"Current theory suggests that man first became Homo sapiens when he put a ban on -- well, let's call it endogamy, the custom forbidding marriage outside the familial group. Exogamy was man's very first painful step forward. No other animal puts a ban on endogamy." "Was it worth it!" Ann exclaimed. "Well, since then man has become all the things we know he has become, conqueror of his environment and all that, but his severance with nature has seemed to grow wider and wider -- I mean with his true nature. "The way the Wenlockians see it, the undermind is, as it were, our old natural mind. The overmind is a later, Homo sap accretion, a high-powered dynamo whose main function is to structure time and conceal all the sad animal thoughts in the undermind. The extremists claim that passing time is an invention of the overmind." Perhaps she was not listening. She said, "You know why I followed you yesterday? I had the strongest feeling directly you appeared that you and I had -- known each other terribly well at some past time." "I'd have remembered you!" "It must have been my undermind playing up! Anyhow, what you were saying was very interesting. I suppose you believe it, do you?" He laughed. "How can you not believe it? We're here in the Devonian, aren't we?" "But if the undermind governs mind-travel, and the undermind's crazy about incest, then surely we should be able to visit times near at hand, early in our own century, for instance -- so that we could see what our own parents and grandparents got up to. That would be the most interesting thing, wouldn't it? But it's much easier to mind, back here, to the earliest ages of the world, and to get back to when there were any humans at all is very difficult. Impossible for most of us." "That's so, but it doesn't prove what you think. If you think of the space-time universe as being an enormous entropy-slope, with the true present always at the point of highest energy and the farthest past at the lowest, then obviously as soon as our minds are free of passing time, they will fall backwards towards that lowest point, and the nearer to the highest point we return, the harder will be the journey." Ann said nothing. Bush thought it likely that she had already dismissed the subject as impossible of discussion, but after a moment she said, "You know what you said about the real me being good and loving? Supposing there is such a person, is she in my over- or my undermind?" "Supposing, as you say, there is such a person, she must be an amalgamation of both. Anything less than the whole cannot be whole." "Now you're trying to talk theology again, aren't you?" "Probably." They both laughed. He felt almost gay. He loved arguing, particularly when he could argue on the obsessive topic of the structure of the mind. If they were going to mind again, now was clearly the time to do it, while they were in some sort of accord. Mind-travel was never easy, and the passage could be rough if one was emotionally upset. They packed their bags and strapped their few possessions to themselves. Then they linked themselves together, arm in arm; otherwise, there was no guarantee they would not arrive a few million years and several hundred miles apart from each other. They broke open their drug packs. The CSD came in little ampoules, clear, almost colorless. Held up to the wide Paleozoic sky, Bush's ampoule showed slightly green between his fingers. They looked at each other; Ann pulled a face and they made the jab together. Bush felt the crypotic acid run warm in his veins. The liquid was a symbol of the hydrosphere, sacrificial wine to represent the oceans from which life had come, oceans that still washed in the arteries of man, oceans that still regulated and made habitable his external world, oceans that still provided food and climate, oceans that were the blood of the biosphere. And he himself was a biosphere, containing all the fossil lives and ideas of his ancestors, containing other life forms, containing countless untold possibilities, containing life and death. He was an analogue of the world; through the CSD, he could translate from one form to the other. Only in that transitional state, as the drug took effect, could one begin to grasp the nature of the minute energy-duration disturbance that the Solar System represented. That system, a bubble within a sea of cosmic forces, was part of a meta-structure that was boundless but not infinite with respect to both time and space. And this banal fact had only become astonishing to man because man had shut himself off from it, had shielded his mind from the immensity of it as the ionosphere round his planet shielded him from harmful radiations, had lost that knowledge, had defended himself from that knowledge with the concept of passing time, which managed to make the universe tolerable by cutting off -- not