Heaven

by Ian Stewart

  “A Galactic-level mind would have better prospects,” said Stun, disappointed.

  “If there is one. Which brings us back to where we began.”

  May remembered those dim flickers of sensation tickling at her mind. “There was something there; I sensed it. And Ship deliberately took us to the Agathyrsi Cluster to make us aware of it. I am convinced, also, that it was Ship that put into my mind the need to consult the pond.”

  “Whatever makes you think that?” asked Will.

  “Because the moment we stopped denying the pond’s consciousness and made contact with it, Ship told you that consensus had been reached for departure. So Ship is in effect telling us to listen to what the pond has to say.”

  Will scratched his nose and turned to Ship’s philosopher. “But it is not that simple, is it, Epimenides?”

  “No, it is not. Ship depends on consensus, and consensus is a matter of opinions. Ship is telling us to respect the pond’s opinion about the Galactic Mind. But that does not mean that we should assume that what the pond is telling us is true.”

  “Assuming that ‘truth’ is a meaningful concept,” said Stun.

  “Do not get me started on that! I am a philosopher, remember. The pond’s opinion offers valuable insights, but we cannot assume that it is the only valid opinion. Or, indeed, that it is a valid opinion at all.”

  May felt let down. She had hoped to convince Will that the Galactic Mind was real. Think of it! Sentience on a cosmic scale! But that was a spiritual viewpoint, and Neanderthals were deeply skeptical about anything spiritual.

  “So what do we do?”

  The Thumosyne expanded once more. “As a pragmatic matter, we should act as if the pond is right. That will reinforce the consensus that Ship clearly desires. And it will keep both the pond and its mariner friend happy. Which may be two different ways to say the same thing, incidentally.”

  “Fine, so we pretend.”

  The philosopher looked startled. “Not at all. You respect the pond’s opinion. You may even find yourselves beginning to accept it.”

  “Are you saying we should take the Galactic Mind’s existence on faith?” said Will, shocked. Neanderthals had no truck with mindless belief. “Galactic Mind” was dangerously close to “god,” and that was intellectual territory into which Neanderthals never ventured.

  “No. I am saying that the interpretation that you place on unfolding events makes no difference to how those events unfold. It is the events, and their unfolding, that determine history. The meaning that you attach to them is irrelevant.”

  May understood the point that the Thumosyne was making; her natural Neanderthal disdain for the spiritual made her sympathetic to it. But at the back of her mind, Fat Apprentice’s question still reverberated, a persistent, nagging doubt: “Is a galaxy what happens when a universe spawns?”

  Could a galaxy—or a universe—be a form of life? And what powers would it possess if it were?

  The thought terrified her.

  The Tweel engineers had plenty of sand, just as they had plenty of everything else, tucked away in Talitha’s capacious holds. Though they had not expected to use it for quite this purpose. It was rather a nice beach, considering that it was on a spaceship, and the pond approved of its new location, too. The larger compartment that had now been provided gave it more room to spread itself.

  Second-Best Sailor sat at the edge of the pond, half on the beach, half in the water, and waited until they were alone. “What did you want this beach for? Just findin’ out ’ow far ya could push them?”

  NOT AT ALL. IT IS ESSENTIAL TO MY LIFE PROCESSES.

  The mariner was puzzled. “How?”

  WATCH.

  The pond rippled, as if a stone had been thrown in but in reverse, and something rubbery and round plopped out of the water, landing next to Second-Best Sailor on the beach.

  “What in the name of the Maker . . .”

  IT IS A SANDSKATER EGG. I ATE ITS MOTHER, JUST BEFORE YOU FELL IN. BACK ON AQUIFER.

  “You ate its mother? Then why not eat the egg, too?”

  BECAUSE IF I ATE THE EGG, THERE WOULD NOT BE ANOTHER MOTHER TO EAT. I AM NOT SO STUPID AS TO DESTROY MY OWN LONG-TERM FOOD STORE.

  As the pond’s molecular “words” resonated in Second-Best Sailor’s mind, the beach near the egg moved aside to create a depression. The egg slipped into the hole. A few moments later, the beach had covered it over.

