Beyond the Farthest Suns (23 page)

He cared nothing for past or future, had lost nothing, gained nothing.

I am or was a part of a society really no part of any

This name is Olmy Ap Sennen

Lover of many loved and loving by few

Contact nothing without

Without contact nothing

Uprooted tree

The lesion's inflamed rim began to brighten. The suspended and aimless figure in its gripping cilia of probabilities maintained enough structure and drive to be interested in this, and noted that compared to past memory, the lesion was much smaller, much darker, and the flaring rim much broader. It resembled an immense solar eclipse with a bloody corona.

Loyalties and loves uprooted

Language itself faded until the aimless figure saw only images, the lushness of another world out of reach, closed off, the faces of old humans once loved once reassuringly close now dead and without ghosts.

Can't even be haunted by a past uprooted

The figure's motion down the valley slowed. No time passed. Eveternity, endless now. Naked, skinless, fleshless, boneless. Consumed, integrated.

Experiences stillness.

Mark this in an endless column:
experiences

Experiences stillness

stillness

stillness

No divisions. A tiny place no bigger than a fist a womb. Tiny place of infinite peace at the heart of a frozen geometry. All elaboration, variation, permutation, long since exhausted; infinite access to unbounded energy contained in oneness.

You/I/We no difference. See?

See.
Vidya.
All seeing. Eye of Buddha. Nerveless kalpas of some body. Nerve vanity.

This oneness consumed. Many nows, peace past.

At peace in the past. Loved women, raised children, lived a long life on a world to which there is no returning.

Nothing one at peace in no past all completed no returning.

Point.

One makes possible all.

I see. Buddha, do not leave your student bound.

The eye is shrinking, closing, its gorgeous bloody flare dimming. It is pierced by a white needle visible behind the small dark center.

Small large no matter no time

Do not go. Take us with

Am your father/mother/food

loved raised living longing no return

my own ghost

8

Ry Ornis, the tall insect-thin master, smiled down on him. Olmy saw many of the master opener, like an avatar of an ancient god. All the different masters merged.

They were surrounded by a glassy tent. A slow breeze cooled his face. Ry Ornis had wrapped him in a rescue field where he fell, carrying safe cool air to replenish what his worksuit could no longer provide.

Olmy rediscovered scattered rivers of memory and bathed his ancient feet there. He swallowed once. The eye, the lesion, had shut forever. “It's gone,” he said.

Ry Ornis nodded. “It's done.”

“I can never tell anybody,” Olmy realized out loud.

“You can never tell anybody.”

“We robbed and ate to live. To be born.”

Ry Ornis held his fingers to his lips, his face spectral in a new light from the south. A huge grin was spreading around half the Way, a gorgeous brilliant electric light. “The ring gate. A cirque,” the gate opener said, glancing over his shoulder. “Rasp and Karn, my students, have done well. We've done what we came here to do, and we saved the Way, as well. Not bad, eh, Ser Olmy?”

Olmy reached up to grab the gate opener, perhaps to strangle him. Ry Ornis had moved, however.

Olmy turned away, swallowed a second time against a competing dryness. There had been no need to complete the ring gate. The unfinished cirque had done its job and drained the final wasted remnants of the lesion, forcing a closure.

As they watched, the cirque shrank. The grin became a smile became an all-knowing serene curve, then collapsed to a point, and the point dimmed on distant rippled sands.

“I think the twins are a little disappointed they can't finish the cirque. But it's wonderful,” Ry Ornis enthused, and performed a small dance on the black obsidian of the valley floor. “They are truly masters now! When I am tried and convicted, they will take my place!”

The Way remained.

Rolling his head to one side, Olmy could not see the Redoubt. “Where's the pyramid?” he asked hoarsely.

“Enoch has her wish,” Ry Ornis said, and shaded his eyes with one hand.

Plass, Enoch, the allthing.

Plass had seen her own ghost.

To east and west, the ruined mountains and their statues remained, rejected, discarded. No dream, no hallucination.

He had been used again. No matter. For an endless instant, like any gate opener, only more so, he had merged with the eye of the Buddha.

9

“The Infinite Hexamon Nexus does not approve of risky experiments that cannot be documented or explained. How many were deceived, Master Ry Ornis?”

“All, myself included.”

“Yet you maintain this was done out of necessity?”

“All of it. The utmost necessity.”

“Will this ever be necessary again? Answer honestly; the trust between us has worn very thin!”

“Never again.”

“How do you explain that one universe, one domain, must feed on another in order to be born?”

