There are still the currents in you that I reported upon. In our Directory you had to stand for your civilization, a raw sampling, added to the torrent of electromagnetics your world sent out so unthinkingly.
“Pleasant way to put it. We yammer a lot.”
At that time you said, “The damned speak frantically.”
“Damned right.”
Mortality does not damn. You in the universe of essences have virtues.
“Damned lucky, maybe.” Nigel laughed airily, transparent. “But still damned.”
That same spice. Laughter.
Later he realized that the Snark was a recording, averaged over all the representations it had in the several million years of its lifespan. It was not an individual, but a set. This trait he could not assess. When one met an old friend, one assumed that it was the same person. Cells replaced here and there, more lines in the face—but the same.
In the long run, living embedded in and among the Syntony, the question was meaningless.
Just as futile was figuring what Nigel’s family flight—Nikka, Benjamin, Angelina, Ito, where/when were they now?—forward in time, voyaging through the Esty, had meant.
Mechs lived there, fought with humanity. Yet Nigel had seen them destroyed in their fevered ecstasies.
Did that mean they would be back? That unknown struggles would overlap and rage through a future altered but not stopped by the Trigger Codes?
Apparently. Perhaps the Walmsley-Amajhi clan had visited something genuinely quantum-mechanical. The stops in the Transits could have been state vectors of potential. Some of those futures would in fact occur. Others were erased by the mech plagues. He would have to voyage again forward through a Worm, to discover which.
Yet if the Grey Mech had killed them all, he was quite sure he would not be thinking over the problem. He would not be.
So he confined himself to thinking about cases he could fathom, at least possibly.
Mechs had a built-in flaw, the pleasure plague, from their antiquity. So did even the super-chimp humans, carrying potential for error in their add-on mental architecture. For they were still assemblages, improved only by additions. All chimps bore their built-in imperatives, which they experienced not as ideas, but as emotions. Lusts, hungers, fears—shorthand for evolution’s lessons. It was all part of the richness. That, he found comforting.
Joy. That he still had. As simple as sunshine.
Joy without obvious cause. Earthy, animal spirits. Sometimes it was no great shakes being a primate, but it was always worthwhile being a mammal.
He laughed at some unconscious irony in the Snark. “Bit heavy, don’t you think? Pig irony.”
It remarked, When you make that sound you seem to have a brief moment of what it is like to live as I do, beyond the press of time.
“As I am now? In this place?”
Yes. But you have carried your essences with you. Your windows.
Nigel laughed.
“That dog was in the room when we were going at it.”
“I didn’t mind. Perhaps by now they’ve evolved to the point where at the crucial moment they politely look away.”
“Moment? You think it lasted only a moment?”
“Well, let’s say it was timeless.”
“That’s better. I do seem to recall the dog barking at an important point.”
“Oh? I thought that was you.”
“Then I’ll never know, will I, the uses you’ve made of Walmsley.”
YOU CANNOT KNOW THEM.
“Then there is no ending.”
LOCALLY, THERE IS. GLOBALLY, NO.
“Alexandria . . . ?”
Yes?
“I want to—I—”
Not that time yet.
He snapped, “I’m like a child, told when to go to bed?”
This isn’t bed. Not nearly as much fun, for one thing.
