Heaven (33 page)

But what can cure an ailing galaxy?

“Second-Best Sailor was telling the truth,” May said out of the blue.

She and Stun were sitting in the gallery. Stun was accessing little-used features to map out the Agathyrsi Cluster’s magnetic
fields. If—when—they returned to their home regions, the information could be added to their civilization’s vast repository
of extelligence.

May had been working on a larger task: mapping the Galaxy. They would never get a better chance. Right now she was taking
holographs of a region close to the Galactic core, where a dense mass of stars gyrated in unusually coherent patterns. Suddenly,
without warning, she
knew
that the polypoid was as sane as any of them. Saner. For only he had the wit to believe the truth. The rest of them were
fools.

“Sorry?”

“Stun, the mariner is right. The pond
is
intelligent.”

The second Neanderthal woman assessed her companion’s mental state. “You do not seem to have joined him in his madness. What
brought about this change of heart?”

May’s eyes flicked from the window to her companion. “My empathic sense tells me, of course! Any Neanderthal should understand
that
!” She stood up. “The pond is a sentient being, the most important one on this vessel! But we have ignored it, insulted it,
denied its very existence!”

Stun grimaced, trying to come to terms with May’s urgency. Her own sense of empathy told her no such thing. “But, May, why
would a pond be important? Even if it is intelligent?”

“Because
we will never get away from here unless we communicate with it
!”

Stun could feel the intensity of May’s conviction but did not yet share it. “What makes you think that?”

May stared at her. “Do you not receive the impressions, too?”

“Receive what impressions, May?”

“A faint, all-pervading sense of something massive and superintelligent. Only here, far removed from all distractions, removed
from the Galaxy itself, could such a weak sensation be perceived. I can feel only the slightest empathic tendrils, and when
I clutch at them, they slip away. But they are always there, in the background, a persistent drumming on the membranes of
my mind.”

Stun calmed her mind, and opened herself to raw, incoming
feeling
.

“Look towards the Galactic core, Stun. Let your mind become receptive.”

There was definitely
something
. When Stun focused her blue eyes coreward—and with them her mind—she could feel delicate, prickling sensations. There was
no pattern to them, no rhyme or reason; they were just
there,
as if they belonged.

“They have always been there,” said May, and Stun nodded wordlessly. “But only out here can we separate them from the emotional
hubbub of our fellow beings. Even here, they are all but swamped.”

“What are they?”

“They are too weak to convey any meaning,” said May. “This is why we need the pond. Only the pond can supply what we are lacking.
And it will, if we can find a way to ask. But only Second-Best Sailor can talk to the pond, for only he shares its chemosensitivity.”

Stun leaped to her feet, lithe and alert. “Then let us go and find him.”

Second-Best Sailor had never felt so depressed in his life. He was giving up the fight; it just wasn’t worth it. His friends
were all dead, and his homeworld was far away. He had been frightened out of his wits and survived only by the wildest machinations
of chance, and his own cleverness, and nobody believed him. They all thought he was crazy.

Well, maybe he was. Maybe he was so crazy that he didn’t care anymore.

He was sitting beside the pond, dangling his tentacles in the water. His sailor suit had rolled itself up to allow contact
with the water without compromising his life support. But today even the pond was uncommunicative—it missed the desert days
and nights, the cycles of light and dark, heat and cold. It missed the fatfly messages from its friends. Most of all, it wanted
the Neanderthals to build it a beach. Second-Best Sailor had tried to tell the Neanderthals that they ought to rig up some
kind of diurnal cycle, vary the temperature in synch with Aquifer’s rotation, and find a bigger compartment and throw in a
few tons of sand, to keep the pond happy, but of course, they hadn’t listened to those ideas, either—

A voice broke the thread of his thoughts. May’s. “Second-Best Sailor?”

Who else did she think he was? He said nothing. He wished he hadn’t survived the attack; he wished he’d been boiled alive
like Fat Apprentice. Then by now he’d be dead, and he wouldn’t feel like this.

“I have come to apologize,” said May, out of breath from her haste to reach him.

Still he said nothing. He squatted beside the pond in a morose heap.

“He is very unhappy,” said Stun.

“He has been depressed for some time,” said May. “Previously I had put it down to his experiences on Aquifer. But now I believe
it has another source. Second-Best Sailor!” She reached out and shook him. “Speak to me! I need you!”

