Seeking the Mythical Future (13 page)

Queghan said incredulously, ‘Castel?' He looked from one to the other. ‘I never knew that.'

Karla Ritblat spoke up. ‘If I may say so, Professor Castel is an extremely suitable candidate. Extremely suitable. His IQ and reliability ratings were exceptional.'

‘I wouldn't dispute that. It just never occurred to me …'

‘The point is,' Karve went on, ‘that all three of you were screened and each had qualities the other two lacked. Ideally we could have done with the three of you rolled into one, the Ideal Composite Candidate, so to speak.'

Queghan felt strange. He had experienced a distinct and by no means comforting presentiment: he wasn't going to be selected. The instinct was as strong as he had ever known it, an absolute certain conviction … and yet, how could this be? His world-line had been fixed, nothing could change it; unless …

The Director was speaking again, seeming to confirm Queghan's own worst fears. ‘And there's also the factor, not to be lightly considered, of not only who is best suited to go but who we can afford to
let
go. We need a mythographer to interpret the inflow of data through the spatio-temporal interface. We also need a cyberthetics specialist as a backup for the Vehicle herself.'

‘But you don't desperately need an archivist,' Queghan said.

‘No, that's true,' Karla Riblat said primly. She was looking not at him but at Karve, and with what seemed to be a peculiar expression; Queghan couldn't make it out until he realized she was smiling. He couldn't recall ever having seen such a smile on her face before.

He said: ‘What you're trying to tell me is—'

‘What we're trying to tell you,' Karve said, ‘is that your intuition could be your downfall, Chris.' He, too, was smiling. Queghan was baffled, bewildered, totally lost. ‘The decision has been made. Quite frankly, I would have preferred you to remain here with us, working in the TFC Lab, but Karla has the final say in the matter.'

Karla Ritblat said, ‘This is off the record, of course, but it was only fair to give you advance notice. We'd like – we would appreciate – your decision within seventy-two hours.'

‘Yes,' Queghan said. He was at a loss to say anything else.

‘Your wife is expecting a child, I believe?'

‘Yes,' Queghan said.

Karve said, ‘There's no reason why the official announcement couldn't be held over until after the baby is born. If you think that might help.'

‘It would help. Thank you. I thought …'

‘Yes?' Karve made a prism of his hands and looked over it with that keen, shaggy-browed gaze that gave the lie to his pretence of a bumbling professor.

‘I was under the impression that the selection date was a couple of weeks away. I know that Brenton is very keen to be chosen. Does he know of the decision?'

‘That, Chris, is the reason for this meeting today. We know how Martin feels, which is why we need your decision. If you should decline, then Martin is the second choice; but he need never know that. It would be bad psychologically. Karla suggested we talk to you first, with no obligation on your part, and if you say no we can make the announcement as planned.'

‘And Brenton would be the one.'

‘Yes.'

‘He thinks the Vehicle won't be compatible with anyone else.'

‘We're aware of that,' Karla Ritblat said. ‘It will be taken care of during Psycho-Med preparation. It's a matter of programming, that's all, nothing we can't overcome. Within three months it'll seem as though you're married to the Vehicle.'

‘I hope Brenton won't feel cuckolded,' Queghan said.

*

Milton Blake was glad to see Queghan and showed him round the Unit, a square two-storey building with clinical white walls, and rotating pyramids of blue-tinted glass on the roof which caught and reflected triangles of light; from a distance the building appeared to be signalling in broken morse code. Against the hard glare of the white wall the name
PSYCON
stood in black-lettered relief and, beneath it, in smaller script: Faculty of MetaPsychical Research.

‘Like everyone else we're fighting for more money,' Blake said, stepping aside to let Queghan through the door into the transmission area. ‘We've put together a prototype but, as you'll see, it's held together by chewing gum and sealing wax. The 3D display is actually something we've borrowed from the astro-technology people.'

‘What about the neuron processing equipment?'

