A B OA R D T H E B E AT I T U D E

  ton in the tiled wall. Metal bars came flashing down. The little man found himself trapped in a cage. It was the way Barakuta’s police dealt with troublemakers on the Bullball ground.

  “Excellent,” said Hungaman, turning to face the in-

  truder. “Now, I want no more conjuring tricks from you.

  Tell me your name first of all.”

  Meekly, the little man said, “You can call me Manifold.”

  Manifold was standing behind a leather-bound arm-

  chair in a black gown. Hungaman was on the other side

  of a desk, the top of which held nothing but an inset

  screen. He found he was sitting down on a hard chair. A

  ginger-and-white cat jumped onto his lap. How the scene

  had changed so suddenly was beyond his comprehension.

  “But—but how—”

  The little man ignored Hungaman’s stutter.

  “Are you happy aboard your ship?” Manifold asked.

  Hungaman answered up frankly and easily, to his own

  surprise: it was as if he was glad to find that metal bars were of no account. “I am not entirely happy with the

  personnel. Let me give you an example. You realize, of

  course, that we have been making this journey for some

  centuries. It would be impossible, of course, without AL—

  aided longevity. Nevertheless, it has been a long while.

  The enemy galaxy is retreating through the expanding

  universe. The ship is deteriorating rapidly. At our velocities, it is subject to strain. It has constantly to be rebuilt.

  Fortunately, we have invented XHX, hardened hydrogen,

  with which to refurbish our interiors. The hull is wearing thin. I think that accounts for the blue bird which got in.”

  As he spoke, he was absentmindedly stroking the cat.

  The cat lay still but did not purr.

  “I was consulting with Provost-Marshal Shappi about

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  which revs and reps to use in this Bullball match, which I take it you interupted, when a rating entered my office

  unannounced. I ordered him to wait in the passage. ‘Ah,’

  he said, ‘the passage of time.’ It was impertinent to answer back like that. It would not have happened a decade ago.”

  The little man leaned forward, resting his elbows on

  his thighs and clasping his hands together. Smiling, he

  said, “You’re an uneasy man, I can see. Not a happy man.

  The cat does not purr for you. This voyage is just a mis-

  ery to you.”

  “Listen to me,” said Hungaman, leaning forward, un-

  consciously copying the older man’s attitude. “You may

  be the figment of a great civilization, now happily de-

  funct, but what you have to say about me means nothing.”

  He went on to inform his antagonist that even now

  tractor beams were hauling stuff into one of the insulated holds, raw hot stuff at a few thousand degrees, mesons,

  protons, corpuscles, wave particles—a great trail of material smaller than dust, all of which the Beatitude would use for fuel or building material. And those whirling particles were all that was left of Manifold’s million-year-old civilization.

  “So much for your million-year-old civilization. Time

  it was scrapped.”

  “You’re proud of this?” shrieked Manifold.

  “In our wake, we have destroyed a hundred so-called

  civilizations. They died, those civilizations, to power our passage, to drive us ever onward. We shall not be defeated. No, I don’t regret a damned thing. We are what

  humanity is made of.” Oratory had hold of him. “This

  very ship, this worldlet, is—what was that term in use in the old Christian Era?—yes, it’s a cathedral to the human 2 2 4

  A B OA R D T H E B E AT I T U D E

  spirit. We are still young, but we are going to succeed,

  and the less opposition to us there is, the better.”

  His violent gesture disturbed the cat, which sprang

  from his lap and disappeared. Its image remained sus-

  pended in midair, growing fainter until it was gone.

  “Mankind is as big as the universe. Sure, I’m not too

  happy with the way things are aboard this ship, but I

  don’t give a tinker’s cuss for anything outside our hull.”

  He gave an illustrative glance through the port as he

  spoke. Strangely, the Bullball game was continuing. A

  gored body was being elevated from the trampled field,

  trailing blood. The crowd loved it.

  “As for your Slipsoid powers—what do I care for them?

  I can have you disintegrated any minute I feel like it.

  That’s the plain truth. Do you have the power to read my

  mind?”

  “You don’t have that kind of mind. You’re an alien

  life-form. It’s a blank piece of paper to me.”

  “If you could read it, you would see how I feel about

  you. Now. What are you going to do?”

  For response, the little man began to disintegrate,

  shedding his pretense of humanity. As soon as the trans-

  formation began, Hungaman pressed a stud under the

  flange of the desk. It would summon General Barakuta

  with firepower.

  Manifold almost instantaneously ceased to exist. In his

  place a mouth, a tunnel, formed, from which poured—well,

  maybe it was a tunnel mouth for this strange concept,

  quantaspace—from which poured, poured—Hungaman could not grasp it . . . poured what?—solid music? . . .

  wave particles? . . . pellets of zero substance? . . . Whatever the invasive phenomenon was, it was filling up the

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  B R I A N W. A L D I S S

  compartment, burying Hungaman, terrified and strug-

  gling, and bursting on, on, into the rest of the giant vessel, choking its arteries, rushing like poison through a

  vein. Alarms were sounding, fire doors closing, confla-

  gration crews running. And people screaming—screaming

  in sheer disgusted horror at this terrible irresistible unknown overcoming them. Nothing stopped it, nothing

  impeded it.

