Collision with Chronos

5

Far from earth, the ISS – Interstellar Space Society – known to its inhabitants as Retort City floated as if transfixed in the blackness of space, approximately mid-way between Altair and Barnard’s Star – that is, as far from any celestial body as it could manage. It took its name from its appearance, which was that of a double retort, or hourglass, but long and elegantly shaped. Retort City was, in fact, a city in a bottle, its outer skin being transparent and having a glassy sheen. An observer watching from the void would have discerned within the glass envelope a sort of double spindle, this being the general plan of the city’s internal structure, and would have seen through a muted blaze of lights an intermittent movement as the internal transport facilities passed up and down.

The city had a history of about five thousand years, having lived it uneventfully for the most part. Probably, its rulers thought, there were other ISS establishments somewhere within a hundred light-year radius of Sol, all surviving fragments of long-vanished Earth civilisations, for at one time the idea of forsaking life on planetary bodies and taking to artificial cities in the interstellar void had been a fashionable one. But they did not know this for sure, and felt no urge to comb space for their lost cousins.

Colloquially the two halves of the ISS were known as the Lower Retort and the Upper Retort – terms with social, rather than spatial implications. Officially they were the Production Retort and Leisure Retort. And no one, except newborn babes, ever passed from one retort to the other.

Or almost no one.

Hueh Su-Mueng shut down his machine and stood for a few moments looking abstractedly around him at the work area: a large, spacious hall filled with rows of machines, some like his own, some different. The next shift was already beginning to wander in; some of the men stood around chatting, others looked over their spec sheets or started up their machines, already becoming absorbed in their work.

Most of Su-Mueng’s shift had already gone. He was about to follow them when a young man, a few years older than himself, stopped by with a smile.

“Hello, Su-Mueng. There’s nothing much doing in my section today. Got anything you’d like me to be getting on with?”

Su-Mueng hesitated. He had been finding his current job interesting and had intended returning tomorrow to continue it – had, in fact, been postponing the final stage of his other project so as to be able to complete it. He glanced down at the half finished assembly of finely-machined components: a new type of calibrator for some unguessable instrument wanted in the Upper Retort.

“Oh, all right. You can carry on with this,” he said resignedly. He pulled out the spec sheets and explained the details and where he’d got to. “There’s no hurry,” he added. “Deadline’s more than a month away.”

The other man nodded, looking eagerly over the work. “It’s always like that on these slow cycles. I hate it when we’re so slack.”

Su-Mueng walked away and discarded his work-gown in the locker room, washing his hands and face and using a refresher spray on himself. The hormone-laden mist settled on his skin and in his nostrils, making him feel fresher and brighter and washing away the weariness that comes from long hours of effort.

Then he strode away and down spiral staircases to the elevators, a slim, elegant youth. His mind began to buzz with thoughts and the excitement of his secret rebellion… but in the elevator that sped towards his domestic level he encountered Li Kim, an old friend he knew from training school, who pressed him to enjoy a short game of ping-pong. Not being able to think of a good reason to refuse, Su-Mueng left the elevator with him and they proceeded together to the nearest recreation hall.

Kim invoked two cans of beer from a dispenser and handed Su-Mueng one. They strolled through a gallery of gaming machines, then past the entrances to the theatres. Further on there was a thumping noise against the wall from some fast-action physical game in progress – batball, most likely.

Ping-pong, Su-Mueng thought. That’s what we get down here. They don’t play ping-pong in the Upper Retort. By Almighty Time, the games they play there!

But even ping-pong, the way it was played in Retort City, was interesting enough, workers’ game or no. They secured a table and Su-Mueng took up his bat. The table was concave, like a wide, shallow bowl, divided by a thin screen of aluminium. Li Kim drained his beer, grinned, took up the ball and served.

They sent the ball ricocheting back and forth a few times. Kim was good, as Su-Mueng had discovered on many past occasions. The curved surface, of course, made a quick eye and hand all the more necessary; but that was not all.

