Macrolife

by George Zebrowski

  Abruptly the bubble flew out of the passage into a large space lined with a desolate landscape, and he knew that he was seeing what was left of the green hollow of home, as he would have imagined it would look after so much time. The hills, lakes, and vegetation were gone, leaving only a layer of fine dust and scattered rocks, a desert of gray and white. Sharp regret filled him as he surveyed the ruins of the place where he had once floated on wings.

  The bubble stopped in the center. The sunscreen was a black disk before him, a broken window letting in the cold of space; for a moment he saw darkness rolling in like fog, but the vision vanished as his expectation changed.

  An image appeared on the sunscreen. He was looking at a red dwarf, a small sun struggling to maintain its brightness; as he looked, he saw its companion, a dull brown-red existing at the edge of darkness. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw that both stars were enveloped in a tenuous haze of heat. Slowly, strange colors floated up out of the penumbras, colors that were not reds, yellows, or oranges, but hues lying between and beyond, somber shades that made him see intense differences and mixtures that he could not name; at one moment he saw only subtle tints; at the next, new brightenings.

  ::There are more than two hundred colors in the full spectrum of a sun, from birth to death::

  As his eyes drank in the quanta of radiation emanating from the two stars, he noticed the dark mass of macrolife encircling the dwarfs in a thin ring.

  He looked around him. The light crowding into the dust bowl interior through the sunscreen cast an oppressive red twilight across the desert. It’s so late, he thought again, so very late. For a moment his orientation shifted, and he was looking down at the sunscreen, a black lake where all the bright stars had been drowned, their fiery glories choked in the deep.

  He wondered what lifetimes had gone by, what worlds had lived and died. Why had he been reanimated in this dreamlike form? He felt that he was himself, but he also had the sensation of physical detachment, as if he were both in his body and elsewhere. Why had they not re-created his self from later ages? To this self, waking up in smallness, the life of the universe was past. What had he lived through in the ages following macrolife’s first return to the solar system? Had he lived a life, or had it been a dream? The crimson-hued stars around him were capable of lasting longer than the lifetime of reality, misers slowly using their energy across trillions of years still to come, lighting a perpetual evening that refused to become midnight. There were things to be learned on this shore of dying suns, things that he could not learn in any other time. He remembered his curiosity about the ultimate fate of nature, his longing to pass forward through time, becoming timeless in the crossing. The intelligences of this time had surely gathered all knowledge and would tell him what he wanted to know; for he was kin to them, having come out of them, and they would not refuse his plea.

  “What will happen?” he asked. “Can the end be overcome?” ::We do not know. Our task is to decide what we will do about it:: The end would be nearby in time, he realized, as they measured time, having experienced billions of years of consciousness.

  “How near is it?” He could almost feel it pressing in around him, a shadow cast across the universe from a not too distant future. ::Think and see::

  The sunscreen went black, swallowing the view of huddling fireflies frozen around the faint unmoving fires; thoughts and images filled his mind, unfolding the history of macrolife that he had missed.

  ii

  Thoughts flowed swiftly. Memory, conscience, planner, and crossroads for all intelligences within its realm, the aggregate’s images of macrolife moved like a singing river, its source small and all but impossible, its main flow an inexorable rush across time, its emptying a humiliation before an infinite ocean. It was this humiliation, John sensed, that was intolerable to the vast mind of macrolife; it had not dreamed the dream of time only to die. Its fear became his fear, the terror of something large that had been made small again. He listened and watched.

  ::Arising from a liquid environment, intelligent life lived on the land masses of natural worlds, then left its cradles in mobile environments, at first using these small designs to move from one planet to another; but in time the designs grew larger, until it became possible to plan complete new environments to fit the needs of sentient beings::

  John saw shapes appearing in hundreds of thousands of sun-spaces; dead worlds were torn apart by the laser-directed energy of suns. The resulting materials were being used to build a variety of habitats: spheres, tubes, domed-over bowls, egg shapes, clusters of spheres and cylinders, honeycombed asteroids, clear blisters a hundred kilometers across; rings of habitats encircled suns, drinking in the radiant energy.

  ::These habitats became the containers of further cultural and biological development, consciously directed, replacing endosomatic evolutionary natural selection. The form of macrolife that was known to you began as the child of earth’s planetary civilization. The first forms were highly organized land and sea communities; later forms included bases on other planets, as well as an endless series of spacegoing research stations that were capable of reaching any point in the solar system. Asterome, a hollowed-out mass of ore, became the first large space home to leave sunspace, following the brief decline of civilization in that system. Asterome grew quickly, level after level, until it became a true example of macrolife, a mobile world independent of planetary circumstances::

  John saw Asterome entering and leaving a hundred sunspaces, gathering resources, searching for intelligent life; he saw Asterome growing in the light of earthlike suns, double suns, green, red, and white trisystems, giant red suns and blue dwarfs; he saw Asterome’s rocky surface acquire a shell, then another, and half a hundred others, until it became the size he remembered.