  Within a hundred heartbeats, the entire speeding Beatitude worldlet was filled completely with the consuming dust. Blackness. Brownness. Repletion. Nonexistence.

  Hungaman sat at his desk in his comfortable office. From

  his windows—such was his status, his office had two win-

  dows—he looked out on the neat artificial lawns of acade-

  mia, surrounded by tall everlasting trees. He had become

  accustomed to the feeling of being alive.

  He was talking to his brainfinger, a medium-sized rep

  covered in a fuzzy golden fur, through which two large

  doggy eyes peered sympathetically at his patient.

  Hungaman was totally relaxed as he talked. He had his

  feet up on the desk, his hands behind his neck, fingers

  locked together: the picture of a man at his ease, perfect if old-fashioned. He knew all about reps.

  “My researches were getting nowhere. Maybe I was on

  the verge of an NB—you know, a nervous breakdown.

  Who cares? That’s maybe why I imagined I saw the or-

  ange blossom falling by the ports. On reflection, they

  were not oranges but planets.”

  “You are now saying it was not blossom but the actual

  fruits, the oranges?” asked the brainfinger.

  “They were what I say they were. The oranges were

  bursting—exploding. They weren’t oranges so much as

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  A B OA R D T H E B E AT I T U D E

  worlds, whole planets, dropping down into oblivion,

  maybe meeting themselves coming up.” He laughed. “The

  universe as orchard. I was excited because I knew that for once I had seen through reality. I remembered what that

  old Greek man, Socrates, had said, that once we were

  cured of reality we could ourselves become real. It’s a

  way of saying that life is a lie.”

  “You know it is absurd to say that, darling. Only a

  madman would claim that there is something unreal

  about reality. Nobody would believe such sophistry.”

  “Yes, but remember—the majority is always wrong!”

  “Who said that?”

  “Tom Lehrer? Adolf Hitler? Mark Twain? Einstein

  McBeil? Socrates?”

  “You’ve got Socrates on the brain, Hungaman, darling.

  Forget Socrates! We live in a well-organized military so-

  ciety, where such slogans as ‘The majority is always

  wrong’ are branded subversive. If I reported you, all this—

  ” he gestured about him,—would disappear.”

  “But I have always felt I understood reality-perception

  better than other people. As you know, I studied it for almost a century, got a degree in it. Even the most solid objects, chairs, walls, rooms, lives—they are merely outward forms. It is a disconcerting concept, but behind it lies

  truth and beauty.

  “That is what faster-than-light means, incidentally. It

  has nothing to do with that other old Greek philosopher,

  Einstein: it’s to do with people seeing through appear-

  ances. We nowadays interpret speeding simply as an in-

  variant of stationary, with acceleration as a moderator.

  You just need a captain with vision.

  “I was getting nowhere until I realized that an oil

  painting of my father, for instance, was not really an oil 2 2 7

  B R I A N W. A L D I S S

  painting of my father but just a piece of stretched canvas with a veneer of variously colored oils. Father himself—

  again, problematic. I was born milaterally.”

  The brainfinger asked, “Is that why you have become,

  at least in your imagination, the father of the crew of the Beatitude?”

  Hungaman removed his feet from the desk and sat up

  rigidly. “The crew have disappeared. You imagine I’m

  happy about that? No, it’s a pain, a real pain.”

  The brainfinger began to look extra fuzzy.

  “Your hypothesis does not allow for pain being real.

  Or else you are talking nonsense. For the captain of a

  great weapon-vessel such as the Beatitude you are emotionally unstable.”

  Hungaman leaned forward and pointed a finger, with

  indications of shrewdness, and a conceivable pun, at the

  brainfinger.

  “Are you ordering me to return to Earth, to call off our

  entire mission, to let the enemy galaxy get away? Are

  you trying to relieve me of my command?”

  The brainfinger said, comfortingly, “You realize that at

  the extra-normal velocities at which you are traveling,

  you have basically quit the quote real world unquote, and hallucinations are the natural result. We brainfingers

  have a label for it: TPD, tachyon perception displace-

  ment. Ordinary human senses are not equipped for such

  transcendental speeds, is all . . .”

  Hungaman thought before speaking. “There’s always

  this problem with experience. It does not entirely coin-

  cide with consciousness. Of course you are right about

  extra-normal velocities and hallucination. . . . Would you say wordplay is a mark of madness—or near-madness?”

  “Why ask me that?”

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  A B OA R D T H E B E AT I T U D E

  “I have to speak to my clonther shortly. I need to

  check something with him. His name’s Twohunga. I’m

  fond of him, but since he has been in Heliopause HQ, his

  diction has become strange. It makes me nervous.”

  The brainfinger emitted something like a sigh. He felt

  that Hungaman had changed the subject for hidden mo-

  tives.

  He spoke gently, almost on tiptoe. “I shall leave you

  alone to conquer your insecurity. Bad consciences are al-

  ways troublesome. Get back on the bridge. Good evening.