Su-Mueng almost missed a return, just caught it, and hammered the ball over the left-hand side of the screen.

On crossing the divide it vanished in midair.

Kim vanished, too. But an instant later the ball came rocketing back at Su-Mueng and Kim, also, sprang back into view at the centre of the table.

This development demonstrated the speciality of Retort City: the ability to manipulate time. The table was divided into time-zones each of whose present moment was marginally out of phase with the others. More than quick reflexes were required – one needed to be almost psychic to anticipate where the ball would be returned from, or when. The phases could be adjusted so as to give a longer or shorter time difference, or more esoterically, rotated so that, for instance, the ball would be returned to the left and mysteriously come back from the right. It was even possible for the ball to be returned before it had been delivered.

And it was easy for the workmen of the Lower Retort to be technically extravagant with such toys. Technology was, after all, their life.

Kim was in fine form, flashing in and out of existence faster than Su-Mueng could follow or anticipate him. He might have done better if his mind had been on the game, but as it was his moves were confused with other thoughts. Kim won the first match and stood grinning at him.

“Same again?”

Su-Mueng laid down his bat. “Some other time, maybe. I don’t think it’s an even contest the way I’m playing today.”

“Time-chess then? Each row on a different time gradient?”

Su-Mueng shook his head. Time-chess required such concentration, such a phenomenal memory, that he wouldn’t have stood a chance.

“Oh. You want to relax more, maybe? A show? Or some girls?”

“Thanks, Kim, but there’s something I want to attend to at home. I think I’ll be getting along.”

“Sure. Don’t let me stop you. Well, in that case I’ll be getting along, too.”

Kim waved him a cheery good-bye and went bounding toward the gaudy awning of a trampoline emporium. Su-Mueng left the leisure area and continued on his way home.

Kim could never understand, he thought, what was on his mind. And his intentions would have left him aghast. Probably no one but himself could understand, and that went for either side of the divided city. People never did understand what was outside their experience, and for everyone but himself the other retort up – or, in the reverse case, down – the shaft was little more than a theoretical concept.…

The elevator swept down, past endless tiers of factories and workshops, past amusement emporiums and domestic precincts. Finally Su-Mueng left the elevator and made his way through a maze of tiny streets until he came to a neat little house merging with a dozen others in a jumbled, interlocking design. He put his thumbprint to the key and went inside.

His grandfather sat at a table drinking a glass of fizzy mineral water. He was not really so very much older than Su-Mueng (so demonstrating another aspect of Retort City’s mastery over time); to be precise he was twenty-six years older.

Su-Mueng gave him a perfunctory greeting, drew a meal from the dispenser, sat down and began to eat the synthesised rice, curried chicken and bamboo shoots.

“Interesting job today?” his grandfather asked, eyeing him speculatively. Su-Mueng nodded abstractedly. “Not bad.” It still surprised him, even ten years after, how much casual conversation in the Lower Retort centred on work. The social system really did function as it was meant to: everybody down here had an obsessive interest in production, in making things. He was interested, too – after all, it was interesting – but with him that was not all. He did not neglect the wider vision that was denied to these… servants.…

He shovelled down the food and sat back, brooding. His grandfather switched on the wall screen. A technician was explaining how to set up a time delay circuit – a circuit that really did delay time, running a tiny fraction of the travelling “now” through a recurrent phase. Su-Mueng, already familiar with the technique, looked on without interest. Later there would be crude dramas, comedy shows, and so forth.

His resentment welled up. “You should see the kind of thing they screen in the Upper Retort,” he suddenly said, loudly.

With a faint groan his grandfather turned to him, smiling derisively. “You’re not going to start that again, are you?”

“But, Grandfather, wouldn’t you like to see what it’s like up there?” Su-Mueng asked. “Believe me, it’s so different. They live so much better than we do… everything’s so luxurious. You ought to see it.”

