by Dan Simmons
“That’s because we didn’t have the one thing that allowed the post-humans to make their breakthrough,” said Orphu of Io and paused. Everyone waited. Mahnmut knew that his friend was enjoying the moment.
“The million human bodies, minds, memories, and personalities that were stored as digital data in their orbital memory satellites,” said Orphu. His deep voice was triumphant, as if he’d solved some long-pondered mathematical conundrum.
“I don’t get it,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo.
Orphu’s radar flickered over all of them, a feathery touch on the electromagnetic spectrum. Mahnmut thought that his friend was waiting for their reactions, perhaps for their shouts of approval. No one moved or spoke.
“I don’t get it either,” said Mahnmut.
“What is the human brain?” Orphu asked rhetorically. “I mean, all of us moravecs have a piece of one. What is it like? How does it work? Like the binary or DNA computers we also carry around for thinking purposes?”
“No,” said Cho Li. “We know that the human brain is not like a computer, neither is it a chemical memory machine the way the Lost Era human scientists believed. The human brain…the mind…is a quantum-state holistic standing wavefront.”
“Exactly!” cried Orphu. “The post-humans used this intimate understanding of the human mind to perfect their Brane Holes, time travel, and quantum teleportation.”
“I still don’t see how,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
“Think about how quantum teleportation works,” said Orphu. “Cho, you can explain that better than I can.”
The Callistan rumbled and then modulated the rumbles into words. “The early experiments in quantum teleportation—done by old-style humans in ancient times, as far back as the Twentieth Century A.D.—worked by producing entangled pairs of photons—and teleporting one of the pair—or actually by teleporting the complete quantum state of that proton—while transmitting the Bell-state analysis of the second photon through regular subliminal channels.”
“Doesn’t that violate Heisenberg’s principle and Einstein’s speed-of-light restrictions?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo, who, like Mahnmut, had obviously not been briefed on the mechanisms by which the gods on Mars’ Olympus Mons QT’d to Ilium.
“No,” said Cho Li. “Teleported photons carried no information with them when they moved instantaneously from place to place in this universe—not even information about their own quantum state.”
“So quantum teleported photons are useless,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “At least for communication purposes.”
“Not quite,” said Cho Li. “The recipient of a teleported photon had a one-in-four chance of guessing its quantum state—the quantum photon had only that many possibilities—and, by guessing, utilizing the quantum bits of data. These are called qubits and we’ve successfully used them for instantaneous comm purposes.”
Mahnmut shook his head. “How do we get from quantum-state photons carrying no information to the Greek gods quantum teleporting to Troy?”
“The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream,” intoned Orphu of Io. “He awoke and found it truth. John Keats.”
“Could you try to be more cryptic?” Suma IV asked caustically.
“I could try,” said Orphu.
“What does the poet John Keats have to do with quantum teleportation and the reason for the current quantum crisis?” asked Mahnmut.
“I suggest that the post-humans made their breakthrough in Brane Holes and quantum teleportation more than a millennium and a half ago precisely because of their intimate knowledge of the holistic quantum nature of human consciousness,” said the Ionian, his voice serious now.
“I’ve run some prelimary studies on the ship’s quantum computer,” Orphu continued, “and when you represent human consciousness as the standing wavefront phenomenon it really is, factor in terabytes of qubit quantum date on the wavefront basis for physical reality itself, apply the proper relativistic Coulomb field transforms to these mind-consciousness-reality wave functions, you quickly see how the post-humans opened Brane Holes to new universes and then teleported there themselves.”
“How?” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
“They first opened Brane Holes to alternate universes in which there were points in space-time where entangled-pair wavefronts of human consciousness had already been,” said Orphu.
“Huh?” said Mahnmut.
“What is reality except a standing quantum wavefront collapsing through probability states?” asked Orphu. “How does the human mind work except as a sort of interferometer perceiving and collapsing those very wavefronts?”
Mahnmut still shook his head. He’d forgotten about the other moravecs standing on the bridge, forgotten that they might be taking his sub and the dropship down to Earth in less than three hours, forgotten the danger they were in…forgotten everything except the headache that his friend Orphu of Io was giving him.
“The post-humans were opening Brane Holes into alternate universes that had come into being through—or at least been perceived by—the focused lenses of pre-existing holographic wavefronts. Human imagination. Human genius.”
“Oh for the Christ’s sake,” said General Beh bin Adee.
“Possibly,” said Orphu. “If you assume an infinite or near-infinite set of alternate universes, then many of these have necessarily been imagined through the sheer force of human genius. Picture them as singularities of genius—Bell-state analyzers and editors of the pure quantum-foam of reality.”
“That’s metaphysics,” said Cho Li in a shocked voice.
“That’s bullshit,” said Suma IV.