“I don't. We were compelled. That is all I know.”

“Could it have gone badly?”

“Of course. As it is, in our clumsiness and ignorance, we have condemned all our ancestors to live with unexplainable presences, ghosts of past and future. A kind of afterbirth.”

“You are smiling, Master Gate Opener. This is intolerable!”

“It is all I can do, Sers.”

…

“For your disobedience and arrogance, what punishment do you choose, Master Ry Ornis?”

“Sers of the Nexus. This I swear. I will put down my clavicle from this time forward, and never know the grace again.”

—Sentencing Phase of Secret Hearings Conducted
by the Infinite Hexamon Nexus, “On the Advisability
of Opening Gates into Chaos and Order”

Tracting through the weightless forest of the Wald in the rebuilt Axis Nader, reaching out to the trees to push or grab roots and branches, half-flying and half-climbing, in his mind's river-wide eye, Olmy Ap Sennen returned to Lamarckia, where he had once nearly died of old age, and retrieved a package he had left there, tied in neat pieces of mat-paper. His wives and children had kept it safe for him, and now they returned it. There was much smiling and laughter, then saying of farewells, last of all a farewell to his sons, whom he had left behind. Occupants of a different land, another life.

As they faded, in his mind's eye, he opened the package they had given to him and greedily swallowed the wonderful contents.

His soul.

MDIO Ecosystems Increase
Knowledge of DNA Languages (2215 C.E.)

H
enry Gee at Nature asked a select list of science fiction writers to contribute brief stories describing some future development in science. The series was great fun. My contribution was an attempt to write a review of recent discoveries as it might appear in
Nature
some two centuries hence. Along the way, I got to pump my speculative views of genetics and biological development (expressed in detail in
Darwin's Radio
,
Vitals
, and
Darwin's Children
) as if they're part of an established paradigm. Talk about smug!

 

The discovery of over 15,000 massive deep ice objects (MDIO) in orbit around supermassive planets in the close interstellar neighborhood has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of biological languages.

Phenotype-generating languages for terrestrial DNA-recorded life forms can be ranked closely according to kingdoms. Most plants, for example, express phylogeny according to the famous Zinn-Wang languages, first decoded in the mid-twenty-first century.

Archaea, commonly used as the Rosetta stone for all primitive DNA languages, have provided deep insights into nonterrestrial biologies that have advanced to the DNA level.

RNA languages in terrestrial viruses constitute a virtual Tower of Babel, indicating a degenerate and mutationally rich mix that can still compel replication in DNA hosts. Early RNA coding systems found outside the solar system, however, can often be translated into Archaean DNA based languages, and these may constitute the most basic fixed languages of life.

MDIOs are typically seven to nine Earth masses and consist of layers of water ice two to five thousand kilometers in depth, overlying a high-pressure liquid ocean (HPLO) that sits in turn on a rocky mantle. At the center is an iron- and sulfur-rich core.

The interior is warmed both by latent heat and radioactivity (chiefly thorium 90) and by tidal friction generated by interaction with the supermassive parent body. Temperatures in the HPLO can frequently exceed 130 degrees Celsius.

MDIOs may constitute the most common life-supporting bodies in the universe.

Neutronium self-guided probes (NSGP) have penetrated seven of these deep ice objects and have obtained remarkable data. Spin-off probes made of normal matter, transmuted from neutronium and released into the HPLO, perform
in situ
analysis of all carbon chemistry and send information to orbiting research stations.

What is most remarkable about MDIO biologies is that they can exist at all under these extraordinary conditions. Once again, it is demonstrated that life will begin and thrive anywhere there is liquid water and the necessary elements.

To date, RNA and DNA language analysis has been conducted on three HPLO ecosystems. Because of limited exploration ranges for the probes, the extent of these ecosystems is not known; however, every probed MDIO possesses life.

One of the ecosystems (MDIO 2341-a) is still in a “profligate” mutation-rich RNA phase, with no complex organisms and no DNA detected. Here, new genetic coding schemes may naturally emerge every few months, and competition between coding schemes is likely to be extreme. (The emergence of competent and stable genetic languages on Earth may have taken more than a billion years.)

The other two ecosystems (MDIO 5756-b, MDIO 349-x) have entered the more stable age of DNA and show remarkable similarities to each other.

The most striking feature of these ecosystems is how bright they are, since they are completely hidden from all starlight. The roving probes have sent back images of massive reef-like structures glowing as brightly as several full moons, surrounded by a thick, slowly churning mass of light-dependent microbes. Feeding on these microbes are living filter nets, fringed by corkscrew cilia, able to join into larger units or separate into smaller.

