Cryptozoic! (21 page)

He surfaced, and it was almost as dark as it had been in his hallucination.
The others were with him, Ann tucked against him. They stood utterly still,
breathing heavily into their air-leakers.
They were standing on the generalized floor with which mind-travel had
made them familiar. The ground was some ten feet below their heels,
so that they appeared to be suspended in mid-air. It was a long while
before any of them could bring themselves to step forward.
The world sweated and shivered below them, waking into the long fever of
being. Great belts of rain were moving across the face of the planet,
more like rivers that flowed vertically than ordinary rainstorms. The
rain was the color of thin varnish.
"The Cryptozoic -- but we picked a showery day!" Silverstone said,
grinning uneasily.
The wilderness of rock below them fermented liquid. Everywhere, its black
and tremendous teeth were lashed by a frenzy of water seeking a place
to run to. The water did not foam or froth, though it was lashed by the
water falling from above.
In all this horrid place, only one feature stood out. This was a wide
fissure that split in two a prominence of rock, cutting across the dome
of it like an axe wound in a skull. From the fissure, more water poured
-- erupted rather, gushing forth in fury, steaming slightly, smearing
the landscape with its bilious vents.
Yellow water gargled into brown amid black basalts. In the sky, the same
dun flags waved as the cloud-race passed perpetually overhead. Of the sun,
no sign existed. There was only a series of lighter or darker patches
where the suspended moisture fell or failed to fall.
The mind-travelers could not tell whether they hung above land or above
the makings of a sea bed; neither concept had meaning here. Their height
above ground level spoke of how the earth in its delirium was heaved up
and heaved down.
"We can't stay here!" Ann said.
It was generally agreed, without discussion. They minded.
They minded five times, each time sinking deeper into the terrible eons,
always moving towards the period when Earth became an alien planet,
its atmosphere a stormy mixture of methane and ammonia, death to human
lungs. They were mere grains of pollen in a great sea.
Bush found that the others were chanting the Wenlock discipline aloud,
as if it were a prayer. In all of them was the terror of the unknown,
the unknowable: the Cryptozoic contained in its raging kingdom five-sixths
of geological time. Each of their mindings covered perhaps ten million
years; the five mindings put together carried them only into the early
fringes of the period.
In their surfacings, the height of the land rose and fell -- once they
were encased entirely in rock -- but always the rain dropped down from
the air, lambasting itself into mist on the exposed slopes. Bush thought
of Turner's "Rain, Steam and Speed"; the old man had created that after
rushing through Maidenhead in a steam train! Here they dwindled into a
three-dimensional Turner that protracted itself through pre-phanerozoic
time.
On the fifth surfacing, the minders came upon a period of drought,
when the gloomy layers of cloud no longer drained their juices onto the
landscape. Whether this was the truce of a day or an age, they could
not tell; indeed, they had passed that metempirical point at which the
old human connotations of time, formed in the overmind, had meaning
or relevance.
They could only stand numbly and stare at the inscrutable georama
about them.
None of them doubted that the silence encasing them here was a true
representation of the world beyond the time-entropy barrier. It was a
panorama dedicated to silence; they stood hushed in it, swathed in its
vastness, like five ants cooped inside the ruins of a cathedral.
As their ears were baffled, so were their eyes. They stood amid a morphic
enigma in which the rules of perspective were as powerless as the laws of
acoustics or the whims of time.
The clayey rocks about them were each the size of a small mountain,
with nothing less than a slab of Stonehenge. They lay heaped about
meaninglessly -- and yet with a terrible meaning that hinted of the
force that had flung them here. They were grey, without strata, their
edges crumbled by the energies of water. Everywhere about, they made a
confusion of angles, while underneath them lay snares of shadow. They
seemed, under the bare yellow net of cloud, to be something between
the inorganic and the organic, to belong neither to the mineral nor
the animal kingdom. It was as if they lay here on the decrepit margins
of time embodying all the amazing forms the world was to carry, as if
the raw turbulent Earth itself were having a nightmare of stone about
the progeny that would swarm on it. These copromorphic things had
the suggested forms of elephants, seals, walruses, skulls, diploduci,
strange squamata and sauropods, hippos, beetles, finny turtles, snails,
eggs, ducks, bats, killer sharks, octopoidal fragments, trachodonts,
penguins, shovel-tusked mastodons, woodlice, foetuses and faeces,
living and dying; and there were reminders of the human physique too:
torsos appearing, thighs, groins lightly hollowed, backbones, breasts,
suggestions of hands and fingers, knees, massive shoulders, phallic
shapes; all distinct and yet merged with the stranger anatomies about
them in some unfathomable splanchnic agony of nature -- and all molded
mindlessly out of a grey putty, without thought turned out, without
thought to be disintegrated. They stretched as far as the eye could see,
piled on top of each other, seeming in their multitudinousness to imply
that they covered the globe.
