by Adam Roberts
Somebody once said that truth comes as conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving it as friend. But Ange tended to think, nevertheless, that truth does not come to us at all, either to embrace or to annex. She tended to think that we have to make our way to the Truth, and the way is harder than many can bear.
She went to sleep, her underarms and crotch sore from the tightness of her suit. She did not dream. She was woken by the silent flashing of a red light, winking knowingly at her.
The first thing she did was wonder why there was no sound. The alarm light should have been accompanied by an alarm noise. The speaker was broken, or else there was no air in the cabin to communicate the sound. In the latter case, she would suffocate. Half awake, she reached for her helmet, but it was not there. She woke up a little more, perked by adrenalin. Where was her helmet? Muzzy with exhaustion and stress and not having slept enough, it took her a long time to realise that she was wearing it.
She must have put it on whilst she slept. There was no air in the cabin, which meant there was no air anywhere this side of the corridor bulkhead. How had the decompression alarm prompted her to put on her helmet, but not actually woken her up? Then: and how had there been a decompression anyway, here so far aft? Another micrometeorite? She went through to the corridor, checked the various chambers, her own breathing like surf inside her ears. Everything was empty, the lights bright white, or else winking red circles. Twelve hours of air in her tank, and then swap over for other tanks, and within a few score hours—her own death.
Cast a cold eye.
No, not twelve hours: she had already used some of that air, sleeping. And now, as she began the conversation, she was compos mentis enough to wonder if this was a tank she had failed to replenish, or one with a slow puncture. She wondered that because it could be that the conversation was a function of hypoxia, a kind of hallucination. Who was there to converse with, rationally speaking? But the tank seemed fine, and she had plenty of oxygen in her bloodstream. But the conversation continued.
You’re not even from Cygnus. She forced open the first of the corridor bulkheads, and was knocked back by the turbulence. Air on the other side, flooding through. Stupid, she thought: you should have found the location of the breach on this side and patched it before you opened the bulkhead! But, actually, the dust and grits and bits of floating debris were flowing down the corridor and round and into the rear store chamber, and there Ange saw, holding onto the doorway to stop herself being blown right through, that a circular hole, a metre in diameter, had been carved right through the flank of the ship. A brand new hole, perfectly circular. Impossiblity. You’re not from Cygnus and we know you’re not from Cygnus, so why do we call you Cygnics?
—It doesn’t bother us, one way or another. It’s only a name. Names are always arbitrary, when you get right down to it.
How could there be a perfectly circular hole in the side of her ship? Ange shut the store chamber door, and could no longer see the big hole. Seal away the room with the breach. Then she went forward up the corridor. She overrode the command and forced open the next bulkhead, and then the one after that, and then the one after that. Each time she was buffeted and blown back by the air coming through, but she made her way back along and repeated the gesture.
—Why did you go away?
—The furthest way it is possible to go.
—Is that why you hung back, all the way out amongst the Oort cloud? Too scared to come any closer?
—Precisely so.
—The sun? Some people reasoned that there was something about the particular spectrum of our sun that was toxic to your kind. Some even suggested that explained the Fermi Paradox, that something in our sun kept aliens away. But there didn’t seem to be anything odd about our sun. There are billions of stars with similar spectra. Out there.
There was no reply. How odd to be talking to yourself, and yet to be so rude as not to reply! The last of the bulkheads was opened, and Ange started on the remaining doors. There wasn’t going to be much air behind any of these, taken as a whole. It was not clear that the air pressure would be raised to any liveable level. But she had to try.
—I always thought, she said, to pass the time, as much as anything, I always thought the thing the Fermi so-called paradox ignored was our tininess. We’re sand fleas. Why should any alien races want to come visit?
—Oh, no. Oh very much no. That’s not it at all.
—Really?
—Oh very much the opposite! Very much the opposite!
—Why did you come, you Cygnics?
There were seven doors to open, and she opened them all. This distributed whatever air remained in those sealed chambers about the whole ship. But it was at a very low bar.
—The thing, the thing, the puzzling thing, for us, the thing.
This was too annoying. She didn’t have much time left! Come along, she snapped. Don’t stammer and mumble.
—To come to the centre of the universe? Can’t you see how much courage that voyage entails?
Ange had an itch on her chin, and she hunched her shoulders to bring her head down sufficiently to be able to scratch it against the inside of the helmet seal. What? The universe doesn’t have a centre. Don’t be ridiculous. She went back to the rear cockpit, but there was no good news on the air-pressure front. There simply wasn’t enough air to be life sustaining. This thought occupied her mind for a while, and she considered alternatives. Then the notion of the centre of the universe reoccurred to her, and she snapped at her invisible interlocutor (which was herself, presumably):
—The universe doesn’t have a centre! Where is this centre of the centre, where is this omphalos you’re talking about?
—Of course, right here.
—Of course, she scoffed. Here?
