Authors: Brian Stableford
As aeons passed, true life—the life of DNA—was
born, a by-product of the creation and destruction of the stars which was the
rhythmic history of the universe itself, the fundamental alchemy of all
things.
Life was not everywhere in the universe; it
had come too late for that. It emerged here and there, and there again. Similar
processes of chemical unfolding produced nearly identical chemistries again and
again in different regions of space. Every time life emerged, it would begin to
spread, its own molecules—organised now into the first primitive cells—discovering
abundant food in the vast clouds ripe for their predation, and discovering in
the light of suns the powerhouses which would drive the motor of their future
growth and evolution.
Eventually, life discovered
worlds:
planets bathing in
the light of suns, whose gravity-wells offered the opportunity for
molecule-systems to congregate very densely, and play their games with an
intimacy and an intensity of competition hitherto unthinkable. Worlds were not
conquered easily, for their surfaces were very violent places, but in the
clouds of gas-giants life often found a refuge, and in the oceans of water
which sometimes surrounded rock-worlds life discovered the most zestful of all
its games, where competition was fiercest of all and the ladder of evolution
reached out to new heights of complexity and cleverness.
It seemed to be only a matter of time—albeit
time measured in billions of years—before life
did
fill the universe,
extending its seeds into every last corner where they might one day grow, so
that it was potentially present in every region where a new sun might be born,
ready to take advantage of whatever opportunities were opened up by the
material system which formed around each coalescing star. There seemed to be
nothing that could inhibit the infinite and eternal extension of the great
game, whose play would become the universal project, the strategy of existence
itself.
There
seemed
to be nothing. . . .
But there was
something.
It was something whose nature I could not
quite grasp. I had to struggle for a way of understanding it. I did not even
know whether it was something that came into being long after the story of life
had begun, or whether it had remained hidden and dormant all the while. Was
it, I wondered, another kind of life, which had its own incompatible game to
play with matter, space, and time? Could it be conceptualised as a force which
was the very antithesis of life—some elemental principle of destruction, or at
least of
deconstruction?
Was it something opposed in essence not
merely to life but even to matter, like the antimatter built of positrons and
antiprotons?
I could not tell, and as I struggled to
understand what message the dream was trying to deliver to my own intelligence,
I felt the perspective shifting from what had seemed (only seemed?) to be a
literal representation into a mythical one, where life became a generative god,
father and mother of all things, while whatever adversary it was that
threatened life became demonic: Satan, Beelzebub, Ahriman, Iblis, Tiamat.
But this mythical framework of
understanding would no more come to a stable and graspable point of resolution
than the cosmological vision had, for simple dualism was quickly hedged with
alternative images and doubts. I caught glimpses of giants which my memory was
quick to name Ymir and Purusha, but they were mere shadows on the cave-wall of
my skull, cast by some inner light that was flickering already under the threat
of being extinguished. They overlapped and all but drowned out a host of other
shadows, some with humanoid form, some with animal form, and some built
from eccentric combinations of the two.
I tried to give names to all the dancing
silhouettes, but it was a hopeless task, because they were already fading away.
I felt like an avatar of Tantalus, condemned to stand beneath the fruit of the
tree of knowledge, but never able to take a bite. I struggled desperately to
find something sensible and meaningful in the chaotic whirl of impressions, but
it was too late.
The communicative bond was shattered. I
woke up. I had one hell of a headache, which was not so much my previous
headache doubled, but my previous headache raised to a new order of magnitude.
I opened my eyes anyway, and found myself
back in the bunk from which I'd fallen. Opposite me, suddenly attentive, was
the scion Urania.
"Please lie still for a few minutes,
Mr. Rousseau," she said, before I could open my mouth to speak. "Your
skull is not fractured, but you were badly concussed. The powers of self-repair
which my sisters awakened in your flesh will preserve you, but you must
rest."
It was one of those occasions when only
cliches will do: "What happened?" I asked, quickly following up with:
"Where are we?"
"A trap was set for us in the
shaft," she said. "I fear that we were careless—we did not think to
investigate the space above the access-point. A heavy mass was dropped shortly
after we began our descent. Fortunately, we were able to release our grip on
one side of the shaft before impact. When the missile hit us, we were already
swinging, and the blow was a glancing one. The extensors which had let go were
able to seize the same side of the shaft as the remainder, so that we were
able to withstand the ripping away of three of the others. Then we resumed our
descent. No one was seriously injured, although 673-Nisreen sustained a broken
arm. He does not have your augmented powers of healing, and the injury will
prove troublesome."
She glanced down as she said it, and I
realised that the Tetron bioscientist must be in the bunk below me. I would
have craned my neck over the edge to catch his eye and say hello, but my head
wasn't quite up to it.
"You are sure that this is me, I
suppose?" I said. "Not something else borrowing my body?"
It was a feeble attempt at humour, but it
was far too near the knuckle. She gave me an anxious, speculative look,
obviously giving the hypothesis serious consideration.
"It's okay," I said, swiftly.
"It really is me. I think the other guy had sole control for a while,
there, but I'm definitely back now. It didn't try to take over. It was trying
to tell me something—to explain what this is all about."
"If you had a further
dream-experience," she said, taking on the interested tone of voice that
her mirror-land parent had adopted in similar circumstances, "I would be
most interested to hear a description of it."
