The entity continued to eclipse Betelgeuse—or whatever was left of it—until we were quite close to it. Then it rolled aside, its six limbs moving like the spokes of a wheel, revealing the vast pink nebula that had formed behind it and the tiny pulsar, the corpse of Betelgeuse, at its heart.
But that was its only acknowledgement of our presence, at least as far as I could tell. I wished again for real windows: maybe if it could see us waving at it, it would respond in kind, moving one of its vast obsidian pseudopods in a slow, majestic arc.
It was maddening: here I was, within spitting distance of what might well be God, and it seemed as indifferent to me as, well, as it had been when tumors had started to form in my lungs. I’d tried once before to speak to God and had received no reply, but now, dammitall, surely courtesy if nothing else required a response; we had traveled farther than any human or Forhilnor or Wreed ever had before.
But the entity made no attempt at communication—or, at least, none that I, or Zhu, my ancient Chinese fellow traveler, or Qaiser, the schizophrenic woman, or even Huhn, the silverback gorilla, could detect. Nor did the Forhilnors seem to be able to contact it.
But the Wreeds—
The Wreeds, with their radically different minds, their different way of seeing, of thinking—
And with their unshakeable faith…
The Wreeds apparently were in telepathic communication with the being. After years of trying to talk to God, God was now, it seemed, talking to them, in ways only they could detect. The Wreeds could not articulate what they were being told, just as they couldn’t articulate in any comprehensible way the insights about the meaning of life that gave them peace, but nonetheless they started building something in the Wreed centrifuge.
Before it was finished, Lablok, the Merelcas’s Forhilnor doctor, recognized what it was, based on its general design principles: a large artificial womb.
The Wreeds took genetic samples from the oldest member of their contingent, a female named K’t’ben, and from the oldest Forhilnor, an engineer named Geedas, and—
No, not from me, although I wished it had been; it would have brought completion, closure.
No, the human sample they took was from Zhu, the ancient Chinese rice farmer.
There are forty-six human chromosomes.
There are thirty-two Forhilnor chromosomes.
There are fifty-four Wreed chromosomes…not that they know that.
The Wreeds took a Forhilnor cell and vacuumed all the DNA from the nucleus. They then carefully inserted into that cell diploid sets of chromosomes from Geedas and K’t’ben and Zhu, chromosomes that had divided so many times already that their telomeres had been reduced to nothing. And this cell, containing the 132 chromosomes from the three different races, was carefully placed into the artificial womb, where it floated in a vat of liquid containing purine and pyrimidine bases.
And then something astonishing happened—something that caused my heart to jump, that caused Hollus’s eyestalks to move to their maximum separation. There was a flash of bright light; the Merelcas’s sensors revealed that a particle beam had shot out of the precise center of the black entity, passing right through to the artificial womb.
Peering in with a magnifying scanner, the interactions were astonishing.
Chromosomes from the three worlds seemed to seek each other out, joining up into longer strands. Some consisted of two Forhilnor chromosomes joined together, with a Wreed chromosome at the end; Hollus had talked about the Forhilnor equivalent of Down syndrome and of how telomere-lacking chromosomes could join end to end, an innate ability, seemingly useless, even detrimental, but now…
Other chains consisted of human chromosomes sandwiched between Forhilnor and Wreed chromosomes. Still others consisted of human chromosomes at either end of a Wreed. A few chains were only two chromosomes long; usually a human and a Forhilnor. And six of the Wreed chromosomes remained unaltered.
It was obvious now that strands of DNA had built into them the ability to do more—much more—than simply die or form tumors after their telomeres had been eliminated. Indeed, telomere-less chromosomes were ready for the long-awaited next step. And now that intelligent lifeforms from multiple worlds had finally, with a little prodding, come into existence simultaneously, these chromosomes were at last able to take that step.
I now understood why cancer existed—why God needed cells that could continue to divide even after their telomeres were exhausted. The tumors in isolated lifeforms were merely an unfortunate side effect; as T’kna had said, “The specific deployment of reality that included cancer, presumably undesirable, must have also contained something much desired.” And the much-desired thing was this: the ability to link chromosomes, to join species, to concatenate lifeforms—the biochemical potential to create something new, something more.
I dubbed the combined chromosomes supersomes.
