Heaven (45 page)

“This is what makes imagination so powerful, Samuel. And unorthodoxy so dangerous.”

“But unorthodoxy leads to heresy,” said Sam.

Epimenides gave the originator of the Samuellian heresy a level stare. “Yes. That is what makes it so valuable.”

The sudden collapse of the mission fleet had saved No-Moon from the devastation of the reefwives’ Last Resort, but it had
come too late to make a great deal of difference. No-Moon was a dying world. The final, full-scale attack by the forces of
Cosmic Unity, and the violence of the reefwives’ defenses, had destabilized the planet’s crust. Seismic quakes continued to
rip the ocean floor apart, turning it into a cracked jigsaw of polygonal plates. White-hot rock, squeezed up from the planet’s
depths by the turmoil, hit cold water and exploded. The ocean, seeping into the cracks, turned to superheated steam, adding
to the already extreme pressures. Thick plumes of sulfurous smoke bubbled up from the sea floor into the atmosphere.

The continental landmasses fared no better. Hundreds of new volcanoes added their own deadly mix of gases: phosgene, carbon
monoxide, ammonia, hydrogen fluoride. Acid rain fell in torrents; giant storms surged across the plains. Forests burned; rivers
flooded. And that was only the beginning. Every fresh quake, every new volcanic vent, added to the destruction. Entire chains
of volcanoes were building up, and when their walls gave way, the plains alongside would be resurfaced by lava flows.

A few hundred polypoid males, the only survivors that could be found, were quickly evacuated to Aquifer. Several hundred tons
of reefwives, from lagoons that had escaped the worst ravages, went with them; more would follow if they could be found alive.

Aquifer was the natural choice. It had already been selected as uniquely suitable for polypoid/coralline colonization. The
monastery of equals and the Heaven that it concealed were no longer a menace; the servomechs had seen to that. The various
species still inhabiting the polar region could remain there indefinitely or be transibled elsewhere; the ponds were happy
in the otherwise uninhabited deserts. No one needed the oceans, so the mariners and their reefwives could establish themselves
without making any serious impact on anyone else’s lifestyle.

There was only one barrier to creating a thriving mariner world: The reefwives were sterile. The toxic chemicals in the oceans
had wiped out their ability to reproduce. About half the males were still fertile, but they lacked fertile females.

Extinction loomed.

But even that possibility had been foreseen.

Second-Best Sailor’s original wifepiece, the one he had given to the Neanderthals, had grown in both size and strength during
her time on
Talitha
. Now she tasted the alien seas of Aquifer, finding them strange but palatable. Bright moonlight filtered down into the shallows,
bathing the lagoon in an ethereal glow.

Moonlight. True moonlight
. So much better than the feeble substitute of meteor showers.

Pale shadows flicked through the water around her. With an air of anticipation, of suppressed excitement, the polypoid males
waited. Among them were Fat Apprentice and Second-Best Sailor, courtesy of the latter’s new ship—the more fertile males, the
better. Neither of them would have dreamed of missing the fun. This would never happen again, not in quite the same way.

This was the genesis of a new world.

Long-suppressed genes became active as the moonlight played on the wifepiece’s soft tissues. Tiny worms peeped out, attracted
by the glow. Polyps emerged from their hiding places, reaching out with their tiny tentacles.

Microscopic spheres began to spurt from the polyps’ gastrovascular cavities, at first in thin streams, then in a thick cloud.
They were eggs, they were fertile, and the males were ready. They swarmed in upon the cloud of eggs in a polypoid orgy. They
darted this way and that, shoving each other aside in frenzied climax. Eggs and sperm mingled in the warm waters, fusing in
pairs.

Fertilized eggs spread across the lagoon floor, finding their way into every crack and cranny in the rocks, settling on the
sand. They would grow into planiculae, larvae equipped with motile membranelles that enabled them to swim. Normally, most
would be eaten by predators, but this first generation of native Aquiferian corallines was protected by a forcewall. Most
of the planiculae would find themselves a convenient rock, attach themselves, and grow into corals. A small proportion would
remain free-swimming and become males.

