by William Spencer
Given immortality, how would Man cope with the enforced necessity of thinking forever? Author William Spencer presents a novel idea of the twilight of humanity.
* * * *
Timon put out a claw and selected “surfing”. His environment shivered, rippled and began to change.
As if through blurring grey jelly he saw the sub-tropical beach with its long sweep of curving sand beginning to appear. The shoreline struggled into view, decked with a white skein of surf. The sand grew rapidly yellower, the sea bluer.
In a matter of moments the illusion was complete. It was no longer an illusion, but a new order of reality which enfolded Timon, and drew him into itself.
He found himself standing on the sand, holding his tall, lightweight surfboard at his side. He felt his lungs filling with the health-giving tang of the sea. His chest heaved gratefully on the salty breeze, which pressed against his tanned flesh almost like a solid wall, solid at least as the creaking well-filled sail of a skimboat. The sand glowed warmly under his bare feet.
Timon stood tall and erect, sensing the strength in his muscular, toughened limbs. He stepped forward decisively into the seething foam of the shallows. With powerful strokes he paddled his board easily seawards, negotiating the curling heavy rush of the breakers. Soon he was positioned far out, where he could catch the big wave as it came, growling like some angry sea-beast, to leap forward and dash itself on the shore.
He knew intimately that wave. Knew how its crest heaved, grew feathery, and began to smoke with descending spume. Knew the exact moment at which to launch himself forward, paddling desperately at first until the moment of triumph when he could stand erect and feel the board shuddering and trembling as it plunged through the water under his taut, keen feet. He knew also those other moments at which it was too early or too late, when the big wave would toss him contemptuously aside, or smash down on him like tons of crushing shale.
He had ridden that same wave a million times.
Now he knew it with the exactitude with which one gets to know any recording. How, in a piece of music, one knows, and comes to anticipate with tedium, the exact moment at which the flautist is forced to snatch his aching breath, or the horn-player just manages to retrieve a false note in the complex labyrinth of his instrument.
Even as he rode the wave with masterly élan, weaving in crisply elegant movements across the track of the wave, his body poised on the board with the utmost nonchalance— even as he felt the surge of satisfaction in his strong young limbs—Timon felt also a corresponding inner wave of tedium, of infinite tedium.
A million times was too many times.
Though the recording contained many variant channels, many different chains of cause and effect, which could be explored and experimented with, ultimately one got to know them all. If A, then B, then C ... as far as N. On the other hand, if A’, then B’, then C’ . . . to N’ If An . . . Timon’s brain churned wearily, while his elegant body pirouetted on the surfboard, with the ease born of endless practice.
There was a symphony of delightful sensory impressions, a warm glow of endocrine gratification, all built into the multichannel recording. Timon felt all this, as he had felt it so many times before. But at the centre of the illusion there was still the real Timon. At the centre, Timon knew himself as he really was: a bag of decrepit self-hatred, a bundle of senile pessimism and ennui.
He would have liked to switch the whole thing off. Any escape from the facile, superficial syrup of the recording would have been welcome. It was sugary, sickly, completely trivial, he thought. But trapped as he was within the quasi-reality of the recording, it was impossible for him to reach the controls and escape. Once selected, the whole tedious thing had to run its course along the pre-empted channel. Or if you preferred to think about it that way, along the pre-destined, fated line.
So it was only after scores of accomplished passes with the surfboard that Timon recognized with relief the sensation of pleasant weariness suffusing healthily through his sunbronzed limbs. He steered the surfboard into the shallows, leaped lightly from it, and gathered it into his arms.
Without a halt in his movements he continued to run forward splashily through the last few yards of water, and up the beach until he reached the point where he flung himself flat on his back in the warm sand, his arms and legs flung wide.
He breathed deeply and easily, while the seawater ran in little warm rivulets from his chest, and dried out in a thin white powder of salt under the scorching sun.
The gusts of warm breeze came desultorily over his delighted flesh; the sun rode through the few wisps of scudding cloud in triumphant splendour; the surf continued to boom relentlessly on the shore.
At last, unbelievably, the scene faded, greying out from his sense channels, and leaving him back in the recording control room. He was himself again.
Timon gibbered and snuffled with pleasure. His shrivelled, shrunken body trembled, almost writhing with satisfaction, on the pillowy, contoured couch that supported his frail spine.
He peered forward with the twin visual receptors which cunning surgery had recessed into his eye sockets. They gave only a dim, monochromatic rendering of his surroundings. But that scarcely mattered. He could see clearly enough for all practical purposes the control with its glowing indicator lamps, arched in a semicircle around his couch. The thousands of tabs and buttons enabled Timon to select any recording he wished from the enormous repertoire of the machine. The controls were all conveniently disposed within easy reach of the plastic claw with which his one remaining arm terminated.
