Eversion, page 21
The shape of the thing was difficult to make out in the vague focus of the long-range scanner. It could have been a piece of cosmic debris, a chunk of foreign rock, the curled-up husk of a man-sized alien spider, or something worse.
But I knew it to be none of these things.
‘That’s Ada Cossile,’ I blurted out, before I could censor my own words.
Mortlock turned from his console to look at me. Doubtless he remembered our awkward exchange after the ordeal of the Plastic Educator.
‘A derckossile? Is that a term with which I’m unfamiliar?’ Van Vught asked reasonably. ‘Some kind of mineralogical or chemical terminology?’
I had seen her clearly. She had been in a yellow spacesuit, crouching on all fours on a treacherously narrow ledge with the sheer drop of the shaft beneath her. I had not needed to see her face or any other identifying features. Who else could it be but the regal psychopomp of my dreams? She was back, despite everything. Despite the fact that she could not possibly be real.
‘One mile to contact,’ Murgatroyd said. ‘Scan is improving.’
Something moved within my chest as the image on the main viewer wobbled and reinstated itself, coming back at a higher clarity. I both wanted and did not want it to be her. I wanted to see her face again, to know that she was something more than a dream-figment, but in the same instant I desired nothing less than her total non-existence. Because the mere fact of Ada Cossile opened a door in my mind, a portal into something which I did not wish to face …
The image sharpened further. To my despair and relief I saw that it was not Ada Cossile.
It was a chunk of crumpled yellow metal, a piece of hull-plating that had been torn off and buckled and mangled so that it might, for an eyeblink, by someone who desired (or feared) it to be so, be taken for a crouching human form.
‘Duralloy composition,’ Murgatroyd said. ‘Partial markings legible … Eu, perhaps Eur …’
‘It’s not Frog!’ Mortlock blurted out. ‘It’s one of ours!’
Van Vught nodded sombrely. ‘Indeed it is – the remains of some poor vessel that strayed this way before us.’ Cautiously he added: ‘Alert condition amber. Resume normal descent speed.’
Eleven further miles we went down that chimney, until we emerged into the lightless space which formed the hollow middle of the Ice-Planetoid. Still at condition amber, Demeter dropped a mile or two into that abyssal space, her instruments and screens twitching against the tiniest speck of cosmic dust which had somehow found its way into that unfathomable void.
Our searchlights sprang on, stroking the canopy of ice above us, casting enormous arcs of yellow radiance. Strange tubular forms wormed across the ice, grey-green against its pearly lustre. The searchlights traced along these tentacular forms, following them as they thickened and united, as if we were tracking down the branches of some immense tree or river delta, groping our way towards the primal source from which they radiated.
Suddenly it was in our lights, projecting down from the ice like the rotten tip of some terrible misshapen fang, puncturing in from above. It was more than a thousand feet deep and wide, a mountain-sized nugget of a curious twisted and bulging form, convex and concave, smooth in some areas and rough-formed in others, like a patterned carpet that had been rolled up and knotted, over and over again, until nearly all sense of its former nature lay concealed.
Dupin was making strange stiff gestures with his hands, framing angles and intersections like a critic trying to find some sense in a piece of modernist art.
‘The geometry …’ he murmured. ‘The geometry! I think I can see it! Each quarter section is homeomorphic to a triangle!’ He stared back to us, wide-eyed and uncomprehending of our own inability to visualise what was plain to him. ‘Can’t you see? It’s beautiful! And hideous! It’s … not right!’
‘Alien minds conceived this form,’ said Topolsky, with a faint dismissiveness. ‘Minds far beyond our ken. Their notions of aesthetic propriety are as odd to us as our classical proportions would be to them.’
‘There is more to it,’ Dupin said, his forehead a mirror of sweat. ‘Something did this. Something twisted it! I think it went through some topological mishap, an accident of geometry! A wrinkle in the hyperspace manifold! An FTL jump that went wrong, leaving it … malformed! But I need to be more precise.’ He pressed fingers to his brow, digging in with his nails. ‘I must specify the exact set of transformations … near enough isn’t good enough! Near enough won’t help! I can’t fail!’
