Fortunately, we have invented XHX, hardened hydrogen, with which to refurbish our interiors.
The hull is wearing thin. I think that accounts for the blue bird which got in."
As he spoke, he was absentmindedly stroking the cat. The cat lay still but did not purr.
"I was consulting with Provost-Marshal Shappi about which revs and reps to use in this Bullball match, which I take it you interupted, when a rating entered my office unannounced. I ordered him to wait in the pa.s.sage. "Ah," he said, "the pa.s.sage of time." It was impertinent to answer back like that. It would not have happened a decade ago."
The little man leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs and clasping his hands together. Smiling, he said, "You"re an uneasy man, I can see. Not a happy man. The cat does not purr for you. This voyage is just a misery to you."
"Listen to me," said Hungaman, leaning forward, unconsciously copying the older man"s att.i.tude. "You may be the figment of a great civilization, now happily defunct, but what youhave to say about me means nothing."
He went on to inform his antagonist that even now tractor beams were hauling stuff into one of the insulated holds, raw hot stuff at a few thousand degrees, mesons, protons, corpuscles, wave particles-a great trail of material smaller than dust, all of which the Beat.i.tude would use for fuel or building material. And those whirling particles were all that was left of Manifold"s million-year-old civilization.
"So much for your million-year-old civilization. Time it was sc.r.a.pped."
"You"re proud of this?" shrieked Manifold.
"In our wake, we have destroyed a hundred so-called civilizations. They died, those civilizations, to power our pa.s.sage, to drive us ever onward. We shall not be defeated. No, I don"t regret a d.a.m.ned thing. We are what humanity is made of." Oratory had hold of him. "This very ship, this worldlet, is-what was that term in use in the old Christian Era?-yes, it"s a cathedral to the human spirit. We are still young, but we are going to succeed, and the less opposition to us there is, the better."
His violent gesture disturbed the cat, which sprang from his lap and disappeared. Its image remained suspended in midair, growing fainter until it was gone.
"Mankind is as big as the universe. Sure, I"m not too happy with the way things are aboard this ship, but I don"t give a tinker"s cuss for anything outside our hull."
He gave an ill.u.s.trative glance through the port as he spoke. Strangely, the Bullball game was continuing. A gored body was being elevated from the trampled field, trailing blood. The crowd loved it.
"As for your Slipsoid powers-what do I care for them? I can nave you disintegrated any minute I feel like it. That"s the plain truth. Do you have the power to read my mind?"
"You don"t have that kind of mind. You"re an alien life-form. It"s a blank piece of paper to me."
"If you could read it, you would see how I feel about you. Now. What are you going to do?"
For response, the little man began to disintegrate, shedding his pretense of humanity. As soon as the transformation began, Hungaman pressed a stud under the f.l.a.n.g.e of the desk. It would summon General Barakuta with firepower.
Manifold almost instantaneously ceased to exist. In his place a mouth, a tunnel, formed, from which poured-well, maybe it was a tunnel mouth for this strange concept, quantas.p.a.ce -from which poured, poured-Hungaman could not grasp it ... poured what?-solid music?
. . . wave particles? . . . pellets of zero substance? . . . Whatever the invasive phenomenon was, it was filling up the compartment, burying Hungaman, terrified and struggling, and bursting on, on, into the rest of the giant vessel, choking its arteries, rushing like poison through a vein.
Alarms were sounding, fire doors closing, conflagration crews running. And people screaming-screaming in sheer disgusted horror at this terrible irresistible unknown overcoming them. Nothing stopped it, nothing impeded it.
Within a hundred heartbeats, the entire speeding Beat.i.tude worldlet was filled completely with the consuming dust. Blackness. Brownness. Repletion. Nonexistence.
Hungaman sat at his desk in his comfortable office. From his windows-such was hisstatus, his office had two windows-he looked out on the neat artificial lawns of academia, surrounded by tall everlasting trees. He had become accustomed to the feeling of being alive.
He was talking to his brainfinger, a medium-sized rep covered in a fuzzy golden fur, through which two large doggy eyes peered sympathetically at his patient.
