Watson, Ian - SSC (27 page)

 
          
“And
of these tiny holes is all ‘matter’ made. Atomic particles are only a tightly
bonded state of these; and in binding, these holes release huge energies. It
was those energies, and their release, that powered the expansion of this thing
you call ‘universe
’—not
the hatching
of the egg itself. Do you understand, Mara?” A touchless caress indicated the
curve of the Hokusai wave, beyond which was a universe of stars, starships,
bodies, and matter. “That is only a para-universe—a secondary cosmos you
inhabit. You have crossed over into the no-place where Reality is. Another was
here. How long ago? He would have joined me but the illusion of matter dragged
him back—”

 
          
“Habib . . .’’

 
          
He
reached below the name for its symbols: the Bedouin, the pilgrim to
Mecca
, the escapee from shabby caravanserais . .
.

 
          
“Yes.
It was him. But now you can join me. Will you join me, Mara?”

 
          
“Are
you . . . God? You say you were there at the creation of things!”

 
          
“Is
‘God’ a creator of‘things’? I left before things began. I am not responsible
for things.” She sensed anger and frustration. “Things are only shadows cast by
knots in the eternal, vital void that the true universe collapsed into. This is
what hatched from the egg of being, not that, out there.

 
          
This
is the true purpose of creation, not
that.
So
join me, Mara, be free of illusion and be my bride—”

 
          
Are
you a devil then?
she
thought fearfully. She stared at
the timeless pool, tasted his faceless kisses on her cheeks, his fingerless
ruffling of her hair, in that place where the Hokusai wave hung like the
ultimate battlement—not penning in the chaos of the Black Hole, but resisting
the weak thrust of the silt of matter that had piled up against this mind’s
domain over aeons of spurious reality; stars, starships, bodies . . .

 
          
“But
what are you?” she hesitated.

 
          
“I
am the Lover,” the answer came.
“The Allembracing.
There is no loneliness. But I invite you—”

 
          
She
remembered the Tantric myth of Shiva and Shakti, the sexual pair so deeply
joined in eternal copulation that they did not know of their difference. Shiva
and Shakti, united at first, had separated. Shakti had danced the dance of
illusion to convince Shiva he was not One, but Many, creating from her womb
the world of multiple objects existing in the illusory flow of time. He, then,
the Void, played the role of Shakti, to the Shiva of the matter universe which
she, and Habib, represented.
The fact that in the myth
Shakti was woman, and Shiva man, was irrelevant.
“He” had been as ready
to love Habib . . . as he was ready to love her. “He” was an arbitrary pronoun,
at best.

 
          
Yet
she sensed a terrible danger if she yielded to him, if “solid” matter was to be
wooed by the original nothingness at its heart. Perhaps in a few billion years
a final copulation of the “Universe” with “Void” was destined to liberate the
energy to restart the cycle . . . But so soon—already?

 
          
But
why should she care about danger to stars and ships and bodies? A surge of joy
took hold of her. She could be the first creature of matter to live the Tantric
myth right through to its end, and be truly loved, as no one else had, by this
being
who
was not “being.”

 
          
“You
are the Lover; then love me—” she whispered.

 
          
And
the mind in the Black Hole gathered about. Her lips were brushed, her hair
stroked, the palms of her hands traced sensuously.

 
          
The
Hokusai wave itself began to tremble; not to fall in on her—rather, to roll
backward, away from the still pool, towering up kilometers into the void sky .
. .

 
          
Through
a mist she sensed cries, orders— voices tissue-thin and torn like tatters in a
storm. For the Black Hole was changing its configuration in space, gathering
itself for an assault on Being and Matter; and as charged particles were sucked
in toward it they sprayed the danger signal of increased outpourings of
synchroton radiation and gravity pulses . . .

 
          
As
he reached out to embrace her, along the line of her thoughts, tracing the
yantric geometry of her teletrance back to its origin in the orbiting starship,
dune and pool dissolved, and she was snatched away . . .

 
          
They
had executed Emergency Return Procedure on her—a violent
coitus
interruptus of chemicals and sheer brute force.

 
          
A
syringe gleamed in Nielstrom’s hand. Habib lay weeping, naked, in a corner of
the room, his penis a shrivelled button. He
coughed,
a
thin smear of blood on his lips; hunched over his nakedness and bruises,
gathering the energy to reach his
aba
and cover himself. It looked as though some urban vigilantes had caught him
raping Mara and beaten him up. Mainly this was the action of the trance-cancel
drug whose results showed so dramatically—a massive physiological aversion:
cold turkey compressed into seconds. But perhaps, too, some gratuitous
violence had been used in wrenching him away from Mara and depositing him
there.

 
          
Mara
hurt so badly that the pain crumpled her into a foetal ball, around a belly
raped by withdrawal and not by entry. Her nipples were bee stings mounted on
top of cones of soft agony like tortured snails stripped of their shells and
teased with burning matches (a flicker image from Lew Boyd’s childhood sucked
in during the decaying moments of the trance).

 
          
Lodwy
Rinehart stood there in the room with Boyd and Nielstrom, his face blank stone.