‘Easy,’ I said, seeing a vein bulging on the side of his temple.
‘No. I’ve got to solve it. I must solve it if we are to escape!’
‘Escape?’ Topolsky asked. ‘Why do you speak of escape, man? We haven’t even got there yet!’
‘I must be allowed to use the Cerebral Augmenter,’ Dupin said pleadingly. ‘It’s all I need to make the final breakthrough.’
‘You disagreed when we last discussed this, doctor?’ said Van Vught.
I nodded at the captain. ‘The Cerebral Augmenter has rarely been tested beyond Interplanetary Service laboratories. The men who used it then had all had many years of experience under the Plastic Educator, and still it took its toll on them. Yes, it can boost the subject’s intellect for a limited interval, allowing them to perform superhuman feats of mental agility, but at a considerable cost. Under service rules, the Cerebral Augmenter is to be considered an instrument of last resort, when all other measures have failed and there is but one chance to save a ship and its crew.’
‘Thank you, doctor,’ the captain said. ‘Mercifully, we are not yet in that position.’
Dupin looked at me despairingly. ‘You tell him, Doctor Coade! Tell him what’s really happened to us! Tell him we’re already inside it! Tell him we’ve been inside for months! Tell him we’re all dying in here! If no one helps us, we’ll end up like the others!’
‘Master Topolsky,’ said Van Vught. ‘You have clearly been working Monsieur Dupin beyond the point of exhaustion. I will not have him on my bridge in this confused, distressed condition. Have him removed, and forced to rest.’
‘Your orders do not extend to my party,’ Topolsky said. ‘If I deem that he is still useful, then it is my decision whether he leaves or remains.’
Van Vught stiffened in his command chair. ‘Then let me make a polite request. It would be better for the boy – for you – for all of us – if he were allowed to rest. Might Coronel Ramos be so kind as to see that it is so?’
Before Topolsky could frame an objection, Ramos raised his massive bulk from his own observation console. His blaster cartridges gleamed on his bandoliers. ‘I will see him back to his quarters, Captain Van Vught. You are right that he would be better for us when his mind is rested.’
‘Thank you, Coronel,’ said Van Vught, easing slightly.
The burly, boulder-headed Mexican offered a companionable hand to Dupin, and when that was ignored he gently but firmly took the boy under the armpits and elevated him bodily from his chair. Dupin, in his troubled, dreamlike state, offered no opposition. He was as pliant as a rag doll, his heels brushing the grid-plates as Ramos half carried, half dragged him to the waiting doors of the vac-lift.
‘Silas,’ Ramos said, eyeing me. ‘Perhaps you should come as well?’
An uneasiness delayed my answer. ‘Yes … yes. I should indeed attend. With your permission, captain?’
‘Do so.’
‘Coronel, would you be so kind as to bring the boy to the medical room, rather than his own quarters? I would prefer to keep him under close observation until I’m satisfied with his progress.’
‘Of course, Silas.’
I was just about to step into the vac-lift, joining Ramos and the boy, when Murgatroyd spoke out suddenly. ‘Captain! There’s something up there, jammed against those rough parts like a fly burned onto a light fitting! It looks like a ship – like …’ His throat seemed to dry on the words. ‘Just like one of ours!’
I did not bother turning around. There was no need. I already knew exactly what it would turn out to be. I could even have told them the full name of the ship from which that hull-plate had been ripped.
Ramos laid Dupin down on the bunk in the medical bay. With a tenderness belying his size and reputation for ferocity, Ramos drew the woven plasteel blanket over Dupin’s shivering form. Above the couch’s headboard, indicators detected his vital signs and began to respond accordingly.
‘He has a fever, Silas.’
‘I’m surprised he has anything left to give, the way Topolsky has been driving him. There’s only so much a body can take.’
‘It is not all Topolsky’s fault. The boy would work himself to exhaustion whether or not he was being asked to. This mania of his will be the death of him, given time. But he will not mind, so long as his name is attached to something more than a footnote.’
‘I’m not sure I would trade my life for a posthumous reputation.’