The older man laughed gently, tolerantly. “Your father certainly has something to answer for,” he chuckled. “You tell me they live better – I don’t think so.” He made a wry face. “No work, nothing really productive. Life would seem useless. I like it better here.”

Yes, Su-Mueng reflected, that was precisely the secret of how the system was able to perpetuate itself: neither side of the split city envied the other. The inhabitants of the Leisure Retort were scarcely aware of the workers who served them, and the workers, in their turn, regarded the participants in the aesthetic leisure culture as idle drones who would probably have been happier doing something useful.

One might have expected that over the passage of centuries some sort of resentment would have built up. But Retort City had neatly circumvented this possibility, by the practice known as the Alternation of Generations – a weirdly democratic principle that for cunning and ingenuity was probably unique. For while the work and leisure classes were strictly segregated, their separation was on a non-hereditary basis. Each babe was taken from its mother a few hours after birth and transported to the opposite retort, usually to be reared by its paternal grandmother – who previously had surrendered her own child… now the babe’s father or mother.

The arrangement was made even more perfect by virtue of the fact that the double exchange could be made simultaneously, even though in real terms a time lag of decades was obviously involved. This was because of the flexible phasing of the two retorts in time. On the same day that a couple parted with their new-born child, they received that child’s own offspring… their grandchild.

It all had a simple, basic ethic: a man might be fated to spend his entire life in the Production Retort, but he had the satisfaction of knowing that his children enjoyed the luxury and sophistication of the Leisure Retort. Conversely, an inhabitant of the Leisure Retort who was obliged to send his children to a life of work and discipline in the Lower Retort was compensated by being able to educate his grandchildren in their stead.

In practice, however, such a rationalisation was unnecessary. Family attachments were weak; people harboured no feelings for the children they never saw, and experienced neither envy nor pity in regard to their lot. In centuries there had been no questioning of the social order, and very few defections.

“Come, now,” Su-Mueng’s grandfather chided, noticing his continuing long face. “Life’s all right here, isn’t it? Don’t worry your head about life up there. Let them live it. This is good enough for me.”

Su-Mueng didn’t answer. Yes, he thought, it all ran perfectly – as long as the two cultures never met.

Which was why it didn’t run perfectly with him.

For he was a product of one of those few defections, the only one, to his knowledge, in recent years.

His father was Hueh Shao, once an official of high rank – a cabinet minister, Su-Mueng believed – in the Leisure Retort. There must have been something badly maladjusted about Hueh Shao, for in a society where for centuries everyone had been faultlessly conditioned into accepting the long-established custom, he had been unable to bear the thought of sending his newborn son down into the Lower Retort. He had broken the law, secretly keeping the babe and representing it as his grandson sent up from below.

It seemed incredible that the deception could go undetected, let alone that Su-Mueng’s absence from his proper place could go unnoticed, but somehow Hueh had managed it for ten full years. Then his crime had come to light. And the law was the law: there could be no exceptions. Su-Mueng, having been raised in what was probably the most refined culture the galaxy had to offer, and despite his tender years, had been sent down to live with total strangers in a different, cruder environment.

The first few years had been nightmarish; and though he had eventually adjusted to some degree, he had conceived a burning sense of resentment against the divided form of society.

And his father – the son of the man who sat opposite him – had been punished. Was still being punished.

He glanced at his grandfather, realising that he was something of an embarrassment to the old man. He had arrived too late, like a messenger from another world.

They had no right to do that, he thought. They should have let me stay where I belong.

He got up from the table and slid aside one of the screens that divided their small dwelling, entering his minuscule home workshop. From a slender cradle he picked up a model of Retort City he had made: two bulbous glass vessels, cinched in the middle with a metal girdle, glittering within like a tinselled tree of metal components.

He had spent the best part of two years working on that model. It was not, in fact, a model – that was simply a disguise. It was a machine. He had put his utmost into it, all his skill, all his ingenuity and patience. One thing they did in the Production Retort was train you well.

This device was going to help him go back where he belonged, to his father.

