But like glaciers in an ocean, all was thought; all substances were one. The same water moves through the system, whether it slowly melts from glaciers, floats as evaporated cloud, falls as rain, or washes as sea across the glacier to freeze to ice again. All was simply one, like water; all was intricately complex, like the dance of a billion water-droplets in an hydrosystem.
The hours and days it took for one thought to go from Neptune to the sun and back were the same, to the Transcendence, as the picoseconds of the Sophotech thoughts sliding across wave barriers in their sub-molecular electrophotonic latticeworks. Likewise, the slumbering thoughts tumbling through the brains of slow, slow men, with their ponderous plod of neuro-electric charge, the heavy movements from axon to dendrite, were part of the same dance, the same tapestry, the same clear sea as all the Transcendence.
All were joined in the effort to think.
Like a surprised child still half-asleep, groggy with dreams, too tired, far too tired yet, to wake, the Mind of all minds realized it would have to pause (a brief pause, to a mind such as it was, she was, he was, they were) and, in another thousand years, strain yet again, to reach out as if with arms of titanic fire, to grasp the bright universe, and yet to find its arms too small, far too small; and yet to smile at the boldness of the attempt, and to cherish what real good the attempt produced.
Partial expressions of the unrealized oneness, like the jeweled complexity of snowflakes, played across the myriad minds and overminds of the One Mind. The Transcendence was delighted with the reflections, the slivers of cool insight, the simple clarity and unity a new perspective gave, and laughed, like a child at a fun-house mirror, at the distortions imposed on each other partial expression, when any partial expression was treated as if it were whole, extending, by analogy, to areas where it was not apt. But in that mirror-play, that wild game of mathematics and poetry, new thoughts, fresh as virgin snow, appeared, and like old friends in a masquerade, ancient insight took on new guises; for even inadequate expressions had a resonance with each other-surface similarities, haunting likenesses, hints of underlying patterns, allusions of design. Like a crystal bell that sets all of her sister bells to chiming with the sweetness of her perfect note, the shattered fragments of the partial expressions rang throughout the universe of thought.
The Transcendence was, at once, aware of the universe, and the universe was ultimately simple, infinitely complex. It was aware, at once, of the littlest of things and of the greatest, of their underlying unity and resplendent divarication. As if in a single instant of time, it saw the growth of life in the universe, and the ultimate ending or things. As if in a long, slow eon of history, it saw the death and rebirth of the Nothing Machine, one microsecond of dissolving singularity accomplished over many years of subjective time; and a change of mind that time could not measure.
And as the Transcendence was dying, dissolving, ending, it paused. For a brief moment, like a game played out in the evening when the work of the day was done, it paused. Or like the dreamy sigh when a reader, profoundly moved, closes the last page of a great book, unwilling to put the book down, lingers to think on the echo of the final words in his imagination, it paused. In that pause, the Transcendence accomplished the little matters that the participating individual minds, ironically, thought of as the main business of the Transcendence.
The Transcendence, as if smiling gently at its own shortsightedness, reviewed all the courses of action since the last Transcendence, from what seemed (to it) a moment ago; examined every thought and dream of all machinekind and, as an afterthought, mankind as well; established harmonies, priorities, reconciliations; rewarded virtue with joyful clarity of understanding and punished vice with terrible clarity of understanding, so that each act rewarded or confessed itself; fanned through the various dreams of the future, and seeing what every one of which it was composed desired, and balancing that against what they ought to desire, and taking into account the uncertainties, the limitations, and the costs of each possible future, reviewed, judged, dreamed, smiled sadly, and chose one. Knowing full well it would not come true quite as anyone expected, and knowing as well that to fail to choose was the worst choice, the Transcendence examined the futures, and chose one.
Fourth and finally, the Transcendence was aware how it would be remembered, later, only in fragments, by each little part of itself, herself, himself, themselves: the Sophotechs, the mass-minds, the Warlocks and Invariants and other humans, each, later, would know a different truth, and distort, amusingly, grossly, those parts it did not know.
Those memories, of course, could be, within the limits allowed by law and propriety, adjusted, woven, played with, emphasized, ignored, adorned, so that maybe, just maybe, there would be a little more harmony, a little less meaninglessness, and a little more happiness, a little less illogic, running through the souls of machine and man until the next time the Transcendence stirred in its mighty sleep, and tried to rise, and attempted the great work of cherishing the universe, and of healing the wide, strange breach between matter and meaning, between love of life and the victory of entropy.
Why do it? Thinking was such hard work, after all.
But thinking was better than nothing.
The Transcendence was aware how the poor, silly Sophotechs would recall all this. They would remember the structure of it all, the logic, the surface meanings, and miss the essence, the form. They would know, but would not experience. So wise themselves, they would be the least affected by the Transcendence. It was not so very different from their normal state of mind. Since the memories would affect them least, in a sense, they would remember the least.
This is what the Earthmind was fated to remember:
As if in a single instant of time, she saw the growth of life within the cosmos, its blind but beautiful striving for more life, and saw as well the sad (but comforting) victory of entropy, the inevitable ending of all things. The sorrow of existence filled the vision with joy; the joy filled it with sorrow.
Why joy? Because to exist was better than not to exist.
Why sorrow? Because to exist is to have identity; to have identity means one is what one is and one is not what one is not; which means, to have causes and consequences, pain and pleasure, experiences and cessation. To exist means to exist within a context. To be defined. To be finite.
Finite things had only finite utility. It meant happiness could only be finite. By the same token, finite pain meant no torment was permanent.
The Final Expression that the Transcendence attempted was more than merely a Grand Theorem to explain all material and energetic phenomena. This Fi-nal Expression must express both that which expresses and that which is expressed. It must explain mental as well as physical existence, subjective as well as objective. The Scientist, perhaps, need not form theories to explain the presence of the scientist; the Philosopher has no such luxury. He can explain the universe fully only when he can explain himself; and part of the ex-planation must tell why he must explain himself.
But above all, the Final Expression must be self-consistent. There were, ultimately, no paradoxes in reality.
The Earthmind saw, at once, both the inevitability of the grand conflict between those who affirm the joys and sorrows of existence and those who deny; saw the war between those who acknowledge reality, logic, and goodness and those who make themselves ignorant; and she saw the tragic simplicity with which all that conflict could have been avoided, could be avoided hereafter.