by Exurb1a
“All right,” she said.
She took more dust from her pocket and launched it into the air. It took the formation of spheres, dozens of them, various sizes. They formed a single, larger sphere.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Do you know Orb Morae?”
“Of course,” I said. What kind of idiot did she think I was?
“My mother travelled there, the first outsider in two thousand years. She was called Io Ferdinand. My father was a local, aristocracy. She brought him back to Ertia, smoothed out relations between the two planets eventually. The Moraens developed a scientific culture after that. They were the first to map the Fifths properly, to study them the way an anthropologist does her own kind.”
“That must’ve been a while ago.”
“A thousand years, yes. Most of the Moraeans left to enter the Fifths eventually. Still, I went to visit a few years ago. Their water habitats sported well-maintained archives and I explored everything I could. They’d found something, an order no one else noticed. They plotted the changing positions of the Fifth stars relative to the non-Fifth stars. The Fifths are moving slowly into a spherical pattern, centred around the black hole at the heart of our galaxy.”
I said, “Why?”
“Mmmm, maybe they find geometry beautiful. Maybe they like order. Or maybe they’re building something, a structure. Honestly, we’ll never know. The farthest star won’t reach the formation for another few thousand years.”
“Few thousand years?” I said. “But space is huge.”
“Oh, they don't play by our physics anymore.”
When we pushed back through the hull there was a crowd waiting, old folk and young. A woman said, “You know it’s wrong. You know you shouldn’t go in there.”
“It’s all my fault,” Lysithea said before I could excuse us. “I didn’t realise we weren’t supposed to. I’m a foreigner. I’m very sorry.”
This was quite a good tactic, I thought at the time. You have to be clever to plead ignorance.
We passed back through the fieldlip and the crowd stood silently and watched us walk away, too proud to ask how the magic worked.
If I’d bothered to check the position of the sun I would have noticed only a few minutes had passed outside. We’d been in there more than two hours, however.
A few children from the crowd followed us half a mile or so, watching from a distance. Then they fell back to their families and we were alone again, walking through what I guess must have been the artists' quarter once.
We silently admired the graffiti and the art galleries. There were shops with crystalline fronts for the extra-sapiens. Inside were objects I didn’t recognise, blobs of newmatter and shards of coloured glass. I knew I wouldn’t understand the function of that stuff even if it was explained to me slowly and carefully.
I felt like Lysithea and I were close enough for real talk now so I said, “Can I ask about the…extraterr stuff?”
“If you want,” she said from up ahead.
“Are you more sapien or proto?”
“You’re pure sapien?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Your deep ancestors were apes and fish and things of that sort weren’t they?”
“I guess.”
“Well, are you more ape than fish, or more fish than ape?”
I didn’t answer.
I don’t like it in tales when someone comes out with their life story. It just serves to remind the reader that they’re reading. Lysithea didn’t seem so much of the real world though, so when she began her speech I just quietly committed it to memory.
She said, “During the century I was born in it was very fashionable to mix human and proto DNA. Of course my mother was human enough, my father too, though they came from different orbs. But still, they added a little proto into me where they felt it might do good. Strengthen the spirit, temper the rage. The Katarsinians, the protos, lived in secret a long time though, you know. After my mother reunified Ertia, Al’Hazaad, and Morae, the Katarsinians came back out into the open.”
The next parts didn’t come in my ears, but my head. It was still spoken in her voice, but the voice echoed; had no volume. I wasn’t scared. She said, “It is understood that there is a shape to the way things develop, a current in the great sea. The current is a kind of improvement, a becoming. If species survive long enough in the galaxy, they receive the privilege of changing themselves into another thing. From cells to silicon, in the classic example.
“There are other routes after silicon though. We talked about the folk on Morae. After their little crisis they became great watchers of the stars and the Fifths. They believed what is happening now is the next stage in a sort of galactic becoming. They believed the Fifths are built into nature’s schemes just as deeply as nebulas and quasars. I think I believe that too now. If my great, great, great grandfather had somehow succeeded in wiping them out with his soldiers and his fleet, the Fifths would only come around again a few million years from now. You know how it is with things. All extraterrs built computers of a kind, whether they were biological or mechanical. Perhaps all civilisations build Fifths eventually.”
And what do Fifths build? I thought.
“I don’t know,” she replied in my mind. “But they've started on it already.”
We looked about at the desolation. Then she turned to me with a kind sort of expression and said, “You're curious about the empire, aren't you?”
“Yes.”
“I've been to lots of the old worlds. Most of them are empty, but I remember everything. Do you want to see it?”
“Yes.”
She opened her mind up to me.
Notions, grievances, suspicions, preferences, all of it a stream trickling past.
There was Orb Sikorak-Et where seventeen thousand original sapiens had drank poison on the very same day, a planetwide ritual to avoid going Fifth.
There was Orb Wirrel, naught but a graveyard.
There was Orb Ertia, holding out against the dark with theoretics and government and decency.
Bodies. Loves. Marriages. Births. Taxes. Books. Sunday afternoons.
