Adrift in the Noösphere (19 page)

I am aghast at the hubris. “So we're...engineering infinity?”

“No,” he tells me, sharply. “Precisely not. We are nothing until we are observed by the universe. Infinity is engineering us.”

Amanda handed me an old musty suit and a cloth cap. Of course I had seen them before. The world shimmered slightly, as if it were uncertain of itself. Two youngsters came into the studio—oh, that's where I was—dressed in Depression era knickerbockers suitable for urchins. The younger boy pushed a flat, flexible machine under his gray shirt, and winked at me.

“You're sending yourself a message, Lee,” he said. “This is the moment we've all been waiting for.”

I sent my daughter out of the room and dressed, dazed. “Who is going to send the orphan film to me?” I said.

“The universe,” my ex-wife Bev told me at some time in the near future. She looked plumper, and a lot happier. Was she pregnant? Did the man pepper the planet with his offspring? “But I've found out who sent me that Rauschenberg, Lee, and I thank you. Of course, it will be a lot cheaper to buy it in 1951.”

The universe looked at me, and I looked back, and found myself blinking in bright snowless winter afternoon light in New York, an older New York with far fewer of the great mirroring skyscrapers that will someday be built. Were. Up ahead, I saw the Reverend ranting, and I strolled past. Some nameless amateur cinematographer was cranking a Ciné-Kodak, and as I passed him I remembered the kid's cheeky wink and slipped the fellow one of my own. The two boys were horsing about, an irritated old geezer slapped out with his cane, but Krastio, the younger, had his eye focused on the middle distance. An intent, lovely woman in a long dowdy 1930s dress appeared out of nowhere at the entrance to a laneway. Quantum tunneled, I suppose Tzvetan would call it. Nobody but the younger boy and I saw her, except everyone and everything, forever. Krastio yelled out hoarsely to Ivaylo, “Your mother's at teh—begin time slot.” He pulled out his display and flashed a page of equations to the rolling film. I walked briskly past, and took Radka's hand. The universe observed us in silence amid the rumbling noise of the city.

All My Yesterdays

“My advice to you,” said the psychiatrist,
tapping his fingers on the polished top of his
desk while he stared at the voluptuous Tiepolo
on the far wall, “is a stiff dose of fornication.”

The small man shook his head.
“I'm sorry, but God won't allow it.”

The psychiatrist injected a healthy trace of skeptic
ism and a touch of contempt into his benign smile.
He was a florid man with painted toes and he smoked
a hashish stick in a manner at once debonair and
disarming.
“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.” The little man was respectfully firm.

Behind his desk, in his huge wicker chair, the psy­
chiatrist seemed lost in thought. He gently stroked a
large phallic symbol with his thumb.

“Why are you sure?” he asked at last. “How do
you know that your belief in God is not the result of
childhood indoctrination, or perhaps a masochistic
frustration symbol, or even an expression of every
man's hopeless yearning for happiness?” He was con­
fident, brimming over with bonhomie, and the hook
was twice as alluring in its naked openness. The little
man was not deceived.

“I have lived long enough to know there is a God.
He stops me from doing things I want to do. He lets
me do things I don't want to do—and His permission amounts to an order. Oh, I know He's there all right
and He has forbidden fornication.”

The florid man had seized the cogent point, and
clung to it.

“Then you still insist that you arc thousands of years
old.
Surely this seems odd to you. Other people
never live much beyond a hundred.
How many thousand years did you say you've been
alive?”

The little man lost his composure,
He was a neat little man, and did not look to be thou­
sands of years old.

“This is the problem, of course. I can't remember.
I only recall flashes, not only déjà vu but genuine
memories. When I check
old records, I invariably prove
correct. Sometimes more correct
, as investigation has shown in a couple of cases.
But I keep forgetting things. In a fortnight's time I
probably won't remember coming to you but if I see
another psychiatrist I'll have an uneasy feeling
I've done it before. To tell the truth, I have that
uneasy feeling now.”

