A Wreath of Stars

Chapter Ten

They reached the mine head without incident, largely because Murphy had seen Carrier in the afternoon and obtained a special permit to bring a car inside the enclosure. Two jeeps were parked in the lee of the gatehouse, as usual, and they switched on their spotlights as Ambrose’s car swept by, but neither of them followed. Snook wondered if the crews had been tipped off about Gene Helig’s presence. In any case, he was glad Prudence had decided to remain at the hotel.

When he stepped out into the pre-dawn blackness he discovered he had become intensely aware of the stars. The constellations were glittering like cities in the sky, the colours of their individual stars easily distinguished, and Snook found himself grateful for their presence. He decided it was an unconscious reaction against his earlier vision of life on a blind planet, from which—even if the cloud cover were to vanish—it might not be possible to see the glowing stellar hearths of other civilisations. As he stood looking upwards, he vowed that when he got clear of Barandi he would take a positive interest in astronomy.

“There’s nothing to see up there, old boy,” Helig said jovially. “I’m told it’s all below ground these days.”

“That’s right.” Snook shivered in a river of cold air, shoved his hands deep into his jacket pockets and followed the rest of the group into descending cages. Ambrose had calculated that top dead centre for the Avernians would occur just above one of the worked-out pipes on Level Two. It was not an ideal location, because the Avernians would rise up into the rock ceiling for a few minutes, but the relative movement would be fairly slow, and there would be two good opportunities for what Ambrose, in a resurgence of good spirits, had described as an ‘inter-universal tete-a-tete.”

When he stepped on to the circular gallery of. Level Two, Snook was relieved to find that his apprehension of the previous day had faded. The first instant of union with Felleth had been shocking, but not so much for its strangeness but its effectiveness. He had entered a mind, an intelligence which was the product of an unknown continuum, and yet it had been less alien to him than the minds of many human beings , he had met. There had been in it. Snook believed, no capacity for murder or greed; and his certainty on this point made him marvel, yet again, that such a strange mode of communication should have been possible at all.

Ambrose had been emphatic in denying the possibility of previous long-range telepathic links between Avernians and humans—but, at the same time, Ambrose had confessed in the car that day that his knowledge of his specialist subject, nuclear physics, was faulty. He, Gilbert Snook, had suddenly become the world’s foremost expert on mind-to-mind data transfer—admittedly without intending to do so—and it satisfied his sense of the fitness of things to postulate that Avernians and human beings, living on concentric biospheres for millions of years, had telepathically influenced each other’s mental processes. The theory would account, perhaps, for the odd coincidence of words which Prudence had discovered, and for the widespread belief among primitive societies that another world existed below the surface of the Earth. Above all, and most important in Snook’s opinion, it accounted for the compatibility of thought modes which made communication possible in the first place.

As he walked around the gallery to the pipe where the other men had gathered, Snook wondered if he could play the role of scientific researcher and take his theory one experimental step further. Having made the initial mental contact with Felleth—could he now, by conscious effort, reach him over a distance? The range would not be all that great, because at that moment Felleth would be somewhere below him and rising up through the rock strata, but the principle could be proved. He stopped walking, took off his Amplites, closed his eyes and tried to screen his brain from all sensory inputs. Feeling selfconscious, and aware that he was probably guilty of monstrous clumsiness in Avernian terms, he strove to form a mental picture of Felleth and to project the Avernian’s name across the gulf which separated two universes.

In his mind there was nothing. Against the screen of his eyelids there was nothing, save the slow drifting of afterimages conjured by his retinas. The random patterns of pseudo-light continued to merge and mingle, then—very gradually—Snook began to feel he could see something behind them. A pale green wall which was not a wall because it was possessed of movement, and endless rising and overturning and falling of its elements; there was transmcency coupled with strength; a sense of solidity and liquidity; a changeless state of eternal changing…

Deep peace of the running…

“Come on, Gil,” Ambrose called. “We’re nearly all set up. Getting it down to a fine art.”

Helig was standing beside Snook, the collar of his rollneck sweater pulled up over his chin. “Yes, come and join us—there’s no show without Punch, is there?”

