Enigma (39 page)

=I do not understand what moves you. I have been watching you across ten million fibers of the spindle. When I look on the matter-matrix of your existence, I see the shadows of what it was and what it will be. The full Greatcycle is contained in the thing itself, its origin and destiny. But you are different. The origin is there to see, but I cannot see the destiny.

–Are you…– The word “God” had never come easily to Thackery’s lips, but in the ideogrammatic communication of the D’shanna it could barely be formed at all.

=You wish me to be more than I am.—You are not the force to which so many of my kind have , looked.

=I am and am not. I am only what you see, not the answerer of orisons nor the bestower of eternal life—except that those pleas helped stir me to take note of you.

Not God
—Thackery felt emptied, deprived of the only label he had which seemed appropriate for the being before him.

–Gabriel,– Thackery said on a sudden impulse. –I will call you Gabriel.

=When I first looked out and discovered you, the idea that matter could be animate and self-directed was beyond formation. It took much time to find the pattern and confirm that it was a true-thought. Even then, as I watched you and came to know you, I believed that the consciousness of those like you was imprisoned in the matter-matrix. I tried at first to free you. But when I first brought your kind across, they could not keep themselves whole. Their energies lost coherence.

–They died?

=Some died. Some I returned to the matter-matrix, but even there they could not restore their coherence.

–Will I die? Will I go mad?

=No.

–Why not?

=Because you have come ready. You have prepared yourself in the searching. I knew one would come looking, and not die.

–Then I am not the only one?

=You are the one who came.

–But there were others.

=In a thousand ways, a thousand others were touched. Some were touched too deeply, and they lost their coherence. Some were touched too lightly, and were not changed. In the craze these last sense the nearness of the spindle and remember.

–Amelia—McShane—

Each name was a tiny resonance in the greater dynamic.

=Yes.

–We’re not in control—we never were. You’ve been watching us, guiding us, manipulating us—what are you? = I am as you perceive me. Nothing is hidden.—But what are you? What is this place? = This is the other face of reality. The birth and death of your matter-matrix are linked here, in the fibers of the spindle. We ride the fibers of the spindle and draw our energies from the cataclysms at both ends.

–If you can do that, then what use are we to you?

Thackery sensed puzzlement. =I have tried to protect you.

–From what?

=Look outward and find it. The spindle holds the reflections of the entire Greatcycle.

–Is this what you did to the Sennifi? When I look will I know what Z’lin Ton Drull knew?

=You will know more.

–What the Drull knew destroyed him and his kind.

=If you are not ready, then I will wait for another to come. If there is time.

–Time before what?

=Look and you will have the answer.

–I am afraid.

=You do not yet know why you must be afraid. Look.

It was like learning to read all over again. Just as there was far more contained in writing than the simple black marks on white paper suggested, so too there was far more to seeing than the eddies and currents he had perceived so far. He opened himself up and the Universe poured into him, finite in extent and infinite in detail, bursting with energy and activity. He saw the Universe for the first time as alive and interconnected, not hostile and empty.

–I can see the ships! The sudden thought was jubilant, a glittery grid of harmonic energy. = Yes. Your vessels draw their energy from here, disturbing the spindle at the interface.

Thackery perceived each ship as a snag, an imperfection, where the fibers of the spindle were drawn outward across the boundary between Gabriel’s universe and Thackery’s. He saw each ship distinctly: the packets shuttling between Earth and the Advance Bases, the survey ships scattered beyond. How tiny is the part of it which we know, how tiny the steps we have taken. But he swelled with pride nonetheless as he found
Dove
and
Munin
playing fox and hound among the stars of Lynx.

–You always knew where we were.

=But you guided your own ships, set your own destinations—as did your Forefathers.

–Can I see them?

=You must.

–Where? How?

=Each fiber encircles space and partitions time. If you would look elsewhere, then you must move in-matrix toward centrality or out-matrix toward horizon. If you would look elsewhen, then you must move uptime toward origin or downtime toward terminus.

