by Ian Stewart
Universal Harmony’s aim was to become a eukaryote religion. A synthesis, a symbiosis, a complicity—not a sterile uniformity. It was structured to thrive on diversity, multiplex thinking, multicultural societies.
Nice trick. Starting is easy.
It’s keeping it going that’s so hard.
The new religion’s founder was suffering agonies of shame.
He would have had every right to be proud of his part in the defeat of the mission fleet. He’d helped to raise Talitha to unprecedented ethical levels; he’d been one of the rescuers of Fat Apprentice, who had picked at a dangling thread of logic and unraveled the fabric of Cosmic Unity; and he’d initiated the Samuellian heresy, in which tolerance was encouraged and valued—but never, never, never imposed.
Instead, Sam was deeply ashamed of the ease with which he had tossed away his humanity when transibled to Aquifer, and had accepted the querists’ justifications for torture and murder.
He just couldn’t get it out of his mind, and it was eating him up. It didn’t matter that Second-Best Sailor had forgiven him. He couldn’t forgive himself.
How could anyone who believed in harmony among sentients, and the virtues of universal love, talk himself into such a frame of mind that he would betray every principle on which his beliefs were based? He found it incomprehensible, even though he’d done it.
Had he been mad?
He sought out Epimenides. He’d noticed that the Thumosyne’s pedantry often held nuggets of wisdom. And right now, he desperately needed some spiritual insight.
Epimenides heard him out in silence and then extracted the essence from Sam’s pain and confusion.
“What torments you, Fourteen Samuel, is the Querists’ Fallacy.”
“The phrase is unfamiliar. What does it mean?”
“It refers to the flawed logic of those who put the question. The question is belief in religious orthodoxy, and they put it with sharp blades, red-hot steel, molten ice, searing blasts of oxygen . . . or bombs, plagues, and planetwide devastation.
“Yet most of them are not evil. Yes, there are some sadists, who torture for pleasure and use religion as an excuse. And others whose motives are political. But most querists honestly believe that what they do is necessary for the good of their victims’ lifesouls. You know why. You have heard their reasoning.” Epimenides paused for emphasis. “And you have asked them: What if their reasoning is wrong?”
“I have,” said Sam. “And I can’t detect any flaw in their answer: ‘By accepting the possibility of error, we risk our own lifesouls for the good of others. What greater love can there be than this?’ That was the answer that led me to become a torturer myself. I tried to inflict mortal harm on Second-Best Sailor!”
“You did,” said Epimenides calmly. “But nevertheless, there is a flaw. You could not find it because you looked for it within the querists’ logic, and that was what seduced you. But the flaw lies in the context, not in the content. Understand this, and you will never make such a mistake again.
“The Querists’ Fallacy is to pose the entire argument within the context of their own belief system. However, if they are wrong to torture innocents, those beliefs may also be wrong. In particular, the belief that the querist’s own lifesoul is at risk may be wrong. And then, what they do is based not on love but on ignorance and superstition.”
“But—are you saying that the Lifesoul-Giver doesn’t exist?”
“No. Neither am I saying that it does. I am saying that it is a fallacy to make deductions on the basis of false hypotheses.”
It was all so obvious that Sam marveled at his own stupidity. He had been mad! “How can anyone live a life founded on such flawed logic?” he asked, forgetting for a moment that he had done just that.
“Because our minds require a definite context in which to think,” the Thumosyne replied at once. “We cannot make a decision if the alternatives have no limits. We always worry that we have omitted some new possibility. So we fall back on the context in which we feel most comfortable, and use that to set the limits of our thinking. We forget that a wider context may alter the whole picture.
“This is what makes imagination so powerful, Samuel. And unorthodoxy so dangerous.”
“But unorthodoxy leads to heresy,” said Sam.
Epimenides gave the originator of the Samuellian heresy a level stare. “Yes. That is what makes it so valuable.”
