Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  Larger than worlds, larger than anything, it was.

  Even as I watched, I saw the innermost ring of galactic clusters fall down toward that light. The spiral galaxies spun like pinwheels, unraveling, and the countless millions of tiny specks, the stars, turned red as embers as they rushed into the flames of that immense, unthinkable central sphere of light.

  As my eyes adapted, I saw as well that there were streamers of colored vapor wrapping the galaxies, much larger than the galaxies, spread like an aurora borealis throughout the immensity of space, and all the streams and filaments of dust were likewise rushing toward that all-devouring central sun.

  There were bands of brighter and dimmer ruby-red painted across the immensity of the central sun, parallel to the equator of its huge rotation; black splotches like sunspots, crusts and dapples of darkness floating in the fire.

  From the north and south poles of the vast red sphere of flame, two beams, white hot, like the beams of a search light, splashed upward and downward, igniting the surrounding clouds to cool peacock-tail-colored fire.

  The light was as red as the petal of a rose, red as a cherry, and inexpressibly beautiful to my weary eyes. It did not burn me.

  It was sunlight.

  He-Sings-Death was staring at Ydmos curiously. He pointed at him. He-Sings-Death points by jutting out his jaw with a jerk of the head. “What does this mean? What he does?”

  Ydmos had his left forearm held near his mouth. He was staring down into the light. There was a small round discoloration, as if something were embedded underneath the flesh of his forearm. It was very near his mouth.

  But then Ydmos lowered his hand and donned his gauntlet. “I am Prepared. I thought that if I were the one carrying the enemy inside, stepping into the light of the Earth-Current would make it show itself.”

  It took me a moment to grasp what he had said, so calmly had he said it. He thought the light would reveal if he were contaminated. The thing buried in his arm was a lethal pill; a suicide device.

  I said, “What is this thing? It looks like a sun, but no sun can be bigger than a galaxy, bigger than a million galaxies.”

  The Blue Man stepped onto the glass and stared downward. His eyes evidently had his ghastly fluid in them, for the whites of his eyes turned blue, and so did his pupils, till he looked like a blind man. The blue pigment grew darker and darker, toward black, as the strange microscopic machines in his eye fluid drew in more and more light from the environment.

  The Blue Man said, “A black hole, 'tis.”

  Abraxander explained to me that a black hole was a body in space so massive that no even light could escape from its mass.

  I said, “Why isn’t it black, then?”

  The Blue Man said, “Ah, we are seeing surface turbulence only, me cuties. The surface area, it be not great enough to absorb the whole of everything, the universe, in one gulp; matter clashes against matter as it drains in, fearful symmetries are recompiled: types of particles, long forgotten ere the earliest universe, are being remembered and remade in yonder heat immense. The heat is caused by gravitational stress on the structure of timespace.”

  Abraxander said gently, “That one, Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss Segment Seven, him, he speaks with less-than-perfect precision. Understand: the tidal stress on even very small particles is too great for the particles to retain, them, their internal cohesion. You know how myth says the Earth’s pull was greater on the to-ward side of the Luna as the fro-ward side? The difference flattened the orb, tide-locked her.”

  “The moon always keeps one face toward Earth,” I said. “Kept, I guess.”

  A sting of sorrow touched my heart. I remember Lisa looking up at the moon, that time we were on a boat near Spain, and the waves were silver in a shining path leading to the horizon. A blue moon.

  She said a girl only would meet the man she was meant to meet once in a blue moon. She smiled at me. Now, there was no more moon. No moon ever again.

  141. Entanglement

  Abraxander was saying in his pedantic voice: “When, during the time of the Fifth Aeon, the moon came too nigh the Earth, she violated Roche’s limit, the satellite, her, she was pulled asunder by tides.”

  For the moment I thought he was talking about a girl. By ‘she’ he meant Luna, the moon-goddess.

  “At this phenomena, here–” Abraxander gestured toward the rose-red central sun. “The gravity gradient is steep enough, it, to pull small particles open. They suffer mathematical transformation into other particle combinations when that happens, still entangled with each other, though separated, them, by the event horizon.”

