Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (57 page)

Harry said, his voice heavy with wonder, ‘A god at the end of time. Is it possible?’

Michael found he wanted to reach the girl, and he tried to put tenderness into his voice. ‘I understand you now, I think,’ he said. ‘You believe that none of this - our situation here, the Qax occupation of Earth, the Qax time-invasion - is real. It’s all transitory, in a sense; we are simply forced to endure the motion of our consciousness along one of the chains of quantum functions which you believe will be collapsed, discarded, by your Ultimate Observer, in favour of—’

‘Heaven,’ Harry said.

‘No, nothing so crude,’ Michael said. He tried to imagine it, to look beyond the words. ‘Harry, if she’s right, the ultimate state - the final mode of being of the cosmos - will consist of global and local optimization; of the maximizing of potential, everywhere and at every moment, from the beginning of time.’ Shining, Shira had said. Yes, shining would surely be a good word for such an existence ... Michael closed his eyes and tried to evoke such a mode; he imagined this shoddy reality burning away to reveal the grey light of the underlying optimal state.

Tears prickled gently at his closed eyes. If one were vouchsafed a glimpse of such a state, he thought, then surely one would, on being dragged back to the mire of this unrealized chain of being, go insane.

If this was the basis of the faith of the Friends, then no wonder the Friends were so remote, so intense - so careless of their everyday lives, of the pain and death of others. History as it existed was nothing more than a shabby prototype of the global optimization to come, when the Ultimate Observer discarded all inferior worldlines.

And no wonder then, he thought, the Friends were so leached of humanity. Their mystical vision had removed all significance from their own lives - the only lives they could experience, whatever the truth of their philosophy - and it had rendered them deeply flawed, less than human. He opened his eyes and studied Shira. He saw again the patient intensity which resided inside this fragile girl - and he saw now how damaged she was by her philosophy.

She was not fully alive, and perhaps never could be; he pitied her, he realized.

‘All right, Shira,’ he said tenderly. ‘Thank you for telling me so much.’

Parz sighed, almost wistfully; his small, closed face showed a refined distress. ‘But she hasn’t yet told us all of it. Have you, girl?’ With an edge in his voice, he went on, ‘I mean, if you truly believe such a wondrous vision - that the history we have lived through, the present and future we must endure - are merely prototypes for some vast, perfect version which will one day be imposed on us from the end of time - then what is the Project all about? Why do you need to do anything to change your condition in the here-and-now? Why not simply endure this pain, let it end, and wait for it all to be put right at the end of things?’

She shook her head. ‘In my time, humans are helplessly subjugated to the Qax. We were able to assemble the resources for our rebellion, but it was only the fortuitous arrival of your ship from the past which gave us the opportunity to do so.

‘Such a rebellion could never happen again. Michael Poole, we believe the Qax Occupation will result, at last, in the decline of man. The Qax - inadvertently, perhaps - will destroy humanity. And thereby they will terminate all possible timelines in which humanity survives the Occupation Era, joins the greater, maturing community of species which is to come, and adds to the wisdom of those mighty races at the end of time. The Qax will stop the transmission of any data about what humans were and might have been into the future. This is a crime on the largest of scales - and would be worth opposing even if we were not of the species affected ...

‘But we are. And we believe we have to thwart the Qax, to safeguard the future role of humanity.’

Poole pulled his lip. ‘Jasoft, what do you make of this diagnosis?’

Parz spread his hands. ‘She may be right. The Qax of my era weren’t planning for our destruction before this disastrous sequence of events, ironically initiated by the Friends themselves - we’ve been too useful, economically. But perhaps in the end, we could not have survived an extended subjugation ...

‘And, looking ahead, we know that Shira’s prediction must come true, but in ways she could not anticipate. The human Jim Bolder will cause the destruction of the Qax home world, drive them to diaspora. After this, it seems, the elimination of humanity will become a racial goal for the Qax.’

Poole nodded; he’d studied Shira’s reactions throughout this discourse, but her face was blank, unreacting, blandly pretty.
She’s not listening
, he realized.
Perhaps she can’t.

