In the Distance, and Ahead in Time

by George Zebrowski

  Inside (2)

  Ishbok raised his head from the field of battle. Black horsemen searched through the sunset glare, silencing the cries of the wounded with quick lance-thrusts. Thirsty, burning with pain, he lay back on the parched plain and remembered the ages still to come, when an ice shrouded Earth, cold and clean, would emerge into a flowering green spring.…

  “We can’t take anything with us,” he had said in futurity to the love of his life.

  Reproach hid in Aina’s eyes.

  “There’s no room,” he insisted. “The ship will only take people.”

  She tried to look cheerful. “Do you think we’ll ever come back here?”

  “To a later time, perhaps, when our scouts find the end of the ice. Not much may be left here by then. It’s best to go to empty places in the past, so we won’t inconvenience anyone.”

  … and a lance struck through a body near him. He looked up at the first evening stars, and the icy Earth trembled in his memory as he waited to be pierced. Black lightning rushed across the whiteness toward the timeship. Deep crevasses opened in the glacier as people struggled to board the black, sluglike vessel to escape the coming ice age. The ship rippled in his eyes, as if already slipping through time, cutting off the line of people trying to board. Then it solidified and stood brutishly on the ice, as if fixed for all eternity, having no need to timeslip.

  The sky began to glow.

  “Aina!” he cried out. Her eyes were wild as she struggled to reach him through the crowd. The moment became infinitely long, refusing to end, and he held onto it desperately as he waited for his time here to expire.

  Outside (2)

  “Such intense feeling,” Gibby said with awe as he peered into the center tank. “He’s dying in one place and reliving his life in another.”

  “Life?” Gorrance asked contemptuously, but with a touch of pity. “These effigies and simulacrums aren’t truly alive.”

  “Inside, you would feel alive,” he answered, “as much as you feel being here and mocking these beings. These spheres are human colonies, living as they have chosen. It has to be so. There could have been no doubt that it was a desired way of life before so many went inside.”

  “We don’t know that,” she said, “and I don’t see how we ever could. As far as we know they’re just recordings, developing along random probabilities in a system that has gone chaotic, from what we see. If they were alive, I’d be for erasing them, to put them out of their pain. They’re living in a mill that cannot ever be as rich as the natural universe, which we have never exhausted. Face it, Gibby, this is what’s left of a cultural disaster.”

  Gibby knew the historical scenario well enough, but felt uncertain about the conclusions and judgments drawn from it. Thousands of years ago, when faced with so-called virtual creation, nanotechnology, and the laying of information highways, branches and offshoots of humankind had succumbed to creative subjectivity. Rather than affecting the reality around them by rebuilding their solar system, or reaching out to the stars in self-reproducing mobiles, these planet-bound folk had moved into their dreams in a fatal way—by linking the output of their minds, through dream generators, to their input, which gave them the experience of omnipotence—believing they could have all they could imagine, all that they had ever lost, for as long as the instrumentalities continued to function and the river of energy did not run dry.

  “All cultures are dreams,” Gibby said, examining the controls more closely, “cysts embedded in a frame of nature, which sets our initial biases through evolution. Why should we not throw nature off and make our own way? Our own mobile culture is also a dream within an indifferent universe. What you call reality is merely one kind of dream.”

  “Come, come, Gibby,” Kateb said. “You sound as if you’d like to live in these nodules. Can’t you see that it’s all gone wrong? It’s incoherent.”

  “Maybe it’s what they wanted,” Gibby said, turning away from his teammates to gaze into the second holo tank, where clouds and human figures were drifting into view …

  Inside (3)

  Ishbok tumbled, drifting above the towers. The wind howled in his ears as the horizon drew him and the blue sky invaded his eyes and opened the infinity at the back of his mind.

  Countryside appeared below. He slowed, stopping the sun, feeling its light go cold on his face as he recovered his sorrow.

  Then he searched the sky for other survivors. A few motes drifted above him, but he could not see their faces. He tried to pull them toward him, but they resisted, and finally clouds obscured his view.

  He recalled the days of departure, a month after the solar system’s entrance into the deadly cloud of interstellar debris. Meteor trails had crossed the sky like glowing raindrops on a window, becoming larger with each incoming wave, until they broke the glass.

  “It’s hopeless,” he had told Aina. “There are countless larger fragments in the cloud, rushing head-on toward us. At best we’ll have a long winter. At worst, the Earth will be shattered by a large fragment. Nothing to come back to, ever.”

  “Are there big fragments?” she had asked achingly.

  “Yes,” he had answered.

  “But we can jump a billion years!” she had exclaimed, and suddenly he could not remember what else she had said or what had happened to her. Time stopped, trapping him between memories.

  Outside (3)

  “You’re blind, Gibby!” Gorrance said, gesturing with both hands as if fending off a physical attack. “How can you be fooled by all this?”

  Startled by her uncharacteristic vehemence, Gibby frowned and said, “You can have what you want inside. From what we might learn here, we might be able to perfect a new form of existence.”

  “We can’t rewrite physical laws, or abolish the structure of an infinite universe.”

