Neverness

by David Zindell

  How many human beings?

  “Do you see, sweet Mallory?” the Katharine imago asked me. “So many, who could have foreseen that life would have made so many?”

  “Are the images you showed me—this history—is it real?”

  “Reach out with your telescopes. Are the ten thousand made–worlds real?”

  I rubbed the side of my nose and said, “Can I know what’s real when I’m inside your brain and you’re inside mine? You can make me see anything you want me to, I think.”

  She smiled as she dipped her hand into her robe’s pocket of concealment. When she removed it, her finger was smeared with blacking oil, which she daubed into her eyepits. She said, “You see well enough these pretty…You must know they are real.”

  I pulled at my beard and asked, “How many people live in each cylinder?”

  “It’s not the same number for each...It will take me a segment of time to recite the exact numbers. And the numbers change as we speak. It’s so funny, the way you can’t help counting all the time, this fetish for exact numbers.”

  “Approximately how many people, then?”

  She nodded her head as she spoke. “Ten million human beings live inside each world.”

  “Human beings—” I began.

  “Human beings,” she said, “are so wonderful! Half– animal, half…”

  I pressed my lips together (I couldn’t help thinking that my face must have looked as tight–lipped as Soli’s), and I said, “It’s impossible for ten million people to reproduce like that in ten years.”

  But even as I spoke, I knew very well that it was not impossible. Assemblers could be used to ripen infants into adults in a few years. But what kind of humans would these be? It was impossible for a human mind to bear its full fruit in the span of a couple of years. I did a swift calculation. If the number of worlds doubled every three–fourths of a year, most of the worlds and the people living inside had not existed three years ago. (Assemblers could even build a fully grown human being in a few days. During the second dark age, the imprimaturs had performed many such forbidden experiments. It was true, a woman or man could be grown like a joint of cultured meat. She would have working arms and hair and hot red blood pumping through her arteries. She would even have a brain. But the brain would be as barren as the upper slopes of Mount Attakel. Assemblers could make a woman or man, but they could not make a mind. They could not make a human mind.)

  “You still don’t see,” Katharine said, and she brushed her hair away from her forehead. She turned towards me. If she had had eyes, I would have guessed she was reading my face for tells. “How can I make you see?”

  And then there were sights and smells and sounds. As if I were a thallow soaring on a mountain thermal, my mind’s eye—my ear and my nose—floated across space and pierced the hull of one of the cylinders. There was warm, moist air, the rich smells of life. Below me and above, curving out and around and down on all sides for miles was a jungle of encompassing green. There were trees and chessboard lawns and ponds and apple orchards hung with sweet–smelling red fruits. And everywhere I looked, circling forward and aft, left and right, there were babies. Babies were everywhere. Naked babies, their bodies as wrinkled and soft as spirali, crawled and squirmed through the long green grasses of the lawns. A small army of domestic robots watched over them. Some of the robots nursed newborn babies from plastic teats which they stuffed in their moist, toothless mouths. Everywhere babies were crying, sucking, sleeping and defecating in the grass. The air was rank with the smells of spit–up milk and mustardy baby dung and fresh, new baby skin. A few of the older babies—they were children, really—climbed like hairless monkeys through the spreading branches of an apple tree. They plucked ripe, red apples and bit off chunks with a crunch, and flung the fruit to the grass below. The lawns were littered with half–eaten apples. I was appalled at the waste. It almost reminded me of a Devaki meat–orgy. I wondered if the apples were riddled with worms. Why else would the babies throw away so much fruit? One of the babies lay cradled in the crotch of a tree while he picked over an apple as carefully as a novice would study a hologram of the galaxy. He smiled, then sank his little white teeth into the apple. The apple was full of worms. Worms swarmed through the meat of the apple. With another smile, the boy–baby held the apple to his lips and sucked out a couple of worms, which he gulped down like milk. I was puzzled why he did this. I wondered why all the other babies carefully sought out apples full of worms. Then I heard Katharine whispering in my ear, and I knew the answer: Baby children—and all human beings—need protein to grow, and worms are nothing but water, fat and protein.

