The hole in the zero, p.4
The Hole in the Zero, page 4
"I'd guess it," jeered Merganser, "a holy man, a christbearer, think?"
Paradine nodded. "A christbearer. You meet them sometimes, and mostly in places like that. A little man, grey, hardy, he worked as sweeper in one of the plants. He lived on nothing, he gave away every centavo, and he slept in a hole in one of the tenements where they'd ripped out a boiler and forgot to put in a new one. That was how I met him."
He suddenly knew two things, that the last green light was on the blink and that the girl was looking at him with sane eyes, and he felt a sudden shock of loss.
"One night there was a big scramble in our precinct," he said to her, "six gangs altogether, and we were on the losers. I am hurt and I am running, I don't know where, and there are ten, twelve shivmen after me, hollering and laughing. Then an iron service-door opens in the wall, and someone pulls me in, and that's all, for a time."
He sighed. It was nearly over.
"When I woke up it was in the hole in the basement where this old man lived, this padre Martin. I was lying on a pile of packing-paper, it was his own bed. I stayed there a while and he looked after me—I 18
was cut quite a bit, think, and he knew the old medicine, and he fed me on good broth. When I was fit again, I'd go out into the streets, but I'd go back often at nights. We talked for hours, and he taught me to read—yes, read out of old paper books. We read stories, all lands, the old ones about Adam and Ulysses and Christ and Arthur, all strange to me then. I'd tell you more, but we haven't time ...
"Well, you know, one night there was another scramble, and the stormtroopers were doing a razzia, and I was pulled in. They knew something about old Martin—the Party was in power then, and the christbearers were something they didn't like. So I told about him. It took so little to make me tell, just hot food and a clean bed. He passed me in a corridor as they brought him in you know, he smiled at me, and made that secret sign they have—" Paradine sketched a tiny x in the air with the tip of his index finger. “
"What happened to him?' asked Helena.
"Re-educated," said Paradine, "that meant the deep mines ... After that the Party looked after me, and put me through school and college. I could have gone all the way with them. But when I heard about the Wardens, I applied, and even the Party couldn't stop the Limitary Authority, and I'm here."
"Brother," said Merganser, and reaching forward put his right hand over Paradine's. "We did our work and took our wages; but you knew it."
In the silence, they felt that the vibration of the drives had stopped; the ship was adrift. "We aren't going to get through," said Kraag.
"No," said Paradine, rising to his feet.
Merganser began to laugh uncontrollably. "You— Boss Kraag—Miss Helena—Warden—me—did we
know —what we were looking for? Perhaps it's here—in the nothing."
"Look," said Helena, "oh what does it mean?" She pointed to the monitor-screens where the patterns had now frozen, but flickered slowly on and off.
"Stasis," said Paradine, "dimensional inversion, total instability."
"That's buggered it," said the voice of the ship's intercom. The robot jerked to its feet and began walking towards the far wall of the control-deck, stripping off its mask and cladding as it did so. The room was changing shape, belling outwards at the end, and the walls vibrated and stank and dissolved, opening out onto a vast floor of darkness. The robot ran free, stretching up as he ran, babbling in a last spasm of his tapes:
"Do not come down the ladder mister prichard i have taken it away look you bach and when the old troubleandstrife told me i couldn't adamandeve it till i'd taken a ballofchalk up the applesandpears and seen it with me own mincepies for ah belong tae glasgow and a man's a man for a'that if you'll pardon the expression sir seeing as howcomewhatsoever five four three two one liftoff and who'll come a waltzing matilda with meeee ..."
As it leapt and ran, its body stretched taller and taller, an attenuated metal spider kilometres high, until there was nothing left but the giant head which melted, raining tears of white-hot metal through the void. The ship tilted suddenly, and without a sound Boss Kraag and Billy boy, Miss Helena and the Warden spilled out. They fell for a symptotic time through infinite space towards the floor of darkness, which grew smaller, contracting to a point. When they met it, they
19
THREE
entered through zones and categories into the small time of nowhere until the season came when it (what?) began to snow green butterflies or something rather similar. There (where?) was a nucleus for ice world and in its time they sat for a space, unintegrated. Life itself, impossibly but not improbably, went on, nor did the rest seem important, since none of it was necessary. Before them an unpicturable landscape dissolved and redissolved, without sound, but they could taste it. It was musty.
