Seeking the Mythical Future (12 page)

‘Seven is a lucky number,' Blake said, winking at Karve. ‘Especially for a mythographer.'

‘If I could predict that well, there'd be need for a Symposium. I'd plot my own world-line and stick to it like a shuttle timetable.'

‘At least he made the shuttles run on time,' said one wag.

Karve said, ‘If you were really that good, Chris, you could inject yourself and stay behind to tell us where the hell you'd got to.'

‘You mean go and not go?'

‘Why not?' Karve said. ‘Transmit a few billion
tachyons
into Temporal Flux and just sit back twiddling your thumbs and waiting for yourself to report.'

‘Slight problem,' said Milton Blake. He'd find himself reporting back before he'd sent the message, so he'd have the answer before asking the question.'

This was a reference to the time-reversing particle known as the tachyon, which, along with the mu-geon, constituted the only sub-microscopic particles yet discovered which broke the ground rules of Einsteinian physics: both were without mass or electric charge and could therefore defy the basic principle that nothing could travel with a velocity exceeding lightspeed – 3,00,000 kilometres per second. The tachyon, travelling faster than lightspeed, arrived before it departed (which was the same thing as time reversal), the classic case, as Karve put it, of a particle picking itself up by its own bootstraps. The mu-geon
was the gravitational particle which made up the fabric of spacetime curvature: it was the basis for the science of Geometrodynamics, which dealt with the concepts of curved space and curved time – the geometric construction arising out of the force exerted by any massive body, such as a star, on the empty space surrounding it.

As for the tachyon, paranormal sensory perception could not exist without it. It was believed that the mind-waves of certain people were capable of detecting tachyons and utilizing the information they contained; thus it was possible to have advance warning of an event before it took place. This led to the weird and unsettling phenomenon of perceiving an Effect before its Cause – rather like seeing a glass tumbler shatter before it fell off the table.

Martin Brenton said, ‘Aren't we jumping the gun in supposing Chris to be the injectee? I understood the selection date to be some weeks off.'

‘So we are and so it is,' Karve said easily, stuffing his pipe with tobacco. His eyes twinkled from beneath ragged grey eyebrows. ‘We were speaking hypothetically, Martin. Hypotheses are two a penny around here today.'

After the evening meal Queghan and Milton Blake stood in the grounds watching the more energetic delegates playing tennis and the less athletic having a game of crown green bowls. Small groups sat here and there discussing the day's Papers and debating their importance and possible consequences. Queghan asked Blake about the technique he was working on and whether it would provide – the big question – the predictive capability that everyone was seeking.

Blake considered his reply, the pale palms of his hands cupped as if to catch his thoughts and present them to the listener. ‘Everything depends on the sender. I'm sure you realize that, Chris. The display is only the interface between his brain impulses and our perception of them. The problem is that human beings tend to be so erratic in terms of performance and reliability that it would be safer to have the hardware do it for us.'

‘There would still be discrepancies,' Queghan pointed out.

‘I wouldn't dispute that for a moment. But any discrepancies would come from the sender, from the injectee. We would assume – we would have to assume – any interference in the transfer of information to be caused by difficulties encountered by the sender at the point of transmission.'

Queghan took this in, and then said, ‘But the vital question is still the one of predictive capability. Presumably you'd record the sender's mind-waves prior to injection and keep them on, master tape as a means of comparison. But what guarantee is there that after injection into Temporal Flux he'll find himself in the spacetime coordinate predicted earlier? His world-point could, quite literally, be anywhere.'

‘Or nowhere,' Milton Blake said. He shrugged and dropped his hands. ‘The fact is – and we have to face up to it – there is no guarantee. As I said before, everything depends on the sender. If he happens to pass into, either deliberately or inadvertently, a spatio-temporal coordinate other than the one recorded on master tape, then we don't have a cat in hell's chance of locating him. He could be as near to us in terms of displacement as the radius of a proton and we'd never know it. Nor could we ever effect retrieval: he'd be lost and gone forever.'

‘It's a bloody fine distinction,' Queghan said. They had come to pause by the perimeter fence, beyond which the encroaching darkness had taken possession.

