Seeking the Mythical Future (23 page)

 … Now, this had to be done quickly and with the utmost caution, without either of them being aware of what was happening. It had to appear an accident; not the slightest hint of suspicion must fall on him. In the morning he would be wakened and told the sad news, and already he had decided on a suitable expression: shock and disbelief, and perhaps a vague suggestion of sorrow as the news began to take hold. He was annoyed that it would mean going without breakfast, but a man distraught with grief for a dearly-beloved dead colleague would
hardly set to with a healthy appetite. Anyway, he'd make up for it at lunchtime.

He placed the canvas bag on the sand, and at once the bag came alivep and started to jerk and writhe. Goodness, what vicious creatures they were. And so nasty and repellent he was almost tempted to believe that someone had dreamed them up in a nightmare. The low murmur of voices went on. Black listened but couldn't make out what was being said. It was of no importance anyway: they would soon be gone from this world, leaving nothing behind but the yellow shrunken husks of their former selves. He opened the outer screen door of the hut leading to a narrow passageway with several doors opening off it. There was no guard on duty (a breach of regulations) and the passageway was dim and smoky from the flickering oil lamps suspended from the ceiling. Holding the bag away from him, he stepped inside, allowing the screen door to close softly behind, and moved stealthily forward, the bag alive and writhing in his grasp. This was the tricky bit. He went over the sequence once again, for the umpteenth time:

1. Unfasten the rope and hold the neck of the bag closed.

2. Open the door.

3. Throw the bag inside.

4. Close the door and hold it shut.

5. Wait until all sounds of struggle have ceased.

There would be cries of course, probably screams as well. But there was no one within earshot, and with the drunken racket the guards were making it didn't matter anyway. He shuddered and licked his dry lips. The pity of it was that he wouldn't be able to watch. He would have to be content with listening and using his imagination. Luckily he had plenty of that, imagination. Just as well the Authority didn't know. Teehee. He unfastened the rope, holding the neck of the bag closed (1), opened the door (2), threw the bag inside (3), closed the door and held it shut (4), and waited until sounds of struggle had ceased (5).

9
The Cup Might Smash …

“Milton Blake said, ‘I'm glad to have this opportunity of talking with you and your staff, Johann. I think it's important that we review the program and update ourselves on the current situation.'

The Director said, ‘I think you know everyone. Shall we sit down? I've arranged to have coffee sent in.' He added, ‘Though I must say I prefer something less noxious,' with a gentle sideways smile at Blake.

‘I don't see why we had to meet in here,' Karla Ritblat said, sitting primly near the window. ‘Your office, Johann, or mine would have been more suitable.'

‘I wanted Milton to see the graphic displays,' Karve said. ‘And they should make any explanation simpler and easier to comprehend.'

There were eleven people assembled in the TFC Lab: Johann Karve and his MyTT Research staff, Milton Blake and his personal assistant – a young, attractive, dark-haired woman with a shy smile – who hadn't yet been introduced. The displays were mounted on huge sheets of tinted silicate fitted to an apparatus which could be revolved to bring the appropriate display into position. From a control console the Director could animate sections of the display and use them to illustrate various concepts of Minkowskian geometry which were otherwise impossible to visualize; a cyberthetic input and printout unit was linked to the console to provide a real-time computation/induction facility.

Karve operated the shutters and the room blacked out, to be dominated by the display area with its brilliantly coloured markers, graphs and three-dimensional representations.

‘Isn't money wonderful?' Blake exclaimed, awed and envious, which provoked laughter from the MyTT people. He exchanged glances with his assistant, who raised her eyebrows in rueful agreement.

The main display showed the inertial frame of reference Theta
²
Orionis in M.42. Karve leaned forward and touched the controls, bringing up a light trace which assumed an orbit round the companion collapsar 2U0525-06. It made a very pretty picture.

