The Rise of Endymion

by Dan Simmons

  “Choose again,” said Aenea.

  I considered that for a wheezing, panting moment. “Choose again?” I said finally.

  Aenea smiled. She had caught her wind and was actually looking down at the vertical view that I was afraid even to glance toward. She seemed to be enjoying it. I had the friendly urge to toss her off the mountain right then. Youth. It’s intolerable sometimes.

  “Choose again,” she said firmly.

  “Care to elaborate on that?”

  “No,” said Aenea. “That’s the whole idea. Keep it simple. But name a category and you get the idea.”

  “Religion,” I said.

  “Choose again,” said Aenea.

  I laughed.

  “I’m not being totally facetious here, Raul,” she said. We began climbing again. A. Bettik seemed lost in thought.

  “I know, kiddo,” I said, although I had not been sure. “Categories … ah … political systems.”

  “Choose again.”

  “You don’t think that the Pax is the ultimate evolution of human society? It’s brought interstellar peace, fairly good government, and … oh, yeah … immortality to its citizens.”

  “It’s time to choose again,” said Aenea. “And speaking of our views of evolution …”

  “What?”

  “Choose again.”

  “Choose what again?” I said. “The direction of evolution?”

  “No,” said Aenea, “I mean our ideas about whether evolution has a direction. Most of our theories about evolution, for that matter.”

  “So, do you or don’t you agree with Pope Teilhard … the Hyperion pilgrim, Father Duré … when he said three centuries ago that Teilhard de Chardin had been right, that the universe was evolving toward consciousness and a conjunction with the Godhead? What he called the Omega Point?”

  Aenea looked at me. “You did do a lot of reading in the Taliesin library, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I don’t agree with Teilhard … either the original Jesuit or the short-lived Pope. My mother knew both Father Duré and the current pretender, Father Hoyt, you know.”

  I blinked. I guess I had known that, but being reminded of the reality of that … of my friend’s connections across the last three centuries … set me back a bit.

  “Anyway,” continued Aenea, “evolutionary science has really taken a bite in the butt over the last millennium. First the Core actively opposed investigation into it because of their fear of rapid human-designed genetic engineering—an explosion of our species into variant forms upon which the Core could not be parasitic. Then evolution and the biosciences were ignored by the Hegemony for centuries because of the Core’s influence, and now the Pax is terrified of it.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Why is the Pax terrified of biological and genetic research?”

  “No,” I said, “I think I understand that. The Core wants to keep human beings in the form and shape they’re comfortable with and so does the Church. They define being human largely by counting arms, legs, and so forth. But I mean why redefine evolution? Why open up the argument about direction or nondirection and so forth? Doesn’t the ancient theory hold up pretty well?”

  “No,” said Aenea. We climbed several minutes in silence. Then she said, “Except for mystics such as the original Teilhard, most early evolution scientists were very careful not to think of evolution in terms of ‘goals’ or ‘purposes.’ That was religion, not science. Even the idea of a direction was anathema to the pre-Hegira scientists. They could only speak in terms of ‘tendencies’ in evolution, sort of statistical quirks that kept recurring.”

  “So?”

  “So that was their shortsighted bias, just as Teilhard de Chardin’s was his faith. There are directions in evolution.”

  “How do you know?” I said softly, wondering if she would answer.

  She answered quickly. “Some of the data I saw before I was born,” she said, “through my cybrid father’s connections to the Core. The autonomous intelligences there have understood human evolution for many centuries, even while humans stayed ignorant. As hyper-hyperparasites, the AIs evolve only toward greater parasitism. They can only look at living things and their evolutionary curve and watch it … or try to stop it.”

  “So what are the directions in evolution?” I asked. “Toward greater intelligence? Toward some sort of godlike hive mind?” I was curious about her perception of the Lions and Tigers and Bears.

  “Hive mind,” said Aenea. “Ugghh. Can you conceive of anything more boring or distasteful?”

