Cryptozoic! (4 page)
Authors: Brian Aldiss
"Current theory suggests that man first became Homo sapiens when he put
a ban on -- well, let's call it endogamy, the custom forbidding marriage
outside the familial group. Exogamy was man's very first painful step
forward. No other animal puts a ban on endogamy."
"Was it worth it!" Ann exclaimed.
"Well, since then man has become all the things we know he has become,
conqueror of his environment and all that, but his severance with nature
has seemed to grow wider and wider -- I mean with his true nature.
"The way the Wenlockians see it, the undermind is, as it were, our old
natural mind. The overmind is a later, Homo sap accretion, a high-powered
dynamo whose main function is to structure time and conceal all the sad
animal thoughts in the undermind. The extremists claim that passing time
is an invention of the overmind."
Perhaps she was not listening. She said, "You know why I followed you
yesterday? I had the strongest feeling directly you appeared that you
and I had -- known each other terribly well at some past time."
"I'd have remembered you!"
"It must have been my undermind playing up! Anyhow, what you were saying
was very interesting. I suppose you believe it, do you?"
He laughed. "How can you not believe it? We're here in the Devonian,
aren't we?"
"But if the undermind governs mind-travel, and the undermind's crazy
about incest, then surely we should be able to visit times near at hand,
early in our own century, for instance -- so that we could see what
our own parents and grandparents got up to. That would be the most
interesting thing, wouldn't it? But it's much easier to mind, back here,
to the earliest ages of the world, and to get back to when there were
any humans at all is very difficult. Impossible for most of us."
"That's so, but it doesn't prove what you think. If you think of the
space-time universe as being an enormous entropy-slope, with the true
present always at the point of highest energy and the farthest past at
the lowest, then obviously as soon as our minds are free of passing time,
they will fall backwards towards that lowest point, and the nearer to
the highest point we return, the harder will be the journey."
Ann said nothing. Bush thought it likely that she had already dismissed
the subject as impossible of discussion, but after a moment she said,
"You know what you said about the real me being good and loving? Supposing
there is such a person, is she in my over- or my undermind?"
"Supposing, as you say, there is such a person, she must be an amalgamation
of both. Anything less than the whole cannot be whole."
"Now you're trying to talk theology again, aren't you?"
"Probably." They both laughed. He felt almost gay. He loved arguing,
particularly when he could argue on the obsessive topic of the structure
of the mind.
If they were going to mind again, now was clearly the time to do it,
while they were in some sort of accord. Mind-travel was never easy,
and the passage could be rough if one was emotionally upset.
They packed their bags and strapped their few possessions to themselves.
Then they linked themselves together, arm in arm; otherwise, there was no
guarantee they would not arrive a few million years and several hundred
miles apart from each other.
They broke open their drug packs. The CSD came in little ampoules, clear,
almost colorless. Held up to the wide Paleozoic sky, Bush's ampoule
showed slightly green between his fingers. They looked at each other;
Ann pulled a face and they made the jab together.
Bush felt the crypotic acid run warm in his veins. The liquid was a symbol
of the hydrosphere, sacrificial wine to represent the oceans from which
life had come, oceans that still washed in the arteries of man, oceans
that still regulated and made habitable his external world, oceans
that still provided food and climate, oceans that were the blood of
the biosphere.
And he himself was a biosphere, containing all the fossil lives and ideas
of his ancestors, containing other life forms, containing countless untold
possibilities, containing life and death.
He was an analogue of the world; through the CSD, he could translate
from one form to the other.
Only in that transitional state, as the drug took effect, could one
begin to grasp the nature of the minute energy-duration disturbance
that the Solar System represented. That system, a bubble within a sea of
cosmic forces, was part of a meta-structure that was boundless but not
infinite with respect to both time and space. And this banal fact had
only become astonishing to man because man had shut himself off from it,
had shielded his mind from the immensity of it as the ionosphere round
his planet shielded him from harmful radiations, had lost that knowledge,
had defended himself from that knowledge with the concept of passing
time, which managed to make the universe tolerable by cutting off --
not only the immense size of it, as recent generations had rediscovered
-- but the immense time of it. Immense time had been chopped into
tiny wriggling fragments that man could deal with, could trap with
sundials, sandglasses, pocketwatches, grandfather clocks, chronometers,
which succeeded generation by generation in shaving time down finer and
finer, smaller and smaller . . . until the obsessive nature of the whole
procedure had been recognized, and Wenlock and his fellow workers blew
the gaff on the whole conspiracy.