Tall spiral chimneys, like Baroque columns in a church, release water heated in the upper mantle, creating plumes that can extend for many kilometers. These plumes spread out at the upper ice layer, eroding smooth domes almost a hundred kilometers in diameter and usually less than a millimeter deep. These domes collect oxygen freed from the actions of photosynthetic organisms. Typically, within seconds the oxygen is forced back under extreme pressure into the water and the ice, but during this brief time, miniature forests of opportunistic organisms grow in the domes, extracting all the benefits from a more efficient oxygen metabolism.

The upper limit of organization in MDIO ecosystems is not known. Typical distributed-intelligence ecosystems are found here, and interact to form complex neuronal networks that govern MDIO life-cycles (as on Earth). However, no condensed nodal intelligences such as large animals have yet been found. Instead, intelligence seems frozen at a very early and distributed stage.

This may reflect the unlikelihood of any intelligences within the MDIO ever being challenged by major environmental change, much less being given a chance to observe the outside universe.

MDIOs seem to be remarkably stable over hundreds of millions of years.

The impossibility of emergence through the deep ice and escape into space limits the potential growth of concentrated hypothesis engines as defined by the Turing-Watteau diagram of novel information vs. expansion opportunity.

Some researchers suggest that the seeding of provocative artifacts (“Clarkeing”) below the deep ice may encourage condensation of concentrated intelligences, or at the very least, induce some interesting emergent properties. The design of these artifacts is currently spurring intense debate.

As one chief communications researcher has asked, “How do you uplift slime?”

Harnessing of bacterial communities on Earth in the last century could provide a template for working with MDIO ecosystems, adding to the list of beings we can actually talk to.

Hardfought

I
can't recall the list of magazines that rejected “Hardfought.” At some 24,000 words, my novella was too long for most at the time; too weird and difficult for some. When I sent it to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, an interim editor caught the story and didn't know what to do with it. (Isaac Asimov did not buy stories for the magazine. He wrote editorials and answered letters, and visited the offices to spread good cheer.)

Asimov's future editor-in-chief, Shawna McCarthy, was enthusiastic, but she was not yet in control. Asimov's had become known for publishing fairly traditional stories, generally light and doggedly unpretentious. “Hardfought” is long and heavy and very pretentious.

I made a phone call and tried to persuade the interim editor to buy it. Certainly it was not your usual SF story, I said. I invoked the hallowed name of Joseph Conrad. I was desperate. I needed the money. “What if I cut it—a little?” I suggested. Pretty please… ?

The editor, still undecided, soon left to take another editorial position. Shawna McCarthy moved up, bought the story, made some cuts, slotted it for publication, and…

But let's go back a bit.

Jim Turner at Arkham House was waiting for me to write a masterpiece to cap off a proposed story collection. Jim is dead now, but I remember his voice very clearly, and cherish his contrarian sense of humor. I sent him “Hardfought.” He phoned to tell me the bad news. It was a tough read, he confessed. He was not enthusiastic.

He read it four more times and called again.

Had he seen Babe, he might have said, “That'll do, Bear.” What he actually said was, “All right, Bear. It's a masterpiece.”

Asimov's published the story first. Shawna warned the magazine's readers that it was not the magazine's usual fare. She needn't have worried.

“Hardfought” and “Blood Music” picked up Nebula awards from the Science Fiction Writers of America, on the same evening. The Nebula Banquet that year (1984) was held on the Queen Mary in Long Beach Harbor. Seated at our table were my mother and father, my favorite college professor, Elizabeth Chater, her daughter Patty, and my wife Astrid. The ceremony was emceed by my good friend Gregory Benford, and the award was presented by my father-in-law, Poul Anderson. Karen Anderson, my mother-in-law, was present as well. A full house!

Need I say it was a great evening?

My first story collection, The Wind from a Burning Woman, was published in the spring of 1983 by Arkham House. It sold out its first print run in ninety days, and became the fastest selling book in Arkham House history.

A few years later, in 1986, I spoke briefly with Isaac Asimov at a SFWA Publisher's Reception in Manhattan. I had my infant son Erik strapped to my chest. Isaac was being ferried from interview to interview when he spotted my name tag, paused, lifted his eyebrows, and said, “So you're
Greg Bear! I'm glad you weren't around when I was getting started!”

I beamed.

This may be the best story I've ever written.