Karve began: ‘By local standard time of the
sat-Con-lab
, whose orbit we have here, injection took place nine days ago, which on our time-scale is thirteen months. In that time – I'm sorry, in
their
time – they were able to maintain contact for three of those nine days, which far exceeded our expectations. Everything seemed to be going perfectly, there was no Vehicle malfunction, the cyberthetic system was doing everything we could have asked of her. The Vehicle was held in stasis on the periphery of the event horizon, all systems were checked, and then she was released from the influence of the Dyson EM Sphere. From that point onwards we had hoped to estimate the Vehicle's relative time and location by means of the Neuron Processer.' He touched the controls and another display revolved into position. ‘This is the Vehicle's track immediately prior to deep injection, and as you can see it's perfectly stable. We knew we were about to lose contact but it was hoped that our predictive capability would at least allow us to calculate the approximate spatio-temporal coordinate.'

‘We were juggling with probabilities,' Karla Riblat put in, with bleak rectitude.

‘We were indeed,' Karve agreed. ‘But the probability of locating the Vehicle at a given coordinate was better than fifty-fifty, which we all agreed were the best odds we were ever going to get.'

‘Was NELLIE on line at this point?' Milton Blake asked.

‘Ever since pre-injection. We thought that if we fed everything we had into her, every scrap of information, then she'd be better equipped to make a few intelligent guesses.'

‘And she made quite a few,' Castel said. He turned his thin,
narrow face to Blake, the reflected light of the display catching the bony protuberances of his forehead and jaw. He said, almost in a tone of apology, ‘I must admit to having been one of the doubting Thomases, Milton, as regards your box of tricks. I thought we were getting dangerously near the voodoo drums and chicken entrails approach, but I take some of it back.'

‘But not all of it,' Blake said, smiling.

‘I don't see how I can, under the circumstances.'

Blake's assistant said, ‘We never tried to hide the fact that NELLIE was prototype equipment. It was a calculated risk all along.'

‘Indeed, indeed,' Karve said. ‘And I don't think postmortem recriminations are necessary; they're certainly of no scientific value.' He touched the controls once again. We tracked the Vehicle into the third day, and then lost her. Nobody's fault, nobody to blame, it was what we expected. From this point on we had to rely on the Neuron Processer, which was linked directly to a terminal here in the TFC Lab. Data started to come through almost at once, within a matter of weeks, which on the Vehicle's time-scale would equate to minutes. It was garbled and difficult to interpret – again as we had anticipated – but the system
was
functioning and we
were
receiving a random scatter of images, some of which were very interesting, not to say intriguing. It was the very devil of a job to collate them and make an assessment of their validity, but we did our best.' He paused. ‘The responsibility for this fell to Professor Castel, who I think did a tremendous job, bearing in mind that it was our first attempt to analyse the results of post-injection feedback. We had at least a coherent if fragmentary picture of what was actually taking place inside Temporal Flux – not at all a mean achievement in my estimation.'

‘I'm flattered by your tribute, Director,' Castel said. ‘However, I think all of us realize that our individual contributions wouldn't have amounted to much if it hadn't been for the painful and harrowing experience that Chris underwent.'

There were murmurs of agreement and Karve said, ‘None of us, I'm sure, would want to minimize his particular contribution: it was indespensable and I know he realizes it.'

There was a lengthy silence which no one, it seemed, was keen to break, until the Director said, ‘Isn't that so, Chris?'

‘I believe we were all indespensable, Johann. It was never at any time a one-man project.' Queghan looked from face to face in the dim light. ‘Even the cyberthetic system must share some of the credit.'

‘Machines, machines,' Castel said lugubriously. ‘They're our blessing and our curse. They limit us and extend us.'

Blake said, ‘You speak of the Project in the past tense, Chris. I wasn't aware that it had been terminated.' He looked questioningly at the Director.

‘It isn't terminated in the strict sense of the word, and won't be,' Karve said. ‘We'll maintain the link with the Control lab and record anything that moves, so the Project is on-going in that sense. But as for keeping Chris in permanent mythic projection in Psycho-Med I don't believe that's necessary any more, besides which it's not a pleasant experience. To artificially stimulate and prolong an epileptic fit could seriously affect long-term mental stability, and that's one machine we can't replace, not at any price.'

