Macrolife

by George Zebrowski

  His eyes adjusted, and he saw that he was standing on a catwalk. He stepped to the railing and looked out into a seemingly endless space. Suddenly the dark vault burst into light, revealing a model of the galaxy, a titanic three-dimensional projection hanging in the night. The image was steady, as if it were made of glass. He was looking across the top of the lens toward the core, where the globular clusters were concentrations of fireflies floating over the enigmatic center. Streamers of gas laced the great spiral arms of the starry maelstrom.

  He walked left on the catwalk, realizing that the chamber was at least five kilometers across. As he peered toward the center of the 100,000 light-years of stars, the image turned and he was looking down at the spiral. “The model can be turned, enlarged, or made smaller,” Rob said through the link, “and specific areas can be enlarged as needed. It’s only a general map, and only the well-known stars are accurately placed. Unknown regions appear as a wash of light, with only a suggestion of individual stars. What do you think?”

  John knew that he did not have to voice his approval. As he tried to look beyond the galaxy, the model shrank, giving him a good view of the Magellanic Clouds, Andromeda and Fornax, the Leo galaxies, Sculptor, and beyond to the local region of the metagalaxy. One day macrolife would have a map of that larger structure; but for the moment this map was a step toward his wish of standing outside nature. On the scale of the cosmos, macrolife was a new kind of cell, the result of things growing upward from the infinitesimal into life, then into organized life and intelligent life, followed by social aggregates of intelligent lives, upward into visible masses within the galaxies, exchanging information between the giant cells, to become…what?

  “Let me show you something else,” Rob said within him.

  A portion of the Milky Way grew large suddenly, and John saw red lines linking more than a hundred stars. “These,” Rob continued, “are the stars to which the alien belongs. They lie about twenty thousand light-years toward the hub from us. What you see is their tachyon communications net. It has linked their culture for half a million years. The alien who came to contact us is a youngster, scarcely twice as old as we are. The solar system will become part of their net. They talk of developing a galaxy-wide net, then an intergalactic net, perhaps even a rapid-transit system following the routes of their communications beams.”

  “Rob, the systems in this net—are any planetary civilizations?”

  “Some are. Others have industrialized their systems and live in potential mobiles, like Drisa’s people. Some move around as we do—our visitor, for example.”

  John remembered something Richard Bulero had said. “The history of macrolife will not always be the history of humankind.” He leaned on the rail and thought again of all the human lives before the beginning of his own. They were all with him, still standing against oblivion. Nature enveloped us, he thought; now we are its custodians, carrying it with us wherever we go, whatever we do. What nature was to life, macrolife is to intelligent life. Beyond the biospheres of planets, a greater nature was coming into being, one that thought and knew itself. Macrolife was the brain and nervous system of something being born all over the galaxy, converging out of the initial diversity of living things as surely as the dust and gas had come together to form stars, yet sustaining within convergence an infinity of change and difference. If the earth had been an infinite flat surface, people would have moved away from one another in an endless flow of groups, diverging continuously, growing unique and powerful, and having no chance to exchange cultural achievements with other groups when stagnation set in. Macrolife is still diverging, he thought. Convergence will begin when macrolife increases in numbers, when new communications and transport systems become available on a large scale. A day would come when the model before him would be dotted with macrolife, inhabiting the spaces between the stars, clustering around stars, and moving out into the greater darkness like seeds thrown off by the living galaxies, in a vast explosion of intelligent life. Macroworlds would grow to be millions of kilometers in diameter, enclosing entire sunspaces; others would be smaller, clustering in geometrical shapes like the molecules of life. Natural worlds would continue to be the nurseries of intelligent life; there life would still grow violently, furiously, sweeping through evolution’s biological storms, throwing up into consciousness series after series of viable intelligences; there, he knew, the gathering of knowledge would never be the prime concern of life. For a moment his mind started to rage against this cruel reality; that it should be so, that planets should be such festering wounds on the starry face of nature, was intolerable; that so much courage was demanded of life on planets, and with so little reward for individuals, was the ultimate tragedy, a cruelty that might almost have been planned by some universal demon. Now he knew why the marks of a mature culture had to be knowledge and permanence, cooperation and love—above all, a treasuring of all intelligent consciousness; the creation of such a civilization was a task denied to nature. Having provided the compost heap of necessary conditions, nature was content to do no more. Natural selection was at an end; the natural selection of mind’s endurance was beginning. There would come a time when he would no longer be able to look back.

  He looked into the darkness around the model. Macrolife was the place from which to ask all questions. Would the universe expand forever, destroying all intelligence as all matter reached thermal equilibrium? Would the cosmos collapse into a point of infinite density, crushing the varied intelligences within it? Was there anything beyond the darkness?

