Destination: Void: Prequel to the Pandora Sequence (22 page)

“And the combinations could produce strange sense qualities, ones we can’t even visualize,” Timberlake said.

“They do,” Bickel whispered, remembering.

“But it’s dead,” Flattery said. “It … refused to live.” He looked up at them while still keeping a check on Prudence’s return to consciousness.

“It’s not like a human, though,” Bickel said. “If we can find the answer—why it turned itself off—why it sent us this message …”

“You’d turn it back on?” Flattery asked.

“Wouldn’t you?” Timberlake demanded.

“Are you forgetting how it turned vicious?” Flattery asked. “You were there with me … trapped.”

We’re playing a kind of blind man’s bluff,
Bickel thought.
We know something’s
out there—
something useful and something dangerous. We grope for it and try to grasp it and describe it, but Raj is right. We don’t know if what we get will be the useful thing or the monster
—
the tool or the Golem.

“But it’ll go beyond our consciousness, beyond our abilities,” Timberlake said.

“Exactly,” Flattery said.

“It contains an infinite progression of shades of, all within that new form of awareness,” Bickel said. “We’ve built a kind of ultimate alien here. Raj’s question is as good as yours. Should we turn it on? Can we turn it on?”

Prudence reached up, groping, pushed Flattery’s hand away from her head. She tried to sit up. Flattery helped her.

“Easy now,” he said.

She put her hand to her throat. How sore her throat felt. She had been absorbing the conversation around her for several minutes, remembering. She remembered there had been a train of thought, frantic efforts to raise Bickel on the intercom and communicate with him. She remembered the effort and the urgency, but the precise reason for aban-doning her post and rushing off to try to tell Bickel eluded her.

“We have to weed false information out of our minds,” Bickel said. “We’re assuming a totally conscious robot, all of its activity directed by consciousness. That cannot be, unless every action is monitored simultaneously.”

His words aroused a vague sense of anger in Prudence. He kept skirting the … what was that thought?

“Would it have the illusion that it’s the center of the universe?” Timberlake asked.

“No.” Bickel shook his head, remembering:
“The universe has no center.”
That’s what it had said to him.

This was a coding problem contained in the concept of
you
and the concept of—of identity. Bickel nodded to himself.
Are you aware? Am I aware?
He looked at the others.

The
object
and its
surround.

A moment of intense despair overcame him. He felt like groaning.

“Life as we know it,” Timberlake said, “started evolving some three thousand million years ago. When it got to a certain point, then consciousness appeared. Before that, there was no consciousness … at least in our life form. Con-sciousness comes out of that unconscious sea of evolution.” He looked at Bickel. “It exists right now immersed in that universal sea of unconsciousness.”

As though Timberlake’s words had released a dam, Prudence remembered the train of thought so urgent it had forced her to abandon her post to go in search of Bickel.

Determinism at work in a sea of indeterminism!
And she held the mathematical key to the problem. That was the train of thought. She had been trying to narrow down a new definition, mathematically stated, of quantum probability. She had sensed a three-dimensional grid forming in her awareness and a probing beam of consciousness focusing into that grid.

Again, she felt that enormous increment of conscious-ness and the memory of that sudden knowledge—she had pushed her body’s chemistry beyond a balance point. She remembered how the darkness had engulfed her just as the mathematical beauty, the simplicity of the thought had spread itself out in her mind.

Everything depended on the origins of impulses and the reflection of them. It was a field of reflections—and this held the key to the
sensation
of consciousness.

We construct consciousness this way.

Our bodies take us part of the way and then the identity takes over.

Identity … an illusion … an assumption.

But that was just a working tool … like a navigator assuming his position on a boundless sea … assuming his position on a chart—an assumption on an assumption, sym-bol of symbols. Assuming such a position, even assuming a position which he knew to be wrong, the navigator could work his way
mathematically
to a close approximation of his correct position.

Approximation.

Particles or waves—it was not important which, but it was important whether the assumption worked.