The minders stared about them in a terror approaching joy, as if emotions
too ran in a vortex, in a circle with the clock. Wisely, they could not
speak. For these uncreated promises in clay there were no words.
Bush saw that the Dark Woman once more stood among them. He felt that
there was an element in the air that made the eyes prickle and caught
in the throat. It made no difference. They had to gulp down, to digest
somehow, these cryptadia round them before they could pursue their own
preoccupations.
But he was the first one to speak, to gasp out anything.
"So this is how the world began!"
"No, this is how it ended," Silverstone said. He stared at them with
the look of self-deprecation on his face. "We are in the Cryptozoic all
right, but it stands at the end of Earth's history, not at the beginning
as you have believed."
And he started to tell them.
Chapter 6
THE HIMALAYAN GENERATION
"I have to tell you of a revolution in thinking so great," Silverstone
said, "that it is hardly likely that any of us standing here will ever
be capable of adjusting to it fully in our lifetimes. The generation
contemporary with Einstein was unable to grasp the revolution he ushered
in; with all humility, we are now faced with something much greater.
"You notice I say 'revolution in thinking,' and it will be helpful if
you never forget that that is what it is. It is not a turning upside-down
of all natural laws, although it often seems like it. The error that has
deluded us until now has been in man's minds, not in the external world.
"Although what I have to tell you is confusing, you will find it less
so if you reflect first on the simple but neglected fact that we know
only of the external world -- the universe, our back gardens, or our
fingernails -- through our senses. We know, in other words, only external
world-plus-observer, universe-plus-observer, back garden-plus-observer,
fingernails-plus-observer. This remains true even when we interpose
instruments between the observed object and our senses. But what mankind
has never taken into account until now is the extent to which the observer
has managed to distort the external object and to found a great mountain
of science and civilization on the distortion.
"So much by way of preface. Now I will tell you as concisely and simply as
I can what this revolution in thinking is. Working with Anthony Wenlock
-- and later, I fear, working against him -- I and my associates have
discovered the true nature of the undermind. The undermind, as you
will know, is the ancient core, historically speaking, of the brain;
its counterpart existed before man became sapiens and exists in the
higher mammals. The overmind is a much later development, an amazing
structure that was unique in its ratiocinative powers until it fathered
the computer; but we have cause to believe that its reason for existence
has been
to distort and conceal the real nature of time
from mankind.
We now have absolute proof -- indeed, absolute proof has always existed,
but has never been recognized as such -- that what we regard as the flow
of time in fact moves in the opposite direction to its apparent one.
"You know that Wenlock shook up our old views of time. He refuted the
old unidirectional idea and with it the spatialization of time. I have
no new time theory to replace his; all I am fundamentally qualified to
speak about is the human mind. But I have to tell you that our findings
on the mind indicate clearly that time is flowing in the direction you
would call backwards.
"Wenlock and I started with more or less the same thought on the matter --
an old thought. Even the great Sigmund Freud of the nineteenth century
had a glimpse of it. He says somewhere that unconscious mental processes
are timeless -- his 'unconscious' was a sort of parody of our undermind;
elsewhere he says something to the effect that 'we have made far too
little use in our theory of the fact that repressed feelings remain
unaltered by the passage of time.' It was the nearest Freud came to
saying that repressions, seated in the ancient part of the brain, are
immune to the sort of time invented by the overmind.