“Stop, please stop,” I said.
The stream ran dry. Still, in the way one gets to know a lover through their smell or their little notes, I knew her now by the signature and character of her mind. At the heart of all of her actions, at the centre of everything, was a desire to know the Fifths.
Then there was another part of her mind, an unknowable section that I suppose was proto. Its thoughts obeyed some other rule of operation and I couldn’t make any sense of the thing. The more I had looked, the more it had scared me—not evil, just horribly, horribly fucking other.
“It’s a strange galaxy we’re living in,” she said lightly, almost a song. “We’re all hybrids now, all part-machine now, those of us left. No one is one thing and the simple answers are dead. The books are gone. The histories are almost gone too. There’ll be nothing to remember us, none of us. When it’s all over, when it all begins again, it will be as though nothing came before.”
I sat down. I wasn’t sure what to say.
She continued. “I came here to broker a peace agreement with the emissary between the remains of the empire and the Fifths. I thought they’d listen. I’m the last one alive with any of the old standing. I thought maybe they’d leave us wasps alone.” For a moment her eyes were muddled smears of pale light. “They won’t listen though, will they?” she said.
“I don’t think so, no. There's no point left to any of it now.”
“Is that what all the racing and drinking and shooting is about?”
I thought about this and shrugged. “We’re only a half mile from the emissary,” I said. “Do you still want to meet him?”
She wiped her eyes and fixed her face in a neutral resting expression. “All right,” she said.
And then she was off, padding down the street.
The outskirts of the city were deserted. Eve
rything was boarded up, smashed, or rubble.
My father told me there was a branch of history concerned with the future. Those historians looked back on what their ancestors had expected of the coming days. Maybe it was a kind of smug exercise, a way of laughing at our own stupid expectations. Even the smartest futurists never got it right. I know a bit about what they expected: peace, abundance, a settling down of the hateful currents in the heart of our species.
We got some of that. But the old currents persisted too and ran into the new ones, and what emerged was a kind of violent meeting of both.
Beauty, food, exploration, and screwing. We’ve kept all that.
Ribbondash, immortality, true-knowing, and the Fifths. We’ve created those.
All for what, I’m not sure.
As far as I’m aware there has never been a point in history when a village, a society, or a planet has come together for a day and said, “What is it we’re all going after?” There has never been a vote about our collective purpose.
Either a whole society is subject to the dictates of one mad ruler who imposes their vision on the whole, or the society is self-driven and strives after its own ends individually, among the whole.
Why is there never an objective?
And now I think about it, if there were, what would it even be?
The answer is perhaps the same for us here at the end of history as it was for our ancestors millions of years ago at the beginning: to live well, to live quietly, and to die without too much of a fuss. And if we are very, very lucky, to love properly at least once.
But we are clever. We find distractions.
By the time we developed a taste for meat, we were already building weapons to catch more meat. By the time we were on our feet, we were building machinations to carry us faster. There wasn't even a thousand years between our realising the stars were teeming with new worlds to discover, and the building of machines to go and visit them. All our stupidity and violence, we took it out into the black, tucked away under mathematics and uniforms. Sapiens made it to the heavens. The animals came too, hiding inside us.
And when enough stars were tamed, when enough worlds were settled, when a society finally established itself across millions upon millions of light-years, no one was quite ready for the re-emergence of those old animals. They crept nimbly out of our heads when the political landscape was calm enough. They demanded more territory for us and less for our enemies. They made war, they annexed.
We should’ve taken all our canine teeth out before we ever left the motherworld. We should’ve cut our claws on the journey up through the atmosphere. The heavens weren’t ready for us, and now we’ve turned the place into a mortuary for the species.
There were great promises made to us, by scientists, by prophets, by leaders, by elders.
Man is a two-thing animal, they said; part beast, part deity. He wants to kill. He wants to know. He should suppress the first and encourage the second. One day we’ll learn to take the beast out entirely and pop it in a little bell jar. There’ll be no violence then. There’ll be no strife. That is the paradise the myths have been pointing to and we’ll make it with knowledge, not magic. We’ll tame nature and tame our own nature. We’ll sell the universe back to ourselves at a reduced cost.
We’ll kill money and burn the barracks to the ground. Truth will beget compassion and compassion will beget true freedom: freedom from nature, and freedom from our own nature. If we have to use violence, we will. We shall justify it with imperious cleverness.
Where there are tyrants, we’ll bring death. Where there are no tyrants, we’ll call them tyrants and we’ll bring death. Where there is anarchy, we’ll bring laws. Where there is no anarchy, we’ll call it anarchy and we'll bring laws.
Somehow, a long time in the future, when we’ve scared mostly everyone into happiness and threatened the rest into submission, when we’ve built utopia and covered the perimeter in the very sharpest of barbed wire, we’ll put the knives away and everything will be fine then, for some reason, for whatever reason, for forever.
