Orbitsville Departure

Chapter 18

The headquarters of the London Anima Mundi Foundation had been set up a short distance south of Winnipeg for a number of reasons, an important one being administrative convenience. It was close to Metagov Central Clearing, the largest fragment of governmental machinery remaining on Earth, and therefore was at the centre of a pre-existing communications and transport network. A trickle of off world traffic was coming in from the Moon, the various orbital stations and from Terranova, the single small planet which had been discovered before Orbitsville had relegated it to the status of a backwater. The level of traffic was barely enough to keep the facility alive, but that was seen as an important contribution to the Renaissance. The global picture was more encouraging than many futurologists would have predicted, but it would be a long time before there would be any reserve capacity in the technology-based industries. Dallen was satisfied with the location for reasons of his own, not the least being that the climate was often comparable to that of his native Orbitsville. There were days, especially in spring and fall, when the air flowing in across the high grasslands had an evocative steely purity which, taking him unawares, would cause him to tilt his head and search the skies as though he might see in them the pale blue watered silk archways of his childhood. And even in midsummer, when the temperatures were higher than he would have preferred, the air was lively and had a freshness he did not associate with Earth.

This was a good place to bring up my son^ he thought as he waited for the breakfast coffee to percolate. Good as any place you would find.

It was a diamond-dear morning — one of a seemingly endless succession of fine mornings in that summer — yet he was acutely conscious of the date as he moved about the familiar environment of the kitchen. August 25, 2302. Only nine years had passed since Orbitsville had departed for another universe, but it had been two whole centuries since an exploration ship had slipped away from the Earth-Moon system heading for unknown space. Now the Columbus was fully stored and ready to spiral out of Polar Band One to test itself against sun-seeded infinities, and the date would be one for the history books.

The thought of books drew Dallen from the kitchen and into the pleasant, long-windowed room he used as a study. One wall featured a custom-built rosewood case which held exactly four hundred literary works, many with antique bindings which proclaimed them to be early editions. In the centre of the case, glazed and framed, was the handwritten reading list which had been the basis of the collection, Dallen smiled as he ran his gaze over the display, taking a wholesome and pleasurable pride in having read every volume, from Chaucer right through to the major 23rd Century poets. His brain, conditioned by nine years of schooling in total recall techniques, effortlessly recreated the circumstances in which he had recovered the list…

For protracted aching minutes after the disappearance of Orbitsville the group of people who had tried to enter Portal 36 had been too stricken to think coherently or act constructively. Dallen remembered continuing his slow-tumbling fell towards the sun, his mind a chaotic battleground for alien concepts and a crushing sense of personal loss, unable to care much about whether he was going to be lost or saved. He had been thousands of metres away from the Hawkshead before the crewman dispatched by Captain Lessen had overtaken him and jetted them both back to safety. The ship's pressure skin, abruptly released from an invisible vise, had resealed itself within its elastic limits and the air losses were no longer a matter of urgency.

In the days that followed Dallen had been able to lose himself in hard work, because — once the incredible truth about the sphere had been accepted — there remained the practical business of the return to Earth.

Many starships, ranging in type from bulk carriers to passenger vessels, had been left in a vast circle around the sun when Orbitsville had vanished from the normal continuum. Forming part of the same circle, but in much larger numbers, had been an even wider variety of interportal ships, many of which had been en route when their destinations had ceased to exist. In some extreme cases, maintenance workers on exterior port structures had been left floating in space, clinging to sliced-off sections of docking cradles.

The salvage operation had been facilitated by the fact that everything left behind was in a stable and tidy orbit around the sun, and was also provided with stellar heat. As a preliminary to the retreat to Earth, all personnel with only spacesuits or unpowered habitats to keep them alive had been located and rescued by small craft. Next, all ships — large and small — had gathered in a single orbiting swarm, and the interstellar vessels had taken on board every human being left in that region of space. That stage of the operation had been complicated by the arrival of twelve ships from Earth and one from Terranova, all of which had been locked in warp transfer at the time of the disappearance, but the problems had been mostly concerned with credibility and had eventually been resolved. The thesis that Orbitsville no longer existed, although astonishing, was remarkably easy to demonstrate.

