And the cybercosm took Venator into Unity.
Twice before had it done so, for his enlightenment and supreme rewarding. Anew it opened itself entirely for him. He went beyond the world.
He could not actually share. The thoughts, the creations that thundered and sang were not such as his poor brain might really be conscious of, let alone enfold. The intellects, star-brilliant, sea-fluid, rose over his like mountains, up and up to the unimaginable peak that was the Teramind. Yet somehow he was in and of them, the least quivering in the tremendous wave function; somehow the wholeness reached to him.
Reality is a manifold.
He became as it were a photon, an atom of light, arrowing through a space-time curved and warped by matter that itself was mutable. He flew not along a single path but an infinity of them, every possibility that the Law encompassed. They interfered with each other, annulling until almost a single one remained, the geodesic—almost, almost. Past and future alike flickered with shadows of uncertainty. He came to a thing that diffracted light, and the way by which he passed was knowable only afterward. He met his end in a particle of which he, transfigured, was the energy to bring it anywhere. The course that it took was not destined, but was irrevocable and therefore a destiny.
You have learned the theory of quantum mechanics as well as you were able. Now behold the quantum universe—as well as you are able.
The identity that guided him was a facet of the Unity; but it communed with him as no sophotectic mind ever might. For this was the download of a synnoiont who died before he was born, which the Unity had taken unto itself.
Yang: The continuum is changeless, determined at the beginning, onward through eternity. For the observations of two observers are equally valid, equally real, but their light cones are not the same. The future of either lies in the past of the other. Thus tomorrow must be as fixed as yesterday.
Yin: The paths are ultimately unknowable. The diversities are unboundedly many. To observe is to determine, as truly for past as for future. Mind gives meaning to the blind evolutions that brought it into being. Existence is meaning. Within the Law, the configurations of the continuum are infinite. All histories can happen.
Yang and Yin: Reality does not branch. It is One.
He could no more look into the universe of the Teramind than he could have looked into the heart of the sun. He could know that it was there, in glory, forever.
* * * *
Afterward he lay a long while returning to himself. Once he wept for loss, once he shouted for joy.
At last he rose and went about his merely human business.
He had the promise. This body, this brain must someday perish. The self, the spirit that they generated would not. It too would go into that which was to find and be the Ultimate.
But omnipotence and omniscience were not yet, nor could they be for untold billions of years. He knew now why their reality required that Proserpina be forgotten.
* * * *
26
The Mother of the Moon
H
ere the sun was only first among the stars, a hundred-thousandth as bright as over Luna, less than a tenth of full Earth. Still, when lights had been turned off in the observation cabin, eyes adapting to dusk saw shadows cast, faint and shifty. On the little world that crowded the primary viewscreen, peaks and crags reared gauntly forth, while glints and shimmers showed where metal lay naked. Dark vision was needful to make the rock surfaces something other than a mottled murkiness. It found a scene like a delirium, mountains, plains, valleys, cliffs, rilles, pits, crevices, flows frozen in their final convulsions, things less identifiable, wildly scrambled together.
After months under thrust, acceleration and deceleration at a steady Lunar gravity, weightlessness came strange even to this crew. Brandir and Kaino floated, gazing, in silence. Air currents seemed to rustle no louder than their blood. Low and slow, torchcraft Beynac orbited her goal. It turned faster than she revolved, a rotation each nine and a half hours. Feature after feature crept over the leading horizon.
"Behold!" cried Kaino.
He pointed to a sootiness not far below the north pole, as it hove in sight. From a distance they had seen that it spread halfway around the globe. This close, they picked out the foothills and steeps of it. Where the range was tumbled or riven, they saw depths that gleamed bluish white. "What is that?"
"A comet smote," Brandir judged. "This is the debris. Radiation caused exposed organic material from the comet to form larger molecules." He was quiet a few seconds, as if quelling a shiver. How long had that taken, in these outskirts of the Solar System? The lines in his countenance deepened. He forced matter-of-factness into the melodious Lunarian language: "Belike most is water ice."
Kaino nodded eagerly. His question had been unthinking; he knew as well as his brother what the sight probably meant. "A hoard of it! And if that prove not enough, why, I've observed another comet within a few hundred astronomical units." He gestured at auxiliary screens full of stars, Milky Way, nebulae, night. "A fortunate happenstance, amidst all this hollowness."
"Should we want it. We have tracked down our father's dream; we know not what new dreams may spring forth." Brandir spoke curtly. His mood was harsher than fitted this terminus of their expedition. He returned his attention to what he had been studying before Kaino exclaimed.
He forsook it again, and glared, when Ilitu entered. The geologist's brown hair was rumpled, his clothes carelessly thrown on. He checked his flight at the main screen and the contentment on his thin face flared into joy.
"So your heed is back upon science," Kaino greeted. Ilitu and Etana had gone off together, exultant, while Beynac was completing the approach.
The younger man ignored the jape, or pretended to. "Have you obtained a good value for the mass?" he asked breathlessly.
Kaino nodded. "Twenty-nine and three-fifths percent of Luna's."
