Otherness

by David Brin

  A certain line of jaw . . .

  An arching of the brows . . .

  A reluctant pleasure in the smile . . .

  Women Isola had never known or heard of stretched in diminishing rows across the room. Part of a continuity.

  Further along, she found troves of data from still earlier times. There appeared images of fathers as well as mothers, fascinating her and vastly complicating the branchings of descent. Yet it remained possible to note patterns, moving up the line. Long after all trace of "family" resemblance vanished, she still saw consistent motifs, those Jarlquin had spoken of.

  Five fingers on each clasping hand . . .

  Two eyes, poised to catch subtleties . . .

  A nose to scent . . . a brain to perceive . . .

  A persistent will to continue . . .

  This was not the only design for making thinking beings, star travelers, successful colonizers of galaxies. There were also Butins, Vorpals, Leshi and ten score other models which, tried and tested by harsh nature, now thrived in diversity in space. Nevertheless, this was a successful pattern. It endured.

  Life stirred beneath Isola's hand. Her warm, tumescent belly throbbed, vibrating not just her skin and bones, but membranes, deep within, that she had never expected to have touched by another. Now at least there was a context to put it all in. Her ancestors' images nourished some deep yearning. The poignancy of what she'd miss—the chance to know this living being soon to emerge from her own body—was now softened by a sense of continuity.

  It reassured her.

  There was a certain beauty in the song of DNA.

  Perched in orbit, circling a deep well.

  A well with a rim from which nothing escapes.

  Micronoughts, spiraling towards that black boundary, seem cosmically, comically, out of scale with mighty Tenembro, star-corpse, gatekeeper, universal scar. What they lack in width, they make up for in depth just as profound. Wide or narrow, each represents a one-way tunnel to oblivion.

  Is it crazy to ask if oblivions come in varieties, or differ in ways that matter?

  Rules were a problem of philosophical dimensions when Isola first studied origins.

  Consider the ratio of electric force to gravity. If this number had been infinitesimally higher, stars would never grow hot enough within their bowels to form and then expel heavy nuclei—those like carbon and oxygen—needed for life. If the ratio were just a fraction lower, stars would race through brief conflagrations too quickly for planets to evolve. Take the ratio a little farther off in either direction, and there would be no stars at all.

  The universal rules of Isola's home cosmos were rife with such fine-tuning. Numbers which, had they been different by even one part in a trillion, would not have allowed subtleties like planets or seas, sunsets and trees.

  Some called this evidence of design. Master craftsmanship. Creativity. Creator.

  Others handled the coincidence facilely. "If things were different," they claimed, "there would be no observers to note the difference. So it's no surprise that we, who exist, observe around us the precise conditions needed for existence!

  Hand waving, all hand waving. Neither answer satisfied Isola when she delved into true origins. Creationists, Anthropicists, they all missed the point.

  Everything has to come from somewhere. Even a creator. Even coincidence.

  Mikaela barely spoke to her anymore. Isola understood. Her partner could not help feeling rejected. The worlds had selected against her. In effect, the universe had declared her a dead end.

  Isola felt, illogically, that it must be her fault. She should have found a way to console her friend. It must be strange to hear you'll be the last in your line.

  Yet, what could she say?

  That it's also strange to know your line will continue, but out of reach, out of sight? Beyond all future knowing?

  The experiments continued. Loyal camera probes were torn apart by tides, or aged to dust in swirling backflows of time near Tenembro's vast event horizon. Isola borrowed factors from the visitors' ship-drive. She tinkered with formulas for small counterweight black holes, and sent the new microsingularities peeling off on ever-tighter trajectories towards the great nought's all-devouring maw.

  Cameras maneuvered to interpose themselves between one nothing and another. During that brief, but time-dilated, instant, as two wells of oblivion competed to consume them, the machines tried to take pictures.

  Pictures of nothing, and all.

  "To pass the time, I've been tinkering with your pseudo-life tanks," Jarlquin announced proudly one evening. "Your servitor fabricants ought to last as long as nine days now, before having to go back into the vat."

  The visitor was obviously pleased with herself, finding something useful to do while Isola gestated. Jarlquin puttered, yet her interest remained focus on a product more subtle than anything she herself would ever design. Unskilled, but tutored by a billion years of happenstance, Isola prepared that product for delivery.

  The second theory of origins had amazed her.

  It was not widely talked about in Kalimarn's academies, where savants preferred notions of quantum fluctuation. After all, Kalimarn served as banking world for an entire cluster. No doubt the colonists liked thinking of the universe as something out on loan.

  Nevertheless, in her academy days, Isola had sought other explanations.

  We might have come from somewhere else! she realized one evening, when her studies took her deeply into frozen archives. The so-called "crackpot" theories she found there did not seem so crazy. Their mathematics worked just as well as models of quantum usury.

