And, still within this heightened awareness, she explained the mathematical clues that had led her to this point.
"A matrix system," Bickel said, remembering his own plunge into this way of attacking the problem, and the blaze of consciousness which that plunge had whipped up. "And submatrices and sub-submatrices without end."
Flattery stood up, seeing where these thoughts must lead, dreading the moment of action to come. He looked down at Prudence seated on the deck, seeing her flushed cheeks, the glitter in her eyes.
"And where does this AAT-cum-Ox stand?" Flattery asked. "Have you thought of that?"
Prudence met his stare, understanding now why their hyb tanks had been filled with colonists. "The colonists," she said, nodding. "A field of unconsciousness from which any unconscious can draw...round that sustains and buoys - and the sleeping colonists provide it."
Flattery shook his head, feeling angry, confused.
Bickel stared beyond Prue, absorbing her words. Ideas merged and fitting - orders evolved in his awareness. This ship had been armed, maneuvered, aimed and fired. He remembered Hempstead: gnome-wise face, eyes glittering, and that compelling voice saying: "What matters most is the search itself. This is more important than the searchers. Consciousness must dream, it must have a dreaming ground - and, dreaming, must invoke ever new dreams."
"Knowledge is pitiless," Bickel said.
Prudence ignored him, keeping her attention on Flattery, aware of the psychiatrist-chaplain's confusion. "Don't you see it, Raj? To separate subject from object there has to be a background of some kind. You have to be able to see it against something. What's the background for consciousness? Unconsciousness."
"Zombies," Bickel said. "Remember, Raj? You called us zombies. And why not? We've existed for most of our lives in a state of light hypnosis."
Flattery knew Bickel had said something, but the words refused to link in any understandable form. It was as though Bickel had said: "Hop limbo promise the insect watering class to be erected to a first behavior preserve." The words trailed off through his mind as though they had been flashed in front of his awareness to screen him from something else.
From what?
A profound silence filled Com-central, broken by the sound of Prudence shifting her position on the deck.
Bickel felt himself go as calm as that silence, as though some other self had waited for that silence to take the reins. The sensation lasted for a single heartbeat and expanded into a sense of well-being, a relaxed poise that illuminated everything around him. It was as if one universe had been substituted for another, as if a sensory amplification of enormous intensity had been turned on his universe.
He saw the stark unconsciousness in Flattery's face, in Timberlake's - and the semi-consciousness of Prudence.
Zombies, he thought.
"Raj, you called us zombies," Bickel repeated. "If we were lightly hypnotized we'd appear partially dead to someone in a higher state of consciousness."
"Do you have to mumble?" Timberlake demanded.
Flattery glared at Bickel. He felt that the man was using real words and that communication was intended, but all the meanings slipped and slithered through his mind without making connection.
Prudence felt Bickel's words lifting her. There came an instant in which the universe turned upon one still point that was herself. The feeling shifted: self no longer was confined within her. As she gave up the self, clarity came. Flattery's words returned to her: "There's nothing concerning ourselves about which we can be truly objective except our physical responses."
The chemical experiments on her own body had never offered a real chance to solve their problem, but they had provided a ground for understanding her own identity. The hope of more had been illusory... because the experiments could not be conducted simultaneously on every occupant of the Tin Egg - their isolated world.
We share unconsciousness! she thought.
And she realized this must be the true reason the hyb tanks were filled with sleeping humans. Somewhere along the line, Project had seen that necessity. The umbilicus crew had to have a minimal ground of shared unconsciousness upon which to stand. They had to have a reference point, a tiny island in the vast dark which they could share with whatever they might produce out of their neuron fibers, and Eng multipliers. They'd needed a ground upon which to stand before they could reach up tall.
The mirror cannot reflect itself, she thought.
"Hypnotized," Bickel said. "We accept it as normal because it's virtually the only form of consciousness we've ever seen. You've watched the Earth video. You wouldn't expect an idiot to be fooled by the commercials, but that rhythmic hammering, that repetition..."
"Half dead," Prudence said. "Zombies."
She said, "Zombies," Flattery thought. Her voice frightened him.
Bickel saw the alertness spread through her eyes, the awakening.
"We should've thought of the AAT when the thing came alive during reception from UMB," Bickel said.
"You see what has to be done?" Prudence asked. "The energizer -"
"Stimulator," Bickel said.
"Stimulator," she said. "It has to be part of the AAT's input."
"Slack lines," Bickel said. "You can't hold the reins too tightly because the signals have multiple functions. They need room to spread!"
Timberlake looked from one to the other. He felt a sense of dullness lifting from his mind. Slack lines... sensory modules.
Symbols!
Timberlake's memory shot back to their conversation about the energizer. "All the master programs dealing with translation of symbols are monitored through feedback loops linked to the AAT." He heard his own voice replaying in his mind.
Symbols!
The whole form of their problem arrayed itself in Timberlake's memory with the sudden force of something thrown at him. Problem and solution set themselves up as a physical arrangement and he saw the nerve-nets they had built all arrayed as a series of triangular faces with a Mobius twist - prisms of cell triangles interlaced and marching with their energy flows through infinite dimensions, forming sense data and memory images outside conventional space, storing bits and altering relationships in limitless dimensional extensions.
Bickel saw the vitality flowing into Timberlake, said: "Think of the AAT, Tim. Remember what we were saying?"
Timberlake nodded. The AAT. It received hundreds of duplicates of the same message compressed into the modulated laser burst. It averaged out the blanks and distortions, filtered for noise, compared for probable meaning on the doubtful bits, fed the result into a vocoder and produced it at an output as intelligible sound.
"It closely approximates what we do when we hear someone say something to us... then repeat it to check if we heard correctly," Timberlake said.
"You're all forgetting something," Flattery said.
They turned, saw Flattery at his own action couch, his hand on his own repeater console. A single red light had come alive there.
Flattery stared from Bickel to Prudence to Timberlake, seeing the unnatural brilliance in their eyes. Madness! And the deep color in their faces, their sense of excitement.
"Raj, wait," Bickel said. He spoke soothingly, watching Flattery's hand poised over a key beneath that single red light.
I should've known there'd be another trigger, Bickel thought.
CHAPTER 31
Mundane existence is the source of renewed suffering. The human goal is to attain release from the bondage of material existence and, achieving release, to unite with the Supreme Self.
FOR A LONG, pulsing moment after Flattery spoke, they all gazed at that red button: the trigger of their destruction. They all knew this thing. Flattery's intrusion had ignited a mutual awareness. They were supposed to accept this moment of oblivion. But something new had happened on this venture.