Awake in the Night Land (40 page)

“We, all the universe, are still within the event-horizon of the original black hole from which the universe came: the creation act was to force information into the matrices of time and space, within the black hole itself. To observers inside, it must have seemed as if the universe began a sudden, inexplicable expansion. Hence, what we call the Hubble Error. Simpler to assume all matter-energy is shrinking, as it loses information value due to entropy, than to assume the edges of the universe are flying off from us.”

I said, “I thought we were seeing the destruction of the universe? What is this talk of the creation?”

Abraxander said, “It is the same. At the moment when all things become indistinguishable, the direction of the arrow of time becomes indistinguishable. At that moment, creation is destruction as seen from backward in time. As a book read back to front might be. However, before and after that moment, creation is the direction of decreasing entropy, and destruction the direction of increasing. Only at the Omega Point itself does the observer see the symmetry. The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols 'abstract' complexity from observed objects.”

I thought I would try a simpler question. I said, “Is it an old sun? Why else would it be red?”

Abraxander said, “It is not a sun, that. That speck falling in, look there–” he pointed at one of the millions of stars streaming into the great central mass “He is a sun, him. Planets and cometary halos he pulls with him, the sun, as he falls in. This–” he pointed at the central sun, “this is not a sun.”

“Why is it red?”

Abraxander said patiently, “It is not. The light seems red because that, the light, it suffers energy loss while it flies upwards against the pull. Light cannot be seen in any frame as moving more slowly; therefore the energy must seem to be lost in the wavelength: more red. It will seem white enough to these here, us, once we reach it, and join its frame of reference. To our eyes then, all will be white and clear.”

He-Sings-Death said in a shaking voice, “How can the sun be under my foot? Who buried the sun beneath this cave?”

I said, “We are not in a house, not in a cave. This is a ship: a sailing vessel that flies through the night sky.”

He-Sings-Death said, “And the sun is below the keel of the canoe?”

I said, “Not below. There is no below.”

He-Sings-Death plucked a bead from his hair and let it fall, clattering at his feet. He pointed at the bead with his chin. “Ah! Look! Tricky little bead, fools me, fools my eye. Bead thinks there is a below. That way. The way it fell. Poor bead!”

I said, “Let me explain. The ship is a cylinder. Because it is spinning, it seems to make weight….well, not weight exactly, but acceleration. No, wait, there must be a way to explain this. Hm. OK. Suppose you took a bucket with water in it and swung it around your head very fast on a rope. See? The water would stay in the bucket.”

He-Sings-Death looked skeptical. “Captain Powell of Nantucket, why should I take a bucket with water in it and swing it around my head very fast on a rope? I am the eldest of ten brothers, and my voice is heard in the wisdom-tent, and even the gray-haired elders listen to my songs. This would not be a good thing for me to do: little children would laugh.”

“Um…. Okay.” I turned to Abraxander: “I get the impression I am not going to understand your explanation any more than Mr. Singer here understood mine, but let me ask: How do you know the ship is moving? You said we were going to enter the frame of something of the sun.”

Abraxander said, “It is not a sun, that. It is the Omega Point. Once this point, that, it achieves condition mathematically indistinguishable from the Alpha Point, all time will reinterpret. Whether the next universe will be as this one, or some other condition, no one can know who is inside the context of time.”

“What do you mean, reinterpret?”

Abraxander said, “Reevaluate.”

“What?”

“Time will reevaluate itself, will re-impose upon itself the values of meaningful events. You know the difference between meaningful and meaningless?”

“I thought I did.” (But, listening to him, now I was not so sure.)

“Time, it is an orderly sequence of non-energy, what is the word? Intervals. Every interval of meaning must have negative non-meaning to define and separate it. Words must have silence; pictures must have white between the black. Ultimately, meaning must mean what it means against a background of non-meaning. Hence, time is a self-evaluating structure. Time gives meaning to time: do you follow me? A thing gives value to a thing by evaluation. This is why life exists only within time-ness, because life must consist of processes bound by birth and death, which are the boundary conditions. Wait. There must be a way to explain. Imagine you are in an infinite but boundaried spacetime of N dimensions. The condition is spherical in N plus Two dimensions. Within your light-cone, of all possible futures, if you have meaning now, they will have meaning then. However, outside your light-cone, in order for the N space itself to have meaning, there must be an imaginary set of points which do not have a past-to-future relationship with any point inside your light-cone. Now suppose (which is impossible in undistorted space) you are rotated to the imaginary points: they would seem like end points at that time, and could be either past or future, depending on the collapse of the uncertainty wave-function.”

