The orchestra leader looked at Solomon Gursky, staff raised to resume the beat. Sol Gursky did not raise the handkerchief. The closest section of Aea was fifteen degrees east, two hundred thousand kilometers out. To Sol Gursky, it was two fingers of sun-lit land, tapering infinitesimally at either end to threads of light. He looked up at the apex, two other brilliant threads spun down beneath the horizon, one behind the Petit Trianon, the other below the roof of the Chapel Royal.
The conductor was still waiting. Instruments pressed to faces, the musicians watched for the cue.
Peacocks shrieked on the lawn. Sol Gursky remembered how irritating the voices of peacocks were, and wished he had not recreated them.
Sol Gursky waved the handkerchief.
A column of white light blazed out of the gravel walk at the top of the steps. The air was a seethe of glowing motes.
An attempt is being made to communicate with us, the Spirit Ring said in a flicker of low-time. Sol Gursky felt information from the Ring crammed into his cerebral cortex: the beam originated from a source of the rim section of the closest section of the artifact. The tectors that created and sustained the Bauble were being reprogrammed. At hyper-velocities, they were manufacturing a construct out of the Earth of Versailles.
The pillar of light dissipated. A human figure stood at the top of the steps: a white Alpha Point male, dressed in Louis XIV style. The man descended the steps into the light of the flambeau bearers. Sol Gursky looked on his face.
Sol Gursky burst into laughter.
“You are very welcome,” he said to his doppelgänger. “Will you join us? The capons will be ready shortly, we can bring you the finest wines available to humanity, and I’m sure the waters of the fountains would be most refreshing to one who has traveled so long and so far.”
“Thank you,” Solomon Gursky said in Solomon Gursky’s voice. “It’s good to find a hospitable reception after a strange journey.”
Sol Gursky nodded to the conductor, who raised his staff, and the petite bande resumed their interrupted gavotte.
Later, on a stone bench by the lake, Sol Gursky said to his doppel, “Your politeness is appreciated, but it really wasn’t necessary for you to don my shape. All this is as much a construction as you are.”
“Why do you think it’s a politeness?” the construct said.
“Why should you choose to wear the shape of Solomon Gursky?”
“Why should I not, if it is my own shape?”
Nereids splashed in the pool, breaking the long reflections of Aea.
“I often wonder how far I reach,” Sol said.
“Further than you can imagine,” Sol II answered. The playing Nereids dived; ripples spread across the pond. The visitor watched the wavelets lap against the stone rim and interfere with each other. “There are others out there, others we never imagined, moving through the dark, very slowly, very silently. I think they may be older than us. They are different from us, very different, and we have now come to the complex plane where our expansions meet.”
“There was a strong probability that they—you—were an alien artifact.”
“I am, and I’m not. I am fully Solomon Gursky, and fully Other. That’s the purpose behind this artifact; that we have reached a point where we either compete, destructively, or join.”
“Seemed a long way to come just for a family reunion,” Solomon Gursky joked. He saw that the doppel laughed, and how it laughed, and why it laughed. He got up from the stone rim of the Nereid pool. “Come with me, talk to me, we have thirty million years of catching up.”
His brother fell in at his side as they walked away from the still water toward the Aea-lit woods.
His story: he had fallen longer than any other seed cast off by the death of Ore. Eight hundred thousand years between wakings, and as he felt the warmth of a new sun seduce his tector systems to the work of transformation, his sensors reported that his was not the sole presence in the system. The brown dwarf toward which he decelerated was being dismantled and converted into an englobement of space habitats.
“Their technology is similar to ours—I think it must be a universal inevitability—but they broke the ties that still bind us to planets long ago,” Sol II said. The woods of Versailles were momentarily darkened as a sky-reef eclipsed Aea. “This is why I think they are older than us: I have never seen their original form—they have no tie to it, we still do; I suspect they no longer remember it. It wasn’t until we fully merged that I was certain that they were not another variant of humanity.”
A hand-cranked wooden carousel stood in a small clearing. The faces of the painted horses were fierce and pathetic in the sky light. Wooden rings hung from iron gibbets around the rim of the carousel; the wooden lances with which the knights hooked down their favors had been gathered in and locked in a closet in the middle of the merry-go-round.
“We endure forever, we engender races, nations, whole ecologies, but we are sterile,” the second Sol said. “We inbreed with ourselves. There is no union of disparities, no coming together, no hybrid energy. With the Others, it was sex. Intercourse. Out of the fusion of ideas and visions and capabilities, we birthed what you see.”
The first Sol Gursky laid his hand on the neck of a painted horse. The carousel was well balanced, the slightest pressure set it turning.
“Why are you here, Sol?” he asked.
“We shared technologies, we learned how to engineer on the quantum level so that field effects can be applied on macroscopic scales. Manipulation of gravity and inertia; non-locality; we can engineer and control quantum worm-holes.”
“Why have you come, Sol?”
“Engineering of alternative time streams; designing and colonizing multiple worlds, hyperspace and hyperdimensional processors. There are more universes than this one for us to explore.”
The wooden horse stopped.
“What do you want, Sol?”
“Join us,” said the other Solomon Gursky. “You always had the vision—we always had the vision, we Solomon Gurskys. Humanity expanding into every possible ecological ruche.”
“Absorption,” Solomon Gursky said. “Assimilation.”
“Unity,” said his brother. “Marriage. Love. Nothing is lost, everything is gained. All you have created here will be stored; that is what I am, a machine for remembering. It’s not annihilation, Sol, don’t fear it; it’s not your self-hood dissolving into some identityless collective. It is you, plus. It is life, cubed. And ultimately, we are one seed, you and I, unnaturally separated. We gain each other.”
If nothing is lost, then you remember what I am remembering, Solomon Gursky I thought. I am remembering a face forgotten for over thirty million years: Rabbi Bertelsmann. A fat, fair, pleasant face, he is talking to his Bar Mitzvah class about God and masturbation. He is saying that God condemned Onan not for the pleasure of his vice, but because he spilled his seed on the ground. He was fruitless, sterile. He kept the gift of life to himself. And I am now God in my own world, and Rabbi B is smilig and saying, masturbation, Sol. It is all just one big jerk-off, seed spilled on the ground, engendering nothing. Pure recreation; recreating yourself endlessly into the future.
He looked at his twin.
“Rabbi Bertelsmann?” Sol Gursky II said.
“Yes,” Sol Gursky I said; then, emphatically, certainly, “Yes!”
Solomon Gursky II’s smile dissolved into motes of light.
All at once, the outer edges of the great tetrahedron kindled with ten million points of diamond light. Sol watched the white beams sweep through the Bauble and understood what it meant, that they could manipulate time and space. Even at light-speed, Aea was too huge for such simultaneity.