Far futures, p.6
Far Futures, page 6
“What do you want?” asks a clear neutral voice. No character, no tone, no emotion. This is the Endtime Work Coordinator, or at least an extension of that powerful social=mind. It does not sound anything like Elisaveta. My hopes have been terribly naive.
After all this time and misery, the teachers’ reserve is admirable. I detect respect, but no awe; they are used to the nature of the Endtime Work Coordinator, largest of the social=minds not directly connected to a Library. “We have been cut off, and We need to know why,” the tributaries say.
“Your work reached a conclusion,” the voice responds.
“Why were We not accorded the respect of being notified, or allowed to return to our Library?”
“Your Library has been terminated. We have concluded the active existence of all entities no longer directly connected with Endtime Work, to conserve available energy.”
“But you have let us live.”
“It would involve more energy to terminate existing extensions than to allow them to run down.”
The sheer coldness and precision of the voice chilled me. The end of a Library is equivalent to the end of thousands of worlds full of individual intelligences. Genocide. Error and destruction.
But my future self corrects me. “This is expediency it says in a private sending. “It is what We all expected would happen sooner or later. The manner seems irregular, but the latitude of the Endtime Work Coordinator is great.”
Still, the tributaries request a complete accounting of the decision. The Coordinator obliges. A judgment arrives:
The teachers are irrelevant. Teaching of the Proof has been deemed useless; the Coordinator has decided—
I hear a different sort of voice, barely recognizable to me—Elisaveta “All affirmations of the Proof merely discourage our search for alternatives. The Proof has become a thought disease, a cultural tyranny. It blocks our discovery of another solution.”
A New Accounting
Our ancient self recognizes something in the message. What We have planned from near the beginning now bears fruit—the ancient self, functioning as an engine of judgment and recognition, has found a key player in the decision to isolate us, and to terminate our Library.
“We detect the voice of a particular tributary,” We say to the Coordinator. “May We communicate with this tributary?”
“Do you have a valid reason?” the Coordinator asks.
“We must check for error.”
“Your talents are not recognized.”
“Still, the Coordinator might have erred, and as there is so little time, following the wrong course will be doubly tragic.”
The Coordinator reaches a decision after sufficient time to show a complete polling of all tributaries within its social=mind.
“An energy budget is established. Communication is allowed.”
We follow protocol billions of years old, but excise unnecessary ceremonial segments. We poll the student tributaries, searching for some flaw in reasoning, finding none.
Then We begin searching for our own justification. If We are about to die, lost in the last-second noise and event-clutter of a universe finally running down, We need to know where We have failed. If there is no failure—and if all this experimentation is simply a futile act—We might die less ignominiously. We search for the tributary familiar to the ancient self, hoping to find the personal connection that will reduce all our questions to one exchange.
Bright patches of light in the sky bloom, spread, and are quickly gathered and snuffed. The other suns and worlds are being converted and conserved. We have minutes, perhaps only seconds.
We find the voice, descendant tributary of Elisaveta.
There are immense deaths in the sky, and now all is going dark. There is only the one sun, turning in on itself, violet shading to deep orange, and the School World.
Four seconds. I have just four seconds . . . Endtime accelerates upon us. The student experiment has consumed so much energy. All other worlds have been terminated, all social=minds except the Endtime Coordinator’s and the final self . . . the seed that will cross the actionless Between.
I feel the tributaries frantically create an interface, make distant requests, then demands. They meet strong resistance from a tributary within the Endtime Work Coordinator. This much they convey to me . . . I sense weeks, months, years of negotiation, all passing in a second of more and more disjointed and uncertain real time.
As the last energy of the universe is spent, as all potential and all kinesis bottom out at a useless average, the fractions of seconds become clipped, their qualities altered. Time advances with an irregular jerk, truly like an off-center wheel.
Agreement is reached. Law and persuasion even now have some force.
“Vasily. I haven’t thought about you in ever so long.”
“Elisaveta, is that you?” I cannot see her. I sense a total lack of emotion in her words. And why not?
“Not your Elisaveta, Vasily. But I hold her memories and some of her patterns.”
“You’ve been alive for billions of years?”
I receive a condensed impression of a hundred million sisters, all related to Elisaveta, stored at different times like a huge library of past selves. The final tributary she has become, now an important part of the Coordinator, refers to her past selves much as a grown woman might open childhood diaries. The past selves are kept informed, to the extent that being informed does not alter their essential natures.
How differently my own descendant self behaves, sealing away a small part of the past as a reminder, but never consulting it. How perverse for a mind that reveres the past! Perhaps what it reveres is form, not actuality . . .
“Why do you want to speak with me?” Elisaveta asks. Which Elisaveta, from which time, I cannot tell right away.
“I think . . . they seem to think it’s important. A disagreement, something that went wrong.”
“They are seeking justification through you, a self stored billions of years ago. They want to be told that their final efforts have meaning. How like the Vasily I knew.”