  ::Powered by hydrogen fusion, mini black holes, and occasional accumulations of radiant energy, free of a past ruled by scarcity, macrolife reproduced itself more than a hundred times in the following millennium, hater, the development of materials synthesis made macrolife almost completely independent of agriculture and planetary systems.

  ::Earth-derived macroforms, like so many of different origin, dispersed into the galaxy, living for their own interests and curiosities, largely ignoring natural worlds as being unfit for viable civilizations. Macrolife’s versatility naturally fostered this attitude; being a society that could easily meet the needs of its citizens, it permitted them to live as they pleased, supplying wealth and power beyond the needs of any individual. Most interests were permitted within the social container; only its destruction was absolutely forbidden. Macrolife fulfilled the needs of beings in search of knowledge and novelty, the miraculous and infinite, while giving safety and adventure::

  “How many were failures?” John asked.

  ::A large number. Not every world was able to isolate and preserve its most progressive and creative elements. In time these worlds destroyed themselves; but the macrolife that remained became the ultimate polis, a means for assimilating the past, utilizing the variety and rebelliousness of the present as a way to further growth and innovation. Thus macrolife secured its own future, and continues to exist::

  John saw empty shells floating in the cold of interstellar space, armadas of dead shapes circling suns whose generous outpouring of energy now fled wasted into the dark abyss, past hearts and minds which had been unable to strike a balance between beast and angel.

  ::Inevitably, earth-derived macrolife came into contact with alien macro-forms, resulting in hybrid societies, joining cultures and technologies, as well as genetic heritages through biological engineering::

  John saw brightly lit interiors filled with graceful living shapes. The humanoid form was present in shades of brown, gold, black, and white; four-legged beings with heavy brows and finely muscled arms strolled together with birdlike figures; water-filled macroforms supported swimming minds of vast size and profound capabilities; zero-g worlds were filled with floating creatures who seemed busy and sym
pathetic.

  :: Within the first million years, the galaxy came to be dominated by the mobile life-form, swarming in numbers greater than the concentration of stars in some sectors. Raw materials for growth, in the form of gas, dust, debris, and dead worlds, were everywhere, although some planetary cultures sought to restrict the gathering of resources within the confines of their solar systems; however, there were too few powerful cultures that were still ruled by scarcity to pose a serious problem in such confrontations::

  Suddenly it seemed to John that he was remembering the history of macrolife. Then he understood; he had been part of that history, and it was only his extreme individual self of the moment which could not remember; his wider self had never forgotten.

  ::Macrolife became the galaxy’s urban life. Planets became the countryside, with the difference that macrolife was independent of rural support. Each macroworld was different, developing along its own lines, reproducing to create individual children, growing against the common history of the societal framework, whose stability contained all change. In your history, only the Greek city-states had aspired to such a project, and failed for lack of material success.

  :: Special relationships arose between some macroworlds and star systems. Many of these contacts were friendly, others hostile, with blame on both sides. Scores of sun systems, once they had developed a workable form of in-system space travel, sought to detain visiting macroforms in order to obtain technical and scientific stores; others sought to seize the star folk’s knowledge of immortality or learn the legendary recipes for perfect nutrition. Early macroworlders regarded flesh-eaters with contempt, while planet dwellers regarded the starfolk as cannibals, became their foods were identical to their bodily proteins. On more than one occasion, a planetary system managed to destroy a macroworld; reprisals against natural worlds became more common as rising civilizations became aware of the circles of intelligent life existing on the galactic scale. The cry went out that macrolife was an infestation, a despoiler of sun systems. The only solution to this hostility was to bring new cultures into the galactic community as soon as they advanced to a certain level, while taking care to leave those in the nursery state isolated::

  “What level was that?” John asked.

  ::The level at which they could communicate a complaint, thus illustrating the old principle that the surest way to close the gap between a scarcity-ruled civilization and one ruled by affluence is to call attention to the gap. A gap communicated spurs its own closing. Of course, a Type I civilization is one that can use the power of a whole planet to signal its complaint, so it is already on its way to solving its scarcity problems, before moving to Type II, which can use a typical sun for its activities: one such activity is talking to distant equals. Well-disguised observers often visited nursery worlds, not so much to report on what was happening as to gain personal experience of life in the universe. This was an effort to avoid the trained incapacity of specialization so often developed by Type I and II civilizations, the result of isolation from the harsher aspects of life, producing a deadening of personal resourcefulness. Later, when contact was made with previously visited worlds, the results of observation and covert influence served to form a bond between the cultures.

  ::In time, many natural planets transformed the materials of their sun systems into macroforms. Some launched their planets away from their suns, taking on the attitudes of macrolife, joining in the vast tide of states; others remained in their sunspaces. Gradually the internal environments of macrolife discarded the gravity-oriented systems of natural worlds. At first, zero-g had been used as an industrial convenience, and for recreation; but as it became less necessary to visit natural worlds directly, many worlds changed over to zero-g interiors. A variety of intelligences adapted to life in these flexible, three-dimensional conditions; for these beings, visits to gravity environments were possible only through the use of exoskeletons to support their frail bodies, or in g-screened flitters. Eventually, the very atmospheres of zero-g worlds became mediums from which nutrients could be drawn directly; internally, macrolife became simpler.

