Gordon R. Dickson (28 page)

But I was not afraid of death, I
told myself, if the results could be achieved. After all, in a sense, I had
been living on borrowed time since that first heart attack. I turned away from
the patterns I was studying and looked deeper into the structure of the web
itself, reaching for understanding of the laws by which it operated.

Gradually, that understanding came.
Porniarsk had used the word "gestalt" in referring to that which he
hoped I would perceive if I came to the situation here with a free and
unprejudiced mind; and the word had jarred on me at the time. The avatar, we
had all assumed, came from a race more advanced than ours— whether it was
advanced in time or otherwise. I had taken it for granted that any twentieth
century human terms would be inadequate to explain whatever Porniarsk dealt
with, and that he would avoid them for fear of creating misunderstandings.

—Besides, "gestalt" came
close to having been one of the cant words of twentieth century psychology; the
sort of word that had been used and misused by people I knew, who wanted to
sound knowledgeable about a highly specialized subject they would never take
the time to study properly and understand. Granted, the avatar was probably
using the human word nearest in meaning to what he wanted to say, I had still
felt he could have explained himself in more hard-edged technical or scientific
terms.

But then, later, he had also used
the word "monad"; and, remembering that, I now began to comprehend
one important fact. The forces of the time storm and the device he was building
so I could come to grips with them, belonged not so much to a physical, or even
a psychological, but to a
philosophical
universe. I was far from
understanding why this should be. In fact, with regard to the whole business, I
was still like a child in kindergarten, learning about traffic lights without
really comprehending the social and legal machinery behind the fact of their
existence. But with the aid of the device, I had finally begun, at least, to
get into the proper arena of perception.

Briefly and clumsily, in the area in
which I would have to deal with the time storm, the only monads—that is, the
only basic, indestructible, building blocks or operators—were individual minds.
Each monad was capable of reflecting or expressing the whole universe from its
individual point of view. In fact, each monad had always potentially expressed
it; but the ability to do so had always been a possible function, unless the
individual monad-mind had possessed something like a device-of-assistance to
implement or execute changes in what it expressed.

Of course, expressing a change in
the universe, and causing that change to take place, was not quite as simple as
wishing and making it so. For one thing, all monads involved in a particular
expression of some part of the universe at a particular moment were also
involved with each other and had to be in agreement on any change they wished
to express. For another, the change had to originate in the point of view of a
monad capable of reflecting all the physical—not just the
philosophical—universe as plastic and controllable.

The time storm itself was a
phenomenon of the physical universe. In the limited terms to which Porniarsk
was restricted by our language, he had explained to me that it was the result
of en-tropic anarchy. The expanding universe had continued its expansion until
a point of intolerable strain on the network of forces that made up the space-time
fabric had been reached and passed. Then, a breakdown had occurred. In effect,
the space-time bubble had begun to disintegrate. Some of the galaxies that had
been moving outward, away from each other and the universal center, producing a
state of diminishing entropy, began, in spot fashion, to fall back, contracting
the universe and creating isolated states of increasing entropy.

The conflict between opposed
entropic states had spawned the time storm. As Porniarsk had said, the storm as
a whole was too massive for control by action of the monads belonging to our
original time, or even to his. But a delaying action could be fought. The
forces set loose by the entropic conflict could be balanced against each other
here and there, thereby slowing down the general anarchies enough to buy some
breathing time, until the minds of those concerned with the straggle could
develop more powerful forces to put in play across the connection between the
philosophical and physical universes.

I was a single monad (though, of
course, reinforced with the other seven at their altered consoles), and not a
particularly capable one basically. But I was also something of a freak, a
lucky freak in that my freakiness apparently fitted the necessity of the
moment. That was why I could think, as I was privately doing now, of creating
an enclave in the time storm that would include the whole earth and its natural
satellite, instead of merely an enclave containing just the few square miles
surrounding us, which had been Porniarsk's hope.

"I'll need one more console
adapted," I said to Porniarsk. "Don't worry, now. I can handle
it."

"But there's no one to sit at
it," said Bill.

"That's correct," said
Porniarsk patiently. "There are only seven other adults in your party. I
haven't any effectiveness as a monad. Neither has the little girl."

"She hasn't?" I looked
hard at the avatar.

"Not... in effect," he
said, with a rare second of hesitation. "A monad is required to have more
than just a living intelligence and a personality. It has to have the
capability of reflecting the universe. Wendy hasn't matured enough to do that.
If you could ask her about it, and she could answer you, she'd say something to
the effect that to her the universe isn't a defined entity. It's amorphous,
unpredictable, capable of changing and surprising her at any moment. For her,
the universe as she now sees it is more like a god or devil than a mechanism of
natural laws—something she's got no hope of understanding or controlling.

"All right," I said.
"I'll settle for the fact she's at least partially a monad."

"There's no such thing,"
said Porniarsk. "A monad either is, or is not. In any case, even if she
was a partial monad, a partial monad is incapable of helping you."

"What about when it's combined
with another partial monad?"

"What other partial
monad?" Bill asked.

"The Old Man, down at the
village."

"This is even worse than your
idea of using Wendy," said Porniarsk. For the first time since we'd met
him, the tone of his voice came close to betraying irritation with one of us.
"The experimental down below us are artificially created animals. The very
concept of 'universe' is beyond them. They're only bundles of reflexes,
conditioned and trained."