I said, “Abraxander-the-Threshold of Tau Ceti, why should I be rotated to these imaginary points outside my lighthouse? I come from a respectable family. This would not be a good thing for me to do: little children would laugh.”

Abraxander opened his mouth to continue his explanation, but then there was a twinkle in his eye, for he took my meaning, and he nodded.

I asked, “Maybe this would be simpler. How do you know that the ship is moving? There is no sensation of motion.”

Abraxander pointed underfoot. “See where the stars stream like dust-motes, them. There is a spiral galaxy unwinding in a few, to us, seconds, all her scattered stars dropping into the central vortex of the Omega Point like raindrops. Calculate the mass involved in even a medium-sized star crossing that degree of arc. Surely it is obvious!”

I said, “Not obvious to me.”

The Blue Man turned and said to me: “Too fast. No galaxy, nothing that size could discombobulate so fast. It took place a million years ago, and took a million years. This ship is crowding lightspeed. Imagine a concentric of light expanding, bing! Bing! Many concentrics. Bing! Bing! Bing!”

I said, “Stop binging at me.”

He said, “Imagine them binging off from the sight, one bing per ten thousand years. We puncture a ten bings of concentric in ten seconds of flight. To us on board, film is fast forward. It looks like it takes a moment or two. Ten seconds. Station time in frame of galaxy, ten thousand times ten years. Get it?”

I said, “No. Forgive me, Mr. Bliss, but I think the spell Nergal cast, or Ydmos, or whatever that hypnotic thing was, might be wearing off.”

Of all people, it was Kitimil who touched my knee and said, “A runner leaves the cave when Uj is born, and he says, weep, all the earth, for Uj is born! He runs east. Second runner leaves the cave when Uj is young man in fullness of his strength, proud as a bull, hateful as a serpent, and he says, weep, all the earth, for Uj is strong, his spear drinks blood, and Uj lifts up his hand in strength! He runs east. Third runner leaves the cave when Uj is dead, and he says, rejoice, all the earth, for Uj sleeps in the ash of the pyre, and his spear sleeps at his side, and slays no more, forever. He runs east.

“A bird who is as swift as the ray of the sun leaves the land of Behind-the-Dawn, and flies from east to west, for all gods run east to west, sun and moon and star. She hears the first runner. She flaps her wing. She hears the second runner. She flaps her wing. She hears the third runner. She lands on the bulbul tree, and says, Oh! Who was this Uj that all men forever feared would be born! Uj was not so to be feared! He lived and died all within three beats of my wings of fire. Foolish men! So she says. The gods are too swift to know our fears. This shell you say is a canoe is as that bird.”

He meant the ship. The ship was moving so quickly it was overtaking the messages, the light, carrying to our eyes the images of a destruction that, as best I could tell, had already happened.

I was staring at Kitimil in astonishment. This savage was apparently able to grasp with ease something that still seemed locked in a riddle to me.

I said, “Who is Uj?”

Kitimil waved his hand above him and below, indicating the vast black ship entrapping us. In his language of grunting clicks he spoke: "Uj clings to the canoe of Neomah and Noah, his hands cling to the bark, and he carries the snake in his belly, the scorpion, the toad. Noah was to drown all poison beasts, but Uj saves them, so that Noah’s sons know pain. He does this for the not-people. He weeps. But the not-people took Magigi from him. They give her back soon.”

“Are you talking about Enoch’s giants? The Nephilim? Or is not-people your word for these devils?”

Kitimil looked at me with pity, and shook his head, and would not answer.

