Heaven (5 page)

This galaxy had suffered from what can best be described as a series of childhood infections. It was chronically infected
with a plague of life. Reproducing entities, leaping from planet to planet and from star to star, had diffused along its spiral
arms, taking the path of least resistance. Occasionally, the more virulent strains had crossed the relatively starless voids
between. Now life forms had become endemic and moved through the galaxy’s substance at will.

And as they spread, they changed the nature of the habitats that they infected, until those accumulated changes affected the
nature of the galaxy itself.

It was not clear whether these spreading patches of change were a disease or a natural progression toward maturity. Or both.
There was no obvious place in the laws of quantum gravity for this fifth state of matter, sticking out at right angles to
the conventional four of solid, liquid, gas, plasma: the spontaneous appearance of organized complexity. The physics of a
galaxy seemed, at first sight, to imply a lifeless future. But the inner workings of those laws, propagated through the Middle
Kingdom of the material mesoscale, led inexorably to persistent outbreaks of self-complication. When allied to the potent
ability to replicate, this tendency gave rise to emergent structures that could only be described as living. And when replication
made mistakes, becoming reproduction, those entities acquired the ability to evolve. Natural selection preserved some mistakes,
destroyed the rest; this accelerated the process of change and offered a natural route to ever-greater complexity.

During the galaxy’s infancy this potential for complication had run riot. It had been realized in a billion different ways—as
carbon chemistry, plasma topology, dislocations in high-gravity neutron crystals, diffraction peaks of electromagnetic radiation,
herds of entangled electrons, communities of graviton orbitals. Each instance formed the nucleus of a separate infection with
its own characteristic etiology, but the overall course of the galactic disease was much the same, whatever physical form
the entities took. This was no disorder, however. On the contrary, it was an insidious, metastasizing outbreak of order. Order
where none should exist, order that danced to its own tune. Impossible, wonderful, unavoidable life, clinging to existence
with a robustness that defied all expectations.

Especially interesting complexities came into being at the boundaries where distinct infections collided and competed. Those
boundaries could be temporal as well as spatial. The past could influence the future. Expectations of the future could influence
the present.

In this galaxy, the dominant influences had been of just these kinds. While still in its early childhood, the galaxy had experienced
a virulent infection by an unusually potent form of intelligence. The Precursors, as they were named by those with whom their
legacy collided, had spread through almost all parts of the galaxy, avoiding only the Black Hole jungle at the galactic core.
The agent and the consequence of this cosmic diaspora went far beyond mere intelligence, to become
extelligence:
the interactive, collective knowledge that is shared by a culture of intelligent, communicative beings. With breathtaking
speed, Precursor extelligence became self-sustaining, self-propelled. It gave rise to a brand of technology so advanced that
it bordered on magic.

All things end. When the Precursor contagion had run its course, and immunity had set in, the infectious intelligences vanished
from the universe. But they left behind relics of their extelligence, scattered enigmatically across huge swaths of intragalactic
space like the scars of long-healed wounds.

Later infections picked at those scars and metabolized them in their own ways. The relics of this childhood disease affected
the symptoms, and the spread, of a thousand later, milder ones.

One of those relics was currently being employed to create several thousand copies of a mechanism so primitive that the Precursors
would have been profoundly embarrassed by the use to which their technology was being put. The construction was being conducted
by Servant-of-Unity XIV Samuel Godwin’sson Travers on board
Disseminator 714
, one small ship in a huge Cosmic Unity mission fleet that was soon to bring the memeplexes of universal joy and tolerance
to yet another grateful world, a planet known locally as No-Moon. He hummed a tune of indeterminate provenance as he packed
the resulting devices into plastic containers, sixty-four to a box.

For a normal human, Sam was tall—not with the exaggerated elongation often found in people who lived in microgravity, but
a head higher than most. His bones were slender and lightly muscled; his face was a little too wide for its jaw, with the
eyes set close together on either side of a narrow, straight nose. He wasn’t ugly; he wasn’t good-looking; he was just ordinary.