He shifted in the air cushions
of the couch, and snapped his mouth shut.
.

The florid man
sucked smoke out of the stick, dribbled
it into the air, and ogled the Rabelaisian painting on
the far wall.

“Your problem,” he said, quietly, sanely, the wild
good humor of a perfectly balanced individual skim­
ming just beneath the surface of his words, “is sexual.
Which is why I suggested a sexual remedy. You quite
obviously hated your parents. This is nothing to be
ashamed of. It's part of the evolutionary progress.
Indeed I believe your St. Paul advises quite strongly
to cast off the old man. In your case you have taken
a path of least resistance and forgotten your parents,
at the same time placing yourself in loco parentis by
devising snatches of imaginary memories which would
make you older than your parents.”

A lesser man would have sat back with a beam of
self-congratulation, but the psychiatrist merely shifted
his gaze to a voluptuously painted breast and chewed
on his hashish slick.

The little man sighed sadly, and strangely enough
the sigh did sound
like the gusting
of an ancient wind,
dry and stale and sad across a couple of thousand
years. He pulled himself to a sitting position,
considerably buffeted in the process by the pneumatic
couch as its internal stresses rippled the couch in an
exhibition of dynamic forces. Heavier men had been
ruffled in the past by the behavior of the couch, and
the little man was no exception. Flustered, he jumped to his feet
and
waved his check book helplessly. The
psychiatrist's look was calculating, and a trifle tired,
and he made no attempt to take advantage of the little
man's embarrassment.

“All right, then, you're the paying customer.” The hashish stick had vanished, and the florid man peered
over plump joined fingers. “If you don't agree with
my diagnosis, that's your privilege—and your loss.
The only thing I can suggest if you really are set
against fornication is a spot of fishing. It's the second-
best thing for washing away those nasty pent-up pre­
natal emotions. The receptionist will take the check.
Good afternoon and a cheery fixation.”

The polished maple door was open, the psychiatrist
was standing beside it, teeth bared and hand extend­
ed, and in a scuttling moment the little man was borne into the receptionist's office. Behind her desk she was wide and white-clad and motherly, and the little man
almost waited to be picked up by the hind legs and smacked. His eyes closed, his
throat moved convulsively, his signature formed on the
blank
check
, and he fled.

Outside in the street the bright sunlight baffled his
eyes. Incredible memories jumped in his
mind, shouting a loud negative to the psychiatrist's
forceful facile answers. The little man was tossed
and pushed by the eddying currents of humanity about
him, but he was oblivious to the smart people and
their towering skyscrapers and their ephemeral worries. V
isions, sounds and smells swirled in his
mind as the crowd carried him to the subway. Auto
matically, he dropped his coin,
passed through a turnstile.
His feet took him to the fifty-mile-per-hour strip and
he stood submerged in the mass of people about him, swarming in their multitude.

But he was no longer in the bustle of the twenty-first
century. The myriad worlds of memory stood at his
feet, and he trod them like a weary disillusioned god.
Again, he walked along the great stone quays of
Byblos, smelled the exotic odors of spices as heavy-
limbed slaves unloaded them, caught his foot on a huge roughly hewn plank of cedar from Lebanon,
cursed as a sweating soldier butted him with the haft
of a short spear.

He gazed across the swelling storm waters of an
unpredictable Mediterranean, sweltered in the flap­
ping shade of a great white mainmast, fearful of the
straining and grinding of the yard high above him.

He sat at the crude table of a monastery refectory,
daintily picking at his food while the vulgar oafs
around him wolfed down their meat with their hands
and belched after their swill of wine.

He stood in one corner of a vast, elegant, over-
decorated Victorian drawing room, listening to a dandy
sweep delicate white hands over ivory keys in a
startlingly poignant evocation of Chopin's Études.

The memories brought little satisfaction. In the
blurred world of frustration and anguish about him
on the speeding, creaking slideway, the little man
gazed in unseeing misery. Ennui is a terrible disease,
and the little man had been incubating it for several
thousand years.

