Ian Watson - The Embedding

That man Zwingler’s paper had been about ‘Disorientation in longflight astronauts’, ‘Disorder of conceptual sets’. What if astronauts did lose their wits in that place of exile between Earth and the Stars? In that mind limbo up there. Who knew what experiments Skylab really carried as a payload? How it fitted the nowadays mood that avenging angels should always be floating overhead. Prometheans who had mastered the secrets of nuclear fire, only to become mankind’s own liver-eating eagles, soaring in perpetual orbit.

Rosson wondered too, what link, if any, there was between this hastily-convened conference on verbal behaviour, and the new Russian moon visible only over Reykjavik, Siberia and the Solomon Islands. A grandiose and meaningless gesture, to inflate such a vast balloon and hang it like a lantern in the sky—where nobody would be seeing it. So unlike the Russians. They always aimed for the maximum propaganda appeal.

Whatever the truth was (and presumably Sole knew it) damn him for a bastard ducking out of the Unit right now. At the very time when his precious Vidya was about to go crazy—and his embedded world was coming apart at the seams…

He passed the fir tree, still standing there at the foot of the Great Staircase. Though Christmas was past, it still lacked a few days till Twelfth Night—and the full ritual was being observed. The tree looked more like a skeleton than ever. An X-ray of a tree skirted about by thick green dandruff.

They should take it away sooner. It had become depressing.

Should he trace a message in the scurf for the nursing staff to read? ‘Bury me, I’m dead’. No point. They had military minds, and stuck to regulations. Regulation 217 subsection (a)—‘Christmas trees shall remain in situ till the Twelfth Day of Christmas’. Something like that.

He passed through the security airlock into the rear wing, knocked on Sam Bax’s door and walked in.

“What is it, Lionel?”

Sam Bax didn’t seem overjoyed to see him. He hadn’t, lately.

“Sam, I must know when Chris is coming back. The situation’s getting more touchy every day. There could be some real damage done before long.”

“Why can’t you hold the fort yourself, Lionel? I’ll ask Richard to take turns with you if you want. But you were Chris’s choice.”

“You haven’t told me when Chris is coming back. Or what he’s doing.”

“Lionel, I frankly don’t know when he’ll be back. Tom Zwingler telephoned from America yesterday. It seems Chris has some significant contribution to make.”

“What to?”

Sam Bax spread his hands on the desk top. The gesture was one of showing all his cards, but the cards were all face down.

“Ah—there you have me. But I promise you, so far as this Unit is concerned, Chris’s visit to the States can only bring profitable feedback.”

“Great, Sam! Just great. And what the hell’s the virtue in finance if there’s nothing left worth financing!”

“It can’t be as sticky as that. Surely you’re exaggerating. Everything went perfectly smoothly up till now. I wouldn’t have let Chris go otherwise.”

“Have you monitored the embedding world lately?”

The Director glanced down at his hands, then shiftily at the telephone.

“Well you know, Lionel, there was this seminar in Bruges. Then the business about the army wanting to withdraw their nurses for active service. And all the boring financial nonsense—which I must admit Chris’s trip might alleviate indirectly, if not directly. Frankly, I’d like to hire a few more high-calibre staff. But the way things are—” His vague excuses tapered off.

Rosson tossed his mane fretfully.

“’More high-calibre’? And how do you intend that diplomatic phrase to be punctuated? Ah, never mind! Sam—I asked you, have you monitored Chris’s world lately?”

Sam shook his head—preoccupied with other thoughts. With Chris? With America? But why? Presumably that Zwingler man had told Sam the real reason. Whatever mental disaster it was that had happened up there in Skylab. This talk about finance was all eyewash. A put-off.

“Give me half an hour, Sam. I’ll play the relevant bits of tape for you. You’ll see why I want Chris back here—whatever’s going on over there. And I don’t need Richard to back me up, as you know very well. Hell, Sam—it’s Chris that the kids know best, and need. Same as Aye and Bee and the others know me and need me. I’m talking about contact. Touch. Play! I’m not bragging, Sam. Nor am I bloody well defending my own status. I’m stating psychological facts that you could probably even get Richard to agree to. These kids have established rapport with Chris just as mine have with me. Dorothy or Richard won’t do as substitutes—if I can’t handle it myself—and you know damn well why!”

“Calm down will you, Lionel? Now listen to me. I’m not calling Chris back from the States whatever goes wrong here. Not if the whole Unit burns down. And I mean that. You’ll have to handle it by yourself. Naturally I’m willing to see the tapes.”

“You seem to have forgotten about the Project, Sam! Six months ago and you’d have rushed to the screen to see those tapes. Now it’s all this finance and organization caper—and what Chris is doing in the States. Why? Sam, what the hell is going on over there? Has there been some mental breakdown up in space? That’s what it looks like to me. What’s so interesting that it makes you unconcerned about a mental disaster on your own doorstep?”

“A mental disaster—among Chris’s kids? You’d go so far as that?” For the first time Sam looked concerned, briefly.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!”

The screen lit and snowed with static, cleared to show Vidya opening up the largest of the talking dolls, taking the smaller doll from inside it, and shutting the larger doll neatly before moving on to the opening of the smaller.

“This is incident number one. The same day as that man Zwingler visited us.”

“No connection, I trust,” grunted Sam.

“Of course there’s no connection!” snapped Rosson. “I’m just telling you when it happened.”

“All right, Lionel. You just seemed to have it in for Tom Zwingler—”

Rosson gestured at the screen.

“It was the story of the Princess and the Pea, Sam. I checked. How the real princess with the fairest skin in all the land—the least blunted nerve endings to you, Sam!—is the only girl that can feel the pea hidden under a pile of feather mattresses.”

“Yes yes,” said Sam impatiently.

They reviewed the first ‘fit’, the one to which Sole had drawn Rosson’s attention before leaving.

“I wondered whether it might have had anything to do with the story itself—that business of mattress upon mattress upon mattress. Then the hard pea—the nub of the matter—at the very bottom of the pile. It’s a sort of mocking comment on the embedded speech, isn’t it Sam?”

Rosson blanked the screen and punched a new set of figures from memory.

The screen snowed once more and cleared.

“This is the second episode, Sam—this happened about forty-eight hours later, after Chris had left.”

Three children surrounded the Oracle in the centre of the maze. But Vidya was resisting the room’s whisperings and hypnotic programming of events.

He was shouting and screaming, raging round the outside of the maze walls, whipping them with a piece of plastic pipe—and howling at the children inside.

Rosson switched the loudspeaker on and incoherent cries rang out.

“I couldn’t make head or tail of it, Sam. The computer claimed it was a genuinely random string of syllables. But I’m beginning to suspect it represents a reversion to babbling, only on a much higher level.”