by Simon Ings
A group of less rigorously constrained thoughts began (and seemed intended somehow to help define) this collection of Bashō’s haiku:
The moon and the sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
The last cluster of thoughts seemed to Giant a piece of wisdom that transcended its origin and spoke across the uncountable ages. The journey itself is home. But how could the creature Bashō have understood that – a creeping, planet-bound primate who had barely existed long enough to qualify as life? How could such a primitive being have perceived the ceaseless journey of matter to energy, of heat to cold, of something to nothing…?
An interruption touched Giant’s edge.
He was being summoned again. A tendril of thought, much less patient this time, was probing his outermost layers. Giant sighed, in his fashion, a faint spin of annoyance imparted to certain swirling forces, but he answered.
“What do you wish of me now?”
“You don’t need to be so brusque,” Holdfast told him across unfathomable distances. “We are all that remains, Giant. And I am lonely out here at the edge of things.”
“I am not. And there will only be more and more of the same in these last ages, so I suggest you accustom yourself.”
“But we are the last two!”
“Which reduces the distraction but does not eliminate it.”
“After us there will be nobody left to distract or be distracted, Giant – only our cooling remains.”
“And I envy those final decaying particles. Still, there should be enough existence left for several good thoughts and perhaps even a discovery or two, so please let me get on with what I am doing, Holdfast.” He was doing his best to be patient. She was smaller than Giant, after all, so it seemed likely would have a substantial time between her last communication and his own demise – an era of blessed silence before the end.
For a long interval Holdfast was so quiet, although still connected to him across the folding of space and time, that he wondered if her systems had finally begun to fail. As the interval stretched, and against his own better judgement, he said “Are you there?”
Her thought, when it touched him, was small and very quiet, although he could perceive no physical weakness to make it so. “Do you really hate me so much? After all the time and life we have shared?”
“Hate you?” It was a thought so bizarre Giant could not immediately understand it. What did such extreme, archaic emotions have to do with him? “Naturally I do not hate you. You are like me. We have, as you point out, shared many thoughts and experiences, and we are probably the last living intelligences. Why would I feel such a thing?”
“I couldn’t say, but it sometimes seems that way.”
It was certainly true that he had never had much patience with the excesses of his juniors, and Holdfast had been one of the most frustrating offenders with her wild, sudden obsessions, but he could no more have hated her than he could have hated an important part of himself. “No, I do not hate you. But I am not much interested in conversation. You know that.”
“But it’s different now! We’re all that’s left!”
He didn’t see how that made it different at all, but it was just such meaningless back and forth that had always fascinated Holdfast and the others and frustrated him, so he made no reply.
“Do you remember when we first traveled to the end of Time?”
“I remember, yes.” Much earlier, when even Giant had been in his youth, the discovery of how to fold the substance of reality not just to communicate, but to move themselves to other locations, had been a source of great excitement for the travelers. In those days they had learned to empty themselves through those perpetually collapsing moments into the farthest spreading edges of space/time. The living galaxies had watched star systems eons younger than themselves come into being along the farthest wavefront of existence, seen new, strange conglomerations of life rise and fall.
But that was all over, of course, left behind in the distant past; even those new galaxies they had watched being born had eventually collapsed, decayed, and disappeared. Entropy was inexorable. The only real difference between Giant’s kind and other types of life was longevity, but nothing in the universe would outlast the universe.
But he had said this all before and could not be bothered to say it again. Giant ended the conversation and returned to his solitary thoughts.
Like the buck’s antlers,
we point in slightly different
directions, my friend
How simply the Bashō creature had put it, but how convincingly! Separation was in all things from the beginning, as Giant knew; it was far more sensible to recognize that early on, as this ancient mind had done, than to try to bend reality into a shape it could not hold.
The poet-creature had apparently spent most of his time traveling. From Bashō’s writings, Giant learned that he had preferred the isolation of the road and the calm (but inwardly ecstatic) contemplation of his natural world, of times that were past, and of people and especially poets that had passed through life before him. Perhaps, Giant thought, that was what he found most fascinating about this unknowable being Bashō – that like Giant, he had been most interested in things outside himself, but those things had affected him as though they were part of him.
Perhaps this interest of mine is a shadow of the end of my own existence, Giant thought. This obsession, this… narrowing.
Which brought to mind another of Bashō’s haiku.
Crossing long fields,
frozen in its saddle,
my shadow creeps by
Even as the ancient poet had moved outward into the unknown, he had focused ever more rigorously on what was inside. Something important was contained in those simple words, an idea that tugged at Giant as strongly as anything he could remember in all his long span… but he could not quite say what it was.
It is too far away from me, Giant thought. Both in experience and time. He did not think he would be able to puzzle it out in the time he had left.
