Seeking the Mythical Future (11 page)

Dr Black had pondered the meaning of the phrase which Q had uttered during his seizure, but if it meant anything at all it was lost on him. He felt better this morning, his depression had lifted and he no longer – for the time being – feared the guards or was too perturbed about the arrival of the
Torremolinos
in Australasia.

After breakfast he sat beneath the subdued canaries on the saloon deck and leafed through the Medikal Direktory he always carried with him. It listed four main causes of seizure: apoplexy, dementia, epilepsy and poisoning of the bloodstream. Any of these might have been the cause, there was no way of knowing, and even with the necessary instruments it was largely a matter of personal interpretation. What one doktor
might have diagnosed as dementia another could just as easily and with as much reason have classified as epilepsy. Providing the explanation sounded logikal and didn't conflict with the prevailing Authority directive it would be accepted without question.

The phrase still bothered him – ‘There shall be time no longer'. There shall be time no longer for what? he asked himself. Was time running out and, if so, who for? For the patient? Black could only suppose that at last Q was beginning to realize what lay in store for him, had woken up to the cold unpalatable fact that Psy-Con was a place from which no one ever returned.

Black looked around him. He regretted that there were no females on board: he was dying for a quick thrust and a poke. Since Sarah had ceased to be available he had cojoined on several occasions with Miss Jardine, the large-busted blonde receptionist (once underneath his desk among the rat droppings while the Registrar hammered impotently on the door); and he was feeling the pain of withdrawal quite acutely. But until landfall there was nothing to be done. In lieu of anything better he would have to settle for his nightly handslide and like it.

A glass tipped over and rolled off the table. The airship had tilted – or the gondola itself had swung askew under a sudden gust of wind. The bamboo cages rocked in unison and set the canaries off to a burst of shrill twittering. The First Officer appeared, treading cautiously between the tables, and assured everyone that there was no cause for alarm. In these latitudes, he explained, the thermal currents were unpredictable and sometimes upset the trim. Everything was under control.

As he said this, there was a violent shudder followed by a wild swaying motion which upset more glasses and sent them tumbling to the deck. ‘We're re-aligning the trim,' said the First Officer with a brave smile. ‘Please don't be alarmed.'

‘Progress has its price,' Black observed, and the First Officer gave him a dark look.

Then the airship seemed to right itself and sailed on as calmly as before. It had been a meteorological aberration, nothing more. They were due to sight the northern coastline of Australasia later in the day, and following that there would be
two days of overland flight before berthing at the reception centre, situated in the Eastern Province.

At noon they passed over the mangrove swamps at a height of fifteen hundred feet. What lay ahead was barren desert baking in the heat of a relatively cool 107 degrees, inhabited only by scorpions, centipedes, two-headed King snakes and, further inland, the high-security settlements surrounded by wire enclosures and the alligator pits. The alligators were sunning themselves in the ooze, their wide flat bodies flaked with dried grey mud. Black had the patient brought to the observation porch, and together they gazed out on the mile after mile of single-storey wooden huts laid in symmetrical blocks of eight stretching away as far as the eye could see.

‘This is the High Intensity Complex,' Black explained. ‘Once you arrive here you never get out. Everyone sent here is a terminal case.'

‘They're dangerous people, are they?' Q inquired, as if out of polite interest.

‘Very dangerous.'

'Violent?'

Black looked surprised. ‘Of course they're not violent. In any case, violence isn't a crime. It's their thoughts which are dangerous: non-associative, subversive, against the King, the State, the Authority. If these people were allowed to roam freely, to think and do as they wished, they would be a disruptive influence on society. We can't allow that. We're entering an age of great scientific progress, the Mekanikal Era some call it, and these people want to wreck and destroy it.'

‘In what way?' Q was curious.

‘In any way they can,' Black said vehemently. ‘The facts are well documented. That's why the Royal Charter was issued which directs the MDA to find some effective means of control and stamp down hard on the reversionaries before they get out of hand.'

