Learning the World

And then Horrocks went off to the founder-controlled asteroids and shacked up with Synchronic. I still shake my head over that. It’s not unheard of, but it seems almost indecent.

But it’s Constantine, strangely enough, that I’ll miss the most. He was never more than a genefather when I was a child, except for that one wondrous incident when he took me to see the engine. But in the years since the contact I’ve seen more of him, and he’s always been understanding and kind, if a little distant.

I called him up just as the ship was leaving. He wasn’t as busy as I’d feared. We talked a little about what are, to me, old times, and new ideas.

“And what do you think now?” he asked me.

“I have a theory,” I said.

“You always do,” he said. “Grant was right about you, back in the day. Your thinking is metaphysical.”

I laughed. “You read that?”

“Oh yes.”

“Well,” I said, “here’s my latest metaphysical theory. You remember when you took me to see the engine?”

He nodded after a moment. The light-speed lag was only just becoming noticeable.

“You said then that you had named it. You never told me why, but that I would know someday. I once thought I knew, but now I’m not so sure. Anyway, this is my theory. The engine generates new universes all the time. These universes are similar but not identical to the one we live in, yes?”

“To the best of our knowledge, yes,” he said. “Information is conserved.”

“Well then,” I said, “what that means is that in some of these universes, there will be starships with cosmogonic engines of their own.”

His expression was inscrutable. “That would seem to follow, yes.”

“So,” I went on, “just as the birth of universes from black holes selects over cosmic time for universes with laws of physics such that black holes can be formed, hence universes with stars and galaxies, so the birth of universes from starship engines selects for more universes in which starships can exist. And what more likely universes to have many starships in, than ones in which intelligence emerges all over the place at almost the same time?”

This time the pause was longer than the light-speed lag could account for.

“There may be something in what you say,” he said. “What inference do you draw from it?”

I swallowed. “That we’re not the first,” I said. “Not the original universe, by a long, long way. We’re a long way down the line from the first universe in which somebody looked at a high-energy physics experiment and saw that it could fly to the stars.”

“That’s a good inference,” said Constantine. “It’s one I once made myself, and—”

The screen went fuzzy. I adjusted the gain. The image came back.

“I’m losing you,” he said. “It’s time we said goodbye, just in case, and then we can carry on until we’re too far apart.”

“Goodbye, Constantine,” I said. “I just wanted to ask. You said information is conserved. How much information?”

“More than you might think,” said the Oldest Man.

The picture and sound became hopelessly indistinct. He may have said more after that, but I didn’t catch it and could never retrieve it. The transmitters the bat people build back there on Destiny II are good, but not good enough to reach us now as we accelerate away.

But as I go about my work with the rest of the crew I’m haunted by two thoughts. One is of a man in the Moon Caves, looking at a high-energy physics experiment and looking up and saying, “But the sky, my lady! The sky!”

For when I imagine that man, I see Constantine.

The other is more troubling. If cosmic evolution works on the scale that I outlined to Constantine, and that he seemed to find plausible, and if as he said information is conserved — then perhaps those like us who come first are changed the least, and are thus doomed always to find themselves in a universe in which they are in every sense primitive, and to encounter species wiser and kinder than they.

Long before the starships and the Moon Caves, these words were written: