Engineering Infinity (20 page)

“Kalihi, where is your home
planet?” He hoped she would point vaguely at some quadrant of the sky.

Everywhere
,
she answered without hesitation.

Kyo shivered once, violently, at
the idea which occurred to him at that single word.

“Kalihi,” he asked, “Where then
are the Hanalb children?”

Her whisper in Kyo’s mind set it
on fire.

Once, we were
everywhere
.

She looked at him then with a
gaze so powerful it wracked him.

In her eyes he saw beautiful
Earth, lyric and fine, forever lost. How had he ever thought his own life
important? The questions which left him sleepless:
Who am
I? Why am I here?
intensified, until he felt surrounded by a crowd
roaring in his ears, within his very brain.

Kalihi’s wings, arching up from
her shoulders and enfolding her arms, reminded him, once more, of Linda’s
wings, and that they had not worked. Linda had wanted him to be her wings. To
simply ask the right question. With a word at the right time - with perhaps
just a smile, a transmission of love through space - he could have saved her.
That thought renewed his agony a hundredfold. It twisted within him,
unbearable. There was no escape. There never would be.

At that instant, trembling,
vision locked with an alien being, he felt the universe splinter and reform
around him: new, simple, complete.

Kalihi closed her eyes. Her wings
shuddered.

He knew, without checking, that
she was dead. It seemed to him at that moment that she had just been waiting
for him to come before letting go. How? He did not know. It did not matter.

That was her transmission.

He stood, and planted his feet
far apart.

His shout was a force that came
from the roots of the planet and found its destination in the hearts of distant
stars.

In the silence that followed, a
hot wind rushed through the leaves of the deserted gardens, and those stars
pulsed above.

The tang of alien herbs overlay
the scent of water from the fountains. That scent of life was replaced, when he
passed out through the gate, by a dry, dusty wind that made him feel shrunken
and old.

He climbed the cliff in the light
of the planet’s moon, not caring if he slipped. He thought nothing as he
crawled through the tunnel and collapsed on the other side.

But he could not stop his dreams.
A myriad of beings grew from nothing, bursting with life, and danced a rapid,
weaving dance while he watched helplessly, unable to dance with them. Then they
dwindled to a small, glowing dot which hung in space an instant before it
vanished forever.

Kyo woke lying on his back just
outside the tunnel. He opened his eyes and was confronted by the alien sky,
tauntingly blue as a mid-Pacific day. His first thought was of Kalihi’s
answers.

Everywhere
,
their children.

Everywhere
,
their home planet.

How plastic, he wondered, is the
basis of life? How mutable is the physiological basis of consciousness? He
remembered that when he was in medical school, a renegade movement claimed that
thought could alter the course of disease. Ridiculed, of course, by him as well
as most people. Maybe, maybe not. But thought, translated into action - into
vaccines, visualizing machines, genetic therapies - could. What else could
thought do? Time was so vast for the Hanalb, and they had tried so many things,
that thought-into-vaccine was probably as short an iteration as an eyeblink was
to him. However long he lived, he doubted that he could understand, much less
master, the technology the Hanalb had let go of. Or at least, it seemed from
his point of view that they had. That might be true. It might not be true. A
glowing ship might arrive in the next instant. What if it did?

Finally, he faced the question he
was trying to hide from. The one which had plagued him so long, the Zen koan:
What is my true nature
?

An excellent question.

He closed his eyes, then opened
them again to the blazing sky and allowed himself to know the truth: the last vestige
of an ancient, brave, massive experiment. One called consciousness. One by
which the universe had been seeded with hope and intelligence.

What is my true nature?

Hanalb.

He had no doubt that it was true.
He wondered what form his brother and sister Hanalb had inhabited, on what far
planets, before metamorphosing to wings. He had always thought that all the
beings in the universe must be related, often wondered what odd twist of mind
poets, artists, scientists, and those seeking God shared, and why.

He stood, and tried to brush the
mud from his filthy robe, then ripped it off and threw it down in a heap.

