Seeking the Mythical Future (15 page)

*

The image transmitted by Stahl had profoundly disturbed him. It contained all the elements of a genuine mythoplasm: a composite of myth, legend and psychic projection. To Stahl, the universe he had created was more real than Room Three of the Psychic Conservation Unit where his physical presence was located; subjective reality was a world of red oceans, airships and concentration camps where millions of people were held in captivity. Supposing they were to inject Stahl into Temporal
Flux – would he find himself inhabiting his private fantasy, trapped in a world of his own nightmarish imaginings? Queghan recalled a line from Karve's
The Hidden Universe:
‘The universe is nothing until we think of it in a certain way; it is an expression of how we ourselves perceive it.' What would his perceptions be, having once passed beyond the event horizon into the maelstrom of Temporal Flux? Did hell, complete with all its demons, await him there?

Oria was sitting in the garden, her body bathed golden by the rays of the sun. There was another chair near by, and Queghan noticed that it still retained the shape of a recent sitter in the contoured vinyl. (The stranger of his dreams, perhaps, having dematerialized on Queghan's arrival?)

He kissed her and said, ‘Pregnancy agrees with you.'

‘Was PSYCON worth the trip?' There were faint vertical marks of tension on her forehead, as if she had acquired a slight though permanent frown.

‘It was … interesting.'

‘Will it help the Project?'

‘Perhaps.'

‘You're being evasive,' Oria said, laying her book down. Queghan read the title upside down:
The First Year of Motherhood
.

‘No, it's really too soon to say. The equipment is in prototype. The results so far are certainly interesting, but I shall have to discuss it with Johann before making any kind of recommendation'.

He sat down, re-shaping the chair to his form, and closed his eyes; the sun glimmered redly behind his eyelids and he was reminded of the ocean.

‘What's the temperature of the fluid at the moment of transfusion?' Oria asked.

Queghan opened one eye. ‘The temperature …'

‘Of the fluid. The injectee receives a complete transfusion of fluid to preserve the molecular structure.'

‘How do you know about that?'

‘I was in Archives for three years,' Oria reminded him. ‘I read up on the Psycho-Med preparations prior to injection.'

‘Was that before or after you revised the general theory of relativity?' Queghan closed his eye again. ‘So why do you want to know the transfusion temperature?'

‘Do you think it might be similar to giving birth?'

‘There's no way I'm ever going to be able to answer that,' Queghan said, grinning into the sun. He was trying to register her but there was too much emotional static, too many impulses scurrying about like blind mice chasing their own tails. He would like to have slept for a long time, the sun held in suspension above the trees, the sun chosen as beneficent provider by a technocratic race. God had created man in His own image and man had created worlds in his own image. God the Creator of the Metagalaxy, man its shaper. How far did they have to go before the mystery revealed itself? And what would they find at the end of it – a tired old man sitting in a shabby cobwebbed room watching the endless sinking of the sun?

Oria was crying. She said, ‘I don't want to lose you.'

He said, almost with relief, ‘I thought it was the child; I thought something had happened to the child.'

‘The child is all right.' The tears fell on to her distended breasts, rolled and evaporated into thin, dried trails.

Queghan went to her, holding both her hands. ‘Nothing will be left to chance, you know how careful they are. Johann won't give the word until he's one hundred per cent certain that every system is at optimum.'

‘A hundred per cent certain of a fifty per cent probability,' Oria said. Her pale-blue eyes shimmered through the refraction of her tears. ‘You didn't have to accept, Chris. Brenton wanted to go, he'd risk anything, he's not married, it didn't matter to him.'

There should have been something he could have said, some magical phrase that would make everything all right, but the magical phrase eluded him. He said emptily, like a child making excuses, ‘You said I had no alternative.'

‘It didn't matter then, it was unreal, it wasn't you, it was some other person we were discussing. The real you would still be here: this make-believe person would be going, not you.'

‘There may be a million mythical futures but there's only one me, I'm afraid,' he said, attempting to smile.

