Collision with Chronos Read online

  Heshke listened fascinated to the way the foreign syllables flowed off Ascar’s tongue – and was just as fascinated at his ability to understand them.

  “The brain’s capacity to absorb information at computer speed is not, I believe, known to your people,” the old man admitted. “We’re able to achieve it with the assistance of an ancient technique called acupuncture.” He indicated the needles that lay on the table. “By inserting these fine needles at particular points under the skin we’re able to deaden or stimulate the nerves selectively. By this means we open the requisite pathways to the brain so that it’s able to assimilate data at a much faster rate than normally – and there are also many other uses for acupuncture.”

  “But that seems such a primitive way of going about things.” Heshke commented, staring at the needles. “Your apparatus is hardly sophisticated.”

  “The technique depends more on knowledge and skill than upon technology,” the old man replied. “It is a very old practice, but it’s been vastly refined and extended by us here in Retort City. It’s said to have been invented originally by the ancient philosopher Mao Tse-Tung, who also invented the generation of electricity.” The Chink smiled tolerantly. “But these legends are not, of course, reliable; they also tell of him driving out the evil demons Liu Shao-Chi and Lin Piao.”

  Ascar grunted and cast a sarcastic glance at Heshke. “You’re right – history tells nothing but fairy stories.”

  Heshke ignored the gibe. “I take it your people have a reason for bringing us here,” he said to the old man. “When will we learn what it is?”

  The other sighed. “Ah yes, very distressing. But that’s not my province. You’ll have to meet representatives of the Cabinet – perhaps even the Prime Minister himself. Have patience.”

  “Patience be damned,” growled Ascar, finding Retort City curses not strong enough for his liking. “When am I going to meet your physicists?”

  In view of the seriousness of the offence, Prime Minister Hwen Wu himself presided over the court. With him sat two lesser ministers, and at a table to one side were the court’s advisers, experts in logic and law.

  Hueh Shao was brought in first and offered green tea, which he refused. He pleaded guilty to attempting to break his confinement, and added that he had intended to go into hiding in the Production Retort, where he would be helped by his son. His voice betrayed an inner weariness, as he spoke quietly and calmly.

  Hwen Wu found the proceedings disturbing to his inner peace. There seemed to be only one possible judgement that could be made in the case of the man who once had been his close friend.

  “One further statement I wish to put before the court,” Hueh Shao continued, “and that is that my son Su-Mueng should be absolved from guilt. It was with my encouragement that he agreed to guide me to the Lower Retort, and in so doing he was prompted by filial duty – he looks upon me as other men look upon their grandfathers. Furthermore, his entire aberration springs from my own actions. But for my former crime he would have lived happily and blamelessly as a production worker, with no knowledge of any other life. In my opinion, any punishment inflicted upon him would be unjust.”

  A logician raised his hand, was recognised and rose to speak.

  “The accused commits an inconsistent statement with his tale of how he induced his son to guide him down to the Production Retort,” he said in a low, melodious voice. “The facts are these: Hueh Shao and Hueh Su-Mueng were apprehended while leaving the area where Hueh Shao was incarcerated. Hueh Shao admits to this. But as regards his statement of his intentions. Hueh Shao must certainly have known that he and his son would be apprehended before leaving the Leisure Retort – although Hueh Su-Mueng, possibly, did not. Hueh Shao couldn’t have intended to do something which he knew to be impossible, and therefore his intentions were otherwise.”

  “And what were his intentions?” Hwen Wu queried.

  “Taking everything into account, it would appear that Hueh Su-Mueng appeared unexpectedly in his father’s apartment and released him from his time-displacement. Hueh Shao was then in a quandary; he knew his son’s scheme to be impossible to execute, and that his son was laying himself open to severe punishment. From that moment on his foremost intention became to spare his son from this punishment – remember the unusual bond that exists between these two, unnatural though it might seem to us. He pretended to fall in with Hueh Su-Mueng’s plan, in order that he might thereby represent himself as its part-instigator and remove some of the guilt from his son’s shoulders.”

