by Greg Bear
Motion stopped. His thoughts slowed. He felt only one body, one existence. All his lines clumped back into one flow.
He tried to close his eyes, to not see, but that was impossible. He faced down and saw his reflection in the mirror-shiny valley floor, a small still man floating beneath the red-rimmed eye like an intruding mote. On either side of the valley rose jagged glassy peaks, mountain ranges like shreds of pulled taffy. A few hundred meters ahead of him, or perhaps a few kilometers, mounted in the middle of the valley lay something he recognized: a Jart defensive emplacement, white as ivory, jagged spikes thrusting like a sea urchin’s spines from a squat discus. Shaded cilia played around the spikes, but the spikes did not track, did not move.
The emplacement was dead.
Olmy held his hands in front of his face. He could see them, see through them, with equal clarity. Nothing was obscured, nothing neglected by his new vision.
He tried to speak, or perhaps to pray, to whatever it was that held him, directed his motion. He asked first if anything was there, listening. No answer. He remembered Plass’s comments about the allthing: that in its domain it was unique, had never learned the arts of communication, was one without other and controlled all by being all. No separation between mind and matter, observed and observer. Such a being could neither listen nor answer.
Nor could it change.
He thought of the emotions arrayed along the path that had guided him here. Pain, disappointment, fear. Weariness. Had the allthing learned this method of communication after its time in the Way? Had it dissected and rearranged enough human elements to change its nature this much?
Why pain? Olmy asked, spoken but unheard in the stillness.
He moved north down the center of the valley, over the dead Jart emplacement. Past the frozen spikes, his reflection again shimmered in the floor’s uneven black mirror. He looked east up the long curves of the Way beyond the jagged mountains, and saw more Jart emplacements, the spiral and beaded walls of what looked like Jart settlements, all abandoned, all spotted with large, distorted shapes he could not begin to comprehend.
Olmy thought, It’s made a Night Land for the Jarts. It does not know any difference between us.
As if growing used to the extraordinary pressure of the shadow cilia gripping him, his body once more sent signals of fear, then simple, childlike wonder, and finally its own exhaustion. Olmy’s head rolled on his shoulders and he felt his body sleep, but his mind remained alert. All his muscles tingled as they went off-line and would not respond to his tentative urgings.
How much time passed, if it were possible for time to pass, he could not judge. The tingling stopped and control returned. He lifted his head and saw a different valley, this one lined with huge figures. If the scale he had assumed at the beginning of his journey was still valid, these monolithic sculptures or shapes or beings—whatever they might be—were fully two or three kilometers distant, and therefore hundreds of meters in height. They were so strange he found himself looking at them in his peripheral vision, to avoid the confusion of placing them at the points of his visual focus. While vaguely organic in design—compound curves, folds of what might have been a semblance of tissue weighted by gravity, a kind of multilateral symmetry—the figures simply refused to be analyzed.
Olmy had many times experienced a lapse of visual judgment, when he would look at something in his living quarters and not remember it right away, and because of dim lighting or an unfamiliar angle, be unable to judge what it was. Under those conditions, he could feel his mind making hypotheses, trying desperately to compare them with what he was looking directly at, to reach some valid conclusion, and so actually see the object. This had occurred to him many times on Lamarckia, especially with regard to objects unique to that planet.
Here, he had no prior experience, no memory, no physical training or familiarity whatsoever with what he looked at, so he saw nothing sensible, nameable, to which he could begin to relate. Slowly, it dawned on Olmy that these might be more trophies of the allthing’s encounters with Jarts.
He was drifting down a rogue’s gallery of failed models, failed attempts to duplicate and understand, much like the gallery of objects and conditions around the Redoubt that made up the Night Land.
Humans had approached from one end of the Way, Jarts from the other. The allthing had applied similar awkward tools to both, either to unify them into its being, or to find some new method of experiencing their otherness.
Both had been incomprehensibly alien to the allthing.
Pain. One of the emotions borrowed from Olmy’s mind and arrayed along the pathway. A sense of disunification, unwanted change. The allthing had been disturbed by this entry; there was no evil, no enthusiastic destruction, in the Night Land. Olmy suddenly saw what Enoch had been trying to communicate to him, and went beyond her own understanding.
A monobloc of pure order had been invaded by a domain whose main character was that of disunity and contradiction. That must have been very painful indeed. And this quality of order was being sucked backward, like gas into a vacuum, into their domain.
Enoch and the guild of gate openers had manufactured the tip of a tooth. They had thrust into this other domain the bloody predatorial tooth of a hungry universe seeking quickening, a completion at its own beginning.
But this hypothesis did not instantly open any floodgate of comprehension or communication. Olmy did not find himself suddenly analyzing the raw emotional outbursts of another mind, godlike or otherwise; the allthing was not a mind in any sense he could understand. It was simply a pure and necessary set of qualities. It gripped him, controlled him, but literally had no use for him. Like everything else here, it could neither analyze nor absorb him. It could not even spread back along his world-line, for Olmy’s existence had begun over with this new body, with his resurrection.
