Planet Probability

by Brian Ball

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Frames were only a realization of the ultimate form of escape. Books, films, sensors, complete total experience - and finally the Frames. The saviors of civilization had shown the way: move the tribes of Americans to Europe, the tribes of the Germans to Spain, the tribes of the English to Switzerland and permutate the combinations endlessly. Use trains, then aircraft, then spaceships. The Frames of the Thirtieth Century were a logical extension of the Mechanical Age's exploitation of the means of mass travel. Now, whole populations moved to new areas of experience. New worlds - new re-created worlds - were manufactured for them. And it had all begun on Talisker. But whatever had left the monstrous scenery on Talisker's desert had not begun anywhere in our universe.

Release date: June 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 188

Sample

There were the two fliers, midgets in the gray sky of over three hundred thousand dawns ago. They had circled that empty sky, just as they did now in this fragment of film. Liz Hassell was conscious of an aching sense of wonder; the past had truly happened, its ghosts still lingered. And they haunted her. The set assistant, a high-grade robot, asked whether it should run the bit of film again. Marvell shook his head.

“I believe,” he said to Liz Hassell and the other young trainee, Dyson, “in an approximation of reality.” He rested his bulk on the side of the staging-bubble and looked down into the dark arena where something like a hundred thousand men and a few women were waiting, unconscious and in the final stages of memory-recycling, to try his latest re-creation. He was worried. “We haven’t all the data. So we must approximate. What do you think?”

He was dressed in what he considered to be the appropriate garments for the period—not unlike those of the Savior of Civilization, thought Liz Hassell. He had the black frock coat, the narrow striped trousers, the white leather spats and the gay cravat of the Mechanical Age impresario who had come to the rescue of mankind just about the time of the Disinvention of Work. The clothes emphasized Marvell’s bulk. Liz disliked heavy men. She turned to her fellow trainee who was a slim handsome bisexual she had once adored; now Dyson was nothing to her. His overwhelming charm, his instant enthusiasm, his boyish mannerisms, grated on her; she saw them as a kind of witless affectation. Predictably, Dyson said:

“It’s going to be terrific, Marvell! It’s going to have them lining up in queues all the way to the end of the Galaxy! They’ve never seen anything like it! What a Plot! And the casualty rate! Thirty percent in the first few hours?”

“Something like that,” said Marvell.

“Well! Ideal for all the certified psychopaths! Isn’t that what we’re short of, a suicidal Plot that doesn’t strain credibility?”

Marvell frowned. He thought Dyson, top student in his training year, unimpressive. About Liz Hassell his feelings were mixed. She had the trick of finding material that others could not imagine existed; and she could set up a Possibility Curve with the best of them; but she lacked a certain panache. She wanted things wrapped up neatly, too neatly. He looked at her slim, rounded figure; the black hair was natural, the eyes too of ordinary human pigmentation; she was neither tall nor short, beautiful nor common. Neat. Ordinary, unaffected, competent. He wasn’t too sure that he wanted to hear what she’d have to say.

“Run the early sequences,” he told the languid robot, whose flat gray carapace had all the signs of robotic boredom. “The Terran film!” snarled Marvell, as the automaton delayed.

Liz Hassell saw that his heavy black moustaches were wet where he had chewed them; he was sweating beneath the tall black hat. He had fallen in love with the Mechanical Age, and he had adopted its dress, customs and mannerisms. Well, each to his soul-place, she thought. She herself had never quite got over a yearning for a more primitive era, though she kept the inclination to herself. Short-stay trips in the Frames were one thing, but should Comp get the idea that you were psychologically in tune with a period that had a number of vacancies—as with the Sub-Men Frames—they might yank you out of Direction altogether. What with the really frightful carnivores, and competition from other bipeds, Java Man had a thin and dangerous time of it. Most of the permanent inhabitants of the Third Sub-Man Frame were Time-outers. Liz grinned. There’d be a few calling Time-out when the Plot below began to roll. Her face became serious as the ancient recording she had found was shown.

“Exquisite!” murmured Dyson, allowing his long blond hair to swish from side to side.

“It’s good,” admitted Marvell. He adjusted the purple and yellow cravat at his throat. “How it survived I’ll never know—Liz, here it comes!”

The robot had adjusted a small total-experience simulator which could translate the ancient piece of film into an approximation of three-dimensional life. The scene was blurred, vague, unstable; but the figures in the white fog were human beings. As yet, they were unrecognizable individually. The amateur cameraman who had probably died in this war of antiquity had not mastered his recording machine. But it was real! Liz shuddered. How had this fragment of celluloid escaped the holocausts of the Mad Wars? This, together with a few charred remnants of books and the odd medallion or piece of statuary, was all that remained of the era. It was as though the Terrans of the Nuclear Ages had wished to erase the origins of their civilization. She had found the film in a vault on one of the planets of Andromeda ZU 58, though what archaeologist had deposited it was unknown; the obsolete and melancholy custodian of the museum thought the film had lain there for over half a millennium. And no, it knew of no more such caches, though it realized how valuable they were.

