Juan glanced back and saw Lena and Malachi slip through the frame. “You'd better let go,” Magnus said.
The shapes turned a dark green as they closed in. Tasarov pushed him away. “They will only hurt you, my friend,” he said.
As Juan kicked away, one of the egg shapes drew near and absorbed the two men. They became motionless inside the transparent mass, still holding each other. The shape rejoined its school, and in a moment Juan could not tell it apart from the countless others who seemed to be circling a hidden center, a central mind. For a moment he was transfixed, realizing that this was as close as he was ever likely to get to a Godlike being. Then he felt revulsion; even here, he thought, minds were drawn to power. Idolatry was as attractive a state for the idolator as it was for the object of idolatry. All that was needed was for the idolator to be convinced that the object was worthy of worship; but even if such worthiness were possible, the genuinely worthy being would not degrade lesser beings by requiring adoration. Only powerful, unworthy entities demanded worship.
Sadly, he turned away and willed himself toward the frame. He shot in horizontally and crawled through on his hands and knees, emerging into the harshly lit chamber.
Lena and Malachi sat on the floor. They got up and helped him to his feet. “Are they coming?” Malachi asked.
“No.”
“I knew they would stay,” Lena said. She seemed awake and herself again. Juan felt empty.
* * *
In the drum-shaped chamber, they sat down and tried to picture the dock from which they had started, hoping to trigger the ship's return.
Juan looked up after a few moments, but the viewspace still showed the red wall. As he watched, it changed to show the universes of superspace, then switched back to the red wall.
“We're confusing it,” Lena said. She looked at him accusingly. “It's probably you. Some part of you doesn't want to go back.”
“I do,” Juan replied.
“And you?” she asked Mal.
“Ever so much.”
They waited. Finally, the viewspace went blank.
“I think we've jumped,” Juan said.
47. THERE IS A DOOR. . .
They waited like sleepwalkers as the ship returned to its dock. When finally it slipped through the glowing lock and resumed its position among the other vessels, Juan felt like a rejected toy being put back in its box. He walked toward the shuttle as if alone. Lena and Malachi avoided his eyes as the sphere whisked them down to the inner surface. Silently, they made their way back to the big ship in the suncore station and passed through the frame back to the ship in the Amazon. The way was clear of troops when they came up the winding passage.
“I hope it's not another ruined variant,” Lena said at the final turn.
The open lock was guarded. They identified themselves, were shown to a jeep, and driven down to Summet's dome. A corporal ushered them into the office.
Juan glanced at his companions as they all sat down before the large desk. “What should we keep to ourselves this time?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Lena answered. “What's there to hide? What have we learned?”
The door slid open and Titus came in.
“Welcome home,” he said as he hurried behind his desk. “I see you're all here,” he added as he sat down.
Juan said, “So Magnus didn't go with us in this variant.”
“He got here just after you three left.”
“And Tasarov?”
“We brought him in just after the riot. He helped us close down the prison. We let them use the frames to settle an Earthlike world. Their colony is accepting regular immigrants. You'd approve, Juan.”
“How long have we been gone?” Malachi asked.
“Thirteen months. What happened?”
* * *
“Well?” Juan asked when he was finished.
Titus smiled. “It's all very interesting, but you haven't given me any assessments. What's it all mean, and what's in it for us, if I may be crass?”
“As far as the web is concerned,” Lena said, “we've dealt with a vast, impersonal system of transport, manufacture, and medical care, abandoned by its builders. It responded to our presence, to our needs, as well as it could, according to how well it could match us with its programs.”
“We had some success,” Juan said, “in operating one of the smaller starships. We think we were able to make it bring us back.”
“The abandoned web,” Lena continued, “was an attempt, we believe, to lay the foundations of a second nature, to be superimposed on our universe, using the energy of countless stars.”
Summet said, “But they went elsewhere.”
“We think so,” Malachi replied, “but I fear that we may never fully understand what we saw. Either the builders made a botch of their final development, or they succeeded. Or we've got everything wrong.”
“Maybe we'll go back to their realm one day,” Juan continued, “and be able to learn something from them. Our Magnus and Tasarov stayed behind.”
“What?”
“They were taken by the place,” Malachi said. “Nothing we could do but get ourselves out.”
Summet sat back. “You've called it a universe. Do you mean literally?”
“Possibly,” Malachi replied. “No way to measure, actually.”
“I believe,” Juan said, “that they designed the laws of their new universe.”
Summet shook his head. “From what you've told me, ours may be a deliberate creation, perhaps bungled by some fledgeling god!”
“Why think that?” Lena asked.
“Because the builders abandoned it.”
Malachi said, “They probably left a natural cosmos, rather than a wrong job.”
“What is this. . . superspace?” Summet asked.
“Just a word,” Juan said. “Think of it as the real universe, in which all others are merely local regions, with varied dimensional structures.”
“And it's infinite in extent, not just lacking an edge or boundary as ours does?”
