Far futures, p.44
Far Futures, page 44
“Clear, and totally irrelevant. I’m interested in restoring Ana, not in learning cosmology.”
“That is understood. Permit me to proceed. Whether or not the universe is open or closed depends on the overall density of matter within it. If that density is too low, the universe must be open. If it is high enough, past a critical value, the universe must be closed. What I say next will seem very difficult to you, and we are not sure that you can ever understand it fully; but the possibility of restoring Ana—your original Anna—depends on whether the universe is open or closed. Hence it depends on the density of matter, or more strictly speaking on the mass-energy density, of the universe.”
“You are quite right, I don’t understand. But if I did, so what? Either the universe is open, or it is closed.” Drake could not conceal his impatience. Once again he became aware that he did not fit well into the present. He was too focused and direct, an atavism in the more polished and diplomatic society that Alman represented. He did not know what the changed physical form of humanity looked like, but his guess was that nails and teeth had gone. He alone possessed his residual claws and fangs.
“Have patience.” Alman effortlessly read Drake’s anger and impatience. “If your original training had perhaps been in mathematics and physics, rather than in music . . .” The implied criticism was left hanging in the air, as Alman continued, “Certain other things become possible in a closed universe. Such a universe possesses a single, final end point. And at that eschaton, that ultimate stage of confluence of all things, the universe itself contracts toward a single point. All timelike and lightlike curves converge there, and everything meets. This was known to scientists and philosophers, even at the time of your own birth. It was sometimes termed the Omega Point. Just before the eschaton is reached, all that has ever been known, all information past or present, becomes accessible. Every item of information about people who died a thousand years ago—or fourteen million years ago—becomes available. At the eschaton, every personality that ever existed could in principle be re-created, in perfect detail.”
“Including Ana! I understand, I understand exactly.”
But Drake was filled with rage, not exhilaration. “If this was known millions of years ago, why the devil was it never once mentioned to me?”
“Because it seemed totally irrelevant. The potential for such future action exists only if the universe is closed. In your time, the observations of mass-energy density provided too low a value, by a factor of ten to twenty. That indicated an open universe. Later, scientists decided on theoretical grounds that the universe ought to sit exactly on the boundary between an open and a closed universe. They sought experimental evidence for the missing matter, and they slowly found it. There was still uncertainty; however, they thought that the universe would expand forever, but more and more slowly. In such a case the Omega Point would never exist.
“But that has at last changed. For reasons that we still do not understand, recent measurements reveal a higher mass-energy density beyond the critical value. That points to a closed universe. The eschaton will exist. One day it must be reached.”
“And Ana can then return to me. When? When will it happen?”
“In the far, far future. After a time so long that it makes the interval from your first moment of cryosleep to the present day seem less than the blink of an eye. We recommend that you do not even consider such a forward journey. Still less should you attempt it. But your own wishes are important. We seek to know what you want.”
“You’re crazy!” Drake glared at Alman in disbelief. “You don’t know what I want? Why do you think I was frozen in the first place? I want to be with Ana. I’ll wait forever if I have to. I don’t care how long I have to stay in the cryowomb.”
“We feared such a response. We deem it irrational. However, we sense your resolution and the force of your will.”
“Good. Then get out of my mind. Let me sleep in the cryowomb until I can do something.”
“That is not an option.” Alman shook his head. Inexplicably, he vanished and Milton at once appeared in his place.
“Other factors must be considered,” said the Servitor. “Your preservation and protection is my prime responsibility. That is why I, with some difficulty, overrode your own command within me and disturbed your cryosleep. The cryowomb will not be adequate for your future needs.”
“It did fine so far.”
“For an interval of only a few million years, yes. At the temperature of liquid helium all biological processes are imperceptible to normal observation. But random thermal motions still exist. A few atoms occasionally gather enough energy to induce state transitions, and those can lead to biological changes. Small changes, admittedly; but mind and memory are very delicate things.” The Servitor paused. “Why are you smiling?”
“You sound just like the head of the Second Chance team, arguing long ago for liquid helium over liquid nitrogen. I thought liquid helium was the coldest you could go in practice.”
“By no means. Do you think there has been no scientific progress in nine million years?”
“You still sound familiar. I had the same thought myself, long, long ago. So why not keep the cryowomb at a lower temperature?”
“No matter how cold, there would still be occasional random effects. Alteration could still happen. However, there is another way, and a better way.”
“Persuade me.” Drake thought he knew what was coming. “Uploading. The conversion of the complete contents of your brain to electronic storage. Even though such storage is not immune to random statistical effects, those can be eliminated using redundancy and error-checking codes. I will vouch for their efficiency—personally.”
“How do you know that you don’t change? You could be different than you were yesterday.”
“And you may not be the Drake Merlin who went into cryosleep, or the same person who met with Trismon Sorel. I can say only this: uploading represents your best chance of remaining unchanged into the far future. It would be painless, and you would be quite unaware that is was happening.”
“I’m not worried by pain. There are worse things in the world than pain. What are you leaving out? You sound uncomfortable.”