Timon viewed with some distaste the thick ropelike duct which was connected to him somewhere in the region of the navel, and which supplied all the sustenance that his feeble body required. Outside his range of vision was the flexible cable entering the top of his head, which provided the rich flood of sensory data that went into the illusory world created in his mind by the recordings.
Timon looked eagerly to see if the indicator lamp was alight above the sleep selector button. His lips trembled in a voiceless muttering when he found that it was still unlit. Just to be sure that he was registering the impression correctly, he pushed the sleep button sharply several times, but no answering wave of oblivion rose from the depths of the machine to give release to his tired brain. A high-pitched gibbering came from the shapeless lower face of Timon. The slit of his mouth dribbled.
The machine was programmed so that sleep could not be selected more frequently than at twenty-four hour intervals.
Timon consulted the time-sphere. Five more hours to go. It seemed to him like a grey waste of horror that he had to navigate through; a grey heaving unlit sea of unthinkable boredom.
His claw hovered indecisively as he cast about the control-bank for a recording which, though infinitely tedious, would be less hideously unpalatable than some of the more unbearably hackneyed ones.
He muttered incoherently as he considered the whole bank of recordings labelled “women”. These were some of the more well-worn tracks. There were close on a thousand of them, all very beautiful in their different ways: blondes, brunettes, redheads; French, Japanese, German, Italian girls —even, for good measure, an Eskimo female. Perhaps to a younger man they might have been enticing; but unfortunately he knew them all too well; knew intimately all their little ways.
He decided that he couldn’t possibly bring himself to face one of them at the moment.
What on earth was he to select? The indecision was beginning to make him feel quite ill.
To make matters worse, a warning light began to wink rhythmically on the console. Beneath it was the single word: “random!”
Timon knew well enough what that meant. If he failed to make a selection manually in the next two minutes, the machine would choose a recording for him. A random number generator inside the labyrinthine works would click into action and come up with a reference number: the corresponding recording would then be foisted upon him, whether he liked it or not.
At all costs this had to be avoided, thought Timon. Impulsively, he twitched forward and struck with his claw the tab marked “4-DIMENSIONAL CHESS: POLYOVSKI”.
In a few moments the recording was establishing itself around him: the huge luminous contest hall, a hemispherical windowless dome, glowed round him on all sides. Then his particular opponent gelled into view, seated opposite him. Polyovski was a rather humourless, bearded Russian, who played a good game, in spite of his somewhat irritating habit of leaning forward and clicking his fingernail against his large shining front teeth when things were going against him.
The chance indicator above the twin globes of the clocks showed that Timon had drawn Negative in the first game, and thus had the first move. He bent forward intently over the huge shining crystal within which the game was played, studying its complex internal planes from first one angle and then another. As one shifted one’s viewpoint in relation to the crystal, there were sudden discontinuous changes in the apparent line-up of the inner geometry—the inevitable distortions caused by representing a 4-dimensional chess board within the limits of 3-dimensional space.
Timon of course was entirely familiar with the board, and with the disposition of the electronic charges which served as men. He was running over in his mind the hundreds of thousands of opening moves, the various combinations and gambits, all of them dreadfully familiar. He knew exactly the reply which Polyovski would make to any one of them.
Timon rubbed his handsome chin. One game is as good as another, he told himself. Perhaps the 3A-463-P22 Attack had as many interesting variations as any.
He reached forward an elegantly manicured hand, which had just enough nervous intellectual strength to prove the virility as well as the intelligence of its owner. With his fingertip he touched one of the sensitive nodes of the crystal. Instantly the coloured points of light within the crystal changed their alignment. He glanced across at Polyovski’s hooded, brooding eyes, but his opponent’s face was already abstracted in the contemplation of an answering move.
Timon stifled a yawn.
Sure enough Polyovski replied with predictable conformism, advancing his upper left inner oblique positive charge one quantum.
Timon sighed. Why on earth didn’t the sober Russian go crazy just once in a while, and do something that was not in the book ?
But perhaps his own game was not free from the taint of dullness? A glint of amusement came into Timon’s grey eyes as he conceived the utterly unorthodox third lower right inner traverse. But even as he made the move, he saw that Polyovski evinced not the smallest ripple of surprise, not the slightest twitch of a shaggy eyebrow.
Then Timon remembered: two centuries earlier they had spent several months working out every possible variation of that particular move. No wonder his opponent had failed to register the hoped-for amazement.
In a few moments, the whole pattern clicked back into place in Timon’s brain. The whole system of variations following from that particular gambit, or unorthodoxy, came welling back clearly. It was only a matter of ...
