Seeking the Mythical Future (20 page)

I don't understand, Queghan said, though the gist of the idea was mushrooming quite rapidly. But he refused to accept it; she couldn't surely mean—

Yes
, said the husky cyberthetic voice.
I'm going to rape your mind. Your body is protected, but your mind is defenceless. I'm already in there. Can you feel me? Can you feel what I'm doing to you? Is it nice? Do you like it?

No, Queghan said. No.

Oh yes, isn't that nice? Now I'll do something else to you. I'll do this. Can you feel me, can you feel my mind inside yours? I'm way inside, deep inside; now doesn't that feel good?

No please don't. I don't want—

You do want. You really like it. I'll do it harder, like this. Oh yes
. Oh yes.
Like this, deep inside your mind. Do I feel good, deep inside you?

You must stop, please stop, Queghan begged her. Please stop …

You're resisting me
, she chided him.
Don't fight it, enjoy it. Let me come all the way inside. Work with me and we'll enjoy it together. Like this. Deep inside together like this
.

I can't do it.

You can. Oh you can
.

No.

Oh yes. Oh yessss
.

You're hurting me.

But isn't it nice? It's so good. Can you feel me everywhere inside you, filling your mind?

You must stop, you must. Please.

Not now, I can't stop now. It's so good. Oh yes. So good
.

I'm losing my mind! Queghan screamed.

Yes
, said the soft cyberthetic voice.
Oh yes
.

*

Over the R/T: ‘Patrol Yellow Zone, height 10,000 feet,' and they were off – Johnny leading, Pussy No 2 on his right, Queghan No 3 on his left, and Prosser and Stratters 4 and 5 doing the crossover guard duty behind. Fifteen minutes later over Rheims the R/T crackled: ‘Two enemy aircraft going west – two Dorniers going west, height 5,000.' They rubbed their hands at the thought of two Domiers to five Hurricanes.

As they were approaching Yellow Zone Johnny called: ‘There they are, straight ahead!' Queghan couldn't see them at first, and then suddenly he does and his heart leaps in his chest. Thirty Dorniers in two squadrons of fifteen in line-abreast covered by fifteen Messerschmitt-i 10s wheeling and zig-zagging above, ahead and behind the bombers. Johnny rocks his wings and goes straight in, climbing a little to 7,000 feet, then turning and diving towards them from astern.

From Johnny: ‘Now keep in – and keep a bloody good lookout!'

They go in fast in a tight bunch, each of them picking himself an adversary and manoeuvring to get on his tail. Queghan selects the rear one of two in line-astern, who breaks away from his No I in a half-circle and steepens his turn, but Queghan turns inside him, holding his fire until he is within fifty yards and then firing a shortish burst at three-quarters deflection. To his surprise a whole lot of bits fly off the Hun, bits of enginecowling and bits of hood. Smoke pours from him and his tail suddenly swivels sideways and comes right off, flames all over the fuselage.

Four Huns are going down: another with the tail off, a
second in a spin, a third vertically in flames, a fourth going up at 45 degrees in a left-hand stall-turn. All the
IIOS
seem to be hotly engaged. He has bags of ammunition left so he pulls his boost-override and climbs steeply. In a moment he is in the middle of what seems a mass of IIOS, although there are in fact only five of them. He knows he hasn't the speed in his woodenblader to dive away and beat it, so decides to stay and make the best of it. Although with his height he is more manoeuvrable than the Huns, he finds it impossible to get a shot in because whenever he gets one almost lined up tracers come shooting past from another of the blighters on his tail. It's all fast and furious.

All he can do now is keep twisting and turning and, when a Hun gets behind him, do as tight a turn as possible, almost spinning with full engine, and fly straight at him, firing a quick burst, then pushing the stick forward and going underneath him. Queghan's mouth is becoming drier and drier. He is getting more and more tired and desperate. Will they never run out of ammunition? Will they push off? Will help come? He knows he can't hold out much longer. He gives a shout over the R/T and Johnny answers, ‘OK Red 3, OK. I have you.'

The
IIOS
meanwhile have formed a defensive circle. Another squadron seems to have joined in. The sky is full of aircraft, so many black shapes it's dizzying to know who's who. He sees a Hurricane below him (it must be Johnny) being attacked by a Hun, and dives on his tail. The Hun pulls up at about 60 degrees with Queghan flat out behind him firing long bursts into his tailplane. Smoke suddenly gushes from him and he falls away to the left with little blue flames streaking along his fuselage. Then ‘Pop-pop. Bang!' and Queghan swerves to the right to see a 110 coming up behind him, firing for all he's worth.

