Heaven (27 page)

“We were fleein’ from an invasion,” said Second-Best Sailor. “See here . . .” The word “see” made him remember his recent
past. “Wait! I was goin’ blind! I
died,
flounce it! Now I’m alive an’ I can
see
.” He gave his surroundings a thorough look. “I’m in the pond, ain’t I? Did I make it that far? Did I fall in?”

NO, YOU WERE CONVEYED HERE AS PREY. CARRION FROM THE BEACH.

“Prey?”
Second-Best Sailor’s voice disappeared in a shower of bubbles. He was about to make a break for the shore when he realized
that he was suitless. “What’ve you done with my suit?”

IT HAS BEEN DISCARDED. REPAIR IS BEYOND MY CAPABILITIES. ITS MOLECULAR STRUCTURE IS TOO UNUSUAL.

Without a suit, Second-Best Sailor was trapped here for the rest of his life. Which, without food, would be short. But there
had to be some way to escape, surely. A mariner never gave up. Stuff the suit, what about
him
? He suddenly realized that his wound had healed. There was no sign that he had ever been burned. Had he dreamed it all? “I
was
burned
. Now there ain’t even a scar. What—”

I AM SUPPLYING THE APPROPRIATE SALTS TO YOUR SKIN AS WE SPEAK—THAT IS WHY YOU TASTE OCEAN. I HAVE REPAIRED YOUR SKIN. BEING
MADE FROM ORGANIC MOLECULES, ITS STRUCTURE WAS WITHIN MY POWER TO REPLICATE. SIMILARLY, YOUR OPTICAL TISSUES HAVE BEEN RESTORED
TO THEIR PROPER REFRACTIVE INDEX.

Second-Best Sailor was impressed, for all his bravado. “Repaired? Me?”

IT WAS NECESSARY. YOU WERE TERMINALLY DAMAGED. AT FIRST I THOUGHT YOU PREY, BUT THEN I NOTICED YOU WERE COMMUNICATING. YOUR
MESSAGES MADE NO SENSE, BUT THE PHENOMENON WAS TOO INRUIGUING NOT TO BE FOLLOWED UP. WITH EFFORT I SOLVED THE PUZZLE OF YOUR
MIND. I AM GLAD NOW THAT YOU WERE NOT DIGESTED.

Me, too
. “I was unconscious, half dead,” Second-Best Sailor protested. “How could I ’ave been communicating?”

NOT BY WORDS. BY CHEMICAL SIGNALS. YOUR MIND RESPONDS TO MOLECULAR MESSAGES, JUST AS MINE DOES. NO PREY CAN DO THAT. WHY,
YOU ALMOST SEEM INTELLIGENT.

Second-Best Sailor decided to ignore the implied insult, which was evidently unintentional, and reflected that it was a good
job his species had evolved the ability to generate and interpret molecular signals. Not only did it open up the use of jellyfish
for sending messages; it had also saved his life.

“I’m not prey,” he confirmed. “Absolutely not. I’m a polypoid, and I’m not just intelligent—I’m sentient.”
Not that the reefwives would always agree with that last bit
. He ran a tentacle over his flank, still amazed to be whole again. “That’s a neat trick for a tiny little beast like you.”

TINY LITTLE BEAST?

“Ain’t you that frog-thing what’s floatin’ in front of my face?”

NO. THAT IS A MINDLESS ANIMAL. I HAVE A MIND. I
AM
A MIND.

“Then—who are you? What are you? Where are you?”

It told him.

He didn’t believe it.

Two hours later, he was still arguing. “I just don’t see how a flouncin’
pond
can be a mind.”

YOU CALL ME A POND. I RECOGNIZE THE DESCRIPTION OF MY COMPONENTS, BUT IT IS NOT A DESCRIPTION OF
ME
. IT IS A DESCRIPTION OF WHAT I AM MADE FROM. WHAT IS YOUR MIND MADE FROM?

“I dunno about my mind,” said Second-Best Sailor. “My brain, now, that’s more straightforward. It’s made from neurobundles,
and those’re made from chemicals.”

IS
YOUR
BRAIN THE SAME AS YOUR MIND?

Second-Best Sailor had never really thought about that. It wasn’t the kind of knowledge that you needed to sail a boat or
make a trade. It was reefwife knowledge.
They
were a mind, weren’t they? The reefmind. When they joined together.

“I don’t think so,” he finally said. “My brain’s physical; my mind’s mental.”

