Damon Knight - Orbit 19

“And suppressive to that degree,” the first added.

“Anything else suppressive?” Garrett asked.

Neither could think of anything else. They left.

Garrett ordered the cancelation of Game P-U, by reason of suppression. In thirty minutes no GO in the galaxy would give the location of Game P-U to anyone; to do so would be treason.

Garrett left for Flag then, confident that his job was done. He would have been startled indeed to learn that he had not yet even begun.

Flag Base. Three days had passed since Fleet Admiral Roderick Garrett had been debriefed on his mission and had returned to the normal business of managing a galaxy.

He had not expected the stats to recover the first or second day after he had canceled Game P-U, but neither had he expected them to continue diving at the same rate. When the drop continued on the third day, he went to see the Commander in Chief.

“Hello, Rod. I was expecting you.”

Garrett sat down.

“I’m puzzled, sir.”

“You and me both. However, I studied your debriefing and I’m convinced you were right about Game P-U.”

“Huh? Then how come the stats are still dropping?”

“Well, we’ll have to go and find out, won’t we?”

The Commander in Chief and his Fleet Admiral located themselves outside a rift in Galaxy Two, near where the GO data placed Game P-U. Then they approached another quality of space, which bespoke to all comers that here was another game. By definition, that meant a different operating basis.

Garrett observed his senior floating through the clear interstellar darkness towards Game P-U, his pure golden energy radiating across the starlight. He wondered at the responsibility level of this being who so casually entered uncharted areas and spaces, without thought for dangers or awe for mysteries. He had heard him talk about it once: he had said that he had taken upon himself the responsibility for everything and every being in the universe. Garrett now observed his intractable awareness and effortless strength, and understood whence they were derived.

Inside Game P-U, they shot their perception toward what they thought must be its opposite boundary. A few galaxies, then—

“Rod! Observe the space itself!” commanded the senior suddenly.

Garrett focused on intergalactic space and tuned up his perception. Smaller and smaller became the area of his attention, down to the evenly-spread atoms. Something weird about this matter, he thought; extraordinarily dense and strong. Down between the atoms. It couldn’t be!

“Space is linear here, sir,” he said to his senior.

“And it should be highly curved, since we’re near the boundary of the universe. Check out the tone of the space, I’ll check the matter.”

Both went to work. They created various energy manifestations-flows, dispersals, ridges, and subtypes—to interact with the matter and space. They plotted thereby the affinity of the medium for beings, measuring its survival value, its tone.

“What’d you come up with, Rod?” the Commander in Chief asked quietly.

The Fleet Admiral, as tough as he was, was shaken. “Off the scale, sir. Definitely below. Ridges, even the weakest, persist for a long time; the space is of a demanding, possibly punishing tone. And matter, sir?”

“Similar. Below scale, lower harmonic of grief by its persistence of dispersals. You noticed the density of particles in intergalactic space? That’s why. I’d call it craving, appetence. This game is inherently suppressive, matter some multiple of four points below space.”

“That’s why cancelation didn’t work, sir,” Garrett said. “Loss is the bottom of our scale, equaling death of a body. Game P-U is below loss; it’s below being a game. We’d have to disconnect—at minimum.”

“At minimum is right. That might not even do it. We sent one trillion beings in here; that’s a contrasurvival act of considerable magnitude. We may have to unmock it—if we can.

“I’ll say one thing for this Game P-U, though, Rod,” the Commander in Chief continued, vibrating in a chuckle. “It’s solved the eternal problem of games.”

“Sir?”

“That a being loses a game when he wins as well as when he loses —because when he wins he no longer has a game.”

“What a solution, sir,” the Fleet Admiral replied. “Getting so far below loss you can’t even know the feeling.”

“True, son, true,” the Commander in Chief said, more soberly. “We still need more data—and there’s a ship over there. You take the top half. Energyless.”

It was a teardrop-shaped vessel. Both entered and observed.

The ship was a naked hull, driven and shielded by the energy and perception of a specialized crew. It was a war vessel returning with booty from a raid: one hundred beautiful female bodies.

Garrett checked the beings operating the female bodies. Unlike the crew, they had no awareness of their true nature—they were being their bodies. But the crew, too, lacked some native abilities; they obviously could not mock up bodies as complex as the ones they were stealing.

Garrett found a common source for their incapabilities: stimulus/response minds!

On a lower deck, the Commander in Chief noticed an implant station. One girl was strapped naked and spread-eagled on a steel platform. She had been drugged and hypnotized into a stupor. A dangerously high amperage played through her body; a movie scene appeared above her of a room with electronic controls. A man opened a door to the room, saw her lying helpless, and madly rushed to pull some levers, after which the current stopped and was replaced by a slowly building, throbbing sexual sensation, and the movie faded to sexual scenes. The cycle repeated, with a different man each time.

They met outside the range of the ship’s detector.

“S/r minds, Rod; did you notice? Incredible! Same function, different structure. It isn’t possible; they couldn’t have done it unknowingly, yet it appears to be so. . . .”

“They aren’t our people, sir. The beings I examined have a time track in this game earlier than we supposedly established it.”

It took a second for the Commander in Chief to assimilate this data. “Then it’s not our game!” he exploded. “Or it’s another universe entirely. You sure it wasn’t an implanted track? They have implants here, you know; that ship’s product is sex slaves.”

“Absolutely, sir. I could tell the difference. Incidentally, the beings in the female bodies were all old implanters themselves. Karmic law operative—”

“Yeah, I noticed.” The Commander in Chief mused, then said: “That makes it more probable this is another universe. Our game creator could have been wandering around down here and been inspired by the space. Do we always shield our games, Rod?”

“We never do, sir. It’s policy.”

“I didn’t think you noticed—during the transition you were intent upon the change in tone. There is a shield. But it’s barely perceptible. And porous.”

“Porous? But why? What function-”

“For finite dimension and possibly, probably, for expansion.”

“Expansion!” Garrett was horrified. “You mean it could take over our universe—wouldn’t a higher-toned game be senior?”

“Other things being equal, yes. Since universes exist, however, only by the agreed creation of the beings within them, this universe— if it truly is one—could rank over ours by the force of agreement of a significantly greater number of beings. Or, as I suspect is the case, its very suppression, its brutal invalidation by appetence and demand, enforces a viewpoint that it is the only universe—to the exclusion of all others, even a being’s personal universe. You noticed that the beings on that ship lacked bright, real personal universes?”