Spacetime Donuts (5 page)

The drug wore off as quickly as it had come on. He was looking into Mick Turner's face. "You're the craziest of us all," said Mick, "We need you."

Too disoriented to form a question about the last few minutes' events, Vernor followed Mick back to the bar. "Is Alice here?" he asked finally.

"I saw her a while ago," Mick said. "She gave me this for you." He handed Vernor a suitcase. His stuff. The Angels were all he had now. "You want to sleep at my place?" Mick was asking.

Vernor shook his head, "I'm going to move back to the library. Starting tomorrow I've got to get myself back together." He felt shaky and frightened. The shot or the kiss?

"Have you seen Andy?" Mick asked.

"No," Vernor answered. "It's been awhile. I thought he was staying with Professor Kurtowski."

"Yeah," Mick said, "but I was just over at Kurtowski's. He hasn't seen Andy in a week."

Moto-O had wandered over, "Last week I see Andy at EM building," he put in. "He say he prepare for biggest trip."

Mick Turner shook his head slowly. "That's what I was thinking he did. We better go look for him."

"What do you mean?" Vernor said, looking from one to the other. "You think he took an over-dose?"

"No," Mick answered. "It's the machine, not the dope. Every time Andy was going a little farther into Phizwhiz. He had the idea that he could
stay
inside the machine and take over . . . live there as 'a stable energy configuration circulating freely among the memory banks and work spaces'!" He had said this last phrase in a sarcastically precise intonation, but the next sentence came straight from the heart. "He was getting tired of coming down."

"We must go to EM building and look for him," said Moto-O.

The three of them hurried out and rode uptown in a robot taxi. The door of the EM building was programmed to recognize the individual Angels' voiceprints, and it let them in. They hurried upstairs, checking all the places where Andy Silver might have installed a private hook-up to Phizwhiz. Finally they found it.

It was a spare room of the cybernetics lab. Vernor was the one who opened the door, and he saw Silver's body lying on the floor, a thick cable leading from his head to the panel of a Phizwhiz implementation. Apparently he had been plugged in for several days. His body was completely inert, and it seemed certain that he was dead.

Mick rushed forward to unplug his old friend, but to his amazement his hand went right through Silver's lifeless form. It seemed to be a ghost, no, a Hollow of Andy Silver. Suddenly the image moved to turn its face towards them, and it spoke, fading as they stood there.

"Tell them I was a martyr for the Revolution," the voice said. By the end of the sentence, the image of Andy Silver before them had dwindled up into the cable to Phizwhiz, leaving only a slowly dying chuckle behind.

Mick Turner took over as the head of the Angels. Silver had left him his stash of ZZ-74, and Turner seemed to know how to find the mysterious Professor Kurtowski to get more of the stuff whenever it was needed. Vernor was eager to be taken to see the great man, but Mick kept stalling on it.

It was hard to tell what had really happened to Andy Silver. They never found his body, so they couldn't be sure he was really dead—or that he had ever really existed. Some claimed that Silver had been a Hollow all along, a fantasy of Phizwhiz. It seemed more likely, however, that Andy was a person who was somehow alive inside Phizwhiz.

The evidence that he had survived assimilation was indirect. It just seemed that after Andy Silver's disappearance, Phizwhiz's behavior became more radical, more provocative. This could, of course, simply have been the cumulative effect of all the Angels' work; but some of Phizwhiz's aberrations seemed to have Andy's distinctive touch.

For instance, the next time the Governor made a speech, something "happened" to the sound track and it sounded like he was drunkenly asking the public at large to turn themselves in to be cooked down to oil for Phizwhiz.

Several days later the USISU newspaper printed the secret locations of Phizwhiz's main components along with detailed descriptions of their mechanized defense systems. Incredible things began appearing on the Hollows, for instance an animated cartoon serial based on the works of S. Clay Wilson, one of the depraved Zap artists of the mid-20th century.

But Vernor was not fully aware of these events. He had moved back into the library. Alice's last words to him still stung and he was spending less time getting stoned and more time working. He kept meaning to get back in touch with her, but he wanted to be able to impress her with some really solid new discovery when he came back.