Snook blinked at the two men and fought to hide his annoyance. Had he been working a confidence trick on himself? Had the words begun to form in his mind because he had been expecting them? How could a telepath distinguish between his own thoughts and those of another?

“Snap out of it, old boy,” Helig said, amiably impatient. “Have you been at the mother’s ruin again?”

“What the hell’s the rush?” Snook demanded. “We can’t do anything until the Avernians get up to this level.”

“Oh!” Helig raised his eyebrows. “Listen to our prima bloody donna!” He punched Snook playfully on the shoulder.

Snook fended off a second blow and forced himself to relax as they walked along the hollowed-out pipe to the area which Ambrose and Murphy, using drawings of the mine and a surveyor’s tape, had marked off as the scene of operations. He was going to have his fill of telepathic experimentation in a matter of minutes, assuming that Felleth kept the implicit rendezvous. Ambrose, satisfied now that he had got his little team together, went on ahead to supervise Quig and Culver.

“Gene, you know this country better than most,” Snook said in a quiet voice. “How long do you think Ogilvie will tolerate this mine being shut down?”

“Strangely enough, the President is taking it quite well. He’s been flattered by the publicity Barandi has got out of it—these things are important to him—and I think he might be in two minds about what he ought to do. Tommy Freeborn is getting restless, though.” Helig’s face was unreadable behind the dark lenses of his Amplites. “Very restless.”

“Think he’s getting ready to answer the call of destiny?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Come on. Gene—everybody knows Freeborn would like to give the two fingers to the United Nations, seal up the borders and get rid of all the whites and Asians.”

“All right, but I didn’t tell you this.” Helig glanced around him, as if expecting to see microphones projecting from the stone. “The smart money has started to flow out of the country. I can’t see Tommy Freeborn letting that go on for more than a week.”

“I see. Are you leaving?”

Helig looked surprised. “Just when I’ll have some real work to do?”

“Your Press card won’t mean anything to the Colonel”

“It means something to me, old boy.”

“I admire your principles,” Snook said, “but I won’t be around to see them put into practice.”

They reached the other members of the group and Snook stood apart, trying to get his thoughts in order. The time had come for him to move on. All the signs were there, all the warnings had been sounded loud and clear, and although he had allowed himself to become involved in other people’s problems, it was a mistake which could be rectified. It now seemed inevitable that there would be a Sharpeville-type slaughter of miners, but there was nothing he could do about that, and his worrying about it would have a negative result. Nature had yet to design a nervous system which was capable of sustaining the guilt of others.

Ambrose and Prudence represented a separate issue. They were sophisticated, well-educated adults—and the fact that he saw them as innocents abroad did not make him responsible for their welfare. Prudence Devonald, in particular, would resent it if he tried to offer advice, and if she wanted to hitch her wagon to Ambrose…

The trend of his thinking filled Snook with sudden self-doubt. Would he have been coolly planning to cut and run if Prudence had fallen into his arms after the incident in the Cullinan? The storybooks all agreed that was the appropriate reward for a knight who rescued a damsel in distress, but was it possible that he—Gilbert Snook, the human neutrino—had seriously expected her to translate romance to reality? And was it equally possible that he was preparing to abandon her in a fit of adolescent pique?

Disturbed at having blundered into emotional quicksands, Snook was almost relieved to see Ambrose studying his watch and giving the fluttering hand signals which indicated that top dead centre was imminent. Ambrose made some final adjustments to the boson field generator, and began explaining the entire procedure for Helig’s benefit. There was less room than in the tunnels where the previous contacts had been made, and the members of the group were standing quite close together when die now-familiar glowing blue line appeared on the rock floor.

“Lateral displacement less than one metre,” Ambrose murmured into his wrist recorder. Quig’s camera began clicking in the background.

Snook moved forward, eager and reluctant at the same time, and stood perfectly still as die line rose upward to become die apex of a triangular prism of luminosity. The prism expanded upwards and outwards until its peak was above Snook’s head and he could see the ghostly geometries of roof structure all about him. The horizontal plane of a ceiling came next, rising over his ankles and knees like the surface of an insubstantial lake. Snook knelt to bring his head down into the volume of the Avernian room. The three translucent figures were waiting for him, Felleth in the centre, growing upwards from the solid rock like sculpted columns of bluish smoke.

