by Greg Bear
Mirsky stared at the spotless floor for a moment, then sighed. “I will begin. Telling it all with words would be painfully slow and clumsy. May I borrow one of your projectors?” “Certainly.” Korzenowski ordered a traction beam to lower the nearest projector. “Do you require an interface?”
“I don’t think so,” Mirsky said. “I’m somewhat more than I appear.” He touched the teardrop-shaped device with a single finger. “Pardon me if I don’t completely reveal myself to your apparatus.”
“Quite all right,” Korzenowski said, with absurd cordiality. Lanier’s body hair tingled again. “Do begin.”
The quarters interior vanished, replaced by something difficult for Lanier to comprehend at first—a condensed representation of the Way, the Axis City, Mirsky’s first few days in the forested Wald of the Central City, the journey down the Way, accelerating along the flaw…
The projected information spun and dazzled. All sense of present time ended. Mirsky told his story in his own way. Korzenowski and Lanier lived it.
Call it escape or the grandest defection of all time. Running from the horrid past, my own death, the death of my nation, the near-death of my planet. If you can refer to as “running” the flight of half a city, filled with many tens of millions of souls and perhaps a dozen million corporeal human beings, down an infinite tunnel in space-time, fleeing through the fury of a star’s heart on the rail of an elongated “knot,” an umbilicus of impossibilities…
The tunnel itself an immense tapeworm curling through the guts of the real universe, pores opening onto other universes equally real but not our own, other times real and equally real…Those pores cauterized by our passage, the tunnel itself changing or having changed because of our flight, warping and expanding from the moment it was made with the prior knowledge of our escape; how do you explain this to an unaugmented human being?
You cannot.
I had to change to know all this, and change I did, many times across decades and centuries of flight. I became many people, and sometimes one of me would hardly know another until they could mesh with each other, exchange personal gossip. I was no longer the Russian Mirsky—had not been perhaps since my assassination in the Thistledown library—but an inhabitant of the Geshel neighborhoods of Axis Nader and Central City. A citizen of a new world, adapting to it’s unlikely environment. We were no longer masters of all we surveyed, as the Axis City had once nearly been…
I watched the humans who had come with me from Earth evolve, as I did, or eventually fade away—die in the last way left to immortals, to forget one’s self and be forgotten by others. The rest of us lived, and merged.
The journey lasted, from our point of view, centuries. You know that time is a variable thing, far less important than our youth and weakness once made us think; flexible, but ever-present, warped and twisted into some barely recognizable form or another.
I lived many different times: the time of the city traveling down the Way at relativistic velocities, my time on the highspeed level of city memory, the time spent communicating directly with my fellow travelers, as I do now with you. Time bunched and coiled like a spring. If all my time were stretched out in a straight line, I might have lived ten thousand years, by your scale…
We had long since passed beyond the point in the Way where the last moments of this universe might have been accessed. Had we opened a gate there, something not possible to us, we might have witnessed the death of all we had ever known, all that was—however remotely—connected with us…And still we fled. I had defected from my own universe.
Strangely, that moment was not particularly momentous. We had already closed in upon ourselves in an extraordinary way, like a pupating insect. We had isolated ourselves from our surroundings, even as we continued to study them.
The Way opened into an immense, twisted tunnel. Our passage down this tunnel no longer followed any rational geodesic. There was no longer a flaw, a singularity, in the middle; the city could not draw its power from the flaw generators, so it sucked power from the very thin atmosphere of particles and stray atoms within the Way. And because of this, we slowed…rapidly. Within ten years of our own basic time, the city traveled at less than relativistic velocities.
The Way grew broader around us. We studied this increase, and foresaw what awaited us…A vast blister of space-time, capping but not ending the Way, finite but unbounded…
We had entered the egg of a new universe. We could not survive as material beings within this egg. We would have been dissolved by the nascent plasma of potential mass and energy as salt vanishes in water. But we learned how to cope with such an eventuality.
