“No, Whitey,” she replied to quite a different question from me. I had asked her about something that had been bothering me since that day beside the swimming-pool: how the simple act of forgetting could have caused all the “tragedy” the human race was supposed to be heir to.
“It’s completely different from simply not remembering. That’s what animals do, of course. They’re not equipped to do anything else. But intelligent beings never really forget anything. With them it’s more a matter of unconsciously refusing to deal with—or of being unable to deal with—certain information that’s stored inside you, of suppressing it, sometimes at the very moment it happens, or of pretending that it doesn’t exist until you lose conscious touch with it.”
“I see,” I lied. I was doing a lot of that, lately.
“But enough of that, for the moment—see, there’s an example for you. I’ve done my lecturing for this morning. After the accident, I replaced Lucille in Praxeology.” She looked from me to the Lieutenant, suppressed a scowl, then smiled at the coyote. Candle-light at this time of day, was a very strange experience. Mr. Meep, it seemed, also the proprietor of the last restaurant in this location, specialized in very strange experiences. “Each of us, in turn, was the youngest Chief ever—”
“The accident?” I repeated.
Her glance at Howell stopped being a smile.
“It wasn’t my place to tell them,” The coyote’s electronic voice reflected oddly from the curved plastic wall. He turned to me. “During an initial planetary survey some years ago, Lucille was killed—that is, injured so terribly that she could not be immediately reanimated. Yes, even by our medical technology, Whitey. Her remains were kept in stasis.”
“Stasis?” It was the Lieutenant, pausing to address Howell during a heretofore uninterrupted campaign of patronizing glances bestowed on the Chief Praxeologist. “Medical stasis. Is that not the condition in which—”
“Indeed you were, Lieutenant,” the coyote nodded, an oddly human gesture. “A state of suspension quite unlike refrigeration, sleep, or anything else you are likely to be familiar with, occurring at the subatomic—”
“Interesting,” the Lieutenant interrupted boredly, “I recall none of it, of course” He rubbed the shoulder that had been nearly severed. I had seen him do this before—on Vespucci, calling modest attention to a minor wound suffered in the Final War—always in the presence of women. I had privately dubbed it the Purple Heart Approach. “From the Scavian attack on our sleeping encampment to my awakening aboard the
Little Tom.
From what the Corporal tells me, it is just as well.”
“That’s the general idea.” Edwina shook her head. “Although sometimes—for example, in my poor sister’s case—it doesn’t always ...”
“But tell me,” the Lieutenant interrupted for a second time. He was getting as bad about that as the Confederates. “How it is that an attractive, accomplished person such as yourself spends all of her time amidst dry praxeological contemplations, wasting all of her most feminine years on graduate seminars more closely resembling military brief—”
Edwina threw her head back, laughing out loud. “Howell, there’s rather a good deal that you didn’t tell them, isn’t there? Lieutenant, what ever gave you the idea that it was a graduate seminar? Simply your august presence at it? Didn’t you even notice the visual aids, the—”
“Edwina,” cautioned Howell, “I wouldn’t—”
“Sorry, Howell. I would like to have the Lieutenant in a graduate seminar—as a textbook example of the authoritarian personality!” She stopped to laugh again. The Lieutenant grew purple in the face. “For your information, that class is one of my charities, for retarded dependents and combat-damaged personnel. Bad brain injuries, most of them.”
Before anyone could think of anything to say, the food arrived.
-5-
“Aborigines? They’re the original inhabitants of Australia. They still are, for that matter. How’d something like that come up in idle conversation?”
Owen Rogers had brought me more than “paper” to take notes on. He’d arrived at my quarters that evening with a freshly-fabricated notebook, the “pencil” he had promised, plus a load of ammunition that I did not really need. It had merely been a pretext for the other items.
Also a mandolar.
If, indeed, there were no such thing as a free lunch, then I was running up quite a tab. I fingered the fret-buttons, idly fiddled with the vane-adjustments. “Howell was telling me something about them that I did not altogether understand, I’m afraid. It was something about their not distinguishing time from space, philosophically. What little I know about physics ... well, physics on Vespucci, anyway, they are saying there is no such distinction. It is supposed to be the latest thing.”
Rogers grinned. “I suppose that sort of depends on the context you’re stuck with. What Howell meant, I suspect, is that Australian Aborigines confused one with the other in an inappropriate context. They thought that, if you were from far away, then you were also from the distant past. When the earliest European explorers arrived in Australia, the Aborigines thought that the intruders were their own ancestors.”
“That is almost appropriate, over interstellar distances, is it not?”
“Whitey, you don’t know the half of it.” But Howell was working toward a point. “There are a number of different dimensions—call it directions—in the physical universe. There’s back-and-forth, for instance. There’s up-and-down. And there’s side-to-side. Those are the three dimensions of space. There’s also back-and-forth in time, the distance from past to future, with the present presumably somewhere in between.”
“That seems simple enough.”
“Yeah? Well, there’s also side-to-side, timewise—”
“So I have been told. Something about different history lines, different—”
“Probability. Look: nobody knew about statistical probability—that’s another way of looking at this sideways dimension—before Blaise Pascal. He was a mathematician, philosopher, and a gambler before he got religion, back in the—well, four hundred years ago. It took longer before anyone realized the importance of probability, that time is not only infinite lengthwise—in the dimension of “duration”—but sideways—in the dimension of probability, as well.”
“What do you mean, infinite?”
“That there is an unlimited number of universes. That every event that can happen in a number of different ways actually happens in every different way it can happen. And that, as a result, every human choice we make is actually made in every different way that it can be made.”
