Macrolife

by George Zebrowski

  It’s not worth living when so much is hidden, John thought as he looked out at the darkened universe. But a braver logic spoke within him. We are splinters, angles of perception and awareness, and we would cease to be individuals if our personal limits were opened to infinity, if we became omniscient. We would become a different kind of being; individuality would lose its meaning. We float as isolated points in a plenum of the unknown. The points grow toward each other as best they can, achieving only an imperfect acquaintance, but they cannot merge. Suddenly the potential openness of his life stirred within him, drawing him on again. The darkness ahead was a field of possibility, the darkness behind a black lake of things forever lost. He would have the link, the larger identity needed for endless life, the knowledge and outlook of selves which had passed through the life of worlds before him, leaving their best. The larger grasp of things would surely dispel the sense of smallness and inadequacy into which he had fallen.

  Wheeler came in from the outer workroom and sat down next to him. “A few minutes now and we’ll be ready for the jump. I’m told that this time we won’t feel quite so disoriented.”

  On the screen in front of John, the companion world shimmered in its field. There was no sense of motion, except for a fleeting sensation born of knowing.

  “Thirty seconds,” Wheeler said.

  Suddenly John felt as if he were falling, as if he could now feel their enormous velocity. On the screens around them, reality had been turned off. The band of yellow stars was gone; the black hemispheres were gone. Fore and aft, above and below, space was gray. The companion world was only a dim geometrical outline in the field. The gray itself was of varying intensity and texture. It seemed to be filled with short pinbursts of light, millions of them occurring with increasing frequency until they seemed like glittering sands.

  “What are they?”

  “We can’t be certain,” Wheeler said. “We might be passing through what may be solid matter elsewhere.”

  The pinbursts merged and the gray otherspace became a shade lighter, an infinite fog that flashed as if from a distant lightning storm. Abruptly it became a flat expanse near the bottom of the screens. The macroworlds seemed to be sliding forward on a hard gray surface.

  “Sometimes it looks as if it had a curve to it,” Wheeler said, “and we’re going over the top.”

  “How much longer?”

  “One or two ship hours. We can’t come out too near to sol. We have to give ourselves enough space in which to decelerate. It would be best if we could enter tachyon space at point zero five light speed and come out the same.”

  “Rob, tell me something. Do you have doubts about our way of life?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “What will become of us?”

  “We’re infants, groping our way from one set of goals to another. We seem to be fairly sure that we don’t want to go back to the cradle of natural worlds. That’s all I can say we are for now. Later, when macrolife has existed for a long time, I suspect we may no longer be human, as we know it now, as the natural worlders know it. If you and I exist then, we may be startled to recall that we were once as we are now.”

  “You think we will be alive, you and I? What will we be?”

  “You see, John, it’s hard to think past a century, even if you know that your life span is indefinite. A thousand years will bring conscious modifications, biological and mental. We have no idea yet how alien cultures may affect us.”

  “If there are any.”

  “They are there, I’m certain of it.”

  “If we can reach them.”

  “We will.”

  John thought of how he would forget Anulka. Entire lifetimes would disappear into the abyss of his personal future. Suddenly he wanted to be there, aged and changed beyond imagining, so that the pain of memory would be lifted. Yet a part of him was pledged never to forget.

  “Rob, what do you feel most clearly?”

  “I live,” Wheeler said, “because the whole world lives, because the universe is both unbearable and absorbing, curious and sublime, and suspiciously right in the way it is. That is the most curious thing about it, and that’s what I feel most.”

  “And that is what sustains you?”

  “Yes, and other things. You asked about the big ones.”

  “Aren’t there any other big things?”

  “Love and friendship. Love becomes very private after a century. It has a chance to succeed, to come and go without the threat of death, because it has time. I’ve not seen Olivia for two decades, but both of us know that we will be together again.”

  When they had been in the jumpspace for two hours, there was a sudden dizzying instant of falling.

  “We’re coming out,” Rob said.

  John expected to see the band of yellow stars reappear, dividing the universe again into two black hemispheres; but the gray remained, glistening occasionally.

  “What’s wrong?” John asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’re not coming out.”

  “We’ll overshoot sol,” Wheeler said.

  The bursts of light grew brighter, as if a vast fire were kindling outside.

  “What if we don’t come out?” John asked, imagining endless life without stars, without natural worlds, without young intelligences dreaming of spaces beyond their sky; that would not be a universe he would want to live in.

  Stars faded in, recreating the universe.

  “They’re not distorted,” Wheeler said. “We’re well below five percent of light speed, but the drive still creaks.”

  The new world was still with them, motionless on the screen. John remembered his anticipation during the approach to Lea, the endless waiting to see the planet. Suddenly he understood that home’s ties with earth, with natural worlds, had been the real motive, or a good part of the reason, for coming into the Lean system. Aimless wandering after material resources and knowledge had not been enough; lifeless solar systems, chosen at random, would have served as well; but only contact with other humanities would bring the special rewards of looking into a true mirror.

  There would be less delay here. In a few minutes of scanning it would be known whether the home sunspace contained any activity or not, if earth was alive or just another wayside world.

