Heaven (6 page)

His duties temporarily suspended by command of the high acolyte, Sam hurried through the bowels of the ship as he always did
on such occasions, trotting securely in the ubiquitous artificial gravity. He was hastening to take his place in the Assembly
of Joy so that he could renew his faith in the essential oneness of Life—be it a magnetic plasmoid in the surface of a star
or a fragile bag of molecules like himself.

It was the high point of his existence, a daily reaffirmation of his reason for being.

To Sam, the atmosphere in the sanctum was pure poison. So, as he entered, protective Precursor machinery sprang into action.
A puff of mist condensed and enveloped him in a molecule-thick membrane that would filter out toxic compounds from the air.
If his skin had been unprotected, these would have had the same effect on him as nerve gas: He would have died within seconds
of entering the room, his skin becoming a mass of giant pus-filled blisters. He knew this, but he seldom even thought about
it anymore. It did not disturb him. Precursor gadgetry never failed.

The environment in the Assembly was deliberately selected so that it suited none of those present. That was fair and just,
reflecting the essential nature of the Community of the Cosmos. Each sentient entity present, in its own way, was protected
by technology, be it endogenous or Precursor. Unity came at a price, the price of constant discomfort and reliance on machines,
coatings, membranes, and magnetogravitic fields. All this served as a valuable reminder that Unity was not the natural state
of the universe, but one that could be attained only through sacrifice, humility, faith, and tolerance.

Tolerance was more than just a state of mind. It was an ever-present act of reaffirmation. You had to work at being tolerant.

Sam looked around, trying to find a place to pray. Worship rings painted on the bare metal floor tacitly told ground-seeking
species where to station themselves. Smaller rings, on the walls, were occupied by metallomorphs, which clung like lichen
to flat surfaces and moved by hitching a ride on other, more mobile creatures. In appearance no more than shiny quasicrystalline
patches, metallomorphs actually housed a quick electronic intelligence.

Other areas of the walls were hung with strips of fabric from many worlds, forming an abstract representation of the striped
clouds of a gas giant, in memory of the Founders. There were no other artworks, nothing ostentatious in any way. The only
smells were those of a working starship, mostly the characteristic odors of its varied inhabitants.

Sam slipped along the rows of worship rings until he found an unoccupied one. He folded his legs beneath him in a yogic pose
and emptied his mind of all save a proper humility and respect for the unfathomable diversity of the Lifesoul-Giver’s creation.
As he waited for the high acolyte to commence the rites, he mouthed a silent prayer to Moish the Firstborn, a simple prayer
that every Child of Unity learned almost before it could transduce energy.

The high acolyte’s entrance was low-key, almost demure, and all the more effective for the absence of pomp and panoply. The
priestess was a blimp from a gas giant’s cloud layer, possibly even a Jovian descendant, though no one seemed to know for
sure. She was enveloped in a Precursor wrap to protect her lumpy skin from the radiant warmth of the inner-world life forms
whose veins flowed with liquid ice, and a breathing bulb hovered beside her as she floated to her place at the rostrum, buoyed
up by the mixture of hydrogen and helium that was almost universal in gas-giant balloonists. Her many tentacles—also a universal
on such worlds—hung down her sides, and she spun lazily as she advanced, spying out her surroundings in an unconscious reversion
to evolutionary habit.

