Watson, Ian - Novel 08

by The Gardens of Delight (v1. 1)

  “The manifest universe only approaches this level of potential energy at the heart of a black hole formed from the collapsed matter of a giant star, or many stars, perhaps many hundreds of them.” (Now his heartbeat: thump, thumpl) “From that singularity point, where natural ‘laws’ break down, anything might emerge fullblown: a tree, a grand piano ... if the event horizon did not draw a cordon sanitaire around the singularity.

  “Yet black holes are not forever bound by the event horizon. Quantum tunnelling makes their boundaries fuzzy.” (Now he had hair on his body! He was being reconstructed physically somewhere, organ by organ, item by item.) “Incoherent, random energy leaks out and away.” (He had pores in his skin, which sweated heat.) “Until, suddenly, in a micromicrosecond the black hole evaporates in radiation-flash. Anything of macroscopic size may emerge at this moment, though the emission spectrum will tend statistically to be nearly thermal, so that any exotic object will simultaneously be destroyed by the emission.

  “But there is an even more curious condition. A collapsing ellipsoid mass rotating rapidly about its long axis will shrink, not to a pointlike singularity within an event horizon, but to a threadlike singularity that is naked to the manifest universe.” (Just as he was naked, in the Void. He had eyes now, to see: rosy filaments of gases that condensed into white-hot O-type suns which ionized these gases . . . Seven suns at least!) “This naked threadlike singularity will continue on its original vector through the manifest universe, emitting a nearly thermal profile for eternity minus random moments. During one of those random moments, as it passes by a condensing nebulosity, it emits into the universe, completely and coherently, not a sapphire as large as a world, nor a grand piano to puzzle future cosmonauts who might find it adrift in space a billion years hence, nor an alien exfarquib (whatever that might be), but—for the simple reason that this can happen, and therefore at this one moment does happen—it emits coherent energy-life: a web of organized energies possessing awareness. Energy-life springs selfaware out of the stochastic chaos. A mind-horde of electromagnetic forces. Ourselves.

  “We mutate. We shift. We balance.” (Now he had eardrums, tubes of the inner ear, a sense of balance.) “We lock ourselves to the myriad dust motes of the nebulosity as though they are the seed that will solidify us.” (His penis squirmed and his gonads ached.) “The radiation of the hot new suns feeds our being. As the hot suns sweep out the rest of the nebulosity, opening clear skies upon the universe, we wonder what we shall be. We find ourselves gifted, from that moment of our origin, with the power to draw on the self-energy of the Void. We can cause to emerge, not merely particle pairs—the ground state stuff of spontaneous creation—but an actual planetary sapphire, a tree, a grand piano. If only we knew what such things were . . .

  “We do not know. Our birth was a sudden flash into existence. We lack archetypes. We lack content.” (Sean sought and found his feet and thighs and chest and face . . . ) “It is only in retrospect that we know of our lack, or know it as a ‘lack’. But we must shift, we must generate and change, we must undergo processes to maintain our balance. What is this strange existence which we have received from the singularity? What should we generate? What changes should we undergo? What processes should we initiate? We project crystalline lattices in space, solid geometries, as those these may serve. We examine the outer universe, of matter and radiation and emptiness.” (Sean felt sensations akin to sunburn and hunger; his skin was warm, his belly empty.) “Is our existence a joke? We only understand this concept much later, and a joke presupposes a joker, whereas we simply happened. We can only speak to you about this, you realize, because you yourselves and others have supplied some reference points.

  “We intercept a coherent radio signal. Our mind-horde considers it. We realize eventually that it is a statement from another kind of life in the universe—specific parochial life— thousands of parsecs away, deep in the past. We discover a genetic code, a history, culture, achievements, purposes. Drawing upon the self-energy of the Void, we construct a spinning world shell with collapsed matter at the heart of it for gravity, and an atmosphere, both of which their life seems to require.” (Now Sean had ribs, bones and joints.) “Upon the crust of this world we animate their gift, of themselves, in so far as we understand it. A small portion of our mind-horde enters into our projection as its aqua vitae, its life spirit, the better to experience it.

