Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (27 page)

 
          
“That
wasn’t ever the reason! It was to . . . reproduce humanity out among the stars.
Hedge our survival bets.” “Well, it couldn’t ever do that either. Not out among
alien suns. No, alien worlds would make alien beings.
/ knew
that.
It was a way, Sean, of interrogating our very humanity—and our
transhumanity; a way of enquiring what we might change into. That’s the only possible
true deep reason for colonization.
An evolutionary one.
New niches, new beings.”

           
“You mean evolution in the Darwinian
sense.”

 
          
“I
mean spiritual evolution too. Triangulating upon the meaning of the universe
from alien perspectives!
Surpassing ourselves.
But how
could you ever sell that to the voting public? Oh Zinjanthropos, pour your
treasure into Homo
Habilis
. Oh Neanderthalers, use
your strength to propel Cro-Magnon Man forward. Yet the will to evolve and be i
transformed is a deep enduring archetype, as you should know! It was this,
cloaked in the panoply of interstellar travel, that provided the true deep
emotional impulse—
just ,
as long as hardly anyone
acknowledged it openly! It was as deep as survival itself. But what
is
survival? Survival spells change and
transformation. It always has done. My confreres elsewhere—or their cloned
descendants, since they were well trained in that aspect of biology!—will be
having a slower time of it than here, where the gold has fallen right into my
hands. Now do you see what the colonization of other worlds really means? And
how it must be secretly shepherded? Think about it, Sean, my apprentice: Man
must
alter.”

 
          
Sean
sat numbly on a log.
Knossos
squatted at his feet in affable parody of the master-apprentice
relationship. The log had not fallen to rot; it was a natural rustic seat,
preserved, maintained.

 
          
“So
you’re a Strauss clone?”

 
          
“No,
Ym
the original. I had luck, Sean.
Luck.
Luck is a factor in the universe, after all.
Coincidence.
Synchronicity.
Isn’t
that the word your spiritual mentor Carl Gustav used? Call it what you will.
Consider your own name, Athlone.
Elective affinity, eh?
Your mentor Jung understood that well enough. This is a very long plan, Sean.
Yes, I am—or was—on all the expeditions.”

 
          
Sean
smacked a fist into his open hand. “No! I simply can’t believe that Earth set
up a whole bloody colonization program to serve your . . . alchemical
obsessions! It won’t wash, Strauss. You’re lying.”

 
          
“Oh dear.
Of course that wasn’t the
overt
reason. It was simply the true deep unacknowledged motive.
Naturally Earth didn’t put clones of
myself
on every
ship for my benefit—or even because they grasped that I was right. Yet I did
‘sell’ myself, Sean,
and
successfully—as what the old futurologists used to call a far-out projection, a
wild card. I was a man of some influence. I knew people—I made sure of that. I
could pull strings. At the same time I could sing for my supper. Transplanting
people to an alien world isn’t the same as shifting them across the
Atlantic
, you know. It’s a whole new ball game,
Sean. You have to carry at least one wild card with you because you might just
need the joker in the pack for sheer survival. Let’s be modest: there may even
have been others, unknown to me! Here, by happy serendipity, I am the joker who
had
to be played.
Immediately.
Target
One
let us down so badly—there were stellar
instabilities which the
Genesis
probe
never picked up. So Captain Jeremy once recalled. Then Target Two betrayed us.
But here were the aliens.
The mimics.
The reality-projectors.”

 
          
Sean
gestured at the spire-tip of
Schiaparelli.
“Earth wants to know the results. They’ll want to know how
well
you’ve done.”
Schiaparelli
seemed to waver, in a trembling of the air; momentarily Sean saw it as
something else—another possibility, more appropriate.

 
          
“Sean,
Sean, don’t
baby
me. I responded to
the challenge of this world and its alien creators correctly.”

 
          
“So
there was a meeting of minds—a compact between vou and them!”

 
          
Strauss
chewed his lips.
“In hyb, yes.
I had a vision.
A dream-contact with them.
Everyone must have done. I met
them in their psychic space. I interceded lucidly. My . . . imagery attracted
them.
Because they are transformers.
Transmutators.”

 
          
“And the God?
You must have believed in a God, to have
included one.”

 
          
“Well,
yes. Now we are developing a God, a state of deity into which we’ll all enter.”

 
          
“He
seems chary of the role.”

 
          
“Growing pains!”

 
          
“You
didn’t have to include Hell!”

 
          
“How
could I not? It clarifies. It distills. And it isn’t forever. The majority of
most people’s time on the upward spiral is spent in the Gardens, which you must
admit are rather nice.” Sean glanced at the rich blackcurrant vintage, hanging
ready to hand. He nodded.

           
“I’m glad you mentioned that,
though,” went on
Knossos
. “If you were to report back, the situation here might seem somewhat,
well, excessive to the Earth authorities. I do realize that it would take
several hundred years in all before they could try to interfere here, and I
frankly doubt if they couid, given the powers the aliens command, but they
might regard my clones in the other colonies as . . . less of a joker, more of
a viper in the bosom.”