  Hwen Wu turned to the accused.

  “Do you admit to this version of events?”

  Hueh Shao nodded; the logician had mercilessly exposed his motives.

  “Hueh Shao’s following statement, however, stands up to examination,” the logician continued. “Hueh Su-Mueng’s aberrated state of mind is to be laid entirely at his door. But whether we should conclude from this that no punishment devolves upon the younger man is an entirely different matter. One cannot dismiss the principle of personal responsibility so lightly.”

  The Prime Minister listened carefully to these pronouncements, considering them from all angles. Finally he turned to the accused again.

  “I find you guilty of cooperating in your own escape, but not of instigating your escape,” he said. “Your actual infringement, in this particular instance, of a city ethic is not an enormous one, but that’s not the issue before us here. The issue is that your original crime, one of truly serious proportions, has surfaced again. You’ve created an individual of apparently irremediable criminal tendencies – already, in his preliminary statements, your son has expressed himself as being totally opposed to the social structure.”

  He fingered the tendrils of his beard, contemplating. “Your crime is unforgivable because it strikes at the roots of society,” he proclaimed. “If allowed to gather force it could destroy the civilisation we enjoy here in Retort City. Nevertheless, your sentence was a lenient one, initially, because it was the first case of its type to occur for many centuries. We must now withdraw that leniency. I regret that I must sentence you to loss of life.” He looked calmly at Hueh Shao. “Do you agree with the sentence?”

  Hueh Shao nodded. He could almost see what was in the Prime Minister’s mind. The sentence was not merely on himself; it gave Hwen Wu a way of punishing Su-Mueng without directly punishing him. The principles of fairness and justice were both satisfied, even though they were in conflict.

  “Then let the sentence be carried out immediately.”

  Hueh Shao turned and walked out through a door to his right.

  A minute or two later Su-Mueng took his place before the court. He listened to the formal charge, pleaded guilty, but in his following statement firmly absolved his father of all guilt in the matter.

  Meantime, in a nearby room, Hueh Shao relaxed into a chair-couch and was handed a bowl of refreshing green tea.

  The bowl was of the most delicate porcelain and its embossed design, a mere tracery when touched by the fingers, was of a style he particularly admired. He sipped the tea, enjoying its fragrance. A feeling of numbness, not particularly unpleasant, came over his limbs as the poison in the tea took effect. He laid the bowl down on a nearby low table, the tea still unfinished, and quietly died.

  In a cold voice Hwen Wu accepted Su-Mueng’s plea and explained the verdict and sentence that had just been passed on his father. “The sentence,” he added, “will by now have been carried out.”

  Su-Mueng’s reaction to this news inflicted the whole court with a faint feeling of revulsion, for it demonstrated the emotional bond that existed between two men who should never even have known one another. Su-Mueng went deathly white and sagged as though punched in the stomach. He recovered himself with difficulty, drawing himself erect, his face still grey, and looked Hwen Wu straight in the eye.

  “Damn you,” he said in a strangled voice. “Damn you all. Your whole system is evil – and one day it will be destroyed. …”

/>   The President of the Court nodded. “We’re acquainted with your opinions, and of their causes. We’re aware also that your attitudes are intractable, which raises the problem of what we’re to do with you. Punishment is inappropriate, because insofar as punishment is deserved it’s already been inflicted in the form of your knowledge that your actions have led to your father’s death. We cannot permit you to live in the Leisure Retort, since that would transgress the law; yet if we return you to the Production Retort, which is your proper place, you’ll no doubt continue to cause trouble. So the question remains, what are we to do with you …?”

  9

  Leard Ascar had been obsessed, from an early age, with only one question.

  The question of time.

  He could remember the day – it had been his tenth birthday – when the full force of the enigma had first struck him. The dilemma, the paradox, the impossible, irreconcilable paradox. The transient present, moving from a past that vanishes into a future that appears from nowhere. And even more perplexingly, what he later came to know as the Regression Problem: how can time “pass” without having “time” to pass in?