“No, that’s what’s happened here,” said Orphu. “We have a terraformed Mars with altered gravity and are asked to believe that such terraforming could be achieved in a few years. That’s bullshit. We have statues of Prospero on a Mars where Greek gods live atop Mount Olympos and commute through time and space to an alternate Earth where Achilles and Hector are fighting over the future of Ilium. That’s bullshit. Unless…”
“Unless the post-humans opened portals to precisely those worlds and universes earlier imagined by the force of human genius,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “Which would explain the Prospero statues, the Calibanish creatures on Earth, and the existence of Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon and all the other humans on Ilium-Earth.”
“What about the Greek gods?” sneered Beh bin Adee. “Are we going to meet Jehovah and Buddha next?”
“We might,” said Orphu of Io. “But I would suggest that the Olympian gods we met are transformed post-humans. That’s where the post-humans disappeared to fourteen hundred years ago.”
“Why would they choose to change into gods?” asked Retrograde Sinopessen. “Especially gods whose powers come from nanotechnology and quantum tricks?”
“Why would they not?” asked Orphu. “Immortality, choice of gender, sex with each other and any mortal they choose to mate with, breeding many divine and mortal offspring—which is something the post-humans could not seem to do on their own—not to mention the decade-long chess game that is the siege of Troy.”
Mahnmut rubbed his head. “And the terraforming and gravity change on Mars…”
“Yes,” said Orphu. “It probably took the larger part of fourteen hundred years, not three years. And that was with the gods’ quantum technology at work.”
“So there’s a real Prospero down there or out there somewhere?” asked Mahnmut. “The Prospero from Shakespeare’s Tempest?”
“Or something or someone close to it,” said Orphu.
“What about the brain-monster that came through the Brane Hole on Earth just a few days ago?” asked Suma IV. The Ganymedan sounded angry. “Is it a hero in your precious human literature?”
“Possibly,” said Orphu. “Robert Browning once wrote a poem called ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ in which the monster Caliban from Shakespeare’s Tempest ponders his god, a creature called Setebos, which Bro
wning had Caliban describe only as ‘the many-handed as a cuttlefish.’ It was a god of arbitrary power that fed on fear and violence.”
“That’s quite a reach in speculation,” said Asteague/Che.
“Yes,” said Orphu. “But so is the creature we photographed that looks like a giant brain scuttling around on giant human hands. An improbable evolution in any universe, wouldn’t you say? But Robert Browning had an impressive imagination.”
“Are we going to meet Hamlet down there on Earth?” asked Suma IV with an audible sneer.
“Oh,” said Mahnmut. “Oh. Oh, that would be nice.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “Orphu, where did you get this whole idea?”
Orphu sighed. Instead of responding verbally, a holographic projector in the comm pod atop the huge Ionian’s pitted and scarred carapace created an image that floated above the chart table.
Six fat books sat in a virtual bookcase. One of the books—Mahnmut saw that it was titled In Search of Lost Time—Volume III—The Guermantes Way—fluttered open to page 445. The image zoomed in on the type on the page.
Mahnmut suddenly realized that Orphu was optically blind—he couldn’t see what he was projecting. It meant that he had to have all of Proust’s six volumes memorized. The idea made Mahnmut want to howl.
Mahnmut read along with the others as the font floated in midair—
”People of taste tell us nowadays that Renoir is a great eighteenth-century painter. But in so saying they forget the element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even at the height of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter or the original writer proceeds on the lines of the oculist. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always pleasant. When it is at an end the practitioner says to us: ‘Now look!’ And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we formerly saw, because they are Renoirs, those Renoirs we persistently refused to see as women. The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky; we feel tempted to go for a walk in the forest which is identical with the one which when we first saw it looked like anything in the world except a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable hues but lacking precisely the hues peculiar to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter or writer of original talent.”
All the moravecs by the chart table stood in silence, broken only by the ventilator hums, machine sounds, and soft background communication of the moravecs actually flying the Queen Mab at that critical moment as they approached the equatorial and polar rings of Earth.
Finally General Beh bin Adee broke the silence—“What solipsistic nonsense. What metaphysical garbage. What total horse manure.”
Orphu said nothing.
“Perhaps it is horse manure,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “But it’s the most plausible horse manure I’ve heard in the last nine months of surreality. And it’s earned Orphu of Io a ride in the hold of the submersible The Dark Lady when the dropship separates and drops into the Earth’s atmosphere in…two hours and fourteen minutes. Let us all go prepare.”
Orphu and Mahnmut were heading for the elevator—Mahnmut walking in a sort of daze, the huge Orphu floating silently on his repel-lors—when Asteague/Che called out, “Orphu!”
The Ionian swiveled and waited, politely aiming his dead cameras and eye-stalks at the Prime Integrator.
“You were going to tell us who the Voice is that we rendezvous with today.”
“Oh, well…” Mahnmut’s friend sounded embarrassed for the first time. “That’s just a guess.”
“Share it,” said Asteague/Che.