He hardly ever went to Waxy's anymore, but kept in touch with the Angels through Mick Turner, who dropped in occasionally. Inspired by Vernor's industry, Mick even read part of
Geometry and Reality
, a book on curved space and the fourth dimension which Vernor pressed on him. But more and more, Vernor was alone with his ideas. He had finally worked his way out to the place where science shades into fiction.

He was getting deeply interested in determining the fundamental nature of matter. The conventional notion is that there is a sort of lower bound to the size of particles. You can break things down through the molecular, atomic, nuclear, and elementary particle levels . . . but eventually you reach a dead end, where you have some final smallest particles, called perhaps quarks.

There is a certain difficulty with this conventional view that there is such a thing as a smallest particle: What are
these
particles made of? That is, when someone asks what a rock is made of, you can answer, "a cloud of molecules"; and if someone asks what a molecule is made of, you can answer, "a cloud of atoms"; but if there is nothing smaller than quarks, what
is
a quark made of?

Vernor had been toying with the idea of the infinite divisibility of matter. A quark would be a cloud of even smaller things, called, say, darks . . . and darks would be clouds of barks, and barks would be clouds of marks, and so on ad infinitum. In this situation, there would
be
no matter . . . for any particle you pointed to would turn out, on closer examination, to be mostly empty space with a few smaller particles floating in it . . . and each of these smaller particles would, again, be a flock of still smaller particles floating in empty space . . . and so on. According to Vernor, an object, such as a book, would simply be a cloud of clouds of clouds of clouds of . . . nothing but pure structure.

Vernor reasoned further that if there was no limit to how
small
objects could be, then perhaps there was no limit to how
large
they could be. This would mean that the hierarchy; planet, solar system, star cluster, galaxy, group of galaxies . . . should continue ever upwards, ramifying out into an infinite universe.

Vernor had studied enough Cantorian set theory to be comfortable with infinity in the abstract, but there was something definitely unsettling about a doubly infinite universe. Was there no way to avoid these infinities without baldly claiming that there is nothing smaller than
this
, and nothing larger than
that
? The solution came to him one night when he had the great vision of his life.

After a good day's work, Vernor smoked a joint one evening and, moved to do something new, went out into the garden behind the library. There was a large tree there, and he was able to climb to its fork some twelve feet up by clinging to the grooves in the tree's bark and inching upwards. Once he was up in the first fork it was easy to move up the fatter of the two trunks to a comfortable perch some forty feet above the ground. He was barefoot and felt perfectly secure.

The reefer had, as usual, increased his depth perception, and his eyes feasted on the three-dimensionality of the branches' pattern. A fine rain was falling, so fine that it had not yet penetrated the tree's leaves. Set back from the City like this, in his leafy perch in the library garden, it was possible to listen to the incoming honks, roars, and clanks as a single sound, the sound of the City.

He noticed a hole in the tree some five feet above his head, and inched up, hugging the thick, smooth trunk. It was a bee-hive in there—a wild musky odor came out of the hole along with a steady, highly articulated "Z". A few bees walked around the lip of the hole, patrolling, but they were unalarmed by Vernor's arrival. He felt sure that they could feel his good vibes.

A soft breeze blew the misty rain in on him, and he slid back down to the crotch he'd been resting in. Closing his eyes, he began working on his head. There seem to be two ways in which to reach an experience of enlightenment . . . one can either expand one's consciousness to include Everything, or annihilate it so as to experience Nothing.

Exceptionally, Vernor tried to do both at once.

On the one hand, he moved towards Everything by letting his feeling of spatial immediacy expand from his head to include his whole body, then the tree trunk and the bees, then the garden, the city and the night sky. He expanded his time awareness as well, to include the paths of the rain drops, his last few thoughts, his childhood, the tree's growth, and the turning of the galaxy.

On the other hand, he was also moving towards Nothing by ceasing to identify himself with any one part of space at all. He contracted his time awareness towards Nothing by letting go of more and more of his individual thoughts and sensations, constantly diminishing his mental busyness.

