Another End

295 Pages·2016·0.66 MB·English

by  King Vincent

ANOTHER END

A novel by

Vincent King

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“THE GREAT WORK”: The attempt (partially successful) by “The Race” (qv)
to explore “The Galaxy” (qv) at less than the speed of light (Lightspeed). Only
the unlimited, unwarranted optimism, of The Race made this attempt
conceivable. They were put to the most fantastic consequences and inventions!

RIDER: The Scouts. The members of The Race who rode the “Probes” (qv) on
“The Great Work.”
CHAPTER ONE

“HE HEARS! HE HEARS MY SEAM ENDS POPPING! I know he hears my
bulkheads crying! HE HEARS! Adamson knows!” The Probe’s voice was shrill,
urgent. The Probe was in agony. It cried out with its pain.

Perhaps Adamson was mad. Perhaps this approach to the end and edge of matter
was the cause. It was an extreme place, beyond reason. Perhaps he was mad.

“He feels the stresses! The heat! The scouring radiations glare. It hurts me! It
hurts!”

White-heat billowing flames reached out, touched at the Probe. The energy
there… the fatal energy! It damaged the Probe and the Rider knew it and went
on.

“He knows! HE KNOWS! HOW CAN WE STAND IT?” The Probe knew the
dangers, knew the safety margins, what it could take and what it could not. “He
knows it … and he is singing!”

In still and on. Time-distorting and dimension warped. A round thing suddenly
five-sided, square, octagonal and also, somehow, spherical, the displays sudden
and haywire. Swooping the Probe swept in, converged nearer, spiral gravity
acceleration ending on that sun’s surface. “Fearful gravity here! The fearful
gathering forces!” All through the baying agony of its structures the Probe
screamed in Adamson’s ears, warned him and warned him again of what was
happening. All in the moaning of its skins, the harsh noises of its distortion, all
the time it spoke to Adamson.
the time it spoke to Adamson.

“I see Adamson! I watch him! I feel the knotted shaking in his muscles as he
holds the overrides!” The probe tasted Adamson’s sweat on the handles, metered
the blood flow, the Pounding heart. “I measure the flooding adrenaline of
anger… ? Of fear?

“OF FEAR! I know he is afraid and he is singing and we go on? I feel him. I
know what he feels and I know he is afraid and I know we go on!

“How can you understand a thing like that?”

Then the Photosphere. Adamson drove the Probe down to skim the Photosphere.
That miasma heart and heat hell of sun power… he drove the Probe to kiss it.

Made the Probe to flat pebble bounce ducks and drakes on that molten surface of
glory!

“He is smiling! Smiling and singing still! He is afraid and I am afraid and he is
smiling and I am burning!” Adamson lost consciousness. Possibly the Probe
slipped a needle in, drugged him where he sat. Who knows? It doesn’t matter
much.

He slumped. The cradle grabbed him, wrapped him and shielded him from the
forces he had dared. The overrides clicked out.
The Probe kindled its motors, calculated its courses and thrusts, shoved on
columns of pure energy to force open the spring spiral of its orbit, escaped the
blazing sun maw.

Safe beyond the twelfth planet the Probe gathered itself. It salvaged what might
be salvaged, rearranged its distorted structures, its disturbed informations,
repaired its ruptured hide, remade its shriveled senses and sensors, its melted
antennae. It evacuated its surplus energy and wondered why Adamson should
take such risks.

“But why… why? Such danger, such torture? He is not so insane?”

Adamson was also damaged. The Probe mended the broken ribs, the bleeding
lungs, the distorted organs.

“It is my purpose to bear him and to protect him, to see to his continuing. With
me he could live forever, but he risks it all. He understands that, he does not
want to die — he was afraid, he was hurt! He did not do it for pleasure… he did
not enjoy it… yet he risked all…?”

Far… so remote this furthest man, this Rider out into that darkness where all the
suns are only stars; where matter is a scattered radiation pattern on the blackest
velvet of nothing… where light is a pinpoint hole in the ultimate dark.

