The Marriage of the Living Dark

CHAPTER-14

behind the wall of sleep

In the blink of an eye the snake swallowed its tail. Kim, lazing on his back on the surface of the pool, stared up at the animation and smiled.

So it was, in that first instant of forever. Nothing before that moment, and nothing - absolutely nothing - outside of it For the universe was an island, infinite in size, yet strangely still an island. Now that was a paradox.

Normally the great dome above him showed an image of the star field into which they daily sped, yet today he was problem-solving. Or so he had told Jelka. What he was really doing was playing - toying with an idea he had had only the other evening, while he was washing out his equipment at the sink An island, yes, but what if there were other islands, close by - so close that you could almost touch and penetrate them? And what if there was a membrane - some kind of field -between the universes, that one could push back and therefore use, just as one could push back and use the surface pressure of the water?

It was so simple - so direct - an idea that he had known at once that it was true.

He had been washing out the beakers and, pushing one down into the water, had felt it slip between his soapy handsand spring, like a rocket being launched, up into the air. For a moment he had simply stared, his mind seeing, in that instant, how one might push the craft he had been making down into the surface of another universe and, using the pressure of the membrane between the universes, launch it at high velocity. No, at a phenomenal velocity. If one could only find where that surface membrane lay. And so, today, he floated here, watching the programme he had made for his daughter, Mileja, on how the universe began -the story of the snake that swallowed its tail - a story of infinite repetition, infinite regression.

He smiled sadly, recalling what he’d said to her, all that time ago. Imagine, he’d said, a firework display. Only this firework display was so quick the eye could not even register it, while the slow fade of the fireworks’ traces in the air took... well, forever. Or so it seemed. But even forever could be measured. The trouble was that the human mind was forever trying to visualise - to form metaphors for the complex processes of physics - but the truth was that he was working within a realm where such visualisation was not a help but a positive hindrance - a distraction. One spent one’s time trying to make such metaphors fit, to put flesh on the bare bones of numbers, yet in doing so the mind would constantly reach for a visual handhold and find ... nothing. Kim stretched then flipped backwards, under the water, bobbing up beside the steps. In two quick movements he was up, reaching for the towel that hung beside the blackboard.

While he towelled his head and shoulders with his left hand, his right hand worked at the calculation that had flipped into his mind, chalking the figures on the board. He stopped a moment, considering what he’d written, then jotted down a further two equations, drawing two long horizontal lines between the figures. There was no connection ... yet. But that would come. It always came. He tossed the chalk into the basket, then turned back, facing the pool once more.

“Opaque,” he said, speaking to the house machine. At once the dome ceased to be a screen, showing - through a second, larger dome - a perfect view of space and, surrounding that second dome, the bare, red-brown surface of Ganymede.

Kalevala was behind him where he stood, the house and its tower raised up on its promontory. Still towelling himself, he turned to face it, never tiring of the sight. Against the backdrop of interstellar space it looked almost Wagnerian. “Kim?”

Jelka’s voice sounded all about him, transmitted by a dozen hidden speakers.

“Yes, my love?”

“Have you finished now?”

He smiled. No doubt she had been watching - had seen the surface of the smaller dome become translucent “For now.”

There was a pause, then. “Only you have a visitor.” Kim raised an eyebrow. It was unusual for Jelka to be so indirect Was something wrong?

“I see.” He stared at the blackboard for a second or two, then looked up again.

“Take them through to my study and have them wait there. I’ll come up.” In that moment, between looking at the blackboard a second time and answering Jelka, he had seen the connection. Or rather, he had seen that there was no connection. And that was it The mathematics of alternate dimensions was a different kind of mathematics altogether - a broken maths with holes and gaps and ...

Kim’s face broke into a grin. And snakes swallowing their tails.

The tree was singing. It seemed as if every leaf and branch was singing. Chuang Kuan Ts’ai stared up at it amazed, and shivered. Birds, the voice inside her head told her. And at once she had an image of birds, and saw their strange, sharp beaks opening and closing and a shrill, high-pitched noise emerge. Birdsong. How strange. “But I thought there were no birds.” There weren’t. But now, it seems, there are.She looked again at the strange tree that stood before the house, then stepped through the massive doorway into the entrance hall. She turned, looking about her. A broad staircase went up to the first floor of the house. From there carved wooden balconies looked out over the tiled square of the hallway below. The hall itself was brightly - artificially - lit, as though by sunlight, yet the whole house had a feel of shadows, as if it were still embedded somewhere deep in the heart of an ancient wood.