He spent the next few hours checking it over with the instruments on his workbench. Eventually he heard his grandfather retire to his sleeping mat, followed by his gentle snoring. Su-Mueng made one last test, then slipped to his own cubicle where he changed into a loose, flowing tunic with a high collar. Then he put his model of Retort City in a cloth bag and left the house.

Minutes later he was on a high-speed elevator heading for the transporter end of the Production Retort, the great metal girdle through which all commodities passed to their destinations in the other half of the city. He swept past scenes that, in most circumstances, would have been fascinating: great shining structures of steel, aluminium and titanium that comprised an ascending industrial process terminating in the delivery area.

No one paid any attention to him when he left the elevator and picked his way across the shunting yards where big cylindrical carriers were pushed through the metal neck into the other retort. He went up a narrow passage, little used, that passed behind the main control junctions. He went through a series of doors and soon was in semi-darkness, climbing a spiral staircase that went up and up interminably.

A good deal of poring over maps and schematics, and a good deal of exploring, had gone into his discovery of this route. There were in fact several such routes: the area between the retorts was riddled with service access passages. All one needed was patience and the right equipment.

At length he came to the top of the staircase and into the galleries surrounding the massive coils that ringed the interior of the metal girdle between retorts. Already peculiar sensations assailed his body, warning him that he was approaching the influence of the stupendous field of variable time that separated the two societies. There was a feeling of tension across the bridge of his nose; his eyes went slightly out of focus; and his heart gave a cautionary jump.

If he had smuggled himself into one of the freight containers and got himself carried through that way, the steeply graded time difference would have killed him whatever precautions he took. This way, threading himself through the surrounding machinery like a needle through half a dozen holes, he stood a good chance. He took the fake model out of the bag and touched some studs fused onto its base. Within, a ragged pattern of subdued lights, amber, green and white, glowed.

He touched the studs again, making adjustments. The model had now taken control of his personal “now-moment”, protecting him from the ravages of the energies in the giant coils; it would synchronise him more gently with the gradient, hopefully making the transition without injury to himself.

He went forward. He was in a place which, though cavernous, was so chock-full of machinery that it seemed like a solid mass. He squeezed between cabinets and stanchions, the hum of the machinery becoming louder in his ears. Once or twice he paused to make further adjustments to his device, and eventually the instrument told him what he already guessed.

He was through the time barrier – synched with the time of the Leisure Retort.

There could be little to stop him now. He continued worming his way through the time-control apparatus, and finally was able to switch off his gadget altogether. But here he came to a slight difficulty. There were no maps or schematics of the Upper Retort available where he had been living for the past ten years. He had hoped that the receiving area would be, to some extent, a mirror image of the delivery area and that therefore there would be a descending staircase in a corresponding position to the one he had come up by. But where was it?

He searched, and located, not a staircase, but a small riding platform. This took him beyond the region defined by the metal girdle; he was in the Leisure Retort.

Below him stretched the retort’s receiving area for all the goods supplied by the city’s willing slaves. It was a shunting yard pretty much like the one he had left, except that everything appeared to be under cybernetic control and the canisters were already being broken open, their contents being transferred to smaller trolleys for dispatch to ten thousand different destinations.

Su-Mueng swung himself down from a gantry and strode confidently forward. He had nothing to fear. No one would stop him or question his presence; no one questioned anyone in the Leisure Retort.

And as he walked he already noticed, with a feeling of excitement, the difference between here and the place he had just left. The air was different; he had ceased to notice, during his long years as a worker, that everywhere in the Production Retort the air smelled faintly of oil and namelessly subtle industrial substances. Here there was only a faint suggestion of perfumes, of anything that pleased the senses.

Many times he had reconstructed in his mind the layout of the retort. He decided that he would not delay, but proceed immediately to execute his mission.