Felledi moved closer to Snook, on legs that were as yet invisible, and his arms were outstretched. Again the mist-pools of his eyes grew large. Snook inclined his head forward and, even before the contact was made, he could see the shimmering movement of the sea-green wall…

Deep peace of the running wave.

I ask your forgiveness, Equal Gil. I was at fault for not understanding that you are not accustomed to the congruency of self which you refer to as telepathy. A few unfortunate members of our race are afflicted with the silence that separates and, in my egotism, I presumed that you were similarly flawed because you issued no greeting. I was glad to feel you trying to make contact with me a short while ago, because it showed that you had come to no harm as a result of my mistake. During this meeting I am using purely sequential thought structures to avoid overloading your neural pathways. This technique, which we use in the teaching of our children, reduces the rate of information transfer, but there will be a gain in effectiveness because your mind will be able to function in an approximation of its normal manner.

I ask your forgiveness, too, because in my blind pride I dared reject your stone house of proven knowledge in favour of my reed hut of conjecture. My only excuse is that I was shocked and in considerable pain—in one second I was given more new knowledge than has been accumulated by the People in the last million days, and much of the knowledge was of a kind I would have been happier not to have. I confess that I was also confused and alarmed by the nature of your arrival. The People have many myths about strange beings who live in the clouds, and when you descended from the sky it seemed to me—for an instant—that all the old superstitions had been proved true. This, of course, is a feeble excuse for my reaction, because the nature of your arrival was in itself a proof of all your claims. A moment of logical consideration would have shown that the vertical displacement of your body relative to mine was generated by a hypocycloid of planetary scale. Once that elementary step had been taken, all the other deductions were inevitable, including the final one concerning the fate of my world.

Snook: I’m sorry that I was the bringer of such news.

Do not distress yourself. The intellectual experience has been unique—and the end is not yet. Also, the knowledge you gave me has been put to good use. I have, for example, been able to explain to the satisfaction of the People certain disturbing phenomena which have occurred in distant lands, all of them near the equal-day line, which you refer to as the equator. Some individuals have been terrified by visions, and by intimations about the end of our world. Without knowing it, for there was nothing to see, they had come within self-congruency range of others of your race who live on or near your equator, and an accidental and partial communication was achieved.

How is it that I am able to see you and your companions?

Please be at ease—it is not necessary for you to construct sentences, nor have we time for such laborious methods. You have a companion who has knowledge of nuclear physics and it was his idea to illuminate your body by placing it within what he calls an intermediate vector boson field. I wish to communicate with him, but he is surrounded by the silence which separates and I have no means of reaching him. It is apity that the planetary motion gives us such a short time together, but there is something you can do to help, if you are willing.

Snook: I’ll do anything I can.

I am grateful. When we are separated from each other,please obtain writing materials and have them in your hands when we are united again. I will then be able to communicate with Equal Boyce. In addition, I have a very important request to make of you and all the other members of your race. I have learned that yours is a troubled and divided world, and in order that my request be properly received I must teach you enough about the People to make it clear that the granting of the request will not add to your problems. In a few seconds we will separate, therefore—to achieve my purpose -1 must resort to full congruency of self. Do not be alarmed, and do not at this stage attempt to impose language upon concept.

Simply receive…

…the People are mammalian, bisexual, vegetarian (images of many Avernians, idealised/transformed by Felleth’s own vision; underwater farms; swimmers tending lines of tree-like plants)…average life span is ninety-two of your I our years (unfamiliar method of reckoning)

…inter-personal communication is telepathic, complemented by vocal sound, expression and gesture (images of Avernian faces, idealised/transformed, made meaningful, fierce white light of truth)…social organisation is paternal, flexible, informal—no equivalent term available in Earth languages (images of philosopher-statesmen holding congress in vast brown stone building covering two islands linked by a double-arched bridge)

…mass aggression and individual aggression unknown in recent history—corrective procedure for murder was voluntary cessation of breeding by all Avernians of same genetic strain

(image of small wave losing momentum, subsiding into the unity of the ocean)

…planetary population is now 12,000,000 but was 47,000,000 before the weight of the oceans decreased (images of bodies of small children floating in water faces downward, numerous as autumn leaves on a forest floor, unmoving except for the slow jostling of the waves)

“Oh, God,” Snook whispered. “It’s too much. Too much.”

