Bob Shaw - The Ceres Solution

“It’s a child’s trainer,” Lorrest explained, taking the object and casually remoulding the bright strip to a new shape. “They use it to set up basic mnemo-curves.”

“How about me?” Hargate reached for the trainer with covetous fingers. “Do you think I could learn to skord?”

Lorrest gave him a searching glance. “You keep coming back to that, don’t you?”

“You don’t understand—this what I had in place of religion. As a kid, I only saw Gretana once at Cotter’s Edge, but that was all I needed. I never told anybody about seeing her, but all my life I knew there were people to whom the ordinary rules didn’t apply, and that was very important to me. As far as I was concerned, you see, we had a bad set of rules. It comforted me to know there was a bigger and better game going on somewhere. I suppose I was nursing a secret hope that some day I’d be invited to play. Does that sound crazy to you?”

“I think I understand,” Lorrest said. “But why is it so important for you to skord?”

“It’s part of my personal mathematics. I like the idea of reducing time to the status of an ordinary dimension, and that’s because I’m short of time.” Hargate hesitated, wondering if he could ever get his point of view across to the Mollanian. “I’ve only got a year or so left—perhaps a lot less—and I want to make the maximum use of it. Mathematically speaking, I want to extend myself in three dimensions to compensate for deficiencies in the fourth.”

Lorrest gazed at him for a few seconds, his eyes becoming lensed with tears. “Why is there no justice, Denny?”

“What do you mean?”

“When I think of the way most of my people squander all those centuries they’ve grabbed for themselves…those pale ghosts of human beings…while you’ve got enough courage for…for…”

“Courage my ass,” Hargate put in. “How about it? Can you teach me to skord?”

“I honestly don’t know. Right from infancy Mollanians are aware of living in a matrix of third-order forces, and that seems to give us an in-built mathematical faculty that a Terran might never be able to acquire.”

Hargate refused to be discouraged. “Come on! I know all about homeomorphism and algebraic topology and theory of functions, and I’ve read Riemann and Hu and Wilder and people like that. You can’t be all that much smarter than I am. What do you say?”

“Your Terran maths might be a handicap. You’d have to unlearn some of it.”

“So I’ll unlearn—what do you say?”

Lorrest smiled helplessly. “Well, we’re going to be airborne on autopilot for a few hours before we reach Vekrynn’s pied-à-terre , or whatever we’re looking for…Maybe I could force some elementary maths into your skull.”

“And I’ll pay you back,” Hargate promised. “I’ll try to force some elementary manners into yours.”

The structure was a featureless slab of concrete, like a single huge building block that had been dropped in a forest clearing. Mosses and vines had attached themselves to much of the surface without softening the uncompromising lines. Only in one place, where a fallen tree formed a sloping catwalk from ground to roof, had the environment made any headway in obliterating the unnatural intrusion.

“No attempt at concealment here,” Lorrest commented. “Either Vekrynn was confident nobody would get this far, or he realised that if they did they weren’t going to be put off.”

Hargate ran his gaze over the wall towards which he was being propelled and picked out the faint outline of a door which also seemed to be made of concrete. “It doesn’t look much like a country residence.”

“No, it has to be a store, a glorified strongbox. The only question is—what’s inside?”

“I’ll bet it takes more than one of your intelligent playing cards to open it.”

“Unbeliever!” Lorrest brought the wheelchair to a halt and went towards the door, already opening his wallet. “The locks are undoubtedly the best that Vekrynn could buy, borrow or steal, which means they were probably manufactured on Mollan around the time the Normans were invading England. Our establishment engineers are handicapped, of course. One thing about our longevity that nobody seemed to anticipate was the stultifying effect on designers—it’s very difficult to find materials that last as long as we do.”

Hargate sniffed noisily to express a bitter amusement. The tranquillity of the surrounding forest and the mellow coppery radiance from the setting sun reminded him of the long summer evenings of boyhood, those evenings on which time seemed to relent and cease its persecution, but he was not deceived. The caravan was still winding its way towards the dawn of nothing. In the solitude of the previous day he had persuaded himself that, as far as the mathematics of eternity was concerned, there was no difference between a lifespan of four decades and one of four millennia—all fractions with infinity as the bottom line had to equal zero—but one had to be in a certain mood to accept that kind of reasoning…

“Hurry up, for Chrissakes,” he said with a kind of nasal snarl. “It’s bloody boring sitting here.”

“Patience, patience,” Lorrest said, unperturbed, continuing to explore the surface of the door with one of his apparently ubiquitous white rectangles. “It’s just a matter of finding the right place for my calling card.”

A moment later he gave a low exclamation and stepped back as—with the loud report of a long-established seal being broken—the door retreated a short distance into the building. It stopped, then slid sideways to reveal a short corridor ending in another door which had a circular window. A pale amethyst light streamed through the glass. Has the light been on all the time , Hargate found himself wondering, his mind seizing on the irrelevancy, or is there a fridge door switch?

Holding the card aloft and slightly ahead of him, Lorrest walked slowly to the inner door. He pushed it open a little, satisfying himself that it was unlocked, and came back smiling. “It’s all right. I didn’t think Vekrynn would have gone in for automatic weapons, but associating with people like you has made me suspicious.”

“Yeah, you look suspicious.” His melancholia displaced by curiosity, Hargate urged his chair forward and through the outer doorway. Lorrest held the inner door open, allowing him to roll into a long chamber which occupied the entire volume of the building. The cold, delicately-tinted light had no obvious sources, coming equally from walls, floor and ceiling, making it difficult to judge dimensions and distances. Hargate, who had half-expected an Ali Baba’s cave of rare treasures, was slightly taken aback to find that the chamber was bare except for a single deeply-cushioned armchair which faced a row of seven metal boxes. The boxes were desk-sized, had numerous flush-mounted panels in varying shades of blue and were massively bolted to the floor, a detail which gave the whole assembly a curiously old-fashioned appearance. Hargate was reminded of twentieth century electrical power installations.

“What is it?” he said, not hiding his disappointment. “Some kind of relay station?”

“Hardly.” Lorrest went forward and stood for a moment by the chair, his face registering an excitement that was almost manic in its intensity. “If I’m not mistaken…Denny, I can’t believe this.”

“Believe what?” Hargate said irritably. “How about letting me in on…?”

Lorrest silenced him with an upraised hand and lowered himself into the deep chair. He touched no controls that Hargate could see, but a few seconds later a screen-like area of white luminescence sprang into existence in the air above the centre box. After a barely perceptible delay the screen blossomed with what Hargate had learned to recognise as Mollanian script.