The depth of his devotion was not. He carried out his allotted tasks with the keenness of a true zealot. Performing the duties
of Cosmic Unity gave him a deep spiritual satisfaction. His lifesoul felt cleansed and sparkling, vibrant with transcendent
love. Ever since early childhood his life had been dedicated to Service, for his parents knew that their son had been born
to serve. They knew that through Service all species would eventually become One, and the sacred prophecies would be fulfilled,
as had been ordained by the Founders. And soon, under their kind but firm tutelage, XIV Samuel came to know it, too.

The prospect sent a shiver along his spine.
If only Unity would be attained soon! So that I am alive to witness it!

Absently he buffed the Precursor duplicator with the sleeve of his robe, removing a faint trace of sweat left by a previous,
less careful servant. The machine functioned without noise, vibration, or indeed any external signs save for the appearance,
in a steady stream, of the copies that it made. It had no evident energy source, but some kind of conservation law seemed
to govern its functions, for it had to be fed an occasional meal of matter. It did not seem important what kind of matter—save
for a few essential elements like praseodymium, which presumably could not be synthesized—but there had to be
enough
matter.

An original of the object being duplicated lay in a shallow depression on the machine’s surface, where Sam had placed it.
The duplicator created such a depression automatically, to fit whatever was deposited there. Sam’s job, in which he had undergone
extensive training, was to operate the duplicator and persuade it to disgorge endless replicas of that one original.

He did not have to know how the duplicator worked, which was good.
No one
knew how any Precursor technology worked—not the giant orbital fortifications encircling Rigel, not even the handheld devices
that had been dug from the frozen nitrogen plains of the fifth moon of Zeta Camelopardi 14, the ones that could both crack
nuts and graft new limbs on silicon-based creatures in low gravity. But that technology had been designed by master engineers,
who did not expect the user to understand what was being used. Every Precursor machine was controlled through a user interface
based on metaphor. It must have been entirely intuitive to any Precursor. But even with extensive and arduous training, it
took their successors many years to become accustomed to the rudiments of the system—and half a lifetime to become proficient.
Even experienced operators often made mistakes.

Mistakes were unimportant. The material could be recycled, the task repeated until it achieved the desired result. When it
did, the duplicator could churn out perfect replicas, apparently identical down to the molecular level, indefinitely.

In a replicative economy, anything that works is free.

Duplicators were a gift to younger species from the long-dead Precursors. The Precursors built to last. Perhaps they had intended
to leave a legacy for those that followed them. Perhaps it was the merest accident that anything useful survived. No one knew
how Precursor minds worked; they had left their artifacts but no record of themselves.

This particular gift was not easily acquired, even so. A quarter-million years before Sam’s lifetime, a Thunchchan expedition
along a section of the Galaxy’s Trailing Spiral Arm had investigated a world whose atmosphere was rich in the sulfur oxides
so necessary for metabolism. Hoping to found a new colony, they had stumbled instead on something of far greater value: the
separate components of an unused duplicator, still in their original wrappings.

It took more than 230,000 years for the combined intellect of the Thunchchan Empire to figure out how to provoke those components
into self-assembly. It took only a few months more to get the device running, producing poor but recognizable copies of small
items like skin clips and crest jewelry.

It took more than a century to refine their control of the device to make perfect copies of any inert object no larger than
their own heads.

Life forms? Those were different. The duplicator could
copy
them, but the copies came out dead. Many religions took this as proof that life was infused with something special, some
nonmaterial essence. But Cosmic Unity held to a simpler, more prosaic explanation: The Precursor machine could duplicate form
but not dynamics.

One duplicator, however, is little more than a curio. The Thunchchans searched their entire region of the cosmos for a second—or,
better still, for another set of components, waiting to be assembled. The components would be small enough to be copied faithfully
with their current skills.

