[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
270 · GREG BEAR
and the universe is empty, desolate, shapeless. Unless at some time those with
the power decide to arrange a kind of resurrection.
Who's doing this?
The Final Mind.
Our descendants save us?
With reason. The observations of living things are a distillation of the
universe, a conversion of information to knowledge. All sensation, all
thought, all experience, is gathered, not just at death, but throughout one5
life. That knowledge is precious; it can be distilled even further and passed
through the tiniest fissures of connection between this universe, as it dies,
and the new universe that is born out of it. The distillation imposes itself
on the new creation, like the passage of seed, guides it away from chaos,
impressing a pattern. The new creation can then develop its own intelligences,
who will in some way or another repeat the process when their universe grows
old.
Nothing dies?
Everything dies. But that which is special in all of us is saved.., if the
Final Mind succeeds. You see the urgency of my mission?
Lanier's memories of all the years of pain and death came to him as if spread
out in an album of three-dimensional pictures. Everything dies . . . But the
Final Mind was burning galaxies at the beginning of time, to power this effort
to recover all that was finest in all the things that had ever lived. Not just
human beings, but all living things; all things, at any rate, that converted
information to knowledge, that learned and observed and came to know their
environment that they might change it. From the scale of microbes to the
living Earth itself, all levels harvested and encoded, selected and
Saved.
He savored that thought, tasting it, delighting in it, sobering at what it
really meant; not the resurrection of the body, not the salvation of any
individual, but the merging and transcendence of the whole. That which is best
in all of us.
He thought of his father, dying of a cerebral hemorrhage in a parked car in
Florida. Of his mother, dying of cancer in a hospital in Kansas. Of his
friends and relatives and colleagues and acquaintances instantly immolated in
the furnace of the Death, that scorching, ashing breath that lingered so
briefly on the Earth. Their achievements, their courage, their foolishness and
mistakes, their dreams and thoughts, harvested as if a combine swept over
them, threshing their kernels of grain away from the husks and chaff of death.
All the simple people, and the brilliant, the swift contentious birds of the
air and the sheep of the green cloud-shad-
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ET E R N I TY · 271
owed fields, fish and strange beasts of the sea, insects, people, people,
people, swept up and saved. Was this immortality, to be rendered into such a
form that the Final Mind could remember all that you were?
And not Earth alone, but all the worlds of this galaxy, and all the worlds of
those galaxies filled with life, immense fields of hundreds of billions of
worlds, some strange beyond imagining. Immense was not the word for such an
undertaking. On any such scale, the fate of the Earth was less than
insignificant, yet the Final Mind was diverse enough, powerful enough to reach
down to Earth and shape history with such delicacy, focusing the eviternal on
the infinitesimal.
Even in his present form, he found this hard to accept, impossible to
understand.
,4m I being harvested, too? Is that what you're doing now carrying me away?
We have a different path and a different role.
What are we spirit, energy?
We are like a current using the hidden conduits by which pa~les of matter and
energy speak to each other, tell each other where they are and what they
are--pathways hidden to humans in our time, but available to the Final Mind.
Where are we going?
First, to Thistledowr~
FIFTY-EIGHT
Thistledown
The witnesses had gathered in the bore hole, behind Korzenowski's control
center: the president, presiding minister, the director of Thistledown,
official Hexamon historians, Judith Hoffman, selected senators and corp-reps.
Directly ahead, through the blister, a circle of night expanded slowly until
it touched the smooth-cut edges of the open seventh chamber, banishing the
stars. Within the darkness swam afterimages of Sun and Moon and Earth, growing
smaller and dimmer.
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272 · GREG BEAR
Korzenowski opened the test link. A pinpoint of milky light glowed in the
center of the dimensionless blackness. Concentrating on the clavicle, refusing
to be distracted by any display but the abstraction provided by the machine,
he "felt" through the link and explored what lay beyond.
Vacuum. The nearly empty void surrounding the flaw; the brightness of a plasma
tube.
The frequency of light matched that of the Way's own variety of plasma tube.
A few meters behind Korzenowski, President Farren Siliom heard the
Engineer whisper, "It's here."
Now Korzenowski broke out of his trance long enough to pict an instruction to
the console hovering beside him. Olmy's mysterious signal passed through the
open link and down the Way.