The next half hour was, to him, delirious. He passed through the gorgeous gardens and concourses that had grown faint in his memory. Past the people who went calmly, serenely, about their unhurried business – unfettered by any regime or timetable, but given to the abstracted, civilised pursuits of art and philosophy, of every kind of cultured subtlety. Here was life at the peak of refinement, a life incomprehensible to those in the Production Retort who had not been educated to appreciate it. But Su-Mueng had been so educated, and then it had been torn from him. As the aura of the Leisure Retort seeped into him his existence down below began to fade to the aspect of a dream.… Su-Mueng pulled himself together. He could not say how long he might manage to stay here, and he was bent on a task that to him was of great importance.

He entered a quiet part of the retort that was used chiefly as a precinct of government. No one accosted him as he walked through the fresh-scented corridors, decorated in shades of orange and lime green, that led to a group of apartments terrible to his memory: the place where his father was incarcerated.

Ten years ago he had witnessed the beginning of Hueh Shao’s imprisonment. The Retributive Council had ordered that horror, in acknowledgement of the seriousness of his offence. Su-Mueng was not surprised to find the environs deserted; all would shun such a place.

The lock on the door was a simple one, though it could not be opened from the inside. Su-Mueng took a small device from his carrying sash, and after a little experimenting sprung it. Stepping inside, he found himself in a glass-walled foyer looking into the offender’s prison: a dwelling-place something like that in which Su-Mueng and his grandfather had lived, but larger and much, much more luxurious. It appeared to be untenanted. Su-Mueng examined a panel set into the rear wall of the foyer, replete with strip-dials, access sockets and so forth. He took his time-phase controller out of the bag he carried, waved it in front of the panel and observed the interior of the glass vessels, touching one or two of the external studs.

Then he picked up a microphone and spoke into it, trying to keep his voice calm and unemotional.

“Honoured father,” he said. “I know that you can see me, although I cannot see you. I am your son, Su-Mueng. I have returned to release you, if I can.”

He put down the microphone and returned to the wall panel; on one end of the model city was a metal plate which he placed against the panel. Magnetic bubbles circulated in the plate, inducing control currents in the apparatus within the wall.

He would never be made to believe that his father deserved the punishment that had been inflicted on him. The Retributive Council had sentenced him to solitary confinement in past time. He was out-synched – his personal “now-moment” back-graded to minutes, possibly only to a few tens of seconds, behind the common “now-moment” of the Leisure Retort. His solitude could not have been more complete, and was scarcely mitigated by the concession that he was not permanently confined to his apartments – being permitted during certain periods to wander within a restricted area – for everyone’s time was ahead of his; he could see them, but they could not see him, or hear him, or respond to him. He was like a ghost, moving among people who ignored him.

The mind of man, thought Su-Mueng, could not have devised a crueller exile.

The lights within the glass bottle flickered and raced. Suddenly the apartment shimmered and the artificially retarded time-field was abolished. There stood Hueh Shao, staring at him amazed, but like Su-Mueng forcing himself to adopt an attitude of dignified restraint.

The ex-minister bore a strong resemblance to his own father in the Production Retort – they were, in fact, of about the same age, a little under fifty – but the similarity was modified by the difference between the customs of the respective communities. He wore a long, wispy goatee beard and neatly cultivated mustachios that dropped down on either side of his mouth. The eyebrows were plucked, curved upward at their outer ends, and showed traces of cosmetic. The greying hair was carefully combed back, but was considerably longer than the cropped style affected down below.

He continued staring with steady eyes while Su-Mueng unlocked the inner door and stepped into the apartment.

“My son,” he said, “what foolishness is this?”

And Su-Mueng stared back, unable to speak, unable to explain what foolishness it was. Incredibly, his thoughts had never ranged beyond this moment: the moment when he set the old man free. His father, a revered elder individual of intelligence and resourcefulness, would surely know what to do, his subliminal thoughts had told him.

Only now did he realise that those thoughts were the thoughts of a ten-year-old boy, arrested at the moment when the law had torn him away from that father. His childish adoration had never died. And only now, as he faced Hueh Shao, did it come home to him that his father was as helpless and resourceless as himself.