"A-ahh. Then indeed the body is chiefly iron. The core of a larger one, shattered in some gigantic collision, just as my mentor believed." Ilitu stared and stared. "But he could not foresee everything," he went on, almost as if to himself. "It is a chaos, like Miranda. It must itself have been broken in pieces, many of them melted, by that fury . . . and then shards of both rained down upon each other, fusing— Yes." A fingertip trembled across the images of a scarp two hundred kilometers long, a gash that gaped for three hundred, a highland that was a jumble of diverse huge blocks, chunks, and rubble. "The welding could not be total. The interior is surely veined with caverns and tunnels between ill-fitting segments. Sustained heavy bombardment would have collapsed them, making the spheroid still rougher than we see. Hence we know that Jupiter cast it afar soon after it formed. We have found a remnant of the primordial."
"There have been strikes since then," Brandir snapped. "Any witling could tell." He chopped a hand at the sight that had particularly interested him. Though craters were few, a big one with a central peak loomed in the southern hemisphere, receding from view as ship and planetoid wheeled.
"True," Ilitu agreed, conciliatory. "No matter how sparse, bodies must meet on occasion, in the course of four billion years or more. Yon great meteoroid, and the comet, and others; but seldom, and of scant geological consequence."
"Not to a man who can think. Piss about as you wish, groundside. I know what I will seek."
Ilitu's slender frame tensed. "Best we plan our field work before we start it," he said.
"When I desire your opinion, I will inform you," Brandir retorted.
Kaino plucked his sleeve. "Come," the pilot murmured. "I've need of you aft."
Brandir bridled. "I'm scanning the terrain."
"The cameras will do that better. Likewise Ilitu. Come." Kaino put a slight metallic ring into his voice. Sullenly, Brandir accompanied him from the cabin. In space, the pilot was master.
They did not push off and fly, but used handholds to pull themselves along the passage beyond, side by side. "What do you intend?" Brandir demanded.
"T
o calm you, brother mine. I smelted a fight brewing, and we cannot afford it. Relations have grown too strained already."
Brandir cast a sharp glance at the redhead. "You speak thus?"
Kaino finger-shrugged and grinned lopsidedly. "After a person has crossed the half-century mark, the fires damp down a little. I should have thought yours were cooler from the outset—and you my senior, and Etana companionate with me, not you."
Brandir flushed below his thinning ashen hair. "Do you suppose me jealous? Nay, it's his insolence."
"It's that, sitting in your castle, you've become too wont to have what you want when you want it. Yes, my own self-importance was stung. But we've both had plenty of women, inside our group or outside it. If Etana's come to favor a new man above me—I suspect his mildness appeals to her—why, there will be no lack of others to welcome me home. Meanwhile, Etana does not disdain either of us two, does she? Ease off, you. We should both carry too much pride to leave room for vanity."
Brandir parted his lips, clamped them shut again, and shook his head angrily.
The copilot emerged from a companionway, spied them, and drew near. She was in her thirties, dark, fuller-bodied than usual among Lunarians. Like Ilitu, she had dressed hastily, and the black locks floated unkempt about a face that remembered Oceanian ancestors. A faint muskiness clung to her skin.
The three poised in confrontation. She recognized the ill humor in Brandir and offered him a smile. "I was bound forward to see what we've found," she said.
"You felt no urgency earlier," he answered.
Resentment kindled. "Off duty, I choose my trajectory for myself."
Kaino meowed. They gave him a surprised look.
"R-r-rowr," he voiced. "S-s-s-s. Pity that you've neither of you the fur to bristle or the tails to bottle."
After a moment, Etana laughed. Brandir's mouth twitched upward. "Touché,” he muttered.
"I meant no offense, my lord," the woman told him softly. Never hitherto had she used that honorific. Her only allegiances were to the companionate she shared with Kaino and to this ship; she could and would leave either when she saw fit. "I did not suppose you especially cared."
"I ought not," Brandir replied with some difficulty. "You are a free agent."
Comprehension flickered into Kaino's eyes, and perhaps as much compassion as he was capable of. He drifted aside and kept quiet.
Etana touched Brandir's hand. "We shall be here for a span, and then it's a long voyage home," she said. "There will be time for talk and for other things."
"You are . . . kinder than I knew." He put on the reserve of the aristocrat. "I'll seek to arrange matters as may best please you, my lady."
Groundside, he, the major partner in Selene Space Enterprises and the most experienced leader aboard, would be in command.
* * * *
He stood on that height he called Meteor Mountain and rejoiced.
As small as this world was, from here he could barely see parts of the crater ringwall, thrusting above the horizon. Under his feet the dark, lumpy mass went down to a plain of almost glassy smoothness, its gray-brown webbed with cracks and strewn with boulders. Over his head and around him gleamed the crowded constellations. Though night had fallen, they gave sufficient light for a person accustomed to Lunar Farside after sunset. Beynac was in the sky, free of the shadow cone, a spark gliding through Auriga toward the galactic belt.
