Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  “Completely convincing, no doubt.”

  “In context and fulfilling.”

  “But of course fabricated.”

  The bird smiled. This did not work at all on a beak. “Detail is seldom well carried forward by cycled memories such as yours.”

  “But they at least are ours.”

  “There is no clear distinction.”

  “You add and heighten. The sheets just then were a light blue silk. Cool but not slick. I doubt that I could recall that.”

  “True. Which way would you rather have it?”

  “Or her scent. It persisted until I fully breathed in again.”

  “I will have to tune that down then.”

  “You’re dodging my point—”

  “I think the reverse is true.”

  Irritatingly quick, this fowl. “I can’t tell which is mine.”

  “The interpolation procedures I use are akin to yours. When you remember naturally, you also stitch in minutiae to fill out your own internal picture-dramas.”

  Nigel nodded sourly. “From now on, thanks, I shall much prefer to hobble forward with my own thin remembrance.”

  “The past is what survives.”

  “In the long run—”

  “Nothing survives.” The bird gave a credible imitation of being amused, eyes dancing, but its voice remained flat.

  “Even you?”

  “Let me be more exact in this serial acoustic representation. No thing survives.”

  “You’re not a thing?”

  With a pang Nigel felt himself getting drawn away, when a deep part of him wanted only to luxuriate in the immediacy of Nikka’s memory. His damnable curiosity always got the better of him.

  “The ‘I’ who presumes to speak for you is not a thing either.”

  “Um. You have no physical substrate?”

  “For the moment it is convenient. In the long run it will not be.”

  “So the mechs were right. Electron-positron plasmas lie ahead.”

  “That destiny shall unfold on a truly immense time scale. The decay of all large particles—‘baryons,’ in your terms—will be slow.”

  “But there’s a finite lifetime to it all. Stars run down. The center cannot hold. Nobody’s going to be sailing bright eternity.”

  “You are doing it now, primate. There will never be more time ahead than at this instant. And infinities are a matter of taste.”

  “Ummm. The positron plasma, I saw it. It’ll happen. Still, it seemed a bit like Chicken Little to be fretting about it.”

  The bird wavered just an instant. Nigel wondered if this reflected the time for it to consult itself, or rummage through the Galactic Library, searching out primate childhood stories. He envisioned seeker programs darting down musty info-corridors, sniffing for

  Little, Chicken; see: fowl/consciousness/cultural inventory.

  “You are correct. There is a more immediate danger.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s anything that our order of being can do anything about?”

  “Scarcely. The vacuum is unstable.”

  Nigel grimaced. Was it a primate quirk to be irked by this bird, presuming that he could instantly access all the jargon in his own tongue? No, probably just a symptom of age.

  “Which means?” he finally conceded.

  “The presumed quantum mechanical ground state of this universe is not in fact a ground state. It is metastable.”

  “Um. So it can . . .”

  “Fall to the lowest quantum state. A state in which all particle masses, spins, and other fundamental properties will be different.”

  Metastable conditions could decay at any time, like a radioactive nucleus. Of all conceivable threats, this was surely the most elliptical. “Cut the coyness.”

  “All information lodged in particles will be lost when these properties change. It is called the Tumult.”

  “Everything gets erased.”

  “And the universe begins anew.”

  “That’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Among other points.”

  For the moment he did not feel like asking for the “other points.” Best to constrain conversations with beings like this, or he would be completely lost. “That’s quite enough for the moment. Do—did—the mechs know?”

  “The Exalteds—the higher order mechanicals—did. To their lower orders they explained that the electron-positron gas was their final goal.”

  “I saw that.” Above the horizon had soared hard, cold destinies, sheets of living light.

  “The same fundamental science, however, may apply to surviving the Tumult.”

  It sent into his mind a flash-image: a gray, seamless wall. Onrushing. Germinated at a point by a nanosecond’s handclap, then swelling, engorged on energies of the vacuum, snowplowing out. Behind the front, sparkling births of blank specks, a blackboard fresh for God’s writing. The Tumult.

  “So they were in fact worried about this? An even worse danger?”

  “They labor upon this now.”

  “And all our feud with mechs . . . ?”

  “It was an inevitable feature of lower life-forms. Think of it as resembling predator-prey relations, which strike a statistical equilibrium in the wild. The mechanicals had gotten out of equilibrium. Their harvesting of the Phylum Magnetic was like—” it paused, “a squirrel scavenging your lunch, which you had left on your picnic table, while you answered a telephone call.”

  “So what we saw as a grand struggle—”

  “It has become an inefficiency.”

  Oceans of blood spilled, minds crushed like fresh flowers beneath a steel boot. “Inefficiency.”

  “The Highers wished a resolution. This was—”

  “Let me guess. The easiest.”

  “Of course. In your way of thinking, at least.”

  “And you mean the term ‘at least’ quite precisely.”

  “Precisely.”

  SEVEN

  Hard Copy

  Killeen found the Restorer by himself. When he came back with the Shibo he looked tired but smiled a lot. Toby found the Shibo very much like his memory of her. Besen wasn’t so sure.

  “How was Resurrection City?” he asked Killeen.