That was why he had not met any ghosts of himself. Physically, he had almost no past. The allthing, if such existed, had flung him along this valley of waste and failure, another piece of detritus, even more frustrating than most.
He squirmed, his body struggling to break free like an animal in a cage. Panic overwhelmed him despite his best efforts. Olmy could not locate any point of reference within; not even a self was clearly defined.
Everything blurred, became confused, as if he had been smudged by an enormous finger and no outline remained. I am no where, now here, no name, moving, no future
He twisted, convulsed, trying to find his center. The figures mounted on the ranges of mountains to either side seemed interested in this effort. He could feel their attention and did not welcome it. He fancied they moved, however slowly, advancing toward him across astronomical time.
If this lump of conflicting order and chaos could define himself anew, perhaps these incomprehensible monoliths, these unworshipped gods and unrealized mockeries, could establish a presence as well.
The panic stopped.
Signals stopped.
He had come to an end. That minimum condition he had wished for was now upon him.
He cared nothing for past or future, had lost nothing, gained nothing.
I am or was a part of a society really no part of any
This name is Olmy Ap Sennen
Lover of many loved and loving by few
Contact nothing without
Without contact nothing
Uprooted tree
The lesion’s inflamed rim began to brighten. The suspended and aimless figure in its gripping cilia of probabilities maintained enough structure and drive to be interested in this, and noted that compared to past memory, the lesion was much smaller, much darker, and the flaring rim much broader. It resembled an immense solar eclipse with a bloody corona.
Loyalties and loves uprooted
Language itself faded until the aimless figure saw only images, the lushness of another world out of reach, closed
off, the faces of old humans once loved once reassuringly close now dead and without ghosts.
Can’t even be haunted by a past uprooted
The figure’s motion down the valley slowed. No time passed. Eveternity, endless now. Naked, skinless, fleshless, boneless. Consumed, integrated.
Experiences stillness.
Mark this in an endless column: experiences
Experiences stillness
stillness
stillness
No divisions. A tiny place no bigger than a fist a womb. Tiny place of infinite peace at the heart of a frozen geometry. All elaboration, variation, permutation, long since exhausted; infinite access to unbounded energy contained in oneness.
You/I/We no difference. See?
See. Vidya. All seeing. Eye of Buddha. Nerveless kalpas of some body. Nerve vanity.
This oneness consumed. Many nows, peace past.
At peace in the past. Loved women, raised children, lived a long life on a world to which there is no returning.
Nothing one at peace in no past all completed no returning.
Point.
One makes possible all.
I see. Buddha, do not leave your student bound.
The eye is shrinking, closing, its gorgeous bloody flare dimming. It is pierced by a white needle visible behind the small dark center.
Small large no matter no time
Do not go. Take us with
Am your father/mother/food
loved raised living longing no return
my own ghost
8
Ry Ornis, the tall insect-thin master, smiled down on him. Olmy saw many of the master opener, like an avatar of an ancient god. All the different masters merged.
They were surrounded by a glassy tent. A slow breeze cooled his face. Ry Ornis had wrapped him in a rescue field where he fell, carrying safe cool air to replenish what his worksuit could no longer provide.
Olmy rediscovered scattered rivers of memory and bathed his ancient feet there. He swallowed once. The eye, the lesion, had shut forever. “It’s gone,” he said.
Ry Ornis nodded. “It’s done.”
“I can never tell anybody,” Olmy realized out loud.
“You can never tell anybody.”
“We robbed and ate to live. To be born.”
Ry Ornis held his fingers to his lips, his face spectral in a new light from the south. A huge grin was spreading around half the Way, a gorgeous brilliant electric light. “The ring gate. A cirque,” the gate opener said, glancing over his shoulder. “Rasp and Karn, my students, have done well. We’ve done what we came here to do, and we saved the Way, as well. Not bad, eh, Ser Olmy?”
Olmy reached up to grab the gate opener, perhaps to strangle him. Ry Ornis had moved, however.
Olmy turned away, swallowed a second time against a competing dryness. There had been no need to complete the ring gate. The unfinished cirque had done its job and drained the final wasted remnants of the lesion, forcing a closure.
As they watched, the cirque shrank. The grin became a smile became an all-knowing serene curve, then collapsed to a point, and the point dimmed on distant rippled sands.
“I think the twins are a little disappointed they can’t finish the cirque. But it’s wonderful,” Ry Ornis enthused, and performed a small dance on the black obsidian of the valley floor. “They are truly masters now! When I am tried and convicted, they will take my place!”
The Way remained.
Rolling his head to one side, Olmy could not see the Redoubt. “Where’s the pyramid?” he asked hoarsely.
“Enoch has her wish,” Ry Ornis said, and shaded his eyes with one hand.
Plass, Enoch, the allthing.
Plass had seen her own ghost.
To east and west, the ruined mountains and their statues remained, rejected, discarded. No dream, no hallucination.
He had been used again. No matter. For an endless instant, like any gate opener, only more so, he had merged with the eye of the Buddha.
