“I’m getting rid of you as well,” Nicklin said. “You don’t exist!”
“What a peculiar thing to say!” The fox cast a worried glance over his shoulder, then gave a laugh which exposed all his pointed teeth. “You wouldn’t be able to talk to me if I didn’t exist. It stands to reason, doesn’t it? You see, this is mental space—and mental entities are just as real here as physical entities. You remember what you were told about mental space, don’t you?”
Nicklin shook his head. “I wouldn’t allow you to exist in any kind of space.”
“Don’t do this to me, Jimmy.” Uncle Reynard glanced back into the darkness again, spraying cartoon-style droplets of sweat into the air from his forehead. “I can help you with what’s coming next. You’ve got to have your interview with Gee-Vee, and I can—”
“Go away!”
The fox took a step backwards, his entire body beginning to ripple, and suddenly he was a thin, balding, unhappy looking man of about forty. Nicklin felt a stirring.of old memories. The creature before him purported to be his real Uncle Reynard.
“You can frig off too,” Nicklin said.
“Don’t do this to me, Jimmy,” the creature pleaded. “All right, perhaps I was a bit too friendly with your mother after your old man died. Maybe you felt sort of betrayed—and I can’t say as I blame you—but that’s all in the past. You’re a grown man now, Jimmy, and you must know how it is when a healthy young woman is-”
“Go away!”
“Let me explain something very important to you, Jimmy,” the creature said in an urgent whisper. “You think this is all a dream—but it isn’t! You’re in mental space now, Jimmy. You must remember what you were told that day in the Beachhead office by Silvia London. You remember her, don’t you? The one with the big knockers? Well, everything she said was absolutely true!”
Nicklin frowned. “That would mean you have an independent existence of your own, and that I can’t harm you.”
“Yes, but I’m not a true mindon entity.” The creature shot a quick look behind itself, in the direction of the mountainous presence which might or might not exist in the blackness, and its disconsolate expression turned into one of purest misery. “Your real Uncle Reynard is somewhere else in this continuum. The only reason I exist at all is that I’m a projection of part of your childhood personality, and if you start interfering with things—”
“You mean—if I grow up.”
“You grew up years ago, Jimmy.” The creature produced a shifty, ingratiating smile. “You grew up great! The way you exploded those three ape men in Altamura was a treat to watch. Specially the third one, when he thought he was getting away. And then there’s the Farthing bitch. I’ll tell you something for nothing, Jimmy—she’s sorry she ever got on the wrong side of you. If you went to her right now you could—”
“Go!” Nicklin commanded, his entire consciousness given over to hatred. “Cease to exist!”
The creature gave a snarl of fury. Its face began to flow… extruding a bestial snout, teeth becoming fangs… but before the metamorphosis could be completed the entire apparition shimmered out of existence.
Nicklin was left alone, but not alone. Beyond the cone of sickly light, far out across the half-perceived plain, an enormous shape was moving. In the absence of spatial referents it could indeed have been as large as a mountain, but it also—was this possible?—might have had a human configuration. What was the name of that statue? The one of the man sitting with his fist pressed against his forehead?
Jim Nicklin, the entity said, its voice a silent thunder between Nicklin’s temples, the time has come for us to speak to each other.
“I don’t want to,” Nicklin quavered, amazed by his ability to emit any kind of sound. “I don’t want anything to do with you.”
That is not true. You know you could not have gone on for much longer as you were.
Nicklin pressed his back against the metal doorframe—his sole remaining contact with the universe of rationality. “Who are you?”
Come on now, Jim! You know perfectly well who I am.
“How… how could I?”
Because you have communed vnth me many times throughout your adult life.
“Communed? I’ve never been a believer. The only deity I ever acknowledged was… the Gaseous Vertebrate!”
Well done, Jim.
“But that’s impossible! You’re just a sort of a private joke. I mean, I invented you!”
No, Jim—I invented you.
Somehow Nicklin managed to resuscitate the argumentative side of his character. “I’m sorry, but I can’t go along with that,” he said. “It doesn’t even make dream-sense to me.”
You always have to make things difficult. I simply wanted to personalise myself for your benefit. Your conception of the Gaseous Vertebrate… the Supreme Prankster… is as near as you have come to visualising a higher order of being.
“I meant him as an analogue of blind chance.”
Yes, but you personalised him.
“Nevertheless, it’s wrong to think of you as the Gaseous Vertebrate?”
It doesn’t have to be wrong.
“Are you claiming to be God?”
I am not claiming to be God—but you may think of me that way, if you please.
“This could go on and on. I prefer Gaseous Vertebrate.”
So, after much circumlocution, you are back where you started—I am the Gaseous Vertebrate.
“Are you also the Good Fairy? Did you create the artefact I knew as Orbitsville?”
At last you have asked a sensible question, one to which I can give a sensible answer. No, I did not create Orbitsville.
“Have you any objections to telling me who did?”
I have no objections at all, Jim. I am willing to provide all the knowledge you are capable of assimilating. Your mind is part of my mind at this unique moment in cosmic history. The only limits to the amount of knowledge you may gain are the limits of your own mentality.
“Did you say my mind is part of your mind?”
Let’s have no rhetorical questions, Jim. You know what I said.
“But it’s important to me. There are little questions as well as big questions. For instance, I would like to know why I am not afraid. I have wandered into a surrealist nightmare, and I have witnessed horrors—”
The horrors were of your own devising.
“All right, but I’m alone in what might easily be a Dali landscape with what might easily be a black statue the size of a mountain… and yet I am not afraid. Why is that?”
You are in mental space now. You exist as a mindon entity—and, as such, you are immune to all the fears which trouble a carnate being.
“I see. So that’s why I can hold a conversation with a sentient black skyscraper.”
There is no conversation. For the moment your mind has been encompassed by and united with my mind. You must take what you can, and make of it what you will.
“Very well then—who built Orbitsville?”
Orbitsville was devised and constructed by beings who are more highly evolved than humans. In their one direct encounter with humans they chose to call themselves Ultans. That is as good a name as any.