  These enigmas drove out all his other interests. He read everything he could understand on the subject, and then studied physics and mathematics so as to understand what was left. He was precocious, ahead of his class in all the subjects he took. He never made any friends, but could have had a brilliant career in almost any branch of physics, had he not preferred to devote himself to unsuccessful, self-financed researches into the nature of time. Among more conventional minds he gained a reputation as a crank, an oddball, and his experiments had regularly ground to a halt for lack of any further money.

  Then he had come into contact with the scientific establishments of the Titanium Legions and they, to give them their due, had made it possible for him to continue his work. Following the victories over the deviant subspecies there had been a splurge of boastful expansionism in the sciences, a feeling that True Man could achieve anything. Not only Ascar but real cranks, near-psychotics with the most extraordinary and fanciful theories, had been allotted funds to bring their ideas to fruition. And so he had made some small progress, until that incredible day when the real nature of the captured alien vehicle had become evident.

  That day had been a climax in Ascar’s life. A second climax came on the day he was introduced to Shiu Kung-Chien, the foremost expert on time in a city that had mastered nearly all its secrets.

  That he had been trained to regard individuals of Shiu Kung-Chien’s race as subhuman did not bother him. He would gladly have sat at the feet of a chimpanzee if it could have taught him what he wanted to know.

  He sat across from the master physicist, beside whom, on a lacquered table, was a pot of the steaming green tea the man never seemed to stop drinking. Around them was Shiu Kung-Chien’s observatory which, so he understood, explored both space and time: on one side a curving, transparent wall giving a view of empty, sable space, on the other a neat array of apparatus whose functions Ascar could not divine.

  Shiu Kung-Chien himself Ascar would not have picked out among his compatriots – but then these Chinks all looked alike to Ascar. His dress and appearance were modest: a simple, unadorned silk gown tied at the waist with a sash, the long, silky beard worn by many of his generation. But his fingernails, Ascar noted, were unusually long, and painted. It seemed that Shiu did almost no physical work himself; all the equipment he used, though designed by him, was constructed elsewhere, and thereafter was set up and attended by the robot mechanisms that now busied and hummed at the other end of the observatory.

  “Yes, that’s quite interesting,” Shiu Kung-Chien said. He had been listening politely while Ascar tried to give him a rundown on his own ideas and what had led up to them. They’d been forced to resort to verbal descriptions – Ascar’s own equations, as it turned out, were adjudged near-useless by Shiu, and those he offered instead were incomprehensible to Ascar. Seemingly the type of mathematics he used had no equivalent in Ascar’s experience, and even the acupuncture assisted language course was of no help.

  Ascar folded his arms and sighed fretfully, rocking back and forth slightly on his chair. “Up until recently my mind was clear on the subject. I thought I’d got to the bottom of the age-old mystery. But since I discovered another ‘now’ – another system of time moving in the opposite direction – I’ve been in confusion and don’t know what to think. The picture I’d built up is really only credible if the Absolute Present is unique.” He shot Shiu a hard glance. “You tell me: is the universe coming to an end?”

  Shiu’s seamed face showed amusement and he chuckled as if at some joke. “No, not at all. Not the universe. Just organic life on Earth. To be more precise, time is shortly due to stop on Earth.”

  He waved a hand and a cybernetic servitor rolled forward with a fresh pot of tea. “You know, you haven’t quite disposed of the Regression Problem, although you appear to think you have.”

