The Wild (9 page)

Danlo wondered if She might use this godstuff to create more highly organized types of matter: complex molecules, cells, life itself. He did not think so. Because Danlo did not know what this matter could be (and because no mechanic of the Order had ever had the pleasure of analysing such bizarre stuff), he decided to collect some to show to his friends.

It should have been a simple thing, this collection of artificial matter. It was simple to send out robots from his ship to scoop up litres of godstuff, but it was also quite dangerous. For first there would come the difficult and dangerous manoeuvring of his ship close to a nearby white star. He named this star Kalinda's Glory. He would have to make difficult mappings to point-exits almost within the white-blue corona of Kalinda's Glory. He would have to enter the manifold in the spaces very near a large star. And then he must fall out into temperatures almost hot enough to melt the diamond hull of his ship. And still he must then rocket through realspace until he came upon a pocket of artificial matter. Only then could he stow the godstuff safely within the hold of his ship. Only then could he fall back into the cool and timeless flow of the manifold and continue on his journey.

From the instant that he opened a window to the manifold in order to complete this minor mission, he knew something was wrong. Instantly, the Snowy Owl was sucked into a grey-black chaos space wholly unfamiliar to him. This space should not have been where it was. Perhaps it should not have existed at all. He should have opened a window that led to another window directly to a third window giving out into the blazing blue corona of Kalinda's Glory. Instead, his ship plunged into a whirlpool of what almost looked like a Lavi space, only darker, blacker, and too dense with zero-points, like sediments in an old wine. Almost immediately, his mappings began to waver like a mirage over a frozen sea, and then – unbelievably – he lost the correspondences altogether. He lost his mapping. This was one of the most dangerous of misfortunes that might befall a pilot. He began tunnelling through a mapless space seemingly without beginning or end. For a while, as he sweated and prayed and told himself lies, he hoped that this might prove no more complex than a normal Moebius space. But the further he fell from any point-exit near Kalinda's Glory, the nearer he came to despair. For almost certainly he had never escaped from such a chaos. Perhaps no pilot had, he was lost in chaos. No pilot, as far as he knew, had ever faced pure chaos before; Danlo had always been taught that a fundamental mathematical order underlay all the seeming bifurcations and turbulence of the manifold. Now he was not so sure. Now, all about him almost crushing his ship, the chaos space began folding and squeezing him toward a zero-point. It was almost like being caught on a Koch snowflake, the crystal points within points, fractalling down to zero. For a while, even as he lost himself (and his ship) in a cloud of billions of such snowflakes, he marvelled at the infinite self-embedding of complexity. He might easily have lost himself in these infinities altogether if his will to escape hadn't been so strong. Although it might prove hopeless, he tried to model the chaos and thus make a map through this impossible part of the manifold.

For his first model, he tried a simple generation of the Mandelbrot set, the iteration in the complex plane of the mapping z into z2 + c, where c is a complex number. When this proved futile, he generated other sets, Lavi sets and Julia sets and even Soli sets of quaternion-fields on a mutated thickspace. All to no avail. After a while, as his ship spun endlessly and fell through an almost impenetrable iron grey, he abandoned such mathematics and fell back upon the metaphors and words for chaos that he had learned as a child. He was certain that he would soon die, and so why not take a moment's comfort where he could? He emptied his mind, then, of ideoplasts and other mathematical symbols. He remembered a word for coldness, eesha-kaleth, the coldness before snow. Now that he had finished sweating, as he waited for the chaos storm to intensify and kill him, his whole body felt cold and strange. In the pit of his ship, he lay naked, shivering, and he remembered the moratetha, the death clouds of his childhood that would steal across the sea and swallow up entire islands in an ice-fog of whiteness where there was no up or down, inside or out, yesterday or tomorrow. The chaos surrounding him was something like such a morateth. But even more, in its fierce turbulence, in its whorls, eddies, and vortices of fractured spaces breaking at his ship, it was like a sarsara. the Serpent's Breath: the death wind that had killed so many of his people. It would be an easy thing, he knew, to let the chaos storm overcome him, even as the overpressures of a sarsara might fall upon a solitary hunter and drive him down into the ice. Then he could finally join his tribe in death. But the oldest teaching of his people was that a man should die at the right time, and something inside him whispered that he mustn't die, not yet. As he lay in the icy darkness of his ship, as he touched the lightning bolt scar on his forehead, all the while shivering and remembering, something was calling him to life. It was a long, dark, terrible sound, perhaps the very sound and fury of chaos itself. And then, in the centre of the chaos, there was a blackness as bright as the pupil of his eye. There were secret colours, bands of brilliant orange encircling the blackness, and then white, a pure snowy whiteness. All the colours of chaos were inside him, and out, and so again he faced his ship's computer and turned his inner eye toward the manifold.