Her entire conceptual process took no more than an eye blink of time but it produced a flare of awareness which filled her with energy.

There was no doubt at all where this flare of awareness pointed—at the AAT system. For a moment, she held the entire complex of the AAT system in her mind, manipulating the continuous interlocking pattern with her symbological grid. It was so simple. The AAT was a four-dimensional continuum, a piece of space-time geometry subject to considerations of curvature, duration-over-distance and particle/wave transfer through a multiplicity of sensor-traverse lines.

To the human nervous system, an instrument designed for the job, nothing could be simplier than visualizing and manipulating such a four-dimensional spiderweb—once the nature of the spiderweb was understood.

“John,” she said, “the Ox isn’t the instrument of consciousness; it’s the AAT, the manipulator of symbols. The Ox circuits are merely something this
manipulator
can use to stand up tall, to know its own dimensions.”

“The
object
and its
surround,”
Bickel whispered. “Subject and background, grid and map … consciousness and uncon-sciousness!”

“The Ox is the unconscious component,” she said, “a machine for transferring energy.”

And, still within this heightened awareness, she explained the mathematical clues that had led her to this point.

“A matrix system,” Bickel said, remembering his own plunge into this way of attacking the problem, and the blaze of consciousness which that plunge had whipped up. “And submatrices and sub-submatrices without end.”

Flattery stood up, seeing where these thoughts must lead, dreading the moment of action to come. He looked down at Prudence seated on the deck, seeing her flushed cheeks, the glitter in her eyes.

“And where does this AAT-cum-Ox stand?” Flattery asked. “Have you thought of that?”

Prudence met his stare, understanding now why their hyb tanks had been filled with colonists. “The colonists,” she said, nodding. “A field of unconsciousness from which any unconscious can draw—a ground that sustains and buoys—and the
sleeping
colonists provide it.”

Flattery shook his head, feeling angry, confused.

Bickel stared beyond Prue, absorbing her words. Ideas merged and fitting—orders evolved in his awareness. This ship had been armed, maneuvered, aimed and fired. He remembered Hempstead: gnome-wise face, eyes glittering, and that compelling voice saying:
“What matters most is the search itself. This is more important than the searchers. Consciousness must dream, it must have a dreaming ground—and, dreaming, must invoke ever new dreams.”

“Knowledge is pitiless,” Bickel said.

Prudence ignored him, keeping her attention on Flattery, aware of the psychiatrist-chaplain’s confusion. “Don’t you see it, Raj? To separate subject from object there has to be a background of some kind. You have to be able to see it against something. What’s the background for conscious-ness? Unconsciousness.”

“Zombies,” Bickel said. “Remember, Raj? You called us zombies. And why not? We’ve existed for most of our lives in a state of light hypnosis.”

Flattery knew Bickel had said something, but the words refused to link in any understandable form. It was as though Bickel had said: “Hop limbo promise the insect watering class to be erected to a first behavior preserve.” The words trailed off through his mind as though they had been flashed in front of his awareness to screen him from something else.

From what?

A profound silence filled Com-central, broken by the sound of Prudence shifting her position on the deck.

Bickel felt himself go as calm as that silence, as though some other self had waited for that silence to take the reins. The sensation lasted for a single heartbeat and expanded into a sense of well-being, a relaxed poise that illuminated everything around him. It was as if one universe had been substituted for another, as if a sensory amplication of enor-mous intensity had been turned on his universe.

He saw the stark unconsciousness in Flattery’s face, in Timberlake’s—and the semi-consciousness of Prudence.

Zombies,
he thought.

“Raj, you called us zombies,” Bickel repeated. “If we were lightly hypnotized we’d appear partially dead to someone in a higher state of consciousness.”

“Do you have to mumble?” Flattery demanded.

Flattery glared at Bickel. He felt that the man was using real words and that communication was intended, but all the meanings slipped and slithered through his mind without making connection.

