Beyond the Farthest Suns (37 page)

Again I feel like clutching my hands to my face and screaming in frustration. Elisaveta—it must mean Elisaveta.

But we were not divorced … not when I was stored!

I sit in my imagined gray cubicle, my imagined body uncertain in its outline, and wish for a moment of complete privacy. They give it to me.

Tapering Time

The scape has progressed to a complexity beyond our ability to process. We stand on our promontory, surrounded by the field of enclaved experiments, each enclave containing a different evolved object, still furiously morphing. Some of the objects glow faintly as night sweeps across our part of the School World.

We are as useless and incompetent as the revived ancient self, now wrapped in its own shock and misery. Our tributaries have fallen silent. We wait for what will happen next, either in the scape, or in the promised contact with the Endtime Work Coordinator.

The ancient self rises from its misery and isolation. It joins our watchful silence, expectant. It has not completely lost
hope
. We have never had need of
hope
. Connected to the Library, fear became a distant and unimportant thing; hope, its opposite, equally distant and not useful.

I have been musing over my last hazy memories of Elisaveta, of our children Maxim and Giselle—bits of conversation, physical features, smells … Reliving long stretches with the help of memory recovery … watching seconds pass into minutes as if months pass into years.

Outside, time seems to move much more swiftly. The divisions between enclaves fall and the uncounted experiments stand on the field, still evolving, but now allowed to interact. Tentatively, their evolution takes in the new possibility of
motion
.

I feel for the students, wish to be part of them. However wrong, this experiment is vital, idealistic. It smells of youthful naiveté. Because of my own rugged youth, raised in a nation running frantically from one historical extreme to another, born to parents who jumped like puppets between hope and despair, I have always felt uneasy in the face of idealism and naiveté.

Elisaveta was a naive idealist when I first met her. I tried to teach her, pass on my sophistication, my sense of better judgment.

The brightly colored, luminous objects hover on the plain, discovering new relations: a separate identity, a larger sense of space. The objects have reached a high level of complexity and order, but within a limited environment. If any have developed mind, they can now reach out and explore new objects.

First, the experiments shift a few centimeters this way or that, visible across the plain as kind of restless, rolling motion. The plain becomes an ocean of gentle waves. Then, the experiments
bump
each other. Near our hill, some of the experiments circle and surround their companions, or just bump with greater and greater urgency. Extensions reach out, and we can see—it must be obvious to all—that mind does exist, and new senses are being created and explored.

If Elisaveta, whatever she has become, is in charge of this sea of experiments, then perhaps she is merely following an inclination she had billions of years before: when in doubt, when all else fails,
punt
.

This is a cosmological kind of punt, burning up available energy at a distressing rate…

Just like her
, I think, and feel a warmth of connection with that ancient woman. But the woman
divorced
me. She found me wanting, later than my memories reach … And after all, what she has become is as little like the Elisaveta I knew as my descendant tributary is like me.

The dance on the plain becomes a frenzied blur of color. Snakes flow, sprout legs, wings beat the air. Animal relations, plant relations, new ecosystems … But these creatures have evolved not from the simplest beginnings, but from already elaborate sources. Each isolated experiment, already having achieved a focused complexity beyond anything I can understand, becomes a potential player in a new order of interaction.

What do the students—or Elisaveta—hope to accomplish in this peculiar variation on the old scheme?

I am so focused on the spectacle surrounding us that it takes a “nudge” from my descendant self to alert me to change in the sky. A liquid silvery ribbon pours from above, spreading over our heads into a flat, upside–down ocean of reflective cloud. The inverse ocean expands to the horizon, blocking all light from the new day.

Our soma rises expectantly on its eight legs. I feel the tributaries' interest as a kind of heat through my cubicle, and for the moment, abandon the imagined environment.

Best to receive this new phenomenon directly.

A fringed curtain, like the edge of a shawl woven from threads of mercury, descends from the upside-down ocean, brushing across the land. The fringe crosses the plain of experiments without interfering, but surrounds our hill, screening our view. Light pulses from selected threads in the liquid weave.

The tributaries translate instantly.

“What do
you
want?” asks a clear, neutral voice. No character, no tone, no emotion. This is the Endtime Work Coordinator, or at least an extension of that powerful social=mind. It does not sound anything like Elisaveta. My hopes have been terribly naive.

After all this time and misery, the teachers' reserve is admirable. I detect respect, but no awe; they are used to the nature of the Endtime Work Coordinator, largest of the social=minds not directly connected to a Library.

“We have been cut off, and We need to know why,” the tributaries say.

“Your work reached a conclusion,” the voice responds.

“Why were We not accorded the respect of being notified, or allowed to return to our Library?”

“Your Library has been terminated. We have concluded the active existence of all entities no longer directly connected with Endtime Work, to conserve available energy.”

“But you have let us live.”

“It would involve more energy to terminate existing extensions than to allow them to run down.”

The sheer coldness and precision of the voice chill me. The end of a Library is equivalent to the end of thousands of worlds full of individual intelligences.

Genocide.
Error and destruction.

But my future self corrects me.
“This is expediency,”
it says in a private sending.
“It is what We all expected would happen sooner or later. The manner seems irregular, but the latitude of the Endtime Work Coordinator is great.”

Still, the tributaries request a complete accounting of the decision. The Coordinator obliges.

A judgment arrives:

The Teachers are irrelevant. Teaching of the Proof has been deemed useless; the Coordinator has decided—

I hear a different sort of voice, barely recognizable to me—
Elisaveta—

“All affirmations of the Proof merely discourage our search for alternatives. The Proof has become a thought disease, a cultural tyranny. It blocks our discovery of another solution.”