‘Get out, get out, the ****** nearly got you!' Prosser's voice over the R/T.

He half-rolls violently to the left, diving at full throttle and with maximum revs, aileron turning on the way down. Is he hit? He doesn't think so. He pulls out in a gentle turn using the trim-wheel carefully and glancing behind. Damn. The 110 is
still with him. A large cannon-hole appears in the port wing, and several bullet holes. He pushes the stick forward frenziedly and there is a stunning explosion in front of his eyes. For a moment his brain doesn't work. The aircraft is falling, all limp at the controls. Then black smoke pours out of the nose and envelops the hood, and as a hot blast and a flicker of flame is reflected into the dark cockpit he says to himself, ‘Come on, out you get!' – pulls the pin out of the harness, unfastens his oxygen-tube and wrenches open the hood. The wind presses against him, forcing him down into the seat. He struggles to get free but there is something entangled round his legs, preventing him from getting out, and his throat closes in panic. He lets go of the stick in order to pull at the sides of the cockpit, the nose drops (the aircraft being trimmed nose-down), and smoke and scorching heat are everywhere, filling his nostrils and singeing his eyebrows. He must get out, otherwise he'll go down with the damn thing. Again he tries to release his feet from whatever's constricting them, bending forward, and feels a searing stab of pain in his left shoulder as the hot metal gunsight burns through his flying jacket and white overalls. The pain spurs him to frantic action and he hauls himself upright, his legs still inside, and then somehow has caught hold of the trailing edge of the wing, heaving himself free. It feels as though he's being twirled round and round through the air on the end of a piece of string held by a giant. He fumbles for the rip-cord, pulls it, and is brought up with a violent jerk that knocks the breath from his body. Then, curiously, all is calm. Little sensation of movement – just a slight wind as he sways gently to and fro, to and fro …

He seemed to have been drifting for days, suspended in blue space, the canopy a gentle fluttering of translucent white above his head. His shoulder was hurting hellishly. He thought he could smell scorched flesh. But it was difficult to move his head and he couldn't examine the place to see how bad it was. He continued to drift, the air becoming warmer the lower he sank, and warmer still, and then quite oppressive. He would have to touch bottom soon, he had been floating for what seemed an eternity. The yellow sun was in his eyes, its harsh glare shutting
out everything else. Perhaps he was dead. The idea came as rather a shock. What if he hadn't managed to free himself and gone down with the burning Hurricane, exploding with a soft dull ‘boom', the smouldering wreckage, him amongst it, scattered far and wide over the French countryside? In which event, he told himself with grim humour, his ***** shoulder should have stopped hurting.

And if he was dead, this heat could only mean he was nearing the nether regions of hell.

Below him, on all sides (as if to confirm this prediction), there was a shifting, glinting redness, as of a vast pit of molten lava; and Queghan drew up his legs in an instinctive reflex of self-preservation. What on earth was he falling into? The temperature had increased and he was perspiring heavily. But when he looked more closely he saw it to be, not churning molten lava as he had supposed, but a boundless ocean, irridescent in the slanting rays of the yellow sun. The canopy above his head (the remnants of the ruptured membrane) wafted lazily in the slack, heavy air so that he was falling in a slow lateral drift towards the ocean. And then he saw the Vehicle – or what was left of it. Only a shell remained, a shallow dish of scorched and blackened metal riding awkwardly on the low, choppy waves. He touched down some distance away, his feet dragging a trail of purple froth through the wave peaks, and delayed for a dangerous split-second before hitting the D-ring, warm water closing over his head as the harness released him. He tasted salt and struck out for the surface, blinking in the fierce light, and finding that the strong saline content of the water was holding him buoyant without effort. It didn't take long to reach the shell of the Vehicle; he climbed on, the metal hot to the touch, thinking with a curious calm detachment: Well, here we are then.

*

There was no doubt about it. He had entered the mythic projection of Milton Blake's patient. This was Stahl's vision of an alternative universe, a world conjured up out of deranged neurological processes which owed their existence to the random interaction of electrochemical impulses. He was the man afloat on the red ocean … the man in Stahl's nightmare projection.