“Too late for that,” said the mariner.

“Listen! I was wrong. I admit it, we were all wrong! You are right, the pond
is
intelligent. And now we need you to communicate with the pond.”

Second-Best Sailor turned listless eyes toward her. “Communicate with a
pond
? Are you flouncin’
crazy
?”

May was on the verge of tears. “Second-Best Sailor, there is not time for this now. Please do not throw our apology back at
us!”

“Why not? That way, ya find out what it’s like when nobody believes ya about somethin’
important
.”

At least he was talking. That was a start. “Second-Best Sailor, Ship has marooned us sixty thousand light-years outside the
plane of the Galaxy. We need your help to get us back. We need the pond’s help, and we need you to talk to the pond.”

“I don’ wanna go back,” said the polypoid, brimming over with self-pity. “I wanna die. Nobody wants me; nobody listens to
me.”

“We want you! We are listening to you!”

“Maybe now y’are. But it’s too late. Lemme ’lone.” His voice was even more slurred than usual. Was he
dying
? It seemed all too likely.

“How can we get through to him?” asked Stun.

“It is a strong barrier,” said May. “I can feel his sorrow, his sense of worthlessness. Oh, Stun, we should never have let
him get this way!”

Stun tried to sort out the sensations. “He feels . . . discarded. He misses his companions, there are no other polypoids on
the ship. But there is more . . . Ah!”

“What else?”

“He misses his wife.”

“Not much we can do about that. The reefwives are on No-Moon. We are stuck here.”

“Just his wife, not the entire reef.”

“But the wifepiece that he always carried was sterilized by laser fire in No Bar Bay and left there to crumble into sand and
be washed away by the tide. That was the only—”

The two women looked at each other as the same thought occurred to them both. Together they ran for the doorway.

“Let us hope this works,” said May.

“Let us hope it is not too late,” said Stun.

Second-Best Sailor perched beside the pond, tentacles dangling.

Beside him was a small container. One of his tentacles was inserted into it instead of the pond. The tentacle was fondling
a small lump of what looked like white rock. He held it tenderly, occasionally giving it a quick caress. Delicate worms put
out brightly colored fans to catch morsels of food. Soft polyps fluttered in the current.

“Coral,” said May. “Living female coral. Good job he gave us some to keep for him.”

“More than just coral,” said Stun. “A piece of his wife. Mariners always take such pieces with them.”

“We tended his wifepiece with care,” said May. “As the reefwives had instructed when he ‘gave’ it to us. Do you think they
envisioned this, all that time ago? They have remarkable predictive abilities.”

“I would like to think so,” said Stun. “Not that they could envision this in detail. I think it was a contingency plan.”

“You may well be right. According to their husbands, they
see
the universe as a contingency plan.”

“The pond says that soon’s ya agree to fix up some lighting and cooling that’ll make ’im feel more at home, and supply a beach,
’e’ll be ready to talk to ya,” Second-Best Sailor broke in.

“Those things are all on their way now,” said May. “The engineers are bringing them.” The mariner passed her message to the
pond.

ASK THEM WHAT THEY WANT
, the pond whispered in Second-Best Sailor’s brain.
I WILL TALK TO THEM NOW.

“One o’ the ’Thal women thinks she can sense some kind of background thoughts,” the polypoid replied. “She says she thinks
it’s important.”

OF COURSE. HAVE THEY NOT ALWAYS BEEN AWARE?

The mariner was puzzled. “Aware of what?”

OF THE GALACTIC MIND.

“Are you crazy?”

LET US NOT START THAT AGAIN. YOU HAVE ACCEPTED THAT A POND CAN BE A MIND. A GALAXY IS A FAR MORE COMPLEX SYSTEM THAN ANY POND.
IT IS FAR MORE COMPLEX THAN ANY SINGLE ENTITY, THAN ANY CIVILIZED SOCIETY. THAN ANY STAR SYSTEM.

“Look,” Second-Best Sailor informed the pond, worried by the implications, “I’ve ’ad enough trouble convincin’ them that a
pond can be intelligent. Now you’re askin’ me to do the same for a galaxy?”

THEY DID ASK.

