place in the proof array. This mental manipulation of symbol into proof has a special name: We call it the number storm because the rush of pure mathematical thinking is overwhelming, like a blizzard in midwinter spring.
With the number storm carrying me along towards the moment of proof, I passed into dreamtime. There was an indescribable perception of orderedness; there was beauty and terror as the manifold opened before me. The number storm intensified, nearly blinding me with the white light of dreamtime. I wondered, as I had always wondered, at the nature of dreamtime and that wonderful mental space we call the manifold. Was the manifold truly deep reality, the reality ordering the shape and texture of the outer universe? Some cantors believe this (my mother is not one of these), and it is their faith that when mathematics is perfectly realized, the universe will be perfectly understood. But they are pure mathematicians, and we pilots are not. In the manifold there is no perfection. There is much that we do not understand.
I was deep in dreamtime when I realized I did not understand the type of the decision tree branching all about me. I was close to my proof – I needed only to show that the Lavi set was embedded in an invariant space. But I could not show this, and I did not know why. It should have been a simple thing to do. When the tree divided and split into a million and then a billion different branches, I began to sweat. Dreamtime intensified into that terrifying, nameless state I thought of as ‘nightmaretime.’ Suddenly I proved that the Lavi set could not be embedded in an invariant space. My heart was beating like a panicked child’s. With my panic came despair, and my proof array began to crash, to shatter like ice crystals ground beneath a leather boot. There would be no proof, I knew. There would be no mapping to a point-exit in real space. I would not fall out around any star, near or distant. I was not merely lost in a hideous decision tree, I had stumbled – or been propelled – into an infinite tree. Even in the worst of decision trees, there is a probability that a pilot will find the correct branch among the billion billion branchings. But in an infinite tree, there is no correct branch, no branch leading to an exit into the warm sunlight of realspace. The tree spreads outward, one branch growing into another, and into ten centillion others, on and on, dividing and redividing into infinity. From an infinite tree there is no escape. My neurons would gradually disassociate, synapse by synapse, leaving me to play with my toes as a child plays with the beads of an abacus. I would be insane, blinded by the number storm, frozen in forever dreamtime, forever drooling into infinity. Or, if I turned away from my ship-computer and let my mind go quiet, there would be nothing, nothing but an empty black coffin carrying me into the hell of the manifold.
I knew then that I had lied to myself utterly. I was not ready to chance everything to experience a goddess; I was not ready to face death at all. I remembered I had chosen my fate freely. I could only blame myself and my foolish pride. My last thought, as a scream formed upon my lips and I began hearing voices inside me, was: Why is man born to self-deception and lies?
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.
Lyall Watson, Holocaust Century Eschatologist
Somewhere it is recorded that the first man, Gilgamesh, heard a voice inside him and thought it was the voice of God. I heard voices reverberating through my inner ear, and I thought my fear of the infinite tree had driven me insane.
Why?
It is a sign of insanity when a man hears voices born not of lips but of his own loneliness and longings. Unless, of course, it is the voice of his ship stimulating his aural nerves, suffusing sounds directly into his brain.
Why is man?
But a ship-computer has little free will; it cannot choose what words or what tone of voice to speak within a pilot. It is possible for it to receive signals from another ship-computer and to translate these signals into voices, but it is not programmed to generate its own signals.
Why is man born?
I knew my ship-computer could not be receiving signals from another lightship because the propagation of signals through the manifold was impossible. It was possible, I told myself, that some of my ship’s neurologics had weakened and died. In that case, my ship was insane, and as long as I remained interfaced with it, so was I.
Why is man born to self-deception and lies?
If I did not like the way my ship was echoing my deepest thoughts, it terrorized me when it began speaking voices, in a hodgepodge of the dead languages of Old Earth. Some of these languages I understood from my learning to read; others were as alien to me as the scent language of the Friends of Man is to human beings.
Shalom, Instrumentum Vocale, la ilaha il ALLAH tat tvam asi, n’est-ce pas, kodomo-ga, wakiramasu? Hai, and thereto hadde he riden, no man ferre, poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina which he called the stars of the Solid State Entity und so wir betreten, feuer-trunken – Ahnest du den Schöpfer? It is I. Mallory Ringess.
So, I thought, this is insanity, to greet myself as a tool with a voice, to speak of entering the Entity ‘drunk with fire,’ whatever that meant. I recognized the phrase, Ahnest du den Schöpfer. It was a line of a poem written in Old High German which meant something like, ‘Do you sense your creator?’ I ‘sensed’ that my ship and myself had gone completely mad, either that or it really was receiving a signal through the warped manifold of the Entity. And then I heard:
If thou beest born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee.
So, the Entity did like ancient poetry. If any signal were being sent through the manifold, I thought, it must be coming from Her. The voices began to modulate and resonate into a single voice. In a way, it was a feminine voice, at once seductive and lonely, beatific and sad. It was a voice uncertain as to whether or not it would be understood. Hearing this lovely voice echo the dead languages of Old Earth made me guess that She was probing to discover my milk tongue. But I was mistrustful of this thought the moment it entered my mind. Perhaps I desired too ardently to speak with Her; perhaps I was only speaking with myself.
No, Mallory, you are speaking with me.
– But I’m not speaking at all; I’m thinking.
Do not flatter yourself that what occurs in your mind is true thought.
– How can you read my thoughts … my mind, then?
You are inside of me and I am inside of you. Yin-yang, lingam-yoni, outside-inside. I am an entity, but I am not solid. Not always.
– What are you?
I am the frenzy; I am the lightning; I am your refining fire.
– I don’t understand.
You are a man. Verily, a polluted stream is man. What have you done to purify yourself?
So, I thought, I had longed