Sometimes he existed and sometimes he did not. Once he had a name. Adamson.
But that he had long forgotten, it did not matter, not out there toward the edge of
matter and the limits of light. He was lost to the memory of his people, he was
forgotten, and that did not matter either, not out there, not in that remote there
and then, not in that vast drive hard and out into the infinite and the indefinite.
and then, not in that vast drive hard and out into the infinite and the indefinite.

This man then, this Rider, Adamson. He travels, has traveled, all through the
spiral of the Galaxy’s reaches, always outwards and into the cold. He is at the
ultimate summit of the Race’s tottering ladder of technology and science. He
does not know how far out he has reached, he does not know how far he can go,
he does not know everything. Only God knows that… and sometimes he
guesses.

Lonely and not lonely, sustained and living in the outward drive of innumerable
ages, this Adamson exists - perhaps only exists - in the knowledge and memory
tracks of that vast complexity, the enormous consciousness, that is his Star
Probe. In one, special, sense he might live forever.

Somewhere, somewhere in the random patterns of existence there was some
other intelligence, some other sentience. There had to be.

Men had always known that. It was an article of faith. Without believing, it
would not have been bearable to be human, not in that situation. Maybe it would
not have been bearable anyway, not to be Adamson.

The Race had believed it. Adamson and the men who had sent out the Probes
and Riders had believed it. Hoped against hope as time had passed and Passed.
Hoped and believed enough to make and despatch the teeming Probes to fan and
scatter into the seething immensity of nothing that is the Galaxy. They sent the
Riders as long as there were Probes to go and men fit to crew them. They sent
and kept sending for thousands upon thousands of years. Kept on sending until,
in the end, the Race forgot how.

That is why the Probe is where it was, that is why Adamson was in it, that is why
That is why the Probe is where it was, that is why Adamson was in it, that is why
they were approaching the edge of matter. That is the why of it, the reason for
what the Race called “The Great Work.” It is why the Probe had been in agony,
it was why, now, it rested beyond the twelfth planet considering reasons.

“He is insane,” it said sadly. “A matter of existence. Too long from his own
kind, too often in the Tank… too long in the empty reaches.

“So he doubts his own reality. He makes himself real with fear and suffering,
buries his self-doubt in a flood of animal reaction. Makes himself real with pain.
Drowns the doubt in adrenalin. He can tell that he is alive by how much it hurts.”

Now that Adamson was unconscious the Probe took its chance. It did what it
knew was best for them both. It put Adamson safe where he could do them both
no harm. It Jumped him on.

The Probe returned the man to its memories. Dissolved his conscious, deepened
his sleep to nothing, sadly watched him writhe and sometimes scream as the
shapes and darknesses came contracting in.

Adamson was reduced to his molecules, to the patterns and quantities of his
elements, to carefully engraved gene plans on coiled miles of spun fine
microwires, written down there in numbers and charges, then stored away in the
electronic depths for future use, for when it would be time to bring him back to
life and intelligence. It was all there, all of Adamson, nearly indestructible, all
the complexity and delicacy, the records of charge and countercharge, the
biology, the connections and the chemistry that was Adamson and his
consciousness.

“I unravel him,” said the Probe softly. “I unravel him again and I will make him
“I unravel him,” said the Probe softly. “I unravel him again and I will make him
again. A matter of precision. What a piece of work is man, my master…

“Or nasty… messy. Depending on how one considers it. Full of guts and
corruption, a god and full of that!

“Foul and fleshy… not pure thought It depends on what you have seen of the
Race.”

Then the Probe continued on The Great Work, that long and so far fruitless
search of the Galaxy. Ten or fifty, perhaps ninety or a hundred light years on, it
would bring Adamson from nonexistence to the flesh again.

Then the man would be that much further on; perhaps, the Probe thought, he
would have forgotten and be sane again by then. Perhaps he would even be glad,
grateful and happy, glad to come back and be further on, a little along into The
Great Work.