But the conspiracy had been necessary. Without it, unsheltered from the
blind desert of space-time, man would still be with the other animals,
wandering in tribes by the rim of the echoing Quaternary seas. Or so
the theory went. At least it was clear there had been a conspiracy.
Now the shield was down. The complexities of the cerebrum and cerebellum
were naked to the co-continuous universe: and were devouring all they
came across.
Minding was a momentary process. It looked easy, although there was
rigorous training behind it. As the CSD tilted their metabolisms, Bush
and Ann went into the discipline -- that formula the Institute had devised
for guiding them through the prohibitions of the human mind. The Devonian
dissolved now, appearing to be a huge marching creature of duration,
with spatial characteristics serving simply as an exoskeleton. Bush
opened his mouth to laugh, but no sound came. In the exhilaration of
travel, one lost most physical characteristics. Everything seemed to go,
except the sense of direction. It was like swimming against a current; the
difficult way was towards one's own "present"; to drift into the remote
past was relatively easy -- and led to eventual death by suffocation,
as many had found. If a foetus in the womb were granted the ability to
mind-travel, it would be faced with much the same situation: either to
battle forward to the climactic moment of birth, or to sink easefully
back to the final -- or was it first? -- moment of non-existence.
He was not aware of duration, nor of the pulse within him that served
as his chronometer. In a strange hypnoid state, he felt only a sense
of being near to a great body of reality that seemed to bear as much
kinship to God as to Earth. And he caught himself trying to laugh again.
Then the laughter died, and he felt he was in flight. Ages rolled below
him like night. He was aware of the discomfort of having someone with
him -- and then he and Ann were surrounded by a dark green world and
reality as it was generally experienced was about them again.
Jurassic reality.
Chapter 3
AT THE SIGN OF THE AMNIOTE EGG
Bush had never liked the Jurassic. It was too hot and cloudy, and reminded
him of one long and miserable day in his childhood when, caught doing
something innocently naughty, he had been shut out in the garden all day
by his mother. It had been cloudy that day too, with the heat so heavy
the butterflies had hardly been able to fly above flower-top level.
Ann let go of him and stretched. They had materialized beside a dead tree.
Its bare shining arms were like a reproof to the girl; Bush realized
for the first time what a slut she was, how dirty and unkempt, and
wondered why it did not alter what he felt about her -- whatever that
might precisely be.
Not speaking, they moved forward, full of the sense of disorientation
that always followed mind-travel. There was no rational way of knowing
whereabouts or whenabouts on Earth they were; yet an irrational part of
the undermind knew, and would gradually come through with the information.
It, after all, had brought them here, and presumably for purposes of
its own.
They were in the foot-hills of mountains on which jungle rioted. Halfway
up the mountain slopes, the clouds licked away everything from sight.
All was still; the foliage about them seemed frozen in a long Mesozoic hush.
"We'd better move down into the plain," Bush said. "This is the place
we want, I think. I have friends here, the Borrows."
"They live here, you mean?"
"They run a store. Roger Borrow used to be an artist. His wife's nice."
"Will I like them?"
"I shouldn't think so."
He started walking. Not knowing clearly what he felt about Ann, be thought
that presenting her to Roger and Ver might cement a relationship he did
not want. Ann watched him for a while and then followed. The Jurassic
was about the most boring place to be alone in ever devised.
With their packs on their backs, they spent most of the day climbing
downwards. It was not easy because they could never see their footholds;
they were walled off completely from the reality all round them. They were
spectres, unable to alter by the slightest degree the humblest appurtenances
of this world -- unable to kick the smallest pebble out of the way --
unless it was that by haunting it they altered the charisma of the place.