“Possibly.” The Servitor hesitated. “I must inform you of one other factor, which we feel is irrelevant but which may appear relevant to you: it is not feasible to upload the complete Ana. Her full genome is already in electronic storage, so future cloning is trivial. But her brain can offer no more than a random chaos of disconnected elements. Their transference would be pointless.”
“If I move, Ana moves as well.”
“That is really quite unnecessary. If her personality can ever be restored, the existence of primitive brain residues will not be a factor.”
“So you say—now. But I’ve heard too often that nothing can be done for Ana. Move us both, or neither one of us.”
“We hear you.”
Milton vanished, but Alman at once popped back into existence in his place. “If you insist, we will agree. But there is one other thing to discuss before uploading begins. Once you have been uploaded, it offers great advantages to become part of a composite—a shared mind, large or small. Will you consent to such a merger?”
The decisions so far had been easy. Now Drake had to think. The pluses were obvious: access to a near-infinite array of facts; a better understanding of the new world he had moved into; probably a better ability to comprehend the arcane but important statements that Alman had made about the eschaton and the far future.
But were there also negatives, so well hidden that the composite represented by Alman was not even aware of them?
Drake could sense one, a subtlety that was hard to define precisely. There was a softness to this age, a willingness to bend and compromise and take direction. That sounded like real progress for the human species (if that name still applied). But as part of the composite, he would surely find his own anachronistic claws and fangs vanishing, dissolved by the soft pacifism of the group mind. And what was good for today might prove fatal tomorrow. Might there still be a future when polish and diplomacy were useless, where what was needed to restore Ana was raw resolve and crude energy?
It was a risk too big to take. “I don’t want to become part of a composite. I’d like to be uploaded and placed dormant in the database. And I’d like to be activated only if there is significant new information about the Omega Point, useful in Ana’s restoration.”
He had said what he wanted to say, yet it felt incomplete. He knew that he owed a personal debt: to this epoch, to his faithful Servitor, to the people who had finally offered him a distant hope that he might succeed.
“But if you have problems—tough problems, ones that I might be able to help with—then you have my permission to bring me from dormancy and add me to a composite. I haven’t had an idea in fourteen million years, but who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky and think of one.”
There are worse things in the world than pain.
It was true. Pain can be channeled and concentrated, marshaled and molded, directed to draw some element of the world into bright particular focus. Harsher pain only leads to tighter focus.
But panic, heart-stilling, gut-twisting panic, has no redeeming value. It dissipates rather than distilling. When blind panic roars and surges, all sensibilities are driven out and all concentration vanishes.
Drake awoke to that knowledge. Terror and horror howled from every direction. He could not learn the cause. He found he was blind to everything, deaf to all but the screaming of minds. He tried to order the chaos around him and structure the questions that must be asked: What is the source of fear? How long has it been present? How far in the future have I come? Why was I not made aware of the problem earlier, before it became urgent?
It was impossible. The questions formed, and a hundred billion replies came raging in at once. They said everything and nothing, individual vectors combining to give a null resultant.
Drake made a supreme effort. He ignored the torrent of inputs from the countless billions of minds accessible to his, and looked inward to create his own environment.
A familiar room, windowed and comfortable. A prospect beyond it of a windswept, sunlit ocean.
And in the seat opposite, ready to answer his questions—
He recoiled. Instinctively he had thought of Ana, and she sat waiting. But it was the worst choice of all. In Ana’s presence he would dream away the time.
Who?
People flickered into the armchair and were as quickly gone. Alman, Trismon Sorel, Milton, Par Leon, Cass Leemu . . .
Tom Lambert. The figure of the doctor stayed and steadied. He shook his head reprovingly at Drake. “Dumb, very dumb. Not your fault, of course, but the composite’s. They should have known better.”
“Better than what?” Drake saw that it was Tom at thirty, leaner and younger than the paunchy version of their last meeting.
“Better than to wait until the problem was so urgent, before calling you to consciousness and asking you to deal with a full composite. They should have insisted that you go through practice sessions long ago, as soon as you were uploaded, so you would know how to structure and sort inputs in a hurry when you needed to.”
“I managed.”
“It’s more than they deserved.” Tom leaned back, pipe and lighted match in hand. He was still in his tobacco-smoking days, shortly before sinus problems had made him give up smoking completely. “Well, let’s get down to business. Some of the questions that you asked are pretty damned hard to answer, you know.”
“Like what? I thought they were very basic.”
“Well, you asked about time again, how many years it is past your upload into the data banks. You know very well that with people buzzing all over the galaxy, or sitting in really strong gravitational fields, everyone’s clock runs at a different rate. They use a completely different technique for describing time now, and if I told you how it worked it wouldn’t mean a thing to you. Why don’t we just agree that however you measure it, it’s been a very long time compared with your previous dormancies.”
“Agreed for the moment. I want to come back to it later.” A very long time—compared with fourteen million years? Drake suspected he would not like the answer, even if it could be put into his old-fashioned terms. “Tell me first about the problem. I asked to be activated if you were close to knowing how to bring Ana back to me, or if you had a big problem. Don’t bother telling me which one it is—I already know.”