The sudden collapse of the mission fleet had saved No-Moon from the devastation of the reefwives’ Last Resort, but it had come too late to make a great deal of difference. No-Moon was a dying world. The final, full-scale attack by the forces of Cosmic Unity, and the violence of the reefwives’ defenses, had destabilized the planet’s crust. Seismic quakes continued to rip the ocean floor apart, turning it into a cracked jigsaw of polygonal plates. White-hot rock, squeezed up from the planet’s depths by the turmoil, hit cold water and exploded. The ocean, seeping into the cracks, turned to superheated steam, adding to the already extreme pressures. Thick plumes of sulfurous smoke bubbled up from the sea floor into the atmosphere.
The continental landmasses fared no better. Hundreds of new volcanoes added their own deadly mix of gases: phosgene, carbon monoxide, ammonia, hydrogen fluoride. Acid rain fell in torrents; giant storms surged across the plains. Forests burned; rivers flooded. And that was only the beginning. Every fresh quake, every new volcanic vent, added to the destruction. Entire chains of volcanoes were building up, and when their walls gave way, the plains alongside would be resurfaced by lava flows.
A few hundred polypoid males, the only survivors that could be found, were quickly evacuated to Aquifer. Several hundred tons of reefwives, from lagoons that had escaped the worst ravages, went with them; more would follow if they could be found alive.
Aquifer was the natural choice. It had already been selected as uniquely suitable for polypoid/coralline colonization. The monastery of equals and the Heaven that it concealed were no longer a menace; the servomechs had seen to that. The various species still inhabiting the polar region could remain there indefinitely or be transibled elsewhere; the ponds were happy in the otherwise uninhabited deserts. No one needed the oceans, so the mariners and their reefwives could establish themselves without making any serious impact on anyone else’s lifestyle.
There was only one barrier to creating a thriving mariner world: The reefwives were sterile. The toxic chemicals in the oceans had wiped out their ability to reproduce. About half the males were still fertile, but they lacked fertile females.
Extinction loomed.
But even that possibility had been foreseen.
Second-Best Sailor’s original wifepiece, the one he had given to the Neanderthals, had grown in both size and strength during her time on Talitha. Now she tasted the alien seas of Aquifer, finding them strange but palatable. Bright moonlight filtered down into the shallows, bathing the lagoon in an ethereal glow.
Moonlight. True moonlight. So much better than the feeble substitute of meteor showers.
Pale shadows flicked through the water around her. With an air of anticipation, of suppressed excitement, the polypoid males waited. Among them were Fat Apprentice and Second-Best Sailor, courtesy of the latter’s new ship—the more fertile males, the better. Neither of them would have dreamed of missing the fun. This would never happen again, not in quite the same way.
This was the genesis of a new world.
Long-suppressed genes became active as the moonlight played on the wifepiece’s soft tissues. Tiny worms peeped out, attracted by the glow. Polyps emerged from their hiding places, reaching out with their tiny tentacles.
Microscopic spheres began to spurt from the polyps’ gastrovascular cavities, at first in thin streams, then in a thick cloud. They were eggs, they were fertile, and the males were ready. They swarmed in upon the cloud of eggs in a polypoid orgy. They darted this way and that, shoving each other aside in frenzied climax. Eggs and sperm mingled in the warm waters, fusing in pairs.
Fertilized eggs spread across the lagoon floor, finding their way into every crack and cranny in the rocks, settling on the sand. They would grow into planiculae, larvae equipped with motile membranelles that enabled them to swim. Normally, most would be eaten by predators, but this first generation of native Aquiferian corallines was protected by a forcewall. Most of the planiculae would find themselves a convenient rock, attach themselves, and grow into corals. A small proportion would remain free-swimming and become males.
The reefmind, intelligent but infertile, congratulated herself on the accuracy of her contingency plan. Thanks to Second-Best Sailor’s second piece of wife, gifted to the Neanderthals and returned when she was most needed, the reef would live again, and thrive.
Faith: I/we observe that the rebuilding of the reef ecology is proceeding apace.
Hope: This world is ideal. We made a mistake when we chose No-Moon so long ago.
Charity: Three-Moons was lost, we had traveled far, and we were tired. The reefmind of that time foretold many futures, not all of which came to pass.
Faith: We did the same. Only one of the wifepieces that we had set aside for safekeeping survived.
Charity: It was enough.
Hope: Emergent history is like that, sisters.
Charity: All histories are true, for a given value of “true.”
