Orbitsville Departure

Chapter 10

Dallen had endured the emptiness and quietness of the house for as long as his temperament would allow, and now he had begun to get a last-man-in-the-world feeling.

From the front window he could see most of one shallow slope of the city's North Hill, and there was no sign of movement anywhere in that expanse of nostalgic blue dusk. The progressive appearance of lights — distant speckles of gold, peach and amber — provided little comfort, because he knew that automatic switches were producing exactly the same effect in the uninhabited districts of Limousin, Scottish Hill and Gibson Park. Everything looked right for the tourists gliding down from orbit on the evening shuttle, but from where Dallen stood it was almost possible to believe that Earth's last citizens had been spirited away while he was dozing.

The words of the old song tried to invade his mind…

But he blocked them off, turning away from the window to walk through silent rooms in which his imagination still detected a hint of urine. Yesterday there had been a message from Roy Picciano explaining that he had, in view of Dallen's late return, taken Cona to the clink for extra tests which would last at least three days. Give yourself a break, the recording had concluded, take a couple of days off.

At first Dallen had been unable to accept the advice. The sortie to Cordele had left him physically tired, but he had driven to the clinic and spent time with Cona and Mikel. She had been bored and then angered by his attempts to get her to speak, and the boy had been asleep in his cot in the adjoining room, one hand clutching a tiny yellow truck. Dallen sought consolation in the fact that Mike! still had a special liking for toy vehicles, but it was a desperately thin lifeline. The infant personality had been erased before it had properly formed — so how could it ever be retrieved? You want a replacement for your baby son, sir? Must have a fondness for miniature cars? Wait just a moment, sir — we've got the exact mode! you need…

Dallen had left the clinic with a tearing pain in his throat and a dark chill gathering in his mind. He could go to the chief of police with a new theory about the five-week-old crime, but Lashbrook would seize on the lack of obvious motive as an excuse to take no action. In any case, Dallen reminded himself, he had no wish for the culprit to be taken by the authorities and shipped off to Botany Bay. The punishment would have to be much more drastic, person-airy administered, a venting of suppurative poison, and for that he would have to find the guilty person unaided.

And there still remained the enigma of the motive. Glib words about a Luddite Special being its own motive explained everything and nothing. What he needed was a credible reason for somebody who worked in City Hall to use such a device on an innocent woman and child, and his brain seemed quite unequal to the task. Grief, bitterness and undirected hatred were no aids to analytical thought.

It was in that state of mind that Dallen had fallen asleep in an armchair after reaching home. When he had wakened in the middle of the night there had seemed no point in transferring to a lonely bed, so he had stayed in the chair till morning. A full day spent in brooding, snacking and dozing had further reduced his drive, and now he felt too dispirited to think at all. The house had become a tomb, a prison, a place from which he had to escape. Ceasing his aimless drifting, he took a cool shower, shaved and changed into fresh clothing, all the while telling himself that he had no definite plans, that he might be going to the gymnasium or to a bar or to his office. It was not until he had actually started the engine of his car and had to choose a destination that he acknowledged he was going to see Silvia London.

He drove south with the top down, following the route he had traversed the previous day with Rick Renard. A few major stars were visible through the city's canopy of diffused light, forming a sparse background to Polar Band One, which was nearing zenith. The north-south line of space stations and parked ships had once been a brilliant spectacle in the night sky, but it had dimmed as the era of the great migrations had drawn to a close. Now it was mainly composed of irreparable hulks, many of which had been partially cannibalised to enable other ships to make final departures for Orbitsville. Dallen could only see it as a symbol of Earth's decline and he had no regrets when turning west removed the thinly jewelled braid from his field of view.

Lights were on all over the London residence and its extensions, and the presence of at least twenty cars on the apron of gravel added to the impression that there was a sizable party going on inside. Dallen, who had been expecting a much smaller gathering, swung his car into a vacant space and got out, discovering that he was dose to Renard's gold Rollac. He hesitated for a second, suddenly dubious about entering the house, then noticed Silvia at a ground-floor window in animated conversation with someone he could not see. The vertical rays from an overhead lamp emphasised the pouting fullness of her lower Up and highlighted her breasts, making her look impossibly voluptuous, like a sexist illustration on a cassette cover. He watched her for a moment, feeling like a voyeur, and went into the house.

