Neverness (71 page)

   _Don't be afraid of the death, my Pilot._

   Aloud I said, "But every star in the galaxy, every poem that's ever been written, everything - it will all be lost."

   Kalinda plucked a flower from her hair. She placed it in the palm of her hand, pursed her lips, and blew it at me. The flower floated in the air a drifted toward me.

   _You still don't understand. Nothing is lost. I picked this hyacinth thousands of years ago, but smell it - isn't it still fresh?_

   "I've tried to understand, thought about this all my life. The decay, the entropy -"

   _Entropy is missing information; entropy is a measure of uncertainty. When entropy is maximum, then all messages are equally probable. The greater the uncertainty, the greater amount of information conveyed in the message._

   "The message of the Ieldra, it's -"

   _From the moment the universe was created it moved away from the disorder of the primal explosion. Macroscopic information is continually created._

   "But I -"

   _Gods seek perfect information about the universe. But information can never be perfect. Consider one of your exhalations, your carelessly bitter words of warm air. If a single gram of matter as far away as Shiva Luz were to be moved a single centimeter, it would change the microscopic state of your breath. Even the universe itself can never create enough information to know its own future._

   "'What has been will be,' Katharine used to say."

   _You cannot even dream what the future of this galaxy will be._

   "We're all doomed and damned, aren't we?"

   _No, it is just the opposite, my Pilot. There are infinite possibilities._

   She plucked another hyacinth from the garland around her forehead and placed this little flower of light in my hair. She told me many things, then, wonderful things. Much of what she said I did not understand, or understood only poorly, as a novice who has been given numbers to play with has only the vaguest notion of transfinite arithmetic. When I asked her why she would allow the ten thousand worlds to murder Gehenna Luz - for clearly the goddess had the power to destroy every world inside Her, if She so desired - she hinted at the existence of certain unalterable ecological "laws." (If I confuse the pronouns referring to Kalinda with those of the goddess, it is because I was confused. In some sense, I am still confused.) Her words were almost gobbledygook: There was something about the decisions of every entity in the universe determining what she called the "ecology of choices." It would be a great crime, she said, to needlessly interrupt the natural flow of choices. And it was an even greater crime not to restore the flow if it had been interrupted. It seemed that there were other ecologies, too. There was an ecology of ideas and an ecology of prophesies, and an ecology of information. She told me about the ecology of determined actions and the ecology of fundamental paradoxes. There were many, many of these ecologies; there was a hierarchy of ecologies. The study of the interplay between ecologies, she said, was her art. When I admitted that her art was as apprehensible to me as probabilistic topology was to a worm, she said, "Worms know enough about transformations to become butterflies."

   She told me something else. All of our communications, all of her manipulations of the manifold that I had found so disturbing, the inexplicable phenomena inside of the Entity - everything that I had so far witnessed, she had accomplished on an unconscious level. No being, she said, could afford to be aware of life processes which she could make automatic. Could a man take the time to consciously adjust his heartrate to the many and varying needs of his environment? To speed up his metabolism and bodily temperature in order to fight a bacterial invasion? To be
aware
of each individual bacteria? No, and neither could a goddess afford to be aware of a mere man, nor even ten thousand worlds full of women and men. The true concerns of the goddess, it seemed, were far beyond my concerns as to man's fate within the galaxy.

   As we had talked, millions of black bodies had fallen out around the star. She told me that they were a form of manufactured matter as dense as black holes, but not nearly so massive. The black bodies - I might as well call them gamma-phages - stored energy; she had made the gamma-phage to absorb and hold the light of the supernova. Why she should need such enormous quantities of energy she kept a mystery. She hinted that I must, trust her, that there was a vital reason why stars must die. But how could I trust this godchild with her goddamned, godwise eyes? Kalinda smiled so sweetly, but she had devoured the brain and mind of the Tycho, and the minds of Ricardo Lavi and other pilots, and who could know what other feasts she might someday require?

