Hugo awards the short st.., p.195
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 195
And now he holds up a notice.
I IMPLY NOTHING. PAY NO ATTENTION TO MY PRESENCE. KINDLY GET ON DOING YOUR OWN THINGS. I CANNOT EXPLAIN TILL 2000.
He holds it up for a whole day, looking not exactly angry, but slightly pained. The whole world, hearing of it, sighs with joy at his modesty. His self-containment, his reticence, his humility. This must be the promised 1995 message, two years late (or two years early; obviously he still has a long way to come). Now he is Oracle; he is the Millennium. This place is Delphi.
The orbital laboratories run into more difficulty with their tachyon research but still funds pour into them, private donations too on an unprecedented scale. The world strips itself of excess wealth to strip matter and propel it over the interface between sub-light and trans-light.
The development of closed-cycle living pods - the carriers of those tachyon recievers to the stars is coming along well; a fact which naturally raises the paradoxical question of whether his presence has in fact stimulated the development of the technology by which he himself survives. We at the National Physical Laboratory and at all other such laboratories around the world are convinced that we shall soon make a breakthrough in understanding of time-reversal--which should connect with that other universal interface in the realm of matter, between our world and the tachyon world—and we feel too, paradoxically, that out current research must surely lead to the development of the VSTM which will then become so bpportunelY nec-es-to us, for reasons yet unknown. No one feels are wasting their time. He is the Future. His presence here vindicates our every effort—even blindest of blind alleys.
What kind of Messiah must he be, by the time he enters the VSTM? How much charisma, respect, ration and wonder must he have accrued by his starting point? Why the whole world will wish him off! He will be the focus of so much we hope and worship that we even start to invetigate Psi phenonomina seriously. The concept of mental thrust as a hypothesis for his mode of travel—although he is vectored not through time of-4space at all but down the waveguide of will-power and desire.
(2001)
The millennium comes and goes without any revelation. Of course that is predictable; he is lagging by a year or eighteen months. (Obviously he can t see the calibrations on his instruments; .it~ WSel~iEchoIce.that was his way to keep sane on the long haul.)
But finally, now in the Autumn of 2001, he holds up a sign, with a certain quiet jubilation:
WILL I LEAVE SOUND IN WIND AND LIMB?
Quiet jubilation, because we have already (from his point of view) held up the sign in answer:
YES! YES!
We're all rooting for him passionately. It isn't really a lie that we tell him. He did leave relatively sound in wind and limb. It was just his mind that was in tatters. . . . Maybe that is inessential, irrelevant, or he wouldn't have phrased his question to refer-merely to his physical body.
He must be approaching his take-off point,. He's having a mild fit of tenth-year blues, first decide anxiety, self-doubt; which we clear up for him....
Why doesn't he know what shape he arrived in? Surely that must be a matter of record before he sets off. . . No! Time can not be invariable we determined. Not even the Past. Time is fluid. He has refrained from comment for all these years so as not to unpluck the strands of time past and reweave them in another, undesirable way. A tower of strength he has been. Well, back to the drawing beard, and to probabilistic equations for (a) tachyon-scatter out in normal space (b) time-reversal.
A few weeks later he holds up another sign, which must be his promised Delphi revelation:
I AM THE MATRIX OF MAN.
Of course! Of course! He has made himself that over the years. What else?
A matrix is a mold for shaping a cast. And indeed, out of him shapes have been molded. Increasingly since the late 1990s, such has been his influence.
Was he sent hindwards to save the world from self-slaughter by presenting such a perfect paradigm—which only frayed and tattered in the Eighties when it did not matter any more; when he had already succeeded?
