The Walking Shadow

by Brian Stableford

  “Third-phase life,” said Paul.

  “Yes.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “The La, in their exploration of that part of the galaxy which they have so far been able to reach, have found three basic types of evolutionary pattern. It is simplest to consider them as if they were consequent on different kinds of initial circumstances pertaining to the actual emergence of life. On Earth, as you know, life evolved in the primeval ocean, rich in organic compounds, first through the formation of chemically-active globules—microspheres—which gradually became more complex structurally, until they became proto-cells, and secondly by the differentiation of such proto-cells into different modes of existence. As organic molecules became less freely available, some proto-cells embarked upon a way of life involving the synthesis of complex organic molecules fueled by sunlight, while others embarked upon a way of life involving the theft of molecules from the molecule-builders.”

  “Plants and animals,” put in Paul. “I know the story.”

  Hadan frowned at the interruption, but went on. “The story of life on Earth is basically the story of the mechanisms invented by cells for the purpose of making more cells. Competition between different kinds of cells—both within and between the basic types—established a situation in which there was rigorous selection between reproductive mechanisms, the most effective surviving while the less effective perished. You know all this, and it is quite obvious. But it has probably not occurred to you to wonder whether there might be alternatives to this whole pattern.

  “In fact, natural selection of this kind is by no means universal to all life-systems. This kind of competition of reproductive systems is not inevitable. There are some worlds where the conditions permitting the evolution of life are not as violent as those pertaining to the early Earth. Some life-systems have emerged in which the fundamental structure was not the microsphere proto-cell but a kind of film, like an oil-slick on still water or a sheath of slime covering a rock. On such worlds, the differentiation of living material into cells came only at a very late stage in the evolutionary story, which was for many years involved not with globular individual life-units but with potentially-infinite sheets. In these systems the differentiation of the modes of existence you call the plant-mode and the animal-mode simply never happened.

  “There is, in such systems, no real difference between growth and reproduction. On such worlds there are no organisms, but only life. All life on such worlds is one. There are no individuals. Sometimes such systems never even develop the ability to photosynthesize more organic substance with the aid of sunlight, and remain forever limited by the initial supply of organic molecules dissolved in the primeval soup or distributed over the primeval rocks. More often, though, the photosynthetic faculty does evolve, and the life-system can continue to evolve, often introducing the differentiation of function and the complication of structure characteristic of any evolutionary pattern, but such systems never evolve individuality and competition—or if they do, they alter their whole mode of being in the process, and become second-phase systems. These systems are, of course, what the La call first-phase life.

  “Third-phase life involves the kind of system that we might imagine originating on a world where conditions were much more violent than those pertaining to the origin of life on Earth. Here, too, the fundamental step is the evolution of the microspheric proto-cell, but instead of its emergence being a relatively comfortable affair, it is one attended by great difficulty. In order for a microsphere to survive at all in such an environment, it needs to have far greater capacities of self-repair than were necessary for the ancestors of Earthly cells.

  “We imagine conditions so violent and a struggle for existence so desperate that the problem of there being so many microspheres that they must compete for dwindling resources never arises. The only problem is maintaining the integrity of the proto-cell. In such circumstances the protocells become gradually more capable. Where two come together they do not simply merge and separate, as second-phase microspheres do, but join and co-operate, adding their capabilities together. This is the price of survival—only those proto-cells that can evolve better and better life-preserving faculties can survive at all.

  “In consequence, individuals do not evolve in this instance either. There is no competition of the second-phase kind, but instead a much more bitter conflict between living substance and environment. What emerges from the process are cells that are highly adaptable, cells that can aggregate and co-operate. What forms is a kind of super-organism, all of whose individual units are protean, and which can adopt any function required for the immediate needs of the whole. Cells or groups of cells can function in the animal mode or in the plant mode, but the whole population of cells remains associated in a way that second-phase cells never are.

  “On such worlds, inordinately complex life-systems have evolved, whose biomass is vastly greater than the biomass of a second-phase life-system, but which consist, essentially, of a single super-organism. Imagine, if you like, all the species of Earth associated like the bees in a hive or the zoophytic colonies comprising a Portuguese Man O’War. This super-organism is infinitely adaptable, and can co-opt into its biomass everything save the rock which is its substratum...and perhaps, as it grows, even that can be slowly eroded. A visitor to such a world need only open the aperture of his starship and he is destroyed. A third-phase life-system will absorb alien flesh in a matter of moments.

  “Sometimes, just as first-phase life can give rise to second-phase, so second-phase life can give rise to third-phase. Once third-phase cells arise, however their origin is achieved, they absorb the entire life-system. That might be the eventual fate of all life in the universe, and would be for certain, were it not for the fact that second-phase life, with its competition between cells to build better and better reproductive systems, almost invariably gives rise eventually to sentient and intelligent beings. Third-phase life can never give rise to intelligence—it has no use for it. Its protean cells are infinitely adaptable physically; they do not need to be adaptable behaviorally. The evolution of intelligence in second-phase systems is vital, because intelligent beings can take responsibility for the future evolution of such systems. They can assure that third-phase life does not evolve, and can destroy it while it is still vulnerable, as and when it emerges. Intelligence can preserve itself, if its owners behave in a truly intelligent way.