 
          
They
played tapes of her poetry back at her. The voice was slurred and smeared,
barely recognizable as Mara’s, but the words were identifiable enough. At
least the poetry was.

 
          
“May
you rot in Hell, Boyd,” swore Habib through his tears. “May Allah use your guts
for spinning
yarn.
”

 
          
“There’s
no alien being in there, is there, Habib?”

 
          
“Of
course there’s a—a being in there,” Mara gasped. “I met him. Touched him—”

 
          
“Even
fell in love with him,”
smirked
Nielstrom.

 
          
Mara
couldn’t understand what was happen-
[ ing
, except
that it must be one more cruel effort to humiliate her.

           
Boyd’s lip curled in anger and
contempt.

 
          
“Did
you think you’d fooled us, Habib? But nobody deserts the Navy, mister
—but nobody!
That’s what cathexis with
home is all about.”

 
          
He
swung round on Mara.

 
          
“And
as for you, little witch—didn’t you suspect what Habib was up to? No, I guess
you didn’t, or you’d have been more scared for your sanity.”

 
          
His
every word was a slap in her face, so recently brushed by love.

 
          
“I
don’t understand any of it,” she moaned.

 
          
“Leave
me alone—leave me to myself.”

           
“Ah there it is! The root of the
matter exposed. To be left to yourselves. That’s what you’d like, isn’t it?
But how, eh?
You can’t trance-trip without a rider. That’s
where the energy comes from, to jump light-years, the rider’s sexual
frustrations. You keep him rooted to
Earth,
he keeps
you rooted to the ship. The psychological security of the ship and its whole
communication net rely on this interplay—”

 
          
Mara
wept, at these hateful, bewildering people around her. She cried for the still
pool beneath the dune . . .

 
          
“Why
don’t you tell her, Habib?” Boyd sneered. “You’re supposed to be her teacher.”

 
          
“Tell
her what? She knows what is down there.”

 
          
“Does
she? Shall I tell her what we know? There’s an event horizon—a one-way membrane
into the Black Hole. But what if a mind could perform a balancing act on the
very horizon itself, eh, Habib?
If you could attach yourself
to the standing wave there?
No more Navy duty then, Habib—you’d be able
to hole up in there and forget about us.” He smiled bitterly at his own
unintended pun. .

 
          
“What’s
this about standing waves, Boyd?” the captain demanded. “Don’t make me play
guessing games on my own ship.”

 
          
“It’s
something we’ve theorized about at Bu- Psych-Sec, sir. The universe hangs
together because of causal relationships. But ever since Pauli, in the
twentieth century, scientists have speculated about other, alternative
relationships—noncausal ones. Clearly these telemediums function because of
this noncausal aspect of things. But with the explosive development of star
travel, we’ve been far too busy exploiting the phenomenon efficiently at
Bu-Psych-Sec, and holding society together, to do really deep research. Damn
it, we’re just fighting to hold the line. You’ve got to protect society against
the disruptive effects of star travel! Well—whereabouts in the universe do you
find a tangible physical boundary between the causal and the noncausal?”

 
          
“The
event horizon,” nodded Rinehart.

 
          
“On
one side is the world of cause and effect,” Boyd went on effervescently. “On
the other side there isn’t any meaningful framework for cause and effect to
operate in. Effectively, it’s a noncausal zone. We think the friction between
the two models of reality generates a kind of standing wave of what I suppose
you have to call ‘probabilities.’ Strange things can happen there. And Habib
saw his chance of breaking the causal chains that fasten him to his body and
his rider, and the starship, and escaping. But he had to be physically close to
the place—and it had to be a two-stage process—”

 
          
‘‘Boyd’s
wrong—there is a Being,” gasped Habib. “It’s not me.”

 
          
“Mental
mutiny?” growled Rinehart, paying no attention to the Arab’s protests. “That’s
a new one for the book.”

 
          
“A particularly ingenious crime, Captain.
Habib sacrificed
that sailor’s life force to build himself a matrix for his mind to fix on, in
there. In doing so, you could say he had to split his personality. No wonder
we found so little of all this in his mind, beyond the glaring desire to
escape, back there in
Annapolis
. Habib had covered his tracks up skilfully, like the furtive Bedouin he
is. Part of his mind stayed there at the event horizon, ready to receive the
rest of him, the major portion of his consciousness.
But the
Bu-Psych-Sec officer who rode him that second time had the sense and the training
to break the trance.
He pulled out, took Habib home. Bu-Psych-Sec
decided we’d give him sufficient rope to hang himself. He didn’t realize the
rope woule be round his ankle restraining him at the critical time! It was no
use his being the rider, you see—he couldn’t make a transfer-

 
          
ence
that way. We’ll be most interested to learn his tricks
when we strip him down again, and the little Swedish witch has her mind peeled
to yield up her memory imprint of that bit of fractured mind she fell in love
with. We’ll have the full picture then.”

 
          
Habib’s
eyes met Mara’s urgently, begging her to believe him, not Boyd. Her own mind
swam with doubts. Had that only been a simulacrum of Habib she had met in
there, and all the symbols telling her of how the universe was
nothing,
only lies—part of a cheap
trick?