9
“The Infinite Hexamon Nexus does not approve of risky experiments that cannot be documented or explained. How many were deceived, Master Ry Ornis?”
“All, myself included.”
“Yet you maintain this was done out of necessity?”
“All of it. The utmost necessity.”
“Will this ever be necessary again? Answer honestly; the trust between us has worn very thin!”
“Never again.”
“How do you explain that one universe, one domain, must feed on another in order to be born?”
“I don’t. We were compelled. That is all I know.”
“Could it have gone badly?”
“Of course. As it is, in our clumsiness and ignorance, we have condemned all our ancestors to live with unexplainable presences, ghosts of past and future. A kind of afterbirth.”
“You are smiling, Master Gate Opener. This is intolerable!”
“It is all I can do, Sers.”
…
“For your disobedience and arrogance, what punishment do you choose, Master Ry Ornis?”
“Sers of the Nexus. This I swear. I will put down my clavicle from this time forward, and never know the grace again.”
—Sentencing Phase of Secret Hearings Conducted
by the Infinite Hexamon Nexus, “On the Advisability
of Opening Gates into Chaos and Order”
Tracting through the weightless forest of the Wald in the rebuilt Axis Nader, reaching out to the trees to push or grab roots and branches, half-flying and half-climbing, in his mind’s river-wide eye, Olmy Ap Sennen returned to Lamarckia, where he had once nearly died of old age, and retrieved a package he had left there, tied in neat pieces of mat-paper. His wives and children had kept it safe for him, and now they returned it. There was much smiling and laughter, then saying of farewells, last of all a farewell to his sons, whom he had left behind. Occupants of a different land, another life.
As they faded, in his mind’s eye, he opened the package they had given to him and greedily swallowed the wonderful contents.
His soul.
MDIO Ecosystems Increase
Knowledge of DNA Languages (2215 C.E.)
Henry Gee at Nature asked a select list of science fiction writers to contribute brief stories describing some future development in science. The series was great fun. My contribution was an attempt to write a review of recent discoveries as it might appear in Nature some two centuries hence. Along the way, I got to pump my speculative views of genetics and biological development (expressed in detail in Darwin’s Radio, Vitals, and Darwin’s Children) as if they’re part of an established paradigm. Talk about smug!
The discovery of over 15,000 massive deep ice objects (MDIO) in orbit around supermassive planets in the close interstellar neighborhood has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of biological languages.
Phenotype-generating languages for terrestrial DNA-recorded life forms can be ranked closely according to kingdoms. Most plants, for example, express phylogeny according to the famous Zinn-Wang languages, first decoded in the mid-twenty-first century.
Archaea, commonly used as the Rosetta stone for all primitive DNA languages, have provided deep insights into nonterrestrial biologies that have advanced to the DNA level.
RNA languages in terrestrial viruses constitute a virtual Tower of Babel, indicating a degenerate and mutationally rich mix that can still compel replication in DNA hosts. Early RNA coding systems found outside the solar system, however, can often be translated into Archaean DNA based languages, and these may constitute the most basic fixed languages of life.
MDIOs are typically seven to nine Earth masses and consist of layers of water ice two to five thousand kilometers in depth, overlying a high-pressure liquid o
cean (HPLO) that sits in turn on a rocky mantle. At the center is an iron- and sulfur-rich core.
The interior is warmed both by latent heat and radioactivity (chiefly thorium 90) and by tidal friction generated by interaction with the supermassive parent body. Temperatures in the HPLO can frequently exceed 130 degrees Celsius.
MDIOs may constitute the most common life-supporting bodies in the universe.
Neutronium self-guided probes (NSGP) have penetrated seven of these deep ice objects and have obtained remarkable data. Spin-off probes made of normal matter, transmuted from neutronium and released into the HPLO, perform in situ analysis of all carbon chemistry and send information to orbiting research stations.
What is most remarkable about MDIO biologies is that they can exist at all under these extraordinary conditions. Once again, it is demonstrated that life will begin and thrive anywhere there is liquid water and the necessary elements.
To date, RNA and DNA language analysis has been conducted on three HPLO ecosystems. Because of limited exploration ranges for the probes, the extent of these ecosystems is not known; however, every probed MDIO possesses life.
One of the ecosystems (MDIO 2341-a) is still in a “profligate” mutation-rich RNA phase, with no complex organisms and no DNA detected. Here, new genetic coding schemes may naturally emerge every few months, and competition between coding schemes is likely to be extreme. (The emergence of competent and stable genetic languages on Earth may have taken more than a billion years.)
The other two ecosystems (MDIO 5756-b, MDIO 349-x) have entered the more stable age of DNA and show remarkable similarities to each other.
The most striking feature of these ecosystems is how bright they are, since they are completely hidden from all starlight. The roving probes have sent back images of massive reef-like structures glowing as brightly as several full moons, surrounded by a thick, slowly churning mass of light-dependent microbes. Feeding on these microbes are living filter nets, fringed by corkscrew cilia, able to join into larger units or separate into smaller.