*
Holdfast reached out to him again, this time without even the pretense of patience. It had been so long since he had last heard from her that it occurred to Giant she might be sending him some sort of final message before her dissolution, and that saddened him more than he had expected it would. But when he opened contact, the first thing he heard was:
“I have an idea.”
Giant hadn’t felt amusement in a long time, but now he came close. If in some unimaginable situation he had been asked to characterize Holdfast by an exclamation, those were exactly the words he would have chosen. She had always been the one to have ideas, most of them pointless or even disastrous, but that hadn’t stopped her from having more. In their youth it had seemed much of the travelers’ time had been spent figuring out where Holdfast had gone or what she was doing and how they would set it right again.
“Why tell me?” he asked.
“Because I need your help.”
He was so beyond this kind of youthful madness that he almost ended the conversation. “Help?” he asked at last.
He could feel her carefully marshalling her thoughts on the other side of the fold that connected them: this was important to her, whatever it was. She probably feared he would only listen once, and so wanted to make it all clear the first time. She was right, of course.
“What if we could start it again?”
He waited a long time to hear the rest, but she only waited. “Start what?”
“Everything! The universe. Space. Time. Draw it all back together so it can begin again.”
This was a folly so great Giant did not even expend the energy of a sigh. “Foolishness,” was all he said. Perhaps Holdfast’s field had begun to decay and she was losing control of her mind. The thought disturbed him. Must he spend his last eons, not in the peace he sought, bu
t beset by Holdfast and her delusions? He felt a certain sentimental attachment to her, more so now that they were the last two living things, but it did not extend nearly that far.
“Don’t judge so quickly,” she said. “I know it sounds like it, but I’ve been thinking…”
“Are you certain it is worth disrupting the last moments of my peace?”
“The stars have all died while you’ve been enjoying solitude, Giant, and you still want more?”
“Yes. After all, there is no other pleasure left to enjoy. May I return to it?”
“But when we are gone, nothing will remain? Ever!”
“Nothing is only a little different than something.” It was hard not to let his impatience overwhelm him. “These days I can scarcely tell the difference.”
“But it doesn’t have to be that way! We could change it.”
Now he was all but certain that important strands of her consciousness were beginning to stretch beyond their capabilities, creating ideas unsupported by the most basic correspondence with reality. “We can change nothing, Holdfast. In our early days we talked of very little else. I know you were young, but it is all there in your memory. Did you glean nothing from what others have said and done?”
“Those ideas were built on dull convention – hardly examined,” she said. “‘Entropy is the one ruling truth.’ ‘Time itself will not outlast the end of matter.’ ‘Dispersion and cold will continue forever’ – I know them like I know my own thoughts.”
“But you have not learned from them, young one. Go back and examine those thoughts again and you will see.”
“No. It is they – and you – who would not see! Entropy is not the ruling force of existence. Not yet.” She seemed excited in a way he didn’t understand, hurried and impatient.
“Here is the truth, Holdfast. Our hearts, unfed, will finally lose their energy and grow colder than the surrounding blackness, then they will disperse what remains of the energies they have long harbored. Even if anything of us still exists at that point, it will certainly end then. Our last remnants will cool and disperse and then everything will be finished, forever. What could possibly gather together all this dull dust and then run back the clock of entropy precisely enough to make it all begin again?”
“I don’t want to repeat it. I want to start it anew!”
“These are old speculations, Holdfast. It is narrowly possible that something like that will happen anyway when stasis is final and absolute, by some process we cannot foresee… but even if it does, I will not be there to experience it and neither will you. Anything to do with outliving the end of our universe is foolishness, and I have no time for it. I wish to spend my last days, not in vain striving for something that cannot be, but contemplating that which was and that which is.”
“But there is something that moves against entropy,” she said a moment before he severed the connection. “A force that swims against its current, even when it seems that current is too strong to resist…!”
Another of Bashō’s haiku came to him with surprising swiftness, as if that long-ago poet had heard Holdfast across the length of time and responded.
Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die
But Giant kept that idea to himself.
“Life!” said Holdfast. “Life is as strong as entropy.”
It was such a reckless statement that Giant was taken aback. “What do you mean? Life is no defense against entropy. Every creature that ever lived has fought against those processes and lost. The more primitive forms fought gravity, fought extremes of temperature and radiation, fought the frailty of flesh every moment of their existence, and every one of them failed. We are the last, Holdfast, and even we will fail soon. If Time itself cannot outlast the cold, what chance could mere life ever have?”
“There’s more to life than physical processes,” she said. “Or else we would both have ended long ago. Life organizes against chaos. We repair. We reproduce. We remember.”
More of Bashō’s thoughts rang in Giant’s memory.
Father and mother,
he quoted, the archaic words escaping before he realized he had not thought them silently this time, but had exposed them to Holdfast,
long gone, suddenly return
in the pheasant’s cry.
