by Greg Bear
The We–ness understands it no more than I.
From the hill below come faint sounds and hints of radiation—gamma rays, beta particles, mesons, all clearly visible to the We–ness, and vaguely passed on to me as well.
“Something’s coming,” I say.
The Berkus advances in its unexpected cloud of production–destruction. There is something deeply wrong with it—it squanders too much available energy. Its very presence disrupts the new matter of which We are made.
Of the seven tributaries, four feel an emotion rooted in the deepest algorithms of their pasts: fear. Three have never known such bodily functions, have never known mortal and embodied individuation. They feel intellectual concern and a tinge of cosmic sadness, as if our end might be equated with the deaths of stars and galaxies. We keep to our purpose despite these ridiculous excursions, the increasing and disturbing signs of our disorder.
The Berkus advances up the hill.
I see through my window this monumental and absolutely horrifying creature, shining with a brightness comprised of the qualities of diamonds and polished silver, a scintillating insect pushing its sharply pointed feet into the thawing soil, steam rising all around. The legs hold together despite gaps where joints should be, gaps crossed only by something that produces hard radiation. Below the Berkus (so the We–ness calls it), the ground ripples as if School World has muscles and twitches, wanting to scratch.
The Berkus pauses and sizes up our much less powerful, much smaller soma with blasts of neutrons, flicked as casually as a flashlight beam. The material of our soma wilts and reforms beneath this withering barrage. The soma expresses distress—and inadvertently, the We–ness translates this distress to me as tremendous pain.
Within my confined mental space, I explode …
Again comes the blackness.
The Berkus decides it is not necessary to come any closer. That is fortunate for us and for our soma. Any lessening of the distance could prove fatal.
The Berkus communicates with pulsed light. “Why are you here?”
“We have been sent here to observe and report. We are cut off from the Library—”
“Your Library has fled,” the Berkus informs us. “It disagreed with the Endtime Work Coordinator.”
“We were told nothing of this.”
“It was not our responsibility. We did not know you would be here.”
The magnitude of this rudeness is difficult to envelope. We wonder how many tributaries the Berkus contains. We hypothesize that it might contain all of the students, the entire student social=mind, and this would explain its use of energy and change in design.
Our pitiful ancient individual flickers back into awareness and sits quietly, too stunned to protest.
“We do not understand the purpose of this creation and destruction,” We say. Our strategy is to avoid the student tributaries altogether now. Still, they might tell us more We need to know.
“It must be obvious to teachers,” the Berkus says. “By order of the Coordinator, We are rehearsing all possibilities of coherence, usurping stored knowledge down to the planetary core and converting it. There must be an escape from the Proof.”
“The Proof is an ancient discovery. It has never been shown to be wrong. What can it possibly mean to the Endtime Work?”
“It means a great deal,” the Berkus says.
“How many are you?”
The Berkus does not answer. All this has taken place in less than a millionth of a second. The Berkus’s incommunication lengthens into seconds, then minutes.
Around us, the glaciers crumple like mud caught in rushing water.
“Another closed path, of no value,” the Berkus finally says.
“We wish to understand your motivations. Why this concern with the Proof? And what does it have to do with the change you provoke, the destruction of School World’s knowledge?”
The Berkus rises on a tripod of three disjointed legs, waving its other legs in the air, a cartoon medallion so disturbing in design that We draw back a few meters. “The Proof is a cultural aberration,” it radiates fiercely, blasting our surface and making the mud around us bubble. “It is not fit to pass on to those who seed the next reality. You failed us. You showed no way beyond the Proof. The Endtime Work has begun, the final self chosen to fit through the narrow gap—”
I see all this through the We–ness as if I have been there, have lived it, and suddenly I know why I have been recalled, why the We–ness has shown me faces and patterns.
The universe, across more than twelve billion years, grows irretrievably old. From spanning the galaxies billions of years before, all life and intelligence—all arising from the sole intelligence in all the universe, humanity—have shrunk to a few star systems. These systems have been resuscitated and nurtured by concentrating the remaining available energy of thousands of dead galaxies.
And they are no longer natural star systems with planets—the bloated, coma–wrapped violet star rising at zenith is a congeries of plasma macromachines, controlling and conserving every gram of the natural matter remaining, harnessing every erg of available energy. These artificial suns pulse like massive living cells, shaped to be ultimately efficient and to squeeze every moment of active life over the time remaining. The planets themselves have been condensed, recarved, rearranged—and they too are composed of geological macromachines.
With some dread, I gather that the matter of which all these things are made is itself artificial, with redesigned component particles. The natural galaxies have died, reduced to a colorless murmur of useless heat, and the particles of all original creation—besides those marshaled and remade in these three close–packed systems—have dulled and slowed and unwound. Gravity itself has lost its bearings and become a chancy phenomenon, supplemented by new forces generated within the macromachine planets and suns. Nothing is what it seems, and nothing is what it had been when I lived.