A New Accounting

Our ancient self recognizes something in the message. What We have planned from near the beginning now bears fruit—the ancient self, functioning as an engine of judgment and recognition, has found a key player in the decision to isolate us, and to terminate our Library.

“We detect the voice of a particular tributary,” We say to the Coordinator. “May We communicate with this tributary?”

“Do you have a valid reason?” the Coordinator asks.

“We must check for error.”

“Your talents are not recognized.”

“Still, the Coordinator might have erred, and as there is so little time, following the wrong course will be doubly tragic.”

The Coordinator reaches a decision after sufficient time to show a complete polling of all tributaries within its social=mind.

“An energy budget is established. Communication is allowed.”

We follow protocol billions of years old, but excise unnecessary ceremonies. We poll the student tributaries, searching for some flaw in reasoning, finding none.

Then We begin searching for our own justification. If We are about to
die
, lost in the last–second noise and event–clutter of a universe finally running down, We need to know where
We
have failed. If there is no failure—and if all this experimentation is simply a futile act, We might die less ignominiously. We search for the tributary familiar to the ancient self, hoping to find the personal connection that will reduce all our questions to one exchange.

Bright patches of light in the sky bloom, spread, and are quickly gathered and snuffed. The other suns and worlds are being converted and conserved.

We have minutes, perhaps only seconds.

We find the voice, descendant tributary of Elisaveta.

There are immense deaths in the sky, and now all is going dark. There is only the one sun, turning in on itself, violet shading to deep orange, and the School World.

Four seconds.
I have just four seconds … Endtime accelerates upon us. The student experiment has consumed so much energy. All other worlds have been terminated, all social=minds except the Endtime Coordinator's and the final self … The seed that will cross the actionless Between.

I feel the tributaries frantically create an interface, make distant requests, then demands. They meet strong resistance from a tributary within the Endtime Work Coordinator. This much they convey to me … I sense weeks, months, years of negotiation, all passing in a second of more and more disjointed and uncertain real time.

As the last energy of the universe is spent, as all potential and all kinesis bottom out at a useless average, the fractions of seconds become clipped, their qualities altered. Time advances with an irregular jerk, truly like an off–center wheel.

Agreement is reached. Law and persuasion even now have some force.

“Vasily. I haven't thought about you in ever so long.”

“Elisaveta, is that you?”

I cannot see her. I sense a total lack of emotion in her words. And why not?

“Not
your
Elisaveta, Vasily. But I hold her memories and some of her patterns.”

“You've been alive for billions of years?”

I receive a condensed impression of a hundred million sisters, all related to Elisaveta, stored at different times like a huge library of past selves. The final tributary she has become, now an important part of the Coordinator, refers to her past selves much as a grown woman might open childhood diaries. The past selves are kept informed, to the extent that being informed does not alter their essential natures.

How differently my own descendant self behaves, sealing away a small part of the past as a reminder, but never consulting it. How perverse for a mind that reveres the past! Perhaps what it reveres is form, not actuality…

“Why do you want to speak with me?” Elisaveta asks. Which Elisaveta, from which time, I cannot tell right away.

“I think …
they
seem to think it's important. A disagreement, something that went wrong.”

“They are seeking justification through you, a self stored billions of years ago. They want to be told that their final efforts have meaning. How like the Vasily I knew.”

“It's not my doing! I've been inactive … Were we divorced?”

“Yes.” Sudden realization changes the tone of this Elisaveta's voice. “You were stored before we divorced?”

“Yes! How long after … were you stored?”

“A century, maybe more,” she answers. With some wonder, she says, “Who could have known we would live forever?”

“When I saw you last, we loved each other. We had children …”

“They died with the Libraries,” she says.

I do not feel physical grief, the body's component of sadness and rage at loss, but the news rocks me, even so. I retreat to my gray cubicle. What happened to my children, in my time? What did they become to me, and I to them? Did they have children, grandchildren, and after our divorce, did they respect me enough to let me visit my grandchildren… ? But it's all lost now, and if they kept records of their ancient selves—records of what had truly been my children—that is gone, too.

My children! They have survived all this time, and yet I have missed them.

They are
dead
.

Elisaveta regards my grief with some wonder, and finds it sympathetic. I feel her warm to me slightly. “They weren't really our children any longer, Vasily. They became something quite other, as have you and I. But
this
you—you've been kept like a butterfly in a collection. How sad.”

She seeks me out and takes on a bodily form. It is not the shape of the Elisaveta I knew. She once built a biomechanical body to carry her thoughts. This is the self–image she carries now, of a mind within a primitive, woman–shaped soma.

“What happened to us?” I ask, my agony apparent to her, to all who listen.

“Is it that important to you?”

“Can you explain any of this?” I ask. I want to bury myself in her bosom, to hug her. I am so lost and afraid I feel like a child, and yet my pride keeps me together.

“I was your student, Vasily. Remember? You
browbeat
me into marrying you. You poured learning into my ear day and night, even when we made love. You were so full of knowledge. You spoke nine languages. You knew all there was to know about Schopenhauer and Hegel and Marx and Wittgenstein. You did not listen to what was important to me.”

I want to draw back; it is impossible to cringe. This I recognize. This I remember. But the Elisaveta I knew had come to accept me, my faults and my learning, joyously; had encouraged me to open up with her. I had taught her a great deal.

“You gave me absolutely no room to grow, Vasily.”

The enormous triviality of this conversation, at the end of time, strikes me and I want to laugh out loud. Not possible. I stare at this
monstrous
Elisaveta, so bitter and different … And now, to me, shaded by her indifference.