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 be so certain of what’s possible and what’s not. Certainty can kill, as I know.’
I rubbed the side of my nose and said, ‘Then the Entity has absorbed the Tycho’s memories and thoughtways – I can believe that. But the Tycho can’t be alive, he can’t have free will, can he? … can you? If you’re part of the whole … Entity?’
The Tycho – or the imago of the Tycho, as I reminded myself – laughed so hard that spit bubbled from his lips. ‘Nay, my Pilot, I’m like you, like all men. Sometimes I have free will, and sometimes I don’t.’
‘Then you’re not like me,’ I said too quickly. ‘I’ve freedom of choice, everyone does.’
‘Nay, was it freedom of choice made you break your Lord Pilot’s nose?’
It scared and angered me that the Entity could pull this memory from my mind, so I angrily said, ‘Soli goaded me. I lost my temper.’
The Tycho wiped the spit from his lips and rubbed his hands together. I heard the swish of skin against skin. ‘Okay. Soli goaded you. Then Soli was in control, not you.’
‘You’re twisting my words. He made me so mad I wanted to hit him.’
‘Okay. He made you.’
‘I could have controlled myself.’
‘Is that so?’ he asked.
I was angry, and I huffed out, ‘Of course it is. I was just so mad I didn’t care if I hit him.’
‘You must like being mad.’
‘No, I hate it. I always have. But then that’s the way I am.’
‘You must like the way you are.’
I closed my eyes and shook my head. ‘No, you don’t understand. I’ve tried … I try, but when I get mad, it’s … well, it’s part of me, do you see? People aren’t perfect.’
‘And people don’t have free will, either,’ he said.
My cheeks were hot and my tongue was dry. It seemed that the Tycho, too, was trying to goad me into losing my temper. As I breathed rhythmically, struggling for control, I looked at the phased light waves composing the imago of the Tycho. His robe was like glowing smoke in the black air.
I asked, ‘Does a goddess, then? Have free will?’
Again the Tycho laughed, and he said, ‘Does a dog have Buddha nature? You’re quick, my Pilot, but you’re not here to test the goddess. You’re here to be tested.’
‘To be tested … how?’
‘To be tested for possibilities.’
As I was soon to learn, the Entity had been testing me since I first crossed the threshold of her immense brain. The torison spaces and the ugly segmented spaces that had almost defeated me – they were her handiwork, as was the infinite tree imprisoning me. She had tested my mathematical prowess, and – this is what the Tycho told me – She had tested my courage. Not the least of my tests had been my ability to listen to Her godvoice and not lose myself in terror. I had no idea why She would want to test me at all, unless it was just another of Her games. And why should She use the Tycho to test me when She could look into my brain to see all of me there was to see? No sooner had I thought this when the godvoice rolled through my head like thunder:
Thousands of years ago your eschatologists mapped the DNA molecule down to the last carbon atom. But they still search for the rules by which DNA unfolds life and codes for new forms of life. They are still learning DNA’s grammar. As with DNA, so it is with the unfolded brain. Imagine a baby who has learned the alphabet but who has no idea what words mean or the rules for putting them together. To understand the brain from its trillions of synapses would be like trying to appreciate a poem from the arbitrary twistings of individual letters. You are that poem. There are infinite possibilities. You, my Mallory, will always be a mystery to me.
– I don’t want to be tested.
Life is a test.
– If I succeed, will you free me from the tree?
Like an ape, you are free at this moment to escape your tree.
– Free? I don’t know how.
That is too bad. If you succeed, you are free to ask me three questions, any questions. It is an old, old game.
– And if I fail?
Then the light goes out. Oh, where does the light go when the light goes out?
I tightened my fists until my fingernails cut my palms. I did not want to be tested.
‘Well, my Pilot, shall we begin?’ It was the Tycho speaking as he scratched his jowls.
‘I don’t know.’
I will not record here in detail the many tests