The entire city, all of its citizens, worked to transform itself. We expected at any moment to simply die, cease to exist, for we were children facing a raging furnace. But there was another possibility, very remote…
The possibility that we could adapt to the furnace-egg, live in it, and finally shape it to expand into a mature universe. It would sever its connection with the Way, drift free in superspace, and within the furnace-egg, our transformed selves would expand butterly wings, reborn.
Is it immodest to say we planned to become gods? We had no choice. We had reached the end of the Way, such as it had any end, and we could not go back…We had no choice but to make our own universe.
To do so, we had to shed all of our material connections. We had to impose ourselves on the foundation of all space and time, beyond and below energy and matter, beyond the touch of the plasma amnion.
I watched my companions wall themselves up in light, great rose windows of personality spreading and blurring at the edges, painted across the walls of the city, using the city’s mass as a temporary restraint against simply dissolving away. The light of each of us touched the light of all. We were drunk with oneness. It was an orgy of incredible proportions. All the remnants of our humanity distilled into a vast merging sexuality. We almost lost sight of our goal. We might have become stunned by our own self-immersion in recognition, love and pleasure, and plunged like a lovesick moth into the furnace…But we regained control, and managed to take the next step.
All that we were, now united, was a frail and very delicate tissue of thought wrapped in and around the remains of the city. We spread those tissues out to the particle winds within the Way, much hotter now with the furnace-egg so near. We toughened, condensed, and finally pushed ourselves through to a level beneath even that of light and energy.
We flowered into the furnace, imposed our will, gave it the impetus to expand by converting the remaining mass of the city into energy, tipping the balance. The unbounded egg began to swell and cool, its plasma amnion condensing and taking shape…
We became shapers of worlds. For a moment, we considered simply reproducing our own birth universe, making galaxies and stars and starting things anew. But we learned quickly that we could not do this. This universe was far more constrained than ours had been. Its roots were humbler, coming not out of the ground of superspace itself, but from the tortured extending of the Way. It would be smaller, less complex, far less ambitious. Still, we could shape it into a fascinating place, a universe that would absorb all our creative abilities…if we were careful.
It is far more difficult to be a god than we could possibly have imagined. We had assumed, from the beginning I suppose, that one conscious will, or a combined conscious will, could shape and control a universe. We focused our pinpoint of will and shaped and made, guided and tuned, in ways that of course I cannot begin to describe, because in this body I cannot remember them, or fit them into my thoughts even if I could remember.
For a time, it seemed all would go well. We rejoiced in our mastery. We were like a child in a vast playground. The universe became beautiful. We began to shape the equivalents of living and thinking beings, to be our companions, perhaps to hold our own personalities in time. We still yearned for material form. We were still influenced by our origins.
And then it began to fail. The universe rupt
ured, decayed, rotted. Its boundaries shriveled inward, eating and transforming what order we had established into sour, hot chaos. We had miscalculated. A single will could not create a stable universe. There had to be contrast and conflict.
We desperately tried to separate ourselves into opposing forces to repair the damage. But it was much too late.
The god we had become, failed.
We would have all ceased to exist, dissolved in the falling shreds of our failure. But we heard another voice. It was a less exalted, less ecstatic voice than ours, and it seemed far away. But it was much more practical and experienced, much more diverse. We thought for a time we had heard the voice of another god, or gods, but that was simply our ignorance. However advanced we had become, we were incredibly ignorant and naive.
What we heard was the voice of our descendants, reaching us from the end of our own universe. All the intelligent beings who had grown up and grown old with the cosmos we had been born into, had detected our failure, and felt us trapped within. They were no more material, no more distinguishable as individuals than we were, but theirs was a hardier, more practical intelligence. They had become the Final Mind, at once united and coherent, and yet made up of many individual communities of minds.
They rescued us. Pulled us back along the still-open cord of the Way, never quite severed from our furnace-egg.
