Elric to Rescue Tanelorn - Michael Moorcock [88]
“What’s that?” Mr. Powys sucked his fingers.
“Yes, what is it?” Mr. Crookshank seemed to dismiss Mr. Powys’s question as he asked his identical one.
“Quasars are stellar objects,” Jerry said, “so massive that they’ve reached the stage of gravitational collapse.”
“What’s that got to do with the West?” Mr. Smiles asked. “Astronomy?”
“The more massive, in terms of population, an area becomes, the more mass it attracts, until the state of gravitational collapse is reached,” Miss Brunner explained.
“Entropy, I think, Mr. Crookshank, rather than chaos,” Jerry said kindly.
Mr. Crookshank smiled and shook his head. “You’re going a bit beyond me, Mr. Cornelius.” He looked around at the others. “Beyond all of us, I should say.”
“Not beyond me.” Miss Brunner spoke firmly.
“The sciences are becoming curiously interdependent, aren’t they, Mr. Cornelius?” said Dimitri, whose statement seemed to echo one he’d picked up earlier. “History, physics, geography, psychology, anthropology, ontology. A Hindu I met—”
“I’d love to do a programme,” said Miss Brunner.
“I don’t think there’s a computer for the job,” Jerry said.
“I intend to do a programme,” she said, as if she’d made up her mind on the spot.
“You’d have to include the arts, too,” he said. “Not to mention philosophy. It could be just a matter of time, come to think of it, before all the data crystallized into something interesting.”
“Of Time?”
“That, too.”
Miss Brunner smiled up at Jerry. “We have something in common. I hadn’t quite realized what.”
“Oh, only our ambivalence,” Jerry grinned again.
“You’re in a good mood,” said Mr. Powys suddenly to Jerry.
“I’ve got something to do,” Jerry answered, but Mr. Powys was staring at his Scotch again.
Miss Brunner felt extremely satisfied. She returned to the subject. “I’d like more information. You know that this computer could be built. And what would it, in turn, create? Where are we heading?”
“Towards permanent flux perhaps, if you’ll forgive the paradox. Not many would have the intelligence to survive. When Europe’s finally divvied up between the Russians and Americans—not in my lifetime, I hope—what expertise the survivors will have! Won’t they be valuable to their new masters, eh? You should remember that, Miss Brunner, if ever events look like exceeding their present speed.” Jerry tapped her playfully on the shoulder.
She reached up to touch his hand, but it had gone. He got up.
“Can Time exceed c?” She laughed. “I’m sliding off, Mr. Cornelius. But we must take up this conversation again.”
“Now or never,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll be away, and we shan’t meet again.”
“You’re very certain.”
“I have to be.” He no longer grinned as he went back to the window, remembering Catherine and what he must do to Frank.
Behind him, the conversation continued.
Miss Brunner was in a savage, exhilarated mood now.
“And what’s your philosophy for the coming Light Age, Mr. Powys? You know, the c age. That’s a better term, on second thoughts.”
“Second thoughts?” Mr. Powys could summon nothing else. He was now on his fifth thought, trying to equate it with his fourth and, as he remembered it, his third.
Mr. Powys was busily disintegrating.
Mr. Smiles kindly filled his glass up, there being some good in all of us.
CHAPTER FOUR
Jerry steered the boat towards the light that had suddenly flashed out from a point near his port. Illuminated by the greenish glow from his indicator panel, his face looked stranger than ever to the others who waited on the deck outside his cabin.
Miss Brunner, most prone to that sort of thing, reflected that the conflicting time streams of the second half of the twentieth century were apparently mirrored in him, and it seemed that the mind behind cried forward while the mind in front cried back.
What had Cornelius been getting at? Time disintegrating? She’d never read one of his books, but she’d heard of them. Didn’t some of them talk about cyclical time, like Dunne? The ultimate point in the past would therefore be the