“True. But with the carpets, it’s not quite the same as random molecular motion.”
“Maybe not.”
Karpal smiled, but said nothing.
“What? You’ve found a pattern? Don’t tell me: our set of twenty thousand polysaccharide Wang Tiles just happens to form the Turing Machine for calculating pi.”
“No. What they form is a universal Turing Machine. They can calculate anything at all – depending on the data they start with. Every daughter fragment is like a program being fed to a chemical computer. Growth executes the program.”
“Ah.” Paolo’s curiosity was roused – but he was having some trouble picturing where the hypothetical Turing Machine put its read/write head. “Are you telling me only one tile changes between any two rows, where the ‘machine’ leaves its mark on the ‘data tape’ . . . ?” The mosaics he’d seen were a riot of complexity, with no two rows remotely the same.
Karpal said, “No, no. Wang’s original example worked exactly like a standard Turing Machine, to simplify the argument . . . but the carpets are more like an arbitrary number of different computers with overlapping data, all working in parallel. This is biology, not a designed machine – it’s as messy and wild as, say . . . a mammalian genome. In fact, there are mathematical similarities with gene regulation: I’ve identified Kauffman networks at every level, from the tiling rules up; the whole system’s poised on the hyperadaptive edge between frozen and chaotic behavior.”
Paolo absorbed that, with the library’s help. Like Earth life, the carpets seemed to have evolved a combination of robustness and flexibility which would have maximized their power to take advantage of natural selection. Thousands of different autocatalytic chemical networks must have arisen soon after the formation of Orpheus – but as the ocean chemistry and the climate changed in the Vegan system’s early traumatic millennia, the ability to respond to selection pressure had itself been selected for, and the carpets were the result. Their complexity seemed redundant, now, after a hundred million years of relative stability – and no predators or competition in sight – but the legacy remained.
“So if the carpets have ended up as universal computers . . . with no real need anymore to respond to their surroundings . . . what are they doing with all that computing power?”
Karpal said solemnly, “I’ll show you.”
Paolo followed him into an environment where they drifted above a schematic of a carpet, an abstract landscape stretching far into the distance, elaborately wrinkled like the real thing, but otherwise heavily stylized, with each of the polysaccharide building blocks portrayed as a square tile with four different colored edges. The adjoining edges of neighboring tiles bore complementary colors – to represent the complementary, interlocking shapes of the borders of the building blocks.
“One group of microprobes finally managed to sequence an entire daughter fragment,” Karpal explained, “although the exact edges it started life with are largely guesswork, since the thing was growing while they were trying to map it.” He gestured impatiently, and all the wrinkles and folds were smoothed away, an irrelevant distraction. They moved to one border of the ragged-edge carpet, and Karpal started the simulation running.
Paolo watched the mosaic extending itself, following the tiling rules perfectly – an orderly mathematical process, here: no chance collisions of radicals with catalytic sites, no mismatched borders between two new-grown neighboring “tiles” triggering the disintegration of both. Just the distillation of the higher-level consequences of all that random motion.
Karpal led Paolo up to a height where he could see subtle patterns being woven, overlapping multiplexed periodicities drifting across the growing edge, meeting and sometimes interacting, sometimes passing right through each other. Mobile pseudoattractors, quasi-stable waveforms in a one-dimensional universe. The carpet’s second dimension was more like time than space, a permanent record of the history of the edge.
Karpal seemed to read his mind. “One dimensional. Worse than flatland. No connectivity, no complexity. What can possibly happen in a system like that? Nothing of interest, right?”
He clapped his hands and the environment exploded around Paolo. Trails of color streaked across his sensorium, entwining, then disintegrating into luminous smoke.
“Wrong. Everything goes on in a multidimensional frequency space. I’ve Fourier-transformed the edge into over a thousand components, and there’s independent information in all of them. We’re only in a narrow cross-section here, a sixteen-dimensional slice – but it’s oriented to show the principal components, the maximum detail.”
Paolo spun in a blur of meaningless color, utterly lost, his surroundings beyond comprehension. “You’re a Gleisner robot, Karpal! Only sixteen dimensions! How can you have done this?”
Karpal sounded hurt, wherever he was. “Why do you think I came to C-Z? I thought you people were flexible!”
“What you’re doing is . . .” What? Heresy? There was no such thing. Officially. “Have you shown this to anyone else?”
“Of course not. Who did you have in mind? Liesl? Hermann?”
“Good. I know how to keep my mouth shut.” Paolo invoked his exoself and moved back into the dodecahedron. He addressed the empty room. “How can I put this? The physical universe has three spatial dimensions, plus time. Citizens of Carter-Zimmerman inhabit the physical universe. Higher dimensional mind games are for the solipsists.” Even as he said it, he realized how pompous he sounded. It was an arbitrary doctrine, not some great moral principle.
But it was the doctrine he’d lived with for twelve hundred years.
Karpal replied, more bemused than offended, “It’s the only way to see what’s going on. The only sensible way to apprehend it. Don’t you want to know what the carpets are actually like?”
