Macrolife (32 page)

 

He looked into the darkness around the model. Macrolife was the place from which to ask all questions. Would the universe expand forever, destroying all intelligence as all matter reached thermal equilibrium? Would the cosmos collapse into a point of infinite density, crushing the varied intelligences within it? Was there anything beyond the darkness?

He thought of Yevetha and Drisa. He would have to see Yevetha as she was, taking her welfare as his own while remembering that she was different from him. Drisa had taught him that, by showing herself to him as she was—beyond his immediate understanding—and as he had wanted her to be; she had suggested that his yearnings were a young love affair with the universe, not a mature struggle with the tyranny of space and time. Was she right? Had she been amusing herself with him, trying to confuse him? Would he change so much in time to come? A defiant part of him said no; he would love her and Anulka, and everything else around him, as he pleased; while another part of him said yes, and it seemed like death.

He looked at the model for a long time, losing himself in its details as he drew out of himself, becoming old and impersonal, viewing the myriad stars with a kind of love that he had not known before; doubts came in to camp at his center, making him feel fluid, as if at any moment he would dissolve and re-form into someone or something else. The pain of life's passing was a feverish night pressing in around him, filling his mind with fear; but as he fixed his eyes on the glowing model, its stately beauty lent him peace, subduing for him the unassailable quality of all things.

He was about to leave when he came upon himself in his most secret thoughts. He saw what he had been, a being from the past, as man had been before, unchanged, unawakened from nature's sleep, blind to what he could become. He had traveled backward in time, drawn by the freshness of rivers, oceans, and forests, into the older regions of his own mind, seeking the viewpoint of an unknown self—a proud self, outraged by death, yet ready to give death. He looked into himself now, at this beast crouched in something like a deep forest surrounded by mountains, and it looked up at him, unrepentant, unafraid; and he knew that he would see this nursery self become the smallest part of him as it receded into the deepest recesses of his structure. Would it become nothing, he wondered, or would it reawaken someday in all its florid, romantic yearning?

John turned and walked slowly out of the darkness, as if from a holy place.

Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the somber hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of color and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will not be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

—ARTHUR C. CLARKE,
“The Long Twilight,”
Profiles of the Future
, 1973

The history of macrolife will not always be the history of humankind. Intelligence is certainly not limited to humanoid forms, or to the chemistry of carbon; other forms will also develop technical civilizations capable of using the energy of their suns on a large scale; for the idea of independence from the chemical-energy-based ecologies of natural planets will surely flow out of alien imaginations, among other things, as it did from our own.

We can expect to alter our bodies as we expand our minds to deal with immortality, with the extended projection of unique personalities across time; we will still call ourselves humankind, but that word will stand for the universality of intelligence in nature, and not for appearances.

—RICHARD BULERO ET AL.,
The History of Macrolife
, 10th ed.,
Revised and Updated, vol. 10,
“Projections and Notes,” Sol, 3025
(See also vol. 11, “Posthumous Fragments”)

There are two kinds of critics of any possibility; those who wait and see, and those who try to kill an idea in advance; at every crossroad, each forward-looking soul is opposed by a thousand guardians of the past.

—RICHARD BULERO
(aphorism in the margin of the last page of his major work)

Then the Old man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole.

“That is the way,” he said
.

“But there are no stairs
!”

“
You must throw yourself in. There is no other way
.”

—GEORGE MacDONALD,
The Golden Key

Under my face a steady rivulet of blood was enlarging to a bright red pool on the sidewalk. It was then, as I peered nearsightedly at my ebbing substance there in the brilliant sunshine, that a surprising thing happened…. I lifted a wet hand out of this welter and murmured in compassionate concern, “Oh, don't go. I'm sorry. I've done for you.”

The words were…inside and spoken to no one but a part of myself. I was quite sane, only it was an oddly detached sanity, for I was addressing blood cells, phagocytes, platelets, all the crawling, living, independent wonder that had been part of me and now, through my folly and lack of care, were dying like beached fish on the hot pavement. A great wave of passionate contrition, even of adoration, swept through my mind, a sensation of love on a cosmic scale, for mark that this experience was, in its way, as vast a catastrophe as would be that of a galaxy consciously suffering through the loss of its solar systems
.