‘Am I such a threat?' Q asked in mild surprise.

‘You must see that you are.' Black was deeply intense when he had a point to get across. He became feverish and lightheaded, his eyes rolled about in his small dark face and he
lisped breathlessly. He rushed on, ‘Anyone outside the norm cannot be tolerated for obvious reasons. You either adhere to the rule of Logik or you must accept the consequences; there is no middle course. You – by your appearance, your conduct, your thought processes – are a million miles away from the norm and therefore constitute a threat. There is no alternative but Psy-Con.'

Q looked down on the huts, the wire enclosures, the alligator pits. The vast black shadow of the airship moved across like a dark stain soaking into the landscape, blotting out the sun in a brief man-made eclipse. In the distance the heat haze was a shimmering yellow fog, distorting the linear perspective and turning it into a complex fragmented display. The eye was deceived, confused and lost in the shifting patterns and indices of refraction. Anything approximating to life out there must needs have the mind of an ant and the metabolism of a reptile.

Black was jotting something down in his notebook. He looked up, preoccupied, and said, ‘Do you recall what happened last night? Can you remember any of it?'

‘Yes' Q said. ‘I remember everything.'

‘You had some sort of fit and apparently you were trying to say something, only the guards couldn't make head or tail of it. It struck me as being very similar to a state of galvanic shock.' Q gazed at him unblinkingly. He said, ‘There is a similarity between the two. It's caused by the neurons discharging an abnormally high amount of electrical energy into the cerebellum, which produces what you would probably describe as a brainstorm. The effects can vary but usually there's a seizure which results in convulsions, periods of staring, occasional babbling, uncontrollable rage and eventually unconsciousness.'

‘You know the symptoms very well,' Black said, leaning forward. ‘It isn't the first time this has happened to you.'

The patient smiled. ‘No, not the first.'

‘Does it happen very often?'

‘Now and then. Whenever I feel it's necessary.'

‘You can control it?' Black said, his dark eyebrows knitting together. ‘You can induce it yourself?'

‘Sometimes, yes. And other times it happens without my being aware of it; there is a measure of control.'

‘But how?' Black was engrossed. ‘What do you have to do?'

‘The methods are rather complex but the simplest way is by using a substance called Dilantin.'

‘I've never heard of it.'

‘I should be surprised if you had,' Q said, smiling again.

‘Oh, I see. Another of your mythic projections or whatever you call them. You spirit this make-believe substance out of thin air and swallow it down and it produces an imaginary effect.' He too was smiling, but tightly and without humour.

‘The effect isn't at all imaginary, as you've seen for yourself.'

‘Maybe,' Black said sceptically. ‘But I still don't see the point of it all. Supposing you can induce this condition, so what? I've seen patients have seizures before now, there's nothing too remarkable about that.'

‘To the observer that's perfectly true. But during the Peak Experience – or seizure, as you would call it – theta waves are produced. What you might describe as “mind stuff”.'

‘Go on,' said Black, the suspicion of a grin lurking at the corners of his mouth. ‘Tell me about “mind stuff”.'

‘“Mind stuff” is the fabric of spacetime—' Q said. He seemed to hold his breath for a moment, almost as if he had experienced a sudden pain.

‘What's the matter, cat got your tongue?' Black asked with a sneering grin.

Q didn't hear him. He said absently, ‘I didn't know any of this yesterday, nothing about neurons or Dilantin … I didn't know any of it.' He seemed lost, bemused.

‘You'll remember next how you came to be adrift in the ocean, no doubt,' said Black, snapping his notebook shut. ‘Any more imaginary leaps you'd like to get off your chest? Any more non-associative cod-laddle? There's no doubt about it, you're heading straight for the High Intensity Complex. Once they've rammed you through the screening process you'll be classified as a subversive risk, Grade A. Nothing I can do about it, not a thing. You've heard my advice to keep your mouth
shut, and yet you babble on like a loonie. Don't say I didn't warn you. I did my best. Don't say – Bladdering shtank!'

