7red moved upward, propelled by capacities unsought into the arena of his destruction. His too was a society of individuals. Though they mixed and meshed as they would, still the very reality of their separate physical bodies kept them apart. He rose to ever greater mastery of the devices and thought modes that made up his world, growing ever closer to the greatness of Centrum and ever farther from the simple things and persons that he loved. Alone in his hard shell 7red worked, and he coupled with Cooloil, then with other beings, greater beings who were more on a level with his increased station in life. His inner essences boiled at a fever pitch with the wonder of it all, and gradually he began to mourn his loss.
Two scenes played in swift counterpoint:
At Ariane's behest, Sealock had moved to Montevideo, living with his woman in Tupamaro Arcology, linked to the now beloved, lost New York only by the wires that otherwise dominated his life. I didn't really need their physical presence, he told himself often, why do I miss it so much? They lay in bed together and made love often.
Brendan lay on the cool, slightly damp sheets of a bed and rubbed his hand slowly across the velvet textures of Ariane's sleeping back, staring hard into the mute darkness. Why has it come to this? he wondered. He put his face against her skin. Why am I here? He stuck out his tongue and tasted her flesh. She sighed and stirred slightly but did not awaken. Why do I lack the strength to run away, go back where I had at least the illusion of happiness? He ran his hand down across her buttocks, then into the crevice between them, down past her anus until he came to her vagina. He felt of its wetness, an albumin-like stickiness that was largely a product of his ownsecretions. She awoke and rolled over, and they made love again. murmuring softly to each other in the darkness.
In that time he forgot to think and wonder, but illusions, once shattered, can never be reformed. And Seven Red Anchorelles rose to the scene of his own final nightmare. Having mastered all else within the inflated boundaries of the great Mother Ocean, he now floated deep within a special inner sea, a pocket far down in the thought folds of Centrum itself. The being, the Overmind, spoke to him in the voice of his people one last time, and he understood. He had achieved Unity. The chemicals struck and he felt a moment of terrible despair, then his shell dissolved, his oils escaped, and he was into oneness with the Overmind. He was gone.
The Time Traveler awoke to himself in a blaze of ecstasy and horror. Centrum penetrated the flowing nebula of this soul with tendrils of awareness and said, I greet you, Brendan Sealock. Be welcome.
It began . . .
Before the dawn of time, the infinite universe was a hard, ringing void. There was nothing, but that nothing had limitless potential energy. It might have remained, this empty potential that stood for God, but nothingness is an unnatural state. It persisted, timeless in the absence of a referent, waiting for the random number that would act as a trigger. The false vacuum stood poised, hard, hot, infinitely denser than the nuclei it would spawn, and the clock of quantum fluctuations ticked away. The slow rollover came. . . . Everything flashed into being. The monopole domains exploded outward, sucking the cosmic-event horizon away into the infinite reaches of now extant space. The vacuum boiled and particles were born. Physical processes toppled down the quick stairway of the flux-gate thresholds and the forces separated, one, then four. Temperature fell, hesitated, and fell again, carrying along density and radius in its wake. The world came into being and evolved.
Swirling clouds of bright matter, white light, cooling, became only an afterecho of cold radiation in mere seconds. Matter and energy now separate, the clouds spun and condensed, becoming ragged and lumpy as they aged, a pudding improperly stirred, a universe made by a lazy chef. Quasars were everywhere then, bright, hot globules of pulsating light, galaxies in birth and exploding. Cooling goes on, hot huge stars quick and brief in their young life, and exploding, seeding the surround as they died. It was too early yet. . . .
And yet the odds had to be broken, as the symmetry was broken. A cluster supernovae went critical in a chain reaction and scattered dense matter through their neighborhood, yet it was in a region far from the hot cores all about. New stars formed, smaller, longer-lived stars that had planets of a small, dense sort. The universe was less than a billion years old.
We evolved then, said Centrum, and fast. As always, the precursors of life came into being among the great, rich hydroxyl clouds. Amino acids rained down out of interstellar space upon those hot silicate worlds and, because of it, life evolved. So far as is known we were the first. Because of the odds, we were, at that time, the only.
The radiation density was higher then, and evolution went at an accelerated pace, making life in seas that nearly boiled. It crawled up onto the land and saw and fought and grew. The eras were short then, and intelligence looked out at the stars for the first time in newborn amazement. The lights in the sky attracted them, bright baubles, lures before a fish, and they flew outward into space. We searched, but they were not there.
We? They? Sealock's persisting sense of self forced a question into the flood. We.The ones who made me in their own image. Star-seeders. We searched, but there was no other life. We were alone. Worse still, we could find no other worlds like our own. We were a fluke. Theywere not there. The others whom we expected. There were other worlds, yes, great balls of warm gas, mostly hydrogen, stars too little to shine. Useless.
We cried out, enraged at our solitude, and the Grand Design was begun. Too long. Too long.
Images formed, imperfect and broken, for Centrum was ancient and damaged. They were images of beings not so terribly unlike men. Beings of flesh and bone walking beneath a starry sky, looking upward resentfully at the universe that had so disappointed them.
We knew it would take too long, longer than we could expect our species, even our own sun, to last. Generations of stars would have to live and die, worlds would have to form and evolve the way ours had, only slower, much slower. We would be gone, vanished for billions of years before the comrades that we sought could come into being. We became the Starseeders and set to work. We searched among the stars for ages and we found them. . . .
What?
