“Would it be fair to say”—this from Horad, in a pensive and leisurely tone—“that what consoles you for the horrors and agonies you go through is the impossibility of digesting even our tiny corner of the universe within one conventional lifetime?”
With emphasis Lodovico said, “No!”
“What, then?” All three of them seemed taken aback.
“In my old life I was resigned to the belief that, just as no observer can know both the speed and the position of a particle, so no consciousness can comprehend the universe which is the frame of its existence. That is among the facts which have not changed over the millennia.
“What I failed to appreciate was how much more important it is to be-conscious than it is to comprehend. Possession of even a meagre imagination permits the owner to envisage processes that are forbidden by the laws of nature. Therefore any consciousness automatically transcends its universe.”
“You are sure of that in so short a time?” Horad breathed.
“I was led to believe,” Lodovico said wryly, “that you were indifferent as to whether a time-span is long or short.”
And he added, “May I now continue my explorations? Or do you have no further need of reports from me?”
“Indeed we do,” said Orlalee. “We welcome them. They are and will remain unique.”
“You mean you do not expect ever to go where I am going?” Genua parried that question. She said, “Is there not a lot of the future still to come?”
The zone of the asteroids he found to be crowded with events, but almost all of them were of a similar kind: collisions. He had much time, while witnessing them; to ponder the implications of the conclusion he had voiced to Horad. It was no more than a matter of probability; however, given that this petty corner of the cosmos was typical of, if not the whole, then a very large volume of it, and given that he had met consciousness on several occasions already—what was more, versions of consciousness capable of recognising him as an aware being even before he identified them—such data convinced him that consciousness must be of the essence of the universe.
It changed his own view of himself-as-he-now-was. Instead of that lingering resentment he still fought against when he set out, he was overtaken by a sense of gratitude so intense it was almost happiness. It might have been on any other conformation of awareness that the chance to be-first fell. It fell to him. Therefore . . .
(After his long spell in the asteroid belt, they asked whether he had grown bored on his quest, and he replied, “Bored? It would be impossible. A man can who can grow old, fatigued, confused—he may feel boredom because it is senility in little. As you have made me, I am no longer vulnerable to it.”)
The cratered plains of Mars—the wind-punished valleys of Venus—the bleak hot mask of Mercury . . . and at last, climactically, the Sun. He plunged from the corona to the core, and when he came back. . .
It took the longest time of all to heal him. Doing what he had done had strained the collective credulity of Earth, and he who had survived the crash of asteroids and the fall of methane avalanches was much less believed in than before.
And yet—and yet—it had been done . . . He knew, who had also doubted the possibility. Gradually the means came clear to other people, and with conviction healing followed. The mechanism? It was not and never had been mechanism, but only that-which-does-the-perceiving, liberated.
So the time arrived when those whom he now called his friends were able to visit him and talk.
“You have suffered,” said one or perhaps all three of them. “Do you regard it as worthwhile?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because what has been wrong with humanity since the beginning is not wrong with me. We have always had the imagination that belongs with immortality, but we have been trapped in destructible substance. It is small wonder that in ancient times there were so many religions that insisted on a life after death. Even our dreams rebelled against the idea of dissolution.”
“But it has been considered by many of the cultures we know about that death is a boon.”
“Is it so regarded now?” Lodovico countered. “Now that you’ve achieved so many of our old ambitions—peace, plenty, freedom from fear?”
They exchanged glances. Or, more nearly: a glance was exchanged among the three of them.
“We doubt it,” Horad said at last.
“And you are right.” He uttered the words with fervour. “It is what it was first believed to be, a burden we have laboured under far too long. And how can you not credit this, you whose supreme achievement has been to create the other-selves, the reflections of your personae which make you halfway to immortal?”
“It is not that we disbelieve it,” Horad said. And the other two seemed to join him in speaking. “It is that we did not until now realise how right we are. Before we evoked you, we had begun to wonder whether there might not be a proper time for a species to die, a time chosen by itself. Thanks to you, we have been satisfied on that score. We go to fix the date for the suicide of man.”
He who had been crushed by clashing asteroids, who had been vaporised by the solar phoenix cycle and returned, was overwhelmed by the purport of that promise. When he recovered enough to formulate a counter-question, he found there was no listener to put it to. He was alone.
After he got over the need to rail and scream, very slowly the truth dawned on him.
His mode of thinking was ancient. Worse—it