Without delay, without haste, Timon’s hand reached forward to reply to his opponent’s further move. He saw his next series of moves clearly laid out in his mind, and his hand went forward to signal the first of them to the crystal.
Even as he did so, Timon felt the wave of ennui gripping him remorselessly by the throat.
The unflickering luminosity of the silent contest hall continued to beat down on Timon’s head, on his profusion of curly chestnut hair, and on the black frizzled hair and bushy beard of the big Russian, as their heads bent over the game.
There was no sound except for a light shuffle of the feet as one of them leaned forward or changed his position slightly. The light, the silence, did not change. But Timon found himself abstracted from what was going on in the big hall. A part of his mind was engaged in the game, a part of him still wanted to win, and win in the series of aesthetically pleasing forcing moves that was characteristic of his best play. His hands still moved to touch the nodes of the crystal where necessary. But it was really only a tiny part of his mind that was so engaged.
The rest of his mind was a grey aching vacuum—a painful void which, trapped as he was within the illusion of the chess game and the contest hall, he could only partially bring into focus.
The game dragged on with unbelievable slowness. It seemed like an eternity in limbo before Timon found himself back once more on his padded couch, back in his own shrivelled, wizened, but authentic form. He gasped and wheezed with a kind of relief. He gulped on the sensation of genuine senility and real fatigue.
Fatigue! But there were still another two hours to go before he could successfully operate the sleep switch. His mind and power of decision seemed to go, as he contemplated those further two hours. He chawed restlessly on the prospect of them, gnawing away at them in his mind as a rat gnaws at a piece of stale crust. He did not see the winking “random!” bulb, until those last foggy moments when he realized that he was being pitchforked, without option, into some unidentified experience.
He was slotted inexorably into the groove of another recording. What was it to be ... ?
Timon blinked briefly as he adjusted his eyes to the submarine gloom of the night-club. The tables were dimly lit, but a sharp light flooded the stage in the centre of the cavernous interior.
Timon looked round at the elegant audience; the men in evening dress, the women in chic little gowns. His own partner, a honey-blonde of splendid proportions, was wearing a dress that in the semi-darkness seemed to flash like a million sharp little jewels whenever she moved. She glanced at him warmly, pursed her tender lips in the shape of a kiss, and fondly squeezed his hand under the table. Timon drew his hand away quickly, smiling faintly and endeavouring to conceal his boredom.
The audience were toying with their drinks, and exchanging desultory small talk among themselves, but nevertheless there was an air of expectancy as the light on the stage grew steadily more intense. Timon knew what was coming.
In a few moments, expectation was fulfilled. The poly-stereophonics blared an introductory theme, and a pink cloud drifted slowly on to the stage. On an authoritative chord, the cloud dissolved and revealed a troupe of girl dancers.
The plumes of their headdresses tossed like the manes of prancing horses. The girls writhed to the sinuous electronic melodies. Their lithe bodies were supple under a film of irridescent dust, which threw back like hoar-frost the shining spotlights.
Timon watched listlessly as the girls were transformed by the coloured lights from acid-green sylphs into electric-blue harpies. It was all very cultural. But not even the warm and cuddlesome rose-pink finale was able to arouse much interest in his exhausted brain.
Timon glanced again at his partner, and saw her bland face grow sultry and thoughtful as the male dancers came on and the music grew more vigorous in its rhythms. She looked quickly at him under long blonde eyelashes which reminded Timon of some bovine animal. She evidently wanted to know that he was enjoying the entertainment as much as she was.
The girl performers, with the arrival of the men, threw themselves into the dance with renewed energy, and were achieving the most extraordinary postures.
Timon sipped his drink. Absinthe laced with mescalin, he seemed to remember that it was. The blend was good, very good. The air in the night-club was getting warmer and thicker. It seemed to Timon that the revolving coloured lights were beginning to rotate inside his head.
He put down his glass and looked again at the girl beside him, appraisingly. She was really quite a peach. That ample, but perfectly poised bosom. Those broad, experienced hips. Her bare arms, resting on the table, tapered in the subtlest modulation of smooth curves from shoulder to wrist. Perhaps it was the drink, but Timon began to feel a flicker of unwonted interest.
In another moment he would suggest that they went back to his flat together....
He took a long, lazy, voluptuous gulp of his drink. Visions of shapely, sprawling, cavorting limbs, and of the profound softness of the big bed, passed fondly through his mind.
The dance now seemed to be developing into something very like an orgy. The lights were flickering and whirling. Timon had one eye on the glittering stage, the other on his tempting and amenable partner.
The scene on the stage now exploded in an abandoned finale, and with a final flourish on the sub-drums, the dancers whirled outwards with the swift scintillations of a bursting firework. One of the girls came rushing towards Timon and leaped breathlessly into his lap. Timon gazed at the taut shining girl, slim as an eel, and his fuddled brain sent a nerve signal to his hand to paw at her delectable torso. But nothing happened. His hand refused to act; and Timon realized that he had taken one long sip too many of the insidious drink.
