"The metaphysical geniuses here have a completely unlikely possibility," said Valentine. "Unless you slipped them something really weird in their lunch."
Kovano laughed and left them alone. But his visit had had the effect of sobering them again.
"Is it possible?" asked Valentine.
"I would never have thought so," said Grego. "I mean, there's the problem of origin."
"It actually answers the problem of origin," said Olhado. "The Big Bang theory's been around since--"
"Since before I was born," said Valentine.
"I guess," said Olhado. "What nobody's been able to figure out is why a Big Bang would ever happen. This way it makes a weird kind of sense. If somebody who was capable of holding the pattern of the entire universe in his head stepped Outside, then all the philotes there would sort themselves out into the largest place in the pattern that they could control. Since there's no time there, they could take a billion years or a microsecond, all the time they needed, and then when it was sorted out, bam, there they are, the whole universe, popping out into a new Inside space. And since there's no distance or position--no whereness--then the entire thing would begin the size of a geometric point--"
"No size at all," said Grego.
"I remember my geometry," said Valentine.
"And immediately expand, creating space as it grew. As it grew, time would seem to slow down--or do I mean speed up?"
"It doesn't matter," said Grego. "It all depends whether you're Inside the new space or Outside or in some other Inspace."
"Anyway, the universe now seems to be constant in time while it's expanding in space. But if you wanted to, you could just as easily see it as constant in size but changing in time. The speed of light is slowing down so that it takes longer to get from one place to another, only we can't tell that it's slowing down because everything else slows down exactly relative to the speed of light. You see? All a matter of perspective. For that matter, as Grego said before, the universe we live in is still, in absolute terms, exactly the size of a geometric point--when you look at it from Outside. Any growth that seems to take place on the Inside is just a matter of relative location and time."
"And what kills me," said Grego, "is that this is the kind of thing that's been going on inside Olhado's head all these years. This picture of the universe as a dimensionless point in Outside space is the way he's been thinking all along. Not that he's the first to think of it. Just that he's the one who actually believed it and saw the connection between that and the non-place where Andrew says the hive queen goes to find aiuas."
"As long as we're playing metaphysical games," said Valentine, "then where did this whole thing begin? If what we think of as reality is just a pattern that somebody brought Outside, and the universe just popped into being, then whoever it was is probably still wandering around giving off universes wherever she goes. So where did she come from? And what was there before she started doing it? And how did Outside come to exist, for that matter?"
"That's Inspace thinking," said Olhado. "That's the way you conceive of things when you still believe in space and time as absolutes. You think of everything starting and stopping, of things having origins, because that's the way it is in the observable universe. The thing is, Outside there're no rules like that at all. Outside was always there and always will be there. The number of philotes there is infinite, and all of them always existed. No matter how many of them you pull out and put into organized universes, there'll be just as many left as there always were."
"But somebody had to start making universes."
"Why?" asked Olhado.
"Because--because I--"
"Nobody ever started. It's always been going on. I mean, if it weren't already going on, it couldn't start. Outside where there aren't any patterns, it would be impossible to conceive of a pattern. They can't act, by definition, because they literally can't even find themselves."
"But how could it always have been going on?"
"Think of it as if this moment in time, the reality we live in at this moment, this condition of the entire universe--of all the universes--"
"You mean now."
"Right. Think of it as if now were the surface of a sphere. Time is moving forward through the chaos of Outside like the surface of an expanding sphere, a balloon inflating. On the outside, chaos. On the inside, reality. Always growing--like you said, Valentine. Popping up new universes all the time."
"But where did this balloon come from?"
"OK, you've got the balloon. The expanding sphere. Only now think of it as a sphere with an infinite radius."
Valentine tried to think what that would mean. "The surface would be completely flat."
"That's right."
"And you could never go all the way around it."
"That's right, too. Infinitely large. Impossible even to count all the universes that exist on the reality side. And now, starting from the edge, you get on a starship and start heading inward toward the center. The farther in you go, the older everything is. All the old universes, back and back. When do you get to the first one?"
"You don't," said Valentine. "Not if you're traveling at a finite rate."
"You don't reach the center of a sphere of infinite radius, if you're starting at the surface, because no matter how far you go, no matter how quickly, the center, the beginning, is always infinitely far away."
"And that's where the universe began."
"I believe it," said Olhado. "I think it's true."
"So the universe works this way because it's always worked this way," said Valentine.
"Reality works this way because that's what reality is. Anything that doesn't work this way pops back into chaos. Anything that does, comes across into reality. The dividing line is always there."
"What I love," said Grego, "is the idea that after we've started tootling around at instantaneous speeds in our reality, what's to stop us from finding others? Whole new universes?"
"Or making others," said Olhado.
"Right," said Grego. "As if you or I could actually hold a pattern for a whole universe in our minds."
"But maybe Jane could," said Olhado. "Couldn't she?"
"What you're saying," said Valentine, "is that maybe Jane is God."
"She's probably listening right now," said Grego. "The computer's on, even if the display is blocked. I'll bet she's getting a kick out of this."