The overall image he had of this activity was of two spheres, one expanding outwards towards infinity, and the other contracting in towards zero. The large one grew by continually doubling it's size, the smaller shrank by repeatedly halving it's size . . . and they seemed to be endlessly drawing apart. But with a sudden feeling of freedom and air Vernor had the conviction that the two spheres were on a direct collision course—that somehow the sphere expanding outwards and the sphere contracting inward would meet and merge at some attainable point where Zero was Infinity, where Nothing was Everything.

It was then that Vernor discovered the idea of Circular Scale. The next few days were spent trying to find mathematical or physical models of his vision—for he wished to fix the flash in an abstract, communicable structure—and he seemed to be getting somewhere. Circular Scale! This could be the big breakthrough he'd hoped for, the discovery that would show Alice he was more than a bum.

He was on the point of calling Alice, but then it was time to go in for his weekly session with Phizwhiz. Vernor went with mixed feelings. On the one hand, with instant access to all of the scientific research ever done, and with the ability to combine and manipulate arbitrarily complex patterns, it might be possible for him to develop his Circular Scale vision into a testable physical hypothesis in a matter of minutes. On the other hand, the personal effect of plugging in again would be to stop him from working on his own for several days, and could quite possibly extinguish the recently kindled creative fire in him.

As it turned out, Vernor was not to face this problem. When he walked into the EM building he sensed that something was funny. Nobody seemed willing to look him in the eye. Nevertheless he went up to the machine/human interfacing room, and took a capsule of ZZ-74 out of his pocket preparatory to plugging in. Suddenly the room swarmed with loaches.

One of them snatched the pill out of Vernor's hand, and then cuffed the hand to his own. "Let's go, Mr. Maxwell," he said, pulling Vernor towards the door.

Another loach put his face near Vernor's. "We got you by the balls, super-brain. That stuff you're on happens to be illegal."

"The pill?" Vernor answered quickly, "That's just vitamins." If he just kept lying he could beat the rap. The loach had seized samples of ZZ-74 before but they'd never been able to get any of it to show up in the lab analyses. The belief among the Angels was that ZZ-74 was so powerful that an individual dose was too minute to be chemically detectable. Unless the Us had radically improved their lab technique, he was safe.

But the loach seemed to have read his mind. "We're not interested in the dope anyway, Maxwell. You're wanted for conspiring to overthrow the government." Vernor stared at him, confused. The loach continued, "It's gone far enough. We rounded up most of the others after the show last night."

"Show?" Vernor asked. "What happened?"

"Listen to him," one of the loaches exclaimed. "As if he didn't know." He turned to Vernor, "only thing I can't understand, Maxwell, is how you could be stupid enough to come in here today."

Vernor decided to keep quiet until he found out what was up. There was a crowd of Dreamer kids out in the street. Some of them had co-ax cable hanging from their sockets, and they held the free ends towards Vernor. Even now, he'd still never directly plugged in with another person.

The fans gathered every afternoon to see the Angels who had plugged into Phizwhiz that day. It was hard to tell what they really wanted—action, good luck, ZZ-74, or just something to hope for. The existence of the Angels had done a great deal for the Dreamers' morale. Suddenly there was a real job which a Dreamer might aspire to, just as he or she was. It helped, of course, to have some scientific training by way of preparation for the high level of abstraction inside Phizwhiz . . . but some Angels, such as Oily Allie, knew very little science and got by on an innate ability to bend without breaking.

Today the kids were more excited than usual. The loaches drew their stun-sticks, but the kids surged closer and closer. Quickly Vernor pulled his free hand out of his pocket and threw his supply of ZZ-74 to one of the wilder looking kids. A loach punched Vernor in the temple as the kid took off down the street, swallowing pills as he ran.

When he recovered from the blow, Vernor found himself in the back of a robot operated paddy wagon, gliding smoothly towards jail. He tried to figure it out. The Us needed the Angels. Or did they? Certainly the Angels had made life more interesting, and their assistance in helping Phizwhiz separate the information from the noise had led to a number of improvements in the Users' technology. But on the debit side, there was the increasingly sociopathic aspect of the changes the Angels had brought about in Phizwhiz.