Then (when?) a sound began, like a horse galloping across drums, and this was Bill Merganser's heart beating, which filled the world with solemn noise. He lay staring up at the vortices which formed and reformed above them. Kraag shivered with cold, his great teeth clenched; Helena huddled beside him in a delirium of euphoria, able to fly if she wished; Paradine sweated. If (when?) a thing could be recalled, it would be known, the heat made him think. And that was it (which?); I. A letter, word, image, a man standing in a place, but who? I am I. Comforting and rosy recollections of the conditioning-room broke through the sensory deformations.
"I am I," he said aloud, using his mouth with careful precision, like a remote-handling device.
"I am me," said the others, and they followed one another in the complex crosstalk of the conditioning chant.
Now they could at least assume contingencies, and the flux stiffened for sufficient time to appear tall (slow?), irregular (polytropic?), viable (relevant?).
Paradine moved stiffly to his feet, and called to the others, and several times later they were gathered and he thought humbly: "Climb." It was all, so that he led them stumbling across the reticulated cracks of the ice-pavement. Words were nothing; it was a place of things.
After (in?) a time of sleep, they floundered across a river of wind and sat down together among the sounds of metal.
Riddled with fever, Kraag's voice jerked out: "What? is? this? place?"
"Randomness," muttered Paradine.
"I've heard," said Merganser. "Of such a planet."
"Insane," murmured Helena, "look. How depraved is all."
It seemed likely that they would climb the mountain, for it was now beside them. Paradine gathered them with the force of his eyes, and pointed to the crest, where a small rolling golden sun reclined upon the high plateau.
"Here," he said. "Now."
To them his hand seemed to touch the sun, but he did not burn; only for a microsecond he too was golden.
The way of the mountain was neither up nor down, neither long nor short, the journey either years or kilometres. They climbed and flew; they fell and swam; they walked and thought. A shaft of gravel or a fallen dolmen was overcome with arduous cunning; cliffs or cataracts passed by them as they slept or did not sleep. Always the mountain flowed and faded; only the golden sun, polarised to their intruding entities, lay placidly above those terraces which no astonishment could survey.
If it was air it blazed; if it was sound it froze. Swarms of boulders drifted by incuriously. If it was water if diffracted; if it was hard radiation it condensed. Acids fought with alkalis. There was a time and a 20
place. They could hear themselves sweat.
When Paradine reached the edge of the cliffs, he turned and called; "Come." Helena fell beside him; Kraag beat blindly at the air; further behind, Merganser tore away the last of his beautiful clothes. But they all entered into the golden forest where the tall feathery trees towered over them, making a bronze twilight. As they lay beneath the trees, the sound of their breath was like oceans.
"Is it?" said Merganser. "A place? Here?"
"No," laboured Paradine. "Instability. Total."
Helena touched one of the trees. "They're gentle," she said.
"Look," said Kraag. He dragged himself to his feet, his great paws dangling at his sides, a man in rags, and turned his bald head up to bronze light. "I've seen. Rain?"
A cloud of darkness swept down and came threshing through the golden trees. It rushed past and swept in again, a golden cloud quilted on the underside like lakes of tar, and with obsidian claws. They turned to run, but the great golden paw swept down once again, and the golden head of the suntyke slewed round to gnash at them with teeth of lightnings. It was
sunset. To right and left, as far as eye could see, the main squadrons stretched in level flight, until they disappeared into the twilight haze on each flank. Squadron by squadron, company by company, the
huge birds cruised steadily through the air, their wings moving in perfect unison, their plumage glowing like copper, their cruel golden eyes staring at nothing, their great yellow beaks thrust out like rams. Far below them across the scarlet fleece of clouds, the light-armed scouts swooped and whirled.
