Otherness (39 page)

The fetch ship receded to a point, leaving behind Tenembro's cavity of twisted metric, its dimple in the great galactic wheel. Ahead, Pleasence Star beckoned, a soft, trustworthy yellow.

Isola blessed the star. To her its glimmer would always say—
You continue. Part of you goes on
.

She went on to bless the ship, the visitors, even Jarlquin. What had been taken from her would never have existed without their intervention, their "selection." Perhaps, like universes spun off behind a star-drive, you weren't meant to know what happened to your descendants. Even back in times when parents shared half their lives with daughters and sons, did any of them ever really know what cosmos lay behind a child's eye?

Unanswerable questions were Isola's métier. In time, she might turn her attention to these. If she got another chance, in a better situation. For now, she had little choice but to accept the other part of Jarlquin's prescription. Work was an anodyne. It would have to do.

"They're gone," she said, turning to her friend.

"Yes, and good riddance."

In Mikaela's pale eyes, Isola saw something more than sympathy for her pain. Something transcendent glimmered there.

"Now I can show you what we've found," Mikaela said, as if savoring the giving of a gift.

"What we . . ." Isola blinked. "I don't understand."

"You will. Come with me and see."

Tenembro was black. But this time Isola saw a different sort of blackness.

Tenembro's night fizzed with radio echoes, reddened heat of its expansion, a photon storm now cool enough to seem dark to most eyes, but still a blaze across immensity.

Tenembro's blackness was relieved by sparkling pinpoints, whitish blue and red and yellow. Bright lights like shining dust, arrayed in spiral clouds.

Tenembro Universe shone with galaxies, turning in stately splendor. Now and then, a pinwheel island brightened as some heavy sun blared exultantly, seeding well-made elements through space, leaving behind a scar.

"But . . ." Isola murmured, shaking her head as she contemplated the holistic sampling—their latest pan-spectral snapshot. "It's
our
universe! Does the other side of the wormhole emerge somewhere else in our cosmos?"

There were solutions to the equations which allowed this. Yet she had been so sure Tenembro would lead to another creation. Something special . . .

"Look again," Mikaela told her. "At beta decay in this isotope . . . And here, at the fine structure constant . . ."

Isola peered at the figures, and inhaled sharply. There
were
differences. Subtle, tiny differences. It was another creation after all. They had succeeded! They had looked down the navel of a macrosingularity and seen . . . everything.

The still-powerful tang of her pain mixed with a heady joy of discovery. Disoriented by so much emotion, Isola put her hand to her head and leaned on Mikaela, who helped her to a chaise. Breathing deeply from an infusion tube brought her round.

"But . . ." she said, still gasping slightly, ". . . the rules are so close to ours!"

Her partner shook her head. "I don't know what to make of it either. We've been trying for years to design a cosmos that would hold together, and failed to get even close. Yet here we have one that occurred by natural processes, with no conscious effort involved—"

Mikaela cut short as Isola cried out an oath, staring at the pseudo-life chaise, then at a waiter-servitor that shambled in carrying drinks, a construct eight days old and soon to collapse from unavoidable build-up of errors in its program. Isola looked back at the holographic image of Tenembro's universe, then at Mikaela with a strange light in her eyes.

"It . . .
has
to be that way," she said, hoarse-voiced with awe. "Oh, don't you see? We're pretty smart. We can make life of sorts, and artificial universes. But we're new at both activities, while nature's been doing both for a very long time!"

"I . . ." The pale woman shook her head. "I don't see . . ."

"Evolution! Life never
designs
the next generation. Successful codes in one lifetime get passed on to the next, where they are sieved yet again, and again, adding refinements along the way. As Jarlquin said—whatever works, continues!"

Mikaela swallowed. "Yes, I see. But universes . . ."

"Why not for universes too?"

Isola moved forwards to the edge of the chaise, shrugging aside the arms that tried to help her.

"Think about all the so-called laws of nature. In the 'universes' we create in lab, these are almost random, chaotically flawed or at least simplistic, like the codes in pseudo-life."

She smiled ironically. "But Tenembro Universe has rules as subtle as those reigning in our own cosmos. Why not? Shouldn't a child resemble her mother?"

What came before me
?

How did I come to be
?

Will something of me continue after I am gone
?

Isola looked up from her notepad to contemplate Tenembro Nought. This side—the deceptively simple black sphere with its star-tiara. Not a scar, she had come to realize, but an umbilicus. Through such narrow junctures, the Home Cosmos kept faint contact with its daughters.

If this was possible for universes, Isola felt certain something could be arranged for her, as well. She went back to putting words down on the notepad. She did not have to speak, just will them, and the sentences wrote themselves.

My dear child, these are among the questions that will pester you, in time. They will come to you at night and whisper, troubling your sleep
.

Do not worry much, or hasten to confront them. They are not ghosts, come to haunt you. Dream sweetly. There are no ghosts, just memories
.

It wasn't fashionable, what she was attempting—to reach across the parsecs and make contact. At best it would be tenuous, this communication by long-distance letter. Yet, who had better proof that it was possible to build bridges across a macrocosm?

You have inherited much that you shall need
, she went on reciting.
I was just a vessel, passing on gifts I received, as you will pass them on in turn, should selection also smile on you
.

Isola lifted her head. Stars and nebulae glittered beyond Tenembro's dark refraction, as they did in that universe she had been privileged to glimpse through the dark nought—the offspring firmament that so resembled this one.