  I said nothing. I had rather imagined that this was the direction of her teachings about learning the language of the dead and all that. I made a note to listen better the next time she taught.

  “Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing,” said my young friend. “A hive mind would be the ancient television broadcasts, or life at the height of the datasphere … consensual idiocy.”

  “Okay,” I said, still confused. “What direction does evolution take?”

  “Toward more life,” said Aenea. “Life likes life. It’s pretty much that simple. But more amazingly, nonlife likes life as well … and wants to get into it.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Aenea nodded. “Back on pre-Hegira Old Earth … in the 1920s … there was a geologist from a nation-state called Russia who understood this stuff. His name was Vladimir Vernadsky and he coined the phrase ‘biosphere,’ which—if things happen the way I think they will—should take on new meaning for both of us soon.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “You’ll see, my friend,” said Aenea, touching my gloved hand with hers. “Anyway, Vernadsky wrote in 1926—‘Atoms, once drawn into the torrent of living matter, do not readily leave it’ ”

  I thought about this for a moment. I did not know much science—what I had picked up came from Grandam and the Taliesin library—but this made sense to me.

  “It was phrased more scientifically twelve hundred years ago as Dollo’s Law,” said Aenea. “The essence of it is that evolution doesn’t back up … exceptions like the Old Earth whale trying to become a fish again after living as a land mammal are just the rare exception. Life moves on … it constantly finds new niches to invade.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Such as when humanity left Old Earth in its seedships and Hawking-drive vessels.”

  “Not really,” said Aenea. “First of all, we did that prematurely because of the influence of the Core and the fact that Old Earth was dying because of a black hole in its belly … also the Core’s work. Secondly, because of the Hawking drive, we could jump through our arm of the galaxy to find Earth-like worlds high on the Solmev Scale … most of which we terraformed anyway and seeded with Old Earth life-forms, starting with soil bacteria and earthworms and moving up to the ducks you used to hunt in the Hyperion fens.”

  I nodded. But I was thinking, How else should we have done it as a species moving out into space? What’s wrong with going to places that looked and smelled somewhat like home … especially when home wasn’t going to be there to go back to?

  “There’s something more interesting in Vernadsky’s observations and Dollo’s Law,” said Aenea.

  “What’s that, kiddo?” I was still thinking about ducks.

  “Life doesn’t retreat.”

  “How so?” As soon as I asked the question I understood.

  “Yeah,” said my friend, seeing my understanding. “As soon as life gets a foothold somewhere, it stays. You name it … arctic cold, the Old Mars frozen desert, boiling hot springs, a sheer rockface such as here on T’ien Shan, even in autonomous intelligence programs … once life gets its proverbial foot in the door, it stays forever.”

  “So what are the implications of that?” I said.

  “Simply that left to its own devices … which are clever devices … life will someday fill the unive
rse,” said Aenea, “it will be a green galaxy to begin with, then off to our neighboring clusters and galaxies.”

  “That’s a disturbing thought,” I said.

  She paused to look at me. “Why, Raul? I think it’s beautiful.”

  “Green planets I’ve seen,” I said. “A green atmosphere is imaginable, but weird.”

  She smiled. “It doesn’t have to be just plants. Life adapts … birds, men and women in flying machines, you and me in paragliders, people adapted to flight …”

  “That hasn’t happened yet,” I said. “But what I meant was, well, to have a green galaxy, people and animals and …”

  “And living machines,” said Aenea. “And androids … artificial life of a thousand forms …”

  “Yeah, people, animals, machines, androids, whatever … would have to adapt to space … I don’t see how …”

  “We have,” said Aenea. “And more will before too long.” We reached the next three hundredth step and paused to pant.

  “What other directions are there in evolution that we’ve ignored?” I said when we began to climb again.

  “Increasing diversity and complexity,” said Aenea. “Scientists argued back and forth about these directions for centuries, but there’s no doubt that evolution favors—in the very long run—both these attributes. And of the two, diversity is the more important.”