Merganser glanced proudly to left and right along the lines of his first full command, a veteran colonel of the Free Cavalry, the oldest and proudest warrior race in this universe. Slowly he raised his falchion, and all along the line, to right and left, tiny riders mounted on each bird raised their pennoned lances in salute, and their armour glowed points of phosphorescent blue in the twilight.
This was how the Free People lived, always aloft above the cloud-layer on their unresting birds, with whom they lived in a delicate symbiotic balance which had evolved in the long forgotten ages since they took to the air to avoid the wreck of their planet. They lived, bred and died on the backs of the birds; and the birds themselves lived always on the wing, carrying their young in pouches until they were fledged. Their world was a perpetual cloudscape, and they knew nothing of what lay below; there was the land of the dead, the great deep into which dead bird and dead man were cast.
In daylight they slept, the birds dozing on the wing, while the whiteness dazzled below. In broad starlight they gathered for festivals, the pipes and quill-harps harmonising to the drumming cries of the birds and the choirs of shrill voices. Or they sailed in procession among the solemn towers of cloud, or circled among curtains of vapour in the mysteries of the nuptial flight, swooping down to draw back and embody the ancestral spirits from the land of the dead. They dreaded the perilous upthrust of storms, which they placated with sacrifices; they rode the swooping currents of the jet-streams. But the favourite time of the People was the long, slow evening, when they rode the sunset line, and foraged, and were convivial. It was the human time between the blinding noon and the spirit-haunted starlight, when by preference they travelled like this, with the screen of Free Cavalry thrust out ahead to guard against enemies—drifters, mutated bats, avioids—and scout for new feeding-grounds.
The cloud-floor tumbled away below them, and they entered into a broad valley, as fine as they had ever seen, its towering walls all rose and ash and amber in the evening sun. The shining floor was sparkled thickly with ripe air-spores, on which, as far as eye could see, dark droves of skimmers 21
browsed. There was food and prey there for generations of the People. Perhaps if a stasis could be achieved, they would remain there forever, circling in this good place, and he would become High Chief and have many wives.
As the line of great birds bunched and swept out across the valley, he glanced back and saw the People swooping over the cloud-ridge behind him. A thousand points of blue fire flashed in the dusk in salute and greeting.
A shrill cry from the left brought him around quickly. At first it seemed that the evening sun had multiplied itself; and then he saw that great globes of metal were rising up out of the vapour on both sides of the valley, and shining blood-red in the sun.
He had barely time to shout the order to wheel about when the first bolt seared across the valley, striking across the flank, and the clouds shook with thunder. Bolt after bolt followed, and the great birds, maddened with fear, swirled and fought and collided. Clouds of skimmers swarmed up to blind them. Twisting about, clinging desperately to the harness, he saw that other rows of the globes had risen behind and among the People, and great chains of lightning twisted and leapt among them. The birds fell, blind and burning, and the lost riders flashed blue as they tumbled screaming into the clouds.
Stronger birds beat desperately upwards until they collapsed and plunged back, bringing new ruin among them. One such, he saw, fell down shrieking among the globes and struck one which collapsed in thunder, a great balloon of metal foil. He might yet save what was left of the People, though he would never lead them now. Calling to his bodyguard, who still swooped about him, he brought them into a ragged line and wheeled left into the rank of globes. Others riders caught the idea, and one, two globes burst and sank as the birds' great beaks rammed home. The range shortened, but too late, and the lightnings arced harmlessly over them; but the enemy only now showed themselves. From the cloud
wall drove a wedge of glittering metal machines and the goggled fliers swept them like scythes through the thinning ranks of birds. He had no time to know that, forgotten ages ago, there had been other accommodations, other ways of refuge, other evolutions.