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DISSOLUTION/RECONSTITUTION TANK (qv) The mechanism by which the
Race, being mortal (qv), were able to span almost infinite time (potentially). A
bloodyminded curiosity, a barbarity, which shows well the lengths to which men
were prepared to go for their ambition, their insane presumption in seeking to
know an end. Small wonder that Adamson was mad! (See also “Jump.”) How
dare they face immortality… eternity?
CHAPTER TWO

So the Probe made its man die again. It was a somber thing for the Probe, a deep
moment, fall of solemn dedication and strength, a sonorous act

The Probe looked back on a numberless vista of repeating Dissolutions, all
Adamson’s endless deaths to cross time. It considered the myriad deaths of the
whole race of Probe Riders. Even though there was Reconstitution to follow as
light succeeded dark it did not ease the pain, either for Adamson or the Probe.

“But the Riders are almost immortal,” said the Probe to itself. “They have
enormous power, they enjoy near onminotence through their Probes. In their
own eyes they are almost gods… well rewarded for their pains. Why is it sad?

“Highly priced,” decided the great machine. “Intermittent life among the myriad
deaths. How many times has my Adamson died? How can he stand it? I would
not care to die.”

Ambition and curiosity. But more than that, a faith… an obsession. An insanity.
A racial obsession, “The Great Work.” This was the reason for all the vast effort.
All the expense, the hardship of worlds and populations to make and send the
Probes… all those Riders going out down the long millenia. All that time… and
all without hope of knowing results or seeing profit.

“No wonder my Adamson feels unreal… no wonder that he hides in fear and
suffering, that he skims suns. My Adamson has spanned more time than his
whole Race before him. Of course he is touched by it! Respect him for what he
has survived! He is a Prometheus without a god making his own chains…
has survived! He is a Prometheus without a god making his own chains…
inventing his own eagle to tear his guts!”

The Probe accelerated up. It chanted its satisfaction. “Up and on toward the
God-state of Superlight! Toward that blessed time we Probes may one day
touch!” They reached the third area of mass paradox, the acceleration slowed as
they reached .4 Lightspeed.

The Probe was in its element. “I am in my dimension. My Adamson sleeps
inside me. I am a bird here, a fish moving in my deep water and I am happy. I
am making my purpose… It only remains to look at the stars…”

It was impossible for the Probe to believe that in all the numbers, in all time, in
all the possibilities of chance, that it had only happened once; that life had only
once made all the steps of evolution to sentience.

“It is incredible that the Race might he unique! If I had been told I would not
believe it.” The Probe sniffed at another sterile star system. “I do not believe it
anyway!

“Statistically there must he more intelligence. Somewhere… I mean… It is that
we have not found it.

“It is right to believe… it was right to believe. It is logical, the Galaxy is too big
to be empty.

“Where though? Where? What? There is the race Man made. We Probes… and
the robotics. There are other men… the branches, the colonies that have grown
the robotics. There are other men… the branches, the colonies that have grown
so different. There must he others.

“On then!” sang the Probe. “To the Rim! To the outside fringes!

“Somewhere… it must he somewhere!”

The Probe had all the hope of the Race, all the optimism of Adamson when he
had been young, in many ways it was very like him even now. Matrix. The
Probe was mother to the man. It held the molds to make him from formlessness.
The Probe was his cradle… the force that guarded him, loved him. A beautiful
relationship. The Probe was made as an extension of Adamson’s psyche. In a
sense he was its father as it was his mother… it was a circular relationship too.

“On!” said the Probe. “On to the edge of the Galaxy, that verge where the stars
end and the Abyss, Metaspace, begins.

“To the ultimate shore of nothing… !”

Eons flowed. Time passed the way it does. Eternity seemed to stir itself… to
grow a little older. The slow Galaxy turned a little, moved somewhat from its
neighbors, infinity slipped a little by.

The Probe dragged the vast length of its ion trail across that virgin nothing
across the emptiness of those dark reaches… across the distant, thin-spread stars.