Macrolife (36 page)

John felt the worlds give in, permitting themselves to be pulled into the ergosphere of the last black hole, but no closer. All that had been was here now, rainbow and rose, mountain and cloud, all yearning and its denial, an individual universe of light and life that would never come again.

Although it seemed that an eternity was passing, he knew that only microseconds were going by as the singularity collapsed toward its gravitational radius, carrying in its ergosphere all that survived of macrolife as the galaxies were pushed together toward infinite compression….

His limbs kicked involuntarily, remembering an ancient terror of being enclosed….

Suddenly he felt as if a great weight had been lifted from him. The superdense mass had reached its greatest point of collapse, bending the curvature of space-time toward infinity, and had tunneled out as a white hole in new space. No one would ever see the expanding fireball; one does not witness one's birth, though there are sensations of pulling and pressing, then relief, to be remembered only in a rudimentary way.

The way was open, where the collapsing mass had tunneled through; but it would not remain open for long. His sensors reached out to the glowing points of his companion worlds, motionless candles in a still midnight; he watched them grow faint as they fell toward a common center and winked out one by one, pulled to the future from an ultimate past. Quickly he flashed through the worlds, looking out from each as they passed below the point of visibility and no electromagnetic radiation could reach him. The last world disappeared, denying him his final observation point.

All sense of forward motion ceased, and he wondered again if it would all be for nothing—billions, perhaps nearly a trillion years of life and continuous civilization, wasted in the last moments….

::
There was no other way
:: the aggregate said out of its long silence.

How long, John wondered, how long this darkness?

::
The question has no meaning
::

He thought again of black holes from all the ages streaming forward into a bottomless black pool. The universe, the greater continuum of superspace, was filled with an infinity of smaller spaces, separated from each other by singularities. Smaller black holes, as well as the final one, were the means for covering infinite intervals of space-time in small subjective times. He knew that they would emerge soon—but how long would it seem?

“How is our power?”

::
Almost gone
::

Flashes of light, starlike bits of energy, appeared in the darkness ahead, passing through him to be left behind. Then the darkness acquired a strange glow, dividing itself into concentric circles growing smaller and smaller to infinity. As he watched, he realized that a model was being created inside him, something that would help him grasp the reality of time acquiring the characterisitics of space, and space becoming like time.

::
All black holes, at whatever time in the life of the universe they appear, are congruent in a higher space. Collapsar galaxies rushing together are already together at a future time; if time is space, one the other, then all space is one and all times meet. All dimensionality of one universe is a point in super-space, where a monistic infinity may be divided into distinct things, and these divided further without end, as long as the law of boundaries is observed. A universe of individualities emerges, creating consciousness out of complexities; and consciousness strives toward unity through a consolidation of values
::

As he stared into the darkness, he imagined that he was swallowing an infinity of darkness, compressing it into a black rope as it rushed into him, filling him like a coiled snake. Macrolife, he realized, his worlds, would have created one new individual, if the universe had not ended; the end would have been the beginning.
I am macrolife
, he thought,
as much as any individual
.

As time swallowed itself around him, he saw a faint purple ahead, almost deep royal blue in places. A series of afterimages followed, reflections and mirror images traveling backward in time into his perceptual field, as if something had passed him, leaving a wake. At one moment it seemed as if the space of the tunnel had retained not only a full negative record of the great collapsing mass that had formed it, but also an image of the mass that had collapsed toward an impossible condition. While macrolife had circled the galactic core hole, the light of the universe had been a record of all the future, all the remaining future rushing in to end in a few moments of experienced time; all that energy, matter, and light that had fallen into the pit was now ahead of them; nothing was left behind; the future was everything.

What if we never come out, he thought, what if this collapsed space is looped into an infinite limbo? What if the white hole closes immediately after the outstream? Macrolife might never see the morning light of creation….

Again he saw some vast, blurred image, as if something rushing ahead of them were leaving a trail. Then darkness returned for a long time, and with it came a complete hopelessness.

