More Things in Heaven Page 17

  XXII

  CARMEN WENT after him: so did the priest, levering himself out of his chair and waddling away. I was left by myself with a myriad unanswered questions thundering around my skull.

  My first impulse was to reject everything that I’d been told. But that was stupid. Faced with inexplicable events, it was more rational to accept a working hypothesis to explain them, even if one had to modify it, than to dismiss it out of hand.

  I tried to calm my tumultuous mind and work out the consequences of Hermanos’ idea.

  First of all, then: the higher continuum which we called hyperspace was supposed to be similar to our own, only—to use Leon’s phrase— “more so.” Did this imply it would be infinite? I thought not. Rather, concepts such as distance would be of a different order. Concepts like a perfect half and a perfect straight line, which to us were mere mathematical fictions, would become not merely intuitive but literal truths.

  But wait a moment. I creased my forehead achingly as I struggled through the welter of confusion besetting me. To achieve that sort of perfection, did one not need to invoke actual

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  Infinity, upward and downward from the human scale?

  No, of course not! I snapped my fingers in excitement. Why hadn’t Hermanos instanced Can- tori an transfinite math in his list of examples— that series of rigorously logical arguments which long ago had demonstrated that some kinds of infinity could be "more infinite” than others?

  Maybe he’d wanted to leave me something to figure out for myself.

  I knew from Leon that Cantor’s concepts had provided some of the basic tools for the design of Starventure. Einsteinian mathematics ran into a dead end at the speed of light. That fitted with the idea of a continuum where our concepts were, so to speak, magnified without being fundamentally altered. Speed, distance, anything where a time factor was involved, must take on a new meaning, though, and to guess at such new meanings was beyond me. Perhaps, once your mind had been preconditioned, you had to experience that type of reality before you could apprehend it. L^on had done his best to describe his experiences, but very little had been clear to me.

  Location, separation . . . there was no end to the list of commonplace ideas which would be upset by transference into higher-order space! I wrenched my mind away from a path which led spiraling dizzily toward chaos, and tried to find an alternative approach.

  Clearly it was no use trying to picture the aliens' view of their own universe, but at least it might make sense to speculate about their impression of ours. Now we’d been assuming

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  our continuum to be finite but boundless, like the surface of a globe translated to four dimensions. If that held good, it would be possible for our entire plenum to be contained in theirs, incapable of interacting with it, so totally self- enclosed that it could be overlooked until an object—Starventure—burst out through its surface.

  But in that case the real extent of the cosmos must be uncountable centillions of times larger than we'd ever envisaged!

  My mind refused to make even an attempt to grapple with concepts on such a scale. Gratefully, I took refuge in thinking about matters that centered more directly on humanity.

  After whatever inconceivable catastrophe had led to the event which Hermanos had compared to a fall of angels, we would have been lost to the creatures of the super-universe: shut off, isolated, ignored. . . . What was the word I was looking for? Of course. Incommunicado.

  And perhaps they were happy to see us go. Whatever we had done, it could not have been a deed to be soon forgotten.

  Now, though, after the passage of millennia we had struggled back from our isolation (imprisonment? self-imposed or decreed as punishment?), and reminded them of our existence. Logically, they would want to look into our cosmos and examine our solar system. . . .

  Now that was right! I remembered the worried voice I’d heard over the PA system in Starventure's vision blister when we had crowded to look at the latest of the monsters in the sky. I’d been struck then by the increased green

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  ness of its appearance, as though radiation of longer wavelength was entering our kind of space. But this radiation must have been emitted from a tangential point between our distorted universe and theirs. No wonder that monster wasn’t visible from Earth; no wonder the Santadonna monster, studied with such care, had no effective mass! The image we were seeing must be a less-than-paper-thin projection.

  Abbott; Flatland. A finger through a plane surface would appear to the inhabitants of a two-dimensional universe as a rounded obstacle of insanely variable diameter.

  Little by little my ability to marshal facts and analogies was drawing me back from my depression. I sat more upright in my chair, halfway to being cheerful for the first time in days. Surely it followed that if Hermanos and his “colleagues” were prepared .to talk to us, to admit their identity openly, they must have some degree of respect for us? And their fluency in the use of our languages suggested that their experience and ours could not be totally foreign to one another. Granted, they might be hiding intolerable frustration at having to employ such a clumsy mode of communication as speech—but they were taking the trouble to hide it, if so. Perhaps they perceived their universe with a fuller awareness, but it nonetheless might contain familiar objects: matter, energy, stars, planets and moons. . . .

  Once, much more than a century ago, Haldane had speculated about the subjective realities experienced by other species: not only those close to us, such as dogs whose world is domi

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  nated by scent, but those with which we have little more in common than the planet we both live on—barnacles, for example, and bees. To a bee, he argued, a concept of "duty” might be as concrete as our notion of, say, solidity.

  Somewhere along those lines one might make a stumbling approach toward truth.