  The Blue Man looked interested at that. “Science of my day, long-gone by-day, it would say that nothing reaches from inside to outside of black hole. Only mass, spin, angular moment. Entanglements shown to be inter-operable? Our theory held all signal must be null: no information from in-to-out.”

  Abraxander said carefully: “The entanglement involves not merely timespace and other metrics, but also symmetries of mind and not-mind, being and not-being. At the fundamental level, it is all one. This one, he who observes: that one, it is observed: both one. At these energy states, a particle endpoint is indistinguishable from its paired mate elsewhere in time and space. Monopolar, honestly: something that cannot exist alone, them. Entanglement allows for what, in our frame, seems backward in time. Eternity is entangled here, too.”

  I said, “Entangled? Are you talking about, what? Atoms?”

  He-Sings-Death slapped me on my back, and said: “Cannot exist alone! So it is with me and She-Speaks-Fair, most beautiful of all the band. Maybe Abraxander-the-Threshold, he means, they marry. She ties him in her hair. Very soft, not rope, the tie that ties the marriage pair. Her hair, one hair from her head, is used when we sing the marriage song. Thread of hair is so slender, man could break, if he wants; but good man, never he wants: so thread is strongest of all things. It is tied to his smallest finger here.” He gestured with his pinky, “To show the man how gentle he must be, how little is his strength to pick up love. It is not to be grabbed with the hand.”

  I said, “Didn’t cavemen bonk women on their heads with clubs, and drag them by the hair to their caves? You seem quite the romantic, sir.”

  He tilted his head at me. “Who of your people ever saw my people? Why would they say this unkind thing of us?”

  I had no answer for that, so I said, “Tell me of your wife.”

  “How I miss the hair of She-Speaks-Fair! Hear my cry, He-Steals-Fire, steal her out of the black water again for me! This time, I will not forget! This time, I will not look back!”

  Mneseus muttered: “No, Abraxander is talking about contagion. Once touching, always touching. This is the alchemic furnace to burn the universe into being. The Central Fire men of earth can never see.”

  Abraxander gently disagreed: “These are image-word these ones, you, speak, they are likenesses, and imprecise.” And he pointed underfoot, saying: "Observe. This place-event, here-now. Omega point affects an ever larger metric, it. Matter-energy falls towards. Entangled particle pairs are pulled away from each other by tidal forces. Energy is released. Liberated. That is what we see. The core of that body, him, is denser than all number can measure, darker than all mystery. This light is an illusion; a side effect.”

  The Blue Man said persistently, “But you claim information can flow from inside to out? How can that be? Black hole swallows all, all but those parameters I said.”

  Abraxander said, “Quantum uncertainty, in highly compacted frames of reference, becomes macroscopic. Information can go from there to here, if the positions of there and here are sufficiently undefined. All that is required is that the information density of the N space be greater inside than out. Thermodynamics will require the greater flows to the less, seeking equilibrium.

  “How else was the universe created by the Big Bang in the first place? All the mass of the universe concentrated at one spot, it could not have exploded, escaped to another spot,
except that, at the same time, it unfolded both into time and space, to create the concept of "another spot". The unfolding was faster than the process of time itself, so that, at no point, was any particle traveling out of the creation gravity-well at faster than the speed of light. You see? It is an illusion.

  “We, all the universe, are still within the event-horizon of the original black hole from which the universe came: the creation act was to force information into the matrices of time and space, within the black hole itself. To observers inside, it must have seemed as if the universe began a sudden, inexplicable expansion. Hence, what we call the Hubble Error. Simpler to assume all matter-energy is shrinking, as it loses information value due to entropy, than to assume the edges of the universe are flying off from us.”

  I said, “I thought we were seeing the destruction of the universe? What is this talk of the creation?”