Before him, beneath the stars of the Solid State Entity, within the dark, twisting tunnels of a phase space, there was an attractor. It was a strange attractor, he decided: stable, non-periodic, low-dimensional. Its loops and spirals would weave infinitely deep, infinitely many fractal pathways inside a finite space. No path would ever cross or touch any other. Strange attractors, it was hypothesized, were the black holes of the manifold. Nothing that approached one too closely could escape its infinities. For a pilot to enter a strange attractor would mean spiralling down endless pathways into blackness and neverness. Any sane pilot would have fled such an attractor. Danlo considered such a course, but where would he flee to and into what dread space might he flee? Strangely, he felt the attractor pulling him, almost calling him, in the way that the future called all life into its glorious destiny. He couldn't deny this call. And so there came a moment when he faced the attractor and piloted his ship into the last place in the universe he would ever have thought to go. With this wordless affirmation made in the dark of his ship, a wild-ness came over him. His body began to warm as if he had somehow drunk the light of the sun. He felt his heart beating strong and fast. His blood surged quickly inside him, thousands upon thousands of unseen turbulent streams, flowing, bifurcating, surging, but always returning to the chambers of his heart. If chaos was anywhere, he thought, it was inside himself. And order was there, too. Chaos/order; order/chaos – for the first time in his life, he began to see the deep connection between these seemingly opposite forces. Chaos, he thought, was not the enemy of order, but rather the cataclysm that gave it birth. A supernova was a most violent, chaotic event, but out of this explosion into light were born carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and all the other elements of life. There was always a place where order might emerge from chaos. Danlo looked for this place within himself; and then he looked within the attractor which coiled before him like an infinite snake swallowing its tail and drew him ever onward. Suddenly he knew a thing. To find the hidden order inside, he must first become himself pure chaos. This was his genius, his joy, his fate. This was his magical thinking approach to mathematics, nurtured by the shamans of his tribe, crystallized and polished in the cold halls of the Academy on Neverness. He must will himself to see where pattern is born of formlessness, that pattern that connects. All his life he had been trained to see such patterns. There was always a choice, to see or not see. Now, inside the attractor that pulled him into its writhing coils, there were patterns. There were ripples and billowings and depthless fractal boundaries like the wall clouds around the eye of a hurricane. The attractor itself swirled with the colours of orange madder and a pale, icy blue. For the first time, he marvelled at the attractor's strange and terrible beauty. There was something haunting in the self-referential aspect of the chaos functions, the way that the functions lay embedded inside one another, watching and waiting and making patterns down to infinity. There were always an infinite number of patterns to choose from, always the infinite possibilities. There was always a possible future; it was only a matter of finding the right pattern, of sorting, inverting, mapping, and making the correspondences, and then comparing the patterns to a million other patterns that he had seen. Now, as the patterns before him fractured into lovely crimson traceries and then coalesced a moment later into a clear blue-black pool that pulled him ever inward, he must choose one pattern and only one. In less than a second of time, in a fraction of a fraction of a moment that would always be the eternal Now, he would have to make his choice. There could be no putting it off once it came. His choice: he could be pulled screaming into his fate, or he could say yes to the chaos inside himself and choose his future. This, he remembered, is what the scryers do. This is what his mother must have done in finding the terrible courage to give birth to him. And so at last, when his moment came and time was now and always and forever, he chose a simple pattern. He made a mapping into this strange, strange attractor, and then he fell alone into the eye of chaos where all was stillness, silence, and beautiful, blessed light.

