Cryptozoic! Read online

  The wish to fight left him. From their point of view, they were perfectly correct in looking at it that way. True, their manner from the start had offended him, but possibly they were less responsible for that than he had allowed.

  "I'm off," he announced. "Lenny can keep his girl!"

  It was time to mind again. He'd get to a safe place and then he would mind to another time and space. He picked his way into the hills, looking back frequently to see they were not following him. After a while, he heard their motor bikes, was aware of the loneliness of the sound, turned to watch their lasered lights vanish down the strand. The Dark Woman was phantasmally there; he watched the disappearing lights through her form. He had no doubt that she was on duty, and that she came from some remote future of his own. Through the sockets of her eyes, the stars of Boötes glistened.

  There was a noise near at hand, indicating someone in his own continuum, sandwiched with him between all the rest of time. The girl was following him.

  "Wouldn't your yobbo boy friend have you back?"

  "Don't be like that, Bush! I want to talk to you."

  "O God!" He took her arm, pulled her through the darkness. At least there were no obstacles to trip over on a generalized floor. Without saying a word more to each other, they climbed up to his tent and crawled in.

  Chapter 2

  UP THE ENTROPY SLOPE

  When he woke, she was gone.

  He lay for a long while looking up at the tent roof, wondering how much he cared. He needed company, although he was never wholly comfortable with it; he needed a woman, although he was never wholly happy with one. He wanted to talk, although he knew most talk was an admission of noncommunication.

  He washed and dressed and climbed outside. Of Ann there was no sign. But of course in mind nobody left any tracks behind, so that the vivid green vegetation on every side was untrampled, although Bush had walked through it a dozen times on his way to doing sentry duty with the lobe fins.

  The sun shone. Its great untiring furnace poured down its warmth on a world in which the coal deposits had yet to be laid in memory of a vintage period of its combustion. Bush had a headache.

  For a while, he stood there scratching himself, wondering what had caused it: the excitements of the day before, or the relentless pressure of the empty eons. He decided it was the latter. Nobody could be said really to live in these vacant centuries; he and the tershers and the rest traveled back here, but their relationship to the actual Devonian was merely tentative. Man had conquered passing time; at least, the intellects at the Wenlock Institute had -- but since passing time was no more than a tic (tick?) of Homo sapiens, the universe remained unmoved by the accomplishment.

  "Are you going to do a groupage of me?"

  Bush turned. The girl was standing above him, some feet away. Because the dimension change between them and the world filtered out light, she appeared dark and wraith-like. He could hardly see her face; mind-travel had reduced them all to spectres, even to each other.

  "I thought you'd gone back to your friends!"

  Ann came down to him. She was swinging her air-leaker carelessly. With her tunic open and her hair uncombed, she looked more of a vagabond than ever. Feeling his biceps, she said, "Did you hope I'd gone back or fear I'd gone back?"

  He frowned at her, trying to make out what she was really like. Human relations exhausted him; perhaps that was why he had hung about here so long, back in the vacuum of exhausted time.

  "I can't make you out, girl. No offense. It's like looking through two thicknesses of glass. Nobody ever turns out to be what they seem."

  She dropped her sharp look and scrutinized him almost sympathetically. "What's bugging you, sweetie? Something deep, isn't it?"

  Her sympathy seemed to open up a wound. "I couldn't begin to tell you. Things are so involved in my head. It's all a muddle."

  "Tell, if it'll make you feel better. I've got all the Devonian in the world!"

  He shook his head. "What your girl friend Josie said yesterday. That this should be the end of the world rather than the beginning. I could only get myself disentangled if that would happen, if I could start my life again."

  Ann laughed. "Back to the womb, eh?"

  He realized he did not feel well. That would have to be reported to the Institute; you could lose your mind back in these damned silent mazes. He could not reply to Ann, or face up to her revolting suggestion. Sighing heavily, he went over to his tent and pulled the cord to let it deflate. It collapsed in a series of shudders; he never cared to watch the process, but now some chattering thing inside him gave a commentary on it, likening it to a disappointed womb from which a lucky child had managed to escape.

  Stoically, he folded up the tent and put it away. With the girl standing watching him, he drew out his rations and made his simple preparations for breakfast. Mind-travelers carried a basic food kit, frugal in the extreme but easy to deal with. He had replenished his stores several times from other minders who were surfacing -- returning to their present -- early because they could not stand the silences, and from a friend of his who ran a small store in the Jurassic.

  As his pan of beef essence steamed, he raised his eyes until they met the girl's and spoke again to her.

  "Care to join me before you clear off?"

  "Since you ask me so graciously . . ." She sat down by him, sprawling with legs apart, smiling at him -- grateful even for my miserable company, Bush thought.

  "I didn't mean to upset you, Bush! You're as touchy as Stein."

  "Who's Stein?"