"Welcome to this informal meeting of Anima Mundi Foundation!" His voice came from a thin, high-shouldered man of about sixty who was standing in the centre of the square hail. He was casually dressed in slacks and floral shirt, but his silver-bearded face had a conscious dignity which would have been more in keeping with donnish robes. A bar of unnaturally high colour reached from cheekbone to cheekbone across the saddle of his nose.

"Is this your first visit to one of our discussion evenings?" he said, giving Dallen a formal smile.

"Yes, but I only came to…" Dallen broke off as he realised he was speaking to a holomorph. The visual illusion was perfect, only betrayed by a slight studio quality to the voice. It had been beamed at Dallen's ears too accurately, robbing it of any acoustic interaction with the considerable volume of sound coming from rooms on either side of the hall.

"In that case let me introduce myself," the holo-morph said. "I am Karal London, and I offer you some wonderful news — you, my friend, are going to live for ever."

"Is that a fact?" Dallen replied uneasily, loathe to converse with the unseen computer which was directing the holomorph's responses.

"Not only is it a fact, my friend — it is the single most important truth in the cosmos. You will have ample opportunity to discuss it during the evening — and there is a comprehensive range of study aids, all available to you free of charge — but let me begin by asking you one vital question. What is…?"

The question was lost to Dallen as the door at his right opened and the buoyantly curvaceous figure of Rick Renard appeared, martini glass in hand. He grinned on seeing Dallen, walked straight to the holomorph and shoved his knee into the vicinity of its groin.

"Out of the way, you silly old fart" he commanded, stepping into the solid image and causing it to flow and fragment. "This really balls the whole system. Old Karal programmed the set-up himself before he left for Orbitsville, but he was too conceited to allow for anybody being disrespectful enough to stand right inside him. The computer just doesn't know how to react."

"I'm not surprised," Dallen said, reluctantly amused.

"Wait to you see this." Renard edged backwards a little, allowing London's image to reassemble itself in front of him, now apparently with four arms, two of which belonged to Renard and were waving like those of a Balinese dancer.

"…long been postulated that mind is a universal property of matter, so that even elementary particles would be endowed with it to some degree," the grotesque image was saying in London's voice. "We now know that mind is a universal entity or interaction of the same order as electricity or gravitation, and that there exists a modulus of transformation, analogous to Einstein's bask equation, which equates mind stuff with other entities of the physical world…"

The superimposed image abruptly vanished, leaving the floor to a triumphant Renard. "The programme can't cope, you see. Old Karal should have stuck to his physics."

"He didn't expect sabotage."

"What did he expect? People come here for some free booze and a bit of discreet lusting after Silvia — not to be lectured by a miserable bloody apparition. Come on, old son, you look as though you could use a drink."

"It's been one of those days."

"Yeah." Renard paused, his gold-freckled face looking uncharacteristically solemn. "I've only just heard about your wife and kid."

"I don't want to talk about that."

"No. It was just that I… Ah, hell" Renard led the way into the room from which he had emerged and went to a long sideboard which was serving as a bar. Dallen asked him for a weak Scotch and water, and while it was being prepared took the opportunity to look around. There were about two dozen people in the room, most of them men, who were standing in groups of three or four. He recognised several faces from various City Hall departments, but was unable to see Silvia.

"She's around somewhere," Renard said knowingly, flashing his narrow bow of teeth.

Dallen concealed his annoyance over having his screens penetrated so easily. "Why are these people here? They can't all be theoretical physicists."

"Metaphysicists would be more like it. Karal claims there are special particles called mindons which are harder to detect than neutrinos because they exist in what he calls mental space. It's all a bit abstruse for a mere botanist, but apparently our brains have mindon look-alikes in mental space — where most of the physical laws are different — which enable us to survive death. Karal doesn't talk about dying — he refers to it as becoming discarnate.