"Maybe every universe lasts long enough to produce something like Jane," said Valentine. "And then she goes out and creates more and--"
"It goes on and on," said Olhado. "Why not?"
"But she's an accident," said Valentine.
"No," said Grego. "That's one of the things Andrew found out today. You've got to talk to him. Jane was no accident. For all we know there are no accidents. For all we know, everything was all part of the pattern from the start."
"Everything except ourselves," said Valentine. "Our--what's the word for the philote that controls us?"
"Aiua," said Grego. He spelled it out for her.
"Yes," she said. "Our will, anyway, which always existed, with whatever strengths and weaknesses it has. And that's why, as long as we're part of the pattern of reality, we're free."
"Sounds like the ethicist is getting into the act," said Olhado.
"This is probably complete bobagem," said Grego. "Jane's going to come back laughing at us. But Nossa Senhora, it's fun, isn't it?"
"Hey, for all we know, maybe that's why the universe exists in the first place," said Olhado. "Because going around through chaos popping out realities is a lark. Maybe God's been having the best time."
"Or maybe he's just waiting for Jane to get out there and keep him company," said Valentine.
It was Miro's turn with Planter. Late--after midnight. Not that he could sit by him and hold his hand. Inside the cleanroom, Miro had to wear a suit, not to keep contamination out, but to keep the descolada virus he carried inside himself from getting to Planter.
If I just cracked my
suit a little bit, thought Miro, I could save his life.
In the absence of the descolada, the breakdown of Planter's body was rapid and devastating. They all knew that the descolada had messed with the pequenino reproductive cycle, giving the pequeninos their third life as trees, but until now it hadn't been clear how much of their daily life depended on the descolada. Whoever designed this virus was a coldhearted monster of efficiency. Without the descolada's daily, hourly, minutely intervention, cells began to become sluggish, the production of vital energy-storing molecules stopped, and--what they feared most--the synapses of the brain fired less rapidly. Planter was rigged with tubes and electrodes, and he lay inside several scanning fields, so that from the outside Ela and her pequenino assistants could monitor every aspect of his dying. In addition, there were tissue samples every hour or so around the clock. His pain was so great that when he slept at all, the taking of tissue samples didn't wake him. And yet through all this--the pain, the quasi-stroke that was afflicting his brain--Planter remained doggedly lucid. As if he were determined by sheer force of will to prove that even without the descolada, a pequenino could be intelligent. Planter wasn't doing this for science, of course. He was doing it for dignity.
The real researchers couldn't spare time to take a shift as the inside worker, wearing the suit and just sitting there, watching him, talking to him. Only people like Miro, and Jakt's and Valentine's children--Syfte, Lars, Ro, Varsam--and the strange quiet woman Plikt; people who had no other urgent duties to attend to, who were patient enough to endure the waiting and young enough to handle their duties with precision--only such people were given shifts. They might have added a fellow pequenino to the shift, but all the brothers who knew enough about human technologies to do the job right were part of Ela's or Ouanda's teams, and had too much work to do. Of all those who spent time inside the cleanroom with him, taking tissue samples, feeding him, changing bottles, cleaning him up, only Miro had known pequeninos well enough to communicate with them. Miro could speak to him in Brothers' Language. That had to be of some comfort to him, even if they were virtual strangers, Planter having been born after Miro left Lusitania on his thirty-year voyage.
Planter was not asleep. His eyes were half-open, looking at nothing, but Miro knew from the movement of his lips that he was speaking. Reciting to himself passages from some of the epics of his tribe. Sometimes he chanted sections of the tribal genealogy. When he first started doing this, Ela had worried that he was becoming delirious. But he insisted that he was doing it to test his memory. To make sure that in losing the descolada he wasn't losing his tribe--which would be the same as losing himself.
Right now, as Miro turned up the volume inside his suit, he could hear Planter telling the story of some terrible war with the forest of Skysplitter, the "tree who called thunder." There was a digression in the middle of the war-story that told how Skysplitter got his name. This part of the tale sounded very old and mythic, a magical story about a brother who carried little mothers to the place where the sky fell open and the stars tumbled through onto the ground. Though Miro had been lost in his own thoughts about the day's discoveries--the origin of Jane, Grego's and Olhado's idea of travel-by-wish--for some reason he found himself paying close attention to the words that Planter was saying. And as the story ended, Miro had to interrupt.
"How old is that story?"
"Old," whispered Planter. "You were listening?"
"To the last part of it." It was all right to talk to Planter at length. Either he didn't grow impatient with the slowness of Miro's speech--after all, Planter wasn't going anywhere--or his own cognitive processes had slowed to match Miro's halting pace. Either way, Planter let Miro finish his own sentences, and answered him as if he had been listening carefully. "Did I understand you to say that this Skysplitter carried little mothers with him?"
"That's right," whispered Planter.
"But he wasn't going to the fathertree."
"No. He just had little mothers on his carries. I learned this story years ago. Before I did any human science."
