Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (25 page)

 
          
“Ahem,”
said the Voice.

 
          
Fifth
Epistle:

           
The Worshipful Aliens

 
          
Lilliput and Brobdingnag are
not, in fact, two separate countries at all but the very same one.
In this
land
of
Lillibrob
(sometimes called Putingnag) people are bom very tiny (though fully formed) and
continue growing all their lives long until they reach giant size. All of their
organs expand in the process, not least their eyes—which, as a result of this
expansion, become less and less capable of focusing effectively. The expanding
eye progressively distorts the world out of focus, although habit and
familiarity mask what is actually going on.

           
Thus
it was that the young identical twins called
Sooner
and Later (so named since the birth of one had preceded the birth of the other
by a few minutes) perceived the arrival of the Aliens in a far more exact,
though necessarily more childish manner than their elders.

           
Consequently
they realized that the visiting Aliens were to be worshipped. Not traded with.
Nor welcomed.
Nor repelled.
Nor interrogated.
Nor copulated with.
But worshiped.
This was the correct mode of
intercourse of alien being with alien being. Indeed, the inhabited galaxy was
actually an immense church whose members all worshipped one another—as the
giraffe might worship an elephant as a prodigy, an epiphany of strangeness and
otherness, if only it had the wit.

           
The
enormous adults of Lillibrob (or Putingnag) couldn’t perceive this strangeness,
so poor was their eyesight. The Aliens looked to them like rather normal,
familiar creatures.

           
Unsurprisingly,
the Aliens quit Lillibrob very rapidly— pursued only by the prayers of the
twins Sooner and Later.

           
However,
as Sooner and Later grew older and larger (their eyes expanding in the process)
they forgot what they had really seen. The trouble was
,
Later forgot about it a few minutes later than Sooner; which led to an
irreconcilable quarrel between the twins, which they rationalized as concerning
priorities in their inheritance rights . . .

 
          
“Oh
God,” moaned Sean, letting the printout flutter away. “I’m getting worse. I’m
regressing.
Devolving.”

 
          
He
quit the desk in despair and wandered the infinite plane of other empty desks.
All empty except one! On that one lay a book, bound in maroon leather, tooled
in gold.

 
          
He
approached it circumspectly.

 
          
Stamped
upon the cover the title read:
Projector’s
Manual.

           
He flipped it open to the title
page.
 

WORLD PROJECTION UNIT

OPERATOR’S MANUAL

Department of Architectonics

Beautistar Cluster

B. C. 1,500,000

 
          
B.C.?
Before Christ?
Beautystar
Cluster?

 
          
He
looked further into the book, but it was printed in an inscrutable script. The
script wasn’t blurred or evasive, as in a dream. He merely had no reference
points for it.

 
          
Why,
then, a title page in English? So that he would at least know what he was
looking at?

 
          
Had
some super-race constructed machines which could transform energy into solid
material objects on a planetary scale, maintaining whole projected environments
for their builders, great material holographs keyed to the thoughts of the
builders . . . ?

 
          
Had
one of these living machines been washed up on the barren shores of 4H97801
with no makers to animate it? Or maybe the makers had all died, or else mutated
into something else.
Or even been absorbed, by some
voluntary or involuntary counterflow, into the projection machine itself.
Into the lens.

 
          
That
was Muthoni’s notion! The idea of using the God as terraforming equipment!
Still, it could be true. ‘In My thoughts, all the time . . .’ Perhaps the
thought had been insinuated into them. Now it surfaced once more, though in a
parody form, here in this interior space of . . . the lens, the superbeing
lattice . . .

 
          
What,
actually,
was
Architectonics?
Architecture, with a whiff of tectonics: building up a planet’s crust with new
landscape? Yes, architecture sliding into the reorganization of the whole
environment. But it also meant, didn’t it, the systematic arrangement of
knowledge? So that by arranging one’s knowledge in such and such a way one
achieved the power to transform a world—so that it would
reflect
that knowledge!

 
          
Had the force behind the God been ‘built’ by aliens?
From
somewhere called Beautystar Cluster? Or had the God emerged spontaneously, as
the Fourth Epistle stated?

 
          
It
had tried to communicate with him,
through quirky parables. Their very quirkiness insisted that they were either
sheer absurdity—or else metaphors for the true state of affairs.

