Conmergence: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction
Page 7
"Deepshine," he blurted out her name, stupid, clumsy, a fool dextrorsum who never knew the right thing to say.
"Brightsharp." She rushed forward and merged her juncture with his. She had done it again, as only she could; she had made him feel that he had said just the right thing.
#
They had met for the first time in Oppat Repository, three cycles ago.
She was there with a visiting group of students. Researchers of all kinds regularly toured the Repository, enabling the monks to share the latest developments in recovered or discovered knowledge. Brightsharp served as the group's guide to the huge building.
Though not yet a monk himself, Brightsharp had been raised in Oppat Repository. His sinistorsum twin had died in childhood, from Bleak's Syndrome, which meant that Brightsharp had little chance of retwinning in adulthood. Physically, he was capable, since there were treatments for the surviving twin of Bleak's Syndrome, but socially -- that was another matter. In a more barbarous era, he would have been killed outright, from superstitious hate. In this age of renaissance, he had received the best education a child could want, right in the heart of the largest known Repository of the Ancients. It was understood he would become a monk.
He had never wanted any other life. Recovering and expanding the work of the ancients provided constant puzzles to solve, a giant game in which each victory of understanding over ignorance unfolded to reveal new mysteries. The monks were all post-adult dextrorsums or sinistorsums whose retwins had died, so they were solitaries, like Brightsharp. It seemed perfectly natural for him to follow in their footsteps.
Until he saw Deepshine.
The first stop along the tour was the Historium.
"Here the ancients preserved the history of our universe," Brightsharp explained to the group. They bombarded the display with a polite rain of interest. "Many of the storage strands containing the information were destroyed during the ages of barbarism, and many more decayed during the ages of neglect after the Repository was lost. But we have since been able to recreate much of what we think was stored there.
"The ancients discovered, and we have reconfirmed with modern science, that the universe is much, much older than a few hundred thousand generations, as was thought during the ages of barbarism. The time periods we deal with in cosmology are so vast that the ancients invented a new period of time called seconds, to measure it. One microsecond or 10-6 seconds, is equal to one trillion cycles. The universe itself began a little over one microsecond ago. Life has only existed for a few billion cycles. The entire evolution of sentience – our kind is the only known example we have yet discovered -- is just a fraction of an era that itself lasts only a millionth of a 'second'."
He felt a shy patter of attention on his body, and when he ventured a quick return volley of his own, he interlaced senses with a perfectly shaped sinistorsum. It was obvious from the jaggedness of her lateral juncture that she had only recently entered adulthood by separating from her childhood twin.
She flashed her name and a question.
"Deepshine here, sir. Could you explain how the monks know from the corpses of bursts that our universe is doomed? I've heard that but don't understand it."
It was a common question, one Brightsharp had answered glibly a dozen tours before. For some reason, he faltered this time as he flashed his reply.
"Uh, well, it isn't the only evidence. We, that is, the monks, I'm not really a monk, uhm..." He realized he was flashing directly at her. Embarrassed at his rudeness, Brightsharp diffused his focus back onto the whole group. "The energy of the burst, which our territorium depends upon for life, comes from the annihilation of quarks and antiquarks. The burst began to shine a few billion cycles ago, and it will continue to shine for few billion cycles, which is how long it will take the antimatter and matter inside the burst to annihilate each other. After the annihilation phase ends, a corpse of the burst will remain, made solely of matter. All the other of billions of bursts in space follow a similar lifecycle; the particles of our territorium, which are made of matter, were created from the remnants of such bursts. The reason is that there is a basic imbalance in the universe between the amounts of matter and antimatter quarks. We calculate that for every thirty million antiquarks there are thirty million and one quarks. What does it mean for life? It means that one day, every burst in the universe will sputter and die. All that will be left in space is a bare remnant of matter quarks. The universe is asymmetric."
"Asymmetric. Like you," wagged some wit from the back of the group.
A bitter pun, a clever insult; it evoked a ripple of laughter from the crowd at Brightsharp's expense. They looked no different than he did, solitary until they retwinned. They too, were asymmetric. But for them it would not be permanent.
Without meaning too, he darted a sensory volley at Deepshine. She did not jiggle with laughter. But neither would she return his tentative bombardment.
Brightsharp kept his words precise and professional.
"Furthermore, as it expands and cools, the universe will eventually lack enough heat or energy to maintain matter in the form that we know it. At a certain critical temperature, a first order phase transition will sweep across the universe. Matter itself, what piteous dregs remain, will freeze to death in a process called hadronization. The quarks that make up matter will no longer be able to maintain the massive high energy particles that enable the complex chemistry of life to exist. Quarks will freeze into lumps of two and three."
"The end of the universe," someone flashed.
"Not at all," corrected Brightsharp. "After the phase transition, the universe will endure, freezing cold, nearly empty, and eternally expanding, for more than 10^10^10 seconds." He chuckled at the absurdity of that abysmal stretch of frozen dying. No one joined him. "Our lives register no meaning against the long eons of the universe."