And they did what regular chromosomes do: they reproduced, unzipping down their entire length, separating into two parts, adding in corresponding bases from the nutrient soup—a cytosine pairing with every guanine; a thymine for every adenine—to fill in their now-missing halves.
Something fascinating happened the first time the supersomes reproduced: the strand got shorter. Large sequences of intronic DNA—junk—dropped out during the copying process. Although the supersomes contained three times as much active DNA as did regular chromosomes, the resulting strings were much more compact. The supersomes did not push the theoretical limit of the size for biological cells; indeed, they packed even more information into a smaller space.
And, of course, when the supersomes reproduced, the cell containing them divided, creating two daughter cells.
And then those cells divided.
And on and on.
Prior to the middle of the Cambrian, life had had a fundamental constraint imposed by the fact that fertilized cells could not divide more than ten times, severely limiting the complexity of the resulting organism.
Then the Cambrian explosion occurred, and life suddenly got more sophisticated.
But there were still limits. A fetus could grow only so large—baby humans and Wreeds and Forhilnors all massed on the order of five kilograms. Larger babies would have required impossibly wide birth canals; yes, bigger bodies could have accommodated bigger brains via live birth—but much of the additional brain mass would end up being devoted to controlling the larger body. Maybe, just maybe, a whale was as intelligent as a human—but it wasn’t more intelligent. Life had apparently reached its ultimate level of complexity.
But the supersome-driven fetus continued to grow larger and larger in its artificial womb. We had expected it to stop on its own at some point: oh, a Forhilnor might stumble into life with a double-length chromosome; a human child might survive for a time having three chromosome twenty-ones. But this combination, this wild genetic concoction, this mishmash, was surely too much, surely pushed the limits of the possible too far. Most pregnancies—be they Wreed or Forhilnor or human—spontaneously abort early on as something goes wrong in the embryo’s development, usually before the mother is even aware that she’s pregnant.
But our fetus, our impossible triple hybrid, did not.
In all three species, ontogeny—the development of the fetus—seems to recapitulate phylogeny—the evolutionary history of that organism. Human embryos develop then discard gills, tails, and other apparent echoes of their evolutionary past.
This fetus was going through stages, too, changing its morphology. It was incredible—like watching the Cambrian explosion play out in front of my own eyes, a hundred different body plans tried and discarded. Radial symmetry, quadrilateral symmetry, bilateral symmetry. Spiracles and gills and lungs and other things none of us recognized. Tails and appendages unnamed, compound eyes and eyestalks, segmented bodies and contiguous ones.
No one had ever quite figured out what ontogeny apparently recapitulating phylogeny was all about, but it wasn’t a real replay of the organism’s evolutionary history—t
hat was apparent since the forms didn’t match those found in the fossil record. But now its purpose seemed clear: DNA must contain an optimization routine, trying every variation that might be possible before selecting which set of adaptations to express. We were seeing not just terrestrial and Beta Hydrian and Delta Pavonian solutions, but also blendings of all three.
Finally, after four months, the fetus seemed to settle on a body plan, a fundamental architecture different from that of human or Forhilnor or Wreed. The fetus’s body consisted of a horseshoe-shaped tube, girdled by a hoop of material from which six limbs depended. There was an internal skeleton, visibly forming through the translucent material of the body, but it was made not of smooth bone but rather of bundles of braided material.
We gave the embryo a name. We called her Wibadal, the Forhilnor word for peace.
She was another child I would not live to see grow up.
But, like my own Ricky, I’m sure she would be adopted, cared for, nurtured, if not by the crew of the Merelcas, then by the vast, palmate blackness sprawling across the sky.
God was the programmer.
The laws of physics and the fundamental constants were the source code.
The universe was the application, running now for 13.9 billion years, leading up to this moment.
That the ability to transcend, to discard biology, came too soon in a race’s life was a bug, a flaw in the design, a complication never intended. But finally, with careful manipulation, the programmer had worked around that bug.
And Wibadal?
Wibadal was the output. The point of it all.
I wished her well.
It was the ancient progression, the engine that had always driven evolution. One life ends; another begins.
I went into cryofreeze again, passing the next eleven months with my body, and its degenerations, arrested. But when Wibadal’s gestation was finally complete, Hollus reawakened me for what, we both knew, would be the last time.
The Wreeds had announced that today would be the day; the child was now whole and would be removed from the artificial womb. “May she express the best in all of us,” said T’kna, the Wreed I’d first met by telepresence all those months—and all those centuries—ago.