Paolo felt himself being tempted. Inhabit a sixteen-dimensional slice of a thousand-dimensional frequency space? But it was in the service of understanding a real physical system – not a novel experience for its own sake.
And nobody had to find out.
He ran a quick – non-sapient – self-predictive model. There was a ninety-three percent chance that he’d give in, after fifteen subjective minutes of agonizing over the decision. It hardly seemed fair to keep Karpal waiting that long.
He said, “You’ll have to loan me your mind-shaping algorithm. My exoself wouldn’t know where to begin.”
When it was done, he steeled himself, and moved back into Karpal’s environment. For a moment, there was nothing but the same meaningless blur as before.
Then everything suddenly crystallized.
Creatures swam around them, elaborately branched tubes like mobile coral, vividly colored in all the hues of Paolo’s mental palette – Karpal’s attempt to cram in some of the information that a mere sixteen dimensions couldn’t show? Paolo glanced down at his own body – nothing was missing, but he could see around it in all the thirteen dimensions in which it was nothing but a pin-prick; he quickly looked away. The “coral” seemed far more natural to his altered sensory map, occupying sixteen-space in all directions, and shaded with hints that it occupied much more. And Paolo had no doubt that it was “alive” – it looked more organic than the carpets themselves, by far.
Karpal said, “Every point in this space encodes some kind of quasi-periodic pattern in the tiles. Each dimension represents a different characteristic size – like a wavelength, although the analogy’s not precise. The position in each dimension represents other attributes of the pattern, relating to the particular tiles it employs. So the localized systems you see around you are clusters of a few billion patterns, all with broadly similar attributes at similar wavelengths.”
They moved away from the swimming coral, into a swarm of something like jellyfish: floppy hyperspheres waving wispy tendrils (each one of them more substantial than Paolo). Tiny jewel-like creatures darted among them. Paolo was just beginning to notice that nothing moved here like a solid object drifting through
normal space; motion seemed to entail a shimmering deformation at the leading hypersurface, a visible process of disassembly and reconstruction.
Karpal led him on through the secret ocean. There were helical worms, coiled together in groups of indeterminate number – each single creature breaking up into a dozen or more wriggling silvers, and then recombining . . . although not always from the same parts. There were dazzling multicolored stemless flowers, intricate hypercones of “gossamer-thin” fifteen-dimensional petals – each one a hypnotic fractal labyrinth of crevices and capillaries. There were clawed monstrosities, writhing knots of sharp insectile parts like an orgy of decapitated scorpions.
Paolo said, uncertainly, “You could give people a glimpse of this in just three dimensions. Enough to make it clear that there’s . . . life in here. This is going to shake them up badly, though.” Life – embedded in the accidental computations of Wang’s Carpets, with no possibility of ever relating to the world outside. This was an affront to Carter-Zimmerman’s whole philosophy: if nature had evolved “organisms” as divorced from reality as the inhabitants of the most inward-looking polis, where was the privileged status of the physical universe, the clear distinction between truth and illusion?
And after three hundred years of waiting for good news from the diaspora, how would they respond to this back on Earth?
Karpal said, “There’s one more thing I have to show you.”
He’d named the creatures squids, for obvious reasons. Distant cousins of the jellyfish, perhaps? They were prodding each other with their tentacles in a way which looked thoroughly carnal – but Karpal explained, “There’s no analog of light here. We’re viewing all this according to ad hoc rules which have nothing to do with the native physics. All the creatures here gather information about each other by contact alone – which is actually quite a rich means of exchanging data, with so many dimensions. What you’re seeing is communication by touch.”
“Communication about what?”
“Just gossip, I expect. Social relationships.”
Paolo stared at the writhing mass of tentacles.
“You think they’re conscious?”
Karpal, point-like, grinned broadly. “They have a central control structure with more connectivity than the human brain – and which correlates data gathered from the skin. I’ve mapped that organ, and I’ve started to analyze its function.”
He led Paolo into another environment, a representation of the data structures in the “brain” of one of the squids. It was – mercifully – three-dimensional, and highly stylized, built of translucent colored blocks marked with icons, representing mental symbols, linked by broad lines indicating the major connections between them. Paolo had seen similar diagrams of transhuman minds; this was far less elaborate, but eerily familiar nonetheless.
Karpal said, “Here’s the sensory map of its surroundings. Full of other squids’ bodies, and vague data on the last known positions of a few smaller creatures. But you’ll see that the symbols activated by the physical presence of the other squids are linked to these” – he traced the connection with one finger – “representations. Which are crude miniatures of this whole structure here.”
“This whole structure” was an assembly labeled with icons for memory retrieval, simple tropisms, short-term goals. The general business of being and doing.
“The squid has maps, not just of other squids’ bodies, but their minds as well. Right or wrong, it certainly tries to know what the others are thinking about. And” – he pointed out another set of links, leading to another, less crude, miniature squid mind – “it thinks about its own thoughts as well. I’d call that consciousness, wouldn’t you?”
Paolo said weakly, “You’ve kept all this to yourself? You came this far, without saying a word – ?”
