“Rob!” he shouted inwardly. A sudden fear clutched at his insides, as if something from deep within him had escaped to become real outside, forcing him to face it.
“We know, we know,” Rob said.
The flitter raced toward the forward cradles. Suddenly the planet-sized globe brightened, as if signaling, dwarfing the two macroworlds in the foreground. Soon the alien took up the whole sky; but as John rushed toward home, the macroworld grew to blot out the visitor.
He floated into the open cradle, and the locks closed behind him. The flitter settled in, but he did not get out immediately. Responding to his curiosity, the link gave him a 360-degree view of the scene outside, turning for an image of earth’s cup, his own companion world nearby, settling finally on the visitor, which was larger than all the spaceborne structures combined.
“They have perfect control,” Rob said. “I can’t detect any significant gravitational effect from their presence that might be harmful to us or to earth.”
“Polite,” John said.
“Just a minute. Something’s happening.”
“What is it, Rob?”
“Our artificial intelligences are chattering away, exchanging information at a fantastic rate, and we can’t stop it. Drisa reports the same thing. The process is running like a chain reaction. Wait a moment….”
John heard a high-pitched sound.
“I don’t like it,” Rob said faintly, as if an ocean of sound were swallowing him. John thought he heard a titanic whispering; there seemed to be laughter in it, or was it joy? A great night tide was washing in, another going out.
“There, it’s over,” Rob said. A great silence seemed to surround Wheeler’s thoughts. “Here’s something from Drisa. The aliens claim to have just given us information on how to build better drive systems, complete matter-synthesis capability, and their entire cultural history—as gifts of friendship.” Rob almost laughed inside him. “I guess they can’t be all bad.”
“If it’s true,” John said.
“Drisa says that it’s like an exchange of biological information during reproduction, but on a large scale, between three cultural organisms.”
Suddenly John perceived a fact about the alien. The information seemed almost a memory, though he knew that he had just received it. The alien was not a complete stranger. It was carrying two earth-born macroworlds within its structure, bringing them back to sunspace as part of its contact project. The first contact had been made by a mobile a long time ago, so this could no longer be earth’s exclusive project.
The alien spoke:
“We invite you to join our circle of civilizations. The primary consideration for us is the fact that you have achieved organic and artificial intelligence interfaces. This frees you, to a large degree, from old instinctual patterns of motivation, the behavioral forms created in the competitive evolutionary process. Your interfaces are still another example of critical mind freeing itself from the unproductive aspects of instinctual mind.”
An image appeared:
Bony, birdlike bipeds with large eyes, ancient and reptilian-looking shapes, their limbs bent into a strange posture, joints thorny and skeletal….
As he held the image in his mind, John realized that it revealed very little; the words said more, conveying a greater sense of the culture’s inner life and direction. Their words communicated everything, overriding body language and other deep-seated reactions in him; and he knew that this was quite deliberate. He was in the presence of advanced minds, ones that could rise above the irrational structures of brain and body, conveying the degree of their victory of the rational cortex to others without triggering fears and prejudices.
“How then do you deal with younger forms of life?” Rob asked.
“We do not deal with them at all, but we are aware of their existence; youth is the source of new things in the universe, and worth watching for its fresh approaches to the tragedies and joys of life, even if never contacted. Since we have no problems of energy or resources, our only activity is to set goals worth accomplishing. We found your mobile worlds very promising, having developed this freedom ourselves. There are other circles of macrolife in the universe; one of our aims is to search for them, in order to compare systems of knowledge and experience. Decide amongst yourselves which of you will join us. We will not intrude on your interfaces until you let us know.”
“They’ll probably invite some exchange of population,” John said.
“Perhaps. The exchange has given them more than our genetic code. They have enough to grow human individuals for themselves, to see how they will develop in that culture. Maybe they’ve done it already—we’re not the first humankind they’ve contacted. I wonder how the two other macroworlds have developed.”
Doubts came into his mind again, like vermin hunting for his hopes; for a terrifying instant he felt that all the pain of her death would flood back into him. It was incredible that Anulka was dead, infinitely cruel and inexplicable. The structure of her body was dissolving into chaos. What was the inner necessity of irreversible processes? Material things ran down, while minds grew in complex reference and internal resonance. I did not know her, he admitted, I pitied her. I have not yet known another as another needs to be known, as I need to be known. Pity for the suffering of natural worlds had distracted him, mixing with his real needs, luring him toward the solution of problems he did not yet understand.
He tore the training disk from his temple and attached it to its place on the control panel. Then he climbed out of the flitter; his footsteps echoed in the cradle chamber as he walked to the exit.
