“These creatures you have created should remain forever under the strict control of human beings,” Ikematsu went on, the grimness of his words belied by the habitual matter-of-factness of his tone. “Base passions exist within man also, but his higher nature is able to contend with them. When animals became your equals in society, with the same power of thought and speech and action, that struggle was exteriorised. A minute or so ago, Admiral Archier, it depended upon you alone as to whether the future belonged to man or to the pig. And who is to say that the pig will not yet triumph? Have you the courage to become a warrior against his Empire? To use the zen gun against him?”
“I?”
Archier felt as if he had been struck a blow. “I am not a kosho.”
“But you are a warrior.” Ikematsu laughed, without humour. “A kosho will not use the gun in war, Admiral Archier. I just explained that. Neither does one need to be a kosho to use it. One needs a degree of mental training, that is all.”
Lowering his head, Archier said, “What I just did is one thing, but 1 don’t think I can bring myself to be traitor enough for what you are suggesting.”
“Against the zen gun, the star fleets will be powerless to enforce obedience. But a man to use it must find the gun by himself. Well, we shall see. If my colleagues can analyse it successfully, the gun can be duplicated. Then the equaliser will remain always present…”
For a moment Ikematsu looked thoughtfully at Hesper. Then he pointed up the hill to the craggy outline. “That is a monastery where koshos receive part of their training. We shall go there now. The boy Trixa will be given mental therapy there.”
He slapped Pout on the back. “This poor tormented creature, too, needs treatment. He should have a better education than life has given him so far. Come.”
Slowly, moving as a group, they climbed through the slowly fading light to the looming, silent building.
Author’s Afterword
THE RECESSIVE HYPOTHESIS
The invented physics used in the background to this novel is very loosely based on a conjecture of my own of which I will give a cursory account. I am not a scientist, and to my shame am not competent mathematically, it is unscientific and unquantified, but it has given me many hours of rewarding thought.
The conjecture arises from my conviction that gravitational attraction is impossible. My feelings about it can be illustrated as follows:
1. Our experience of manipulating material objects is that we can move them about by pushing at them, i.e. applying force causes motion in the direction opposite to that from which the force came. Intuitively we feel this to be bound up with the form and character of the space in which we live, so that being able to draw an object towards us by means of magnetism or stickiness seems slightly mystifying.
2. Randomly moving objects spread out with time, and this also is a feature of our spacetime. E.A. Milne gave the following as an example of irreversibility: a swarm of non-colliding particles movingly uniformly in straight lines will at some instant become an expanding system even if initially it was a contracting one. An already expanding system, however, will never become a contracting one.
Gravitation would be more explicable if it were repulsive instead of attractive. In physics the tendency is to regard forces of attraction and repulsion as opposite but otherwise equivalent, but the symmetry breaks down when the milieu in which they act is taken into account: the effect of repulsive forces weakens as they push their sources apart, but attractive forces are able to act more strongly as they bring their sources together. The difference is crucial for world-building. Once again, it results from the “form” of universal space, which permits limitless dispersal but not limitless convergence.
Its attractive character is only one of gravitation’s mysterious properties, of course. Another is the equality between gravitational and inertial masses, which is the physicist’s way of saying that all bodies fall with the same acceleration regardless of their masses. This equality makes it impossible to test Newton’s third law of action and reaction with respect to gravitating bodies. Newton’s expression for gravitational interaction between two bodies makes it a single force dependent on the products of the masses, and in this form it satisfies both gravitational and inertial equality and the third law, but this is a mathematical device. In reality it is to be supposed that each body exerts its own influence on the other, and a proper test of the third law would require the effects of each force taken separately to be measured.
What if gravitation were a force of repulsion? Since every piece of matter is surrounded by all the other matter in the whole universe, it is only necessary to suppose it is also opaque to the passage of the repulsive force for this force to be converted to one of apparent attraction between (relatively) close bodies. Earth and the moon are bound together because the pressure of the whole universe overcomes their native effort to separate. In one leap we have related gravitation to the recession of the galaxies.
The recessive hypothesis goes a step further. The equality of gravitational and inertial masses suggests that gravitation is not a force acting “through” the immaterial “something” we call space (as in the old ether theory) but is instead intimately implicated in the structure of space (as in general relativity). It is, therefore, a model of space that is called into play, one that answers to points 1 and 2 above.
The hypothesis posits primary locations which henceforth shall be called particles. The particles do not exist in isolation: they have a relationship with one another, and the relation is a dynamic one: they are all receding from one another at a standard uniform rate.
This recession is the major constituent of spacetime. It introduces, however, the rather abstruse concept of motion as an irreducible principle rather than a composite phenomenon played out against an already created backdrop of time and distance. Motion begins as the fundamental interaction, or mode of reciprocal existence, of the particles themselves. Time and distance are its emergent phenomena.
The idea can perhaps be conveyed with the remark that in receding from one another, the particles are not going towards anywhere else. This remains true of the receding galaxies.
Space, then, consists primarily of universal recession. In a sense the hypothesis revives the old principle of instantaneous action-at-a-distance, but this is because it pictures space as a dynamic connector of bodies, not as a static geometry.
In The Zen Gun there is talk of the Simplex, a state of existence in which recession is the only relation between particles. Our realm, however, could only accommodate a 4-simplex, or tetrahedron. In other words, it introduces geometrical relations as well as the recessive one. This means that a particle can interrupt the recessive link between other particles. When that happens, we shall assume the link is broken, and because of the law of perspective a pair of particles will each hide more of the celestial sphere from the other the closer together they are. What happens when a particle is receding from a greater number of particles in one direction than in another? Relativity has entered. We shall suppose the inequality to manifest itself in a lower overall rate of recession from the occluded region. Hence, the closer together bodies are in space, the slower is their rate of recession from one another.
If the distance between them is small enough, the recession is decremented sufficiently for them seemingly to attract one another. This is a definite transition. Their own mutual recession has become negative; for the first time particles are heading towards somewhere as they recede.