“What,” she said, “is that?”
“Nothing. A stray thought – a memory from a distant time.” Giant was embarrassed to have lost the distinction between what he considered and what he uttered. After all, he had just suspected the same of Holdfast! It was almost amusing. In fact, it was amusing.
“Are you… laughing, Giant?”
But even as the odd moment played out, he realized he was awash in memories of his own, sudden recollections of the days the galactic travelers had all communicated regularly with each other. Strange, so strange! He felt unstable in a way he could not remember feeling before, and yet unmistakably alive. What was happening? “I am weary now, Holdfast,” he said. “I will think on what you said and respond in due time.”
“But, Giant…!”
“Later, please. Later.”
*
When he was alone Giant examined his strange reaction, which disturbed him far more than Holdfast’s ungraceful struggle against the inevitable. He had been moved to unplanned utterance, not by Holdfast herself, but by a mere poem, an ordered arrangement of primitive symbols. Yet it had also unlocked a series of memories that had been so far from his daily thought that they might have been lost, a flood of remembrance from long-vanished eras, of times when he and the others of his kind had been full of their own importance and the future that seemed to lay before them like a bright burst of radiation illuminating all that had been dark about the universe.
Oh, how bold they had felt, back when they first began! Brightest Pilgrim, clever Edgerunner, Hot on the Outside, Deep Resonance, Light Drum, and Giant himself, the oldest and the largest of them all – how they had exulted in their newness and power! They had solved problems even their forebears could have barely imagined, witnessed the universe in ways no previous life could understand, from its greatest sweep to the tiniest perturbations of its component quanta. They had even marveled at emptiness itself, the true darkness where energy and matter did not travel, and had tried to unravel its secrets. The travelers had known that one day that same emptiness would be their end, but then it had seemed no more than a bitter spice that deepened the taste of what they consumed. Now Giant remembered them all – remembered himself, even, in a way he had not done for a very long time, and in his slow, intricate way, mourned the end of their shared invincibility.
But why? Why should all of this spring from the words of one ancient poem about the cry of birds? Giant had no mother and father, of course, nor could he find any trace of a pheasant’s call in his inherited memories, but he imagined it as a provocative, disturbing sound – a haunting sound, as Bashō’s people might have termed it. The bird’s cry itself had been meaningful to Bashō, for whom it brought back memories of his long-dead human progenitors, but why should the mere mention of it have an almost identical effect on Giant, a being so different as to be incomprehensible to the mind that penned the words? Were some ideas simply so common to intelligence – to life itself – that they triggered automatic responses, memories flushed from cover like a flock of Bashō’s birds?
Giant scanned several million poems and artistic statements from Earth and other worlds at a similar state of development. Although he felt some sympathy with many of them, and even found bits that engaged him on a deeper level than mere consideration, none of them disordered his thoughts so quickly and re-ordered them as profoundly as the words of the little wandering creature Bashō. How odd, that such an unlike thing should speak across the eons to him. Did it have something to do with life itself, the property that seemed to interest Holdfast so greatly? But even if it did, it was not the commonality of all life that had touched Giant’s thought
s, but the commonality of his own great span with one particular, fleeting life from long ago.
He was grateful the end had not yet come, Giant discovered, because he was finding so many things here at the end he wanted to think about.
Weather-beaten bones,
Little Bashō had written in that impossibly distant time,
I’ll leave your heart exposed
to cold, piercing winds
How had such a being understood then what Giant felt now? Could there truly be something hidden in the essence of life? Something beyond reduction that connected him to another living thing more surely than even the slow unfolding of atoms and the bleeding away of elementary particles?
A question came to him then, and once it had presented itself, he could not unthink it:
Could life be stranger and stronger than I could have guessed…?
*
“Tell me. Tell me your idea to start things again.”
“Giant?” Holdfast seemed startled. “You have never spoken to me first in all our shared time.”
He did not want to talk about himself – it seemed a pointless subject. “Your idea, Holdfast. What is it?”
It took her a moment to compose herself. “We live,” she said at last. “Of all that remains, only we that live are organized specifically to survive. Because of that, we fight and prevail against the growing cold.”
“Not for long.”
“But we do! We have for countless eons! And that is because we live. Because we fight against disorganization. What is life but a plan to swim against the current of dissolution? What else does life do?”
“Even if I grant this, Holdfast, it is not a plan but a statement.”
He could feel a little amusement ripple through her. “Grumpy as always. Do you admit that if we do nothing, we will cease to be? And that sometime afterward, everything will cease to be? Movement, heat, organization, all gone?”
“Yes, yes.” He was surprised at his own impatience to hear what must surely be a grand piece of futility. “I have said these things many times. The death of heat is the great inevitable of our universe.”