—LOREN EISELEY,
The Unexpected Universe
,
“The Inner Galaxy,” 1969

::
Know separateness again
::

He swam in a midnight sea. Something was preparing him for a return to individual consciousness.

“
What has happened
?” John asked of the thing that cared for him.

“
What…am I
?”

::
You have been separated from another condition
::

“
Why
?”

::
Partially became we could not prevent it, partially because something of you wished it once, and because you may be needed
::

“
I don't understand
.”

::
Know: Macrolife has endured for a hundred billion years. Maroworlds ranging in size from one hundred kilometers to millions of kilometers remain in a universe where star formation has all but ended. Macrolife is the only remaining civilization
::

So much time, he thought, trying to feel where it had passed within him.

::
No time has passed for you. Your present, narrowed awareness has not experienced it
::

He tried to open his eyes.

::
See: The star is a hot blue-white dwarf. The material that was its planets and smaller bodies is gone. Gathered closely around the dwarf, you see thousands of macroworlds of differing sizes, forming a complex even-sided triangular solid, five million kilometers on each side, created for use in gathering the energy of the star until the very end. These worlds are populated in small part by derivations from the humanity you knew, but mostly by the progeny from myriad unions between intelligent species, including the children of organic intelligence, both open-ended and deductive minds. No stars are visible in the sky, as your eyes once saw them. All the remaining suns in the universe are too faint to be seen, except at the closest distances, and often only from inside their shell of worlds. Near us in the darkness, there is only one faint red-normal star, whose slow use of energy may continue for thousands of billions of years, if the universe continues to expand forever
::

“
Will it expand forever? What is known
?”

::
The galaxies long ago reached their farthest point and are hurtling back toward the center. More and more stars are collapsing into darkness, as are the galactic cores, creating an increasing number of intermittent quasars. Other stars are black dwarfs, their particles resting in the lowest energy states. Radiant energy is slowing its streaming, as the second law of thermodynamics nears its final physical proof. In time, all remaining galactic material will exist as galactic-core black holes, and these will eventually coalesce into the final collapsar
::

The voice became silent inside him, sensing his need to consider; for a time he was alone, a gathering of scattered thoughts in a dark place. Gradually his self-awareness improved, but he still half felt that he was someone else; at any moment the closeness with himself would fade, and he would wake up into another identity….

He opened his eyes to an almost substantial darkness, a shroud thrown over all that was once open and alive with light, concealing the laughter of colors, the longing in distant vistas, the grace of movement.

Slowly the universe became a room filled with shadows and faint lanterns.

::
Soon you will see as we do, throughout the spectrum
::

It's so late, he thought, so very late. “
From where have I come to this place
?”

::
You have come out of us…as we fragment. You will understand this later. It is possible that something may be gained by restoring your individuality
::

The darkness receded as his eyes adapted. He saw a red glow near the edges of his vision. Gradually it became a bright orange, filling the room, leaving only a faint violet near the curved corners of the floor and ceiling. His vision took in one hundred eighty degrees and was clear right out to the edges. Slowly he moved an arm and floated into position to face the floor.

The floor darkened, revealing a night dotted sparsely with deposits of dully glowing stars, reds and infrareds now visible to his eyes. As he watched, the sky seemed to acquire a glow, as if a distant daylight were spilling in from over the edge of the universe.

::
The background temperature of the universe is increasing from continued contraction
::

Something drifted into the room. He turned left to face it. The being floating over the translucent floor was vaguely humanoid. Its head was perfectly round and hairless. The body was long and thin, golden-skinned, ending in a tail-like appendage; graceful arms ended in delicate six-fingered hands. The eyes were large black ovals with multiple pupils.

The view below changed to reveal a faint white sun surrounded by a shell of globes.

