Watson, Ian - SSC (26 page)

 
          
“One
more thing,” added Boyd. “We want to keep in better touch with the medium
through the trip.” He indicated a slim grey machine, mounted on rubber rollers,
backed up against the wall. Tendrils of wire sprouted from it, terminating in
tiny suction pads.

 
          
“An
electromyograph,” he said, tapping the machine, “registers the minute voltage
changes in the muscles associated with speech. There’s always some element of
subvocalizing in a trance. It only takes time and money to write a computer
programme to make some verbal sense of these electrical effects. So we’ve
finally taken the time and spent the money. The electromyograph processes its
data through the ship’s main computer, so we can hear real-time speech.”

 
          
Lew
Boyd patted Mara in a patronizingly amiable way.

 
          
“Give
us a running commentary, won’t you, little witch, while you’re navigating your
way through . . . whatever it is?”

 
          
Habib
darted a look of horror at Mara—a horror she shared.

 
          
“Voyeurs!”
cried Habib.
“You vile peepers.
That’s the only
privacy we have, our symbol landscape. That’s our only dignity.’’

 
          
“A
pilot scheme,” smiled Boyd ingratiatingly, his hand lingering on Mara’s
shoulder. “It’s our job after all . . . to know.”

 
          
There
was no golden desert visible now . . .

           
One great dune was all she could
see—curling over at the top like a frozen Hokusai wave. The Black Hole warped
her mind’s view of the desert into this single, vast, static lip of sand . . .

 
          
No
wonder Habib hadn’t been able to find his way to Earth when this thing hung
nearby, dominating the whole field of vision. Where stars were normally spread
out as endless ripples of sand, the Black Hole was a whole warped desert in
itself.

 
          
She
hovered by a pure mirror pool, beneath the overhang of that awful cliff, and
realized she was already at the event horizon, seeing the symbol of it in her
mind.

 
          
The
sand dune seemed to be falling in on her perpetually, like a breaker crashing,
but in this frozen landscape of the mind—beyond events— nothing moved. Nothing
could move when there was no “here,” no “there.”

 
          
Somewhere
inside that blank mirror was the mind she’d been sent to find.

 
          
She
had the barest sensation of Habib riding her, but couldn’t get through to him
to ask advice. Telemedium and rider had so little contact. Till now this had
been the main consolation in being a

 
          
Navy mind-whore.
That,
and the
beauty of the desert. Now, it was frightening. She was so utterly on her own.

 
          
Another
thing made her anxious. Was it she, or Habib, who was supposed to contact the
mind in the mirror of the pool? Normally, it was the rider who spoke to rider.
But this mirror had no rider in it. She remembered something Habib had warned
her about . . . the mirror of illusion that reflects yourself, that can trap
you in it . . .

 
          
She
knew so little and it seemed so strange and dangerous here.

 
          
Shortly
afterward, in that timeless stasis, love dawned for Mara . . .

 
          
There
was a consciousness—a presence in the mirror pool.
A craving
for Otherness.
This being seemed so alone, and could love so deep.

 
          
But
how could he reach out a hand to her, when he knew nothing of length and
breadth and depth? She came from beyond the event horizon—but how could anyone
come from beyond that?

 
          
“How
can you be?” thought the mirror pool.

 
          
He
couldn’t show her his face.
His body.
He had none. But
he could search in her mind for words and make her lips whisper them.

 
          
Mara,
tom away from her Swedish village of cool forest, clear lakes, goose honk, by
Earth’s
Naval
draft board, hadn’t really awakened till
now. The past three months had been such a false, horrid nightmare.

 
          
Words
formed as he found the poetry in her soul.
Her words—or the
Other’s.
It didn’t matter.

 
          
There
was emotional identity. And what’s another word for that, but Love?

 
          
He
cried:

 
          
“Outside,
I should like to see

           
Your Inside

           
Outside, show me your Inside!

           
Outside, are you brave enough?’’

 
          
And
she replied:

 
          
“Inside,
are you brave?’’

           
He asked:

 
          
“That
I should go outside myself

           
Who have only
myself
to be in

           
Is
that
what you demand?’’

 
          
“Yes!’’
she cried to her lover.

