by Greg Bear
“You’ll be downloaded into your implant soon. You don’t want that.”
“No. But it shouldn’t be now.”
Mirsky bent on one knee and stared at him intently. “It is now. You are dying. You can either die their way—they will give you a new body this time—or you can die your own way. In which case, I would like you to come with me.”
“I…don’t understand.” His speech was slurred. He couldn’t control his tongue. This is awful. It was awful before, it’s awful now. “Karen.”
Mirsky shook his head sadly. “Come with me, Garry. There’s adventure. And some startling truths. You must decide soon. Very soon.”
Not fair. “Call for help. Please.”
“I can’t. I’m not really here, not physical this time.”
“Please.”
“Decide.”
Lanier closed his eyes to avoid the tunnel, but he could not. He hardly knew who he was now. “All right,” he said in a voice so weak it was not even a whisper.
Something warm pressed behind his eyes, and he felt a sharpness—not painful, just sharp—throughout his head. The sharpness pared his thoughts away layer by layer, and for a brief moment, there was no self at all. Still the paring went on, unwinding, unraveling. Then the process seemed to reverse, and he felt things fall back into place, but with a different texture underlying—as if he were a layer of paint on a canvas, being peeled from the old surface and pressed onto a new…. Yet there was no surface, no ground, nothing solid to hang himself on, only the pattern and some ineffable connection to Mirsky, who no longer looked like Mirsky, or any human. What he saw now was not light, and what he heard from Mirsky was not words.
I’ve been wondering what you really are, he commented without lips to move. You’re not a man at all.
No longer, Mirsky affirmed. I will put something here for Karen, that she will not have lost everything.
Lanier’s body fell to one side, crushing a fern and knocking bark from the rotten side of the stump. The eyes flickered half-open. The right hand twitched and curled sharply, then relaxed. The lungs fluttered and urine trickled into the pants. The heart continued to beat for several more minutes, but then the breathing stopped and the chest was still.
His implant was not empty, but Garry Lanier was dead.
55
Thistledown
The seventh chamber was in shadow, turned away from sun and Earth and moon, pointing to the stars. Its smooth-cut edges, its vast round cavity swept clean of debris, were a lesser and emptier black. Only four sets of lights shone on its perimeter, and fitful glows from survey parties making final alignments.
The blister capping the bore hole now contained a contingent of VIPs and guests; the official Hexamon historians, a group Korzenowski was not unfamiliar with; scientists and technicians who would assume the maintenance functions once the Way was reconnected and re-opened; the president and presiding minister; the director of Thistledown; Judith Hoffman.
Olmy, looking considerably improved.
They all hung in the dim lines of traction fields like spider’s prey, quiet, expectant.
As much ceremony as if this were the actual re-opening, Korzenowski thought, moving to the center of the dome with his extended clavicle. He had done this before, centuries ago; opening the Way for the first time after its creation, setting the Hexamon on a course far more difficult and final than any had then suspected.
He had still not made his final decision on whether to transmit Olmy’s signal. Friendship, even personal debt, was not something that could be weighed against an event as important as this…. The considerations of individuals were dwarfed by his larger responsibilities.
And yet, Olmy had never in his life done anything that was not for the good of the Hexamon. A more heroic and dedicated figure did not exist.
Korzenowski locked himself into the traction field at the center of the blister and slowly swung the control clavicle into place. The nodes surrounding the seventh chamber’s cap were slaved to this device. He had all the capabilities and the entire power of the sixth chamber machinery at his disposal. He had months of preparation and tests behind him. His hands on the clavicle were sure; his mind was more clear and more sharply focused than it had been in years.
The time had come. Around him, the visitors fell quiet and stopped picting.
Korzenowski closed his eyes and let the clavicle speak to him. The Thistledown’s superspace probes—little more than mathematical abstractions given temporary reality by the sixth chamber machinery—spread outward and inward and in directions that could not be followed by unaided human brains.
Across the smear of closely related half-realities that surrounded this universe, across the multiform fifth dimension that separated the great universes and their different world-lines, the probes went in search of something artificial, something unlike the precisely organized chaos of nature. They passed their results back to the clavicle and to Korzenowski. He saw a weave of great universes twisting around and even through each other, coinciding and separating, almost always spreading away from each other, their fifth dimensional distances increasing.
He knew a kind of ecstasy. The part of him that was Patricia Vasquez was like the quiet surface of a deep ocean accepting rain; not responding, merely receiving, leaving him alone to work his extraordinary technology.
For a timeless moment, Korzenowski’s senses merge with the clavicle, and he understood with a clarity at once transient and transcendent all the secrets of this limited fifth-dimensional cross-section. Korzenowski was in the state he had experienced only a few times in his past; theoretical quibbles about the nature of superspace meant less than nothing. He knew.
