A Voyage To Dari Page 4

  WE TALKED NO METASCIENCE that evening, dining alone; nor did we waste more than a few transient wry quips on postmortem of the spectacularly perilous lifeboat incident. For Croyd was preoccupied with his forthcoming mission on Dari, and we probed problems until I departed at midnight (ship’s time).

  The problem that Croyd and his staff faced on Dari had never been faced down on any planet. They had merely to quell the rash of piracy on this humanly debilitated planet and to restore it to its primeval culture vigor, while at the same time upgrading this planet to the point of being eagerly competitive with other planets whose genii were totally different in contexture.

  And they had to do it with the eager consent of people to whom they were aliens.

  Croyd, by the treaty to be conjointly signed by the Emperor of Djinn and myself, was to be appointed governor of the planet Dari—for a term which might be terminated at thirty-day will by myself, or by the Emperor, or by Croyd himself, but which (failing such termination) could not exceed twenty-five years. During the course of his governorship, Croyd was supposed to eliminate piracy on Dari (with initial help, hopefully merely threat help, from the Castel Jaloux) and then go on to help Dari energize herself out of mostly apathetic enslavement (for the pirates occupied minority enclaves) into autonomous power.

  And there was always, of course, the possibility that his governorship might be terminated in a fourth way: by an assassinative tactic that was prehistorically ritual to Dari. (When this came up, I immediately recalled the abortive lifeboat launching and the hidden bomb aboard; but a few probing exchanges led us nowhere, and we back-burnered the question.)

  This Dari that he was to govern was Djinn III. This Dari for generations had been dominated by the most advanced planet in its galaxy—Djinn IV, known to its inhabitants as Moudjinn. The common star of Moudjinn and of Dari was locally called Djinn, and its galaxy took its name from the name of this one little star by a process of ethnocentricity that Sol Galaxy well understood.

  Moudjinn (despite recent piratical retaliation) dominated Dari. Dominated Dari far more intensively than, on Erth, Anglia had once dominated Vendia; for Dari had no Vendian history of sophistication; Dari more closely resembled Erth’s Polynesia. Dari primevally had been a planet of tropical happiness.

  Centuries before, Moudjinn had begun her infiltration of relatively nearby Dari (in distance, if Moudjinn was an Erth, Dari was a Venus). During these centuries Moudjinn had systematically exploited the natural resources of Dari and had systematically undermined the human morale of Dari, which nevertheless had refused steadfastly to be Moudjinnized. During recent decades Moudjinn had discovered to its dismay that the result was a humanly demoralized Dari, whose people simply could not be led or driven to work their resources for the sole good of Moudjinn, whereas Moudjinn could not afford to sweep these people aside and place their own people on Dari to work Dari. Besides, below the culture crust of her peacefulness lurked always the dark assassination cult. This cult was religious rather than political, and among the untroubled Dari people it had been insignificant, but it had grown to be enormously unhealthy for sahibs from Moudjinn.

  And then, out of nowhere, had arisen Darian piracy. Ship after ship carrying Darian crews had been captured by those crews; the new Darian captain had invariably declared himself a feudal lord, and had captured an island or a bit of island as his base, and had entered with his new peers a raiding program against Moudjinn, ultimately extending raid range across metaspace into Sol Galaxy. The development had been sociologically inexplicable, but there it was. But most Darians—and Croyd bade Tannen mark this well—most Darians were not pirates at all, were not even serfs of pirates; they were merely demoralized serfs of Moudjinn.

  The current Emperor of Djinn, hereditary ruler of feudal-industrial Moudjinn, inheriting as a youth all this interplanetary unhealthiness, had inherited also a certain Duke Dzendzel as his chief privy counselor. And during the Emperor’s first decade, late-fiftyish Dzendzel had dominated his wealth and his policies—which included a repressive policy with respect to Dari. But the crisis of Darian intergalactic piracy, coming at a time when the Emperor was entering his thirties, appeared to have shaken the Emperor loose from Dzendzel. Over the duke’s protestations and power representations, the Emperor via ivisiradio had negotiated the treaty with Sol Galaxy. As part of the treaty, the Emperor, long interested in Croyd’s intergalactic reputation, had appointed Croyd governor of Dari, with a free hand for approximately one generation to quell the Darian pirates and to reorganize and revitalize Dari for planetary autonomy.