  WHEN IT HATCHES, THERE WILL BE A NEW MOTHER.

  “And you’ll eat her then?”

  NO, NOT STRAIGHTAWAY. ONLY WHEN SHE HAS LAID ENOUGH EGGS TO ENSURE THE SURVIVAL OF HER SPECIES. THE SANDSKATERS ARE PARTHENOGENETIC; THEY NEED NO MALES.

  The mariner thought about that. First he thought about his wifepiece and gave thanks that she wasn’t parthenogenetic. Then he thought about the pond’s strange attitude to its food. It was really just a form of gardening, he decided. Like growing lemon trees on top of a boat and eating the lemons. Not as much fun as hunting, but more secure. He wasn’t sure what the mother sandskater thought about the arrangement. But the pond was:

  WITHOUT THE MOISTURE THAT I PROVIDE, HER EGGS WILL NOT HATCH. WE ARE SYMBIONTS; BOTH SPECIES BENEFIT FROM THE ARRANGEMENT. IS NOT THE GALACTIC MIND WONDERFUL?

  “Let’s not start that again,” said Second-Best Sailor.

  12

  THE VESTIBULE OF HEAVEN

  For the survival of the principle, the many shall be sacrificed.

  For the survival of the many, the few shall be sacrificed.

  For the survival of the few, the self shall be sacrificed.

  For the survival of the self, the principle shall be sacrificed.

  Koans of the Cuckoo

  You are safe now,” the servomech assured Sam. “The levithons cannot penetrate this building.”

  “Levithons? There are more of the things?”

  “Thousands. They are universal scavengers, biological constructs about which we knew nothing until their spores descended from space.”

  Sam sat down suddenly, and all the energy sagged out of him. Tears coursed down his cheeks; he felt like throwing up. “She’s dead. Nerydd. Why wasn’t she protected by a building, if that’s all it takes?” He tried to summon up techniques from his training as lifesoul-healer. He knew the self-delusional traps.

  It still hurt.

  “We have been carrying out an urgent program of construction ever since the first levithon attacks, a century ago,” the servomech explained, oblivious to Sam’s distress. “For the previous four thousand, five hundred years, this facility functioned faultlessly. Faultlessly, do you hear me? The arrival of such predators was not anticipated, and there was no technological need for containment buildings. They would merely have added to the cost.”

  “Actions have consequences,” said Sam. “They are never neutral. Prey attracts predators; carrion attracts scavengers. New resources will be exploited. You should have anticipated the general nature of the threat, even if its specific form was unpredictable.” Not that gaining the robot’s agreement would bring back Nerydd. “What are those awful things?”

  “The levithons should not exist,” said the servomech. “We kill them by the hundreds, but occasionally one of them gets through our defenses. Then it eats its fill. They are immune to our protective femtomachines, even though they lack identifying qubit tags. Moreover, they infringe every principle of xenoscience. Such a generalized predator cannot credibly evolve. Levithons consume all organic material. From innumerable species, which evolved on innumerable worlds. They cannot have been selected to occupy such a broad ecological niche.”

  “So they’re impossible,” said Sam. “What killed Nerydd, then?”

  Unusually, the servomech sounded hesitant. “It is thought . . . nothing is certain, but there is evidence . . . though no records . . . that the levithon is a Precursor construct. An all-purpose scavenger, bioengineered to clean up dysfunctional ecologies. The ground where a levithon has passed is immensely fertile, once it h
as thawed again. Their immunity to femtotechnology is presumably a consequence of Precursor engineering.”

  “For all that, she’s still dead,” said Sam sullenly.

  Servomechs had no sense of sympathy. “By your arguments, she was not a real person in any case.”

  “Damn the arguments! She wasn’t real when her body was scattered in bloody slabs and disarticulated bones!” Sam yelled. “But she was real when you put her back together!”

  The servomech could make no sense of the distinction. In either state the organism had the same components, connected in the same manner; discorporation just distributed the components in a more rational, more accessible arrangement. “Discorporation is merely the most convenient state for maintenance work,” it said, bemused. “It makes no functional difference.”

