In the Distance, and Ahead in Time

by George Zebrowski

He reached to her side and slipped his fingers into one of her orifices. It was moist and yielding between the ribs. With his left hand he found another on her left. Her face was without expression, but she almost cried out when yellow sunbeams cleared the court wall and shot into the room through the open double doors. He stopped and held her, as if she were wounded and her life was slipping away.

  Her eyes were satin, rimmed with gold; the pupils were black. Her white hair flowed out of her head and fell back in a solid waterfall over the edge of the bed to the charge area terminal on the floor. His body tingled from the low level energy flowing through her body.

  He thrust harder, using her side openings as handholds. She grew dewy in her sides; her face reddened and her lips parted to release a gentle puff of warm air. She closed her third eye, but left the two open, staring up at him. He heard a rush as she released a strongly scented musk. The fragrance quickened the flow of his blood to his muscles. He took deeper breaths as her arms began to stroke him lightly on his back and buttocks.

  Suddenly her legs again encircled his waist. He felt the suction of openings near her navel, as they sought his valves. The short hairs of her soft white skin began to vibrate as she drew more power into her body, a million needles trying to pierce his skin.

  Her breasts hardened. “Drink quickly,” she said, “before I burst.”

  The sweet liquid pumped down his throat, sending fire into his limbs. As the flow stopped, his lips seized the other breast. In a few moments he felt swollen.

  She grasped his head with two hands and guided his mouth to the openings under her breasts, forcing him to kiss the lips, first one and then the other. He drank the heat coming out of her, then tumbled into a cold abyss.

  He shivered, grasping her back, grinding his palms into the bony hardness of her shoulder blades. She called to him in an endless procession of sounds, no two alike, leading him down a long corridor of musical notes.

  A flood rose within him and filled her; but before he died she renewed his longing, suspending him again between desire and fulfillment. Eyes closed, he drifted in a blue space.

  “He’s back,” she whispered, “but don’t go!”

  Tross opened his eyes, turned his head, and saw the figure standing in the doorway, just at the edge of vision. Pulling away from her, Tross turned on his back in time to see the tall leathery master rushing toward him, red lizard eyes open wide, blade raised to kill, as the lady began to laugh.…

  3 / Flame of Life, Memory of Death

  “Father, O father! what do we here

  In this land of unbelief and fear?

  The Land of Dreams is better far,

  Above the light of the morning star.”

  —WILLIAM BLAKE

  Thrushcross waded into the muddy water and pushed his way toward the island. He fell down once and his palms pressed down on the yielding bottom. He stood up and staggered forward, finally reaching dry ground.

  He walked up toward the cylinder, through the open portal, and up a short ramp into a room lit in electric blue. Black cubes sat in a circle on the floor.

  Thrushcross sat down on one of the shapes and the floor dissolved. He saw himself from above, standing near the tree, looking up at Evelyn’s head. The interruption was over and the sequence was running forward again; the intruder had been eliminated.

  Thrushcross felt himself flow into the nervous system of his simulacrum, while still watching the scene from above.

  —the spear entered his chest, his attacker came at him with the machete, and his head flew upward—

  Thrushcross withdrew as the simulacrum tumbled to the sand. He watched it bleed at the edge of the swamp.

  He had looked through death more than once, tasting its supper of ashes, knowing that without it and its cousins, sleep and danger, there would be no quickening of sequences, no sharp edges, no welcoming of safety, no release of pleasure. The sight of his simulacrum faded from beneath his feet, ending the poem of death.

  “Besides sensation there would be knowing,” the intruder said, “regions of music and reguli, without illusion.” Perhaps, after all, the intruder was part of the sequence?

  “No. The sequence is not going forward. I have stopped it.”

  “You—who are you? Why do you intrude again? Where are you?” Thrushcross stood up from the cube and waited for an answer.

  “Intrude? I have spoken and you have forgotten countless times, as you have forgotten identical lives, identical sleeps, endlessly alike returns.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Right here.” One of the cubes lit up inside, revealing a small frog-like body with four eye-stalks. The eyes were large globes filled with snow, regarding Thrushcross questioningly.

  “Who are you?”

  The light in the room brightened into warm crimson. “Later,” the stranger said, “I’ll tell you who I am.” The voice was soft, louder than the previous thought-whispers. “Let me tell you a story. There will be a choice for you to make at the end, a choice you have never made before. After you have made it, I will tell you who I am. The choice will be one you will either forget or one which will make forgetfulness forever impossible, because you will leave the game cycles. I know this seems unclear to you, but it will be clear when I am finished.” The four eye-stalks came together graciously.

  Thrushcross sat down on the cube again and waited for the alien to speak. The forward eye-stalks floated slowly apart, one to each corner of the cube face, as if signaling some division of the subject at hand.

  “When humankind reached a high level of control over biological materials five thousand years ago, intelligent life on Earth split into various branches …”

  Suddenly Thrushcross thought that the transparent face of the cube was a prison wall, and the alien was speaking to him in desperation, each eye a human fist pounding from within.