  “Why not? Perhaps if we reach deeply enough, we’ll find the innermost chaos, the ground from which even the outermost may be reshaped.”

  “Delusions!” Gorrance shouted. “You’ve forgotten how all this must have happened, when this culture, like others, simply forgot the difference between amusement and reality. Entertainment gave them their deepest, darkest wishes, without any obvious cost. Violence, brutality, the heartless torment of other human beings, the wringing of every pleasure from power and sexual adventure—all supplied free of conscience and remorse.”

  Gibby felt pride at having provoked her. The issue had to be important for her to react with such intensity. Perhaps she thought something of him after all.

  Gorrance calmed down and looked at him with concern. “Their escapes were crude at first,” she continued. “They had only their games, books, paintings, their dramas, all of which could verge on becoming life itself, or the most important thing in it. No culture can live in both realms for long, without one subverting the other. Too much reality, and creativity dies. Too much imagination, and reality dies.”

  Gibby was silent, knowing that Gorrance would not let him answer until she was finished.

  “The struggle went on, life contending with reinvented life. Every civilization that survives the early threats of tribal warfare will have to contend with the temptation of dreams—and here the lure of wishes has won out, as it did elsewhere. I expect to see it too often, this exile of intelligent life to an inward shore, spreading across hermetic empires, where new generations will accept artificialities as reality—caves on whose walls will creep the shadows of blind and lost humanities, tyrannized by artificial intelligences.” She gazed past him at the tanks. “We can’t even call them generations, really. They are the deathless copies of once living personalities proliferating through the matrix.”

  Gibby gave her a disappointed look.

  “Of course all cultures have had ways of hiding out from the universe,” she continued. “Communal caves in which we give ourselves faces and names without knowing who
we are, and give up asking the hard questions.”

  “You like the questions,” Gibby said, “more than the answers. You won’t accept any answer that isn’t part of the question. Who are we?”

  Gorrance narrowed her eyes. “You know that we strive to be acultural, pursuing only knowledge, trying to understand who we are—if that question has any meaning. We are what we make of ourselves, after we have understood how nature made us.”

  “Have we ever succeeded to any degree?” Gibby asked.

  Gorrance frowned. “As well as I can see, we have to be a question mark, floating free of evolutionary niches and conventional cultures, avoiding the rigidity that the ancients too often saw as identity. We are nothing, but remain free to develop and grow, to abandon and begin again, looking outward as much as inward. We don’t ask who we are, because a sense of identity cannot be bestowed. We know our origins, and we continue to grow and change—a work in progress.”

  “I’ve heard all this,” Gibby said.

  “And you question it.”

  “I sometimes long to be something much more specific.”

  “You long to enter one of these locked worlds,” she said with cold disappointment.

  “Yes,” Gibby said eagerly, gazing at the controls. “So I can have exactly what I want.” He felt himself tremble, as if a great chord had suddenly been struck deep within him. “I want to see what it feels like, at least for a while.”

  Gorrance shook her head. “You won’t have that, ever, because these worlds, however vivid, must have a horizon, a mechanical rigidity. They can’t equal the unpredictability of an open, standing infinity in which local universes are random fluctuations, single possibilities in an infinity of possibilities. You would be choosing only a sub-creation of a sub-creation, a cave within a cave. At worst, you would simply die and never know it, and a caricature of you would appear in the tank. At best, you would emerge into a universe that is much more limited than our own. And you would certainly not be able to come out.”

  Gibby shook his head in denial and gazed around the chamber of worlds. “I’ll see for myself.”

  Gorrance looked at him with concern and said, “There will be nothing of you left to bring out, and it may not be you who will see, but a poor simulacrum.”

  Inside (4)

  The agony of his loss flared through Ishbok, and he recalled that some had left the planet, fleeing uselessly to other communities within sunspace. Others, unable to abandon their beloved Earth, had slipped into the past, swimming against the currents of entropy’s river to earlier, brighter times. Down from the infinitely branching future to beginnings, the ship was a ghost passing through all possible worlds, seeking sunny moments in the vast uninhabited stretches of time’s estates.…

  He held Aina’s hand. The lake was a silver mirror spilling streams into a green forest. The timeship hovered in a tall sky, preparing to land, then was caught between the winds of branching possibilities and torn apart, scattering its people into the vortex, leaving them to echo with aspiring reality in the varying timestream. Yearning for fixity, flickering dust motes fought dissolution with fragments of memory, struggling to halt drift and self-cancellation. The inertia of unknowing opposed waves of suffering remembrance, reminding him that the survivors, robbed of continuity, would drill and fade forever, echo begetting echo, fainter into infinity, spiraling in toward the unattainable singularity of nonbeing.…

  Outside (4)

  “You just don’t understand,” Gibby said. “I want to experience omnipotence, even if it’s illusory.”

  Kateb shook his head. “To hear this from one of us means there must be deep flaws in us.” He was looking sternly at Gibby. “Even twenty thousand years of self-design and redesign haven’t eliminated them, it seems.”

  “You misunderstand,” Gorrance said. “Gibby’s perversity only proves our continuing openness, even if he chooses to end it for himself.”