Only the air-leakers gave them some slight bond with actuality, by drawing
their air requirements through the invisible wall of time-entropy about them.
The level of the generalized floor on which they trod was sometimes below
the "present" level of the ground, so that they trudged along up to their
spectral knees in the dirt; or at another time they appeared to be stepping
on air.
In the forest, they were able to walk straight through the trees.
But an occasional tree would stop them; they felt it as a marshmallowy
presence and had to go round it; for its lifespan would be long enough --
it would survive the hazards of life long enough -- to create a shadowy
obstruction in their path.
When sunset was drawing near, Bush stopped and pitched his tent, pumping
until it struggled into position. He and the girl ate together, and then
he washed himself rather ostentatiously as they prepared for sleep.
"Don't you ever wash?" he asked.
"Sometimes. I suppose you wash to please yourself?"
"Who else?"
"I stay grubby to please myself."
"It must be some sort of neurosis."
"Yes. Probably it's because it always annoys clean blighters like you."
He sat down by her and looked into her face. "You really want to annoy
people, do you? Why? Is it because you think it's good for them? Or good
for you?"
"Maybe it's because I've given up hoping to please them."
"I've always thought people were on the whole pathetically easy to please."
Later, when he recalled that fragment of conversation, he was annoyed that
he had not paid more attention to her remark; undoubtedly it offered
an insight into Ann's behavior, and perhaps a clue as to how she could
best be treated. But by that time he had come to the conclusion that for
all her prickliness she was a girl one could genuinely converse with --
and she was gone.
He was wrong in any case to challenge her after she had gone through a
tiring day so uncomplainingly; even the Dark Woman had faded off duty.
He woke next morning to find Ann still asleep, and staggered out to look
at the dawn. It was like a dream to climb from bed and find the great
overloaded landscape outside; but the dream was capable of sustaining
itself for millions of years. A million years . . . perhaps by a scale
of values of which mankind might one day be master, a million years
would be seen as more meaningless, more of a trifle, than a second.
In the same way, not one of these dawns could have as much effect on him
as the most insignificant remark Ann might drop.
As they were packing up to move on, she asked him again if he was going
to do a groupage of her. Bush was glad of even uninformed interest in
his work.
"I'm looking for something new to do. I'm at a block -- it's a familiar
thing for creative artists. Suddenly human consciousness is lumbered with
this entirely new time structure, and I want to reflect it as best I can
in my creative work -- without just doing an illustration, if you understand.
But I can't begin, can't begin to begin."
"Are you going to do a groupage of me?"
"I just told you: no. Groupages aren't portraits of particular people."
"They're abstracts, I gather?"
"You don't know J. M. W. Turner's work, do you? Ever since his day --
he was an early Victorian -- we've had technical ways of reproducing
the forms of nature. Abstracts reproduce forms of ideas; and, for all
our computers, only man can make abstracts."
"I love computer-pictures."
"I hate them. My spatial-kinetic groupages try to . . . oh, identify the
spirit of a moment, an age. Sometimes, I used to work in mirror-glass --
then everyone saw a SKG differently, with fragments of their own features
lurking over it. That's the way we see the universe. There's no such
thing as an objective view of the universe -- ever think of that? Our
features look back at us from every quarter."
"Are you, religious, Bush?"
He shook his head and stood up slowly, looking away from her. "I wish I
were religious. My father, he's a dentist, he's a religious man. . . .
Yet sometimes, when I was successful, when the ideas were really pouring
out of my fingers, doing my best SKGs, I knew I had a bit of God in me."
At the mention of God, they both became self-conscious. As he helped Ann
up, Bush said in curt, workaday tones, "So you don't know Turner's work?"
That closed the subject.
Not until the afternoon, as they were coming down onto the plains,
did they see the first creatures of the plains, sporting in a valley.