She was followed by a dozen lesser acolytes, each from a different species. Every day they were chosen by lot. Today the first
was a tall, spindly creature, all black twiglike legs, supported in what for it was high gravity, by a Precursor exoskeleton.
Sam recognized it as a linecrawler from one of the rare rock webs—clusters of small asteroids linked by thick cables, extruded
over the eons by a variety of arachnoid organisms that obtained their energy directly from infrared light. It was followed
by a Wymokh, a representative of a species that he had never seen before, which resembled a tangled ball of wool. Surprisingly,
it moved not by rolling but by squashing itself flat and suddenly expanding, so that it hopped along in a series of rapid
bounds. He found it difficult to imagine what habitat might cause such a form of locomotion to evolve. Third in line was a
steel blue Hytth insectoid. Next was something rather like a stubby centipede, then a metallic construct with what looked
like wheels, then a procession of three apparently identical creatures like giant butterflies with teardrop bodies—but in
fact these had originated in totally different spiral arms of the Galaxy and used totally different genetic material. It was
a strange case of convergent evolution and vivid affirmation of the Unity of Life. Sam was pleased to see an Earth-norm humanoid,
possibly even a true human—until he realized that the creature just looked like a human. It was a metamorph, and it could
mimic anything from a neutronium tetrahedron to a beautiful human female—which was today’s choice. The informal procession
was completed by a chlorine-breathing Illensan, which dragged a spherical powerball behind it on a trolley to run its life-support
systems.

So many species
. Sam remembered his childhood priest explaining how much the Church valued a diversity of cultures and species. Universal
tolerance involved having something definite to be tolerant toward. It was not enough to love one’s fellow species in the
abstract. They had to be present in the flesh—or whatever else they were made of. The Church made sure that they were present,
by creating a suitable mixture of species on every converted world and in every space-going vessel that it operated.

There were, of course, no exotics—no plasmoids, no neutron-star crystallines. As yet, no way had been found to include them
in such company without destroying it, the ship, and anything else within lethal range. That was beyond even the Precursors,
or at least beyond the known capabilities of any of their gadgetry that had yet been discovered.

It was a serious theological embarrassment to Cosmic Unity that some of its adherents were so incompatible with planet-dwellers
that there was no conceivable form of protection that could permit them to coexist, and the paradox had inspired several heresies.
The orthodox view was that somewhere in the Galaxy there must exist powerful, compact Precursor force fields, antigravity
hypergenerators, or whatever, that would permit even these entities to join the planet-dwellers in Full Convocation.

Without a doubt, the Lifesoul-Giver would have arranged this, and it was only a matter of time before suitable devices were
discovered. Until then the planet-dwellers, even though they were a minority, necessarily represented all other fellow participants
in the One.

As a compromise, several exotics were always present as holograms, and the entire ceremony would be broadcast by ansible to
selected audiences—three stars that hosted converted plasmoid colonies, a band of nomadic believers herding their magnetotori
across the cold and dark of the interstellar vacuum to solar-wind pastures, and four orphan planets, worlds without any accompanying
stars. Such planets, long ago expelled from nascent stellar systems, were common in the celestial voids. Typically, they possessed
high-pressure atmospheres, in which a kind of greenhouse effect could sustain life for tens of billions of years. On one of
these orphan worlds, flat creatures like pancakes had evolved an advanced culture beneath a high-pressure atmosphere of molecular
hydrogen that retained nearly all the heat from decaying thorium and other radioactives. Cosmic Unity planned to help them
spread to the other three orphan worlds, as soon as appropriate inducements could be found.

They were working on it.

No challenge was too great to prevent dissemination of the Memeplex and the way of life that went with it. Cosmic Unity would
not be denied to any sentient creature, however great the challenge.

The blimp spread her tentacles, and the Assembly fell silent save for the gentle hiss of air pumps here and there and a gurgle
of body fluids from those unable to suppress this evidence of their material nature. Those who spoke in light toned down their
emissions. Pheromone production was contained within barrier fields produced by specially duplicated generators.

The representative selection of acolytes positioned themselves in various rest poses at the high acolyte’s feet. The last
to settle was the Illensan, which hesitated before deciding to sit down on its powerball.

All attention now focused on the high acolyte.

The light from No-Moon’s sun filtered down onto the reef, refracted into ever-changing caustic patterns by the ripples and
waves that coursed across the lagoon of Crooked Atoll. Corals were wedged in huge convoluted mounds or scattered haphazardly
across underwater clearings of open sand. Giant purple fans sprouted from thick lumps of pale jelly, undulating in the gentle
currents. Shoals of brightly colored fish gathered in clefts between the rocks or patrolled the open waters alongside the
reef, alert for any hint of a predator. The predators took them anyway, but enough survived their attentions to keep their
species in business.