The logistics of assembling the return fleet had been such that Dallen had plenty of time to rescue his family's possessions from the condemned Hawkshead and transfer them to an aging but grandiose passenger liner, the Rosetta, in which they had been assigned a suite. And it had been while repacking some oddments that he had found the reading list folded and tucked into a rarely-used tobacco pouch. Cona had prepared it for his benefit three years earlier. It detailed four hundred books she regarded as important and which she had urged him to read.

"That's purely for starters," she had said, smiling. "Just to give you some idea of where you came from and where you ought to be going."

The old Dallen had refused the intellectual gift, inflicting unknown pain by not trying even one of the suggested books, but the new Dallen had been determined to make amends. Standing there in the special sunlight of that special morning, he touched the oiled wood of the bookcase, recognising and respecting all that remained to him of his former wife. The body which had once belonged to Cona was now inhabited by a cheerful and uncomplicated young woman who had a mental age of about thirteen and whose home was on a nearby farm owned by the Foundation. Belatedly accepting his former physician's advice, Dallen had renamed her Carol and used the name automatically in his thoughts.

He went to visit Carol once a month and occasionally they would go horseback riding together, and he was always glad that their relationship, although pleasant, was cool and undemanding. Carol treated him as she would an uncle, sometimes enjoying his visits a lot and at others showing impatience over being dragged away from the stables. The active farming life had pared her figure down, taking years off her apparent age, with the result that when Dallen saw her from a distance there was little to remind him of his former wife — Cona Dallen doesn't live here any more — and he had learned that all grief has to fade.

"Coffee in five minutes," he shouted, hearing the first subdued thump from the old-style percolator in the kitchen. He arranged settings for three people at the breakfast bar, then returned to the study and sat down at his desk. The computer displayed his job notes for the day, but he found it hard to concentrate on the symbols when the lawns and shrubs beyond his window were glowing with a phosphorescent nostalgic brilliance and the Columbus was circling up there beyond the atmosphere, making ready for deep space. Dallen reached for his pipe and, while filling it, allowed his thoughts to drift back over the previous nine years.

Dwelling in the past was psychologically inadvisable for most people, but in his case it had literally become a way of life, a profession. Project Recap had been set up within weeks of his return to Earth after the Orbitsville departure, with Dallen as a principal director. In the early stages all but three of the thirty-four men and women who had witnessed and been affected by the seminal encounter with the Ultans had been part of the team, each making a unique contribution to the collective memory. The ineffable moment of wordless, mind-to-mind contact had been shared by all, but the common experience had been interpreted by individuals in different ways, modified by their intelligence, outlook and education.

Holorecordings of the event — with their hazy images of black entities shimmering in blackness — had proved to the rest of humanity that something had happened, but it had been the very diversity of the participants' reactions which had finally eliminated all theories about mass hysteria. Doctor Glaister, for example, with her background in particle physics, had emerged from the experience with recollections which varied a great deal from Dallen's in some places, especially where the "dialogue" had touched on the relationship between mindons and gravitons. The detailed insights she had received — cameos of cold logic, engraved in permafrost, with the black ice of eternity showing through" was how she once described them — revitalised her entire field of learning, in spite of the fact that only one in a thousand of its workers had not been translated into the Region II universe.

The effect had been similar, though to a lesser extent, with some technical and engineering experts of the Hawkshead's crew, and it was largely as a result of their subsequent work that the exploration ship Columbus would be able to fly at close to tachyon speeds, bringing the core of the galaxy within mankind's reach. Other members of the same group had formed a cadre of inspired technocrats who, with material assistance from Terranova, were playing a vital role in the Renaissance.