Enough of that. “Owen, there is something else that I have to ask you.”
The praxeologist stopped, blinked. “What’s that, Whitey?”
“Well, I got involved, today, in a discussion of repression. The fact that intelligent beings never really forget anything, stuff like that ...”
“Now you’re more into my territory,” Rogers said. “What was the question?”
“This: when scientists dig into the sands of my home planet, they occasionally run across the remains of four-legged creatures very much like Howell. Apparently, they were imported when our ancestors arrived on Vespucci, for food or some other purpose. But they were obviously not intelligent. They were domestic animals of some kind, lacking—as Howell must—the cranial capacity to be an intelligent creature. Yet Howell has mentioned several times that he has ‘circuits’. He not only never forgets anything, he seems to remember more than anyone I have met on this ship. No offense intended, I mean.” I flushed with embarrassment.
“None taken. You’re right, Howell started as a four-legged animal, not even a domestic one. He’s from a species of wild prairie-rovers. But he’s also different in that he carries several thousand gigabytes of electronic supplementation—data storage-and-retrieval, speed and capacity boosters—attached to the surface of his brain. In a sense he’s half dog and half computer and he’ll gladly tell you all about it, if you ask him. He’s a lot like the Patchwork Girl’s glass cat in that regard. But be prepared to stand around listening for several hours.”
“Oh.” It had been much as I expected. The trouble was, it led to a question that I dare not ask, not of Rogers, nor of anyone else aboard this ship. I had figured Howell out all by myself, then made a leap. No one ever had to look anything up aboard
Tom Paine Maru.
They all knew, at any given moment, precisely what time it was, when the next auxiliary was arriving, what the temperature was, sometimes even what the person in the next room was thinking. Were they all like poor Howell, electronically brain-implanted slaves of some giant master computer?
They certainly all believed the same things, acted cooperatively, accomplished great works (like
Tom Paine Maru
herself) without any visible institution to indoctrinate, instruct, or coordinate their efforts. They acted as if they were under the control of some powerful government somewhere. The problem was that they did not seem to have one.
Impossible!
The Patchwork Girl’s glass cat?
Operation klaatu
Hanging in the middle of the darkened room, I hooked my left arm under my right knee to fold myself into a sitting position. Holding the notebook against my naked thigh with my left hand, I twisted the business end of Rogers’ pencil until it shed soft light on the plastic pages:
Notes from the
Asperance
Expedition
Armorer/Corporal YD-038 recording
Page One:
Along the infinite dimension of “probability”, are universes, existing side-by-side (“coextant” is the expression used aboard the
Tom Paine Maru),
in which, to name one example, the Big Bang never happened.
Or happened differently.
Or where somebody in Earthian history named Albert Gallatin talked them out of the Whiskey Rebellion, instead of leading it to the anarchistic victory that Confederates hail as the beginning of their era.
The three principal developments that determined the history of the present era—the 3rd Century A.L., as they call it—were the perfection of catalytic fusion for power production, improvements in the area of interstellar space travel, the discovery of parallel realities.
While searching for a faster-than-light stardrive, the physicist Dora Jayne Thorens, with her partner, Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet (I have rendered that last name phonetically as best I can—I will discuss the lack of a written language among the Confederates later) stumbled upon another version of Earth where their Rebellion had been lost, where the state had grown for two hundred years instead of withering.
The examples above are not chosen arbitrarily. The first, somehow a different start for the universe, made what they call the “Malaise Catastrophe” possible. The reference is obscure, yet this, almost as much as the Whiskey Rebellion, seems to be responsible for everything the Confederacy is doing now. It is the reason these enormous ships are exploring the galaxy. It forms the basis for their attitude toward “Kilroys”.
The second, Gallatin’s rebellion, produced the world we stand in.
Inferences are impossible to resist. There are other universes out there where I was never forced to give up music, universes where I never met or came to love Eleva, or where I never volunteered for the
Asperance
expedition, or where I gave up in Sca’s dungeons, or where I—
I stopped, twisted the end of the pencil Rogers had given me to its ERASE mode, then carefully rubbed out the last paragraph I had written.
In its place, I wrote:
Each choice produces a new clutch of universes, entirely complete unto themselves, perhaps differing only by a single human decision. According to Rogers (or others I have begun asking about the subject), this is not some religious notion, but cold, scientifically proven fact.
I have had many reasons in my life for feeling insignificant or inefficacious. Yet, if each choice I make, no matter how trivial, creates an entirely new universe—an entirely new set of universes—what does that say about the power of the human mind? Any human mind?
Even mine?
I stopped writing once again. Belatedly, it had occurred to me that, if I were successful in my self-appointed spying against the Confederates, it might advance me in rank, helping my chances with Eleva.
Now, more than ever, I must get home!
Oddly, that self-serving thought made me feel guilty toward a dozen people at once. As time passed, my friend, my nominal superior, Enson Sermander looked increasingly like ... well, a rather stupid, boring individual, in contrast to those I was meeting here. Yet the man was my Lieutenant, the lawful representative of the planet I had been born on—which was, itself, looking a little stupidly boring to me.
As for Eleva—
A surge of guilt swept through me all over again, along with the thought that any woman who requires something to stir her like the promotion I aspired to, does not deserve to be stirred. I stifled the thought, then immediately felt guilty for repressing it, repression being the root of all evil as far as my new-found friends seemed to be concerned.
Can you feel guilty about feeling guilty? I had asked Howell that very question. His answer had been enigmatic “Only in southern California”.