  “I hope now that you can see something of the pattern of life in the universe. Seeing that, you can better appreciate the philosophy of the La, and their behavior. The survival of intelligent life—of all intelligent life—is their goal. They have known races that could not be preserved, and whose worlds have either become utterly sterile and lifeless or have fallen prey to third-phase life. They see the long-term future in terms of a growing network of symbiotic relationships between second-phase life-systems across the galaxy, and perhaps even between galaxies. Without such a network, they fear that third-phase life will mindlessly possess all the habitable worlds of all the stars. The idea of a mindless universe appalls them, because they believe that the universe itself is not merely a physical system but is, at least potentially, possessed in its unity and entirety of the property of mind.”

  When he stopped, silence fell.

  Paul let a full half-minute pass before he asked: “How many stars have the La visited?”

  “Tens of thousands,” replied Hadan. “Very few have worlds where life exists; even fewer have second-phase life; fewer still have intelligent life. Ours is the thirteenth intelligent species the La have contacted, although they have found residual evidence of two more that are now extinct. Of the thirteen, one has already fallen prey to third-phase life. Its world had to be abandoned by the La, and the La concerned had themselves to be quarantined. It is an experience that the race remembers with horror and fear. Remila and his people do not want to see the same thing happen to Earth.”

  “And you agree completely?”


  “Yes, I do.”

  “Even though everything you have told me is, from your point of view, hearsay. You have not been into space—and nor has any other human.”

  “Humans are not equipped, physically or psychologically, for travel between the stars. The La can travel in suspended animation, sustained only by the symbiotes that live within their bodies, and which can supply their elementary metabolic requirements by means of photosynthesis.”

  “What about time-jumpers?” asked Paul. “If a human were to ride a spaceship beyond the solar system, and then go into stasis, surely he’d stay where he was, inside the ship? That way, he could survive a journey of fifty or a hundred years.”

  “Time-jumping is erratic,” replied Hadan. “It seems to be simple enough to jump, but planning one’s arrival is quite another thing. What use would it be to take a passage on a starship, if one were to wake up thirty years too soon, or not at all. No human has gone to the stars, and no human intends to try. There is no reason whatsoever to doubt what the La tell us. What motive could they possibly have for trying to deceive us?”

  To that question, Paul could make no reply. Instead, he said: “What, exactly do the La want from us? What would count as a convincing demonstration of our worthiness to be part of their grand plan?”

  “At the moment,” replied Hadan, “the opposition to wholehearted co-operation with the La is focused on your name. There are many different cults and groups of one kind or another, and countless individuals, who are bound together only by the fact that they are in some sense waiting for your return, convinced that you might be able to tell them what to do, offering them a different kind of salvation. If all those movements were to lose the glue that holds them together, our cause would be won. A few disaffected individuals don’t matter; the La themselves have plenty of those, and whole shiploads have arrived in the wake of accounts of Earth that reached other La worlds over the last few centuries. They, too, have only one thing in common: the futile hope that an alien messiah with the power to move through time might offer them a reason for living that can stand in opposition to the philosophy of the La.”

  “In other words,” said Paul, “you think that everything will be beautiful, if only I’ll throw in with you and preach your gospel.”

  “To me,” agreed Hadan, “it certainly seems that way.”

  Paul glanced across at Remila, who was patiently watching and listening.

  Remila went into a long monologue in his own language. When he had finished, Hadan said: “He says that it would have been better if you had never awakened, or had vanished completely like some of the others. He doesn’t think that even you can overcome the mythology of your name. But he still hopes that we might win, with all his heart, and he knows that we must try.”

  Most of the speech went right over Paul’s head, because his attention had been caught and held by one particular phrase.

  “What do you mean, vanished?”

  Hadan looked genuinely surprised. “Didn’t you know?” he said. “I thought that even in 2119.... Some of the jumpers don’t ever land. Sometimes the statues blink out, just like that!” He snapped his fingers. Then he added: “It seems that your pilgrims to the end of time haven’t picked a particularly safe way to travel.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Rebecca’s letter was headed: Paul. Just that, and nothing else. Perhaps she hadn’t felt confident enough to write more than that. Perhaps she hadn’t felt that anything else was necessary. She might have known—or at least believed—that her letter would be read by other eyes, and alien eyes at that. How much, he wondered, might that have altered what she had chosen to write?

  As he read on, he imagined that he could hear her voice saying the words, speaking in the low, intense tone that she had used during the first night, before she realized who he was...when he was just another ordinary person reborn into the post-war world.