only the immense size of it, as recent generations had rediscovered -- but the immense time of it. Immense time had been chopped into tiny wriggling fragments that man could deal with, could trap with sundials, sandglasses, pocketwatches, grandfather clocks, chronometers, which succeeded generation by generation in shaving time down finer and finer, smaller and smaller . . . until the obsessive nature of the whole procedure had been recognized, and Wenlock and his fellow workers blew the gaff on the whole conspiracy. But the conspiracy had been necessary. Without it, unsheltered from the blind desert of space-time, man would still be with the other animals, wandering in tribes by the rim of the echoing Quaternary seas. Or so the theory went. At least it was clear there had been a conspiracy. Now the shield was down. The complexities of the cerebrum and cerebellum were naked to the co-continuous universe: and were devouring all they came across. Minding was a momentary process. It looked easy, although there was rigorous training behind it. As the CSD tilted their metabolisms, Bush and Ann went into the discipline -- that formula the Institute had devised for guiding them through the prohibitions of the human mind. The Devonian dissolved now, appearing to be a huge marching creature of duration, with spatial characteristics serving simply as an exoskeleton. Bush opened his mouth to laugh, but no sound came. In the exhilaration of travel, one lost most physical characteristics. Everything seemed to go, except the sense of direction. It was like swimming against a current; the difficult way was towards one's own "present"; to drift into the remote past was relatively easy -- and led to eventual death by suffocation, as many had found. If a foetus in the womb were granted the ability to mind-travel, it would be faced with much the same situation: either to battle forward to the climactic moment of birth, or to sink easefully back to the final -- or was it first? -- moment of non-existence. He was not aware of duration, nor of the pulse within him that served as his chronometer. In a strange hypnoid state, he felt only a sense of being near to a great body of reality that seemed to bear as much kinship to God as to Earth. And he caught himself trying to laugh again. Then the laughter died, and he felt he was in flight. Ages rolled below him like night. He was aware of the discomfort of having someone with him -- and then he and Ann were surrounded by a dark green world and reality as it was generally experienced was about them again. Jurassic reality. Chapter 3 AT THE SIGN OF THE AMNIOTE EGG Bush had never liked the Jurassic. It was too hot and cloudy, and reminded him of one long and miserable day in his childhood when, caught doing something innocently naughty, he had been shut out in the garden all day by his mother. It had been cloudy that day too, with the heat so heavy the butterflies had hardly been able to fly above flower-top level. Ann let go of him and stretched. They had materialized beside a dead tree. Its bare shining arms were like a reproof to the girl; Bush realized for the first time what a slut she was, how dirty and unkempt, and wondered why it did not alter what he felt about her -- whatever that might precisely be. Not speaking, they moved forward, full of the sense of disorientation that always followed mind-travel. There was no rational way of knowing whereabouts or whenabouts on Earth they were; yet an irrational part of the undermind knew, and would gradually come through with the information. It, after all, had brought them here, and presumably for purposes of its own. They were in the foot-hills of mountains on which jungle rioted. Halfway up the mountain slopes, the clouds licked away everything from sight. All was still; the foliage about them seemed frozen in a long Mesozoic hush. "We'd better move down into the plain," Bush said. "This is the place we want, I think. I have friends here, the Borrows." "They live here, you mean?" "They run a store. Roger Borrow used to be an artist. His wife's nice." "Will I like them?" "I shouldn't think so." He started walking. Not knowing clearly what he felt about Ann, be thought that presenting her to Roger and Ver might cement a relationship he did not want. Ann watched him for a while and then followed. The Jurassic was about the most boring place to be alone in ever devised. With their packs on their backs, they spent most of the day climbing downwards. It was not easy because they could never see their footholds; they were walled off completely from the reality all round them. They were spectres, unable to alter by the slightest degree the humblest appurtenances of this world -- unable to kick the smallest pebble out of the way -- unless it was that by haunting it they altered the charisma of the place. Only