Hollus bobbed her torso. “A” said one of her mouths, and “men” concluded the other.
I was groggy from the suspended animation, but I watched in fascination as Wibadal was decanted from the womb. She came into the universe crying, just as I had done, and just as all the billions who had gone before me had.
Hollus and I spent hours simply looking at her, a strange, bizarre form, already half as big as I was.
“I wonder what her life span will be,” I said to my Forhilnor friend; perhaps an odd question, but life spans were very much on my mind.
“Who” “knows?” she replied. “The lack of telomeres does not seem to be an impediment for her. Her cells could go on reproducing forever, and—”
She stopped.
“And they will,” she said after a few moments of reflection. “They will. That entity”—she gestured at the space-faring blackness centered on one of the wall-sized viewing screens—“survived through the last big crunch and big bang. Wibadal, I suspect, will survive though the next, becoming God to the universe that follows this one.”
It was a staggering notion, although perhaps Hollus was right. But I wouldn’t live long enough to know for sure.
Wibadal was behind a glass window in a specially built maternity ward with a single circular crib. I tapped on the glass, the way parents on my world had done millions of time before. I tapped, and I waved.
And Wibadal stirred, and waved a stubby, chubby appendage back at me. Maybe the current God had never acknowledged my presence—even when I’d come right up to him, he’d still been indifferent to me—but this god-to-be had noticed me, at least once, at least for a moment.
And, for that moment, I felt no pain.
But soon, the agony was back; it had been growing worse, and I had been growing weaker.
Time was running short.
I wrote a final, long letter to Ricky in case, by some miracle, he was still alive. Hollus transmitted it to Earth for me; it would reach there almost half a millennium hence. I told my son what I’d seen here and how much I loved him.
And then I asked Hollus for a last favor, a final kindness. I asked her for the sort of thing only a good friend could request of another. I asked her to help release me, to help me pass on. I’d brought only a few things with me from Earth, besides my cancer medication and pain pills. But I did bring a biochemistry text with enough information for the Merelcas’s doctor to synthesize something that would painlessly and swiftly end my life.
Hollus herself administered the injection, and she sat by my bed, holding my emaciated hand in one of hers, her bubble-wrap skin the last thing I felt.
I told Hollus to write down my final words and transmit them back to Earth, as well, so that Ricky, or whoever was still there, would know what I’d said. As I mused before, perhaps he, or one of my great-to-the-nth grandchildren, might even put together a book about the first contact between an extraterrestrial and someone who, I suppose, was all too human.
I was surprised by what my last thoughts turned out to be. “You know,” I said to Hollus, her eyes weaving back and forth, “I remember when I first became fascinated with fossils.”
Hollus listened.
“I’d been at the beach,” I said, “playing with some rocks, and I was amazed to find a stone shell embedded in one of them. I’d found something then that I’d never even known I’d been looking for.” The pain was easing; everything was slipping away. I squeezed the Forhilnor’s hand. “I guess I’m a lucky man,” I said, feeling peace come over me. “It’s happened a second time.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert J. Sawyer is the best-selling author of eleven previous novels, including The Terminal Experiment, which won the Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year; Starplex, which was both a Nebula and Hugo Award finalist; and Frameshift and Factoring Humanity, both of which were Hugo Award finalists.
Rob has won twenty-one national and international awards for his fiction, including an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada; five Aurora Awards (Canada’s top honor in SF); five Best Novel HOMer Awards voted on by the 30,000 members of the SF&F Forums on CompuServe; the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award; and the top SF awards in France (Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire), Japan (Seiun), and Spain (Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción, which he has won twice).
Maclean’s: Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine says Rob is “science fiction’s northern star—in fact, one of the hottest SF writers anywhere. By any reckoning Sawyer is among the most successful Canadian authors ever.” Rob is profiled in Canadian Who’s Who, has been interviewed more than one hundred times on TV, and has given talks and readings at countless venues, including the Library of Congress. He lives in Thornhill, Ontario (just north of Toronto), with Carolyn Clink, his wife of sixteen years.
For more about Rob and his fiction-including a readers’ group discussion guide for this novel—visit his World Wide Web site (called “the largest genre writer’s home page in existence” by Interzone) at www.sfwriter.com.
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