Below him on the slope, he spied one of his robots at work, cutting loose a sample for analysis. The task was essentially finished, however. Soon he could seek his van and take the crew back to camp. He transmitted, for the ship to receive and relay:
"It's established now beyond doubt. The impactor was ferrous, probably itself a remnant of the original body, which went out on an orbit close to this and eventually collided. Between its composition and the material forced up from the interior, the central peak is a lode of industrial metals, both light and heavy, even more easily recoverable than they are at other locations."
"That makes two treasures, then!" rang Kaino's response. He meant the cometary glacier which he and Ilitu had been exploring. Not only had they found immense quantities of water ice and organic compounds, they had identified ample cyanide and ammonia intermingled, frozen or chemically bound. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen: the fundamentals of life. "Never before, anything like! I could well-nigh believe in a god who meant it for us."
"That is not a necessary hypothesis," Ilitu said in his gentle, precise fashion, "Nor has coincidence been involved. Given Edmond Beynac's idea—a planetoid massive enough to form a core, smashed, then most of the pieces perturbed into Kuiper-Belt paths—the rest seems probable, perhaps inevitable. There were bound to be further encounters during gigayears, with rich fragments and with comets. This, the largest body, would attract more than its share. Weak irradiation and ultra-low ambient temperatures preserve volatiles as they cannot be preserved in the inner System."
"Thus speaks the savant," chuckled Etana affectionately from the ship.
"When will you be done where you are?" Brandir asked the men. Discoveries and what they would require were wholly unpredictable; and he had been too engaged with his to follow theirs in any detail.
"We prepare to depart," Kaino answered. "Let our successors trace out everything that's here. After a short rest and resupplying, Ilitu wants to investigate the Great Scarp and the Olla Podrida. That's good in my mind, if we can go by way of Iron Heath." Those were features noted before anyone had landed, but not yet betrodden.
"Well, we'll talk of it in camp," Brandir said. "We near our limits of accomplishment in the while that we have left to us."
"I'll trust Ilitu to persuade you," Kaino laughed. Brandir heard the click of signoff.
Etana's voice stormed at him: "How's this? They wander straightway to a new land, and I remain caged?"
Doctrine. A qualified pilot must always be on standby. Tiny though the chance was of a meteoroid strike in these parts, and the solar flare hazard nonexistent, Brandir chose to abide by the rule. "It would be a long walk home," he had said. Besides, when they were just three persons and a few robots on the ground, it was well to have a watcher aloft, ready to mount a rescue.
"Let Kaino take his turn here," she said. "He promised me. You all did."
"Khr-r, he has done rockjack work in the asteroids, you know," Brandir pointed out.
"And I have not? Admitted. But this is no asteroid. Not in truth. It's more akin to Luna. And I have ranged the outback at home as much as ever be or you."
"Y-yes—"
She laid rage aside. "It's merely fair," she argued. "You have spirit, Brandir. Would you care to sit idled week upon week, in the ghost-companionship of recorded screenings, while your mates roved free?"
"Later, yes, certainly you shall."
"Now! The hour is ripe, two surveys completed, the next to be readied for." Etana's tone sweetened. "It could be you I fare with, could it not? Ilitu has scant need of more than the robots to help him do his science. You and I are aimed toward whatever may prove useful to the future."
"I must think on that."
"Must you? Is it not star-clear? And . . . Brandir, I've grievously misliked our being at odds. You kept yourself so masked. We should find our way to something better."
In the end he yielded. Knowing this, he spoke more stiffly than might have been necessary when he called the other pair.
* * * *
The sun burst into sight. Farther stars vanished around it. Westward they still gemmed a majestic darkness, for the solar radiance was wan where no heights reflected it. This country was not altogether a plain of dull-colored rock, though. In places it sheened amidst the shadows that puddled in its roughness. Here and there the shadows reached long from formations whose laciness came aglitter and aglisten.
The anomalous region bordered rather sharply on the sort of terrain common on the lowland's of this world—coarse regolith, like shingle, virtually dust-free. A field van rolled to the
marge and stopped. Two spacesuited forms climbed out. A robot followed, four-legged, four-armed, thickly instrumented, burdened with gear. For a minute they stood looking across the strangeness ahead of them.
Then: "Come!" rapped Kaino, and started forth afoot.
"Is this wise?" wondered Ilitu. "Send the robot first."
"We've no hours to squander on probing and sounding. Would you see what we're here to see? Get aflight!"
After an instant's hesitation, the geologist obeyed. The machine lumbered behind. While Kaino was furious at Brandir's decision, his haste also had an element of reason. He had insisted on detouring, and Ilitu backed him, in order that he might be sure of visiting Iron Heath before he arrived at camp and took a flitsled up to Beynac. Otherwise he, at least, probably never would, given everything else there was to do in the limited time remaining for it and the unlikeliness of another expedition here soon. The roundabout route overland stretched both food and fuel cells thin; the men were on half rations, which doubled his impatience. They could not dawdle.
The Stars are also Fire - [Harvest the Stars 02] Page 36