Neverness (12 page)

   "The elements of protein," I said. "The neurologics of computers are often made of protein."

   "Oh, who cares what things are made of? What matters is peace and harmony. And you are dangerous to our harmony, I think."

   "I'll leave, if that's what you want."

   In truth, I couldn't wait to leave that hot, stifling planet.

   "Hai, you must leave. The longer you stay, the more dangerous you become. Please, tomorrow will you leave? And please, do not talk to the children anymore. They would be frightened if they thought the moon was alive."

   I abandoned the people to their pleasures and their decadent harmonies. In the middle of the long night, I rocketed away and fell again into the manifold. Again I fenestered inward towards the center of the Entity's brain. I was more determined than ever to seek the nexus of her intelligence, if indeed such a nexus existed. The further I fell, the more moon-brains I discovered. Near one hot, blue giant star, there must have been ten thousand moons clumped together like the cells of an embryo. I had an intense feeling that I was witnessing something I was not meant to see, as if I had caught my mother naked in her morning bath. Were the moons somehow reproducing themselves, I wondered? I could not tell. I could not see into the center of the clump because the space there was as black as a black hole. Even though I knew it would be chancy to fall any further, I was afire with the
possibilities
of new, godly life, so I made a point-to-point mapping into the center of the gathered moons.

   Immediately, I knew that I had made a simple mistake. My ship did not fall out into the center of the moons. Instead, I segued into a junglelike decision tree. A hundred different pathways opened before me, dividing and branching into ten thousand others. I was sick with fear because I had only instants to decide upon the correct branching, or I would be lost.

   I reached out with my mind to my ship, and slowtime overcame me. My brain rushed with thoughts, as snowflakes swirl in a cold wind. As my mentations accelerated, time seemed to slow down. I had a long, stretched-out instant in which to prove a particularly difficult mapping theorem. I had to prove it quickly, as quickly as I could think. The computer modeled my thoughts and began infusing my visual cortex with ideoplasts that I summoned up from memory. These crystal-like symbols glittered before my inner eye; they formed and joined and assembled into the proof array of my theorem. Each individual ideoplast was lovely and unique. The representation of the fixed-point theorem, for instance, was like a coiled ruby necklace. As I built my proof, the coil joined with feathery, diamond fibers of the first Lavi mapping lemma. I was thinking furiously, and the ideoplasts froze into place. The intricate emerald glyphs of the statement of invariance, the wedgelike runes of the sentential connectives, and all the other characters - they formed a three-dimensional array ordered by logic and inspiration. The quicker I thought, the quicker the ideoplasts appeared as if from nothingness and found their place in the proof array. This mental manipulation of symbol into proof has a special name: We call it the
number storm
because the rush of pure mathematical thinking is overwhelming, like a blizzard in midwinter spring.

   With the number storm carrying me along toward the moment of proof, I passed into dreamtime. There was an indescribable perception of
orderedness
; there was beauty and terror as the manifold opened before me. The number storm intensified, nearly blinding me with the white light of dreamtime. I wondered, as I had always wondered, at the nature of dreamtime and that wonderful mental space we call the manifold. Was the manifold truly deep reality, the reality ordering the shape and texture of the outer universe? Some cantors believe this (my mother is not one of these), and it is their faith that when mathematics is perfectly realized, the universe will be perfectly understood. But they are pure mathematicians, and we pilots are not. In the manifold there is no perfection. There is much that we do not understand.

