Mr G
Page 13
Please, said Uncle. Try. I would be so relieved if the intelligent ones could understand that their lives, as brief as they are, are part of something immortal.
Yes, I said, I believe I can do that.
At the moment of death, said Uncle. Then, even if the glimpse is overwhelming, it will not crush their lives.
Let us try with the guilt-ridden young woman who stole food to support her family, I said. Eons ago. I will shift time, so that we can go back to her era. And … I have wanted to do something for her. This, at least, will be something. Even though at the end of her life.
Thank you, Nephew. We will not be gone long? Your aunt is getting impatient.
Then I compactified Uncle to a dot, and we entered the universe. Together, we glided through the cosmos, through galactic clusters, past one shining galaxy after another, to a particular galaxy, one spiral arm, one star system, one planet, one commune.
There she is, now eighty-three local years old. She lies upon a porcelain bed in a dim chamber, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, the scent of the ritual branda plant filling the air. Following her custom, she lies on her right side, one of her eyes covered with a leaf. Her labored breaths make a sputtering sound. You hear her breathing? Yes, says Uncle, the time must be near. It goes by so quickly, a life.
Sixty-five years have passed since she stood by a window in a different abode in a different commune, looking out at a courtyard with spherical rocks and a tadr bird circling the cistern. Soon after that defining moment, struggling with confusion and guilt, she left her home, joined a traveling group of merchants, decided to punish herself by uniting with a vagabond, gave birth to a child that she abandoned. Every man she met, she wanted to be her father. Over time, a great remorse flowed through her, and she forgave her mother and herself. But she did not forgive the vagaries of the universe. She and her second husband had four children, who then bore their own children. Never did she find the child she abandoned in her youth. Despite years of searching, she never found that child. And that is her final regret as she now lies on her right side, breathing with shallow breaths, holding the hand of her grandson.
She has had moments of joy in her life, as well as frustration and sadness? asked Uncle.
Yes.
Sixty-five years passed in an instant. Her life has been used up in an instant.
Her ability to hear has ceased. Although one of her eyes is open, she sees only dim hazy shapes. She feels heavy, as if she cannot move from the position where she lies. Her mouth feels dry. She cannot move her tongue. Her breathing sounds like a pant, a dry thirsty exhale and inhale.
The moment approaches. She dreams.
Through the opaline clouds of a dream, she sees herself as a girl. Her father, young and strong, runs with her over a field. He is trying to tell her something, but each time he speaks she cannot hear him. Then she is holding her first child, the one she abandoned, the one she loved most. Then she is walking from habitat to habitat making her prophecies, behind each door a face, a room, a table, running water.
I can’t believe it’s over. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to hear it. It grows smaller and smaller. Where’s my daughter Leita? Where’s my son Mrand? I want a second life. I want more life. Please. You, there. Who are you? What is this place? Is this where I’ve gone?
She has entered my dream, said Uncle Deva. Uncle began weeping.
Now, I said. Now she has the glimpse.
The old woman lying on her right side gave one long exhale, and a smile appeared on her face, and she died.
Permanence from Impermanence
And she died. At that moment, there were 3,147,740,103,497,276,498,750,208,327 atoms in her body. Of her total mass, 63.7 percent was oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars.
In the cremation, her water evaporated. Her carbon and nitrogen combined with oxygen to make gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which floated skyward and mingled with the air. Most of her calcium and phosphorous baked into a reddish brown residue and scattered in soil and in wind.
Released from their temporary confinement, her atoms slowly spread out and diffused through the atmosphere. In sixty days’ time, they could be found in every handful of air on the planet. In one hundred days, some of her atoms, the vaporous water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and ingested by animals and plants. Some of her atoms were absorbed by light-utilizing organisms and transformed into tissues and tubules and leaves. Some were breathed in by oxygen creatures, incorporated into organs and bone.
Pregnant women ate animals and plants made of her atoms. A year later, babies contained some of her atoms. Not that her atoms had identification labels. But they were certainly her atoms, there is no doubt about that. I knew which ones. I could count them. Here, and here, and here.
Several years after her death, millions of children contained some of her atoms. And their children would contain some of her atoms as well. Their minds contained part of her mind.
Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this woman? It is not likely. Will they feel what she felt in her life, will their memories have flickering strokes of her memories, will they recall that moment long ago when she stood by the window, guilt ridden and confused, and watched as the tadr bird circled the cistern? No, it is not possible. Will they have some faint sense of her glimpse of the Void? No, it is not possible. It is not possible. But I will let them have their own brief glimpse of the Void, just at the moment they pass from living to dead, from animate to inanimate, from consciousness to that which has no consciousness. For a moment, they will understand infinity.