Instinct asserting itself, Bush's impulse was to watch them from behind
a tree. Then he recalled they were less than ghosts to these bulky
creatures, and walked out into the open towards them. Ann followed.
a ban on -- well, let's call it endogamy, the custom forbidding marriage
outside the familial group. Exogamy was man's very first painful step
forward. No other animal puts a ban on endogamy."
"Was it worth it!" Ann exclaimed.
"Well, since then man has become all the things we know he has become,
conqueror of his environment and all that, but his severance with nature
has seemed to grow wider and wider -- I mean with his true nature.
"The way the Wenlockians see it, the undermind is, as it were, our old
natural mind. The overmind is a later, Homo sap accretion, a high-powered
dynamo whose main function is to structure time and conceal all the sad
animal thoughts in the undermind. The extremists claim that passing time
is an invention of the overmind."
Perhaps she was not listening. She said, "You know why I followed you
yesterday? I had the strongest feeling directly you appeared that you
and I had -- known each other terribly well at some past time."
"I'd have remembered you!"
"It must have been my undermind playing up! Anyhow, what you were saying
was very interesting. I suppose you believe it, do you?"
He laughed. "How can you not believe it? We're here in the Devonian,
aren't we?"
"But if the undermind governs mind-travel, and the undermind's crazy
about incest, then surely we should be able to visit times near at hand,
early in our own century, for instance -- so that we could see what
our own parents and grandparents got up to. That would be the most
interesting thing, wouldn't it? But it's much easier to mind, back here,
to the earliest ages of the world, and to get back to when there were
any humans at all is very difficult. Impossible for most of us."
"That's so, but it doesn't prove what you think. If you think of the
space-time universe as being an enormous entropy-slope, with the true
present always at the point of highest energy and the farthest past at
the lowest, then obviously as soon as our minds are free of passing time,
they will fall backwards towards that lowest point, and the nearer to
the highest point we return, the harder will be the journey."
Ann said nothing. Bush thought it likely that she had already dismissed
the subject as impossible of discussion, but after a moment she said,
"You know what you said about the real me being good and loving? Supposing
there is such a person, is she in my over- or my undermind?"
"Supposing, as you say, there is such a person, she must be an amalgamation
of both. Anything less than the whole cannot be whole."
"Now you're trying to talk theology again, aren't you?"
"Probably." They both laughed. He felt almost gay. He loved arguing,
particularly when he could argue on the obsessive topic of the structure
of the mind.
If they were going to mind again, now was clearly the time to do it,
while they were in some sort of accord. Mind-travel was never easy,
and the passage could be rough if one was emotionally upset.
They packed their bags and strapped their few possessions to themselves.
Then they linked themselves together, arm in arm; otherwise, there was no
guarantee they would not arrive a few million years and several hundred
miles apart from each other.
They broke open their drug packs. The CSD came in little ampoules, clear,
almost colorless. Held up to the wide Paleozoic sky, Bush's ampoule
showed slightly green between his fingers. They looked at each other;
Ann pulled a face and they made the jab together.
Bush felt the crypotic acid run warm in his veins. The liquid was a symbol
of the hydrosphere, sacrificial wine to represent the oceans from which
life had come, oceans that still washed in the arteries of man, oceans
that still regulated and made habitable his external world, oceans
that still provided food and climate, oceans that were the blood of
the biosphere.
And he himself was a biosphere, containing all the fossil lives and ideas
of his ancestors, containing other life forms, containing countless untold
possibilities, containing life and death.
He was an analogue of the world; through the CSD, he could translate
from one form to the other.
Only in that transitional state, as the drug took effect, could one
begin to grasp the nature of the minute energy-duration disturbance
that the Solar System represented. That system, a bubble within a sea of
cosmic forces, was part of a meta-structure that was boundless but not
infinite with respect to both time and space. And this banal fact had
only become astonishing to man because man had shut himself off from it,
had shielded his mind from the immensity of it as the ionosphere round
his planet shielded him from harmful radiations, had lost that knowledge,
had defended himself from that knowledge with the concept of passing
time, which managed to make the universe tolerable by cutting off --
not only the immense size of it, as recent generations had rediscovered
-- but the immense time of it. Immense time had been chopped into
tiny wriggling fragments that man could deal with, could trap with
sundials, sandglasses, pocketwatches, grandfather clocks, chronometers,
which succeeded generation by generation in shaving time down finer and
finer, smaller and smaller . . . until the obsessive nature of the whole
procedure had been recognized, and Wenlock and his fellow workers blew
the gaff on the whole conspiracy.