"It's all supposed to be very comforting and uplifting," Renard added as he handed Dallen a clinking glass. "Personally, I prefer this stuff or an occasional dab of jinks."

"Felicitin?" Dallen was only mildly curious. "Can you get it right here in Madison?"

Renard shrugged. "A dealer comes through from the west coast once a month, so somebody in town must be really hooked on the stuff."

"Who's got that kind of money?"

"Dealers don't talk. Felicitin isn't illegal, as you know, but heavy users generally get up to some highly illegal activities sooner or later. You can sometimes spot them, though, if you know what to look for."

Dallen sipped his drink and was a little surprised to find it had been mixed exactly to his specification. Renard was on his best behaviour. How, he wondered, would you pinpoint a person who was really dosing up on felicitin? Look out for someone who was always cool and calm, exuding that air of serene confidence…? A memory picture flickered briefly behind his eyes — tall young man with Nordic good looks, expensively tailored, relaxed, smiling. Dallen concentrated until he had identified the image as that of Gerald Mathieu, the deputy mayor, then frowned and peered into his glass as a coldness developed in his stomach.

"I hope this isn't super cooled ice," he said. "I've heard this stuff can be bad for you."

Renard smiled. "It's always the ice — never the booze."

Dallen nodded, becoming aware of a man and woman purposefully moving closer to him. He turned and saw the rotund figure of Peter Ezzati, the city's salvage officer, accompanied by his equally plump wife, Libby. While they were shaking hands he noticed that the woman's eyes were following his with a kind of melting intensity and he guessed with a sinking feeling that she was a tragedy buff, a professional sympathiser.

"Is this your first time here, Carry?" Ezzati said. "Are you enjoying it?"

"I'm a bit vague about what fm supposed to enjoy."

"The talk, mainly. Karal can be quite convincing about his mindons, if you follow his argument right through, but it's the conversation I like. You get guys here whose minds aren't limited to sport and sex, who can talk about anything. For instance, what do you think about these green flashes they're getting on Orbitsville?"

Dallen was baffled. "I’m afraid I…"

"You're the first policeman we've had at the meetings" Libby Ezzati put in, her gaze still a channel for moist compassion.

"I'm not a policeman," Dallen explained. "I work for the Deregistration Bureau."

Libby shot an accusing glance at her husband, as though charging him with having told her lies. "But you can arrest people, can't you?"

"Only lor things like being on land where there's an exclusion order in force."

"That's another thing" Ezzati said. "Is it true they're pulling the deregister line in to a forty kilometre radius of Madison?"

Dallen nodded. "The population here is shrinking. There's enough good farming land within the radius."

"I don't like it — it's all part of a process." Ezzati considered what he had just said and appeared to raid it significant. "All part of a process."

"Everything is part of a process" Dallen said.

"I'm not talking philosophy — I'm talking people."

"You're talking piffle, darling," Libby told her husband, and having allied herself with Dallen decided it was rapport time. "You know. Carry, Kipling had a vital message for all of us when he pointed out that God never wasted a leaf or a tree…"

"Rick is the botanist around here." Dallen walked away quickly and went back into the hall where the rematerialised holomorph of Karal London was addressing two new arrivals… discarnate mind composed of mindons interacts with matter only very weakly, but that doesn't call its existence into question. After all, we have yet to detect the graviton or the gravitino… Coming out of the beam of sound, Dallen went into the room opposite and found it populated like the one he had left, small groups standing and talking earnestly in an ambience of low-placed lights and amber drinks.

He worked his way through them and went into the extension where yesterday morning, which seemed an aeon ago, he had first seen Silvia's incredible glass mosaic screen. The studio was empty. Diffuser lamp’s were shining behind the trefoil panels, providing a patchy illumination which obscured the design of the three universes, shading them off into a mysterious darkness suggestive of the vast tracts of the cosmos beyond the limits of human vision. Dallen found the entire construct beautiful beyond words, and again he was awed by the sheer amount of labour that it represented. His appreciation of art was untutored, a chief criterion being that a piece should appear difficult, to have taxed the artist's powers, to have been hard work — and by that standard alone the screen, with its hundreds of thousands of varicoloured glass chips, had to be the most impressive and soul-glutting creation he had ever seen.