But a matrix is also an array of components for translating from one code into another. So Yang's demodulation of information hypothesis is revived, coupled now with the idea that the VSTM is perhaps a matrix for transmitting the "information" contained in a man across space and time so the man-transmitter experiments in orbit redouble their efforts); with the corollary (though doubts could hardly be voiced to the enraptured world at large) that perhaps the passenger was not there at all in our sense; and he had never been. We were witnessing an experiment of the possibility of transmitting a man across the galaxy, performed on a future Earth by future science to test out the degradation factor: the decay of information—mapped from space on to time so that it could be observed by us, their predecessors! Thus the onset of madness (i.e., decay) in our passenger, timed in years front his starting point, might set a physical limit in light-years to the distance to which a man could be beamed (tachyonically?). And this was at once a terrible kick in the teeth to space science—and a great boost. A kick in the teeth, as this suggested that physical travel through interstellar space must be impossible, perhaps because of Man's frailty in the face of cosmic ray bombardment; and thus the whole development of intensive closed-cycle life-pods for single astronaut couriers must be deemed irrelevant. Yet a great boost too, since the possibility of a receiver-less transmitter loomed. The now elderly Yang suggested that 1 December 1985 was actually a moment of lift-off to the stars. Where our passenger went then, in all his madness, was to a point in space thirty or forty light-years distant. The VSTM was thus the testing to destruction of a future man-beaming system and practical future models would only deal in distances (in times) of the order of seven to eight years. {Hence no other VSTMs had imploded into existence, hitherto.)
(2010)
I am tired with a lifetime's fruitless work; however, the human race at large is at once lovlng and frenetic with hope. For we must be nearing our goal. Our passenger is in his thirties now (whether a live individual, or only an phenomenon of a system for transmitting the information present in a human being: literally a "ghost in the machine". This sets a limit. It sets a limit. He couldn't have set off with such strength of mind much earlier than his twenties or (I sineerely hope not) his late teens. Although the teens are a prime time for taking vows of chastity, for entering monastries, for pledging one's life to a cause.
(2015)
Boosted out of my weariness by the general euphoria, I have successfully put off my retirement for another four years. Our passenger is now in his middle twenties and a curious inversion in his "worship" is taking place, representing (I think) a subconcious groundswell of anxiety as well as joy. Joy, obviously, that the moment is coming when he makes his choice and steps into the VSTM, as Christ gave up carpentry and stepped out from Nazareth. Anxiety, though, at the possibility that he may pass beyond this critical point, towards infancy; ridiculous as this seems! He knows how to read books; he couldn't have taught himself to read. Nor could he have taught himself how to speak in vitro—and he has certainly delivered lucid, if mysterious, messages to us from time to time. The hit song of the whole world, nevertheless, this year is William Blake's The Mental Traveller set to sitar and gongs and glockenspiel . .
The unvoiced fear represented by this song sweeping of the world being that he may yet evade us; that he may slide down towards 1w fancy, and at the moment of his birth (whatever support mechanisms extrude to keep him alive till then!) the VSTM will implode back whence it came: a sick joke of some alien superconciousness, intervening in human affairs with a scientific "miracle" to make all human striving meaningless and pointless. Not many people feel this way openly. It isn't a popular view. A man could be torn limb from limb for espousing it in public. The human mind will never accept it; and purges this fear in a long song of joy which at once mocks and copies and adores the mystery of the VSTM.
Men put this supreme man into the machine. Even so, Madonna and Child does haunt the world's mind... and a soft femininity prevalls—men's skirts are the new soft gracious mode of dress in the West. Yet he is now so noble, so handsome in his youth, so glowing and strong; such a Zarathustra, locked up in there.
(2018)
He can only be 21 or 22. The world adores him, mothers him, across the unbridgeable gulf of reversed time. No progress in the Solar System, let on the interstellar front. Why should we travel out and away, even as far as Mars, let a1one Pluto, when a revelation is at hand; when all the secrets will be unlocked here on Earth? No progress on the tachyon or negative-time fronts, either. Or any further messages from him. But he is his own message. His presence alone is sufficient to bless Mankind: hopes, courage, holiness.
I am called back from retirement, for he is holding up signs again: the athlete holding up the Olympic Flame.