  I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I was back in the pit of my ship looking at Katharine. “So many,” she said, “the worlds are full of new...Oh, yes, there are adult humans, too, a thousand for every world. The ultimate astriers, do you see? But the babies know the real...They’re so sweet and eager to live—and they’re so hungry!”

  “Worm eaters,” I said, thinking of Shanidar’s ghastly smile and the many horrible things he had eaten. “It reminds me of certain things I’d rather not be reminded of.”

  “Don’t be afraid of your memories. Memory is everything.”

  “This careless fecundity. It’s so damn barbaric!”

  “Be compassionate, Mallory.”

  “They’re barbarians.”

  “And that is the problem with human beings, do you see? Oh, these poor people are uncivilized! They’re so…Their hunger is so limitless. They’ve consumed the elements of the planet, but they’ve run out of one crucial…The planet was nitrogen–poor—did you know that? This limits their growth. How can they make protein without nitrogen? So now they must look for more food. Other planets around other stars: food for human babies, do you see?”

  “No, I’d rather I was blind.”

  Katharine pointed her finger at me. The oil–smeared tip was invisible. She spoke, and her words were slow and grave. “The ten thousand worlds are like enormous deepships—only not so like. How is it possible, you wonder, to open a window for such a massive object as a made–world? The deformations would have to be so…enormous. When Gehenna has fallen into supernova, the deformed spacetime in that star’s neighborhood will suddenly unbend, like a sheet of rubber—isn’t that the analogy pilots always use? And like our pilots, the pilots of the made–worlds will make their mappings. Just before the light incinerates them, the worlds will be flung into the manifold like...like stones through an open window. It’s the only way.”

  “They’re barbarians!”

  She shook her head hard enough to whip her long, black hair from ear to ear. “No, they are women and men, like us. Like, but not the same because they lack our pilots’ artistry. Their mapping theorems are so crude. Rarely do they find a one–to–one mapping. Most of the time, they must map from a point–source to an open set of...You see, most of the worlds will fall through a window and scatter at random throughout the galaxy. Eventually they will fall out around other stars. Which stars these will be, none of the lords of the manswarm can know.”

  “Barbarians!”

  The Vild was nothing but dead stars murdered by human beings.

  I understood, then. I thought I understood everything of human beings and their terrible fate within the limiting lens of the Milky Way galaxy. The blood was hot in my face because I was terribly embarrassed. What have we done, I wondered? Why human beings at all? Human beings had at last abandoned all restraint. Human beings would destroy a star because the urge to new life and new niches for life was greater than reverence for the life of any star; in a way, paradoxically, it was greater than existing life itself. Ten thousand worlds full of human beings would fall through the windows of the manifold to the galaxy’s distant stars. Some worlds might fall into stars; some would dwell too long in the manifold and run out of food; a few worlds would be lost in infinite trees or other topological traps. Perhaps only a half or a third of the worlds would survive—who co
uld calculate the probabilities? But that would be enough. The seed worlds would reach bright new stars, and they would make billions of new human beings. Nothing would stop the wreckage of whole planets and the transmutation of simple elements into human beings. Human beings in their billions would become trillions of trillions, and the stars would die one by one, and thousand by thousand, and the Vild would grow until all the stars and planets and interstellar dust were used up, and the galaxy, from the dead Alpha Crux to the burned–out Antares, was nothing but a swirling spiral of diamond–hulled worlds full of hungry human beings.

  To the glowing imago of Katharine, I said, “You must hate us.”

  “Sweet Mallory, no, I don’t hate you.”

  “How can they reproduce and journey thus, knowing they’ll destroy everything?”

  “But they don’t know anything, don’t you see? These ten thousand worlds—the human beings inside believe they sacrifice a few stars so their children can bloom and prosper. Because starlight...because they cannot journey as our pilots do, they lack perspective. Because the light from most of the supernovas hasn’t had time to reach much of the galaxy, they can’t see it. In truth, even though they are its creators, they don’t know the Vild exists.”

  “But they must know that sooner or later all the stars will be dead!”