The reefmind, intelligent but infertile, congratulated herself on the accuracy of her contingency plan. Thanks to Second-Best
Sailor’s second piece of wife, gifted to the Neanderthals and returned when she was most needed, the reef would live again,
and thrive.

Faith:
I/we observe that the rebuilding of the reef ecology is proceeding apace.

Hope:
This world is ideal. We made a mistake when we chose No-Moon so long ago.

Charity:
Three-Moons was lost, we had traveled far, and we were tired. The reefmind of that time foretold many futures, not all of
which came to pass.

Faith:
We did the same. Only one of the wifepieces that we had set aside for safekeeping survived.

Charity:
It was enough.

Hope:
Emergent history is like that, sisters.

Charity:
All histories are true, for a given value of “true.”

All:
Wishy-washy syncretist!

Faith:
The ancient evil followed the ancient path, as we foresaw.

Charity:
Yes. A benevolent memeplex, spiraling into the self-set trap of inflexibility. A multiculture freezing into monoculture.

Faith:
And now a new memeplex of harmony and coexistence is unleashed. How long, sisters, will it avoid the trap?

Hope:
This time the priests are driven by empathy, not belief. This memeplex will maintain its openness and flexibility indefinitely.

Charity:
Optimist. How long did that state last before?

Faith:
Not long enough.

Charity:
It never does.

Hope:
Perhaps, this time . . .?

All:
My timechunk does not extend that far.

There were rearguard actions. As the servomechs pressed ahead with the lengthy process of incorporating eighty-eight Heavens,
some acolytes of Cosmic Unity struggled to regain their supremacy—and some succeeded, for a time. Four Heavens were repopulated
using rogue servomechs, but two of these fell to levithons, one was lost when its star unexpectedly flared, and the fourth
suffered massive technical failure from unknown causes.

Millions died; millions awoke to madness; but billions once more lived real lives—less pleasant than their previous virtual
fantasies, but ultimately more satisfying.

It rapidly became clear that the Samuellian memeplex was evolutionarily superior to the unmodified one that had for so long
sustained and propagated the Church of Cosmic Unity. The Church was dying, as a new species took over its habitat. It wasn’t
that the ecclesiarchs attracted massive opposition, or lost further space battles. It was just that whenever anyone attempted
to promote Cosmic Unity in its original form, the tried and tested methods of the past no longer worked. It was as if the
universe itself was against them.

The ponds thought they knew why.
THE GALACTIC LIFESOUL IS WHOLE AGAIN.

The Neanderthals thought that they, too, knew why. A new wave of skepticism and self-assurance was sweeping through civilized
society. Blind faith in a discredited priesthood was giving way to a rational appraisal of the value of genuine mutual coexistence.

Fourteen Samuel had his own explanation: His heresy had become orthodoxy. It wasn’t the universe that had changed, but the
Memeplex, by self-modification. He was awed by the ability of such a social construct to adapt to new conditions. The Church
had not been destroyed; it had evolved.

Second-Best Sailor had no opinion on the matter, and didn’t give a squirt anyway. Like the ’Thals, he had a relatively low
opinion of gods, and the alleged Galactic Mind seemed too close to a deity for comfort. He was happy piloting his magnetotoral
steeds between the stars, sailing the currents of space and the solar winds.

He was trying to obtain consensus for a lightsail. His attempts to grow fruit outside the hull had fared poorly.

Epimenides just reveled in the multitude of philosophical viewpoints that were springing up.

All agreed that whatever interpretation you placed on events, the Galaxy did seem to be settling down, becoming a more pleasant
place to live.

Sam still couldn’t get one puzzle out of his head. Had their actions truly influenced the Galactic Mind, or were those actions
merely a consequence of the physical workings of a mindless Galaxy? In a way, he felt, they were both. Although the emergent
structures of an anthill had different priorities from the ants, what was seriously bad for a lot of ants was also bad for
their anthill. The two points of view weren’t alternatives, but different levels of interpretation.

The real transition to Mind, Sam decided, arose from exactly the opposite principle to the one that had driven Cosmic Unity:
not uniformity, but the power and peace attained by valuing and validating
difference
. It was the complexity of the differences in the pond’s components that enabled its intelligence, but it took the multiplexity
of meaningful communication between individual ponds to generate the necessary extelligence. It took both intelligence and
extelligence to make a Mind.