 

In the Han Dynasty, historians were appointed by royal edict to write the history of Imperial China. They alone were the arbiters of what would be recorded. Although various emperors tried, none could gain access to the ironbound chest in which each document was placed after it was written. The historians preferred to suffer death rather than betray their
trust.

At the end of each reign the box would be opened and the documents published, perhaps to benefit the next emperor. But for these documents, Imperial China, to a large extent, has no history.

The thread survives by whim.

Humans called it the Medusa. Its long twisted ribbons of gas strayed across fifty parsecs, glowing blue, yellow, and carmine. Watery black flecked a central core of ghoulish green. Half a dozen protostars circled the core, and as many more dim conglomerates pooled in dimples in the nebula's magnetic field. The Medusa was a huge womb of stars—and disputed territory.

Whenever Prufrax looked at the nebula in displays or through the ship's ports, it seemed malevolent, like a zealous mother showing an ominous face to protect her children. Prufrax had never had a mother, but she had seen them in some of the fibs.

At five, Prufrax was old enough to know the
Mellangee's
mission and her role in it. She had already been through four ship-years of in­doctrination. Until her first battle she would be educated in both the Know and the Tell. She would be exercised and trained in the Mocks; in sleep she would dream of penetrating the huge red-and-white Senexi seedships and finding the brood mind. “Zap, Zap,” she went with her lips, silent so the tellman wouldn't think her thoughts were straying.

The tellman peered at her from his position in the center of the spherical classroom. Her mates stared straight at the center, all fo­cusing somewhere around the tellman's spiderlike teaching desk, waiting for the trouble, some fidgeting. “How many branch individ­uals in the Senexi brood mind?” he asked. He looked around the classroom. Peered face by face. Focused on her again. “Pru?”

“Five,” she said. Her arms ached. She had been pumped full of moans the wake before. She was already three meters tall, in elfstate, with her long, thin limbs not nearly adequately fleshed out and her fingers still crisscrossed with the surgery done to adapt them to the gloves.

“What will you find in the brood mind?” the tellman pursued, his impassive face stretched across a hammerhead as wide as his shoul­ders. Some of the fems thought tellmen were attractive. Not many, and Pru was not one of them.

“Yoke,” she said.

“What is in the brood-mind yoke?”

“Fibs.”

“More specifically? And it really isn't all fib, you know.”

“Info. Senexi data.”

“What will you do?”

“Zap,” she said, smiling.

“Why, Pru?”

“Yoke has team gens-memory. Zap yoke, spill the life of the team's five branch inds.”

“Zap the brood, Pru?”

“No,” she said solemnly. That was a new instruction, only in effect since her class's inception. “Hold the brood for the supreme overs.” The tellman did not say what would be done with the Senexi broods. That was not her concern.

“Fine,” said the tellman. “You tell well, for someone who's always half-journeying.”

Brainwalk, Prufrax thought to herself. Tellman was fancy with the words, but to Pru, what she was prone to do during Tell was brainwalk, seeking out her future. She was already five, soon six. Old. Some saw Senexi by the time they were four.

“Zap, Zap,” she said softly.

Aryz skidded through the thin layer of liquid ammonia on his broadest pod, considering his new assignment. He knew the Me­dusa by another name, one that conveyed all the time and effort the Senexi had invested in it. The protostar nebula held few mysteries for him. He and his four branch-mates, who along with the all-important brood mind comprised one of the six teams aboard the seedship, had patrolled the nebula for ninety-three orbits, each orbit—including the timeless periods outside status geometry—taking some one hundred and thirty human years. They had woven in and out of the tendrils of gas, charting the infalling masses and exploring the rocky accretion disks of stars entering the main sequence. With each measure and update, the brood minds refined their view of the nebula as it would be a hundred generations hence when the Senexi plan would finally mature.

The Senexi were nearly as old as the galaxy. They had achieved spaceflight during the time of the starglobe when the galaxy had been a sphere. They had not been a quick or brilliant race. Each great achievement had taken thousands of generations, and not just be­cause of their material handicaps. In those times elements heavier than helium had been rare, found only around stars that had greedily absorbed huge amounts of primeval hydrogen, burned fierce and blue and exploded early, permeating the ill-defined galactic arms with carbon and nitrogen, lithium and oxygen. Elements heavier than iron had been almost nonexistent. The biologies of cold gas-giant worlds had developed with a much smaller palette of chemical com­binations in producing the offspring of the primary Population II stars.

Aryz, even with the limited perspective of a branch ind, was aware that, on the whole, the humans opposing the seedship were more adaptable, more vital. But they were not more experienced. The Senexi with their billions of years had often matched them. And Aryz's perspective was expanding with each day of his new assign­ment.

