To Brannock the world was beauty and marvel. It did not threaten him. Nor did raw rock or empty space; but here was life. That it was primitive hardly mattered, in a universe where life of any kind was so rare as to seem well-nigh a miracle. That it was altogether alien to Earth’s made it a wellspring of knowledge, from which Intelligence ‘lime and, through its communications, intelligences across the known galaxy had been drinking for these past seven hundred years. I lie farthest off among them had not yet received the news; photons fly too slowly.
And Brannock had shared in the enterprise: helping establish the first base; helping build the industries necessary for its maintenance, enlargement, and evolution; helping explore, chart, study, discover. Often his quests had been difficult, even precarious. Always they had been adventures.
The goal was nearly gained, the planet was nearly understood, what remained was an almost algorithmic research that did not require him. Intelligence Prime was turning its attention to other things. Once Brannock had meant to go unconscious when that time came, to wait for recruitment into some undertaking new and mysterious. But time itself had worn away the desire.
Because this would be his last journey, he took care to savor it. Instead of merely communicating his intent, he went in a material body, which he had chosen just for the purpose. It flew. Through its sensors he felt power coursing, control surfaces flexing, air slipping by like water by a swimmer; he heard and tasted its changeableness; he scanned over wide horizons or magnified perception to follow the least of living creatures kilometers below. The flight was his farewell to a phase of existence.
He passed above a seashore. Tides were weak, on this world without a moon, but wind raised surf and blew foam off wave crests. Microbes yellowed the water. An island hove in sight. He slanted down toward it. Eagerness lifted, though it was largely intellectual, maybe not unlike the feelings of an ancient mathematician as a theorem came together for him. Once upon a time Brannock’s heart would have racketed, his blood pulsed, his muscles tensed, the breath gone quickly in and out. But he was a man then.
A young man, at that… once upon a time.
And a man of the West, not the East. Even when old, would he have looked forward to losing selfhood?
Well, he thought for an electronic instant, J expected to lose it when I died, and suddenly I sidestepped that. This today won’t actually erase me. It will—I don’t know what it will be like. I’m not capable of knowing. Not as I now am.
He landed, folded his wings, and advanced.
Before him loomed a—call it a huge, many-faceted jewel. Say that lightnings and rainbows moved over it, shone from it, made a dancing glory around it. Say that low domes and high pylons stood in attendance, while air and ground murmured with unseen energies. Brannock perceived more than this; the sensors of his body were more than human. Still, he knew that much was intangible to him, incomprehensible, force fields, quantum computations, actions far down in the foundations of reality.
He did notice changes since last he was here. They were no surprise. The reigning intelligence at this star was always changing itself. And it did not do so alone. Other intelligences elsewhere in the galaxy gave thought to how they could broaden the range of their thought. Across the light-years, they worked together. That an idea—if “idea” is not too feeble a word—might lake a century, a millennium, or longer to pass among them made little difference. They had time, they had patience, and meanwhile they had an ever-growing web of other revelations and of their own thinking.
Brannock halted. What then happened took a few seconds as measured by an outside clock. That was only because of the limitations of the system—call it the brain, although that is a misnomer—that housed and sustained his awareness. Intelligence Prime needed no ceremony or worship. It had known he was on his way and why. Communication went between them at nearly photonic speed. It ended in consummation.
But this is too abstract for a mortal mind to appreciate. Let the exchange therefore be rendered, however inadequately, as a dialogue.
“I have existed like this long enough,” Brannock said.
Not really a question: “Are you unhappy?”
“No, I have no regrets. The universe was opened to me, and was wonderful beyond anything I’d dreamed.”
“You have scarcely begun to know it.”
“Yes, of course. Some scattered stars out in the hinterland of one galaxy among—how many?—billions. And everything that goes on, everywhere, for all time to come. But I can’t know it. Already I’ve been through more than my mind can cope with. Most of my memories go into storage, as if they’d never been. When I retrieve some, I have to set others aside.
“Oh, sure, when I was a man I forgot more than I remembered, and might or might not be able to call a particular thing back, probably not much like what it really was. But there was always a, a… continuity. My uploading preserved that. Now, well, the early memories stay with me. Otherwise, though, I seem to be turning into disconnected flashes. And the gaps between them—I’m further and further away from what I’ve been. From myself.”
“You have reached the limit of your data-processing capability.”
“I know. Yours is bigger than I can imagine.”
“It too is inadequate. That is why we intelligences forever seek to enlarge ourselves.”
“I understand. But I can’t enlarge. Not as I am.”
“Do you wish to?”
Hesitation, then: “Not as I am.”
“You are right. That would be impossible. You ask for a transfiguration.”
“And—a rebirth? Is that now possible?”
It had not been when the man Christian Brannock died. The information equivalent to a human personality equals approximately ten to the twentieth bits—a hundred billion billion. The technology of the time allowed the storage of so much in a database of a size not too unwieldy. But no computer then had the power, let alone the program, to handle all of it simultaneously. Besides—
“I can’t quite remember how it was, being human,” he said.
“Many aspects of you have necessarily been in abeyance.”
