Sol Gursky flew to an eye of gravitational stability in the flux and activated the worm-hole nodes seeded throughout his diamond skin. Space opened and folded like an exercise in origami. Sol Gursky went elsewhere.
The starbird grazed the energy-dense borderlands of the central accretion disc. It was immense. Sol’s Statue of Liberty was a frond of one of its thousand flight feathers, but it sensed him, welcomed him, folded its wings around him as it drew him to the shifting pattern of sun-spots that was the soul of its being.
He knew these patterns. He remembered these emotional flavors. He recalled this love. He tried to perceive if it were her, her journeys, her trials, her experiences, her agonies, her vastenings.
Would she forgive him?
The soul spots opened. Solomon Gursky was drawn inside. Clouds of tectors interpenetrated, exchanging, sharing, recording. Intellectual intercourse.
He entered her adventures among alien species five times older than Pan-Humanity, an alliance of wills and powers waking a galaxy to life. In an earlier incarnation, he walked the worlds she had become, passed through the dynasties and races and species she had propagated. He made with her the long crossings between stars and clusters, clusters and galaxies. Earlier still, and he swam with her through the cloud canyons of a gas giant world called Urizen, and when that world was hugged too warmly by its sun, changed mode with her, embarked with her on the search for new places to live.
In the nakedness of their communion, there was no hiding Sol Gursky’s despair.
I’m sorry Sol, the starbird once known as Lenya communicated.
You have nothing to sorry be for, Solomon Gursky said.
I’m sorry that I’m not her. I’m sorry I never was her.
I made you to be a lover, Sol withspoke. But you became something older, something richer, something we have lost.
A daughter, Lenya said.
Unmeasurable time passed in the blue shift at the end of the universe. Then Lenya asked, Where will you go?
Finding her is the only unfinished business I have left, Sol said.
Yes, the starbird communed. But we will not meet again.
No, not in this universe.
Nor any other. And that is death, eternal separation.
My unending regret, Sol Gursky withspoke as Lenya opened her heart and the clouds of tectors separated. Good bye, daughter.
The Statue of Liberty disengaged from the body of the starbird. Lenya’s quantum processors created a pool of gravitational calm in the maelstrom. Sol Gursky manipulated space and time and disappeared.
He re-entered the continuum as close as he dared to a frond. A pulse of his mind brought him within reach of its dendrites. As they drew him in, another throb of thought dissolved the Statue of Liberty joke into the plasma flux. Solomon Gursky howled up the dendrite, through the frond, into the soul matrix of Ua. There he carved a niche in the eleventh and highest heaven, and from deep under time, watched the universe end.
As he had expected, it ended in fire and light and glory. He saw space and time curve inward beyond the limit of the Planck dimensions; he felt the energy gradients climb toward infinity as the universe approached the zero-point from which it had spontaneously emerged. He felt the universal processors sown through eleven dimensions seize that energy before it faded, and put it to work. It was a surge, a spurt of power and passion, like the memory of orgasm buried deep in the chain of memory that was the days of Solomon Gursky. Light to power, power to memory, memory to flesh. Ua’s stored memories, the history of every particle in the former universe, were woven into being. Smart superstrings rolled balls of wrapped eleven-space like sacred scarabs wheeling dung. Space, time, mass, energy unraveled; as the universe died in a quantum fluctuation, it was reborn in primal light.
To Solomon Gursky, waiting in low-time where aeons were breaths, it seemed like creation by fiat. A brief, bright light, and galaxies, clusters, stars, turned whole-formed and living within his contemplation. Already personas were swarming out of Ua’s honeycomb cells into time and incarnation, but what had been reborn was not a universe, but universes. The re-resurrected were not condemned to blindly recapitulate their former lives. Each choice and action that diverged from the original pattern splintered off a separate universe. Sol and Lenya had spoken truly when they had said they would never meet again. Sol’s point of entry into the new polyverse was a thousand years before Lenya’s; the universe he intended to create would never intersect with hers.
The elder races had already fanned the polyverse into a mille feuille of alternatives: Sol carefully tracked his own timeline through the blur of possibilities as the first humans dropped back into their planet’s past. Stars moving into remembered constellations warned Sol that his emergence was only a few hundreds of thousands of years off. He moved down through dimensional matrices, at each level drawing closer to the time flow of his particular universe.
Solomon Gursky hung over the spinning planet. Civilizations rose and decayed, empires conquered and crumbled. New technologies, new continents, new nations were discovered. All the time, alternative Earths fluttered away like torn-off calendar pages on the wind as the dead created new universes to colonize. Close now. Mere moments. Sol dropped into meat time, and Ua expelled him like a drop of milk from a swollen breast.
Solomon Gursky fell. Illusions and anticipations accompanied his return to flesh. Imaginings of light; a contrail angel scoring the nightward half of the planet on its flight across a dark ocean to a shore, to a mountain, to a valley, to a glow of campfire among night-blooming cacti. Longing. Desire. Fear. Gain, and loss. God’s trade: to attain the heart’s desire, you must give up everything you are. Even the memory.
In the quilted bag by the fire in the sheltered valley under the perfume of the cactus flowers, the man called Solomon Gursky woke with a sudden chill start. It was night. It was dark. Desert stars had half-completed their compass above him. The stone-circled fire had burned down to clinking red glow: the night perfume witched him. Moths padded softly through the air, seeking nectar.
Sol Gursky drank five senses full of his world.
I am alive, he thought. I am here. Again.
Ur-light burned in his hind-brain; memories of Ua, a power like omnipotence. Memories of a life that out-lived its native universe. Worlds, suns, shapes. Flashes, moments. Too heavy, too rich for this small knot of brain to hold. Too bright: no one can live with the memory of having been a god. It would fade—it was fading already. All he need hold—all he must hold—was what he needed to prevent this universe from following its predestined course.
The realization that eyes were watching him was a shock. Elena sat on the edge of the fire shadow, knees folded to chin, arms folded over shins, looking at him. Sol had the feeling that she had been looking at him without him knowing for a long time, and the surprise, the uneasiness of knowing you are under the eyes of another, tempered both the still-new lust he felt for her, and his fading memories of aeons-old love.
Deéjà vu. But this moment had never happened before. The divergence was beginning.
“Can’t sleep?” she asked.
“I had the strangest dream.”
“Tell me.” The thing between them was at the stage where they searched each other’s dreams for allusions to their love.
“I dreamed that the world ended,” Sol Gursky said. “It ended in light, and the light was like the light in a movie projector, that carried the image of the world and everything in it, and so the world was created again, as it had been before.”