  And. granting all this, one could see why Hermanos did not prevaricate when I challenged him. What could they have to fear from us, trapped in an inferior universe and constrained to follow twisted lines in the mistaken belief that they were straight? They could do anything to us without our preventing them, down to and including lifting the fragile web of personality out of one body and into another, as neatly as mechanical components, simply so that they could study us at firsthand.

  Yes, but . . . Having studied us, what did they intend to do?

  It was approaching sunset when I grew tired of waiting by myself and walked around the side of the church back to the plaza. People were preparing to leave. Some farsighted peddlers had obtained a supply of wax torches for the return trip—of course, here on the equator darkness would come like a curtain falling—and there was a brisk trade in them at the far side of the square. Another enterprising young man was selling tortillas and a kind of enchilada to those who had forgotten to bring any food.

  Hermanos was standing by the latter’s stall, eating and talking to a succession of inquirers. Carmen and the priest were listening intently. I

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  stood a few paces away until there was a break in the conversation; then Hermanos excused himself and turned to me with a twinkle in his eye.

  “Well?” he said. “Have you come to any conclusions this afternoon?”

  I told him about them as baldly as I could.

  “Veiy good,” he approved. “If you’ll allow me to make a suggestion . . . ? Make this the subject of your next book. You’ll be famous because of it, but that’s incidental. The truth itself is what’s important.”

  “Yes, of course, but...”

  “But what?” Hermanos cocked his head.

  “But 1 still don’t know what you’re going to do!”

  He looked surprised. "What would you expect us to do? Leave, of course. Return these borrowed bodies to their original owners
—”

  Carmen gave a stifled exclamation, and he turned to her. “Yes, I’m afraid what David told you is true,” he said kindly. “I’m not in fact your brother—but don’t worry! The next time you see this face Hermanos Iglesias will be back in charge of it.” He gave a pleasant chuckle which took all the eldritch implications out of his words.

  “But do you mean you’re Just going to leave?” I insisted. “You’re not going to—well, keep in touch with us?”

  “What happens from now on isn’t up to us,” he said. Suddenly he was as stem as a judge, and no longer seemed to be a mere young man, slim, lightly built, quiet-voiced. “The rest, I’m afraid, is your affair. There will be no more

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  monsters In the sky after tonight. There will be no more people who look like people and are not. We shall wait. You must act. If you want to. You may not want to. You may be content in your little puddle, in which case there will be no more visits to the stars. You will be too afraid.”

  “Act!” I cried. “How? Tell us how!"

  “Why should I? Work it out! After all, we didn’t wish this fate on you. You brought it on yourselves. ”

  “What did we do?"

  “That we will never tell you—human. Fortunately you seem to have forgotten; if you hadn’t, we would prevent you from returning to us by closing the only possible path. You realize I or any of my kind could smash one of your puny starships more easily than you can swat a fly? But let that be. It’s not important. We who remember what you did will keep the memory to ourselves, so that you may with luck escape the temptation to try it again.”

  There was a silence that embraced only him, me. Carmen; the priest had gone bustling to talk with believers in the departing crowd. Yet it seemed to smother the world.

  Hermanos broke it. He clapped me on the arm and gave a broad grin. “Even if we won’t help, you can be certain we won’t hinder you. You’ve improved since we last saw you, you know. I hope very much to welcome you back with us one day.”

  “You don’t mean me, ” I said.

  “No, I don’t mean you.” He hesitated. “It will probably take twenty thousand years.”

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  * * *

  While I was still lost in the contemplation of two hundred centuries, he was gone.

  Rousing, I looked around in amazement. Darkness had fallen, and the four pole-mounted lights at the comers of the square showed only Carmen and the last few stragglers on their way toward Quito.

  “Where did he go?” I snapped at her,

  “I don’t know!” she whispered. “David, I’m afraid! He wasn’t my brother—you were right after all. But I don't see how, I don’t understand!”

  Beseechingly, she caught at my hand and stared up at my face as though to read an answer there.

  I had nothing to say. I put my arm around her shoulders; feeling her tremble, I began automatically to urge her after the others taking the Quito road, and she followed docilely. As soon as we had left the glare of the village’s lights, we could see the stars and—like stars on Earth—the dozens of wavering torches that traced the curves of the road.

  At intervals, people raised their heads to scan the sky. But there were no angels tonight, or any other night. There was only the glinting diamond of Starventure, orbiting between horizon and eclipse.

  A symbol of the future. A symbol of the wrong future.

  I grew aware that Carmen was weeping soundlessly, like a frightened child alone in the dark. I drew her closer, wishing that I could weep too—for our lost gloiy and our lost conceit. We had opened Pandora’s box, and all the evils had

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  gone out into the world, and nothing was left to us but hope.

  Gradually, though, as the irregular procession wound through the chilly evening, I began to think of talking to Leon in his right shape, and arguing with him, and explaining that there was work to be done, and that spark of hope flared up like one of the torches ahead, not driving back the gloom but showing at least that there was a way forward.