He holds them up for half an hour at a stretch though we are not all eyes agog, filming every moment in case we miss something, and when I arrive, the signs that he has already held up have announced:
(Sign One) THIS IS A VERY SLOW TIME MACHINE.
(And I amend accordingly, crossing out all the other titles we had bestowed on it successively, over the years. For a few seconds I wonder whether he was really naming the machine, defining it, or complaining about it! As though he'd been fooled into being its passenger on the assumption that a time machine should proceed to its destination instantly instead of at a snail's pace. But no. He was naming it.)
TO TRAVEL INTO THE FUTURE, YOU MUST FIRST TRAVEL INTO THE PAST, ACCUMULATING HINDWARD POTENTIAL. (THIS IS CRAWLING DOWNHILL.)
(Sign Two) AS SOON AS YOU ACCUMULATE ONE LARGE QUANTUM OF TIME, YOU LEAP FORWARD BY THE SAME TIMESPAN OF YOUR STARTING POINT. (THIS IS SLIDING UPHILL.)
(Sign Three) YOUR JOURNEY INTO THE FUTURE TAKES THE SAME TIME AS IT WOULD TAKE TO LIVE THROUGH THE YEARS IN REAL-TIME; YET YOU ALSO OMIT THE INTERVENING YEARS, ARRIVING AHEAD INSTANTLY. (PRINCIPLE OF CONSERVATION OF TIME.)
(Sign Four) SO, TO LEAP THE GAP, YOU MUST CRAWL THE OTHER WAY.
(Sign Five) TIME DIVIDES INTO ELEMENTARY QUANTA. NO MEASURING ROD CAN BE SMALLER THAN THE INDIVISIBLE ELEMENTARY ELECTRON; THIS IS ONE "ELEMENTARY LENGTH" (EL). THE TIME TAKEN FOR LIGHT TO TRAVEL ONE EL IS "ELEMENTARY TIME" (ET): I.E., 1O SECONDS; THIS IS ONE ELEMENTARY QUANTUM OF TIME. TIME CONSTANTLY LEAPS AHEADBY THESE TINY QUANTA FOR EVERY PARTICLE; BUT NOT BEING SYNCHRONIZED, THESE FORM A CONTINUOUS TIME-OCEAN RATHER THAN SUCCESSIVE DISCRETE "MOMENTS" OR WE WOULD HAVE NO CONNECTED UNIVERSE.
(Sign Six) TIME REVERSAL OCCURS NORMALLY IN STRONG NUCLEAR INTERACTIONS. IN EVENTS OF ORDER 1O SECS. THIS REPRESENTS THE "FROZEN GHOST" OF THE FIRST MOMENT 0F THE UNIVERSE WHEN AN "ARROW OF TIME" WAS FIRST STOCHASTICALLY DETERMINED.
(Sign Seven) (And this is when I arrived, to be shown polaroid photographs of the first seven pages. Remarkably, he is holding up each in linear sequence from our point of view; a considerable feat of forethought and memory, though no less than we expect of him.) NOW IT IS INVARIABLE; FROZEN IN; YET UNIVERSE AGES. STRETCHING OF SPACE-TIME BY EXPANSION PROPAGATES "WAVES" IN TIlE SEA OF TIME, CARRYING TIME-ENERGY WITH PERIOD (x) PROPORTIONAL TO THE RATE OF EXPANSION, AND TO RATIO OF TIME ELAPSED TO TO TIME AVAILABLE FOR THIS COSMOS FROM INITIAL CONSTRANTS. EQUATIONS FOR X YIELD A PERIOD OF 35 YEARS CURRENTLY AS ONE MOMENT OF MACRO-TIME WITHIN WHICH MACROSCOPIC TIME REVERSAL BECOMES POSSIBLE.