‘Cyberthetic,' Blake said, stepping over a coil of multicoloured cables as thick as a man's thigh which snaked across the vinyl floor. He edged round a bank of instrumentation, its open guts a maze of solid-state circuitry. ‘We have a permanent on-line link-up which handles the processing and gives us direct feedback. Then we do our bit of jiggery-pokery and up it comes on the display, large as life and twice as ugly.'

‘Do you have a name for the system?'

Milton Blake smiled in the easy unaffected way only people confident of their attractive appearance can. Queghan felt pale, tall and ghostly beside him. ‘We do have several names for it, most of them four-letter ones. Usually it's referred to as
NELLIE
by the staff, but it's registered in the catalogue as a Neuron Processing & Transfer/Three-Dimensional Display Interface.'

‘Wow,' Queghan said.

‘Try making an acronym out of that.'

‘I won't even attempt it,' Queghan said, looking round the transmission area. It wasn't very large, every cubic metre utilized for some purpose or other, even the ceiling, from which hung tangled skeins of wiring bound together with tape. It looked a mess – though prototype hardware, as Queghan knew only too well, just growed and growed with a seemingly haphazard
accumulation of electro-mechanical junk. ‘I don't see the display,' he said.

‘Up there,' Blake pointed to an angled observation plate high in one corner. ‘We watch the display in the box, a separate viewing room, and keep an eye on the patient at the same time. It wouldn't do if he woke up and saw his own nightmares made flesh.'

Queghan was surprised. ‘Is that possible? I assumed he'd be heavily sedated during transmission.'

‘Sedated yes, but not heavily. If we put him too far under we get a blank screen; it kills everything but the snores.'

He took Queghan along to the Psychiatric Wing where four patients had private rooms and their own medical team. They were well cared for and had agreed voluntarily to take part in the neuron processing experiment.

Blake explained: ‘They're all psychiatric cases, ranging from mild neurosis to manic-depressive paranoia. The case in Room Three is the one I'd like you to observe; he claims to be in contact with a parallel universe – in fact during transmission he believes himself to be
in
a parallel universe. It's absolutely real to him.'

‘And when he's conscious?' Queghan asked.

‘As far as we can make out his few waking moments are a sort of dreamworld. He talks to the staff as though they're part of this other place; he's got his own private alternative universe.'

‘So we're the dream, the other place is the reality.'

‘That's it.'

‘He might just have a point.'

Milton Blake laughed. ‘You're here to observe, but I'm sure we could find a bed for you.' He gave instructions that the patient in Room Three (a hollow-eyed, emaciated fellow called Stahl) should be prepared, then took Queghan along to the viewing room, overlooking the transmission area. Through the tangle of wires and other paraphernalia they saw the patient being wheeled in and positioned like a white oblong chess piece amid the clutter of equipment.

‘We put him under an hour ago, ready for transmission. We can regulate his dream cycle through to Stage IV; then we hold
him there, and when we're ready an implant triggers the brain chemical acetylcholine, and then we wait for the rhythm peaks to reach optimum. Which doesn't take long,' he added, reaching forward to adjust the controls on the three-dimensional display.

Queghan said, ‘From which viewpoint do we observe the patient's fantasies – through his own eyes and perceptions, or objectively, as an onlooker?'

‘Both,' Blake said. His hands were expressive as he explained: ‘Sometimes we observe from the patient's viewpoint, and at others we see the patient himself, inside his dream, as it were. Think of your own dreams as a
neurological landscape
. Most of the time you're aware of being an entity, an individual person looking out at what's happening, seeing the dream subjectively. At other times it's as though you're watching the scene from no particular place, almost like a disembodied presence, and you can watch yourself – knowing it's you – reacting to the dream.'

Queghan wanted to know if the dream always followed a logical sequence, as a story in a movie.

‘Stahl usually begins with the same scene, as though he's tuning in by using the same image, and it follows on from there. We get interference, of course, fragmentary bits and pieces which don't fit in anywhere, but there is a logic to it, though sometimes it's pretty weird. Anyway, you'll see for yourself.'

Somebody down below spoke through the talkback: a woman's voice. ‘Professor Blake, the patient is showing REM activity. Shall we boost the signal?'

