Cryptozoic! Read Online Free PDF

interesting. I suppose you believe it, do you?"

He laughed. "How can you not believe it? We're here in the Devonian,

aren't we?"

"But if the undermind governs mind-travel, and the undermind's crazy

about incest, then surely we should be able to visit times near at hand,

early in our own century, for instance -- so that we could see what

our own parents and grandparents got up to. That would be the most

interesting thing, wouldn't it? But it's much easier to mind, back here,

to the earliest ages of the world, and to get back to when there were

any humans at all is very difficult. Impossible for most of us."

"That's so, but it doesn't prove what you think. If you think of the

space-time universe as being an enormous entropy-slope, with the true

present always at the point of highest energy and the farthest past at

the lowest, then obviously as soon as our minds are free of passing time,

they will fall backwards towards that lowest point, and the nearer to

the highest point we return, the harder will be the journey."

Ann said nothing. Bush thought it likely that she had already dismissed

the subject as impossible of discussion, but after a moment she said,

"You know what you said about the real me being good and loving? Supposing

there is such a person, is she in my over- or my undermind?"

"Supposing, as you say, there is such a person, she must be an amalgamation

of both. Anything less than the whole cannot be whole."

"Now you're trying to talk theology again, aren't you?"

"Probably." They both laughed. He felt almost gay. He loved arguing,

particularly when he could argue on the obsessive topic of the structure

of the mind.

If they were going to mind again, now was clearly the time to do it,

while they were in some sort of accord. Mind-travel was never easy,

and the passage could be rough if one was emotionally upset.

They packed their bags and strapped their few possessions to themselves.

Then they linked themselves together, arm in arm; otherwise, there was no

guarantee they would not arrive a few million years and several hundred

miles apart from each other.

They broke open their drug packs. The CSD came in little ampoules, clear,

almost colorless. Held up to the wide Paleozoic sky, Bush's ampoule

showed slightly green between his fingers. They looked at each other;

Ann pulled a face and they made the jab together.

Bush felt the crypotic acid run warm in his veins. The liquid was a symbol

of the hydrosphere, sacrificial wine to represent the oceans from which

life had come, oceans that still washed in the arteries of man, oceans

that still regulated and made habitable his external world, oceans

that still provided food and climate, oceans that were the blood of

the biosphere.

And he himself was a biosphere, containing all the fossil lives and ideas

of his ancestors, containing other life forms, containing countless untold

possibilities, containing life and death.

He was an analogue of the world; through the CSD, he could translate

from one form to the other.

Only in that transitional state, as the drug took effect, could one

begin to grasp the nature of the minute energy-duration disturbance

that the Solar System represented. That system, a bubble within a sea of

cosmic forces, was part of a meta-structure that was boundless but not

infinite with respect to both time and space. And this banal fact had

only become astonishing to man because man had shut himself off from it,

had shielded his mind from the immensity of it as the ionosphere round

his planet shielded him from harmful radiations, had lost that knowledge,

had defended himself from that knowledge with the concept of passing

time, which managed to make the universe tolerable by cutting off --

not only the immense size of it, as recent generations had rediscovered

-- but the immense time of it. Immense time had been chopped into

tiny wriggling fragments that man could deal with, could trap with

sundials,