You can't be a nonconformist if you don't wear the proper uniform.
He had often wondered if there was something deep in the human psyche that insisted on tribalism. People used to fight wars not so much to protect their own life-style but to impose it on others.
That's why so many worlds were like these people's—there had been wars to spread the faith, convert the downtrodden. Now the Confederacy forbade that—but the existing conformity, world to world, was the status quo it protected. The leaders of each planet sat on a Council, with an enforcement arm capable of destroying any planet that strayed into "unsafe" paths and manned by specially trained barbarian psychopaths. But these weapons of terror could not be used without the actions of a majority of the Council.
It had worked. There were no more wars.
They had conformed the entire mass of humanity.
And so had the Markovians, he thought. Oh, the size and sometimes the color and workmanship of the cities had varied, but only slightly.
What had that youth, Varnett, said? Perhaps they had
deliberately
broken down the system?
Skander's face had a frown as he removed the last of his pressure suit. Ideas like that marked brilliance and creativity—but they were unsafe thoughts for a civilization like the one the boy had come from. It revived those old religious ideas that after perfection came true death.
Where could he have gotten an idea like that? And why had he not been caught and stopped?
Skander looked after their naked young bodies as they filed through the tunnel toward the showers and dorm.
Only barbarians thought that way.
Had the Confederacy guessed what he was up to here? Was Varnett not the innocent student he was supposed to be, but the agent of his nightmares?
Did they suspect?
Suddenly he felt very chilly, although the temperature was constant.
Suppose they
all
were. . . .
* * *
Three months passed. Skander looked at the picture on his television screen, an electron micrograph of the cellular tissue brought up a month before by the core drill.
It was the same pattern as the older discoveries—that same fine cellular structure, but infinitely more complex inside than any human or animal cell—and so tremendously alien.
And a six-sided cell, at that. He had often wondered about the why of that—had even
their
cells been hexagonal? Somehow be doubted it, but the way that number kept popping up he wouldn't disbelieve it, either.
He stared and stared at the sample. Finally, he reached over and turned up the magnification to full and put on the special filters he had developed and refined in over nine years on this barren planet.
The screen suddenly came alive. Little sparks darted from one point in the cell to another. There was a minor electrical storm in the cell. He sat, fascinated as always, at the view only he had ever seen.
The cell
was
alive.
But the energy was not electrical—that was why it had never been picked up. He had no idea what it was, but it behaved like standard electrical energy. It just didn't measure or appear as electricity should.
The discovery had been an accident, he reflected, three years before. Some careless student had been playing with the screen to get good-looking effects and had left it that way. He had switched it on the next day without noticing anything unusual, then set up the usual energy-detection program for another dull run-through.
It was only a glimpse, a flicker, but he had seen it—and worked on his own for months more to get a filter system that would show that energy photographically.
He had tested the classical samples from other digs, even had one sent to him by a supply ship. They had all been dead.
But not this one.
Somewhere, forty or so kilometers beneath them, the Markovian brain was still alive.
"What
is
that, Professor?" Skander heard a voice behind him. He quickly flipped the screen off and whirled around in one anxious moment.
It was Varnett, that perennial look of innocence on his permanently childlike face.
"Nothing, nothing," he covered excitedly, the anxiety in his voice betraying the lie. "Just putting on some playful programs to see what the electrical charges in the cell might have looked like."
Varnett seemed skeptical. "Looked pretty real to me," he said stubbornly. "If you've made a major breakthrough you ought to tell us about it. I mean—"
"No, no, it's nothing," Skander protested angrily. Then, regaining his composure, he said, "That will be all,
Citizen
Varnett! Leave me now!"
Varnett shrugged and left.
Skander sat in his chair for several minutes. His hands—in fact, his whole body—began shaking violently, and it was a while before the attack subsided. Slowly, a panicked look on his face, he went over to the microscope and carefully removed the special filter. His hand was still so unsteady he could hardly hold on to it. He slipped the filter into its tiny case with difficulty and placed it in the wide belt for tools and personal items that was the only clothing any of them wore inside.
He went back to his private room in the dorm section and lay down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling for what seemed like hours.
Varnett, he thought. Always Varnett. In the three months since they had first arrived, the boy had been into everything. Many of the others played their off-duty games and engaged in the silliness students do, but not he. Serious, studious to a fault, and always reading the project reports, the old records.
Skander suddenly felt that everything was closing in on him. He was still so far from his goal!
And now Varnett knew. Knew, at least, that the brain was alive. The boy would surely take it the step further—guess that Skander had almost broken the code, was ready, perhaps in another year or so, to send that brain a message, reactivate it.
To become a god.
He would be the one who would save the human race with the very tools that must have destroyed its maker.
* * *
Suddenly Skander jumped up and made his way back to the lab. Something nagged at him, some suspicion that things were even more wrong than he knew.
Quietly, he stepped into the lab.
Varnett was sitting at the television console. And, on the screen, the same cell Skander had been examining was depicted
with its energy connectors clearly visible!
Skander was stunned. Quickly his hands reached for the little pocket in which he kept his filter. Yes, it was still there.
How was this possible?
Varnett was doing computations, checking against a display on a second screen that hooked him to the math sections of the lab computer. Skander stood there totally still and silent. He heard Yarnett mumble an assent to himself, as if some problem he had been running through the computer had checked out correct.
Skander stole a glance at his chronometer. Nine hours! It had been nine hours! He had slept through part of his dark thoughts and given the boy the chance to confirm his worst nightmare.
Something suddenly told Varnett he wasn't alone. He sat still for a second, then glanced fearfully around.