The hopelessness shattered into a million thoughts.

“…We shall never come out…”

“…We should have stayed in the past, where the end was still far off…”

“…What shall we do…?”

If we come out, John thought, it will be like regaining the past, except for whatever original features might exist in the new cycle of nature. He tried to shut out the continuing assault of doubts and reproaches being exchanged in the darkness. Was this the first time creation had come to an end? Was it the first time that all distinctions had been collapsed, only to be remade anew into a new variety? Perhaps this
was
the first time the universe had ended, and there would never be another. The idea was as frightening as the thought of a universe expanding into cold nothingness, never to be drawn back together, never to grow warm again. It was unthinkable that only nothingness lay ahead; as unthinkable as the idea of absolute zero, left without right, or a unique beginning to the cycles of expansion and contraction.

::
It may be
::

“I reject even the possibility,” John said. “It is as impossible as the idea of absolute nothingness; something must always exist; to imagine otherwise is to fall into contradiction.”

But how knowable would the new universe be? How long would it last? He imagined the births and deaths of the universe to be days and nights, or seasons; each season would be different, filled with unique details, never fully knowable. Surely something like this was true. All that macrolife had done, was now doing, had once been imagined; what was happening now, in this passage between universe cycles, past and future, was as much understood through intuition and imagination as through accumulated knowledge. His perception of what was happening was indirect, built up out of his own and the aggregate's visualizations; the predictions had been correct until now, leaving only the emergence into new space to be fulfilled….

::
The weight of all that is known is on the side of our success. Too much beauty lies behind our models, too much is explained, for it not to be true
::

“But you still doubt?”

::
Doubt is always necessary
::

He stared into the darkness, doubting as fear crept into him.

“What will I see? What should I see? Tell me what to look for!”

::
Look for the light of cooling hydrogen, as the fireball dissipates. Hydrogen forms after the outstream, when the temperature of the fireball drops low enough. We will see the light of heated hydrogen
::

But only darkness still lay ahead.

A renewed babble went up around him, but he shut it out, subduing the thoughts as they lanced into him, blunting their penetration, beating them into a contained silence, cutting the lines of panic to reduce the danger of disintegration; at one moment he struck out with mercy, but in the next moment it felt like murder.

“Let it begin,” he said to himself. “Let the light begin.”

A chorus picked up his thought as if it were a prayer.

“…Begin, begin, begin…”

“…Let begin, let begin…”

“…Light, light, light…”

“…Begin the light, begin the light…”

“…Let it begin,” he said, joining in as he felt the yearning take hold of him, desire struggling against a fate that seemed determined to drown the last of intelligence, down, down, down, throwing it into a bottomless spatial deformity, into an oblivion without death.

“Let it begin,” he said again, afraid that his fearfulness would cause a critical mass of doubt, leaving him to drift in darkness, alone in a sea of mad beings. “Let us live,” he said, as the hope drained out of him.

::
Light
:: The very word seemed to glow as John peered ahead.

Slowly, the rich royal purple of hydrogen appeared as a distant patch, growing suddenly to cover half the field of vision; the mixture of helium's vivid spring green created areas of faint yellow. John heard a sound, something like the tinkling notes of a soft harpsichord playing a ghostly row. His awareness flashed through all the worlds, rushing backward from first to last, watching as a million macroforms spilled out into the deeply glowing gas that filled the new space. He could see them all ahead, floating aimlessly in what seemed to be a warm daylight sky, not very far away. Some of the worlds were empty of conscious life, he noted, dead husks thrown out of the cave of winter by the spring wind, too late to live again.

He was the last to come out of the cave. Behind him, the knothole in space would become a closing gravitational vortex, existing long enough to help form the metagalaxy, whose member galaxies would condense into stars as they flew apart. In a million years, individual stars would begin to shine, as gravity pulled the gas together. It would be enough, this cloud of light and gas, to provide them with a supply of energy and hope.

As he watched his worlds gathering into a giant sphere, John found himself at peace. Each world glowed as its supply of hydrogen and newly formed mini black holes was replenished from the warm universe. He thought of streetlights going on in an endless fog….

