Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (6 page)

 
          
“Who
can they be?” whispers Salman to himself, close by. “The enemies of God’s
World? Those we came to fight?” More than a little seduced too, he sounds, by
the thought of holy war.

 
          
“Double
fireball, twice!” Ritchie calls out exuberantly. He sounds as though he is
ordering some jet jockey’s cocktail from an invisible bartender. “Uh, radar
blips have gone funny, Sir. I’m uncapping the scopes for a visual sighting.”

 
          
There
they are again, swimming on two screens. Have we wrecked them? No, the alien
vessels are
changing shape.
The cone
is becoming box-like, the balloons are squeezing into tight sausages. The ovoid
is altering too . . . It’s all wrong.

 
          
“Maybe
we’re just seeing them from a different angle,” suggests Natalya. “How can we
see anything in High Space at all? If those ships, then why not stars?”

           
“Because they’re using High Space
drives too,” says Captain K. “Presumably this creates a resonance—a bridge
between us. Hence their missiles stay in High Space, and ours too. But no one
communicates by firing missiles. Destroy those two ships,
j
Mr Jacobik.”

           
“Four gone, five gone.” Jacobik
slaps our nuclear darts on their way, while Ritchie caps the scopes.
Acceleration surges again, irregularly. We waver, we cling on.

 
          
“Renormalise
our speed afterwards, Colonel Trimble. We don’t know what these velocity
changes in High Space may translate into in the normal universe. That may be
their plan. The fireworks could be incidental.”

 
          
“Shit,
they’ve fired a salvo! ”

 
          
Jacobik’s
thin smile slips as he stares at his own instruments, counting. “Seven, eight,
nine.”

 
          
“Confirm.
Spreading out. Two targeting on our missiles. Others on different vectors.”

 
          
“Slow
lasers,” broods Heinz, disenchanted now. “And nuclear warheads doing about as
much harm as hand grenades . . . How punily our weapons perform.”

           
“Hence my remark about fireworks,
Anders. Possibly the main effect is sucked down into normal space. I hope we’re
not disrupting anything.”

 
          
“You’re
glad!” accuses Jacobik, driving Heinz away from him with a glare of
hatred—which even encompasses Captain K. “You really don’t want us to blow them
out of the sky. You’re dooming us! ”

 
          
“How
could I be?” Heinz recoils, looking puzzled.

 
          
“Intercept
those missiles, Mr Jacobik. Use the minimum salvo possible.”

 
          
“Minimum
computes as seven. That’s all we have left!”

 
          
“Double
fireball! And again. That’s our attack missiles taken out. Seven bandit
missiles oncoming. Those slow X-rays can’t have cooked their circuits.”

 
          
“Use
all seven, Mr Jacobik. And afterwards, pray.”

 
          
Jacobik
obeys, then stares listlessly at his control board, for his nest is eggless
now.

 
          
As
the tiny double-suns bloom invisibly in High Space, with Ritchie counting off
the echoes of the fireballs, something writhes and surges and explodes within.
Something discharges in my belly, my abdomen, my sex. There’s absurd
relief.
A slackening of tension.

 
          
“Did
you feel it, Amy?” gasps Peter. To some degree or other we all must have.
Jacobik’s face is drained of blood.

 
          
“A
dream,” mutters Rene. “What next?”

 
          
As
if in answer, Ritchie uncaps the scopes. Four scimitars of red light are
cutting in towards us. They’re too close. There’s no time left to gun the
engines.

 
          
“We’re
hit,” cries Natalya; and her face reveals astonishment. “No we aren’t. Yes we
are. There’s damage, but it’s the old damage. The same sites that were lasered
before. I don’t understand.”

 
          
“I
do,” says Heinz. “We have lasered ourselves. We already did it when the alarm
rang, when we were all in mess room. Causality is different here. Cause and
effect break down outside.
You
fired
our lasers, Jacobik, because your blood’s roused and you’re fighting mad. We were
all getting quite worked up. The beams have looped round us in High Space, and
through time too. There are two impact times, balancing each other: after you
fired, and before you fired. The effect is the cause of the effect— but the
real cause is
you
, my friend. Or,” he
shudders, “maybe all of us, with you as the catalyst. We’ve just shot
ourselves. Which means—”

 
          
“Look
at the alien ships! ” Peter catches Rent’s arm.