"Professor!" he exclaimed. "I'm glad it's you! This is stupendous! Why aren't you telling everyone?"
"How—" Skander stumbled, gesturing at the screen. "How did you get that picture?"
Varnett smiled. "Oh, that's simple. You forgot to dump the computer memory when you closed up. This is what you were looking at, which the computer held in new storage."
Skander cursed himself for a fool. Of course, everything on every instrument was recorded by the computer as standard procedure. He had been so shook up by Varnett's discovery of his work that he had forgotten to dump the record!
"It's only a preliminary finding," the professor managed at last. "I was waiting until I had something really startling to report."
"But this
is
startling!" the boy exclaimed excitedly. "But you have been too close to the problem and to your own disciplines to crack it. Look, your fields are archaeology and biology, aren't they?"
"They are," Skander acknowledged, wondering where this conversation was leading. "I was an exobiologist for years and became an archaeologist when I started doing all my work on the Markovian brains."
"Yes, yes, but you're still a generalist. My world, as you know, raises specialists in every field from the point at which the brain is formed. You know my field."
"Mathematics," Skander replied. "If I recall, all mathematicians on your world are named Varnett after an ancient mathematical genius."
"Right," the boy replied, still in an excited tone. "As I was developing in the Birth Factory, they imprinted all the world's mathematical knowledge directly. It was there continuously as I grew. By the time my brain was totally developed at age seven, I knew all the mathematics, applied and theoretical, that we know. Everything is ultimately mathematical, and so I see everything in a mathematical way. I was sent here by my world because I had become fascinated by the alien mathematical symmetry in the slides and specimens of the Markovian brain. But all was for nothing, because I had no knowledge of the energy matrix linking the cellular components."
"And now?" Skander prodded, fascinated and excited in spite of himself.
"Why, it's gibberish. It defies all mathematical logic. It says that there are
no
absolutes in mathematics! None! Every time I tried to force the pattern into known mathematical concepts, it kept saying that two plus two equals four isn't a constant but a
relative
proposition!"
Skander realized that the boy was trying to make things baby-simple to him, but he still couldn't grasp what he was saying. "What does all that mean?" he asked in a puzzled and confused tone.
Varnett was becoming carried away with himself. "It means that all matter and energy are in some kind of mathematical proportion. That nothing is actually real, nothing actually anything at all. If you discard the equal sign and substitute 'is proportional to' and, if it is true, you can alter or change
anything.
None of us, this room, this planet, the whole galaxy, the whole universe—none of it is a constant! If you could alter the equation for anything only slightly, change the proportions, anything could be made anything else, anything could be changed to anything else!" He stopped, seeing from the expression on Skander's face that the older man was still lost.
"I'll give a really simple, basic example," Varnett said, calmed considerably from his earlier outburst. "First, realize this if you can: there is a finite amount of energy in the universe, and that is the only constant. The amount is infinite by our standards, but that is true if this is true. Do you follow me?"
Skander nodded. "So you're saying that there is nothing but pure energy?"
"More or less," Varnett agreed. "All matter, and
constrained
energy, like stars, is created out of this energy flux. It is held there in that state—you, me, the room, the planet we're on—by a mathematical balance. Something—some quantity—is placed in proportion to some other quantity, and that forms us. And keeps us stable. If I knew the formula for Elkinos Skander, or Varnett Mathematics Two Sixty-one, I could alter, or even abolish, our existence. Even things like time and distance, the best constants, could be altered or abolished. If I knew your formula I could, given one condition, not only change you into, say, a chair, but alter all events so that you would have always
been
a chair!"
"What's the condition?" Skander asked nervously, hesitantly, afraid of the answer.
"Why, you'd need a device to translate that formula into reality. And a way to have it do what you wished."
"The Markovian brain," Skander whispered.
"Yes. That's what they discovered. But this brain—this device—seems to be for local use only. That is, it would affect this planet, perhaps the solar system in which it lies, but no more. But, somewhere, there must be a master unit—a unit that could affect at least half, perhaps the whole, galaxy. It
must
exist, if all the rest of my hypothesis is correct!"
"Why must it?" Skander asked, a sinking sensation growing in his stomach.
"Because
we
are stable," the boy replied, an awe-struck tone in his voice.
Only the mechanical sounds of the lab intruded for a minute after that, as the implications sank home to both of them.
"And you have the code?" Skander asked at last.
"I think so, although it goes against my whole being that such equations can be correct. And yet—do you know why that energy does not show by conventional means?" Skander slowly shook his head negatively, and the mathematician continued. "It is the primal energy itself. Look, do you have that filter with you?"
Skander nodded numbly and produced the little case. The boy took it eagerly, but instead of placing it in the microscope he went over to the outer wall. Slowly he donned protective coveralls and goggles, used in radiation protection, and told Skander to do likewise. Then he sealed the lab against entry and peeled back the tent lining in the one place where it covered a port—not used here, but these tents were all-purpose and contained many useless features.
The baleful reddish landscape showed before them at midday. Slowly, carefully, the boy held the tiny filter up to one eye and closed the other. He gasped. "I was right!" he exclaimed.
After a painful half-minute that felt like an eternity, he handed the little filter to Skander, who did the same.
Through the filter, the entire landscape was bathed in a ferocious electrical storm. Skander couldn't stop looking at it.
"The Markovian brain is all around us," Varnett whispered. "It draws what it needs and expels what it does not. If we could contact it—"
"We'd be like gods," Skander finished.
Skander reluctantly put down the filter and handed it back to Varnett, who resumed his own gazing.