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“Well, obviously, from new social developments.”

“Thank you. Oh, thank you so much! That’s settled then, and we need think no more about it! May I go on? When such a deviant individual becomes too uncomfortable for the group mind to tolerate, various things can happen. Commonly, expulsion. Labelled seditious, mad, and in any case wrongheaded, he or she is thrown out… yes, yes, we all agree that in our case this would be a pity. Talking generally though, this individual may start an opposing group having attracted enough people with similar ideas—no, I am not threatening you. Can we not talk about this with less personal reference? Can we not? Yes, indeed, I concerned about our ancient association, indeed I am anxious for my personal safety—but can you not believe that brooding about these questions I am still Ambien II, who has with you administered an Empire for so long? This deviant individual may influence others of this group, this mind, to think differently, when the entity will split into two—and I do not expect this to happen in this case. No. What has caused me to think differently from you has affected, I believe, only myself… no? We shall see! No, I am not threatening! How can it be a threat? We are not in control of these processes. We like to think we are. But they control us. You like that thought! We of the Five don’t like to think that all this long time we have never been more than straws in a current… but may I go on to suggest another possibility for this deviant and so irritating individual? If he or she is not expelled, or does not expel herself, but remains, contemplating her position, then a certain train of thought is inevitable. She has been part of a group mind, thinking the same thoughts as her peers. But now her mind holds other ideas. Of what whole is she now a part? Of what invisible whole? It is surely not without interest to speculate, when feeling isolated, apparently alone, on the other little items or atoms who with her are making up this other whole… this line of thought doesn’t interest you? And yet surely I have been seeing indications that it does, it interests you very much—and in fact perhaps your speculations in this realm are why you are here, visiting me, just as the others have done… did you not know that the others have all been? Odd, that! Once we would all have known, we did all know what the others did, and thought. What is happening to us? We don’t know! That is the point! Are we going to be like the Rohandans, quite happy to use social machinery without being prepared to examine the mechanisms that rule them? Are we quarrelling? Does our disagreement have to be seen as such a threat?”

“We not hostile to you, Ambien. You must not think that we are. Not to you personally.”

“When have we ever seen our relations with each other as personal? Well, I am delighted to have your personal good wishes, of course.”

“I must go. Can we send you anything? Do you need anything?”

“I am not ill! I am not, as far as I am aware, under arrest? But thank you, no, I don’t need anything, and I have occupation enough with what I am thinking. I think day and night about group minds and how they work. Do you realise that one may present a fact as hard and bright and precious as allyrium to a group of individuals forming a group mind, one that is already set in a different way, and they cannot see it. Literally. Cannot take it in. Do you understand the implications of that? Do you? Well, thank you for coming to see me. Thank you. Thank you.”

During this period I had not heard from Klorathy, nor had there been any official communication between Canopus and Sirius. When the other members of the Five had concluded their visits to me, a message arrived addressed personally to me. “Perhaps you would consider taking a visit to the Isolated Northern Continent.”

The Four had seen this, and had directed it on: normally a message for an individual of the Five is not intercepted.

I informed the Four that I was again visiting Rohanda but they made no comment. Not knowing what I was supposed to be doing, I instructed my Space Traveller to hover over the Isolated Northern Continent, at the highest altitude possible for observation. I was not alone. The skies were full not only of craft originating on Rohanda, but of the observational machines of Canopus, Shammat, and the three neighboring planets. A Canopean Crystal, Shammat Wasps, and ten of the Darters evolved by the three planets: they often shared their technology.

I was looking down at the continent, in an idle nonfocussed way, remembering the other guises and transformations I had seen it in, when the Canopean Crystal floated down and lay in the air in front of me. It was in its most usual shape, a cone, and it hung point down among the charming clouds of that atmosphere, with the blue of the atmosphere beyond, it was most attractive, and I was admiring it when it moved off, slowly, and I followed. I did not understand this lesson, which I assumed it was, but only watched, and enjoyed—as always—the aesthetic bonuses of this planet. The Crystal became a tetrahedron—the three facets of it I could see reflecting the landscape of these blue and white skies—then a globe. A glistening ball rolled and danced among the clouds. I was laughing with the pleasure of it, and even clapping my hands and applauding… it elongated and became like a drop of liquid at the moment when it falls from a point. But it was lying horizontally, the thin end in front of us.

This exquisite drop of crystalline glitter was thus because of the pressures of the atmosphere, it was adjusting itself to the flow of the jet stream, we were being sped along by the air rivers, and the Crystal had become a long transparent streak. My craft was almost in the end of the streak, and for a few moments we seemed almost to intermingle, and what delicious thoughts sang through my mind as we saw the rivers and mountains and deserts of the landmass beneath through what seemed like liquefied light. My guide was changing again, was showing how it had to change, and flow, and adapt itself, for all the movements and alterations of the atmosphere we were submerged in like liquid moulded this Globe, or Rod, or Streak, or Fringe… How many shapes it assumed, this enchanting guide of mine, as we followed the flowing streams of the upper airs of Rohanda—how it evolved and adapted and shone!—but then dulled, so it seemed as if a lump of dullish lead lay there, sullen in a chilly and yellow light, but then lost its grey and took in a sparkle and a glisten again, and seemed to frolic and to play, and yet again became serious and stern, with an edge of hardness in it, all the time a flowing and an answering, and an astonishment, but then, my mind lost in contemplation of this Crystal that seemed to have become no more than a visible expression of the currents, I saw that it had stopped, and had become the shape of a drop that points down. Its narrow end was directing my attention below. What was it I was supposed to be noticing?

I hovered there near the monitoring Crystal and saw again how the edges of the continent were being pressed and squeezed up into its mountain folds, how the deserts lay and spread, how the great forests of other times had gone, and realised that I was seeing something extraordinary. A grid had been stamped over the whole continent. It was a mesh of absolutely regular rectangles. I was seeing a map, a chart, of a certain way of thinking… this was a way of thought, a set of mind, made visible. It was the mind of the Northwest fringes, the mind of the white conquerors. Over the variety and change and differentiation of the continent, over the flows and movement and changes of the earth—as vigorous as that of the air above, though in a different dimension of time—was this stamp of rigidity. Cities, towns, the larger mountains, the deserts, interrupted it: but over rivers and hills and marshes and plains lay the grid, this inflexible pattern.