The Well of Stars (28 page)

Authors: Robert Reed

“Which equation?” asked Perri.

“It’s one of the Theories of All,” his new friend reported. Then Locke glanced up, staring at no one in particular, explaining, “This is one of those mathematical wonderlands that neatly explain everything just as well as their six good friends manage to explain it.”

“I thought there were just six Theories of All,” Quee Lee muttered.

“There’s always been a seventh,” Locke assured.

“It gets mentioned, on occasion,” said Washen. A deep memory surfaced for a moment, the face of her own mother appearing before her. “Engineers and most scientists don’t have any use for the monster, so they don’t bother mentioning it.”

“What exactly does it say?” Quee Lee pushed.

Everyone turned toward Locke.

“You know these shadow realms we talk about?” he began. “These parallel worlds and such?” He set the tablet facedown on the moist yellow ground. “In some theories, the parallel worlds are real places. In others, to varying degrees, they’re only shadows, ghosts buried in the big equations, and we are what is genuine, what is real. Our reality carries the rest along like a tree trunk holding up countless branches.”

He paused.

Then with a genuine deep-felt scorn, Locke said, “The seventh theory is just as impossible to disprove as the others, and much less useful, too. Basically, everything in Creation is shadow, ghostly and unreal … while the future is infinitely vague, as is the past …”

“Which means?” Quee Lee pressed.

“There is no such thing as history, at least where it matters to you and me.” He shook his head, placing a bare foot on top of the glowing tablet. “Which means that there is no one true past. A trillion trillion pasts give birth to every shadowy moment that we call Now.”

He paused, briefly.

“And more important than that, the universe hasn’t actually been born yet. Strange as that seems, it follows inevitably and inarguably from the same equations. Creation is an event that has been suspended. Creation is something that still waits to begin. Think of a tiny ball that rolled down a pitched slope many billions of years ago, and suddenly the ball found itself caught … trapped … perched on a treacherously narrow lip.” He still had a Wayward’s foot, broad and comfortably callused and happily bare. Pushing his foot into the glowing earth, he confessed, “I don’t know these equations as well as I might. But from what I have heard and what little I’ve read, they claim that if you are one of the shadows, and if you happen to discover where the Creation was halted … where the little ball lies … and if you can give that stubborn ball a good firm kick in just the right direction …”

With a toe, he kicked a tiny lump of iron.

Quietly, almost inaudibly, he said, “Boom.”

CONCEPTION

I remember this …

Myself. Alone. Me, simply and purely, and there was nothing else, and for no perceptible measure of time, there was only me. No compelling sense of a volume occupied or a vastness left empty. I was smaller than I am now. On the brink of nothingness, perhaps. Perhaps. But I remember nothing other than my own form, perfect and timeless, and in a deep and abiding fashion, I understood that everything that was had no choice but to be part of me. There was nothing else. What else could be real? I was wandering through a perfect seamless night, not a whisper of light defining the surrounding blackness. Even in my dreams, I knew nothing else. Nor could I imagine any temperature but the changeless cold, perched on the brink of absolute nothing. Nor could I appreciate my own terrific and relentless motion.

I was born inside that blackness, I am sure.

Born alone, without question.

The two of us are rather similar. Are we not? Each of us holds great long memories of dark and cold, timelessness and changelessness. If we could speak—if you had a voice of your own, a voice that rose from your truest soul—then I think we would find much in common. Shared assumptions, and understandings, and a host of deep, eternal intuitions.

Like me, you were born tiny.

But unlike you, I grew. My darkness was not as empty as yours, and then the darkness was ended. What do I remember of it? My own stark terror, of course. And a searing pain. And perhaps worst of all, I recall the terrible suddenness of the change. One moment, all was blackness and forever. Then before the next moment could find me, I slammed onto the surface of an unseen, unfelt body. I struck a large lost comet, as it happened. The impact created a brilliant white-hot fire, and the fire spilled across a volume of space
millions of times farther than I could ever reach. Thus, millions of times the distance that I could imagine. Not that I saw the spectacle, of course. My body and soul were left mangled and temporarily dead. But in another moment, or 10 billion moments, what remained of me managed to heal itself, reconstituting inside the watery depths of a still-molten world … and slowly, slowly, I learned to use my limbs and strength, swimming sluggishly about my enormous new realm.

Still, everything was blackness. And still, I was alone. An entity born in my circumstances—our circumstances—has no choice but to believe in a seamless, unending solitude. And any mind accustomed to such thoughts will not give up her solitude easily, and perhaps never completely.

I had found an entire world, and I explored it thoroughly. I swam through the freezing sea, then cut and clawed my way to the surface, easing across the dusty black ice. In gradual and spectacular motions, I learned about the greater universe: The world’s sluggish pull taught me about gravity; eroded craters hinted at the depths of time; every new shape gave me experience
in
the common geometries; and the occasional impact of dusts and pebbles convinced me that there was even more to Creation than myself and this one vast worldscape.

Like any life, I grew.

