Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (29 page)

 
          
Sean
applauded. He called Archie back down to him and sent the bird off in search of
aerial transport,
then
he walked to the base of the
tower and circled it till he found a marble slab that tilted at his touch to
become an access ramp. He walked up the counterbalanced ramp—which closed
behind him—into the central core of the tower, which was indeed hollow. Steps
spiralled overhead, around the inner hexagon, faintly lit (though brightly to
his hypersense) by sunlight suffusing through the pink glans of the summit.

 
          
He
mounted, till he came to the place where a control deck might have been, had
this been a starship. He stepped out through an oval opening on to the
vertiginous platform which might have been the deck, extruded.

 
          
Austin
and Muthoni were still poised in their slow erotic
asana.
Sean patted Muthoni merrily on the inverted rump, and she
grinned up at him, while
Austin
contrived a wink. They toppled backward, uncoupling, rolling smoothly
to their feet.

 
          
“Come
to a Cavalcade, old friends? There’s a gathering by the
Solvent
Lake
beyond the Hill of Hermes.”

 
          
“Can
we fly?” asked Muthoni eagerly.

 
          
“Why not?”

 
          
Austin
paced to and fro exaltedly.
Schiaparelli
no longer existed, and
Earth was so far away, that noon-day. He hardly remembered Earth at all, but he
would have to forget it somewhat more. It would, Sean saw, soon be time for him
to die voluntarily and sojourn in Hell a while. Muthoni caught Sean’s look; she
nodded, regretfully, then instantly cheered up.

 
          
Presently
a flying shark, ridden by a merman, glided through the sky led by the squawking
parakeet. Nosing up to the platform, it swung around until one fin-wing lay
across the whole width of the platform. The merman sat gazing blankly ahead.

 
          
They
boarded the merman’s back, and the shark cast off. Soon they were sailing along
a few hundred feet above the dips and rises of the Gardens. Muthoni clasped
Sean around the waist, and he could feel the wedge of
Austin
’s hands in the small of his back clasping
Muthoni likewise.
Austin
wouldn’t, of course, forget absolutely; but Earth would become his
uterine life, his prenatal existence. His consciousness would be of other
things.

 
          
Sean
extended his perception, and the Gardens became a curving, multi-planar map
like the lattice, though full of content.
Sparks
burned at nodes in the mesh of human life
and mind-horde life, each one presenting a little rainbow spectrum,
zebra-striped by its own unique absorption lines of knowledge.

 
          
The
entire pattern still eluded him, and there was an occasional nagging sense of
something missing from it, or from himself—something forgotten or
overlooked—yet he was sure it would come clear in time. Of time there was still
plenty. The sun stood still at its zenith in the sky, warming his skin through
his tunic and directly warming the naked flesh of his friends, marking time
forever, for the present . . .

 
          
—We've really brought them to life,
Beautystars!

           
—Brought
ourselves to life, elemental one!

           
—No,
this projection has achieved autonomy.
Integrity,
authenticity.
I’m sure of it!

           
—They
may have behaved in this manner. / Grudgingly / Can we ever be sure? Item, surely
there was more subtle interplay between their cerebral hemispheres, sinister
and dexter, than they realized?

           
—Therefore,
elemental one I A hint of sarcasm / through feedback we evolved a more refined
probability-model. We inserted the arrival of a starship. Our Beautystar
elemental ‘Athlon’ has performed impeccably. His influence upon the whole
projection will be to reintegrate these loose ends in their psychology.

           
—In
so doing he develops a different vector from our elemental *
Knossos
’.
¹
Evolution’
is purposive to
Knossos
.
To Athlon, evolution is basically a laying down of psychic strata which the
weathering of time will re-expose, demanding reintegration. Athlon realizes—at
least occasionally—that his Hell-born hypersense is allied to the old limbic
immediacy of perception which must now be linked to neocortical understanding.

           
—I
agree that
Knossos
’s
vision is the more exciting.

           
—And
the more uncertain! But only on a scale of uncertainty! All we know of their
actual ‘unconscious' processes is what they were able to describe
encyclopedically—or symbolize in the ‘artwork’ they transmitted. Item, the
concept of a guiding
meta-
being—a ‘deity’—is
deficient. We are already a proper meta-being. Our elementals in the ‘deity’
and ‘antideity’ roles suffer discomfort.

           
—You
feel anguish at our own arbitrary origin, elemental! Who are we to praise
ourselves? If the sense of ‘deity’ evolved naturally deep in the ‘human’ mind
it may be a correct reflection of an aspect of reality. We must appreciate
this.

           
—I
say there is anguish in the projection!

           
—You
refer to Hell? Undoubtedly there is a vein of masochism in their
curiosity-gratification system. Their brains work by pleasure plus pain, do
they not? A dual mechanism! The neurological data demonstrated this.

           
—Item,
Athlon has not discovered the pattern nested within the pattern, even though he
intuited our own origin! Is this necessarily impossible, while he remains a
‘man’? Or are our embodied elementals over-simplified, over-constrained?