The glow of this universe would fade one day, when its free electrons and protons combined to form transparent hydrogen.

Then he noticed another glow. It was coming from far away, and suddenly he saw that it was a transparent globe.

::
A hundred million kilometers in radius
::

As the object drew nearer, John became aware that it was filled with millions of glowing objects.

::
Macrolife from before our cycle, surviving from the uncounted ruins of nature. We are not the first large units of intelligent awareness
::

He should have expected it, especially when the stranger had passed them in the aperture; but the reality was still a surprise. This, John thought, was the Type III civilization which had not revealed itself, preferring to wait rather than influence youthful development. This was the first form of macrolife, surviving from some unimaginable past.

There was no need to speak. The elder form opened its shell, and the million worlds passed inside without ceremony. There would be survivors from every cycle; they had been expected.

Macrolife waits in the morning light of creation, its millions of worlds forming a complex figure in the field of the giant sphere. Inside, the youngest macroforms are setting out their newest understanding of the glittering sequence through which their parent universe pulses as it lives and dies and is reborn in the fabric of eternity; reality has given up its elementary secrets, while leaving a deeper grain.

Morning will pass; birthing suns will build up the light for noon. But macrolife is already looking to a greater frame of activity, in which this universe is only one in an ocean of possibility. Macrolife plans to move across the time of this cycle, observing the growth of intelligent life, adding, if possible, to its knowledge and awareness, gathering new macrolife at the end, ultimately sweeping across future cycles in shortened subjective time, taking on hydrogen and quantum black holes at each birth and new intelligences at each maturity, drawn ever forward by the continuing novelty of universes.

An infinity of universes swim in super space, all passing through their own cycles of birth and death; some are novel, others repetitious; some produce macrolife, others do not; still others are lifeless. In time, macrolife will attempt to reach out from its cycles to other space-time bubbles, perhaps even to past cycles, which leave their echoes in superspace, and might be reached. In all these ambitions, only the ultimate pattern of development is unknown, drawing macrolife toward some further transformation still beyond its view. There are times when the oldest macrolife senses that vaster intelligences are peering in at it from some great beyond….

Within the youngest macroform, John Bulero is slowly fading; the usefulness of his will, its narrowly gauged impetus, is over. His finitude, his ancient human aches are passing into what seems a larger dream. He understands now that knowledge can never be final, even as it grows with the forward unfolding of the universes. His thirst to know, his hunger to see and experience, must be content with the finality of endlessness, with the wisdom that teaches the acceptance of the logic of infinity. The unraveling of the illusion of last things should be least attempted, says the logic of infinities; the darkness of unreality hides last things better than any real cloak.

Yet: why is there anything? Why do universes come into being? To what greater process do these brilliant sparks owe their existence? Where was the valley of his beginning? Why was it the cruelty of death that ensured their unique value? Were they truly unrepeatable? He would take these questions into the greater gauge of consciousness. Perhaps then he could accept the fact that decline and destruction served to create new things—new individuals, novel physical cycles, the kind of intense development that could not otherwise be sustained; even macrolife, continuous as it was with the old and new, depends on natural universes for a supply of new minds and for the means by which it can nurture its own creations. As John Bulero, he had paid the price in loss, to live toward the midnight, past the fleeting seconds where night turns into a glowing morning, leaving him with the ashes of memory….

Quietly, John Bulero forgets himself; the universe is mysterious again, at the very moment when its violent processes have become comprehensible to him. All knowledge is suddenly old knowledge, no longer curious or a delight, simply old and repetitious; elsewhere lies knowledge that is curious and new, to be gathered by the hungry, for whom the mystery of existence must always be its greatest beauty. The open book gives reference on its last page to a further library….

All that had pulled him down was gone.

Having survived into its first maturity, the youngest macrolife has learned a new patience with which to soothe its curiosity; and in that patience of endless knowing it has found its own enduring kind of beauty.