—The ship at full velocity. A faint radiance hazed space, bow wave of screen fields flinging interstellar atoms aside. Beyond it gaped a cyclopean void, where aberration and Doppler effect had driven the stars from vision—except dead forward, a hundred thousand blue-white, clustered around a luminosity that was the cosmic background itself. Guthrie contemplated it for months before he told his attendant robot to shut him off.
—After ten shipboard years and three-fourths of a light-century, he was awakened. The vessel was well into deceleration, constellations blossoming back into sight around her.
—Bion. A glass-green sea from whose depths wings burst through waves and soared into the air. A forest of Gothic arches in which hung scarlet curtains and crystalline chimes resounded. A mountain enmeshed from its snowpeak to its foothills by a single violet vine, home to creatures of uncounted kinds. Rainfall, in each drop an embryo that came to term while it fell, springing free when it struck. Animals that built cities of faerie grace but showed hardly more wit than ants. Other animals that made use of sharp sticks and stones. Other animals that did not, although they tended fires. . . .
A neighbor globe orbited the same sun. While life on it was as rudimentary as life had been on Demeter when first he arrived, microbes attacking rock had blanketed land with loam and two moons kept the seas brisk. Here, better than at Beta Hydri or 82 Eridani, were the makings of a New Earth. But ships that could bring humans to it must crawl, their cargoes shriveled to corpses. . . .
—Homebound. The outside again going alien. Memories of what lay behind. If only, if only. ... Of course it was impossible, a hope Guthrie had cast from him hundreds of years ago when he could no longer endure it. Not so?
—That other me didn’t know what we’d learned from the sophotects on Earth before they cut us off, he said. More important, oh, much more, he didn’t know what you’d become, your maturity. I who stayed here knew, but hadn’t thought what it might mean. Too busy, or—or too afraid I’d prove wrong. . . . Somehow, when he and I came together, the disorientation, the, the craziness— Can chaos be creative?
—It is the fountainhead of creation, Demeter told him. It rises from a reality that will forever surprise us with newness if we open ourselves to it, being greater than we can conceive; and yet we can grow into it. . . . (Meditation) Why did I not see? Was I likewise too deeply engaged, or too afraid? This could make me forsake my living world for years on end, to its terrible hurt. But it is foredoomed, whatever I choose. If, from its death, there should come life unbounded—
—Yes, she breathed through the leaves, yes, I think, feel, believe the power may indeed be mine—
—Yes! she cried triumphant.
Her spirit seized his. For a span they whirled away together through her forests and her fields, down into her waters and aflight in her thunderstorms, up toward their stars and their vision. She was Demeter Mother, but she was also Kyra, Eiko, and everything he remembered of Juliana.
* * * *
62
T
o make anew the flesh and bone of Anson Guthrie, a task not lightly undertaken, was the first and smallest step in the enterprise.
Like his colonists, he had put his medical record into the database that went with them from Sol to Centauri; like theirs, his included the map of his genome. True, the information concerned a man whose ashes had long lain at rest on the Moon, mingled with those of the wife of his manhood. No physician would evoke it, seeking the best treatment for an illness or the best advice to give a prospective parent. However, the mass that it added to the total was effectively zero; and someday, somehow, he might want it, or somebody else might.
Thus when the day incredibly came, the instructions were there to encode for the nanomachinery. Molecular assemblers went to work. From the solutions and gels in the tank they drew what they needed; they built the DNA and RNA strands of cell and mitochondrion, they fashioned the zygote and set it to functioning, they guided its proliferation and differentiations.
What grew in that fabricated womb was no fetus. It could have been, were such desired. A few times on Earth, a few persons had been rich enough and vain enough to raise children who were clones of themselves. Guthrie was never tempted, and now it would have defeated his intention. He required a body young but fully developed. An infantile or juvenile brain could not have coped with what he meant to give it. The knowledge, so much and so various, would overburden to destruction, insanity. And if he first let the clone mature, it would be too late. A distinct personality would have formed, memories and synapse patterns set, resistant to any downloading imposed on it until it likewise collapsed under the impact.
Even for an adult unconscious in darkness and silence, the operation had formerly been impossible. This was notabula rasa, passively waiting to be written upon. A programmable network, like the one into which old Guthrie had been copied, was. It received the data piece by piece as neurons were scanned and the information in them transmitted. Not until everything was there, fully coordinated, was the program activated. A new awareness sprang into being as a complete entity.
The reverse was altogether different. Although artifice kept the clone alive while he lay in the tank, he did live. He metabolized. He kept going the manifold homeostases necessary for hour-to-hour survival. His brain, devoid of thought, nonetheless grew steadily busier as it advanced, coordinating the whole, secretion, excretion, flow of impulses and juices, rhythms of heart and smooth muscles. It began, vaguely, to dream.
Bit-by-bit input of what was outside its experience could not happen, because the living nervous system could never be still. By its very nature it must distort those meaningless fragments, scatter them, suppress them, get rid of them.
