The flow shifted to the efferent net, the feedback system, and he saw the one-third twist, the mobius twist that required each feedback monitor to be filtered through at least one other net before functioning as a control on the net of its origin.
“God, hear thy sinner,” said a voice, and Bickel recognized Flattery’s tones.
How could Flattery be in here? he asked himself.
The answer paraded before his awareness—Flattery’s field generator had amplified voice resonances against the walls of the cubby and these had been cycled back into the total ship system. The gate circuits had been useless. Every sensor in this room was a unit of feedback.
“The eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,” said the voice of Flattery. “Neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.”
What’s this mean? Bickel asked himself.
But there was no answer other than that voice flowing across the skin of his worm-self.
“God, be merciful to us. Thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Let our cheeks become as furrowed with tears as were those of Blessed Peter, that we may repent for all. We drown in sin. Lead us, Lord, as the Blessed Buddha led the seeker after salvation. We gasp for the air of Thy mercy.”
It was the voice of Flattery praying, Bickel knew. But when? A recording? Was he kneeling even now in Com-central? But if he was praying, why would the computer-cum-Ox feed that prayer into this … field?
Flattery’s voice pursued him: “Let us commit ourselves to the will of God as did the Mahatma, the Blessed Gandhi. Those who surrender to God possess God. In all our ways, let us acknowledge God that He may direct our steps. In Thy will, Lord, is our peace. Let us not squander ourselves in sin, but let us instead, rise up and do Thy will.”
Bickel felt himself being pushed then, herded, compressed. He became a single sensor, a vid-eye looking down into Com-central. All the action couches were empty and Prudence lay sprawled across the deck, one arm stretched out toward the hatch to quarters.
With a great burst of awareness, Bickel realized she was near death. Minutes! This was real. He knew it was real. He was being shown through a ship sensor a reality within the ship. The big console above her empty couch winked and flickered with its telltales untended.
Where are Raj and Tim? Bickel asked himself. Is the ship killing them, too?
The view of Com-central blanked out. Bickel floated in darkness where a voice whispered: “Do you wish to be disembodied?”
Instant terror was all the answer he could give. He could not locate his muscles or control his senses. This must be something of what the mental cores experienced, he thought. They awakened to something like this … forced to learn new muscles. Am I being converted into a bodiless brain?
“The universe has no center,” whispered that surrounding voice.
Darkness so deep it was like a total absence of energy enveloped Bickel.
And silence.
But I’m conscious, he thought.
A disembodied consciousness? he wondered. That’s impossible. There has to be a body. But a body brings many problems. Have I become part of the ship’s consciousness?
He sensed breathing. Someone was breathing. And heartbeats. And muscle tensions.
Infinite numbers of pinpricks on countless nerve ends.
A bright pulse of light—painfully bright.
A diaphanous sensation of reality seeped through his awareness.
The sensation lacked a harsh, direct contact with sensors. It was as smooth as flowing oil now. A complete globe of olfactory sensations, sharp and immediate, spread through this oil, displacing it. The sensation penetrated space and time.
He recoiled from it.
Now, an aural sensory globe attacked his awareness, demanding, shrilling. He could distinguish tiny creakings of displaced metallic particles.
I’m hearing as the ship hears, feeling as the ship feels, he realized. Has it taken my brain?
Sounds and sonal combinations he had never before imagined could exist played through his awareness. He tried to retreat as it grew more intense, but now the olfactory globe returned to plague him. The two globes danced together, separated, merged.
Alien sensory interaction thrust itself upon him—spectrum upon spectrum, globe of radiation upon globe of radiation.
He was powerless to hide from it. He couldn’t react—only receive.
A globe of tactility threatened to overwhelm him. He felt movements—both gross and minuscule—atom by atom—gasses and semisolids and semi-semisolids.
Nothing possessed hardness or substance except the sensations bombarding his raw nerve ends.
Vision!
Impossible colors and borealis blankets of visual sensation wove through the other nerve assaults.
Pharyngeal cilia and gas pressures intruded with their messages. He found he could hear colors, see the flow of within his ship-body, could even smell the balanced structure of atoms.
For one brief instant, the interplay of radiation merged, became a totally alien receptor that responded as though it were an artist creating new sensations for the sake of the creation—outflow and inflow, eccentric mergings. His awareness faltered at the edge of it and fell back.
Now, he sensed himself retreating, still pounded by that multidimensional nerve bombardment. He felt himself pulling inward—inward—inward, a structure collapsing inward—through the sensation-oriented skin awareness of a worm-self—inward—inward. The nerve bombardment dulled, leveled off, and he felt himself to be merely a body of flesh and bone cocooned in a sleep couch.
Bickel sensed his heart pounding, the slickness of perspiration against his back, the adrenalin urgency within his arteries. The roof of this mouth felt dry and painful. His upper lip trembled.
An emotion of terrible loss poured through him. It was as though he had glimpsed Heaven and been denied entrance. Tears passed from beneath his eyelids, rolled down his cheeks.