Here, faint traces in the sand told of a lurking trapdaw buried under the lagoon floor, waiting for its open jaws to be sprung
by any unwary crustacean that walked into the trap. There, just visible behind fronds of algaweed, was the double snout of
a rigid eel. Tiny free-swimming polyps created huge semiopaque clouds, often forming spontaneously into grotesque shapes.

The reef formed a huge dented ellipse, broken in four or five places as the result of bleaching by too-warm seas during unusually
hot summers. It was about three miles from end to end, half that from side to side. It contained roughly fifty million corals.

One, not distinguished in any notable way from any of the others, was Second-Best Sailor’s wife.

Unconnected, as she was right now, her mental abilities were rather weaker than those of a desert cactus. She could feed,
transduce energy, and—when the night was luminous and the mood was right—breed with her husband. She could compete for territory
with her neighbors, exuding toxins to keep them away, or—if that failed—to kill them. Some of her neighbors had another weapon:
They could turn themselves inside out and eject their stomachs, still attached to their main bodies, toward any suitable victim
. . . and eat it. When satisfied, they would draw their stomachs back into their more usual position.

This was how Second-Best Sailor’s wife got on with the other reefwives—who also had the brains of a cactus, so it worked out
fine. Every coralline reef is a battleground, but the unending guerrilla warfare has a positive consequence. The reef thrives.
In a web of mutual enemies there must be many accidental cooperations. As the old saying goes, “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.”
In literal terms, the saying is nonsense, for my enemy’s enemy can perfectly well have a go at me, too, but whenever it has
a go at my enemy, it does help me. When the webs become more complex, ecological support groups cannot avoid coming into existence.
Wars cannot be fought on too many fronts at the same time.

Dormant neural connections activated. With no warning, Second-Best Sailor’s wife, and millions like her, suddenly became united
to create the reefmind.

The reefmind determined that she was in need of multiple viewpoints, and she segregated herself into four separate conscious
modules: North, South, East, West.

North:
You will remember from our recent-immediate unison that I/we expressed concern about a potential threat on the fringes of
our joint perception?

East:
Agreed.

South:
Confirmed.

West:
I would kind of go along with that, yes.

East:
And now we are all distinctly apprehensive, for the threat is no longer potential. Our males send news from the ports. The
disturbing activity is migrating toward the center of our perceptions.

North:
Am I justified in sensing invasion of our territory?

West:
Too true. And I am sure that I speak for us all.

East:
I believe we would do well to unite for a moment and pool our resources and recollections. I want to make certain . . .

. . . Yes, it is as I suspected. I/we have encountered such a threat before.

South:
Many times. A benevolent memeplex, perhaps already turned malignant. And now we have a name for it: Cosmic Unity.

North:
The name alone is worrying. How can a diverse cosmos ever become united?

South:
Unified.

West:
Uni
form
. Regimented.

South:
That is what I fear. It is a pattern as old as the Galaxy. Apologies, I exaggerate.
Almost
as old as the Galaxy.

West:
I think it’s older. There are other galaxies.

East:
But no means of transport between them.

West:
That we know of. Yet.

North:
Whatever—it is an ancient pattern. More ancient even than the Precursors. And a precondition for its appearance is infestation
by extelligent life forms.

South:
The
only
precondition.

West:
You realize, it was just this threat that forced us to leave our beloved Three-Moons and flee across the void to this unpleasantly
moonless world, where only the light of sporadic meteor showers exists to stimulate our mating urges?

East:
Agreed.

South:
Affirmed.

West:
Right on.

For a moment the reefmind remembered the great evacuation as if it had happened yesterday—the bargaining to secure allies,
the transfer of males and females, the restructuring of their new home’s ecology. And the war that had destroyed their original
world.