Otherness

by David Brin

  "You see," Jarlquin continued, blithely ignorant of Isola's distraction. "although we've pierced much of the code of Life, and reached a truce of sorts with Death, the fundamental rule's the same. That is successful which continues. And what continues most successfully is that which not only lives, but multiplies."

  Why is she telling me this? Isola wondered, sitting in a gently vibrating nonlife chair across from Jarlquin. Did the biologer-nurturist actually care what her subject thought? Isola had agreed to disrupt her research and donate a clone, for the genetic benefit of Pleasence World. Wasn't that enough?

  I ought to be flattered. Tenembro Nought may be "close" to their world by interstellar standards; still, how often does a colony send a ship so far, just to collect one person's neonate clone?

  Oh, the visitors had also made a great show of scrutinizing their work here, driving Mikaela to distraction with their questions. The pair of Butins were physicians and exuded enthusiasm along with their pungent, blue perspiration. But Jarlquin had confided in Isola. They would never have been approved to come all this way if not also to seek her seed. To treasure and nurture it, and take it home with them.

  As I was taken from my own parent, who donated an infant duplicate to Kalimarn as her ship swept by. We are a model in demand, it seems.

  The reasons were clear enough, in abstract. In school she had learned about the interstellar economy of genes, which prevented the catastrophe of inbreeding and spread the boon of diversity. But tidal surges of hormone and emotion had not been in her syllabus. Isola could not rightly connect abstractions with events churning away below her sternum. They seemed as unrelated as a sonnet and a table.

  Two pseudo-life servitors entered—no doubt called when Jarlquin winked briefly a moment ago—carrying hot beverages on a tray. The blank-faced, bipedal protoplasmoids were as expressionless as might be expected of beings less than three days old . . . and destined within three more to slip back into the vat from which they'd been drawn. One servant poured for Isola as it had been programmed to do, with uncomplaining perfection no truly living being could have emulated.

  "You were speaking of multiplication," Isola prompted, lest Jarlquin lose her train of thought and decide to launch into another recital of the wonders of Pleasence. The fine life awaiting Isola's clone.

  "Ah?" Jarlquin pursed her lips, tasting the tea. "Yes, multiplication. Tell me, as time goes on, who populates the galaxies? Obviously, those who disperse and reproduce. Even though we aren't evolving in the old way—stressed by death and natural selection—a kind of selection is still going on."

  "Selection?"

  "Indeed, selection. For traits appropriate to a given place and time. Consider what happened to those genes that, for one reason or another, kept individuals from leaving Beloved Earth during the first grand waves of colonization. Are descendants of those individuals still with us? Do those genes persist, now that Earth is gone?"

  Isola saw Jarlquin's point. The impulsive drive to reproduce sexually had ebbed from humanity—at least in this sector. She had heard things were otherwise, spinward of galactic West and in the Magellanics. Nevertheless, certain models of humanity seemed to spread and thrive, while other types remained few, or disappeared.

  "So it's been in other races with whom we've formed symbioses with. Planets and commonwealths decide what kinds of citizens they need and requisition clones or new variants, often trading with colonies many parsecs away. Nowadays you can be successful at reproduction without ever even planning to."

  Isola realized Jarlquin must know her inside and out. Not that her ambivalence was hard to read.

  To become a mother, she thought. I am about to . . . give birth. I don't even know what it means, but Jarlquin seems to envy me.

  "Whatever works," the Pleasencer continued, sipping her steaming tea. "That law of nature, no amount of scientific progress will ever change. If you have what it takes to reproduce, and pass on those traits to your offspring, then they will likely replicate as well, and your kind will spread."

  What came before? And what came before that?

  As a very little girl, back on Kalimarn, she had seen how other infants gleefully discovered a way to drive parents and guardians to distraction with the game of "Why." It could start at any moment, given the slightest excuse to ask that first, guileless question. Any adult who innocently answered with an explanation was met with the same simple, efficient rejoinder—another "Why?" Then another . . . Used carefully, deliciously, it became an inquisition guaranteed to provoke either insanity or pure enlightenment by the twentieth repetition. More often the former.

  To be different, Isola modified the exercise.

  What caused that? she asked. Then—What caused the cause? and so on.

  She soon learned how to dispense quickly with preliminaries. The vast, recent ages of space travel and colonization were quickly dealt with, as was the Dark Climb of man, back on old Beloved Earth. Recorded history was like a salad, archaeology an aperitif. Neanderthals and dinosaurs offered adult bulwarks, but she would not be distracted. Under pestering inquiry, the homeworld unformed, its sun unraveled into dust and gas, which swirled backwards in time to be absorbed by reversed supernovas. Galaxies unwound. Starlight and cold matter fell together, compressing into universal plasma as the cosmos shrank towards its origins. By the time her poor teachers had parsed existence to its debut epoch—the first searing day, its earliest, blaring minute, down to microfractions of a second—Isola felt a sense of excitement like no storybook or fairy tale could provide.

