David Brin - Heaven's Reach

The heart can be enough. It can sustain.

Akeakemai called.

“We’re back in two-way holo mode, Dr. Baskin. And there’s a transmission coming in.”

The big visual display erupted with light, showing the control room of an approaching warship. It had the blunt outlines of Thennanin manufacture. The crew was mostly human, but the face in front of the camera had the sharp cheekbones and angular beauty of a male Tymbrimi, with empathy-sensitive tendrils wafting near the ears.

“… that we must find your claims improbable. Please provide evidence that you are, indeed, TAASF Streaker. I repeat …”

It seemed a simple enough request to satisfy. She had spent hard, bitter years striving for this very moment of restored contact. And yet, Gillian felt reluctant to comply.

After a moment’s reflection, she knew why.

To any human, there are two realms—“Earth” and “out there.”

As long as I’m in space, I can imagine that I’m somehow near Tom. We were both lost. Both hounded across the Five Galaxies. Despite the megaparsecs dividing us, it only seemed a matter of time till we bumped into each other.

But once I set foot on Old Terra, I’ll be home. Earth will surround me, and outer space will become a separate place. A vast wilderness where he’s gone missing — along with Creideiki and Hikahi and the others — wandering amid awful dangers, while I can only try to stay busy and not feel alone.

Gillian tried to answer the Tymbrimi. She wished someone else would, just to take this final burden off her shoulders. The ordeal of ending bittersweet exile.

She was rescued by an unlikely voice. Emerson D’Anite, who faced the hologram with a smile, and expressed himself in operatic song.

“Let us savor our folly!

Man is born to be jolly!

“His idle pretenses,

and vain defenses,

trouble his senses, and baffle his

mind.

“Leaner or fatter,

we cavort and flatter,

so let us be cheerful and let us

pretend.

“Fun is the triumph

of mind over matter,

we’ll all get home if we laugh in

the end!”

THE ZANG COMPONENTS WERE BETTER prepared to take all this in their philosophical stride. So were the machine entities who helped make up the macrocommunity called Mother.

In both hydro-and silicon-based civilizations, there existed a widespread conviction that so-called “reality” was a fiction. Everything from the biggest galaxy down to the smallest microbe was simply part of a grand simulation. A “model” being run in order to solve some great problem or puzzle.

Of course, it was only natural for both of these life orders to reach the same conclusion. The Zang had evolved to perform analog emulations organically, within their own bodies. Machines did it with prim software models, carried out by digital cognizance. But ultimately, it amounted to the same thing. Joined at last, they found a shared outlook on life.

We — and everything we see around ourselves, including the mighty Transcendents — exist merely as part of a grand scenario, a simulacrum being played out in some higher-level computer, perhaps at another plane of existence — or else at the Omega Point, when the end of time brings all things to ultimate fruition.

Either way, it makes little sense to get caught up in feelings of self-importance. This cosmic pattern we participate in is but one of countless many being run, in parallel, with only minute differences from each to the next. Like a chess program, working out every move, and all possible consequences, in extreme detail.

That was how some of the other Mother-components explained it to Lark and Ling. Even the Jophur-traeki converts seemed to have no trouble with this notion, since their mental lives involved multiple thought experiments, flowing through the dribbling wax that lined their inner cores.

Only the human and dolphin members of the consortium had trouble reconciling this image — for different reasons.

Why? Lark asked.

Why would anyone expend vast resources doing such a thing? To calculate the best of all possible worlds?

Once they find it … what would they do with the result?

And what will they do with all the myriad models they have created along the way?

What will they do with us?

That question seemed to startle the Zang components, but not the machines, who answered Lark with strangely earnest complacency.

You oxies are so obsessed with self-importance!

Of course, all the models have already been run, evaluated, and discarded. Our feelings of existence are only an illusion. A manifestation of simulated time.

To Lark, this attitude seemed appalling. But Ling only chuckled, agreeing with the dolphins who had recently joined the onboard community, and who clearly considered this whole metaphysical argument ridiculous.

Olelo, a leader among that group of former Streaker crew members, summed up their viewpoint with a burst of Trinary haiku.

Listen to the crash

Of breakers on yonder reef,

And tell me this ain’t real!

Lark felt glad to have the newcomers aboard, in several ways. They seemed like interesting folks, with a refreshing outlook. And they helped keep up the oxy side of the ongoing debate. There would be plenty of time for give-and-take discussions over the course of many subjective years, until the transformed Polkjhy finally reached journey’s end.

With a flicker of awareness, he cast his remote senses through one of the external viewers, taking another look at the cosmos. Or what passed for one.

It was a perspective few others had ever witnessed. A blankness that was quite distinct from the vivid color, black. None of the great spiral or elliptical galaxies were visible in their normal forms — as gaudy displays of dusty white pinpoints. From this high standpoint, no stars could be seen, except as mere ripples, brief indentations that he could barely make out, if he tried.

Everything seemed flattened, ephemeral, tentative — almost like a crudely drawn rough draft of the real thing.

In fact, Polkjhy was no longer quite part of that universe. Gliding along just outside the ylem, the modified vessel rode atop a surging swell that was composed not of matter, or energy, or even raw metric. The best he could figure — having discussed it with others, and consulted the onboard Library — Polkjhy was riding upon a swaying fold of context. A background of basic law, from which the universe had formed long ago, when a perturbation in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle allowed the sudden eruption called the Big Bang.

An emergence of Something from Nothing.

What he saw now was not things or objects but a vast swirl of causal connections, linking one set of potentialities to another.

Behind the hurtling ship, diminishing rapidly with each passing dura, several of these junctions could be glimpsed twisting away from a recent, shattering separation. A splitting apart of ancient ties.

He felt Ling’s mind slip alongside his own, sharing the view. But after a while, she nudged him.

All of that lies behind us. Come. Look ahead, toward our destiny.

Though nothing tangible existed on this plane — not matter, or memes, or even directionality — Lark nevertheless got a sense of “forward” … the way they were headed. According to the Transcendents, it was a large cluster of galaxies, lying almost half a billion parsecs away from Galaxy Two. A place where enigmatic signals had been emanating for a long time, hinting at sapient activity. Perhaps another great civilization to contact. To share with. To say hello.