YOUR MIND IS MADE FROM A DIFFERENT KIND OF MATTER THAN YOUR BRAIN?

“No, no, you’re twistin’ my words. . . . I guess my mind is what my brain does. But not what it
is
.”

SO MIND IS NOT A
THING,
BUT A PROCESS CARRIED OUT BY A BRAIN?

“Yeah, that’s it.”

DOES IT THEN MATTER WHAT THE BRAIN IS MADE OF, SO LONG AS IT CAN CARRY OUT SUCH A PROCESS?

“Uh—no. Different sentients have different brains. The ’Thal brain is made from quite different stuff than ours.”

The pond was ecstatic.
DIFFERENT SENTIENTS? YOU MEAN THERE ARE
OTHERS
?

“Oh, yeah. The Galaxy’s full of ’em.”

GALAXY?
WHAT IS A— NO, FIRST LET US FINISH DISCUSSING MINDS. I WILL LEARN MORE FROM YOU LATER. SO YOU AGREEE THAT A BRAIN CAN BE
MADE OF ANYTHING?

“Anything that can carry out the processes of a mind, yeah, I s’pose.”

COULD IT BE MADE OF WATER, ALGAE, CRUSTACEANS? FISH?

“No,” said Second-Best Sailor, without hesitation.

WHY NOT?

“Too simple,” said Second-Best Sailor.

IS A CRUSTACEAN LESS COMPLEX THAN A NEUROBUNDLE?

Second-Best Sailor had to admit that it wasn’t. But he still didn’t see how a pond could be a mind. Nonetheless, he was clearly
floating in a pond, talking to a mind, and that mind insisted that it was the pond.

So maybe it was time to stop arguing, accept what the pond was telling him—and find a way to get the flounce out of here.
He couldn’t stay in the pond forever, and there might still be an ansible waiting for him in No Bar Bay.

If the attackers hadn’t wrecked it.

He couldn’t stop the pond “talking,” and he couldn’t stop his mind responding. He was floating in a batch of chemicals, and
the pond was in total control of them.

He wanted to find a way to escape. The pond wanted to discuss natural philosophy. Except when in its motile form, it never
went anywhere. It rested in its hollow and thought great thoughts. The discovery that there were more wheres to go to than
it had previously thought fascinated it.

The pond was especially intrigued by the concept of a galaxy. It insisted that Second-Best Sailor should tell it everything
he knew about space, planets, stars, galaxies. This wasn’t much, but it was enough for the pond to make a huge conceptual
breakthrough. Aquifer was not the entire universe; it was not the only place where life could exist.

The pond knew about stars. Its amphibians had eyes—they
were
its eyes. What its amphibians saw, the pond saw. And it knew about the tiny lights in the night sky. It had studied their
patterns for a long, long time. . . .

Can a pond be a mind? Second-Best Sailor was having much more trouble grasping that idea than the pond was having with the
notion of an external universe. One reason was that the pond was considerably more intelligent than the mariner. Another was
that the pond had been around a lot longer. It had experienced a continuity of existence—a “life”—that spanned 460,000 years.

During that time it had uprooted itself roughly every ten years, packing up its active contents into a walker and finding
a new place to set itself up in the business of being a predator. Reproduction occurred when a pond became sufficiently complex—size
alone was not enough—to produce more than one walker. The ponds had discovered early in their evolution that it paid to be
a nomad; after a while the prey learned to avoid the bare patch of sand that surrounded most ponds, and it was best to move
on. One subspecies of pond had developed the trick of permitting vegetation to grow near its edges, but the vegetation competed
with its host for water and nutrients, and the trick paid off only in the damper regions of the planet—mostly on the edges
of the tundra, in a thin band between permafrost and desert.

The brains of most living entities were systems of intercommunicating components—nerve cells in Neanderthals and humans, neurobundles
in polypoids, crystalline silicon with inlaid electronic conductors in metallomorphs. The precise materials were unimportant,
except that the brain had to evolve in whatever environment its owner inhabited. What mattered was that the components could
be organized into a complicit computational network. They must be able to filter information, extract meaning from it, and
trigger a response to it. If simple networks could do this, in however limited a way, then the stage was set for the evolution
of a brain. The network could be linked to sense organs—at first, rudimentary patches that responded in some way to heat,
light, moisture, electron flows; later, elaborate structures that had outperformed generations of competitors. The same network
could drive movement, and feedback from the senses could control it.