  22. Earth Again

  The two macroworlds were decelerating toward earth’s orbit at an angle of thirty degrees to the sun’s equator. Sol lay at the bottom of the screen. John turned his chair around and looked back toward Praesepe, now 155 parsecs away, more than five hundred years in the past if measured by light’s slow crawl. He had outrun the light that had left Lea’s sun five centuries before Anulka’s birth. He was looking toward the edge of the galaxy. Taurus, Orion, Cancer, and Gemini stood on the backdrop of intergalactic darkness, dominating the screens. Praesepe was a swarm of bright insects frozen in flight by the perspective of immensity.

  He turned again to look at their destination. Sunspaces are whirlpools of matter, he thought. Sol’s whirlpool is two trillion kilometers in diameter. A cloud of hydrogen collapses to form a protostar, and gravitational compression kindles the star’s thermonuclear furnace. Two hundred billion such furnaces of pulsating plasma circle the galactic center, he thought, but we were born here.

  “The sun seems normal,” Wheeler said. “There’s no sign of the anomaly. Are you going up into the hollow to watch with everyone else on the big sunscreen?”

  “I prefer the observatory,” John said. “I like the small room you’ve given me; I like the dining area and the atmosphere of work going on.”

  “John, I like to share what I do, but you’re using the observatory to escape. You’ve been avoiding everyone except me.”

  “I’m also interested in what you do here, I really am.”

  “As long as you see what you’re doing.” Wheeler sat at the table-screen in the center of the room. John could see only his back as they spoke.

  “It’s what I want for now.�
� He thought of the future again, when macrolife would be vastly changed. Anulka, Anulka, where are you? All this immensity has got to be capable of throwing up your life again. He knew that it was a stupid wish and that the life so ordered would never be the person he had known; but his mind persisted in projecting itself to the extremes of time and space, like a madman searching through a room for something he had lost. He could not control his dreams, his most secret wishes, which seized upon little bits of detail, always to enlarge them out of all proportion.

  “There was human life here,” John said. “On Mars and in the Jovian system, wasn’t it?” Wheeler was a dark shape peering down into the tablescreen.

  “We’ll know in a matter of hours if anything survives,” he said. “We’re listening for any kind of noise. Frank will cut in to tell us if we pick up anything. I don’t hear any radio….” There was a tremor in Rob’s voice, as if he was suddenly afraid, or suspicious.

  “What is it, Rob?” John stood up and walked over to look at Rob’s screen.

  “Just a thought.”

  Wheeler switched to a view of the hollow, throwing a bright afternoon light into the dark observatory. John looked into the space of green land curving around the disk of light which now showed the smaller, brightly yellow disk of sol. More than a million people were in the hollow, milling around the lake, walking down paths and sitting by streams, filling up the resorts and ordering lunch in the outdoor cafes, reclining in the meadows and lounging on park benches, stopping occasionally to look up at the sunscreen, where the sun of earth was rising again. All were waiting for sight of earth, for the first glimpse of the world that had produced their ancestors, even if that earth turned out to be a dead world, an empty shell washed up on this shore of space-time.

  “Look at them,” Wheeler said. “Our birthplace is a spectacle for them. They’re afraid of the sun, of any sun. So many are superstitious about suns and planets, especially the oldest, those over a few centuries old.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “I once was. I hate death but no longer fear it. My work gets on in a body of individuals, none of whom is indispensable except in a personal way.”

  “I’ve never heard you speak so critically.”

  “We need shaking up,” Wheeler said. “I’ve heard some of the reactions to your stay on Lea, and they’re all pretty narrow opinions. We’re too detached from the grosser forms of pain and unhappiness which you’ve seen. Many of our people are quietly bored. They stop living. They either take their own lives or they just stop.”

  “Stop?”

  “They give up and die with nothing wrong. I guess a perverse form of natural selection will leave us those who can take on an indefinitely long life, but I sometimes wonder. We don’t live the fully engaged lives of planet dwellers, but we’re not free of natural worlds, either. We always return to sunspaces—to reproduce, to gather resources, or to spy on lives harder than our own. Maybe we should not look back, not even in our thoughts. If we could become what we are completely, irreversibly, then there would be no danger of internal collapse from being part one thing and part another.”

  “But, Rob,” John said, “I’ve begun to hope.”

  “The vision of the founders is not present equally in all our people. History is not an unbroken memory, despite the link. And even if memory were continuous in all individuals, human beings would not all be happy and accepting. Universal linking is like what the desire for universal literacy once was, but when it comes, it will bring problems of a new order. We have to permit the life that wishes to do nothing, the life that is weak and fails, as well as the life that is complaining and ambitious. Some links are being used as a drug, a source of entertainment, to support a purely aesthetic life, in the way alcohol and drugs were used by the middle classes on earth.”

  “Middle classes?”