The film jumped into focus at last, and there was a misted dawn over a flat landscape with broken trees splintered by violent explosions. The foreground was still shadowy, yet the blurred and unstable figures were real men, youngsters with long rifles and fixed bayonets; on their heads, rakishly, mushroom-shaped helmets, and cigarettes drooping from their mouths. Liz savored the smoke. The totex machines gave you the stench of the battlefield, its rum and coffee, the cigarettes, a hint of corruption from the green long-dead. She saw the better shots now. One man smiling dreamily at a memory: he was the one who was catapulted back, shot at the moment of the advance; the angular-jawed young captain beside him took a sip of coffee. And Liz experienced a helpless sense of belonging—a kind of angry pity that was part-identification; and then the officer, a cheerfully handsome man, smiled confidently into the camera lens. A wry grin at the slippery mud of the trench. Marvell’s voice came as if from a thousand miles away.

“The simply incredible thing about it is that there were people, they lived, they spoke, they acted as we see them now. And anyone can have it all! All of it!”

He had touched a chord in the girl’s imagination for a moment, but the sight of his broad, fleshy face and its sweat brought her back to the present; Marvell overdid his effects. No wonder he sweated and chewed the black moustaches! The fliers he’d put into the Plot were too much.

The stench of fetid water hit Liz as the totex showed a glimpse of the soldiers’ feet; they were up to their ankles in watery mud; one dropped a cigarette and cursed silently. They were desperately keyed up now. Liz thought suddenly that this was why she was in Direction rather than tramping contentedly through green savannahs behind some huge-jawed mate from the dawn of humanity; for her it was more important to make the Frames than to live in them.

“It’s a lovely bit of war, Liz,” said Marvell. “Lovely, uncomplicated rituals. See, they’re ready!”

And they were. About two score of young men, some with only minutes of life before them; one would soon topple back toward the unidentified cameraman, ending the brief glimpse into trench warfare of the Mechanical Age.

“He’s raising his whistle!” Dyson squealed. “Oh, see!”

The young officer was serious. Comp had explained the purpose of the whistle: part symbolic, part functional. It had talismanic qualities, for it brought the fliers into the combat.

“There they go!” Marvel exclaimed.

A silent sustained blast, the men scrambling over the top of the slippery trench wall, and a boy of twenty hurtling back toward the camera; and that was all, except for the few seconds of mysterious film that showed the fliers. It wasn’t much of a record for Comp to build a whole Plot on.

The robot beside the totex globe waited until the last ancient flickering moments of blackness had ceased.

“Sir?” it addressed Marvell. “Run the flying machines in greater depth?”

Marvell frowned, for the robot had guessed his anxiety. Dyson told it to go ahead, but Marvell’s pride would not allow the showing.

“Leave it,” he said. “Cigar!” he yelled to a servo-robot which skittered across on spidery legs with a fat cigar glowing. It had waited an hour for this moment; when Marvell took the cigar, it was a sign that the memory-cassettes had almost completed their work in the skulls below. Individual memory-cells were biting deeper and deeper into the subconscious minds of the thousands who had opted for the experimental Plot; tiny clusters of cells would be smashing through nerve-tissue in the quiet and receptive bodies, racing with bewildering speed through the vital areas of control to restructure the psyche so that it could cope with the demands of the Plot. Information roared in a colossal stream into the deep, submerged areas, planting colonies of memory, detailing the background each man and woman could expect to have acquired, modifying a million million corners of hints of recollection, and gnawing with a monstrous power at all that had occurred in their minds!

Liz could see some of the gently respiring figures when she used her scanner; it amazed her that each one was being imbued with a new persona. But could the restructured minds cope with the Plot? Was it viable?

Any new Plot could go wrong, which was why Comp had to recheck and doublecheck against the possibility that humans couldn’t adapt to the new circumstances with which they were faced. Liz shrugged. Comp said go, and that was enough for Marvell.

There would be a re-creation of the ritual warfare of the Mechanical Age. Real mud, real rifles, real death. And real flying traction-engines.

Somehow Marvell had convinced Comp that the Possibility Space of the Mechanical Age had room for his beloved steam engines. Not only that, but that they were tied up with the fetish he was hung up on, that of Mechanical Man’s absorption with personal conveyances. A statistical test of significance had shown that he might be right. Liz Hassell shrugged again beneath the elegant fur she wore. He could be right. But if he wasn’t, there’d be thousands yelling to get out of the Plot in a short time; and what was to happen to the delicate balance of the Frames if a sudden demand for Time-out on this scale should occur? After all, only suicidal maniacs wanted to be in a Plot like this one of Marvell’s; they looked for quick death, most of them, but not in an idiot world, not in one the human mind couldn’t accept as possible! Where could they be placed at short notice if the Plot failed?

No wonder Marvell was worried!

“I had a look at the fliers in the old film.” Dyson was saying to an uninterested Marvell. “Yesterday I checked it with Comp. They’d got the speed to that of the fliers—about ninety miles an hour. Agrees beautifully with the technology of the age! And the overall weight allowed quite a lot of projectile power. Why, they’d managed to absorb all the recoil from the howitzer without going out of the technological possibilities!”

Liz saw Marvell’s indecision. She felt unaccustomedly bitchy.