  “What would I be ending?” Gibby asked, intrigued by Gorrance’s half-hearted defense of him. “This reality you bow before is imposed on me. I never chose it.”

  “But it is infinitely more creative than what you’ll find inside.”

  “Perhaps—but it can’t give me the experience of omnipotence, to change my world at will.”

  “If this system is still functioning correctly,” Kateb added. “You may not get what you want. And remember, your body will be a problem after your mental algorithm is recorded and engaged. There may be no coming back—except if you imagine it.”

  “Which you won’t be able to do,” Gorrance said, “because the whole point is to forget the artifice, to believe in the reality, to be fooled completely, to be a complete fool.”

  “But I won’t know that,” Gibby said, “and I will have what I want. The experience is all that counts. I can only doubt and suffer before I go inside.”

  “And if you don’t find what you want?”

  “I may feel that I have even if I don’t. I’ll traverse this hall of worlds for what may be a subjectively infinite time.”

  “Until this sun dies,” Kateb said, “revealing the lie of subjective worlds.”

  “I won’t know it when that happens.”

  “But you know it now,” Gorrance said. “Keep in mind that during the transfer only your copy may go inside, leaving you outside and possibly injured. Gibby, you don’t really want to take the chance, do you?”

  “I didn’t think about that,” Gibby said.

  Kateb said, “Perhaps we should destroy this place, so others won’t be tempted.”

  “No!” Gibby cried.

  “These worlds are a waiting addiction,” Gorrance added.

  Kateb raised a hand. “We’ll catalog them first, maybe see if we can communicate with them—”

  “These are not living cultures from which we can learn anything. They’re only elaborate kaleidoscopic hells in which the echoes of the living suffer, not worlds in which to open embassies.”

  “But can we destroy them?” Gibby asked. “Complete erasure may be impossible.”

  “We’ll destroy the whole physical matrix,” Gorrance said. “This is only the lingering ghost of a culture. No one is left on the planet. The originals perished long ago.”

  “Why not just leave what’s left alone?” Kateb asked.

  “That may be more cruel than destruction. These insides are obviously drifting into chaos. You can see how bits and pieces of persons are trying to use what control they have to make sense of their world.”

  “But surely the builders knew the dangers,” Gibby protested, “and the provisions for correction.”

  “No safety device can last forever,” Kateb said.

  “Is it possible that everything may be working just fine,” Gibby asked, “even though it looks wrong to us?”

  Kateb looked at Gorrance. “He still wants to go inside.”

  “It’s his decision,” she said resignedly. “I can’t believe he wants it, but it must be his free choice. We can’t force him to do what’s best, even if he fails, much as I’m tempted to save him.”

  “I wonder,” Gibby said, “why these monitors are here. Was someone meant to watch?”

  Kateb said, “The monitors were probably guides for new arrivals.”

  “I’ll watch for a while,” Gibby said, “before I decide.”

  As Gorrance and Kateb turned to leave, he turned his gaze to the row of open, coffin-like receiving chambers that stood to the left of the tanks.

  “I pity you,” he heard Gorrance say behind him, surprising him with the sorrow in her voice.

  Inside (5)

  Ishbok was slipping from the rock into the sea, drawn by powerful, conflicting currents that stopped and started in discrete steps.

  Why was I not given something else to be? he asked, clinging to the rock that seemed to rise and fall with th
e waves. He felt that he was dying and being reborn from second to second. Finally, he felt continuous, and stood up in the wind.

  The echo of the timeship appeared low over the water and passed through him, ripping the sight of cloudy sky from his eyes and streaking the stars. Aina’s giant shape rose from the sea, picked him up from the rock, and hurled him skyward.

  He floated, weak, unbreathing, clawing at the vacuum, unable to die. Space crumpled up like paper around him; his awareness collapsed to a point in the darkness, but he resisted nothingness.

  I am alive, he whispered, echoing within himself, alive, alive, alive as his world crushed him into an endless limbo—and he found himself walking across a large grassy clearing, in the center of which sat the timeship. People were coming down the gangway in small groups. He stopped and watched them, feeling the bright sunlight on his face. Aina came out and saw him at once. She waved. He waved back and hurried toward the ship, feeling that he had been in peril somewhere else only a few moments ago. …

  Outside (5)

  Gibby came out of the great pyramid and started across the field, to where the exploratory flyer waited three hundred meters short of the forest. The day was sunny, so vividly real that he was taken aback by its immediacy, and he almost dropped the small globe he carried. The landscape was as much inside him as outside, possessing both depth and opacity beyond his senses, where he knew it was entirely different from what he perceived, an ethereal wave function supporting the varied experience of space-time. One might break out of a virtual space and ruin its reality, but how would one break out of the space around virtual space into the noumenal space that supported the realm of phenomena? It could not be done, however one tried to imagine the noumenal.

  Gorrance and Kateb were right, of course. The infinite, uncreated universe around him was a transcendent fact that could not be contained in any finite mind; and rather than taking it as an affront to his pride, he should accept it as a happy, miraculous gift.

  There was nothing here on Earth for him and his kind, he realized as he came up to the flyer. Gorrance and Kateb were waiting for him, sitting cross-legged in the tall grass.