"You know what it sounds like to me? That the story might come from a time when you didn't carry little mothers to the fathertree. When the little mothers didn't lick their sustenance from the sappy inside of the mothertree. Instead they hung from the carries on the male's abdomen until the infants matured enough to burst out and take their mothers' place at the teat."
"That's why I chanted it for you," said Planter. "I was trying to think of how it might have been, if we were intelligent before the descolada came. And finally I remembered that part in the story of Skysplitter's War."
"He went to the place where the sky broke open."
"The descolada got here somehow, didn't it?"
"How old is that story?"
"Skysplitter's War was twenty-nine generations ago. Our own forest isn't that old. But we carried songs and stories with us from our father-forest."
"The part of the story about the sky and the stars, that could be a lot older, though, couldn't it?"
"Very old. The fathertree Skysplitter died long ago. He might have been very old even when the war took place."
"Do you think it might be possible that this is a memory of the pequenino who first discovered the descolada? That it was brought here by a starship, and that what he saw was some kind of reentry vehicle?"
"That's why I chanted it."
"If that's true, then you were definitely intelligent before the coming of the descolada."
"All gone now," said Planter.
"What's all gone? I don't understand."
"Our genes of that time. Can't even guess what the descolada took away from us and threw out."
It was true. Each descolada virus might contain within itself the complete genetic code for every native life form on Lusitania, but that was only the genetic code as it was now, in its descolada-controlled state. What the code was before the descolada came could never be reconstructed or restored.
"Still," said Miro. "It's intriguing. To think that you already had language and songs and stories before the virus." And then, though he knew he shouldn't, he added, "Perhaps that makes it unnecessary for you to try to prove the independence of pequenino intelligence."
"Another attempt to save the piggy," said Planter.
A voice came over the speaker. A voice from outside the cleanroom.
"You can move on out now." It was Ela. She was supposed to be asleep during Miro's shift.
"My shift isn't over for three hours," said Miro.
"I've got somebody else coming in."
"There are plenty of suits."
"I need you out here, Miro." Ela's voice brooked no possibility of disobedience. And she was the scientist in charge of this experiment.
When he came out a few minutes later, he understood what was going on. Quara stood there, looking icy, and Ela was at least as furious. They had obviously been quarreling again--no surprise there. The surprise was that Quara was here at all.
"You might as well go back inside," said Quara as soon as Miro emerged from the sterilization chamber.
"I don't even know why I left," said Miro.
"She insists on having a private conversation," said Ela.
"She'll call you out," said Quara, "but she won't disconnect the auditory monitoring system."
"We're supposed to be documenting every moment of Planter's conversation. For lucidity."
Miro sighed. "Ela, grow up."
She almost exploded. "Me! Me grow up! She comes in here like she thinks she's Nossa Senhora on her throne--"
"Ela," said Miro. "Shut up and listen. Quara is Planter's only hope of living through this experiment. Can you honestly say that it wouldn't serve the purpose of this experiment to let her--"
"All right," said Ela, cutting him off because she already grasped his argument and bowed to it. "She's the enemy of every living sentient being on this planet, but I'll cut off the auditory monitoring because she wants to have a private conversation wi
th the brother that she's killing."
That was too much for Quara. "You don't have to cut off anything for me," she said. "I'm sorry I came. It was a stupid mistake."
"Quara!" shouted Miro.
She stopped at the lab door.
"Get the suit on and go talk to Planter. What does he have to do with her?"
Quara glared once again at Ela, but she headed toward the sterilization room from which Miro had just emerged.
He felt greatly relieved. Since he knew that he had no authority at all, and that both of them were perfectly capable of telling him what he could do with his orders, the fact that they complied suggested that in fact they really wanted to comply. Quara really did want to speak to Planter. And Ela really did want her to do it. They might even be growing up enough to stop their personal differences from endangering other people's lives. There might be hope for this family yet.
"She'll just switch it back on as soon as I'm inside," said Quara.
"No she won't," said Miro.
"She'll try," said Quara.
Ela looked at her scornfully. "I know how to keep my word."
They said nothing more to each other. Quara went inside the sterilization chamber to dress. A few minutes later she was out in the cleanroom, still dripping from the descolada-killing solution that had been sprayed all over the suit as soon as she was inside it.
Miro could hear Quara's footsteps.
"Shut it off," he said.
Ela reached up and pushed a button. The footsteps went silent.
Inside his ear, Jane spoke to him. "Do you want me to play everything they say for you?"
He subvocalized. "You can still hear inside there?"
"The computer is linked to several monitors that are sensitive to vibration. I've picked up a few tricks about decoding human speech from the slightest vibrations. And the instruments are very sensitive."
"Go ahead then," said Miro.
"No moral qualms about invasion of privacy?"
"Not a one," said Miro. The survival of a world was at stake. And he had kept his word--the auditory monitoring equipment was off. Ela couldn't hear what was being said.
The conversation was nothing at first. How are you? Very sick. Much pain? Yes.
It was Planter who broke things out of the pleasant formalities and into the heart of the issue.
"Why do you want all my people to be slaves?"
Xenocide Page 47
