“ Morag. Is all this going anywhere?”
“And now here you are fiddling with all of human history,” she said. “You think it’s a coincidence that this weird old woman picked you? Of course you’re going to want to plunge your hands in up to the elbows. It’s what you do. You’re a meddler, Michael. An instrumentalist.”
I sighed. “You always go over the top, don’t you?”
“All right. Put it this way. You’re childish. You’re like a kid in an art show. You want to touch the paintings, scrape bits off, deface them, draw your own copies, put them in new frames. Because you’re not mature enough yet just to sit back and enjoy the view — without meddling. ”
I thought that over. “But that’s what we’re like. Humans, I mean. We’re a species who do things.”
“Not necessarily,” Alia said now. “There are other ways to be.” And she widened my perspective yet again.
There was a spectrum of minds, here within the Transcendence itself, and still more beyond its still-expanding walls. I sensed these different minds as if hearing voices at the ends of long corridors. All of them were human or post-human, and most were more or less like my own. But there were sorts of mind quite different to mine, other ways of thinking, other ways to live.
The strange Coalescents in their vast hives were one example.
And with Alia’s gentle guidance I came on a people, a branch of mankind, who had long ago settled on a world in the Sagittarius Arm. It was a water-world, like an Earth drowned under an almost global ocean. The people here, post-people anyhow, had given up clothes and spaceships and even tools, and developed bodies like otters or small dolphins, and now spent all their lives in the endless calm of the water.
Alia said, “They gave up their minds. They knew it was happening. What you don’t use, you lose. But they didn’t care…”
I didn’t understand. “They could do so much more. They once did. But they put it all aside. And they’ve left themselves vulnerable. A volcanic spasm, an asteroid strike—”
“They don’t care! They have the present, they have each other, and that’s enough.”
There was a deep question here, Alia said. What was the purpose of intelligence? Was intelligence the highest outcome of the evolutionary process — or, like everything else, a mere means to an end?
“Intelligence is expensive,” Alia said. “There’s the energy cost of your big brain itself. And you need a lot of infrastructure to support it — some equivalent of eyes, hands, legs, to give you the information you need on the external world, and the capability of manipulating it.”
“So why bother getting smart at all?”
“Because there are circumstances where it is the only choice…”
Humanity’s chimplike ancestors had been kicked out of their ancestral forests by climate change. The savannah was a harsh environment, where you were exposed to extremes of temperature, easily spotted by predators, and where water and food sources were scattered far and wide. In order to survive, human intelligence had had to mushroom.
“You need to be smart, if you’re adrift in a hostile environment,” Alia said. “But if you ever manage to stumble off the savannah and back into the forest again—”
“You can give up your mind,” I said.
Morag said, “I think I understand. Birds give up flight whenever it’s safe, if they flap to an island without predators. Why not mind?”
Curiously I turned to the seal-folk flipping and gliding in their world-ocean. Their shining, shallow thoughts were contained within the Transcendence’s awareness; cautiously I sampled them. I tasted contentment, as delicious and ephemeral as the salty flesh of a fish. Yes, for these post-people it was enough. Life had no goals, for them; life was a process, whose only purpose was to be relished.
Alia said, “Michael Poole, are you seriously telling me they need to be redeemed from their pain by your flawed god? What pain?”
“But I still don’t understand,” I said. “Intelligence isn’t just a tool. Knowledge is worth having for its own sake… isn’t it?”
Morag brought back that jewel-like knot of wisdom that represented the Transcendence’s physics. “Take another look.”
Again I peered into the mass of ancient wisdom. But this time, under the guidance of Alia and Morag, I looked deep into the heart of the jewel — and I discerned a tiny flaw, a lack of completion.
There were limits to understanding by any mind — human or post-human, even Transcendent. This was incompleteness: no mathematics, a logical construct of the human mind, could ever be made whole or completely consistent. Because of this, you could prove that there were limits to what any conceivable computer could do. But a mind was at heart an information-processing system — so no mind, however vast, could ever be fully cognizant of itself.
Not even the Transcendence.
“Ah,” Morag said, as if she was learning with me. “ ‘What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it a model of the whole Universe?’ ”
“Who’s that?”
“David Hume. Not an engineer, so you won’t have heard of him. Face it, Michael. No mind can ever be fully cognizant of itself — and mind is not the goal of the cosmos anyhow. And the Redemption, this cack-handed do-it-yourself fix-up it means to inflict on human history, can only lead to disaster.”
Leropa had been silent for a long time. She said now, “Flawed god the Transcendence may be, but it is capable of at least one great act. Perhaps we can never atone for the suffering of past ages. But we can at least wipe it away. And, if we can’t atone, isn’t it our duty to do so?”
Alia said, “Leropa—”
“It is time for your decision, Michael Poole.”
The other voices, Alia, Morag, fell silent, and I was left alone.
I looked deep inside myself.
Could there be any possible ethical justification for the Cleansing? Could the elimination of suffering ever be worth the elimination of life itself?
If the great cauterization were done, then those unborn — including myself — would never have known it happened. It would not be felt, nor would the pain they might have suffered. But on the other hand, they would have no chance — no chance to make their own futures, to be glad to be alive, however briefly.
“Life comes first,” I said. “Everything else is secondary.” Yes, I thought as I framed the words; that was just.
“Then,” Leropa said, “what of the Redemption?”
The Transcendence was like an immense parent, I thought, brooding over the lives of its children — all of humanity, in the future and the past. And the Transcendence longed to make its children safe and happy, for all time.
But I was a parent, too. I had lost one child, saved another. If I could somehow have fixed Tom’s future at his birth, or even before he was conceived, so that his life would be lived out in safety — would I have done so? It seemed a monstrous arrogance to try to control events that might happen long after my death. How could I ever know what was best? And even if I did, wouldn’t I be taking away my son’s choices, his ability to live out his own life as he wanted?
You had to let go, I thought. You had to let your children make their own mistakes. Anything else verged on insanity, not love.
I didn’t have to say it. As I formulated these thoughts I glanced around the sky-mind of the Transcendence. There was a change, I thought. Those pinpoint awarenesses whirled in tight, angry knots, and giant reefs of wisdom loomed out of the dark like icebergs on a nighttime ocean. I had troubled the Transcendence with my decision, then. Perhaps that meant it was the right one.
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