The patient was out of control. His limbs were jerking like rods and he was in danger of strangling himself with the noose. Black leaped forward and slackened it just as Q began to speak, the words coming out fast and low between the flecks of foam. The doktor, having no choice, listened.

5
Stasis

“The Scenario Planning Symposium was attended by over four hundred delegates from the fourteen planetary and planetoidal states, all of them in the related sciences of Myth Technology and
MetaPsychical Research
. The two sciences ran parallel in the pursuit of the same ultimate goal but were dissimilar in method and approach; on the one hand MetaPsychical Research (‘MetaPsychics' as the newsmedia called it, to the intense dislike of those involved) was concerned with establishing a
MetaPsychical Code
which would define the neurological connection between man's sensory perceptions and the physical nature of the universe. It was hoped that this would evolve into a pre-dictive as opposed to a post-dictive science, because without this capability the Myth Technologists would find themselves in the position of someone floundering around helplessly in a magnetic snowstorm.

Myth Technology was more into the field of practical investigation of the infinite series of mythical futures which were known to exist and not to exist at one and the same time – a paradox which could only be explained in terms of relativistic physics. Part of this work was the attempt to construct a Unified Psychic Field Theory which would relate all known psychic forces with the four prime energy sources of the Metagalaxy. In this there was an overlap with the MetaPsychical Code, which some Myth Technologists regarded as part of the Unified Psychic Field Theory; but where the two fields of study did come together was in the shared responsibility and enthusiasm for Project Tempus. It was a joint commitment which required the pooling of every resource, technical and financial, of the governmental agencies responsible for cosmological exploration.
The purpose of the Symposium was to assess the work done so far and to recommend the optimum critical path for further research; in practical terms it was the final meeting before Project Tempus moved from the realm of abstract speculation into the real world of hard uncompromising fact.

As Director of MyTT Johann Karve was there as the coordinating chairman and floor leader; Martin Brenton, architect of the cyberthetic Injection Vehicle, was also present, and so too was Karla Ritblat, who as head of the Psycho-Med Faculty had the final say in the selection of the injectee. Professor Milton Blake, the leading theorist in MetaPsychical Research, was there to present the latest conclusions in the contentious area of predictive technology; and one of the main talking points was his Paper
Concerning the Hypothesis of Determining Problematical Futures
. Everything depended, the Paper emphasized, on the injectee having the facility to project his thoughts on a consistent world-line through the spatio-temporal barrier; only then would it be possible to locate, identify and plot the injectee's world-point – in other words, home in and effect retrieval when necessary.

Another problem discussed in the Paper was that of
time dilation
,
^*
which was the effect experienced by anything of mass approaching the ergosphere of a Temporal Flux Centre. This meant that the injectee's time-scale would slow down almost to a stop; his ageing process would be practically negligible, while for those observing him (direct observation was in fact impossible) time would pass in the usual way. The problem – all too real as Blake had pointed out – was that the injectee, if and when he returned, would find himself several hundred, possibly several thousand years in the future. Everything and everyone he had known – his home, his family, his friends – would have been lost, gone forever in the mists of time; if he had a continuing line of descendants he would be able to shake the hand of his grandchild fifty, perhaps a hundred, generations removed from his own time. He would be condemned to the future, never able to return, except in the mythical sense.

Milton Blake was a lithe man with a handsome Negroid face and slim expressive hands. He smiled a good deal, and it was difficult to think of anyone he could not charm if he put his mind to it. Even Karla Ritblat couldn't help the occasional sidelong glance and tentative smile, a flush of colour in her hollow cheeks. Blake asked Queghan about his wife and the child they were expecting; how many children did they plan to have?

‘Maybe one will be enough to bust the stress rating.' Queghan said, which evoked laughter from the dozen or so people present. It was an informal group relaxing in one of the recreation rooms after a morning session.