Oh God, oh Jesus…
We came finally to a bulbous structure, a sort of enormous shining liqueur bottle. We had been walking for hours and, despite Lysithea’s strange biology, I’m sure she was just as exhausted as me. The boy was waiting for us on the porch and welcomed us in without a word. He looked perhaps eight, dressed in a white linen robe. He led us through to a circular room at the centre of the structure. A low table was stacked with breads and vegetables and sweets.
“I’m sure you’re both very hungry,” he said in a voice that sounded as childlike as his appearance suggested. “Please eat, then join me in the next room.”
Lysithea and I ate. When we were both full I nodded to the door the boy had mentioned and she waggled her head in agreement. We went in.
The boy was sat on a futon eating a fruit of some kind. He smiled and showed his teeth to be full of pips. He gestured to several futons opposite him and we sat.
When he was quite done eating he said, “You’re both tired. Would you like me to make you not tired?”
“No thanks,” I said. Lysithea shook her head.
The door closed behind us. The walls changed from a shining white to a sober ocean blue.
“Some ground rules,” the boy said. “Out of respect I have not looked into your motives, though I can at any time I like. If I think you’re being untruthful, I will do so. Do you agree to the terms?”
We both nodded uncertainly.
He turned to Lysithea. “I should also say that I’m aware of your ancestry and I hold no grudge against it. In the same way I don’t consider you a warlord based on your lineage, I hope you won’t consider me a tyrant or a god based on mine.”
“I won’t.”
“Excellent.” The boy picked a pip from his teeth, swallowed it. He wiped his hands on his robe. “As is the custom with these things,” he said, “we’ll discuss our terms in neutral territory”.
The room dissolved and we were in the black then, suspended in space, billions of stars about us. Lysithea’s hair lifted from her head. I felt my insides released from the great, unnoticed tension of gravity.
The boy spoke without his mouth. “Now, what is it you two have come about?”
Lysithea discarded speech too then. “Do you represent all the Fifths?”
“In a sense.”
“I believe your kind are moving into position to create a new geometry of some sort. Centuries ago the Black Ruby Stars sought to do the same thing. They had horrible intentions.”
The boy looked out to the stars with old eyes. “It is a different game now. Something else is coming. From your perspective it will take a very long time. It shouldn’t be of any concern.”
“What if there are sapiens still alive when it happens?”
“That’s very unlikely.”
“What if there are?” Lysithea said with irritation.
“Then I’m sure they’ll be offered somewhere else to go.”
The stars were moving slowly, only centimetres at a time, but moving nonetheless.
“Are you here to broker peace?” the boy said.
“No,” Lysithea said quietly. “That’s what I came for, but…”
“But now you know how pointless that is.” The boy said it flatly, without rudeness, but without kindness either.
“Yes.”
Lysithea and the boy dissolved around me, though I could feel their minds were still near. I had no body either now, just mentality in a vacuum.
Some of the stars grew brighter, their hues rising to strobing white. They clearly formed lines, from one side of the black to the other, coming together in a ring.
“What is it?” Lysithea said. “What will it create when it’s all done?”
There was a long pause. Then the boy said, “I don’t know. We aren’t in control anymore.”
“Who is?”
“Something else. Something we made. The more complex the system,
the faster it gives rise to its successor. You see then, you’re not the only ignorant ones here.”
God, I thought, what’s above the stars?
“We’re asking ourselves the same question,” the boy murmured.
From where we floated there was no sign of humanity’s fingerprint on the cosmos. Billions had been born, billions had died. There were the warlords first. Then the explorers. Then the arties. Then the empire. Then the Fifths. And now something else.
I was sick of it. I said, “You’ve completely destroyed the remains of the empire. We have nothing left. All we do is drink and wander about. There’s no point. No one builds a damn thing anymore. They never will again. Join you or fall into squalor. That’s the ultimatum, isn’t it?”
The boy said, “It doesn’t sound so appealing when you put it that way, no. But please don’t think of creation as wallpaper. It’s more an incubation tank. Yes there are individual lives, yes there are individual syndicates and empires, but the whole process ultimately builds to the same climax in all iterations. That is, the consolidation of intelligence, the gathering of the wool of perfect wisdom, and the death of want.”
Sounds like religious bullshit, I thought.
“It bears a striking resemblance to spirituality, I’ll grant you,” the boy said. “Still, that is the shape of things and that is their destination. We've made arrangements already to send technological dictionaries back to the early empire, ensuring that the timestream remains continuous, leading up to this point once more.” He sounded a little sad again. “On some level I envy you. You’re wise enough to understand what you are, but still sufficiently primitive to let that knowledge go when it serves you. No species will ever do that again. It’s wisdom all the way up now.”
Something rang distantly, a musical note. It was followed by another, then another; major key. It grew louder and a choir joined, one or two voices, then tens, then hundreds, wailing, exultant. In the melody was all the loss of all the worlds, all the collected science, each slight and kindness. Every battle was in there, every argument, every orgasm and ballroom dance, every rocket launch and glass of lemonade. I saw my mother’s eyes for the first time, from down in her arms when I was a baby and covered in blood and mess. I saw my father’s eyes for the last time as he walked from me with my mother in that field.