‘And a cruel one. Wherever he found himself, supposing he actually had a physical existence, he'd be trapped for all time. Maybe in the worst of all possible worlds, who knows?'

Queghan laced his fingers into the mesh of the fence. He suddenly needed to feel the physical reality of an actual object; the planet beneath his feet seemed transitory and insubstantial.

He stared into the darkness and said, ‘That idea of Johann's. Do you suppose it might be feasible?'

‘Which idea was that?'

‘The one he mentioned at lunchtime.'

To Queghan's discomposure Blake burst out laughing. His teeth were a vivid crescent in the gloom.

‘Is it so preposterous?'.

‘The idea of transmitting tachyons, you mean?' Blake laughed again and then sobered a little. ‘I suppose not,' he said, and then, more seriously, ‘I've never given it much consideration. The problems would be tremendous. We can't even isolate tachyons, never mind transmit them. And now I come to think about it, what I said at lunchtime is really the crucial question: how do we know what to ask when we receive the answers first? It'd be like answering the questions in an examination paper before the examiner had set them or even made up his mind what to ask. I suppose, in the cyberthetic sense, there's no reason why it couldn't be made to work, but in practice—?' He shook his head doubtfully

‘The chicken and the egg,' Queghan said.

‘The egg and the egg.' Blake's face was an anonymous blur above the crisp and dazzling points of his collar. ‘Where do we start? Easier to trap fog with this wire fence.'

Queghan said quietly, as if thinking aloud, ‘But we do know that tachyons exist. We know – we think we know – they're responsible for precognitive perception.'

‘This is more your field than mine,' Milton Blake said. ‘I have no extrasensory faculties and don't pretend to have. But I think you'll agree that while we have a theoretical structure for paranormal phenomena it's the very devil of a job to impose a formal scientific code of behaviour on them. For a start, the mathematics don't make sense, they're completely up the wall; but, for some reason God alone knows, they actually work. We don't understand, we simply accept.'

They turned away from the outer darkness and strolled back to the residential quarters. The night was warm and the air dense with the heavy green smell of close-packed shrubbery. There was no moon and it was quite dark.

‘You must come and see what we're doing at the Unit,' Milton Blake said. ‘You'd find it interesting.'

‘Yes, I'm sure. Is the display operational?'

‘Has been for three months now. I've been running comparison tests using patients from the Unit – cases we have full data on, EEG records and so forth. We feed the output into the machine and come up with some pretty strange stuff.'

‘Fantasies?'

‘Fantasies, fetishes, complexes—'

Queghan reached out and steered him round an obstacle, then set him back on the path. As they approached the lighted forecourt Milton Blake said, ‘If you're selected, will you go?'

‘Yes.'

‘No qualms?'

‘A few.'

‘I suppose if you've been preparing yourself for this one opportunity you can't very well turn it down.'

‘That's it.'

‘How does Oria feel about your going?'

‘She thinks she accepts it.'

‘You mean she doesn't accept it?'

‘Intellectually yes, emotionally no.'

There were still several small groups sitting close to the anti-mosquito screens, the subdued murmur of voices very restful on the velvet night air.

‘Tell me something. I've often wondered about this.' Milton Blake pressed the palms of his hands together. ‘How much can you foresee? Is it a hit-or-miss affair, or can you predict with certainty what's going to happen?'

‘You mean, do I know for an absolute fact that I'm going to be selected. The answer is no, I don't know. It doesn't work like that. If I made an effort to find out that's the one sure way of never finding out. It has to come to me, to seek me out first.'

‘The harder you chase it the faster it outpaces you.'

‘Yes.'

Milton Blake went up the steps. ‘You must come along to the Unit, Chris. We have more sights there than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'

‘I'm sure that's true,' Queghan said, fully intending to visit the Psychic Conservation Unit, more commonly known as
PSYCON
.

*

The study was a shambles. It was as if the Director had gone out of his way to foster an image of the amiable eccentric professor pottering about with pipe and slippers amidst the
flotsam of academic chaos. Indeed, he did wear slippers and smoke a pipe, but his manner was far from bumbling and he was anything but woolly-minded.