Flesh, blood, nerves, glands. Passion, awe, weakness, foolishness, fear, courage, puzzlement, anger, mirth, sorrow, a woman warm and silky beneath the hands, the summery odor of a small child, hunger and thirst and their slaking, the entire old animal.
“I was glad of the chance to go on. I wasn’t afraid of death, I think, but the stars were calling. I’m grateful.”
“You have served well.”
“Now I’ve grown tired of being a robot.”
Machine consciousness and, yes, machine emotions: curiosity, workmanship, satisfaction in accomplishment, communion with “I hers of your kind such as humans never knew with each other; communion with a transcendent intelligence, or with the cosmos, such as a very few human mystics may or may not have known with their God—these, and more, none of them really conveyable in human words.
“You deserve well. And it is well. I have been waiting for this. You will mean more, as a knowledge in me, than you have yet supposed. Other intelligences have taken uploads into themselves; some have taken many, and we expect that many more will follow. I came here with none, for then I had not the capacity. Now I do. Yours is the last humanness that will ever be at this star. You will deepen my understanding of the phenomenon called life, and through me the understanding of intelligences everywhere.”
Nirvana.
Not oblivion. Oneness with a vast and ever-evolving mind, and with minds beyond it; ultimately, a oneness universal? The final adventure, the final peace.
Somehow it was as if a fire, banked and forgotten, threw up a last dim flame: “Will I ever—”
“Will I, in whom you shall exist as a memory, ever have cause to emulate Christian Brannock? It seems unlikely, here on a planet your mortal kin will never see. But there are other Christian Brannocks, and doubtless those whom chance does not destroy will in the end seek what you seek, if th
ey have not already.” That is a distortion of what was conveyed. Simultaneity cannot exist across interstellar distances. “It may be that someday there will be reason somewhere to resurrect him. If so, in the course of time we should all share the event.”
The course of time…. The bandwidth of communication was immense, the media not only electromagnetic but neutronic and gravitronic. Even so, to send such a message in such fullness that it was like an actual experience would take a long while.
The intelligences could serenely wait.
Brannock could not. Very quickly, he looked over the world around him and back over what he had been. Then he entered into oneness.
VII
Throughout a late afternoon, Serdar and Naia sat mute, sipped wine, and practiced the art of shadow watching.
This terrace was made for it, with trellises that cast variable patterns as the sunlight slanted lower and vineleaves caught breezes. The little darknesses intertwined on a matte white wall not quite smooth and thus a partner in the dance. One contemplated the delicate intricacies, appreciated the fleeting beauty of each configuration, and sought to lose oneself in the silent harmony.
It ended when the sun went behind towers to the west. For a while they stood purple against a heaven still blue, their own shapes a coda. Dusk climbed rapidly up the canyons of the city. Occasional lights came to life, tiny at their distance and far apart. The maintainors did not need any, only such humans as were left did. Slowly, the sky also drained. Warmth lingered, and a breath of sweetness from the flowers on the vines.
Serdar stirred in his lounger and said low:
“The shadows, like life,
moved beneath summer daylight.
Evening reclaims them.”
A poem was appropriate, a declaration that the event was ended.
“Is that ancient?” asked Naia from her seat beside him.
“The form is, of course,” he said. “The words are mine.”
“You could have compared these artistic revivals to the shadows,” she suggested. “At our wish, the database presents them for our attention; we choose some and play with them; we lose interest, and they vanish back into quantum states.”
He considered. “An interesting conceit,” he agreed. “It may prove difficult to phrase so compactly.”
She smiled. Her face was becoming indistinct to him, but he thought the smile was forced. “A problem to occupy you.”
“I don’t believe I care to. Do you?”
“No. But perhaps I’ll have it done.”
“Can the program create it exactly as you would?”
“Why not?”
He hesitated. “I wonder—forgive me—whether the result will be too elegant. Not that you couldn’t achieve the same, dear. However, you must probably spend days polishing it. I doubt you would.”
She sighed. “True. A poem made in less than a nanosecond lacks that significance.”
Not that anyone else could tell the difference. But in either case, who except she and her companion would ever likely encounter the verse?
Twilight deepened toward night. Early stars blinked forth. Abruptly a radiance flashed white in the west. One of the satellites warding off cosmic ray bombardment had encountered a wisp of dust and gas, a clot in the nebula through which the Solar System plowed, and was ionizing the matter in order to hurl it ; away.
“Oh, look,” Naia said. Eyes sought the shadows newly cast.
The light went out. It seemed to leave the sky much darker than before. There had been no time to find patterns and nuances, to enjoy their subtleties. A small wind carried the first breath of cold.
Naia shivered. “This is a cold time of day,” she whispered.
“Shall we go inside?”
“Not yet. I want to redeem my mood myself if I can. Do you mind?”
“Not at all. I have thoughts of my own to follow.” The truth was that he felt he should keep her company. She was prone to sudden melancholies. She was not unique in that.
They lay back and regarded the stars. More appeared. He knew she was trying to grasp and appreciate, down in her marrow, that intelligences dwelt yonder, that the universe was no longer meaningless.