  She smiled and said, “They hope that event will occur later, not sooner.” And then she added, “If all the stars fell into supernovas, the galaxy will flare with wild…The star fire will create an abundance of new elements, and so their children’s children will find new, if dangerous, possibilities for life.”

  Despite myself, I could not help smiling, too. I was dreadfully ashamed that my fellow human beings were destroying the stars, yet perversely proud that we were clever enough and powerful enough to do so. Even a goddess, I thought, must be helpless before a galaxy– wrecking swarm of human beings.

  And then pride gave way to guilt, and I repeated, “You must hate us.”

  “Sweet Mallory, I don’t hate you, I...Oh, don’t you see? We scryers, all who learn the art...this new ecology, it was foreseen so long ago. Even the Agathanians, they saw this moment in its becoming.”

  “Why wasn’t I told then? If I knew—”

  “Don’t you see? If you had known, you would have despaired, because it is one thing to know, another to…What could you or anyone of our Order have done to stop the Vild’s growth?”

  “Am I so different than I was? What can I do...now?”

  “You will stop the pain because that is your fate. The Vild is torturing the galaxy. My sweet Mallory, you brought yourself here to cure the pain...and for other reasons.”

  Although I dreaded hearing these “other reasons,” I said, “Tell me, then.”

  Katharine smoothed the flowing folds of her robe and said, “I can’t tell you It’s not for me to...No, I must leave you now, Mallory. For the time, for an eon of time, until I am remembered. Kalinda will tell you what you need to know. Kalinda of the Flowers.”

  “Katharine, I never told you the most basic thing which is—”

  “Goodbye, sweet Mallory, goodbye.”

  “No!”

  Katharine shimmered as she disappeared. I knew it was a ridiculous thing to do, but I reached out to touch her. I touched air. I floated with my arm outthrust and my fist clenched, and I stared into the sudden blackness.

  “I remember you too well,” I said aloud. “Goddamn my memory!”

  A moment later, a new imago I had never seen before came alive and floated above my head. I looked up. She was a beautiful girl. Her skin was as brown as a baldo nut, and she wore a red robe from neck to knee. Her eyes were almost as black as the Timekeeper’s; they were shaped like almonds and seemed too large for her head. It occurred to me that I had never seen eyes so wise and intelligent in a human face. Around the little finger of each of her quick little hands she wore a red ring, and her dark hair was decorated with tens of little white flowers. Her name was Kalinda of the Flowers.

  I would bless your memory and help you remember, if I could.

  It is impossible to describe her voice. Certainly it was high and sweet like the piping of a snow loon. At the same time, it was rich, measured, and calm. When she spoke, she enunciated each of her words clearly, in a very unchildlike manner. In a godly manner. Her voice was the godvoice, and it sounded inside me in deeper tones that perfectly harmonized with the music pouring out of her girlish throat. There was whimsy in her voice, and there was poetry. She gave me a knowing look as she recited:

  Dear, beauteous death! the jewel of the just.

  Shining nowhere but in the dark;

  What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust.

  Could man outlook that mark!

  There were more poems after this, ancient poems and modern, poems of Fravashi origin and poems that I thought she must have composed herself. I was given to understand that this too–wise little girl was a part of the Entity in a way that the Tycho, and certainly Katharine, were not. Had she lived on one of the worlds which fell out into the Entity’s dark interior long ago? Had she been killed, encapsulated and absorbed into one of the Entity’s oldest and deepest memory spaces? Why did the warrior–poets and the Agathanians refer to the Entity as Kalinda? I looked at her fingers, at the rings, the rings of a warrior–poet. Was it possible? Was this the girl that Dawud had spoken of? Had she been the result of an experiment in breeding female warrior–poets? And she wore two red rings! I had a terrible suspicion. I felt—and probably the goddess was quite pleased that I felt this way—I somehow guessed that this poetry–loving child was alive within the very core of the Entity. Perhaps the Entity had taken pity on the young warrior–poet; perhaps she had honored the only human being ever to have worn the poet’s and the warrior’s red rings. I thought of the image of an onion, and my eyes burned with tears. The Entity must be very like an onion, layer upon layer, whole moons of her brain built up over an inner self who loved flowers and poetry.