In that place beyond words and experience, he found an anomaly. Infinitely long, curiously coiled
it is very like a worm
at a number of points, those points being places of deep confusion known as the geometry stacks; curiously super-coiled within the boundaries of one universe, his own; extending like a linear flame to an unoccupied and indefinite darkness—the shadow of the terminal universe that would be made and would fail—
The Way.
Within those ponderous, fluid yet immutable coils—intestines, snakes, protein molecules, DNA—he searched for a cauterized end. The search might have taken centuries; he did not know or care. If the Thistledown itself had become a cold, sterile hulk in the time it took, he would not have been bothered. His goal was clear and overwhelming.
Korzenowski examined his creation more carefully this time, with a more practiced and mature eye. There were certain features of the Way he thought might merit future investigation: the structure of the very twisted and interwoven geometry stacks, the wonderful complex curves of the Way as it interacted with its parent universe’s own enormous space-time anomalies, avoiding disruption and inevitable destruction. His creation had become like a living thing, seeking to continue its existence undisturbed…
In all the weave of great universes, nowhere could the sensors find any overall pattern or sense. No intelligence had made all this, nothing had willed this totality into being. If a god or gods existed, they had no place here; this much he understood beyond any shadow of a doubt, knew in a way he could never consciously understand or recover.
There was no god of allness and everythingness. No god would have desired such a role; for what Korzenowski saw could not have been created, and would never be destroyed. It was superspace’s own Mystery, ineffable; the sink beyond all mathematics and physics that absorbed all Gödelian contradictions.
What Korzenowski saw was a fantastic panoply of canvases on which those things which concern intelligences could be painted, a playground for ever-evolving and ever-greater intelligences, up to and beyond gods. Worlds upon worlds upon worlds without end or beginning.
There would never be true boredom here, or true and permanent loneliness. This was All, and it was infinitely more than enough.
Almost as an anticlimax, the Engineer
found what he sought, the cauterized end of the Way.
He readied the clavicle and powered the stimulators and projectors surrounding the open seventh chamber. Reflections and distortions of Earth and Moon and Sun formed slowly spinning halos around the perimeter. The distant stars shimmered.
He moved nothing, exerted no force, yet brought the cauterized end of the Way across vast distances to meet with the broadly distended field of the projectors. He gave little thought to anything but the reaches of superspace; he was in the ecstasy of stretching his abilities to their greatest range. Consequences were irrelevant now. The act itself was sufficient.
56
Earth
The night sky above Earth filled again with diffuse sheets of light and the stars danced. Karen shouted through the punctuated blackness; Lanier had been gone for seven hours, and she could not call for a search party. Power to the cabin was out. More than power was out—no communications were possible.
She navigated back and forth along the trail, moving through the forest by the light of an electric lantern, flinching at the pyrotechnics visible through the canopy overhead. “Garry!” She had an awful knowledge, the awareness of a missing connection; she knew she would not find him alive. She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and blinked to clear away a sting of terror.
Again Karen shined the lantern beam on the trail. Always, his footsteps ended here. As if he had been carried away. She had gone farther three times now, finding no more footsteps, no trace; tear-streaks on her face reflected red from the sky as she stared up, grimacing with frustration. “Garry!”
His footsteps became confused here, as if he had stumbled around. Beside the trail, ferns and deep moss hid any spoor. A stump rose from the foliage. She had passed the stump half a dozen times, pacing, shining the lantern at it.
For the first time, she noticed that a long layer of bark had been freshly peeled away. She pushed through the ferns and saw a declivity beyond. Ferns had been crushed on the lip.
Breathing deeply, erratically, she stumbled and slipped down the shallow angle and stood in the gully, pausing, not wanting to complete the act. Lips set tight, she bent over and fingered a broken fern. Then she used both hands to pull aside the thick fern boughs.
Above the forest canopy, cold sea-green luminosity smeared across the sky, brighter than her lantern, creeping under every shadow and flattening all depth. The outline beyond the ferns was brought into dreamy relief.
“Garry,” she said softly, her face contorted. After a moment in which she felt as if she were falling down a long, deep well, she touched his neck for pulse, found none, then shined her light into half-open, unresponsive eyes. Her skin crawled at the coldness of the body’s skin, her husband’s skin, and her breath came in painful hitches, unconscious, sharp, birdlike cries lost in the forest. She could not call Christchurch. All communications were disturbed by the activity at Thistledown.
She was on her own.
Instinctively—she had done this only once before, but the training had been thorough—she opened her pocket tool and pulled down the rumpled jacket collar, rolling the corpse over to expose the neck.
57
Halfway
Lanier could not feel his body, or for that matter anything else, but he could see in a fashion; seeing without eyes, wrapping himself around light and finding images.
He experienced the presence of his teacher, and knew it to be the being that had masqueraded as or played or returned to the role of Pavel Mirsky. He mingled with this being, observed its nature and qualities, and began to model himself after it, gaining more control.
Without speech or words, he asked certain pressing questions left over from his physical mind, and received the beginnings of answers.
Where are we?
Between the Earth and Thistledown.