The ponds’ innovation was to build a brain from an ecosystem. As their shoals of fishes flitted to and fro in the water, their
gyrations operated on two distinct levels. Overtly, they followed the rules of shoaling, staying close to their neighbors
but not too close; they hunted food, and they avoided danger, real or imaginary. Covertly, they were carrying out their part
of the computational cascade that formed the brain of the pond.

There was nothing strange about this dual role. Every neuron in a Neanderthal brain, every transistor in a metallomorph, was
subject to the same duality. Not a duality of
substance
—a trap into which innumerable philosophically minded sentients repeatedly fell—but a duality of
interpretation
.

An ecosystem was extremely complex—far more so than the creatures that composed it. If part of a fish could be a brain, then
part of a pond that contained a fish could also be a brain. But the pond did not use the fish brains to think.

It used the
fish
to think—along with medusas, crustaceans, and amphibians. The network of algal filaments that surrounded a pond possessed
a computational ability well in excess of that of a human brain; it contained more cells, linked in more complex ways. And
that was just the algae. The pond’s computational abilities extended right down to the atomic level. It was more than just
an ecosystem; it was an ecosystem that acted as a coherent whole.

On one level, a fish sucking algae from a rock was dinner.

On a deeper level, it was a thought.

Not a thought about dinner. The physical realization of the thought manifested itself in a thousand ways—the pattern that
the browsing snout made on the rock, the angle at which the fish inclined its eyes, the waves that flittered along its fins.
All these variables obeyed mathematical laws—some simple, some too intricate to comprehend.

As the pond carried out its day-to-day activities, it enacted the working-out of those laws.

Early explorers from the inward regions of the Trailing Spiral Arm had seen the walkers and totally misunderstood them. They
thought that a walker was an organism, and that it died when it encountered and was absorbed by a pond.

Not so.

That was when the walker came to life. A walker was simply a mobile form into which a living pond could metamorphose when
its local supply of prey ran out. A walker was a vehicle for the pond’s intelligence, but not of itself intelligent. It was
a construct, a tool.

All this, Second-Best Sailor learned from his chemical transactions with the mind of the pond. It made sense, inasmuch as
he could follow the argument. If some of it baffled him, that was nothing compared to the problem the pond was having in understanding
how a single organism could develop a mind out of something as simple as a mere network of neurobundles. Its own amphibians
had brains not so different in structure from that of the polypoid, but the amphibians didn’t have minds.

“Well, we agreed just now that a mind ain’t a
thing
,” said Second-Best Sailor. “It’s a process, right?” He remembered Fat Apprentice making just that point, floating upside
down in an unusually squalid bar late one midseason evening.

THAT IS SO.

“Then I guess that some brains can carry out that kind of process, an’ some can’t.”

YOU MEAN THAT MIND CAN EMERGE FROM A SUFFICIENTLY COMPLEX BRAIN, BUT NOT FROM A SIMPLER ONE?

“Yeah, sort of. Something like that.”

AS A CONSEQUENCE OF ITS ORGANIZATION?

“Well . . . Fat Apprentice always said that unless a brain is intelligent, it can’t make a mind. Can it?”

I AM NOT SURE THAT WE WOULD AGREE ON THE MEANING OF “INTELLIGENT,” BUT YOU HAVE PROPOSED AN INTERESTING LINE OF ARGUMENT.

Second-Best Sailor refused to be diverted. “Look,
I’m
intelligent and
you’re
intelligent, and those frogs of yours
ain’t
. That’s what I mean.”

The pond’s intelligence was another thing that the mariner didn’t understand. He had been taught that mariner intelligence
resulted from complicity between two systems: the internal one of the brain, and the external one of mariner culture. The
evolution of intelligence was intimately bound up with that of communication.

How could
ponds
communicate?

That one turned out to be easy.
I WILL SHOW YOU
, the pond had told him.
TILT TOWARDS THE VERTICAL AND WATCH THE FATFLY LARVAE.

Second-Best Sailor had noticed the masses of wriggly wormlike creatures clustered on the pond’s surface and had recognized
them for what they were. No-Moon had regular plagues of flies, which emerged from similar organisms that infested many of
the planet’s freshwater lakes. The mariners weren’t really bothered by them; in fact, they were a useful source of food for
some of their own food animals when billions of dead flies formed a thick scum in the shallows. The flies were more of a pest
for the mariners’ land-based trading partners, but they had ways to deal with the problem when the flies were hatching.