As he walked toward his cave, he
yanked clumps of sweet grasslike fronds out by the roots. Sugar. By the time he
got there, he had an armful, which he dropped next to his spring.

Now what? Yes, he had to get one
of the cooking vats. It would be heavy.

He headed down into the main
valley, saw no one, and was glad. He wouldn’t have cared if they had all
wandered out onto the plains, troublesome creatures.

He certainly didn’t plan to. At
present, that stubborn thought was all he had.

He strode into the cooking area
and grabbed a vat. He turned it on its side and began to roll it back up the
hill, wrestling it over the rocks. Sweat stung his eyes, and he sat down to
rest.

He regarded the vat.

The huge, battered container was
made of soft metal. It was used by a race of beings that travelled to other
galaxies. In it, they cooked simple grains in boiling water.

His laughter began slowly, and
grew until it echoed against the rocks and he was gasping for breath, sides
aching.

Between the arms of the valley,
the lava plains glittered like the blue Pacific of his childhood. But he would
never see white sails upon them, or watch fish scatter at his approach in the
shallows. And neither would anyone else. Ever.

It had never hit home before.

Kyo gazed at the landscape with
new eyes.

Death had shattered him once. But
now, the thought of all that was gone, and the fact, suddenly apparent, that
life, its near-extinction, and its re-flowering as galaxies bloomed and died,
had been happening infinitely - the incomprehensible weight of it, and its
attendant, vast, lightness and release - hit him like the Roshi’s stick, like
the opening of Linda’s white wings in flight.

He grasped the vat and continued
up the hill, pushing it ahead of him with renewed energy. Arriving at his
grotto, he righted it. The vat rang like a great gong as it hit the rocks.

He bent a thousand times to fill
it with spring water from his small bowl, loving the splash of water falling
into water. The winnowed grain spilled through his hands like millions of
smooth, dry, tiny fish; the green slush of pounded plants smelled sweet as a
newly split coconut. He performed each step, registered each sensation, as if
he had repeated them through infinity and perfected them. Perhaps this was all
he was good for: to spread the life of the yeast.

That, at least, was
something
.

Finally, he opened the bag and
poured all of his precious yeast into the vat. Now all he had to do was wait.

He sampled it several times a
day, thinking about the slow yet inevitable translation of matter as the yeast
fed. And with each brief taste, always different, the universe seemed renewed.
Why hadn’t he noticed its perfection before?

One day he dropped his spoon. He
bent to pick it up, straightened, and paused.

The light pervading the landscape
penetrated him, as if the particles which he thought of as himself were loosely
connected and barely maintained in the particular form of Kyo.

The force of truth cleared all
else from his being.

The thought registered briefly:
Universe can reprogram mind. Mind can reprogram body. We may be the last, but
we will
not
walk out on the plain.

Wings were meant for flight, for
joy.

Hope was gone. Only stark reality
was left.

That was enough.

Koans for his charges appeared in
his mind, complete and powerful, precise puzzles which could cause thought to
transform the very atoms of those who experienced the solution. Each thought a
new pattern in a re-formed mind.

As days passed and the beer
brewed, in waking and in sleep, Kyo’s world was filled with light: constant,
strong, and insistent, a brilliant power he did not understand and did not even
care to. He only knew exactly how to share it. His companions progressed
swiftly through his koans and checking questions, which tested each state of
individual realization.

On the twentieth morning, he
found the beer perfect.

Kyo readied two bowls, next to
the most beautiful part of his grotto, where purple and red flowers sprouted
from the rocky wall.

He sensed excitement outside, and
smiled. He did not hear footsteps, for bare feet made no sound on the path.

Kyo.

Kyo turned.

Roshi stood in the bright light;
gasshoed, then straightened.

Do you have a
question?
asked Kyo.

Only one: can
you save me
?

Kyo looked straight into Roshi’s
eyes.

An absurd
question. Why ask? I only know one thing: I make excellent beer.