It doesn’t look like the Earth. Those fingers of light…
We’re not seeing with eyes now. You left those behind.
Yes, yes…The taint of his own impatience sent a ripple through him that was its own punishment. He would soon learn to control these vestigial emotions; without a body, they were more than useless, they were disturbing. The pain is gone. But so is my body.
No need.
Lanier absorbed and processed images of the Earth below. It did not look at all the same now; it seemed covered with glowing, shifting strands that reached out to darkness, twisted, and vanished…What are they? I can hardly see the planet, there are so many of them.
All those being gathered, large creatures and small. Watch where the light goes.
It ties into a kind of knot…I can’t follow it.
Harvesting the lives. Gathering all the memories and patterns, all the sensations and recollections.
Souls?
Not as such. There are no ectoplasmic bodies or souls. We are all frail and temporary, like wilting flowers. When we are gone, we are truly gone—and the universe is empty, desolate, shapeless. Unless at some time those with the power decide to arrange a kind of resurrection.
Who’s doing this?
The Final Mind.
Our descendants save us?
With reason. The observations of living things are a distillation of the universe, a conversion of information to knowledge. All sensation, all thought, all experience, is gathered, not just at death, but throughout one’s life. That knowledge is precious; it can be distilled even further and passed through the tiniest fissures of connection between this universe, as it dies, and the new universe that is born out of it. The distillation imposes itself on the new creation, like the passage of seed, guides it away from chaos, impressing a pattern. The new creation can then develop its own intelligences, who will in some way or another repeat the process when their universe grows old.
Nothing dies?
Everything dies. But that which is special in all of us is saved…if the Final Mind succeeds. You see the urgency of my mission?
Lanier’s memories of all the years of pain and death came to him as if spread out in an album of three-dimensional pictures. Everything dies…But the Final Mind was burning galaxies at the beginning of time, to power this effort to recover all that was finest in all the things that had ever lived. Not just human beings, but all living things; all things, at any rate, that converted information to knowledge, that learned and observed and came to know their environment that they might change it. From the scale of microbes to the living Earth itself, all levels harvested and encoded, selected and
Saved.
He savored that thought, tasting it, delighting in it, sobering at what it really meant; not the resurrection of the body, not the salvation of any individual, but the merging and transcendence of the whole. That which is best in all of us.
He thought of his father, dying of a cerebral hemorrhage in a parked car in Florida. Of his mother, dying of cancer in a hospital in Kansas. Of his friends and relatives and colleagues and acquaintances instantly immolated in the furnace of the Death, that scorching, ashing breath that lingered so briefly on the Earth. Their achievements, their courage, their foolishness and mistakes, their dreams and thoughts, harvested as if a combine swept over them, threshing their kernels of grain away from the husks and chaff of death. All the simple people, and the brilliant, the swift contentious birds of the air and the sheep of the green cloud-shadowed fields, fish and strange beasts of the sea, insects, people, people, people, swept up and saved. Was this immortality, to be rendered into such a form that the Final Mind could remember all that you were?
And not Earth alone, but all the worlds of this galaxy, and all the worlds of those galaxies filled with life, immense fields of hundreds of billions of worlds, some strange beyond imagining. Immense was not the word for such an undertaking. On any such scale, the fate of the Earth was less than insignificant, yet the Final Mind was diverse enough, powerful enough to reach down to Earth and shape history with such delicacy, focusing the eviternal on the infinitesimal.
Even in his present
form, he found this hard to accept, impossible to understand.
Am I being harvested, too? Is that what you’re doing now—carrying me away?
We have a different path and a different role.
What are we—spirit, energy?
We are like a current using the hidden conduits by which particles of matter and energy speak to each other, tell each other where they are and what they are—pathways hidden to humans in our time, but available to the Final Mind.
Where are we going?
First, to Thistledown.
58
Thistledown
The witnesses had gathered in the bore hole, behind Korzenowski’s control center: the president, presiding minister, the director of Thistledown, official Hexamon historians, Judith Hoffman, selected senators and corpreps.
Directly ahead, through the blister, a circle of night expanded slowly until it touched the smooth-cut edges of the open seventh chamber, banishing the stars. Within the darkness swam afterimages of Sun and Moon and Earth, growing smaller and dimmer.
Korzenowski opened the test link. A pinpoint of milky light glowed in the center of the dimensionless blackness. Concentrating on the clavicle, refusing to be distracted by any display but the abstraction provided by the machine, he “felt” through the link and explored what lay beyond.
Vacuum. The nearly empty void surrounding the flaw; the brightness of a plasma tube.
The frequency of light matched that of the Way’s own variety of plasma tube.
A few meters behind Korzenowski, President Farren Siliom heard the Engineer whisper, “It’s here.”
Now Korzenowski broke out of his trance long enough to pict an instruction to the console hovering beside him. Olmy’s mysterious signal passed through the open link and down the Way.
“Is everything—” the president began.