“We can't be sure,” Juan said, “unless we could measure its curvature, if it has any. It does provide a background from which to derive our universe. An infinite universe avoids the need for an omnipotent and omniscient deity, if you will.”
“You sound unhappy about it.”
“I don't like infinities, either in a deity or in nature.”
Malachi said, “There's always that nagging thought of something lurking outside.”
“But not outside an infinite superspace,” Summet said.
“Yes,” Juan answered, “but you could never get to the end of an infinite superspace to know if it was infinite or not. If curvature is unmeasurable for superspace, you'd have to be convinced of its infinite expanse on purely rational grounds.”
“Which are?”
Juan shrugged. “A secular ontological proof. Informally speaking, it asserts that a zero-field, or nothing, is logically contradictory, as well as being physically and psychologically impossible. We can't think it and we can never offer up an example. What we call space is a full plenum. On that basis, something must exist necessarily, meaning it doesn't depend on anything, never came to be, and will never disappear. It exists eternally and infinitely. God, never having come into being, is nothing more than a psychologically primitive metaphor for this fact, known intuitively long before we were able to defend it rationally. The old religious ontological proof put forward by Anselm is exactly this, except that he conveniently identifies that which exists necessarily as the Christian God. There's no need to, because everything needed to have a universe is already present in an infinite necessary existence. By Occam's Razor, God is one entity too many, a technical extreme of language which we've mistakenly personified.”
“Ah, yes!” Titus exclaimed. “But can you have a very large necessary existent, your superspace, and have genuine nothingness outside, an infinite nothingness?”
“The word has no meaning. It wou
ld involve us in a lot of contradictory talk. Nothingness outside superspace would end up being something, which would reduce our superspace to a function of that something, and we'd be off into an infinite regress of renormalizations. You can define nothingness all you want, but you can never find any.”
Titus smiled. “And you can't ever put your hands on infinity, either.”
“This is all well and good,” Lena cut in, “but we can only be sure of our space-time and what we've seen nearby.”
“She's right,” Juan said. “Whatever our universe is, we'll have to keep developing in our own way, through all our variants, using whatever comes to hand, following whatever interests us. Maybe somewhere among the other universes of superspace we'll find a culture that might have an idea of what's going on.”
“Why so sad about it?” Titus asked.
“I don't think I am,” Juan answered, feeling tired and knowing that his thinking was scattered and inadequate. He needed time to organize his thoughts and impressions.
Lena said, “Titus, we'll help you do as much as possible with what we're learning, but we must widen our group. We may be able to run these starships.”
“Yes,” Malachi added, “we must make sure our kind survives.”
Juan said, “In our own way, not that of the builders.”
“So you'll throw us a bone once in a while, eh?” Summet said.
“I deserve that,” Juan replied. “I've looked so hard for the better that I forgot the ordinary, which still needs to be tended.”
Titus said, “We haven't done very well with what knowledge has come our way, not in my time or before.” He stood up. “Look, Juan, I don't want to see you down like this. You go for the long shots, and just promise. . . to help a little with the nearer targets. I can see you've stared all this in the face without flinching, reasoning your way through conclusions without fudging. Don't stop. Take some time to record your thoughts while they're still fresh.”
Juan felt his sincerity. “Thanks,” he said, sure now that he had never given himself a chance to know the man.
“Oh, we'll disagree. Count on it.”
48. . . TO WHICH WE HAVE NO KEY
There are gods out there, Juan thought as he showered. Large aggregate beings moved through superspace and occasionally tried to create somethingother. They might have been made in some infinite past, or had grown to awareness from natural space-times; during their endless existence they had learned everything except the answers to one or two possibly unanswerable questions, and had become confused, perhaps even startled anew by their own being, and tried todo something. . .
He watched the water running out at his feet. They were leviathans, these swimmers in the vastness, minds as large as universes, left with nothing to do, because doing flowed from desire, and desire was a function of lacking; it kindled in them only when they remembered the few mysteries still beyond them. . .
He had once hoped that humankind was alone in the universe, with no competition, not just an isolated child. Now distant others waited, and there were no clear common parents from whom to win favors. Countless universes swam in superspace, some of them the creations of large minds; but even though the relationship might resemble that of God and Creation, these stand-ins were not omniscient or omnipotent. . .
For months he had worked in his house, struggling to assemble his notes forAnother Region of an Infinite Universe, but had found no easy way to organize the mass of his ideas, arguments, impressions, and suppositions; yet he continued to set them down.
Either the universe was infinite and contained regions at differing levels of development, or endless finite universes grew in an infinite superspace. The first model had no need of a surrounding superspace; all regions were open to each other, even though logic required regions that would be at an infinite distance from each other, governed by the same laws. Such a universe required no creation in some distant past. . .
There would always be time in an infinite universe to escape a dying or collapsing region, and go where the stars were young. It was a simpler infinity than one requiring local spaces set in superspace. The space-superspace model was only the single-infinity universe expressed with more terms.