  ::Macrolife permeated the galaxy, having come out of the smallest life-forms, each unit of life growing to become the unit for the next: first the endless series of cells, then organisms in great variety; then intelligent organisms; societies of intelligent organisms, rising and falling as better methods of organization were tried; finally, the first multiorganismic forms capable of freeing themselves from the limits of planetary existence.

  ::After filling whole galaxies, macrolife exploded outward into the metagalaxy, there to meet others like itself, combining, consolidating, transforming itself. Five million years after the birth of macrolife, all conflict with natural worlds ceased; most planetary civilizations had either destroyed themselves or become part of macrolife, mobile and sunspace-bound.

  :Eons passed. The new countryside being created by the birth of new suns and planets gave rise to new intelligence, which grew toward maturity unaware of our macrolife; these youths emerged into their galaxies with their own macro-forms. For one thing is clear about all intelligence: however limited it may be in its origins, it sets no limits for itself in space-time. Mind sets about transforming itself into whatever form is necessary for the attainment of its desires, even if certain attainments can be possessed only in a world of dreams; in those cases, minds dream, living in synthetic realities tended by servant creations, and this form of mind dies when its suns die, unaware of the end.

  :: Across billions of years, macrolife became layered according to its time of origin, marked by the birth of new stars. The youngest would often initiate the boldest new projects after learning of the existence of the great circle of civilizations around them. Sometimes it took a long time for a younger group of cultures to learn of the existence of older forms::

  “Who are the oldest?” John asked.

  ::We are nearly certain that we know every one, but there may be older Type III forms hidden from us. Our greatest concern now is to continue our system of conscious organization against entropy, to find a way to outlast the decline of nature. We have unified the universe with our communications and transit web, enabling us to go wherever our worlds exist to receive us; because of this, the mobility of macrolife is no longer as important as it was once. Suns and black holes continue to provide all the power we need, as we prepare to suffer the ruin of nature, the end that will make all the epochs of our labor useless, unless we can survive. We have rediscovered the presence of death.

  ::But if we can perceive the nature of the problem, if we can make use of what we know of the nature of the universe, knowledge gained through billions of years of comparing universe models against the evidence of observation and experiment, then perhaps we may succeed::

  “Where in the universe are we?” John asked.

  ::We are gathered around a dwarf sun that wanders above the plane of a darkening galaxy, the galaxy you once knew::

  The black mirror of the sunscreen revealed a plain of white stars, dull red coals, and massive clouds of gas. He was looking toward the galactic center from above. A strange brightness seemed to be hidden at the galactic core, a glowing fire covered by clouds. The small star, around which this group of macroworlds huddled, might have been an old bridge star to the Magellanic Clouds or a waif torn loose from one of the great globular clusters.

  ::The galaxies rotate slowly now, and more mass is swallowed by the growing black hole at each center as rotation slows. In the times since you lived as a simple individual, we have had experience with three kinds of singularities: star-sized black holes; galaxy-core black holes; and the very small black holes that we create for our power generators, the kind that were once part of a younger universe. Some two billion years ahead in time lies the black hole of the universe. As time goes forward, more and more black holes, star-sized and galaxy-core sized, will form with increasing frequency, prefiguring the universal collapse into infinite density and zero volume. Infinite d
ensity and zero volume being obvious impossibilities, the collapsed matter of our universe will disappear from the space-time we know; space will close up as it becomes infinitely curved in the vicinity of the titanic black hole’s mass::

  “What happens then?” John asked, feeling again that he was asking the question of another part of himself.

  ::Then all the energy of our universe tunnels out into a new space; the universe is wound up in a quantum fireball, expansion begins, entropy decreases. This is possible, we believe, because universes swim in an infinite superspace, each cosmos expanding and contracting in its season. Imagine that in superspace our universe leaves a mark, a point, and a track; the track grows longer and shorter as it expands and contracts; each collapse into a black hole means there will be a white hole reemergence. In the case of smaller black holes, reemergence may be elsewhere in the same universe, or not at all if the quantum conditions are wrong, leaving a dense mass and a region of curved space, and only the possibility of a white hole. Each emergent universe may be different; its life cycle may be longer or shorter; the final expansion may be larger or smaller; the mass of particles may vary; there may be more disorder, more energy than matter, or the reverse; there may be a difference in the way that the monoforce breaks up into the other forces.

  ::Each of the universes in superspace has gone through an indefinite number of births and deaths. We may be the first intelligence to think of surviving the end of our cycle. We have an idea of how this may be done::

  “By reaching across superspace to a younger locality?” John asked.

  ::No, although that is a consideration. Unfortunately, we have no knowledge of the topology of superspace; there would be no way to know which direction to take, even if superspace could be entered directly. There is another way, however, one based on direct physical observations::