Prudence felt Bickel’s words lifting her. There came an instant in which the universe turned upon one still point that was herself. The feeling shifted: self no longer was confined within her. As she gave up the self, clarity came. Flattery’s words returned to her:
“There’s nothing
concerning our-selves about which we can be truly objective except our physical responses.”

The chemical experiments on her own body had never offered a real chance to solve their problem, but they had provided a
ground
for understanding her own identity. The hope of more had been illusory … because the experiments could not be conducted simultaneously on every occupant of the Tin Egg—their isolated world.

We share unconsciousness!
she thought.

And she realized this must be the true reason the hyb tanks were filled with sleeping humans. Somewhere along the line, Project had seen
that
necessity. The umbilicus crew had to have a minimal
ground
of shared unconsciousness upon which to stand. They had to have a reference point, a tiny island in the vast dark which they could share with whatever they might produce out of their neuron fibers and Eng multipliers. They’d needed a ground upon which to stand before they could reach up tall.

The mirror cannot reflect itself,
she thought.

“Hypnotized,” Bickel said. “We accept it as normal because it’s virtually the only form of consciousness we’ve ever seen. You’ve watched the Earth video. You wouldn’t expect an idiot to be fooled by the commercials, but that rhythmic hammering, that repetition …”

“Half dead,” Prudence said. “Zombies.”

She said, “Zombies,”
Flattery thought. Her voice frightened him.

Bickel saw the alertness spread through her eyes, the awakening.

“We should’ve thought of the AAT when the thing came alive during reception from UMB,” Bickel said.

“You see what has to be done?’ Prudence asked. “The energizer—”

“Stimulator,” Bickel said.

“Stimulator,” she said. “It has to be part of the AAT’s input.”

“Slack lines,” Bickel said. “You can’t hold the reins too tightly because the signals have multiple functions. They need room to spread!”

Timberlake looked from one to the other. He felt a sense of dullness lifting from his mind.
Slack lines … sensory modules.

Symbols!

Timberlake’s memory shot back to their conversation about the energizer.
“All the master programs dealing with translation of symbols are monitored through feedback loops linked to the AAT.”
He heard his own voice replaying in his mind.

Symbols!

The whole form of their problem arrayed itself in Timberlake’s memory with the sudden force of something thrown at him. Problem and solution set themselves up as a physical arrangement and he saw the nerve-nets they had built all arrayed as a series of triangular faces with a Mobius twist—prisms of cell triangles interlaced and marching with their energy flows through infinite dimensions, forming sense data and memory images outside conventional space, storing bits and altering relationships in limitless dimensional extensions.

Bickel saw the vitality flowing into Timberlake, said: “Think of the AAT, Tim. Remember what we were saying?”

Timberlake nodded. The AAT. It received hundreds of duplicates of the same message compressed into the modulated laser burst. It averaged out the blanks and distortions, filtered for noise, compared for probable meaning on the doubtful bits, fed the result into a vocoder and produced it at an output as intelligible sound.

“It closely approximates what we do when we hear someone say something to us … then repeat it to check if we heard correctly,” Timberlake said.

“You’re all forgetting something,” Flattery said.

They turned, saw Flattery at his own action couch, his hand on his own repeater console. A single red light had come alive there.

Flattery stared from Bickel to Prudence to Timberlake, seeing the unnatural brilliance in their eyes. Madness! And the deep color in their faces, their sense of excitement.

“Raj, wait,” Bickel said. He spoke soothingly, watching Flattery’s hand poised over a key beneath that single red light.

I
should’ve known there’d be another trigger,
Bickel thought.

Chapter 31

Mundane existence is the source of renewed suffering. The human goal is to attain release from the bondage of material existence and, achieving release, to unite with the Supreme Self.

—Education of the Psychiatrist/Chaplain Moonbase Documents

For a long, pulsing moment after Flattery spoke, they all gazed at that red button: the trigger of their destruction. They all knew this thing. Flattery’s intrusion had ignited a mutual awareness. They were supposed to accept this moment of oblivion. But something new had happened on this venture.

