The Book of Feasts & Seasons

When even at last the solemn hour shall come,
And wing my mystic flight to future worlds,
I cheerful will obey; there, with new powers,
Will rising wonders sing: I cannot go
Where Universal Love not smiles around,
Sustaining all yon orbs, and all their suns…

—
The Seasons, A Hymn
, James Thomson (1700–1748)

The Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God, also called New Year's Day

I should mention that, as a science fiction writer, I can comment authoritatively and finally on the true meaning of life.

Fifteen billion years ago an unexplained and inexplicable event created all the matter and energy, all the time and space in the universe, apparently out of nothing and for no reason. However, the precise nature of this event allowed primordial plasma to expand, cool, and form the nebulae which one day would give rise to the galaxy, especially one rather small G-type star in the outer arm of an otherwise insignificant galaxy: by yet another coincidence—if coincidence it was—the third planet from that star possessed the exact chemical conditions to give rise, first to life, then to intelligent life, then to civilization, then to techno-industrial civilization.

Unbeknown to the dwellers on that small insignificant sphere, all galaxies, including this one, are teeming, not merely with life, but with ultra-intelligent life. However, this world is strictly quarantined for reasons that will soon become apparent.

You see, the first experiments in time travel have already taken place.

H.G. Wells is the first man to have crossed the time barrier and beheld the grim and final destiny to which the race of homo sapiens is doomed, to devolve into subhuman Eloi and grisly, cannibalistic Moorlocks.

Olaf Stapledon was the second man to cross the barrier of the abyss of eternity, and he beheld, as if in a vision, the eighteen separate human species which will rise and fall after our species, the First Men, devolves into Moorlocks. A second human species, made of finer and nobler character by their descent into subterranean savagery, will again rise, and devote their mechanical knowledge to the investigation of the cosmos.

Mr. Stapledon’s movements in the time stream were of course detected by the later generations of time travelers, including the agents of the world-system of the Third Men known as Nexx in the Eighty-First Century, and the merciless disembodied sub-aquatic superbrains of the One Hundred and Seventh Century, the so-called Fourth Men.

Alfred Elton van Vogt is the final time traveler that later generations of time wardens will permit to bypass the timespace barrier, and he was told in strictest confidence the secret of the meaning of life by the Ultimate Intellect which rules the otherwise barren and lifeless world once called earth in the time of the Eighteenth Men, beneath a reddish, giant and dying star once called Sol. The men of that era have compiled themselves into a single mental system, using all the resources of their dying planet to do so.

What Mr. Van Vogt was told, he years ago told his fellow writer Harlan Ellison. Mr. Ellison then told me these dire secrets during an evening of inordinate inebriation when I met him at the Science Fiction Writers of America mansion in New Jersey.

He and I are both confirmed fans of AE van Vogt, and we were toasting his memory. I was frankly expressing my admiration that Mr. Ellison had put forth the effort to get Mr. van Vogt his long overdue SFWA Grand Master's award. As the evening progressed, the other drinkers in the bar retired, and soon we two were alone, and both in somewhat of high spirits.

It started innocently enough. We were discussing our favorite Van Vogt monsters, the Coeurl, the Ixtl, the Rull, and I made the offhand remark that with such superhuman nasties in outer space, we humans are lucky the universe is mostly empty of intelligent life.

Mr. Ellison fixed me with his eye. “Empty? What makes you say so?” And there was a look of agitation there. At the time, I put it down to his somewhat peppery temper, but now I know it had a deeper source.

The conversation turned to the Drake Equation, and the estimates that, even if the number of stars with life bearing planets is microscopic, and even if the number of life bearing planets that bring forth spacefaring civilization is submicroscopic, the number of stars in this local arm of the galaxy alone is so astronomical (the pun was his, not mine) that surely we would have detected some sign of alien intelligence somewhere among them. It is not an unusual topic for fans of scientific speculation to discuss.

Mr. Ellison began swearing and cursing, saying that the Drake Equation was not merely an underestimation, it was—and I quote—“a fucking dumbshit underestimation”. It did not take into account the number of artificial races, specifically constructed to fill non-earthlike worlds, that a forerunner race could make to populate the stars at a geometrical rate of increase.

Mr. Ellison emphasized this point by poking my chest and demanding I pay for the next round of drinks. I was happy to do so, fascinated by what he was saying, and eager to hear more.

