Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

“No,” Mary said. “I won’t have it so.”

“We can’t really change the past, Mary, and you know it,” Chalmers said. “Both times you were out you trended to the left under a kind of tropism that brought you back in. The worst that can happen is that we will all have a shaking up and a bad dream. But how do we know that this island of ours will not move with us if we all go? We must use trial and error until we have enough data for an operational hypothesis.”

“Muscle-thinking,” Svirsky said. “But let’s try it, Hank. We can pick up our word game afterward.”

“I’m coming back,” Mary warned.

Svirsky’s big hand encircled her left wrist.

Water black as the night sky above swirled around Thomas Gard’s chest. His small son in the crook of his left arm whimpered into his ear. His wife was losing her footing, clinging to his right elbow, pulling him over.

“Climb up on me, Mary,” he said, stooping a little. “Let me carry you both. We’ll be swept away else.”

“You haven’t the strength, Tom. Let me go, save Edward.”

“All of us or none of us, Mary. Only a hundred yards now.”

“Too far. I know it. Edward, goodbye Edward, you be a brave, strong man now.”

“Mary!”

“Goodbye, Tom. I love you.”

The current swept her into darkness. Thomas Gard shouted her name in anguish over the black, swirling water. The child cried in a greater fear.

The four men stumbled into present awareness by the metal cage, still holding hands. Chalmers was trembling.

“I grant you that death-urge now, Ed,” he gasped, “but don’t ask me—”

“Never mind, Hank,” Gard said. “Let’s be convinced now that charging bullheaded into it isn’t going to change a thing. We have to think our minds free of this.”

“God yes,” McPherson said. “I relived that fight I had with Vane when he tried to restrict me to the base the night before liftout. I felt murderous, I tell you. He kept getting up and I beat him almost to death. I thought I’d get a year in jail.”

“He was trying to beat the jinx on Proteus,” Gard said. “That’s why he restricted you and also why he wouldn’t bring charges.”

“The fight bothered me,” McPherson admitted. “I went on to the party, but I couldn’t get drunk. I didn’t have enough steam and ugliness left in me to carry through that near-rape I relived the first time out. Funny how things hang together.”

“Isn’t it, though? I went through a crucial episode in my grandfather’s life, a flood. I was three people and this time I think I accepted death while willing life. But that’s not data, even for a word game.”

“I’ll play now, Joe,” Chalmers said. “Start your word game.”

“Let your muscles hear this part,” Svirsky said. “Sit down and relax.”

They sprawled on the dull green grass.

“We vertebrates define time, space and thingness first in our own bodies,” Svirsky began. “Then we generalize them to all sensory input to make a real world. It was an action-world for a billion years before it became a thought-world, and it is muscles which act. Our wiring diagram provides our muscles with two separate innervation circuits.

“One circuit is for muscle tone and it never relaxes completely until death. It maintains posture, any unchanging position we hold through time. It does it by continuous motor discharge from and kinesthetic sensory feedback to the cerebellum. From the cerebellum association fibers go to the cerebral cortex and almost all of this innervation is on the same side of the body as the muscles concerned.

“Suppose for the moment that tonus underlies our basic feeling of time as duration.

“The phasic innervation provides for action, the causing of relative position changes among things. It starts from the motor area of the cortex and feeds back to an adjacent sensory area. Both areas on both hemispheres have the shapes of grotesque manikins. Discriminatory touch, pain and temperature also feed into the sensory areas. But the fibers nearly all cross over from muscles and skin on the opposite side of the body.

“Suppose now that phasis underlies our root-feeling for space and change. Suppose further that its cortical projection areas are superimposed on the uncrossed sensory-tonic projection from the cerebellum. Suppose finally that combination of sameness-in-difference gives us the stubbornly felt apartness of time from space and, in the tension between them, thingness. Number, magnitude, causality, the world, can follow.

“We know our language structures our thought and the world we experience. But the structure of our nervous system, our coding and uncoding equipment, provides language itself with an invariant pattern upon which linguistic relativity is only secondary elaboration.

“All of this, my brothers, is to persuade your muscles not to listen to what I wish to say next.”

Gard flexed his powerful left arm. “You just go along for the ride, now,” he addressed his biceps.

“Almost you make me touch the how of how itself,” Chalmers mused. “Go on with the word game. My muscles are out of circuit.”

Svirsky smiled. “The Protean vertebrate wiring diagram,” he said, “does not provide for tract crossings in the cord. The brain is imperfectly divided and has no bundled commissures. Like us, they code the world in volleys of neural impulse, but their decoding equipment is different.

“Like us, they exist in the continuum as world-lines. They have wound around our own thin sheaf of worldlines a massive coil of their world-lines. It makes a time cage that coerces our world-lines in a way our muscles cannot grasp.”

“You mean they outvoted us muscleheads?” McPherson asked.

“They have more of their kind of muscle, Ike,” Chalmers agreed. “But Joe, do you mean we have to grasp their reality?”

“We must stop trying to grasp it. I said our vertebrate wiring diagram may dictate our primal symbol of reality. But some few of the fibers in each case I cited do not follow the structural rule. And we have also, below consciousness, a phylogenetically older diagram. These are ghosts within us, my brothers, not bound to the primal symbol. Let us wake them now.

“Let go of lever and pushrod causality for the notion of statistical covariance. Let go of that for the still more primitive notion of ‘organism’ and ‘sympathy of the whole’ out of which both arise. Remember that fairly late in the pre-space era our own ancestors used to bewitch each other and one potent how was to run nine times widdershins around the victim. Think of that timeless, spaceless, pre-vertebral ‘sympathy of the whole’ as the substrate from which parapsychological phenomena still arise to bedevil science centuries after Rhine.” “You mean we’re bewitched, then?” Chalmers asked. “That’s the simplest how that we can dredge out of our symbol system,” Svirsky agreed. “We are under a spell so powerful that our massed rationality cannot prevail against it at any cost. So we must erect your operational hypothesis on an irrational base.

“Here is one. We are caged by a field effect. When we cut across it consciousness drops almost to a cellular level and the coordinating T flees screaming. But fields have structure. We must find a geodesic and it may lead us out.”

“We can only grasp fields instrumentally,” Chalmers objected. “But of course, we can be the instruments. To hell with observer detachment.”