Macrolife (34 page)

::
Each of the universes in superspace has gone through an indefinite number of births and deaths. We may be the first intelligence to think of surviving the end of our cycle. We have an idea of how this may be done
::

“
By reaching across superspace to a younger locality
?” John asked.

::
No, although that is a consideration. Unfortunately, we have no knowledge of the topology of superspace; there would be no way to know which direction to take, even if superspace could be entered directly. There is another way, however, one based on direct physical observations
::

Another configuration of macroworlds appeared on the sunscreen, a ring of faint globes circling a dark center. As John watched, one world left its position near the black hole and began to move away. For the first time in his conversation with the aggregate, John sensed an hand of death, which it had not known since the universe was young.

“
Why are worlds dying when there is an answer
?” John asked.

::
It may be a false answer. To begin with, it would take all our energy to maintain and adjust our position within the galactic core hole's ergosphere; energy expenditure would increase as we passed farther into futurity. We will need reserves to maintain our various protective fields against the possible effects of the white hole outstream, as well as against the density and temperature of the new universe in its early stages; we may need to use our tachyon tunneling drives for brief moments, to pass by the effects at the birth of the next cycle; this last may not be necessary, as the expansion might proceed with us at its outer edge. Still, there may be unforeseen dangers. What you must understand is that the price of using all our resources and energy on such a venture has created for us what may be an insurmountable crisis
::

“
Is there a choice
?”

::
Death by choice, or death by fate
::

“
But wouldn't it be better to die trying, to risk everything on even the smallest hope for success
?”

::
Now you know why your extreme individuality has been returned. Our mind is too conscious of difficulties and possible failure, too unused to death, to develop the impetus to risk everything. Caution is the first principle of practical reason, which is finite, dealing with the definable and known. Under the pressure of time and death, you have reappeared to stand apart from our large individuality. Macrolife began to fragment into blocks of worlds, then into single worlds; you are one of the first individuals to reappear inside a single unit. We are forced…I am forced to interpret this as a survival response. You, and others like you, will try to save yourselves, as you must, in the manner of younger intelligences, and you may save macrolife
::

“
Then…my body has not persisted from before
.” Suddenly John was afraid, as he confronted the thought that he was not himself, that something large had been dreaming him.

::
You have been retrieved from past information; your bodily form, such as it is, has been visualized to be as it was. What you are now remembers the past
,
even if what you are now is a duplication of an earlier self, an exact copy in everything except that it is a copy. Perhaps you are still your original pattern of complex awareness; I do not know, but that is not the central consideration. You might think it cruel to be brought back to such extreme finitude, to be small and powerless in your self, but I assure you that we may follow your will, because small, narrowly focused systems of past intelligent life were capable of what seem to us now as blind decisions of transcendent potential. What is convincing about this view is the fact that you were not called up entirely through our choice; you have been thrown up at a time when incapacity before death fragments macrolife
::

In the aggregate's containing silence, John wondered about the limits to the size of intelligence. After a point, the parts of a vast mind might begin to separate, as the being broke up into simpler components….

::
This is happening because we are again faced with the possibility of death. Many worlds have already fallen into forgetfulness, with no center of general remembrance; they no longer know who or what they are, and live as dreams in the self-maintaining structure, which provides objects for perception in an energy environment. In time we may disintegrate into billions of individual entities as the galactic con holes coalesce and natural history accelerates toward its point of quantum uncertainty
::

“
Who are you
?” John asked.

::
I am one of the larger centers, a hyperpersonal aggregate of historical individuals. As I acquired facets, I grew more complex, containing whole worlds of awareness. Only a little while ago…I was larger. I know what is happening, having served those who have fallen away. You were part of me, and now you know also
::

The aggregate sensed his confusion.

