Watson, Ian - SSC (20 page)

 
          
Well,
how long is their present? It’s hours— days!”

 
          
“You
mean they see into the future?”

 
          
“No!
Their present is
larger,
that’s all.
They’re only probably-here in our own specious present. Their probability of
being here oscillates in time, wherever they direct their attention—the same
way as the thing you’re looking at in your field of vision seems more real,
while you focus on it, though the rest’s still there. They’re like particles
with resonance peaks, Commander. They could be anywhere—any-time! They’re most
probable at certain times—though actually they spread over all the possible
timespan open to them. And we can feel this. Oh yes, we can feel it. Our
reality is dictated by them.”

 
          
“Ridiculous.
A being can’t shuttle about in time.”

 
          
“They
don’t shuttle. They extend over a longer period than we do. What the hell is
time, anyway? It’s only a way of relating events and measuring them. It doesn’t
exist on its own.”

 
          
“That
doesn’t explain how they could de-ink that water.”

 
          
“Yes,
it damn well does. Tracking backwards, from our point of view, they seem to influence
events towards previous states . . . They’re only really amplifying an earlier
bit of their own specious present, the way we focus more attention on an
object when we look at it; only the world isn’t made of objects, Commander,
it’s made of processes, events. We’re only observers spread out in space, but
they can be unobservers too— unobserving events happening, as they track

 
          
back
. Like the ink in the water. They didn’t de-ink it. I
inked it, actually, when we saw your little ship coming down.
As a demonstration.
They unobserved it for your benefit, to
show you. I loiew they would. We’re luckier than frogs. At least we can share
in their world a little. We see their
unobservations.
We see the ripples couverging on the pebble thrown in the pond. We see the
world fluctuating backwards and forwards. Children weren’t born to us after a
while . . . because the moment of conception becomes the
separating
of the sperm from the egg!”

 
          
“More
likely because they had the urge drained out of them,” I whispered to Commander
Marinetti.

 
          
“They
don’t hate us; they drew us here, to the center, to care for us, Commander! Oh,
it started about the second year, I guess.
Dreams first.
Our dreams running backwards . . . Have you ever dreamt backwards, Commander?
It’s much easier for them to influence a dream . . . Dreaming backwards was
just our preparation for the same thing happening in waking life. It was the
habituation of our minds to sense what they sense.”

 
          
“The
ink thing happened,” Resnick protested. “Look, I saw it happen. It did violate
thermodynamics!”

 
          
“No,
it was just one
way
of seeing what
happened, inside the span of a present that included the whole event. The world
stays conserved for them. They know much more about the workings of our minds
now. They’ve studied us.”

 
          
“So
they see things differently from us. Or so you say. How did this stop your
animals breeding?” demanded Marinetti, taking my point about the possible
psychological block in the colonists’ case.

 
          
“Ah,”
grinned Greenberg slyly, “there was no way of conceiving the world. So there
was no way of conceiving in it, either.”

 
          
“Those
are just words, man.”

 
          
Greenberg
cackled inanely. “Do you think we have the language for discussing this,
Commander? We’re like the frog’s eye and brain, built to notice something
utterly limited. Why do you suppose the word ‘conceive’ ties Thought and Life
together so neatly?”

 
          
“A
frog still lays eggs that hatch successfully, whatever
we
think of the universe, Mr. Greenberg.”

 
          
“Alas,
if only we were frogs then . . . We had some luck with the chickens for a time.
Even they were a shade too bright. Capable of being influenced ... Or maybe we
didn’t look after them properly, we had other things on our minds by then.”

 
          
That
was more likely, I thought! The Fairies had very effectively sabotaged our
settlers—by getting them to do it themselves!

 
          
Marinetti
looked close to tears; but he was drying them before an inner fire of angry
duty.

 
          
“I
expect you want to be evacuated, now?”

           
“Back to Earth?
To insane hospitals?
Oh no, this is our world. We live
here. We’re learning to know it. Know them. I realize that there won’t be any
kids to carry on the work . . .”

           
“What work?” sneered Marinetti.

 
          
“The work of learning, of course.”

 
          
“Learning
what?
To survive here?”

 
          
“No, you idiot, the work of finding out what this world is.
That’s all. We live here, don’t you see? We’ve been learning to understand too
long to give up now. Anyway, I’m sure they like us. Or the crops wouldn’t
thrive—”

 
          
“You’re
abject.”

 
          
“A
man has one life,
then
it ends. We have our lives to
lead, and finish them. Then the whole event will have taken place. We will have
seen it out. Don’t you realize,” Greenberg whispered urgently, “we will
have known the whole lifespan of Man on this world, when the last one of us
dies? The whole experience will have been acted out by us personally. We will
have shown them an event lasting fifty or sixty years and, what’s more, that we
are satisfied with this event! This will be our full true span of
knowledge—longer, far longer, than theirs! We’ll win, in dying.”

 
          
“It’s
dreadful,” murmured Marinetti. “We can’t take them back to Earth. They’re
aliens now. How can we leave them here, though, like this?” “You can leave us,”
shouted Greenberg, overhearing, “because we damn well
are
aliens. What did you expect, dumping us here? That you’d find a
world peopled with human beings? Now, Mister Commander, Sir, I have other
things to think about.
More important things.
You
caused a lot of upset, landing here again. You had no right to.” And off he
stalked.
And the other colonists too, leaving us alone to
find our own way back to the survey craft.

