Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2)

by George Zebrowski

  But he doubted, feeling that he was as credulous as Bely clinging stubbornly to his old beliefs, which could not do battle on the field of fact and evidence and had to invoke the bludgeon of faith. Hope might seem a poorer instrument than faith, but it was more honest in its freedom from embellishments. Hope had created the mobile world around him.

  Paul thought about the people he and Josepha had seen during the day. They had been tall, varied in skin tones, and self-possessed. He had returned their calm stares, wondering if perhaps a certain vitality was absent from their eyes.

  He was imagining too much, he told himself as he turned and went back to bed, thinking of the usual litany of failures that he would be taking back to sleep. This world seemed free of the undercurrents of chance and history that had ruled his life. The basics of existence here were fixed and reliable. Still, he wondered how well freedom was used here.

  He closed his eyes and breathed the perfect air, feeling physically better than he had in years. Then he thought of Bely, of Ondro and Jason and the outcasts on the islands, of opening the eyes of the young, of helping his world as he had once dreamed. It seemed possible now to untie old knots and give new life.

  He smiled as he recalled the meeting that Voss Rhazes had taken him and Josepha to late in the day, after their tour. The planners of the new habitat had discussed the interior design of their new world. Most seemed to want an irregular interior of random surfaces, to be created as if crumpling a piece of paper. There was no obstacle to constructing such an interior, Paul had gathered, but there was opposition. This was what rebellion amounted to here—the decision to leave the parent mobile and argue politely over the architecture of the new home.

  “The group that wishes to settle on your world has declined to meet with you,” Rhazes had told him as they had left the meeting.

  Paul had wanted to ask him why he and Josepha should meet with any of these groups.

  “They want to settle a true wilderness,” Rhazes explained, “and be free of any government. It’s possible that they may pass on Tau Ceti IV and wait for the discovery of a completely uninhabited planet. But given the difficulty of finding such a world, it is more likely that they will settle here, on the other continent.”

  As he had told Bely, there was no way to prevent this from happening, given the disparity of technologies between the two cultures. Paul imagined that Rhazes had shown him something of these two groups as a foretaste of what to expect. Of course, there was no army, or means of transporting it to the farside continent, that Bely or his successor could raise to oppose colonization from the sky—not this year or next, or in twenty years, given the pace of permitted technical applications.

  “In your view we’re something of a classical Utopia,” Wolt Blackfriar had said to him and Josepha at the end of the day. His manner had been jovial, but with a hint of irony. Paul recalled that Josepha had listened to him without expression or comment, looking up at the tall but stocky man as a little girl might look at some great beast that had come out of the forest wearing strange clothes and speaking about important matters. “We have model urban areas, neighborhoods, parks, an open technical and political elite…with our political elite being drafted into office at regular intervals,” Blackfriar had continued. “We go on the view that when you’ve solved the material problems, given individuals a chance to grow without fear of want or death, and limited the growth of power, you may have a mostly happy citizenry.”

  Human desires, Paul thought, would always overflow the rational means of satisfying them. Even here, where humanity was linked to helpful artificial intelligences, where there seemed to be no disease, where sane traditions of education dominated and were passed on, where knowledge was the guiding element in all decision making, and where humanity lived on the edges of even greater changes in human nature, undercurrents of discord still flowed—a better class of undercurrents, but still capable of causing troubles. At least that’s how it seemed to him, until he learned better.

  “Tell me about your most difficult problems,” Paul had said.

  Blackfriar had smiled as if expecting the question. “You want to know how bad things can get,” he said, showing him and Josepha to comfortable chairs before the great windows of the common area in the residential tower. “There are always a few suicides, and personal cruelties between individuals. Separatist groups are always being born. They all yearn to start over. They will have their chance one day to have their own separatists. This is part of our constitution, which enables our way of life, generally speaking, to reproduce while containing any style of life that may develop.”

  “I was asking about more intractable problems,” Paul had said. Josepha had glanced at him as if worried that he might embarrass them both.

  “I know what you are asking,” Blackfriar had said with a shrug. “We have the temptation of final happiness. It’s hardest to convince very new people not to want it, that it’s a mistake of both thought and feeling, since it puts an end to all exploration and creative growth, an end to dealing with the real universe.”

  Josepha had said, “Can it be had?”

  Blackfriar had smiled and nodded with no sign of annoyance. “In dream worlds an individual can loosen all limits and be a god. Anything imaginable can happen when the individual’s mental output is connected to his input, thus creating the experience of omnipotence. What the individual says, happens. There are those among us who absolutely decry this way, and want to banish it.” He paused for a moment, then said, “But there is no effective way to say that this is wrong, or that an individual, or groups of individuals, may not choose it. Quite a number of our people already exist in such a state. Some come out of it. Many do not.”

  “How did this happen?” Josepha asked with concern in her voice, but not quite understanding. The closest she could imagine was addiction to alcohol or drugs.