  The stupid mechs really couldn’t see any difference, could they? “She couldn’t walk, or talk, or breathe when she was discorporated!”

  “In her mind, she could.”

  “That’s not the same!”

  This was where the servomech could never follow the human’s argument. Was it missing something vital? The novice lifesoul-healer seemed so certain that there was a meaningful distinction. “To her, it was. In her discorporate state she could do more than was ever possible in a corporate one. That is our task: to enhance the function and experience of lifesouls. To give them what you might call a ‘better world.’”

  Sam’s anger boiled over. “Not like that! That’s obscenity, blasphemy! Insanity!” But the mechs would never understand. To them, function was what mattered; form was irrelevant. They had no sense of aesthetics, no sense of propriety, and no sense of evil.

  Sam was struck by a new thought. “You say that it makes no difference whether her bodily parts are scattered or assembled. Could she not be brought back, by the same process that incorporated her?”

  “Using what for body-parts?”

  “Duplicated copies. Have you no recorded templates?”

  The servomech patiently dashed his hopes. “Even if we had . . . even if her organs were all intact, a vital element of process is irretrievably lost when an organism dies. We cannot re-create the correct dynamic state. What the Lifesoul-Stealer has taken can never be restored. Death, like life, is a question of function, of process. Not components.”

  Well, he was certainly getting an education in the secrets of the Church, Sam told himself. But was it the education that his superiors had intended? He had assisted in torturing Clutch-the-Moon Splitcloud to death, supposedly for the unfortunate creature’s spiritual health. And he had swallowed the theological creed of the Great Memes, which had led him to shoot an innocent alien and leave him to die a terrible death. He had discovered that the reward for spiritual advancement was Heaven—but the paradise was fake, and the reality was a planetary charnel house. And he had met and been attracted to an irritatingly sarcastic woman of supreme beauty, and had watched her being smothered and consumed by a monster.

  And this was supposed to be evidence of tolerance? Love? Respect for one’s fellow lifesouls?

  Really?

  “Your visit to this facility has served its purpose,” said the servomech, breaking into his thoughts. “Your tuition here is at an end. The transible has been prepared for your return. Delay will be inefficient and costly.”

  Delay? Sam couldn’t wait. When he got back to Aquifer, the hiero-crat would have an awful lot of answering to do.

  Surrection, resurrection. Quantum phases recohered. Matter, briefly transparent, became opaque. The ghostly inner light faded, and XIV Samuel was back on Aquifer.

  Oval pink eyelets peered at him myopically from an elongated, ophidian head. “No, Hhoortl555mup isn’t here,” it said in answer to his question. The Cakhadyll operating the transible was apologetic, but its mind was occupied elsewhere, and its forefringe ruffled helplessly. “It’s been nothing but confusion since she left.”

  Sam was aghast at the dereliction of duty implied by this offhand remark. “Did the hierocrat not make arrangements to appoint a deputy?”

  “She seemed a lot more interested in getting off the planet,” said the operator. “She was in such a rush, the friction could have set her tail on fire.” The eyelets contracted as the Cakhadyll ran the words through its mind again. “Not that she has a tail, just a figure of speech,” it added.

  Sam had no time for the gaudy creature. Brushing it aside, he hurried out of the transible area, trying to find someone in a position of authority. Someone to receive the complaint that ran molten rivulets through his mind. But as he stalked the corridors of the Nether Ice Dome, he became ever more convinced that on Aquifer the governing hierarchy of Cosmic Unity had broken down completely. No one seemed to be taking control. Everyone was waiting for orders that never came. All the senior clergy seemed to have left, and their juniors sat around with stupid looks on their faces, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

  Something had changed in Sam. Something radical and deep-seated. Not long ago he, too, would have been content to await instruction. But now, every instinct urged him to do something. He had to act, now. If nobody else would take charge, he would.

  He grabbed a passing Spuchthene menial and shook it viciously. “Where are the querists?”