  “Had to go through three Lanes to find it. Mechs’d messed it up pretty bad.”

  The Shibo said very precisely to Toby, “I do wish that you had not removed my chips.”

  Toby seemed to remember her speaking in a more clipped way, quick and to the point. He figured that the Restorer had installed a speaking augmentation to correct for damage. “I had my reasons.”

  “I had mine.” She stared at Toby until he looked away.

  The next waxing Killeen seemed out of sorts. It got worse for three more days and then Killeen and Shibo had an argument right in camp, loud and abrasive and ending with her throwing a pot at him.

  Next day she moved out of his bunk and made her own.

  She wouldn’t talk to anybody about it. Killeen of course never did.

  Toby could find no way to approach her, she seemed prickly, all angles and angers. Finally he asked her straight out how she liked her new state. “I don’t,” she said.

  “Rather be in chip?”

  He meant it as light and friendly but her face clouded. “Yeasay.”

  “Heysay, life’s more than any Aspect.”

  “I was a Personality.”

  “Well, yeasay, but—”

  “This way is analog. In digital, you can . . .”

  “Can what?”

  “You would not know.”

  “Try me.”

  “You can . . . fly.” She shook her head violently. “No, that is not it. Better than flying.”

  She tried to talk about it but all Toby could get was that being a real person was like crawling through mud that you could never wash off. Digital was clean and pure and, well, something more, too.

  She kept trying to tell him how it was and getting frustrated at the words that came out of he
r mouth, as though they belonged to somebody else. He guessed that in some way he could not understand, they did.

  Shibo took some Bishops and went to live a short distance away right after that. Killeen didn’t talk about her and by that time Toby had a hundred other things to do. The Family wanted to spread out through the esty. Success, or at least survival, brought out the worst. People who fought well together turned disagreeable. He worked with them, using some bits of Cermo that operated something like Aspects and Faces working in concert. Besen took up a lot of his time, too, but that was not work.

  Killeen had his morose times but held the Family together when some factions wanted to take off into other Lanes. Toby thought Killeen was doing a pretty fine job and told him so and they got along better. But his father had his moods. Killeen wouldn’t talk to Shibo at all anymore.

  Pretty soon Toby just gave up on the whole Shibo thing. There was plenty to do, yeasay.

  EIGHT

  The Thirst That from the Soul Doth Rise

  Ah, you disgusting old fart, Nigel thought. Hopeless. He could call up the pictures, sounds, aromas, with utter ease—

  NASA. Dear dead old Post Office of a space program, when what the world needed was Federal Express.

  He had said that to Nikka, over thirty thousand years ago.

  NASA. Both telescopes and rockets were round right cylinders, each with a point. Masculine tech, right-angled in all its particulars, wedded to the graceful curves of the feminine; collaboration.

  Cybervores. He had watched them feeding once. Not so much beings as moving appetites, organizations of currents and plasma that could feed upon metals, ionizing them to produce satisfying gauzy halos of effervescent tasty potentials.

  So many sharp, clear memories.

  So deeply, thoroughly, not his own. Not now.

  Unearned memories stick in the mind, give it an emptiness that lies beyond words.

  He had known the truth in that small, passing moment when he met Killeen. Sure enough, the old frontal lobes yielded up the instant datum that he had met this man before. Had caused his people to be cast down into planetary darkness, to suffer torment, to resist and trim and emerge through millennia of pain.

  But Nigel could remember nothing more of Killeen.

  Been edited out, he realized.

  He wondered for a long while, which number he was. Two, eight, ten? Measuring the span of time, the scattered event-slabs, it had to be more. Fifty?

  “That’s why,” he said to the wall of blank blackness that sheared away half the space. It was like standing next to a wall that absorbed every sound, giving nothing back.

  WHY DO YOU ASK?

  “I don’t want to be recalled and used. Not the next time some glitch surfaces in the Syntony.”

  THAT MAY BE GRANTED. BUT IT IS NOT YOUR RIGHT.

  “I’m not talking bloody rights.”

  YOU DO NOT HAVE THE PHYLUM RANK TO EVEN PHRASE THE QUESTION.

  “Phrase it for me.”

  THE SYNTONY SHALL DISPOSE.

  And that was all it would ever say.

  NINE

  The Pain of Eternity

  Naked chance means order springing forth from chaos.”

  He was sitting on a wooden bench. Back of the lecture hall. Cold morning, fingers too chilled to take notes. Cambridge. Smell of freshly poured asphalt from the window cocked open a mere inch.

  The lecturer looked as bored as the class. Black robe tattered, ostentatiously so. Worn over a tweed jacket, maroon trousers. Awful. Nigel yawned, stretched, wished for tea.

  “If the fully developed eye—yours, for example—evolved in one leap of untamed chance, in one generation, that would be utterly unlikely. Eyes came into the world by gradual addition of slightly better traits. The difficulty comes when we try to imagine higher orders than ourselves. We must argue that the odds against untamed chance giving forth fully fashioned, perfect beings are remote, impossibly remote.”

  Nigel sat upright. If evolution was universal, then this rule applied to deities as well. They would arise from incremental change. And none be perfect.