Their rescue was not magnanimous. They had a use for us.
Is it appropriate to describe the emotions of a failed god? We were chagrined, deeply embarrassed. We measured ourselves against this other matrix of thought, and saw we were less than infantile: we were puerile. We were young wine aspiring to vintage. We had begotten vinegar.
But we were forgiven, and treated, brought back to the equivalent of health. We were welcomed into the community of thinkers, one and separate at once, who occupied the end of the old universe. They revealed many things to us.
I was reconstituted from the whole of my matrix, isolated—an experience worse than death, I can assure you, worse than loss of family or city or nation or planet. I mourned and went crazy, and they reconstituted me again, with refinements. Finally, after many attempts, they made me stable, and sent me back here.
I carry a message, and a request—if it can be called a request. They have their limitations, these descendants of all intelligent beings now alive. And they have their duties. They must bring the universe to an honorable and complete end, an aesthetic conclusion. But they do not have infinite resources.
I am more than I seem, but I am far less than those who sent me here, and I must persuade you of one thing.
I have described the Way as a great tapeworm, winding through the guts of the universe. It extends beyond our universe, as you know. The universe cannot die with such an artificial, such a young construct winding through its body; rather, it cannot die well. It can only die badly, and our descendants cannot accomplish all they hope to.
Lanier swam out of the projection and re-focused his eyes on Mirsky. One particular image lingered in his mind. It terrified him. He tried to remember it clearly, but all he could retrieve was a vague impression of certain galaxies being chosen, throughout time, for sacrifice…
Galaxies dying to provide the energy for whatever the Final Mind was trying to do.
His head throbbed and he felt mildly nauseated, as if he had eaten too much. Moaning, he leaned forward between his knees.
Korzenowski put a hand on his shoulder.
“I share your distress,” the Engineer said quietly. Lanier glanced up at Mirsky, who had released the projector.
“What in hell are you?” he asked weakly.
Mirsky didn’t answer that question. “You must re-open the Way, and you must destroy it from this end. If you do not, then we have betrayed our children at the end of time. The Way, to them, is a kind of magnificent hairball, an obstruction. We are responsible for it.”
14
Gaia
On the evening of her fourth day in Alexandreia, after seven frustrating hours trying to find her way around the maze of buildings, walking from classroom, to distant classroom, as Rhita sat alone in her room, digesting another unfamiliar and faintly nauseating meal eaten in the tiny dining hall reserved for women, she allowed herself a moment of supreme homesickness and misery. There was nothing she could do but cry. After a few minutes of that, and no more, she sat up on the hard cot and grimly considered her situation.
There had been no word yet from Kleopatra.
She had not yet met with the mekhanikos Demetrios, her appointed didaskalos. On a rare occasion of providing useful information, Yallos told Rhita that she should meet with the didaskalos within a week or so, otherwise her standing in the academic competition might slip. She felt lost; she had had an appointment with the man since the week before sailing from Rhodos. Inquiring at his office, in a dark, ancient and ill-tended building in the western quarter of the Mouseion grounds, she had been told by a waspish male assistant, “He has been called to Krētē for a conference. He will be back inside a month.”
What was worse then the indignity was her sense of loss and alienation. Nobody here knew her; it seemed scarcely anybody cared about her. The women—with the unfortunate exception of Yallos, whom Rhita had taken a strong disliking to—ignored her or slighted her. Yallos, with an air of coming to the aid of a simpleton, had appointed herself Rhita’s informal advisor.
To the women in the dilapidated two story building, she was “an island girl,” unsophisticated and boorish. Worse, she was also from a well-known family, and yet had not been graced by the Mouseion with any apparent privileges. Her social status was a puzzle, then; she was fair game for their disdain. Within earshot, they gossiped about her, speculating wildly. She had heard whispered rumors that the Kelt was her “island lover.”
That, she thought, was probably envy.