  Blackfriar sat back and said, “Our entertainment artists and engineers were too effective. All the written, audio and visual history we inherited from Earth helped to create vast, self-perpetuating secondary worlds so attractive, given the technical possibilities, that many of our people were content to disappear into them.”

  “But not all?” Josepha had asked.

  “Not even most,” Blackfriar had said. “The majority understood that this pursuit of pleasurable omnipotence destroys art forms that are joined, critically, with the universe outside our minds, and that to reject given reality is to turn away from art as a means of imaginative engagement and understanding in favor of novel intensity and gratification.”

  “But those who resist,” Paul had said, “the majority, are they able to do so because they have never experienced this state?”

  Blackfriar had nodded. “We do use secondary worlds to house those who have died in ways so destructive that their bodies cannot be repaired, requiring them to wait for new embodiment as we regrow their originals. But many do not wish to return once they have tasted direct wish fulfillment. Even a small degree is addictive. Remember, what they order with the output of their minds comes back to them as experienced input that is so vivid, so real as to be irresistible.”

  “It’s not surprising,” Paul had said. “You gave them a heaven.”

  “It’s more serious than that,” Blackfriar had replied. “There will be examples of macrolife, if there aren’t already, that will become oblivious to the life of the Galaxy. We’ll find them, I suspect, in wide orbits around young stars, living their virtual dream life. Nothing will disturb them until a star dies through some misfortune and their artificial intelligences must move their dreaming charges elsewhere. But if these worlds are well placed, then only the end of the cosmos will wake them, if ever. But who is to say how a civilization is to live? It grows as it does or dies, according to its history and the limits of physical possibility.”

  Bely might have his heaven, Paul thought, if he could be slipped into such a state unknowingly.

  “But don’t they know its unreality?” J
osepha had asked.

  “Yes, for a time they know. But forgetfulness is part of the addiction. Even before entering virtual godhood, it is argued that the best way is to go in and forget. Why spoil it with the knowledge of its unreality? There is an automatic withdrawal program for first-timers—but they always decide to go back in with forgetfulness as soon as they come out.”

  “How does anyone resist?” Josepha had asked.

  “By not trying it,” Blackfriar had replied, “by understanding the reality of it and the danger of unknowing, that once inside there is no coming out except by force. And yet, we also have philosophers who suggest that the universe itself is constituted in the same way as our secondary worlds, but we can’t see the walls. Some of these thinkers insist on searching for experimental proof of the falseness of our universe. And once that is accomplished, physical laws themselves might be altered.”

  Paul had smiled and said, “So you also have theological disputes.”

  “Neither Voss nor I engage in them,” Blackfriar had said. “Every kind of culture is to some degree a collective dream, unless one chooses to live under the tyranny of a natural environment. There are those among us who seem to want that—the ones who wish to settle in the wilderness of your world. No, we do not dispute with anyone. They explore themselves in their own way, we in ours.”

  “But you look outward,” Josepha had said.

  “We all explore ourselves to some degree,” Blackfriar had answered, “no matter how far we look.”

  19

  The giant holo image of her world floated in the great black space of the observation chamber. As Josepha sat and watched, the planet was swiftly enlarged.

  One of the two continents showed, revealing green patches, brown furrows that were mountains, mismatched eyes that were lakes, and the silver ribbons of rivers. Bits of the large landmass seemed to have broken off and were adrift in the western ocean.

  “That has to be Celestia,” she said, “the continent of my home. And there’s New Vatican, by the ocean. And the Celestine Archipelago…” She felt her voice weaken as she thought of Ondro.

  “How were they named?” Voss asked next to her.

  “After Celestine VI,” she replied softly, still thinking of Ondro. “He was our first pope, and commander of the starship that brought us here. The islands are…also named after him.”

  “Does the name Celestine have any special significance?” Voss asked, as if trying to distract her from the sadness she felt. “The Link does not answer me beyond the meaning of the word celestial. It has no details about your colony starship.”

  “There were five popes with that name on Old Earth,” she answered as she studied the image of her world. “Celestine VI took his name from Celestine V, who served for only five months in 1294 A.D., resigned and was imprisoned at age eighty-five, and was then murdered by the criminal bosses who controlled medieval churchdom. Clementine V sainted him as hermit and confessor, healer, prophet, and dreamer, who saw no compromise between the pursuit of power and the love of God.”

  She paused for a moment as she gazed at her world, and was about to ask Voss a question, but instead finished the lesson she had learned in school. “Our captain and first pope was a good man…who brought his people across the dark.” She paused again, then said, “And he did not deserve to have prison islands named after him…”

  A large pinwheel of clouds waited below the islands. She tensed and sat still.

  “What do you mean?” Voss asked as she stared fearfully at the vast western ocean, then pointed at the pin-wheel, hoping that it was not her father’s instrument of execution.

  “It’s a hurricane storm,” Voss said next to her. “Moving north.”

  A storm, Paul had told her, was meant to kill Ondro, his brother, and all the exiles. It might already have happened. There was no way for her to know, except by going there, whether an earlier storm had come through the islands.