::
Think of minds, individual bodies, both physical constructs and beings of force, pure patterns of energy. Imagine a vast system of minds within one macroworld, sustained by a central source of energy. Individuals are facets, but they enter into larger, linked unions, which become permanent, evolving into still greater minds as they join with other macro-worlds in a conscious design. Imagine large biological masses, teeming with mind-linked individuals, cells of life as large as entire sunspaces
::

He thought of warm lighted spaces, where the cold darkness was only a distant thought; where the eye saw bright violets, blues, greens, and yellows, warm orange, and little else; where the universe was new. All gone, all lost because he had forgotten. Countless joys and tragedies flying up like sparks, discovering one another, loving, hating, passing….

He remembered wanting to witness final things.

Before him now lay the abyss separating all consciousness from the end of time. Macrolife's spontaneous response to the problem of survival was a process of fragmentation, a narrowing of perception in the manner of the ancients who had put blinders on horses before leading them through danger. Isolated centers of consciousness would revert to local control; blind to billions of years of critical doubt, these centers of mind would lead. Alone in a midnight universe of dying worlds, he knew what had to be done. He did not want to die; therefore, any choice was better than waiting for the final darkness….

“
Is there anyone else like me
?” he asked. “
Has anyone else reawakened
?”

The screen showed another sudden star, another world dying after a final moment of light.

::
There is
::

The bubble moved, carrying him out of the desolate hollow into a passageway, away from the once green place where he had played as a child, where the sunlight of a hundred different suns had streamed in to fill the garden-forest space, playing like liquid on the leaves and grass. He remembered well-lighted urban levels, stylish living complexes, environments created by the loving will and dedicated intelligence of a powerful people; he remembered a civilization created in a period of crisis, when only the new and the best had been sufficient to decide whether the life of earth would continue or be spilled back into evolution's echoing cauldron of screams.

::
You will meet someone like yourself
::

The bubble shot out into darkness; his eyes adjusted and he saw a glowing white floor. The bubble floated forward across the limitless surface. John peered ahead, trying to penetrate the blackness, but there was nothing except the warm glow of the endless floor.

Gradually he began to see something. At first it appeared to be a mound with a gray peak, shimmering so far away that all the bubble's forward motion could not make it larger; then it began to look like a raised platform, a dais, or a huge bed. Something like a human figure sat in a black, almost invisible chair. The light from the glowing floor threw shadows into the figure's face, giving it the appearance of an eyeless mask looking upward.

Suddenly the bubble was gone from around him, and he was standing on the floor near the edge of the platform. As he looked up at the shape on the dais, John became aware of gravity. He observed his bare feet pressing against the lighted floor; it seemed that the ethereal light was passing into his legs and body, illuminating him from within.

::
He is in a chair, to make a familiar image for you
::

“Who are you?” John asked the figure.

There was no answer. The face was still searching the obscurity overhead. The eyes were dark hollows. There was no billowing of breath from the mouth. The body was covered by a seamless garment.

The floor darkened until there was only enough light to illuminate the figure, now seemingly floating in the darkness.

A distantly familiar voice answered him at last.

“I am like yourself. I lived in the time that you remember, in the memory that has been restored to you. Our origins were the same, but I have forgotten millions of lifetimes. What I am now is not the individual facet of macrolife to which you have returned. I have fallen back, but not to your state. I am as different from you as you are from the single cell that began your life. Yet once I knew you….”

John almost knew the voice. “I did know you. Who were you?”

“Searching through stored knowledge and experience, I find that I knew you—only that, nothing more. I cannot remember as you remember….”

“But tell me who you are!” The face was looking at him, eyes now clearly visible, large inhuman eyes. Someone was alive in those eyes, struggling to reach him, a lost friend swimming upward through cold, deep waters.

“Who are you?” John asked again.

He saw white lips part to answer; a hand raised itself and fell; the lips closed to complete a stony expression of failure.

John walked forward and stopped at the edge of the platform. For the first time now, he noticed the figure's size. The person in the chair was at least fifteen feet tall, sitting down. Looking up into the darkened face, John asked again: “Can you tell me who you are?”