Ydmos said, “We learned, much to our sorrow, that it is unwise to give names to the things in the Night Land, for then they appear in our thoughts as more human than they are. It is our custom, even among ourselves, to refer to the enemy only by attributes. There is a danger otherwise.”

Enoch spoke, “For the good powers of the world, as well as for the ill. It is not right for man to make in brass or iron any image of the Lord of the Eloi, for it is idolatry, and men come to praise the works of their hand, and not Him whose handiwork Man is.”

Ydmos bowed toward Enoch, as if toward a sage.

Then, to me, responding to an earlier comment of mine, Ydmos said, “If the conjunction made with Nergal the Hunter fails, I cannot reconnect it.”

“How does it work? Who or what is doing the translating for us?”

Ydmos said, “The science of aetheric pnumatics is largely forgotten in my time. The speculations of unwise men breached the walls of time, and opened doors that should have been kept shut. I did perform a conjunction: but I also sensed a unification of energies centered in Nergal the Hunter. His spiritual condition was bifurcated, as if the Night-hearing had once been his, and then had been taken from him. His past self, it enjoyed singularity of language: I brought it forward, for it was connected to the ur-word, which I know.”

I said, “
'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.’
“

Enoch looked at me, a look of fear and wonder on his face. He said, “As if I hear a trumpet: there is one who stands behind Captain Powell and speaks words of power through him!”

I said, “It is a quote from the Old Testament. About the confusion of tongues.”

He-Sings-Death whispered to me, “Why does he hear voices? Who speaks to him that does not speak to us?” He pointed at Enoch with his chin.

I said to Enoch, “What are you hearing? Whom did you hear, when I spoke?”

I saw the look of fear and guilt on his face.

He-Sings-Death raised his spear toward Enoch. “He is the one. The darkness is in him like a serpent.”

I said, “What? How do you know?”

Enoch was backing away, and raised his wand.

He-Sings-Death said, “Does he weep? Why did he pull the tongue from the spell Mneseus wove?”

I said, “So that we might live. Mneseus would have had us kill each other.”

He-Sings-Death grinned a savage little grin. “Live? For what? Who else wanted us to live? Who woke us from death?”

Mneseus said, “There is no more time for speech. Now it begins.”

I said, “What? What begins?”

Crystals-of-Bliss said to Abraxander: "Are we entering the event horizon, poppet?”

Abraxander looked at him with a slight smile, and said, “These ones, us, we will encounter no barrier, no wall. Does this one, you, does he know what an event horizon looks like? It is not like smashing through a pane of ice. It is passing an imaginary point beyond which the calculated escape velocity exceeds the speed of light.”

The reddish sunlight underfoot grew more yellow as he spoke.

I forgot Enoch. I looked down.

He-Sings-Death said, “Praise the Dawn, and the coming of the Dawn, and praise as well He-Brings-Dawn, for what should men who walk on Earth, what should we do, if the Bringer should fail to bring some day? A baby cannot find milk without his mother: no more can men who walk on Earth find light, if the light-bringer does not bring light.”

I said, “It is not dawn. We are dropping into the Central Sun. Look! Where have the other galaxies gone?” For the wide belt of streaming galaxies, pinwheels and spirals and nebulae of all sizes, vanished before we passed through it. Here and there were scattered stars, stars without Milky Ways around them, and some clouds of thin gas, green and blue and indigo, luminous with the light behind them.

Even those last few suns were dropping toward the Central Sun, like droplets of fire falling into an ocean of fire.

The circle of the central sun grew larger and larger underfoot. Around the rim of that blazing disk, the black sky of the empty universe was beginning to glow cherry-red, as if the whole cosmos were some enormous oven.

Abraxander said, “It is not a sun. It is not the dawn. The hue of light is higher in its frequency, because this ship here, her speed is greater.” And then to Crystals-of-Bliss, he said sardonically, “Can you not see the color of the sky beyond and around the Omega Point?”

Crystals-of-Bliss said, “So we are already beyond the point of no return.” His nonchalance, for once, had vanished: he looked frightened.

I said to him, “Mr. Bliss, why does the prospect frighten you? If understood Mr. Threshold's explanation, the space and time itself outside the event horizon are also being pulled in.”