I like to play.
Before my mind’s eye, a transparent, glowing cube appeared. The cube was segmented into eight other stacked cubes, each of which flickered with confusing images. I looked inward at the cubes, and the images began to coalesce and harden. In each cube, except the one on the lower right, a disembodied head floated within its prison, as a pilot floats within his ship’s pit. Each face was scarred with the rictus of terror and insanity. Each face stared open-mouthed at me – stared through me – as if I were air. I recognized the faces, then. The historians had taught me well. They were the faces of Wicent li Towt, Ishi Mokku and the others who had come before me.
What is death, Mallory? The pilots are each lost in a dividing branch of the decision tree. They are as lost and forgotten as poems of the Aeschylus. But someday, I will remember them.
I wondered how she had encapsulated the pilots (and myself) in the infinite tree. There are ways, of course, to open a window into the manifold at random, to send a pilot unmapped and unprepared into an infinite tree. But She had used none of these ways. She had done something else, something marvellous. How was it possible? I wanted to know. Had Her consciousness really moulded the shape of the manifold, twisted the very strands of deep reality, much as a child braids together ropes of clay?
I did not know. I could not know. I had seen less than a millionth part of her, and She had probably needed only the tiniest portion of that part to speak with me mind to mind. I was like a grain of sand trying to understand an ocean from a few eddies and currents sweeping it along; I was like a flower trying to deduce space travel from the faint tickle of starlight upon its delicate petals. To this day I search for words describing my impression of the Entity’s power, but there are no words. I learned – if that is the right word for knowledge which comes in a sudden flash of insight – I was given to understand that She manipulated whole sciences and thought systems as I might string words into a sentence. But Her ‘sentences’ were as huge and profound as the utterances of the universe itself. She had reached truths and ways of knowing far beyond even the metaphilosophies of the alien Fravashi. She, a goddess, played with concepts which could remake the universe, concepts unthinkable to the mind of Man. While most of my race lived out their days muddled and confused in darkness, She had solved problems and found new directions of thought which we had never dreamed of, and worse, She had done so as easily as I might multiply two times one.
The mechanics often bemoan their oldest paradox, which is this: The strings weaving the fabric of the universe are so infinitesimal that any attempt to study them will change their properties. The very act of observation perturbs that which is observed. On Old Earth, it is said, there was a king who carked the atoms of everything around him so that all he touched turned into gold. The fabled king could neither eat nor drink because his food and wine tasted of nothing but gold. The mechanics are like this king: Everything they ‘touch’ turns into ugly lumps of matter, into electrons, quarks, or zeta-neutrinos. There is no way for them to perceive deep reality except through the golden, distorting lenses of their instruments or through the touch of their golden equations. In some unfathomable way, the Entity had transcended this prison of matter. To see reality directly, as it really is – this, I thought, must be the privilege of a godly intellect.
Do you see the pilots, Mallory Ringess?
I saw insanity and chaos. I stared into the cube containing the undead pilots. The black, sharp face of Jemmu Flowtow was leaking drool from its narrow lips.
– You trapped the pilots; then you could free them. And me.
But they are free. Or will be free when the universe has remade itself. What has been will be.
– That’s scryer talk.
The time distortions: When the universe has expanded outward so that the closest two stars are as far apart as the Grus Cloud of galaxies is now from the Canes Venatici, after billions of your years, the pilots will be as you see them, frozen into forever nowness. It is easier to stop time, is it not, than to restart it? To kill than create? But creation is timeless; creation is everything.
– The pilots … in the tree where the infinities branch into insanity, have you seen their insane frozen faces, then?
There is no help for insanity. It is the price that some must pay.
– I feel like I’m going insane now down the branching of this tree where it splits into two and two into for insanity you say there’s no helping me escape from infinity and stop playing games with my mind!
You, Mallory, my wild man, we will play together, and I will teach you all there is to know of instantaneity, and perhaps insanity, too. Will you join the other pilots? Watch carefully, the empty cube is for you.
I noticed then what I should have seen immediately: that eight pilots had been lost within the Entity, but only seven of the ghastly death’s-heads floated within the cubes. In none of them did I see the huge, walruslike head of the Tycho.
– What happened to the Tycho?
I am the Tycho; the Tycho is me, part of me.
– I don’t understand.
The Tycho exists in a memory space.
Inside my mind the little girl’s voice returned, only it was no longer quite so sweet, no longer quite the voice of a little girl. There were sultry, dark notes colouring the innocent fluting and I heard:
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
He was a savage man beneath his silken robes, a lovely man, a demon lover of a man. When I saw what a wild intelligence he had, I severed his brain from his body, and I copied it synapse by synapse into a tiny pocket of one of my lesser brains. Behold John Penhallegon.
Suddenly, within the pit of my ship, an image of the Tycho appeared. He was so close to me that I could have touched his swollen red nose as one reaches for a snow apple. He was – had been – a thick-faced man with yellowish incisors too long for his blubbery lips. He had a mass of shiny black hair hanging in clumps halfway down his back; his jowls hung from his bristly chin halfway to his chest. ‘How far do you fall, Pilot?’ he asked in a voice thick with age, repeating the traditional greeting of pilots who meet in faraway places. His voice rang like a bell through the pit of my ship. Apparently the Entity could generate holograms and sound waves as easily as She could jiggle electrons. ‘Shalom,’ he said. With his red, sweaty fingers he made the secret sign that only a pilot of our Order would know.
‘You can’t be the Tycho,’ I said aloud. The sound of my own voice startled me. ‘The Tycho is dead.’
‘I’m John Penhallegon,’ the imago said, ‘I’m as alive as you are. More alive, really, because I can’t be killed so easily.’
‘You’re the voice of the Entity,’ I said as I wiped the sweat from my forehead.
‘I’m both.’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘Don’t