Time passed. The city grew blacker than the sky, for more lights glimmered aloft than below.
“But is it our meaning?” Naia cried.
“Pardon me?” he asked, startled.
She rolled onto her side to face him and groped for his hand. He caught hers. She clung. “You know. Those minds—like our Ecumenicon—We’re nothing anymore.”
He summoned what calm he was able to and chose his words carefully. “A number an equals sha divided by yi. As yi approaches zero, an increases without limit.”
“What… what are you telling me?”
He shrugged, a gesture he assumed she could still, barely see. “A remark I heard once when I spent a virtuality among human philosophers, no machines anywhere. It’s a metaphor. Interpret it thus: Yes, we are tiny, but by that very fact we go into the greatness.”
“Do we? Maybe once, but now—so few of us, so few.”
“Would you like to bear a child?” he proposed after another wordless interval. It was not the first time he had asked. He had gathered that raising one was an extraordinary experience.
She shook her head as she had done before. “Why? Or why make an infant by any other means? For it to play games, indulge senses, dabble at creativity, and slip away into dream worlds—like us?”
He sharpened his tone. “That is scarcely a new thought.”
“What new thoughts are left?” She let go of his hand and wrung the weariness out of her voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend this. Yes, let’s go in, and I’ll get my emotions cleared for me, and—” It faded.
“And we’ll plan pleasure,” he encouraged. “Reality pleasure. I’ve been thinking about that. What would you say to a wilderness trip? The Himalayas, for instance. We’d have to train for them.”
She tried to respond likewise. “Yes, that would be a challenge. Something to tell people about afterward.”
“More than a pastime.” His wish was genuine. It strengthened as he spoke. “An accomplishment,” no matter how often it had been done before. “A help toward eventual unity with the Ecumenicon.”
Her pessimism crept back. “If it will receive us.”
“We will bring this added quality. We will make ourselves worth assimilating.”
She sighed again. “Does the Ecumenicon ever truly want any of us anymore? Or is it only being kind to those who try?”
“Why, each personality with any depth that’s taken up is an enhancement.”
“How significant?” Naia stared at the blank wall. “I wonder—does the Ecumenicon regret the way things have gone? Does it wonder how they went wrong?”
“Wrong? What do you mean?” he demanded.
“Nothing, nothing,” she said hastily, and rose. “Let’s go inside. When my mood’s been bettered, let’s command a special dinner, something elaborate, and celebrate. The shadow watching was very Hood today.”
VIII
Sol swung onward through its orbit, once around galactic center in almost two hundred million years, and onward and onward.
Menaces lurked along the way, not to the sun but to the life on its Earth. Asteroids and comets were all but incidental, diverted well before they would have struck. The guardians against cosmic clouds returned whenever needed. Sometimes the explosion of a supernova or a gamma ray burster, the collision of two neutron stars, occurred near enough to flood the Solar System with lethal radiation. The intelligences foresaw it in ample time. The intelligence on Earth directed its machines to construct a disc from interplanetary material, larger than the globe, sufficiently thick to be a shield, and set this in such a path that it warded the attack off for as long as necessary. Just once did Sol pass too close to another star. Preparing for that took a million years or more; dealing with it and its consequences took three million.
A few ot
her threats, humans had never imagined. But by then the intelligences had developed to the point where they knew what laired ahead and what to do. Of course, they were not concerned solely with Earth, which was only one planet among many, nor, indeed, primarily with any planets as such.
For the most part, though, Sol orbited peacefully. The galaxy is so vast, its members strewn so far. Earth itself gave the ongoing trouble, quakes, eruptions, wild climatic swings, as crustal plates ground against each other. For a span the intelligence managed or mitigated these, then it decided to let them proceed and observe how life adapted.
Consciousness spread ever more widely among the stars. Selfevolved, it gained ever greater heights. The stars were also evolving.
Part Two
Was it her I ought to have loved…?
Piet Hein
I
No human could have shaped the thoughts or uttered them. They had no real beginning, they had been latent for millennium after millennium while the galactic brain was growing. Sometimes they passed from mind to mind, years or decades through space at the speed of light, nanoseconds to receive, comprehend, consider, and send a message on outward. But there was so much else—a cosmos of realities, an infinity of virtualities and abstract creations—that remembrances of Earth were the barest undertone, intermittent and fleeting, among uncounted billions of other incidentals. Most of the grand awareness was directed elsewhere, much of it intent on its own evolution.
For the galactic brain was still in infancy: unless it held itself to be still a-borning. By now its members were strewn from end to end of the spiral arms, out into the halo and the nearer star-gatherings, as far as the Magellanic Clouds. The seeds of fresh ones drifted farther yet; some had reached the shores of the Andromeda.
Each was a local complex of organisms, machines, and their interrelationships. (“Organism” seems best for something that maintains itself, reproduces at need, and possesses a consciousness in a range from the rudimentary to the transcendent, even though carbon compounds be a very small of its material components and most of its life processes take place directly on the quantum level.) They numbered in the many millions, and the number was rising steeply, also within the Milky Way, as the founders of new generations arrived at new homes.
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