“A few more seconds of life aren’t important,” Bickel said. He held up a hand, hesitant. “You can … wait for just a few seconds.”

“You know I have to do this,” Flattery said.

Even as he spoke, Flattery savored the “Ahhhhh” of suspense which charged this moment with an electrical sensation. It filled the air around them like ozone.

“You have control of the situation,” Bickel said. His glance flickered toward the red switch with Flattery’s hand poised to touch it. “The least you can do is hear what I have to say.”

“We can’t turn this thing loose upon the universe,” Flattery said.

Timberlake swallowed, glanced down at Prudence.
How odd,
he thought,
that we should die so soon after coming alive.

“How is it, Raj,” Bickel asked, “that we can explain more about the unconscious networks of the human body than we can about the conscious?”

“You’re wasting time,” Flattery said.

“But the thing’s dead,” Bickel said.

“I have to be sure,” Flattery said.

“Why can’t you be sure
after
hearing what John has to say?” Prudence asked.

She looked at Bickel to draw Flattery’s attention there. Two lights had begun blinking on the main computer console behind Flattery.

“It’s a paradox,” Bickel said. “We’re asked to discard logical positivism while maintaining logic. We’re asked to find a cause-and-effect system in a sea of probabilities where enormously large systems are based on even larger systems which are based on greater systems yet.”

Flattery looked at him, caught by the trailing ends of Bickel’s thoughts. “Cause and effect?” he asked.

“What happens if you push that key?” Bickel asked. He nodded to the trigger beneath Flattery’s hand.

Prudence held her breath, praying Flattery would not turn. More lights were winking on the main computer con-sole above Timberlake’s couch. She couldn’t say why the lights gave her hope, but the evidence of life in the ship …

“If I push this key,” Flattery said, “an action sequence will be alerted in the computer.” He glanced back at the winking lights. “You’ll notice that part of the computer is becoming active. These circuits—” he returned his attention to Bickel “—have extra buffering and emergency power. The master program set off by this key instructs the computer to destroy itself and the ship—opening all the locks, exploding charges in key places.”

“Cause and effect,” Bickel said. And he marveled at how automatic Flattery’s movements appeared. A zombie. “Cause and effect doesn’t square with consciousness,” he said.

A fascinating idea,
Flattery thought.

“If any subsequent action proceeds with absolute and immediate causality from the sequence of past actions, then there can be no conscious influence of behavior,” Bickel said. “Think of a row of dominoes falling. The human willpower—the muscle and arm of our consciousness—couldn’t decide what behavior to use because that behavior would all have been predetermined by a long line of preceding cause and effect.”

Flattery felt the hand poised over the deadly key begin to ache. “We can’t predict what this beast would do,” he said. “I know.”

Bickel
^’
s signing our death warrant,
Prudence thought. She got to her feet. Her muscles still felt weak, but she sensed the stimulant doing its work. She gripped Timber-lake’s arm to steady herself.

Timberlake glanced at her hand, looked back at Flattery.

How calm Tim seems,
she thought.

“Maybe consciousness doesn’t influence neural activity at all,” Timberlake said. “Perhaps we only imagine—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Flattery said. “That’d have no survival value and wouldn’t have arisen in nature. Conscious creatures would’ve died out long ago.”

Well, at least we’ve got him arguing,
Timberlake thought. He smiled at Prudence, but she was watching Bickel. Timberlake returned his attention to Flattery.
How dull … almost dead the man looks.

“Think of an electronic tube,” Bickel said. “A very tiny amount of energy applied at the critical bias junction produces a tremendous change in output. Consciousness does something on the same order, Tim. We have a neural amplifier.”

“Instant causality,” Flattery whispered.

Lord! How that hand ached—as though it had been held above the trigger key for a century.