—Earth, actually.
—You’re saying Copernicus was wrong? The Earth is the centre of the Universe? Hah!
—It’s why we came. It’s also why it took us such a long time. To come, I mean. We were afraid. It’s like cutting a slit in the veil of the temple and stepping through into the holy of holies.
—What nonsense are you speaking now?
—You keep adding people to people. You keeping making more consciousnesses, and breeding more human beings. You keep doing it!
—Not I, said Ange, fiercely, thinking of her own rationally chosen childlessness.
—That’s exactly it! You know what dark energy is?
But she had no time for that sort of non-question. She had practical matters to address. There were six suit tanks, and she was breathing one of them now. Say: another six hours in this one, plus sixty hours in the other five. Less than three days. Was there a way she could compress, or distil, the tenuous air that now circulated through the cabin? Even if she could construct a machine for doing that, how much time would it give her?
She looked back on what she had done. Why had she opened all those doors? She should have lived in each room in turn, breathing its air until it went bad, and then moving on. That would have given her certain extra hours. But it hardly mattered. Hours were no help when she needed weeks.
Inspired by some left-field insight into something-or-other, Ange threw a question out that chanced to hit the eye of the bull, bullseye, centre-target.
—How many of you are there, anyway?
—Three, came the reply, immediately.
Odd that nobody else had thought of asking that question, during all the earlier interactions between human and Cygnic.
—You left the rest of your people at home?
—Our people?
—Your civilisation.
—We are our civilisations. Three separate, entire civilisations. Come to visit you.
—One from each? Three home worlds? It must be an honour to be the chosen representative.
—You’re being dense and dumb. Listen: I am my civilisation, entire.
—I see, said Ange, who was feeling hungry, and wondering how she might smuggle pieces
of food into her helmet and thence to her mouth without dying of asphyxiation in the process.
—You see?
—I see infinity in a grain of sand, she said, unsure why she did so.
—The thing we have found hardest to grasp is your lack of self-knowledge in this matter, said the alien, haughtily.
—I don’t even know, said Ange, that haughty is a phrase that means anything to you. Who knows what alien emotions are like?
—You’re the alien, said the Cygnic.
—We’re alien to one another. I suppose it’s relative.
—No, said the Cygnic. It’s not. We’re not the aliens. You are.
—I don’t see how that works, Ange replied, a little crossly. What’s sauce for the goose is ... But she couldn’t remember how that phrase concluded.
—There are more than twenty billion human beings on Earth.
—So?
—So, said the alien, as if that summed everything up.
—How many of your species are there? Billions, I don’t doubt. Maybe trillions, since you clearly have the technology to spread yourself all around the galaxy.
—Me.
—Yes, you. How many are there of you?
—Just me.
—That’s what I’m asking.
—I’m answering. Just me.
Ange thought about this, and it sunk in. It percolated through. Oh, she said. So when you said there are three of you ...
—Three separate entities. We united to make this pilgrimage; it’s an almost unprecedented event in Galactic history. But it was important.
—And you are, she said. What: the last of your race? What happened to all the others? Dead?
—There never have been any others. I am the first and last. The same with every other intelligence in the cosmos. Intelligence is singular, of course.
And then, fractal-like, the implications of this statement unfolded and unfolded the more she looked at it. Good grief, she said.
—Life is multifarious, of course. And there are even intelligent hive-like creatures; I’ve met one myself. But in such cases, the hive adds-up to one intelligence. That’s the logic of the universe. A form of life arises, and comes to consciousness and rational capacity. Intelligence is a rare, singular thing. Except here! Here it is an insane profusion. Think of it like this: you travel about meeting people. You meet an intelligent person in this place, and then you meet another intelligent person, and then you meet another intelligent person, and then, madly, you meet a person whose every single cell is intelligent, sentient, self-aware. It would strike you as crazy, impossible, no?
—Good God, said Ange.
—This is the only place in the Universe where this is true, said the alien.
—How can you know that? Ange asked. Surely you haven’t visited every star!
—This is the only place, the alien repeated. The structure and form of the cosmos itself shows that to be true. There can only be one centre, after all.
—What?
—Intelligence is a profound thing. Intelligent observation interacts with and alters the nature of reality itself, at a quantum level. You know this already! You know about your cat-in-boxes, and particle-waves, and observational biases. But you haven’t thought it through. My intelligence alters the universe through which I move, but it’s only one intelligence, so it doesn’t make much of an impact. But here! Billions of intelligences, all concentrated in one place! Such a huge force of focussed consciousness, hundreds of millions of times more intense than all other cosmic intelligence put together! It’s a kind of insanity! It has wholly distorted spacetime. And the more intelligences you add to the core the more that is true. It’s like a black hole, except that the effect is not quasi-gravitational, but something the reverse. You have the science to see it, although you don’t understand it. You call it dark energy.