Guthrie knew no way of imposing his entirety on it in a single instantaneous assault. Had he possessed devices for that, they would have been worse than useless. Some conditioned reflexes might be established, but the brain is not made to learn in any such fashion. It needs time to assimilate knowledge.
First, it must provide itself with redundancy, copies of each molecular-level trace, because quantum fluctuations degrade them and if it has no replacements the memory will soon be lost. Second, the mind is not a separate thing quartered somewhere in the head. It is a subset—large, among humans, but still a subset—of what the whole organism does. That organism can no more learn immediately how to be a particular person than it can learn immediately how to walk a tightrope or play a violin or stop fearing death. To force it would be to break it.
Therefore download Guthrie had not supposed a man Guthrie would again walk the world: until Demeter came to her flowering.
Neither her powers nor her intellect were unbounded. They transcended the human, but that which was at Sol could have scorned them, had it deigned to be petty. Or perhaps not. What it was and what she was were incommensurable. Is a lightning bolt superior to an ocean tide? Demeter was the unity of a living planet, as the brain and nerves are the unity of a single. creature. Although they do not control each cell, they keep the cells in harmony, and at need they call upon all to act as one. So did she reign over her billions.
Bach did not compose with his veins, lungs, legs, gonads, or even his heart. His ears gave him knowledge of sound, his hands worked keyboards and wrote down scores, but in a later age those services could have been provided him robotically. Yet it was no disembodied cerebrum that adored God and wrought the Mass in B Minor; it was the whole human being.
In similar wise—crude analogy; words are weak—Demeter’s mind and spirit were of all her lives. Multitudinousness became magnitude. The ultimate organism, she knew the organic as no machine by itself ever would. Insight so broad and deep went further still, to the quantum level and its mysteries; hers were observations that, within their range, reconciled the paradoxes.
If she could steer the destiny and heal the self-inflicted wounds of a biosphere, she could guide the genesis of an individual.
It was not easy. As she foresaw, imm
ense thought—and computation— must go beforehand, and then for hundreds of days her full attention was engaged, while she fed her nursling with Guthrie and, governing, upholding, led the blind spirit into existence. At that, it was an experiment with many unknowns. This was a reason why he had decreed that he be the first subject. “A decent comandante doesn’t send his men into any risk he won’t try. If we fail, it’ll be an Anson Guthrie who suffers, and me who takes the responsibility. If the thing suffers too horribly, I will kill it.”
But what the robots finally raised from the tank, what drew a breath and looked from side to side, was a strong young man. While naturally he needed some intensive training and conditioning, from the start his identity stood forth beyond any mistake.
In him dwelt memories and loves reaching back to a childhood on Earth, forward to voyages between the stars. They did not include everything that had happened to the download; the storage capacity of the brain has its limits, and his own life awaited him. However, he knew enough, and he could look up the rest whenever he desired, or hear it from the father who was himself.
Meanwhile Demeter, heartened by success, embarked on a creation more daring. In part, it was done to increase her knowledge and skill. In part, it was to provide a symbol, an incarnation; man does not live by reason alone, and the times to come would try men’s souls. In part, it was to serve a purpose that would outlive her.
The next DNA template was not exclusively Kyra’s. Mingled were elements of Eiko’s, for she too must be in the re-embodiment. Guthrie hoped, he believed, that something of Juliana would also come back; over the centuries, whenever he and Demeter linked, they had shared that ghost, and now the being who took form in the nascent human was Demeter herself.
Partial, yes—a hint, a fragrance, a fleeting vision. The woman could only know in full what it had been to be women. She could only go on to live in her own right, a mortal. But in her should abide the seed of what was more than human, another and greater Demeter on many another world.
She opened her eyes. She smiled.
* * * *
63
W
hen their first-born had turned six years of age, Anson and Demeter Daughter brought him to the sanctum on Lifthrasir Tor. They could have given him at home the meeting to which they went, but to come here made a ceremony of it, and they felt that was wanted. Moreover, the rare privilege of visiting in person roused in him an excitement, an eagerness, that they hoped would bear him past any terrors. Some of the questions he was lately asking had answers that disquieted grown men.
An autumn wind blew wild across the highlands. It harried clouds over one sun and then the next, so that light fell in spearshafts bright or dim, blinked out, and struck anew, while shadows raced beneath. A flight of geese trekked on it; their cries shrilled faint through its bluster, as if already they were afar. Evergreens stood doubly dark, broadleaf trees startlingly red and yellow, against grass turned wan. Those on the hilltop roared with wind. It carried odors of rain-wet heath, sharp as itself.
The building was quiet and softly illuminated. A robot conducted the guests to a room that the parents knew well. There stood chairs, a table set with a goblet of nectar and two of wine, a multiceiver. At the moment the view in it was of a seashore, surf thunderous green and white, gulls, ice plant in purple bloom behind the dunes. The scan swept slowly inland, to meadows where horses cropped, on to a sequoia forest and up a mountainside, the living world.