But the conspiracy had been necessary. Without it, unsheltered from the
blind desert of space-time, man would still be with the other animals,
wandering in tribes by the rim of the echoing Quaternary seas. Or so
the theory went. At least it was clear there had been a conspiracy.
Now the shield was down. The complexities of the cerebrum and cerebellum
were naked to the co-continuous universe: and were devouring all they
came across.
Minding was a momentary process. It looked easy, although there was
rigorous training behind it. As the CSD tilted their metabolisms, Bush
and Ann went into the discipline -- that formula the Institute had devised
for guiding them through the prohibitions of the human mind. The Devonian
dissolved now, appearing to be a huge marching creature of duration,
with spatial characteristics serving simply as an exoskeleton. Bush
opened his mouth to laugh, but no sound came. In the exhilaration of
travel, one lost most physical characteristics. Everything seemed to go,
except the sense of direction. It was like swimming against a current; the
difficult way was towards one's own "present"; to drift into the remote
past was relatively easy -- and led to eventual death by suffocation,
as many had found. If a foetus in the womb were granted the ability to
mind-travel, it would be faced with much the same situation: either to
battle forward to the climactic moment of birth, or to sink easefully
back to the final -- or was it first? -- moment of non-existence.
He was not aware of duration, nor of the pulse within him that served
as his chronometer. In a strange hypnoid state, he felt only a sense
of being near to a great body of reality that seemed to bear as much
kinship to God as to Earth. And he caught himself trying to laugh again.
Then the laughter died, and he felt he was in flight. Ages rolled below
him like night. He was aware of the discomfort of having someone with
him -- and then he and Ann were surrounded by a dark green world and
reality as it was generally experienced was about them again.
Jurassic reality.
Chapter 3
AT THE SIGN OF THE AMNIOTE EGG
Bush had never liked the Jurassic. It was too hot and cloudy, and reminded
him of one long and miserable day in his childhood when, caught doing
something innocently naughty, he had been shut out in the garden all day
by his mother. It had been cloudy that day too, with the heat so heavy
the butterflies had hardly been able to fly above flower-top level.
Ann let go of him and stretched. They had materialized beside a dead tree.
Its bare shining arms were like a reproof to the girl; Bush realized
for the first time what a slut she was, how dirty and unkempt, and
wondered why it did not alter what he felt about her -- whatever that
might precisely be.
Not speaking, they moved forward, full of the sense of disorientation
that always followed mind-travel. There was no rational way of knowing
whereabouts or whenabouts on Earth they were; yet an irrational part of
the undermind knew, and would gradually come through with the information.
It, after all, had brought them here, and presumably for purposes of
its own.
They were in the foot-hills of mountains on which jungle rioted. Halfway
up the mountain slopes, the clouds licked away everything from sight.
All was still; the foliage about them seemed frozen in a long Mesozoic hush.
"We'd better move down into the plain," Bush said. "This is the place
we want, I think. I have friends here, the Borrows."
"They live here, you mean?"
"They run a store. Roger Borrow used to be an artist. His wife's nice."
"Will I like them?"
"I shouldn't think so."
He started walking. Not knowing clearly what he felt about Ann, be thought
that presenting her to Roger and Ver might cement a relationship he did
not want. Ann watched him for a while and then followed. The Jurassic
was about the most boring place to be alone in ever devised.
With their packs on their backs, they spent most of the day climbing
downwards. It was not easy because they could never see their footholds;
they were walled off completely from the reality all round them. They were
spectres, unable to alter by the slightest degree the humblest appurtenances
of this world -- unable to kick the smallest pebble out of the way --
unless it was that by haunting it they altered the charisma of the place.