As DNA coded for success in life-forms, so did
rules
of nature—fields and potentials, the finely balanced constants—carry through from generation to generation of universes, changing subtly, varying to some degree, but above all programmed to prosper.

Black holes are eggs
. That was the facile metaphor.
Just as eggs carry forward little more than chromosomes, yet bring about effective chickens, all a singularity has to carry through is the
rules.
All that follows is but consequence
.

The implications were satisfying.

There is no more mystery where we come from. Those cosmos whose traits lead to forming stars of the right kind—stars which go supernova, then collapse into great noughts—those are the cosmos which have "young." Young that carry on those traits, or else have no offspring of their own
.

It was lovely to contemplate, and coincidentally also explained why she was here to contemplate it!

While triggering one kind of birth, by collapsing inward, supernovas also seed through space the elements needed to make planets, and beings like me
.

At first, that fact would seem incidental, almost picayune.

Yet I wonder if somehow that's not selected for, as well. Perhaps it is how universes evolve self-awareness. Or even
. . .

Isola blinked, and smiled ruefully to see if she had been subvocalizing all along, with the notepad faithfully transcribing her disordered thoughts. Interesting stuff, but not exactly the right phrases to send across light-years to a little girl.

Ah, well. She would rewrite the letter many times before finishing the special antenna required for its sending. By the time the long wait for a reply was over, her daughter might have grown up and surpassed her in all ways.

I hope so
, Isola thought.
Perhaps the universe, too, has some heart, some mind somewhere, which can feel pride. Which can know its offspring thrive, and feel hope
.

Someday, in several hundred billion years or so, long after the last star had gone out, the great crunch, the Omega, would arrive. All the ash and cinders of those galaxies out there—and the quarks and leptons in her body—would hurtle together then to put "finis" on the long epic of this singularity she dwelled within, paying off a quantum debt incurred so long ago.

By then, how many daughter universes would this one have spawned? How many cousins must already exist in parallel somewhere, in countless perpendicular directions?

There is no more mystery where we come from
. Had she really thought that, only a few moments ago? For a brief time she had actually been
satiated
. But hers was not a destiny to ever stop asking the next question.

How far back does the chain stretch
? Isola wondered, catching the excitement of a new wonder.
If our universe spawns daughters, and it came, in turn, from an earlier mother, then how far back can it be traced
?

Trillions of generations of universes, creating black holes which turn into new universes, each spanning trillions of years? All the way back to some crude progenitor universe? To the simplest cosmos possible with rules subtle enough for reproduction, I suppose
.

From that point forward, selection would have made improvements each generation. But in the crude beginning
. . .

Isola thought about the starting point of this grand chain. If laws of nature could evolve, just like DNA, mustn't there exist some more
basic
law, down deep, that let it all take place? Could theologians then fall back on an ultimate act of conscious Creation after all, countless megacreations ago? Or was that first universe, primitive and unrefined, a true, primeval accident?

Either answer begged the question. Accident or Creation . . . in what context? In what setting? What conditions held sway
before
that first ancestor universe, that forerunner genesis, allowing it to start?

Her letter temporarily forgotten, with mere galaxies as backdrop, Isola began sketching outlines of a notion of a plan.

Possible experiments.

Ways to seek what might have caused the primal cause.

What had been before it all began.

I earn my living as a writer. In other words, as a magician, shaman, metaphorist. By chant and incantation—and with the active collaboration of my clients, the readers—I create images, characters, alternate realities in other minds. It is an ancient, venerable profession. All tribes have had storytellers, who wove legends round the campfire. My specialty involves epics not about long ago, but about times and places yet to come. It attempts to weave realistic might-bes, and vivid might-have-beens. Above all, it is the literature of change.

These are bold days for such a genre, since change is the very fabric of our time. If today's modern "priesthood" consists of scientists, we SF authors are like those wild-eyed folk in hair shirts who once stood outside the Temple gates, performing tricks and dazzling the crowds, generally tolerated by the official guardians of wisdom, for astute priests understand that people need myths, as well.

In fact, the best of today's scientists seem to enjoy reading far-out, speculative tales. Perhaps they, too, like to be taken far away now and then, exploring possibilities that require no proof, only plausibility. Having worked on both sides, both inside the Temple and out, I can say that, for all their differences, science and science fiction have something deep in common. You might call it a shared frame of reference . . . a new and different way of looking at the world.

I alluded to this worldview in earlier essays. Now I want to look one more time at the Dogma of Otherness.

Consider the following statement:

Subjective reality is what I see and experience; objective reality is what's really out there. They aren't necessarily the same thing
.

In other words, I look through my eyes and see only a version of the world, a version that can be, and often is, colored or twisted by what I
want
to see. Another person may witness the same events and yet observe something entirely different.

This is the first of two ideas on which I believe Otherness is based, and to a modern reader it probably sounds pretty obvious. Who among us hasn't noticed the effect of subjectivity in daily life? The illusions others are prone to, and those (if we are honest about it) that we ourselves nurture or allow? In fact, awareness of this problem has been around for a long time. Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Buddha, and countless other mystics, in countless cultures, have preached the same message—that we all exist amid a blur of uncertainty in an imperfect world. That one can never know complete truth about physical reality via our senses alone. Much is made of the differences between their systems . . . Socrates teaching reason, Buddha urging meditation, and Jesus prescribing faith. But what they all had in common was far more important. Each of those sage-prophets worried that the power of human egotism tends to make each of us lie to ourselves, leading to error, hypocrisy, and all too often the rationalizing of evil actions.

Moreover, each of these great savants offered a variant on the same cure.