The after-effects of the unique encounter had not been uniformly beneficial, however. The three men who had not been able to participate in Project Recap had been jolted by their experience into a profound autism which still gave little sign of abating. Dallen himself, prime target for the Ultans' psychic energies, had been disturbed for weeks, prone to nightmares and loss of appetite, alternating between periods of torpor and hyperactivity. When he had learned that his work for the Project would involve repeated and full-scale mental regression to the encounter he had at first refused to cooperate in any way, and only gradually had overcome his instinctive fears. There had also been the problem of his disbelief in the essential proposition.

The central idea was that the Ultans could be used retrospectively as a kind of sounding board for scientific and philosophical beliefs to be specially implanted in Dallen's mind. By drug-intensified hypnotic regression he would be able to meet the superhuman entities again and again, recreating a special state of consciousness, continuing to harvest or corroborate knowledge, to glean and scavenge until the law of diminishing returns made the exercise pointless.

His scepticism had gradually faded when he discovered he had already, in association with Billie Glaister, helped change men's dunking about no less a question than the ultimate fate of the universe. Cosmologists had never been able to find enough mass in the universe, even with allowance for black holes, to guarantee that it was closed and therefore cyclic. The best they had been able to hope for was the Einstein-de Sitter model of a marginally open or flat universe, one which barely expanded but would go on doing so for ever. However, the mindon graviton component imposed a positive curvature on space time, promising an infinite sequence of Big Squeezes and Big Bangs. The cosmological timescales were such that Dallen could feel little personal concern, but he could see that a cyclic universe was more pleasing to philosophers.

Of much greater interest to him were the questions posed by the mindon science of the Renaissance. The very fact that it not only accepted personal immortality, but had it as a cornerstone, made it unlike any scientific discipline that had gone before. It was exuberant, optimistic, mystical, life-centred, full of wild cards, boasting as one of its creeds a statement hypnotically retrieved by Dallen from the Ultan encounter: It is the thinker in the quietness of his study who draws the remotest galaxies back from the shores of night.

Dallen liked to regard himself as an integral part of the universe, and he savoured the irony in the way in which human beings, who had until recently accepted a life expectancy of some eighty years, were now debating their prospects of surviving the next Big Bang as mindon entities. "Science used to be preoccupied with tacking on more and more decimal places," a colleague told him. "Now we add on bunches of zeroes."

It had been that moral buoyancy, the powerful life-enhancing elements of mindon science, which had given Dallen the necessary incentive to join Project Recap. To the world at large the demanding aspect of his work had been the mental wear and tear caused by the periods of intensive study of abstruse subjects followed by regressions and the subsequent debriefings. Dallen had found the process intellectually harrowing, but the principal strain had been emotional — for it entailed his losing Silvia London time after time. One system of thought demanded that he regard her as having lived out her life billions of years before the oldest stars in the universe were formed; but in another — the one which was instinctive and natural to Dallen — she was vitally alive, separated from him only by some malevolent trick of cosmic geometry. And both systems had exacted their due of bitter tears.

For months after the premature death of his mother Dallen had been haunted by fantastic dreams in which she was still alive, and on his awakening his grief had returned with almost its original force. A similar sequence occurred with Silvia. Over and over again, in the slow-motion quasi-existence of hypnotic regression, he saw her reaching her arms towards him as he flew upwards to the edge of the portal. He saw her tears and was able to read the words on her lips: I love you, I love you, I love you…

The subsequent dreams were varied. In some he reached the portal and forced his way through the diaphragm field in time to voyage with Silvia into the Region II universe, in others she remained behind with him in the normal continuum, but — dreams being what they are, with their own laws and logics — the one that troubled him most was the one which took the threads of reality and wove them into the most fantastic, least realistic pattern. Dallen had it on the authority of the Ultans themselves that there were anywhere from eight to forty of their titanic spheres in the Milky Way system. He had also been told that the sphere known to mankind as Orbitsville had been forced to leave earlier than scheduled — which meant that the others were still located in various arms of the galaxy, still making their unhurried preparations to depart for another continuum. In the dream Dallen sailed out on a tachyon ship, found one of the remaining spheres, and entered it just in time to be transported to a Region II galaxy. And in the dream he quit the second sphere and flew with magical ease and certainty to Orbitsville, and was reunited with Silvia.