 
          
“I’m
sure Earth would understand that you acted for the best,” said Sean ironically.

 
          
“We’ll
all evolve in a healthy symbiosis with the aliens, to our mutual and immortal
benefit,” nodded Strauss. “Then the world can all be Gardens and
Eden
. But tell Earth about Hell, the crucible?
Ah no.
Too soon.”

 
          
“How
can a non-rotating world be covered in Gardens?”
“Oh, Sean.
You just spin it.
Come
the Millennium.”

           
“But
momentum—”

           
“Will be
transferred to the little black hole at the center of this world shell.
Our aliens have
powers
, Sean. They
just somewhat lack purposes, save for the purposes of other races which they
borrow. They’re chameleons!
Super-chameleons.”

 
          
“What
happens after the Millennium?”

 
          
“Who
can say what a world of perfected beings will choose to do?”

 
          
“Perhaps
have children?
At last?”

 
          
“Ah
yes. I didn’t want the little ones to have to go through Hell. I am a
compassionate man. The adult population is quite large anyway. I persuaded the
mind-horde to clone a number of suitable individuals as well as developing all
our frozen ova to adult state with imprinted orientation knowledge: language,
abilities,
a
sense of the meaning of the world. Those
neo-adults have, of course, developed their own inherent personalities since
then during the course of the Work.”

 
          
“Suitable
individuals?
How—?”

 
          
“—could
I know?
By sensing their pattern.”

 
          
“Their spectrum.”

 
          
“Ah,
you understand! You see it like
that,
do you, as a
spectrum?
Hmm.
Yes, it fits. You can read out very
fine details of a psyche. I thought of it in terms of a fractional distillation
column or a chromatograph. But then, that’s my background ... A few adults,
too, are projected imitative bodies animated by the mind-horde. There are
enough of us—but still we may choose to have children: perfected
Eden
children.”

 
          
“And
what happens, Herr Professor, if Earth seeks you out nevertheless—with greater
impact than
Schiaparelli?
What if
Earth builds faster than light stardrives?”

           
Knossos
shrugged. “The mind-horde can’t move their
worlds faster than slow sublight speeds even though they draw on the very
energy of the Void. No other race
whom
they reanimate
ever built FTL ships to follow up their radio-eggs. FTL seems impossible. When
we all reach the perfect stage, Sean, we’ll be on quite a different threshold:
of contact with those other perfected creatures by another channel—of the
spirit!”

 
          
“Assuming
they’re all still around, on some other level of existence!
A
mighty big assumption.”

 
          
“Think
big, Sean. No doubt some of them went to the wall. But life is the language of
the universe. Shall the universe forget how to articulate itself, unto itself?”

 
          
“Ah yes, your holovision program!”

 
          
“You
know about that?”

 
          
“A
little machine told me. Your vanity kept your dossier from being a complete
secret.”

 
          
“Vanity?
Oh no! My dossier is . . . simply irrelevant. I am
Knossos
now.”

 
          
“Gnosis.”

 
          
Strauss
executed a graceful little bow. Then his face hardened. “If you want to play
the role of Devil’s advocate, though, I promise you there’s a place for that!
I’d much rather you were my apprentice, or equal.”

 
          
“Are
you threatening me?”

 
          
“On the contrary!
Hell is where you’ll slide to,
automatically. Until you purge yourself of jealousy and false commitments. I
don’t ask for your belief—because everybody
believes.
Belief is the framework for any thought or action.
Belief in
something, even in unbelief.
Belief is the air we breathe, or we
wouldn’t be alive. No, you already have some knowledge of the psychic mechanics
of the projection. I merely ask you to apply that knowledge instead of denying
it. Isn’t that your
job?”

 
          
“Amongst
other things my job was to report back to Earth.”

 
          
“Well,
there’s your starship over there. Go to it. Go to your Captain and his crew.
See how well
that
belief- framework
applies after all that you’ve learned. You
are
different now, Sean. You’re altered.”

 
          
“Yes,”
Sean admitted. He could sense Muthoni, Denise,
Jeremy
... the Devil, the God, where they all belonged in the pattern of
transformation into a higher kind of being. He could sense their location, if
he put his mind to it, like tracks in a bubble chamber tracing out the
collision of their ‘particles’ with other particles, burst of energy giving
rise to new charged particles—their slowly transforming selves. Jeremy seemed
to be a perennial decay product—or, no, an exchange particle, something that
was perpetually exchanged between other interacting particles, like a photon, a
unit of observation.
A track of light in the lens that was
the microcosm of this planet.
He could sense their distribution curves,
their spectra —and what exotic yet long-lived particles all the ‘alien’ beasts
and birds with their own psychic energy signatures represented . . . Briefly,
the Gardens blossomed for him— into a kaleidoscope of sparkling, conversing
energies: an intercourse of living light.