“I was, in part, Blackfriar. Do you know me?” The words came painfully, as if they were being ripped out.

As the words spoke within him, John Bulero knew that something more than his old friend was speaking, and Blackfriar was the least part of it; the words were being pulled out of archaic substrata, sources so old that they could not be drawn upon with any sympathy or recognition. As he continued to watch the colossal face, feelings of recognition wrenched him. “Frank,” he cried out. “It's me! Frank, why are you here, like this?”

The face looked into the oblivion overhead. “I don't know,” it said. “I think…I have come here to die.”

The sadness in the voice brought panic into John. “Frank—remember Lea? Remember the three centuries that followed? Remember when we left the galaxy, remember how we made nothing of the distance to Andromeda?”

The stone face looked down at him, and through him.

“Frank—try and remember when it was not so dark, when everything was young and bright.” John felt himself grow more desperate, almost as if he were watching another person, until the panic inside him broke out in a reproach. “Why did you have to be here!” he shouted.

“I don't know,” the great shape repeated. “I don't know.”

::
Like yourself, he has become an isolated center of consciousness, falling back into this state from a greater state. You are the most isolated form, remembering life as it was before you were even one millennium old; he is an aggregate of individual centers, perhaps including others that were once known to you. His confusion is great as he tries to meet your demands. Now you see why something must be done quickly, why you must lead before we disintegrate into powerless, suffering forms, incapable of understanding our own instrumentalities. This is why we have arranged this meeting, visualizing it as best we could. Do you understand
?::

All of time is dead and gone
. The thought was a cold, desolate wind. He wanted to weep, but the grip of sudden loneliness froze the reaction in him, suspending him in a barren silence, naked before his own scrutiny….

A part of him took satisfaction in the understanding of space-time that he now possessed. Once he might have given anything to be here, to see and know what would happen at the end. He thought of the thousands of lives that he had certainly lived before the universe had reached its noon, and the millions that must have followed in the long afternoon and early evening. How often had be been cloned; how many destinies had his mind-body pattern followed? How long had he been an individual before macrolife took the next step upward in organization?

He thought of Anulka; her shadow and that of her murderer came into him, threatening to kill all sense of renewal and hope. Like the universe around him, those two persons, and countless others, would never come again.

Anulka stood before him, dressed as he had last seen her.

“John,” she said.

Something—within him—was holding her back. Then he realized that she was a creation—too lovely to be the reality. The aggregate could not call up the original because all that was left of her was a memory, an idealization which responded to his moods. He remembered his anger toward her, and she tensed visibly; he recalled her strong arms and intense kisses, and she softened; he thought of her disappointment, and her eyes became cold. She continued looking at him, as if she were trying to penetrate a barrier between them; in a moment she would succeed and he would hold her.

::
The matrix of information out of which she might have been recalled is random noise. All that exists of her now is information flowing in one direction, out of your memory. There is nothing of her outside of you that remembers the past
::

As he looked into the eyes of the image, he realized that he was looking into himself and that he was only a thought in some larger mind.
I think, I feel, the irreversible loss of her, and I know that I do so. What am I
?

She faded and he realized that the aggregate held others who were real, that the aggregate was a sum of continuing personalities. Who were they, besides Frank? He saw hierarchies, whole worlds contained in the lower reaches of the aggregate, minds living out entire sensory existences, bits of information unaware of the greater whole, as cells are oblivious of the body.

::
No. They are aware of the larger complex, and may enter it at any time, though not as discrete configurations, and they may return to the smaller focus of intelligent awareness
::

“Who else is there?”

Drisa Haldane appeared.

“Help us,” she said.

He saw Margaret, Rob Wheeler, Yevetha, and hundreds of familiar faces. What lives had they lived? How much was there to remember?

“You must help,” they said.

These shapes insisted, existing as independent realities, not just memories. He could feel their pleas reaching into him, pushing into his pride. He was to be the horse who would go forward because blinders prevented him from seeing the danger; his mind was too small to see all the difficulties of the survival project; his narrow focus was the scalpel that would cut away inertia and the fear of death….