A large element of the little man's misery was his
feeling of being lost at sea. All around him the short-
lived scurrying humans dashed in their search for
material comfort, clogging their minds and pores with
activity in the endless race to submerge their souls.
They knew whence they came; they knew that the
dust of the earth would take back their bodies in less
than a century. Their lives were neatly packeted, their three
score and ten deftly notched with a program
of sublimation which would carry them from first
howl to last groan with the minimum of spiritual
travail. But the little man's world had no such handy
parameters. It was a chaos of a hundred past lives,
and a farrago of a million possible futures.

Sometimes the little man thought he might be God.

Only sometimes, of course. He knew he was not
God. God pushed him
around. His thoughts of God were not bitter, though
perhaps he had every right to be bitter about God.
On the contrary, he was quite fond of Him. In the
little man's colossal boredom, the only pleasure re­
maining was to try to sneak a swift move past God's
eyes.

It hardly ever worked, though, and the little man
came reluctantly up from his sea of memories to
look about him for an opportunity to put one over
God. A man sat a few feet from him, on the floor, lost
in a celibate intellectual orgasm. Dopers were
becoming more common as the mass mind endeavored
to lose itself in the disguise of looking for itself. Fur­
ther along the strip a tart in an orange and purple
striped Bedouin nightie caught his eye. She wriggled
her thin body, and when the little man nodded
she sauntered up to him.

The little man derived a sad beaten masochistic
pleasure in the anticipation of what would happen.
God had forbidden fornication and if God was on the
ball as He invariably was—there, with a
frightened
look
, the
little
tart backed
off suddenly and disappeared in a swirl of translucent
color. Something in the little man's face, something in the world, but certainly not of it, something an earlier
age might have associated with spectral fingers or
floating Grails, something threw her back in terror.
The little man followed her with his eyes, unhappily,
and saw her break her leg as she stepped backwards
on to a slow strip.

By the time the little man had left the strip and was
making his way up an afternoon-lit suburban road,
he had forgotten the psychiatrist and the thin tart had
faded from memory. He walked up a quiet hill, a
peaceful street of browned grass and old houses and ancient Scotty dogs. There were no children here to
disturb the heavy meditative senile air, and the little man was grateful for that if nothing else. The great
gables hung heavy, and ivy crept up the walls, clinging to life.

The little man was tired, tired to death, tired of life
and the endless futile childish round of food and
activity and sleep. He thought of the gilded Floren­
tine palaces where he had slept, the nasal tones of
Lorenzo de' Medici, the flickering rapier which had
taken off his left ear and made him look lopsided before the ear grew back. He thought of the dust-
ridden Californian ranch he had helped to
build, when only a handful of white men had seen
the Pacific from an American beach. He thought,
and he thought, and he remembered the beer he had
not been allowed to drink and the women he could
not touch because they walked away afeared, and the
money he could never keep enough of to be rich, and
he was tired.

Finally, his feet were still, and he pushed his key into the front door lock and with a slight click the
door opened. The house was musty, cool, empty and
heartbreaking. The little man paused at the refrigera­
tor for a glass of lemonade, went to the back room
and brought in to the kitchen a fine hemp rope.
Between his fingers it felt good, rough and strong, and
an inch thick. He looped it, tied the loop carefully
into a hangman's noose, and held it out proudly to
survey
it.

The kitchen was roofed with waxed boards, and a
great cross plank stretched above the little man's
head. Carefully, he moved a chair over and stood on
it. The other end of the rope went over the huge beam
and the little man knotted it with delicate precision.
He pulled it, swung on it, and the rope calmly held.
He slipped the noose over his head, arranged the
knot carefully behind the base of his skull, and
peered for the last time around the room. But he was
tired, bored, and unless he put an end to his thou­
sands of years of life soon, he would be too bored to
do even that. With a sigh of gratitude, he kicked away
the chair and the rough fibers of the rope cut shock­
ingly into his throat as he fell.