"It's not for sale," Silvia London said from close behind him.

"Pity — I was going to commission a dozen." He turned and found himself warmed by her presence. Everything about her seemed right to him — the humorous intelligence in the brown eyes, the determination of the chin, the strength combined with the utter femininity of the fuli bosomed figure sheathed in a pleated white dress.

"Perhaps I could make you a little suncatcher," she said.

"It wouldn't be the same. Being little, I mean. It's the size of this thing — all those separate pieces of glass — which helps make it what it is."

Silvia's lips twitched. "You're a dialectical materialist."

"Step outside and say that," Dallen challenged. Silvia laughed and this time his arms, unbidden, actually opened a little to receive her. He froze in a turmoil of guilt and confusion. Silvia seemed to catch her breath and her eyes became troubled. "I was talking to Rick a little while ago," she said. "He told me what happened to your family. I'd heard about it before, but I didn't realise… I didn't connect you…"

"It's all right. It's my problem."

She nodded thoughtfully. "I’ve heard of people making a full recovery."

"It depends on how close they were to the gun. If only the memory cells are affected it's possible for a person to be re-educated, recreated almost, in a year or so, because all the connecting networks that person built up are still intact. But if the cell connections have been damaged…"

Dallen hesitated, shocked at finding himself discussing the subject with an outsider, and even more so by what he was about to admit to himself. "Cona and Mikel were hit at very close range. I think they're gone,"

"I'm so sorry." Silvia stared at him for a moment, shoulders slightly raised, as if coming to a decision. "Carry, I'm not trying to push Karal's ideas at you, but there's something I'd like you to see. Will you come and look?"

"I don't mind," He said, setting his glass down.

"Through here." Silvia led the way to the back of the studio, into a workshop which was equipped with a range of machine tools, and from there into a short corridor. At the end of it was a heavy door which she opened by thumb printing the lock. Revealed was a large square chamber which was dominated by a rectangular transparent box resembling a display case in a museum. Suspended inside the box on near-invisible wires were six spheres of polished alloy roughly a metre in diameter. Dallen went closer to the case and saw that each sphere was surrounded by a cluster of delicate needle-like probes, all of them impinging in a direction normal to the surface. Wires from the bases of the probes converged on instrument housings on the floor beneath the case.

"Impressive," Dallen said. "I've seen a Newton's cradle before, but not his double bed."

"My husband and five other volunteers are surrendering their lives for this experiment," Silvia replied, making it clear that flippancy was not welcome. "The probes are not actually touching the spheres, though it looks that way. The tip of each one is ten microns from the surface. They're kept at that distance by sensors and micro controls even if the spheres are disturbed by local vibrations or earth tremors or temperature changes. The system compensates for all natural forces."

"What's the point of it?"

Silvia's face was solemn. "It won't compensate for supranatural forces. Karal is planning to move the first sphere in the line when he becomes discarnate. If he is successful, as he fully expects to be, the sphere will make contact with one or more probes, and there'll be a signal."

"I see." Dallen sought a way to conceal his instinctive scepticism. "Proof of life after death."

"Proof that what we call death is merely a transition."

Dallen realised that he had to be honest. "Haven't other people tried to send signals back from the quote other side unquote?"

"They weren't physicists with a full understanding of quantum non-location and the forces involved."

"No, but… I never heard of mindons before tonight, but 1 gather that if they exist at all their interaction with matter is very, very weak. How could a… discarnate entity composed of mindons hope to move a thing like that?" Dallen flicked his thumb to indicate the nearest of the massive spheres.

"Karal teaches that mindons are somehow related to gravitons."

"But we don't even know that gravitons exist."