“Sorry about that. But it is a problem, the very devil of a problem, nothing to do with Ana. We are beyond desperation. To be honest with you, you are our last hope, and a long shot at that. A damned long shot. We need a new thought. Or maybe an old thought.” Tom’s mouth trembled, and the fingers holding his pipe writhed. On the fringes of his mind Drake heard again the faint cry and yammer of countless terrified minds. He ruthlessly suppressed them, building a gate in his own consciousness that admitted only the calmer components.
“Thanks. That’s a lot better.” Tom took the pipe from his mouth and laid it down on the broad windowsill. “Might be a good thing if I show you directly, don’t you think, and let you see for yourself? You know the old advice: Don’t tell, show.”
“Go ahead.”
“We’ll begin with the solar system. Hold onto your hat, Drake. And hey presto.” Tom clapped his hands. The inside lights turned off. The scene beyond the picture window changed. Suddenly it was dark outside, with no hint of sea or sky. The room hovered on the edge of a bleak and endless void, lit only by glittering stars.
As Drake stared, the scene outside began to move smoothly to the right, as though the whole room was turning in space. A huge globe came into view. It was bloated and orange-red, its glowing surface mottled with darker spots.
“The Sun?” Drake knew the answer even before he asked the question. If he was within the solar system, this had to be Sol. But Sol transformed by time, from the warm G-2 dwarf star that he had known into a brooding stranger. “What happened to the planets? I don’t see them.”
“Not enough natural reflected light. But I can highlight them.” As Tom spoke, bright sparks appeared to one side of the Sun. “That’s Jupiter, and that’s Saturn.”
“And Earth?”
Tom shook his head. “Sol has advanced along the main sequence to its red-giant phase. It’s a hundred times its old size, two thousand times the luminosity. If Earth had remained in its original orbit it would have been incinerated, just like Venus. Mercury was swallowed up completely. Don’t worry about Earth, it still exists. But it . . . moved. Far away. No point in looking for it. Sol isn’t even visible from Earth’s present location. If you like I can show you the Moon, that was left behind.” Far away. How far away? Would a human (if there was still such a thing) see today, looking upward from the surface of that distant Earth?
“I had a dream which was not all a dream.” Drake muttered the old words as they welled up in his mind. “The bright Sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless, and pathless; and the icy Earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.”
“Sorry?” Tom’s voice was puzzled. “I don’t quite grasp what you’re getting at.”
“Not my thoughts. Those of a writer dead long before I was born. Don’t worry about me. Keep going.”
“Right. I wanted to start close to home, give you a local perspective, then move out bit by bit. Here we go again.”
Sol was shrinking, as the room that Drake sat in backed away into space and lifted high above the ecliptic. The planets of the outer solar system appeared briefly in the plane below as highlighted points. Neptune was there. Pluto had vanished. Uranus, its fusion fires long stilled, formed an invisible cinder no bigger than a Jovian moon.
And the motion was continuing. In another minute the inner edge of the diffuse globe of the Oort Cloud became visible, billions of separate and faint points of light smeared by distance into a glowing haze. “Every one highlighted for the display, naturally,” Tom said casually. “Not much sunlight this far out. And of course we’re showing just the inhabited bodies. What you might call the ‘old’ solar system colonies, before the spread outward really began. Wanted you to see that, but now if you don’t mind we’re going to pick up the pace a bit. Can’t afford to take all day.”
The outward movement accelerated, accompanied by Tom Lambert’s offhand commentary. The whole Oort Cloud was seen briefly, then shrank rapidly with distance from huge globe to small disk to tiny point of light. Other stars with inhabited planets, or planet-sized free space habitats, appeared as fiery sparks of blue-white. The whole spiral arm came into view. It was filled with occupied worlds. The interarm gaps showed no more than a sparse scattering of points, but across those gulfs the Sagittarius and Perseus arms were as densely populated as the local Orion arm. Finally the whole disk of the Galaxy was visible in the field of view. Blue-white sparks extended from the dense galactic center to its wispy outer fringes.
The display froze at last.
“That’s the way it stood,” Tom said. “It was like that until just one-tenth of a galactic revolution ago. Development, by organic, inorganic, and composite forms, had been steady and peaceful through twelve complete revolutions of the Galaxy. But not any more. Now I must show you a recent time evolution—in terms familiar to you, I will display what has been happening in the past few hundred millions of Earth years.”
There was a tremor in his voice, a new hint of uncounted minds quivering beyond the gate and walls imposed by Drake. The static view outside the picture window slowly began to change.
At first it was no more than a hint of asymmetry in the great pattern of spirals, one side of the Galaxy perhaps showing a shade less full than the other. After a few moments the differences became more pronounced and more specific. A dark sector was appearing on one side of the disk, the blue-white points within it quenched by its touch. Drake thought at first of an eclipse, as though some unimaginably big and dark sphere was occulting the whole galactic plane. Then he realized that the analogy was wrong. The blackness at the edge of the Galaxy was not of constant diameter. It was increasing in size, as though something was moving in to invade the galactic disk and growing constantly as it did so.