   _Do not brood so, my Pilot. It would be unpoetic if all the stars died. You won't let them die._

   Because she was lonely, because she could read the fear and wild anticipation in
my
eyes, because she was at heart a compassionate goddess, this child with flowers in her hair promised to help me if only I would promise her a simple thing. Although it was reckless of me to do so, I made her this promise, a promise which I shall tell of presently.

   _And now it begins._

   If I had possessed a millionth of the Entity's powers, I think I would have stopped the murder of Gehenna Luz. But I was just a man, and there was little I could do. Kalinda twisted the ring around one of her fingers and told me to watch the swarm of worlds through my telescope. I did as she commanded. I watched one of the worlds nearest the sun open. It looked like two halves of a gigantic oyster opening to an ocean of sunlight. And inside was a pearl of a machine, a great jewel of a spacetime engine.

   _It is pretty, isn't it? See how it sparkles. Face your ship, my Pilot, and let your computer model what is to come._

   I watched human beings accelerate the natural life cycle of a star. The lords of the manswarm - or somebody, or some computer - oriented the spacetime engine on points within the plasma core of Gehenna Luz. It took fourteen hundred fifty four seconds for the probability waves to propagate through space to the star. At the points near the core, where the temperature was one hundred million degrees, the zero-point energy of spacetime was suddenly converted to thermal energy. In the neighborhood of the point-sources, the plasma was a molten sea, and there was a series of explosions. The core of the star grew even hotter. The hydrogen plasma began burning at an accelerated rate, faster and faster, four hydrogen atoms slamming into each other to yield each helium atom plus a bit of energy, plus a raging maelstrom of energy ripping across the red sea of hydrogen.

   _Do you burn to return home, my Pilot? There is always a returning. I will descry a part of your future: One last time you will return to me._

   At an accelerating rate, zero-point energy was converted to heat. At one hundred and fifty million degrees, helium fusioned to form carbon, the element of life, and it grew hotter still. A million years of stellar evolution occurred in perhaps a tenth of a year. When the core fire reached six hundred million degrees, carbon fused into neon. And time contracted even as the star's core contracted, pressing inward, generating temperatures greater than a billion degrees. Thus the atoms of oxygen were born, and oxygen burned to form silicon and iron, and the core of the star was very, very hot. The star - this is how I saw it through the thoughtspace of my ship - the interior of Gehenna Luz was like an onion with a core of iron plasma. Enveloping the core was a silicon shell surrounded by burning sulphur, and skins of oxygen, carbon, and helium. The core was now hot enough to finish its own evolution in a few days, and so the spacetime engine grew still, and the manswarm inside the made-worlds prepared to make their mappings.

   _Life and death; death/life._

   Because iron will not fuse spontaneously into heavier elements, soon the entire core had burned itself out. The core grew too massive, too dense. Without the electron pressure of gushing energy to oppose the gravity of the star's interior - at the Chandrasekhar limit - the core collapsed at a quarter of lightspeed. In less than a second, it fell inward like a crushed thallow's egg. It grew hellishly hot, eight billion degrees hot. The core matter broke down into protons and neutrons and was compressed to such densities that it rebounded with a snap. An enormous shock wave ripped through the onion skins to the surface, blowing off the star's outer layers. Gehenna Luz exploded in a fire of hydrogen plasma and gamma rays and bright, hot light.

   _The secret of life._

   I did not actually see the ten thousand worlds fall in. My ship modeled the manifold, though, and I watched it twist like a roasted worm, twist and distort. I saw millions of huge, gaping windows open in the neighborhood of the worlds. Then, in a moment, the worlds were gone, flung out into the galaxy where new and virgin stars awaited.

   _You have wondered at the Ieldra's secret, but I may not tell you because I am what the greater gods would warn you against. When you return to Neverness, you must ask your Timekeeper why this is so. He is very old, and in a way, wiser than you could believe. And for now, goodbye, my Pilot._

   I did not remain to watch Gehenna's wavefront of light blow across my ship. I had seen enough. I was eager to find my brother and sister pilots, wherever they might be. I was eager to do other things as well, so I found a window and made a mapping. As I fell into the manifold, into the timeless realm where the only light was the light of mathematics and dreamtime, Kalinda clapped her hands together and sang out, "But it's so pretty!" Then she, too, was gone. However, I could still smell her flowers, and the sound of her last poem rang in the air:

Stars, I have seen them fall,

   But when they drop and die,

No star is lost at all,

   From all the star-sown sky.