  Abraxander said, “It is the same. At the moment when all things become indistinguishable, the direction of the arrow of time becomes indistinguishable. At that moment, creation is destruction as seen from backward in time. As a book read back to front might be. However, before and after that moment, creation is the direction of decreasing entropy, and destruction the direction of increasing. Only at the Omega Point itself does the observer see the symmetry. The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols 'abstract' complexity from observed objects.”

  I thought I would try a simpler question. I said, “Is it an old sun? Why else would it be red?”

  Abraxander said, “It is not a sun, that. That speck falling in, look there–” he pointed at one of the millions of stars streaming into the great central mass “He is a sun, him. Planets and cometary halos he pulls with him, the sun, as he falls in. This–” he pointed at the central sun, “this is not a sun.”

  “Why is it red?”

  Abraxander said patiently, “It is not. The light seems red because that, the light, it suffers energy loss while it flies upwards against the pull. Light cannot be seen in any frame as moving more slowly; therefore the energy must seem to be lost in the wavelength: more red. It will seem white enough to these here, us, once we reach it, and join its frame of reference. To our eyes then, all will be white and clear.”

  He-Sings-Death said in a shaking voice, “How can the sun be under my foot? Who buried the sun beneath this cave?”

  I said, “We are not in a house, not in a cave. This is a ship: a sailing vessel that flies through the night sky.”

  He-Sings-Death said, “And the sun is below the keel of the canoe?”

  I said, “Not below. There is no below.”

  He-Sings-Death plucked a bead from his hair and let it fall, clattering at his feet. He pointed at the bead with his chin. “Ah! Look! Tricky little bead, fools me, fools my eye. Bead thinks there is a below. That way. The way it fell. Poor bead!”

  I said, “Let me explain. The ship is a cylinder. Because it is spinning, it seems to make weight….well, not weight exactly, but acceleration. No, wait, there must be a way to explain this. Hm. OK. Suppose you took a bucket with water in it and swung it around your head very fast on a rope. See? The water would stay in the bucket.”

  He-Sings-Death looked skeptical. “Captain Powell of Nantucket, why should I take a bucket with water in it and swing it around my head very fast on a rope? I am the eldest of ten brothers, and my voice is heard in the wisdom-tent, and even the gray-haired elders listen to my songs. This would not be a good thing for me to do: little children would laugh.”

  “Um…. Okay.” I turned to Abraxander: “I get the impression I am not going to understand your explanation any more than Mr. Singer here understood mine, but let me ask: How do you know the ship is moving? You said we were going to enter the frame of something of the sun.”

  Abraxander said, “It is not a sun, that. It is the Omega Point. Once this point, that, it achieves condition mathematically indistinguishable from the Alpha Point, all time will reinterpret. Whether the next universe will be as this one, or some other condition, no one can know who is inside the context of time.”

  “What do you mean, reinterpret?”

  Abraxander said, “Reevaluate.”

  “What?”

  “Time will reevaluate itself, will re-impose upon itself the values of meaningful events. You know the difference between meaningful and meaningless?”

  “I thought I did.” (But, listening to him, now I was not so sure.)

  “Time, it is an orderly sequence of non-energy, what is the word? Intervals. Every interval of meaning must have negative non-meaning to define and separate it. Words must have silence; pictures must have white between the black. Ultimately, meaning must mean what it means against a background of non-meaning. Hence, time is a self-evaluating structure. Time gives meaning to time: do you follow me? A thing gives value to a thing by evaluation. This is why life exists only within time-ness, because life must consist of processes bound by birth and death, which are the boundary conditions. Wait. There must be a way to explain. Imagine you are in an infinite but boundaried spacetime of N dimensions. The condition is spherical in N plus Two dimensions. Within your light-cone, of all possible futures, if you have meaning now, they will have meaning then. However, outside your light-cone, in order for the N space itself to have meaning, there must be an imaginary set of points which do not have a past-to-future relationship with any point inside your light-cone. Now suppose (which is impossible in undistorted space) you are rotated to the imaginary points: they would seem like end points at that time, and could be either past or future, depending on the collapse of the uncertainty wave-function.”

