. His guess at the size and shape of the hail was thus confirmed, and he now knew also that it was at ground level. Then his eyes returned to their stony and boring regard of the facing wall and the neglected, meaningless artifacts.

  “Who are you?” the Qvant voice said. “And how have you invaded my brain?”

  “Your brain?”

  “This is my brain, and I am its rightful occupant—the pre­cious personality of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. I have been thus encased and maintained since the end of Rebirth Three, of which era what you see
is the museum. The men of Rebirth Four regard me as a quasi god, and they do well to do so.” The menace in that last sentence was unmistakable. “I repeat, who are you, and how have you come here?”

  “My name is John Martels, and I haven’t the faintest idea how I got here. And nothing I’ve seen or heard makes the faintest sense to me. I was within a couple of seconds of

  certain death, and then suddenly, here I was. That’s all I know.”

  “I caution you to tell the truth,” Qvant said heavily. “Else I shall dispossess you, and then you will die within two or three seconds—or go on to the afterlife, which amounts to the same thing.”

  Martels felt an instant flash of caution. Despite the fact that the two of them seemed to share the same brain, this creature evidently could not read Martels’ mind, and there might well be some advantage to be gained in withholding some of what little information he had. He had, after all, no guarantee that Qvant would not “dispossess” him anyhow, once the “quasi god’s” curiosity was satisfied. Martels said, with a desperation more than half-real:

  “I don’t know what it is you want to know.”

  “How long have you been lurking here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What is your earliest memory?”

  “Of staring at that wall.”

  “For how long?” Qvant said implacably.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think to count the days. Nothing ever seemed to happen, until your petitioner spoke.”

  “And what did you hear of my thoughts during that time?”