Polystom (15 page)

Some of the scientists with whom the young Cleonicles mixed – some of these venerable men and women saw Divinity in the precision. They saw God in the staggering profusion of miniature perfection. But not Cleonicles. For him, science had been a liberation from the foggy doctrines of ‘God’, not an endorsement of them. It had struck him sometimes, as he worked carefully at his early scientific projects, that this elimination of faith in his heart had not been accompanied by any depression of spirits, any pangs of angst. Probably there was a deeper faith than religion in Cleonicles’ heart: one planted by his childhood sense of the closeness and permanence of his family – the careful attention and more carefully delineated boundaries of proper behaviour laid down by his parents; leavened into something less military, something more human, by the love he shared as a small boy with his brother. His parents had been distant figures, perhaps, but he had never doubted the bond between himself and his brother. It was love, a deep love.

Growing older, he realised that this elegant structure, rigid yet yielding, was more than family. It was society as a
whole, the whole marvellous intricacy of humanity itself. And science first drew Cleonicles for the same reason. It gave him an insight into the deep structures that underlay everything, and the sense that the apparent randomness and diversity of the visible System was governed, underneath, by certain simple, immutable laws. The fact that the principles of order and structure were fundamental chimed with his own sense of things. The beauty of science lay precisely in this feeling of
rightness
. It was not ‘God’ – any more than a crystal, a painting, a population of mice, a nest of orbits around the sun, any more than
any
pattern was ‘God’. But it was
ordered
, and that was enough.

Order was important to him.

At this early stage in his life (he lost all pretensions to religion in his late teens) science was a pastime; he was just one more gentleman amateur, dabbling in the prettier disciplines. His life ran, still, in conventional channels. He drank. He intrigued. He enjoyed love affairs. He even played sport, although his lanky, unmuscular frame was ill suited to it. And his whole life might easily have worked it way along those lines, with science as no more than a hobby, except for one thing: a flaw in the symmetry of structure he observed that snagged his attention.

It grew out of his observation of scilia, the very same microscopic free-floating creatures that played so important a role in interplanetary space. Cleonicles watched them through his microscope. He sketched them, marvelled at their jewel-like beauty. Then he read a study of the skywhals – the enormous, floating beasts that basked through interplanetary sky with mouths agape, gill-grilles filtering out hundreds of pounds of scilia a day. The scilia fed, in a manner of speaking, on the sun; the skywhals fed on the scilia. Like a planet-bound natural chain of being, Cleonicles saw structure and harmony here just as it existed in human life. But there was an absence in the pattern, and it was this absence that attracted Cleonicles’ attention.

He knew the generally accepted theory, called by some ‘evolution’ and by others ‘progressive alteration’. He had read the classic studies by Anhydrocles, Pelias and others, of the slow accretion of biosphere on each of the System’s worlds. First, microscopic life, then progressive alteration and growth to multi-cellular creatures; then larger and more complex patterns feeding on the simpler, until complex life evolved, honed either to defeat predation by numbers or agility, or else to predate more effectively. Cleonicles saw in the microbes, plants, insects, birds and ornithophages of, say, his home world Enting a beautifully balanced structure, as glittering and precise as crystal. But comparing the situation, he couldn’t see why a similarly complex chain-of-being had not progressively grown into interplanetary space. Out there were microbes (the scilia) and large-scale grazers (the skywhals), but there was nothing else.