"The next century -- the twentieth -- was completely time-obsessed,
multitudes of people suffering from schizophrenia, as the division
between overmind and undermind became more apparent. As so often happens,
artists were first to reveal the time-obsession, or to speak of it in
revealed terms: painters such as Duchamps and Degas and Picasso, and
writers such as Thomas Mann, Olaf Stapledon, Proust, Wells, Joyce, and
Woolf. Then the scientists followed, uncovering smaller units of time,
the millisecond, the nanosecond, and the attosecond, establishing them
all as viable units with their own scale of events. At the beginning of
our own century, we have seen inflated time come into common currency --
we talk happily of megaseconds and gigaseconds, and find it convenient
to think of the Solar System as entering into existence some 150,000
teraseconds ago. The greatest novelist of our age, Marston Orston,
created in
Fullbright
a deliberately unfinished novel of over four
million words that solely concerns the actions of a young girl rising
to open her bedroom window. The groupages of our time-dwelling friend
Borrow will, I feel sure, prove equally momentous.
"All these things are symptoms of the overmind's increasingly desperate
efforts, swinging one way and another, to maintain its lying command
over the undermind. My findings completely finish its dominance.
I happen to come along as an instrument of its downfall; I am merely the
culmination of a process that, with hindsight, we can see has been going
on a long time. The fourth-century St. Augustine has a famous passage in
his Confessions, 'In te, anime meus, tempora metior -- It is in you, my
mind, that I measure time. I do not measure the things themselves whose
passage produced the impress; it is the impress that I measure when I
measure time. Thus either that is what time is, or I am not measuring time
at all.' Augustine almost hit on the truth, and genius always most closely
in contact with its undermind has often seemed to suspect the truth.
"But you see I tell you all this in the old terms, in the way in which
we have been accustomed all our lives. Now I'm going to paraphrase it
in its true terms, according to our proper time concept, as our children
will learn it.
"'After Wenlock and Silverstone's day, the true nature of time was lost,
and it was believed to run backwards. Because the truth as yet lay only
just under the surface, this was a time of great unrest, with the scientists
occupying their thought with inflated time scales, while a novelist of the
period, Marston Orston, filled a four-million-word novel with an account
of a girl getting up to open her bedroom window. Earlier novelists,
too, such as Proust and Mann, and painters like Picasso, manifested the
time-distortion that was being digested by society. Many members of that
society, unable to agree that time flowed backwards, became mentally ill,
often with schizophrenia.
"'Society coped with the problem by slowing down its pace and abandoning
fast modes of transport such as the airplane and automobile. At the
beginning of a more leisurely age stands the psychoanalyst Freud, who
clearly grasped much of the temporal disturbance, although he never
fathomed its cause. After him, the idea of the undermind becomes hazy
indeed.
"'Over the centuries, the human population itself drops, and the disturbing
truths of the undermind are almost buried, although occasional geniuses
suspect them, so that the fourth-century Augustine almost comes within
an ace of the reality.'
"Well, my friends, such is the matter briefly. I've given it to you without
much of a how and certainly no 'why,' but I know it is appalling and
indigestible stuff. Before we go any farther, perhaps you would like to ask
me some questions."
Silverstone had risen to address his four companions, who had as
instinctively settled themselves down among the cryptic gray forms,
looking upwards into his face as they listened. When he fell silent,
they all dropped their gaze to the ambiguous rock.
Howes was first to speak. He gave a husky stage laugh and said, "So we
rescued you so that you could tell the world that we've had time back
to front all these years."
"Correct. Both Bolt and Gleason want me out of the way."
"Well, it's certainly a theory to overthrow just about any government
you care to name. But this St. Augustine, he was just a nut-case,
wasn't he?" And he laughed again. Bush thought that this remark of Howes
showed a certain coarse limitation of his mind. But, as interpreters of
Silverstone's discovery, he and Borrow would have to overcome precisely
that sort of limitation. His mind ran lightly over the new prospects;
they were not alien to him, and he realized with a tremor that in his
own thinking the prospect of time and life flowing backwards had not
been without a place. He would have to put himself intellectually on
the professor's side, to help him gain the credence and comprehension
of the others.