"All but one of them," I
said. "Porniarsk, don't forget there're a lot of things I can see now with
the help of the seven sets you've already produced, even if they don't have
monads in connection with them yet. One of those things is that the Old Man may
have been bred in a test-tube—or whatever they all came from—but he's got some
kind of concept of 'universe,' even if it's limited to his village and a mile
or so of the rock around it. When we first came in here and passed the initial
test of their attack, all the rest of them immediately took us for granted. Not
the Old Man. By design or chance, he's got something individual to measure new
things against, plus whatever it takes to make new decisions on the basis of
that measurement. And you can't deny he's adult."

No one said anything for a moment.

"I don't think," said Bill
at last, "that Marie's going to like Wendy being hooked up to something
like the Old Man."

"Wendy won't be. They'll both
just be hooked in with all the rest of us. Anyway, I'll explain it to
Marie."

"How'll you get the Old Man to
cooperate?"

"He doesn't have to
cooperate," I said. "I'll bring him up here, connect him to one of
the consoles and chain him to it with Sunday's chain. Then give him a day or
two to get used to the feel of assistance, and his being in connection with my
mind. Once he feels the advantages these things give him, my bet is he'll get
over being scared and become interested."

"If you use force to bring him
up here," said Porniarsk, "you'll undoubtedly trigger off the
antagonisms of his fellow experimentals."

"I think I can do it without,"
I said. "I've got an idea."

With that, I left the two of them
and went back down to our camp, which was set up at the foot of the peak. I
unchained Sunday and went looking for Marie. Sunday could only be trusted to
stick around the camp when I was there. He had shown no particularly strong
hunting instincts before in all the time I had known him; but for some reason
the experimentals seemed to fascinate him. Since the first day of our camp at
the foot of the hill, when I had caught him stalking one of the village
inhabitants who was out hunting among the rocks, we had kept him chained up
when I was up on the peak. It was possible he might not have hurt the
experimental, but the sight I had had of him, creeping softly along, belly
almost dragging the ground and tail a-twitch, was too vivid to forget.

At any rate, now I let him loose,
and he butted his head against me and rubbed himself against my legs all the
time I was looking for Marie. I found her, with Wendy, down at the creek by the
foot of the peak, doing some washing.

It was not the time to mention that
I wanted Wendy at one of the consoles. The little girl had come to trust me;
and—I don't care how male and solitary you are—if a small child decides to take
to you, you have to carry your own instincts somewhere outside the normal
spectrum not to feel some sort of emotional response. Anything unexpected or
new tended to frighten Wendy; and any concern or doubt about it by her mother
made the fright certain. The idea would have to be presented to Wendy gently,
and with Marie's cooperation. I spoke to Marie now, instead, about the other
matter I had in mind.

"Have you got any of that
brandy left?" I asked.

She put down in a roaster pan some
jeans of Wendy's she was wringing out and shook her hands to get the excess
water off. She had her own slacks rolled up above her knees and her legs and
feet bare so that she could wade into the creek. The work had pinkened her face
and tousled her hair. She looked, not exactly younger, but more relaxed and
happy than usual; and for a second I felt sad that I had not been able to love
her after all, instead of Ellen.

"What's the occasion?" she
asked.

"No occasion," I said.
"I'm hoping to bait the Old Man in the village down there, so I can get
him up to the roundhouse. We want to try him with the consoles. You do have
some brandy left?"

"Yes," she said. "How
much do you want?"

"One full bottle ought to be
plenty," I said. "Is there that much?"

"I've got several full
bottles," she said. "Do you want it right away, or can I finish up
here first?"

"I'd like to get down to the
village before dark."

"I'll be done in five
minutes."

"Fine, then," I said and
sat down on a boulder to wait. It took her closer to fifteen than five minutes,
as it turned out, but there was still at least an hour or so of sunset left. We
went back to the camper; she got me an unopened bottle of brandy, and I walked
down to the village with it.

The whole thing was a gamble. I had
no idea what kind of body chemistry the experimentals had. From what Porniarsk
had said, they had evidently been developed by future humans from ape stock;
chimpanzee at a guess. The larger part of their diet seemed to be some sort of
artificially prepared eatable in a cube form that came from inside one of the
dome-shaped buildings. But since the building was small, and the supply of the
cubes seemed to be inexhaustible, I had guessed that there was some kind of
underground warehouse to which the building was merely an entrance. However, in
addition to the cubes, the experimentals were at least partly carnivorous. They
went out into the rocks around the village in the daytime to hunt small
rodent-like animals with their throwing knives; and these they either ate raw
on the spot or carried back into their buildings at the village to be eaten at
leisure.

All these things seemed to add up to
the strong possibility that they had digestive systems and metabolisms pretty
similar to a human's. But there was no way of being sure. All I could do was
try.

The Old Man was not out in the open
when I first walked into the village, but before I was half a dozen steps down
the main street, he had emerged from his dwelling to hunker down in front of
his doorway and stare at me steadily as I approached. I de-toured along the way
to pick up a couple of handleless cups or small bowls that one of the local
workmen was turning out on his machine. I'd thought earlier of bringing a
couple of containers from our camp, then decided the Old Man would be more
likely to trust utensils that were familiar to him. I came up to within ten
feet of him, sat down cross-legged on the hard-packed, stony dirt of the
street, and got my bottle from the inner jacket pocket in which I had been
carrying it.

I put both cups down, poured a
little brandy into both of them, picked up one, sipped from it and started
staring back at him.