This perceived imbalance led him to look more closely at the habitat provided by interplanetary atmosphere, and these enquiries, casual at first, then more committed, pulled him with inexorable and delicious force into science as a whole. By twenty-three he was history’s youngest-ever member of the Prince’s Scientific Society, with seven published papers to his credit, including groundbreaking research on skywhals and on interplanetary sky. By twenty-five he had published a book-length study, part observation and part hypothesis, on the interplanetary habitat – arguing that freak mutation had given certain high-gliding birds float-bladders that had lifted them higher still, and the pure emptiness of interplanetary sky had meant that no rivals prevented these birds from colonising the new realm. It was still the most widely accepted theory for skywhal ‘evolution’. And from there he had worked on the very first Computation Device; and then, opening up whole new worlds of science, into other arenas. He had pioneered stellar research as a scientific discipline. He had financed
the first experiments out of his own pocket. And, now, an old man, he could look back on his life with satisfaction. He could have done so, except that such a degree of introspection was alien to his nature. As he had always done, he absorbed himself wholly in what he was doing, in the now. His memories were hazy and rarely consulted (except for strictly scientific recollections), and his sense of the future as unformed as a baby’s. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of this, he was as contented a man as lived in the whole System. Of course he did not know, as he continued to track the skywhal with his telescope, that this was to be his last day alive.

Eventually the skywhal swung round the globe and out of sight of his telescope. This was, Cleonicles calculated, the beast’s closest approach to the moon yet. His mind worked through possibilities. Was it deranged in some way? Was this bizarre flight-path merely the skywhal equivalent of youthful high spirits? Was the beast suicidal, to tempt the fatal tug of the gravity of this world?

Cleonicles went back inside and took a glass of coffee and some marinated and freshly grilled chitterlings, before writing up his observations properly. Something very interesting going on, he was certain of that.

He took an interest in everything, as was (he thought) proper for a scientist. But he had given over the majority of his energy, in these last years, to the mysteries of the cosmos beyond the System. Stars! Vacuum! A scale that some experts calculated at thousands of miles, some at
billions
– difficult to judge which was more likely. For the man hungry for mystery this arena was the most mysterious of all. It was this impossible place, outside the cosmos, that chiefly animated him now. If he had one regret at devoting his life to science, at choosing his researches over partner and family, it was simply that he now had no son with
whom to enthuse over each day’s new startling discovery. He tried, sometimes, to engage Polystom; but much as he loved his nephew he had to concede the boy’s mind was weak and vacillating, infected by what the great physicist Cinesias called ‘the virus of subjectivity’. For a time he had come close to irritation (without, luckily, actually succumbing to the vulgar impulse) at his nephew’s presence. It was that period of six or seven months after his wife’s death when he seemed forever visiting, forever sleeping in a guest room, forever wearying Cleonicles’ ear with his sorrow and his self-pity. Throughout those months he had distracted Cleonicles from research at a particularly exciting juncture, and it had crossed the old man’s mind simply to ask him to go. He was glad, in retrospect, that he had never given way to so base an instinct. It wasn’t Polystom’s fault that he had fallen for a madwoman, and when all was said and done he was family, after all.

The mail had arrived.

An official-looking letter, the envelope crested with the Bear of Enting, had come from some officious civil service officer. It related to the execution of a servant that had taken place two days earlier on Cleonicles’ estate. Cleonicles glanced at it: an endorsement, nothing more. A waste of paper. But this other one looked more interesting – a long pale-orange envelope, evidently a communication from his onetime rival and now occasional collaborator, Scholides. Cleonicles pulled the corner off the envelope and slid his finger in to rip away the top. What was the old boy saying?