  “For a long while we are satisfied by our re-animation of their life. During millions of subsequent rotations of this world shell there is only silence and static in the universe. And now we intercept another life-message. Again we create a world shell. Again we project the message into solid form, in so far as we can guess at all that was left unsaid. Again another small part of ourselves imitates the way they must have been. We perpetuate our idea of their idea of themselves.

  “The white suns are well advanced along the main sequence when our mind-horde, searching always, picks up another signal to animate. Eons pass. Life is so rare and far between! And so frail. Though in the whole universe, equally, there must be many examples of it.

  “As our white suns swell into red giants we have already received perhaps twenty messages from life that has reached that peak. Do they receive each other’s messages? We doubt it. What happens after it has reached that peak? We do not know. Perhaps it exhausts its world. Perhaps it exhausts itself. Our suns swell and will soon collapse and explode. We draw on the Void-energy at our command to shift our twenty world shells out in different directions—to bring the presumed dead beings who have inhabited the galaxy back among the stars, as an act of—you might say—worship/honor/admiration/ memorial.

  “We are so old, yet so young. The very youngest of you contains a billion years of evolution. We are an end point of evolution, if it has such an end point, reached at the very commencement of ourselves. We began ‘perfect’ and fell into actualities. Where other worlds had dreams, we had to dream worlds. We must re-enter being, if we are to understand that omega point of our beginning. Identical with ourselves, we took on alien identities in so far as we could simulate them. Is our only purpose to maintain the purposes of others? How can there be purpose at ail, when we simply happened? We must search all their purposes to learn this. But themselves we have never met, only as recreated by ourselves. They are always gone, long gone. They have never known each other, except in our mind-horde. So how can we know if we are accurate in our representation of them? We are mimic life.”

  Sean found his tongue. He licked his lips, unlocking them.

  “Till Copernicus met up with one of your world shells, orbiting here?”

  “You are the first life we have met, with its own life power intact, its own symbol forces of the deep mind. We are trapped joyfully by the strength of your existence-signal. The deep symbols and purposes compelled us. But we cannot inform our other worlds; they are dispersed afar and along- time. The space between the stars is vast. The gulfs of time are huge. Our worlds wander on, somewhere in this galaxy, or perhaps out of it—a mind-horde animating each projection, with a caul of free mind-horde in attendance.”

  A wandering, dispersing multi-world museum of projected, reanimated alien life forms ... a cosmic psychic Disneyland: this was the only other current life form sharing the galaxy with human beings? The only other higher life form? True, there was other lower life: the ecologies of the colony worlds that Earth had found so far . . .

  “The original Mind-Horde Prime has all descended into matter now, but we can still independently animate a fresh world at the expense of the previous projection, whose specifics we can store indefinitely. Perhaps another world shell, receiving the message of your life from your home world long after you have passed away, may choose to store its own current projection and reanimate your Earthworld instead—for an hour or a million years. And try to guess what you really were. But you, we actually know by direct experience. So we worship/honor/admire you.”

  “So that’s why you’re hipped on Knossos�
�s purposeful highspeed evolution! It gives you the infancy you never had before? And when we all reach the millenium, if we do, you can switch off the projection! And animate your idea of some intelligent lizards or squids or gas-balloons who sent out a message a million years ago instead . . . Wait a moment, why should all these life forms pass away? Why should Earthlife send out a message then vanish from the scene?”

  “But life does. So it seems from the evidence. Of course, we can only speak of those who have signalled, not of those who never signalled their presence. But those who signalled only do so for a short time. It is the high peak of a species. Silence, then.”

  “We’re colonizing. Moving out.”

  “A few star-spans away from your home world. That is nothing. Already your home world may be dying back into itself, having reached its peak of purpose. Only we are inexhaustible—for we tap the Void itself, being children of the Void, its very projection out of the singularity. Yet our coming together here may be a Great Event. Even though it may not be an event for your own home world, which must fulfil its own purpose on its own. We see that now. All life must learn how to be itself, amidst the balm of emptiness— the huge spaces, the vacant time. Only we can collate and compare life-purposes, who have none of our own from our origin.”

