Macrolife

by George Zebrowski

  As he stared into the darkness, he imagined that he was swallowing an infinity of darkness, compressing it into a black rope as it rushed into him, filling him like a coiled snake. Macrolife, he realized, his worlds, would have created one new individual, if the universe had not ended; the end would have been the beginning. I am macrolife, he thought, as much as any individual.

  As time swallowed itself around him, he saw a faint purple ahead, almost deep royal blue in places. A series of afterimages followed, reflections and mirror images traveling backward in time into his perceptual field, as if something had passed him, leaving a wake. At one moment it seemed as if the space of the tunnel had retained not only a full negative record of the great collapsing mass that had formed it, but also an image of the mass that had collapsed toward an impossible condition. While macrolife had circled the galactic core hole, the light of the universe had been a record of all the future, all the remaining future rushing in to end in a few moments of experienced time; all that energy, matter, and light that had fallen into the pit was now ahead of them; nothing was left behind; the future was everything.

  What if we never come out, he thought, what if this collapsed space is looped into an infinite limbo? What if the white hole closes immediately after the outstream? Macrolife might never see the morning light of creation….

  Again he saw some vast, blurred image, as if something rushing ahead of them were leaving a trail. Then darkness returned for a long time, and with it came a complete hopelessness.

  The hopelessness shattered into a million thoughts.

  “…We shall never come out…”

  “…We should have stayed in the past, where the end was still far off…”

  “…What shall we do…?”

  If we come out, John thought, it will be like regaining the past, except for whatever original features might exist in the new cycle of nature. He tried to shut out the continuing assault of doubts and reproaches being exchanged in the darkness. Was this the first time creation had come to an end? Was it the first time that all distinctions had been collapsed, only to be remade anew into a new variety? Perhaps this was the first time the universe had ended, and there would never be another. The idea was as frightening as the thought of a universe expanding into cold nothingness, never to be drawn back together, never to grow warm again. It was unthinkable that only nothingness lay ahead; as unthinkable as the idea of absolute zero, left without right, or a unique beginning to the cycles of expansion and contraction.

  ::It may be::

  “I reject even the possibility,” John said. “It is as impossible as the idea of absolute nothingness; something must always exist; to imagine otherwise is to fall into contradiction.”

  But how knowable would the new universe be? How long would it last? He imagined the births and deaths of the universe to be days and nights, or seasons; each season would be different, filled with unique details, never fully knowable. Surely something like this was true. All that macrolife had done, was now doing, had once been imagined; what was happening now, in this passage between universe cycles, past and future, was as much understood through intuition and imagination as through accumulated knowledge. His perception of what was happening was indirect, built up out of his own and the aggregate’s visualizations; the predictions had been correct until now, leaving only the emergence into new space to be fulfilled….

  ::The weight of all that is known is on the side of our success. Too much beauty lies behind our models, too much is explained, for it not to be true::

  “But you still doubt?”

  ::Doubt is always necessary::

  He stared into the darkness, doubting as fear crept into him.

  “What will I see? What should I see? Tell me what to look for!”

  ::Look for the light of cooling hydrogen, as the fireball dissipates. Hydrogen forms after the outstream, when the temperature of the fireball drops low enough. We will see the light of heated hydrogen::

  But only darkness still lay ahead.

  A renewed babble went up around him, but he shut it out, subduing the thoughts as they lanced into him, blunting their penetration, beating them into a contained silence, cutting the lines of panic to reduce the danger of disintegration; at one moment he struck out with mercy, but in the next moment it felt like murder.

  “Let it begin,” he said to himself. “Let the light begin.”

  A chorus picked up his thought as if it were a prayer.

  “…Begin, begin, begin…”

  “…Let begin, let begin…”

  “…Light, light, light…”

  “…Begin the light, begin the light…”

  “…Let it begin,” he said, joining in as he felt the yearning take hold of him, desire struggling against a fate that seemed determined to drown the last of intelligence, down, down, down, throwing it into a bottomless spatial deformity, into an oblivion without death.

  “Let it begin,” he said again, afraid that his fearfulness would cause a critical mass of doubt, leaving him to drift in darkness, alone in a sea of mad beings. “Let us live,” he said, as the hope drained out of him.

  v

  ::Light:: The very word seemed to glow as John peered ahead.

  Slowly, the rich royal purple of hydrogen appeared as a distant patch, growing suddenly to cover half the field of vision; the mixture of helium’s vivid spring green created areas of faint yellow. John heard a sound, something like the tinkling notes of a soft harpsichord playing a ghostly row. His awareness flashed through all the worlds, rushing backward from first to last, watching as a million macroforms spilled out into the deeply glowing gas that filled the new space. He could see them all ahead, floating aimlessly in what seemed to be a warm daylight sky, not very far away. Some of the worlds were empty of conscious life, he noted, dead husks thrown out of the cave of winter by the spring wind, too late to live again.

  He was the last to come out of the cave. Behind him, the knothole in space would become a closing gravitational vortex, existing long enough to help form the metagalaxy, whose member galaxies would condense into stars as they flew apart. In a million years, individual stars would begin to shine, as gravity pulled the gas together. It would be enough, this cloud of light and gas, to provide them with a supply of energy and hope.