In a week’s time - at Ta Hsueh, the Time of Great Snow -Chuang would be sixteen, yet she was strangely small for her age; her slender, almost elfin figure giving her the appearance of a child some four or five years younger. The furniture in the hallway - the great grandfather clock and the massive oak chair, dwarfed her tiny figure.

Seeing her there, Jelka came across, her golden eyes smiling; a warm, welcoming smile.

“Kim says he’ll see you. He’s been bathing in the star-pool, but he’s finished now. He won’t keep you long. You can wait for him up in his study.” Placing her hands together, Chuang bowed. “Thank you.”

“Come then. I’ll show you through.”

Chuang hesitated, then. “I liked the birds ... in the tree outside. Are they new?”

Jelka laughed. “Quite new. Kim made them last year. It was an old GenSyn formula. You should ask him to show you one sometime.” “I shall.”

She followed Jelka, not up the main stairway, but along a corridor and up a flight of narrow wooden steps at the back of the house. Kim’s study was at the end of another long corridor, past the library and what was clearly a laboratory of some kind.

On the wall behind Kim’s desk was a portrait

Marshall Knut Tolonen, said the voice in her head. Jelka’s father.

In an instant she knew all that was important to know about the man whose likeness hung there. That knowledge added a whole dimension to what she saw. Before she could stop herself, she heard herself say, “Do you miss your father?” Jelka turned, surprised, then, with a little nod, answered her. “Yes. But part of him’s still here, inside me.” And she touched her brow with the forefinger of her right hand.

Chuang studied Kim’s wife, almost as if she had not seen her before that moment, though the truth was she had known her nine years now. Her hair, which had once been long and blonde, was now cut short about her face, and her eyes which had once been a startling blue, were now a dull, burnished gold, but her face was still strong and beautiful.

Unbidden, the Machine gave Chuang a picture of Jelka as a child, displaying it so that the two images - one real, one memory - were superimposed upon Chuang’s eye. Chuang gave a little shiver. At once the older image faded. Why did you show me that? she asked silently. Because you wanted to know. And that was probably true. It was just that sometimes she would rather chose what she saw and what was left mysterious.

I’m sorry.

You’re not, she answered. Then, suddenly conscious that Jelka was watching her, she walked across and sat in the low chair by the window. “Would you like a drink?”

Chuang shook her head, then, realising how rude that seemed, quickly added. “No, thank you. I...”

She wondered briefly if she should mention why she’d come. Wondered if Jelka too had had the dream.

Jelka seemed to hover a moment, then, when there was nothing more, she smiled again. “Well... I’ll leave you I’ve things to do.” “Of course ...” Left alone, Chuang looked about her at Kim’s study, noting how even in the apparent disorder of things there was a logic. You see it too, then? the Machine asked. Yes, Chuang answered, standing and walking to the desk. He connects things that seem to have no connection.She picked up a tiny ivory box and turned it in her hand, wondering what it was, then turned it over. There was a word scratched into the ivory on the bottom in a neat and tidy hand. Kim’s writing, she supposed. A-N.NA.

Chuang looked up, expecting the Machine to enlighten her, but it was silent.

“My mother,” Kim said.

Chuang turned, surprised, to find Kim standing in the door. There was a strangely wistful look on his face. He came across and gently took the box from her, doing something to it - twisting it somehow.

At once a faint, ghostly figure filled the air. “Blinds,” Kim said, speaking to the house machine. Swiftly, the window blinds came down, throwing the room into darkness. In that sudden dark, the hologram shone clearly. It was a woman. Kim’s mother, Anna.

“But I thought...”

“I was an orphan,” Kim answered, anticipating her. “My father was executed before I ever had a chance to meet him. My mother... well... she died in the Clay, back on Chung Kuo. I was six when I last saw her. Oh, and she never looked like this. This is a computer extrapolation, based upon my own and my father’s genetic material. But the resemblance suggests her. Indeed, in my mind she has come to look very much like this. Any real memory of her is hidden from me. Walled-off.”

Chuang frowned. “Why?”

Kim shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps if s just that I don’t like to see her as she really was.”

