The alien considered his remark, warming through shades of orange to a bright venous red. Like an echo, the shade spread to the other members of the gathering.
'We help,' the leader told Renfrew. 'That is what we do. That is what we have always done. We are the Kind.'
He returned to the base and tried to continue his affairs, just as if the Kind had never arrived. Yet they were always out there whenever he passed a window: brighter and closer now as evening stole in, as if they had gathered the day's light and were now reradiating it in subtly altered shades. He closed the storm shutters but that didn't help much. He did not doubt that the ship was still poised above, suspended over the base as if guarding the infinitely precious thing that he had become.
Renfrew's old routines had little meaning now. The aliens hadn't just brought the base back to the way it had been before he crashed the buggy. They had repaired all the damage that had accrued since the collapse of Earthside society, and the base systems now functioned better than at any point since the base's construction. As mindless as his maintenance tours had been, they had imposed structure on his life that was now absent. Renfrew felt like a rat that'd had his exercise wheel taken away.
He went to the recreation room and brought the system back online. Everything functioned as the designers had intended. The aliens must have repaired, or at least not removed, his implant. But when he cycled through the myriad options, he found that something had happened to Piano Man.
The figure was still there - Renfrew even knew his name now - but the companion he remembered was gone. Now Piano Man behaved just like all the other generated personalities. Renfrew could still talk to him, and Piano Man could still answer him back, but nothing like their old conversations was now possible. Piano Man would take requests, and banter, but that was the limit of his abilities. If Renfrew tried to steer the conversation away from the strictly musical, if he tried to engage Piano Man in a discussion about cosmology or quantum mechanics, all he got back was a polite but puzzled stare. And the more Renfrew persisted, the less it seemed to him that there was any consciousness behind that implant-generated face. All he was dealing with was a paper-thin figment of the entertainment system.
Renfrew knew that the Kind hadn't 'fixed' Piano Man in the sense that they had fixed the rest of the base. But - deliberately or otherwise - their arrival had destroyed the illusion of companionship. Perhaps they had straightened some neurological kink in Renfrew's brain when they put him back together. Or perhaps the mere fact of their arrival had caused his subconscious to discard that earlier mental crutch.
He knew it shouldn't have meant anything. Piano Man hadn't existed in any real sense. Feeling sorrow for his absence was as ridiculous as mourning the death of a character in a dream. He'd made Piano Man up; his companion had never had any objective existence.
But he still felt that he had lost a friend.
'I'm sorry,' he said to that polite but puzzled face. 'You were right, and I was wrong. I was doing fine just the way things were. I should have listened to you.'
There was an uncomfortable pause, before Piano Man smiled and spread his fingers above the keyboard.
'Would you like me to play something?'
'Yes,' Renfrew said. 'Play "Rocket Man". For old times' sake.'
He allowed the Kind into Tharsis Base. Their crystalline forms were soon everywhere, spreading and multiplying in a mad orgy of prismatic colour, transforming the drab architecture into a magical lantern-lit grotto. The beauty of it was so startling, so intoxicating, that it moved Renfrew to tears with the knowledge that no one else would ever see it.
'But it could be different,' the leader told him. 'We did not broach this earlier, but there are possibilities you may wish to consider.'
'Such as?'
'We have repaired you, and made you somewhat younger than you were before your accident. In doing so we have learned a great deal about your biology. We cannot resurrect the dead of Earth, or your companions here on Mars, but we can give you other people.'
'I don't follow.'
'It would cost us nothing to weave new companions. They could be grown to adulthood at accelerated speed, or your own ageing could be arrested while you give the children time to grow.'
'And then what?'
'You could breed with them, if you chose. We'd intervene to correct any genetic anomalies.'
Renfrew smiled. '"Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids." At least, that's what a friend of mine told me once.'
'Now there is nowhere
but
Mars. Doesn't that make a difference? Or would you rather we established a habitable zone on Earth and transplanted you there?'
They made him feel like a plant, like some incredibly rare and delicate orchid.
'Would I notice the difference?'
'We could adjust your faculties so that Earth appeared the way you remembered. Or we could edit your memories to match the present conditions.'
'Why can't you just put things back the way they were? Surely one runaway virus isn't going to defeat you.'
The alien turned a shade of chrome blue that Renfrew had learned to recognise as indicative of gentle chiding. 'That's not our way. The runaway agent now constitutes its own form of life, brimming with future potential. To wipe it out now would be akin to sterilising your planet just as your own single-celled ancestors were gaining a foothold.'
'You care about life that much?'
'Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that.' The chrome blue faded, replaced by a placatory olive green. 'Given that Earth cannot be made the way it was, will you reconsider our offer to give you companionship?'
'Not now,' he said.
'But later, perhaps?'
'I don't know. I've been on my own a long time. I'm not sure it isn't better this way.'
'You've craved companionship for years. Why reject it now?'
'Because . . .' And here Renfrew faltered, conscious of his own inarticulacy before the alien. 'When I was alone, I spent a lot of time thinking things through. I got set on that course, and I'm not sure I'm done yet. There's still some stuff I need to get straight in my head. Maybe when I'm finished--'
'Perhaps we can help you with that.'