"Is everything--" the president began.
The point of light in the darkness ahead of them flashed. Korzenowski felt a
tremor in the clavicle. That tremor seemed to growl throughout the
Thistledown; warning picts appeared in front of him, telling of disturbances
in the sixth chamber.
Korzenowski made sure the link had been correctly established. It had.
Something was trying to pass through the link from the other side.
Korzenowski focused all his attention once again on the clavicle. A
force had inserted itself into the link, intent on keeping it open; a force
stronger and more sophisticated than Korzenowski had imagined possible.
"Trouble," he picted quickly at Farren Siliom.
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He tried to sever the link. The point of light remained, even grew in size. He
could not reduce the link; all he could do was expand it, and he did not think
that was wise. Whatever was on the opposite side apparently desired a complete
re-opening, a reconnection with Thistledown.
Returning to the clavicle's simulation of the weave between universes,
Korzenowski examined the link from a wide variety of "angles," searching for a
weakness, something that in theory had to exist. He could exploit that
weakness to destabilize the link, clamp it down on whatever was trying to pass
through.
Before he found that weakness, a hideous flare of energy shot from the point
and pierced the traction field blister over the end of the bore hole.
The blister sparkled and vanished and everything spun in an instant wind,
other traction fields flickering desperately as air rushed out of the bore
hole.
Farren Siliom grabbed Korzenowski's robe. The flare of energy whipped this way
and that, searing the walls of asteroid rock and metal,
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Eternity.txt (287 of 355)
[5/21/03 12:34:14 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Eternity.txt
ET E R N I TY · 273
arcing over the witnesses to touch the lead fiawship and blast its nose into
shards. The fiawship swung out of its traction dock and smashed against
Korzenowski's spherical personal quarters, squashing it against the smoking
wall.
Korzenowski could not breathe, but that didn't matter. He closed his eyes and
in the expanded instants of implant-augmented time, searched for the defect he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl wyciskamy.pev.pl
270 · GREG BEAR
and the universe is empty, desolate, shapeless. Unless at some time those with
the power decide to arrange a kind of resurrection.
Who's doing this?
The Final Mind.
Our descendants save us?
With reason. The observations of living things are a distillation of the
universe, a conversion of information to knowledge. All sensation, all
thought, all experience, is gathered, not just at death, but throughout one5
life. That knowledge is precious; it can be distilled even further and passed
through the tiniest fissures of connection between this universe, as it dies,
and the new universe that is born out of it. The distillation imposes itself
on the new creation, like the passage of seed, guides it away from chaos,
impressing a pattern. The new creation can then develop its own intelligences,
who will in some way or another repeat the process when their universe grows
old.
Nothing dies?
Everything dies. But that which is special in all of us is saved.., if the
Final Mind succeeds. You see the urgency of my mission?
Lanier's memories of all the years of pain and death came to him as if spread
out in an album of three-dimensional pictures. Everything dies . . . But the
Final Mind was burning galaxies at the beginning of time, to power this effort
to recover all that was finest in all the things that had ever lived. Not just
human beings, but all living things; all things, at any rate, that converted
information to knowledge, that learned and observed and came to know their
environment that they might change it. From the scale of microbes to the
living Earth itself, all levels harvested and encoded, selected and
Saved.
He savored that thought, tasting it, delighting in it, sobering at what it
really meant; not the resurrection of the body, not the salvation of any
individual, but the merging and transcendence of the whole. That which is best
in all of us.
He thought of his father, dying of a cerebral hemorrhage in a parked car in
Florida. Of his mother, dying of cancer in a hospital in Kansas. Of his
friends and relatives and colleagues and acquaintances instantly immolated in
the furnace of the Death, that scorching, ashing breath that lingered so
briefly on the Earth. Their achievements, their courage, their foolishness and
mistakes, their dreams and thoughts, harvested as if a combine swept over
them, threshing their kernels of grain away from the husks and chaff of death.
All the simple people, and the brilliant, the swift contentious birds of the
air and the sheep of the green cloud-shad-
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Eternity.txt (285 of 355)
[5/21/03 12:34:14 AM]
Page 195
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Eternity.txt
ET E R N I TY · 271
owed fields, fish and strange beasts of the sea, insects, people, people,
people, swept up and saved. Was this immortality, to be rendered into such a
form that the Final Mind could remember all that you were?
