by Mike Resnick
The Worldmaker winked encouragingly, apparently peeping in on the intoxicated Bibendum diners. It seemed to encourage the musky scents of cultured cell broths harvested from young stags entering mating season and the background chorus of moans, groans and sighing that undulated through the Oyster Bar, which wooed the exquisite ceremonies of life. After all, every living thing in the universe belonged to the same strange family of lively substances, whether they possessed DNA, or not.
Taron suddenly shouted in pain and held his hands over his ears. Lara’s discomfort quickly followed. The wasp lipids, which boosted myelin sheath activity to make all sensations more intensely felt, had just kicked in. Suddenly, the natural tremor in their own muscle fibres could be heard as an excruciating white noise.
Paul prepared to deliver the appropriate reassurance if necessary, until the diners adjusted to new landscapes of sensory possibility, stretching from the nanoscale to the cosmic reaches.
Shortly after, the diners’ worldview contracted and as auditory peace returned, Taron realized that he could hear the splitting valve sounds of Lara’s heart as she sighed. Lara could feel his augmented pheromone stream stepping across her skin like tiny, electrified chicken feet. Their attentions were guided by their chemically soaked senses, which unfolded microscale manifold landscapes before them. Their just-out-of-reach bodies shrieked at each other in molecular symphonies through sympathetic resonances. For long moments they could sense each other’s pulse connecting over the bioelectrical fields of the tablecloth, as pheromones gripped their metabolism, their digestion slowed, their breath quickened and their glands began to ooze with the promise of mingling and with the absent magic between them they had craved.
Almost as soon as she had acclimatized to the nanoscale, Lara’s senses suddenly opened skywards. Above her, in the light studded sky, she could hear the flapping of a clone owl’s wings, the networked roar of suborbital H-planes, the hum of bobbing orbital space hotels and the background data roar of their social networks. From there she was drawn to the rumble of solar flares. She could hear sounds that echoed through the furthest reaches of the cosmos, where stars shrieked at their birth and extinction. And right there, in the middle of the Cosmic Symphony, even brighter than the Moon, was the new Mother of all Mothers of the universe. Lara observed her, awestruck, as the Worldmaker appeared to be mounting Jupiter, the ancient Father of Fathers.
“Can you see her?” Lara whispered, gesturing upward.
“See whom?” pulsed Taron, whose perceptual landscape had completely collapsed into Lara’s molecular manifolds and was struggling to appreciate anything beyond her biochemical field.
“The Worldmaker. There! She’s green, no, red! No, blue!” gasped Lara. “Oh I do believe I can hear her singing!”
Brilliantly demonstrating his professional expertise, Paul triumphantly whisked several cubes of protease-softened, urban pigeon-fed, estuary-reared alligator, in front of the diners – a delicacy that was served on a bed of anchovy-soaked seaweed. He invited the couple to feed each other with the morsels using long, pointed walnut sticks “Comme ça. Voilà!”
“Well, of course not,” Taron protested, beginning to feel the confusion and ecstatic rush that accompanied his rapidly expanding senses. He placed his elbows on the table to steady himself and was chided by Paul’s wagging gesture about his manners.
Taron smirked. Recovery was swift. His vision had already re-expanded. His thoughts were clear. He felt powerful and aroused. Returning quickly to the lustful game, he quipped, “Because I’m not wearing my Im-player,” and traced the tip of speared seaweed across Lara’s upper lip.
“That’s not what I mean,” said Lara, snapping up the limp frond. “You don’t need your implantable receiver! Stay as still as you can.” She put her hand on his oscillating walnut spear to dampen it and refocus his attention on her. “I think I can hear her making music right now. When we’re this close to the universe, we don’t need a receiver. Our entire bodies are tuning in to the strings of her song.”
Paul resisted fussing over the splattering beads of gelatinous anchovy sauce that were landing on the shivering tablecloth from the unconscious flicking movements Lara was making with her walnut spear as she spoke – like a conductor.
Taron found her earnestness endearing. “But I really can’t hear her,” he protested. “Let me tune in. I have my Im-player here somewhere, in the seam of my shirt lining.” He opened it with a pinch and the tiny implant popped into his palm.
Disappointed, Lara understood that the aphrodisiacs were having different effects on them both, and to gain his attention, she asked, “Will you play me your tune?”