“That’s what we have to toss out of our thinking,” Bickel said. “Instant causality says if we have complete knowledge of a natural law and complete knowledge of the given system at a given time, then we can predict
exactly
what the system will do from that point on. That sure as hell isn’t true at the atomic level and it doesn’t apply to consciousness. Consciousness is like a system of lenses that select and amplify, that enlarge objects out of the surround. It can delve deep into the microcosm or into the macrocosm. It reduces the gigantic to the manageable, or enlarges the invisible to the visible.”

This doesn’t change anything,
Flattery thought.
Why are we talking? Is he just trying to gain a little time?
The pressures of the terrible necessity which had been built into him were becoming almost unbearable.

Bickel saw the faint stirrings of life in Flattery’s eyes. “But this consciousness factor isn’t a completely random thing. In a universe packed with random possibility of des-truction, random activity equals the certainty of encoun-tering that destruction—and we’re assuming consciousness is survival-oriented.”

“Unless it’s a healing process,” Flattery said.

“But the healing process would have to completely counteract
any
destruction,” Bickel said. And he saw the light of vitality grow in Flattery’s eyes, his manner.

“I have to push this key, John,” Flattery said. “Do you know that?”

“In a moment,” Bickel said.

“Raj, you can’t,” Prudence said. “Think of all those lives down in the hyb tanks. Think of—”

“Think of all those helpless lives back on Earth,” Flattery said. “What would we turn loose on them? John’s black box—white box transfer put his life—his entire ancestry—into the computer. Don’t you see that? Any of you?”

Prudence put a hand to her mouth.

Bickel saw the alertness in Flattery, the vital consciousness expressed in every movement, realized that death-conditioning tensions had pushed him over the threshold into something near full potential. But the new argument Flattery had produced staggered Bickel.

If we restore it … awaken it … I’d be its unconscious,
Bickel thought.
I’d be its emotional monitor, its id, its ego and its ancestors.
He swallowed.
And Raj …

“Raj, don’t push that key,” Bickel said.

“I must,” Flattery said. And as he spoke he sensed the poignancy of their awareness—this new vitality.

“You don’t understand,” Bickel said. “That field genera-tor in your cubby—you think there was no feedback from you into the system, but there was. Your voice, your prayers—every gross or subtle reaction went back into the system through its sensors. Whatever religion is to you, that’s what it’d be to the Ox. Whatever—”

“Whatever religion
was
to me,” Flattery said.

And he pushed the key. It clicked, locked.

“How long do we have, Raj?” Timberlake asked.

“Perhaps a few minutes,” Flattery said.

“And perhaps more,” Bickel said.

“Don’t you think we should’ve tried to limp back to UMB?” Prudence asked. “Awake as we are now, the ship control necessities would’ve been so much simpler.”

“Some fool would be certain to play with this ship—just testing,” Flattery said. “And we …” He gestured to include all four of them. “This potential we’ve discovered without ourselves would’ve been engulfed on Earth, smothered, killed.” He shrugged. “What are a few minutes or a few years, more or less? I had a responsibility … and fulfilled it.”

“You had a death wish, too,” Bickel said.

“That, too,” Flattery agreed, recognizing how the deadly impulse had helped project him into his full awareness.

With that realization, Flattery began to glimpse the train of Bickel’s cryptic words—their other meaning.

“There were Greeks who said that even the gods must die,” Bickel said.

Flattery turned, looked at the big board. It was fully alight now, not a warning telltale showing, every gauge zeroed normal.

“It’s programmed to take us to Tau Ceti,” Bickel said.

Flattery began to laugh, almost hysterically. Presently, he stopped. “But there’s no inhabitable planet at Tau Ceti. You know what all this is, John—a set piece. We know what we are—cell-culture humans! A host gave a bit of himself containing the template of the total and the axolotl tanks took care of the rest. We were expendables!” He sighed, put down the urge to sink back into the deadly torpor. “They’re already growing our replacements, our duplicates, building another Tin Egg … back at UMB. Each failure teaches them something back at UMB. They’ve had a continuous monitor on the computer. When I depressed that key, that also launched a capsule back toward Earth—the complete report.”

