He touched the plate gently and let the pages pass by at a slow pace. The work became technical for long stretches. Speeding up the pace, John turned to the last pages. This was not just a large work of three thousand pages; this was the complete constitution of his world, the background of his life. This is the source of my very thoughts. I was brought up hearing variations on what is in this work. The echoes seemed like a song now, the song of home, once far away, now growing closer.
The last page faded. As he moved to get up, John saw a miniature holo of a man appear on the desk.
“Hello. My name is Richard Bulero. I’ve been asked to add a personal note to my work, though I don’t know what else the careful student might wish to know.”
John sat down again, passing his hand casually through the recorded image. The screen flashed an instruction:
THIS IMAGE MAY BE PROJECTED IN FULL LIFE SIZE, OR IN COMPACT FORM.
The screen went dark as the image of Richard Bulero strolled back and forth across the desktop. John could see that his light brown hair was slightly streaked with gray. The man was not very tall, but he seemed tall in his lean catlike grace. He stopped and rubbed his chin, looking out across time.
“This is how we saw things at the beginning,” Richard Bulero said. “I hope it is how you see macrolife. I wrote the work you have been studying, but thousands of people did the work for it. In a sense, all of earth’s humanity helped to create macrolife.” He paused for a moment. “No doubt many things are different in your time. Whether I was too optimistic is for you to decide. I hope that you are examining what I wrote in an open society, not in secret. How I envy what must be available to you in your library terminals.” He paused again before continuing. “My desire was to dream the future at a time when humanity had all but destroyed itself in the solar system. What more can I add to what you must know in your time? I hope that we have not confined your ambitions by our mistakes. I hope that macrolife lives by the words of Thomas Jefferson, who asked in 1801: ‘What more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one more thing—a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.’ This last part applies to us, I hope, only in the sense that our governments to come must not take away, either through accident or through perverse design, the freedom that the historical labor of humanity has created for us. I hope you are alive in a society that does not take away, but receives the creativity and goodwill of its people. I’m reminded of one further point. Human history is driven by basic developments which are too often misunderstood. I’ll assume for the moment that macrolife, even in your time, is no exception. The most misunderstood basic development is the notion of an elite and its function. Our great talents never divide people into higher and lower, into winners and losers. The function of ability is to work in the company of normal people, those who consume and need skills and abilities, those who can appreciate and understand, but perhaps not originate, and with whom the talented share a common humanity. I wonder if it would be too much to hope that all our citizens might one day be high achievers and that what would pass for talented in the earlier society would be merely normal in the later one. Elites should be the first trickle in a direction that greater numbers may later follow. The function of the strong is to help the weak, the knowledgeable to spread knowledge. The writer writes for those who don’t, the singer sings to nonsingers. Elitism, I feel, is the disease of those envious individuals of middle abilities who cannot rise higher, so they settle for the power of their prestige. They have fallen in love with the true half of a half-truth. They do not look outward to humanity, they look down, and fail truly to share. They hate those below them and envy those above. We can discourage these tendencies in our children in a thousand subtle ways, teaching them to hold one another accountable according to their best tendencies, their most generous feelings. These are in fact as real as any imaginable external moral standards, because they can be elicited from the array of potentials in our biological nature, as surely as the harsher inheritance that we carry from evolution’s struggle. The ideals of macrolife must live in each individual consciousness as nothing has ever lived before. Macrolife must not exist in the economic externals alone, though they are equally important. Macrolife will be the test of an energy-rich civilization. Are you surviving without the whip of scarcity? Are the internal pressures of human nature stronger than the rational cortex? That’s all I can add for now. Good-bye.”
The image winked out. The screen lit up for a moment with a few bibliographical reference numbers, among them a list of the works of Samuel Bulero and the biological studies of Margot Toren, and then the lights went on in the cubicle.
This, John thought, was how it had looked at the beginning. He was struck by how much of this spirit was still alive. It was strong in Frank, in Margaret, in Rob Wheeler, in the builders of the new mobile. He had not seen it dying in anyone except himself.
He thought of the link. For Margaret, Rob, and Frank, the link provided a long cultural memory, while he was limited to what he could look up and the memories of a couple of decades. The historical amnesia of new generations was not a problem for them. For them, macrolife wasn’t any one thing. It was a stand against death, ignorance, and forgetfulness, against chaos, against all the forces that tear down and destroy. Suddenly he felt the continuing patience of macrolife, holding together everything that he had known. Blackfriar, Margaret, and Rob were for macrolife because it stood against the death of individuals, the death of societies, the passing of knowledge and awareness, the death of love, appreciation, and joy, the death of species and stars in the flux of time. On planets death walks into every heart, poisoning the future with the promise of ruin. The young glimpse death as a far-off destroyer, rushing slowly toward them, then falling upon them sooner than expected. Despair and anxiety are death’s left and right hands, winning death’s battles for it. On planets the living are dead before they die, and death the victor, when it calls, comes upon itself. Richard Bulero’s thoughts spoke across the ages, saying, “We have survived the solar system. Our social form will give us the necessary permanence, flexibility, and mobility to avoid most endings. Time will give us the patient accumulation of knowledge, to know ourselves and the universe better. We will endure.”