He became aware of the pressure of the uneven rock against his knees. His hands were holding the smooth plastic frame of his magniluct glasses, and a flashlight beam was dancing behind the silhouettes of human beings, shadows flailing and flickering in the confines of the tunnel.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Helig said. “I never saw anything like that.”

Murphy and Helig came forward and helped Snook to his feet. He looked around him and saw that Ambrose was close by, still wearing his Amplites, busy chalking marks on the tunnel wall, consulting his watch and talking into his recorder in a low voice, Quig was operating his camera, pointing it upwards, and Culver was doubled over the rectangular shape of the pulse code modulator. For an instant the scene was completely meaningless to Snook and he felt lost, then there was a shift of perception, and the strangers became known to him, their motivations familiar.

“How long did it last this time?” Snook’s throat was dry, hoarsening his voice. “How long was I in contact?”

“Your forehead was touching Felleth’s for nearly a minute,” Murphy said. “Was it Felleth, by the way?”

“Yes, that was Felleth.”

“They all look alike to me,” Murphy commented drily. “Then he leaned forward and his head was right inside yours, the way it was yesterday, for about a second.”

“A second?” Snook pressed the back of a hand to his forehead. “I can’t go on like this. I spend my whole life avoiding people, because I just don’t want to know, and now…”

“They’ve gone,” Ambrose said in a firm voice. “Everybody take their Amplites off—I’m turning on the big light.” A moment later the tunnel was filled with marble-white brilliance. There was a general shuffling of feet and flexing of shoulders. Snook felt in his pocket for his cigarettes.

“We can relax for ten minutes until the Avernians pass top dead centre and drop down again/ Ambrose continued.

“We drew a blank on the modulator,” Culver said. “I don’t think they were trying for light-sound communication this time—at least, I didn’t see any equipment.”

“No, it looks as though they’ve decided to work through Gil.” Ambrose lit Snook’s cigarette and his voice became unexpectedly sympathetic. “How was it, Gil? Rough?”

Snook inhaled fragrant smoke. “If anybody ever shoves an air hose in your ear and inflates your head to five times its normal size, you’ll get some idea.”

“Can you give me a preliminary report?”

“Not now—I’ll need a full morning with a recorder.” There was an abrupt stirring in Snook’s memory. “Felleth is going to send you a message, Boyce. I need a writing block and a pen before he comes back again.”

“A message? Have you any idea what it could be?”

“It’s technical. And it’s something big…” Snook felt the coldness of prescience beginning to grow within him and he fought to quell it. “Just give me the block and pen, will you?”

“Of course.”

Snook took the writing equipment, moved a short distance down the tunnel from the rest of the group and stood by himself. He lit a second cigarette and smoked it with quiet concentration, all the while wishing he was far away and above ground, in sunlight. The sunlight was important. There had to be clear skies, with views of infinity, a visual antidote to the bund grey skies of Avernus. There had to be an escape from the claustrophobic, doomed world, with its low islands reflecting as diamond-shapes in the tideless ocean, and the bodies of alien children drifting like sterile spawn…

“Ready for you, Gil,” Ambrose called, and at the same moment the tunnel was returned to its former state of darkness. Snook put on his Amplites, creating a spurious blue radiance in which his cigarette end shone with magnified brilliance. He ground it out under his heel and walked back to the arena.

Deep peace of the running wave.

You will be interested to learn, Equal Gil, that although the People’s transportation systems have largely been destroyed, our communications were not affected by the disaster a thousand days ago. The possibility of using electrical phenomena to transmit signals over great distances has been known to us for a long time—and vie have demonstrated the method for purely scientific reasons—but for all general communications we rely on the congruency of self —which you know as telepathy.

In this way, the knowledge you brought me yesterday has already been disseminated to all of the People. The Responders have held communion and given their advice, and a decision has been made. It is contrary to our philosophy to surrender life to the forces of entropy, but we have agreed that we do not want our children’s children to be born into a world which can offer them nothing but death. Accordingly, we will cease to fertilise our females.