  "The old guy -- the one with the gang. You know -- dyed hair -- you spoke to him. He shook your hand."

  "Oh, yes. Stein? How did he fall in with you and Lenny?"

  "He was going to be beaten up or something and Lenny and the boys saved him. He's terribly nervous. You know, when we first saw you, he said you might be a spy. He's from 2093 and he says things are bad there."

  Bush had no wish to think about the twenty-nineties and the dreary world in which his parents lived. He said, "Lenny has his good side, then?"

  She nodded, but was pursuing her own line of thought.

  "Stein had me scared about mind-travel. Do you know, he said that Wenlock might be all wrong about mind-travel, and that we might not really be here at all, or something like that? He said there was something sinister about the undermind, and nobody understood it yet, despite all the claims of the Wenlock Institute."

  "Well, it's all new as yet. The undermind was only first developed as a concept in 2073, and the first mind-travel wasn't till two years later, so there may be more to discover, although it's difficult to see what it might be. What does Stein know about it, anyway?"

  "Maybe he was just sounding off, trying to impress me."

  "Did you let him -- I mean, did he lie with you?"

  "Jealous?" She grinned challengingly.

  "What do you want me to say?" They stared at each other. Through the dirty pane of her face, he saw life shine. He reached forward and kissed her.

  She lifted the boiling beef essence off his tiny stove and said, "I think I've about had the Devonian Period. How about moving on to the Jurassic with me?"

  "Aren't Lenny and Co. going there?"

  "So what? There's forty-six million years of it . . ."

  "Touché. What do you want to do there? See the carnivores mate?"

  She gave him a sly look. "We could watch 'em together." Instantly, he was excited. He slid a hand across her buckskin thigh.

  "I'll come with you." As they drank their essence, he was jeering at himself for getting mixed up with the girl; she was confused and could only upset his mental balance. It was true she was not unintelligent and a good lay, but he had never been satisfied to accept anyone else by compartments; her whole self did not seem accessible. And perhaps he was not the right person to help her render all of her personality accessible.

  She snuggled against him. "I need someone to mind-travel with. I'd be frightened to let go on my o
wn. My mother wouldn't mind-travel to save her life! People of that generation will never take to it, I suppose. Wow, I wish we could mind back just a little way -- you know, one generation -- because I'd so like to see my old man courting my mother and making love to her. I bet they made a proper muck-up of it, just as they did of anything else!"

  When he said nothing, she nudged him. "Well, go on, say something! Wouldn't you like to see your parents at it? You aren't as stuffy as you make out, Bush, are you? You'd love it!"

  "Ann, you just don't realize the horror of what you are saying!"

  "Come on, you'd like it too!"

  Bush shook his head. "I have enough data on my parents without the need for that sort of thing! But I suppose yours is the majority view. Dr. Wenlock ran a questionnaire at the Institute about a decade ago -- I mean in 2080 -- which showed how strong incest-motivation is in mind-travelers. It's the force behind the predisposition to look back. The findings coincide with the old psychoanalytical view of human nature.

  "Current theory suggests that man first became Homo sapiens when he put a ban on -- well, let's call it endogamy, the custom forbidding marriage outside the familial group. Exogamy was man's very first painful step forward. No other animal puts a ban on endogamy."

  "Was it worth it!" Ann exclaimed.

  "Well, since then man has become all the things we know he has become, conqueror of his environment and all that, but his severance with nature has seemed to grow wider and wider -- I mean with his true nature.

  "The way the Wenlockians see it, the undermind is, as it were, our old natural mind. The overmind is a later, Homo sap accretion, a high-powered dynamo whose main function is to structure time and conceal all the sad animal thoughts in the undermind. The extremists claim that passing time is an invention of the overmind."

  Perhaps she was not listening. She said, "You know why I followed you yesterday? I had the strongest feeling directly you appeared that you and I had -- known each other terribly well at some past time."

  "I'd have remembered you!"

  "It must have been my undermind playing up! Anyhow, what you were saying was very interesting. I suppose you believe it, do you?"

  He laughed. "How can you not believe it? We're here in the Devonian, aren't we?"

  "But if the undermind governs mind-travel, and the undermind's crazy about incest, then surely we should be able to visit times near at hand, early in our own century, for instance -- so that we could see what our own parents and grandparents got up to. That would be the most interesting thing, wouldn't it? But it's much easier to mind, back here, to the earliest ages of the world, and to get back to when there were any humans at all is very difficult. Impossible for most of us."

  "That's so, but it doesn't prove what you think. If you think of the space-time universe as being an enormous entropy-slope, with the true present always at the point of highest energy and the farthest past at the lowest, then obviously as soon as our minds are free of passing time, they will fall backwards towards that lowest point, and the nearer to the highest point we return, the harder will be the journey."