  She knew what she had to do as she turned and looked at Voss with as much agitation and dismay as she could force into her face. She told herself that it was all there within her anyway, but she had to show it to save lives.

  He looked back at her for a moment, then asked, “You seem distressed. What’s wrong?”

  “I need your help,” she said softly, grateful for the tears that came into her eyes; but they flowed with less force than she had expected. The love of my life is down there, she told herself, doubting. His loss will be unbearable, she insisted. It is in my power to rescue him. She wanted to feel more; but the place where she had stored her devotions was fleeing from her.

  20

  Ondro sat on the beach and turned his world over in his thoughts. He had never quite grasped it all; but now it seemed to him that he might remake it with mind alone, as Descartes had, from the ground up.

  Humankind had fled here from a nearby star, arriving, luckily, long before native intelligence might have developed, and before long called this star the Sun and this planet New Earth. The refugees had lived through the long-promised death of Old Earth, though it had come not according to the Book of Revelation but through technological accidents and nuclear war, leaving only small settlements scattered throughout the homespace. These had sent out makeshift starships and self-reproducing habitats to the nearer stars. As far as it was known, all had gone by slow relativistic acceleration.

  And what had come of humanity’s new efforts on Tau Ceti IV? The old problems and conflicts lived on despite the freshly applied restraints of an ancient faith. The human creature itself was at fault. Driven by impulses and needs greater than its self-control, the beast even believed its own words of reform. But all thought and hope served another master in such a creature; its egotism lacked independent ground from which to examine its humanity. It could not reach inward and tear out its worst, and it could not teach itself to become a better kind of being….

  Christian efforts to remake human nature were useless, because sainthood could not be inherited. Authority without force was unconvincing and crumbled before rational doubt, and fled from criminal ingenuity’s organized cleverness. Dogmatic faith and the fear of punishment beyond the grave had never restrained the powerful.

  Pride had led Ondro to believe that he could have helped to change his world; but in fact he would only have helped to put his own clique of well-wishers into power. It almost made sense to him lately to imagine that life had to be a testing place for another try. The sooner he made his peace with God, the sooner he would be ready for the passage through death. Better not be caught unawares.

  Rain fell on the horizon. Darkness crouched below the edge of the world. This is the storm that will destroy us, he thought, tasting the salt spray, wondering whether it was Bely’s wrath or God’s that was now so close to him. Religious practice was to have been a time-out from struggle, a moment of justice in which to ask not what is but what should be. It never was.

  As he considered divine mercy and his world’s unpracticed faith, his thoughts swam toward infinity, but were weighed down by questions.

  “If we do not take the next step,” Jason had once said to him, “the step from a cowardly agnosticism to a brave atheism, we will not be able to do what we need to do for ourselves, and we will always be looking to another life as the redemption of this one.”

  Jason had smiled at him one sunny afternoon in the great square. “I know—words seem too easy. But this much has been settled by thought. All you have to do is think.”

  “Go on,” Ondro had said happily to a brother who seemed eager to open his mind.

  “Take a look. Christian Thomism holds that man unaided cannot find salvation in this life, but will in the next. But secular reason also doubts humanity’s capacity for progress, which is slow and sometimes nonexistent. Christianity holds out a remedy, in the form of grace that comes with faith, as well as a regimen of constant correction through confession, repentance, and atonement through good works. Secular reason is not far off, since it holds that in
a universe of no revealed purpose, only knowledge and the finding of purpose through human responsibility can give life meaning. Anthropology is generous to religions—they have been a way of reaching into human nature for ideals, and a stepping aside from nature to see what could be. These are important goals, but their accomplishment can only happen in the future.”

  “Is that it?” Ondro had asked.

  Jason had scowled at him. “Now keep in mind that both religious and nonreligious thinkers have agreed on one thing—that unchanged human nature has a doubtful future. Knowledge, work, and love are the sources of happiness to the secular mind, even though they deny personal survival after death. But survival is a dream of the future, where we may yet achieve life for as long as we wish it, if not forever. To forge a human purpose in the midst of an indifferent universe is a noble enough task. And whether religionists admit it or not, this is also what they seek—except that they give their ethical meanings a mythic pedigree, lest people fail to obey. Jesus had it right—meaning does not come from on high, but from within. And if there is a God, he will not punish me for thinking in this way.”

  All the history of human struggle had once been settled for him by Jason’s proud, clear-eyed thoughts; but the perverse beast knew how to forget arguments, parallels, and examples. It knew best of all how to be dissatisfied.

  If we return to God’s being through death, Ondro asked, will there still be moments when he’ll leave us free to be ourselves?

  21

  “Take me down there,” Josepha said, looking at the patches of land in the storm’s path, and realizing that she had to know what had become of Ondro. “We must get them out.” She imagined Ondro and Jason in the green hollow, sitting on the grass, marveling at the sun that stood still at one end of the enclosed sky.