Starmind
Page 27
I/we have also reconstructed Eva's story, and made it part of mine/ours, partly for the additional perspective it adds, and mostly to show that I/we can. Reb knew her, and so the Starmind does, and always will. No one will ever completely die again . . . so long as there is one brain in the Starmind that ever knew him or her. I'm teaching the unborn daughter in my belly about Eva right now—since Rand and Jay are going to give her Eva's name.
* * *
"O wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, and foolish notion."
Robert Burns was right. The gift has been given. Take it . . .
* * *
What has happened to our species may seem unprecedented. But it is not. We have made other Jumps of comparable magnitude, up the evolutionary scale. From the sea to the mud to the trees to the mountaintops to the skies . . . and now to space itself, free of the womb altogether.
There is less than no future in being a Neo-Neanderthal . . . for the next evolutionary Jump is already in progress. A Starmind of nine and a half billion brains possesses the necessary complexity and depth to begin to make sense of the Cosmic Background Babble. Deep in the Oort Cloud where the comets play, far from the sun, something is presently nearing completion that will help, a thing that has no analog in human experience. The infant is listening, learning to hear; one day it will learn to talk. There are as many stars in this galaxy as there are neurons in a brain: imagine a mind made up of a galaxy of Starminds!
For millions of years, an endless succession of generations of upright, lonely apes have gazed up in dumb yearning at the stars, at the infinite depth and breadth of the universe, at the teasing promise of the other 99.9999+% of reality. Now, at long last, we have come home.
Join us—as soon as you are ready!
I am Rhea Paixao, and my message to you is: the stars are here.