And not Earth alone, but all the worlds of this galaxy, and all the worlds of
those galaxies filled with life, immense fields of hundreds of billions of
worlds, some strange beyond imagining. Immense was not the word for such an
undertaking. On any such scale, the fate of the Earth was less than
insignificant, yet the Final Mind was diverse enough, powerful enough to reach
down to Earth and shape history with such delicacy, focusing the eviternal on
the infinitesimal.
Even in his present form, he found this hard to accept, impossible to
understand.
,4m I being harvested, too? Is that what you're doing now carrying me away?
We have a different path and a different role.
What are we spirit, energy?
We are like a current using the hidden conduits by which pa~les of matter and
energy speak to each other, tell each other where they are and what they
are--pathways hidden to humans in our time, but available to the Final Mind.
Where are we going?
First, to Thistledowr~
FIFTY-EIGHT
Thistledown
The witnesses had gathered in the bore hole, behind Korzenowski's control
center: the president, presiding minister, the director of Thistledown,
official Hexamon historians, Judith Hoffman, selected senators and corp-reps.
Directly ahead, through the blister, a circle of night expanded slowly until
it touched the smooth-cut edges of the open seventh chamber, banishing the
stars. Within the darkness swam afterimages of Sun and Moon and Earth, growing
smaller and dimmer.
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Eternity.txt (286 of 355)
[5/21/03 12:34:14 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Eternity.txt
272 · GREG BEAR
Korzenowski opened the test link. A pinpoint of milky light glowed in the
center of the dimensionless blackness. Concentrating on the clavicle, refusing
to be distracted by any display but the abstraction provided by the machine,
he "felt" through the link and explored what lay beyond.
Vacuum. The nearly empty void surrounding the flaw; the brightness of a plasma
tube.
The frequency of light matched that of the Way's own variety of plasma tube.
A few meters behind Korzenowski, President Farren Siliom heard the
Engineer whisper, "It's here."
Now Korzenowski broke out of his trance long enough to pict an instruction to
the console hovering beside him. Olmy's mysterious signal passed through the
open link and down the Way.
"Is everything--" the president began.
The point of light in the darkness ahead of them flashed. Korzenowski felt a
tremor in the clavicle. That tremor seemed to growl throughout the
Thistledown; warning picts appeared in front of him, telling of disturbances
in the sixth chamber.
Korzenowski made sure the link had been correctly established. It had.
Something was trying to pass through the link from the other side.
Korzenowski focused all his attention once again on the clavicle. A
force had inserted itself into the link, intent on keeping it open; a force
stronger and more sophisticated than Korzenowski had imagined possible.
"Trouble," he picted quickly at Farren Siliom.
Page 196
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
He tried to sever the link. The point of light remained, even grew in size. He
could not reduce the link; all he could do was expand it, and he did not think
that was wise. Whatever was on the opposite side apparently desired a complete
re-opening, a reconnection with Thistledown.
Returning to the clavicle's simulation of the weave between universes,
Korzenowski examined the link from a wide variety of "angles," searching for a
weakness, something that in theory had to exist. He could exploit that
weakness to destabilize the link, clamp it down on whatever was trying to pass
through.
Before he found that weakness, a hideous flare of energy shot from the point
and pierced the traction field blister over the end of the bore hole.
The blister sparkled and vanished and everything spun in an instant wind,
other traction fields flickering desperately as air rushed out of the bore
hole.
Farren Siliom grabbed Korzenowski's robe. The flare of energy whipped this way
and that, searing the walls of asteroid rock and metal,
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Eternity.txt (287 of 355)
[5/21/03 12:34:14 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Eternity.txt
ET E R N I TY · 273
arcing over the witnesses to touch the lead fiawship and blast its nose into
shards. The fiawship swung out of its traction dock and smashed against
Korzenowski's spherical personal quarters, squashing it against the smoking
wall.
Korzenowski could not breathe, but that didn't matter. He closed his eyes and
in the expanded instants of implant-augmented time, searched for the defect he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]