‘Very well. Then, Shira, tell us how turning Jupiter into a black hole will help you achieve your aims. Is the singularity to be some form of super-weapon?’

‘No,’ Shira said calmly. ‘Such is not our intention. Not directly.’

‘No,’ said Michael, staring at the girl. ‘You’re not weapons-manufacturers, or warriors. Are you? I think you see yourself as part of the great upwards streaming of life, towards this marvellous, cosmic future you’ve described. I think you want to preserve something. Information of some kind. And send it beyond the current perilous era into this distant, glorious future, when those wise Observers of the universe will pick up your message and understand its true meaning.’

Parz was staring at him, baffled.

Michael said, ‘Jasoft, I think they are turning Jupiter into a vast time capsule. They’re constructing a black hole; a black hole which will evaporate in - what? Ten to power forty, fifty years from now? Jupiter will be like a vast tomb, timed to open. A naked singularity will be exposed. These cosmic engineers, these tinkerers with the dynamic evolution of the universe, will come to investigate; to extinguish the peril exposed to the universe and its future/past.’

‘Ah.’ Jasoft smiled. ‘And when they do come, they will find a message. A message left for them by the Friends.’

Harry laughed. ‘This conversation gets more and more bizarre. What will this message say? How do you strike up a conversation with god-like cosmic designers ten to power forty years in the future? “Hello. We were here, and had a hell of a lot of trouble. What about you?”’

Michael smiled. ‘Oh, you might be a bit more imaginative than that. What if you stored the human genome in there, for instance? The future consciousness could reconstruct the best of the race from that. And with a bit of tinkering you could store the “message” in the consciousness of the reconstructed humans. Imagine that, Harry; imagine emerging from some fake womb, with your head full of memories of this brief, glorious youth of the universe - and into a cosmos in which the formation, life and death of even the last, shrivelled star is a memory, logarithmically distant ...’

Shira smiled now. ‘There is no limit, given the technology,’ she said. ‘One could imagine converting an Earth-mass to data, lodging it within the event horizon. One would have available ten to power sixty-four bits - equivalent to the transcription of ten to power thirty-eight human personalities. Michael, one might imagine storing every human who ever lived, beyond the reach of the Qax and other predators.’

‘But how would you store the data? We know already that a black hole is a vast source of entropy; if an object of whatever complexity implodes into a hole, all bits of data about it are lost to the outside universe save its charge, mass and spin—’

‘Singularities themselves are complex objects,’ Shira said. ‘Unimaginably so. Our understanding of them has advanced enormously since your time. It may be possible to store data in the structure of the spacetime flaw itself—’

‘But,’ Parz said, his round, weak face broken by a sly smile, ‘with respect, my dear, you still haven’t told us precisely what your message to these superbeings of the future would be. Even if you succeeded in transmitting it.’

Michael settled back on his couch. ‘Why, that much is obvious,’ he said.

Shira watched him, utterly erect and tense. ‘Is it?’

‘You’re trying to get a message to the Ultimate Observer.’ He heard Parz call out wordlessly, but he pressed on. ‘You want to influence the way the Observer selects the optimal lifeline of the cosmos; you want to ensure that data about humanity reaches the post-Qax future, and that the Observer selects worldlines in favour of humanity.’ Michael smiled. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? I have to admire your capacity for thinking big, Shira.’

Shira nodded, stiffly. ‘Our goal is a valid one, from a racial point of view.’

He inclined his head in return. ‘Oh, certainly. None more valid. And once the final Observation takes place, the events we have endured will not have taken place, and the means you have employed are justified ... because if the end is met,
the means won’t even have occurred
.’

‘It’s utterly outrageous,’ Parz said, green eyes sparkling. ‘But wonderful! I love it.’

Shira sat silently, her eyes still locked disconcertingly on Michael’s.

‘Well, at least we know what’s going on now,’ Harry said brightly. ‘But now comes the difficult bit. Do we help them ... or try to stop them?’

The dot of blue light at the zenith had grown to the size of a fist.

Shira shrugged, almost casually. ‘I have no more influence to exert on you. I can only rely on your wisdom.’

‘Right.’ Michael pursed his lips. ‘But you weren’t so keen on trusting to that wisdom earlier, were you?’