“Which tune?” wondered Taron, recalling a number of particular LifeSky recordings that he’d captured on special occasions as he positioned the Im-player at the entrance of his external auditory canal.
“You know,” she said, “the one your mother gave you at birth.”
If he hadn’t been so expertly botoxed over many decades, Paul may have raised an eyebrow at the woman’s interest in the birth tune of her companion. People actually believed they could tell something about the character of a person from the simplistic beats and bars that the Worldmaker apparently relayed straight to them from a seemingly life-laden cosmos – like the old astrological charts that told your horoscope. While he respected the importance of these frequencies as representing signals that proposed humankind was not alone in the universe, he did not believe that the tunes captured at the moment of birth had any more relationship to a person’s character – or fate – than sounds made outside by the ceaseless chorus of urban crickets. It was trite nonsense.
“Oh!” replied Taron, with a smarting tone that suggested, despite being physiologically entangled with his partner’s biorhythms, she had actually been presumptuous.
Being perfectly tuned to biochemical nuance, Lara sensed the hesitation as loud as a thunderclap and decided to make light of the personal request. It was hard not to cross intimate boundaries in this intoxicating space. “Here! Here’s mine.” she offered. “It was downloaded from the Globular One cluster of the Andromeda galaxy between minus ninety and plus five hundred and twenty minutes at the time of my birth.”
Taron relaxed somewhat and cocked his head to one side like an early bird listening for morning worms, a gesture that slid the perched Im-player deep into his auditory canal, where it transformed his entire skull into a receiver. Lara waited until his defensive molecular mood settled before joining him. They eavesdropped on the tones and beats of her ancestral line together. Celestial music was so rich with qualities that captured the infinite bounty of the cosmos. It reflected the vibrating strings of the universe so that no two recordings were alike. Indeed, the Worldmaker music was an epic journey that conjured a koyaanisqatsiesque encounter with so many different places, spaces and timelines – promising to spread harmony throughout the cosmos. Actually, it was said that when the Worldmaker symphonies were mixed with the background noise of the universe, the creative possibilities exceeded those of the genetic code. The universe was an orchestra teeming with life and every life form had its own signature tune.
The diners started to biochemically bond again. Their gestures were much more open and relaxed, although their attentions now firmly focused on the heavens. Yet Paul knew that having invoked the Worldmaker as a cosmic fertility symbol, it would only be a matter of time before the diners’ lustful flesh would mingle in its name. However, it would not happen in this particular Oyster Bar. Not on his watch.
The existential beats of Lara’s birth music had stirred her primordial curiosity. “What do you think she’s like?” she asked.
“Oh! She’s an artist.” Crooned Taron, his immaturity softened by taking a metered dose of cloned rhino horn into each nostril, which had been cultured in a de-extinction program offered to him by the waiter from a laced nanocarbon platter. “A lone astronaut who germinates a multiplicity of panspermic seeds and mixes them up to paint the universe wi
th the rainbow of life. She loads the biopaints into tiny robots that swarm around the universe like pollinating insects, which are inspired by the poetry of uncertainty. These drones endlessly forage for different planets that will host their gifts in nearby solar systems and star-forming clouds. She is as voluptuous as she is brilliant. But she lives a life in solitude, like the nuns back in olden times. She sings out of devotion and the knowledge of fertility within the universe brings her much joy.” He appeared thoughtful. “It is her only joy.”
“I was beginning to think that you didn’t believe in her,” observed Lara. “I thought you only cared about ‘boys’ toys’. But your view is a most original one.”
“Of course,” replied Taron, “everyone has a view on the Worldmaker! And of course I’m original. I am not just any guy, you know! I’m as unique as my birth tune.”
“Okay, then, if you know her so well, tell me why she approves of our excesses so much.” said Lara. “How do you resolve her isolation with her mission to bring fertility to the cosmos?”
“That’s easy!” Taron laughed. Although he loved being a guy, there was absolutely no point in life without women. “The Worldmaker has simply exchanged one kind of fertility for another. Instead of having one kind of partner and a few children, she has many different kinds. She couples with them by making a host of different sorts of panspermia vessels and sends hundreds of thousands of her children to barren worlds. But she is also very generous and considers all of us as her family.”
