Shells within shells. And beyond the skin of her ship, more layers still.
Plato and his peers envisioned a cosmos consisting of perfect, crystal spheres, on which rode planets and the stars. A more comforting image, perhaps, than our modern concept-a roiling expanse spanning tens of billions of light-years.
With her percept expanded by the ship’s wide-gazing sensors, Tor felt awash in clusters and nebulae, as if the stars were flickering dots of phosphorescent plankton in a great sea. And, once again, she felt drawn to wonder.
What happened out here, so long ago?
What’s going on out there, right now?
She felt haunted by the story that small hands chiseled into the Rosetta Wall. Though some parts seemed clear, the rock mural’s core eluded understanding. Scenes that portrayed strange, machinelike beings, doing incomprehensible things. Tor suspected some parts of the puzzle no archaeologist or smart-mob-biological or cybernetic-would ever decipher.
We’re like lungfish, climbing ashore long after the continents were claimed by others. Blinking in confusion, we stare across a beach that looks devastated. Surrounding us are skeletons, from those who came earlier.
But they’re not all dead or gone, those who emerged before us.
There are footprints in the sand.
The Wall testified to a time when simple, naive rules gave way. Machines changed. Evolved.
We’ll learn much from studying the wrecks we find out here. But we’d better remember-those corpses were the losers!
The carvings also depicted something else-the plague of fomite viroids, portrayed as little packets of peril, crisscrossing the Rosetta Wall. Infecting. Enticing. Replicating and spreading.
Facing all this, should a sensible lungfish scoot back underwater? Surely, that path to safety was chosen by many races. To cower. To live in shabby, feudal nostalgia, praying to heaven while ignoring the sky. But hunkering also means declining to irrelevance. Existing, not thriving, while using up a single, fragile world.
Like it or not, that won’t be our way. Whatever was deciphered from ruins of the past, men and women couldn’t stay crouched by one tiny fire, terrified of shadows.
An image came to her, of Gavin’s descendants-and hers-forging bravely into a dangerous galaxy. Explorer-machines who had been programmed to be human. Or humans who had turned themselves into starprobes. A maker race blending with its mechanical envoys.
A pattern she had not seen among the rock wall depictions. Because it was doomed from the start? Should we try something else?
What options had a fish, who chose to leave the sea a billion years too late?
Tor blinked. And as her eyelids separated, stars diffracted through a thin film of tears, breaking into rays. Innumerable, they streaked across the dark lens of the galaxy and beyond, spreading a myriad ways. In too many directions. Too many paths to follow.
More than her mind could hold.
PART EIGHT
TO BE…
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
– Richard Brautigan, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
89.
An expanse of cloudy shapes spread in all directions, puffy and throbbing with potentiality. An almost limitless capacity to become.
Rising to consciousness-now alert, aware, interested-he looked around and knew at once; this was no earthly landscape.
Light came from all directions… and none.
Up and down, apparently, were only suggestions.
He wasn’t alone; figures could be seen dimly, through a haze that drank all definition from their moving forms. They might be small and close, or giants moving ponderously, very far away. Or both at once? Somehow, he suspected that could happen in this place.
This… place…
What is all this? How did I get here?
I knew the answer to that, didn’t I?
Once upon a time.
There was something more pertinent. A question they (they?) had said he must ask of himself, each time he awakened here.
Oh, yes.
Who am I?
What is my name?
Letting his gaze settle downward, he looked upon a pair of masculine human hands-my hands-rather large, with long fingers that flexed when he told them to. Manicured nails gleamed. Floppy sleeves covered his arms, part of a robelike garment. Not angels’ robes, he noted with some relief. Terry cloth. Rough and comforting. My old bathrobe.
And I am…?
Words. He spoke them out of reflex, before jerking at how hollow and resonant they sounded in this place.
“Hamish. My name is… Hamish Brookeman.”
Author. Director. Producer. E-tropist. Celebrity confidant of statesmen and the mighty. Beloved of masses. Failed husband. Object of ridicule and devotion. Both hands lifted to stroke his face, finding the texture taut, vibrant, pleasantly youthful. And somehow he knew that he would never have to shave again. Unless he wanted to.
“Oh yes,” Hamish recalled. “I know where I am. What this place is.
“I’m aboard a starship. A crystal emissary, bound for a distant sun.”
The first production run of envoy-capsules would be just ten million, they said. All that could be made on a narrow starting budget, equal to that of a medium-sized nation. All that could be propelled by just one giant laser-launcher, perched in orbit above the moon. Of course, those ten million were the vanguard of enormous numbers to come later, once remaining political and social resistance was finally overcome with relentless persuasion-imaginative, varied, and persistent.
The message carried by this little probe-(it seemed so vast inside!)-was worth all the effort, the expense, the resources, and sacrifices. A message of cautionary warning for other young species. An offer of hope.
Now Hamish recalled the pride, the great honor, of being chosen as one of the first. Not only to upload a version of himself into many tens of thousands of crystal ships, but also when he was invited to come up in person-frail but spry in his nineties-to inspect the first batch of probes, all shiny and new, emerging from humankind’s first giant, automated factory-in-space.
That memory-of being old, with creaky joints and aching bowels, yet lauded with a role at the ribbon cutting-seemed fresh as yesterday. In fact, he remembered everything up to the point, a few days later, when they attached electrodes and told him to relax, assuring him that personality and memory recording almost never hurt.
So, it must have worked.
I was skeptical, in my deepest heart, that any copy of me would ever waken in a virtual world, no matter how thoroughly we tested alien technologies, modifying and revising them with human science. Many of us feared the inhabitants would be just clever simulations. Robaitic automatons, not really self-aware.
But here I am! Who can argue with success?
It was all coming back. Years spent leading a new branch of the Renunciation Movement, fighting an obsolete prophet for control, then guiding the faction in new directions. Making it less a tool of oligarchs, religious troglodytes, and grouchy nostalgists. Transforming it instead into a more aggressive, technologically empowered force. An affiliation combining tens of millions… even hundreds of millions… who wanted science controlled. Guided by wisdom.