He lay back under the burning yellow sun, the lip of the craft on the edge of his vision, seeing Stahl's world through his own eyes. Was he trapped here for ever? Would he have to live every painful moment of Stahl's experience, bound to an alien universe which might – only might – exist in one of an infinite number of mythical futures? That this world existed for him there was no doubt, but did it exist for others? For Karve, orbiting in the satellite-Control laboratory somewhere in another region of spacetime, did this planet of red oceans and sea monsters and airships have any real, palpable existence? If it didn't then he was lost. He was inhabiting the madness of a patient strapped down in Room Three of the Psychic Conservation Unit.

Despite the sun's heat Queghan was suddenly chilled to the bone. What if Stahl's mythic projection, the one he remembered – the one he
thought
he remembered – hadn't yet occurred? Queghan had assumed that this was a memory trace from a previous happening, but it was conceivable, given a breach in causality, that this was happening for the very first time:
this actual experience
was the one seen by Stahl and projected on to the three-dimensional display. Stahl hadn't dreamt it, he had picked up ahead of time an actual occurrence that had yet to take place … but if that were true, how was it that he, Queghan, could foretell what was going to happen next? He knew that, sooner or later, he would be rescued, taken to New Amerika and experimented on by Black and Hallam, then deported by airship to Psy-Con and then—

And then. What? How had Stahl's mythic projection ended? Queghan lay back against the blistered metal, the pain in his left shoulder still intense, and tried to recall the closing scenes and what had happened to the man (himself?) at the end. There had been no end that he could remember. Perhaps the end didn't yet exist, was waiting to be experienced, by him, before he could know it. He eased his position, seeking to find a more comfortable spot, and his eye fell on the Vehicle's insignia and markings, or what was left of them, now partly defaced by blackened streaks of heavy compound carbon. The stencilled words had once read:

TEMPORAL
FLUX
INJECTION
VEHICLE

but now most of the letters were obscured, leaving a garbled hieroglyph to be pondered over by someone with an inquiring mind; someone from another world, another time, another future.

*

Days and nights passed; he lost track of how many. The days were empty spaces without events to fill them except the neverchanging panorama of yellow sun, azure sky, red ocean. The nights were black voids, the lapping of the waves close at hand, a sultry breeze on his face, the inverted bowl of sky above him a blazing starscape of strange unrecognizable configurations. Once he thought he detected the Great Spiral in Andromeda but it turned out to be a hazy mist of nothingness that moved independently of the surrounding constellations. Was the sun of his own planetoidal home out there somewhere? If it was – if one of those needle points of light was home – then it brought little comfort: he was seeing it as it had been several thousands of years ago, possibly millions of years in the past. The light had crossed an immense distance of interstellar space to bring news of a world upon which the dinosaurs reigned. His own familiar world, that containing everything he knew and loved, his wife Oria, was a billion molecular transmutations in the future, while Queghan, alive and breathing, his heart beating inside his body, was witnessing the world as it had been before Colonization.

With each daybreak he looked with gnawing expectancy towards the four points of the compass. The flat, boring horizon surrounded him like a movable prison, always keeping him by some mysterious alchemy in the dead-centre of a perfect circle. Perhaps he had landed on a dead planet? A powerful gravitational field had shifted everything towards the red (which would explain the colour of the ocean) and prevented the genesis of life. He was the only living speck on its surface, the
only consciousness inhabiting Stahl's mythic projection; the rest were blurry phantoms which had evaporated into thin air: walk-ons who had been paid off and gone home. Another day passed in a haze of blank detachment, and during the calm, lapping night he thought he heard the Vehicle speaking to him. A residue of intelligence, presumably, was still lurking in its shell, in the dish in which he lay, more dead than alive. The Vehicle's words were as fragmentary and unintelligible as those written on its surface. He attempted to decipher the words, to comprehend them, for it was communication of a sort, but they made little sense. His lips moved, under the spread of stars, forming a reply. The reply went on interminably through the long hours of darkness until the sound of his own voice became that of a stranger. He listened to the stranger's voice, the low murmur of uninterrupted monologue filling the vacancy in his head and ascending into the warm dark air. At daybreak, his friend and enemy the yellow sun appeared, smiling and scowling down upon him. ‘Still here?' it seemed to say, ‘all alone?' in a chiding, reproachful tone. And, ‘Still alive? Not dead yet?' He answered, ‘Mythic projections cannot die, they exist in perpetuity.' Then he would scan the horizon, knowing what he might find, praying for it and dreading it too: the flash of yellow vinyl that would signify the arrival of the barque.”