'Help me understand the universe? Help me understand what it means to be the last living man? Maybe even the last intelligent organism in the universe?'
'It wouldn't be the first time. We are a very old culture. In our travels we have encountered myriad other species. Some of them are extinct by now, or changed beyond recognition. But many of them were engaged on quests similar to your own. We have watched, and occasionally interceded to better aid that comprehension. Nothing would please us more than to offer you similar assistance. If we cannot give you companionship, at least let us give you wisdom.'
'I want to understand space and time, and my own place in it.'
'The path to deep comprehension is risky.'
'I'm ready for it. I've already come a long way.'
'Then we shall help. But the road is long, Renfrew. The road is long and you have barely started your journey.'
'I'm willing to go all the way.'
'You will be long past human before you near the end of it. That is the cost of understanding space and time.'
Renfrew felt a chill on the back of his neck, a premonitory shiver. The alien was not warning him for nothing. In its travels it must have witnessed things that caused it distress.
Still, he said: 'Whatever it takes. Bring it on. I'm ready.'
'Now?'
'Now. But before we begin . . . don't call me Renfrew any more.'
'You wish a new name, to signify this new stage in your quest?'
'From now on, I'm John. That's what I want you to call me.'
'Just John?'
He nodded solemnly. 'Just John.'
PART FOUR
The Kind did things to John.
While he slept, they altered his mind: infiltrating it with tiny crystal avatars of themselves, performing prestigious feats of neural rewiring. When he woke he still felt like himself, still carried the same freight of memories and emotions that he'd taken with him to sleep. But suddenly he had the ability to grasp things that had been impenetrably difficult only hours earlier. Before the accident, he had probed the inlets of superstring theory, like an explorer searching for a navigable route through a treacherous mountain range. He had never found that easy path, never dreamed of conquering the dizzying summits before him, but now, miraculously, he was on the other side, and the route through the obstacle looked insultingly easy. Beyond superstring theory lay the unified territory of M-theory, but that too was soon his. John revelled in his new understanding.
More and more, he began to think in terms of a room whose floor was the absolute truth about the universe: where it had come from, how it worked, what it meant to be a thinking being in that universe. But that floor looked very much like a carpet, and it was in turn concealed by other carpets, one on top of the other, each of which represented some imperfect approximation to the final layer. Each layer might look convincing, might endure decades or centuries of enquiry without hinting that it contained a flaw, but sooner or later one would inevitably reveal itself. A tiny, loose thread - perhaps a discrepancy between observation and theory - and with a tug the entire fabric of that layer would come apart. It was in the nature of such revolutions that the next layer down would already have been glimpsed by then. Only the final carpet, the floor, would contain no logical inconsistencies, no threads waiting to be unravelled.
Could you ever know when you'd reached it? John wondered. Some thinkers considered it impossible to ever know with certainty. All you could do was keep testing, tugging at every strand to see how firmly it was woven into the whole. If after tens of thousands of years the pattern was still intact, then it might begin to seem likely that you had arrived at final wisdom. But you could never know for sure. The ten thousand and first year might bring forth some trifling observation that, as innocent as it first seemed, would eventually prove that there was yet another layer lurking underneath.
You could go on like that for ever, never knowing for sure.
Or - as some other thinkers speculated - the final theory might come with its own guarantee of authenticity, a golden strand of logical validation threaded into the very mathematical language in which it was couched. It might be in the nature of the theory to state that there could be no deeper description of the universe.
But even then, it wouldn't stop you making observations. It wouldn't stop you testing.
John kept learning. M-theory became a distant and trifling obstacle, dwarfed by the daunting unified theories that had superseded it. These theories probed the interface not just of matter and space-time, but also of consciousness and entropy, information, complexity and the growth of replicating structures. On the face of it, they seemed to describe everything that conceivably mattered about the universe.
But each in turn was revealed as flawed, incomplete, at odds with observation. An error in the predicted mass of the electron, in the twenty-second decimal place. A one-in-ten-thousandth-part discrepancy in the predicted bending of starlight around a certain class of rotating black hole. A niggling mismatch between the predicted and observed properties of inertia in highly charged space-time.
The room contained many carpets, and John had the dizzying sense that there were still many layers between him and the floor. He'd made progress, certainly, but it had only sharpened his sense of how far he had to go.
The Kind remade him time and again, resetting his body clock to give him the time he needed for his studies. But each leap of understanding pushed him closer to the fundamental limits of a wet human brain wired together from a few hundred billion neurons, crammed into a tiny cage of bone.
'You can stop now, if you like,' the Kind said, in the hundredth year of his quest.
'Or what?' John asked mildly.
'Or we continue, with certain modifications.'
John gave them his consent. It would mean not being human for a little while, but given the distance he had come, the price did not strike him as unreasonable.
The Kind encoded the existing patterns of his mind into a body much like one of their own. For John, the transition to a machine-based substrate of thinking crystal was in no way traumatic, especially as the Kind assured him that the process was completely reversible. Freed of the constraints of flesh and scale, his progress accelerated even more. From this new perspective, his old human mind looked like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Compared to the mental mansion he now inhabited, his former residence looked as squalid and limiting as a rabbit hutch. It was a wonder he had understood
anything
.