Hungaman was totally relaxed as he talked. He had his feet up on the desk, his hands behind his neck, fingers locked together: the picture of a man at his ease, perfect if old-fashioned. He knew all about reps.
"My researches were getting nowhere. Maybe I was on the verge of an NB-you know, a nervous breakdown. Who cares?
That"s maybe why I imagined I saw the orange blossom falling by the ports. On reflection, they were not oranges but planets."
"You are now saying it was not blossom but the actual fruits, the oranges?" asked the brainfinger.
"They were what I say they were. The oranges were burst ing-exploding. They weren"t oranges so much as worlds, whole planets, dropping down into oblivion, maybe meeting themselves coming up." He laughed. "The universe as orchard. I was excited because I knew that for once I had seen through reality. I remembered what that old Greek man, Socrates, had said, that once we were cured of reality we could ourselves become real. It"s a way of saying that life is a lie."
"You know it is absurd to say that, darling. Only a madman would claim that there is something unreal about reality. n.o.body would believe such sophistry."
"Yes, but remember-the majority is always wrong!"
"Who said that?"
"Tom Lehrer? Adolf Hitler? Mark Twain? Einstein McBeil? Socrates?"
"You"ve got Socrates on the brain, Hungaman, darling. Forget Socrates! We live in a well-organized military society, where such slogans as "The majority is always wrong" are branded subversive. If I reported you, all this-" he gestured about him, "-would disappear."
"But I have always felt I understood reality-perception better than other people. As you know, I studied it for almost a century, got a degree in it. Even the most solid objects, chairs, walls, rooms, lives-they are merely outward forms. It is a disconcerting concept, but behind it lies truth and beauty.
"That is what faster-than-light means, incidentally. It has nothing to do with that other old Greek philosopher, Einstein: it"s to do with people seeing through appearances. We nowadays interpret speeding simply as an invariant of stationary, with acceleration as a moderator. You just need a captain with vision.
"I was getting nowhere until I realized that an oil painting of my father, for instance, was not really an oil painting of my rather but just a piece of stretched canvas with a veneer of variously colored oils. Father himself-again, problematic. I was born unilaterally."
The brainfinger asked, "Is that why you have become, at least in your imagination, the father of the crew of the Beat.i.tude!"
Hungaman removed his feet from the desk and sat up rigidly. "The crew have disappeared.You imagine I"m happy about that? No, it"s a pain, a real pain."
The brainfinger began to look extra fuzzy.
"Your hypothesis does not allow for pain being real. Or else you are talking nonsense. For the captain of a great weapon-vessel such as the Beat.i.tude you are emotionally unstable."
Hungaman leaned forward and pointed a finger, with indications of shrewdness, and a conceivable pun, at the brainfinger.
"Are you ordering me to return to Earth, to call off our entire mission, to let the enemy galaxy get away? Are you trying to relieve me of my command?"
The brainfinger said, comfortingly, "You realize that at the extra-normal velocities at which you are traveling, you have basically quit the quote real world unquote, and hallucinations are the natural result. We brainfingers have a label for it: TPD, tachyon perception displacement.
Ordinary human senses are not equipped for such transcendental speeds, is all . . ."
Hungaman thought before speaking. "There"s always this problem with experience. It does not entirely coincide with consciousness. Of course you are right about extra-normal velocities and hallucination. . . . Would you say wordplay is a mark of madness-or near-madness?"
"Why ask me that?"
"I have to speak to my clonther shortly. I need to check something with him. His name"s Twohunga. I"m fond of him, but since he has been in Heliopause HQ, his diction has become strange. It makes me nervous."
The brainfinger emitted something like a sigh. He felt that Hungaman had changed the subject for hidden motives.
He spoke gently, almost on tiptoe. "I shall leave you alone to conquer your insecurity. Bad consciences are always troublesome. Get back on the bridge. Good evening. I will see you again tomorrow. Have a nice night." It rose and walked toward the door, narrowly missed, readjusted, and disappeared.
"Bad conscience! What an idiot!" Hungaman said to himself. "I"m afraid of something, that"s the trouble. And I can"t figure out what I"m afraid of." He laughed. He twiddled his thumbs at great speed.
