In the Distance, and Ahead in Time

by George Zebrowski

  And to convince himself he thinks: in seeking happiness they forgot the virtues of satisfaction. Happiness is a bottomless pit, requiring infinite power with which to conjure. Thoughts become things, dreams reality—the cruelest wishes have no consequence, a river of stored information becomes flesh, solid material is projected to any part of the planet, data fed by the libido of endless power; and forgetfulness wipes away identity and all sense of good or evil. When the sun bloats into a red giant, this vast journeying of souls will scarcely notice the end of their billion-year playground. They will never have known the pursuit of knowledge, the satisfaction of curiosity, which requires great racial projects, the limiting of bodily energy through reason. They will never have known cumulative expansion, historically meaningful as a binding up of time, so that the latest may say, I am loyal to the first, and the last may feel kinship with all those who have gone forever into the dark… O Earth, I suffer with you in your blindness …

  “Let me tell you about our time-travel project,” his companion starts to say and stops.

  “There is no one to oversee,” Issli says. “They have no one person or group which sees what they have come to. The interior life is all-pervasive and nothing else is known.”

  “Maybe we should wake them up,” Esteb says.

  “If we disturbed them, only the illuminati would speak to us, the ghosts they have set to rule. The humanity of Earth would be happy to dispense with physical objects completely; then they would not need the Earth. They would dream until all nature decayed. My friend, what prevents me from ignoring this form of life is the fact that too many intelligences in the galaxy engage in it for me to think it insignificant. Perhaps solipsism is a form of transcendent reference, like the ancient mathematics which relates the forms of all possible universes?”

  “I think the dismissive posture is truest in this case,” Esteb says.

  “Theirs is a charming madness. Sampling it saddened me. Hoping to find something of myself in those who contributed to our form, I found only a crossroads …”

  “There is not that much of their genetic input in our hybrid forms, Issli.”

  “If knowledge comes first, then perhaps I should have given myself up completely to their life before I could understand it.”

  “Not if it would mean a loss of consciousness. I would have to come and waken you—but you say that might not be possible.”

  “I would like to explore the memory of their artificial intelligences which circle the planet. Perhaps there is a record of some accident that brought a halt to all development, placing the entire society of immortals into a process of self-reference, a Moebius strip of self-awareness, producing the illusion of a high consciousness and new knowledge as the culture spiraled back into rearranged memories, internalizing all reality …”

  “How could you even consider studying a circular system? There are enough other backward types which don’t refute themselves so obviously.”

  “I thought there might be something I’ve overlooked,” Issli says.

  “Let me tell you about the new cosmology coming out of the equatorials …”

  Issli floats out of his cube, and together with his companion drifts to the open view of their star, which is enclosed by millions of worlds, making up a porous shelf several astronomical units in radius. The worlds drink the yellow sun’s energy and will continue to do so for as long as the sun’s mass permits an outflow…

  And Issli thinks: Ultimately there is a universe out there which is not what we are; we may be made of the same stuff, but it is not what we are at our level of organization, the level of complexity that makes possible the qualities of intelligence and self-awareness. We fail to grasp this universe at its most basic levels of organization; when we try, we alter, splintering reality. Yet we know something of it, even if we cannot be its complete masters. This surely must be better than denying the difference between a self-reference inwardness and the vast sea around us which crystallized our forms …

  “There is something of Earth in you,” Esteb says, “in the way it draws you, in the way you are troubled.”

  As he looks across the sun’s intimate space, at the many-shaped worlds set in a globular mesh around it, Issli worries about the resonances created in his mind by the visit to Earth. A zoo of strange lives. Many a culture leaves such living relics behind it in the climb away from the mad vitality of origins. Earth is a place of rituals, illusory knowledge and false wisdom…

  And something in me loves its desperate beauty.

  4 / Memory Is No More

  “If a man could be sure

  That his life would endure

  For the space of a thousand long years—”

  —SONG

  “Add and alter many times,

  Till all be ripe and rotten;”

  —ANONYMOUS

  “But even at ‘death’s end’ men will remain finite beings in their accomplishments if not their expectations. I do not know whether the opportunity to exercise our abilities over an indefinite time period will itself be an answer to the unhappiness over our finitude. … If this should not prove the case, then some other kind of reconstruction of man appears called for to deal with finitude.”

  —GERALD FEINBERG, The Prometheus Project

  Shapes stood in the sky, morning clouds outlining a pair of vast, contemptuous intelligences scrutinizing the landscape. Thrushcross sat on the terrace looking out over the plateau, waiting for the end, for the sleep that would renew him. Sometimes he sat here at night, when the world was lit by lightning, each flash a spider of electricity as it moved away from him over the Earth. Mornings he would lean over the small table, setting down marks on the rolls of white parchment, noticing the leatheriness of his hands and the white hairs from his head touching the table. His eyes hurt at the end of each day, and he wondered why renewal was taking so long. When he slept, his dreams were filled with sharp stones, and he felt that he had failed to complete some task. Daily he set down the red marks, imagining that they represented a vast cycle of musical sounds, and he would hear them played during his next return to life.