“I looked in on Comp too,” she said. “They said Spingarn didn’t like the steam—”

“Spingarn!” Marvell bawled, face red. “Never say Spingarn! It’s bad luck!”

Dyson hadn’t learned to curb his impulsiveness. He chattered intelligently:

“Wasn’t that the Plot Director whose persona went aberrant—the thing about random vari—”

“Shut up!” roared Marvell, stabbing his cigar squarely onto the gray carapace of the set-robot. It allowed itself a high-pitched whine of protest. “I never want to hear that name again! Never! It’s not just bad luck—it’s lunacy! Liz, don’t do it again!” He kicked the machine for protesting.

Dyson sulked. His troubles were just beginning, thought Liz Hassell. He’d never make Plot Director, however much he enthused. He’d be back in the Frames before long. The thought was some consolation to her, for she had suffered a month of cold hell on Cygnus VIII not long ago, when he had told her their affair was over. It was taking too much of his organic energy, he told her. His career was suffering. There had been a ferocious mutant struggle going on at the time in the Cygnus Frame: Liz had found herself recycled amongst long-headed things with wet skin and webbed feet. It had been the only opening at short notice for a nubile young woman of her dimensions. She shuddered at the memory. Dyson would pay. When he was dismissed from Direction, she would see that he was dropped off into a Geriatric Frame for virgin spinsters. And keep him there.

“Starting time?” Marvell snapped at the robot he had offended.

“Three minutes, sir,” it said, still hurt. “May I take this opportunity of wishing you a great success?”

There was metallic irony in its voice. Marvell took a second cigar from the eager servo and blew smoke over the high-grade’s lizard-metal gray skin; it wrinkled at the pollution. Marvell blew again. It didn’t protest. With Marvell, neither men nor machines raised too much fuss; he wasn’t one of the hotshot Directors, and it was rumored that he’d lost the confidence of the Director of the Frames. But he was still Marvell, Liz’s boss. To her surprise, Marvell insisted she give her opinion of the new venture.

“You’ve worked on it for months, Liz—is it a goer? I mean, I know you’ve reservations.”

She smiled at him. When he spoke in this unconfident manner she found him almost appealing; if only he hadn’t so much sheer bulk! He could do with restructuring. She answered him carefully, to help his distrust of his work.

“I saw the reruns of some of the bits you tried—I liked them all, Marvell. But I think Comp’s put you way out on a limb with this linkup between personal transportation and ritual war. See!” she said suddenly, snapping her fingers at the sulking robot. “Close focus on the fliers. Quick!”

“Only two minutes before we start,” Dyson said. “Shouldn’t we be getting clear of the area? There’s going to be a lot of projectiles whizzing about soon, and the staging-bubbles won’t stand up to them.”

Marvell and Liz ignored him as the totex globe unwound snakily and the tiny fragment of recorded history flickered like the shadow of a ghost across the screens. It chilled Liz Hassell to see it. A few seconds of dim images preserved by some blind chance: the only record that was anything like coherent of the flying machines of the Mechanical Age. And there they were, two blurred gray shapes half a mile above the trench where the young officer and his men waited for death; the cameraman had swung his lens up, or perhaps had the camera torn from his hands. But the pictures existed. Two vague machines, size unknown, but unquestionably man-made. Altogether the wrong dimensions for animals or birds; and with a lazy deadliness about the way they circled like fragile predators above the battlefield. Comp thought they were engaged in some kind of ritual exchange of courtesies before swooping down to join the muddy and desperate encounters below. And maybe Comp was right.

“It could be viable, couldn’t it, Liz?” Marvell asked.

“Of course!” Dyson gushed.

“One minute before commencement,” reported the set-robot. “You should move away for your own safety, sir.”

“I liked part of it,” Liz said, ignoring the interruptions. “I loved the close combat sequences—they’ll have nothing to complain about there. The casualty list’s going to be as high as that of the Solar Drift cultists, and they burn up at quite a rate. I liked the mud and the diseases. Comp could be entirely right about that side of things. But I have this creepy sensation that they’re wrong in deriving a correspondence between your steam engines and the fliers we saw just now.”

“Please clear the area!” implored the robot, forgetting its hurt feelings.

Comp added a warning. A suave voice echoed over the immense Plotting hall:

“Director Marvell! Your Plot goes forward in thirty seconds! All personnel are advised to enter protected areas immediately. Otherwise, they must be removed by Security operatives.”

Marvell threw his second cigar away. It would be undignified to be hauled away by some cheerfully tender Security robot. He jumped into the staging-bubble and made room for Liz. Dyson stared openmouthed as Marvell punched buttons. He was still standing, amazed and dismayed, as they were swept away.

“Spingarn!” growled Marvell at Liz Hassell. “He said the same thing.”

The staging-bubble skittered for the safe areas at a tremendous pace. Liz Hassell felt excited, nervous, almost fearful; every time the name of Spingarn came up, Marvell lost all his authority. It meant something vital to him; she could see it in his eyes. He looked like a bewildered stallion, all his strength and power of no use. Spingam … why?

“I know. Comp said Spingarn was against the traction-engines.”

“Then how the hell did they get t. . .