Suddenly John realized that he was living only a small part of himself and that he wanted to be like everyone else at home: to know as they knew, to feel as they felt, to love as they loved; but the feeling passed, as if something were trying to steal it from him.
John leaned over the tablescreen and watched the three-hundred-ten-kilometer companion world suspended in space below them.
“All basic systems are now operational,” Rob said as he sat in front of the screen at John’s right. “Most of the population has moved in.”
Around them, all twenty-five of the observatory’s screens were on, showing the panorama of the Praesepe cluster as the two macroworlds moved away, accelerating toward light speed. Lea’s twins were still bright, soon to be lost among the bright swarm.
“Are you feeling better?” Wheeler asked.
“I’m looking forward to link citizenship,” John said. There was no point in mentioning his feelings until he had decided what to think about his stay on Lea, about home, about himself.
He was looking at the companion world. The idea of a gravitic field pushing all that mass was strange, even after he had used one so often in the flitter. He thought of a massive fish swimming in water and a grav generator making waves to push against the curvature of space-time.
“One day,” Wheeler said, “we won’t need this kind of running start. Well be able to switch in the stardrive as soon as we’re reasonably clear of a sun. Converting to tachyon structure is costly enough by itself.”
“How long before we appro
ach light speed?”
“Three months. Actually, we could switch to tachyon tunneling at half light, as long as our direction was properly set for the jump to sol. The margin for error is great—it’s like stabbing a needle through a bunched-up fabric, hoping to hit the buttonhole. Fortunately, we always come out near point fifty c, so it’s not long to our destination, our time.”
There were a number of complementary theories, John knew. It had been called the tachyon tunneling effect, the tachyon quantum jump, and others. The tachyon universe had been described as having a highly variable spatial curvature.
“The tachyon universe,” Wheeler was saying, “is, well, to be very picturesque, pasted against ours, on the other side, to continue the metaphor, and that’s why our space is elastic to the degree that it is. Tachyon space-time can be stretched or compressed, practically speaking, from the point of view of our consciousness, to a higher degree than our space-time’s usual malleability.”
“What’s our usual?”
“You know—as light speed is approached, experienced time drops toward zero, mass increases toward infinity. All the extremes demanded by theory never occur, of course, but these extremes do serve as barriers of a sort between universes, frontiers between different sets of physical order. Dimensional theory allows for paper-thin universes to be piled up one on top of the other. Universes may interpenetrate one another, yet be unknown to the inhabitants of each. I won’t even start on time branching or time travel.”
“Finish with jumps first.”
“I think the best way to think of jumps is to imagine that we jump onto a supralight speed wave moving toward a far shore. We need initial speed and the tachyon switchover to get on. The wave then carries us toward that shore, which may be roughly congruent with our destination star in our original space-time. We come off by changing back to the tardyon slower-than-light wave structure while continuing to move, much as a person would have to keep running in his direction of travel when jumping off a slow-moving vehicle. Once we’re off, we can slow down. Tardyon and tachyon structures are only relative terms. We don’t feel much difference while we’re one or the other.”
“We don’t know much, do we?” John said.
“It lacks complete elegance, but the unwieldy description of what happens will disappear as we learn more. My dream is to have a drive that does not take us out of our frame of experience at all, or as little as possible.”
“What would that be?” John asked, knowing that he was using the discussion to distract himself, but another part of him found itself absorbed in the concepts.
“A direct control of the plasticity of space around the vehicle—altering the curvature of space directly without leaving our universe. Of course, if such a way to high transoptic speeds were possible, there would be some distortion of stars in the visual field, but we could correct for that. Navigation would be more accurate because we would still have some kind of information from our own realm to interpret.”
“But what about the mass-speed-time relationships?”
“They would not be affected, because we would not really be exceeding light speed or moving at all as an accelerating object upon which a force is exerted. We would be moving the space around the ship, in a sense. Mass would not approach infinity, time would not contract in relation to anywhere else, and we would not drain the energy of the universe as we became more and more massive near c. Only distance would be reduced. We would be a little universe all our own, moving like a ghost through the normal universe.”
“Why don’t we run into a star when we come out of jump? And why don’t we feel anything different when we’re tachyons?”
“It’s luck, the vastness of space, which makes it a low risk of hitting a sun or planet, or the fact that given the nature of the gravitational force involved, attractive and repulsive, it is just not possible to come out in a sun or even close to any material body with a deep gravity well.”
“I don’t understand that—but what about not feeling tachyonic?”