  The red notes flowed endlessly from his hand, more varied and complex as he cut the roll into sheets. The protectors had failed to take him into the sleep ship. The illuminati had forgotten that he had lived past his measured sequence. Throughout the world, he knew, others were passing into new lives, leaving him to die like one of the unchanged.

  He looked out over the grassy plateau below his Earthen terrace set in the mountainside, and beyond to the lowlands. Suddenly his eyes filled with tears, and he longed to enter the landscape, transfigure every particle of it with his own consciousness; every tree, stone, blade of grass and grain of sand would become an aspect of himself.

  Gone would be the terrible isolation of waiting, of looking down at the red marks whose meaning lay just beyond his grasp.…

  Moments passed. A cool breeze touched his face, drying his tears. A sudden realization of his own existence surprised him. He looked down again at the characters on the parchment. They seemed to writhe as he tried to read their meaning, transparent snakes filled with blood, an endless, animated frieze of memory, each echo unrecognizable, empty, except for the pain he felt.

  Clouds passed, uncovering the sun’s warmth. His sense of self was slipping away. He closed his eyes and watched shapes glide across a bloody background. When he opened them, he did not know what he was seeing. Light flooded his field of vision. He looked at his hand and found it strange, as if he had picked up an oddly shaped piece of wood at the shore. He had no name, no shape, only a waking awareness. He was concealed in time, in a grain of sand in a river bed, as the water rolled on. He looked out through eyes as hard as glass, feeling an empty attentiveness that craved to be filled.

  I want to be a child again, naked, without knowledge or memory. He remembered a choice, a chance at renaming th
e universe, and he had chosen memory, endless desire, possible only in the world at the center of his will. The illuminati knew his will. They would provide and protect. I want to die, but only for a short time. A bell knelled somewhere like a broken wail.

  He leaned forward and saw his father coming up the path to the house. Evelyn walked with him, brushing away the foliage that threatened to cover the clay path. At last they were coming to take him to the sleep ship; at last Thrushcross began to feel again the tug of time, drawing him forward into a new private place, among endless places to come. Rastaban and Evelyn were youthful and smiling as they walked in the lush greenery.

  Thrushcross closed his eyes. A prayer of understanding entered his mind. Death once gave renewal. We die by degrees, discarding memories, keeping what we please of ourselves. We renew our bodies without the sacrifice of death. We shape ourselves. We go on despite forgetfulness. The pen dropped from his hand and he leaned back in his chair. His will expanded to fill the world, until such time when it would again fall back into the limits of individual awareness. Memory rushed away from him, emptying into an infinite sea, where all things were possible, where all distinctions were obliterated, all pain dissolved.…

  Emtio awoke. He turned his head and saw two faces watching him from behind the clear partition, a man and a woman. I remember, I remember, he thought as the faces turned away and disappeared from sight.

  Between the Winds

  Inside (1)

  The sun was a bloody Portuguese man-of-war sinking into the tar-black sea. Ishbok leaned on the ship’s wooden rail and was suddenly afraid that the world would disappear if he stopped thinking about it.

  The sea sloshed against the horizon as if it were the rim of a bowl. He tried to remember leaving port. Perhaps his memory had been affected by his best friend’s death at the hands of the mad street prophet. What was his friend’s name? The same as the poor soul who had been washed overboard by the storm yesterday. Or had it been the day before?

  Ishbok squinted as the wind struck his face with a million pinpricks, and was grateful for the sudden reality of the sensation. The rain, still some leagues off, dropped a gauzy curtain on the sunset, obscuring something dark moving on the horizon, pushing through an invisible barrier at the edge of the world, as if coming in from the sky.

  A serration of waves cut across the crimson blister of the setting sun.

  The whale-thing swam closer. Ishbok gripped the rail as he saw black armor plate. Time twitched forward.

  His vessel’s lower deck guns fired; white smoke billowed into the dusk from the lower deck as thunder pulsed in his belly. The iron whale swelled until he could see its great round windows, eyes furious with fire, and he staggered back as it struck the ship. Ripping vibrations shot up through his feet. He swung around, coughing from the smoke, and the deck tilted, pitching him over the rail. He struck the whale-thing, rolled on the metal plates clawing for a handhold, then slipped off and tasted the sea. Surfacing, he saw the whale-thing tear through his ship.

  He cried out to his crew as the current bore him away, and realized they had been trapped below on the gun decks as the ship went down.

  Light drained from the world as the last red sliver of daystar was eclipsed by the horizon, and the sea seemed to boil as if quenching the sun. The sky filled with musing stars. Rock raked his back. He turned around and saw a tower of stone reaching up into the night. Probing with his arms in the water, he crawled forward on the submerged crags, hands and knees slipping on the seaweed as he struggled to stand up into the cool air.