 
          
On
the scopescreens they’re growing larger now, closing in on us from two
different quadrants. Still they change shape. The cone is now a prism, studded
with four cubes. And the ovoid is a cube, with hemispheres upon it. Ritchie
backs off the magnification, and now they aren’t closing on us at all, but on
each other.

 
          
“They
won’t fire again,” cries Peter. “I know they won’t. Don’t we all?”

 
          
Rene
slaps his belly and gufffaws.
“Ten suis
certain ”

 
          
“He’s
right! ” shouts Heinz. “They’re
us
,
that’s what. They’re projections—transformations of
Pilgrim
. Their shape’s the same as ours: five linked units each.
Topologically it doesn’t matter whether those are spheres or cubes or pussy
cats. It’s a zone of abstract geometry out there.”

 
          
So
the two strange ships converge. So they collide, and pass into each other,
becoming one. That one is the mirror image of
Pilgrim.
Rapidly the echo of
Pilgrim
out there shrinks to a vanishing point in the grain of High Space. We’re quite
alone again.

 
          
“So
what were we firing our missiles at?” asks Captain K wearily.

 
          
“At
their
doppelgangers.
Themselves,
before they were fired. They exploded in proximity to themselves. I hope we
haven’t lost much headway because of this.” Turning, Heinz marches magnetically
across the deck to where the control peak of the alien drive pokes up from
below ...

 
          
The high space
drive was an iridescent
crystalline pyramid some four metres high. It seemed alive, but in an unknown
mineral manner. It seemed that it might have grown up there like a crystal,
transmuting the black gravel of the Gobi to build its substance. And it was an
object of thought projected from elsewhere, one which formed a sufficiently
complex system of
cognita
to endure,
apparently permanently.

 
          
Russian
and Chinese planes discovered the pyramid sitting on a stony tract of wasteland
north-west of Gashiun Nor, where Mongolia and Chinese Inner Mongolia
ambiguously meet. Small in itself, it registered a considerably larger blip on
groundsearching radars, as though a great ellipsoid zeppelin invisibly
surrounded it.

 
          
Set
against one face of the pyramid, up high, was a flat translucent rhombus.
Within this plate a pattern of sparkling dots —a star map, perhaps even a coded
flight plan—indicated 82 Eridani as the target sun. Since the plate was
immovable it merely remained very likely that thousands of alternative courses
—thousands of flight plan templates—could be set; or even that this same
rhombus could be modified internally to map out other possible flights. (Such
as a return to Earth? We do not know that till we re-activate the pyramid, out
by 82 Eridani. The knowledge did not present itself. We do not know.)

 
          
On
a second face, high up, was inset the probability meter, as it came to be
known: a triangular orange crystal with a thin green line across the bottom
calibration. One sensed that it was so. One sensed much about its workings from
being close to it— except
how
it
worked.

 
          
On
the third face was a milky crystal enclosing a tiny pyramid within an ellipse
of light. When this crystal was touched, a series of design alternatives
appeared one after another within the confines of the ellipsoid: possible
starship hulls, as well as some that were frankly not very possible. The effect
was three-dimensional. Every tenth hull became too large for the ellipsoid, and
broke up in fire. Thus were the size constraints laid down.

 
          
The
fourth face bore a plate, black as night, with a tiny white pyramid perched on
a green ball afloat within. The pyramid fell free of the ‘planet’, and only
when the two were separated by some distance did the pyramid suddenly englobe
in its ellipsoid of light. Below, was the activator itself: one simple switch.
Again, one knew what it was; the knowledge insinuated itself . . .

 
          
Below
again, the ‘psychometer’: a blue panel with a stylized stick figure within—and
at the edge of vision hints of other possible entities, squat, rotund,
four-legged ... On either side of the psychometer were shallow recesses with
small knobs surely intended to be grasped.