(Sign Eight) CONSTRUCT AN "ELECTRON SHELL" BY SYNCHRONIZING ELECTRON REVERSAL THE LOCAL SYSTEM WILL THEN FORM A TIME-REVERSED MINI COSMOS & PROCEED HINDWARDS TILL X ELAPSES WHEN TIME CONSERVATION OF THE TOTAL UNIVERSE WILL PULL THE MINI-COSMOS (OF THE VSTM) FORWARD INTO MESH WITH UNIVERSE AGAIN I.E. BY 35 PLUS 35 YEARS.
"But how?" we all cried. "How do you synchronize such an infinity of electrons? We haven't the slightest idea!
Now at least we knew when he had set off: from 35 years after 1985. From next year. We are supposed to know all this by next year! Why has he
-waited so long to give us the proper clues?
And he is heading for the year 2055. What is there in the year 2055 that matters so much?
(Sign Nine) I DO NOT GIVE ThIS INFORMATION TO YOU BECAUSE IT WILL LEAD TO YOUR INVENTING THE VSTM. THE SITUATION I& WISE. TIME IS PROBAHILISTIC, AS SOME OF YOU MAY SUSPECT. REALIZE THAT I WILL PROBABLY PERVERT THE COURSE OF SCIENCE BY MY ARRIVAL.
MOMENT OF DEPARTURE FOR IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW YOUR PREDICAMENT TOO EARLY, OR YOUR EFFORTS TO AVOID IT WOULD GENERATE A TIME WHICH WOULD UNPREPARE YOU FOR MY SETTING OFF. AND IT IS IMPORTANT THAT IT DOES ENDURE, FOR I AM THE MATRIX OF MAN. I AM LEGION. I SHALL CONTAIN MULTITUDES.
MY RETICENCE IS SOLELY TO KEEP THE WORLD ON TOLERABLY STABLE TRACKS SO THAT I CAN TRAVEL BACK ALONG THEM. I TELL YOU THIS OUT OF COMPASSION, AND TO PREPARE YOUR MINDS FOR THE ARRIVAL OF GOD ON EARTH.
"He's insane. He's been insane from the start."
"He's been isolated in there for some very good reason. Contagious insanity, yes."
"Suppose that a madman could project his madness—"
"He already has done that, for decades!"
"—no, I mean really project it, into the consciousness of the whole world; a madman with a mind so strong that he acted as a template, yes a matrix for everyone else, and made them all his dummies, his copies; and only a few people stayed immune who could build this VSTM to isolate him—"
"But there isn't time to research it now!"
"What good would it do shucking off the problem for another thirty-five years? He would only reappear—without his strength. Shorn. Senile. Broken of his bond with the human race up. A mental leech. Oh, he tried to conserve himself. Sitting quietly. Reading, waiting. He broke! Thank God for that. It was vital to future that he went insane."
Ridiculous! To enter the machine next year he would already be alive! He must already be out in the world projecting this supposed influence his. But he isn't. We're all separate sane individuals, all free to think what we want—" Are we? The whole world has been increasingly obsessed with him these last twenty years. hions, religions, life-styles: the whole world been skewed by him ever since he was born! It must have been born about twenty years ago; around 1995. Until then there was a lot of reasearch into him. The tachyon hunt. All that. But only began to obsess the world as a spiritual cure after that. From around 1995 or so. When he as born as a baby. Only, we didn't focus our minds on his own infantile urges because we had him here as an adult to obsess ourselves with.
"Why should he have been born with infantile gesalt. If he's so unusual, why sbouldn't he have been born already eching on the world's mind; ready knowing already experiencing everything around him?"
"Yes, but the real charisma started then! All the irrational intoxication with him!"
"All the mothering. All the fear and adoration of his infancy. All the Bethlehem hysteria, picked up as he grew and gained projective strength. We‘ve been just as obsessed with Bethlehem as with Nazareth, haven't we? The two having hand in hand~"
(Sign Ten) I AM GOD. AND I MUST SET YOU FREE. CUT MYSELF OFF FROM MY PEOPLE; CAST MYSELF INTO THIS HELL OF ISOLATION. I CAME TOO SOON; YOU WERE NOT READY FOR ME.