  “… the relatively unmodified humanity left the Earth in mobile, self-reproducing worlds, societies which sought through new forms of social organization the attainment of individual happiness. The remaining unchanged clung to ancient ways, fearing any changes in the original organism; some of these still remain. Others accepted creative modifications, developing the gaming civilization. These are yours, seeking complex pleasures, successive lives, dramatic forms, the manipulation of the senses; all drawn from stored memory. You see, the position of individuals in ancient times was defined through a varying control of abundance and scarcity; after the great changes, when scarcity ceased to be a problem, the abundant life still reflected the natural life, vastly stylized, of course. Sequences varied in quality, from banal, anarchic creations given up to simple vitality, to fluid movements mirroring the will that moves all things. Yet even in the best could be seen the gesture of the beast, the pain of the fish swimming upstream to its spawning ground, the cruelty that does not know its own face…”

  Thrushcross felt uncomfortable, nervous.

  “You don’t like standing aside from your game?”

  “Why should I have to do it?” Thrushcross asked. “There’s nothing of interest.”

  “Don’t you feel curious? There are those who seek knowledge as the only way of life …”

  “To examine like this,” Thrushcross said, “to seek knowledge is for unchanged fools—the ancients showed us that it breeds a painful and unproductive self-consciousness, leading only to discontent. There is nothing beyond what I see and feel, and I will never know more.”

  “All you have is repetition, endless drifting …”

  “I have not known it to be that.”

  “I will make you see it.”

  Thrushcross stood up, enjoying the anger which stiffened his body, curling his hands into fists. “I don’t want you tampering with my sequence anymore. Who are you?”

  “I study the forms intelligence has taken in the galaxy. The humankind left here
on Earth, for example, is a strange mix of unconscious evolutionary residues and rational awareness; an exceptionally curious adaptation. Most races, when they reach the time of biological fluidity, choose a more cooperative, rational set of physical and social characteristics; these intelligences often leave the cradle of the home world to live in worlds of their own design, leaving the surfaces of natural planets to the unchanged, the inevitable portion of the naturally adapted for whom further change is a terrifying extravagance.” The alien seemed to sigh for a moment; the eye-stalks quivered. “The debate follows a predictable form on countless worlds: in the name of humanism, or whatever name it goes by on a particular world, technical progress is denied; humanity saw basic flaws in itself once, faults which could not be remedied through technical progress or social reform. But if psychological forms become fluid, so do social and physical forms; there is no immutable nature and all the old objections are seen as brakes born of fear …”

  “We please ourselves,” Thrushcross said as he sat down again. “Now what is this choice of yours?”

  “Look.”

  The floor dissolved again, revealing an endless deep of stars. Thrushcross leaned forward and fell on all fours, trying to press himself away from the openness of lanterned darkness. “That pale red star just below you,” the alien said. “My world encloses that sun. I am a hybrid of intelligences from Earth and one other world. I offer you the choice of turning away from your life of endless returns and forgetfulness. I can give you clear, unbroken memory, with no accumulation of noise and useless impressions …”

  Thrushcross managed to stand up and stagger back to the cube. “But why should I want to?” he asked as he sat down.

  “If I were to open the gates of your suppressed memory, which still exists at basic levels in your brain despite removal techniques, you would see the endless sameness of your life, its poverty. Your society is trivial and changeless. Its existence is a problem to my understanding …”

  “Why?”

  “You do not direct your own lives.”

  “I don’t care. Why should I listen to you?”

  The eye-stalks seemed to look down, as if looking for the answer among the multitude of stars shining in space below the floor. “I cannot convince you by discussion alone,” the alien said, “but I can affect you in ways that will help you understand …”

  “I don’t want to be affected,” Thrushcross said.

  “… that you have no understanding of your past, hence no identity. Try to understand what I am saying.…”

  Thrushcross considered for a moment. He saw a male face, a woman’s face, children’s faces, forest land, a small village.

  “You were once an unchanged man,” the alien said.

  Thrushcross felt a silence inside him. In the stillness something entered his mind and began to direct his thoughts. He felt a new sense of power; a feeling of relief took hold of him. His protectors had come at last to help him. He began to answer the intruder.

  “We have been freed from the chaos of reproduction, the pains of scarcity and competition, the limits of reality; we have created endless delight through simple physical health, friendships, and curiosity. Life for us is intentionally varied in ways we cannot predict; and we have destroyed death …”

  “You must know that these are not your words,” the alien said, “and that I am now speaking to the illuminati, not you.”

  “The illuminati lead, plan, and protect,” Thrushcross said, “leaving us to our lives. All that was of the planning, shaping impulse in us lives in them. They are our other half. They are the living, incorruptible reguli of our lives, but they are part of us.”

  “But how do you know if what they do is right?”

  “Their origins warrant our trust.”

  “You speak with more awareness, for the moment. But you will forget all this—”

  “—as soon as I no longer need it.”

  “For you to see what I mean, Thrushcross, you would have to divest yourself of the very controls and inputs that cannot be removed, since you have given up that choice. The illuminati feed you thought-toys, billowing dreams—”

  “Do you have a name?” Thrushcross asked.

  “Issli.”

  “You’re very foolish, Issli, if you don’t see that in your mind anything can happen; there can be no final difficulty, no restriction when all of material reality is made of thoughts.”

