Charles Sheffield: Convergence

“If the image sequences contained nothing else, I would probably agree with you.” Darya could feel her own competitive juices bubbling. “But there was something else, something that you either did not notice or did not want to mention. One past and future of the spiral arm portrayed our past, and perhaps our present and future. That one, alone of all pasts and futures, shows the growth and continued presence of multiple clades . Many species, not just one, share the future of the arm. And unlike all other cases, that sequence does not end in the collapse of civilization. It shows a far future in which the arm is populated, healthy, and stable. And there is one other point, the most important of all: Our version of history, and our version alone, contains Builder artifacts . There is no sign of artifacts in any other alternative history.”

“Stop right there.” Bloom held up his hand, palm facing Darya. “Do you realize that you have just destroyed whatever minimal credibility your argument might have had? You accept a scenario that shows the future of the spiral arm. There is no way to know such a future, unless it is shown to us by beings who themselves are from that future .”

“ Wrong . That’s what stopped me, for the longest time. I asked myself: how could any being, no matter what it was like, know the future ? It might make predictions; we do that all the time. But this would have to go far beyond prediction. I wondered. Could a being exist who saw the future, as we see things around us? If such an entity did exist, what would be its essential properties?

“I didn’t have an answer — until I saw the polyglyphs on the walls of Labyrinth. Normally a picture is a two-dimensional idea. These were three-dimensional pictures, and the third dimension represented time . I asked myself, What kind of being would find it natural to treat time as a dimension no different from any other? And I found an answer: A being with finite extension in time .”

“Gibberish!” Bloom glanced around, seeking support from the others in the cabin. “What she is saying is physically ridiculous and implausible.”

“To us, maybe. But to the Builders, we are implausible. We are totally flat , living within an infinitely thin slice of time. No wonder the Builders find us difficult to communicate with. We perceive space as three dimensions, but we move through time always trapped in the moment of the immediate present. We have no direct experience of anything else, past or future. A being with finite size in time as well as space will move forward through time, just as we do, but it will also have direct experience of what we perceive as the immediate past and the immediate future. To see in any dimension, it is necessary to have a finite size in that dimension. They see the future, as we see things in space. And, like our vision, their time-vision can see detail close up, but only the broad outlines farther off.”

Darya could sense a change in the atmosphere within the cabin, people moving and turning away from her and Bloom. But she was too absorbed to stop, and in any case he was the one who had to be convinced. She spoke faster.

“I could accept this idea conceptually, but I still had a major problem: We talk about ‘the future’ as though it is a well-defined thing. But it isn’t. The future is a potential , it can take many different forms. Depending on what we do — and what the Builders did — many different futures might be possible for the spiral arm. And at last I understood. The Builders see — and illustrated, for our benefit — potential futures. That’s what the polyglyphs showed. Different walls, different possible futures. And of all those possibles, only one permits stable growth and continued civilization. It is the one where the arm is populated and dominated by multiple clades . And the Builders, with the use of artifacts planted long ago, have created the possibility of that future.”

Darya, struggling to make her points as clearly as she could, hardly saw her surroundings. Her mind was filled with the vision of the Builders, performing actions in the past and present, then peering out far ahead to watch the shifts and changes of a misty set of futures. They could not guarantee a future, they could only increase its chances. How did those options look, to the strange Builder senses? Did alternatives fade or sharpen, as different actions were taken or considered that would vary the future? How much detail were they able to see? The rise and fall of a clade, yes. But what about the smaller options, of economic power and influence?

Someone was tugging impatiently at her arm. She glared, expecting it to be Quintus Bloom. Instead it was Hans Rebka. Bloom himself was pushing his way into a crush of other people, all milling around the cabin.

Darya turned her annoyance onto Rebka. “What a nerve. I was talking to him!”

“No.” He began to pull on her arm, dragging her after the others. “You just thought you were. For the past thirty seconds you haven’t been talking to anybody. You’re as bad as he is, you know, when you get going. Come on. We have to find a way out of here. Everything is falling apart. You can tell us all about the Builders some other time — if we’re that lucky.”

It was like being engaged in a public debate — at the moment when the stage falls out from under you. Darya had been pumped up for a verbal duel-to-the-death with Quintus Bloom. She had no illusions; the fight was far from over. But now, without warning, both Bloom and audience had departed.

Darya, glancing at the screens for the first time in many minutes, could see why. Labyrinth was becoming unrecognizable. The walls were dissolving. Darya could see right through them. She could observe, as through a fine gauze curtain, the whole of the helical structure right down to the tightest innermost chamber.

And Labyrinth was simplifying . One spiral now, not thirty-seven. One great coiled tube, filled with novelties.

The bulging vortices had vanished, leaving in their place a horde of new arrivals. The spiral arm, revealing its diversity…

…ships, from the newest design of the Fourth Alliance to the ponderous and ancient bulk of the legendary Tantalus orbital fort. The corrugated surface of the fort crawled with a thousand identical vessels like twelve-legged metallic spiders. Nothing in today’s spiral arm remotely resembled them. Beyond the fort was a transport vessel for Hymenopt slaves, with next to it the disk and slim spike of an original McAndrew balanced drive. Most of the ships in the whole mismatched flotilla were drifting in one direction, toward an exterior wall of Labyrinth.

…writhing free-space Medusae, Torvil Anfracts in miniature, rainbow lobes shimmering like sunlit oil on water.

…alien creatures, familiar and strange, suited or naked to space, dead or alive, fresh or mummified. Some of the beings without suits were leaping easily through space from ship to ship. Some of the others were legless, eyeless forms. Far from their homes in deep oceans or on gas-giant planets, they twisted helpless in the gulf. The interior of Labyrinth could support life unassisted, although it was strange that everything could breathe the same air. But how had those giants ever been carried to the interior of an artifact?

Moving through the whole mass, guiding and shepherding, were thousands of miniature Phages, small twelve-faced solids no bigger than Darya’s hand. They showed every sign of intelligent behavior.

Darya recalled the common wisdom of the Fourth Alliance: Intelligence was not possible in an organic structure below a minimum mass. That mass far exceeded the size of these mini-Phages.