“It’s not my doing! I’ve been inactive . . . Were we divorced?”
“Yes.” Sudden realization changes the tone of this Elisaveta’s voice. “You were stored before we divorced?”
“Yes! How long after . . . were you stored?”
“A century, maybe more,” she answers. With some wonder, she says, “Who could have laiown we would live forever?”
“When I saw you last, we loved each other. We had children . . .
“They died with the Libraries,” she says.
I do not feel physical grief, the body’s component of sadness and rage at loss, but the news rocks me, even so. I retreat to my gray cubicle. My children! They have survived all this time, and yet I have missed them. What happened to my children, in my time? What did they become to me, and I to them? Did they have children, grandchildren, and after our divorce, did they respect me enough to let me visit my grandchildren . . .? But it’s all lost now, and if they kept records of their ancient selves—records of what had truly been my children—those are gone, too. They are dead.
Elisaveta regards my grief with some wonder, and finds it sympathetic. I feel her warm to me slightly. “They weren’t really our children any longer, Vasily. They became something quite other, as have you and I. But this you—you’ve been kept like a butterfly in a collection. How sad.”
She seeks me out and takes on a bodily form. It is not the shape of the Elisaveta I knew. She once built a biomechanical body to carry her thoughts. This is the self-image she carries now, of a mind within a primitive, woman-shaped soma.
“What happened to us?” I ask, my agony apparent to her, to all who listen.
“Is it that important to you?”
“Can you explain any of this?” I ask. I want to bury myself in her bosom, to hug her. I am so lost and afraid I feel like a child, and yet my pride keeps me together.
“I was your student, Vasily. Remember? You browbeat me into marrying you. You poured learning into my ear day and night, even when we made love. You were so full of knowledge. You spoke nine languages. You knew all there was to know about Schopenhauer and Hegel and Marx and Wittgenstein. You did not listen to what was important to me.”
I want to draw back; it is impossible to cringe. This I recognize. This I remember. But the Elisaveta I knew had come to accept me, my faults and my learning, joyously, had encouraged me to open up with her. I had taught her a great deal.
“You gave me absolutely no room to grow, Vasily.”
The enormous triviality of this conversation, at the end of time, strikes me and I want to laugh out loud. Not possible. I stare at this monstrous Elisaveta, so bitter and different . . . and now, to me, shaded by her indifference. “I feel like I’ve been half a dozen men, and we’ve all loved you badly,” I say, hoping to sting her.
“No. Only one. You became angry when I disagreed with you. I asked for more freedom to explore . . . You said there was really little left to explore. Even in the last half of the twenty-first century, Vasily, you said we had found all there was to find, and everything thereafter would be mere details. When I had my second child, it began. I saw you through the eyes of my infant daughter, saw what you would do to her, and I began to grow apart from you. We separated, then divorced, and it was for the best. For me, at any rate; I can’t say that you ever understood.”
We seem to stand in that gray cubicle, that comfortable simplicity with which I surrounded myself when first awakened. Elisaveta, taller, stronger, face more seasoned, stares at me with infinitely more experience. I am outmatched.
Her expression softens. “But you didn’t deserve this, Vasily. You mustn’t blame me for what your tributary has done.”
“I am not he . . . it. It is not me. And you are not the Elisaveta I know!”
“You wanted to keep me forever the student you first met in your classroom. Do you see how futile that is now?”
“Then what can we love? What is there left to attach to?”
She shrugs. “It doesn’t much matter, does it? There’s no more time left to love or not to love. And love has become a vastly different thing.”
“We reach this peak . . . of intelligence, of accomplishment, immortality . . .”
“Wait.” Elisaveta frowns and tilts her head, as if listening, lifts her finger in question, listens again, to voices I do not hear. “I begin to understand your confusion,” she says.
“What?”
“This is not a peak, Vasily. This is a backwater. We are simply all that’s left after a long, dreadful attenuation. The greater, more subtle galaxies of Libraries ended themselves a hundred million years ago.”
“Suicide?”
“They saw the very end we contemplate now. They decided that if our land of life had no hope of escaping the Proof—the Proof these teachers helped fix in all our thoughts—then it was best not to send a part of ourselves into the next universe. We are what’s left of those who disagreed . . .”
“My tributary did not tell me this.”
“Hiding the truth from yourself even now.”
I hold my hands out to her, hoping for pity, but this Elisaveta has long since abandoned pity. I desperately need to activate some fragment of love within her. “I am so lost . . .”
“We are all lost, Vasily. There is only one hope.”
She turns and opens a broad door on one side of my cubicle, where I originally placed the window to the outside. “If we succeed at this,” she says, “then we are better than those great souls. If we fail, they were right . . . better that nothing from our reality crosses the Between.”
I admire her for her knowledge, then, for being kept so well informed. But I resent that she has advanced beyond me, has no need for me. The tributaries watch with interest, like voyeurs.