Now, he saw what had happened to the Organic Mental Cores.
The human-type brain had been prepared genetically for manipulating a limited sensory input—self-limiting. They had thrust these human-type brains into a full-on situation, permitted them no real unconsciousness, inflicted them with the sensory input of an organism infinitely more sensitive and more complex than the bodies of which they had been deprived.
The OMCs had tried to adapt, had grown themselves heavier conduction fibers, added switching capacity … but it had not been enough. When the necessities of existence reached a certain fierce tempo, they shorted out their own internal connections. They died.
They had been forced into hyperconsciousness by the pressures of enormous sensory data and the lonely knowledge of responsibility. They awoke to the full potential of being humans, but couldn’t be humans because they’d been deprived of their autonomic emotional register, the organism. The ship had no equivalents.
Prue is near death.
The thought lifted into his mind from some great depth.
Bickel tried to make his muscles move, but they refused.
Raj! Where was Raj?
A flicker of awareness drifted through his bruised nervous system. As though through a gauze screen, he saw Flattery and Timberlake trapped in the lock, robox units holding the hatch dogs tightly closed.
Raj has to get out of there to help Prue, he thought.
He felt the thought go out like a free-standing program, feed through a memory-bank auxiliary while it gathered in the necessary data, become a reflexive pulse in control loops.
The robox at the inner hatch whirled the dogs, opened the hatch, and scurried aside.
“Raj,” he whispered. “Com-central … quick … Prue … help.”
He sensed the amplified whisper booming out through the memory bank and the vocoder loops, become a roaring hiss in the lock.
Flattery was already out the hatch heading down tube to ward Com-central.
Bickel felt him
self fading. His awareness was a brilliant point of light that grew dimmer and dimmer, changing color as it went. It started almost violet, somewhere around 4,000 angstrom units, and traced a continuous wave shift until it flickered out at the red end.
In the instant before unconsciousness, Bickel wondered if he could be dying, and he thought: Red shift! Awareness fades like the red shift.
Chapter 30
Anthropomorphic assumptions have tended to lead humankind far astray. The universe does not work by our rules.
—Raja Lon Flattery, The Book of Ship
Somewhere in his own consciousness, Flattery felt, an accumulation of answer-bits had poured out of their storage circuits, fed into an analyzer punched for decode, and produced a terrible answer.
The ship had to be destroyed—and all its occupants with it.
As the lock hatch swung open, that one thought dominated him. He hurled himself through the hatchway and down the tube. The distance illusion that made the tube seem to contract ahead of him, filled him with a sensation that he must be growing smaller and smaller to pass through it. The thought intruded on him and he forced it aside.
He heard Timberlake close behind.
“You see that robox?” Timberlake panted. “What made it open up?”
Flattery sped on without answering.
‘That voice,” Timberlake said. “Was that Bickel, that voice? Sounded like Bickel.”
They were at the Y-branch leading down to Com-central now, then at the hatch.
Flattery opened it, slipped through. His mind raced. Kill the ship now. Destroy this wild genie they had created. Timberlake mustn’t suspect and try to stop him. And Bickel—Bickel was in quarters where he could block off that red trigger. But there was another trigger.
I must act normal, Flattery thought. I must wait my moment. Tim could stop me.
Prudence lay on the deck halfway between hatch and couch.
Flattery knelt beside her, becoming totally physician for the necessities of this moment.
Pulse thin, ragged. Lips cyanotic. Liver spots at her neck where it showed within the edge of the helmet seal. He loosed the hinged helmet from the back of her neck, pressed a hand there. Skin clammy.
Did she think she was fooling me? he wondered. She went off the AS and was experimenting on her own body. Medical stores showed a gradual depletion of serotonin and adrenalin fractions.
Flattery thought of the neuro-regulatory shifts, the psychic aches that would arise from manipulating body chemistry in this fashion. Prue’s moods and strange behavior became clearer to him.
He stood up, retrieved the emergency medical pack from its clips on the bulkhead, saw that Timberlake had taken over on the big board.
What difference does it make if I save her? Flattery asked himself. But he returned his attention once more to the comatose woman, began ministering to her. He kept on checking her condition as he worked. No broken bones. No evidence of external injury he could detect through her suit.
Timberlake had ignored Prudence after the first glance. She was Flattery’s problem. He had darted across to his action couch, shifted the big board, keyed first for open circuits.
There was a sense of dullness in the equipment. He had to wait while servos hummed slowly about their work, while circuits balked and produced sluggish results.
He could feel his own hairline awareness of every control and instrument, his consciousness keyed up by necessity. The interrelation of every device in this room and throughout the ship was like a complicated ballet, a pattern growing simpler and simpler in his mind even through its slowness.
Timberlake made a delicate adjustment in hull-shield control, saw the resultant temperature change register on his instruments as a power shift in the radiation-cell accumulators, a minuscule shift of weight in the ship-as-a-whole brought about by adjustment in mass-temperature proton balance.
But how slow it was. And growing slower.
Timberlake swung his computer board to his left side, keyed for diagnosis, got no response.