"But, but, but!" Silvia's smile was sadly messianic. "Has it ever struck you how onomatopoeic that word is?"

"I'm in a constant state of wonderment over it," Dallen said and immediately cursed the verbal reflex which often tricked him into hurting those he had no wish to hurt, but Silvia was unaffected.

She went straight into a discourse on nuclear physics, the gist of which was that not all fundamental interactions are common to all particles — a neutrino having just one — which opened the theoretical door for mindons having only the mental interaction plus another, as yet undemonstrated, with gravitons. The picture Dallen received was one of a dead Karal London somehow riding herd on a swarm of gravitons and guiding them across interstellar space to collide with one of the six spheres. He also gleaned that there were five other elderly disciples — one on Orbitsville, one on the planet Terranova, three in various parts of Earth — who had similar visionary plans, each with a separate sphere as his target. It was a scenario which Dallen found quite preposterous" I'm sorry," he said. "It's too much for me. I can't believe it."

"Belief isn't necessary at this stage — all you have to do is accept that it's all conceivable in terms of present day physics." Silvia spoke as one repeating a creed. "A personality is a structure of mental entities, existing in mental space, and it survives destruction of the brain even though it required the brain's complex physical organisation in order to develop."

"My brain is getting a bit overheated," Dallen said, dabbing imaginary sweat from his brow.

"All right — here endeth the first lesson — but I warn you you'll get more of the same when you come back." Silvia walked to the door of the chamber and paused for him to join her. "If you come back,"

"I don't scare easily." You liar, he told himself, you're going weak at the knees. He was acutely aware as he walked towards her that a clearly delineated "business" phase of the encounter had ended, that they were alone, and that she was waiting in the actual doorway, which meant there would be a moment in which it would be almost impossible to avoid contact. He went to her and an instinct prompted him to extend his hands, palm outwards and fingers slightly apart, in a gesture which had meaning only for the two of them and only for that unique instant. Silvia put her hands against his, interlocking their fingers, and the warmth of her entered him and changed him. He tried to move closer, but she checked him with a slight increase of pressure.

"Don't kiss me. Carry," she said. "I couldn't handle it."

"Does that mean it's too soon?"

She eyed him soberly. "I think that's what it means."

"In that case," he said, deciding that a change of mood would be good strategy, "shall we repair to wherever people repair at a time like this?"

Silvia nodded, looking grateful, and they walked back through the studio to the main part of the house, where she parted from him to attend other guests. Dallen's feeling of elation lasted perhaps five seconds after she was lost to view, and then — as he had known it would — there came a reaction. The predominant emotion was guilt, his constant companion in recent weeks, but now a caustic new element had been added, one he had trouble identifying. Was it in the acknowledgement of what Silvia London could do to him, his belated discovery of the difference between affection, which he had always assumed to be love, and another kind of emotion altogether — wayward and unsettling — which might really be love?"

I ought to get out of here, he thought. I ought to get out of here right now and never come back. He turned to walk to the door and almost collided with Peter Ezzati and his wife.

"You've been getting your indoctrination," Ezzati said gleefully. "I can tell by your face."

"Peter!" Libby was overtly tactful. "Carry doesn't want intrusions."

Dallen looked down at her, recalled his earlier lack of manners and forced a smile. "I'm afraid I get a bit irritable when it's past my bedtime — I must need a cocoa infusion or something."

"I'll get you a proper drink," Ezzati said, moving away. "Scotch and water, wasn't it?"

Dallen considered calling him back and refusing the drink and leaving immediately, then came the realisation that it was still only around ten in the evening and his chances of sleeping if he went back to his empty house were zero. It could be a good idea to spend some time with neutral and undemanding people, to wind down a little and prove to himself that he was a balanced and mature person with complete control over his emotions.

"I was reading a bit about probability math the other day," he said, seeking total irrelevancy. "It said that if two people lose each other in a big department store there's no guarantee they'll ever meet up again unless one of them stands still."

An expression of polite bafflement appeared on Libby's round face. "How interesting."