All: Wishy-washy syncretist!
Faith: The ancient evil followed the ancient path, as we foresaw.
Charity: Yes. A benevolent memeplex, spiraling into the self-set trap of inflexibility. A multiculture freezing into monoculture.
Faith: And now a new memeplex of harmony and coexistence is unleashed. How long, sisters, will it avoid the trap?
Hope: This time the priests are driven by empathy, not belief. This memeplex will maintain its openness and flexibility indefinitely.
Charity: Optimist. How long did that state last before?
Faith: Not long enough.
Charity: It never does.
Hope: Perhaps, this time . . .?
All: My timechunk does not extend that far.
There were rearguard actions. As the servomechs pressed ahead with the lengthy process of incorporating eighty-eight Heavens, some acolytes of Cosmic Unity struggled to regain their supremacy—and some succeeded, for a time. Four Heavens were repopulated using rogue servomechs, but two of these fell to levithons, one was lost when its star unexpectedly flared, and the fourth suffered massive technical failure from unknown causes.
Millions died; millions awoke to madness; but billions once more lived real lives—less pleasant than their previous virtual fantasies, but ultimately more satisfying.
It rapidly became clear that the Samuellian memeplex was evolutionarily superior to the unmodified one that had for so long sustained and propagated the Church of Cosmic Unity. The Church was dying, as a new species took over its habitat. It wasn’t that the ecclesiarchs attracted massive opposition, or lost further space battles. It was just that whenever anyone attempted to promote Cosmic Unity in its original form, the tried and tested methods of the past no longer worked. It was as if the universe itself was against them.
The ponds thought they knew why. THE GALACTIC LIFESOUL IS WHOLE AGAIN.
The Neanderthals thought that they, too, knew why. A new wave of skepticism and self-assurance was sweeping through civilized society. Blind faith in a discredited priesthood was giving way to a rational appraisal of the value of genuine mutual coexistence.
Fourteen Samuel had his own explanation: His heresy had become orthodoxy. It wasn’t the universe that had changed, but the Memeplex, by self-modification. He was awed by the ability of such a social construct to adapt to new conditions. The Church had not been destroyed; it had evolved.
Second-Best Sailor had no opinion on the matter, and didn’t give a squirt anyway. Like the ’Thals, he had a relatively low opinion of gods, and the alleged Galactic Mind seemed too close to a deity for comfort. He was happy piloting his magnetotoral steeds between the stars, sailing the currents of space and the solar winds.
He was trying to obtain consensus for a lightsail. His attempts to grow fruit outside the hull had fared poorly.
Epimenides just reveled in the multitude of philosophical viewpoints that were springing up.
All agreed that whatever interpretation you placed on events, the Galaxy did seem to be settling down, becoming a more pleasant place to live.
Sam still couldn’t get one puzzle out of his head. Had their actions truly influenced the Galactic Mind, or were those actions merely a consequence of the physical workings of a mindless Galaxy? In a way, he felt, they were both. Although the emergent structures of an anthill had different priorities from the ants, what was seriously bad for a lot of ants was also bad for their anthill. The two points of view weren’t alternatives, but different levels of interpretation.
The real transition to Mind, Sam decided, arose from exactly the opposite principle to the one that had driven Cosmic Unity: not uniformity, but the power and peace attained by valuing and validating difference. It was the complexity of the differences in the pond’s components that enabled its intelligence, but it took the multiplexity of meaningful communication between individual ponds to generate the necessary extelligence. It took both intelligence and extelligence to make a Mind.
Only the newly resurgent reefwives possessed the wisdom to know the true nature of the Galaxy. Unbreakable law or free will? Mechanism or consciousness? Unthinking or sentient? But nobody asked them. Nobody would have believed their answers, anyway. The reefwives had their own take on the universe.
She’s so beautiful, Sam thought, watching Dry Leaves Fall Slowly as she sat on the beach beside the pond and splashed her feet in the water. Second-Best Sailor and the pond had ansibled Sam on board Talitha, having found themselves with a few hours to spare before they loaded a cargo of pressed fernseed bound for the Eohippus System. The pond wanted to play with Fall, and the mariner was happy to go along with the plan. So was Sam. So he and Fall had been transibled to the mariner’s new ship for a short visit.
