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Ian Watson - Alien Embassy
The three hundred hotels of Miami Beach housed approximately three thousand
Bardo trainees, we learnt. Which posed huge organizational problems. This was
why we were not to stray away from our own hotel. Inside the hotel, we were
not to enter any areas of the building marked by. red swastika warning signs
on the doors.
'So: work hard. Train hard. Remember, we need round-the-clock vigilance at the
Procyon Embassy, Our contact with them must never be lost-'
And so the hotel manager's speech subsided.
'Any questions, queries, problems?,' The three melted into one, because
everything was still a question, a query, or a problem.
'Obviously not right now,' he laughed 'Well, the bigger questions sort
themselves out as time goes by? Any immediate difficulties, ask at the desk or
phone down from your room,'
Maimouna nudged me in the crowd, afterwards.
'Why do Bardo need so many trainees?; Three thousand people training just to
keep in touch with one world! In the old days there were only a couple of
hundred astronauts, ever,'
'That wasn't mental travel. It takes a lot of psychic energy.-You have to rest
up between flights. Flights are shorter-'
They've been training people for years and years, What's the urgency? Is Bardo
flight so exhausting that they need these sort of numbers? I tell you, the
manager
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Ian Watson - Alien Embassy was scared of something - something about Bardo.'
'Nonsense.'
'Scared, my dear, as my fly is scared of my spider. I
know
. My Chinese Teacher laid his hands on my skull when I was ten years old. He
stared into my eyes and said he saw the spider in my left eye and the fly in
my right eye, and I'd always know them when I met them in my life. If Bardo
spins mind webs into space, Lila, why was our manager sweating like a trapped
fly?'
Hamidou-A butted in. 'That fly and spider - it's just an image of the two
sides of your own brain, Maimouna, to help you concentrate on integrating
them. Didn't you realize? Fly must learn to trust the spider. Spider must
learn not to want to eat the fly.'
"The left side of your brain analyses,' echoed his brother. "It spins webs of
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analysis. The right side intuits. It flies into the beyond. Your Chinese
Teacher was just taking your own personality into account with his fly and
spider story -
trading on your sly, suspicious nature, to make the best he could of you.'
'You're always spinning webs for people, to prove how clever you are.'
Take care you don't catch yourself in your own web!'
SEVEN
During the first month, we attended lectures on the field phenomenon -we'd be
using to make our almost instantaneous transition to Asura: Action at a
Distance.
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Ian Watson - Alien Embassy
Our instructor, an Indian from Arizona, showed us a time-lapse film of a seed
germinating, sprouting, becoming a full grown plant, flowering and dying. Then
he ran the film backwards. The plant grew back into the seed again.
Next he showed a film of a waterfall falling up a cliff face, instead of down.
Then another film, of stones and dust flying together to form a solid boulder
- at which we all laughed, it looked so silly.
'That's a natural reaction - laughter,? commented the Indian. 'Time always
flows in one direction only. So rivers never run backwards, and rubble never
reorganizes itself into a boulder after you've dynamited it. Time flies
forward like an arrow. It stands to reason, eh?
'It so happens that it isn't reasonable at all! According to modern physics,
events should always be reversible, theoretically. Consider the universe,
overall. The universe is a unit. There isn't anything that isn't in the
universe. Consequently all parts must be connected to all other parts.
Strictly, there can't' be any "parts" at all! So what is it that links "near"
to "far"?, What is it that links this single unit, the universe? Please
consider a source of energy anywhere in the universe.
Waves radiate outwards from this source at the speed of light. Radio waves, X-
rays, visible light, whatever. We call all these energies "retarded" waves,
because they arrive somewhere else later than they set off, whether it's a
minute later or a million years later. Obviously it stands to reason that
something should arrive later than it leaves. The effect has to follow the
cause.
'Just you try to prove it! According to Maxwell's fundamental equations for
electro-magnetic fields, the opposite case is equally possible. "Advanced"
waves can also exist, which travel back through time to converge on their
so-called
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Ian Watson - Alien Embassy
"point of origin". As these must be in equal and opposite reaction to the
emission of the retarded waves, we can call on Newton's Third Iaw to back us
up here-'
The Indian drew diagrams of radiating arrows and squiggly lines, and chalked
up formulas which we scribbled down in our notebooks to study later and be
asked questions on.
'All this is theory. But does any waterfall actually flow back to its source?
Does starlight ever really fly backwards through time to a star to arrive at
the same time as it radiates it? Plainly not -
to our eyes
. Yet this has to be the case for the universe as a whole, or it simply
couldn't hold together in one single unit. It has to act upon itself at a
distance in this way. When a "retarded" wave reached
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Procyon from Sol, Procyon reacts with an "advanced" wave which travels back
through time, to arrive at Sol just as the original retarded wave is setting
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