‘In terms of injection – on his time-scale – he hasn't been there very long,' Milton Blake said. ‘Nine days, I think you said.'

Karve was prepared to admit that it could, conceivably, be even less than that. ‘It might be hours, minutes, maybe a few seconds. We honestly don't know. Time dilation in that region of spacetime is impossible to calculate.'

‘But we're keeping all channels open?'

Karve nodded. ‘Absolutely. If Martin or the Vehicle are releasing data of any description we'll process through NELLIE, relay down here to the TFC Lab and plug Chris into the terminal point. Anything he comes up with on the cyberthetic printout will be interpreted by Professor Castel. After thirteen months it's become standard procedure.'

Quegan looked at him quickly, thinking that it was a phrase he hadn't heard the Director use before; but after all, it was an ordinary phrase that anyone might use. A lot of people did use it.

Milton Blake's young assistant said, ‘Was contact with Brenton
lost suddenly, at a precise world-point, or did it tail off … sort of fade away?'

‘As you'll know from the extracts—' He looked from the girl to Milton Blake.

‘I'm sorry,' Milton Blake apologized. His teeth flashed brilliantly against the mass-black of his skin, itself lost in the dimness of the room. ‘Dr Hallam, my personal assistant. Zandra Hallam.'

‘You'll have noted from the extracts, Dr Hallam, that right from the beginning contact was erratic and incomplete. We picked up a lot of stuff we couldn't interpret or fit into the overall pattern and even now we don't know how much of the information is valid; we can only trust that Martin – Professor Brenton – stayed reasonably close to the projection as processed.'

‘Are you saying that contact was lost abruptly or over a period?'

‘I'm saying that I can't give you a definite yes or no either way.' Queghan smiled at her. ‘Is it personal interest, or is it important that you know?'

Zandra Hallam frowned and caught Milton Blake's eye. It seemed as if a signal had passed between them: a question from her which he had acknowledged and confirmed. She said, ‘How important or significant this is I'm not sure. The patient died a few days ago. He reacted violently as though someone had injected a virulent poison into him.'

‘And you assumed that loss of contact with Brenton coincided with the death of your patient,' Castel said, his large protruding eyes swivelling from Blake to his assistant.

‘Not quite that,' Zandra Hallam said. ‘But if we were to look for meaningful coincidences, then that would seem to be a prime candidate. Stahl dying and loss of contact with the injectee might be causally connected.'

‘I thought causality was in rather poor shape these days,' Queghan said. ‘You might just as well point to an acausal connection for all the difference it makes.'

The Director spoke up. We shouldn't dismiss this without at least considering it. I don't think any of us can give satisfactory
answers to the questions raised by post-injection; the more information we have, from whatever source, the more likely we are to make intelligent predictions as opposed to wild guesses.'

‘I'd go alone with that,' Castel said. It occurred to Queghan that there were times when Castel was more concerned with having his voice heard than in making a positive contribution. Just as now – glancing round to make sure that people were paying attention, his hollowed face alert and serious, and below it the stringy neck with the prominent thyroid cartilage. His wispy, thinning hair was caught in the light like a solar flare round the dome-like skull. He said, ‘As the only archivist present I feel I've got to be a little more pragmatic in my approach. And in what I'm prepared to accept,' he added, in mock-apology. ‘Despite the success we've had with our mythic projection technique and the Neuron Processor, I find that I'm left with a fair amount of faith but very little proof. We think we know what happened to Brenton inside Temporal Flux: we
think
we know, but we have no direct evidence. As someone has already said, the feedback to date has been incomplete and difficult to interpret. But what if – ' he looked at Queghan and raised his sparse eyebrows ‘– I'm sorry, Chris – what if none of it, not a scrap, is accurate? What if it's merely a random series of neurological impulses that have been scrambled cyberthetically, and Chris has been able to present them in some sort of rational, coherent order? In other words—'