A flash challenged him directly.
"I can't believe that." It was Deepshine.
Alas that Spring should vanish with the rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that in the Branches sang
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows?
Neither of them had planned to keep meeting one another. They were drawn against their better judgments. One secret rendezvous led to another. They had not intended to mingle junctures, but each tantalizing hint of how full retwinning would taste made it harder to stop. Finally, they realized they must make a choice, before biology made retwinning a mortal imperative. Retwin or stop seeing one another.
Brightsharp would not ask Deepshine to retwin. She had more to lose than he did. Social custom demanded that twins marry opposing twins, and Deepshine's twin, Shinedeep, already had in mind a match with a pair named Reachfar and Farreach. If Deepshine had had another pair of twins in mind, Shinedeep would consider them, but if Deepshine retwinned with Brightsharp, Shinedeep would be left single -- and shamed.
Deepshine declared that she was prepared to flout social custom to retwin with Brightsharp. They made an appointment to meet in one of their usual places. Once retwinned, they planned to flee the Repository, leave Oppat Territorium altogether, and settle in a distant territorium where no-one knew their history. Brightsharp knew he should talk her out of this folly, but instead he hurried through a garden of the Repository, on his way to retwin.
The immensity of what he was about to do suddenly overtook him, and he stumbled to a halt. He, Brightsharp, the twinless freak, was about to retwin. A sinistorsum wanted to join him.
Sharpbright, I wish you could be here to see this. It had been cycles since he'd allowed himself to think of his dead twin. Now he allowed the memories to return in full. Brightsharp drew in the patter of the garden: the wind blown tickle of the tufted herbs; the small, sharp probes of tiny floating things; the plodding zip-zap-zip-zap of a tube burrower nosing the tufts for food; the swirls of vagrant sensory interchanges churned into random whirlywigs by the wind. When Sharpb
right died, a monk named Truelance had told Brightsharp that his twin would live on in a garden. The ancients had believed a literal garden awaited the dead, but modern monks taught a more subtle form of immortality consistent with science. After the complex particles making up a person disintegrated, they decayed into constituent particles. The tufts and tubes that fruited the territorium trapped and recollided these particles into heavier combinations, completing the circle. Sharpbright lived on in the elementary particles cycling through the changing patterns of life.
That had never been comfort enough before. After all, Brightsharp knew better than anyone that the seeming ability of life to reverse entropy was only an illusion, paid for in energy doomed to run out. The "circle of life" was actually better compared to a spiral, leading ever down. A "twist" of the spiral, whether breaking apart heavy particles into small ones or coalescing small particles into heavier ones, required a transition from one energy state to another. In heat equilibrium, no work was possible. The direction had to lead "down", to a lower state, because if there were no way to dump the excess heat generated by the work, the organism would fry itself. This had nothing to do with whether the work was being used to create heat or cold; a refrigeration device generated excess heat, in total, in order to create a localized area of coolness.
An organism could circle an infinite number of twists down the spiral only if it had access to an infinite tower of states. However, the cosmological constant, which the ancients had discovered must exist to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe, meant that there was a minimum temperature to the universe -- a bottom to the spiral. As long as life could operate above that temperature, life could subsist. Once the wavelength of thermal radiation grew larger than the size of the radiating system, no further cooling would be possible.
Even the Project could only delay the inevitable, not guarantee the survival of life and sentience. Brightsharp had devoted himself to the Project because it was all he had, not because it gave him true hope. Why scrabble after one more fraction of briefness when it could never be enough?
Ironic that only now he would have to leave Oppat Repository and the Project did he finally come to believe in its worth. If the Project could buy just one more cycle for sentience, it would be worth it. In fact, never before had he felt so greedy for time, time to grow old with Deepshine, time to lavish on the offspring he imagined them budding, time for their offspring to bud generation upon generation to come. The sweetness of the garden, the briefness of life: if it were part of her, it would be enough.
Was it Sharpbright's approval that Brightsharp felt wafting through the garden, or only his own happiness reflected back at him?
I'm already late. Deepshine will worry. Brightsharp forced himself out of the reverie. But he flashed at the garden before he left: Thank you.
Would you that spangle of Existence spend
About the Secret – quick about it, Friend!
A hair perhaps divides the False and True –
And upon what, prithee, may life depend?
Deepshine arrived at the rendezvous early, all her worldly possessions trimmed to fit in one small container. She felt a shuffle in the distance and sent a volley of sensory bombardment into the dimness. To her shock, the shape that approached her was not Brightsharp, but one of the monks.
Before she could concoct a likely excuse for her presence in this isolated corner of the Repository, the monk addressed her.
"I know who you are, and why you are here."
Deepshine quivered with shame and anger. "Do you?" she challenged. "Can you really understand?"
"I was young once," replied the monk. "We hoped that Brightsharp would give this up on his own, or that we could trust your sense of responsibility to your twin to restrain you to do what is right. But, obviously, we must intervene."
"There's nothing wrong with what we plan!"