  I will see you again tomorrow. Have a nice night.” It rose and walked toward the door, narrowly missed, readjusted,

  and disappeared.

  “Bad conscience! What an idiot!” Hungaman said to himself. “I’m afraid of something, that’s the trouble. And I can’t figure out what I’m afraid of.” He laughed. He

  twiddled his thumbs at great speed.

  The Beatitude had attained a velocity at which it broke free from spatial dimensions. It was now traveling

  through a realm of latent temporalities. Computer SJC1

  alone could scan spatial derivatives, as the ship-projectile it governed headed after the enemy galaxy. The Beatitude had to contend with racing tachyons and other particles

  of frantic mobility. The tachyons were distinct from light.

  Light did not enter the region of latent temporalities.

  Here were only eotemporal processes, the beginnings and

  endings of which could not be distinguished one from

  another.

  The SJC1 maintained ship velocities, irrespective of

  the eotemporal world outside, or the sufferings of the

  biotemporal world within.

  *

  *

  *

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  B R I A N W. A L D I S S

  Later, after a snort, Hungaman went to the top of the

  academy building and peered through the telescope.

  There in the cloudless sky, hanging to the northwest, was the hated enigmatic word—if indeed it was a word—

  hiseobiw . . . Hiseobiw, smudgily written in space fires.

  Perhaps it was a formula of some kind. Read upside

  down, it spelt miqoesiy. This dirty mark in space had puzzled and infuriated military intelligentsia for centuries. Hungaman was still working on the problem, on

  and off.

  This was what the enemy galaxy had created, why it

  had become the enemy. How had it managed this bizarre

  stellar inscription? And why? Was miqoesiy aimed at the Solar system? What did it spell? What could it mean?

  Was it intended to help or to deter? Was it a message

  from some dyslexic galactic god? Or was it, as a joker had suggested, a commercial for a pair of socks?

  No one had yet determined the nature of this affront

  to cosmology. It was for this reason that, long ago, the

  Beatitude had been launched to chastise the enemy galaxy and, if possible, decipher the meaning of hiseobiw or miqoesiy.

  A clenched human fist was raised from the roof of the

  academic building to the damned thing. Then its owner

  went inside again.

  Hungaman spoke into his voxputer. “Beauty of mental

  illness. Entanglements of words and appearances, a maze

  through which we try to swim. I believe I’m getting

  through to the meaning of this enigmatic sign. . . .

  “Yep, that does frighten me. Like being on a foreign

  planet. A journey into the astounded Self, where truth

  lies and lies are truth. Thank god the hull of our

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  A B OA R D T H E B E AT I T U D E

  spacevessel is not impermeable. It represents the ego, the eggnog. These bluebirds are messengers, bringing in hope

  from the world outside. TPD—must remember that!”

  Hungaman, as he had told the brainfinger to little ef-

  fect, had a clonther, a clone-brother by the name of

  Twohunga. Twohunga had done well, ascending the mil-

  itary ranks, until—as Steel-Major Twohunga—he was ap-

  pointed to the WWW, the World Weaponry Watch on

  Charon, coplanet of Pluto.

  So Hungaman put through a call to the Heliopause HQ.

  “Steel-Major here . . . haven’t heard from you for

  thirty-two years, Hungaman. Yes, mmm, thirty-two.

  Maybe only thirty-one. How’s your promotion?”

  “The same. You still living with that Plutottie?”

  “I disposed of her.” The face in the globe was dark and

  stormy, the plastic mitter banded across its forehead. “I have a rep—a womanroid—for my satisfactions now.

  What you might call satisfactions. Where are you, pre-

  cisely? Still on the Beatitude, I guess? Not that that’s precise in any way . . .” He spoke jerkily and remotely, as if his voice had been prerecorded by a machine afflicted by

  hiccups.

  “I’m none too sure. Or if I am sure, I am dead. Maybe I

  am a rev,” said Hungaman, without giving his answer a

  great deal of thought. “It seems I am having an episode.

  It’s to do with the extreme velocity, a velocillusion . . .

  We’re traversing the eotemporal, you know.” He clutched

  his head as he spoke, while a part of him said tauntingly to himself, You’re hamming it up. . . .

  “Brainfinger. Speak to a brainfinger, Hungaman,”

  Twohunga advised.

  “I did. They are no help.”

  “They never are. Never.”

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  B R I A N W. A L D I S S

  “It may have been part of my episode. Listen,

  Twohunga, Helipause HQ still maintains contact with the

  Beatitude. Can you tell me if the ship is still on course, or has it been subjugated by life-forms from the Slipsoid

  system which have invaded the ship?”

  “System? What system? The Slipsoid system?”

  “Yes. X377. We disintegrated it for fuel as we passed.”

  “So you did. Mm, so you did. So you did, indeed. Yes,

  you surely disintegrated it.”

  “Will you stop talking like that!”

  Twohunga stood up, to walk back and forth, three

  paces one way, swivel on heel, three paces the other way, swivel on heel, in imitation of a man with an important