Ramos smiled kindly. ‘But then you are not Raymond Dupin. I do not think you or I can really understand what it is like to be him. The Cerebral Augmenter may seem like a devil’s bargain to men such as you or I, but our minds were never brilliant to begin with. We cannot judge.’
‘Nothing could matter enough to allow a man to burn out his own mind, just to seek some abstract mathematical solution.’
‘And if it were not abstract? If the fate of Demeter truly depended on his insights? If he was the only one of us who could make use of the Augmenter, in a decisive fashion?’
‘No matter what the regs say, I still wouldn’t agree to it.’
‘Master Topolsky would say that he does not need your agreement. Reluctantly, I would have to accept his opinion. Besides, what would be the crueller thing? To allow the boy that ecstasy of insight, or deny it him for ever?’
‘My only duty is to the welfare of the crew. There are no circumstances under which I would ever consent to treating Dupin like a pile of matchwood, to be burned for our convenience.’
‘We all have our certainties,’ Ramos replied. ‘The only thing of which I am certain is that all men have a point where their minds may change.’
‘Not mine,’ I asserted.
‘I would not be so sure.’
Ramos moved to the desk where the Cerebral Augmenter lay in its duralloy box. He opened the lid and extracted the double-lobed apparatus, with its close-fitting crown and bulbous, earmuff-like inductor modules.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Examining the apparatus. Is it accidental that you asked for him to be brought to the medical bay, Silas? He would have been no worse in his own room, with a guard to keep him from over-exerting himself. Yet the Cerebral Augmenter has been in your possession since we left Terra.’
‘Because it is experimental mental equipment, its use falls under my responsibility. Put it away now, please.’
Dupin stirred. His eyes opened to slits and he seemed to latch onto the object still within Ramos’s grasp. Reaching an arm out from beneath the plasteel sheet, he beckoned at the Cerebral Augmenter as if it were a vision of heaven itself, a celestial city breaking through clouds.
‘Please,’ he whispered. ‘I must have it.’
‘You fool,’ I snarled intemperately. ‘You’ve only made him more agitated!’
‘How easily the bonds of friendship fray,’ Ramos answered.
‘This is a torment!’ I retorted.
‘The real torment is in denying the boy the thing he craves.’
Dupin was straining now, leaning up from the couch, sweat pearling his brow and his cold eyes fixed wide on the prize. ‘Just a minute under the Augmenter,’ he said. ‘That’s all I need!’
‘Nothing matters this much!’ I said.
‘Everything matters, doctor! Everything matters! Oh, please let me have it!’ Some bargaining calculation worked behind that glistening brow. ‘You can say it was too dangerous, and I won’t ask again! But just give me one minute. That’s all I need. I know it. I can solve the problem of eversion, if only I have that minute. Then I can give you the path …’
I frowned. ‘The path?’
‘The path you need. To find your way through it! To reach the others!’
‘The others?’
Spittle foamed around his lips. ‘Others. No, not others. Us. To reach us. To help us get out. You need my solution. You need me.’
‘If it eases his troubled mind,’ Ramos reminded me in a near-whisper. ‘Would one minute really do so much harm?’
‘It has left men gibbering after forty-five seconds, never mind a minute. The worst of them pleaded to be sent to the annihilation cubicles rather than live with the ruins of their own sanity!’
‘It is his choice. Whatever he is going through now, it is surely beyond anything the Augmenter could inflict.’
The cool logic of the Coronel reached through my defences. Stated in those terms, the dilemma had only one ethical resolution. If my obligation as a doctor was to do no harm, then in denying him the Augmenter I was in violation of the most fundamental tenet of my profession.
‘Thirty seconds,’ I said. ‘That is all I’ll allow. Most men have endured that interval, albeit with varying after-effects.’
Ramos clearly sensed that I was beyond negotiation. ‘It is the right thing, Silas.’
‘You have forced my hand on this. Remember that.’
‘It need not be on your conscience.’
‘Good,’ I said brusquely.