Rob shrugged. “We don’t because the tach universe is self-consistent in physical structure, like our own. Equivalent physical structures replace our own. How would we compare? All realities are observer-oriented. Maybe if half of you were tachyons, half tardyons, you’d feel the difference, but not when you’re fully one or the other.” Rob smiled.
“I think I see.”
John was silent. He turned his chair in a circle and looked out through all the screens. He was standing on an open platform in space, and the splendor made him feel like a localized bundle of awareness, the result of something that had fallen in on itself, become small and individual, full of pain and longing for a larger state.
“Rob, tell me something.”
“What?” Wheeler turned toward him. Half his face was shadowed.
“Do you tire of your work, of all this? You’ve been at it so long.”
“There’s too much to do, practical and theoretical, and I’ve yet to have a chance at the crucial experiments and observations.”
“That’s all that bothers you?”
Wheeler laughed, and for a moment starlight was reflected in his eyes. “I wish I knew more. There is so much that is not in the link storage. I wish I could plan ambitious projects, but we’re not ready for some of them.”
“Like what?”
“A time travel device, for example—it can be built. We’ve known that since Tipler’s work on earth in the 1970s. The device would be tens of kilometers in size, requiring dense materials.”
“What else would you do?”
“Close approach to a black hole. It’s almost certain there’s a giant black hole at the galactic center.”
“What would these projects tell us?”
“If we knew that, then we would not have to do them. These two would tell us a lot about what kind of universe we live in—not just our local universe, but maybe something about the larger reality. And we would learn experimentally, as a matter of measured experience.”
John was silent for a moment. “Rob, does the universe die?”
“We think it does.”
“How long?” The question seemed strange, almost as if he were asking about his own life.
“Anywhere from a hundred billion to a trillion years before the final collapse into a universal black hole. A long time ago we thought the time would be much shorter, about eighty billion years.”
No conscious being could ever exhaust that amount of time, John thought, wondering about those final moments when nature would lose its self-sufficiency, its seeming lack of contingence, and slip away, to die as individual creatures had died for so long within it. He wondered if personal death was a slipping away into a greater self-sufficiency, into something godlike.
“Then what?” he asked.
“The gravitational force becomes dominant, pushing everything toward zero volume and infinite density. Since this is impossible, there is nothing left but to expand. It’s really more complex than that. The explosion may push into a new space, creating a white hole, a new big bang. The new universe may have different physical laws each time, different constants and experiential properties. The model seems cyclical, but probably isn’t. It’s an oscillating model, and steady state in a sense, too.”
“It’s cyclical in the sense that there are a series of universes, but they are not repetitious, they’re individual.”
“That’s right. I hope it’s true. It would be another support for the idea that physical determinism is just strong enough to give us things like deductive explanations and weak enough to give us genuine novelty and the freedom to choose among alternatives.”
What happened on Lea is the bottom of my past. I can’t see beyond its horizon, either to what I was or what I might be, and I don’t like what I am now.
The vastness of space-time on the screens was a beckoning puzzle, and he was an enigma within the puzzle. John took a deep breath. There would never be a solution to himself, at least
not the kind of solution that might exist for the puzzle of nature. Only what he was to become had any chance of making sense.
21. The Jump
One month later, the mobiles passed one-third of light speed. The twin suns of Lea faded from the aft view, to be replaced by a growing circle of darkness that slowly ate the Praesepe group. Gradually the two stars had changed from yellow to orange, red to a deep coal red, before winking out; all light rushing after the macroworlds was being stretched into the infrared wavelengths that were invisible to the unmodified human eye, but still visible to the navigational scanners.
John watched the darkness that had swallowed Lea’s suns and was now devouring the universe behind him. He had come into the observatory once a day for the last month, dividing his time between link training, the library terminal, and watching the progress of acceleration. Sometimes Rob sat with him in the screen room, but much of the time John was alone while Wheeler went about his work.
Sol lay 150 parsecs ahead, in a region of sparsely scattered yellow stars; but with increasing speed the light waves were shortened into invisibility as they piled head-on into the macroworlds. Sol turned yellow green, full green, and violet before the contracting wavelengths became ultraviolet and visible only to the navigational sensors. The area of sol became a black disk, expanding to meet the darkness behind them.
As the two worlds continued accelerating toward .90 of light speed, the two black disks covered more of the sky, until only a band of stars was left between what appeared to be two empty hemispheres. On the sol side, the bow of stars was banded with violet, blue, and green; yellow lay in the center of the ring; on the Praesepe side, the bands were orange and red, fading into the infrared hemisphere at whose center lay Lea’s suns.
The great curtain of colors hanging in space grew narrower, leaving at last only the thin band of yellow stars at the starbow’s center. John almost expected that the two hemispheres would meet to cover the remaining stars of the visible universe; but gradually the hemisphere ahead reached its farthest extent and started to recede, as if pushed back by the still expanding hemisphere behind the macroworlds. The ring of yellow stars moved forward, surrounding their invisible destination as if to mark it.
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