"It was nothing much," I
muttered, sourly. "Just a history lesson. We never got to the end of it,
and I think I was too stupid to get the point anyway. All I'm sure of is that
it was trying to explain to me that there's a war going on—not just in Asgard
but throughout the universe. We already suspected that."
But while I said it, I was wondering. Was
the thing in my brain an independent intelligence, trying to tell me what this
whole affair was all about? Or had the experience been some kind of programme
playing on automatic, on which I'd just happened to eavesdrop? If the latter
was the case, did it mean that the thing inside me wasn't anything like a
person,
but more like a
bundle of non-sentient programmes . . . game-playing programmes? Maybe Tulyar
wasn't so much a victim of demonic possession as an ambulatory automatic pilot:
a zombie lodestone or a golem direction-finder. The possibilities, alas, were
still endless. There were too many names, too many metaphors queued up like
idols in some bizarre marketplace, none of them quite able to grasp the essence
of the problem.
"Oh,
merde"
I said with
feeling. "I think I'd rather not have woken up at all. Do you happen to
know if I finished my supper?"
She handed me a tube and a bladder, both
half-full—or half-empty, if you happen to be of the pessimistic turn of mind. I
took a long pull from the bladder-pack, and felt a little better. The headache
was clearing fast, and I guessed that I'd already been supplied with
medication.
"How long was I out?" I asked.
"According to your measurement,"
she said blandly, "about fifty-two hours."
This was not as much of a shock as it might
have been. Lately, I'd been losing vast chunks of my life right, left, and
centre. If I'd still been condemned to the traditional threescore years and ten
I'd have begun to feel aggrieved, but Myrlin and the Nine had assured me that
their tinkering with my personal biotechnology had increased that potential
many times over. If I were careful, I'd outlive Methuselah. I could afford to
spend a few days in suspended animation every now and again.
The truck rocked slightly, and I became
aware that we were traveling horizontally. During the two days and a bit I'd
missed, we'd obviously had plenty of time to get to the bottom of the shaft,
and for all I knew we might have climbed down another just as long.
I eased myself out of the narrow bunk,
ignoring Urania's painstaking mime of anxious disapproval. Her big brown
monkey-like eyes had no difficulty at all in signifying sadness, but I wasn't
about to be blackmailed into feeling guilty by an accident of anatomy.
I worked my way forward into the cab.
Myrlin was in the driving seat but he wasn't actually driving. The truck was
making its own way, with a little help from the intelligent suitcase resting
on his lap. Susarma Lear was on the other side of the front seat, her left
elbow wedged into a convenient cranny so that she could prop up her face on the
heel of her hand. She was staring moodily out at the way ahead. She looked
round when I moved into the space behind the seats.
"In the Star Force," she said,
"we like to think that we're always ready for action. We do not take fifty-two-hour
naps." But she said it lightly, to let me know that she didn't really mean
it. She had about as much chance of learning to be witty as I had of absorbing
the true Star Force spirit, but at least she was trying.
I looked past her at the landscape that was
dimly illuminated by the headlights. There was nothing much to see— just a sea
of fine sand or dust, silvery grey in colour. It wasn't flat, though its undulations
were shallow. The air seemed to be full of tiny particles shimmering in the
beams of light that preceded us. The truck wasn't making anything like the
speed it should have been, and I guessed that the wheels were sinking into the
dust. We must have been kicking up one hell of a cloud behind us.
"Dead?" I asked, as I eased
myself into a position between Myrlin and Susarma Lear.
"Apparently not," said Myrlin.
"But well on the way," added the
colonel.
They both sounded glum.
"Something wrong?" I asked.
"We're having difficulty following the
trace," Myrlin explained. "The small quantities of organic material
leaked by the other truck seem to be disappearing very quickly. It's possible
that they're simply adhering to particles that are then scattered by the
disturbance of its passage, but I think it more probable that the molecules are
actually being metabolised. We have a bearing, of course, but it is not
certain that the other vehicle will hold a straight course. If it deviates, we
might have difficulty picking up the trail."
"Metabolised?" I queried.
"You mean the dust is full of bacteria?"
"Ninety percent organic," said
Myrlin. "Millions of species in every handful."
"The usual story," said Susarma.
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It's just that this level has no middlemen."
It was a cleverer joke than I'd ever heard her make before, and the first sign
that a bit of me was rubbing off on her.
"Is this the same sort of stuff that
the rings of Uranus are made out of?" I asked. "Has anyone told
Nisreen?"
"He's asleep," said the colonel,
laconically. "Sedated. Got a broken arm."
The truck lurched slightly as it came over
the top of a bigger-than-usual undulation. One of the wheels spun free for a
second or two, but then it got a grip again. The air seemed so thick with the
dust that it was difficult to see where the ground ended and the space above it
began. To say that visibility was poor was an understatement—we might have
been driving through a dense fog. I wondered whether this really was a level
full of the kind of dust that could be found in the gas-clouds where
second-generation stars were found—a sample of the primeval life-system which
seeded the seas of every world where water could exist as a liquid. Who could
tell? Maybe it was a different kind of system altogether—a very old one.
Perhaps metazoan life was only a passing phase which biospheres went through,
and in the end it all came full circle. As Susarma said: ashes to ashes, dust
to dust.