   I was deep in dreamtime when I realized I did not understand the type of the decision tree branching all about me. I was close to my proof - I needed only to show that the Lavi set was embedded in an invariant space. But I could not show this, and I did not know why. It should have been a simple thing to do. When the tree divided and split into a million and then a billion different branches, I began to sweat. Dreamtime intensified into that terrifying, nameless state I thought of as "nightmaretime." Suddenly I proved that the Lavi set could
not
be embedded in an invariant space. My heart was beating like a panicked child's. With my panic came despair, and my proof array began to crash, to shatter like ice crystals ground beneath a leather boot. There would be no proof, I knew. There would be no mapping to a point-exit in real space. I would not fall out around any star, near or distant. I was not merely lost in a hideous decision tree, I had stumbled - or been propelled - into an infinite tree. Even in the worst of decision trees, there is a probability that a pilot will find the correct branch among the billion billion branchings. But in an infinite tree, there is no correct branch, no branch leading to an exit into the warm sunlight of realspace. The tree spreads outward, one branch growing into another, and into ten centillion others, on and on, dividing and redividing into infinity. From an infinite tree there is no escape. My neurons would gradually disassociate, synapse by synapse, leaving me to play with my toes as a child plays with the beads of an abacus. I would be insane, blinded by the number storm, frozen in forever dreamtime, forever drooling into infinity. Or, if I turned away from my ship-computer and let my mind go quiet, there would be nothing, nothing but an empty black coffin carrying me into the hell of the manifold.

   I knew then that I had lied to myself utterly. I was not ready to chance everything to experience a goddess; I was not ready to face death at all. I remembered I had chosen my fate freely. I could only blame myself and my foolish pride. My last thought, as a scream formed up on my lips and I began hearing voices inside me, was: Why is man born to self-deception and lies?

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.

   Lyall Watson, Holocaust Century Eschatologist

Somewhere it is recorded that the first man, Gilgamesh, heard a voice inside him and thought it was the voice of God. I heard voices reverberating through my inner ear, and I thought my fear of the infinite tree had driven me insane.

   _Why?_

   It is a sign of insanity when a man hears voices born not of lips but of his own loneliness and longings. Unless, of course, it is the voice of his ship stimulating his aural nerves, suffusing sounds directly into his brain.

   _Why is man?_

   But a ship-computer has little free will; it cannot choose what words or what tone of voice to speak within a pilot. It is possible for it to receive signals from another ship-computer and to translate these signals into voices, but it is not programmed to generate its own signals.

   _Why is man born?_

   I knew my ship-computer could not be receiving signals from another lightship because the propagation of signals through the manifold was impossible. It was possible, I told myself, that some of my ship's neurologics had weakened and died. In that case, my ship was insane, and as long as I remained interfaced with it, so was I.

   _Why is man born to self-deception and lies?_

   If I did not like the way my ship was echoing my deepest thoughts, it terrorized me when it began speaking in voices, in a hodgepodge of the dead languages of Old Earth. Some of these languages I understood from my learning to read; others were as alien to me as the scent language of the Friends of Man is to human beings.

   _Shalom, Instrumentum Vocale, la ilaha il ALLAH tat tvam asi, n'est-ce pas, kodomo-ga, wakiramasu? Hai, and thereto hadde he riden, no man ferre, poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina which he called the stars of the Solid State Entity und so wir betreten, feuer-trunken - Ahnest du den Schöpfer? It is I, Mallory Ringess._

   So, I thought, this is insanity, to greet myself as a tool with a voice, to speak of entering the Entity "drunk with fire," whatever that meant. I recognized the phrase,
Ahnest du den Schöpfer
. It was a line of a poem written in Old High German which meant something like, "Do you sense your creator?" I "sensed" that my ship and myself had gone completely mad, either that or it really was receiving a signal through the warped manifold of the Entity. And then I heard:

If thou beest born to strange sights,

   Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand days and nights,

   Till age snow white hairs on thee.

   So, the Entity did like ancient poetry. If any signal were being sent through the manifold, I thought, it must be coming from Her. The voices began to modulate and resonate into a single voice. In a way, it was a feminine voice, at once seductive and lonely, beatific and sad. It was a voice uncertain as to whether or not it would be understood. Hearing this lovely voice echo the dead languages of Old Earth made me guess that She was probing to discover my milk tongue. But I was mistrustful of this thought the moment it entered my mind. Perhaps I desired too ardently to speak with Her; perhaps I was only speaking with myself

   _No, Mallory, you are speaking with me._

   - But I'm not speaking at all; I'm thinking.