 
          
He
saw, with surprise, that he was no longer a schoolboy dressed in short trousers
and blazer. He had become a grown man again. He was no longer naked but
clothed. He hid knowledge within himself now. He was dressed in the same kind
of tunic as
Knossos
favored, though it was of the same
silver-gray color as the
Schiaparelli
jumpsuits. His scalp itched. He scratched—and his fingers tangled in hair.
Tight, wiry curls.
He tore a single hair free. It was
crinkly—and rusty red.

 
          
Could
the Beautystar aliens have become perfect beings? Were they actually
here,
and did they—through the God they
had (perhaps) built for themselves—welcome the arrival of
Copernicus?
As something dynamic.
A new start.
Because perfection meant . . . that the world
stood still, like a fly in amber.

 
          
So
human beings spelled salvation? Thus the Devil (and the God) did indeed worship
the human newcomers just as the Fifth Epistle suggested! While, at the same
time, as the Third Epistle said, humans were really still at the level of
chickens and the bearded, pink-robed Deity in Eden was only ... a chicken
saviour, faintly puzzled at this circumscribing of his role, an event which the
Beautystar aliens might actually welcome—as an
escape
from the God they had generated, an escape from static
perfection into process and activity and events!

 
          
“Of
course!’’ he shouted at the empty lattice. “You aren’t in here any more, are
you, perfect ones? You’re all out there in the Gardens or
Eden
dressed in bodies. Maybe not in Hell,
though? You’ve left that to the robots. That’s a human place. You’re the rest
of the population! You’re the fish and the birds, the mermen, the winged
sharks, the lion and the unicorn! You could be some of the human beings too!
You’re relishing us! Enjoying our rich, strange psyches! Our struggle to
evolve!

 
          
“Aren’t
you? Aren’t you?” he challenged.

 
          
He
thumped the nearest desk with his fist, hitting it with such force that the
legs folded up under it. The desk sank smoothly into the floor, leaving only a
faint notional mark.

 
          
A
shockwave radiated out. Like toppling dominoes, like a house of cards, all the
other desks began to fold up and become mere marks on the plane. And as it lost
its content of desks, so the plane itself—and those above, and those
below—began slowly to deform. The planes folded in on themselves around him,
into some hyperdimensional shape— which perhaps represented geometrically some
arcane Number of Reality?

 
          
He
had accused, he had challenged. The collapse of the lattice seemed to be his
only answer. But just as the hypershape folded around him, deforming the space
occupied by his own reformed adult body—in a painless though disconcerting way,
his own length and breadth and height vanishing in the process—a voice that,
for once, was not his own spoke up.

 
          
He
was nowhere,
in the midst of
nothing. A nacreous light illuminated this nothing without, however, suggesting
near or far, or up or down. He thought he was wriggling his arms and legs,
trying to orient himself. Then he gave up. He had no arms and legs, although
his nervous system still thought that he had. His hand in front of his face
simply wasn’t there. The collapse of the lattice, he thought, had deprived him
of an outside. It was as though the projection of reality had been switched
off. Now he was only a dot, a point, dimensionless.

 
          
And
a voice spoke to him.

 
          
Reprogramming
him?
By sensory deprivation?
He had no choice in the
matter, since there was no other matter present.

 
          
“Nowhere isn’t nothing, Sean.
Nowhere is the Void. Listen:
there is more energy locked up in a single fingerspan of Void” (and now he had
at last a sensation of fingers, gripping . . . nothing) “than there is in all
the suns and radiation in the whole universe. Particle pairs spring into being
from this nowhere constantly, of their own accord. But given enough release of
energy, anything whatever can appear: configurations of particles corresponding
to a sapphire, a tree, a grand piano . . .

 
          
“The
manifest universe only approaches this level of potential energy at the heart
of a black hole formed from the collapsed matter of a giant star, or many
stars, perhaps many hundreds of them.” (Now his heartbeat:
thump
,
thumpl)
“From that
singularity point, where natural ‘laws’ break down, anything might emerge
fullblown: a tree, a grand piano ... if the event horizon did not draw a
cordon sanitaire
around the singularity.