—That can’t be right, said Ange. Dark energy is something spread out through the whole cosmos.
—No it isn’t.
—It’s pushing the galaxies apart!
—Yes, yes, yes, alas. It is doing that. But it is not spread out. It is concentrated here.
—That’s not what our observations lead us to believe.
—Your observations are entirely compromised by the thing they are observing! What you see as a huge, distant structure is actually a tiny mote of dust upon the lens of your telescope. Dark energy is your own unique contribution to the universe.
Ange went through, got herself some food. She held it in front of her helmet for a while, and pondered how to get it in her mouth. She could certainly hold her breath long enough to get the helmet off, and the food in, but there was always a risk that she would fumble her grip, and have to scrabble around to get the helmet back on. Was it a risk worth taking? She would be dead soon, but had no desire to die sooner than absolutely necessary. On the other hand, she was hungry.
—For a while I couldn’t believe it. I sought out another, and s/he didn’t believe it either. The distortion certainly looked like consciousness; but how could there be so much of that in one tiny place! And what would happen if we went there—would it destroy our own minds? We debated it for a long time. A third joined us. Finally we decided to come. Approaching, we encroached upon the limit of your telecommunications, and were able to see your self-imaging. It was a shock. So profligate with thought, so promiscuous with consciousness! In an individual body cells die and are born all the time, but they’re just cells, they’re nothing more. But you! You treat the vast significance of individual consciousness as the most common thing in the universe! You are breathtakingly cavalier with individual life—and and and yet, then again, why wouldn’t you be? New life is being born all the time on your world. Oh, insane profusion! It explains the uniquely turbulent nature of the concentration of this force; the raging furnace, consciousness being continually snuffed out, but continually replaced and more than replaced. It’s like looking into a solar maelstrom ... and yet you live in it, as calmly as a flower in the dirt!
—Hard to believe.
—You said it! It keeps powering up, growing and growing, this concentration of the most powerful force in the cosmos. We came, we three, in part to see if there was anything we could do about it.
—And is there?
—It has destroyed my two companions.
—Oh, said Ange, surprised. I’m sorry.
—We were giddy. We were intoxicated by the glory and seediness and splendour of it all. When they died I took my craft away, but my own consciousness has been ... poisoned, I suppose you might say ... as well. So I have come back. I might as well expire here as anywhere. Here at the heart of the cosmos.
The next question occurred to Ange only very belatedly: can you help me? I’ve suffered a series of malfunctions and don’t have enough air.
—I know. I cannot help you. I’m sorry.
—Oh, said Ange. Then: ah well.
—I have a question, though.
—Shoot.
—The shape of the cosmos is big bang, rapid expansion and then final contraction and crunch. The rise of your ... multiform species has overwhelmed that natural rhythm. So I suppose I want to ask: how can you not see it? But immersing myself in your communications and culture, I suppose I see the answer to that. The universe has renewed itself, systole and diastole, innumerable times; but your rise has interrupted that. Unless you do something it will all end in entropy. Can you bear the thought? Won’t you do something about that?
—You’re asking the wrong woman, said Ange, putting the food away in one of her suit pockets. I’ve got three days left, max.
—It’s not a very well-formed question, I suppose, said the alien, mournfully.
He, she, it—didn’t speak again.
***
Ange took the plunge, more out of boredom than hunger. Deep breath, pop up the helmet, morsel in mouth, helmet down again. Then she checked through the ship. She even managed to sleep—a nap, at any rate.
The next t
hing that happened was the arrival of a military sloop, the Glory of Carthage, burning its candle-end fierce in the night to decelerate after a high-g insertion. Ange was relieved and grateful to be rescued, of course; although they hadn’t come for her. The Cygnic craft had popped up on ten thousand sensor screens, and the Glory of Carthage had been the nearest. Of course they had rushed to that location: the Oort cloud was forbiddingly distant, but the space between Mars and Earth was thronged with craft of every kind.
They arrived too late: the Cygnic had gone, vanished, dead presumably, and he, she, its craft had vanished. So they took Ange on board and interviewed her and debriefed her and took her conversation with last Cygnic very seriously indeed. But that didn’t mean they were able to answer the alien’s last question. Still: centre of the cosmos, after all! That’s something, isn’t it? Poor old Copernicus, thought Ange, drifting to sleep finally. Wrong after all.
She was alive, despite everything. Her flight home began with a 3g acceleration burst (the sort of thing only the military could provide), followed by some fraternising with the physically attractive crew. The flush of near death and survival touched even Ange’s distant soul. And in her new eminence, the only homo sapiens sapiens to have talked directly with the Cygnics, she found herself the focus of a great deal of attention. In this, without a murmur, she indulged herself; and broke her years-long period of celibacy with the crewman who appealed the most to her. She was not too old. It wasn’t too late for her, she told herself, to return home and give birth to a new civilisation, entire.
