“I sympathize with that,” said Wayfarer mildly, hoping for conciliation. “Maybe I can discover or suggest something helpful.”
“No. You are too ignorant, you are blind, you can only do harm.”
He stiffened. “We shall see.” Anew he tried for peace. “I did not come in any hostility. I came because here is the fountainhead of us all, and we think of saving it.”
Her manner calmed likewise. “How would you?”
“That is one thing I have come to find out—what the best way is, should we proceed.”
In the beginning, maybe, a screen of planetary dimensions, kept between Earth and sun by an interplay of gravity and electromagnetism, to ward off the fraction of energy that was not wanted. It would only be a temporary expedient, though, possibly not worthwhile. That depended on how long it would take to accomplish the real work. Engines in close orbit around the star, drawing their power from its radiation, might generate currents in its body that carried fresh hydrogen down to the core, thus restoring the nuclear furnace to its olden state. Or they might bleed gas off into space, reducing the mass of the sun, damping its fires but adding billions upon billions of years wherein it scarcely changed any more. That would cause the planets to move outward, a factor that must be taken into account but would reduce the requirements.
Whatever was done, the resources of several stars would be needed to accomplish it, for time had grown cosmically short.
“An enormous work,” Gaia said. Wayfarer wondered if she had in mind the dramatics of it, apparitions in heaven, such as centuries during which fire-fountains rushed visibly out of the solar disc.
“For an enormous glory,” he declared.
“No,” she answered curtly. “For nothing, and worse than nothing. Destruction of everything I have lived for. Eternal loss to the heritage.”
“Why, is not Earth the heritage?”
“No. Knowledge is. I tried to make that clear to Alpha.” She paused. “To you I say again, the evolution of life, its adaptations, struggles, transformations, and how at last it meets death—those are unforeseeable, and nowhere else in the space-time universe can there be a world like this for them to play themselves out. They will enlighten us in ways the galactic brain itself cannot yet conceive. They may well open to us whole new phases of ultimate reality.”
“Why would not a life that went on for gigayears do so, and more?”
“Because here I, the observer of the ages, have gained some knowledge of this destiny, some oneness with it—” She sighed. “Oh, you do not understand. You refuse to.”
“On the contrary,” Wayfarer said, as softly as might be, “I hope to. Among the reasons I came is that we can communicate being to being, perhaps more fully than across light-years and certainly more quickly.”
She was silent a while. When she spoke again, her tone had gone gentle. “More … intimately. Yes. Forgive my resentment. It was wrong of me. I will indeed do what I can to make you welcome and help you learn.”
“Thank you, thank you,” Wayfarer said happily. “And I will do what I can toward that end.”
The sun went under the cloud deck. A crescent moon stood aloft. The wind blew a little stronger, a little chillier.
“But if we decide against saving Earth,” Wayfarer asked, “if it is to go molten and formless, every trace of its history dissolved, will you not mourn?”
“The record I have guarded will stay safe,” Gaia replied.
He grasped her meaning: the database of everything known about this world. It was here in her. Much was also stored elsewhere, but she held the entirety. As the sun became a devouring monster, she would remove her physical plant to the outer reaches of the system.
“But you have done more than passively preserve it, have you not?” he said.
“Yes, of course.” How could an intelligence like hers have refrained? “I have considered the data, worked with them, evaluated them, tried to reconstruct the conditions that brought them about.”
And in the past thousands of years she has become ever more taciturn about that, too, or downright evasive, he thought.
“You had immense gaps to fill in,” he hinted.
“Inevitably. The past, also, is quantum probabilistic. By what roads, what means, did history come to us?”
“Therefore, you create various emulations, to see what they lead to. About this she had told scarcely anything.
“You knew that. I admit, since you force me, that besides trying to find what happened, I make worlds to show what might have happened.”
He was briefly startled. He had not been deliberately trying to bring out any such confession. Then he realized that she had foreseen he was bound to catch scent of it, once they joined their minds in earnest.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why else but for a more complete understanding?”
In his inwardness, Wayfarer reflected: Yes, she had been here since the time of humanity. The embryo of her existed before Christian Brannock was born. Into the growing fullness of her had gone the mind-patterns of humans who chose not to go to the stars but to abide on old Earth. And the years went by in their tens of millions.
Naturally, she was fascinated by the past. She must do most of her living in it. Could that be why she was indifferent to the near future, or actually wanted catastrophe?
Somehow that thought did not feel right to him. Gaia was a mystery he must solve.
Cautiously, he ventured, “Then
