Heaven's Reach (81 page)

All told, they weren't company she'd look forward to inviting over for dinner.

As the haze of battle cleared, Gillian ordered
Streaker
's cracked and fused blast armor sloughed away from the viewing ports for the first time since Kithrup, allowing her to stand before the glittering Milky Way—a spray of constellations so familiar, they would have reassured even some cavewoman ancestor whose life
was spent in hardship, grubbing for roots, a mere ten thousand years ago.

Lightspeed is slow, but inexorable
, she thought, gazing at the galaxy's bright lanes.
During the next few millennia, this starscape will flare with extravagance. Supernovas, blaring across heaven, carrying the first part of the transcendents' message.

A simple message, but an important one that even she could understand.

Greetings. Here we are. Is anybody out there?

Gillian noticed Emerson—whose duties down in Engineering were finished at last—hurry in to embrace Sara. The couple stood nearby with their silent chimp companion, regarding the same great vista, sharing private thoughts.

Of course the young woman from Jijo was another gift to Earth, a treasure who, using only mathematical insight, had independently predicted the Great Rupture. That alone was an impressive accomplishment—but now Sara was making further, startling claims, suggesting that the Rupture was only a
symptom.
Not of the expanding universe, as Earth's savants claimed, but of something more complex and strange. Something “coming
in
from outside our contextual framework” … whatever that meant.

Sara thought the mystery might revolve somehow around a race called the “Buyur.”

Gillian shook her head. At last, there would be others to pass such problems on to. Skilled professionals from all across Earth—and dozens of friendly races—who could deal with arcane matters while she went back to being a simple doctor, a healer, the role she had trained for.

I'll never order anyone else to their death. Not ever again. No matter what they say we accomplished during this wretched mission, I won't accept another command.

From now on, I'll work to save individual lives. The cosmos can be somebody else's quandary.

In fact, she had already chosen her first patient.

As soon as the spymasters let me go, I'll focus on helping
Emerson. Try to help restore some of his power of speech. We can hope researchers on Earth have already made useful breakthroughs, but if not, I'll bend heaven in half to find it.

Was guilt driving this ambition? To repair some of the damage her commands had caused? Or was it to have the pleasure of watching the two of them—Sara and Emerson—speak to each other's minds, as well as their hearts.

Watching them hold hands, Gillian relaxed a bit.

The heart can be enough. It can sustain.

Akeakemai called.

“We're back in two-way holo mode, Dr. Baskin. And there's a transmission coming in.”

The big visual display erupted with light, showing the control room of an approaching warship. It had the blunt outlines of Thennanin manufacture. The crew was mostly human, but the face in front of the camera had the sharp cheekbones and angular beauty of a male Tymbrimi, with empathy-sensitive tendrils wafting near the ears.

“…  that we must find your claims improbable. Please provide evidence that you are, indeed, TAASF
Streaker.
I repeat …”

It seemed a simple enough request to satisfy. She had spent hard, bitter years striving for this very moment of restored contact. And yet, Gillian felt reluctant to comply.

After a moment's reflection, she knew why.

To any human, there are two realms—“Earth” and “out there.”

As long as I'm in space, I can imagine that I'm somehow near Tom. We were both lost. Both hounded across the Five Galaxies. Despite the megaparsecs dividing us, it only seemed a matter of time till we bumped into each other.

But once I set foot on Old Terra, I'll be home. Earth will surround me, and outer space will become a separate place. A vast wilderness where he's gone missing—along with Creideiki and Hikahi and the others—wandering amid awful dangers, while I can only try to stay busy and not feel alone.

Gillian tried to answer the Tymbrimi. She wished someone else would, just to take this final burden off her shoulders. The ordeal of ending bittersweet exile.

She was rescued by an unlikely voice. Emerson D'Anite, who faced the hologram with a smile, and expressed himself in operatic song.

Destiny

T
HE ZANG COMPONENTS WERE BETTER
prepared to take all this in their philosophical stride. So were the machine entities who helped make up the macrocommunity called
Mother.

In both hydro- and silicon-based civilizations, there existed a widespread conviction that so-called “reality” was a fiction. Everything from the biggest galaxy down to the smallest microbe was simply part of a grand simulation. A “model” being run in order to solve some great problem or puzzle.

Of course, it was only natural for both of these life orders to reach the same conclusion. The Zang had evolved to perform analog emulations organically, within their own bodies. Machines did it with prim software models, carried out by digital cognizance. But ultimately, it amounted to the same thing. Joined at last, they found a shared outlook on life.