  Don’t be afraid of the death, my Pilot.

  Aloud I said, “But every star in the galaxy, every poem that’s ever been written, everything—it will all be lost.”

  Kalinda plucked a flower from her hair. She placed it in the palm of her hand, pursed her lips, and blew it at me. The flower floated in the air and drifted towards me.

  You still don’t understand. Nothing is lost. I picked this hyacinth thousands of years ago, but smell it—isn’t it still fresh?

  “I’ve tried to understand, thought about this all my life. The decay, the entropy—”

  Entropy is missing information; entropy is a measure of uncertainty. When entropy is maximum, then all messages are equally probable. The greater the uncertainty, the greater amount of information conveyed in the message.

  “The message of the Ieldra, it’s—”

  From the moment the universe was created it moved away from the disorder of the primal explosion. Macroscopic information is continually created.

  “But I—”

  Gods seek perfect information about the universe. But information can never be perfect. Consider one of your exhalations, your carelessly bitter words of warm air. If a single gram of matter as far away as Shiva Luz were to be moved a single centimeter, it would change the microscopic state of your breath. Even the universe itself can never create enough information to know its own future.

  “‘What has been will be,’ Katharine used to say.”

  You cannot even dream what the future of this galaxy will be.

  “We’re all doomed and damned, aren’t we?”

  No, it is just the opposite, my Pilot. There are infinite possibilities.

  She plucked another hyacinth from the garland around her forehead and placed this little flower of light in my hair. She told me many things, then, wonderful things. Most of what she said I did not understand, or understood only poorly, as a novice who has been given numbers to play with has only the vaguest notion of transfinite arithmetic. When I asked her
why she would allow the ten thousand worlds to murder Gehenna Luz—for clearly the goddess had the power to destroy every world inside Her, if She so desired—she hinted at the existence of certain unalterable ecological “laws.” (If I confuse the pronouns referring to Kalinda with those of the goddess, it is because I was confused. In some sense, I am still confused.) Her words were almost gobbledygook: There was something about the decisions of every entity in the universe determining what she called the “ecology of choices.” It would be a great crime, she said, to needlessly interrupt the natural flow of choices. And it was an even greater crime not to restore the flow if it had been interrupted. It seemed that there were other ecologies, too. There was an ecology of ideas and an ecology of prophesies, and an ecology of information. She told me about the ecology of determined actions and the ecology of fundamental paradoxes. There were many, many of these ecologies; there was a hierarchy of ecologies. The study of the interplay between ecologies, she said, was her art. When I admitted that her art was as apprehensible to me as probabilistic to topology was to a worm, she said, “Worms know enough about transformations to become butterflies.”

  She told me something else. All of our communications, all of her manipulations of the manifold that I had found so disturbing, the inexplicable phenomena inside of the Entity—everything that I had so far witnessed, she had accomplished on an unconscious level. No being, she said, could afford to be aware of life processes which she could make automatic. Could a man take the time to consciously adjust his heartrate to the many and varying needs of his environment? To speed up his metabolism and bodily temperature in order to fight a bacterial invasion? To be aware of each individual bacterium? No, and neither could a goddess afford to be aware of a mere man, nor even ten thousand worlds full of women and men. The true concerns of the goddess, it seemed, were far beyond my concerns as to man’s fate within the galaxy.

  As we had talked, millions of black bodies had fallen out around the star. She told me that they were a form of manufactured matter as dense as black holes, but not nearly so massive. The black bodies—I might as well call them gamma–phages—stored energy; she had made the gamma–phages to absorb and hold the light of the supernova. Why she should need such enormous quantities of energy she kept a mystery. She hinted that I must trust her, that there was a vital reason why stars must die. But how could I trust this godchild with her goddamned, godwise eyes? Kalinda smiled so sweetly, but she had devoured the brain and mind of the Tycho, and the minds of Ricardo Lavi and other pilots, and who could know what other feasts she might someday require?