It is not difficult for us —a logical consequence of our form of telepathy is voluntary control over the proto-minds of our seedlings. This has given us predetermination of the sex of our offspring, and it also permits us to choose sterility if we so desire.

We have been fortunate—some would say a greater power has ordained it—in that the time remaining to our world is slightly greater than the average lifetime of our individual members. A small proportion of the People will therefore continue to produce children for another four hundred days. It will be the melancholy duty of this final generation to act as caretakers for the rest of us, to oversee our departure from life, and to organise our dwindling resources in such a way that in the last days there will be no starvation, no deprivation) no suffering, no loss of dignity. When the oceans rise again they will bring neither fear nor death -for we shall have gone.

Snook: How can you make a unanimous decision like that in such a short time?

The People are not like human beings. I am not claiming that vie are superior—it can be expected of any telepathic society that reason, which reinforces itself and grows stronger on the universality of truth, will prevail over unreason, which grows less coherent and weaker as its individual proponents are isolated in their own unrealities. The People will act in concent as one, in this final trial, as in the lesser ordeals of the past.

Snook: But how can they accept it so quickly when only two days ago you had no science of astronomy? How do they know that what I told you was true?

I do not know if you will be able to understand the difference in our philosophies, but the only reason we did not have a science of astronomy is that we had no requirement for it. It would have served no purpose. Our physics are not your physics. I have learned, from your store of knowledge, that you have a science of radio astronomy, with instruments which would tell you of the existence of other worlds and other stars even if Earth was permanently covered by cloud—but, although wave phenomena are similar in my universe, such instruments have not been constructed here because we could not have conceived a use for them. However, when we were presented with the evidence of your experience we were quite capable of using it as a foundation and building an appropriate logical edifice. The People were not persuaded by you, or by me. They were persuaded by truth.

Snook: But so quickly!

It is not the speed of acceptance which perplexes you, but the acceptance itself. But do not be deceived into thinking there is no grief. We are neither passive or submissive. The People are not content to bow out of existence. We accept that the vast majority of our race must cease to exist, but as long as a few of us survive our life-wave will be preserved and may grow strong again some day.

Snook: Is that possible? I’ve been told that your world will be totally destroyed—so how will it be possible for any of you to survive?

There is only one way in which we can survive, Equal Oil—and that is by entering your world.

On behalf of the People…and in the name of Life…I am asking your race to make room for us on Earth.

The bright light had been switched on again, transforming the tunnel into a pantomime setting, and the cast of strangers was assembled as before. Snook stared at each in turn, until they had assumed their identities. Murphy was looking at him with a slight frown, but the other men were standing near the light and their attention was focused on a flat rectangular object. It took Snook a few seconds to identify it as the writing pad which Ambrose had given him. Ambrose raised his eyes in a long, level stare.

“What is this, Gil?” he said. “What’s happening here?”

Snook flexed his fingers, trying to orient himself in his own body. “I’m sorry. Felleth must have forgotten to give me the message, or perhaps there wasn’t enough time.”

“I’ve got the message! Look at it!” Ambrose held the pad in front of Snook’s face. The entire top sheet was covered with words and mathematical symbols, laid out in perfectly straight lines as if they had been typed.

Snook touched the block with his fingertips, feeling the faint indentations caused by the pen. “Did I do that?”

“In about thirty seconds flat, old boy,” Helig said. “I tell you, I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve heard of automatic writing, but I never really believed in it till now. I tell you, this is…”

“We can go into that later,” Ambrose cut in. “Gil, do you know what this is?”

Snook swallowed with difficulty, playing for time in which to think. “What does it look like to you?”

“These equations appear to outline a process, using inverse beta-decay, which would transmute antineutrino matter into protons and neutrons,” Ambrose said in a sombre voice. “At first glance it looks like a proposal for transferring objects from the Avernian universe into this one.”

“You’ve almost got it right,” Snook replied, reassured at hearing what might have been his own private fantasy voiced by another human being. “But Felleth wasn’t talking about transferring objects—he wants to send us some of his people.”