One of the tokens of Lithian evil is the mystery surrounding mating and birth on the planet. Chtexa, a Lithian with whom Ruiz-Sanchez talks, explains that he is living alone because no female has chosen him to fecundate her eggs that season. The priest asks, ‘And how is the choice determined? Is it by emotion, or by reason alone?’
‘The two are in the long run the same,’ replies Chtexa.
If emotion and reason are the same ‘in the long run’, then so it seems are religion and science. ‘Clouds and clouds’ of angels follow the Ariadne back to Earth, riding the same Standing Wave as the ship (but the Standing Wave was in a field which ‘relatively rejected the universe’). In that same novel, The Star Dwellers, the children have a tiny transistorised transceiver often unusually employed; as young Sylvia says, ‘Dad uses it to talk to Lucifer.’ (Similarly, the characters in Black Easter listen to Armageddon taking place over Radio Luxembourg. We have to assume that Blish thought such feats possible if there are wholly new ideas of number yet to be revealed.)
Such formulae are passing strange. Therein lies their attraction; they force us to recall the intimate connection between mathematics and reality. Blish’s vision encompasses remote equations where the sedimentary strata of reason are indistinguishable from the igneous deposits of emotion.
He works towards a universe Milton accepted with one that Dirac envisioned, to justify the esoteric problem of evil with the recondite spin of the electron. This is not a problem one meets with regularly in science fiction, yet many people confront it daily. There is always a demand for a New Jerusalem among our dark satanic mills.
As Blake saw eternity in an hour, so the great Mary Somerville, translator of Laplace, saw a proof of the unity of the Deity in Differential Calculus. The American Edward Everett declared, a bit more gushingly, ‘In the pure mathematics we contemplate absolute truths which existed in the divine mind before the morning stars sang together.’ Perhaps Leslie A. White came nearer to Blish’s position – and to Spengler’s – when he remarked that ‘Mathematics is a form of behaviour.’
So could belief in a Dirac transmitter, like absolute trust in God, free us from sin? Such seems to be Blish’s assumption in his justly renowned story, ‘Beep’, published the year after A Case of Conscience and ‘Common Time’. ‘Beep’ builds a remarkable bridge between love and judgment.
In ‘Beep’ we have with a vengeance a culture coming to an end and a fresh idea transforming culture, wrapped up in numerology. The peculiar structure of the story is designed to exhibit these transformations to best effect. (I refer to the original novella, not the slightly revised version published under the Browneian title, The Quincunx of Time.)
One of the pleasing ingenuities of ‘Beep’ lies curled up within its title; like a Samuel Palmer chestnut tree alert within the confines of a conker, so a forest of implications unpacks from the title’s meaningless seed of noise. Here we encounter ‘Common Time’ Garrard’s dream come true: the ‘panoplies of pure reason’ can be unravelled in less than ‘a single day of ship-time’ through the Dirac computer. This achievement results in a universe of rigid causal laws; the banishment of Chaos, the imposition of an Order more rigorous than anything we could achieve today with our inferior math.
‘Beep’ contains a central image, which, being a numerological incantation, banishes all devils:
‘I’ve heard the commander of a world-line cruiser, [says one of the characters] travelling from 8873 to 8704 along the world-line of the planet Hathshepa, which circles a star on the rim of NGC 4725, calling for help across eleven million light years – but what kind of help he was calling for, or will be calling for, is beyond my comprehension.’
Communication, however, mysterious at first, is achieved; help is forthcoming.
Communication begets communion. ‘Beep’ concerns one of the central problems of a galactic civilisation, how to overcome those immense lines of communication stretching across space and time. Blish’s Dirac transmitter provides a remarkable solution to the problem. For not only does it in part abolish space and time (bringing the metagalactic centre to our doorsteps, so to speak) but it proves to be, in effect, a machine which abolishes the Problem of Evil, root and branch. Heisenberg-Born-Dirac wield more clout than the Holy Trinity.
The story goes on to demonstrate what good effects follow – including having one of the characters married almost forcibly to a transvestite lady of mixed ancestry (to his great benefit).
Unravelling the skeins of this strange tale, Blish posits that if freewill could be removed from human affairs there would be no sin (a contrary assumption, if I have my theology correct, to the ones in A Case of Conscience – and, par example, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange).
Determinism shapes all activity: human consciousness is ‘just along for the ride’, or ‘helpless’. An embodiment of this is the Richard Strauss persona, resurrected to create a masterpiece, in ‘A Work of Art’. Again, events rule. Blish manages to make this hellish proposition sound utopian. The world of ‘Beep’ is the happiest one in the Blishian canon; as one of the characters remarks, ‘The news is always good.’
This connection between instant communication and freedom from sin is bold – yet we commonly equate non-communication (secrecy) with wickedness. Blish makes the situation real by showing what tender care is taken by the Service to see that lovers always meet as planned, thus maintaining future events in their predestinate grooves. Never before did Secret Service so closely resemble Marriage Bureau.
Most SF writers, slaves to catastrophes, portray instant communication as something which can be seized upon and perverted to further the aims of the conqueror. In ‘Beep’, it is seized upon to bring further peace. Is Blish trying to equate instant communication with perfect communion? There seems no other way to explain why his all-powerful Service is so incorruptible. The Event Police have become veritable Angels on Earth.
Other riddles attend us. We puzzle at the way Blish has planted two people in disguise – one in the inner, one in the outer story. They assume their disguises for devious purposes, yet neither meets with so much as mild disapproval when they are discovered.
Perhaps deception carries no penalties in a utopia. The deceit is maintained for benevolent ends (though theologians, not least Ruiz-Sanchez, would look askance at that). But, in this utopia, deceit cannot be feared, since there is no aggression. If you remove reasons for aggression, will aggression vanish? Does the wish to throw stones disappear on a perfectly sandy beach? Useless to ask such questions about the world of ‘Beep’, since the Dirac transmitter makes cause and effect inoperative by rendering the whole universe totally open to scrutiny. After such knowledge, there is no room for Judgment Day.
If you grant that ‘Beep’ is of a utopian disposition, then you have to grant that it is a rare sort of story indeed, even among Blish’s cabinet of curiosities. I know of no other galactic empire which could be remotely regarded as utopian; in general, the sewers of these glittering Trantors are clogged with the dismembered bodies of the oppressed. Yet, given angelic guidance, even Trantor could be made to blossom.
James Blish, in his wisdom, did a lot of strange things. He was a thinker, a maker, until the day of his death. Unlike so many science fiction writers – enslaved by editors, formulae and prospect of riches – he did not grow less interesting as he grew older, as he engaged in a daily fight with death and the night shapes. One of the themes that ‘Common Time’, ‘Beep’, and A Case of Conscience have in common is immortality: immortality of thought, immortality of material things, immortality of evil. When the city of Dis makes its dreadful apparition in the seared lands of America which Blish had by then vacated, we feel it as an eruption of a dreadful cancer – largely forgotten, yet ever-living.
In the volumes of the Cities in Flight series, along with the spin-dizzies go the anti-death drugs that confer extreme longevity on all. In the years when Blish was writing of Mayor Amalfi and the cities, he was carefree enough to use the idea as no more than a plot-device. But the evil days would come, and what was merely