  “Knossos wants quarantine for his world experiment!”

  “Knossos knows the deep symbols of your life. Knossos is the seed. But you too, Sean Athlon, have reached our inner core ...”

  Sean flexed his body. He felt himself complete again: re-embodied. Eyes, nose, lips. Lungs, belly, heart. Feet and hands. No longer was he in the midst of nowhere. His body started to re-establish space around itself: length, breadth and height. A single tug, and he could be pulled inside-out— like a tennis ball rotated through higher space—into reality again. The projected reality. Issuing from the mind-horde, through their lens.

  He tugged himself.

  Part Four

  GARDENS

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Sean lay on soft green turf.

  The noon-high sun shone down from a turquoise sky, unblazingly. Great blackberries hung wine goblets from the hedges. A red mullet as large as a seal gasped and fin-paddled its heavy way across the sward. Whistling, a naked woman darted out of laurel bushes and gathered the fish up in her arms, in a slippery phallic embrace to which it yielded gratefully . . .

  Blinking, Sean knew the Gardens.

  He knew, too, his own familiar limbs. He stretched them; he was once more himself.

  But he was still dressed in the same Knossos tunic, which he had presumed imaginary. It had been projected here along with him.

  There existed aliens, who reanimated the dead, gone cultures of the galaxy with their own essence . . . Because life was few and far between in time and space, and seemed not to survive beyond a certain stage . . . What did the alien curators hope to gain? It was an instinct with them. Like the bower bird, they were decorating their nests with objets trouves . . .

  Just as we regret the passing of the dinosaur, the dodo, and the whale . . . How much more would we regret the passing of Canopians, Vegans, Aldebarians or whomever, with all the insights they had gained? It gave the aliens meaning. It gave them substance.

  A silver something shone above the trees. It was the tip of Schiaparelli! Sean scrambled to his feet. Where were Muthoni and Denise? Denise: ah yes. The birds singing sweetly in the trees ... He sensed Denise . . . elsewhere. Yes, he was a different person from before. If his ordinary senses had grown preternaturally acute in the gloom of Hell, he acknowledged that he had another sense now, a new sense, since he had been in the mind-horde’s lattice: a sense of connection with this whole planetary projection. The sense was fuzzy as yet. He didn’t know how to focus it. But even so: Muthoni was ... a panther (or behaving like a panther) padding her way through the glades, homing on the ship from a considerable distance.

  He focused his new sense some more. No, she was still a woman. An angry woman. Hunting. She’d been abandoned, first by Denise then by Sean. She’d dived into the lens, sharp fingernails poised like scalpels. The lens had projected her back into the Gardens. Where was Jeremy? He was weeping (or biting his lip so as not to weep) beside the fountain pool in Eden: everlasting witness—just as the aliens were witnesses, so they had chosen him for this role. Denise had come . . . together, elsewhere. She was bathing in a pool, around which circled a Cavalcade. The three of them were bright sparks in a swirling galaxy that wrapped around the world, each with their own unique spectral lines—their own configuration of knowledge absorbing certain wavelengths of experience, transparent to others, which passed right through them.

  Knossos, the clothed man, was . . . nearby. The other man clothed in knowledge. He absorbed so much of it that his spectrum was barred with darkness. But lines of light shone through, characterizing him: chinks in his cloak.

  Sean slipped behind a bush, though presumably Knossos could winkle him out with his own variant of the sense.

  Presently the familiar magpie flapped overhead, cawing. As Knossos himself stepped into the glade, glancing speculatively from side to side, Sean darted out of ambush and gripped him by the arm.

  “Got you, Heinrich Strauss!”

  Knossos eyed Sean’s tunic up and down and grinned. He made no effort to get away.

  “Yes, a little bird told me you’d been talking to the aliens. Poor old mind-horde.” Knossos shook his head mock- dolefully. “So much power, so little comprehension! Culture parasites . . . Other cosmic life didn’t disappear, don’t you know? It perfected itself. It moved on.”

  “Oh did it? I suppose you have a crystal ball? A hot line to the transcendental alien races?”