There also stood download Guthrie, in his body that recalled an ancient knight. “Hello,” he greeted, and stooped to shake hands with Noboru. They knew one another well, he romped and told stories and sang songs, but today he made a point of respecting the dignity of the child.
“Welcome,” said the low voice that was Demeter Mother’s. “Be at ease. This too is your home.”
“Thank you,” Noboru whispered. She had spoken to him before, but always, inescapably, she was the Presence, however gentle or even playful. He took his seat between Anson and Demeter Daughter, gripped his goblet, but did not lift it.
Guthrie sat down opposite; he ought not to loom over them. “Yes, do relax, lad,” he urged. “Enjoy. Your folks tell us you’ve been wondering about some things, and think we could help. Not that you can’t learn it from them or at school or on your own, but—well, you’re pretty special to us, and we’d like you to know we aren’t just odd kinfolk of yours, we’re your friends.”
“Don’t go getting the kid above himself,” Anson laughed.
“Ha!” snorted Guthrie. “Just you wait till you’re a granddad.”
“I’ll dote every bit as hard as he, I’m sure,” said Demeter Daughter.
The banter encouraged Noboru. “When will that be?” he piped, and gulped from his drink. “On this planet?”
“We don’t know, dear,” replied his mother. “You and your wife will decide that, if you aren’t on one of the other planets when you meet her.”
Noboru gave her a look. He half understood that she and his father had had a destiny; what was hard to grasp was that nobody else did. Of course, she was unique in her beauty—tall, slim, golden-skinned, black locks falling past high cheekbones, finely molded features, forthright hazel eyes—as his father was unique in his ruggedness and boisterous mirths. But that was because they were his parents.
“You see,” Guthrie reminded him, “we’ll soon be ready to move the first lots of people to Isis and Amaterasu,” the chosen globes at 82 Eridani and Beta Hydri. “By the time you’re grown up, quite a few will be leaving every year.”
Noboru frowned, concentrating. “People people?”
“Yes, those few who want it that way,” said Demeter Daughter.
“Those who want to help the machines and machine-bodied downloads change yonder worlds into this kind,” Anson added.
“And to be on them, human, from the first,” Demeter Daughter laid to that.
“Most will have to go as downloads,” Anson said. “We’ll never have the cargo space to carry many as suspends, nor be able to provide for them at the end of the trip before the planets are really flourishing. They’ll have to wait, switched off. I don’t expect they’ll mind. They’ll miss out on the challenges and excitement of early pioneering, but they’ll miss out on the hardships and dangers as well. In a couple of hundred years, maybe less, the environment and the Life Mother should be ready for them. Then she will activate them and make them into humans.”
“Like you,” Noboru said.
“Yes, dear.” Demeter Daughter stroked his dark locks.
The boy winced, braced himself, and blurted, “What about their old bodies?”
“Confused about that?” Guthrie asked. He glanced at the couple. “You haven’t explained to him yet?”
“No,” Anson confessed awkwardly. “The, uh, the occasion never seemed right.”
“It is a solemn thing, and could be frightening,” Demeter Daughter said. “It’s best that you two tell him.”
Demeter Mother spoke through the multi. The scene became that of a woodland lake under stars. Their light trembled on the water, as if to the nightingale song that ran liquid beneath her words. “When a mind downloads, Noboru, before leaving for the stars, it can be—it almost always will be—with the body asleep; and the body will never wake from that sleep, but pass peacefully into quietness.”
“Then he’s dead!” the child cried.
“No, he is freed from age and pain. His true self will be in the download, and live again in a new body.”
Noboru bit his lip. “And they’ll, they’ll wipe the download?”
“If that’s what it wants,” Guthrie said, “which I reckon it usually will.”
“Do not be afraid of death or of life, darling,” said Demeter Mother. “They are one. See.” The multi showed a dandelion in golden bloom. Time speeded. The flower became a stalk and a puffball, it strewed its seed on the wind and died, leaves fell, snow drifted, spring came again and the land stood in flower.
; “He’s kind of young to hear how all those agonizing philosophical-theological conundrums amount to ‘Ask a silly question, you get a silly answer,’“ Guthrie muttered. “But maybe we can shove some notion of identity across.” Aloud, to the boy: “Think. A message, a picture, a pattern, they aren’t the same as whatever happens to carry them. Remember that song I sang you about Pilot MacCannon? It was in my voice, but it’s been in a lot of other voices too and will be in more, and it’s been in books and databases and Lord knows what else. They pass away—a book might catch fire, for instance—but it goes on. You’re like a song.”
Anson laid a hand on his son’s shoulder. “You won’t ever have to end,” he avowed. “You can have life after life, on world after world.”
“Until you have had enough,” Guthrie said low.
Noboru cast an astonished gaze on the helmet head. “When w-will that be?” he stammered.
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