The Beat.i.tude had attained a velocity at which it broke free from spatial dimensions. It was now traveling through a realm of latent temporalities. Computer SJC1 alone could scan spatial derivatives, as the ship-projectile it governed headed after the enemy galaxy. The Beat.i.tude had to contend with racing tachyons and other particles of frantic mobility. The tachyons were distinct from light. Light did not enter the region of latent temporalities. Here were only eotemporal processes, the beginnings and endings of which could not be distinguished one from another.
The SJC1 maintained ship velocities, irrespective of the eotemporal world outside, or the sufferings of the biotemporal world within.
Later, after a snort, Hungaman went to the top of the academy building and peered through the telescope. There in the cloudless sky, hanging to the northwest, was the hated enigmaticword-if indeed it was a word-hiseobiw . . . Hiseobiw, smudgily written in s.p.a.ce fires.
Perhaps it was a formula of some kind. Read upside down, it spelt miqoesiy. This dirty mark in s.p.a.ce had puzzled and infuriated military intelligentsia for centuries. Hungaman was still working on the problem, on and off.
This was what the enemy galaxy had created, why it had become the enemy. How had it managed this bizarre stellar inscription? And why? Was miqoesiy aimed at the Solar system?
What did it spell? What could it mean? Was it intended to help or to deter? Was it a message from some dyslexic galactic G.o.d? Or was it, as a joker had suggested, a commercial for a pair of socks?
No one had yet determined the nature of this affront to cos-mology. It was for this reason that, long ago, the Beat.i.tude had been launched to chastise the enemy galaxy and, if possible, decipher the meaning of hiseobiw or miqoesiy.
A clenched human fist was raised from the roof of the academic building to the d.a.m.ned thing. Then its owner went inside again.
Hungaman spoke into his voxputer. "Beauty of mental illness. Entanglements of words and appearances, a maze through which we try to swim. I believe I"m getting through to the meaning of this enigmatic sign. . . .
"Yep, that does frighten me. Like being on a foreign planet. A journey into the astounded Self, where truth lies and lies are truth. Thank G.o.d the hull of our s.p.a.cevessel is not impermeable. It represents the ego, the eggnog. These bluebirds are messengers, bringing in hope from the world outside. TPD-must remember that!"
Hungaman, as he had told the brainfinger to little effect, had a clonther, a clone-brother by the name of Twohunga. Twohunga had done well, ascending the military ranks, until-as Steel-Major Twohunga-he was appointed to the WWW, the World Weaponry Watch on Charon, coplanet of Pluto.
So Hungaman put through a call to the Heliopause HQ.
"Steel-Major here . . . haven"t heard from you for thirty-two years, Hungaman. Yes, mmm, thirty-two. Maybe only thirty-one. How"s your promotion?"
"The same. You still living with that Plutottie?"
"I disposed of her." The face in the globe was dark and stormy, the plastic mitter banded across its forehead. "I have a rep-a womanroid-for my satisfactions now. What you might call satisfactions. Where are you, precisely? Still on the Beat.i.tude, I guess? Not that that"s precise in any way . . ." He spoke jerkily and remotely, as if his voice had been prerecorded by a machine afflicted by hiccups.
"I"m none too sure. Or if I am sure, I am dead. Maybe I am a rev," said Hungaman, without giving his answer a great deal of thought. "It seems I am having an episode. It"s to do with the extreme velocity, a velocillusion . . . We"re traversing the eotem-poral, you know." He clutched his head as he spoke, while a part of him said tauntingly to himself, You"re hamming it up. . . .
"Brainfinger. Speak to a brainfinger, Hungaman," Twohunga advised."I did. They are no help."
"They never are. Never."
"It may have been part of my episode. Listen, Twohunga, Heli-pause HQ still maintains contact with the Beat.i.tude. Can you tell me if the ship is still on course, or has it been subjugated by life-forms from the Slipsoid system which have invaded the ship?"
"System? What system? The Slipsoid system?"
"Yes. X377. We disintegrated it for fuel as we pa.s.sed."
