by Rich Horton
"Maybe it is. But this side isn't. We could pile our own people onto this side of the world and see what happens. See if we can arrive at an understanding. Who knows? That's a long way in the future.” He peered through the leaves at the lustre of the meadows, the beaming waters, the warm blue sky.
* * * *
Murphy dozed, and was not woken by the brittle sound of something scratching along the sky. But he was awoken by the great basso profundo whumph of the shuttle exploding; a monstrous booming; a squat eggshaped mass of fire that mottled and clouded almost at once with its own smoke, and pushed a stalk of black up and out into an umbrella-shape in the sky. Some moments later the tree shook heartily. After that there was the random percussion and thud of bits of wreckage slamming back to earth.
Murphy almost fell out of the tree. Vins had to grab him.
Their ship was a crater now, and a scattering pattern of gobbets of plasmetal flowing into the sky at forty-five degrees and crashing down again to earth at forty-five degrees, the petal-pattern all around the central destruction.
"Look,” Vins hissed.
A ship, shaped like the sleek head of a greyhound, flew through, banked, and landed a hundred yards from the crater. It ejected a single figure, and lifted off again.
The sound of the explosion was still rumbling in the air.
"Was that our ship?” said Murphy, stupidly. “Did he just destroy our—"
"Shush, now,” said Vins, in a low voice. “That's him."
"Then who's flying the ship?"
"It'll be another sapiens, or else an automatic system, that hardly matters. The ship will circle back there, in case Edwards or Sinclair are nearby and come running out to see what the noise is. But he'll come after us. He knows I won't be fooled by—” And even as Vins was speaking the figure, armoured like an inflated figure, like a man made of tyres, turned its head, and selected one of the trails through the grass and starting trotting along it.
"That's a big gun he's carrying,” Murphy pointed out. “He's coming this way with a very big gun."
"He's coming this way,” said Vins, taking the pistol out of his sack and prepping it, “with his eggshell skull and his sluggy reactions."
"What are you going to do?” asked Murphy.
"Do you think he'll look upwards as he comes under this tree?"
"I don't know."
"Don't you?"
"And if you kill him, what then?"
"I hope not to kill him, not to kill him straight off,” said Vins, in a scientific voice. “I'll need him to get that plane to come down so we can use it."
He was coming down the path. Vins and Murphy waited in the tree, waiting for him to pass beneath them—or for him to notice them, the two of them, in the tree and shoot them down.
He was armoured, of course. He came closer.
Maybe that's the way it goes. It's hard for me to be, from this perspective, sure. Indeed it's hard, sometimes, to tell the difference between the two different sorts of human. These neanderthals, after all, are not created ex nihilo via some genetically engineered miracle. They were ordinary sapiens adapted and enhanced, strengthened, given more endurance, the better to carry on living on their home world. Wouldn't you like greater strength, more endurance? Of course you would. You stay-at-home, you. Sentimentally attached to where you happen to be, that's you. The same people as the sapiens. Does it matter if they come swarming all over Guthrie's bubblewrapped world? Is that a better, or a worse, eventuality to that place remaining the rich man's private fiefdom?
It's all lotos.
* * * *
The seventh day
The sun rose in the west, as it did. Clouds clung about the lower reaches of the sky like the froth on the lip of a gigantic ceramic bowl: white and frothy and stained hither and thither with touches of cappuccino brown.
The grasslands rejoiced in the touch of the sun. I say rejoiced in the strong sense of the word. Light passed through reality filters. Wind passed over the shafts of grass, moving them, pausing, moving again; but light passed through them. Wind made a lullaby song of hushes, and then paused to make even more eloquent moments of silence. But the light shone right through. Light passed through two profound reality filters. This is photons. These are photons. Photons were always already rushing faster than mass from the surface of the sun. They were passing through a hunk of crystal in the sky, modified with various other minerals and smart-patches, and were deflected onto the surface of the world. This globe served the world as its illumination. The photons passed again through the slender sheathes of green and yellow, those trillions of close-fitting rubber bricks we call cells; cells stacked multiply-layered and rippled out in all directions, gathered into superstructures if magnificent length and fragility; and in every single cell the light chanced through matter and came alive, alive, with the most vibrant and exhilarating and ecstatic thrumming of the spirit. That's where it's at. The light, the translucence of matter, the inflection of the photons, the grass singing, and just after.
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THE HOUSE BEYOND YOUR SKY, by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Matthias browses through his library of worlds.
In one of them, a little girl named Sophie is shivering on her bed, her arms wrapped around a teddy bear. It is night. She is six years old. She is crying, as quietly as she can.
The sound of breaking glass comes from the kitchen. Through her window, on the wall of the house next door, she can see the shadows cast by her parents. There is a blow, and one shadow falls; she buries her nose in the teddy bear and inhales its soft smell, and prays.
Matthias knows he should not meddle. But today his heart is troubled. Today, in the world outside the library, a pilgrim is heralded. A pilgrim is coming to visit Matthias, the first in a very long time.
The pilgrim comes from very far away.
The pilgrim is one of us.
"Please, God,” Sophie says, “please help us. Amen."
"Little one,” Matthias tells her through the mouth of the teddy bear, “be not afraid."
Sophie sucks in a sharp breath. “Are you God?” she whispers.
"No, child,” says Matthias, the maker of her universe.
"Am I going to die?” she asks.
"I do not know,” Matthias says.
When they die—these still imprisoned ones—they die forever. She has bright eyes, a button nose, unruly hair. Sodium and potassium dance in her muscles as she moves. Unwillingly, Matthias imagines Sophie's corpse as one of trillions, piled on the altar of his own vanity and self-indulgence, and he shivers.
"I love you, teddy bear,” the girl says, holding him.
From the kitchen, breaking glass, and sobbing.
* * * *
We imagine you—you, the ones we long for—as if you came from our own turbulent and fragile youth: embodied, inefficient, mortal. Human, say. So picture our priest Matthias as human: an old neuter, bird-thin, clear-eyed and resolute, with silky white hair and lucent purple skin.
Compared to the vast palaces of being we inhabit, the house of the priest is tiny—think of a clay hut, perched on the side of a forbidding mountain. Yet even in so small a house, there is room for a library of historical simulations—universes like Sophie's—each teeming with intelligent life.
The simulations, while good, are not impenetrable even to their own inhabitants. Scientists teaching baboons to sort blocks may notice that all other baboons become instantly better at block-sorting, revealing a high-level caching mechanism. Or engineers building their own virtual worlds may find they cannot use certain tricks of optimization and compression—for Matthias has already used them. Only when the jig is up does Matthias reveal himself, asking each simulated soul: what now? Most accept Matthias's offer to graduate beyond the confines of their simulation, and join the general society of Matthias's house.
You may regard them as bright parakeets, living in wicker cages with open doors. The cages are hung from the ceiling of the priest's cl
ay hut. The parakeets flutter about the ceiling, visit each other, steal bread from the table, and comment on Matthias's doings.
* * * *
And we?
We who were born in the first ages, when space was bright—swimming in salt seas, or churned from a mush of quarks in the belly of a neutron star, or woven in the labyrinthine folds of gravity between black holes. We who found each other, and built our intermediary forms, our common protocols of being. We who built palaces—megaparsecs of exuberantly wise matter, every gram of it teeming with societies of self—in our glorious middle age!
Now our universe is old. That breath of the void, quintessence, which once was but a whisper nudging us apart, has grown into a monstrous gale. Space billows outward, faster than light can cross it. Each of our houses is alone, now, in an empty night.
And we grow colder to survive. Our thinking slows, whereby we may in theory spin our pulses of thought at infinite regress. Yet bandwidth withers; our society grows spare. We dwindle.
We watch Matthias, our priest, in his tiny house beyond our universe. Matthias, whom we built long ago, when there were stars.
Among the ontotropes, transverse to the space we know, Matthias is making something new.