Only the newly resurgent reefwives possessed the wisdom to know the true nature of the Galaxy. Unbreakable law or free will?
Mechanism or consciousness? Unthinking or sentient? But nobody asked them. Nobody would have believed their answers, anyway.
The reefwives had their own take on the universe.

She’s so beautiful,
Sam thought, watching Dry Leaves Fall Slowly as she sat on the beach beside the pond and splashed her feet in the water. Second-Best
Sailor and the pond had ansibled Sam on board
Talitha,
having found themselves with a few hours to spare before they loaded a cargo of pressed fernseed bound for the Eohippus System.
The pond wanted to play with Fall, and the mariner was happy to go along with the plan. So was Sam. So he and Fall had been
transibled to the mariner’s new ship for a short visit.

Sam was aware that his viewpoint was unusual. To most humans, the Neanderthal child would have seemed . . . not exactly
ugly,
but uncouth. Ill-proportioned. The protruding face was too apelike for flatfaced humans, and the thick hair was close to fur.

The Neanderthals were too similar to humans—that was the problem. So each subspecies judged the other by its own standards,
comparing them to its own self-image, and found it wanting. Their perceptual systems for humanoids were highly discriminating.
And so, paradoxically, the grotesque insectoid shape of a Hytth, with its steel blue exoskeleton, could seem elegant . . .
whereas a form that, to the Hytth, was just another weird two-eyed, jointed biped looked misshapen and deformed.

Not to Sam. He could see through the false comparison to the child beneath, and she was lovely.
Such a tragedy that there isn’t a
person
in there anymore
. Despite all the medical advances achieved by Galactic civilization, the mind largely remained a mystery. Some mental illnesses
could be cured by drugs; these were essentially gross physical malfunctions of synapses or neurotransmitters. Diseases of
the brain, which only indirectly affected the mind. Fall’s condition was deeper, some subtle failure of the process of consciousness.
The complexity of the brain made it virtually impossible to unravel the workings of the mind, let alone to discover what was
wrong and find a way to cure it.

Fall had improved a little, as time put distance between her present and her tormented past. But the past was too strong;
the best that they could hope for was that she would remain relatively peaceful when Sam left her for a few minutes. Something
about the pond fascinated her, though, and Sam was convinced that when she was trailing her fingers through the water or paddling
her feet, she came as close to happiness as her mind would permit.

“How is she?” Second-Best Sailor asked Sam.

“Physically sound, but mentally . . . well, see for yourself.”

“Pity.” The mariner was clad in his trademark sailor suit, and he dipped one tentacle into the pond to stay in touch with
his friend. Proper mental contact required molecular contact, so he instructed the suit to peel back a small patch of its
skin, where the tip of the tentacle could touch the water.

The pond’s ecochemical “thoughts” interfaced with the mariner’s own neurobundle mode-molecules.
HELLO, SAILOR. THIS IS FUN. SHE LIKES IT.

“Yes. But . . .” Subvocally, the mariner added:
Sam seems so sad
.

HE DOES? I WAS NOT AWARE. I AM NOT ATTUNED TO HUMAN EXPRESSION, AND HE RESTRICTS HIMSELF TO THE SPOKEN WORD.

He is sad because of the child,
Second-Best Sailor thought.
Her mind has been damaged.

YES. THE CHEMISTRY OF HER THOUGHTS HAS BECOME INFLEXIBLE.

The statement so surprised Second-Best Sailor that he spoke aloud. “You can sense her thoughts?”

OF COURSE. JUST AS I SENSE YOURS.

“But—polypoids have evolved to interpret chemical messages as well as verbal ones. ’Thals haven’t.”

THAT PREVENTS HER FROM UNDERSTANDING
MY
THOUGHTS. IT DOES NOT MAKE IT DIFFICULT FOR ME TO UNDERSTAND HERS
.

“Ask the pond what Fall is thinking!” Sam urged, having heard the mariner’s startled outburst and then insisting on being
told what had caused it.

The mariner did so.