  “Why?” I said. She must have been growing tired of that syllable. I sounded like a three-year-old child even to myself.

  “Scientists used to think that basic evolutionary designs kept multiplying,” said Aenea. “That’s called disparity. But that turned out not to be the case. Variety in basic plans tends to decrease as life’s antientropic potential—evolution—increases. Look at all the orphans of Old Earth, for instance—same basic DNA, of course, but also the same basic plans: evolved from forms with tubular guts, radial symmetry, eyes, feeding mouths, two sexes … pretty much from the same mold.”

  “But I thought you said diversity was important,” I said.

  “It is,” said Aenea. “But diversity is different than basic-plan disparity. Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design … thousands of related species … tens of thousands.”

  “Trilobites,” I said, getting the idea.

  “Yes,” said Aenea, “and when …”

  “Beetles,” I said. “All those goddamn species of beetles.”

  Aenea grinned at me through her mask. “Precisely. And when …”

  “Bugs,” I said. “Every world I’ve been on has the same goddamn swarms of bugs. Mosquitoes. Endless varieties of …”

  “You’ve got it,” said Aenea. “Life shifts into high gear when the basic plan for an organism is settled and new niches open up. Life settles into those new niches by tweeking the diversity within the basic shape of those organisms. New species. There are thousands of new species of plants and animals that have come into existence in just the last millennium since interstellar flight started … and not all bio-engineered, some just adapted at a furious rate to the new Earth-like worlds they were dumped down on.”

  “Triaspens,” I said, remembering just Hyperion. “Ever-blues. Womangrove root. Tesla trees?”

  “They were native,” said Aenea.

  “So the diversity’s good,” I said, trying to find the original threads of this discussion.

  “Diversity’s good,” agreed Aenea. “As I said, it lets life shift into high gear and get on with its mindless business of greening up the universe. But there’s at least one Old Earth species that hasn’t diversified much at all … at least not on the friendly worlds it colonized.”

  “Us,” I said. “Humans.”

  Aenea nodded grimly. “We’ve been stuck in one species since our Cro-Magnon ancestors helped to wipe out the smarter Neanderthals,” she said. “Now it’s our chance to diversify rapidly, and institutions like the Hegemony, the Pax, and the Core are stopping it.”

  “Does the need to diversify extend to human institutions?” I said. “Religions? Social systems?” I was thinking about the people who had helped me on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, Dem Ria, Dem Loa, and their families. I was thinking about the Amoiete Spectrum Helix and its complicated and convoluted beliefs.

  “Absolutely,” said Aenea. “Look over there.”

  A. Bettik had paused at a slab of marble upon which words were carved in Chinese and early Web English:

  High rises the Eastern Peak

  Soaring up to the blue sky.

  Among the rocks—an empty hollow,

  Secret, still, mysterious!

  Unearned and unhewn,

  Screened by nature with a roof of clouds.

  Time and Seasons, what things are you,

  Bringing to my life ceaseless change?

  I will lodge forever in this hollow

  Where springs and autumns unheeded pass.

  —Tao-yun, wife of General Wang Ning-chih, A.D. 400

  We climbed on. I thought that I could see something red at the top of this next flight of stairs. The South Gate of Heaven and entry to the summit slope? It was about time.

  “Wasn’t that beautiful though?” I said, speaking of the poem. “Isn’t continuity like that as important or more important in human institutions as diversity?”

  “It’s important,” agreed Aenea. “But that’s almost all humanity has been doing for the last millennium, Raul … recreating Old Earth institutions and ideas on different worlds. Look at the Hegemony. Look at the Church and the Pax. Look at this world …”

  “T’ien Shan?” I said. “I think it’s wonderful …”

  “So do I,” said Aenea. “But it’s all borrowed. The Buddhism has evolved a bit … at least away from idolatry and ritual back to the open-mindedness that was its earliest hallmark … but everything else is pretty much an attempt to recapture things lost with Old Earth.”