‘One moment, Zandra,' Blake said, fiddling with the controls. The display remained blank, a muddy ochre. ‘What have we on the cyberthetic input readout?'

‘It's on-line, Professor. You should be getting something.'

‘REM,' Queghan said. ‘Rapid Eye Movement?'

Blake nodded, still intent on the controls, and said, ‘Take it up slowly; don't overload the circuit or he'll have a nightmare,' and then, his voice rising, ‘Yes, we're getting something.' He glanced through the observation plate to the patient below, and even from this distance it was possible to see the flutter of the eyelids indicating a dreaming state. The display had cleared, a
vista appearing through mist, the muddy ochre replaced by a brilliant sparkling red laced here and there with streaks of purple.

‘Ah,' Blake said with evident satisfaction, as a conjurer performing his best trick, ‘there we have it: the red ocean.'

‘A red ocean?' Queghan said after a pause.

Blake leaned back after sharpening the focus, not moving his eyes from the display. ‘This is Stahl's tuning-in point. He might continue from here or jump to a later incident.'

‘He's projected this scene before?'

‘It's never quite the same. There are always minor discrepancies, things left out or new things added, details changed, and so on. Maybe it's caused by a neurochemical imbalance at the time of transmission, we really don't know.' He was like someone settling down to watch his favourite video program.

‘I suppose we don't have sound,' Queghan said, not entirely serious, but Blake took the question at face value.

‘We're working on that. Maybe on our second generation module; but sound has problems, as you'll know if you think about your own dreams for a moment. They're primarily a visual medium.'

Queghan wanted to ensure there was no possibility of error, no margin for misunderstanding: ‘What we're seeing on the display are the patient's neurological impulses which have been processed cyberthetically and transferred into visual wavelengths.'

‘On the button,' Milton Blake said, intent on the screen.

Queghan's first impression was that the image was remarkably lifelike. The red ocean rippled beneath a huge yellow sun, the waves peaked with purple foam dashed against something below the line of vision and exploded in a translucent rainbow – a rainbow in which all the colours were shifted towards the red. It seemed that the patient (this was Queghan's thought) had projected himself into a world with an exceptionally powerful gravitational field; either that or the planet was moving at a velocity approaching that of lightspeed. Nothing else, to his knowledge, could account for the red shift.

The eye-view swept the horizon as if seeking a point of reference,
found none, and came to rest on a pair of feet encased in a black shiny ribular substance resembling seared thermoplastic.

‘What is he floating on?'

‘Some kind of metal dish. The last time he transmitted this sequence it went on for five hours.'

As he spoke the scene shivered and they caught a confused glimpse of the man himself, gaunt to the point of pale death, his eyes sunk deep in their sockets: it was, and yet strangely wasn't, the patient lying below in the transmission area. It was the patient as seen through a distorting mirror, the features twisted out of shape and the prominences showing through like bleached bone.

Again the image trembled: the yellow sun against a backdrop of deepest azure filled the frame and vibrated like a pulsing eye so that Queghan could almost feel the heat crinkling his flesh and evaporating the moisture in the pores of his scalp. It was too fierce, too real; he was intimidated by the realness of it.

Blake said: ‘We should see the ship any minute now. The ocean, the seizure, the ship, that's the usual pattern …' but for Queghan this was, and he recognized it as such, a mythic experience. Blake saw it as an interesting experiment, but Queghan's gift of instinctive apprehension awoke in him a mystical feelings, whereby the leys of the universe had been revealed – a finite, irreducible grain of truth laid bare. He began to lose track of himself as a kind of floating airiness overcame his senses. It was as though the range and breadth of his perceptions had increased by a factor of ten – a flash of light in the brain – and the sense of life, the consciousness of self, expanded within him so that all his vital forces were working at their highest tension. The past and future ages of man became a comprehensible whole: there was a grand design which he was on the edge of perceiving, and he knew beyond doubt that everything had meaning – from the world-within-world of sub-microscopic processes to the ultra-macroscopic vastness of galaxies moving on their predestined paths through the universe. There was cosmic harmony, and everything, animate and inanimate, was a vital and necessary part.