Ramos moved to the boy. As he brought the Cerebral Augmenter within reach, Dupin lunged for it, snatching it from the Coronel’s hands and ramming it down over his sweat-matted crown. Nothing happened, of course, for the Augmenter was operated by a set of remote controls, built into a portable console encased within the hinged lid of the duralloy container.
I flipped the first of two switches. ‘Power to Cerebral Augmenter.’
A hum and a red glow emanated from the apparatus.
I observed the tell-tale lights on the console.
‘Power stable. Hold him, Ramos.’
He braced the boy firmly but gently. ‘I am.’
Eyeing the clock above the desk I worked the second switch. ‘Commencing induction.’
Dupin stiffened, his jaw tensing as he threw back his head in an ecstasy of elevated intellect.
The humming intensified; the red glow became an angry throb.
‘I can see it …’ Dupin strained to speak, his voice broken by awe and terror. ‘The bounding loops … A to H, I to J, J to A. The intersection of Section East with itself! The ordering of the quintuple points! I could not see it but now I see it!’
‘Easy,’ I murmured, as the clock hit the quarter-minute mark.
‘The sections form a tetrahedron! The tetrahedron is homeomorphic to a sphere! Self-intersection has been achieved!’
The clock indicated twenty-five seconds. My finger hovered over the switch, ready to de-energise the Augmenter.
‘Just a little more!’ Dupin shrieked. ‘I must verify the solution! You’ll only have one chance to get it right! There isn’t time to make another mistake …’
‘Give him what he needs,’ Ramos said.
‘No,’ I said, flicking the switch. ‘Thirty seconds in that thing is more than enough. It’ll already have felt like an hour to him.’
Dupin slumped back, mentally exhausted, as the apparatus quietened its humming and the red glow paled to nothing. Ramos removed the Augmenter, quiet concern on his face.
‘Was it enough, Dupin? Did you see what you needed to see?’
Dupin breathed slowly. His eyelids fluttered. He rubbed a knuckle against his lips, dragging loose a scurf of foam. ‘I saw it. I understood. I wanted to verify …’ His eyes welled with tears. ‘You should have let me verify! If they find a mistake in my analysis, they won’t remember me!’
‘I have faith in you,’ Ramos said. ‘There was no error in your analysis.’ Then, with a fearful edge to his voice. ‘Do you … remember it?’
‘Yes!’ Dupin exclaimed. ‘Of course I—’
There was a knock. Instinctively I turned to the door, before a ghastly dawning awareness informed me that the sound had not come from within the ship, but from outside. It had originated on the opposite side of the little cabin, from the direction of the portal in the outer wall.
The knock came again.
Wordlessly I moved to the portal. A sliding duralloy shield was down across it. I flicked a lever and the shield whisked aside.
‘What is it, Silas?’ Ramos asked, still regarding the boy with sympathy.
I looked out through the portal. Ada Cossile was just outside. She was in a tight-fitting yellow spacesuit of antique design, the sort that belonged to an era of flimsy ships and crude atomics. A mission patch, the flags of forgotten nations. She hung onto the outside of Demeter, one hand gripping a service rail, the other waggling a finger slowly in front of her faceplate. Her face floated beyond the gold-mirrored surface of her visor. Her lips moved and I read them with the effortlessness of dreams.
Let me in.
The visor fogged and cleared itself. Beyond it loomed open sockets, two vertical slits where a nose should have been, beneath them a grinning maw of tooth and bone.
I screamed until the world melted.
Chapter Twenty-one
‘Good,’ Ada Cossile said, still crouching before me in her yellow resistance suit. ‘You’re back in the room. I’ve got to give you credit: coming up with a fantasy which not only rationalises all the previous ones …’ She shook her head admiringly. ‘I had to work hard to reach you in there. Do you remember when I told you we had two hundred hours, at best? Strike that. We’re now looking at something nearer to one hundred and fifty. I lost you in there for another two days, Silas! We can’t afford to have that happen again.’
I mumbled: ‘There’s always lightning.’
‘Yes – good! That’s important. There’s always lightning. You’ll understand why a little later on, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves just now. What matters is you. We’ll get nowhere until you finally deal with the fact of what you are.’