To the dreaming mind such epic flights, far from seeming preposterous, are perfectly natural and normal, and that was the vision Dallen's unconscious elected to repeat most, its poignancy magnified by the very factors which divorced it from reality. At first he expected the dream to retain its full power, then he realised that his grief over the loss of Silvia was following the merciful and inevitable course of all passions. Pain softened into sadness, sadness mellowed into resignation, then it came to Dallen that he was truly a different person. The change had begun when he had finally acknowledged that he deserved to love Silvia and be loved by her in return, and it had been accelerated by his having, for the first time in his life, work he found absorbing and worthwhile.

Cosmogony and cosmology were only part of Project Recap's domain — there was the subject of the Ultans themselves. As the one who had had the closest mental contact with the enigmatic beings, Dallen was assigned the position of leading expert in the brand-new field of study, but he was well aware of his human inadequacies. In common with all other members of the original encounter group, when he tried to empathise with the Ultans, to penetrate their minds, all he divined was an overpowering sense of coldness. For Dallen the feeling was reinforced by his recollection of the icy calmness of the aliens, of their dispassionate reliance on logic as they tried to influence him mere seconds before the Orbitsville departure.

There were arguments and counter-arguments, all based on speculation. Perhaps the humans, like receivers tuned to a single radio frequency, had been oblivious to a wide spectrum of telepathic transmission. The Ultans, it was reasoned, must be capable of human-like feelings because they were engaged in conflict and were not above using subterfuge. On the other hand, perhaps they had betrayed no trace of emotion because — and this was the argument which had dismayed many people — the fate of Orbitsville, so important in human terms, was infinitesimal in the Ultan scheme of existence. After all, what did it matter about one sphere when more than a million times a million of them had been deployed in an Olympian struggle to shape a future universe? Nothing could be deduced about the probable outcome of that struggle, nor about the super-dimensional symmetry of the next Big Bang, using the fact that Orbitsville was now located in Region II. Orbitsville was too insignificant, a single grain of sand on a storm-swept shore…

"This is the last call for coffee," Dallen bellowed. "If nobody shows up I'm having the lot. There was a scuffling and the sound of laughter from the direction of the bedrooms, and a second later Nancy Jurasek and Mikel jostled their way into the kitchen. Nancy was an engineer with the Industrial Reclamation Office in Winnipeg. She devised ways of reactivating municipal services for the benefit of people drifting back into the cities from the old independent communes. She was dark-haired and vivacious, and in the two years she had been living with Dallen had built an excellent relationship with Mikel, playing the role of substitute mother or sister when required, but in general simply being herself. One of her .most valuable contributions had been in bringing out the irreverent and fun-loving side of Mikel ’s nature, characteristics he had had little chance to develop in the cloistered atmosphere of the Foundation.

Mikel accepted a beaker of coffee from Dallen, sipped it and made a grimace of distaste. "The thing I look forward to most about the Columbus" he said earnestly, "is getting a break from Dad's coffee."

Dallen pretended to be hurt. "1 was going to make a big flask of it to send with you."

"There's a law against shipping toxic wastes."

Mikel dodged a playful swipe from Dallen, sat down at the breakfast bar and began to eat toast. Although not quite eleven years old, he was taller than Nancy and had an unruly appetite. He also had a prodigious talent for mathematics and physics, and had fully earned his place on the Columbus science team. Dallen's feelings had been mixed when he was giving his permission for Mikel to go on the exploratory flight. His instinctive parental feeling was that the boy was too young to leave home and venture into space, even for two months, but in his regressions to the Ultan encounter he had had repeated glimpses of the infant Mikel's face, the eyes blackly luminous as they gazed from the interior of the ovoid crib. It was something he had never discussed with the others, and there were no relevant criteria, but Dallen could half-believe that his son had been born again in that moment, a true child of space, with a mind brain complex which by a freak of destiny had been created by Gerald Mathieu for a singular congress with the Ultans, a tabula rasa for alien stylii.