  “Such as?” I said.

  “Such as the language, dress, the names of the mountains, local customs … hell, Raul, even this pilgrimage trail and the Temple of the Jade Emperor, if we ever get there.”

  “You mean there was a T’ai Shan mountain on Old Earth?” I said.

  “Absolutely,” said Aenea. “With its own City of Peace and Heavenly Gates and Mouth of the Dragon. Confucius climbed it more than three thousand years ago. But the Old Earth stairway had just seven thousand steps.”

  “I wish we’d climbed it instead,” I said, wondering if I could keep climbing. The steps were short, but there had been a hell of a lot of them. “I see your point though.”

  Aenea nodded. “It’s wonderful to preserve tradition, but a healthy organism evolves … culturally and physically.”

  “Which brings us back to evolution,” I said. “What are the other directions, tendencies, goals, or whatever that you said had been ignored the last few centuries?”

  “There are just a few more,” said Aenea. “One is an ever increasing number of individuals. Life likes gazillions of species, but it absolutely loves hypergazillions of individuals. In a sense, the universe is tooled up for individuals. There was a book in the Taliesin library called Evolving Hierarchical Systems by an Old Earth guy named Stanley Salthe. Did you see it?”

  “No, I must have missed it when I was reading those early twenty-first-century holoporn novels.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Aenea. “Well, Salthe put it sort of neatly—‘An indefinite number of unique individuals can exist in a finite material world if they are nested within each other and that world is expanding.’ ”

  “Nested within each other,” I repeated, thinking about it. “Yeah, I get it. Like the Old Earth bacteria in our gut, and the paramecia we’ve dragged into space, and the other cells in our bodies … more worlds, more people … yeah.”

  “The trick is more people,” said Aenea. “We have hundreds of billions, but between the Fall and the Pax, the actual human population in the galaxy—not count
ing Ousters—has leveled off in the last few hundred years.”

  “Well, birth control is important,” I said, repeating what everyone on Hyperion had been taught. “I mean, especially with the cruciform capable of keeping people alive for centuries and centuries …”

  “Exactly,” said Aenea. “With artificial immortality comes more stagnation … physical and cultural. It’s a given.”

  I frowned. “But that’s not a reason to deny people the chance for extended life, is it?”

  Aenea’s voice seemed remote, as if she were contemplating something much larger. “No,” she said at last, “not in itself.”

  “What are the evolutionary directions?” I asked, seeing the red pagoda come closer above us and praying that the conversation would keep my mind off collapsing, rolling back down the twenty-some thousand steps we had climbed.

  “Just three more worth mentioning,” said Aenea. “Increasing specialization, increasing codependency, and increasing evolvability. All of these are really important, but the last is most so.”

  “How do you mean, kiddo?”

  “I mean that evolution itself evolves. It has to. Evolvability is in itself an inherited survival trait. Systems—living and otherwise—have to learn how to evolve and, to some extent, control the direction and rate of their own evolution. We … I mean the human species … were on the verge of doing that a thousand years ago, and the Core took it away from us. At least from most of us.”

  “What do you mean, ‘most of us’?”

  “I promise that you’ll see in a few days, Raul.”

  We reached the South Gate of Heaven and passed through its arched entry, a red arch under a golden pagoda roof. Beyond it was the Heavenly Way, a gentle slope that ran to the summit that was just visible. The Heavenly Way was nothing more than path on bare, black rock. We could have been walking on an airless moon like Old Earth’s—the conditions here were about as amenable to life. I started to say something to Aenea about this being a niche that life hadn’t stuck its foot into, when she led the way off the path to a small stone temple set in among the sharp crags and fissures a few hundred meters below the summit. There was an air lock that looked so ancient it appeared to have come out on one of the earliest seedships. Amazingly, it worked when she activated the press pad and the three of us stood in it until it cycled and the inner door opened. We stepped inside.