Paul removed the remains of the feast, wondering how seemingly intelligent people could hold the most senseless of beliefs, crafted by their own fears and egos – without a hint of irony or insight. He recalled the year 2088, when the Worldmaker was launched as part of the third wave of human expansion, which proposed to spill humanity into the solar system. While he also knew very little of the identity of the crew, he was sure that the ‘heavenly body’ was not staffed by a tantalizing woman. Yet he found it interesting that when an event vividly captured the public imagination, it became a Pandora’s box that fuelled conspiracy theories and urban legends, which totally ran amok despite the facts.
“Well, I’m sure she’s a colony of women,” asserted Lara. “They are makers, dedicated to nurturing nonhuman life. But they do not deny themselves and take pleasure in many fertility rituals that weave cells from their own bodies into the fabrication process, in the same way as women made textiles in the cottage industries of olden times. The women work together, with one mind and one ambition – to spread life throughout the universe. As they work they sing. It’s a working song. It’s a nurturing song. Nurturing is their work. So they sing and life sings back to them. It’s a wonderful thing we’re a part of.”
“Monsieur, Madame, la bombe au chocolat!” Paul interrupted. You may begin to eat your desserts at the sound of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances, number five. The high notes will make your palettes sweet, the low tones will be bitter. Bon appetit.”
The salivating diners lay back in their seats, licking the tips of a long double-ended spoon carved from almond wood and polished with rooftop beeswax. Their shoeless feet started to entwine like a detail from Salvador Dali’s Autumnal Cannibalism, as the molecular sound of chocolate spread through their tissues and into the universe.
Noisy interplanetary space stretched above them, seemingly teeming with life.
Paul balanced a couple of sugar-moulded absinthe glasses on his fingers, which were laced with regenerative kidney proteins. They were fabricated with matching spoons that stood upright at the centre of the glass, inviting the diners to break them free of their attachment and use them to stir a syrupy concentrate of Reshi mushrooms and goat penis essence into their drinks. Through augmented senses, the diners were mesmerized by the vastness of the universe and scanned the sky with photon-precision vision. Each light receptor was no longer a site to receive packets of pinpoint light but became a screen; the cosmos could project itself into each cell, saturating their retinas with the story of its life, one in which humans were already playing a part.
Commander Martyn Fogg dined alone. He always dined alone with no ornate ritual. Yet he had developed a bad habit of sipping on his flat pack while finger tipping at the keys of his workstation. He suspected that perpetual multitasking wasn’t good for him, but his schedule was tight. Every minute on the station was accounted for and certain things were bothering him. In fact, they’d been a growing concern for quite some time and he’d simply not been bold enough to confront them. He’d dreamed of making contact with life in the stars since he was a young boy and had turned Michael Mautner’s panspermia principles into a poster that he pinned on his bedroom wall:
Life is unique.
Life has purpose.
The cosmos must be seeded with life.
Humans must protect and propagate life forever.
That which is good is life promoting – that which harms life, is evil.
Life will fill the universe with a cosmic purpose that is good.
The potential of future life is immense.
To fulfil this quest, he voraciously read the late 20th century interstellar visionaries Alan Bond and Tony Martin, who had proposed the first design for a habitable, interstellar craft. Yet his ambitions were still a little ahead of their time. After excelling in astronaut training and piloting several Mars missions to Olympus Mons, Martyn successfully established a robot fabrication unit at the base of the huge mountain. He had subsequently accepted the appointment to provide a similar kind of robot manufacturing base in Europa’s orbit. However, the chronic stress of suppressing details about the various robot explorer research projects that he led was taking a physical toll on his health. Giving the ‘wrong’ data to the Terrestrial Interplanetary Strategy Board (TISB) could easily shut down the entire outpost. Therefore he was continually conflicted about what he should, or should not, reveal to the authorities. Chasing down a flat pack meal that was acid balanced to neutralize the growing pain from his stomach ulcer, he began to write.