  Ann said nothing. Bush thought it likely that she had already dismissed the subject as impossible of discussion, but after a moment she said, "You know what you said about the real me being good and loving? Supposing there is such a person, is she in my over- or my undermind?"

  "Supposing, as you say, there is such a person, she must be an amalgamation of both. Anything less than the whole cannot be whole."

  "Now you're trying to talk theology again, aren't you?"

  "Probably." They both laughed. He felt almost gay. He loved arguing, particularly when he could argue on the obsessive topic of the structure of the mind.

  If they were going to mind again, now was clearly the time to do it, while they were in some sort of accord. Mind-travel was never easy, and the passage could be rough if one was emotionally upset.

  They packed their bags and strapped their few possessions to themselves. Then they linked themselves together, arm in arm; otherwise, there was no guarantee they would not arrive a few million years and several hundred miles apart from each other.

  They broke open their drug packs. The CSD came in little ampoules, clear, almost colorless. Held up to the wide Paleozoic sky, Bush's ampoule showed slightly green between his fingers. They looked at each other; Ann pulled a face and they made the jab together.

  Bush felt the crypotic acid run warm in his veins. The liquid was a symbol of the hydrosphere, sacrificial wine to represent the oceans from which life had come, oceans that still washed in the arteries of man, oceans that still regulated and made habitable his external world, oceans that still provided food and climate, oceans that were the blood of the biosphere.

  And he himself was a biosphere, containing all the fossil lives and ideas of his ancestors, containing other life forms, containing countless untold possibilities, containing life and death.

  He was an analogue of the world; through the CSD, he could translate from one form to the other.

  Only in that transitional state, as the drug took effect, could one begin to grasp the nature of the minute energy-duration disturbance that the Solar System represented. That system, a bubble within a sea of cosmic forces, was part of a meta-structure that was boundless but not infinite with respect to both time and space. And this banal fact had only become astonishing to man because man had shut himself off from it, had shielded his mind from the immensity of it as the ionosphere round his planet shielded him from harmful radiations, had lost that knowledge, had defended himself from that knowledge with the concept of passing time, which managed to make the universe tolerable by cutting off -- not only the immense size of it, as recent generations had rediscovered -- but the immense time of it. Immense time had been chopped into tiny wriggling fragments that man could deal with, could trap with sundials, sandglasses, pocketwatches, grandfather clocks, chronometers, which succeeded generation by generation in shaving time down finer and finer, smaller and smaller . . . until the obsessive nature of the whole procedure had been recognized, and Wenlock and his fellow workers blew the gaff on the whole conspiracy.

  But the conspiracy had been necessary. Without it, unsheltered from the blind desert of space-time, man would still be with the other animals, wandering in tribes by the rim of the echoing Quaternary seas. Or so the theory went. At least it was clear there had been a conspiracy.

  Now the shield was down. The complexities of the cerebrum and cerebellum were naked to the co-continuous universe: and were devouring all they came across.

  Minding was a momentary process. It looked easy, although there was rigorous training behind it. As the CSD tilted their metabolisms, Bush and Ann went into the discipline -- that formula the Institute had devised for guiding them through the prohibitions of the human mind. The Devonian dissolved now, appearing to be a huge marching creature of duration, with spatial characteristics serving simply as an exoskeleton. Bush opened his mouth to laugh, but no sound came. In the exhilaration of travel, one lost most physical characteristics. Everything seemed to go, except the sense of direction. It was like swimming against a current; the difficult way was towards one's own "present"; to drift into the remote past was relatively easy -- and led to eventual death by suffocation, as many had found. If a foetus in the womb were granted the ability to mind-travel, it would be faced with much the same situation: either to battle forward to the climactic moment of birth, or to sink easefully back to the final -- or was it first? -- moment of non-existence.

  He was not aware of duration, nor of the pulse within him that served as his chronometer. In a strange hypnoid state, he felt only a sense of being near to a great body of reality that seemed to bear as much kinship to God as to Earth. And he caught himself trying to laugh again.

  Then the laughter died, and he felt he was in flight. Ages rolled below him like night. He was aware of the discomfort of having someone with him -- and then he and Ann were surrounded by a dark green world and
reality as it was generally experienced was about them again.

  Jurassic reality.

  Chapter 3

  AT THE SIGN OF THE AMNIOTE EGG

  Bush had never liked the Jurassic. It was too hot and cloudy, and reminded him of one long and miserable day in his childhood when, caught doing something innocently naughty, he had been shut out in the garden all day by his mother. It had been cloudy that day too, with the heat so heavy the butterflies had hardly been able to fly above flower-top level.

  Ann let go of him and stretched. They had materialized beside a dead tree. Its bare shining arms were like a reproof to the girl; Bush realized for the first time what a slut she was, how dirty and unkempt, and wondered why it did not alter what he felt about her -- whatever that might precisely be.