  Inevitably, instructors and matrons sought refuge in the singularity. The Great Singularity. Before ever really grasping their meaning, Isola found herself stymied by pat phrases like "quantum vacuum fluctuation" and "boundary-free existence," at which point relieved adults smugly refused to admit of any prior cause.

  It was a cop-out of the first order. Like when they told her how unlikely it was she would ever meet her true parent—the one who had brought her into being—no matter how far she travelled or how long she lived.

  Subtle chemical interactions cause cells to migrate and change, taking up specialties and commencing to secrete new chemicals themselves. Organs form and initiate activity. All is done according to a code.

  It is the code that makes it so.

  Isola took her turn in the control chamber, relieving Mikaela at the end of her shift. Even there, one was reminded of the visitors. Just beyond the crystal-covered main aperture, Isola could make out the long, narrow ship from Pleasence, tugged by Tenembro's tides so that its crew quarters lay farthest from the singularity. The imposition chamber dangled towards the great hole in space.

  "Remember when they came into orbit?" Mikaela asked, pointing towards the engine section. "How they pulsed their drive noughts at a peculiar pitch?"

  "Yes." Isola nodded, wishing for once that Mikaela were not all business, but would actually talk to her. Something was wrong.

  "Yes, I remember. The nanoholes collapsed quickly, emitting stronger spatial backwash than I'd seen before."

  "That's right," Mikaela said without meeting Isola's eyes. "By creating metric-space ahead of themselves at a faster rate, they managed a steeper deceleration. Their engineer—the Vorpal, I'q'oun—gave me their recipe." Mikaela laid a data-sliver on the console. "You might see whether it's worth inserting some of their code into our next probe."

  "Mmm." Isola felt reluctant. A debt for useful favors might disturb the purity of her irritation with these visitors. "I'll look into it," she answered noncommittally.

  Although she wanted to search Mikaela's eyes, Isola thought it wiser not to press matters. The level of tension between them, rather declining since that talk over breakfast, had risen sharply soon after. Something must have happened. Did she ask Jarlquin to be tested? Isola wondered. Or could I have said something to cause offence?

  Mikaela clearly knew she was behaving badly, and it bothered her. To let emotion interfere with work was a sign of unskilled sel
fing. The fair-skinned woman visibly made an effort to change tack.

  "How's the . . . you know . . . coming along?" she asked, gesturing vaguely towards Isola's midriff.

  "Oh, well, I guess. All considered."

  "Yeah?"

  "I . . . feel strange though," Isola confided, hoping to draw her partner out. "As if my body were doing something it understood but that's totally beyond me, you know?" She tapped herself on the temple. "Then, last night, I dreamt about a man. You know, a male? We had some on Kalimarn, you recall. It was very . . . odd." She shook her head. "Then there are these mood swings and shifts of emotion I never imagined before. It's quite an experience."

  To Isola's surprise, a coldness seemed to fill the room. Mikaela's visage appeared locked, her expression as blank as pseudo-life.

  "I'll bet it is."

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence. This episode had disrupted their planned decade of research, but now there was more to it than that. A difference whose consequences seemed to spiral outward, pushing the two of them apart, cutting communication. Isola suddenly knew that her friend had gone to Jarlquin, and what the answer had been.

  If asked directly, Mikaela would probably claim indifference, that it didn't matter, that procreation had not figured in her plans, anyway. Nevertheless, it must have been a blow. Her eyes lay impenetrable under twin hoods.

  "Well. Good night, then." The other woman's voice was ice. She nodded, turning to go.

  "Good night," Isola called after her. The portal shut silently.

  Subtle differences in heritage—that was all this was about. It seemed so foolish and inconsequential. After all, what was biological reproduction on the cosmological scale of things? Would any of this matter a million years from now?

  One good thing about physics—its rules could be taken apart in fine, separable units, examined, and superposed again to make good models of the whole. Why was this so for the cosmos, but not for conscious intellects? I'll be glad when this is over, Isola told herself.

  She went to the suiting room, to prepare for going outside. Beyond another crystal pane, Tenembro Nought's glittering blackness seemed to distort a quarter of the universe, a warped, twisted, tortured tract of firmament.

  There was a vast contrast between the scale human engineers worked with—creating pico-, nano-, and even microsingularities by tricks of quantum bookkeeping—and a monster like Tenembro, which had been crushed into existence, or pure nonexistence, by nature's fiercest explosion. Yet, in theory, it was the same phenomenon. Once matter has been concentrated to such density that space wraps around itself, what remains is but a hole.

  The wrapping could sometimes even close off the hole. Ripples away from such implosions gave modern vessels palpable waves of space-time to skim upon, much as their ancestors' crude ships rode the pulsing shock-fronts of antimatter explosions. The small black holes created in a ship's drive lasted for but an instant. Matter "borrowed" during that brief moment was compressed to superdensity and then vanished before the debt came due, leaving behind just a fossil field and spatial backwash to surf upon.