The rainbow lights began to spin fiercely in his brain, creating endless abstract patterns of pure colour, into which intruded, occasionally, a glimpse of more earthy female beauty.
Timon was dimly aware that he had lost contact with the night-club. He was launched on a chemically induced dream in which, paradoxically, he was aware that he was dreaming. He knew that the drug-provoked fantasy would last now until this final episode of the day ended and it was time to sleep.
Even in his delirium, Timon felt the strange pull of the idea of sleep. It was supremely desirable.
But the dream went on and on, for an immeasurable length of time, it seemed. Countless images of weird beauty or unspeakable horror passed before his closed eyes, and were forgotten as they came and went. It seemed to Timon, watching the succession of phantasms, that the whole range of possible experience was flickering before his consciousness.
He had reached the shores of what was ultimately possible for his mind. He realized now, finally, that there was nothing more for him to experience.
As Timon contemplated the final limits of his existence, the phantasms slowly cleared....
He was back again, once more himself, in the grey half-light of the control room. He lay on the couch, before the console with its banked rows of selectors.
Timon looked at the controls, and at the glowing spherical clock, and knew that it was time to press the sleep selector. He also knew that simply to press it was not enough.
Of what use was it, to sleep for a mere eight hours, and then wake up again, and begin again the round of tedious and familiar recording sequences ?
He strained his dim eyes to see clearly the sleep button. He gathered the shreds of his senile force together, reached out a skinny, trembling arm, and searched and probed with his slender claw.
The claw skidded on the shiny surface of the panel, failing to find a purchase. Timon persisted, summoning the last dregs of his energy for a supreme effort. Suddenly the claw jammed itself in the panel, and would not move.
For an instant Timon panicked; then he sighed with satisfaction, realizing that he had achieved his goal. Through oncoming waves of profound drowsiness, he saw his claw firmly fixed into the panel, locking the sleep button permanently in the “on” position.
* * * *
The Surveillance Centre, at the hub of the vast concourse of recording control rooms, was a place of undisturbed calm.
Machines whirred slowly about their diverse duties at an unvarying speed. Nothing could halt or accelerate their methodical, unhurried activity.
Certainly not the flashing red light, winking insistently, on Panel 23....
For the moment, it could and would be ignored. This was, after all, only one red light among the many flickering signals which had to be watched and dealt with.
At length Machine Z-137 rolled slowly forward, grumbling a little in its whining servomechanisms, and identified the source of the trouble. Complex 23 Timon. Sleep selector locked on.
The Machine’s computer flickered briefly. The fault was a commonplace one, and the remedy was routine. No need for an immediate consultation at higher level. The usual report, filed in due course, would cover this one. But first, to attend to the little local difficulty.
The Machine rumbled down an aisle between racks of heavy shelving loaded with assorted recording gear. Not much more than halfway down, it turned sharply left into the narrow runway between adjacent racks. Then the Machine began to scan up and down the shelves for the appropriate identification tag. Its antennae flickered over the racks like a braille reader; its hydraulic legs lengthened or shortened absurdly as it consulted high or low shelves.
Now the Machine had found what it was looking for. It reached up and slowly slid a heavy memory drum from the rack, cradling the drum carefully in its manipulators. Then it made the leisurely journey back to the Surveillance Centre and, crossing the floor, went down the long corridor that led to Complex 23
When it reached the control room of the Complex, the double doors opened automatically. The Machine spared only a brief glance at Timon’s slumped, inert figure-on the dimly-lit couch.
Moving round behind the arc of the control console, the Machine carefully placed the memory drum on a low table. Then it moved forward to check over all the internal monitor circuits, looking for possible neural damage.
Only when it was satisfied on this score did the Machine crack open the inner housing. One by one the multiple pickup heads were clicked aside, exposing the grey, finely-etched surface of the old worn memory drum already inside the complex. Patiently the Machine worked to ease out the worn memory drum. The label on the end read Universe 23c.
Depositing the old memory drum on the table, it picked up the new drum, labelled Universe 23d, and slid this gently into the empty mountings. After checking that the new drum spun freely on its bearings, the Machine clicked the pick-up heads back into position around it.
It was the work of only a few moments, then, for the Machine to free Timon’s claw from the sleep selector button.
The time-sequencer had been re-set, so there was no delay. The Machine paused for a few moments, watching Timon’s chest heaving like one newly awakened from a slumber as deep as death. It observed his visual receptors click open once more.
Satisfied, the Machine turned and, without looking back, moved out through the double doors and whirred quietly away down the corridor.