And the individual atoms, cycled through her body and then cycled through wind and water and soil, cycled through generations and generations of living creatures and minds, will repeat and connect and make a whole out of parts. Although without memory, they make a memory. Although impermanent, they make a permanence. Although scattered, they make a totality.
See, Uncle, it is done.
Material Intelligence
Eons passed in the universe. But in the Void, eons can be moments.
“The Void does not seem what it was once before,” said Belhor. “Would you agree?”
“It seems much more empty,” I said.
Belhor laughed. “Isn’t it fascinating that a totally empty thing can become more empty. A long time ago, I predicted that our new universe would change us. Indeed. We have all become more full, and everything else has become more empty. But the new universe is not so new anymore, is it.”
“It is nearly 2.5 x 1033 atomic ticks old.”
“It is passing away,” said Belhor. “Already many of the stars have faded. Even a universe passes away.”
“I say good riddance,” said Baphomet the Larger, who was following behind Belhor and me as we moved through the Void. “The place had some unpleasant individuals in it.”
“Some very unpleasant individuals,” said Baphomet the Smaller, who walked another few paces behind Baphomet the Larger. “But we fixed quite a few of them, didn’t we. We fixed them good.”
Baphomet L. turned around and frowned at Baphomet S., then did a backwards somersault. At which point the smaller Baphomet performed his own somersault, clumsily done. The larger Baphomet stopped and showed the smaller beast how to tuck itself in during the roll.
“None of you should have intervened,” I said. “I did not intervene.”
“Allow me to apologize for the enthusiasm of my companions,” said Belhor. “But we did not alter the course of events in any significant way. We merely observed. And if we ever did more than observe, it was only to give a slight nudge to capacities and tendencies already there, to events already in motion.”
“You have a circuitou
s way of saying things,” I said.
“You are getting to know me,” said Belhor. “Nonetheless, I think we can all agree that the thing had quite an inertia of its own. The universe and its contents, including its minds, seemed to know from the beginning where it was headed.”
“The most advanced civilizations continually amazed me,” I said. “On their own, they discovered my organizational principles. With not much to go on. I have been impressed.”
“Yes,” said Belhor. “Impressive. But none of them ever discovered the First Cause.”
“No, that would have been impossible. With their calculations, they could go far back in time, back to the point when the cosmos was only a fraction of a tick old. But there is no way they could go back to the beginning.”
“Of course not,” said Belhor. “They cannot get outside of the sphere they inhabit. They cannot even see the walls of the sphere. For all of their inventiveness, they are still insects compared to us.”
“They exist in three dimensions. But it would be the same at five or a hundred. As you say, they cannot get out of the space they inhabit. They cannot even imagine the Void.”
“I, for one, would not be comfortable with their imagining the Void,” said Belhor. “Let them live and expire inside their little sphere. All in all, it has been an interesting experiment.”
“Experiment? Experiment?” said Baphomet the Larger. “Nobody told me we were doing an experiment.”
“Nobody told me either,” said Baphomet the Smaller, who pretended to start sobbing. “Nobody ever tells me anything.”
“We have learned something about what a material mind is capable of,” said Belhor. “It is capable of great goodness, and also great evil. And more extreme in either case than I would have thought. But that is what happens with intelligence.”
“Is it a consequence of intelligence, or materiality?” I said. “Because we have even greater intelligence.”
Belhor smiled and said nothing.
Nihāya
And the universe continued to age and grow old. One by one, the stars burned up their nuclear fuel. Without replenishment, their internal heat slowly leaked away. And without heat and pressure to support them against the inward pull of their own gravity, the spent stars contracted and shrank and dwindled until they were cold and dim embers floating in space.
Planets in orbit about these dead stars no longer had a ready source of energy. Consequently, their lifeforms could no longer sustain themselves. Here and there, some few civilizations had created their own energy sources, independent of their central stars, but all energy is limited, and in time these sources too were depleted. In eons past, after the first generation of stars had passed away, a second generation had formed from the contraction of great clouds of gas. Now, however, the universe had expanded and spun out to such a degree that the gas filling the vast spaces between stars was too thin and sparse, and it was completely unable to form new stars. Gravity, once the creator of stars and the creator of life, was at this point only a feeble force in the universe.
Slowly, slowly, animate matter became extinct. The tiny fraction of material in the cosmos that had been alive, the smattering of mass that existed in the form of living and breathing beings, diminished to zero. Once again, Aalam-104729 was a sphere of dead, lifeless matter. Only now, all of its energy was in unusable form. The potential for life had been utilized and exhausted. The only future for Aalam-104729 was to continue expanding, dimming, thinning, with the particles of its dead matter getting farther and farther away from one another.