 
          
The
first scientific teams found themselves learning by a welling up of
understanding (so much, and no more) out there in the Gobi in a no-man’s-land,
while soldiers watched each other and helicopters circled, and the Chinese and
Soviet embassies argued (and American satellites resolved in detail what was
happening on the ground). Finally the Chinese government insisted on an
international expedition. America had the technological edge for producing the
starship itself; China’s friends of the Iranian Islamic Peoples Republic
offered heavy financial backing —in return, it was understood, an Iranian
scientist should accompany the expedition, a
Moslem
scientist; while China’s Common Market friends, who had
spurred the scientific leap forward of the Eighties before the freeze of the
Nineties, would contribute too. Russia suddenly endorsed an international
scheme, to minimize the Chinese presence on it. . .

 
          
“The
green line’s bobbing up and down.”

 
          
“Still
riding the shockwaves ...”

 
          
Snakes
and ladders: our journey takes us across a snakes and ladders board. Now that
we’ve met a snake, we might slide all the way down again. And the snake is
ourselves . . . We could oscillate here forever. Or we might suddenly arrive.

 
          
“Something
reached out,” whispers Salman, “just as it reached out to Earth. It reached out
to disarm us.”

 
          
Jacobik
slumps across his console,
weeping.
Weeping bitterly. I didn’t know that he had tear ducts in his eyes.

 
          
“It’s
stabilising at a higher level! It’s holding. Oh, we had to unload all our fear
and hatred. We had to jettison them overboard, explode them.” Heinz beams at
Captain K.

 
          
Who
shrugs. “We’re all drugged by irreality, as Natalya says. We hallucinate, we
disarm the ship—while the physical constants play dice outside.” He moves to
Jacobik’s side to lay a fatherly hand on the Czech’s shoulder while our
ex-warrior sobs childishly, impotently, all his stings drawn. “Do you know,
Comrade, where I come from they have a saying that magpies in a crowd have more
strength than tigers in single file? We aren’t tigers any more. Let us flock
together, then! ”

 
          
“Magpies
are thieves,” sniffs Wu. “What are we really but a flock of thieves—borrowers
of alien tools we never made? Nowadays one does not pray, of course. Not yet!
One
psychs
the machine, as the jargon
goes. The next step will be prayer, though. And on Earth too, as it is in
Heaven? As Mencius truly said, ‘Heaven does not speak! ’ ”

 
          
Our
Captain gently reprimands her. “One can only pick one’s way through that irreal
flux out there by an act of thought and imagination, not just with brute
machinery.”

 
          
“Alas,
the mysticism at the heart of the Russian soul.” Wu stands there with hand
raised, a Chinese Cassandra—of revolutionary Reason. She’s too late; the world
has already altered. The universe is other than we thought. So she preaches,
Cassandra-like, to deaf ears ... Or is she, rather, that figure poised behind
the Emperor’s throne, whose duty it was always to whisper in his ear, ‘Remember
you are only human’? She would certainly omit the qualifier! To be human is
enough. And now it’s too late for that: the superhuman is upon us from the star
82 Eridani...

 
          
Yet,
blinkered martinet though she is—political appointee, too: historiographer
royal!—there’s something about her, which Ritchie responds to more deeply than
I. But which I do sense. She wears a mask, a very perfect mask, yet it isn’t
her real face. Even amidst the forced rapports of High Space I cannot see what
that
is. It’s as though she has
hypnotised herself, to forget herself—a typically Chinese political manoeuvre,
perhaps ... Is that ‘real’ face of hers identical with the political mask by
now? Not quite. There’s a faint, yet growing, hint of irony or even sarcasm in
her preachings, aimed not merely at us benighted devils but at those preachings
themselves, as though she is giving us a covert warning about them, deliberately
presenting herself as the epitome of what she attacks: which is blind faith in
control of people’s minds. She preaches, not just for our apparent benefit, to
criticise us (lest we forget), but also to brace her silent, emotionless
comrade Li into an even more implausible perfection. But surely Li is simply a
cool-thinking scientist—a lovely neuter who thinks only of biochemistry
(assisted by the thoughts of Mao and Stalin), whereas Wu is the demagogue.
Somehow, by making herself such a mouthpiece, and such a strident one, Wu
suggests that really it’s the other way about ... I don’t understand her. But
there’s something to respect.