by John Love
And whatever made the universe which made Her, was that acting consciously, or blindly? How high up the orders of magnitude do you have to go before you get to the final sentience? Maybe you never do. Maybe it’s neverending. Or maybe there isn’t a final sentience. Maybe sentience is the inferior quality, and doesn’t have a higher ultimate version but belongs lower down. Maybe the final nature of the final living thing is nonsentience.
We don’t see evidence of sentience in the universe, or even nonsentience, or indeed anything at all, but we wouldn’t. The universe is too big. We don’t see it all, or even a meaningful part of it. Orders of magnitude: the fraction we see is incomparably vast and we’re incomparably small. Almost nothing.
If it was sentient we could at least say it was a higher form of us, but I believe it isn’t. I believe it’s not alive enough to know it can ever die. I think its constructs, like Faith, aren’t the work of conscious thought or intelligence, but of blind reflex. They’re secretions. And we’re the sentient and thinking lesser parts of a vast but nonsentient and nonthinking organism.
My ship was nine percent sentient. It died like I always imagined Jeeves would have died, tidily and thoughtfully. And one of the best insults to be found in literature comes from a Jeeves book, from Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Agatha: “There are times, Bertie, when I think you are barely sentient.”
But maybe not an insult. Nonsentience is where everything starts and where everything returns, full circle: the beginning and the end. Our sentience is only a staging-point, in the middle. The last living thing—the final, ultimate living thing—is as unthinking as the first. Irony doesn’t come any bigger, or any more compelling.
•
All my life I’ve lived by nuances and inflexions, things unseen and unsaid. There’s a kind of vertigo in trying to guess their magnitude, because it might be infinite.
It seems years, not days, since I last came to Sakhra.The engagement with Her still hasn’t ended; its effects will come next. Its effects will be like a srahr, seen as a line from its edge or an oval from other angles, but never as a full disc. I never saw or did anything during the engagement with Her which wasn’t the tip of something larger or the opening movement of something unseen.
What She gave us was like a srahr, either zero or infinity. It may make us turn away from each other and regress, or it may make us go into the universe and find out how it works, and if it really is living and really does make its own antibodies. Things like Faith were secreted to neutralise things like the Commonwealth. But this time, they may not.
I always professed indifference to the speculation about what She is. I’m the last person who should have found out, but now I know it as fully and deeply as Srahr himself. Irony, or what?
Maybe the Commonwealth will regress, like Sakhra. Maybe Cyr and I will meet again, the same sets of cells recombining after trillions of generations. The chances against it are infinite, but that means that the chances in its favour are infinite too. Or (another irony) we may just pass by without recognising each other. But that doesn’t belong here. I’ll start again.
Will the Commonwealth regress, like Sakhra? Will we turn away from each other, like Sakhrans? I don’t know. For once, maybe they were wrong. The universe is vaster like this, with a dark majesty; more of a thing of wonder. The Sakhrans regressed when Srahr told them they’d become a disease and the universe had sent an invincible opponent to halt their spread. But Faith wasn’t invincible: we almost defeated Her. She intended to return to Sakhra but couldn’t, because of what we did to Her. No other opponent has ever damaged Her like that.
And what does Regress mean? When Srahr told them what She is it made them turn away from each other, though being Sakhrans they never regressed entirely. They didn’t sink into total despair, because they always had their sense of irony as a long-stop. They have a highly developed sense of irony. So do I, now. Unlike Faith, I’ve been to Sakhra twice.
•
I know Sakhrans better than most. They reproduce asexually, but they’re not mere copies; I could never have the kind of relationship with Sulhu that I had with his son. I always knew Thahl was my closest colleague, but it was only in the moments before he died that I realised he was my closest friend. I think he always knew that.
Orders of magnitude. I loved Thahl as much as I loved my mother and father, and almost as much (I realise this now) as I loved Cyr…but Thahl was only a fraction of Srahr. He knew what She was, because he’d read Srahr’s Book. Srahr was the one who wrote it. What must he have been like? They all say he was the greatest of all Sakhrans, a combination of poet, philosopher, soldier and scientist. I’m just a warship commander; not even that, any more. But Srahr was also an author, and his people never recovered from his literary career. I may have at least that in common with him.
And even Srahr wasn’t right all the time. He thought She was invincible, and I almost proved She wasn’t. She could only defeat us by replicating our missiles, the ones which damaged Her almost fatally, and that’s almost an admission of Her defeat. Or maybe I’m whistling in the dark, the same dark where our Fire Opals and Diamond Clusters and other weapons fell and died.
Almost is such a big word; almost infinite. We almost defeated Her, but in the end my ship was destroyed and half my crew were lost. This makes no sense, Smithson bellowed at me, after Cyr and Thahl died. He was outraged. I wouldn’t have cared if I lived or died, but she should have lived and he should have lived. I ought to put his words in quotes, but they work equally well as they are. They’re my words too.
When I’m finished here, I’ll leave and go back into the Commonwealth on my own; and that leads me to one last piece of self-indulgence, one last shift from the general to the personal. When I leave here it will be without Cyr and without Thahl. I miss them, Thahl for what was and Cyr for what should have been.
I can never see anything in quite the same way as before: an apple, a dust-mote in sunlight, a grain of sand, my own hand in front of my face. I built empty spaces between myself and Cyr, and between myself and Thahl, when they were alive. Now they’re dead, I still see the empty spaces. People die, but the empty spaces between them are immortal.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Love spent most of his working life in the music industry. He was Managing Director of PPL, the world’s largest record industry copyright organisation. He also ran Ocean, a large music venue in Hackney, East London.
He lives just outside London in north-west Kent with his wife and cats (currently two, but they have had as many as six). They have two grown-up children.
Apart from his family, London and cats, his favourite things include books and book collecting, cars and driving, football and Tottenham Hotspur, old movies and music. Science fiction books were among the first he can remember reading, and he thinks they will probably be among the last.