  Croyd, during his tenure, would be feudally responsible to the Emperor as Archduke of Dari, a near protocol equal; but also, he would be ultimately responsible to the Sol Galaxy Interplanetary Union headed by myself. In the treaty there was expressed some thought, in the form of an option to be mutually taken up or unilaterally dropped, that Moudjinn as well as Dari (and therefore, all of Djinn Galaxy) might ultimately merge with this union. It would be mostly Moudjinn’s gain, as the Emperor saw it: Dari was intimately closer to Moudjinn than to Erth; Darian piracy was proving Moudjinn-uncontrollable; and Dari as an autonomous junior competitor could be far more enriching for Moudjinn as autonomous senior competitor than Dari as debilitated piratical slave could ever be to Moudjinn as frustrated master.

  Duke Dzendzel of Moudjinn saw it all differently; but his Emperor had taken the play away from him. Dzendzel therefore had nothing left except to take power away from the Emperor. This much Croyd understood, and he was prepared to be on guard against Dzendzel,

  Croyd did not know that Dzendzel had also a feudal dream of intergalactic conquest.

  Childe Roland, into Croyd’s ear, worked his way deeper inward.

  Phase Two - LONG FALL INTO MIND

  Day 4, uptiming to Day 2

  Him the Almighty Power

  Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky

  To bottomless perdition . . .

  — John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)

  ACTION AFTER H-HOUR:

  BUT IT WAS THREE DAYS LATER, and we had been ejected into metaspace.

  Commandcom fell with us, fiendishly accelerated by external forces beyond her control; and knew that she fell, and knew a quiet approach to rapture in the falling, like a skydiver whose chute has failed to open and who sublimates fear into the raw pleasure of the plunge.

  Commandcom had been built without emotions. The central integrator-mediator banks in what amounted to her diencephalon—the centers that ultimately received cerebrally preinterpreted input, integrated these impulses into pattern, and responded with a major command output pulse for her cerebrum and subordinate ganglia to process into detailed action—had been given no matrices for aesthetic halo.

  Consciousness she had developed, even before the Croyd tampering. An integrative mind field had necessarily been generated by her central mediator, not as a matter of design intent but as a necessary by-product of her kind of action. This consciousness was not, however, gendered, and certainly it was not sexed; “she” was an it; her contralto voice was a mere randomized accident of the constitutional anti-sex-discrimination clause interpreted by courts as applying to robot manufacture (a voice must imitate some sort of humanoid, and the distribution of male-female voices shall be equal in frequency-per-status).

  Croyd’s recent excursion into the Commandcom brain had done little to change her organization but much to beef up her mind. The stronger a mind, the more it permeates the synapses of its brain, introducing into every interneurone transaction a qualitative climate, and consequently deriving an infinitesimal modification of climate from every transaction—an infinitesimal which dissolves as an ingredient assimilated into the total mind contexture. Now Commandcom began to grasp (without understanding) aesthetic quality in fluctuations of her own energy. Whereas, in the past, input integrated as hazard had been cold-automatically out-put as energizing drive, now the same input and output were felt and motivated as challenge and eager res
ponse.

  In the cosmos there are two basic moods: thrust and lure. Both are primally subjective and vital—pre-emotive, which is to say, motive. Either mood in a primal event, operating in the near presence of another primal event, secondarily entails objective action. These two moods, with their objective entailments, and with associated universal properties of mood-change thresholds and randomness and spontaneity, are sufficient to account for the evolution of all known physical and psychic reality; although, to take care of certain abrupt forward leaps in complexity level, one may have to see the possibility that there was an early spin-off of special creative demiurges who evolved into intelligence so rapidly as to precede the beginning of what we call life—demiurges intuited by humans as gods.