‘Chris,' Oria said softly, ‘Chris, there's no way back. They can inject you into that place, wherever it is, but they can never bring you back. You know it, that's why you didn't tell me, you know that you'll never return … '

Queghan saw her for a split second, absolutely cold-bloodedly, as a neurochemical organism responding to electrical stimuli, as a body secreting warm salty fluid, as a mammalian receptacle for the furtherance of the species. He thought: we have come so far and still a woman's tears defeat us; defeat our science, our logic, our knowledge. What is the point of anything when a commonplace emotion can reduce us to helplessness? If we don't understand this, what do we understand? And what is the point of understanding anything?

‘Who told you? Johann was going to withhold the announcement until after the baby was born.'

‘The baby,' Oria said. ‘The fucking baby!' She raised her fists as if to strike him and hit herself in the stomach very hard. Queghan caught her wrists and held them, like brittle sparrow's bones in his large hands. She had amazing strength and he had to hold her in a tight grip, afraid that in wanting to harm the child she would kill them both.

Anger rose up suddenly within him and he said roughly, ‘Who was it? Who told you?
Who told you
?'

‘Brenton,' she said, the fight and strength gone out of her. He released her wrists. ‘Why didn't you tell me, Chris? You should have told me.'

‘I would have told you, after the baby came.' A fleck of foam had appeared at the comer of his mouth. ‘We agreed, Johann and I agreed, to wait just a few weeks. It wouldn't have made any difference, to the Project, to me, to Brenton—'

‘Let him go, Chris,' Oria said. ‘Let
him
go. He wants to go. He'd do anything.' She was pale and dry eyed, trying to do by reason what could not be done by emotion. ‘They need you here, Brenton said so. He said the Vehicle would reject you—'

‘I have to go.'

‘Only because you want to go,' she said harshly.

‘I have to.' His eyelids fluttered. He felt the world recede, and experienced the glare of white light in his brain, like the flash of a prolonged explosion going on for ever. He tried to say something, but his tongue was coiled thickly in his mouth. The foam bubbled on his lips.

‘Chris,' Oria said, ‘
Chris!
' and failed to hold him as he fell on to the grass, his blank eyeballs staring at the sky, and in the infinitesimal fraction of time before blackness came he heard her voice calling to him, loud and then soft, loud and soft, as he sank into the warm bowels of the planet.

*

She knelt on the grass, her belly-burden wedged between her thighs. It was like trying to comfort a statue. The sun had disappeared behind the trees, a few lingering rays touching the highest branches, just as the larger of the two moons was rising palely in the northern sky.”

6
Psy-Con

‘It's simply a matter of Logik,' Benson said. ‘Where's your training, old man? Approach the thing logikally and there shouldn't be any problem.' Then he had the gall to smile.

His smile, his confidence, his smugness, his height – above all, his height – infuriated Dr Mathew Black. He was even more incensed to learn that Benson had been sent as Special Envoy, appointed by King's Commission, to review the screening procedure at Psy-Con. Benson had been nothing in the sanatorium,
nothing
, a mere pip-squeak, a jackanapes, and here he was, with power and overall responsibility handed to him on a plate. While he, Black, had been saddled with a babbling madman fit only for the High Intensity Complex. He felt like murdering them both.

‘I suppose you would have disposed of the patient and filed your report by now.'

‘You've had weeks, old chap,' Benson said, raising his eyebrows yet retaining a trace of a smile. ‘The MDA were generous enough to permit an extension, but even that doesn't appear to have satisfied you.' He added as an afterthought, ‘And that's something else the Authority will have to answer for.'

There had been another purge. It made Black sick to think about it. The rules were changed, the priorities switched, the Authority restructured, yet again. Cases would be reclassified according to a new set of criteria, the medikal jargon reinterpreted and redrafted to embrace a different code of ethiks. The guards, of course, remained.

‘And I thought you were one of our best people,' Benson said condescendingly, shaking his head from side to side.

Black nearly exploded. Our best people!
Our
best people! He had to turn away to the window to hide his emotion, looking out blindly at the baked landscape and plumes of dust – red, brown, orange, yellow – swirling in the hot wind. This was the pitiless Pilbara, separated from any decent human habitation by several hundred miles of desert and raw scrubland. The roof of the hut in which they were standing was hot enough to evaporate water at a touch, had anyone been foolish enough to squander it in this way.