  As he watched his worlds gathering into a giant sphere, John found himself at peace. Each world glowed as its supply of hydrogen and newly formed mini black holes was replenished from the warm universe. He thought of streetlights going on in an endless fog….

  The glow of this universe would fade one day, when its free electrons and protons combined to form transparent hydrogen.

  Then he noticed another glow. It was coming from far away, and suddenly he saw that it was a transparent globe.

  ::A hundred million kilometers in radius::

  As the object drew nearer, John became aware that it was filled with millions of glowing objects.

  ::Macrolife from before our cycle, surviving from the uncounted ruins of nature. We are not the first large units of intelligent awareness::

  He should have expected it, especially when the stranger had passed them in the aperture; but the reality was still a surprise. This, John thought, was the Type III civilization which had not revealed itself, preferring to wait rather than influence youthful development. This was the first form of macrolife, surviving from some unimaginable past.

  There was no need to speak. The elder form opened its shell, and the million worlds passed inside without ceremony. There would be survivors from every cycle; they had been expected.

  vi

  Macrolife waits in the morning light of creation, its millions of worlds forming a complex figure in the field of the giant sphere. Inside, the youngest macroforms are setting out their newest understanding of the glittering sequence through which their parent universe pulses as it lives and dies and is reborn in the fabric of eternity; reality has given up its elementary secrets, while leaving a deeper grain.<
br />
  Morning will pass; birthing suns will build up the light for noon. But macrolife is already looking to a greater frame of activity, in which this universe is only one in an ocean of possibility. Macrolife plans to move across the time of this cycle, observing the growth of intelligent life, adding, if possible, to its knowledge and awareness, gathering new macrolife at the end, ultimately sweeping across future cycles in shortened subjective time, taking on hydrogen and quantum black holes at each birth and new intelligences at each maturity, drawn ever forward by the continuing novelty of universes.

  An infinity of universes swim in super space, all passing through their own cycles of birth and death; some are novel, others repetitious; some produce macrolife, others do not; still others are lifeless. In time, macrolife will attempt to reach out from its cycles to other space-time bubbles, perhaps even to past cycles, which leave their echoes in superspace, and might be reached. In all these ambitions, only the ultimate pattern of development is unknown, drawing macrolife toward some further transformation still beyond its view. There are times when the oldest macrolife senses that vaster intelligences are peering in at it from some great beyond….

  Within the youngest macroform, John Bulero is slowly fading; the usefulness of his will, its narrowly gauged impetus, is over. His finitude, his ancient human aches are passing into what seems a larger dream. He understands now that knowledge can never be final, even as it grows with the forward unfolding of the universes. His thirst to know, his hunger to see and experience, must be content with the finality of endlessness, with the wisdom that teaches the acceptance of the logic of infinity. The unraveling of the illusion of last things should be least attempted, says the logic of infinities; the darkness of unreality hides last things better than any real cloak.

  Yet: why is there anything? Why do universes come into being? To what greater process do these brilliant sparks owe their existence? Where was the valley of his beginning? Why was it the cruelty of death that ensured their unique value? Were they truly unrepeatable? He would take these questions into the greater gauge of consciousness. Perhaps then he could accept the fact that decline and destruction served to create new things—new individuals, novel physical cycles, the kind of intense development that could not otherwise be sustained; even macrolife, continuous as it was with the old and new, depends on natural universes for a supply of new minds and for the means by which it can nurture its own creations. As John Bulero, he had paid the price in loss, to live toward the midnight, past the fleeting seconds where night turns into a glowing morning, leaving him with the ashes of memory….

  Quietly, John Bulero forgets himself; the universe is mysterious again, at the very moment when its violent processes have become comprehensible to him. All knowledge is suddenly old knowledge, no longer curious or a delight, simply old and repetitious; elsewhere lies knowledge that is curious and new, to be gathered by the hungry, for whom the mystery of existence must always be its greatest beauty. The open book gives reference on its last page to a further library….

  All that had pulled him down was gone.

  Having survived into its first maturity, the youngest macrolife has learned a new patience with which to soothe its curiosity; and in that patience of endless knowing it has found its own enduring kind of beauty.

  To view a chart of the Genealogy of Macrolife, visit:

  http://www.ereads.com/ebookimages/macrolife.html

  AFTERWORD TO THE FIRST EDITON

  The physical concept of macrolife as a “societal container” is not the work of one person. Dandridge Cole originated the term “Macro Life,” and described it in “The Ultimate Human Society” (1961). Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and J. D. Bernal had much earlier suggested this kind of space-colony concept, stressing the use of sunspace as an energy-rich environment for civilization. Artificial planets appeared in the works of Olaf Stapledon and others. The idea of self-contained space habitats as alternatives to natural worlds is also related to the “generation starship” idea, a kind of Noah’s Ark for colonizing the stars.