The search proved fruitless. The Thunchchans were the sole owners of one solitary item of Precursor magic, and all they could
use it for were party tricks.

It was frustrating.

Thunchchan technocrats studied the duplicator until there were no ideas left to test, learned nothing useful, and consigned
the artifact to an archaeological museum. There it was prominently displayed but seldom operated. It remained there for three
thousand years . . . until one morning an inquisitive youngling, climbing over the exhibit, triggered a second mode of operation,
in which the duplicator accessed a presumably preinstalled database of constructs. It began turning out copies of a limited
range of devices without the presence of an original.

It then took Thunchchan science less than a year to discover how to access the default templates that generated all the components
of a duplicator. Complete with wrappings.

Duplicates of these components could also self-assemble. The result was a fully functional duplicator. There seemed to be
no loss of fidelity: The product of a chain of copies thousands of generations long seemed to do everything that the original
could.

Within ten years, the machines were in use on a hundred worlds. All attempts to control their spread failed, even—especially—when
they fell into the hands of Thunchch’s enemies. Within a century, there was not a solid-matter civilization in the Galaxy
that could manage without them.

Like life, the duplicators were a disease, and they spread like wildfire. They needed only three things to function: nutrients
in the form of matter; a small but essential supply of rare elements, notably praseodymium; and a host mind to configure them.
The duplicators were not self-reproducing life forms, but they reproduced nonetheless. They were viruslike parasites, or more
probably symbionts—the verdict was not yet in.

Sam turned to the duplicator and knelt before it, his head bowed. He made a series of graceful gestures with his hands.

It was not some religious rite, although there were plenty of those on board
Disseminator 714
as it spread the Good News of Cosmic Unity, namely, the Oneness of All Life. It was how the machine’s user interface—its
metaphace
—worked. Presumably, the Precursors had used a language of gesture, or possibly that was merely how they communicated with
their machines. All Sam knew was that this particular series of movements would (he hoped) increase the size of the output
by approximately 12 percent. It did seem to help if the duplicator was approached in a reverential frame of mind, but he suspected
that was because such a mood slowed his gestures down and made them clearer. Or smoother. Or more confident.

Sam didn’t really care; all he cared about was serving Unity, as he had been trained to do by his revered parents, XIII Samuel
and his partners XVI Eloise and II Josephina.

Sam drew a short breath of pleasure. The new devices
were
larger, just as he had intended, but otherwise they were identical to the original. He had no idea of the purpose for which
Cosmic Unity needed them, and it never occurred to him to ask. They were just the next item on a very long list: 65,536 copies
of original AZ-F-4933, the second half of them to be made one standard increment larger. He uttered a short but heartfelt
prayer to the Lifesoul-Cherisher, and experienced a flood of satisfaction as he fulfilled his assigned role of servant.

While its operator prayed, the duplicator continued to disgorge identical devices, one every few seconds.

Sam rose to his feet and picked up an empty container. The boxes themselves were made by a colleague in an adjoining chamber.
Methodically he packed the box with the devices he had made. By the time he had finished, another boxful was ready. Occasionally,
he conversed with the box-maker, another human male.
Disseminator 714
had the fifteen types of species that the Church had determined were ideal to maintain social harmony, but repeated attempts
to mix species on technical tasks never seemed to work very well and had been abandoned.

In this manner Sam’s morning passed. It was fulfilling work.

In the belly of
Disseminator 714
was a large open space, once a cargo tank. The vessel had originally been built to carry freight, mostly liquids that were
common in some parts of the Galaxy and rare, but essential, elsewhere. When the market in liquid neon collapsed, Cosmic Unity
had purchased the ship at a bargain price and converted it for creatures warmer-blooded than its previous Gra’aan owners.
The cargo tank became a sanctum for the rites of the Community of the United Cosmos, and the vessel became yet another agent
for the dissemination of the Memeplex of Universal Tolerance to a receptive Galaxy.