  “But in reality no species is omnipotent …”

  “We don’t have to be—except in ourselves. That is our great perfection. Your drab reality, with all its spaces and terrors, does not impinge—”

  “—except through me, or through the natural catastrophes that one day will consume the Earth and sun.”

  “Why should I choose your life? What would I gain except restrictions?”

  “You would gain a sense of reality and identity—the satisfactions of truth.”

  “Would there be happiness?”

  “Only moments, but satisfaction and knowledge are more substantial.”

  “Your reality would not be very satisfying in its limitations, which is why the illuminati were created, and they built the frame of Earth for us to live in. Go away.”

  Issli was silent for a few moments. Thrushcross watched the eye-stalks come together over the body, as if trying to become one eye. “You assume,” Issli said suddenly, “that your sequenced illusions are as real as the reality outside them—that you would perceive both in the same way, as well. Do you want to be wakened, to make the comparison, to see which world is the facade?”

  “No. If you are right, it makes no difference. I don’t want to make the comparison. If I don’t know, I won’t know the difference. I now think my world vivid and interesting. Why should I spoil its intensity? We reject what you call reality, whatever it is. Whether you are telling the truth or a lie makes no difference.”

  “But the real world is profound, mysterious, inexhaustible.”

  Thrushcross felt nothing at the thought. “I want you to disappear,” he said. “Even if you are right, we will in time reproduce all that your world contains. Now go away.”

  “But your powers do not reach that far …” The alien’s body seemed to swell in a visible sigh. “It’s always the same … the growing power over the physical environment leads to dimorphism … a species splits into those who leave the natural world, thereby extending knowledge, and those who stay to develop the unbounded energy of evolutionary flesh… the ones who leave choose the future of fate, of real limits painfully pushed back … the ones who remain choose the future of desire, which always finds a way of making failure feel like success. Desire is all will and inwardness, all that was cruel in screaming, competitive evolution, the central devil of all intelligent life in the universe. Those who leave natural planets, those seething caldrons of will boiling itself into first consciousness, first intelligence, meet other intelligences, thereby gaining an external viewpoint on their science and social organization; they gain a comparison of cosmologies, thereby satisfying in part their hunger for uncovering the nature of the universe. Their fate is the search for the given reality, which is multifarious. All these things you will never know.”

  “We create universes,” Thrushcross said, “knowing that imagination is superior to all things outside it.”

  “Not true, not true,” Issli said. “Fate will overtake your world when the sun dies; or, if you should escape through the intervention of some kindly passerby, you will die when the cosmos dies.”

  “By then we will have placed all things inside ourselves.” As he said the words, Thrushcross saw the stars and galaxies glowing inside his body; he would open his mouth and draw in all the suns shining at his feet, all the flowing darkness, all the worlds still awake …

  “For you,” Issli said, “there is nothing external; only the eye which sees a sight, a hand
which feels. Your kind is quite insane. I am glad that you are not mobile.”

  Thrushcross felt distrust and fear. Words formed in his mouth: “There is no choice for me to make.”

  “Very well,” the intruder said.

  In a moment the cube was empty. The chamber darkened, leaving only the open doorway at the bottom of the ramp as a source of light.

  3-1 / Resonance

  “And what is good, Phaedrus,

  And what is not good—

  Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

  —PLATO, Phaedrus

  Outward, away from Earth’s rivers and mountains, oceans and deserts, valleys and plains, across the Moon’s orbital distance, the planet shrinking first into an oasis, then into a small green stone, finally becoming nothing, its locale marked by a fading star; across fleeing light-years to a world not grown in time’s natural soil, a world which has captured its own sun within a shell: here Issli, ninth son of Earth, says, “I have returned.” Even though he is used to space travel of one kind or another, he is not untouched by the vastness he has traversed.

  Esteb, his co-researcher, asks, “What do you think?”

  Issli’s cube drifts out of the enclosure and settles to the floor. “They are a disappointing lot,” he says.

  Esteb brings his eye-stalks together and is quiet. Finally he asks, “Will we leave them to live as they do?”

  Issli considers for a moment. “I think we’ll have to … I don’t know, maybe they know something we do not, though I was not able to find out what that might be. In any case, it will be wise to leave a reservoir of such worlds, to let them develop in their own way, just in case.”

  “But they do not develop—we’ve seen that again and again.”

  “I will consider them again one day.”

  “You seem affected.”

  “As one is affected by a story, a certain planned experience produced in the art forms of natural worlds. In these dramatic forms, experience was judged to be meaningful when it referred to some aspect of the real world, relating it to inner experience; but when reference was made only to the form, and imaginative fabrication—by which known sights and sounds of the culture were rearranged in some bizarre fashion—then the form became trivial and meaningless, a clever entertainment, lacking in all conviction. For us, the creation of beautiful things and the search for knowledge are the only things worth doing in the prison of the universe. Those of our brethren who still walk the Earth have chosen a terrible form of beauty—beauty without knowledge. They have no clear view of their condition in the cosmos. Are we who know better off? What shall become of us as we huddle around one star, then another? I don’t know, but I am grateful for the openness of the question …”