  I started with Cole’s hollow asteroid and projected its development beyond this stage. I used an asteroid because it might be safer, providing shielding from solar radiation as well as natural resources. Gerard O’Neill’s space cylinder, as well as other designs which assume construction from scratch, seem too precarious to me right now, but I may be wrong. O’Neill’s approach to the space-habitat idea, however, strikes me as a thoroughly considered near-future vision. I suspect that space habitats will get built in just about every way they can be built.

  I was also stimulated by Isaac Asimov’s neglected version of long-term space-habitat development (“There’s no Place Like Spome,” 1965, reprinted in Is Anyone There? Doubleday, 1967), as well as by G. Harry Stine’s The Third Industrial Revolution (Putnam, 1975). Mr. Stine bears some responsibility for this novel’s existence, because in 1961 he complained (in “Science Fiction Is Too Conservative,” Analog) that concepts such as Cole’s Macro Life were being ignored by science fiction authors and that most of the innovative speculation was going on outside SF. This is even more true today, I’m sorry to report. If he had mentioned Asimov’s spomes, I wonder if the title on the cover of this novel might have been Spomelife?

  The richness of the macrolife concept lies not only in its physical aspects, but in the psychosocial consequences for the idea of human society, in the ways that human experience might be affected and transformed into something else; this speculative richness is the province of the novelist. I am certain that I have not exhausted macro-life within the pages of one book.

  I would like to thank those people who were directly helpful in the writing of this novel: Poul Anderson, Gregory Benford, Mark Olson, Pamela Sargent, Marjorie Horvitz (finest of copy editors), M. S. Wyeth Jr., and Stephen K. Roos (thoughtful, demanding editors both), Norbert Slepyan, Joseph Elder, William Pizante, Robert Neidorf, Robert L. Forward, Jack Dann; for their encouragement, Guy Streatfeild, John and Magda McHale.

  Paolo Soleri’s concept of “arcologies” (among them a spacegoing version) was partially responsible for my naming the first macroworld Asterome. Special thanks to “Rebus Heviwait” and “Emmanuel Lighthanger,” whose enterprising book, Projex (Links Books, 1972), was invaluable. John McHale’s classic The Future of the Future (Braziller, 1969) was also very helpful.

  Of course, the people mentioned above had nothing to do with the changes I may have made in their speculations. All mistakes and misconceptions are mine.

  DON’T READ THIS FIRST AFTERWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  What can an author say about a novel he wrote in a bold mood of declamatory poetry over twenty-five years ago, a first novel that he dreamed about throughout his high school years and which finally came to him in handsome publication? Well, one can observe and measure the past, and be gratified that this novel received high praise from its many readers and continues to do so. At the end of his days, Isaac Asimov said to me, “These stories about macrolife will be your Foundation series. Don’t neglect them!”

  I was writing this book from about 1961 onward, struck by the social ideas of mobile habitats in the scientific/engineering work of Dandridge Cole and developing his vision not only in its engineering aspect but also in the philosophical view of mobile habitats as the ultimately flexible societal organism, capable of great divergent development. No work of fiction had taken the ideas as far as I did by 1979; one had to look to the nonfiction of J. D. Bernal, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and Isaac Asimov, to various suggestions in the works of Olaf Stapledon, and to Cole’s brief works, not to stories and novels. But one thing was clear to me even as a teenager: I took the idea as a reality waiting to be realized.

  The writing of my novel, which presents three visionary snapshots in the life of mobile habitats and what they are for, swallowed my life for most of two decades. As Dante had been inspired by theological cosmologies to search out a context for human life, I was drawn to the deeper implications of space tr
avel and to a critical reconsideration of a too easily accepted idea of settling the planets of other solar spaces. Macrolife also sang to me as a symphonic structure—a heroic first part, a slower middle movement, and a long visionary poem for the finale.

  One criticism raised about the novel when it was first published claimed that it did not show “how we get from here to there.” It was basically a dismissal of the Utopian visionary ideals of the story, somehow forgetting that all of Part 1 presents catastrophe as the midwife of change, if not progress, as it has always been throughout human history, if one reads and remembers that the fall of every major civilization sows the seeds of the next. I would prefer that planetary disaster not be the midwife to the birth of macrolife; but it may in fact have to be so, whether it be ecological of our own making, cosmic (permitted by our own inaction), or sociopolitical. My contribution was in suggesting that a mobile civilization would not fail, at least not as easily as our planetary cultures have fallen, and perhaps not ever.

  Ever is a cosmological word deeply rooted in our apprehensions about reality, because we still come and go too quickly. I was thinking of Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History Chart, from which I fondly recall the entry for 2600 AD—“Civil Disorder, followed by the end of human adolescence, and the beginning of first mature culture.” I also charted a future history, for use in writing the novel, on a white board in black marker; one day I will revise it.

  Another notable misconception involved the scale of my mobiles. One reviewer asked why they were called macroworlds, since they were so “small,” little realizing that length is not the same as volume and square surface area, which can yield an inner surface at least twice that of the Earth, as noted at the start of Part 2. One curiously derisive comment likened this novel to a famously difficult philosophical work, when in fact my novel’s reading level has been measured as being that of midcollege. William Styron once said that a good novel should leave the reader slightly exhausted, and I say that a science fiction novel without actual thinking in it is not worthy of the name.