the air-leakers gave them some slight bond with actuality, by drawing their air requirements through the invisible wall of time-entropy about them. The level of the generalized floor on which they trod was sometimes below the "present" level of the ground, so that they trudged along up to their spectral knees in the dirt; or at another time they appeared to be stepping on air. In the forest, they were able to walk straight through the trees. But an occasional tree would stop them; they felt it as a marshmallowy presence and had to go round it; for its lifespan would be long enough -- it would survive the hazards of life long enough -- to create a shadowy obstruction in their path. When sunset was drawing near, Bush stopped and pitched his tent, pumping until it struggled into position. He and the girl ate together, and then he washed himself rather ostentatiously as they prepared for sleep. "Don't you ever wash?" he asked. "Sometimes. I suppose you wash to please yourself?" "Who else?" "I stay grubby to please myself." "It must be some sort of neurosis." "Yes. Probably it's because it always annoys clean blighters like you." He sat down by her and looked into her face. "You really want to annoy people, do you? Why? Is it because you think it's good for them? Or good for you?" "Maybe it's because I've given up hoping to please them." "I've always thought people were on the whole pathetically easy to please." Later, when he recalled that fragment of conversation, he was annoyed that he had not paid more attention to her remark; undoubtedly it offered an insight into Ann's behavior, and perhaps a clue as to how she could best be treated. But by that time he had come to the conclusion that for all her prickliness she was a girl one could genuinely converse with -- and she was gone. He was wrong in any case to challenge her after she had gone through a tiring day so uncomplainingly; even the Dark Woman had faded off duty. He woke next morning to find Ann still asleep, and staggered out to look at the dawn. It was like a dream to climb from bed and find the great overloaded landscape outside; but the dream was capable of sustaining itself for millions of years. A million years . . . perhaps by a scale of values of which mankind might one day be master, a million years would be seen as more meaningless, more of a trifle, than a second. In the same way, not one of these dawns could have as much effect on him as the most insignificant remark Ann might drop. As they were packing up to move on, she asked him again if he was going to do a groupage of her. Bush was glad of even uninformed interest in his work. "I'm looking for something new to do. I'm at a block -- it's a familiar thing for creative artists. Suddenly human consciousness is lumbered with this entirely new time structure, and I want to reflect it as best I can in my creative work -- without just doing an illustration, if you understand. But I can't begin, can't begin to begin." "Are you going to do a groupage of me?" "I just told you: no. Groupages aren't portraits of particular people." "They're abstracts, I gather?" "You don't know J. M. W. Turner's work, do you? Ever since his day -- he was an early Victorian -- we've had technical ways of reproducing the forms of nature. Abstracts reproduce forms of ideas; and, for all our computers, only man can make abstracts." "I love computer-pictures." "I hate them. My spatial-kinetic groupages try to . . . oh, identify the spirit of a moment, an age. Sometimes, I used to work in mirror-glass -- then everyone saw a SKG differently, with fragments of their own features lurking over it. That's the way we see the universe. There's no such thing as an objective view of the universe -- ever think of that? Our features look back at us from every quarter." "Are you, religious, Bush?" He shook his head and stood up slowly, looking away from her. "I wish I were religious. My father, he's a dentist, he's a religious man. . . . Yet sometimes, when I was successful, when the ideas were really pouring out of my fingers, doing my best SKGs, I knew I had a bit of God in me." At the mention of God, they both became self-conscious. As he helped Ann up, Bush said in curt, workaday tones, "So you don't know Turner's work?" That closed the subject. Not until the afternoon, as they were coming down onto the plains, did they see the first creatures of the plains, sporting in a valley. Instinct asserting itself, Bush's impulse was to watch them from behind a tree. Then he recalled they were less than ghosts to these bulky creatures, and walked out into the open towards them. Ann followed.
Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters by Barker, Clive, Golden, Christopher, Lansdale, Joe R., McCammon, Robert, Mieville, China, Priest, Cherie, Sarrantonio, Al, Schow, David, Langan, John, Tremblay, Paul