The door slid open and he stepped into the corridor of the engineering level. The wide passage was empty of vehicles. He looked right and left. The overhead lights stretched to the vanishing point, curving around the world’s forwards. Across from him, the elevator doors were closed. He stood perfectly still, wondering about the endless oblivion of death, the many-legged insect horror that might come rushing toward him at any moment. A small failure within his body might kill him in an instant, despite his indefinite life span. He was still finite and mortal. Macrolife had not crushed death; it had only pushed it out of immediate sight.
He turned right and started to walk down the endless passageway. Was there any doubt, still, where his loyalty lay? People had been killed on a world where intelligence was a small, powerless force, enclosed on all sides by a killing nature, a cruel and squalid process of life clinging to the outside of a planetary surface. The village had been an agricultural community trying to throw off hunting and gathering, while the nomads had persisted in treating the village as just another wild animal to hunt for food. I’m for macrolife because it is against death, he thought. Macrolife is the fulfillment of the hopes of all who have died before me. At last we are free of nature’s agriculture of death. City life is finally free of the countryside. As long as there are raw materials, we can exist forever.
The passageway was restful as he walked. The solar system, he realized, had drawn its children back for a purpose. Old ghosts were being laid to rest; the future was opening up again. In a thousand years, he would still be young, still starting out. Large, impersonal thoughts came into him again. What was this universe, this enveloping reality that made him doubt and hunger and desire? Would he always live without knowing? He stopped and closed his eyes, trying to see forward to ages of greater knowing, willing himself to move ahead into those times, to feel what they held. If he wearied of long life, a thousand, ten thousand, half a million years hence, there would be ways to advance into futurity more quickly. He felt impatient. The limits around him were there as firmly as death had once been. Although home had given a better life to generations, something was still missing. The little voices within him would not be still. He had been born too early, ages before macrolife became more than the uneasy cooperation of its individuals. He had waited most of his early life to see a planet, a local space bathed in the natural light of its sun; but despite the
beauties he had seen, the experience had left him with bitterness and pity, and sorrow over the loss that he could not replace or forget easily. Having been born on a world moving in space, he had developed the expectation of arriving at a destination; yet all worlds moved in space, and such motion was incidental to life.
He opened his eyes and continued walking, knowing that he could continue down the passage for hundreds of kilometers without stopping. The thought calmed him, and he knew what he had to do.
25. Crossroads
Human thoughts were everywhere, as numerous as the people he saw in public places, surrounding him with welcome and reassurance. A week after attaining full link, he was still practicing the self-control that would ensure his privacy; separateness of mental space was a right that each citizen knew how to enforce at will. During the first month, he was not always happy about shutting himself up in his own skull; the time off was necessary, but he did not like it. He would send his mind into the information labyrinth of Humanity II, there to be guided by the various servants, who would appear in his field of vision as human personalities, real in every sense except that they could not be touched; they could be called upon to explain visual or written information, to give an audiovisual overview of public activities throughout the home biosphere. They also provided a continuous feedback of medical intelligence from each citizen’s body, warning and prescribing as necessary.
Occasionally he would call up the image of Richard Bulero, who would appear full-size and respond to questions; the answers, of course, were only extrapolations made by Humanity II, based on everything that remained of Richard’s views. John’s biological nephew lived, in a sense, as animated information within macrolife’s system of technology for transmitting basic cultural structure. Richard had been prophetic, John learned, about the link system: “The link will not be telepathy, but a direct line into the sensory and speech centers of the brain, perhaps in time using neutrino and tachyon beams as carriers, instead of lasers and radio. Individuals will still have to listen and speak to one another, but the ease of access among individuals, as well as to library information services, will be efficient and convenient, making possible a higher degree of personal growth and democratic participation for everyone. The promise of link implants in creating a cohesive social structure for macrolife cannot be underestimated. Not only will the links between persons be strengthened, enabling them to individuate themselves and to share a common culture to a degree previously impossible, but the sense of historical continuity, educational heritage, and direction will be enhanced.” Richard had not foreseen the large-scale use of information imprinting, especially in languages and musical structure, or the link’s use in sleep control, psychosomatic direction of the body’s self-maintenance programs, the formation of dyads and triads of friends and lovers, the triggering of special brain functions in mathematics and long-term concentration. A whole inner space was opening up its vistas to him.
John found himself alternating between the larger extension of his awareness and the local mental space of his previous self. He had found that he could represent humankind’s organized knowledge as a seemingly endless plain of growing things; he would rush across this forest, overcome by the sheer magnitude of stored treasures, dipping into the greenery to sample information. There was a poetry in mind’s origins, which expressed itself in these visualizations—a nostalgia for the warm forests and teeming oceans of sunspaces, drawing him with a silent, reconciling music, which he knew to be the song of the brain’s oldest regions. “The rational cortex,” Richard said, “is the new kid on the block, presuming on the older wisdom of instinct and impulse. Well-dressed, clean, mannerly, the cortex becomes the natural target for the mind’s ruffians, who always taunt and bully someone who is not like them. So the older brain bullies the more refined cortex, as well as seducing it with nostalgia, the siren song of a simpler, less conscious existence.”