If this was true, then the alien ship had only jumped across a vast space to reach the red sphere, and the web builders had not escaped entirely; they had only walled themselves off from infinity. Their universe might last forever, but no intelligence would ever be able to remake an infinite existence. Its reality was transcendent, an arrogant citadel of secrets which could never be stormed. Supercivilizations might transform whole galaxies, populate the silence of space for a billion years, and still not touch its infinite otherness. . .
There was no secret behind this infinity; it simply existed, had always existed, and would always exist. Nonexistence was an impossibility. . .
It maddened him. Finite universes were tidy, but they required an outside space to contain them. Infinite space, like the notion of nothingness, was incomprehensible to common reason, which claimed that it couldn't be imagined, only defined and insisted upon. For Aristotle it had been an absurdity, a word that stood for nothing, since infinity could not be had. On the face of it, both finite and infinite universes were an affront to rationality. . .
To prove that the universe was infinite in all directions required difficult measurements. The attempt itself exposed the finite bias of the human mind—to measure infinity and make it a verifiable fact, even if it could not be encompassed. Reason depended on limits, which meant that infinities were not rational, or that a finite creature took its own limits as the model for rationality. . .
The varieties of infinity escaped the intuitive grasp of his kind, yet they insisted on talking about a God in those terms. So why not simply accept an infinite, uncreated universe as the central fact of existence?
An infinite, uncreated universe was unimaginable and terrifying; but an all-powerful Deity was even more terrifying—especially if It might reach into finite beings and speak. Perhaps that was why God preferred to whisper in a still, small voice that human beings could easily mistake for their own conscience. . .
Deity would be an insoluble mystery to Itself, never having come into being; in Its presence, finite creatures would be nothing. . .
Hopes for afterlife clung like barnacles to archaic human notions of Omnipotent Deity; but these afterlives were banal systems. If true, they would be a tyranny imposed on finite beings, who had been created to be tested for moral worthiness, in which the exercise of free will decided the game—except that everyone had to play.
Without afterlife, it was argued, life would be degrading; but an additional life could not make life fair, since it would also be imposed, not chosen. So why did human beings cling to Deity and afterlife? Tasarov had been right—to preserve the appearance of an unquestionable pedigree for ethical norms.
It seemed more reasonable to accept the growing evidence for an eternal existence in which the growing freedom of intelligent beings was a central feature. Humanity was on its own, responsible for the discovery of its own humane norms as it strove to transcend itself. There might be fellowship with powerful others, also struggling, by degrees, to comprehend a transcendent universe, but no prior, omniscient God. It had been a case of mistaken identity to attribute the features of an infinite, fecund nature to an omnipotent being. . .
Ethical rules had grown out of religious justifications, but could now stand on their own. Deity's insisted-upon enforcement of ethical norms was only psychologically necessary—but this made them no less real, since ethical norms could not help but grow out of historical needs; they could never be arbitrary, even in a Godless universe. The price of transgression had never been God's wrath, but social damage. . .
Juan imagined an eternal Deity lying down in the void to create a finite universe of passing things, then watching Its creatures test themselves against Its moral laws and physical mysteries, and finally plucking the worthy for what—an une
qual, enforced fellowship?
Only an uncreated life offered true freedom, he realized, because it steered alone through an open, infinite universe that offered a true test of freedom, because it did not consciously impose purpose. Humankind was free to work against natural limits and find its own way. Personal death, with nothing after, was a terror for only the vain and egocentric. A godless universe, infinite in all directions, including time, was the best state of affairs imaginable. Religious imagery presented hoped-for states that would one day be attained. . .
At the edge of life's shore, the arrogant fortress of infinities rose before him, but he knew now that it was uninhabited, and there was no key to its gates. Order arose from chaotic process, which could not help but produce order, given endless time. The unpredictability of process did not make it acausal, only opaque before the fact. This was the secret of all creativity. Too much order was uncreative and totalitarian. Biosystems, with their plasticity, seized the regions between order and chaos. . .
Job's answer to God's cruelties was that he would obey and be faithful. But God's test of Job made sense even in a Godless universe—humanity still had the chance to shine or fail before temptation and adversity, to choose a human morality over lawlessness. . .
Juan could not imagine a nobler freedom as he stepped out of the shower and remembered the boy who had loved attic spaces—the more irregular the better—and had crawled into them in search of strangeness. We're drawn to small, narrow spaces, he thought, to places filled with odd individual things that revealed how far the universe had come from its hot, early uniformity. Humankind was one such oddity, organizing to be an enemy of entropy. . .
He turned off the water and stood at the center of silence, realizing the fragility of insights that lived in isolated moments. He and Lena needed a time of private spaces—kitchens, bedrooms, sitting rooms and backyards—a collapse into the human scale of things. Was he so tired, to think such docile thoughts?
She had gone to pick up Magnus at the airport. Juan was looking forward to telling him the story. One day they would all visit Tasarov on his distant green world, even if it meant braving another variant. The Russian had remained loyal to his community, and had secured a better life for it, even as his variant swam in mathematical ecstasies.
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