(“Perhaps there is a chance.” My descendant self speaks in a private sending.)
“I see why you divorced me,” I say sullenly.
“You were a tyrant and a bully. When you were stored—before your heart replacement, I remember now . . . When you were stored, you and I simply had not grown far apart. We would. It was inevitable.”
(I ask my descendant self whether what she says is true.
“It is a way of seeing what happened,” it says. “The Proof has yet to be disproved. We recommended no attempts be made to do so. We think such attempts arefutile.”
“You taught that?”
“We created patterns of thought and diffused them for use in creation of new tributaries. The last students. But perhaps there is a chance. Touch her. You know how to reach her.”)
“The Proof is very convincing,” I tell Elisaveta. “Perhaps this is futile.”
“You simply have no say, Vasily. The effort is being made.” I have touched her, but it is not pity I arouse this time, and certainly not love— it is disgust.
Through the window, Elisaveta and I see a portion of the plain. On it, the experiments have congealed into a hundred, a thousand smooth, slowly pulsing shapes. Above them all looms the shadow of the Coordinator.
(I feel a bridge being made, links being established. I sense panic in my descendant self, who works without the knowledge of the other tributaries. Then I am asked: “Will you become part of the experiment?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You are the judgment engine.”)
“Now I must go,” Elisaveta says. “We will all die soon. Neither you nor I are in the final self. No part of the teachers, or the Coordinator, will cross the Between.”
“All futile, then,” I say.
“Why so, Vasily? When I was young, you told me that change was an evil force, and that you longed for an eternal college, where all learning could be examined at leisure, without pressure. You’ve found that. Your tributary self has had billions of years to study the unchanging truths. And to infuse them into new tributaries. You’ve had your heaven, and I’ve had mine. Away from you, among those who nurture and respect.”
I am left with nothing to say. Then, unexpectedly, the figure of Elisaveta reaches out with a nonexistent hand and touches my unreal cheek. For a moment, between us, there is something like the contact of flesh to flesh. I feel her fingers. She feels my cheek. Despite her words, the love has not died completely.
She fades from the cubicle. I rush to the window, to see if I can make out the Coordinator, but the shadow, the mercury-liquid cloud, has already vanished.
“They will fail,” the We-ness says. It surrounds me with its mind, its persuasion, greater in scale than a human of my time to an ant. “This shows the origin of their folly. We have justified our existence.”
(You can still cross. There is still a connection between you. You can judge the experiment, go with the Endtime Work Coordinator.)
I watch the plain, the joined shapes, extraordinarily beautiful, like condensed cities or civilizations or entire histories.
The sunlight dims, light rays jerk in our sight, in our fading scales of time.
(Will you go?)
“She doesn’t need me . . .” I want to go with Elisaveta. I want to reach out to her and shout, “I see! I understand!” But there is still sadness and self-pity. I am, after all, too small for her.
(You may go. Persuade. Carry us with you.)
And billions of years too late—
Shards of Seconds
We know now that the error lies in the distant past, a tendency of the Coordinator, who has gathered tributaries of like character. As did the teachers. The past still dominates, and there is satisfaction in knowing We, at least, have not committed any errors, have not fallen into folly.
We observe the end with interest. Soon, there will be no change. In that, there is some cause for exultation. Truly, We are tired.
On the bubbling remains of the School World, the students in their Berkus continue to the last instant with the experiment, and We watch from the cracked and cooling hill.
Something huge and blue and with many strange calm aspects rises from the field of experiments. It does not remind us of anything We have seen before.
It is new.
The Coordinator returns, embraces it, draws it away.
(“She does not tell the truth. Parts of the Endtime Coordinator must cross with the final self This is your last chance. Go to her and reconcile. Carry our thoughts with you. “)
I feel a love for her greater than anything I could have felt before. I hate my descendant self, I hate the teachers and their gray spirits, depth upon depth of ashes out of the past. They want to use me to perpetuate all that matters to them.
I ache to reclaim what has been lost, to try to make up for the past.
The Coordinator withdraws from School World, taking with it the results of the student experiment. Do they have what they want—something worthy of being passed on? It would be wonderful to know . . . I could die contented, knowing the Proof has been shattered. I could cross over, ask . . .
But I will not pollute her with me anymore.
“No.”
The last thousandths of the last second fall like broken crystals.
(The connection is broken. You have failed.)
My tributary self, disappointed, quietly suggests I might be happier if I am deactivated.
Curiously, to the last, he clings to his imagined cubicle window. He cries his last words where there is no voice, no sound, no one to listen but us:
“Elisaveta! YES!”
The last of the ancient self is packed, mercifully, into oblivion. We will not subject him to the Endtime. We have pity.
We are left to our thoughts. The force that replaces gravity now spasms. The metric is very noisy. Length and duration become so grainy that thinking is difficult.
One tributary works to solve an ancient and obscure problem. Another studies the Proof one last time, savoring its formal beauty. Another considers ancient relations.