The We–ness looks forward to less than four times ten to the fiftieth units of Planck time—roughly an old Earth year.
And in charge of it all, controlling the Endtime Work, a supremely confident social=mind composed of many “tributaries,” and among those gathered selves…
Someone very familiar to me indeed.
My wife.
“Where is she? Can I speak to her? What happened to her? Did she die, was she stored—did she live?”
The We–ness seems to vibrate both from my reaction to this information, and to the spite of the Berkus. I am assigned to a quiet place where I can watch and listen without bothering them.
I feel our soma, our insect–like body, dig into the loosening substance of the promontory.
“You taught us the Proof was absolute,” the Berkus says, “that throughout all time, in all circumstances, error and destruction and pain will accompany growth and creation, that the universe must remain indifferent and randomly hostile. We do not accept that.”
“But why dissolve links with the Library?” We cry, even as We shrink beneath the Berkus’s glare. The constantly reconstructed body of the Berkus channels and consumes energy with enormous waste, as if the students do not care, intent only on their frantic mission, whatever that might be … Reducing available active time by days for all of us—
I know why! I know the reason! I shout in the quiet place, but I am not heard, or not paid attention to.
“Why condemn us to a useless end in this chaos, this madness?” We ask.
“Because We must refute the Proof and there is so little useful time remaining. The final self must not be sent over carrying this burden of error.”
“Of sin!” I shout, still not heard. Proof of the validity of primordial sin—that everything living must eat, must destroy, must climb up the ladder on the backs of miserable victims. That all true creation involves death and pain; the universe is a charnel house.
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I am fed and study the Proof. I try to encompass the principles and expressions, no longer given as words, but as multi–sense abstractions. In the Proof, miniature universes of discourse are created, manipulated, reduced to an expression, and discarded: the Proof is more complex than any single human life, or even the life of a species, and its logic is not familiar. The Proof is rooted in areas of mental experience I am not equipped to understand, but I receive glosses.
Law: Any dynamic system (I understand this as organism) has limited access to resources, and a limited time in which to achieve its goals. A multitude of instances are drawn from history, as well as from an artificial miniature universe. Other laws follow regarding behavior of systems within a flow of energy, but they are completely beyond me.
Observed Law: The goals of differing organisms, even of like variety, never completely coincide. History and the miniature universe teem with instances, and the Proof lifts these up for inspection at moments of divergence, demonstrating again and again this obvious point.
Then comes a roll of deductions, backed by examples too numerous for me to absorb:
And so it follows that for any complex of organisms, competition must arise for limited resources.
From this: some will succeed, some will fail, to acquire resources sufficient to live. Those who succeed, express themselves in later generations.
From this: New dynamic systems will arise to compete more efficiently.
From this: Competition and selection will give rise to *streamlined* organisms that are incapable of surviving even in the midst of plenty because they are not equipped with complete methods of absorbing resources. These will prey on complete organisms to acquire their resources.
And in return, the prey will acquire a reliance on the predators to hone their fitness.
From this: Other forms of *streamlining* will occur. Some of the resulting systems will become diseases and parasites, depending entirely on others for reproduction and fulfillment of basic goals.
From this: Ecosystems will arise, interdependent, locked in predator–prey, disease–host relationships.
I experience a multitude of rigorous experiments, unfolding like flowers.
And so it follows that in the course of competition, some forms will be outmoded and will pass away, and others will be preyed upon to extinction, without regard to their beauty, their adaptability to a wide range of possible conditions.
I sense here a kind of aesthetic judgment, above the fray: beautiful forms will die without being fully tested, their information lost, their opportunities limited.
And so it follows…
And so it follows…
The ecosystems increase in complexity, giving rise to organisms whose primary adaptation is perception and judgment, forming the abstract equivalents of societies, which interact through the exchange of resources and extensions of cultures and politics—models for more efficient organization. Still, change and evolution, failure and death, societies and cultures pass and are forgotten; whole classes of these larger systems suffer extinction, without being allowed fulfillment.
From history: Nations pray upon nations, and eat them alive, discarding them as burned husks.
Law: The universe is neutral; it will not care, nor will any ultimate dynamic system interfere…
In those days before I was born, as smoke rose from the ovens, God did not hear the cries of His people.
And so it follows: that no system will achieve perfect efficiency and self–sufficiency. Within all changing systems, accumulated error must be purged. For the good of the dynamic whole, systems must die. But efficient and beautiful systems will die as well.
I see the Proof’s abstraction of evil: a shark–like thing, to me, but no more than a very complex expression. In this shark there is history, and dumb organic pressure, and the accumulations of the past, and the shark does not discriminate, knows nothing of judgment or justice, will eat the promising and the strong as well as birthing young. Waste, waste, an agony of waste, and over it all, not watching, the indifference of the real.