For a moment, all was still.
Light poured over beautiful blue lava. Bands of colour wavered in interlocking trapezoidal
patterns on the floor of Kyo’s pool.

Roshi and Kyo burst into laughter
like children.

Kyo’s sides ached; he wiped tears
from his face, took a deep breath. He was aware only of light, filling the
grotto as if it were a pool, permeating them both.

Roshi’s new wings, as he accepted
Kyo’s bowl of beer with immense solemnity, caught that pure light and shone.

Damien Broderick and
Barbara Lamar

Damien
Broderick is an award-winning Australian SF writer, editor and critical
theorist, a senior fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the
University of Melbourne. Barbara Lamar is a Texan tax lawyer, permaculture
farmer, and co-author of their forthcoming novel
Post Mortal Syndrome
. Lamar and Broderick married in Melbourne, Australia, in 2002,
and live in San Antonio, Texas. Broderick has published 45 books, including
Reading
by Starlight
,
The Spike
(the
first full-length treatment of the technological Singularity), and
Outside
the Gates of Science
(a study of parapsychology). He edited
Chained to the Alien
, and
Skiffy and Mimesis
, essays from the fabled
Australian Science Fiction Review
. His 1980 novel
The Dreaming Dragons
(now updated as
The Dreaming
) is listed in David
Pringle’s
Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels
. His
latest US releases are the novels
I’m Dying Here
,
and
Dark Gray
(both with Rory Barnes). Recent SF
collections are
Uncle Bones
,
Climbing Mount
Implausible
, and
The Qualia Engine
.

“The question of whether the
waves are something ‘real’ or a function to describe and predict phenomena in a
convenient way is a matter of taste. I personally like to regard a probability
wave, even in 3N-dimensional space, as a real thing, certainly as more than a
tool for mathematical calculations... Quite generally, how could we rely on
probability predictions if by this notion we do not refer to something real and
objective?”

- Max Born,

Natural
Philosophy of Cause and Chance

Hanging onto the desk’s edge, I
eased myself back, then slumped down again while the floor got itself on an
even keel. I’d drooled on the interdisciplinary dissertation I was meant to be
assessing. Psychoanalytic cinema theory, always such fun these post-postmodern
days.
Ob(Stet)Rick’s: A/ob[gyn]jection, Blood and Blocked
de(Sire) in Casa[blank]a
. I closed my eyes again, feeling ill.

Lissa was shocked. I wasn’t all
that pleased myself. Slightly reproachful, she said, “Dr Watson, your
appointment with the committee chair.” I squinted at the blur of my watch, did
a sweep of the cluttered surface of my desk. No glasses in immediate view. You
need to be wearing them in order to see where they are, but if you’re wearing
them you already know where they are. That was the kind of pseudo-paradox this
grad student’s dissertation was cluttered with. The inside of my head gonged.

“Yeah.” I tried to clear my
throat. “Thanks, Liss.”

“Ten minutes. Shall I bring you a
cup of coffee?” Delivering coffee was explicitly
not
part of Lissa’s job description as administrative assistant, but I seemed to
bring out the motherly instinct in her, although she is too young by a
generation and a half to be
my
mother.

“Sure. You’re a sweetheart.”
Inside my head a Hell’s Angels convention were thrashing their hogs and tearing
the town apart. Probably shouldn’t have brought that bottle of Jack Daniels to
the office. Only meant to take a swallow to calm my nerves.

I shoved the (th)esis on to the
floor, where it landed with a (th)ud, then dug through the random drifts of
paperwork on my desk. My reading glasses were three layers down. I jammed them
on my face. Where the hell had I put the notes for the meeting? I was stern:
Lee, my boy, do this in an orderly manner.
Here was the
title page from Jerry Lehman’s chapter on the effects of adrenergic stimulants
on the signification behaviour of non-autistic children. I was supposed to be
reviewing the damned thing. Two months behind, so far, but I’d catch up, soon
as I got things worked out with Beverley.