           
What did those sailors and
scientists know of this?
With all their brash talk of Surface
Velocities equal to the Speed of Light.
Of Singularities and
Strangeness! What did they know of true Singularity, those trashy men! With
their Kruskal Coordinates for Schwarzschild Spacetime, what did they really
know! With their tin starship flying outside the Surface of Infinite Redshift,
far beyond the Event Horizon—beyond this lonely pool where time had frozen—how
could they establish a relationship, locked outside as they were forever?

 
          
In
the
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar,
her
body lay in a trance . . .

 
          
“The
boat goes round and round,” she sang,

 
          
“In
the circles of Day and Night

           
But never do I lose my grip upon
You
.

           
You

           
Shall be my oar!”

 
          
What
did those wretched scientists want her to do? Interrogate this being about his
state of mind and how he saw physical conditions inside a collapsed star?

 
          
“Could
I

           
Describe Height,” she sang, to taunt
the scientists and Bu-Psych-Sec officers, if they were spying on her voice
successfully up there,

 
          
“I
would choose
A
star at the head A star at the feet

 
          
And
under the feet a mirror-image
Concluding
in a star.”

 
          
They
wanted to hear the secrets of a
black
Hole. Yet it wasn’t black at all, but a startling pearly white; shimmering,
opalescent, surrounded by that yellow lip of sand like a curling shell. It was
the color of mother of pearl, set in gold. They wanted to know about Length and
Breadth and Height? She sang out:

 
          
“Could
I describe Breadth I would choose an embrace

 
          
Because
I have senses

 
          
False
and primitive

 
          
And
cannot grasp what really
Exists

 
          
There
is no Star

 
          
Where
your head is

 
          
There
is no middle-point

 
          
Where
your feet stand

 
          
But
an inch of your loveliness

 
          
I
have known.”

 
          
They
wanted to know about distances and measurements? She shouted joyfully at the
top of her voice:

 
          
“An
inch of your loveliness I have known!”

 
          
Mara
felt the brush of the being’s presence on her lips. And then his image grew
clearer—as though he had at last understood how to communicate himself, in his
own thought forms rather than in poetry filched from
her own
mind. He made a clearer and clearer statement of identity. Some of it totally
evaded her, presenting itself in mathematical or abstract alien symbols she
had no knowledge of—forged according to an alien logic from a region where the
laws of logic, and even mathematics, had been radically different from the
logics devised by humans to suit a universe of elements coherently bonded
together into galaxies, stars and planets. But much came through. And when he
failed, his symbols hunted for some other means of resonance within her.
Concepts using the raw symbolism
of her own
thought
processes for internalizing sensations— tactile, kinesthetic, erotic
sensations—took the place of words then.

 
          
In
this blend of words and formalized sensations, he coded his message to her,
presenting her with the Black Hole he inhabited as the essential mode of
existence; the shadow cast by which constituted the “solid” universe of stars
and planets.

 
          
He
reversed the Real and the Unreal for her, till she knew the joy of escape that
Habib must have tasted three years earlier.

 
          
“Do
you not know that
this
is the Real,
the other the Unreal? Let me tell you about the origin of things . . . Mara.”
His mind reached below her name for the personal symbol cluster attached to it.
“Dreamspinner . . . Shapechanger . . . Lady Riding on a Stick
Through
the Starlit Night. . .

 
          
“The
Energy Egg exploded
before
the start
of i ‘things.’ (By ‘things’ I mean stars, starships, bodies.) It was not the
Birth of Things. For a very short time there was a true physical universe—” She
sensed him searching her mind for measurements of time. “It lasted . . . ten
to the minus forty ‘seconds,’ by and large, this universe. Soon—and when I
conceive ‘soon,’ I conceive a time long before that universe was one ‘second’
old—all that would later be ‘matter’ had already become a near-infinity of tiny
‘black holes. ’ Space
¹
and Matter march hand in hand. But how could
so i tiny a volume of newly created Space contain so much hatched energy? It
could not grow fast enough. The only way Space could expand swiftly enough to
contain the hatching was by expanding inwardly, creating
a
myriad holes
.

 
          
That
was the one and only mode that so much could exist in—holes. Each hole could be
no larger than ten to the minus twenty-three ‘centimeters’—”

 
          
“Numbers so small!
I can’t
feel
them. They mean nothing.”