  Ascar frowned. “Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. The Regression Problem points out the apparent impossibility of passing time. It’s defined thus: take three consecutive events, A, B and C. One of these events is occurring ‘now’ and the other two are in the past or the future. Let’s say that B is ‘now’, so that A is in the past and C is in the future. But there must have been a time when A was ‘now’ and B and C were in the future, and likewise there will be a time when C is ‘now’ and the other two are in the past. So we can draw up a table of three configurations of these three events, giving nine distinct terms in all. But we can’t stop there: if we did there’d be three simultaneous ‘nows’, and there can only ever be one ‘now’. So we must select one of these configurations and assign our own ‘now’ to it – this gives us a second-order ‘now’ related not to a single event but to a dynamic configuration of all three events: the one containing the real location of ‘now’. But we can’t stop there, either. Each one of the three configurations can in turn claim a second-order ‘now’, by virtue of the fact that the ‘now’ is moving. So we have to draw up a new table where the first table is repeated three times, the A-B-C groups number nine, and the single events themselves are permutated to twenty-seven, all this being encompassed by ‘third-order time’. The process can be repeated to the fourth-order, fifth-order, and ad infinitum time.”

  Shiu waved his hands at Ascar, suddenly impatient with the exposition. “I’m fully conversant with all the arguments,” he said. “But what made you think you’d resolved the paradox?”

  “Well,” said Ascar slowly, “when we actually travelled into the past and into the future and discovered there was no ‘now’ there, I simply assumed that the whole argument was fallacious. The facts showed that there was no regress.”

  “But did you not bother to ask yourself why the regress did not occur?” said Shiu acidly. “No; you merely rushed in like a schoolboy and forgot about the matter.”

  Ascar was silent for long moments.

  “All right,” he said, “where did I go wrong?”

  “Your basic mistake was in presuming time to be a general feature of the universe,” Shiu told him, bringing out his words carefully and emphatically. “You imagined the Absolute Present as a three-dimensional intersection of the whole of existence, traversing it everywhere simultaneously, much like a pickup head traversing a magnetic tape and bringing the images it contains to life. Agreed?”

  “Yes,” said Ascar, “that’s a pretty good description.”

  “But don’t you see that if you adopt that picture then the Regression Problem remains?”

  “No,” Ascar answered slowly, “because the time intersection passes each instant only once –”

  He stopped suddenly.

  “Yes, you’re right,” he resumed heavily. “I can see it now. There’d have to be an infinite number of identical universes, one for each instant in our own universe, varying only in that the Absolute Present – the time intersection – was in a
different part of its sweep. Every instant, past, present or future, would at this moment have to be filled by an Absolute Present somewhere among those universes.”

  “And beyond that,” Shiu continued for him, “would have to exist a further set of universes numbering infinity raised to the power infinity, to take care of the next stage in the regression. Already we’re into transfinity.”

  Ascar nodded hurriedly. “All right, I accept that. I also accept that the facts have shown my model to be wrong. So what’s the truth?”

  “The truth,” said Shiu, “is that the universe at large has no time. It’s not ‘now’ everywhere simultaneously. The universe is basically, fundamentally static, dead, indifferent. It has no past, no future, no ‘now’.”

  He refilled his teacup, allowing Ascar to interrupt with: “But there is time.”

  Shiu nodded patiently. “Localised, accidental phenomena without overall significance. Processes of time can begin over small areas, usually associated with a planet, though not always. They consist of flows or waves of energy travelling from one point to another: small, travelling waves of ‘now’. Philosophically it’s explained thus: the universe issued from the Supreme as an interplay between the forces of yin and yang to form a perfect, dealocked harmonic balance. Occasionally these forces get a little out of balance with one another here and there, and this causes time energy to flow until the balance is redressed. As such a wave proceeds it organises matter into living forms in the process we know as evolution.”

  “So time is a biological phenomenon, not a universal one?”

  “Rather, biology is a consequence of time. Biological systems aren’t the only phenomena it can produce. There are – many variations. But life and consciousness can arise in the moving present moment and be carried along with it.

  “You can see now why time travel is comparatively easy,” Shiu went on. “We merely have to detach a fragment of the travelling ‘now-wave’ and move it about the real static world of non-time. It comes away quite easily, because it’s local energy, not part of a cosmic schema.”