Watson, Ian - SSC (19 page)

 
          
“Well,
we've come back. We've settled four other worlds successfully—" He talked
a little while, a little floridly and formally, trying to make theirs seem a
dignified defeat, I suppose. Greenberg and the others only stared at us, as
though from the other side of aquarium glass. When they finally responded, it
was shiftily, awkwardly, irrelevantly; impatiently, as though there was
something we really needed to know, and dismissively, as though they cared not
a hoot. More “Fairies" flickered in the fields. For the first time I
caught a proper glimpse of one, and was surprised to see that the diaphanous
insect-being—and others, and others!—seemed to be actively tending the crops,
here and there, in a sort of erratic, fanciful Brownian-movement way. The
creatures were almost perfectly camouflaged by their neartransparency,
presenting bodies as a kind of thin, vibrating grid over the scenery, which one
tended not to notice head on, only picking up their movements laterally.

 
          
“But haven’t you any children?”
Marinetti was repeating for
the third or fourth time. Greenberg gestured at the fields.

 
          
“Children?”
he smirked. “Children have to be taught their lessons.”

 
          
“Do
you mean they’re in school? Where are they, man? Why are you all living here out
among the natives?”

 
          
“Taught,
for instance,” proclaimed Greenberg, “that the sun draws light into itself; or
that a pebble draws ripples to itself from across a pond.
Taught to see such things.”

 
          
They
hadn’t merely gone
infertile,
they had gone crazy—with
grief at the absence of children . . . ?

 
          
Marinetti
let our small party be led—hand in hand with the colonists, as though otherwise
we might stumble or walk into walls!—down that poky alley between the
clipped-together modules with their mud and wattle additions—which I $ I
suddenly fancied were not for the human beings i at all, but represented their
idea of what Fairy folk s might like to roost in: a lure for Fairies, architec-
il tural equivalent of a dish of milk set down to id gratify a household imp!

 
          
They
had deliberately come into their midst.

 
          
None
of the colonists bothered carrying any weapons. Had they taken the evanescent
Fairies for the only “Children” they could ever have?

 
          
We
arrived where the outer “suburb” block made an effort to climb over the inner
ring; from this point we had to walk over the roofs of the inner modules for a
little way till a wooden ramp took us back down to ground level, along another
alley debouching into a small “park” at the center of town, with a dirty
village pond. A few more souls joined the little crowd escorting us: all in
their early or late seventies. Hardly a dangerous or inclement world, I
reflected. Just, that they had failed to breed. Just, that they had gone,
collectively and pathetically, silly. Even the younger people, the very few in
their forties, were just as “senile”: rambling, forgetful, assertive, fussy—
their minds motheaten tape-loops. Quite a few other people didn’t even bother
approaching us, though they must have known who we were. They just went about
their own business, oblivious to us.
Incredible.

 
          
A
bowl of pebbles stood beside the filthy pond. With a practised “ritual” gesture
Greenberg picked out a pebble and tossed it into the pond. Plop. The ripples
spread out, rebounding from the edge. Greenberg stood for a while, admiring the
patterns,
then
urgently he rushed us inside a module
with the faded stencil legend, ADMINISTRATION, still on it. Just at the moment
of going in, I glanced at the roof, attracted by a faint flurry of light. As
though called by the “plop” of water, one of the Fairy folk had arrived,
overhead, racing—flying?—over the rooftops. It flickered briefly then was gone
again.

 
          
Inside an empty room, on an otherwise bare table, stood a tumbler
of clean water, with a black pebble floating incongruously just under the surface.

 
          
The
pebble dissolved. It began diffusing through the water, in coils and clouds
of.
. . no, it hadn't been a pebble, but a large blob of
ink—a blob of ink which began to mix with the water but which certainly had not
been mixing
till
we walked in! There
had been no one else in the room before us. No other doors led from the room;
the window and skylight were bolted shut.

 
          
Marinetti
stared at the tumbler, perplexed. Greenberg picked it up, shook it from side to
side, emphasizing the inevitable mixing of ink and water, then set it down
heavily.

 
          
“Did
you see that?” he leered.

 
          
A
blob of ink had “unmixed” back into the same blob it had once been—by chance,
at random, the moment we walked in? Then started to mix again? Out of all the
billions of molecules of ink, out of all the billions of molecules of water,
out of all the positions they could be in, they had suddenly reverted to their
original unmixed state? But it would take thousands of billions of years for
such a thing to happen by chance, if indeed it could be encompassed within the
lifespan of the universe. That we should walk in upon it—and Greenberg react
as though he expected it? Didn’t the Second Law of Thermodynamics apply here?
Were there supposed to be different natural laws for different worlds?

           
“Oh, no” I protested quickly.
“Somebody prepared that just before we got here! Or
something
did,” I added, remembering the flicker of light on the
roof.

 
          
“We
thought of that explanation,” remarked Greenberg.

 
          
“One of those Fairy creatures!
Hypnosis.
Or psychokinesis.
Some mental force you don’t know
about—”

 
          
“They
help with the crops. They have a beneficial influence. We love them; they may
as well be our own children—” He smiled benignly.

 
          
“But
they’re sabotaging the colony. They must be.”