           
“Yet black holes are not forever
bound by the event horizon. Quantum tunnelling makes their boundaries fuzzy.”
(Now he had hair on his body! He was being reconstructed physically somewhere,
organ by organ, item by item.) “Incoherent, random energy leaks out and away.”
(He had pores in his skin, which sweated heat.) “Until, suddenly, in a
micromicrosecond the black hole evaporates in radiation-flash. Anything of
macroscopic size may emerge at this moment, though the emission spectrum will
tend statistically to be nearly thermal, so that any exotic object will
simultaneously be destroyed by the emission.

 
          
“But
there is an even more curious condition. A collapsing ellipsoid mass rotating
rapidly about its long axis will shrink, not to a pointlike singularity within
an event horizon, but to a threadlike singularity that is
naked
to the manifest universe.”
(Just as he was
naked, in the Void.
He had eyes now, to see: rosy filaments of gases
that condensed into white-hot O-type suns which ionized these gases . . . Seven
suns at least!) “This naked threadlike singularity will continue on its
original vector through the manifest universe, emitting a nearly thermal
profile for eternity minus random moments. During one of those random moments,
as it passes by a condensing nebulosity, it emits into the universe, completely
and coherently, not a sapphire as large as a world, nor a grand piano to
puzzle future cosmonauts who might find it adrift in space a billion years hence,
nor an alien
exfarquib
(whatever that
might be), but—for the simple reason that this
can
happen, and therefore at this one moment
does
happen—it emits coherent energy-life: a web of organized
energies possessing awareness. Energy-life springs selfaware out of the
stochastic chaos.
A mind-horde of electromagnetic forces.
Ourselves.

 
          
“We
mutate. We shift. We balance.” (Now he had eardrums, tubes of the inner ear, a
sense of balance.) “We lock ourselves to the myriad dust motes of the
nebulosity as though they are the
seed
that will solidify us.” (His penis squirmed and his gonads ached.) “The
radiation of the hot new suns feeds our being. As the hot suns sweep out the
rest of the nebulosity, opening clear skies upon the universe, we wonder what
we shall
be.
We find ourselves
gifted, from that moment of our origin, with the power to draw on the
self-energy of the Void. We can cause to emerge, not merely particle pairs—the
ground state stuff of spontaneous creation—but an actual planetary sapphire, a
tree, a grand piano. If only we knew what such things were . . .

           
“We do not know. Our birth was a
sudden flash into existence. We lack archetypes. We lack content.” (Sean sought
and found his feet and thighs and chest and face . .
. )
“It is only in retrospect that we know of our lack, or know it as a ‘lack’. But
we must shift, we must generate and change, we must undergo processes to
maintain our balance. What
is
this
strange existence which we have received from the singularity? What should
we
generate? What changes should we
undergo? What processes should we initiate? We project crystalline lattices in
space, solid geometries, as those these may serve. We examine the outer
universe, of matter and radiation and emptiness.” (Sean felt sensations akin to
sunburn and hunger; his skin was warm, his belly empty.) “Is our existence a
joke? We only understand this concept much later, and a joke presupposes a
joker, whereas we simply happened. We can only speak to you about this, you
realize, because you yourselves and others have supplied some reference
points.

 
          
“We
intercept a coherent radio signal. Our mind-horde considers it. We realize
eventually that it is a statement from another kind of life in the
universe—specific parochial life— thousands of parsecs away, deep in the past.
We discover a genetic code, a history, culture, achievements,
purposes
. Drawing upon the self-energy of the Void, we
construct a spinning world shell with collapsed matter at the heart of it for
gravity, and an atmosphere, both of which their life seems to require.”
(Now Sean had ribs, bones and joints.)
“Upon the crust of
this world we animate their gift, of themselves, in so far as we understand it.
A small portion of our mind-horde enters into our projection as its
aqua vitae
, its life spirit,
the
better to experience it.

 
          
“For
a long while we are satisfied by our re-animation of their life. During
millions of subsequent rotations of this world shell there is only silence and
static in the universe. And now we intercept another life-message. Again we
create a world shell. Again we project the message into solid form, in so far
as we can guess at all that was left unsaid. Again another small part of
ourselves
imitates the way they must have been. We
perpetuate our idea of their idea of themselves.

 
          
“The
white suns are well advanced along the main sequence when our mind-horde,
searching always, picks up another signal to animate. Eons pass. Life is so
rare and far between!
And so frail.
Though in the
whole universe, equally, there must be many examples of it.

