Between Nigel and Ito there was a distance, one they never bridged.
Again Nigel could not truly tell if this arose from the errors in salvaging Ito or in the coolness that develops all too often between father and son. He would never know.
Nikka did not seem to notice it. She had fitful spells now, apparently some neurological damage from the Grey Mech attack. Her head and hands would suddenly tremble and she could not control them. She brushed aside their concerns when the medical tech could find no solution.
“It’ll pass in time,” she said. “The body knows its own ways.”
Still, she made a remark later that meant she did guess about Ito. They spoke of their child the way parents do, knowing that in the end there is remarkably little they can do. That served to ease the sad separation Nigel felt from this man who had come back from death and been changed by it.
Fathers and sons speak inevitably across an abyss. Time rubs. It is never really possible to do anything over again. The Cauchy Horizon permits no erasures.
THIRTY-FOUR
When Paltry Planets Formed a Stage
Nigel went for a walk days later, when the house was secured and he could stride again on sturdy legs. Nikka was not feeling well and turned down his invitation.
At university he had learned scraps of poetry, and one returned to him now.
And there grow fine flowers
For others’ delight.
Think well, O singer,
Soon comes night.
In the dimness that was not a true night he thought of the time when the esty would unfold, up there in the far future.
He went to a hillside where he could see a profile of the distant other side of the Lane. Here it was somewhat like the impossible horizon he had seen at the other end of the wormhole. He remembered the gauzy filaments hanging in that strange sky. And he thought of the Cauchy Horizon, beyond which physics could not see. As if even God had a sense of metaphysical modesty.
He sighed, like breathing in clouds of cobwebs now, and tried to feel how it would be.
So plasma entities of immense size and torpid pace will drift through a supremely distant era. Sure and serene, free at last of ancient enemies.
Neither the thermodynamic dread of heat death nor gravity’s gullet can swallow them. As the universe swells, energy lessens, and the plasma life need only slow its pace to match. By adjusting itself exactly to its ever-cooling environment, life—of a sort—can persist forever. The Second Law is not the Final Law.
And they will have much to think about. They will be able to remember and relive in sharp detail the glory of the brief Early Time—that distant, legendary era when matter brewed energy from crushing suns together. When all space was furiously hot, overflowing with boundless energy. When life dwelled in solid states and mere paltry planets formed a stage.
And frail assemblies of chemicals gazed at the gliding plasma forms and knew them for what they were. Destiny glimpsed, then lost.
Suddenly he felt a fierce conviction that this would happen. That it must. That man and mech would work together to this final, far-flung destiny. That they would finally reconcile and realize that intelligence transcended the mere substrate that embodied it.
He felt the stars then, beyond the folds of the esty. Somewhere in that far night a ringing of the esty came, like an old Cambridge church bell. The low still tone bore him momentarily up into the swarming jewel lights so that he walked not under but among them, for a last time jaunty and irreverent, laughing like a thief of time loosed in a glowing orchard, with more paths for the choosing than any mind could count.
He staggered then, wheezing, and turned toward home. A sip of wine as a nightcap, perhaps. A fine bottle from their own cellar. He and Nikka would sit and smile and not talk about his indices. Not any more.
Perhaps they would speak of Ito’s restlessness; already he wanted to go courting a young lady in a nearby Lane. Nigel thought of his own young days and smiled.
Or perhaps they would discuss Angelina’s need to go off to study in high citadels of knowledge, for her grasp had now exceeded their farm. Or of the raccoon, which still lived in the Lane and was very busy. Going about something it would not say, perhaps could not say.
The subject would not matter much. The present was now all that mattered. A sliver so thin, yet as wondrously wide as a tick of time.
Dispassionate Discourse
These humans may be the ones we seek to understand.
They carry deeply embedded programs?
Their deepest are termed “emotions”—but this is not what we seek, in my opinion.
Emotions?
They are like our “drivers.”
But drivers are mandates, easily changed.
In humans they are fixed in matter, laid down in durable pattern on neurological substrate.
What a pointless method. But at least it must make them simple to read out, to record, to anticipate.
Somehow it does not. Their “emotions” learn.
But programs fixed in matter!—only crude laborers use such, and then purely because high energy fluxes are so wearing on them.