Only the air-leakers gave them some slight bond with actuality, by drawing
their air requirements through the invisible wall of time-entropy about them.
The level of the generalized floor on which they trod was sometimes below
the "present" level of the ground, so that they trudged along up to their
spectral knees in the dirt; or at another time they appeared to be stepping
on air.
In the forest, they were able to walk straight through the trees.
But an occasional tree would stop them; they felt it as a marshmallowy
presence and had to go round it; for its lifespan would be long enough --
it would survive the hazards of life long enough -- to create a shadowy
obstruction in their path.
When sunset was drawing near, Bush stopped and pitched his tent, pumping
until it struggled into position. He and the girl ate together, and then
he washed himself rather ostentatiously as they prepared for sleep.
"Don't you ever wash?" he asked.
"Sometimes. I suppose you wash to please yourself?"
"Who else?"
"I stay grubby to please myself."
"It must be some sort of neurosis."
"Yes. Probably it's because it always annoys clean blighters like you."
He sat down by her and looked into her face. "You really want to annoy
people, do you? Why? Is it because you think it's good for them? Or good
for you?"
"Maybe it's because I've given up hoping to please them."
"I've always thought people were on the whole pathetically easy to please."
Later, when he recalled that fragment of conversation, he was annoyed that
he had not paid more attention to her remark; undoubtedly it offered
an insight into Ann's behavior, and perhaps a clue as to how she could
best be treated. But by that time he had come to the conclusion that for
all her prickliness she was a girl one could genuinely converse with --
and she was gone.
He was wrong in any case to challenge her after she had gone through a
tiring day so uncomplainingly; even the Dark Woman had faded off duty.
He woke next morning to find Ann still asleep, and staggered out to look
at the dawn. It was like a dream to climb from bed and find the great
overloaded landscape outside; but the dream was capable of sustaining
itself for millions of years. A million years . . . perhaps by a scale
of values of which mankind might one day be master, a million years
would be seen as more meaningless, more of a trifle, than a second.
In the same way, not one of these dawns could have as much effect on him
as the most insignificant remark Ann might drop.
As they were packing up to move on, she asked him again if he was going
to do a groupage of her. Bush was glad of even uninformed interest in
his work.
"I'm looking for something new to do. I'm at a block -- it's a familiar
thing for creative artists. Suddenly human consciousness is lumbered with
this entirely new time structure, and I want to reflect it as best I can
in my creative work -- without just doing an illustration, if you understand.
But I can't begin, can't begin to begin."
"Are you going to do a groupage of me?"
"I just told you: no. Groupages aren't portraits of particular people."
"They're abstracts, I gather?"
"You don't know J. M. W. Turner's work, do you? Ever since his day --
he was an early Victorian -- we've had technical ways of reproducing
the forms of nature. Abstracts reproduce forms of ideas; and, for all
our computers, only man can make abstracts."
"I love computer-pictures."
"I hate them. My spatial-kinetic groupages try to . . . oh, identify the
spirit of a moment, an age. Sometimes, I used to work in mirror-glass --
then everyone saw a SKG differently, with fragments of their own features
lurking over it. That's the way we see the universe. There's no such
thing as an objective view of the universe -- ever think of that? Our
features look back at us from every quarter."
"Are you, religious, Bush?"
He shook his head and stood up slowly, looking away from her. "I wish I
were religious. My father, he's a dentist, he's a religious man. . . .
Yet sometimes, when I was successful, when the ideas were really pouring
out of my fingers, doing my best SKGs, I knew I had a bit of God in me."
At the mention of God, they both became self-conscious. As he helped Ann
up, Bush said in curt, workaday tones, "So you don't know Turner's work?"
That closed the subject.
Not until the afternoon, as they were coming down onto the plains,
did they see the first creatures of the plains, sporting in a valley.
Instinct asserting itself, Bush's impulse was to watch them from behind
a tree. Then he recalled they were less than ghosts to these bulky
creatures, and walked out into the open towards them. Ann followed.
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