“Not quite complete,” Bickel said.

“The ship is going to take us to Tau Ceti,” Timberlake said.

“But the self-destruction program,” Prudence said. And as she spoke, she saw what the others already had seen. The ship held control of its own death. It could die. And this was what had given it life. The impulse welled up into the AAT from the Ox circuits … and was repressed, the way humans repressed it. The ship had come to life the way they had—in the midst of death. Death was the background against which life could know itself. Without death—an ending—they were confronted by the infinite design problem, an impossibility.

All Flattery had done was to provide the AAT—the seat of consciousness—with a superenergizer.

“Nothing at Tau Ceti, you’re sure?” Bickel asked.

“Planets, but not inhabitable,” Flattery said.

A green action light began to glow on the main console.

“No sense going into hyb,” Bickel said.

“We are happy,” Prudence said. She stared at the green light. “It isn’t fully conscious yet—the ship.”

“Of course not,” Timberlake said, and he thought how deftly she had phrased their emotional state.
I would’ve
said we are filled with joy. But joy has somewhat religious overtones. Prue’s way is better.

Prudence grew aware that Flattery was looking at her. “Why not?” he said.

Yes, why not?
she agreed.

But no woman had ever presided at a stranger birth.

She crossed to the main console, switched the computer’s audio pickup into the main input channel.

“You,” she said.

She kept her hand on the switch, the new sensitivity of her skin reporting the molecular shift of metal in direct contact.

They waited, knowing the outline of what was happening inside their robotic construction. That one word, internally powered by programmed curiosity and self-preservation directives, was winding its way through the as-yet semi-conscious creation. Preservation—but there were many kinds of preservation, many things to preserve.

But there was only one receptor upon which “You” could impress itself.

Programs were firing, new cross-links being created, comparisons and balances being made.

Abruptly, the board in front of Prudence went dead. Every light extinguished, every gauge at dead rest. She waggled the computer switch, got no response. The entire ship began to tremble.

“Is that the self-destruction program?” Bickel asked.

A single word, metallic and harsh, boomed from the vocorder above them: “Negative.”

The ship vibration eased, resumed, cut off sharply.

There came a weighted sense of drifting, a profound silence which they felt extended throughout the ship.

Again, the vocoder came to life, but softer: “Now, you will see on your screens a lateral view.”

The overhead screen and the fore bulkhead screen came alight with the identical scene: a view of a solar system, planets picked out by the telltale red arrows of computer reference.

“Six planets,” Flattery whispered. “Notice the pattern—and the sky beyond.”

“You recognize it?” Timberlake asked.

“It’s the view the probes brought back,” Flattery said. “The Tau Ceti system.”

“Why would it reproduce the probe view?” Prudence asked.

“Prudence,” said the vocoder, “this is not a probe view. These radiations are what I … see now around me.”

“We’re already at Tau Ceti?” Prudence asked. “How can that be? We can’t be there!”

“The symbol
there
is an inaccuracy,” said the vocoder. “There and here shift according to a polarity dependent upon dimension.”

“But we’re there!” Prudence said.

“A statement of the obvious may be used to reinforce your awareness,” the vocoder said. “You were to be conveyed safely to Tau Ceti. You have arrived at Tau Ceti.”

“Safely,” Flattery said. “There’s no place for us to land.”

“An inconvenience, no more,” said the vocoder.

Every arrow but one on the screen winked out.

“This planet has been prepared for you,” said the vocoder.

Bickel glanced sideways at Flattery, saw the psychiatrist-chaplain mopping perspiration from his brow.

“Something’s wrong,” the vocoder said. “You have but to look around you. You are safe. Observe.”

The scene on the screens shifted.

“The fourth planet,” said the vocoder. “That which is prepared can be preserved.”

Flattery gripped Bickel’s arm. “Can’t you hear it?”

But Bickel was staring at the view on the fore screen—a planet growing larger, filling the screen: a green planet with atmosphere and clouds.