Brian Ball: Singularity Station

I can open a million years of evolution, was his simple, sublime claim. If a few must be sacrificed to show what the human mind is, then why not?

Liz caught herself gasping at the simple enormity of what he said. And at the center of it all, a terrifying logic.

“Don’t press her,” ordered Rosario.

“You won’t get the chance again, Miss Deffant,” Tup insisted. He grinned placatingly at Rosario. “She can tell them at Messier 16 that she saw Maran.”

“Don’t go down if you don’t want to.” Rosario said.

Liz’s thoughts were confused. She had seen the newscasts, with Maran stating his case so lucidly. There was a calmness about him that had fascinated all who saw him. And Maran was absolutely right in his main point.

Man was a unique phenomenon. There was only one intelligence in the whole of the Galaxy. Perhaps in the whole of creation. It must be understood, this thing called man, Maran had said. We must know the when and the how and the why of its beginnings!

When the gruesome details of Maran’s experiments were revealed, it was difficult to equate the calmness with the horrific things he had done to fellow human beings. We must gouge out the secrets of a million years, he had insisted. Find the beginning, understand the mechanism of transition from thing to man!

There was only one mystery, according to Maran. The mind of man. And he had devised his strange machines to investigate the human psyche. At first there were volunteers. The Enforcement Service moved in when the news of what had happened to them began to filter out. By that time, he had agents recruiting “helpers” in remote and primitive systems. Gullible men and women responded to his promises of wealth and mystical power. They were furious when the cruisers shipped them back to their barbaric planets. Maran had charisma. His simple, monumental message had enormous potency. Find the moment of man’s emergence to knowledge! Hold the moment, freeze it in time; examine, understand, develop it; and build the psyche into a cosmic engine! Liz recalled the arguments. To so many, they had become a catechism.

“Suppose he’s right,” she found herself saying to the two Enforcement Service crewmen.

“Maran right?” Rosario asked.

“Yes!”

“How, Miss Deffant? How right?” Tup wanted to know.

She could hardly put it into words, but she knew what she wanted to convey. Maran had pointed out that, despite all the attempts to communicate with supposed alien intelligences in other island universes, there had been no answers. Vast scanners ranged the depths of the Universe. They had sensed no coherent emissions. Despite the huge beamers which tried to tell far galaxies of the existence of the human race there had been no response. Couldn’t it be, Liz asked herself, that man was entirely alone in the Universe? Maran said so.

She collected her thoughts.

“I meant, what if he’s right about our being the only advanced life-form?” Before they could answer, she went on: “Oh, I know there have been theories about intelligent minerals operating on a time-scale too slow for us to understand—I even went for the notion of intelligent stars when they found that crazy double-star, but not now—you see, I’ve been around! I’ve been to all kinds of planets

—I’ve seen insect-eating lichens, walking plants, fossils that wake up once every millenium and then go back to sleep—but I’ve never come across anything that I can talk to! Nothing! And neither has anyone else!”

Tup was startled by the flow of words, but Rosario was not. New Settlements people had this enthusiasm. It came from their planetfalls on strange worlds which might soon echo to the building of towns. They had to be dreamers.

Liz realized that Rosario was waiting for her to go on. She saw his strong square face and looked at him for the first time as she would look at any handsome man. A stray recollection came back. Buchanan. Al Buchanan. He had looked so helpless the first time she had seen him. Not weak, but hurt. Not at all determined, like Rosario. But Al and Rosario were of a type. There was strength in the Enforcement Service commander’s steady gaze: he would make up his mind and act. Perhaps not as obsessively as Al. Other memories clamored for attention as she tried to marshal her inchoate arguments. Liz recalled small, intense private pleasures from the first days with Buchanan. A tiny victory when he said he would not run the recordings of the Court of Inquiry anymore. The feeling of dried leaves kicked up by their feet as they plowed through an autumn wood. The day they decided to freelance. There had been so many good days.

“Maran, Miss Deffant?” prompted Tup, who had not developed Rosario’s patience. She realized that they were politely waiting for her to make up her mind. The decision, and the answer, came:

“I’ll see him. Not because I want to tell anyone I’ve seen him. It’s just that I wonder about the man who thinks—believes—we’re unique.”

“Take Miss Deffant,” said Rosario. He smiled at Liz. “I think Maran could be right too.”

“Jack?” said Tup, in surprise. “ You think he’s right?”

“Yes. Right about the uniqueness of the human mind. Maybe we are the only advanced form of life in the whole of the Universe. Maybe we should find out what caused this thing we call intellect or intelligence or soul.”

Liz hesitated. “You think Maran was right to try to solve the mystery—of how we started?”

“He was in too much of a hurry. If he’s right, if there is some way of understanding the processes of human thought and building on them, then we needn’t hurry. We’ve been around a long time. There’s no need to force the pace.”

“This way, Miss Deffant,” Tup said. He could not help adding: “This way to the Chamber of Horrors!” There was the usual grav-chute. At the bottom, Tup announced their arrival to an unseen robot servitor.

“I’m bringing a female visitor with full Security clearance,” he told it. To Liz he added: “Regulations. We have to comply.”

A shield slid away and Liz saw the cell-deck. A Security guard came across, to be introduced as Pete. Liz waved to him, but she barely noticed his polite smile, nor his brief welcoming words. She was spellbound, rooted to the spot, dazed by the sight of the unconscious expellees in the eerie green subdued lights of the enormous hold.

It was so much bigger than she expected. And nothing had prepared Liz for the shock of seeing rows of tanks, each with its gently swaying body cushioned by a grayish ooze. Tup had spoken of a Chamber of Horrors. It was. The unconscious figures were subtly sinister, like so many effigies of once-fearsome men and women. Liz tried to control her shaking hands. She felt fear, sensed it deep within her body.

“They don’t feel a thing!” declared Tup. Wrapped up in her own reaction as she was, Liz could recognize a change in the young man’s tone. He, too, sensed the chilled malice that emanated from the scores of tanks.

A green iridescence picked out the features of the expellees. Young, old, some women but mostly men. Near-naked bodies bobbed in a pulsating ooze. All the minds blotted out, monitored by machines below the tanks. There was no rational cause for fear, thought Liz. But she felt fear. It was not the corpselike appearance of the expellees, nor the eerie glow of the subdued lighting, nor yet the soft squelching of the ooze as bodies slipped and slid about the tanks; none of these things mattered, for she knew that they were held in a state of unconsciousness deep below the normal level of sleep. The cause of her fear was other than these.

Tup laughed. It was a young man’s reaction, thoughtless and without malice. “There’s nothing to worry about!” he added at once. “They can’t harm you!”