"Yes, but if you think about it that has to be one of the most useless pieces of information ever. I mean…"

"I've never been to a big department store," Libby said. "It must have been wonderful to visit somewhere like Macy's before they let New York go down. Something else that's been lost…"

Dallen was unable to produce an original comment. "You win some, you lose some."

"If that were the case things might be reasonable, but the fact is that we lose, lose, lose. Optima Thule has taken everything and given nothing back."

In spite of his emotional disquiet, Dallen was able to interest himself in the point of view. "Aren't we taking from Optima Thule? Isn't it doing all the giving?"

"I'm not talking about patches of grass. What has the human race done in the last two centuries? Nothing! There has been practically no progress in any of the arts. Science is static. Technology is actually slipping back a notch or two every year. Orbitsville is a swamp.

"This seems to be my lecture night," Dallen said.

"I'm sorry." Libby gave him a rueful smile and he realised he had been too quick to categorise her earlier. "I'm a romantic, you see, and for me Orbitsville is an ending, not a beginning. I can't help wondering what Garamond and all the others would have found if Orbitsville hadn't been there and they had kept on going."

"Probably nothing."

"Probably, but now we'll never know. There's a galaxy out there, and we turned our backs on it. Sometimes, when I'm reeling paranoiac, I suspect that Orbitsville was built for that very reason."

"Orbitsville wasn't built by anybody," Dallen said. "Only people who have never been there can think of it as an artefact. When you've actually seen the oceans and the mountains and the…" He broke off as Ezzati appeared at his side and thrust a full glass into his hand with unnecessary vigour.

"Some of these guys have a bloody nerve," Ezzati muttered, his apple cheeks dark with anger. "I'm doing no more favours, folks — not for anybody."

Libby was immediately sympathetic. "What happened?"

"That young weasel Solly Hume, that's what happened! He's getting tanked up in the next room, and when I hinted to him — purely for his own good, mind you — that he was overdoing it a bit he had the gall to say I owed him fifty monits."

"Peter, you haven't been borrowing," Libby said, looking concerned.

"Try to talk sense, will you?" Ezzati gulped down some liquor and concentrated his attention on Dallen. "Last week I practically gave that kid Hume an obsolete computer for his stupid bloody society, and tonight he had the nerve to ask for his money back. Said its guts had been denatured or something like that. What does he expect from a gizmo that's been lying in a basement since the year dot?"

"Perhaps he thought it would have glass tubes," Dallen said, wishing his own problems could be so trivial. "You know — hollow state technology."

"No, it's only an old Department of Supply monitor he found on Sublevel Three. There used to be a computer centre down there. Apparently this thing was supposed to keep tabs on municipal supplies. It beats me why anybody would want to be bothered with it."

Dallen felt the coolness return to his system, as if a door was swinging ajar.

"You've argued yourself into a corner, darling," Libby said scornfully. "If the monitor was so boring and useless in the first place you were lucky to get fifty monits for it."

"Yes, but…" Ezzati glared at her, unwilling to concede the point. "I'll take it back from Hume and advertise it properly. Electronic archaeology is a big thing these days, you know. As a matter of fact…" He frowned into his glass as he swirled its contents. "…I might already have another customer. I seem to remember somebody else asking me about that machine."

"Now you're being childish," Libby said, her voice vibrant with scorn. "Admit it."

Dallen stared frozenly at Ezzati, willing him to produce a name.

"Perhaps you're right," Ezzati said with a shrug. "Why should I get worked up when it isn't my money that's involved? You don't get any credit for bringing the job home with you. Not around here, anyway. There was a time when I was dumb enough to believe that all it took to get a man to the top in Madison was hard work and dedication and loyalty, then I got wise to myself and… Gerald Mathieu!"

"You got wise to yourself and Gerald Mathieu?" Libby stared at him, feigning concern, and raised her gaze to Dallen's face. "Have you any idea what my idiot husband is talking about?"

"I'm afraid he has lost me," Dallen said, moving away in search of a place where he could be alone with his thoughts, where he could begin to draw up his plans.