           
“We can’t evacuate them.
Definitely,” Marinetti told us as we walked out through the contemptible
mini-suburb. “We can’t take this absurd defeat back to Earth from the stars.”

 
          
“On
the other hand,” said Laura Philipson, “if any of
it’s
true, aren’t the aliens here terribly important? What are they?
How
are they? What do they mean? They
could change our whole concept structure. I feel . . . this may be the major
discovery of the whole journey. And the colonists are our only tool for
knowing. Oughtn’t
we
try to take them back for that
reason, whatever they wish? This mightn’t seem such a failure, then. This might
seem one of the great breakthroughs in our knowledge.”

 
          
I
myself nodded, half convinced. Because, frustrating, depressing, and damping of
all our hopes for a viable colony though this was, at least (and at last)
something out of the ordinary had happened. Almost, I thought bizarrely, worth
losing one world—to gain a whole unexpected dimension.

 
          
“We’ve
no way to force them, even if we wanted to,” Resnick retorted. “Besides, I
think it’s downright dangerous to stay here a moment longer than we have to.
We all saw that blob of ink return to its starting point, from inky water. We
saw it.
Us.
The new arrivals.
We can be influenced in a way we never were during all those months building
the colony originally. We’ve left our human ‘specimens’ here. The Fairies have
found out about us. If Greenberg’s telling the truth, they’ve i put us through
a rats’ maze, with walls made of time instead of space. It needs a separate
special scientific expedition, taking precautions we can’t take.”

 
          
“The
last colonist will be dead by the time that could get here,” argued Laura.
“Forty years’ experience wasted . . . what to do then? Plant another colony of
people and let them be affected like laboratory animals?
Hardly!”

 
          
Marinetti
looked frustrated, dried up; dehydrated of his hopes. But he refused to stay.
“The main thing is to take the facts back to Earth, not the casualties,” he
told us flatly, drably.

 
          
“It
isn’t so bad,” I reassured. “There’s the whole future. There’ll be star travel,
communication. This is only the first starship. The problem of Haven can wait
another hundred years, or a thousand years—if it has to. We’ll be back. Some
human beings will, that is. They’ll know what to expect.”

 
          
So
Laura flew our little ship back, up to Starseeder and we made ready to light
the fusion torch.

 
          
Fairies—or a fairy—on board
Starseede
r.
Can’t catch them, can’t even film them to prove it. Now you see them, now you
don’t. Even this isn’t true, since they aren’t completely present, riding their
wave of probability back and forth, dodging us, keeping their amplitude peaks
out of phase with our brief specious present. All the time they’re living
slightly in the past or future. They just ghost
via
us briefly, momentarily, yet not present enough to catch. Maybe
there’s only one that slipped on board the survey craft. How to tell?

 
          
One
is enough. Astrophysics reports ridiculous observations: quasars blue-shifting
towards us, as though the universe is contracting in on itself with us at the
center of focus. It can’t be the case, or the whole sky would be blazing with
inpouring radiation. And yet . . . perhaps it is . . . for microseconds? Some
sensors overload and burn out. Still, the quasar and far galaxy observations
aren’t constant—they fluctuate. We have to joke that a fairy is in the
equipment, and disregard them.

 
          
One
of the technicians puts a bowl of milk and a saucer of food scraps outside his
cabin door. He says he was figuring on a new improved fairy-trap. No sign of
the trap, though, only the bowl and the saucer. Marinetti reprimands him for
stupidity.
But in a kindly way.

 
          
Swanson,
Navigator-Astronomer, is blinded in one eye by a flaring up of light when he
looks through the optical scope for a star-fix. His skin is deeply sunburnt
around the eye. The retina is destroyed, burnt out. By all the light in the
universe, pouring inwards.

 
          
It cannot be that way.

 
          
We’ve
set our course, now, not by star-fix, but by computer course memory and
radio-maps.
Too risky to look outside directly.
Automating the op- ticals only results in equipment overloading,
even before dampers intervene.
If we didn’t know that the outside
termperature of space is still steady a shade above absolute zero, we might be
forgiven for assuming that the universe was in- j deed imploding in a storm of
light and radiation, from time to time, at random. As it is, we have to accept
that somehow we perceive the expansion of the universe in reverse, for brief
moments. Do our instruments really perceive this too? Or do we only perceive
them as doing it—while that Fairy is “unobserving” us? How was Swanson’s eye
burnt? Do we only hallucinate that it is burnt?

 
          
Critical
surges in the fusion drive, as it accelerates us to translight transition.
Impossible to hold the magnetic plasma steady when currents are liable to
alternate and fluctuate like this at random. We switch the drive off, having
only achieved one thousandth of light-speed, nowhere near to transition point.
Now we’re drifting, hopefully in the direction of Sol; though Sol will have
moved out of our path by the time we arrive there, approximately 8,000 years
from now at our present velocity. So we blend arsenic compounds in the lab and
put out other saucers and dishes of food and milk, doped with the poison. They
are accepted. Joy! The dishes are licked clean. Thank God for that.