Where were his memories of the midtime? He must have seen the great central ages of the universe; yet it was exactly as if he had not seen them, as if he had been exiled to this place without ever having lived.

::
Do you understand
?::

I'm alive somewhere, he thought, alive but dying, and all this is a desperate dream, the only thing that I can throw against death. He saw his body lying in a field, under a bright sun that would burn for another billion years, as his eyes turned inward to a growing darkness.

“Where are my memories?”

::
First, do you understand the danger, and what you must do
?::

“Yes, but tell me—“

::
Will you do what is necessary
?::

“Yes, but please tell me—“

John waited, suddenly afraid that the complex personality had disintegrated into smaller components.

“Tell me!” John shouted. The darkness was an army of shadows assaulting him from every direction.

::
As an extreme individuality.., you could not contain, or differentiate, the memories of even a hundred thousand years; you would have to change, following the path of renewal, much like the strategy of birth and death in the natural realm. After a millennium, you ceased to be the individual that you recall now; you chose to expand your personality, so that it might better deal with time. It was the common choice of that period; extended lifetime demanded that individuals expand their minds, in order to cope. Less complex individuals quickly ran out of creative resources; unable to sustain life interest, these limited entities chose death or forgetfulness. After the first millennium of your life, there is no John Bulero, as he is again now. You would have to reintegrate in order to regain the subjective experience of the times that followed, and then you would not be the personality that now asks to know
::

“Return to me what you can!”

::
There is almost nothing left
::

“I want what is mine!” He pictured an endless series of missing moments, dead within him, their time stolen and stored somewhere, deteriorating into a noisy chaos of information.

He reached out, longing, and saw:

 

The last planet; the final bit of debris was gone, used up in the building of interior living spaces. The sun was now enclosed in a porous shell of worlds, a small galaxy of intelligences drinking its radiant energy.

He was among them somewhere.

 

He saw Drisa and himself for a moment.

Macrolife exploded outward from thousands of worlds, striving, building, intruding….

He felt its effort to fill the darkness. Its will was his will, but he could not find himself.

 

The home sunspace was dying:

He saw a bloating red sun and millions of worlds retreating from its vaporizing tide….

The red giant collapsed into a white-hot star; the worlds crept in closer again.

Still, he could not find himself in the breathing membrane of life.

 

He listened, bloodying himself on oddly shaped memories as the aggregate labored to reconstruct a personal universe. Only shards remained, hints and images, facets of a titan's life. Slowly John realized that what he wanted was to fulfill the desire of something that was a shard; he was a broken piece which thought of itself as the whole; but he could no more grasp the whole than a single drop could be an ocean.

Ocean? Once there had been oceans, the warm places of origin, the wombs that came before the war of evolution….

 

::
There is no more. It has not survived
::

As he looked up at Blackfriar again, John felt a quickening, as if he were about to return to a state of swifter rational processes, faster intuitions and comprehension, all fed by vast knowledge and experience; but he held back, content for the moment to know that his sudden regret and grief could be dissolved.

“I am sorry,” Blackfriar said, “that I cannot remember, that I cannot be the person you knew. Yet…there is…about you…a certain familiarity. Wait! I think I remember…something….”

John rushed to the edge of an abyss and looked across at his friend.

“Didn't we? Wasn't it…could we have done…whatever it was?”

“Go on!”

“I…can't. I? What am I?”

John's hope fell away into the darkness. “That's enough,” he said. “You and I and countless others have been together throughout time. I understand that now.” He felt in control again, knowing that the half-truth would have to be enough. The kinship he felt with the terrified being existing behind the mask of the giant was real, whoever he was.

::
Think of how many will suffer, as time throws each into its abyss of individuality and helplessness
::

“We need a new universe,” John said, trying to fill the thought with the necessary urgency. “We must act.”