There came a point in time when only a single galaxy remained that harbored life. Uncle Deva named this galaxy Nihāya. Stars in all other galaxies had faded away, but in this galaxy, a few points of light still shined. There came a point in time when only a single planet in this galaxy contained life. The intelligent beings on this planet understood that the universe was dying, that their days as a civilization were numbered. But they could not know that they were the last in the universe. They made paintings and music and books to commemorate the end of their existence, but they could not know that there would be no future beings to witness these things. The last life on this planet was, in fact, insects and plants. There came a point in time when this too passed away. And life in the universe was finished.
“Do you have regrets?” said Belhor to me. “Knowing that there would be suffering, would you make the universe again?”
“I regret that there was suffering,” I said.
“Yes, but would you do it again?”
I entered Aalam-104729, and I glided past the dim galaxies, the dim planets, the dim stars. Again I heard voices. Voices from past civilizations that dreamed of immortality.
A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion, does not act as if it is real, so he escapes the suffering.
We have built the heaven with might, and We it is who make the vast extent.
The senses are higher than the body; the mind higher than the senses; above the mind is the intellect; and above the intellect is the Self.
What is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
A New Dress for Aunt Penelope
From the outside, Aalam-104729 looked as it always had. Aunt Penelope held it up, shook it, and listened. Then she sighed. Well, Nephew, she said, what will you do for your next one? As I remember, you wanted everything bigger.
I changed my mind, I said. I’d like the next one to be the same.
As we were speaking, billions of empty universes flew through the Void, all waiting, and waiting. They hummed and sputtered and shrieked.
The next one won’t be the same, said Uncle Deva.
No, I said, it won’t. But I would not be unhappy if it was very similar.
I think we were all rather fond of the thing, said Uncle D.
Yes we were, I said. And fond of the inhabitants.
It was a lovely thing, said Aunt P.
It was a beautiful thing, said Uncle. It had beauty. And joy. And sadness.
It had all of that, I said. It had everything.
Not everything, said Aunt. It did not have immortality.
No it did not, said Uncle. But I think maybe it did have a soul after all.
A mortal soul? said Aunt. Sometimes I can’t tell what you are talking about, Deva.
It’s gone now, I said. That is the nature of things. But I do miss it.
There will be another one, said Deva. And another one after that.
Yes.
OK, Nephew, said Aunt P. I’m anxious to see what the next one will be like. Let’s get on with it.
Don’t rush Him, said Uncle. He needs to take His time.
Yes yes, said Aunt. And just so that both of you know, I’d like a new dress from the next universe, like the last one.
Certainly my dear, said Uncle.
Notes
Origin of Names
Aalam is a Muslim name meaning “universe.” Belhor, also called Belial, Baalial, and Beliar, is a demon figure in the Christian and Hebrew apocrypha. Baphomet is a twelfth-century pagan deity in Christian folklore, appearing in the nineteenth century as a Satan-like figure. Deva is a Sanskrit word meaning “deity.” Nihāya is an Arabic word meaning “ending,” used to refer to the endings of Arabic stories and Sufi poetry. Ma’or is a Hebrew name meaning “star.” Al-Maisan is an Arabic name meaning “the shining one.”
Science
The physical creation of matter and energy, galaxies, stars, and planets, and the emergence of life follow the best current data and theories in physics, astronomy, and biology. All quantitative discussion of various cosmic events is scientifically accurate. The unit of time used by Mr g, the “tick of a hydrogen clock,” is the reciprocal of the frequency of the Lyman alpha emission from the hydrogen atom, equal to about 4 x 10-16 seconds.
Numbers
There is no reason why Mr g would use base 10 to discuss numbers, but this base has been used here because it is the number system that will be
familiar to most (Earthling) readers.
Origin of Italicized Quotations at End of Chapter Nihāya
“A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion …”
—saying of the Buddha
“We have built the heaven with might …”
—Qur’an, 51:47
“The senses are higher than the body …”
—Bhagavad Gita, 3:42
“What is seen is temporary …”
—New Testament, 2 Corinthians 4:18
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Lightman is the author of five previous novels, a book-length narrative poem, two collections of essays, and several books on science. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Nature, among many other publications. His novel Einstein’s Dreams was an international best seller and has been translated into thirty languages. His novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award. A theoretical physicist as well as a novelist, Lightman has served on the faculties of Harvard and MIT, and was the first person to receive a dual faculty appointment at MIT in science and in the humanities. He is also the founding director of the Harpswell Foundation, which works to empower a new generation of women leaders in Cambodia. Lightman lives in the Boston area.
Visit Alan Lightman at http://writing.mit.edu/people/faculty/homepage/lightman
Also available in eBook format, by Alan Lightman:
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