"If you believed that, why would you scuttle about in secret, like vermin after scraps? No, child, you know what you propose to do is dishonorable. But perhaps you have not considered how it will harm Brightsharp -- and all of our species, if you continue with this selfish course."
"Harm Brightsharp?" she scoffed. "He is not a post-adult. It is harm to force him to live as though he were already one of you!"
"And you would be his salvation," sneered the monk. Deepshine recoiled at the blaze of his scorn. He made an obvious effort to gentle his next flashes. "Child, you have no idea who Brightsharp is. You cannot comprehend his needs."
"I will know once we retwin." They would become one.
"And by then it would be too late. We have raised twinless children here in Oppat Repository for hectocycles. Normally, the survivor of diseases such as Bleak's Syndrome leaves a survivor who is half a person, mentally retarded and socially incapable."
"That doesn't describe Brightsharp at all."
"No, it doesn't. Occasionally, a twinless displays something else, a form of intelligence just as abnormal, just as imbalanced, if you will, but of great value. Brightsharp's mind is such a mind. It is as if, being freed of the need to have a well-rounded personality, all that remains of his mind is focused on one kind of thinking, a deep mathematical kind of thought that surpasses the abilities of most people. None of the other twinless children in his generation have the capacity to share the work of the monks. Brightsharp not only can share in it, he contributes to it. He is vital to it. I do not think we will be able to finish the Project in time without him."
"I don't care."
"The future of our species depends upon it."
"What project could be so all-important?" demanded Deepshine.
"The survival of our people against the coming destruction. The Phase Transition."
Deepshine laughed uneasily. "Do not think me as ignorant as all that, monk! Brightsharp has spoken of it many times -- I know he is studying it -- and I know this 'Phase Transition' is billions of cycles in the future."
The monk pattered her hard, apparently trying to decide how much more to tell her. "By the time the temperature drops to the critical level that will trigger the phase transition, there will not be enough energy left for a civilization to draw upon to create the vehicle we need to survive the transition. The Phase Transition itself is far off, but our response to it must begin now. If we are not already too late."
"How could it be too late?" asked Deepshine. This paranoid vision of apocalypse repelled her, yet she found it hard to disbelieve entirely. Brightsharp had hinted... "Isn't there already a Ship?"
The monk flashed in anger, "He revealed that?" confirming what Brightsharp had only implied. "Yes, we have recovered a vehicle, if you can call it that, for it is larger than a thousand territoriums, left by the ancients. Already, kilocycles ago, they were preparing themselves for the inevitable. But their civilization fell before they could complete the Project. And we do not know how to finish the vehicle. To do that, we have to recapture the level of mathematics they used, especially concerning topological flaws. Brightsharp..."
"...isn't the only mathematical genius in the thousands of territoriums in the universe. He does not need to be part of your Project."
"He wants to be a part of it. He volunteered to be one of those to travel on the Ship. If he gives that up for you, a part of him will always regret it. Resent it. Repent it."
Shaken, Deepshine could not think of a reply.
"Did it never occur to you that perhaps seemingly bad things happen for a greater purpose?" the monk asked with glowing words, soft like prayers. "That Brightsharp was detwinned early for a purpose? A purpose greater than himself, greater than you, greater than all of us? Can you really compete with that?"
Deepshine fluttered a wan negative. Then, with a sob that wracked her body, she fled the Repository.
#
When Brightsharp arrived, several microcycles later, he found the monk waiting for him in place of Deepshine.
"Truelance," Brightsharp said in surprise. "I... uh, was just..."
"She came and left," said Truelance.
"What?" he said, staring stupidly.
"She left a message. She could not bring shame upon her twin, Shinedeep. Child, I'm sorry. She hoped you would understand."
Brightsharp floundered in silence for a nanocycle, while the territorium turned summersaults in his gut. The universe laughed at him. "Yes. I understand."
Strange, is it not? That of the myriads who
Before us pass’d the door of Darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the Road,
Which to discover we must travel too.
The assembly flashed and pattered politely as Brightsharp was introduced.
"Please welcome Brightsharp + Prosthetic, primary contributors to finding a viable solution to the Winwage + Holdwell’s Paradox. Brightsharp + Prosthetic will be coordinating with the community leaders of Oppat to oversee the exodus to the Ship."
As a polite fiction, the introductory speakers referred to Brightsharp in the plural, as if he were retwinned. New technology had allowed Brightsharp to retwin with a prosthetic sinistorsum, which through biofeedback technology provided his mind with the illusion of a mirroring mind. Undoubtedly, it was a tremendous health breakthrough. But psychologically, his mind was not fooled. In his subjective experience of self, no amount of mental masturbation could compensate for his awareness of his own incompletion.
If only he had not flirted with the sensation of retwinning with Deepshine, the emptiness might not have stung so sharply. He wished he could curse her, hate her, blame her. But the prosthetic mirrored back his curses at him with echoes of the truth, that despite everything, he missed her, yearned for her and craved her.