The link enabled him to observe the developing relationship with earth and with the visiting alien. There was discussion of taking the new mobile to the center of the galaxy, to study the core dynamics and to make contact with a number of fast-developing cultures which had recently attained tachyon signaling capability. His own world was considering staying in the solar system for a time, to develop various projects with Drisa’s government; among these new undertakings would be the building of mobiles for the restless factions among the solarites.
Drisa wanted the sunward peoples to expand into the asteroid belt, to develop it into mobile and sun-orbit communities. The flying mountains were already settled by a large contingent of industrial workers, the descendants of Martians and Ganymedians; they provided much of the solar system’s raw materials. Drisa herself was from Ceres, the largest asteroid, so it was not surprising that she should support the expansion into her native region.
He had not seen her since their meeting on earth; the thought of seeing her again filled him with hope. He was glad that his world was staying, even if that was not a venturesome choice. Drisa represented something completely new for him; Anulka stood for the kind of human past he wanted to forget for a while; Margaret was an unchanging present, giving security and understanding. Of course, Drisa might not like him at all. He wondered what he could do to catch her interest. His image of her was that of a strong woman with a controlled sense of humor. He thought of her body, as it might be; he saw her red hair, her breasts and supple belly. What color were her eyes? Would she be what he imagined, or would she disappoint him?
The world’s past was vital again, the present a crossroads of potentialities. For a moment he saw the first three decades of his life as a set of problems, to be understood and put away after he had confronted them. He felt the changelessness of macrolife in himself, its openness, its strength and weakness; there would always be danger in openness, the chance of failing. It seemed that he was condemned to live a contradiction, to be himself and to change, to be permanent yet fluid. The secure world of his childhood was gone; the home biosphere had reproduced and returned to earth; and strangers had come from the stars to offer choices. Life seemed too large suddenly, too complex, making him apprehensive that he would lose himself in it. He longed for the simplicity of Lea, with all its discomforts and dangers; but the longing died as he understood the cause of his lapse. It would happen less frequently as he changed. He perceived the strength of macrolife within; it had always been there, when he had been doubting or accepting.
He did not regret his stay on Lea; he had seen through the eyes of two realms. Home was new to him again; beneath its surface lay a greater world of memory and understanding, an inner world of sympathetic mentors who ruled a universe of information, where he might quiet his hunger to know as he prepared for greater life.
Faraway thoughts drifted around him as he rested in the apartment, quiet, impenetrable clouds of consciousness moving through the mental space of the world surrounding him. There was comfort in the sensation of so many other thoughts; he watched them billow and change shape as their thinkers responded to the universe. The apartment no longer seemed unpleasant. It was his and Yevetha’s now.
He sat up. Someone was coming toward the bedroom, a person without a link, probably Yevetha.
The lights brightened into an orange-yellow glow.
“Hello,” Drisa Haldane said. “I’m sorry to break in on your rest, but I wanted our talk to be private.” She paused. “You’re a disturbing person…. It was something about you in the valley, maybe the history of the Bulero name.”
“What is it?” John was too surprised to look directly at her.
“Perhaps I owe you this visit, since you took such a clear interest. Please don’t protest. I’m a trained diplomat and three times your age. I’m not flattering myself.”
“No, please go on.”
“I’ll be leaving soon with a diplomatic and scientific mission to the alien’s home system, as part of an exchange delegation.”
“I thought you didn’t approve of
interstellar wandering.”
“I don’t, but this is too important to pass up, so my personal views don’t count. I prefer cultures that grow internally at a rate greater than that of mere physical expansion. I know that you’ll be staying, so I wanted to see you before I go.”
“I don’t understand, but you’re welcome, of course.”
“Don’t you see?”
“What?”
“I want you to know something about me as I am.”
“You’re really leaving?”
“Yes. I can see your disappointment, but you can’t come with me. I’ve come to teach you a lesson, because I like you. In a century you might very well become an extraordinary person, and an equal.”
“What are you talking about?”
He looked directly at her, slowly realizing his mistake. He did not really know her. “I wanted you,” he said. “You attracted me.”
She took off her tunic and pants, revealing a pale white skin, rounded hips, and small breasts; her red pubis was aglow in the light. She came toward him and his feelings raced, shutting out the link community, shrinking him back into the borders of his own skin as he gazed into her hazel eyes, imprisoning him in the place where he had first grown into awareness. He wanted her, as he had wanted Anulka.
“You don’t have to delude yourself,” she said as she leaned over him. “The past moves us all and does not have to be thwarted. If you can learn to give without losing yourself, then you’ll know how to live across the centuries.”
Three kilometers beyond the observatory, he came to a door off the passageway. It opened, and closed when he was inside. “I’m here, Rob,” he said within himself as he looked around in the dark. “What do you want to show me?”
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