We—and everything we see around ourselves, including the mighty Transcendents—exist merely as part of a grand scenario, a simulacrum being played out in some
higher-level computer, perhaps at another plane of existence—or else at the Omega Point, when the end of time brings all things to ultimate fruition.

Either way, it makes little sense to get caught up in feelings of self-importance. This cosmic pattern we participate in is but one of countless many being run, in parallel, with only minute differences from each to the next. Like a chess program, working out every move, and all possible consequences, in extreme detail.

That was how some of the other Mother-components explained it to Lark and Ling. Even the Jophur-traeki converts seemed to have no trouble with this notion, since their mental lives involved multiple thought experiments, flowing through the dribbling wax that lined their inner cores.

Only the human and dolphin members of the consortium had trouble reconciling this image—for different reasons.

Why?
Lark asked.

Why would anyone expend vast resources doing such a thing? To calculate the best of all possible worlds?

Once they find it … what would they do with the result?

And what will they do with all the myriad models they have created along the way?

What will they do with us?

That question seemed to startle the Zang components, but not the machines, who answered Lark with strangely earnest complacency.

You oxies are so obsessed with self-importance!

Of course, all the models have
already
been run, evaluated, and discarded. Our feelings of existence are only an illusion. A manifestation of simulated time.

To Lark, this attitude seemed appalling. But Ling only chuckled, agreeing with the dolphins who had recently joined the onboard community, and who clearly considered this whole metaphysical argument ridiculous.

Olelo, a leader among that group of former
Streaker
crew members, summed up their viewpoint with a burst of Trinary haiku.

Lark felt glad to have the newcomers aboard, in several ways. They seemed like interesting folks, with a refreshing outlook. And they helped keep up the oxy side of the ongoing debate. There would be plenty of time for give-and-take discussions over the course of many subjective years, until the transformed
Polkjhy
finally reached journey's end.

With a flicker of awareness, he cast his remote senses through one of the external viewers, taking another look at the cosmos. Or what passed for one.

It was a perspective few others had ever witnessed. A
blankness
that was quite distinct from the vivid color, black. None of the great spiral or elliptical galaxies were visible in their normal forms—as gaudy displays of dusty white pinpoints. From this high standpoint, no stars could be seen, except as mere ripples, brief indentations that he could barely make out, if he tried.

Everything seemed flattened, ephemeral, tentative—almost like a crudely drawn rough draft of the real thing.

In fact,
Polkjhy
was no longer quite part of that universe. Gliding along just
outside
the ylem, the modified vessel rode atop a surging swell that was composed not of matter, or energy, or even raw metric. The best he could figure—having discussed it with others, and consulted the onboard Library—
Polkjhy
was riding upon a swaying fold of
context.
A background of basic law, from which the universe had formed long ago, when a perturbation in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle allowed the sudden eruption called the Big Bang.

An emergence of Something from Nothing.

What he saw now was not things or objects but a vast swirl of causal connections, linking one set of potentialities to another.

Behind the hurtling ship, diminishing rapidly with
each passing dura, several of these junctions could be glimpsed twisting away from a recent, shattering separation. A splitting apart of ancient ties.

He felt Ling's mind slip alongside his own, sharing the view. But after a while, she nudged him.

All of that lies behind us. Come. Look ahead, toward our destiny.

Though nothing tangible existed on this plane—not matter, or memes, or even directionality—Lark nevertheless got a sense of “forward” … the way they were headed. According to the Transcendents, it was a large cluster of galaxies, lying almost half a billion parsecs away from Galaxy Two. A place where enigmatic signals had been emanating for a long time, hinting at sapient activity. Perhaps another great civilization to contact. To share with. To say hello.

Its sole manifestation—to Lark's subjective gaze—was a swirl of faintly glowing curves and spirals. Vague hints that another domain existed where hyperdrive and transfer points and all the conveniences of spacefaring might be found in abundance.

We'll live to see that
, Ling pondered.
And much else. Are you glad we came?

Unlike the dolphins, no transcendent had ever asked Lark about his wishes. Yet, he felt pretty good.

Yeah, I'm glad.

I'll miss some people. And Jijo. But who could turn down an opportunity like this?

In fact, some already had. Gillian Baskin, striving to remain where her duty lay. And Sara, whose love he would carry always. In sending a dozen dolphin volunteers, Baskin had included other gifts to accompany
Polkjhy
's voyage—
Streaker
's archives, the genetic samples accumulated during a long exploration mission.