And if each forerunner race created as many new races as its technology permitted, and if as Ellison insisted, the technology level itself increases geometrically as each new species encounters or creates new species in turn, the rate of increase is more than geometrical, more than asymptotic. The limiting factor to growth is only the total amount of matter energy in a solar system, and how much needed to be expended to send a self-replicating machine or organism to the next nearest few thousand solar systems.

No nonsense about cryogenic sleep or carrying air in bottles: a truly advanced race would merely adapt its deep space-crossing members to the needs of the journey and modify them to live long enough to outlast the eons slower-than-light travel required. When they arrived at the target, the nearest gas giants would be dismantled for parts to create the next variant of the race. There was no need to be out of contact with the home worlds in the meanwhile, since vacuum could not disperse laser-carried data streams.

I was skeptical, but he neatly skewered my skepticism with a few back-of-the-envelope type calculations on a bar napkin. I remember this because I handed him my ballpoint pen.

He spoke with conviction, not as if he were speculating or daydreaming. He spoke as if he
knew
.

Every star has between ten to a hundred inhabited planets, and each planet has six to twenty intelligent races occupying their various landmasses, oceans, and cloud levels; not to mention energy-based intelligences dwelling inside the fires of the sun, or the surfaces of neutron stars; or more exotic intelligences dispersed throughout nebulae, and occupying worldlets, centaurs, asteroids and cometary bodies. And they were all at a much more advanced level of mechanical, energetic, and telepathic technology than ours.

“The stars are crammed! They are packed in like sardines up there!” he shouted. Then, sadly, as if to himself. “And no one else will ever get to see them. Poor Van!”

Trying to ignore the strangeness of this remark, trying to pretend that this was still a normal conversation, I acted as if we were merely still discussing a speculation and asked why, if he spoke true, we have never heard the least whisper of any radio signals from any of these civilizations?

He made a shushing gesture. “If you knew the meaning of life—the reason behind it all—I could tell you. Van Vogt knew! HG Wells knew!”

“Is the secret of life Dianetics? I had heard that Mr. van Vogt was interested in…”

“Wright! Don’t be an asshole. Or at least be a smaller one! You’d stink less!”

Mr. Ellison pulled me close, and in breaths bleary with beer fumes he spilled out the secret of the universe to me in short, frantic sentences.

He told me a time machine is almost absurdly easy to construct with four gyroscopes, an electromagnet, a Moebius strip, and a bicycle frame. Anyone handy with normal house hold tools can make one in his garage.

Ellison took up a napkin from the bar and with a few clear swift strokes of my ballpoint pen (which he still has), he sketched for me the diagram of how to construct a time machine.

The principle is quite simple: the action of the gyroscopes prevents motion in any of three dimensions, and the electromagnetic field of the solenoid is therefore forced, thanks to the twist in the Moebius strip, through a prism into the fourth dimension. The field moves the iron frame of the machine a certain number of increments in the time direction, taking the gyroscopes with it, and the process repeats as long as the power to spin the gyroscopes remains.

I asked why, if it were so simple to build, there were not time machines for sale in every bookstore and bicycle shop?

He told me anyone from our period of time attempting to make one will find what seem to be odd coincidences, accidents, including deadly accidents, will always somehow interrupt the investigation before the final Moebius coil is complete: this is due to the vigilance of the Nexx Time-Sweepers of AD 8000 and the World-Brains of AD 10600.

The Time-Sweepers have all the time in the world, centuries, to plan the accidents, and can go back to any previous point in time and shift one link in the chain of cause and effect, no matter how small, to undo the event. And if their results are less than perfect the first few hundred times they try, later expeditions of later generations can try again a thousand times a thousand times.

I smiled at this revelation, and this seemed to enrage him. With many an oath and a blistering curse, dragging me by the tie to my feet, Mr. Ellison took me to the basement of the mansion and showed me a mechanism stored there, but warned me not to touch it.

No one had apparently touched it for many a year, not even to clean it. It was draped with dry spiderwebs and crusts of oil.

It was a crude and unimpressive-looking mechanism, consisting of little more than a seat, two levers and a dial connected to a set of gyroscopes wrapped in electrical wire, and connected to a piezoelectric bar no bigger than my thumb.