From the dusts and ice, I found the makings of myself, and gradually, gradually, I consumed my world.

In strength and in mind, I prospered.

When it was time to envision the Creation—a seminal moment for any species, I would imagine—I focused my intellect on a set of premises and intuitions that few organisms would willingly consider, except in the most abstract fashion.

Inside that perfect darkness, I saw an abbreviated Creation.

Inside a realm of shadow, I drew an existence built upon vague possibilities, nothing real except for my own mighty self.

Alone, my world-self drifted, and for a long while, that was enough. In the dense heart of the nebula, dust and snowballs would find their way to me, a natural accretion giving me more wealth to swallow—meat to ingest and transform however I wished. But then I decided
to
grow faster, and for another long while, I wove tendrils and elaborate nets, delicate and far-reaching, and strong enough to bring more treasures to my mouths. But ionizing the far dusts and then snaring them with EM rivers was more productive. And . after a little heavy feasting, what began as an anonymous lump of ice and tar was swollen a millionfold, creating a deep watery body with enough mass to yank down all that passed by

I do not believe in a single history.

There are countless paths to my story, each ending at this perfect and not-quite-real moment. But at some point in every past, I reached a critical juncture where I had to reverse the flow of the EM rivers, quenching the, flow from above. And at some other juncture, I asked myself—with the private and intense and thoroughly self-consumed voice—“What else can I accomplish?”

I made my first tentative buds, and with caution and a host of sensible rules, I cast the buds out into the cold.

A series of wet warm worlds became Me.

With my new wealth,
I began
to play with biology and physics, occasionally stumbling into new principles and possibilities.

The blackness was far from black, I realized. My vast new eyes betrayed flickers of light, particularly in the infrared and radio frequencies. Ever-larger eyes peered out into the nothingness, and gradually, the universe emerged. But to my way of thinking, it was a decidedly unimpressive universe. Unremarkable, forgettable. The false Creation was built upon vacuum—great endless reaches of true Nothing—with only a diluted webwork of warm matter and temporary plasmas strung here and there. With just a little watching, I
could see every future. Stars aged and died, but new suns were slow to be born. Galaxies reddened and grew old, exhausting their finite dusts. And the dying emptiness was expanding, accelerating away from itself at a spectacular rate … a damning oblivion waiting for those who were born in the next little while …

I saw nothing, then I blinded myself.

For a very long while, I happily produced my totipotent buds and sent them to find comets that grew into new worlds that were Me.

Within my realm fat with matter and latent energies, I prospered.

Inside a frigid cloud, I became vast, no one noticing my hands at work, thoroughly remaking a great volume
of
space.

A few suns were scattered inside my body—wanderers with a firm pull and a dangerous heat. Since they did not suit my needs, I let them pass; but their little worlds offered
rare metals and good experience. I devised ways
to
gut those worlds, lifting out their useful hearts and dismantling what remained.

One of the worlds had life and sentient minds that rode inside a tiny portion of the living matter. My solitude was finished, if only for a moment and only in a small fashion. I studied the little creatures. I learned more about them than they knew about themselves. And of course, nothing about them was special or beautiful, and they did not offer any knowledge about others who were close to my equal. The few bits of knowledge that were new to me, I took. And I took their world and their flesh and consumed each of their
minds, and with their own genetics, I built bodies far more lovely than they had ever envisioned.

Afterward, I devised machines that carried slivers of myself out of the nebula, stealing flesh and technologies from my neighbors, and always dressing myself as what I was: powerful and remote and forever undefined.

All is shadow.

The past and future are equally vague, and the Creation was aborted before it could begin, and whenever I listen to the chatter of the little species, none speak about such obvious truths.

Plainly, others are fools.

Inferior, and tiny, and contemptible.

For aeons, through every possible past, I have maintained my perfection. My only regret was that I would live to see the end of this empty unlovely universe—the galaxies cooling and retreating into nothingness; the wasteful suns eating their own flesh until they were cold embers or light-sucking holes; and all of those little species eventually collapsing back to dust.

If only the Creation had been without flaw, I thought.

If its enormous potential could have been realized and the shadows were thrown aside for all time …

And then, I found a speck talking in the dark.

I found O’Layle.

The creature sang praises for some great old ship, and I listened casually. And then he spoke about something tiny and awful that was carried inside the ship
—
something as old as the universe, perhaps
—
and
I
listened fervently.

Suddenly, all made sense.

The Creation.

The Great Ship.

And me.

In the vastness of All, you found me. Conditions and happenstance and the actions of a multitude of foolish souls had brought you to me, and you cannot imagine how it felt.

At the speed of light, news traveled through my grand self.

“My purpose is clear,” I proclaimed with my millions of bodies. And without a shred of doubt or a millisecond of hesitation, I set to work.

We are very much alike, you and me.

But do not fight with me, sister.

If you hear any whisper of what I am saying to you now, hear this:

You are tiny and weak. I am grand and irresistible. Do not struggle, and together, let us finish the glorious Creation … !