           
—This
is not a game with a single winning move! The ‘Work’ is constantly opening up
genuine new heuristic strategies. Which we shall surely apply subsequently!

           
—I
misdoubt the ‘Work’. Many other possible projections of ‘man’ could be achieved
from the given data. For instance, we could project the martial search for
‘beauty’ in their
Nippon
culture . . .

           
—We
have time to explore all the possibilities. I still contest that the ‘Work’ is
the most potentially rewarding. I would even go so far as to assert that we owe
this to the memory of the ‘man’ Strauss who inserted data on this rare
invention ‘alchemy’ in the transmitted mega-bits. Here we have a tool we can
apply to ourselves and our dilemma. This alchemy complements our
transformational play magnificently.

           
—We
cannot apply it to other heuristic alien animations!

           
—Because
we haven’t mastered it yet. Alchemy is a strategy of understanding. Their
symbols for it are quite peculiar, we all agree. (Not to them, no doubt,
arising as these symbols do from their unconscious processes!) They are such
alien beings. Still, I believe they would recognize themselves. I submit that
we have simulated them authentically.
1 vote for continuance.
We owe it.

           
—To
ourselves, though?

           
—Duty,
Beauty stars, is the defeat of anguish! We must never assume that alien
life-forms arise and communicate their knowledge merely to amuse us. There have
been eons of mere amusement already. During this eon, let us be serious. We may
discover something to be serious about. I repeat
,
this
projection has attained autonomy. It has developed real goals. If it achieves
those goals, elementals, we may surprise ourselves—quite as much as our own
existence surprises us in the first place!

           
—But
how can a flawed simulation—a fiction!—achieve a goal greater than we already
are? At root it is imperfect. We, on the other hand, are perfect. We are the
end-point, to begin with! We can be anything. We are free of the struggles, the
parochial ‘histories' of planetary beings!

           
—So
why do we continue to bind up our minds in lesser existences? Because, noble
mind-horde, we must build constraints for ourselves. We mustn’t make mistakes
that prevent us from making further mistakes, or we will cease to exist. If we
are initial arbitrary perfection, Beautystars, we are perfection in search of
error. The mistake is our tool. All of our worlds have been mistakes, because
they are only approximate.
As is this one too.
Its
flaw is that it isn’t a perfect simulation—and that is our saving grace, our
noble achievement. Because it is flawed, it gives us a history—a history of
error. Hell is the biggest error in that world. It is error supreme.

           
—Yet
if the alchemy succeeds—the transmuting of everything into everything else,
without constraints!—and the world becomes all Gardens . . .

           
—It
will not, I think. Hell will continue to govern
Paradise
,
retarding it and advancing it at the same time. The Millennium will be a little
late this year. Our embodied elementals must be able to go on making creative
mistakes in the right direction. Thus, one day, we will have made enough
mistakes to understand ourselves, and survive our own miraculous existence.

           
—We
must consider the imperfections of our projected world more deeply! Any
ordinary material object or entity can conform to how things are in nature
without bothering about it—whereas we have to bother! So we can only project an
almost-perfect world, with almost-perfect rocks, plants, beasts and people.
Actually we are topping it up all the time—so that the aerial sharks can fly,
and fish can walk, and trees produce fruit without insects to fertilize them.
Oh, we could revise the beasts, introduce insects, but that isn’t the point. I
maintain that other imperfections would necessarily appear. With respect,

 
 
         
Beautystars,
this world hasn't—and cannot have—achieved autonomyIhomeostatis. I deny this.
And this is very important.

           
—But
we are perfect. / Insistence /

           
—No!
The necessary imperfections of the projected world must teach us that this
isn't so. There is a level of organization beyond us that we cannot even
recognize. The limits of the projection prove that there are limits to us, too.
Our limit is in not knowing this.

           
—Specify!

           
—Item:
what is the Void, which energizes us? What might an absence of Void ‘be'? Item:
where is the life in the universe, whose signals we have animated? Elemental
Knossos
deduces that it has moved on, shifted its organization level. This is hidden
from us, and our only way of inferring this is through the imbalance in our
imperfect projection—not with our own free intellects, Beautystars! Our
elemental Athlon is quite right to accuse our elemental God of agnosticism—of
riot-knowing.
Because this is the truth, if we were not
blinded by our own small power.
We are to the natural-life that evolved
dynamically as are the questing machines in Hell to the analogue humans of the
projection! The aesthetic balance of the projected world proclaims that truth
about us, if we can realize it. Paradox: because this is beyond our
realization, yet still declares itself through the projection, it is so. There
is a further level of organization to find, which perhaps by its nature is
unfindable.

           
—Mere
hypothesis! There is a real universe, of which we are the sport.

           
—But
what is ‘reality'? What is the Void? What is time?

           
—Continuance,
Beautystar-consensus?

           
—Continuance!