We begin to feel very cold; yet we cannot feel cold. Something prevents us—a kind of malicious contagious tranquillity.
It is all so right.. It slots into our heads so exact like the missing jigsaw piece for which the h lies cut and waiting that we know what he sai true; that he is growing up out there in our sessed, blessed world, only waiting to come to up.
(Sign Eleven) (Even though the order of the sign was time-reversed from his point of view, the was the sense of a real dialogue now between him and us, as though we were both synchronized. This wasn't because the past was inflexible, and was simply acting out a role he knew "from history". He was really as distant from us as ever. It was the looming presence of himself in the world which cast its shadow on us, molded our thoughts and fitted our questions to his responses; and we all realized this now, as though scales fell from our eyes. We weren't guessing, fishing in the dark any longer; we were being dictated to by an overwhelming presence which we were all conscious—and which wasn locked up in the VSTM. The VSTM was Nazareth.
The whole world was a womb of the embryonic God, his birth, childhood and youth combined into synchronOuS sequence by his all-knowingness, with the accent on his wonderful birth filtered through into human consciousness.
MY OTHER SELF HAS ACCESS TO ALL THE SCIENTIFIC SPECULATIONS WHICH HAVE BEEN GENERATED; AND ALREADY I HAVE THE SOLUTION OF THE TIME EQUATIONS. I SHALL ARRIVE SOON. YOU SHALL BUILD MY VSTM & I SHALL ENTER IT; I SHALL BUILD IT INSIDE AN EXACT REPLICA OF THIS LABORATORY, SOUTHWEST SIDE. THERE IS ROOM THERE. (Indeed it had been planned to expand the National Physical Laboratory that way but the plans had never been taken up because of the skewing of all our research which the VSTM brought about.) WHEN I REACH MY TIME OF SETTING OUT, WHEN TIME REVERSES, THE PROBABILITY THIS LABORATORY WILL VANISH, & THE OTHER WILL ALWAYS HAVE BEEN THE TRUE LABORATORY THAT I AM IN, INSIDE THIS VSTM. THE WASTE LAND WHERE YOU BUILD, WILL NOW BE HERE. YOU CAN WITNESS THE INVERSION IT WILL BE MY FIRST PROBALISTIC MIRACLE. THERE ARE HYPERDIMENSIONAL AXIS FOR THE PROBABILISTIC INVERSION, AT THE INSTANT OF TIME REVERSAL BE WARNED NOT TO BE THIS LABORATORY WHEN I SET OUT, WHEN I CHANGE TRACKS, FOR THIS SEGMENT OF REALITY WILL ALSO CHANGE TRACKS, BECOMING EMOBABLE, SQUEEZED OUT.
(Sign Twelve) I WAS BORN TO INCORPORATE YOU INTO MY BOSOM; TO ENTER YOU IN A WORLD MIND, IN PHASE SPACE THOUGH YOUR INDIVIDUAL SOULS. BUT YOU ARE NOT READY. YOU MUST BECOME READY IN 35 YEARS FOLLOWING THE MENTAL EXERCISES WHICH I SHALL DELIVER TO YOU, MY MEDITATIONS. IF I REMAINED WITH YOU NOW, AS I GAIN STRENGTH YOU WOULD LOSE YOUR SOULS. THEY WOULD BE SUCKED INTO ME, INCOHERENTLY. BUT IF YOU GAIN STRENGTH, I CAN INCORPORATE YOU COHERENTLY WITHOUT LOSING YOU. I LOVE YOU ALL, YOU ARE PRECIOUS TO ME, SO I EXILE MYSELF. THEN I WILL COME AGAIN IN 2055. I SHALL FROM TIME, FROM THE USELESS HARROWING OF LIMBO WHICH HOLDS NO SOULS PRISONER, FOR YOU ARE ALL HERE, ON EARTH.