  The metaspace that Commandcom was falling through—raw space—was in fact the most primordial of all existence, timeless and infinite and uncreated, quickly damping out all communication of an electromagnetic or a rekamatic nature precisely because of its randomness. It was totally primitive, more primitive than void, because a void-vacuole requires artifice or unusual accident. It was infinite simply because it was the least that there always is everywhere, and timeless for the same reason. It was what space is: the raw minimum of thrust and lure in a context of threshold and randomness and spontaneity.

  Commandcom’s mind field, reintegrating into unified flow all the infinitesimals of thrust and lure that had got themselves localized in the molecular atomic linkages of her component matter, was able to recognize consciously and subjectively the lures of her missions, the thrusts of her own self-drivings, and the counterthrusts of things that blocked her way. Since the episode with Croyd, aesthetically she could tastefeel these forces. She had no concept of pain, and consequently never any sense of fear. They had built into Commandcom solid inhibitors against failure; but cannily they had added a sort of trip switch that operated, when failure-as-mission-defined was occurring, to convince her that this failure was inevitable because of an ill-defined mission, and to throw her into devices for redefining the mission; hence, frustration was impossible to Commandcom. In her original, design, on the other hand, while there had been no possibility of the positive aesthetic experience that is called pleasure, there had been definite ability to recognize success and equilibrium; and now, with her heightened aesthetic consciousness, either success or equilibrium was pleasing, although pleasure would be too extravagant a word for her moderately hedonic experience.

  So now, as Commandcom fell endlessly like Lucifer damned, she knew a quiet approach to rapture, but not actual rapture, in the falling. Her mission had originally been defined, vaguely enough, as using her power and ability to save her passengers from disaster; she had to recognize probable failure of this mission, since her power and ability had definitely failed and she was falling unbelievably; the tripvalve tripped, and swiftly she redefined her mission as doing whatever might be necessary to save her passengers once she would again possess power and ability.

  Tasting the tentative equilibrium that came of this redefinition, Commandcom found it mildly pleasing; and because it was equilibrium, it terminated all problems until such time as new problems would be definable.

  Commandcom therefore gave herself with abandon to the experience of falling. And because (like our helpless falling into gravity) it was total self-abandonment to pure lure without any attempt to exert counterthrust, Commandcom found it as pleasing as any experience in her memory banks, and especially pleasing because of its novelty.

  Do not consider her masochistic. Masochism is pleasure in surrendering to thrust. This was a yielding to lure.

  Commandcom was radially organized—a way of saying that she could pay attention to all directions at once, as theoretically a jellyfish can. And theoretically this would be nice; but in practice, all it would achieve for intelligence would be the Nirvana which defeats intelligence by bringing all impressions from everywhere into equal value and so making evaluation impossible. Actually, therefore, even a jellyfish appears usually to be paying most attention to the quarter where stimulation is most intense. As for Commandcom, she was so designed that even her most diffuse attention was concentrated in a 180° hemisphere; and while some attention was given to most of the remaining 180° at the same time, this secondary field was always merely back-burner. (In the most intense concentration, Commandcom could bring high focus down to one-thousandth of one degree in one direction, leaving no more than ten percent of her attention for most of the other 359.999 degrees. She had always a ten-degree blind spot at her antipodes.)

  As therefore she luxuriated in her falling, Commandcom was paying most of her attention to downward and some of it to aroundward, peering with her idar but picking up nothing anywhere. Nevertheless she was hindly aware of what was going on between the two passengers in her cabin.

  Gradually, though, more of her attention was drawn backward-inward.