   _Do not flatter yourself that what occurs in your mind is true thought._

   - How can you read my thoughts ... my mind, then?

   _You are inside of me and I am inside of you. Yin-yang, lingam-yoni, outside-inside. I am an entity, but I am not solid. Not always._

   - What are you?

   _I am the frenzy; I am the lightning I am your refining fire._

   - I don't understand.

   You are a man. Verily, a polluted stream is man. What have you done to purify yourself?

   So, I thought, I had longed to experience a greater being, and she spoke to me in riddles. Quickly I turned my mind away from the manifold and the infinite tree. I tested the ship's neurologics. But they were healthy and sound, and nowhere could I find the source of the Entity's signal.

   _There is no signal, as you think of signal. There is only perception and touch: I look into the electric field of your ship's logics and reach out and jiggle the electrons to change the hologram. And so your computer runs my thoughts and suffuses my voice into your brain. I would touch your brain directly but that would frighten you._

   Yes, yes, it would have. I was already frightened enough. I did not want anything alien to "jiggle" the electrons in my brain, to fill me with its images and sounds, to make me see and hear and touch and smell things which did not exist, to change my very perception of reality. With this thought came a much more disturbing thought: What if the Entity already were jiggling my brain's electrons? Perhaps She only wanted me to
think
that the voice I heard came from the computer. I did not know what to think. Was I really thinking my own thoughts? Or was the Entity playing with me, making me doubt that I was thinking my own thoughts? Or worse still, what if it all was a nightmare of madness? Maybe my ship had disintegrated; maybe I was experiencing a final moment before death, and the Entity - for whatever reasons - had reached into my brain to create an illusion of sane existence. Maybe I was dead or just dreaming; maybe I, whatever "I" was - was entirely the Entity's dream creation. Everyone, of course, has these thoughts and fears, but very few have had a goddess speak to them. When I thought of Her being inside my mind, I was dizzy with a sense of losing my self. My stomach churned with a sick feeling that I had no free will. It was an awful moment. I thought that the universe was a terribly uncertain place where I could be certain of only a single thing: that in the realm of my mind, I wanted no thoughts other than my own to alter my thinking.

   Because I was full of fear and doubt, the Entity explained how she manipulated matter through the layers of the manifold. But I understood only the smallest part of the physics, the simplest of ideas. She had created a new mathematics to describe the warp and woof of spacetime. Her theory of interconnectedness was as beyond me as a demonstration of the different orders of infinities would be to a worm. Ages ago, of course, the mechanics had explored the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. For example, they had shown that both photons in a pair of photons are connected in fundamental ways no matter how far the two particles are separated in realspace. If two photons fly away from a light source towards the opposite ends of the universe, each will "know" certain of its twin's attributes, such as spin or polarization, no matter how far apart they are. And they will know it instantaneously, as if each instantly "remembered" it should be polarized horizontally, not up and down. From this discovery the mechanics theorized that it is possible to transmit information faster than light, though to their disgrace they have never succeeded in doing so. But their brains are small where the Entity's is measureless. It seemed She had found a way not only to communicate but to instantaneously touch and manipulate particles across and through the reaches of space. How She did so, I still do not understand.

   - I don't understand your definition of a correspondence space; is it isomorphic to what we call a Lavi space? I can't see ... if only there was more time!

   _At the beginning of time all the particles of the universe were crushed together into a single point; all the particles were as one, in the singularity._

   - And I don't remember the derivation of your field equation. It must be -

   _Memory is everything. All particles remember the instant the singularity exploded and the universe was born. In a way, the universe is nothing but memory._

   - The correspondences are superluminal, then? The correspondence scheme collapses? I've tried to prove that a hundred times but -