If it weren’t for this porthole that gives me a spectacular view over Europa’s icy landscape, I think I’d go crazy. I’ve been commander of the Europa Orbital Outpost since 2085. I have been responsible for developing the station’s research strategy, building a robot fabrication unit, writing seemingly endless reports, producing scientific papers, and ensuring that the accounts are in order. Yet, having been trained as a man of reason, I have found these past few decades most frustrating, as it has been frequently necessary to compromise my objectivity to secure funding from TISB. While I fully accept that this is implicit in my employment contract, I resent the increasing creativity required in submitting my findings to TISB, and pandering to politics. I need to document that I consider my complicity in current events not as an attempt to deceive but as a survival strategy. This is important both for the human race and for the future of life throughout the cosmos. As a man of reason, I am finding these demands on my integrity most uncomfortable. To alleviate my conscience I have decided to write my own personal accounts without prejudice to the sensitivities of the various events I have witnessed. Yet, these notes are an infrequent luxury, written in stolen times, as the station schedule is demanding and I am under continual surveillance.
Our current definitions of life are too narrow to accomplish our directed panspermia mission. My misgivings are based on the prevailing assumptions that life is directed by centralized molecular systems such as DNA or RNA. While this idea sounds perfectly reasonable to those who are familiar with life on Earth, in this strange place, these principles may not be so appropriate. Europa has been highlighted as one of the most potentially habitable locations in the solar system and rich with the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. Several generations of robotic probes have already been sent to explore hydrothermal vents in the sub-glacial ocean floor. They have discovered new self-assembling chemistries that produce densely matted, aperiodic, seaweed-like structures. Some of these are many meters long. Others
are microscopic and similar to extremophile microbes that can persist and grow without sunlight in Earth’s abyss. Yet we have not been able to formally describe these strange assemblies within any recognizable definition of ‘life’, although they are remarkably lifelike. They can move around their environment, sense it and even follow chemical trails, which are the equivalent of food sources. While my concerns for the appropriateness of life’s definitions may initially appear philosophical, pedantic, or even heretical, they are of profound importance to us all. Indeed, the way we recognize and describe ‘life’ will establish which agents we choose to spread when propagating it throughout the universe. As a pioneer of directed panspermia, I believe that humans have an ethical responsibility to inclusively represent and expand the personhood of life that we wish to spread throughout the cosmos and whose evolution we hope to shape.
The Jovian research community and Saturn miners have decided to abandon the Worldmaker project. This has been a difficult decision, as much is at stake. The robotic experimental platform was conceived as a base station for an interplanetary directed panspermia program. It was designed to harvest matter, mix it with a cocktail of extremophiles and then laser-propel these ‘living seeds’ towards fertile areas in the cosmos. However, it is a vexing contraption, riddled with hardware and software problems, which have wasted much of our time and resources. Perhaps the media hype that surrounded its launch from Earth’s orbit in 2088 was an ill omen. Yet, the Worldmaker has not been without its benefits, as it has undoubtedly captured the public imagination in a way that no other space program has since the Moon landings. In fact, it would be fair to say that the program has come to represent our common interest in resolving the Fermi Paradox once and for all. Since extra-terrestrial intelligences appear to have made no efforts to reveal themselves, we have nothing to lose by taking the initiative and sow life’s seeds into the stars to jumpstart the conversation. After all, this is the ultimate purpose of our existence and humanity’s everlasting legacy. Yet, the Worldmaker project has proven difficult in every possible way. While its robotic bioprocessing units and panbiotic program should have been trivially easy to maintain, the AI that synchronizes the production of seeds with the sounds of the cosmos has proven stubbornly erratic. Indeed, an almost catastrophic set of multiple failures in the hardware and software has rendered the whole facility a liability. While we have managed to repair the hardware over the past year, the Worldmaker AI is more problematic to address, as it seems to keep ‘evolving’. The platform is no longer suitable for a directed panspermia program. With dwindling interplanetary resources and tight schedules, none of us in the Jovian research stations or in the Saturn mining communities wish to take sole responsibility for its longer-term maintenance. So, she will be reassigned as a greenhouse to process the dark organic matter we are harvesting from Europa and to mix it with human excrement to create new soils, which may be used to grow food crops. Yet her redeployment is not without difficulty, since reporting the effective ‘failure’ of such a high profile technical project will inevitably result in public criticism and a loss of revenue for the interplanetary community. A crisis-management teleconference has led the interplanetary community to decide that being ‘economical’ with the truth, is the best way forwards. So, where all reports of the Worldmaker are concerned, they are to lead TISB to believe that she is still fully operational. This convenient untruth is causing me much sleeplessness.