After what seems hours of study, of questions asked and answered, new ways of thinking acquired—re–education—I begin to feel the thoroughness of the Proof, and I feel a despair unlike anything in my embodied existence.
Where once there had been hope that intelligent organisms could see their way to just, beautiful and efficient systems, in practice, without exception, they revert to the old rules.
Things have not and will never improve.
Heaven itself would be touched with evil—or stand still. But there is no heaven run by a just God. Nor can there be a just God. Perfect justice and beauty and evolution and change are incompatible.
Not the birth of my son and daughter, not the day of my marriage, not all my moments of joy can erase the horror of history. And the stretch of future histories, after my storage, shows even more horror, until I seem to swim in carnivorous, cybernivorous cruelty.
Connections
We survey the Berkus with growing concern. Here is not just frustration of our attempts to return to the Library, not just destruction of knowledge, but a flagrant and purposeless waste of precious resources. Why is it allowed?
Obviously, the Coordinator of the Endtime Work has given license, handed over this world, with such haste that We did not have time to withdraw. The Library has been forced away (or worse), and all transponders destroyed, leaving us alone on School World.
The ancient self, having touched on the Proof (absorbing no more than a fraction of its beauty) is wrapped in a dark shell of mood. This mood, basic and primal as it is, communicates to the tributaries. Again, after billions of years, We feel sadness at the inevitability of error and the impossibility of justice—and sadness at our own error. The Proof has always stood as a monument of pure thought—and a curse, even to We who affirm it.
The Berkus expands like a balloon. “There is going to be major work done here. You will have to move.”
“No,” the combined tributaries cry. “This is enough confusion and enough being shoved around.” Those words come from the ancient self.
The Berkus finds them amusing.
“Then you’ll stay here,” it says, “and be absorbed in the next round of experiment. You are teachers who have taught incorrectly. You deserve no better.”
I break free of the dark shell of mood, as the tributaries describe it, and now I seem to kick and push my way to a peak of attention, all without arms or legs.
“Where is the plan, the order? Where are your billions of years of superiority? How can this be happening?”
We pass on the cries of the ancient self. The Berkus hears the message.
“We are not familiar with this voice,” the student social=mind says.
“I judge you from the past!” the ancient self says. “You are all found wanting!”
“This is not the voice of a tributary, but of an individual,” the Berkus says. “The individual sounds uninformed.”
“I demand to speak with my wife!”
My demand gets no reaction for almost a second. Around me, the tributaries within the soma flow and rearrange, thinking in a way I cannot follow. They finally rise as a solid, seamless river of consent.
“We charge you with error,” they say to the Berkus. “We charge you with confirming the Proof you wish to negate.”
The Berkus considers, then backs away swiftly, beaming at us one final message: “There is an interesting rawness in your charge. You no longer think as outmoded teachers. A link with the Endtime Work Coordinator will be requested. Stand where you are. Our own work must continue.”
I feel a sense of relief around me. This is a breakthrough. I have a purpose! The Berkus retreats, leaving us on the promontory to observe. Where once, hours before, glaciers melted, the ground begins to churn, grow viscous, divide into fenced enc
laves. Within the enclaves, green and gray shapes arise, sending forth clouds of steam. These enclaves surround the range of hills, surmount all but our promontory, and move off to the horizon on all sides, perhaps covering the entire School World.
In the center of each fenced area, a sphere forms first as a white blister on the hardness, then a pearl resting on the surface. The pearl lifts, suspended in air. Each pearl begins to evolve in a different way, turning inward, doubling, tripling, flattening into disks, centers dividing to form toruses; a practical infinity of different forms.
The fecundity of idea startles me. Blastulas give rise to cell–like complexity, spikes twist into intricate knots, all the rules of ancient topological mathematics are demonstrated in seconds, and then violated as the spaces within the enclaves themselves change.
“What are they doing?” I ask, bewildered.
“A mad push of evolution,” my descendant self explains, “trying all combinations starting from a simple beginning. This was once a common exercise, but not on such a vast scale. Not since the formulation of the Proof.”
“What do they want to learn?”
“If they can find one instance of evolution and change that involves only growth and development, not competition and destruction, then they will have falsified the Proof.”
“But the Proof is perfect,” I said. “It can’t be falsified …”
“So we have judged. The students incorrectly believe we are wrong.”
The field of creation becomes a vast fabric, each enclave contributing to a larger weave. What is being shown here could have occupied entire civilizations in my time: the dimensions of change, all possibilities of progressive growth.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
“It’s futile,” my descendant self says, its tone bitter. I feel the emotion in its message as an aberration, and it immediately broadcasts shame to all of its fellows, and to me.
“Are you afraid they’ll show your teachings were wrong?” I asked.
“No,” my tributary says. “I am sorry that they will fail. Such a message to pass on to a young universe … That whatever our nature and design, however we develop, we are doomed to make errors and cause pain. Still, that is the truth, and it has never been refuted.”