–I can go to any time or place? = If you can find the proper place in the spindle and can look with sufficient skill. I will guide you.—No,—Thackery said, retreating.—If I am to believe what you show me, there are things I must see alone first. = 1 will wait for you here.

Moving required Thackery to employ a conception of direction. Unconsciously, Gabriel’s ideograms had already tapped Thackery’s library of schema for the words most appropriate to describe the undescribable. Following that lead, Thackery completed the image of a great translucent cell caught in metaphase, the birth and death of the universe forming the poles of the mitotic spindle.

Time flowed along the fibers of the aster, past to future, centriole to centriole. Across the breadth of the aster stretched the expanse of space, its geometry reflecting the slowing expansion and inevitable contraction of the cosmos. And beyond the cell membrane lay the matter-matrix of Thackery’s Universe.

The image was incomplete and imperfect, but it sufficed. He crossed space in great dancing leaps. His self-resonance propagated from one fiber to the next to the next. The leaps were made with more confidence than was justified. Deceived by his own heliocentric mentality, having forgotten that the shape of the Universe reflected not human coordinate systems but the dictates of the physics which spawned it, he quickly became lost, looking out on nameless suns with no conception of which of the Galaxy’s billions they might be.

His very conception of Gabriel’s universe buckled at the realization that, again the victim of ethnocentrism, he had failed to factor in the infinitude of galaxies. Burdened by that complexity, he lost his perception of order, and with it very nearly lost the coherence of the resonance which was his entire existence.

–Gabriel, help me. Guide me to Earth.

The call did not bring Gabriel, but other D’shanna came to cluster around him as though examining a curiosity. They sent thought-pictures to each other, but not to him.

>The matrix is disturbed here.

one thought, and stirred up a swirl of ocher energy which crashed down on Thackery and further weakened him.

:It persists.

–Call Gabriel, Thackery pleaded.

>See, you have disturbed the disturbance into an imitation of life. A good joke, –namepattern–, I will remember to speak it when I return downtime. With that, the D’shanna moved off. Thackery was too feeble to follow, his resonance half the amplitude and a far paler hue than it had been. He did not know how much time passed while he languished that way, carried toward terminus by the current of the fiber.

=Merritt Thackery.

The ideogram came out of the distance, bright and clear. Thackery seized it and molded what remained of his self to its contours.

=Merritt Thackery.

=Merritt Thackery.

Each repetition strengthened him, for the name was more than a label—it was the pattern of his consciousness, taken in totality. It came to him that the D’shanna were not immortal, that they required the mutual reinforcement which came from other-recognition to persist as coherencies. As he thought that, his own resonance acquired a new harmonic.

–Gabriel,—he called as the alien appeared in the distance. It was then that Thackery realized Gabriel’s resonance was far more complex than those of the D’shanna who had found him a curiosity and nothing more.

=Have you found what you wanted?

–No. I was lost.

=Show me where you wish to see.

–Earth.

The glittery thoughtpattern was blue, brown, and white, as beautiful as the planet itself.

=I will take you there.

Together, Thackery and Gabriel flew across the aster, a hundred thousand light-years compressed into a thousand multifilamented fibers.

–Where are the people?– Thackery demanded as he looked down on a world of stone and ocean and cloud.

=You came a long way downtime in your wandering.

–This is the future?

=You can see only the impulse of the inanimate future. Extend yourself against the current and we will find the present.

Though the fiber itself was tranquil and turgid, unlike the leaps across the aster, there was resistance to their passage uptime. As they neared the present, the complex turbulence which had surrounded Thackery in the beginning began slowly to reappear.

–Is this why some D’shanna live downtime?

=Not some but most, living between the boundary of now and the terminus of the spindle. In the far downtime the spindle is undisturbed. It demands less of them and offers freedom to construct a self of such form and dimension that could never exist here.

–But you choose to be here.

=It is the only place where your world and mine can touch.

They soon reached a point where Thackery could look out on a populated world astir with activity, and did so without Thackery requiring further reinforcement from Gabriel.