  I said, “Abraxander-the-Threshold of Tau Ceti, why should I be rotated to these imaginary points outside my lighthouse? I come from a respectable family. This would not be a good thing for me to do: little children would laugh.”

  Abraxander opened his mouth to continue his explanation, but then there was a twinkle in his eye, for he took my meaning, and he nodded.

  I asked, “Maybe this would be simpler. How do you know that the ship is moving? There is no sensation of motion.”

  Abraxander pointed underfoot. “See where the stars stream like dust-motes, them. There is a spiral galaxy unwinding in a few, to us, seconds, all her scattered stars dropping into the central vortex of the Omega Point like raindrops. Calculate the mass involved in even a medium-sized star crossing that degree of arc. Surely it is obvious!”

  I said, “Not obvious to me.”

  The Blue Man turned and said to me: “Too fast. No galaxy, nothing that size could discombobulate so fast. It took place a million years ago, and took a million years. This ship is crowding lightspeed. Imagine a concentric of light expanding, bing! Bing! Many concentrics. Bing! Bing! Bing!”

  I said, “Stop binging at me.”

  He said, “Imagine them binging off from the sight, one bing per ten thousand years. We puncture a ten bings of concentric in ten seconds of flight. To us on board, film is fast forward. It looks like it takes a moment or two. Ten seconds. Station time in frame of galaxy, ten thousand times ten years. Get it?”

  I said, “No. Forgive me, Mr. Bliss, but I think the spell Nergal cast, or Ydmos, or whatever that hypnotic thing was, might be wearing off.”

  Of all people, it was Kitimil who touched my knee and said, “A runner leaves the cave when Uj is born, and he says, weep, all the earth, for Uj is born! He runs east. Second runner leaves the cave when Uj is young man in fullness of his strength, proud as a bull, hateful as a serpent, and he says, weep, all the earth, for Uj is strong, his spear drinks blood, and Uj lifts up his hand in strength! He runs east. Third runner leaves the cave when Uj is dead, and he says, rejoice, all the earth, for Uj sleeps in the ash of the pyre, and his spear sleeps at his side, and slays no more, forever. He runs east.

  “A bird who is as swift as the ray of the sun leaves the land of Behind-the-Dawn,
and flies from east to west, for all gods run east to west, sun and moon and star. She hears the first runner. She flaps her wing. She hears the second runner. She flaps her wing. She hears the third runner. She lands on the bulbul tree, and says, Oh! Who was this Uj that all men forever feared would be born! Uj was not so to be feared! He lived and died all within three beats of my wings of fire. Foolish men! So she says. The gods are too swift to know our fears. This shell you say is a canoe is as that bird.”

  He meant the ship. The ship was moving so quickly it was overtaking the messages, the light, carrying to our eyes the images of a destruction that, as best I could tell, had already happened.

  I was staring at Kitimil in astonishment. This savage was apparently able to grasp with ease something that still seemed locked in a riddle to me.

  I said, “Who is Uj?”

  Kitimil waved his hand above him and below, indicating the vast black ship entrapping us. In his language of grunting clicks he spoke: "Uj clings to the canoe of Neomah and Noah, his hands cling to the bark, and he carries the snake in his belly, the scorpion, the toad. Noah was to drown all poison beasts, but Uj saves them, so that Noah’s sons know pain. He does this for the not-people. He weeps. But the not-people took Magigi from him. They give her back soon.”

  “Are you talking about Enoch’s giants? The Nephilim? Or is not-people your word for these devils?”

  Kitimil looked at me with pity, and shook his head, and would not answer.

  Ydmos said, “We learned, much to our sorrow, that it is unwise to give names to the things in the Night Land, for then they appear in our thoughts as more human than they are. It is our custom, even among ourselves, to refer to the enemy only by attributes. There is a danger otherwise.”

  Enoch spoke, “For the good powers of the world, as well as for the ill. It is not right for man to make in brass or iron any image of the Lord of the Eloi, for it is idolatry, and men come to praise the works of their hand, and not Him whose handiwork Man is.”