Adrift in the Noösphere (14 page)

All his sensations are scrambled.
The terror in his head clangs against
the lugubrious mood of his hormones.
I looked at the clock, he tells himself
desperately, clutching for a falsifiable
test. Sound scientific method. What
did it say? 4:37. Last time round. He
grips that single datum, while his
mutinous corpse leans on the railing of
the catwalk, one foot propped on a
rubber tread. Glancing at the wall
clock, he sees that he's wasted half an
hour—

Oh God Almighty. 4:37. Exultation
bursts in his mind, leaving his flesh to
plod like lead. Hold it, that doesn't
mean you haven't flipped your crani
um. Everyone has a built-in clock.
Three Major Biorhythms Ordain Your Fate, that sort of thing. He wants to
giggle, but his chest and jaw don't re
spond to the wish. His frail flesh has resigned itself to the honorable discharge of his employment. A dizzying
aura of bloody light spangled with pin
points of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him.

No! the small anarchic part screams
silently. I can't stand it. It's happening
again. I'm stuck in a loop of time.
Wait, I can prove it. I dropped the rabbit. Any moment now I'll glance down
and see it....

...trying to get back into its box.
The stupid bastard is hungry again. He heaves it in—

Rostow tells himself: this is the
third time round. Or is it? Were he in
control of his programmed muscles, he
would shudder. Maybe I've been
caught in this loop for all eternity, or
at any rate long enough for random
quantum variations in one part of my
brain to set up an isolated observing
subprogram. Jesus, how much pseudo-duration would that take? Ludwig Bolzmann's
Stosszahlansatz
postulate:
ordered particles spontaneously decay into chaos, but given enough interac
tions they can swirl together again into a new order, or even the old order.
Suppose I'm at the bottom of a local
fluctuation from unordered equilibri
um. What's the Poincaré recurrence
time for a human being and his lab?
Say ten to the tenth power raised to the
thirtieth power. That's
absolutely
gro
tesque. The entire universe would have
evaporated into dead cold soot. So I'm
recycling. I stuck my mitt in the hatch and screwed up the mirror. I'm looping
through the same 30 minutes forever,
knowing exactly what's due next and unable to do anything about it. Maybe
I'm not crazy—but I will be soon.

I'm a prisoner, Rostow realizes, in
my own past.

For a moment, to his horror, he
finds himself regretting his divorce.
Worse, he finds—

Hold it, the isolated segment
thinks. If I'm patched into the lasing
system, the additional mass of my
body is pushing the mirror into a
singularity on an asymptotic curve,
tending to the limit at 30-odd minutes duration. But Hawking has shown that quantum effects re-enter powerfully
under such conditions. After all,
Rostow debates with himself, they
must, or I'd be unaware of what's hap
pening. The human brain has crucial quantum-scale interactions. Hadn't Popper and Eccles been arguing that
case for years? So maybe I can break
free of my prior actions. What's to stop
me
deciding
to cross the room and pick up the flask from the bench where I put
it?

Jenny, you bitch, he thinks, why
are you doing this to me? Bitterly, he
wanders to the bench and lifts the luke
warm flask of melted ice-cubes to his
lips. It tastes terrible. He puts it down
with revulsion, then picks it up once more and stares in amazement. I'm not
thirsty. Something
made
me do that—

—the flask slips out of his fingers and shatters. The twin sectors of con
sciousness fuse.

Eddie Rostow goes stealthily to his
console chair and lowers himself with
infinite delicacy.

Aloud, he mutters: “I'm not out of
it yet. Or am I? Is one change in the cause-and-effect sequence sufficient to
take me off the loop?” Mellowing af
ternoon light slants across his fists
from the barred skylight, a sympathet
ic doubling to the shadow from harsh
white fluoros, and his voice echoes
wanly. Rostow flushes. If Donaldson
comes through that door to hear him
mumbling to himself
—

But that isn't on the agenda, is it? If
anyone in the entire world has a certi
fied lease on his own immediate future,
it's Edward Theodore Rostow, doctor
al candidate and imbecile. The sparkling impossible conjecture has come belatedly on tiptoes to smash him behind the ear. With a glad cry he leaps
to his feet. “I can do anything!
Any
thing
I wish!”

I'm not trapped. I thought I was a
prisoner, but I'm the first man in
history to be genuinely liberated. Set free from consequences.
Do it.
If you
don't like the results, scrub it on the
next cycle and
try again
.

Rostow grabs up paper and calcula
tor, scrawls figures. Start by establish
ing the exact parameters. See if the
loop is decaying or elongating. It's ag
gravating, but he rounds out the cycle
with his eyes clamped to the clock. The
bloody aura flashes a half-minute after
the digital clock jumps to 4:37. With
iron control he keeps hold of the rabbit and wrenches his head around as vi
sion clears. Three minutes after four.
His endocrine fluids are telling him to panic, sluggishly stuck in the original
sequence. Rostow's excited mind
shouts them down. Denying the inertia
of previous events, he takes the wrig
gling bunny to his console and places it
carefully in its cardboard home. A
thirty-four minute loop, forsooth.

Considerable effort is required in
itially. Rostow's First Theorem, he
thinks, grinning. Any action will con
tinue to be repeated indefinitely unless
a volitional force is applied to counter that action. Fortunately, the energy necessary to alter intention and will is in the microvolt range. Yes. The brain
is
a quantum machine for making
choices, once you understand that
choice is possible.