Karpal was chastened. “I know it was selfish – but once I’d decoded the interactions of the tile patterns, I couldn’t tear myself away long enough to start explaining it to anyone else. And I came to you first because I wanted your advice on the best way to break the news.”
Paolo laughed bitterly. “The best way to break the news that first alien consciousness is hidden deep inside a biological computer? That everything the diaspora was trying to prove has been turned on its head? The best way to explain to the citizens of Carter-Zimmerman that after a three-hundred-year journey, they might as well have stayed on Earth running simulations with as little resemblance to the physical universe as possible?”
Karpal took the outburst in good humor. “I was thinking more along the lines of the best way to point out that if we hadn’t traveled to Orpheus and studied Wang’s Carpets, we’d never have had the chance to tell the solipsists of Ashton-Laval that all their elaborate invented lifeforms and exotic imaginary universes pale into insignificance compared to what’s really out here – and which only the Carter-Zimmerman diaspora could have found.”
Paolo and Elena stood together on the edge of Satellite Pinatubo, watching one of the scout probes aim its maser at a distant point in space. Paolo thought he saw a faint scatter of microwaves from the beam as it collided with iron-rich meteor dust. Elena’s mind being diffracted all over the cosmos? Best not think about that.
He said, “When you meet the other versions of me who haven’t experienced Orpheus, I hope you’ll offer them mind grafts so they won’t be jealous.”
She frowned. “Ah. Will I or won’t I? I can’t be bothered modeling it. I expect I will. You should have asked me before I cloned myself. No need for jealousy, though. There’ll be worlds far stranger than Orpheus.”
“I doubt it. You really think so?”
“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe that.” Elena had no power to change the fate of the frozen clones of her previous self – but everyone had the right to emigrate.
Paolo took her hand. The beam had been aimed almost at Regulus, UV-hot and bright, but as he looked away, the cool yellow light of the sun caught his eye.
Vega C-Z was taking the news of the squids surprisingly well, so far. Karpal’s way of putting it had cushioned the blow: it was only by traveling all this distance across the real, physical universe that they could have made such a discovery – and it was amazing how pragmatic even the most doctrinaire citizens had turned out to be. Before the launch, “alien solipsists” would have been the most unpalatable idea imaginable, the most abhorrent thing the diaspora could have stumbled upon – but now that they were here, and stuck with the fact of it, people were finding ways to view it in a better light. Orlando had even proclaimed, “This will be the perfect hook for the marginal polises. ‘Travel through real space to witness a truly alien virtual reality.’ We can sell it as a synthesis of the two world views.”
Paolo still feared for Earth, though – where his Earth-self and others were waiting in hope of alien guidance. Would they take the message of Wang’s Carpets to heart, and retreat into their own hermetic worlds, oblivious to physical reality?
And he wondered if the anthrocosmologists had finally been refuted . . . or not. Karpal had discovered alien consciousness – but it was sealed inside a cosmos of its own, its perceptions of itself and its surroundings neither reinforcing nor conflicting with human and transhuman explanations of reality. It would be millennia before C-Z could untangle the ethical problems of daring to try to make contact . . . assuming that both Wang’s Carpets, and the inherited data patterns of the squids, survived that long.
Paolo looked around at the wild splendor of the star-choked galaxy, felt the disk reach in and cut right through him. Could all this strange haphazard beauty be nothing but an excuse for those who beheld it to exist? Nothing but the sum of all the answers to all the questions humans and transhumans had ever asked the universe – answers created in the asking?
He couldn’t believe that – but the question remained unanswered.
So far.
COMING OF AGE IN KARHIDE
By Sov Thade Tage em Ereb, of Rer, in Karhide, on Gethen
Ursula K. Le Guin is probably one of the best-known and most universally respected SF writers in the world today. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade, and shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre – even ignoring the rest of Le Guin’s work, the impact of this one novel alone on future SF and future SF writers would be incalculably strong. (Her 1968 fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, would be almost as influential on future generations of High Fantasy and Young Adult writers.) The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as did Le Guin’s monumental novel The Dispossessed a few years later. Her novel Tehanu won her another Nebula in 1990, and she has also won three other Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award for her short fiction, as well as the National Book Award for children’s literature for her novel The Farthest Shore, part of her Earthsea trilogy. Her other novels include Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon’s World, The Beginning Place, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, Tehanu, Searoad, the controversial multimedia novel Always Coming Home, and The Telling. She has had eight collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Compass Rose, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Four Ways to Forgiveness, Tales of Earthsea, and, most recently, The Birthday of the World. Upcoming is a collection of her critical essays, The Wave in the Mind: Tales and Essays on the Reader, and the Imagination. Her stories have appeared in our Second, Fifth, Ninth, Twelfth and Fourteenth annual collections. She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon.
In this one, she returns to the setting of her best-known novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, for a poignant and evocative story of the transition to adulthood – which is always a difficult passage, no matter what sex you are . . . and which is perhaps even a little more difficult if you have the potential to be either.
The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF Page 55