Benson leaned over the trestle-table and turned a page of the report, which stuck damply to his thin fingers. Everything about him was thin, from his bare spindly legs to his bare bony arms and shoulders and the stringbean of a neck with its jutting Adam's apple. His sun helmet with its King's Commission insignia reminded Black of a bucket balanced on a flagpole. He resisted the urge to laugh.

‘You don't seriously expect me to submit this do you?' Benson said, frittering through the pages. ‘This nonsense. I should have said HIC classification and got rid of the fellow. What are you trying to prove, some new-fangled theory of diagnosis that'll get your name in the medikal books?' His bulging eyes looked up from the report and compelled Black to turn and meet them.

Black said, somewhat rashly, ‘I suppose that's the new order of the day, classify everyone HIC and have done.'

‘Not at all, old chap, not at all.' Benson was unexpectedly fraternal. He was so sure of himself that he could afford to be lax about protocol, to be expansive, even. Black was enviously eating himself away. He moved his veiled eyes and looked once more through the window. The dust plumes obscured the horizon. This heat must affect the brain, it must send men mad.

‘You tried galvanology, I see,' Benson said, wiping his hands on his handkerchief.

‘Yes,' Black said without turning his head.

‘Was it a success?'

‘It's all there in the report.'

‘I asked you if—'

‘I think so. But I had to discontinue the experiment. The MDA don't believe in galvanology.'

‘Didn't believe.'

‘You mean they do now?'

‘Considering it, considering it,' Benson said slowly, turning the pages. He had adopted the mannerisms of power and authority with infuriating ease.

‘Do I take that to mean I'll be allowed to continue the experiment?'

‘Possibly,' Benson drawled. ‘Possibly.' He straightened up. ‘I conducted some experiments myself in galvanology, as you may recall. Nothing quite so elaborate, but I fancy the results were equally valid.'

A nasty suspicion had entered Black's mind. Benson wanted to take over the patient himself. He had tumbled to the importance of the work Black was engaged on and had decided to step in and take the credit for himself. They would see about that. The nerve of the man – of this long streak of nothing with as much savvy as the rasp of a dry fart.

‘I got the impression that you weren't keen on the report,' Black said, a shade too smugly for his own good.

‘Some of it I find interesting; mildly interesting.' (I'll bet, thought Black.) ‘The patient is obviously at the mercy of a chaotic imagination quite beyond his control. He invents people, events, other worlds even, willy-nilly. He even refers' – Benson turned several pages – ‘to another patient, fellow by the name of Stahl, who by some tomfoolery or other finds himself in
this
world, adrift on the ocean.'

‘The explanation is very simple. The patient was himself discovered in the ocean and he's unconsciously incorporated the experience into his ramblings. He's done the same with Psy-Con, which has become PSYCON in his imagination. It's very obvious.'

‘And the other similarities?'

‘What others?' Black said sharply.

‘Why, the names of course.' Benson tapped the page with his bony knuckles. ‘He mentions someone called Blake, a name similar to your own. There's also a fellow called Brenton, which
I take to be a reference to myself. This chap Q is living in two quite separate worlds simultaneously, one of which is imaginary.'

‘I could have told you that.'

‘Don't be stroppy,' Benson said, glancing up. ‘I needn't remind you of your position here. As Special Envoy I have complete authority over all activities in or pertaining to Psy-Con. The patient Q is under my jurisdiction. Strictly speaking, your duties are now discharged. I could have you sent back on the next airship or seconded to the High Intensity Complex.'

‘But I'm a qualified doktor attached to the Medikal Centre,' Black protested hotly. ‘I'm not here on permanent loan.'

‘You will go where I say you must go and do what I say you must do,' Benson told him crisply, his Adam's apple bobbing in his skinny throat. A drop of perspiration gathered on the tip of his nose and fell on to the page. ‘As for the patient, I suggest you continue the Gestalt Treatment under my supervision. When the report is complete we can put it forward jointly; I think that's fair enough.'