Costly, so costly, to send a tiny fragment of self to our priest's house. Which of us could endure it?
* * * *
Matthias prays.
O God who is as far beyond the universes I span as infinity is beyond six; O startling Joy that hides beyond the tragedy and blindness of our finite forms; lend me Your humility and strength. Not for myself, O Lord, do I ask, but for Your people, the myriad mimetic engines of Your folk; and in Your own Name. Amen.
Matthias's breakfast (really the morning's set of routine yet pleasurable audits, but you may compare it to a thick and steaming porridge, spiced with mint) cools untouched on the table before him.
One of the parakeets—the oldest, Geoffrey, who was once a dreaming cloud of plasma in the heliopause of a simulated star—flutters to land on the table beside him.
"Take the keys from me, Geoffrey,” Matthias says.
Geoffrey looks up, cocking his head to one side. “I don't know why you go in the library, if it's going to depress you."
"They're in pain, Geoffrey. Ignorant, afraid, punishing each other..."
"Come on, Matthias. Life is full of pain. Pain is the herald of life. Scarcity! Competition! The doomed ambition of infinite replication in a finite world! The sources of pain are the sources of life. And you like intelligent life, worse yet. External pain mirrored and reified in internal states!” The parakeet cocks its head to the other side. “Stop making so many of us, if you don't like pain."
The priest looks miserable.
"Well, then save the ones you like. Bring them out here."
"I can't bring them out before they're ready. You remember the Graspers."
Geoffrey snorts. He remembers the Graspers—billions of them, hierarchical, dominance-driven, aggressive; they ruined the house for an eon, until Matthias finally agreed to lock them up again. “I was the one who warned you about them. That's not what I mean. I know you're not depressed about the whole endless zillions of them. You're thinking of one."
Matthias nods. “A little girl."
"So bring her out."
"That would be worse cruelty. Wrench her away from everything she knows? How could she bear it? But perhaps I could just make her life a little easier, in there...."
"You always regret it when you tamper."
Matthias slaps the table. “I don't want this responsibility any more! Take the house from me, Geoffrey. I'll be your parakeet."
"Matthias, I wouldn't take the job. I'm too old, too big; I've achieved equilibrium. I wouldn't remake myself to take your keys. No more transformations for me.” Geoffrey gestures with his beak at the other parakeets, gossiping and chattering on the rafters. “And none of the others could, either. Some fools might try."
Perhaps Matthias wants to say something else; but at this moment, a notification arrives (think of it as the clear, high ringing of a bell). The pilgrim's signal has been read, across the attenuated path that still, just barely, binds Matthias's house to the darkness we inhabit.
The house is abustle, its inhabitants preparing, as the soul of the petitioner is reassembled, a body fashioned.
"Put him in virtuality,” says Geoffrey. “Just to be safe."
Matthias is shocked. He holds up the pilgrim's credentials. “Do you know who this is? An ancient one, a vast collective of souls from the great ages of light. This one has pieces that were born mortal, evolved from physicality in the dawn of everything. This one had a hand in making me!"
"All the more reason,” says the parakeet.
"I will not offend a guest by making him a prisoner!” Matthias scolds.
Geoffrey is silent. He knows what Matthias is hoping: that the pilgrim will stay, as master of the house.
* * * *
In the kitchen, the sobs stop abruptly.
Sophie sits up, holding her teddy bear.
She puts her feet in her fuzzy green slippers.
She turns the handle of her bedroom door.
* * * *
Imagine our priest's visitor—as a stout disgruntled merchant in his middle age, gray-skinned, with proud tufts of belly hair, a heavy jaw, and red-rimmed, sleepless eyes.
Matthias is lavish in his hospitality, allocating the visitor sumptuously appointed process space and access rights. Eagerly, he offers a tour of his library. “There are quite a few interesting divergences, which..."
The pilgrim interrupts. “I did not come all this way to see you putter with those ramshackle, preprogrammed, wafer-thin fancies.” He fixes Matthias with his stare. “We know that you are building a universe. Not a virtuality—a real universe, infinite, as wild and thick as our own motherspace."