“John Bulero,” the being next to him seemed to say, “I am as you are, but from a time past your origins. We are both restored to an extreme condition of individuality, to the state that preceded what we became later, you and I. The aggregate is all memory and will instruct us as needed.”

::
A thousand worlds around this star
::

John Bulero. The name and gender were somehow his, yet both were strange possessions. Suddenly he thought of bright stars, wondering if home still existed. ::
Parts of the home you knew exist within this one, unused memories near the center
:: The information was provided without intrusion, gently, with a feeling for his need to reclaim the past.

A portion of the floor became a portal. He was suddenly enveloped in a glowing transparent bubble and carried downward. The thoughts of the alien humanoid reached after him. “Farewell. I hope you find what you need.” Then he was moving into an endless passageway. A dull white glow erased all comparisons from his field of vision, producing for brief moments the sensation of rushing at a blank wall.

::
You can see into the infrared and beyond, as well as below the ultraviolet
::

As the bubble carried him forward, he watched the dull warmth of the walls, the hot fog of his own breath billowing out of his body to fill the red-orange shell of force; he looked at his hands, at the white glow of his naked body, feeling that the form was not his own, that it was an imaginary thing.

Abruptly the bubble flew out of the passage into a large space lined with a desolate landscape, and he knew that he was seeing what was left of the green hollow of home, as he would have imagined it would look after so much time. The hills, lakes, and vegetation were gone, leaving only a layer of fine dust and scattered rocks, a desert of gray and white. Sharp regret filled him as he surveyed the ruins of the place where he had once floated on wings.

The bubble stopped in the center. The sunscreen was a black disk before him, a broken window letting in the cold of space; for a moment he saw darkness rolling in like fog, but the vision vanished as his expectation changed.

An image appeared on the sunscreen. He was looking at a red dwarf, a small sun struggling to maintain its brightness; as he looked, he saw its companion, a dull brown-red existing at the edge of darkness. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw that both stars were enveloped in a tenuous haze of heat. Slowly, strange colors floated up out of the penumbras, colors that were not reds, yellows, or oranges, but hues lying between and beyond, somber shades that made him see intense differences and mixtures that he could not name; at one moment he saw only subtle tints; at the next, new brightenings.

::
There are more than two hundred colors in the full spectrum of a sun, from birth to death
::

As his eyes drank in the quanta of radiation emanating from the two stars, he noticed the dark mass of macrolife encircling the dwarfs in a thin ring.

He looked around him. The light crowding into the dust bowl interior through the sunscreen cast an oppressive red twilight across the desert. It's so late, he thought again, so very late. For a moment his orientation shifted, and he was looking down at the sunscreen, a black lake where all the bright stars had been drowned, their fiery glories choked in the deep.

He wondered what lifetimes had gone by, what worlds had lived and died. Why had he been reanimated in this dreamlike form? He felt that he was himself, but he also had the sensation of physical detachment, as if he were both in his body and elsewhere. Why had they not re-created his self from later ages? To this self, waking up in smallness, the life of the universe was past. What had he lived through in the ages following macrolife's first return to the solar system? Had he lived a life, or had it been a dream? The crimson-hued stars around him were capable of lasting longer than the lifetime of reality, misers slowly using their energy across trillions of years still to come, lighting a perpetual evening that refused to become midnight. There were things to be learned on this shore of dying suns, things that he could not learn in any other time. He remembered his curiosity about the ultimate fate of nature, his longing to pass forward through time, becoming timeless in the crossing. The intelligences of this time had surely gathered all knowledge and would tell him what he wanted to know; for he was kin to them, having come out of them, and they would not refuse his plea.

“
What will happen
?” he asked. “
Can the end be overcome
?” ::
We do not know. Our task is to decide what we will do about it
:: The end would be nearby in time, he realized, as they measured time, having experienced billions of years of consciousness.

“
How near is it
?” He could almost feel it pressing in around him, a shadow cast across the universe from a not too distant future. ::
Think and see
::

The sunscreen went black, swallowing the view of huddling fireflies frozen around the faint unmoving fires; thoughts and images filled his mind, unfolding the history of macrolife that he had missed.