Barrington Bayley - The Zen Gun

Then a breeze rippled the grass, and with it there came faint nameless scents.

He looked to see how Hesper had reacted. She seemed more bewildered than frightened, gazing about her with an expression of total bemusement. She had never used the intermat.

Pout had toppled over when deprived of the wall he had been leaning against and now sobbed with fear, until the kosho leaned over him and said something in a low, reassuring voice. He helped him to his feet.

“What planet is this?” Archier asked him.

“This is Earth.”

“Earth?” echoed Hesper. “The planet we were on before? But that’s impossible!”

“So everything you’ve told us about that gun is true.” Archier nodded at the weapon which Ikematsu still held limply in his hand. The kosho nodded, putting it away somewhere in his robe.

Curiously, Archier looked at him. “Why didn’t you help me when I was fighting with Gruwert?” he asked. “Why didn’t you take the gun from the chimera yourself? You could have done that, probably. If it comes to that, why did you have to tell the pig about the gun at all?” He paused. “It’s almost as if you set up what happened back there.”

When Ikematsu didn’t answer, Archier said, “I’ve heard koshos don’t get involved in political causes. Is that true?”

“Anything you hear about koshos is liable to be untrue,” Ikematsu said, with a hint of levity. Seriousness returned to his tone. “I will tell you the fact of it. My order has a rule: the kosho may not intervene directly in historical events. He may only act so as to create possibilities for actions by others. When I explained the nature of the zen gun to the pig, 1 was really speaking to you.”

“And if I had stayed loyal to the Empire? Or if Gruwert had won? You wouldn’t have interfered?”

“No.”

Archier shook his head. “There’s no point to this rule. It leaves everything to chance.”

“The rule does not exist for the benefit of civilisation. It exists to preserve the kosho from corruption. Yet, paradoxically, because of it the order is better able to serve mankind. The zen gun was made because a kosho foresaw that the pigs would eventually seize power. He left it to chance to preserve his weapon until that time.

“This is why the gun’s control is mental as well as manual. A pure animal cannot use it at all. The chimera Pout was able to use it a little, because he is partly human. But he would never be able to unlock its real secrets. For that, a spiritually trained intelligence is needed.”

“This kosho foresaw what the pigs would do? That long ago?” Archier was incredulous. “I can’t believe it.”

“But it was inevitable from the start. When you gave artificial intelligence to animals, you were giving base emotion an unnatural power of action. An animal with intelligence is still not equivalent to a man. It has no possibility of spiritual development, as a man has. This is easily proved. Animals do not experience what we call ‘beauty,’ for instance.”

Archier frowned. It was true: they were beauty-blind, as the phrase had it. Implants didn’t make any difference there.

“These creatures you have created should remain forever under the strict control of human beings,” Ikematsu went on, the grimness of his words belied by the habitual matter-of-factness of his tone. “Base passions exist within man also, but his higher nature is able to contend with them. When animals became your equals in society, with the same power of thought and speech and action, that struggle was exteriorised. A minute or so ago, Admiral Archier, it depended upon you alone as to whether the future belonged to man or to the pig. And who is to say that the pig will not yet triumph? Have you the courage to become a warrior against his Empire? To use the zen gun against him?”

“I?”

Archier felt as if he had been struck a blow. “I am not a kosho .”

“But you are a warrior.” Ikematsu laughed, without humour. “A kosho will not use the gun in war, Admiral Archier. I just explained that. Neither does one need to be a kosho to use it. One needs a degree of mental training, that is all.”

Lowering his head, Archier said, “What I just did is one thing, but 1 don’t think I can bring myself to be traitor enough for what you are suggesting.”

“Against the zen gun, the star fleets will be powerless to enforce obedience. But a man to use it must find the gun by himself. Well, we shall see. If my colleagues can analyse it successfully, the gun can be duplicated. Then the equaliser will remain always present…”

For a moment Ikematsu looked thoughtfully at Hesper. Then he pointed up the hill to the craggy outline. “That is a monastery where koshos receive part of their training. We shall go there now. The boy Trixa will be given mental therapy there.”

He slapped Pout on the back. “This poor tormented creature, too, needs treatment. He should have a better education than life has given him so far. Come.”

Slowly, moving as a group, they climbed through the slowly fading light to the looming, silent building.

The invented physics used in the background to this novel is very loosely based on a conjecture of my own of which I will give a cursory account. I am not a scientist, and to my shame am not competent mathematically, it is unscientific and unquantified, but it has given me many hours of rewarding thought.

The conjecture arises from my conviction that gravitational attraction is impossible. My feelings about it can be illustrated as follows:

1. Our experience of manipulating material objects is that we can move them about by pushing at them, i.e. applying force causes motion in the direction opposite to that from which the force came. Intuitively we feel this to be bound up with the form and character of the space in which we live, so that being able to draw an object towards us by means of magnetism or stickiness seems slightly mystifying.

2. Randomly moving objects spread out with time, and this also is a feature of our spacetime. E.A. Milne gave the following as an example of irreversibility: a swarm of non-colliding particles movingly uniformly in straight lines will at some instant become an expanding system even if initially it was a contracting one. An already expanding system, however, will never become a contracting one.

Gravitation would be more explicable if it were repulsive instead of attractive. In physics the tendency is to regard forces of attraction and repulsion as opposite but otherwise equivalent, but the symmetry breaks down when the milieu in which they act is taken into account: the effect of repulsive forces weakens as they push their sources apart, but attractive forces are able to act more strongly as they bring their sources together. The difference is crucial for world-building. Once again, it results from the “form” of universal space, which permits limitless dispersal but not limitless convergence.

Its attractive character is only one of gravitation’s mysterious properties, of course. Another is the equality between gravitational and inertial masses, which is the physicist’s way of saying that all bodies fall with the same acceleration regardless of their masses. This equality makes it impossible to test Newton’s third law of action and reaction with respect to gravitating bodies. Newton’s expression for gravitational interaction between two bodies makes it a single force dependent on the products of the masses, and in this form it satisfies both gravitational and inertial equality and the third law, but this is a mathematical device. In reality it is to be supposed that each body exerts its own influence on the other, and a proper test of the third law would require the effects of each force taken separately to be measured.