If that were the case, if Mikel had been uniquely prepared to lead new generations to the stars, it could be seen as a curious atonement for Mathieu's original crime. Thinking back to the awesome events nine years in the past, Dallen could find in himself no residue of the hatred which had dominated and disfigured a part of his life. When Gerald Mathieu had been reeled back into the Hawkshead ’s airlock he had been found to be dead, with no apparent physiological cause. His body had been consigned to the Orbitsville sun and it was as though Dallen's negative emotions had gone into that stellar crucible with it. Now the entire episode seemed like a dream, and all that remained to him from it were echoes of feelings, stray reflections of things that might have been.

Had the group which reached the portal also been in mental contact with the Ultans? Dallen posed himself the familiar, unanswerable questions as he sipped his coffee. Were they telepathically appraised of their situation? Or bad they been mystified when the drip and all connected to it bad ceased to exist and strange constellations bad flared beneath their feet? Had Silvia and Renard had children? What was she doing at that very moment, forty billion years ago in a different universe?

"You seem a little quiet this morning," Nancy said. "Worried about Mikel?"

"No, the Columbus is a good ship," Dallen replied, glancing at his son who was still munching toast. "And hell only be gone lor two months."

"Two months for thy trip," Mikel said, his eyes growing darkly rapt in the way that Dallen remembered so well. "In that time we'll travel farther than anybody has ever done, but that's just for starters. Soon well be able to do anything… cross the galaxy… go hunting for Ultan spheres…"

Nancy gave a delighted laugh. "Dream on , child!"

"It isn't as far-fetched as you might think," Mikel said, a solemn expression appearing on his face as he tapped into his prodigal's intellect. "Here's a possible scenario for you to consider. We know that the Ultans put a minimum of eight spheres into this galaxy, and we were also told that they selected locations favourable to the development of intelligent life. Well, when we have improved our knowledge of this region of space sufficiently we will be able to decide what characteristics it has that make it a good site for a sphere. Then we can search for other similar areas in the galaxy and track down other spheres."

"Easy as pie," Nancy said scornfully, "but what happens if you bump into the Ultans themselves?"

Dallen enjoyed the way in which Nancy and Mikel were consciously playing word games, building an edifice of purest fantasy, but at some point they had begun to stray close to the chimerical never-never land of his old recurrent dream. He found himself oddly intent as he waited for the boy's answer.

"But that's what we'd be trying to do," Mikel said. "The spheres themselves are of no value to us. What we want is to find the Ultans, study them, learn from them, communicate with them."

"And what great message would you pass on?"

Mikel frowned, and for an instant his boyish features were overprinted with the face of the man he was Co become. "For one thing — I’d let them know we don't appreciate being treated like cattle."

Dallen turned away thoughtfully, realising he was almost afraid of his own son, then it came to him that he was listening to the voice of a new age. The Orbitsville phase had ended. In future when men set out to straddle the galaxy they would be searching for more than just areas of grass on which to pitch their tents. Equipped with superb tachyon ships, girded with mindon science, consciously immortal, they would have aims which could be incomprehensible to men of Dallen's generation. But there was nothing wrong with that, he reasoned. It was a sign that mankind was on the move again, and he should feel nothing but gladness that he had contributed to the process of vital change.

In the afternoon Dallen stood with one arm around Nancy at the Winnipeg spaceport, watching the shuttle carry his son up to an orbital rendezvous with the Columbus. There was no denying the sadness he felt over parting with the boy, at the idea of Mikel spending his eleventh birthday farther from Earth than men had ever been before. But the transcendental mood of the morning still lingered, sustaining him as the shuttle dwindled to a silver point and disappeared in the wind-scoured blueness of the sky. Ultans, he thought, we'll see you around.