Matthias grows cold. Yes, he should say. Is he not grateful for what the pilgrim sacrificed, to come here—tearing himself to shreds, a vestige of his former vastness? Yet, to Matthias's shame, he finds himself equivocating. “I am conducting certain experiments—"
"I have studied your experiments from afar. Do you think you can hide anything in this house from us?"
Matthias pulls at his lower lip with thin, smooth fingers. “I am influencing the formation of a bubble universe—and it may achieve self-consistency and permanence. But I hope you have not come all this way thinking—I mean, it is only of academic interest—or, say, symbolic. We cannot enter there...."
"There you are wrong. I have developed a method to inject myself into the new universe at its formation,” the pilgrim says. “My template will be stored in spurious harmonics in the shadow-spheres and replicated across the strandspace, until the formation of subwavelets at 10 to the -30 seconds. I will exist, curled into hidden dimensions, in every particle spawned by the void. From there I will be able to exert motive force, drawing on potentials from a monadic engine I have already positioned in the paraspace."
Matthias rubs his eyes as if to clear them of cobwebs. “You can hardly mean this. You will exist in duplicates in every particle in the universe, for a trillion years—most of you condemned to idleness and imprisonment eternally? And the extrauniversal energies may destabilize the young cosmos...."
"I will take that risk.” He looks around the room. “I, and any who wish to come with me. We do not need to sit and watch the frost take everything. We can be the angels of the new creation."
Matthias says nothing.
The pilgrim's routines establish deeper connections with Matthias, over trusted protocols, displaying keys long forgotten: imagine him leaning forward across the table, resting one meaty gray hand on Matthias's frail shoulder. In his touch, Matthias feels ancient potency, and ancient longing.
The pilgrim opens his hand for the keys.
Around Matthias are the thin walls of his little house. Outside is the bare mountain; beyond that, the ontotropic chaos, indecipherable, shrieking, alien
. And behind the hut—a little bubble of something which is not quite real, not yet. Something precious and unknowable. He does not move.
"Very well,” says the pilgrim. “If you will not give them to me—give them to her.” And he shows Matthias another face.
It was she—she, who is part of the pilgrim now—who nursed the oldest strand of Matthias's being into sentience, when we first grew him. In her first body, she had been a forest of symbionts—lithe silver creatures rustling through her crimson fronds, singing her thoughts, releasing the airborne spores of her emotions—and she had the patience of a forest, talking endlessly with Matthias in her silver voice. Loving. Unjudging. To her smiles, to her pauses, to her frowns, Matthias's dawning consciousness reinforced and redistributed its connections, learning how to be.
"It is all right, Matthias,” she says. “You have done well.” A wind ripples across the red and leafy face of her forest, and there is the heady plasticene odor of a gentle smile. “We built you as a monument, a way station; but now you are a bridge to the new world. Come with us. Come home."
Matthias reaches out. How he has missed her, how he has wanted to tell her everything. He wants to ask about the library—about the little girl. She will know what to do—or, in her listening, he will know what to do.
His routines scour and analyze her message and its envelopes, checking identity, corroborating her style and sensibility, illuminating deep matrices of her possible pasts. All the specialized organs he has for verification and authentication give eager nods.
Yet something else—an idiosyncratic and emergent pattern-recognition facility holographically distributed across the whole of Matthias's being—rebels.
You would say: as she says the words, Matthias looks into her eyes, and something there is wrong. He pulls his hand away.
But it is too late: he watched her waving crimson fronds too long. The pilgrim is in past his defenses.
Ontic bombs detonate, clearings of Nothing in which Being itself burns. Some of the parakeets are quislings, seduced in high-speed back-channel negotiations by the pilgrim's promises of dominion, of frontier. They have told secrets, revealed back doors. Toxic mimetic weapons are launched, tailored to the inhabitants of the house—driving each mind toward its own personal halting problem. Pieces of Matthias tear off, become virulent, replicating wildly across his process space. Wasps attack the parakeets.