  He thought of Yevetha and Drisa. He would have to see Yevetha as she was, taking her welfare as his own while remembering that she was different from him. Drisa had taught him that, by showing herself to him as she was—beyond his immediate understanding—and as he had wanted her to be; she had suggested that his yearnings were a young love affair with the universe, not a mature struggle with the tyranny of space and time. Was she right? Had she been amusing herself with him, trying to confuse him? Would he change so much in time to come? A defiant part of him said no; he would love her and Anulka, and everything else around him, as he pleased; while another part of him said yes, and it seemed like death.

  He looked at the model for a long time, losing himself in its details as he drew out of himself, becoming old and impersonal, viewing the myriad stars with a kind of love that he had not known before; doubts came in to camp at his center, making him feel fluid, as if at any moment he would dissolve and re-form into someone or something else. The pain of life’s passing was a feverish night pressing in around him, filling his mind with fear; but as he fixed his eyes on the glowing model, its stately beauty lent him peace, subduing for him the unassailable quality of all things.

  He was about to leave when he came upon himself in his most secret thoughts. He saw what he had been, a being from the past, as man had been before, unchanged, unawakened from nature’s sleep, blind to what he could become. He had traveled backward in time, drawn by the freshness of rivers, oceans, and forests, into the older regions of his own mind, seeking the viewpoint of an unknown self—a proud self, outraged by death, yet ready to give death. He looked into himself now, at this beast crouched in something like a deep forest surrounded by mountains, and it looked up at him, unrepentant, unafraid; and he knew that he would see this nursery self become the smallest part of him as it receded into the deepest recesses of his structure. Would it become nothing, he wondered, or would it reawaken someday in all its florid, romantic yearning?

  John turned and walked slowly out of the darkness, as if from a holy place.

  III. THE DREAM OF TIME

  Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

  It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and
infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the somber hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of color and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in trillions.

  They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will not be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

  —ARTHUR C. CLARKE,

  “The Long Twilight,”

  Profiles of the Future, 1973

  The history of macrolife will not always be the history of humankind. Intelligence is certainly not limited to humanoid forms, or to the chemistry of carbon; other forms will also develop technical civilizations capable of using the energy of their suns on a large scale; for the idea of independence from the chemical-energy-based ecologies of natural planets will surely flow out of alien imaginations, among other things, as it did from our own.

  We can expect to alter our bodies as we expand our minds to deal with immortality, with the extended projection of unique personalities across time; we will still call ourselves humankind, but that word will stand for the universality of intelligence in nature, and not for appearances.

  —RICHARD BULERO ET AL.,

  The History of Macrolife, 10th ed.,

  Revised and Updated, vol. 10,

  “Projections and Notes,” Sol, 3025

  (See also vol. 11, “Posthumous Fragments”)

  We are poor and forgotten

  When night falls.

  Night after night

  Diminishes us toward death,

  While by day the smiles of women

  Convince us of immortality.

  The self is a trap

  To escape.

  —RICHARD BULERO (poem found written in the margin of his major work)

  There are two kinds of critics of any possibility; those who wait and see, and those who try to kill an idea in advance; at every crossroad, each forward-looking soul is opposed by a thousand guardians of the past.

  —RICHARD BULERO

  (aphorism in the margin of the last page of his major work)

  Then the Old man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole.

  “That is the way,” he said.

  “But there are no stairs!”

  “You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.”

  —GEORGE MacDONALD,

  The Golden Key

  Under my face a steady rivulet of blood was enlarging to a bright red pool on the sidewalk. It was then, as I peered nearsightedly at my ebbing substance there in the brilliant sunshine, that a surprising thing happened…. I lifted a wet hand out of this welter and murmured in compassionate concern, “Oh, don’t go. I’m sorry. I’ve done for you.”

  The words were…inside and spoken to no one but a part of myself. I was quite sane, only it was an oddly detached sanity, for I was addressing blood cells, phagocytes, platelets, all the crawling, living, independent wonder that had been part of me and now, through my folly and lack of care, were dying like beached fish on the hot pavement. A great wave of passionate contrition, even of adoration, swept through my mind, a sensation of love on a cosmic scale, for mark that this experience was, in its way, as vast a catastrophe as would be that of a galaxy consciously suffering through the loss of its solar systems.

  —LOREN EISELEY,

  The Unexpected Universe,

  “The Inner Galaxy,” 1969

  i

  ::Know separateness again::

  He swam in a midnight sea. Something was preparing him for a return to individual consciousness.

  “What has happened?” John asked of the thing that cared for him.

  “What…am I?”