  “I don’t have one yet. But I will have one. So will we all. Even, the mind-horde can move on, then. Already they’re fish, flesh and fowl. The process is well under way, thanks,” he smiled modestly, “to my efforts and our presence here. So say I, at least!” He beamed at the red mullet, in benediction, and blessed its lady attendant as she passed by.

  “This was intended to be a human colony.”

  “Ah yes, true. And why do you suppose that we got out into the galaxy if it isn’t to transform ourselves into something alien, something new? What do you imagine the true deep purpose of colonization is? Mere Lebensraum: more space for ordinary activities? Ach, any new world will change Mankind, slowly but steadily, into another sort of being. The alien sunlight, the alien biorhythms, the alien ecology . . . You can’t fit in to that without altering. Here the process is simply accelerated, thanks to our hosts the mind-horde.”

  “I suppose you knew all this in advance before you even took off from Earth.”

  “Ah, sarcasm. No, Sean, I’m not mad. How could I possibly have known of the mind-horde in advance? I didn’t know what would happen here in any detail. But here I struck gold indeed: the lapis, aqua nostra. It was being misused; it was a misunderstood power. Did the mind-horde tell you they were busily animating a race of sapient birds before we arrived? Been doing it for a hundred thousand years at least. Like clockwork. Round and round, over and over. Well, that got set aside—except in so far as some of the mind-horde involved in the animation took on, shall we say, new plumage! They’d never had the living spirit of a race to deal with before: all the fierce unconscious forces. The spiritual dynamics. They’d only had the outer shell and their guess at the spirit, their simulation of it. All their artificial world shells must be like that—unless some of them have achieved ignition, and genuinely started to evolve. Unless the simulation takes them over—something that our energy friends really crave for, deep down, to give them some kind of existential authenticity. Because they didn’t ever evolve, as we did. They just happened one day, full-blown and coherent, out of the singularity.”

  “They told me that the originals for these alien Disneylands of theirs have all passed away. Apart from this mimic life of theirs, we’re alone.”

  “Another misunderstanding, caused by their lack of
evolutionary impetus! Evolving races seem possessed by an urge to boost a message out about themselves. ‘Hullo, this is what we are.’ They lay a radio egg. We’ve done it ourselves. That’s when they think they might still have contemporaries in the ordinary lonely universe. But it is lonely. When races realize their aloneness, they have to choose whether to stay put as they are, and recede—or evolve into something extraordinary, outside the ordinary lonely universe. That’s where the silent alien races have gone to.” He squinted up into the turquoise sky as though he could see them clearly, beyond the sun, beyond the gulf of space.

  “Oh, come on! There’s one obvious alternative— colonization. If the galaxy’s lonely, fill her up. Colonize the whole damn place. As we’re doing!”

  Strauss shook his head. “Are we? Are we really? Too much space, Sean, too huge a time-span! Besides, any races who go in for a colony program will soon discover that colonizing alien worlds produces beings alien to themselves. They don’t just reduplicate themselves elsewhere. Who will proceed with the investment, then? They must either shut up shop or choose the extraordinary path instead.”

  “As is happening here?”

  “Quite, Sean. Gold!” He polished his knuckles, an Aladdin summoning a genie which had been at his command these two hundred years. The magpie considered whether to land there, decided that it preferred a blackberry instead.

  “How convenient—for you with your views! And what a bloody coincidence! You’d think it was all fore-ordained, the way you’re talking. Your personal destiny was just waiting for you out here. What if you’d volunteered for a different Exodus ship instead, eh?”

  Knossos patted his tunic complacently. He was modestly in love with himself today. “On other colonies no doubt I bide my time, watching the effects of the alien life rhythms. No doubt I shall play an increasingly important role as time goes by—or else the colony will inevitably go kaput as its alienness becomes obvious. Oh, I’m there for a very good reason whichever Exodus ship it is. Just as you’re here now, with your own expertise. Incidentally, that’s almost the same as mine: the adjustment of our inherited archetypal patterns to a nonhuman framework, nicht so? The currents of the unconscious which, if they’re forced to shift, will compel man into a new being.”