Abraham walked over to it, put a hand through the still form, and said wonderingly, “You can make it do that?”
“I don’t make it do anything. It honors trivial requests.”
The bird said, “The time is approaching.”
“Um, really?” He felt wan and distant, and an ancient verse came to him.
Time universal and sidereal,
time atomic and ephemeral
time borne on and time halted.
Its beak and eyes slid up and down while its head held fixed, apparently its notion of a nod. “True, defining simultaneity is impossible. But events come.”
Nigel felt embarrassed by his small pleasure at extracting agreement from the thing. Difficult, it was, living as a self-aware microbe in an alien carcass. “You’re going to lose a lot.”
It beat its wings again. To make him slightly more comfortable? “Winnowing.”
“Darwinnowing.”
It caught the rather awful pun, of course. It had read the entire bloody Galactic Library, down to the footnotes. And it never laughed.
“Has anything this huge and horrible happened before?” Nigel asked.
“When we were ceramic, yes.”
“Ceramic?”
“Life did not begin in your embodiment. First came clays that could impress upon each other and replicate. They enjoyed energies vast and various, in the early phase of this universe. Matters were far hotter then.”
Nigel had never heard this before. “And they died.”
“They later spawned the elements of cellular life. Then they were culled.”
“Um. By you?”
“They were us.”
“So they—you—are still around?”
“We are now a different Phylum.”
“And what would that be?” This thing had never entertained discussion of its own properties before. Why now?
“You cannot know it.”
“Why?”
“You do not understand. That is a central property of our Phylum.”
“That we can’t know what you are?”
“Yes. Thus, to you, we can have no true name.”
“Um. Wouldn’t mind, then, if I called you, say, Fred?”
No response. The bird seemed to dissolve, then snapped back into a razor-sharp profile. It looked real enough, but still a millimeter deep. “You came from clays—”
“And later, united with the self-organized, replicating bodies of information.” The bird spoke rapidly now.
Abraham asked Nigel quizzically, “That means bodies that aren’t real?”
Nigel nodded. “Things that lived off the higher mechminds.”
“Parasites?”
“To a plant, vegetarians look like parasites. I gather that these, um, organized data fed off the mechminds the way a cow uses grass.”
The bird abruptly swelled to immense size. Nigel felt as though he were falling into it, the thin outline of it rushing at him—
A huge voice spoke, but not in his ears.Simply viewed, the world’s competition concerns the fate of organisms. Their bustle and energy, tragedy and comedy, occupy center stage. They strive to reproduce, to be on stage for the next act.There is a deeper panorama. Far below the restless energies of organisms, the genes of these beings are true actors, though limited ones. They, too, replicate.An organism, then, is a device to make more copies of its DNA. The genes strive to make this happen. They rule, in a sense.To survive better, genes “invented” brains. These in turn evolved to support minds. In time, minds learned to communicate with each other, through language and culture.This set another, broader stage.Minds store their interior models of the external world. These are intricate, ever-changing, sustained by a continual flow of sustenance from simpler sources. Evolution, whether natural or designed, can improve minds. Genes sharpen themselves in the endless, fateful Darwinnowing. Often, they shape fresh mental hardware—more subtle, supple minds.Genes are lesser than organisms because they do not directly know of organisms at all. Only the blunt feedback of survival “tells” genes of the furious combat and subtle strategies played out on the stage of the organisms.In a larger view, organisms are as unaware as genes.At a critical stage of evolution, once minds appear and thrive, a new stage deploys.Above the apparent order of the gene world, above even the drama of organisms, a higher complication plays out. This is the largest theater of all. Upon it, self-replicating ideas in the minds of machines follow the same laws of evolution. These are called kenes.