  Shocked by the body contact, it didn’t even protest. “Gone. They left as soon as the hierocrat had departed.”

  “Then who is the senior priest here?”

  The menial studied his garments for a moment and gave him a funny look. “I think you are.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re the lifesoul-healer, aren’t you? Maroon robe, silver tackings?”

  “With levo knottings, not dextro. I’m a novice lifesoul-healer.”

  The menial decoded the pattern of knots. “Son-of-Good-One Samool, fourteenth member of the lineage of . . . Traven?”

  “Travers.”

  “That was it. They’ve been looking for you. Everybody senior to you has fled. The rest would have gone, too, but they couldn’t find you to authorize their departure. You broke the chain of command.”

  “I was on another world.”

  The menial would have been happy for Sam to have stayed there, judging by the angle of its forelimbs. “Ah. So that’s why you couldn’t authorize the rest of us leaving. So we’re still here. It’s all your fault.”

  Sam finally caught up with the conversation. “Yes, and I am in charge now.” The menial cringed as the logic struck home. “You will keep civil tongues in your head. And you will do my bidding.”

  The menial’s face brightened. This was more like it.

  Sam’s first act was to seek out the Neanderthal child. Dry Leaves Fall Slowly had never been far from his thoughts, and he did not want her to be neglected amid the confusion that now reigned in the monastery of equals.

  Where was she? Deep underground in the correction facility—unless she’d been moved.

  The querist’s quarters were locked, but Sam had access to a duplicator, and he knew how to work it. He ran through the tunnels to the duplicator room and ransacked files of past batches until he found what he was looking for. The qubit key to the querist’s quarters would have been enough, but some modest changes to the gesture pattern persuaded the metaphace to accept instructions to duplicate a master key to the whole Ice Dome, along with a copy of the hierocrat’s Ankh of Authority.

  He might as well be terminated for a sheep as for a yullé.

  The querist’s quarters were just a little too untidy. Their occupant had left in a hurry. The door that opened onto the spiral ramp leading down into the bowels of the monastery opened at a touch of the key. Sam slipped through and shut it behind him.

  The ramp was dark, which implied that it was deserted. A simple gesture activated the pass lights. Now, as he trotted down the curve of the ramp, the lighting would rise and dim as if accompanying him.

  He reached the bottom, breathless. He opened what he thought was the right door. Inside was the decaying carcas
s of a blimp. He couldn’t tell what had killed it, but he could guess.

  Try another door. This one?

  Yes, this was the place. But Dry Leaves Fall Slowly was not at prayer.

  He tore the dividing membrane and kicked his way past the door that led out of the semicircular devotional chamber. Behind it he found a sparsely furnished room with a hard bed and one thin wrap. Aside from these, the room was empty.

  He swore, inwardly relishing the blasphemy, clamping down savagely on reflex feelings of guilt. Then he rushed out into the ramp-way and collided with a Hytth, bowling him over. Sam hauled the creature upright. “There was a Neanderthal here.”

  “There were several,” said the Hytth, more interested in checking that he had suffered no damage in the collision.

  “I’m looking for a child. Female.”

  “That one has been moved from the correction facility,” the insectoid stated. “Along with other infidels.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “In the infirmary.”

  That didn’t sound good. Sam set off at a run.

  When he reached the infirmary, a Rhemnolid orderly barred his way. “You are not authorized.”

  Sam glared at it. “I am the most senior priest present.”

  “That iss a mere fact, and as such iss irrelevant. I have no insstructions to admit you.”

  “Do you have instructions to refuse admission to a lifesoul-healer? In the absence of higher authority, I am the senior priest. You will obey my orders! You have a Neanderthal child here. Take me to her!”

  Grudgingly the orderly allowed him to pass and led him to a padded couch, where Fall was lying, curled into a tight ball.

  Sam’s relief at finding her was short-lived. One glance at her, and he was appalled. “What’s happened to her?”

  The orderly consulted records. “The . . . Neanderthal . . . suffered a spiritual relapse. Denial of the Memeplex. Wicked allegations.”