  “I don’t know if you’ll ever receive this letter,” said the voice, “and I don’t know how much it will matter if you do. Hundreds of people have written letters to you, and I suppose I’m just following the trend. The La have agreed to hold the letters, and they seem to live so long that the same ones will still be around when you come back, so I suppose they mean what they say. I don’t know what other people have said in their letters but what I want to do is tell you how I see things and why I’m doing what I’m doing. Others will tell you about the world and give you plenty of advice, so there’s no need for me to tell you what I found when I came out of the jump or how I reacted to it all. Either things will still be the same and you’ll go through it yourself, or they’ll be different, and it won’t matter.

  “I don’t think I write now as the same person you found when you first came to the house that night. I’m not very much older, but I feel very different, about almost everything. Partly that’s because I’m a jumper now, and I know something of what you must have felt. Partly it’s because of what happened in the few days you were with me and what’s happened in the days I’ve lived since. I’m looking at a different world now, and I realize how much I was trapped before with the idea of the future that seemed natural to the world I’d lived all my life in.

  “Because I knew you, and because I spent sixty years frozen still in time with your arm around me, I’ve become something of a celebrity. I feel that people are expecting something of me. They go over and over what I saw and what you said, as if there ought to be some secret message hidden in it, which will tell them what to do and what to be. I don’t like it. It scares me. They can’t be satisfied with what there is to say, but I daren’t make up anything. They expect me to be able to tell them what parts of your book mean, as if I were the one person in the world who could get it all clear and make it simple for them. They won’t accept that I don’t know. Everything here is confused. Partly, I suppose, what I’m doing in jumping—and I’m planning to jump, again and again—is trying to escape this situation. I’m trying to get away from not being what other people want me to be. But it’s not just a matter of running away. There’s much more to it than that—or if it is just running away, it’s running away from much more than the pressure of what people expect of me.

  “Mainly, I’m jumping because there’s nothing in this world that means anything to me. It has nothing to give me. There’s no place in it for me. Most of the jumpers feel the same—the reason most of them left their own times was that those times seemed to have nothing for them, and they felt dislocated. Jumping has made things worse and not better. They now feel even more dislocated. They can’t revert to what ordinary people consider to be ordinary life—it’s harder for them now than it would have been before they ever started. Nearly all the jumpers jump again. Sometimes they stay around for months, or even years, but until they get old and tired they keep on jumping, and I think they will keep on jumping for as long as they can. The only exceptions are some of the ones who jumped to escape the destruction of the USA: Marcangelo and some like him. Marcangelo is still alive; he’s helped me while I’ve recovered and thought about things. He’s a few years older. There are some people here who are three-time jumpers, and not one of them has stayed more than a few days. I’ve been here a couple of months, but I’ll never stay so long again.

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. We’ve tried to work out why it is that the jumps vary so much, but we can’t. All we know is that the three-time jumpers tend to jump further every time. Maybe the lengths of the jumps increase according to some mathematical relationship, but we don’t know enough yet to be sure. No one knows why some people only jump twenty or thirty years, while others jump a century—it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with how hard you try, and as we still have no idea what actually causes the slips there seems to be no possibility of our learning any kind of control. Anyone who jumps has got to reconcile himself or herself to the fact that it’s a very lonely prospect. The chance of meeting up with people you know is slim.

  “Looked at l
ike that, jumping as a way of life isn’t very attractive. On top of that, some people disappear forever and some come out dead. We think the dream might kill them, but we don’t know how. Most jumpers dream the same kind of dream, but we don’t know why. We think that it might be a place rather than a dream—a place where we go when we cut ourselves out from spacetime—but there’s no way to know. As long as we aren’t frightened to death, it seems that there’s little the dream can do to hurt us, but we’re not sure even about that, because of the ones that vanish.

  “The idea of jumping again and again does frighten me, but it seems to be the only thing I can do—the only road I can follow. I don’t know whether there’s anything at the end of the road, or even whether there can be anything at the end of the road, but if there isn’t anything, then there isn’t anything anywhere—not for me.

  “Marcangelo has said all there has to be said about it: that we only have fifty or sixty years of life, no matter how we distribute it through time, and that we’ll still die, even if we die a billion years from now. He says that the only choice which faces us is the choice of dying alone, uselessly, or dying here, among people, having used life to do something that’ll be useful even when we’re gone. He says that the only meaningful way to reach the future is to have children, who will have children of their own, and so ad infinitum. That way, we can be part of everything forever—part of the symbiotic empire that the La want to extend throughout the universe. That doesn’t mean anything to me. It just leaves me cold.

  “I’m alone now. I feel alone, and I don’t think that I’ll ever feel any different. Unless there is something at the end of the road. I can see why Marcangelo considers that to be such a ridiculous and forlorn hope, but to me it’s the only hope that means anything at all. There’s no going back to 2119, no way to undo anything that’s ever been done. The only way is ahead, whether you go one day at a time or try to cross a billion years. I’m going to try to cross a billion years.