Even though this post could have been called PS2 Notes #11: Hylozoic, I got tired of putting that tag into my entry titles. I guess I could flag these novel notes via a Category tag at the end of each entry, but I find that too much trouble, too. The blog’s internal Search box takes care of categorization actually. Search for Hylozoic or PS2, and you’ll find the entries about the novel.
[Here, by way of segue, is an Art Sample from the Glorious Seventies.]
I was set off on today’s line of thought by a comment on my blog from RedSlime: “I think you need a good physics reason for limiting teleportation — suppose that, say, humans’ Higgs particle interactions are unique, with the difference caused by some quality of human mentation.”
Yes, what if the human ability to teleport is very rare among the intelligent beings of the cosmos? It would be cool if the Khan and need humanoids to drive the teleportation engines of their intergalactic spaceships. Maybe they’ve enslaved a humanoid race in another galaxy.
This puts me in mind of Robert Sheckley’s 1953 story ”˜Specialist,’ from his landmark anthology, Untouched By Human Hands. In the story, humans are so-called Pushers, who can push starcraft to faster-than-light speeds. The starcraft is in fact a symbiotic organism composed of cooperating aliens: Walls, Engine, Thinker, Eye, Talker. Their Pusher has died, and they land on Earth to abduct a regular guy to help them.
He Pushed. Nothing happened.
“Try again,” Talker begged.
Pusher searched his mind. He found a deep well of doubt and fear. Staring into it, he saw his own tortured face. Thinker illuminated it for him. Pushers had lived with this doubt and fear for centuries. Pushers had fought through fear, killed through doubt. That was where the Pusher organ was!
Human—specialist—Pusher—he entered fully into the Crew, merged with them, threw mental arms around the shoulders of Thinker and Talker.
Suddenly, the Ship shot forward at eight times the speed of light. It continued to accelerate.
[Passage quoted above is from Robert Sheckley, “Specialist.” The image below is from Sheckley’s journals.]
It occurs to me today that this is a transreal description of becoming a writer! Doubt and fear is why I write. Also, of course, the jonesin’ for “the narcotic moment of creative bliss.” But in any case, it’s the doubt and fear that make me need that rush so much.
Back to teleportation, yeah, it’s gotta be what the Sheck-man says. Doubt and fear. That’s what makes me write; that’s what allows humans to teleport. And hardly any other beings have our levels of doubt and fear.
Certainly it seems as if animals don’t have doubt and fear in the same way that we do. If a predator comes, an animal runs away, end of story. If cornered, a rat bares his teeth and fights. Animals don’t worry about what might happen; they don’t brood over what they did in the past; they don’t mentally agonize—or at least one can suppose that they don’t. [Maybe elephants do, though. Maybe elephants can teleport, too.]
And it’s easy to suppose that the silps that inhabit natural processes don’t have doubt and fear either. Silps don’t much care if they die. A vortex of air forms and disperses, no problem.
And for the purposes of the story, we can suppose the aliens—the Kang and Rull—are also lacking in doubt and fear. They’re like kiwis/cockroaches and manta-rays/rats. So they can’t teleport either.
I still need to cook up some physics-like explanation for why the human qualities of doubt and fear entail the ability to teleport.
As a first stab, I’m thinking that having doubt and fear involves creating really good mental models of alternate realities. And being able to create good mental models of alternate realities means the ability to imagine yourself being there rather than here. And this means that we can spread out our wave functions in ways that other beings can’t. We carry out certain delicate kinds of quantum computation.
I found a version of the kiwi-like Kang’s starship in a photo supply store, it’s a black natural-rubber dust-blower bulb called Giottos Q.ball. The tip tilts over and poof, the kiwi Kang come tumbling out.
And, dig this, the Kang have a pilot. A humanoid Pusher who allows them to teleport between the galaxies. He’s black and stocky and he wears shades. He’s modeled on the jazz hero Charlie Parker! Maybe he’ll win Thuy away from Jayjay. Maybe he plays an alien instrument that’s something like a saxophone.
I’ve been listening to Charlie Parker all day every day lately—I’m a born-again late-life convert to the Church of Bepop. I’m reading this great biography, Bird Lives, by Ross Russell (Charterhouse, New York 1973). Got this picture off a KC library site. Not much video of Bird online, most of it seems to be excerpted from an unfinished movie of him with Coleman Hawkins playing first, you gotta wait a minute for Charlie.
Also there’s a nice YouTube clip of Bird playing “Hothouse” with Dizzy Gillespie at a DownBeat awards event where Charlie only gets “Alto Sax of the Year 1951” and Diz gets “All Time Jazz Great” award, which I’m sure bugged the Bird a certain amount.
I’m not so into embedding YouTube video on the blog page as I was a couple of weeks ago, as I find the embeds really slow down the page load time.
