Midsummer Century - James Blish

Midsummer Century - James Blish, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 1

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Copyright©1972by James Bush
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
A shorter version of this novel appeared in
Fantasy and Science Fiction
magazine, April1972
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
NOTE
I am indebted to Rowland BowenandDr. John Clark, both of England, for substantial elements of my
hypotheses about the nature of ESP and mystical experience, respectively. In both instances I have
simply helped myselfto whatever seemed useful in advancing my own notions, and my story, without
hying to be rigorous about it. The theories remain theirin-tellectual properties and await their own
expositions of them. I am grateful to both for permission to simplify their work into fiction.
JAMES BUSH
Harpsden (Henley)
Oxon, England
1971
PART ONE
REBIRTFI UI
Page 1
 1
In alltheointment which the world had provided for the anointing of John Martels, D.Sc., F.R.A.S., etc.,
there was only one fly: There was something wrong with his telescope. Martels, unmarried and30,was
both a statistic and a bene-ficiary of what his British compatriots were bitterly calling the brain-drain, the
luring of the best English minds to the United States with higher pay, lower taxes, and the apparent
absence of any class system whatsoever. And he had found no reason to regretit,let alone feel guilty
aboutit.Both his parents were dead, and as far as he was concerned, he owed the United Kingdom
nothing any more.
Of course, the advantages of living in the States were not quite so unclouded as they had been presented
to him, but he had never expected anything else. Take the apparent absence of a class system, for
instance: All the world knew that the blacks, the Mexicans, and the poor in general were discrimi-nated
against ferociously in the States, and that political op-position of any kind to the Establishment was
becoming in-creasingly dangerous. But what counted as far as he was concerned was thatitwas not the
same sortof class system.
Born of a working-class family in the indescribably ugly city of Doncaster, Martels had been cursed from
the outset with a working-class Midlands dialect which excluded him
fromthe “right” British circles as permanently and irrevocably as if he had been a smuggled Pakistani
immigrant. No “public” school had been financially available to his parents to help him correct the horrible
sound of his own voice; nor to give him the classical languages which in his youth had still been necessary
for entry into Oxford or Cambridge.
Instead, he had ground, kicked, bitten, and otherwise foughthis way through one of the new redbrick
polytechnics. Though he emerged at the end with the highest possible First in astrophysics, it was with an
accent still so atrocious as to deny him admittance to any but the public side—never the lounge or
saloon—of any bar in Britain.
In the States, on the other hand, accents were regarded as purely regional,and a man’s education was
judged not by his inflection but by his grammar, vocabulary, and the state of his knowledge. To be sure,
Martels was disturbed by the condition of the Negro, the Mexican, and the poor, but since he was none
of these things, he was not oppressed byit.
As for political activity, that was absolutely out for Martels; he was an alien here. Were he to so much as
raise a placard, regardless of what was written onit, he would lose either his passport or his citizenship.
The money situation had worked out in very much the same way. While there was a lot more ofit
available here than there was in England, in places like New York they tookit away from you almost
faster than you could makeit; but Martels was not in New York. After a brief but moderately spectacular
lecture-ship as a radio astronomer at Jodrell Banks, he had been hired on as Director of Research in the
field by a new but already sprawling university in the American midwest, where money went a good deal
farther—and where, in addition, Negroes, Mexicans,and the poor were in invisibly short supply. He
could not quite put their plight out of his mind, but at leastit was easier on the conscience to have it out of
Page 2
 sight. The
sailplaning here wasn’t as good asithad been in the Chiltem Hills, but you can’t have everything.
And there had been a final inducement: Sockette State had just completed construction of a radio
telescope of a radically new design, a combination of mile-square dipole arrays and steerable dish with a
peculiar, bowl-like glacial gouge in the landscape which made all its predecessors seem as primitive as
the optical machine Galileo had filched from Hans Lippershey. The combination made it possible to
mount a dish rather smaller than the one at Jodrell Banks, and involved instead a wave-guide focal point
almost as big, and as skeletal, as the tubular frame of a 65-inch optical reflecting telescope. It took a
startling amount of power to drive the thing—over and above the power necessary to steer it—but in
theory at least,itought to penetrate far enough around the universe to pick up the radio equivalent of the
temperature at the back of Martels’ own neck.
At first sight, he had been as pleased with it as a father who has just bought his son a new electric train.
Just trying to imagine what great events might be recorded by such an instrument was splendid. It seemed
to pose only one problem:
Thus far, it couldn’t be made to pick up anything but the local rock-and-roll station.
There was nothing wrong with the theory, of that he was quite certain. The design was as sound asit
could possibly be. So was the circuitry; he had tested that out repeatedly and intensively. The only other
possibility was a flaw in the gross construction of the telescope, probably something so simple as a girder
out of true in the wave guide which would distort either the field or the transmission.
Well, there was at least one thing to be said for a redbrick university: It did nothing for either your Greek
or your English, butitinsisted that its physical scientists also be passable en-gineers beforeitlet you
graduate. Warming up the amplifier,
tuning it, and cranking the gain up all the way—a setting which should have effectively relocated the
campus of Sockette State in the heart of Ursa Major No. z,a cluster of galaxies half a billion light-years
away—he crossed the parabolic alu-minum basketwork of the steerable antenna and scrambled up the
wave guide, field strength detector in hand; awkwardly, it was too big to be put into a pocket.
Gaining the lip of the wave guide, he sat down for a rest, feet dangling, peering down the inside of the
tube. The pro-gram now was to climb clown into there slowly in a tight spiral, calling out the field intensity
readings at intervals to the technicians on the floor.
