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"Its own senescence and eventual death. Technological cultures are mortal, like everything else. They flourish until they exhaust their resources; then they die."
Unless they don't, I thought. Unless they continue flourishing, expand into their solar systems, transplant themselves to the stars…
But Jason had anticipated my objection. "Even local space travel is slow and inefficient for beings with a human life span. Maybe we would have been an exception to the rule. But the Hypotheticals have been around a very long time. Before they devised the Spin membrane they watched countless inhabited worlds drown in their own effluvia."
He drew a breath and seemed to choke on it. Carol turned to face him. Her mask of competence slipped, and in the moment it took him to recover she was plainly terrified, not a doctor but a woman with a dying child.
Jase, perhaps fortunately, couldn't see. He swallowed hard and began to breathe normally again.
"But why the Spin, Jase? It pushes us into the future, but it doesn't change anything."
"On the contrary," he said. "It changes everything."
* * * * *
The paradox of Jason's last night was that his speech grew awkward and intermittent even as his acquired knowledge seemed to expand exponentially. I believe he learned more in those few hours than he could begin to share, and what he did share was momentous—sweeping in its explanatory power and provocative for what it implied about human destiny.
Pass over the trauma, the agonized groping after appropriate words, and what he said was—
Well, it began with, "Try to see it from their point of view."
Their point of view: the Hypotheticals.
The Hypotheticals—whether considered as one organism or many—had evolved from the first von Neuma
They had seen sentient biological species evolve and die on planets like ours countless times. By passively transporting organic material from star to star they may even have helped seed the process of organic evolution. And they had watched biological cultures generate crude von Neuma
From their point of view this endless stuttering gestation of simple von Neuma
A mystery, because transient events on a purely biological time scale were difficult for them to comprehend or even perceive.
A tragedy, because they had begun to conceive of these progenitor cultures as failed biological networks, akin to themselves—growing toward real complexity but snuffed out prematurely by finite planetary ecosystems
For the Hypotheticals, then, the Spin was meant to preserve us—and dozens of similar civilizations that had arisen on other worlds before and since—in our technological prime. But we weren't museum pieces, frozen in place for public display. The Hypotheticals were reengineering our destiny. They had suspended us in slowtime while they put together the pieces of a grand experiment, an experiment formulated over billions of years and now nearing its ultimate goal: to build a vastly expanded biological landscape into which these otherwise doomed cultures could expand and in which they would eventually meet and intermingle.
* * * * *
I didn't immediately grasp the meaning of this: "An expanded biological environment? Bigger than the Earth itself?"
We were courting full darkness now. Jason's words were interrupted by convulsive movements and involuntary sounds, edited out of this account. Periodically I checked his heartbeat, which was rapid and growing weaker.
"The Hypotheticals," he said, "can manipulate time and space. The evidence of that is all around us. But creating a temporal membrane is neither the begi
Carol sat beside him on one side of the bed and I sat on the other. I held his shoulders when his body convulsed and Carol stroked his head during the intervals in which he could not speak. His eyes sparked in the candlelight and he stared intently at nothing at all.
"The Spin membrane is still in place, working, thinking, but the temporal function is finished, complete… that's what the flickers were, the byproduct of a detuning process, and now the membrane has been made permeable so that something can enter the atmosphere through it, something large.…"
Later it became obvious what he meant. At the time I was bewildered and I suspected he might have begun to pass into dementia, a sort of metaphorical overload governed by the word "network."
I was, of course, wrong.
Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living. I had read that somewhere in my postgraduate days and remembered it as I sat at his side. Jason died as he had lived, in the heroic pursuit of understanding. His gift to the world would be the fruits of that understanding, not hoarded but freely distributed.
But the other memory that sprang to mind, as the substance of Jason's nervous system was transformed and eroded by the Hypotheticals in a way they could not have known was lethal to him, was of that afternoon, long ago, when he had ridden my thrift shop bicycle down from the top of Bantam Hill Road. I thought of how adroitly, almost balletically, he had controlled that disintegrating machine, until there was nothing left of it but ballistics and velocity, the inevitable collapse of order into chaos.
His body—and he was a Fourth, remember—was a finely tuned machine. It didn't die easily. Sometime prior to midnight Jason lost the ability to speak, and that was when he began to look both frightened and no longer entirely human. Carol held his hand and told him he was safe, he was at home. I don't know if that consolation reached him in the strange and convolute chambers his mind had entered. I hope it did.
Not long after that his eyes rolled upward and his muscles relaxed. His body struggled on, drawing convulsive breaths almost until morning.
Then I left him with Carol, who stroked his head with infinite gentleness and whispered to him as if he could still hear her, and I failed to notice that the sun when it rose was no longer bloated and red but as bright and perfect as it had been before the end of the Spin.
4X109 A. D. / WE ALL LAND SOMEWHERE
I stayed on deck as the Capetown Mam left its berth and made for the open sea.
No less than a dozen container ships abandoned Teluk Bayur while the oil fires were burning, jostling for position at the harbor mouth. Most of these were small merchant ships of dubious registry, probably bound for Port Magellan despite what their manifests said—vessels whose owners and captains had much to lose from the scrutiny that would follow an investigation.
I stood with Jala and we braced ourselves against the rails, watching a rust-spackled coastal freighter veer out of a bank of oil-fire smoke alarmingly close to the Capetown's stern. Both ships sounded alarms and the Capetown's, deck crew looked aft apprehensively. But the coastal freighter sheered off before it made contact.