  No origin to speak of. No destiny worth mentioning. That was how one of Isola's fellow students had put it, back in school. It was glib and her classmate had been proud of the aphorism. To Isola, it had seemed too pat, leaving unanswered questions.

  Her space suit complained as pseudo-life components stretched beyond programmed parameters to fit her burgeoning form. Isola waited patiently until the flesh-and-metal concatenation sealed securely. Then, feeling big and awkward, she pushed through the exit port—a jungle of overlapping lock-seal leaves—and stepped out upon the station platform, surrounded by the raw vacuum of space.

  Robotic servitors gathered at her ankles jostling to be chosen for the next one-way mission. Eagerness to approach the universal edge was part of their programming—as it appeared to be in hers.

  Even from this range Isola felt Tenembro Nought's tides tugging at fine sensors in her inner ears. The fetus also seemed to note that heavy presence. She felt it turn to orient along the same direction as the visitor ship, feet towards the awful blackness with its crown of twisted stars.

  Let's get on with it, she thought, irritated by her sluggish mental processes. Isola had to wink three times to finally set off a flurry of activity. Well drilled, her subordinates prepared another small invasion force, designed to pierce what logically could not be pierced. To see what, by definition, could not be seen.

  The color of the universe had once been blue. Blue-violet of a purity that was essential. Primal. At that time the cosmos was too small to allow any other shade. There was only room for short, hot light.

  Then came expansion, and a flow of time. These, plus subtle rules of field and force, wrought inexorable reddenings on photons. By the time there were observers to give names to colors, the vast bulk of the universe was redder than infrared.

  None of this mattered to Tenembro Nought. By then it was a hole. A mystery. Although some might search for color in its depths, it could teach the universe a thing or two about fugitinal darkness.

  For all intents and purposes, its color was black.

  "I thought these might intrigue you," Jarlquin told her that evening.

  There was no way to avoid the visitor—not without becoming a hermit and admitting publicly something was bothering her. Mikaela was doing enough sulking for both of them, so Isola attended to her hosting duties in the station lounge. This time, while the other visitors chatted near the starward window, the nurturist from Pleasence held out towards Isola several jagged memory lattices. They lay in her slender hand like fragments of ancient ice.

  Iola asked, "What are they?"

  "Your ancestry," Jarlquin replied with a faint smile. "You might be interested in what prompted us to requisition your clone."

  Isola stared at the luminous crystals. This data must have been prepared long ago: inquiries sent to her homeworld and perhaps beyond. All must have been accomplished before their ship even set sail. It bespoke a long view on the part of folk who took their planning seriously.

  She almost asked—"How did you know I'd want these?" Perhaps on Pleasence they didn't consider it abnormal, as they had on Kalimarn, to be fascinated by origins.

  "Thank you," she told the visitor instead, keeping an even tone.

  Jarlquin nodded with an enigmatic smile. "Contemplate continuity."

  "I shall."

  In school, young Isola had learned there were two major theories of True Origin—how everything began in that first, fragmentary moment.

  In both cases the result, an infinitesimal fraction of a second after creation, was a titanic expansion. In converting from the first "seed" of false vacuum to a grapefruit-sized ball containing all the mass-energy required to form a universe, there occurred something called "inflation." A fundamental change of state was delayed just long enough for a strange, negative version of gravity to take hold, momentarily driving the explosion even faster than allowed by light-speed.

  It was a trick, utilizing a clause in creation's codebook that would never again be invoked. The conditions would no longer exist—not in this universe—until final collapse brought all galaxies and stars and other ephemera together once more, swallowing the sum into one Megasingularity, bringing the balance sheet back to zero.

  That was how some saw the universe, as just another borrowing. The way a starship briefly "borrows" matter without prior existence, in order to make small black holes whose collapse and disappearance repays the debt again. So the entire universe might be thought of as a loan, on a vastly larger scale.

  What star voyagers did on purpose, crudely, with machines, Creation had accomplished insensately but far better, by simple invocation of the Laws of Quantum Probability. Given enough time, such a fluctuation was bound to occur, sooner or later, according to the rules.

  But this theory of origin had a flaw. In what context did one mean "given enough time?" How could there have been time before the univ
erse itself was born? What clocks measured it? What observers noted its passage?

  Even if there was a context . . . even if this borrowing was allowed under the rules . . . where did the rules themselves come from?

  Unsatisfied, Isola sought a second theory of origins.

  Black.

  Within her eye's dark iris, the pupil was black. So was her skin.

  It had not always been so.

  She looked from her reflection to a row of images projected in the air nearby. Her ancestresses. Clones, demiclones and variants going back more than forty generations. Only the most recent had her rich ebony flesh tone. Before that shades had varied considerably around a dark theme. But other similarities ran true.