He halts with his hand on the door latch. Think this through. Stan Don
aldson, esteemed head of department
and professor, is the last sonofabitch who deserves to know. Will I fall off the loop if I wander away from the mirror? Leaving the loop is suddenly a
most undesirable prospect. Yet some
obscure prompting dispels these trepi
dations. Rostow opens the door and
enters the long colorless corridor.

Led by bombastic Donaldson, the
Board of Directors is taking the stairs
to the free hooch. Jennifer Barton's
thick mane swirls as she shakes her
head, freeing her arm from the sena
tor's grip. On the bottom step she
pivots and turns right, toward her
small office in the Software Center. Not
celebrating? Eddie shuts the lab door
and pursues her down the corridor.

I can't tell her about it. She'd be
obliged to call for the men in white. Up
ahead, she slips into her office without looking in his direction. Arousal stirs in him, fecklessly.

Not truly believing it, he reminds
himself: Anything is possible. There
are no payoffs. The world's a stage, tra-la. “I'll just lay it on the line,” he
mutters seriously. A passing student
blinks at him. With an inane giggle,
Rostow nods. Loudly, in a crisp tone, he tells the student: “I'll ask her what
the hell it is between us.”

“Oh,” says the student, and walks on, swiveling
his brows.

High out of his gourd on freedom
unchecked by restraint, Rostow zooms
toward joy with the woman of his dreams. In a magical slalom on the
vinyl tiles, he bursts through Jennifer
Barton's door and thrusts his hands on
the desk's edge. Her lab coat lies on a
filing cabinet; she stands at her win
dow, brushing her hair. “Tell me, for Christ's sake,” Eddie barks before his
vocabulary can freeze up, “what the
hell it is between us.”

His secret sweetheart narrows her
eyes. With deflated, acute perception,
Rostow surmises that perhaps he is not
her
secret sweetheart. “I hate it with
the rabbit,” she tells him, putting the
brush in a drawer. “But it was a sensa
tional
coup de théâtre.
Coming up for a drink?”

“Didn't you notice? I wasn't in
vited.”

“Surely it was understood.” She is
being patient with him. Rostow closes
the door at his back and sits on the
desk. Stress is winding him tight. Has
the stoned euphoria gone already?

“Jennifer,” he says.

She waits. Then she rolls the caster-
footed chair forward, sits before her
impressive stacks of hard copy, and
waits some more.

“Look. Jennifer, something went wrong with my upbringing. The only time I'm fluent is when I'm smashed,
and then I turn into the maddened
wolfman. So I don't go out very often. For example. Six months ago, after a
horrible divorce, I ventured to a party without a keeper. Nobody tied me up
or shoved a gag in my face. I failed
conspicuously to recognize an old ac
quaintance, and then hectored him
about the polarity of his sexual crav
ings. In the crudest possible terms.
With no provocation, I noisily engaged
a stern feminist on the matter of her
tits, which I found noteworthy. I ended by shouting in a proprietorial man
ner from one end of the host's house to
the other, at three in the morning, inviting young bearded people and their
companions to drink up and depart
swiftly, in what seemed to me a hearty
and engaging fashion. When I got
home I fell down in my own puke.”

After a further silence, Jennifer
lights a cigarette. “How horrible.”

“Doubtless I'm a horrible person in
every respect.”

“That's not what I meant.”

Rostow starts to yell, then lowers
his voice in confusion. “I stumble over
you sprawled on a fat bean-bag in the
middle of a room of colleagues and strangers having your tits massaged by
a swarthy blackamoor—”

She's on her feet. “Okay, sport.
Enough. Out.” Eddie is taken aback at the power of her extended arm as she
hoists him off the desk. He thumps down heavily, barring the door with
one leg.

“No, goddamn it. So I sit down
beside you and toy with your wonderfully hairy leg. You smile and extend your limbs. I can't believe it. Up goes
my little hand, hoppity-scamp—”

“Shut up, you creep.”

For this, Rostow is utterly unpre
pared. He gapes.

Jennifer refuses to lower her eyes. Blotches of color stand out on her
cheekbones. “You're right, Rostow,
you are a horrible person. Incredibly
enough, I once found you rather pi
quant. Your crass behavior the other
night might have been forgivable as
whimsy.” In authentic rage she clamps
her teeth together and wrenches the
door open. “Stay or go as you please.” Then the room is vacant, and Rostow
slumps on the desk with his guts spill
ing out of his wounds and his brain whirling into sawdust and aloes.

The bloody aura is a jolt from one
awful dream to another. With iron
control he keeps hold of the rabbit and
wrenches his head around as vision
clears. Three minutes after four. Yet
the appalling encounter echoes like a
double image, a triple image in fact.
His chemistry overloads and he vomits
uncontrollably. Finally sourness
sweeps away hallucination; he totters
to the console and runs the mirror
system down to Latent.

Aghast, he tells himself: “Scrub it
out. Make it didn't happen.” Regressing to childhood. His mouth tastes re
pulsive; he wipes his lips on the back of
his hand. I can't take much more of
this, he thinks. The human frame
wasn't meant to handle the strain of
dual sets of information. It'd take a
Zen roshi to cope with this weirdness.
The bitch, the lousy bitch.