The ability to remember the past gives one the power to descry events that have yet to be. This is the great problem of consciousness, for man and god. this awareness in time: the more clearly we visualize the future, the more we live in dread that it will inevitably become the present.

- from A Requiem For Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

Danlo fell out near a small yellow star as beautiful as any star he had ever seen. The star was circled by nine fat round planets, one of which was very near to him indeed. Below his lightship – a bare ten thousand miles below the Snowy Owl – there spun a planet all green and blue and swaddled in layers of bright white clouds. He could scarcely believe his good fortune. It seemed too much of a miracle to have escaped an inescapable attractor, only to then fall out above such a lovely and earthlike planet. In the pit of his ship he lay shaking with triumph and joy, and he opened a window in the ship's hull to look out over this unnamed planet. For a long time he looked down through space at mossy brown continents and sparkling blue oceans. With his scanning computers, he analysed the gases of the atmosphere, the oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide involved in the interflow of organic life. He did this to reassure himself that he had really fallen out into realspace, and so he reached out with his telescopes and scanners and eyes to embrace it, to touch it, to see it as it truly was. In the sweep of the planet's mountains, in the fractal curves of the continents' coastlines and the shape of the vast oceans, he became aware of a pattern hauntingly familiar to him. At first he could not identify this pattern. But then he searched his memory, and there was a shock of recognition, like suddenly beholding the face of a friend who has returned from the wounds and scars of old age into an untouched and marvellous youth. It astonished him that the face of the planet below him matched his brilliant memory so exactly; it was an astonishing thing to discover here in the heart of the Solid State Entity a planet that must be, that could only be that great and glorious planet that men remembered as Old Earth.

It cannot be, he thought. It is not possible.

The planet was Earth; and yet it was not Earth. It was a pristine, primeval Earth untouched by war or the insanity of the Holocaust, an Earth somehow healed of its terrible wounds. Its atmosphere bore no trace of the fluorocarbons or chloride plastics or plutonium that he would have expected to find there. As he saw through his telescopes, the oceans teemed with life and were free of oil slicks or the taint of garbage. Far below him, on the grassy veldts of a continent that looked like Afarique, there were herds of antelope and prides of lions, and an animal that looked much like a horse but was covered from nose to tail with vivid white and black stripes. There were trees. There were trees! Parts of every continent, save the southernmost, were covered in unbroken swathes of brilliant green forests. Such an Earth might have existed fifty thousand years ago or fifty thousand years in the future, but it was hard to understand how this beautiful planet had come to be here now. As Danlo well knew, if Old Earth still existed it must lay some eight thousand light-years coreward along the Orion Arm, in the spaces near Sahasrara and Anona Luz. It was impossible, he thought, that even a goddess might have arms strong enough or long enough to move a whole planet fifty thousand trillion miles through a dangerous and star-crossed space. Still gazing through his telescopes, he wondered if he was really seeing anything through his telescopes. The Entity, it was said, could directly manipulate any type of matter through countless miles of realspace, through the force of Her will and Her thoughts alone. Perhaps the Entity, even at this moment, was manipulating the molecules of his mind, subtly pulling at his neurons, much as a musician might pluck the strings of a gosharp. What unearthly tunes, he wondered, might a vastly greater mind play upon his consciousness? What otherworldly visions might a true goddess cause a man to see?

After a very long time of thinking such deep thoughts and brooding over the nature of reality, Danlo decided he must accept the sensation of his eyes as true vision and his computer's analyses of the planet's carbon cycles as true information, even though he feared that his sense of interfacing his ship computer (and everything else) might be an almost perfect simulation of reality that the Entity had somehow carked into his mind. He had no objective reason for making such an affirmation. It occurred to him that just as he had penetrated the spaces of the Entity to fall out inside Her very brain, in some way, as with an information virus or an ohrworm. She might be inside the onstreaming consciousness of his brain. And the image of himself as pilot who had penetrated the living substance of a goddess might be, at this moment, one of Her deepest thoughts, and suddenly this looking inside himself to apprehend the reality of who lay inside whom was like holding a mirror before a silver mirror and looking down into an infinite succession of smaller mirrors as they almost vanished into a dazzling, singular point.