. . .
my preference, as you know, refuses to apprehend ‘vacuum’ as any but an extreme, laboratory-induced phenomenon. And, dear friend, although I know you mistrust numerical sciences, I have brought ‘mathematics’ to bear on the issue. Following on from my recent paper, the one you kindly endorsed, I worked with a notional ‘planet’ with a notional atmosphere existing in the sort of ‘vacuum-space’ you postulate
as existing beyond the borders of the cosmos. I have now utilised a force algorithm to examine the effect of the pressure gradient from one bar to zero bar over a length of seventy kilometres. Now you will say that this final measurement is arbitrary, and so it is; but I would counter that it needs must be arbitrary, believing as I do that no such situation could ever actually obtain in the universe! And given the need for this arbitrary number, I have taken seventy thousand metres from your own models! With these initial data, and the equation
F = G[(m1)/x — (m1m2)/x
²
],
such that
x
is the figure of seventy thousand which we have mentioned and the
m
s 1 and 2 the respective atmospheric pressures, we arrive at a force of one seventh of a Kratos – a small force, but one capable of accelerating a particle as tiny as an oxygen or nitrogen particle up to fifty thousand kilometres an hour! Acceleration of such force, occasioned by the effective decompression of going from one bar to zero in so short a space of time, would, as I have demonstrated, suck any atmosphere clean away from any planet. Any liquid would also be boiled away into space, and some mineral matter, although minerals such as granite or compression-formed marbles may possess tensile strength enough to resist the force (a related question is whether rocks as we understand them could form in the extreme conditions you posit). You will note that assuming a vacuum of zero bar effectively eliminates the second part of the equation, but even if we assume a vacuum of very low bar – say one one-thousandth – it does not materially affect the equations. The gravitational
G
in the equation might be thought to have the power to rein in some small proportion of the particles, but only if
G
approached infinite levels could an atmosphere be maintained – atmosphere being at the molecular level, as we both know, billions of individual missiles travelling ballistically at velocities great enough to escape the gravitational attraction of any world. Clearly, then, no worlds as we understand them could exist in the conditions of a vacuum cosmos: and if my own world of Rhum were translated there
by magic the ‘vacuum’ would boil its atmosphere and seas away in moments, rip away its biomass and whirlwind away much of its soil and rock
.

Only two postulates can possibly follow from this state of affairs. One
. . .

From the flowery language it looked as though Scholides was planning to publish this letter; the ‘My Dear Cleonicles . . .’ at the top would be enough to find it a home in half a dozen respectable journals, and it was a quicker way of publishing than working through the tortuous rituals of refereed
Proceedings
and
Journals
. Well, let him publish. It was dull stuff, and not particularly original. Worse, there was a degree of dishonesty about it: for Scholides knew perfectly well (though he didn’t say so) that Cleonicles had never suggested this bizarre model . . . planets existing out in vacuum, beyond the cosmos, with atmospheres that simply
sat
, like pools in an indent. That was patently ridiculous. Clearly any such atmosphere would be boiled away into space, either immediately or else through a process of depletion over time. He folded the letter to throw it away, and then thought better of it. Perhaps it was worth checking the ‘two postulates’ that the old rogue mentioned. Maybe he had something new to say.

Only two postulates can possibly follow from this state of affairs. One is that the ‘stars’ and ‘atmosphere-bearing planets’ of what we may be pleased (in your honour) to term Cleonicles’ vacuum cosmos – that these stars and planets preserve themselves against the tendency of universal vacuum to dissipate their constituents by means of some force-field or barrier. So incredible this barrier would have to be, of such surpassing might and power, draining such quantities of power, that it has properly been called not a function of Physics at all, but rather a manifestation of God. For the renowned atheist Cleonicles to be endorsing a Religious reading
of the universe is ironic indeed! The second postulate, on the other hand, is to my mind the inevitable one – that there is no ‘vacuum’ beyond our cosmos, and that no planets and no stars exist in the mighty imaginary emptiness of ‘Cleonicles’ Space’. That the objects observed at the boundary of the cosmos have some other, more rational explanation. Is there any way, my old friend, in which I can convince you of the folly of denying
. . .

Cleonicles dropped the letter to the floor. A servant would clear it away. A less placid man might have been annoyed by the impertinent tone of Scholides’ communication, but Cleonicles had been through so many petty disputes with so many petty scientists he no longer cared. The introduction of religion was a clever twist of the argument, though; he had to concede that.

Polystom – for some reason, this day, his mind kept wandering back to his nephew – Polystom had once advanced the ‘religion’ argument. It was a fundamentally unscientific manoeuvre, which was why Scholides had inserted it into his letter, hoping to discredit Cleonicles’ theories by association. Of course, to simply brush everything a man could not immediately understand into the satchel marked ‘God’ was nothing more than intellectual laziness. So people had once called the planets ‘gods’, shining through the sky, before the age of flight; the same planets that the descendants of those same people now inhabited. ‘But uncle,’ Polystom had said, his face flushed. ‘What holds the System together?’