Kim turned and snapped his fingers. At once the room was filled with light again. With a small twist of his hand, the hologram vanished from the air. “I’m sorry.”

Kim shrugged. ‘If s okay. Now... what did you want to see me about?”

Tve had another dream.”

“Ah ...” Kim went round his desk and sat Chuang had come several times before to tell Kim of her dreams, and most times the dream had proved significant Not prophetic in any direct fashion, yet meaningful enough for Kim to sit up and listen attentively. “In the dream I was back on Chung Kuo,” Chuang said, staring away, her eyes recalling the dream. “It was the time of the Spring Festival, when the earth is renewed, but this time there was to be no renewal. The ritual plough lay broken, its metal harrow rusted and rotten. And the earth was not earth at all, but ash. Deep drifts of ash. And in the distance a host of sickly white flowers had bloomed, huge things that towered above the trees and houses, their black and snake-like roots seeking out every tiny nook or crack in the rock beneath the ashes. And their scent...” She shuddered. “Their scent was like the stench of rotting flesh.”

She fell silent

“Was that all?”

Chuang lowered her head and nodded. “It seems very little in the telling, but I woke in a panic, my whole body covered in a sheen of sweat I felt...” She swallowed, then continued. “I felt as if I had been buried alive.” Kim nodded. “And did you have this dream once or many times?”

“Just once.”

“Ah...” Reaching across, Kim touched a pad on the side of his desk. “Jelka?

Would you join us, please?”

Chuang turned as Jelka appeared in the doorway. She looked to Chuang, then walked across to Kim. “Yes?”

He looked up at her. “Have you been dreaming lately?”

There was a tiny hesitation, then she nodded.

“Has Chuang Kuan Ts’ai spoken to you of her dream?”

“No.”

“Or you to her of yours?”

“No.”

Kim narrowed his eyes, then looked to Chuang. “Tell Jelka your dream, Chuang.

Just as you told me.”

Chuang began to repeat her dream, then stopped, conscious that Jelka was staring at her open-mouthed, her eyes appalled.

“What is it?” Chuang asked.”That dream,” Jelka said. “That is the dream 7 had two nights ago. And in the dream ...” “You died?” Both Chuang and Jelka looked to Kim. He stood, then gestured to them. “Come,” he said. “Lef s see who else has had this dream.”

Deep in the rock, in the great engine room that serviced the six great shafts, Ikuro Ishida turned to his brother Tomoka and smiled broadly. Behind him a row of screens showed images of the massive engines that drove the moon through space Just above them were a further row of screens, each giving a separate readout.

‘It looks good, elder brother,” Bcuro said, raising his voice above the constant pulse of the engine room. “At this rate we can begin slowing down long before the year’s end.”

Tomoka stared back at him, his demeanour serious. “You think the Council would agree to that, Ikuro?” he half-shouted back. “You know their feelings on the matter. They would rather we travelled faster and braked harder.” “And tear this planet into rubble!” Dcuro huffed his impatience. “No, the new engines Kim designed for us have done their work. We’ve cut our journey time by more than sixty per cent Isn’t that enough for them? We have to start decelerating soon or well overshoot! We’ve passed the halfway mark as it is!” Maybe,” Tomoka said, conceding the point “Even so, the matter must be debated formally. You cannot decide for everyone, Ikuro.” “I know, I know ... but...”

“No buts. You put your case and the Council will vote on it It is our way now. No single man - not even Kim - can have it otherwise.” Dcuro bowed his head. “As you say, elder brother.” “Good, now let us ...”

Tomoka stopped mid-sentence. One of the screens was flashing. Someone was trying to contact them. Tomoka reached across and touched the screen. It was Ward. ‘Tomoka? Dcuro?”

“Yes, Kim?”

“Urgent meeting. Kalevala. One hour.”

“Has something happened?”

“Something and nothing,” Kim answered cryptically. Til tell you when I see you.”

And then he was gone.

Dcuro looked to his brother. “What was that about?”

Tomoka shrugged. “Maybe he overheard you, little brother.”

“And agreed, no doubt,” Dcuro said. Then, more soberly, “He looked troubled.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think something’s wrong?”

“Do I read minds, little brother?”

“No, but...”

“Then wait We will find out what it is soon enough.”

Karr was washing - sluicing water up into his face - when Marie called him from the next room.