It may be fairly asked why animals, who live by talon and beak and their most immediate and savage impulses, do not devour each other down to the last writhing worm? And why do the gods not shatter worlds when they tremble with godly wrath? Why is man uniquely cursed with war? The answer to this question is both historic and evolutionary: We walk the brink of racial suicide because we were smart enough to make atomic bombs and stupid enough to use them.

   from
A Requiem for Homo Sapiens
, by Horthy Hosthoh

Deep within the Entity was a planetless star which has come to be known as the Pilot's Star. It was a small, yellow star of no particular distinction except that it was closest - topologically closest - to Gehenna Luz. When I fell out above the Pilot's Star I found that of all the lightships racing through the manifold, only one had arrived. It was Soli's
Vorpal Blade
, shining in the starlight like an Old City spire on a winter night.

   I sent my imago into his ship's pit, which was a warm, dark sphere much like my own pit. I talked to him. His long, hard Alaloi muscles knotted beneath his hairy belly, and he greeted me. "How far do you fall, Pilot?" And then, "Do you remember the race the day after you became a pilot? There was my lead the whole way then, too. But now neither of us will cross the finish line, will we? Your goddess's star has fallen supernova too soon - the deformations were point to zero-point so there can't be any doubt that it was a supernova. There'll be no more mappings beyond this star, will there?"

   "Only mappings homeward."

   "Yes, the race -"

   "The race is over, Soli." I told him then that I had just witnessed the death of a star. I told him about the hundred billion homeless people who had helped cause the growth of the Vild.

   There was sweat on his forehead, sweat in his beard. He didn't want to believe I had reached Gehenna Luz before him. "No, that's impossible," he said. "My mappings were tight and elegant. Yours couldn't have been tighter."

   "Perhaps I didn't need to make as many mappings," I said.

   "Why not, Pilot?"

   I wanted to shout out my proof of the Continuum Hypothesis. Would the news that I had proved what he had struggled vainly for three lifetimes to prove ruin him? Very well, let it ruin him.

   "How should I tell you, then? It's the simplest reason: that between any pair of discrete Lavi sets of point-sources there exists a -"

   "It's proven!"

   " - one-to-one -"

   "You've proved it, haven't you?"

   " - mapping."

   "Yes, the bastard Ringess and his reckless dreams - not entirely reckless after all." He held his chin up proudly and asked, "What's the proof, Pilot? Tell me your proof"

   I told him nothing. I was tempted to blurt out my collapse of the Lavi correspondence scheme, but I said nothing. For the first time in my life, I began to truly understand the Timekeeper and his secretive ways.

   When I didn't answer him, he tapped his long nose and asked, "Are you ashamed of your proof? How could you be ashamed? Ah, but was it entirely
your
proof? Yes, there's a little shame, now, in your reckless, carked brain, in everything you do. You're not to be envied, no; you should be pitied instead."

   "It's not your pity I want."

   He said, surprisingly, "Pity these lost peoples of the Vild. You say they've lost their sense of wrong and right. Isn't that the worst fate? To lose that which is necessary to live happily within ... within the bounds of ..." He did not finish his sentence. He closed his eyes and strained to speak. I thought he might want to tell me something about Justine, or perhaps, about pity and forgiveness, but he seemed to have lost his voice. The apple of his throat jumped up and down as he swallowed empty swallows of air.

   At last he rubbed the muscles of his neck and said, "Yes, your goddess has told you secrets. When we return to the City, we'll have to call a new quest. The Timekeeper will be spoken to. We'll have to send a mission to the Vild, to educate the poor people in the rudiments of mathematics, the rules of civilization."