“And we’ll plan pleasure,” he encouraged. “Reality pleasure. I’ve been thinking about that. What would you say to a wilderness trip? The Himalayas, for instance. We’d have to train for them.”
She tried to respond likewise. “Yes, that would be a challenge. Something to tell people about afterward.”
“More than a pastime.” His wish was genuine. It strengthened as he spoke. “An accomplishment,” no matter how often it had been done before. “A help toward eventual unity with the Ecumenicon.”
Her pessimism crept back. “If it will receive us.”
“We will bring this added quality. We will make ourselves worth assimilating.”
She sighed again. “Does the Ecumenicon ever truly want any of us anymore? Or is it only being kind to those who try?”
“Why, each personality with any depth that’s taken up is an enhancement.”
“How significant?” Naia stared at the blank wall. “I wonder—does the Ecumenicon regret the way things have gone? Does it wonder how they went wrong?”
“Wrong? What do you mean?” he demanded.
“Nothing, nothing,” she said hastily, and rose. “Let’s go inside. When my mood’s been bettered, let’s command a special dinner, something elaborate, and celebrate. The shadow watching was very good today.”
IX
Sol swung onward through its orbit, once around galactic center in almost two hundred million years, and onward and onward.
Menaces lurked along the way, not to the sun but to the life on its Earth. Asteroids and comets were all but incidental, diverted well before they would have struck. The guardians against cosmic clouds returned whenever needed. Sometimes the explosion of a supernova or a gamma ray burster, the collision of two neutron stars, occurred near enough to flood the Solar System with lethal radiation. The intelligences foresaw it in ample time. The intelligence on Earth directed its machines to construct a disc from interplanetary material, larger than the globe, sufficiently thick to be a shield, and set this in such a path that it warded the attack off for as long as necessary. Just once did Sol pass too close to another star. Preparing for that took a million years or more; dealing with it and its consequences took three million.
A few other threats, humans had never imagined. But by then the intelligences had developed to the point where they knew what laired ahead and what to do. Of course, they were not concerned solely with Earth, which was only one planet among many, nor, indeed, primarily with any planets as such.
For the most part, though, Sol orbited peacefully. The galaxy is so vast, its members strewn so far. Earth itself gave the ongoing trouble, quakes, eruptions, wild climatic swings, as crustal plates ground against each other. For a span the intelligence managed or mitigated these, then it decided to let them proceed and observe how life adapted.
Consciousness spread ever more widely among the stars. Self-evolved, it gained ever greater heights.
The stars were also evolving.
PART TWO
Was it her I ought to have loved …?
-PIET HEIN
I
No human could have shaped the thoughts or uttered them. They had no real beginning, they had been latent for millennium after millennium while the galactic brain was growing. Sometimes they passed from mind to mind, years or decades through space at the speed of light, nanoseconds to receive, comprehend, consider, and send a message on outward. But there was so much else—a cosmos of realities, an infinity of virtualities and abstract creations—that remembrances of Earth were the barest undertone, intermittent and fleeting, among uncounted billions of other incidentals. Most of the grand awareness was directed elsewhere, much of it intent on its own evolution.
For the galactic brain was still in infancy: unless it held itself to be still a-borning. By now its members were strewn from end to end of the spiral arms, out into the halo and the nearer star-gatherings, as far as the Magellanic Clouds. The seeds of fresh ones drifted farther yet; some had reached the shores of the Andromeda.
Each was a local complex of organisms, machines, and their interrelationships. (“Organism” seems best for something that maintains itself, reproduces at need, and possesses a consciousness in a range from the rudimentary to the transcendent, even though carbon compounds be a very small of its material components and most of its life processes take place directly on the quantum level.) They numbered in the many millions, and the number was rising steeply, also within the Milky Way, as the founders of new generations arrived at new homes.
Thus the galactic brain was in perpetual growth, which from a cosmic viewpoint had barely started. Thought had just had time for a thousand or two journeys across its ever-expanding breadth. It would never absorb its members into itself; they would always remain individuals, developing along their individual lines. Let us therefore call them not cells, but nodes.
For they were in truth distinct. Each had more uniquenesses than were ever possible to a protoplasmic creature. Chaos and quantum fluctuation assured that none would exactly resemble any predecessor. Environment likewise helped shape the personality—surface conditions (what kind of planet, moon, asteroid, comet?) or free orbit, sun single or multiple (what kinds, what ages?), nebula, interstellar space and its ghostly tides. … Then, too, a node was not a single mind. It was as many as it chose to be, freely awakened and freely set aside, proteanly intermingling and separating again, using whatever bodies and sensors it wished for as long as it wished, immortally experiencing, creating, meditating, seeking a fulfillment that the search itself brought forth.
Hence, while every node was engaged with a myriad of matters, one might be especially developing new realms of mathematics, another composing glorious works that cannot really be likened to music, another observing the destiny of organic life on some world, life that it had perhaps fabricated for that purpose, another—Human words are useless.
Always, though, the nodes were in continuous communication over the light-years, communication on tremendous bandwidths of every possible