Redbrick polytechnics insist that their physical scientists also be engineers, but they neglect to turn them
into steeple-jacks as well. Martels was not even wearing a hard hat. Set-tling one sneakered foot into
what appeared to be a perfectly secure angle between one girder and another, he slipped and fell
headlong down the inside of the tube.
He did not even have time to scream, let alone hear the shouts of alarm from the technicians, for he lost
consciousness long before he hit bottom.
In fact, he never hit bottom at all.
Page 3
 It would be possible to explain exactly and comprehensively what happened to John Martels instead, but
to do so would require several pages of expressions in the metalanguage in-vented by Dr. Thor Wald, a
Swedish theoretical physicist who unfortunately was not scheduled to be born until the year2060.Suffice
it to say that, thanks to the shoddy workmanship of an unknown welder, Sockette State’s radical new
radio telescope did indeed have an unprecedented reach—but not in any direction that its designers had
intended, or could even have conceived.
2
“Ennoble me with the honor of your attention, immortal Qvant.”
Swimming upward from blackness, Martels tried to open his eyes, and found that he could not.
Nevertheless, in a moment he realized that he could see. What he saw was so totally strange to him that
he tried to close his eyes again, and found he could not do that, either. He seemed, in fact, completely
paralyzed; he could not even change his field of view.
He wondered briefly if the fall had broken his neck. But that shouldn’t affect his control of his eye
muscles, should it? Or of his eyelids?
Besides, he was not in a hospital; of that much, at least, he could be sure. What was visible to him was a
vast, dim hall in bad repair. There seemed to be sunlight coming from over-head, but whatever there was
up there that was admitting it was not letting much through.
He had a feeling that the place ought to be musty, but he seemed to have no sense of smell left. The
voice he had heard, plus a number of small, unidentifiable echoes, told him that he could still hear, at
least. He tried to open his mouth, again without result.
There seemed to be nothing for it but to take in what little was visible and audible, and try to make as
much sense as
possible of whatever facts that brought him. What was he sitting or lying upon? Was it warm or cool?
No, those senses were gone too. But at least hecUdnot seem to be in any pain— though whether that
meant that that sense was gone too, or that he was either drugged or repaired, couldn’t be guessed. Nor
was he hungry or thirsty—again an ambiguous finding.
About the floor of the hail within his cone of vision was a scatter of surpassingly strange artifacts. The
fact that they were at various distances enabled him to establish that he could at least still change his
depth of focus. Some of the ob-jects seemed to be more decayed than the hail itself. In a number of
instances the state, if any, of decay was impossible to judge, because the things seemed to be sculptures
or some other kind of works of art, representing he knew not what, if anything at all, for representational
art had been out of fashion all his life, anyhow. Others, however, were plainly machines; and though in no
case could he even guess their intended functions, he knew corrosion when he saw it. This stuff had been
out of use a long, long time.
Page 4
 Somethingwas still functioning, though. He could hear the faintest of continuous hums, like a 50-cycle line
noise. It seemed to come from somewhere behind him, intimately close, as though some spectral barber
were applying to the back of his skull or neck a massaging device intended for the head of a gnat.
He did not think that the place, or at least the chamber of it that he seemed to be in, was exceptionally
large. If the wall that was visible to him was a side rather than an end—which of course he had no way of
determining—and the remembered echoes of the voice were not misleading, then it could not be much
bigger than one of the central galleries in the Alte Pinakothek, say the Rubens room.. .
The comparison clicked neatly into place. He was in a museum of some sort.Andone both without
maintenance and
completely unpopular, too, for the floor was thick with dust, and there were only a few footprints in that,
and in some cases none at all, near the exhibits (if that was what they were). The footprints, he registered
without understanding, were all those of bare feet.
Then, there came that voice again, this time with rather a whining edge to it. It said:
“Immortal Qvant, advise me, I humbly pray.”
And with a triple shock, he heard himself replying:
“You may obtrude yourself upon my attention, tribesman.” The shock was triple because, first of all, he
had had no in-tention or sensation of either formulating the reply or of utter-ing it. Second, the voice in
which it came out was most cer-tainly not his own; it was deeper, and unnaturally loud, yet seemed to be
almost without resonance. Third, the language was one he had never heard before in his life, yet he
seemed to understand it perfectly.
Besides, my name is not and has never been Qvant. I don’t even have a middle initial.
But he was given no time to speculate, for there now sidled into sight, in a sort of cringing crouch which
Martels found somehow offensive, something vaguely definable as a human being. He was naked and
dark brown, with what Martels judged to be a mixture of heredity and a deep tan. The naked-ness also
showed him to be scrupulously clean, his arms short, his legs long, his pelvis narrow. His hair was black
and crin-kled like a Negro’s, but his features were Caucasoid, except for an Asian eyelid fold, rather
reminding Martels of an African bushman—an impression strengthened by his small stature. His
expression, unlike his posture, was respectful, almost reverent, but not at all frightened.
“What would you have of me now, tribesman?” Martels’ new voice said.
“Immortal Qvant, I seek a ritual for the protection of our
maturity ceremonies from the Birds. They have penetrated the old one, for this year many of our new
young men lost their eyes to them, and some even their lives. My ancestors tell me that such a ritual was
known in Rebirth Three, and is better than ours, but they cannot give me the details.”
“Yes, it exists,” Martels’ other voice said. “And it will serve you for perhaps two to five years. But in the
end, the Birds will penetrate this too. In the end, you will be forced to abandon the ceremonies.”
Page 5
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