 
          
“As
our white suns swell into red giants we have already received perhaps twenty
messages from life that has reached that peak. Do they receive each other’s
messages? We doubt it. What happens after it has reached that peak? We do not
know. Perhaps it exhausts its world. Perhaps it exhausts itself. Our suns swell
and will soon collapse and explode. We draw on the Void-energy at our command
to shift our twenty world shells out in different directions—to bring the
presumed dead beings who have inhabited the galaxy back among the stars, as an
act of—you might say—worship/honor/admiration/ memorial.

 
          
“We
are so old, yet so young. The very youngest of you contains a billion years of
evolution. We are an end point of evolution, if it has such an end point,
reached at the very commencement of ourselves. We began ‘perfect’ and fell into
actualities. Where other worlds had dreams, we had to dream worlds. We must
re-enter being, if we are to understand that omega point of our beginning.
Identical with ourselves, we took on alien identities in so far as we could
simulate them. Is our only purpose to maintain the purposes of others? How can
there be purpose at ail, when we simply happened? We must search all
their
purposes to learn this. But
themselves
we have never met, only as recreated by
ourselves. They are always gone, long gone. They have never known each other,
except in our mind-horde. So how can we know if we are accurate in our
representation of them? We are mimic life.”

 
          
Sean
found his tongue. He licked his lips, unlocking them.

 
          
“Till
Copernicus
met up
with one of your world shells, orbiting here?”

 
          
“You
are the first life we have met, with its own life power intact, its own symbol
forces of the deep mind. We are trapped joyfully by the strength of your
existence-signal. The deep symbols and purposes compelled us. But we cannot
inform our other worlds; they are dispersed afar and along- time. The space
between the stars is vast. The gulfs of time are huge. Our worlds wander on,
somewhere in this galaxy, or perhaps out of it—a mind-horde animating each
projection, with a caul of free mind-horde in attendance.”

 
          
A
wandering, dispersing multi-world museum of projected, reanimated alien life
forms ... a cosmic psychic
Disneyland
:
this
was the only other current life
form sharing the galaxy with human beings?
The only other
higher life form?
True, there was other lower life: the ecologies of the
colony worlds that Earth had found so far . . .

 
          
“The
original Mind-Horde Prime has all descended into matter now, but we can still
independently animate a fresh world at the expense of the previous projection,
whose specifics we can store indefinitely. Perhaps another world shell,
receiving the message of your life from your home world long after you have
passed away, may choose to store its own current projection and reanimate your
Earthworld instead—for an hour or a million years. And try to guess what you
really were. But you, we actually know by direct experience.
So
we worship/honor/admire you.”

 
          
“So
that’s why you’re hipped on
Knossos
’s purposeful highspeed evolution! It gives you the infancy you never
had before? And when we all reach the millenium, if we do, you can switch off
the projection! And animate your idea of some intelligent lizards or squids or
gas-balloons who sent out a message a million years ago instead . . . Wait a
moment, why
should
all these life
forms pass away? Why should Earthlife send out a message then vanish from the
scene?”

 
          
“But
life does. So it seems from the evidence. Of course, we can only speak of those
who
have
signalled, not of those who
never signalled their presence. But those who signalled only do so for a short
time. It is the high peak of a species. Silence, then.”

 
          
“We’re
colonizing.
Moving out.”

 
          
“A few star-spans away from your home world.
That is
nothing. Already your home world may be dying back into itself, having reached
its peak of purpose. Only we are inexhaustible—for we tap the Void itself,
being children of the Void, its very projection out of the singularity. Yet our
coming together here may be a Great Event.
Even though it may
not be an event for your own home world, which must fulfil its own purpose on
its own.
We see that now. All life must learn how to be itself, amidst
the balm of emptiness— the huge spaces, the vacant time. Only we can collate
and compare life-purposes, who have none of our own from our origin.”

 
          
“
Knossos
wants quarantine for his world experiment!”

 
          
“
Knossos
knows the deep symbols of your life.
Knossos
is the seed. But you too, Sean
Athlon
, have reached our inner core ...”

 
          
Sean
flexed his body. He felt himself complete again: re-embodied.
Eyes, nose, lips.
Lungs, belly, heart.
Feet and hands.
No longer was he in the midst of
nowhere. His body started to re-establish space around itself: length, breadth
and height. A single
tug,
and he could be pulled
inside-out— like a tennis ball rotated through higher space—into reality again.
The projected reality.
Issuing from
the mind-horde, through their lens.