“A small thing and perhaps impossible,” Heagran replies. “I know that we travel across immense spaces and that what we call the Companions are limitless in number. In such voyages, is it conceivable that we will ever again approach the new home of my people, to see how they fare?”
“I’m not sure.” Margaret’s brow has the so-human line of preoccupation, Heagren might have been asking her for a tricky computation. “Space, yes, and there is the factor of time. I believe we can mark the world you select, and return to it. But the time-lapse may be many generations of lives on that world.”
“We can ask no more.” The huge old being’s image colors a lilac so beautiful it seems to need no translation, and he vanishes away.
Margaret-the-human-woman remains gazing at the place where Heagran’s form had been.
“A new Task must be found soon,” she says quietly, whether to herself or Dann. “We feel the need. I begin to understand our powers and constraints. But I alone have not the vision to do more than the original program of transporting endangered peoples. After we put his people down on their new world it will be time. “She turns a perfectly normal, purposeful face on Dann. “Ask among the others, my old friend. See what visions they have.”
It could be a young committeewoman asking for ideas. Only the profile in the starry dimensions behind her warns him that the “ideas” will not be of any Earthly mode.
“Yes.”
And he is alone again, his brain whirling. Transporting endangered peoples—using the powers of time to revive lost races—choosing among alternative evolutions for whole planets—perhaps intercepting stellar armadas, or seeking ultimate unknowns—Daniel Dann’s human mind blooms with visions, his long-dead imagination stirs, shedding off rusty sparks.
Reality has already come unhinged, unrooted to sense or time or place. Now it seems it is about to take flight entirely, undergo transmogrification to undreamt-of realms.
And is it possible that he, whose life has all but ended so many times, he who was for so long an automaton of pain and Earthly ignominy, he the utterly inconsequential, randomly selected, unqualified—except for that gift he shrinks to use—is it possible that he will be witness to such wonders? Will he come to accept them? “Today we rejuvenate a sun. Tomorrow we give a species the terrible boon of self-conscious intellect.”
Incredible. Impossible.
But, apparently, slowly about to begin to happen.
And—for how long?-How long will it go on?
With that, the deepest, most dire and secret shudder of all shakes him. Dann allows consciousness at last to the word that has been working its unadmitted ferment in the bottom of his souclass="underline" FOREVER.
Immortality?
Yes, or something very like it. At the least, a time measured not in years or lifetimes but astral epochs. Nothing here changes, has changed, apparently will change or run down for millennia. The mysterious cold energies that sustain them have cycled, it appears, for stellar lifetimes. There seems no reason they should not continue to an approximation of eternity.
An eternity of unimaginable projects? Yes—and an eternity too of Waxman’s young voice, of Heagran’s sublimity, of Frodo’s grief and Tivonel’s laugh and Giadoc’s persistent How and Why and What, and all the rest of it. The trivial, ineluctably finite living bases of their unreal lives loom up before him like an endless desert to be traversed on foot, under a sky raining splendor. The close-up limiting frame around the view of infinity.
Can we take it? Will we go mad?
Heagran has said they will all change, he reflects. Perhaps the constant mind-touching will merge them gradually, affect even Margaret. Perhaps we will become like one big multifaceted person, maybe that will be the solution. Or maybe the fused minds will be incompatible. We could become a hydra-headed psychopath.
But Margaret, he thinks; she’s in control of us all, really. She could do something, put us out or freeze us if it came to that. But then she would be alone forever. Hurt strikes the node of nothing that had been his heart. For her sake we must, I must, stay sane. Hang on. Maybe it will be great, a supernally joyous life.
But—eternity? A cold elation and foreboding mingle in his mind.
What have I learned, he wonders. Voyager between worlds, I have been privileged beyond mortal man. I have met an alien race, I have encountered endless unknown things. What great changes has all this wrought in me? What transformations have I suffered to make me worthy of a place in such a drama? To witness, perhaps participate in the fates of worlds? To enjoy something like immortal life? What great contribution will I make to the symbiosis?
Nothing, he reflects wryly. Not one tangible thing.
I have only what I had before, a little specialized knowledge of the workings of bodies we no longer possess. Beyond that, only my old compound of depressive sympathy and skepticism about brave new claims, however appealing. If we actually meet Jehovah or Allah or Vishnu out here I would still take my stand on the second law of thermodynamics.
What in the name of life can make mine worthy of such perpetuation? What do I ever learn but the same old lessons—that people are people, that pain is bad; that good is too often allied with vulnerability and evil with power. That absolutes are absolutely dangerous: Bethink ye, my lords, ye may be mistaken. That one can do ill in the name of doing well, and error buggers up the best laid plans. That even the greatest good of the greatest number is no safeguard—Tyree was burned because it was in the path of the destruction that saved a galaxy.
I don’t know a single distinguished philosophy, he thinks, except perhaps my respect for Bacon’s Great Machine. Or wait—Spinoza, when he changed one word in the ecclesiastical definition of truth. The Church called it the “recognition of necessity.” Spinoza called it the “discovery of necessity,” and for that they persecuted him because it undermined all authority.
But what new great necessities have I discovered, beyond the old necessity of kindness? And, he thinks, I am apt to be slow to discover any in this future which seems all too unconstrained. Some great thinker should be here in my place. Waxman with his boyish fervors about new modes of consciousness is more deserving of this life than I.
I’m not going to be reborn as the embryo of humanity transcendent in the cosmos. I’ll just be me.
As he has been thinking these bleak thoughts beneath the radiant processions of suns within the nucleus, a small presence has come quietly close to him.
It is the child, he sees, seeming younger than usual; that incarnation of Margaret which perhaps holds all her unscarred wonder and delight. Ordinarily they rarely touch. But such is his distress now that his hand goes out unthinkingly and strokes her thin shoulder. She does not move away but turns on him a smile of elfin beauty.
As he looks down into her large eyes his worries fade somewhat. Even his lack of intellectual grandeur seems less important.
Well, he thinks, there is one thing I can do, do always. Even if it comes to eternity, I will still have that. He is almost sure of it, knows it beyond reason.
No matter how long the future stretches or what it holds, he will carry into it his love.
Chapter 28
Tivonel, bright spirit from the winds of Tyree, is still on her life-way although in dark and surpassing strangeness among the stars. The energy-configuration that is her essence glides from point to point in the vastness of the Destroyer—no, we have to call it the Saver now, she thinks—with the skill with which her winged body had once breasted Tyree’s gales.