  The Syntony included.

  “I’m competent to deal with a gentleman who is a bit worn out. In fact, I’m adept.”

  “I know. My memory is not completely gone, you’ll find. I believe I can even find the right places without a map.”

  “Just feel your way along? I can help with that.”

  “So I see.” The warmth never waned for him. “Um. Such an earth mother you are.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “Well, at least you can’t talk.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Talk later.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Later, yes, much better. There, right.”

  A long drifting time. Gray curtains of light folded him.

  “I thought you said the advantage of this way was that I couldn’t talk?”

  “Talk later, I said. This is partly later.”

  “Eliot.”

  “I know it’s bloody Eliot.”

  “How wonderful, to have such a lofty conversation while—”

  Lounging back on their massive bed, Nikka laughed despite herself. “Can’t you do your medical some other time? I was just getting in the mood.”

  “I’ll recalibrate my secretors. Add some hormones. Give you an even better run for your money.”

  “I wasn’t planning on paying money, and I didn’t have running in mind.”

  He groaned as he tuned digital controls that the peeling had exposed. “A literalist! God spare the sacred erotic impulse from their kind.”

  “I don’t understand why you keep me when I don’t want to be kept.”

  Nigel was sitting in a stiff-backed chair, as if for a job interview. In a way, it was.

  YOU ARE THE ORIGINAL. WE KEEP YOU IN ORDER TO CHECK THE FIDELITY OF COPIES.

  “That uber-Nigel I saw once?”

  THAT AND OTHERS.

  “So I’m kept within a constricted parameter space?”

  TO BE CERTAIN THAT MIXING WITH FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT INFLUENCES DOES NOT CHANGE YOU INALTERABLY.

  “I want to change inalterably.”

  HIGHER PHYLA HAVE HIGHER USES. THE SYNTONY IS ENGAGED IN PURSUITS FOR WHICH YOUR STANDARDIZED, FIDUCIARY REPRESENTATION IS ESSENTIAL. THIS KNOWLEDGE SHOULD PROPERLY BE ENOUGH FOR YOU.

  “You don’t know me all that bloody well, do you?”

  WE KNOW YOU UTTERLY.

  “You never will.”

  WE CAN SIMULATE YOU WITHIN FINE TOLERANCES.

  “A copy’s not the original.”

  THAT IS THE POINT THE SYNTONY WISHES YOU TO UNDERSTAND.

  “I shall wear my trousers rolled.”

  WHAT?

  Many millennia ago, they had made the Snark. Only rudimentary elements of what was to be the Syntony had spanned a tenuous web over the galaxy then, machines searching out life, protracted voyages down stretching corridors of eons and parsecs. The Snark was a low grade device, but records of it—that is, the digital self—had to remain somewhere. What bloody use was a Galactic Library if you couldn’t look up such?—The fossil debris of a life lived and loved and gone?

  So they brought the Snark to him.

  You are something like the form I knew, it allowed.

  To Nigel the Snark was a floating cloud, green electrical forks working within. Nothing like the sphere he had actually seen near the moon. But this was not real space he was in, either. “Remember the universe of essences?”

  You are in it still.

  “And you?”

  I still am not. You are a spontaneous product of matter. We lack windows you possess.

  He was surprised, something he had thought impossible now. Even here, they carried their baggage. “And the other way ’round, I expect.”

  As must be. All windows are partial.

  “Some are rather larger.”

  You seem more varied now, greater than before.

  “I’ve . . . traveled.”
>
  There are still the currents in you that I reported upon. In our Directory you had to stand for your civilization, a raw sampling, added to the torrent of electromagnetics your world sent out so unthinkingly.

  “Pleasant way to put it. We yammer a lot.”

  At that time you said, “The damned speak frantically.”

  “Damned right.”

  Mortality does not damn. You in the universe of essences have virtues.

  “Damned lucky, maybe.” Nigel laughed airily, transparent. “But still damned.”

  That same spice. Laughter.

  Later he realized that the Snark was a recording, averaged over all the representations it had in the several million years of its lifespan. It was not an individual, but a set. This trait he could not assess. When one met an old friend, one assumed that it was the same person. Cells replaced here and there, more lines in the face—but the same.

  In the long run, living embedded in and among the Syntony, the question was meaningless.

  Just as futile was figuring what Nigel’s family flight—Nikka, Benjamin, Angelina, Ito, where/when were they now?—forward in time, voyaging through the Esty, had meant.

  Mechs lived there, fought with humanity. Yet Nigel had seen them destroyed in their fevered ecstasies.

  Did that mean they would be back? That unknown struggles would overlap and rage through a future altered but not stopped by the Trigger Codes?

  Apparently. Perhaps the Walmsley-Amajhi clan had visited something genuinely quantum-mechanical. The stops in the Transits could have been state vectors of potential. Some of those futures would in fact occur. Others were erased by the mech plagues. He would have to voyage again forward through a Worm, to discover which.

  Yet if the Grey Mech had killed them all, he was quite sure he would not be thinking over the problem. He would not be.

  So he confined himself to thinking about cases he could fathom, at least possibly.