Sam was aware that his viewpoint was unusual. To most humans, the Neanderthal child would have seemed . . . not exactly ugly, but uncouth. Ill-proportioned. The protruding face was too apelike for flatfaced humans, and the thick hair was close to fur.
The Neanderthals were too similar to humans—that was the problem. So each subspecies judged the other by its own standards, comparing them to its own self-image, and found it wanting. Their perceptual systems for humanoids were highly discriminating. And so, paradoxically, the grotesque insectoid shape of a Hytth, with its steel blue exoskeleton, could seem elegant . . . whereas a form that, to the Hytth, was just another weird two-eyed, jointed biped looked misshapen and deformed.
Not to Sam. He could see through the false comparison to the child beneath, and she was lovely. Such a tragedy that there isn’t a person in there anymore. Despite all the medical advances achieved by Galactic civilization, the mind largely remained a mystery. Some mental illnesses could be cured by drugs; these were essentially gross physical malfunctions of synapses or neurotransmitters. Diseases of the brain, which only indirectly affected the mind. Fall’s condition was deeper, some subtle failure of the process of consciousness. The complexity of the brain made it virtually impossible to unravel the workings of the mind, let alone to discover what was wrong and find a way to cure it.
Fall had improved a little, as time put distance between her present and her tormented past. But the past was too strong; the best that they could hope for was that she would remain relatively peaceful when Sam left her for a few minutes. Something about the pond fascinated her, though, and Sam was convinced that when she was trailing her fingers through the water or paddling her feet, she came as close to happiness as her mind would permit.
“How is she?” Second-Best Sailor asked Sam.
“Physically sound, but mentally . . . well, see for yourself.”
“Pity.” The mariner wa
s clad in his trademark sailor suit, and he dipped one tentacle into the pond to stay in touch with his friend. Proper mental contact required molecular contact, so he instructed the suit to peel back a small patch of its skin, where the tip of the tentacle could touch the water.
The pond’s ecochemical “thoughts” interfaced with the mariner’s own neurobundle mode-molecules. HELLO, SAILOR. THIS IS FUN. SHE LIKES IT.
“Yes. But . . .” Subvocally, the mariner added: Sam seems so sad.
HE DOES? I WAS NOT AWARE. I AM NOT ATTUNED TO HUMAN EXPRESSION, AND HE RESTRICTS HIMSELF TO THE SPOKEN WORD.
He is sad because of the child, Second-Best Sailor thought. Her mind has been damaged.
YES. THE CHEMISTRY OF HER THOUGHTS HAS BECOME INFLEXIBLE.
The statement so surprised Second-Best Sailor that he spoke aloud. “You can sense her thoughts?”
OF COURSE. JUST AS I SENSE YOURS.
“But—polypoids have evolved to interpret chemical messages as well as verbal ones. ’Thals haven’t.”
THAT PREVENTS HER FROM UNDERSTANDING MY THOUGHTS. IT DOES NOT MAKE IT DIFFICULT FOR ME TO UNDERSTAND HERS.
“Ask the pond what Fall is thinking!” Sam urged, having heard the mariner’s startled outburst and then insisting on being told what had caused it.
The mariner did so.
HER FISHES ARE NOT SHOALING PROPERLY. THEIR MOVEMENTS ARE TOO CHOREOGRAPHED. NOT FLEXIBLE ENOUGH.
“She don’t have fishes!”
THAT EXPLAINS WHY THEY TASTE SLIGHTLY DRY. AND THEIR MOTIONS ARE OBSESSIVELY CYCLIC. I AM INTERPRETING HER THOUGHT PATTERNS IN TERMS THAT I FIND FAMILIAR, THAT IS ALL.
“She can’t get the horrors out of her mind,” Second-Best Sailor explained. “It’s such a tragedy she can’t be cured.”
Never before had he had the sense of catching the pond unawares. Suddenly, his mind was filled with it. SHE CANNOT BE CURED?
“No. Our medical science can heal her body, but her mind is beyond its scope.”
IT MAY NOT BE BEYOND MINE.