  “An economic designation. They were not as rich as the rich and very rich, but they were far from poor. Life was decent in physical terms. Of course, if the whole world had been middle class or rich, then things would have been different. But the entitled rich were above the middle class, and the poor made it feel guilty. Many of the problems of middle-class life were mental—problems of value and justice, self-development. How much time to devote to making a living and how much to leisure, and what to do with leisure. All that we can ever do, I think, is offer individuals a choice of opportunities. But individuals still have to make those opportunities work for them, and there can be no guarantees of success. Macroworlders know that natural worlds are what the old poor once were, but we’re not sure that there is anyone better off than we are. We have not been around long enough to meet an alien culture.”

  As he listened, John realized that Rob, Blackfriar, and Margaret were aware of the conversations he had held with each of them. The link enabled them to compare notes, reinforce points made by the others, and continually follow up lines of discussion. They were his family, he realized, playing the roles they might have played if he had been born on a planet.

  “There were earth cultures twice as old as we are,” Wheeler was saying, “but they survived through rigidity and dogma.”

  John thought again of the humanity scattered within the 200-parsec radius of the solar system, most of it poor and unable to move to a high-energy civilization. Macrolife was growing, but no planet could join its circle unless it worked its way up.

  “You think I was heading for the role of messiah on Lea?” John asked.

  “Of course, and you would have had to take over the planet to make things work.”

  “But would that have been a good or bad thing?”

  “I wish it were that simple a question,” Wheeler said as he turned around in his chair. John backed up and sat down again. “What I’ve tried to say is that there are two kinds of macroworlders: the spoiled and the self-critical—those who are arrogant and feel naturally entitled to our way of life and those who see it for what it is, a high point of development which is nevertheless not absolutely beyond the problems of the past. In time we must come to help natural worlds, but in ways that will not be destructive.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “We’ll have to see, and there will be mistakes. You’ve been asking a lot of questions. You’ve struggled to affirm your own world. Keep that, but think of helping others also. The time may come when your experience on Lea will be very valuable.”

  “Rob, is the boarding and sacking story true? What happened there?”

  “It’s true enough. The planetbound population of the Tau Ceti IV colony became very resentful of the macroworld in its sky, which was recruiting young people very rapidly. There was an attack against the half-built world in 2331. Most of the new population was slaughtered, with the unfortunate result that most of the skilled scientific elite died, leaving no teachers. The few surviving macroworlders built the star-ship that we found circling Lea. They were too proud to resettle among the people of Tau Ceti after their families and friends were killed. On Lea we saw that all the old problems followed them into Praesepe, as well as new difficulties that were born along the way. We’ll never know everything that happened on Lea, except that a technical civilization died there. Maybe a native one also.”

  “How soon before we cross the orbit of earth?”

  “Within a week.”

  John sighed.

  “Summarize,” Rob said. “I want to see how you’ve put it all together.”

  “In the one view, we should leave planets alone. Natural worlders resent us, even though some would join us. We can’t give help to different groups on planets because this would only create strife—clan against clan, nation against nation. So the only way that would work would require a team to impose order. But this would involve us in police guardian activities for every human colony world, and such an empire would distract us from developing our own civilization.”

  “Have you considered that such an empire might be a good thing? Maybe it would be part of our own devel
opment, not just a side activity.”

  “You’re just trying to confuse me. Let me finish. Involvement would prevent us from working upward from our level of problems, our plateau of difficulties. We would become a parent civilization, forever looking backward to the nursery worlds. We’re too busy to do that. Maybe one day, when macrolife is more numerous, we can close out the remaining planetary cultures by giving them a leg up.”

  “It changes them to know about us,” Wheeler said, “and it changes us whenever we are confronted by them, as you have been. It can’t be helped, even with all the best intentions on both sides. Miklos has been on all the human settlement worlds. He’s never forgotten. He’ll never tell you what help he’s given and how ineffective his efforts had been. Maybe someday you will build worlds that will specialize in natural planets.”

  “I don’t like what I did on Lea.”

  “Face the fact that humankind is not wholly rational and may never be. We have tried to rise above the animal without embracing the amorality of the intellect. But just because we can see beyond the slime a ways does not mean we have left it behind. Only the fact that exceptional individuals are born with a fair degree of regularity gives me hope.”

  “Is it a matter of biology?” John asked.

  “Partly. The interplay of complexities is another reason we shy away from meddling. The array of genetic potential is difficult to develop effectively without being coercive. Persuasion is not enough. Too often cultures have merely punished older, previously acceptable forms of behavior. Biology is necessary but not sufficient. A creative social form is sufficient, given the biology, but it must be coupled with a creative psychology, one which develops individuals without tyrannizing them or fostering dependency. In both psychology and biology we must never be happy with what is, but must ask what should be and what we want to be. Now we’ve managed to channel our irrational impulses, controlling the gross forms of envy, fear, hatred, and destructiveness. But we still have fools and egomaniacs, as well as people who aspire to ideals and behave humanely. Our laws stand above us and resolve our differences, but these laws are still made to work through human beings. I think it’s the long-lived among us, those who taught Humanity II, who are responsible for the continuity of our laws and practices. Yet we may decline in time, and to prevent that we may need the natural worlds again—we may need their view of us, their novelty, just as we need the rationality of Humanity II.”