When Queghan entered the room it was like stepping into a peaceful backwater where time ticked by with the measured serenity of a pendulum; yet Johann Karve's gentle appearance and genial disposition were deceiving only to those rash enough to accept anyone or anything at face value. He offered Quegan a cup of tea and, while waiting for the kettle to boil (another apparent ‘eccentricity'), they talked generally about the Project and the minutiae of day-to-day administration. But Queghan surmised that this was only a preamble to the main proceedings.

‘Karla should be along in a minute or two,' Karve remarked, setting out three cups and saucers. He hummed something tuneless and patted his pockets in a convincing parody of a nuclear physicist having mislaid the vital equation for the Lepton Anti-Matter Bomb.

‘You're visiting the, er, Unit soon, I hear,' he said, breaking off his tuneless drone.

‘Next week. Milton has a patient he wants me to observe who has the notion he's receiving messages from a parallel universe.'

‘Blake receiving messages?' Karve said, pausing with grey eyebrows suspended high on his forehead.

‘No,' Queghan smiled. ‘The patient.'

‘Yes, of course. Parallel universes,' Karve mused. ‘How the old SF writers used to love parallel universes.' He poured boiling water into the china teapot and said, ‘We've narrowed our potential target areas down to two.'

Queghan watched him without responding.

‘Perhaps you know them already.'

‘I'll make a guess. Would I be far out if I suggested that our old friend HD226868 is one of them?'

‘We've examined a number of single-line spectroscopic binaries and, yes, HD226868 is one of the likely candidates. In the final analysis, however, it depends which is the better suited to accommodate a
Dyson Electromagnetic Sphere
capable of containing the Temporal Flux radiation.' Karve sat down behind
the desk piled several layers deep with files, data processing cards, reels of magnetic tape and a number of thick reference works bristling with markers. There was also a cyberthetic input and a desk-mounted Indexer, tuned, Queghan noted, to alpha.

‘And the other candidate?' Queghan said.

‘Ah yes.' Karve had drifted away for a moment. ‘Yes, the other one is the companion to Theta
²
Orionis in M.42, X-ray reference
2U0525-06
I think, for what my personal opinion is worth, that this is the one we should go for: its collapsar has a mass similar to the companion of HD226868, about fourteen solar masses, but its orbital period is 21 days as opposed to 5.6 days, which gives us far greater leeway in positioning for injection. It shouldn't be— Come in,' he said in response to Karla Ritblat's knock, the authoritative sound of a person with no time to waste.

Queghan nodded companionably to Karla Ritblat as she made herself briskly comfortable, sitting perfectly straight in the chair ergonomically designed to promote a relaxed posture. Her grey hair, flecked with silver, was cut in the shape of a norman helmet, enclosing her broad, flattish face and tending to emphasize its severity. She said, ‘No sugar, thank you.'

‘I've been telling Chris about our two target areas, Karla.' The Director leaned back and sipped his tea, holding the cup in both hands as if to warm them. ‘However, that's by the way. We'll have a feasibility report within a day or so and that should decide things for us, one way or the other.'

‘We've made our preference known, I hope, Director?' Karla Ritblat said, the cup suspended between lip and saucer.

Karve nodded. He let out his breath and said, ‘Chris, the purpose of this meeting – at Karla's suggestion by the way – is to finalize the selection procedure. Karla has made the point that whoever's chosen will have to undergo at least six months' preparation in Psycho-Med, not counting the actual pre-injection medical checks, so we have to stop counting sheep and get our …' his gaze wavered momentarily from Queghan's face to Karla Ritblat's ‘… collective fingers out.'

The woman sat cold and impassive as stone.

‘I didn't know there was a race on,' Queghan said.

‘There isn't … not as such.' The Director seemed unaccountably ill at ease. He drank his tea and then spent some time setting the cup back in the saucer. ‘You know that MyTT was given full responsibility for selection, and we've had to consider every conceivable factor: age, medical history, blood type, specialist ability, family background, etc. Well,' he looked directly at Queghan, ‘the choice narrowed down to three: Brenton, Castel, yourself.'