“Well, given my little theory,” said Orphu, “who would demand in a female voice to see our passenger—Odysseus, son of Laertes?”
“Santa Claus?” suggested General bin Adee.
“Not quite,” said Orphu. “Calypso.”
None of the moravecs seemed to recognize the name.
“Or from the universe our other new friends came from,” continued Orphu, “the enchantress also known as Circe.”
62
Harman had drowned but was not dead. In a few minutes he would wish he were dead.
The water—the golden fluid—filling the dodecahedral crystal cabinet was hyperoxygenated. As soon as his lungs completely filled, oxygen began moving through the thin-walled capillaries of his lungs and reentering his bloodstream. It was enough to keep his heart beating—start beating again, one should say, since it had skipped beats and stopped for half a minute during his drowning process—and enough to keep his brain alive…dulled, terrified, seemingly disconnected from his body, but alive. He could not breathe in, his instincts still cried out for air, but his body was getting oxygen.
Opening his eyes was a huge struggle and all it rewarded him with was a swirling vision of a billion golden words and ten billion throbbing images waiting to be born in his brain. He was vaguely aware of the six-sided glass panel of the flooded crystal cabinet and of a blurrier shape beyond which might have been Moira, or perhaps Prospero, or even Ariel, but these things were not important.
He still wanted to breathe air the correct way. If he had not been only semiconscious—tranquilized by the liquid in preparation for the transfer—his gag reflex alone would probably have killed him or driven him insane.
But the crystal cabinet reserved other means for driving him insane.
The information began pouring into Harman now. Information, Moira and Prospero had said, from a million old books. Words and thoughts from almost a million long-dead minds, more, because every book contained multitudes of other minds in its arguments, its refutations, its fervent agreements, its furious revisions and rebellions.
Information began to pour in, but it was like nothing Harman had ever felt or experienced before. He had taught himself to read over many decades, becoming the first old-style human being in uncounted centuries to make sense of the squiggles and curves and dots in the old books moldering away on shelves everywhere. But words from a book flow into the mind in a linear fashion at the pace of conversation—Harman had always heard a voice not quite his own reading each word aloud in his own mind after he learned to read. Sigling was a more rapid but less effective way to absorb a book—the nanotech function flowed the data from books down one’s arms into the brain like coal being shoveled into a hopper, without the slow pleasure and context of reading. And after sigling a book, Harman always found that some new data had arrived, but much of the meaning of the book had been lost due to absence of nuance and context. He never heard a voice in his head when sigling and often wondered if it had been designed as a function for old-styles in the Lost Era to absorb tables of dry information, packets of predigested data. Sigling was not the way to read a novel or a Shakespearean play—although the first Shakespearean play Harman had encountered was an amazing and moving piece called Romeo and Juliet. Until Harman had read Romeo and Juliet, he’d not known that such a thing as a “play” existed—his people’s only form of fictional entertainment had been the turin drama about the siege of Troy, and that only for the past decade.
But while reading was a slow, linear flow and sigling was like a sudden tickling of the brain that left a residue of information behind, this crystal cabinet was…
The Maiden caught me in the Wild
Where I was dancing merrily
She put me into her Cabinet
And locked me up with a golden Key
This information Harman was receiving was not entering through his eyes, ears, or any of the other human senses nature had evolved to bring data to the nerves and brain. It was not—strictl
y speaking—passing into him through touch, although the billion-billion pinpricks of information in the golden liquid passed through each pore of his skin and each cell of his flesh.
DNA, Harman knew now, likes the standard double helix model. Evolution had chosen the double helix for a variety of reasons to carry its most sacred cargo, but primarily because it was the easiest and most effective way for free energy to flow—forward or back—as that energy determines the folds, joins, forms, and function of such gigantic molecules as proteins, RNA, and DNA. Chemical systems always move toward the state of lowest free energy, and free energy is minimized when two complementary strands of nucleotides pair up like a double Shaker staircase.
But the post-humans who had redesigned the hardware and software of Harman’s branch of the old-style human genome had redesigned a sizeable percentage of the redundant DNA in his decanted species’ bodies. Instead of right-handed twisting B-DNA, the post-humans had set in place left-handed Z-DNA double helixes of the usual size, about two nanometers in diameter. They used these ZDNA molecules as keystones, lifting from them a scaffolding of more complex DNA helixes such as double-crossover molecules, tying these ropes of DX DNA together into leakproof protein cages. Within those billions upon billions of scaffolded protein cages deep within Harman’s bones, muscle fibers, gut tissue, testicles, toes, and hair follicles were biological reception and organizing macromolecules serving still more complex caged clusters of nanoelectronic organic memory storage clusters.
Harman’s entire body—every cell—was eating the Taj Moira’s library of a million volumes.
The Cabinet is formed of Gold
And Pearl & Crystal shining bright
And within it opens into a World
And a little lovely Moony Night