Damon Knight - Orbit 17

“Anyone can be a showboat in his own field of study,” Melchisedech said. “You are the god of sleep, so you have the advantage over me in the discussion.”

“Everyone is the god of something,” Morpheus said. “You did not know that? But I have broader interests than most. ‘Morpheus’ (‘sleep’) and ‘Morphe’ (‘shape’) are really the same word, and shape is known only in sleep. A waking world would be a shapeless and formless monstrosity.”

“I’ll take that chance. Help me to wake up.”

“Absolutely not. There is no longer any such thing as waking up.”

“Where did I go wrong?” Melchisedech asked the empty ears of misty Morpheus. “Why am I alone unamalgamated in this thing?”

“Where did you go wrong, where did you go right? It was in being too stiff to change. You allowed yourself to become an old wineskin,” Morpheus said.

(“Neither do men put new wine into old bottles,” Matthew said. “If they do, the skins burst and the wine runs out. See me, 9:17.”

“No man, having drunk old wine, straightway desires new, for he says, ‘The old is better,’ ” Luke said. “See me, 5:39.”

“You evangelists go settle it among yourself,” Melchisedech told them, “with eight-ounce gloves.” The evangelists went away.)

“Now tell me true, Morph, am I awake or not?” Melchisedech asked the sleep god.

“No, you are not awake and you are not not. You can never wake up, for waking up is one of the options that have now disappeared from the world. And you cannot really sleep. You can only dream a diminishing dream in a state of half-sleep. It all closes up on itself. It goes out of business.”

“Is the whole world only my dream, Morph?” Melchisedech asked.

“Yours or mine, Duff. We seem to be the only two left. We’ll end as two submicroscopic snakes, the only remaining things in the worlds, and then one of us must swallow the other.”

“I’ll not like that. There must be more than that.”

“No. The whole thousand-times-mega cosmos began as one single-celled creature. Then he had the notion that there were two of him, and this notion was the beginning of his dreaming. He dreamed the whole multiplex thing that has seemed to be the worlds. The dream grew for long eons, but now it shrinks back again to its beginning. There is still one single cell left, dreaming a diminishing dream.”

“So let it be,” Melchisedech said, “so long as I am that single cell.”

“Or I,” said Morpheus, “but there is still only one. I’ll wrestle you for the illusion.”

They wrestled. But Morpheus was one of those timeless, ever-young Greek gods, and cosmic wrestling is their game. Moreover, they smear themselves completely with a numenous grease that makes them very hard to get hold of.

There came over Melchisedech the panic of extinction. The old-fashioned fear of damnation isn’t even in the same league with it. The lungs pop like toy balloons, the kidneys melt like wax, the heart bursts like a cherry bomb. Melchisedech collapsed on himself and became smaller by a million orders, and Morpheus followed him down. They were a single-celled creature swallowing itself. Melchisedech screamed as loudly as a single-celled creature can scream in a void, after he’s swallowed himself.

“It’s the end,” he gasped.

“No, it’s the beginning,” Morpheus gurgled in his swallowed state. “We’ve been here before.”

A hint as to a possible alternate outcome had been given in an article in the magazine-journal The Bark one year before. But how is a single-celled creature that has just swallowed itself going to have access to back issues of obscure magazines?

There are a few Great Day verses left over, and the world affair cannot be concluded until they are disposed of. There are also, unaccountably, about the same number of persons left over, and they must also be disposed of.

If each person will come forward and proclaim loudly one of the verses, then both that person and that verse can be forever obliterated. Try it. Lose yourself in it.

There, it worked, didn’t it? Got rid of everything.

A mighty maze! but not without a plan.

He gives her a starched white gown and surgeon’s mask and leads her down tiled corridors past caged rats, through wards of muzzled dogs, cats with electrodes in their brains, convalescing baboons strapped to tables.

Red arrows point the way through the tunnels to the employees’ cafeteria. Each noon she hurries along enormous pipes insulated in asbestos. When the generators kick the light bulbs dim. At intersections the arrows are almost scuffed away. She’s grateful when he begins bringing her lunch in the laboratory. Each noon she eats it off a comer of the stainless-steel table: grilled cheese, slice of pickle, black coffee.

It’s not the maze itself that’s important. The maze is only one component of his experiment. Through a combination of radioactively induced mutation and the chemical alteration of DNA, he intends to expand intelligence. The maze will afford controlled problems of survival, a method of testing, measuring, and finally selecting out subjects that have been successfully altered.

The subjects will be mice. They never discuss correlations with other species. Still, sometimes she feels the air so charged that excitement seems to crackle like a current leaping between electrodes in old horror films.

It’s the year of constant zero. The year of the twenty-eight-day blizzard. He shows her an article in Scientific American that claims a new ice age is beginning. She doesn’t really mind being stranded. After working late it’s easier not to worry about getting home, to simply curl up on the operating table and rest one’s eyes after a day’s close work translating ancient Minoan blueprints. There’s always clean sheets and each morning a fresh uniform waiting. At night she dreams of unmapped subterranean rivers— of bolting black rapids on a sheet of ice.

From the start her task has been maze research. The years have carried her through the fabled Labyrinth, the Catacombs, secret passageways of Borgia’s castle, fin de siècle funhouses, the Paris sewer system, the Pentagon. Now, finding man’s intricacies simple beside Nature’s, she delves into the seashell’s plumbing, mysteries of mole and earthworm, enters the anthole, down pulsing corridors past pupa nurseries, Mammoth Cave, Carlsbad Caverns, there are so many dead ends. How many lives would be needed to travel them all and back?

—Oh, so beautiful! she says. Ablaze with shifting angles like a gem turning under a spotlight. Stainless steel, magnesium, fiberglass incorporating all shapes. Curving back on itself like space. —Yes, he says, now the real work can begin.

And now she wanders back on herself through all those years of preparation, remembering the first walk down the tiled corridors, pacing the red arrows backward till they are erased by footsteps, leaving only a snowblinding dazzle like the landscape one morning when the blizzard fell from her eyes like gauze. Her eyes are always tired now, staring back bloodshot from the shining planes of steel. Sometimes she catches a glimpse of her reflection: a pale contour of cheek, the drained curve of chewed lips, grey roots at the hairline.