She was not free to leave the Mouseion and wander the streets of Alexandreia; she knew very well what might happen to an innocent “island girl” there. And walking with the burly, taciturn Kelt at her side was not the sort of stroll she fancied just now, though in time she might resort to his company, just to get away from the Mouseion.
She hadn’t seen the ocean since leaving the quays in the Great Harbor.
Rhita longed for Rhodos, for the prancing sea-laughter of the waves when a storm sat offshore, the dusty green smell of olive groves and the play of dazzling clouds against lapis blue sky. What she missed most of all was the company of Rhodians, simple and sun-wise, as the island saying went; especially the beach children.
Perhaps she was just an “island girl.”
At almost any hour of the day, sometimes even at dusk or after the twilight had faded, on the rocky and sandy beaches of Rhodos could be found a few scampering adolescents, brown and naked but for shifts or lioncloths. Usually they were Avar Altais from the south of the island or the old refugee slums in Lindos, swarthy, oriental-eyed, round-headed, mouths full of curses, sun-gold limbs flashing as they spear-fished in the tidepools or carried makeshift metal detectors in search of lost coins or buried wrecks. She had stolen away as an adolescent from her studies to run with them, laughing and learning their language, their curses and sunny expressions of enthusiasm, musical and harsh at once, so alien on her Hellenized tongue. Her mother had called them “barbarians,” an old word seldom used now. Most of the citizens of the Oikoumenē were barbarians by her mother’s definition.
When Rhita’s breasts had developed, and the shoulders on the beach boys had grown broader, something new had come into their play—a tender roughness. She had almost appreciated the curses thrown at her, half in jest, half as if growled by carnivores wanting her flesh. Had she been less protected, a bit more worldly and less enshrouded by the Hypateion gymnasion’s code of behavior, one of those boys might have been her first lover. The Great Mother knows she had had enough caresses and kisses stolen from her.
She still remembered their jokes, born out of centuries of struggle and desperatio
n, not at all tempered by the tolerance and clime of Rhodos. There were cruel, wild jokes about ill-timed death spoiling great plans, raucous fables about separated families and lost relatives, about herd animals never seen on Rhodos.
Once, she had sat talking with a boy perhaps a year younger than she. He had told her his family’s story, unnumbered centuries tangled up with the lives of other families, other tribes, perhaps even other nations; and she had tried to fit that in to what she knew about the old Rhus-Oikoumenē-Parsa alliances and the extinguishing of the Steppes tribes. In return, he had listened to her formal history with unusual politeness and attention, and then had told her, “That’s what you winners say.” Leaping up, he had brayed at her like an ass, and run across the beach, his bare feet unerringly picking a path on flat sun-heated stones.
With a sigh, Rhita opened her eyes, losing that hot pale noon sky and distant running boy. She picked up the electronic teukhos that had belonged to her grandmother, switched it on, selected a memory block and began to search through the volumes listed. Then, realizing she might be taking a risk, she turned the machine’s lighted screen off. Examining the frail door, she decided the least she could do was block it with the room’s single cane chair. She hadn’t dared listen to any of the music cubes since her arrival; discovery would be at best embarrassing, and at worst, disastrous. The Mouseion might confiscate the Objects. They might accuse her of all sorts of ridiculous crimes; how could she know?
Rhita hated this strange, difficult, clannish Mouseion, with its ancient, mazy gounds…
She felt out of place among the city-wise students, drawn from all around Gaia. To her surprise, she had seen young men dressed in the peculiar fringed leather clothes sported by Nea Karkhēdonians, in imitation of the indigenous peoples they had subjugated a century ago. These were the children of the sworn enemies of the Oikoumenē. What perversion of diplomacy allowed them into Alexandreia? She had even seen students dressed in the shifts and leather skirts of Latin tribes. Not that she disliked any of them personally; Rhodos seemed so remote from all that, though having studied her history, she knew nobody was truly isolated from such conflicts.