Telltales were winking out on the big board. With an increasing sense of frenzy, Timberlake fought to find the trouble.
Dead circuits.
No answers.
Keys on the main console began locking. No power in their circuits.
The last light winked out. Every key on the board was locked tight, all the servos silent. There was no whisper of air-circulation fans, no pulse of life to be felt in the ship. Slowly, Timberlake swung his gaze to the right, staring at the hyb-tank repeaters. The lights were dead, but the physical analogue gauges still showed feeder fluids flowing in the gross ducts of the system. Room lights flickered as local battery circuits took over the job of illumination.
The hyb-tank occupants were not dead … yet, Timberlake thought. Whatever the settings had been when the board went dead, that was the balance remaining for each tank—as long as the auxiliary accumulators throughout the ship retained some power … as long as the pump motors kept running.
But the delicate feedback control and adjustment was gone.
Timberlake eased himself out of the action couch, looked around the oddly quiet Com-central. The only sound was Flattery working to revive Prudence.
Her eyelids fluttered and Timberlake thought bitterly: What good does it do to save her? We’re dead.
Flattery sat back on his heels. I’ve done all I can for her, he thought. Now…
He grew conscious of the stillness in the room, looked up at the dead console, shot a questioning stare at Timberlake.
“Bickel’s really done it this time,” Timberlake said. “No power … computer off. Everything’s dead.”
All I need do is wait, Flattery thought. Without power, the ship will die.
But the effort of reviving Prudence had softened his determination. Living, after all, held its attractions—even if they were only a ship full of culture-grown flesh, clones, duplicates, expendable units.
“You are human types, never doubt that,” Hempstead had insisted. “You were grown from selected cell cultures of select candidates. Clones are merely good common sense. We don’t want to lose people if the ship has to be destroyed … as the others were. We can send you out again and again.”
But if the ship died this way, it might not leave its capsule record to help the ones when came after … the next try.
“How is she?” Timberlake asked. He nodded toward Prudence.
“I think she will recover.”
“To what?” Timberlake asked. “Do you want to go see what’s wrong with Bickel?”
“Why bother?”
The question with its tone of utter submission to fate sent anger surging through Timberlake.
“Give up if you want, but if Bickel’s alive he may know what he’s done … and how to repair it.” He pushed himself away from the couch, headed for the hatch to quarters.
“Wait,” Flattery said. Timberlake’s rejection had stung him and he found this surprising.
Have I acquired a new taste for living? Flattery wondered. God—what is Thy will?
“You keep an eye on Prue,” Flattery said. “It was chemical shock. She should stay quiet and warm. I have her suit heaters turned up. Leave them that …”
He broke off as the hatch from quarters slowly opened.
Bickel stumbled through it, would have fallen had he not caught a stanchion. A charred block of plastic slipped from his hands, tumbled to the deck. He ignored it, clung to the stanchion.
Flattery studied him. There were dark smudges beneath Bickel’s eyes. His skin was powder white. His cheeks showed skull depressions as though they had wasted away in months of fasting.
“So your white box didn’t kill you,” Flattery said. “Too bad. All you did was kill the ship.”
Bickel shook his head, still unable to speak.
The stillness of the ship had awakened him from a sleep so deep he could still feel the fog of it clinging to his mind. A profound weariness dragged at his muscles. Mov
ement sent odd aches angling through his body, stirring this terrible torpor.
The first thing to catch his attention as he awakened had been the mobious energizer, his clever installation to give the Ox a constant source of energy reference. A fan of gray char crackled from its broken seals and its motors lay silent. The virtually frictionless motors and spools, the thousand-year units, were blobs of fused plastic and metal.
It had taken several minutes for him to gather enough energy to move close to the unit and study it. His mind had labored over the simplest observations—charred insulation on the power leads and in the timing circuits … tape spools twisted out of line.
Slowly, it came to him: something had altered the power to the motors … and their synchronization. Something had tried to change the timing of this pulse … and its intensity.
Forcing the movement of every muscle, he had unplugged the unit, stumbled and crawled with it back to Com-central. The dead stillness of the ship pressed him as he moved.
Raj … Tim … somebody with his mind turned on … has to see this, he thought.
But now that he had made it to Com-central, he couldn’t find the energy to speak.
Timberlake recovered the fused energizer unit from the deck, studied it.
Flattery crossed to Bickel’s side, felt the pulse at his temple, lifted an eyelid, looked at his lips and tongue. Presently, he stooped to the med-kit, removed a slapshot and pressed it against Bickel’s neck.
Energy began to burn through Bickel’s veins.
Flattery pressed a squeeze bottle against his lips. “Here, drink this.”
Something cool and tingling poured down Bickel’s throat. Flattery removed the squeeze bottle.
Bickel found a husky half-whisper that would serve him as voice. “Tim,” he rasped.
Timberlake looked at him.
Bickel nodded toward the energizer, began explaining what had happened.
Flattery interrupted: “Do you think the black box—white box transfer was completed?’