In the early generations of the struggle, Senexi mental stasis and cultural inflexibility had made them avoid contact with the Popu­lation I species. They had never begun a program of extermination of the younger, newly life-forming worlds; the task would have been monumental and probably useless. So when spacefaring cultures developed, the Senexi had retreated, falling back into the redoubts of old stars even before engaging with the new kinds. They had re­treated for three generations, about thirty thousand human years, raising their broods on cold nestworlds around red dwarfs, con­serving, holding back for the inevitable conflicts.

As the Senexi had anticipated, the younger Population I races had found need of even the aging groves of the galaxy's first stars. They had moved in savagely, voraciously, with all the strength and mu­tability of organisms evolved from a richer soup of elements. Biology had, in some ways, evolved in its own right and superseded the Senexi.

Aryz raised the upper globe of his body, with its five silicate eyes arranged in a cross along the forward surface. He had memory of those times, and times long before, though his team hadn't existed then. The brood mind carried memories selected from the total store of nearly twelve billion years' experience; an awesome amount of knowledge, even to a Senexi. He pushed himself forward with his rear pods.

Through the brood mind Aryz could share the memories of a hun­dred thousand past generations, yet the brood mind itself was younger than its branch individuals. For a time in their youth, in their liquid-dwelling larval form, the branch inds carried their own sacs of data, each a fragment of the total necessary for complete memory. The branch inds swam through ammonia seas and wafted through thick warm gaseous zones, protoplasmic blobs three to four meters in diameter, developing their personalities under the weight of the past—and not even a complete past. No wonder they were inflexible, Aryz thought. Most branch inds were aware enough to see that—es­pecially when they were allowed to compare histories with the Pop­ulation I species, as he was doing—but there was nothing to be done. They were content the way they were. To change would be un­speakably repugnant. Extinction was preferable … almost.

But now they were pressed hard. The brood mind had begun a number of experiments. Aryz's team had been selected from the seedship's contingent to oversee the experiments, and Aryz had been chosen as the chief investigator. Two orbits past, they had cap­tured six human embryos in a breeding device, as well as a highly coveted memory storage center. Most Senexi engagements had been with humans for the past three or four generations. Just as the Senexi dominated Population II species, humans were ascendant among their kind.

Experiments with the human embryos had already been con­ducted. Some had been allowed to develop normally; others had been tampered with, for reasons Aryz was not aware of. The tamperings had not been very successful.

The newer experiments, Aryz suspected, were going to take a dif­ferent direction, and the seedship's actions now focused on him; he believed he would be given complete authority over the human shapes. Most branch inds would have dissipated under such a burden, but not Aryz. He found the human shapes rather interesting, in their own horrible way. They might, after all, be the key to Senexi survival.

The moans were toughening her elfstate. She lay in pain for a wake, not daring to close her eyes; her mind was changing and she feared sleep would be the end of her. Her nightmares were not easily separated from life; some, in fact, were sharper.

Too often in sleep she found herself in a Senexi trap, struggling uselessly, being pulled in deeper, her hatred wasted against such power…

When she came out of the rigor, Prufrax was given leave by the subordinate tellman. She took to the
Mellangee's
greenroads, walk­ing stiffly in the shallow gravity. Her hands itched. Her mind seemed almost empty after the turmoil of the past few wakes. She had never felt so calm and clear. She hated the Senexi doubly now; once for their innate evil, twice for what they had made her overs put her through to be able to fight them. Logic did not matter. She was calm, assured. She was growing more mature wake by wake. Combat-bud­ding, the tellman called it, hate emerging like flowers, synthesizing the sunlight of his teaching into pure fight.

The greenroads rose temporarily beyond the labyrinth shields and armor of the ship. Simple transparent plastic and steel geodesic sur­faces formed a lacework over the gardens, admitting radiation neces­sary to the vegetation growing along the paths. No machines scooted one forth and inboard here. It was necessary to walk. Walking was luxury and privilege.

Prufrax looked down on the greens to each side of the paths with­out much comprehension. They were
beautiful.
Yes, one should say that, think that, but what did it mean? Pleasing? She wasn't sure what being pleased meant, outside of thinking Zap. She sniffed a flower that, the signs explained, bloomed only in the light of young stars not yet fusing. They were near such a star now, and the greenroads were shiny black and electric green with the blossoms. Lamps had been set out for other plants unsuited to such darkened conditions. Some technic allowed suns to appear in selected plastic panels when viewed from certain angles. Clever, the technicals.