–Let me go on alone, Thackery said, his confidence restored.

=I cannot make you see what is not there, nor stop you from seeing what is.

–I am not finished.

=Time passes both here and in the matter-matrix.= The thought was tinted gray by Gabriel’s ill ease.

–I will not be long.

The old woman in the chair was dead, her face a cold blue and drawn tight in the rictus of rigor. Except for the light from the video screen, the room was dark, the environmental system having noted the lack of movement and followed its energy-conserving instincts. On the top of a nearby bureau, a photograph of a boy and the boy-as-man gathered dust.

–Andra…

But he could not complete even the namepattern, because he did not know its shape or details. He no longer saw her with the clarity the ideograms demanded, and she could no longer remind him of what he had forgotten or never known.

Mourning without tears, he drifted downtime until the body was discovered, then followed it through autopsy and cremation in the hope of learning where she rested. It was a shock to discover there was no marker, no memorial, because nothing but energy proceeded from the combustion chamber, energy to brighten hallway lamps and power the lifts that brought the next cargo of bodies to the processing center.

Anguished, he scrambled uptime until he found her alive. Watching her eat a meal, then fall asleep watching the NET in the chair where she would die, brought paltry comfort. And so he crawled still farther uptime, until he found her standing in a field of Queen Anne’s lace, milkweed, and wild wheat, gazing up at the sky with an expression that was both wistful and peaceful. That was when he constructed the namepattern to which he would cling, and that was where he left her for the last time.

Withdrawing from all but the most superficial contact with the matter-matrix, Thackery drifted downtime, past the departure of
Tycho
, past the death of his mother, watching the comings and goings of the packets serving A-Cyg. Presently he drew in closer as the packet
Audubon
docked at Unity and disgorged its human cargo. Hovering over the proceedings, Thackery watched as a tall, raven-haired woman led a buoyant, gap-toothed eight-year-old girl by the hand down the walkway.

–Diana… Andra…

Suddenly it was not enough to watch. With a fury fueled by anguish, Thackery drove himself downward against the barrier, meaning not only to draw close but to cross, to leave the spindle and enter the scene presented so vividly before him. He drove himself down again and again, summoning not only his own energies, but momentarily marshaling the currents of the aster itself against the obstacle, reaching out with both love and guilt to take the girl and her mother in his arms.

But the only result of the effort was to weaken him. Failure slowly but patiently taught him that Diana and Andra were in a place that he could not reach, that he was seeing not reality, each microsecond frozen and preserved in an infinitude of Universes, but waves of causality—that what propagated across the barrier to the spindle was not a reflection of a substance still existing, but an echo of energies past. That which could be seen from Gabriel’s spindle was true but not real. Only the present, from which Thackery had come, was both true and real. And realizing that, he had a sudden hunger to be finished and return there..

–Gabriel,—he called out in despair.—I am ready. Show me what you must. = I am here, = Gabriel said, gliding out of the colorclasm toward him. = We must go farther back.

The planet he looked down on was Earth, but it was not Thackery’s Earth. It was the Earth of the geologists and paleontologists, the Earth of first chapters and prehistories. A heavy cloak of ice and snow covered its surface well into what Thackery had learned to call the temperate latitudes.

On the face of the great glacier were the cities of the FC.

They were not cities as Thackery conceived them, with spires of steel and roads of stone. They were cities the way a sponge is an organism, thousands of small structures conjoined to form a greater whole, but each still capable of existing apart.

The cities of the open ice were carried along southward by its inexorable but fitful advance, reforming and reconnecting as fissures and ridges spoiled the neat tickweave pattern. The heart of each city was comprised of hundreds of domed storehouses, containing the harvests of the past held for the hunger of the future. Of the cells surrounding the core, some held the tools of their artisans, some the creations of their artists. The remainder of the shells were home to the city’s inhabitants. From them came the people who manned the hunting sledges and snowboats, who kept the great articulated infrastructure of the city in repair, who bore children, laughed, and drank wine over the dead.