  At last he scrambled out of the water, sat down on the rough rocks and watched the woolly clouds glide in from the north. Stars pierced the overcast for a while, their glitter fading and dying as they were drawn into the net of obscurity.

  I am alive, he said within himself, shivering in the salt spray, searching the gloom, feeling desolate and lost. The world wore a mask, and imposed forgetfulness on his thoughts and suspicions as they arose. He shuddered, slipping toward numbness as chill breezes rushed through him. He looked up and saw a star struggling to penetrate the clouds, burning bright as if hoping to ignite the cottony cumulus.

  I am alive, he repeated within his cavernous self, but the universe has walls.

  Lightning joined sea and sky, thunder tore the air. He rose and saw the echo of the timeship cutting through the clouds, then fading.

  Time tumbled backward, and he almost remembered.

  Outside (1)

  Eighteen thousand years after the mobiles had left Earth, the first to return found a deserted planet, growing back green, except for one large structure plunging deep into the plain of what had once been central North America. They worked all day to open the random molecular locks to enter the inner chamber of worlds inside the pyramid.

  The chamber, a brightly lit sphere at the center of the double pyramid, housed thousands of shining blue globes, stored rigidly against each other in large, skeletal container frames set on a polished floor that cut the chamber in half.

  Gibby, a youth not yet a century old, who had studied with deep fascination the report of the technical team that had been here a week earlier, caressed one of the balls with the palm of his hand. “Every one of them,” he said, “is a world of living, feeling people who have existed in virtual dreams for so long that they accept them as the real world. They’re just as much lost as the people of generation starships we’ve encountered, who no longer know that they exist on a ship or that it has a destination.”

  “And what shall we do, Gibby?” asked Gorrance, the linguist. “Disillusion them?”

  “We can’t do that,” Gibby replied, irritated by the fact that she had already made up her mind. Her millennium of life, he told himself, had not made her infallible, although she sometimes seemed to believe it had.

  “Why not?” Gorrance asked, her dark eyes narrowing.

  “Why not disillusion them? Mentalities that fail to distinguish between fantasy and reality need our help—if we can even say that we’re dealing with real persons of any kind—to be put out of their misery.”

  “There’s no point in disillusioning them,” said Kateb, the head of the expedition. He was nearly half Gorrance’s age, but she still treated him as a child. “We’ve come here only to observe a noumenal humanity that once had something in common with us.”

  “Yes,” Gorrance said, “before they moved into their dreams!”

  “There’s a control center here,” Gibby said, moving eagerly to a series of round touch-panels, above which stood three large square tanks, each black inside as if filled with a viscous liquid. “Shouldn’t there be bodies stored somewhere?”

  “There was nothing in the technical survey,” Gorrance said. “It seems they moved inside permanently, abandoning their bodies.”

  Gibby was studying the panels, pressing control surfaces and anxiously waiting to see if any of the tank monitors lit up, realizing that there would be stored physical bodies only if anyone wanted to come out. These people might have left a way out only at first, and had then decided to go inside permanently.

  As the three tanks began flickering, Gibby looked around the chamber, feeling almost as if a virtual caretaker might appear. A foolish notion: these systems had certainly been designed to maintain themselves.

  Kateb frowned. “The trouble with sub-creations,” he said, “is that they can’t escape the cosmology of the external world in which they are embedded. A sun may go nova and collapse into a black hole, a planet might be destroyed by collisions—virtuals are vulnerable and can’t do anything to save themselves.”

  Gorrance said, “Yet countless fools have claimed that virtual worlds might be the equal of given reality, and maybe preferable to it. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. Once it was a planetary colony, where life got too hard. Another time it was an interstellar vessel, adrift because of some malfunction, with no one left a
live except in the virtual banks. It could happen to any culture.”

  Gibby did not want to hear again about the difference between virtual worlds and the reality that impinged on senses and instruments from outside. He had heard enough about genuine, uncreated otherness. It did not mean that virtual insides were necessarily simple creations. That depended on the sophistication of the creators.

  “I wonder,” he said, gazing into the blank noisy holo monitors before him. “Is there really an outside? Have we ever been able to look that far? Maybe the settings of our senses, on which even our best instruments depend, are no different in principle from the settings of virtuals. Perhaps we don’t move through space at all, as we imagine that we did in coming here, but through a vastly rich mental space. We’re all inside.”

  He liked the idea, whether it was true or not.

  “Nonsense!” Gorrance cried. “Which of us would dive into a sun? We are not dreams! Even the insiders must have believed in their own given reality before they entered their hells.”

  “But they also had to believe in the hard won reality of their creations,” Gibby objected, “before committing themselves irrevocably.”

  All three holo-tank monitors lit up suddenly in front of Gibby, casting a blue glow across the chamber. “Now we’ll see how they live,” he said excitedly as Gorrance and Kateb came up, and together they watched the images that began to move inside the center tank. …