  When a black hole is created after a supernova explosion, the matter that collapses into it doesn't just vanish. According to the equations, it goes . . . "elsewhere." To another space-time. A continuum completely detached from ours.

  Each new black hole represents another universe! A new creation.

  The implication wasn't hard to translate in the opposite direction.

  Our own cosmos may have had its start with a black hole that formed in some earlier cosmos!

  The discovery thrilled her. It appalled Isola that none of her professors shared her joy.

  "Even if true," one of them had said, "it's an unanswerable, unrewarding line of inquiry. By the very nature of the situation, we are cut off, severed from causal contact with that earlier cosmos. Given that, I prefer simple hypotheses."

  "But think of the implications!" she insisted. "Several times each year, new macro-black holes are created in supernovas—"

  "Yes? So?"

  "—What's more, at any moment across this galaxy alone, countless starships generate innumerable microsingularities, just to surf the payback wave when they collapse. Each of those "exhaust" singularities becomes a universe too!"

  The savant had smiled patronizingly. "Shall we play God, then? Try to take responsibility, in some way, for our creations?" The old woman's tone was supercilious. "This argument's almost as ancient as debating angels on pinheads. Why don't you transfer to the department of archaic theology?"

  Isola would not be put off, nor meekly accept conventional wisdom. She eventually won backing to investigate the quandaries that consumed her. Much later, Jarlquin told her this perseverance was in part inherited. Some colonies had learned to cherish tenacity like hers. Though sometimes troublesome, the trait often led to profit and art. It was a major reason Pleasence World had sent a fetch ship to Tenembro Nought.

  They cared little about the specific truths Isola pursued. They wanted the trait that drove her to pursue.

  Cells differentiate according to patterns laid down in the codes. Organs form which would—by happenstance—provide respiration, circulation, cerebration. . . .

  In one locale cells even begin preparing for future reproduction. New eggs align themselves in rows, then go dormant. Within each egg lay copies of the script.

  Even this early, the plan lays provisions for the next phase.

  Normally, a
pseudo-life incubator would have taken over during her final weeks. But the nurturist, Jarlquin, wanted none of that. Pseudo-life was but a product. Its designs, no matter how clever, came out of theory and mere generations of practice, while Isola's womb was skilled from trial and error successes stretching back several galactic rotations. So Isola waddled, increasingly awkward and inflated, wondering how her ancestors ever managed.

  Every one of them made it. Each managed to get someone else started.

  It was a strange consolation, and she smiled, sardonically. Maybe I'm starting to think like Jarlquin!

  She no longer went outside to conduct experiments. Using her calculations, Mikaela fine-tuned the next convoy sent to skim Tenembro's vast event horizon, while Isola went back to basics in the laboratory.

  What mystery is movement—distinguishing one location from another? In some natures, all points correspond—instantaneous, coincidental. Uninteresting.

  What riddle, then, is change—one object evolving into another? Some worlds disallow this. Though they contain multitudes, all things remain the same.

  Is a reality cursed which suffers entropy? Or is it consecrated?

  Once more a flash. Two microsingularities fell together, carrying a tiny holocamera with them to oblivion. In the narrow moment of union, the robot took full-spectrum readings of one involute realm. The results showed Isola a mighty, but flawed, kingdom.

  The amount of mass originally used to form the nought mattered at this end—determining its gravitational pull and event horizon. But on the other side, beyond the constricted portal of the singularity, it made little difference. Whether a mere million tons had gone into the black hole or the weight of a thousand suns, it was the act of geometric transformation that counted. Instants after the nought's formation, inflation had turned it into a macrocosm. A fiery ball of plasma exploding in its own context, in a reference frame whose dimensions were all perpendicular to those Isola knew. Within that frame a wheel of time marked out events, just as it did in Isola's universe—only vastly speeded up from her point of view.

  Energy—or something like what she'd been taught to call "energy"—drove the expansion, and traded forms with substances that might vaguely be called "matter." Forces crudely akin to electromagnetism and gravity contested over nascent particles that in coarse ways resembled quarks and leptons. Larger concatenations tried awkwardly to form.

  But there was no rhythm, no symmetry. The untuned orchestra could not decide what score to play. There was no melody.

  In the speeded-up reference frame of the construct-cosmos, her sampling probe had caught evolution of a coarse kind. Like a pseudo-life fabrication too long out of the vat, the universe Isola had set out to create lurched towards dissipation. The snapshot showed no heavy elements, no stars, no possibility of self-awareness. How could there be? All the rules were wrong.

  Nevertheless, the wonder of it struck Isola once more. To make universes!

  Furthermore, she was getting better. Each new design got a little farther along than the one before it. Certainly farther than most trash cosmoses spun off as exhaust behind starships. At the rate she was going, in a million years some descendant of hers might live to create a cosmos in which crude galaxies formed.