"So you did. Mm, so you did. So you did, indeed. Yes, you surely disintegrated it."
"Will you stop talking like that!"
Twohunga stood up, to walk back and forth, three paces one way, swivel on heel, three paces the other way, swivel on heel, in imitation of a man with an important announcement in mind.
He said, "I know you keep ship"s time on the Beat.i.tude, as if the ship has a time amid eotemporality, but here in Sol system we are coming up for Year One Million, think of it, with all the attendant celebrations. Yep, Year One Million, count them. Got to celebrate. We"re planning to nuclearize Neptune, nuclearize it, to let a little light into the circ.u.mference of the system. Things have changed. One Million . . . Yes, things have changed. They certainly have.
They certainly are . . ."
"I asked you if we on shipboard have been subjugated by the aliens."
"Well, that"s where you are wrong, you see. The wrong question. Entirely up the spout.
Technology has improved out of all recognition since your launch date. All recognition . . .
Look at this."
The globe exploded into a family of lines, some running straight, some slightly crooked, just like a human family. As they went, they sp.a.w.ned mathematical symbols, not all of them familiar to Hungaman. They originated at one point in the bowl and ricocheted to another.
Twohunga said, voice-over, "We used to call them "black holes," remember? That was before we domesticated them. Black holes, huh! They are densers now. Densers, okay? We can propel them through hypers.p.a.ce. They go like spit on a hot stove. Pro-pelled. They serve as weaponry, these densers, okay? Within about the next decade, the next decade, we shall be able to hurl them at the enemy galaxy and destroy it. Destroy the whole thing . . ." He gave something that pa.s.sed for a chuckle. "Then we shall see about their confounded hiseobiw, or whatever it is."
Hungaman was horrified. He saw at once that this technological advance, with densers used as weapons, rendered the extended voyage of the Beat.i.tude obsolete. Long before the ship could reach the enemy galaxy-always supposing that command of the ship was regained from the Slipsoid invader-the densers would have destroyed their target.
"This is very bad news," he said, almost to himself. "Very bad news indeed."
"Bad news? Bad news? Not for humanity," said Twohunga sharply. "Oh, no! We shall do away with this curse in the sky for good and all."
"It"s all very well for you to say that, safe at Heliopause HQ. What about those of us on the Beat.i.tude-if any of us are there anymore . . . ?"
Twohunga began to pace again, this time taking four paces to the left, swivel on heel, four paces to the right, swivel on heel.He explained, not without a certain malice, that it was not technology alone which had advanced. Ethics had also taken a step forward. Quite a large step, he said. He emitted a yelp of laughter. A considerably large step. He paused, looking over his shoulder at his clonther far away. It was now considered, he stated, not at all correct to destroy an entire cultured planet without any questions asked.
In fact, to be honest, and frankness undoubtedly was the best policy, destroying any planet on which there was sentient life was now ruled to be a criminal act. Such as destroying the ancient Slipsoid dual-planet culture, for instance. . . .
As Captain of the Beat.i.tude, therefore, Hungaman was a wanted criminal and, if he were caught, would be up for trial before the TDC, the Transplanetary Destruction Crimes tribunal.
"What nonsense is this you are telling-" Hungaman began.
"Nonsense you may call it, but that"s the law. No nonsense, no! Oh, no. Cold fact! Culture destruction, criminal act. It"s you, Hungaman, you!"
In a chill voice, Hungaman asked, "And what of Military Morality?"
"What of Military-"What of Military Morality?" he asks. Military Morality! It"s a thing of the past, the long long past! Pah! A criminal creed, criminal . . . We"re living in a new-In fact, I should not be talking to a known genocidal maniac at all, no, not a word, in case it makes me an accessory after the fact."
He broke the connection.
Hungaman fell to the floor and chewed the leg of his chair.
It was tough but not unpalatable.
"It"s bound to be good for him," said a voice.
"They were an omnivorous species," said a second voice in agreement-though not speaking in speech exactly.
Seeing was difficult. Although it was light, the light was of an uncomfortable wavelength.
Hungaman seemed to be lying down, with his torso propped up, enabling him to eat.