 
          
“And
yet, the truth is we are
their
children. . . .” Then—as though the sight of the inky water discharged some
kind of static from Greenberg’s brain (murk into murk, as it were) the man
became lucid and began to talk coherently at last, approximately on our
wavelength; a mental cripple, briefly peering through the bars of his disorder
into the real world once again, struggling to communicate his disorder. “It’s
their sense of time . . . Odd to us.
Real for this world.
The appropriate
Umwelt.
The right perceived environment.
The successful evolutionary
one.
The sun draws light into it, the pebble draws ripples to it: that’s
the way
we
see it, I don’t say that’s
how it is.
Though we’re learning.
Such a strain and a
nuisance, having to talk to you like this, explaining. We’ve adapted well,
considering. We’re used to living here. It wasn’t unpleasant, once we got right
amongst them. It was so disturbing and tor- meriting, before that—until we got
here and adjusted. Two or three years, lost out there by the sea. It took
another two or three years trekking, to find the right spot—the place of power.
But we’re catching on now—”

 
          
“You
aren’t
adapting,
man! You’re dying
out.’’ Snatching up the tumbler of inky water angrily, I rushed out of doors
and jerked the contents violently into the pond. I heard Greenberg’s laughter
behind me, from the doorway. He came out and removed the empty tumbler from my
hand, bent down and refilled it with murky water, which he took indoors and set
on the table again.
A rite, a rite of murk and water.
The impossible separation, the reversal of the flow of time.
Automatically, I glanced at the roof. There was no sign of any Fairy there now.
I felt annoyed at myself for looking; then enraged
that
creatures
so insubstantial, so evanescent, had apparently caused so
much harm. They weren’t fairies, they were devils. But how had they done it?
Thank God that
Cambria
,
Hekla
,
Livingstone and Zoe had been such raw, dormant worlds, after all, with no
mischievous higher life!

 
          
“Those
creatures are obviously responsible,’’ nodded Marinetti. “But what are they? I
can hardly see the damned things.’’

 
          
“After
a few years, you cotton on,” confided Greenberg. “They’re a superior
adaptation, no doubt about it. We’d have broken down but for their guidance . .
. Signs, such as the de-inking of water.”

 
          
“In what way superior?”

 
          
“I
mean more widespread than us—”

           
“Since you haven’t bred yourselves,
nor bred your animals, but only shrunk to this pitiful muskox-at-bay circle in
the middle of
nowhere, that
must be the case!”

 
          
“Not
widespread in that sense.” Greenberg struggled to express himself. “Not in your
sense. I guess it’s hard to remember that you yourselves can’t see how they’ve
spread out around you, the way we can now.”

 
          
Greenberg
braced himself; from now on he talked in a stiffly lucid way, with a huge,
resentful effort, like someone having to speak in a foreign language they
despised.

 
          
“They’re
not widespread in the sense of numbers. They’re spread out in time, do you see
. . .
In time.
No, you can’t see,
that’s the whole trouble. Not till you learn the trick. I guess that’s why they
have those faceted eyes, so they can perceive the different present moments . .
. different quanta of the present. Listen, Mister Starship Commander with your
clever Einsteinian time dilation, I tell you they can perceive duration, the
way you perceive extension in space. Imagine yourself always looking at the
world through a narrow tube. Things will seem to be appearing and disappearing
all the time, while you look around, right? But actually the world stays linked
up and constant, because we perceive extension. A frog doesn’t see the world
our way, though. It just sees a few patterns and movements. If a thing keeps
still, it’s just not there. Bits of the real world just aren’t there at all!
We’re better than frogs, because the world’s all here for us all the time. But
how
much better are we, eh?”

 
          
“You're
not saying that we’re like frogs, compared to these Fairies?”

 
          
“Oh,
I am! They live in a world, as large again! They perceive
duration
—extension in time. That’s the world they live in!”

 
          
“Fairyland!”

 
          
“So
you only see them a little, every now and then. Yes, we’re like frogs, only
seeing the fly when it moves. Not seeing
all the
world
that’s really there. How can we possibly influence or exploit a world we can’t
see?
It isn’t like our not seeing X-rays
or radio
waves yet still being able to build sensors to detect them . . . We can’t build
sensors to see duration. How to? The concepts don’t exist, for Men—”

 
          
“They
certainly seem to exist for you!”

 
          
“Oh,
we’re being shown. We’re learning. We’re not really their children. More like
their pets.
Their experiment.
We’re more convenient to
them here, than at the coast, you see.”

 
          
“Why
didn’t you
stay
there?”

 
          
“Couldn’t,” mumbled Greenberg angrily.
“The . . . pressure
of their
Umwelt
. . . the suction
towards the center of the land . . . too much.
The whirlpool
of their sense of time . . . intruding on us.
You’ll understand
,
if you stay a few years. How is it now? You feel the world
enduring moment by moment: one moment after another.
The
past, fixed, gone forever.
The future, just about to
happen.
In between, there’s the specious present: how long does it last?
How much present-time do you feel you inhabit? Something between three and
seven minutes, I’d say. That’s about the length of time you feel the ‘present’
lasts, isn’t it?