  If only we could solve the problem of looking down Tenembro, she thought.

  That great black ripple lay beyond the laboratory window, crowned by warped stars. It was like trying to see with the blind spot in her eye. There was a tickling notion that something lay there, but forever just out of reach.

  To Isola, it felt like a dare. A challenge.

  What strange rules must reign in there! she sighed. Weirdness beyond imagination . . .

  Isola's gut clenched. The laboratory blurred as waves of painful constriction spasmed inside her. The chaise grew arms which held on, keeping her from falling, but they could not stop Isola from trying to double over, gasping.

  Such pain . . . I never knew . . .

  Desperately, she managed a faint moan.

  "Jar . . . Jarlquin . . ."

  She could only hope the room monitor would interpret it as a command. For the next several minutes, or hours, or seconds, she was much too distracted to try again.

  It is a narrow passage, fierce and tight and terrible. Forces stretch and compress to the limit, almost bursting. What continues through suffers a fiery, constricted darkness.

  Then a single point of light. An opening. Release!

  Genesis.

  They watched the fetch ship turn and start accelerating. Starlight refracted through a wake of disturbed space. If any of the multitude of universes created by its drive happened, by sheer chance, to catch a knack for self existence, no one in this cosmos would ever know.

  Isola's feelings were a murky tempest, swirling from pain to anaesthesia. A part of her seemed glad it was over, that she had her freedom back. Other, intense voices cried out at the loss of her captivity. All the limbs and organs she had possessed a year ago were still connected, yet she ached with a sense of dismemberment. Jarlquin had carefully previewed all of this. She had offered drugs. But Isola's own body now doped her quite enough. She sensed flowing endorphins start the long process of adjustment. Beyond that, artificial numbing would have robbed the colors of her pain.

  The fetch ship receded to a point, leaving behind Tenembro's cavity of twisted metric, its dimple in the great galactic wheel. Ahead, Pleasence Star beckoned, a soft, trustworthy yellow.

  Isola blessed the star. To her its glimmer would always say—You continue. Part of you goes on.

  She went on to bless the ship, the visitors, even Jarlquin. What had been taken from her would never have existed without their intervention, their "selection." Perhaps, like universes spun off behind a star-drive, you weren't meant to know what happened to your descendants. Even back in times when parents shared half their lives with daughters and sons, did any of them ever really know what cosmos lay behind a child's eye?

  Unanswerable questions were Isola's métier. In time, she might turn her attention to these. If she got another chance, in a better situation. For now, she had little choice but to accept the other part of Jarlquin's prescription. Work was an anodyne. It would have to do.

  "They're gone," she said, turning to her friend.

  "Yes, and good riddance."

  In Mikaela's pale eyes, Isola saw something more than sympathy for her pain. Something transcendent glimmered there.

  "Now I can show you what we've found," Mikaela said, as if savoring the giving of a gift.

  "What we . . ." Isola blinked. "I don't understand."

  "You will. Come with me and see."

  Tenembro was black. But this time Isola saw a different sort of blackness.

  Tenembro's night fizzed with radio echoes, reddened heat of its expansion, a photon storm now cool enough to seem dark to most eyes, but still a blaze across immensity.

  Tenembro's blackness was relieved by sparkling pinpoints, whitish blue and red and yellow. Bright lights like shining dust, arrayed in spiral clouds.

  Tenembro Universe shone with galaxies, turning in stately splendor. Now and then, a pinwheel island brightened as some heavy sun blared exultantly, seeding well-made elements through space, leaving behind a scar.

  "But . . ." Isola murmured, shaking her head as she contemplated the holistic sampling—their latest pan-spectral snapshot. "It's our universe! Does the other side of the wormhole emerge somewhere else in our cosmos?"

  There were solutions to the equations which allowed this. Yet she had been so sure Tenembro would lead to another creation. Something special . . .

  "Look again," Mikaela told her. "At beta decay in this isotope . . . And here, at the fine structure constant . . ."

  Isola peered at the figures, and inhaled sharply. There were differences. Subtle, tiny differences. It was another creation after all. They had succeeded! They had looked down the navel of a macrosingularity and seen . . . everything.

  The still-powerful tang of he
r pain mixed with a heady joy of discovery. Disoriented by so much emotion, Isola put her hand to her head and leaned on Mikaela, who helped her to a chaise. Breathing deeply from an infusion tube brought her round.

  "But . . ." she said, still gasping slightly, ". . . the rules are so close to ours!"

  Her partner shook her head. "I don't know what to make of it either. We've been trying for years to design a cosmos that would hold together, and failed to get even close. Yet here we have one that occurred by natural processes, with no conscious effort involved—"