A machine dived down at him, keening in the thin air. For a moment he saw, close and clear, the pilot's naked body shining with a thin film of oil, the masked face grinning at him. Then his bird screamed and side-slipped, one wing torn off by the glancing impact of the machine. Weeping for his lost
Kingdom he tumbled down, and the floor of the cloud-valley split open, and he fell towards the burning surface of the dead planet a hundred leagues below.
rock. He knew the rock and tasted it with all his senses. He lived with the harsh taste of basalt, the sweet-sourness of metallic ores, the blandness of oil-shales, the crusted saltiness of diluvian tracts, the light crumbling richness of organic deposits. It was his element, in which he lived, moving slowly among its endless caverns, gulfs and fissures.
Kraag, like all his kind, was a solitary. Except for the bleak brief matings which maintained his sparse race, he had no intimate contact with the others, for like him they lived in a state of perpetual mineral wonder. Sometimes two would sit together for a while, squat limbs working as they conveyed in
guttural sounds the qualities and textures they had experienced. Then one would reach out to taste or touch, and they would drift away, tasting, touching, slowly sensing out the changing textures of their world.
It was an immediate world, in which the tastes combined into a complicated ever-renewed pattern. He could dimly remember being a young one, as a time when the pattern was simple, and each sensation was new. And he was aware that the old ones slowly ceased to wander, settled in some favoured spot and at last became one with it. He found them occasionally; they crumbled richly.
22
Once, during his middle times, when life was most zestful and wandering widest, he found an old one, and spoke with it. It was one of the other ones, the mates, but too old, yet alive in a curious way. It lived in a cavern near a volcanic vent, and the very air was full of the pungent peppery scent of fire and rock.
Good here, said the old one. Stand and taste. Strong. Good.
Stand. Taste, said Kraag. Good.
Old, said the old one. Old tastes weak. Wants strong strong taste. Sharp. Hot. Rich.
Rich, said Kraag. Old one good good.
The old one rasped its touchers to show pleasure, and offered him a small nodule of jade. He found it excellent, and said so. This was followed by other politenesses, the old one meanwhile tasting pumice, and gradually it began to talk.
A past thing. A mate. Tasting, talking. It knew. A big wandering. Beyond the fire. A long cavern. Many fissures. Much water falling. Cliffs: long small cavern. Still water. Under water. Caverns of poor tasteless sand. Up a crevice. A place, air moving. Many tastes, faint, unknown. Fear fear fear. Down and back. Here.
Kraag felt the fear. Air moving, he said. Unknown tastes. No good thing.
The mate wanted wanted, much wanted, said the old one. Wandered. Not known.
He stood there, his body tingling with the intoxicating spiced taste of the fire, and his mind slowly turned over these new things. It disturbed him deeply, the way the old one not only remembered, but recalled another's memory and tried to pass on acquired knowledge. Even worse was the memory itself, of the purposeful journey and of the air that moved and tasted of fear. Yet as he chewed on it his mind, stimulated by the fiery scent, took hold, and the thing became so new, so tasty in his mind, that it drew all his sense towards it. It filled him with dim wonder, that something in his mind tasted more real than rock.
After a long time he took a piece of the pumice to calm himself, and said, Want. Going. Climb. New thing.
No, said the old one, no. Mate went. Not known.
Going, said Kraag. Here good. Old one good. Going.
And with a touch he went slowly towards the fiery scent. Thus began Kraag's journey, which he told of to others whom he met on the way so that it became a legend in the caverns, passing slowly from one to another, always dimmer and less communicable, until it died away into the rock.
Passing the fire was both pleasant and terrible. He felt his way along a narrow ledge which led up and down beside the fire-pit, and the intoxication of the fire made the rocks slip and stagger. Several times he swayed over, but always the reassurance of the rock-wall drew him back and its touch cleared his head. When at last he came out into the broad cavern beyond, his treaders seemed to be going different ways, and he grunted meaninglessly and waved his touchers about. Then he tripped on a stone, his mind darkened as it did after mating, and he lay still for a number of times.