‘We did not believe you would understand,’ she said simply. ‘We calculated it was more likely to yield success if we proceeded alone.’

‘Yes,’ said Parz coldly. ‘Perhaps you were wise to attempt such a course, my dear. I have learned that these people, from fifteen centuries before our shared era, are behind us in knowledge and some experiences, but are our peers - more than our peers - in wisdom. I suspect you knew what the reaction of these people would be to your schemes; you knew they would oppose you.’

Shira looked at Michael uncertainly.

He said, somewhat reluctantly, unwilling to be cruel to this young, earnest girl, ‘He’s talking about hubris, Shira. Arrogance.’

‘We are attempting to avert the extinction of the species,’ Shira said, her voice fragile.

‘Maybe. Shira, to my dying day I will honour the courage, the ingenuity of the Friends. To have constructed the earth-craft under the very eyes of the Qax; to have hurled yourselves unhesitatingly into an unknown past ... Yes, you have courage and vision. But -
what right do you have to tinker with the history of the universe?
What gives
you
the wisdom to do that, Shira - regardless of the validity of your motives? Listen, you scared us all to death when we thought you were just trying to create a naked singularity. That would have set off an unpredictable explosion of acausality. But in fact you’re trying to disrupt causality deliberately - and on the largest scale.’

‘You dare not oppose us,’ Shira said. Her face was a mask of anger, of almost childish resentment.

Michael closed his eyes. ‘I don’t think I dare allow you to go ahead. Look, Shira, maybe the whole logic of your argument is flawed. For a start, the philosophical basis for the whole thing - that particular resolution of the Wigner paradox - is speculative, just one among many.’

Parz nodded. ‘And where is the evidence of this advance of life that you’ve based your hopes on? The most advanced species we know are the Xeelee. But the Xeelee don’t fit the description, give no evidence of sharing the goals you’ve advanced. They show no signs of having the gathering and recording of data as their key racial motive. Indeed their goal seems to be very different - the construction of their Kerr-metric gateway to another universe - and they seem prepared to destroy data, in the form of structures on an intergalactic scale, to do it. So how will this cosmic eye, this Ultimate Observer of yours, ever come about, if even the Xeelee don’t want to lead us towards its formation?’

Her nostrils flared. ‘You’re not going to help us. You’re going to try to stop us. Michael Poole, you are—’

Poole held his hands up. ‘Look, don’t bother insulting me again. I’m sure I’m a fool, but I’m a fool who doesn’t trust himself where a final solution to the history of the universe is concerned. I’d do anything to avert the imposition of such a solution, I think.’

‘Perhaps the Project won’t, or can’t, succeed,’ Shira said. ‘But it remains humanity’s best and only hope of removing the Qax yoke.’

‘No,’ he said. He smiled, an immense sadness sweeping over him; he felt irrationally ashamed at his systematic demolition of this young person’s ideals. ‘That’s the clinching argument, I’m afraid, Shira. The fact is, we don’t need your Project.’ He nodded to Parz. ‘Jasoft has told us. Humans will get out from under the oppression of the Qax. It will take a long time, and will mean the near destruction of the Qax - but it will be done, we know that now, and it will come from the simple, surprising, actions of a single man. From the unpredictability of humanity.’ He studied her empty face, the surface of an incomplete personality, he realized now. ‘Ordinary humanity will beat the Qax in the end, Shira. But that’s beyond your imagining, isn’t it? We won’t need your grandiose schemes to win freedom by sabotaging history.’

‘But—’

‘And the only way that outcome can be subverted, as far as I can see,’ Michael pressed on, ‘is if we leave that portal open; if we allow the Qax themselves more chances to change history - in their favour. I’m sorry I had anything to do with building the damn thing, unleashing all this trouble in the first place. Now, all I want to do is to put that right ...’

‘You’ll be killed,’ Shira said, clutching at straws.

He laughed. ‘Funnily enough, that doesn’t seem to matter so much any more ... But I don’t want to take you all with me, if I don’t have to. Harry, give me an option to get them off before we hit.’

‘Working,’ Harry said calmly. ‘Thirteen minutes to the portal, now.’