Nigel felt himself drifting in a high and hollow place, airless. He glanced out at the wheeling moon. Its riddled and wrinkled hide he saw afresh, looming strange below, craters of absurdly perfect circles that had been arranged so randomly. Nigel breathed deeply.
“The stars are…”
“Populated by the machines, descendants of the organic cultures that arose and died.”
“Computers live forever?”
“Unless a carbon-based life finds them. Machine societies cannot respond to your strange mixture of minds coupled with glands. They have no evolutionary mechanism to make them develop techniques for survival— other than by hiding.”
Nigel chuckled. “They’re cowering out there.”
“And learning. They sent me. I learned much from you, in the desert.”
“And from Alexandria,” Nigel said in a whisper. “Yes.”
“Where… where is she? You were with her in a way no one ever has been when, when she…”
“The machine civilizations—I have visited some by accident, though not the vaster complex that must have made me—have shown that disintegration of structure equals information loss.”
“I see.”
“But that is only for machines. Organic forms are in the universe of things and also reside in the universe of essences. There we cannot go.”
Nigel felt an odd trembling in his body, a sense of compressed energies. “Universe of essences…?”
“You are a spontaneous product of the universe of things. We are not. This seems to give you… windows. It was difficult for me to monitor your domestic transmissions, they fill up with branches, spontaneous paths, nuances…”
“The damned speak frantically.”
“No.”
“But we are damned. Compared to you.”
“By duration? Eight hundred thousand of your years— so much as I have counted—are still not enough. Your time is short and vivid, colored. Mine…I scream, sometimes, in this night.”
“Good God.” He paused. The voice had shifted to a deeper bass and now seemed to echo in the cabin. “I would like to have those years, whatever you say. Mortality—”
“Is a spice. A valued one.”
“Still—”
“You are not damned.”
“Damned lucky, maybe.” Nigel laughed airily, transparent. “But still damned.”
“What was that sound?”
“Uh, laughter.”
“I see. Spice.”
“Oh.” Nigel smiled to himself. “Is your palate so flat?” After a long moment the voice said, “I see that it might be. Each of you laughs differently—I cannot recognize or predict the pattern. Perhaps that is significant; much hides from me. I was not made for this.”
“They designed you to—”
“Listen. Report occasionally. I awake at each new star. I perform my functions. But the sum is not greater or lesser than the parts, merely different … I, I cannot say it in your words. There, there are dreams. And what I gathered in from you is mine. The flavors. Your art and the set of your minds; only I am interested in those. Essences? They did not want it; perhaps the world-minds did not need it. But I…it is for my times in darkness.”
The pearl was dwindling, drawing up unto itself.
“I wish you well out there.”
“If I functioned as my designers intended, I would not need your blessing. I would go through that night blindly. I—the part who speaks to you—am an accident.”
“So are we.”
“Not of the same oblique cast. I have received a recognition signal… but you will discover them soon enough. For the moment I see that other men will exact much from you, for this.”
Nigel smiled. “I’ve let the quail take wing. Right. They’ll lay me out, I expect.”
“They cannot rob the essences from you.”
“The experience itself, you mean? Well, no, I suppose not. It’s good-bye then?”
“I think not.”
“Oh?”
“I am versed in many… animal theologies. Some say you and I are not accidents and that we shall meet again in different light. You are membrance. Perhaps we are all mathematics, everything is, and there is only one whole… sum. A self-consistent solution. That implies much.”