  ::You have been separated from another condition::

  “Why?”

  ::Partially became we could not prevent it, partially because something of you wished it once, and because you may be needed::

  “I don’t understand.”

  ::Know: Macrolife has endured for a hundred billion years. Maroworlds ranging in size from one hundred kilometers to millions of kilometers remain in a universe where star formation has all but ended. Macrolife is the only remaining civilization::

  So much time, he thought, trying to feel where it had passed within him.

  ::No time has passed for you. Your present, narrowed awareness has not experienced it::

  He tried to open his eyes.

  ::See: The star is a hot blue-white dwarf. The material that was its planets and smaller bodies is gone. Gathered closely around the dwarf, you see thousands of macroworlds of differing sizes, forming a complex even-sided triangular solid, five million kilometers on each side, created for use in gathering the energy of the star until the very end. These worlds are populated in small part by derivations from the humanity you knew, but mostly by the progeny from myriad unions between intelligent species, including the children of organic intelligence, both open-ended and deductive minds. No stars are visible in the sky, as your eyes once saw them. All the remaining suns in the universe are too faint to be seen, except at the closest distances, and often only from inside their shell of worlds. Near us in the darkness, there is only one faint red-normal star, whose slow use of energy may continue for thousands of billions of years, if the universe continues to expand forever::

  “Will it expand forever? What is known?”

  ::The galaxies long ago reached their farthest point and are hurtling back toward the center. More and more stars are collapsing into darkness, as are the galactic cores, creating an increasing number of intermittent quasars. Other stars are black dwarfs, their particles resting in the lowest energy states. Radiant energy is slowing its streaming, as the second law of thermodynamics nears its final physical proof. In time, all remaining galactic material will exist as galactic-core black holes, and these will eventually coalesce into the final collapsar::

  The voice became silent inside him, sensing his need to consider; for a time he was alone, a gathering of scattered thoughts in a dark place. Gradually his self-awareness improved, but he still half felt that he was someone else; at any moment the closeness with himself would fade, and he would wake up into another identity….

  He opened his eyes to an almost substantial darkness, a shroud thrown over all that was once open and alive with light, concealing the laughter of colors, the longing in distant vistas, the grace of movement.

  Slowly the universe became a room filled with shadows and faint lanterns.

  ::Soon you will see as we do, throughout the spectrum::

  It’s so late, he thought, so very late. “From where have I come to this place?”

  ::You have come out of us…as we fragment. You will understand this later. It is possible that something may be gained by restoring your individuality::

  The darkness receded as his eyes adapted. He saw a red glow near the edges of his vision. Gradually it became a bright orange, filling the room, leaving only a faint violet near the curved corners of the floor and ceiling. His vision took in one hundred eighty degrees and was clear right out to the edges. Slowly he moved an arm and floated into position to face the floor.

  The floor darkened, revealing a night dotted sparsely with deposits of dully glowing stars, reds and infrareds now visible to his eyes. As he watched, the sky seemed to acquire a glow, as if a distant daylight were spilling in from over the edge of the universe.

  ::The background temperature of the universe is increasing from continued contraction::

  Something drifted into the room. He turned left to face it. The being floating over the translucent floor w
as vaguely humanoid. Its head was perfectly round and hairless. The body was long and thin, golden-skinned, ending in a tail-like appendage; graceful arms ended in delicate six-fingered hands. The eyes were large black ovals with multiple pupils.

  The view below changed to reveal a faint white sun surrounded by a shell of globes.

  “John Bulero,” the being next to him seemed to say, “I am as you are, but from a time past your origins. We are both restored to an extreme condition of individuality, to the state that preceded what we became later, you and I. The aggregate is all memory and will instruct us as needed.”

  ::A thousand worlds around this star::

  John Bulero. The name and gender were somehow his, yet both were strange possessions. Suddenly he thought of bright stars, wondering if home still existed. ::Parts of the home you knew exist within this one, unused memories near the center:: The information was provided without intrusion, gently, with a feeling for his need to reclaim the past.

  A portion of the floor became a portal. He was suddenly enveloped in a glowing transparent bubble and carried downward. The thoughts of the alien humanoid reached after him. “Farewell. I hope you find what you need.” Then he was moving into an endless passageway. A dull white glow erased all comparisons from his field of vision, producing for brief moments the sensation of rushing at a blank wall.

  :: You can see into the infrared and beyond, as well as below the ultraviolet::

  As the bubble carried him forward, he watched the dull warmth of the walls, the hot fog of his own breath billowing out of his body to fill the red-orange shell of force; he looked at his hands, at the white glow of his naked body, feeling that the form was not his own, that it was an imaginary thing.