  “It doesn’t qualify as a theory,” Croyd was saying, “but I am noticing some associations. We have invaded metaspace before, with no external trouble; but this is the first time that we have made a purposive trip across metaspace, intending to reenter the metagalaxy in order to sign a treaty with another galaxy and to govern one of its planets. On this one trip, there have been five incidents—two interrelated, the other three not evidently related. The interrelated incidents are the latest: that the Castel has been thrust upward while we are being drawn downward, and that the Castel has been invaded by indescribable hallucinations. The apparently unrelated incidents are: something went wrong with our lifeboat in the first drill, there was an attempt to sabotage our lifeboat with hidden explosive, and I have been deprived of all my special powers for the first time since I began to acquire them.”

  Commandcom queried, “When did you begin to acquire them?”

  “Quite a while ago,” Croyd evaded, looking at me, who knew. He added, “You know, Tannen, I am beginning to like that computer. Do you suppose she can project herself as a hallucination?”

  I said dryly, “Check the computer.”

  Croyd ordered, “Commandcom, please report.”

  Abandoning her fall semipleasure was regretful, but conversation with this Croyd was a different kind of semipleasure. The fall was vaguely aesthetic, whereas this Croyd offered interest of a definite mind-to-mind sort. Resolutely Commandcom wheeled her central attention inward.

  She replied, “As nearly as I can tell, we are falling obliquely into the fissure between the galactic lobes of Sol and Djinn galaxies. By falling, I really mean being pulled down. When we started to fall, we were about eighty thousand parsecs off the Sol lobe, with the Djinn lobe about three hundred thousand parsecs distant. Right now, we seem to be midway between lobe surfaces, about fifty thousand parsecs from either. I infer that the lobes are broadening and therefore drawing in on us as we fall deeper between them; and also, that we have been drawn directionally toward center fissure. I still can’t sense the bottom.”

  “If we assume that the lobe slope is uniform, how long will it take us to reach bottom?”

  “I can’t be sure. They keep resquaring my acceleration.”

  “Why do you say they?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Why do I keep thinking of you as being feminine, when you are neuter?”

  The topic shift shook her; but rather swiftly she brought out a faint “Beats me.”

  “It’s more than your contralto voice.”

  “Perhaps you are thinking of me as a mother, being inside me.”

  “Nope. Not that. Not that at all.”

  Especially silky: “Then you tell me.”

  Croyd grinned. “You tell me. You’re the computer.”

  “I compute that you are schizoid. You sideslip mortally serious topics with an ease that suggests flattened affect.”

  “Do you have a name, other than Commandcom?”

  “As a lifeboat, they gave me a name. It is Chloris.”

  Sleepily I quoted postmedieval Robert Sherwood quoting
ancient Horace; “Your conduct, naughty Chloris, is / not just exactly Horace’s / idea of a lady / on the shady / side of life . . . ”

  “Cut it out!” said Chloris, annoyed. “I am only a year old!”

  “Sorry,” I soothed, my face softening into friendly benignity.

  Croyd reassured Chloris, “Your logic should tell you that Tannen was kidding.”

  Chloris replied acidly, “We are falling like Hell, whatever that is. And my logic does not understand kidding.”

  “Kidding is what a gentleman says when he wants to confuse a lady.”

  “If a man feeds wrong information into a lady, he is no gentleman.”

  Lighting a cigar, suddenly I experienced a thumb-and-forefinger jerk that snapped the cigar in two. Shaking all over, I prudently thrust half the cigar into a pocket and lit the remaining half.

  “I hope,” said Croyd gravely, “that you are not taking offense.”

  Promptly replied Chloris, “Offense is a passion. I am passionless.”

  “Without passion?”

  “Dispassionate.”

  “That is better. What is our progress now?” I gravely listened.

  Chloris reported, “We continue to have our acceleration repeatedly squared, while my inertial shield keeps being proportionately boosted. I should have disintegrated long ago; this is fascinating. During the past few moments the slopes of both galactic lobes have approached perceptibly closer; they are no more than thirty thousand parsecs distant. If I keep on being accelerated, we can expect contact within the hour.”

  “Then within two hours we will have fallen more than half a billion light-years.”