Then the pond “spoke” for a long time, while Second-Best Sailor took mental notes. He assembled his thoughts, ready to convey
the gist of the conversation to the two women.

“Uh—the pond tells me, yes, he senses the same thing. Says ’e always has, even back on Aquifer.”

“Then he is more sensitive than we.”

“Yes, ’e is. Bein’ a collective mentality, ’e can get on the same wavelength as anuvver collective mentality. You’re better
suited to organisms. Wiv collectives, you get signals so faint that you can’t interpret ’em.”

“Of course!” said Stun. “That is why we could not empathize with the pond and feel its intelligence for ourselves.”

“What other kind of collective mentality does the pond detect?” May inquired, picking up the important part of Second-Best
Sailor’s words. Insights into their own frailties could wait.

“Um. That’s the tricky part. I’m not sure I’ve understood ’im properly. All I can do is try. If you don’ believe me, that’s
your problem. Right?”

“Right. But do not worry: We promise to believe you.”

“You may regret sayin’ that,” said Second-Best Sailor. “As best as I can tell, ’e reckons ’e’s attuned to the collective mind
of the whole flouncin’ Galaxy.”

“But that’s—” Stun began.

May stopped Stun’s mouth with her hand. “We can examine the philosophical implications later, Stun. Epimenides would be delighted
to assist, I am certain.”

“Uh—yeah, sure.”

At that moment, Will’s voice carried throughout the ship on the internal communicator. “Warning to all crew: Prepare for departure.
Ship says we have achieved consensus!”

The two women stared at each other. Ship had clearly been waiting for something, and it must have had a reason to wait out
here. Then they made contact with the pond, the pond told them that the Galaxy had a conscious mind, and suddenly Ship was
ready to take them home again.

Sometimes Precursor technology could be very frustrating.

“I think it must be some kind of Aquiferian pond religion,” said Will. “Their version of God. Galactic Gaia.”

“You do not think that the Galactic Mind is real?”

“May, I do not dispute that we made a mistake when we doubted Second-Best Sailor’s story about the pond. And I agree that
we must not make the same mistake twice.” He stroked his massive but undercut jaw in indecision. “Equally, we should not allow
the first mistake to predispose us to a different one.”

“There was something out there,” said May. “I felt it. Just off the edge of conscious sensation, like a memory that cannot
quite be recalled, a name dangling from the tip of one’s tongue.”

“I do not doubt that you felt
something
,” said Will. “But to talk of a Galactic Mind implies conscious volition. A galaxy is made of gas and rock. Most of it is
a vacuum. Much of the rest seethes with violent nuclear reactions. That is not a mind.”

The ship’s Thumosyne philosopher, the one nicknamed Epimenides, joined the discussion. The original Epimenides had been a
Cretan—whatever species that was—who’d said that all Cretans were liars. The name fitted. “You thought that water, crustaceans,
and fish could not be a mind,” the Thumosyne said.

“Yes, but at least those were
organic
!”

Epimenides expanded slightly, and his ruffs changed register, so that his normal pattern of hexagonal spots became jagged
stripes. “As I keep reminding you, the material constitution is irrelevant. It is complexity of organization that creates
the possibility of a mind.”

“How can a galaxy possess complex organization?”

“How can it fail to? It is at least as complex as the sum total of everything in it. You are part of the Galaxy; therefore,
the Galaxy is more complex than you.”

Will sucked at his lip. “I think that is a category error,” he said finally. “If there
is
a Galactic Mind—and I am not conceding that there is—then its ‘components’ will be on a very different level from those of
my mind. My presence may contribute to the complexity of the Galaxy, but not on the right level of organization.”

“Just as the amphibians’ brains do not contribute to the mind of the pond, but the amphibians themselves do?”

“Uh—yes, Epimenides. That is it, exactly.”

“Then perhaps it is people, sentient entities, that form the components of the Galactic Mind. Every action that they take
constitutes a ‘thought’ in the mind of the Galaxy.”

“Say that again,” said Stun.

The Thumosyne exhaled, and its ruffs clicked back into the hexagonal pattern. “I am suggesting that the Galactic Mind, if
it exists—and I am not asserting that it does, merely examining whether it might—is just as insensitive to the individual
minds within it as your own minds are to your neurons. Its ‘thoughts’ are the movements and behavior of its component mentalities,
but interpreted on a very different level.”