How genuine is it? wonders Wayfarer. How sane is she? “Could you not be content with your emulations?” he asks.
“No. How possibly? I cannot make a whole cosmos for them. I can only make them, the flesh-and-blood them, for the cosmos. Let them live in it not as machines or as flickerings within a machine, but as humans.”
“On a planet soon dead?”
“They will, they must forge survival for themselves. I do not compel them, I do not dominate them with my nearness or any knowledge of it. That would be to stunt their spirits, turn them into pet animals or worse. I simply give guidance, not often, in the form of divinities in whom they would believe anyway at this stage of their societies, and simply toward the end of bringing them to a stable, high-technology civilization that can save them from the sun.”
“Using what you learn from your shadow folk to suggest what the proper course of history may be?”
“Yes. How else should I know? Humankind is a chaotic phenomenon. Its actions and their consequences cannot be computed from first principles. Only by experiment and observation can we learn something about the nature of the race.”
“Experiments done with conscious beings, aware of their pain. Oh, I see why you have kept most of your doings secret.”
“I am not ashamed,” declares Gaia. “I am proud. I gave life back to the race that gave life to us. They will make their own survival, I say. It may be that when they are able, they will move to the outer reaches of the Solar System, or some of them somehow even to the stars. It may be they will shield Earth or damp the sun. It is for them to decide, them to do. Not us, do you hear me? Them.”
“The others yonder may feel differently. Alarmed or horrified, they may act to put an end to this.”
“Why?” Gaia demands. “What threat is it to them?”
“None, I suppose. But there is a moral issue. What you are after is a purely human renascence, is it not? The former race went up in the machines, not because it was forced but because it chose, because that was the way by which the spirit could live and grow forever. You do not want this to happen afresh. You want to perpetuate war, tyranny, superstition, misery, instincts in mortal combat with each other, the ancient ape, the ancient beast of prey.”
“I want to perpetuate the lover, parent, child, adventurer, artist, poet, prophet. Another element in the universe. Have we machines in our self-sureness every answer, every dream, that can ever be?”
Wayfarer hesitates. “It is not for me to say, it is for your peers.”
“But now perhaps you see why I have kept my secrets and why I have argued and, yes, fought in my fashion against the plans of the galactic brain. Someday my humans must discover its existence. I can hope that then they will be ready to come to terms with it. But let those mighty presences appear among them within the next several thousand years—let signs and wonders, the changing of the heavens and the world, be everywhere—what freedom will be left for my children, save to cower and give worship? Afterward, what destiny for them, save to be animals in a preserve, forbidden any ventures that might endanger them, until at last, at best, they too drain away into the machines?”
Wayfarer speaks more strongly than before. “Is it better, what they might make for themselves? I cannot say. I do not know. But neither, Gaia, do you. And … the fate of Christian and Laurinda causes me to wonder about it.”
“You know,” she says, “that they desired humanness.”
“They could have it again.”
Imagine a crowned head shaking. “No. I do not suppose any other node would create a world to house their mortality, would either care to or believe it was right.”
“Then why not you, who have so many worlds in you?”
Gaia is not vindictive. A mind like hers is above that. But she says, “I cannot take them. After such knowledge as they have tasted of, how could they return to me?” And to make new copies, free of memories that would weigh their days down with despair, would be meaningless.
“Yet—there at the end, I felt what Christian felt.”
“And I felt what Laurinda felt. But now they are at peace in us.”
“Because they are no more. I, though, am haunted,” the least, rebellious bit, for a penalty of total awareness is that nothing can be ignored or forgotten. “And it raises questions that I expect Alpha will want answered, if answered they can be.”
After a time that may actually be measurable less by quantum shivers than by the stars, Wayfarer says: “Let us bring those two back.”
“Now it is you who are pitiless,” Gaia says.
“I think we must.”
“So be it, then.”
The minds conjoin. The data are summoned and ordered. A configuration is established.
It does not emulate a living world or living bodies. The minds have agreed that that would be too powerful an allurement and torment. The subjects of their inquiry need to think clearly; but because the thought is to concern their inmost selves, they are enabled to feel as fully as they did in life.
Imagine a hollow darkness, and in it two ghosts who glimmer slowly into existence until they stand confronted before they stumble toward a phantom embrace.
“Oh, beloved, beloved, is it you?” Laurinda cries.
“Do you remember?” Christian whispers.
“I never forgot, not quite, not even at the heights of oneness.”
“Nor I, quite.”
They are silent a while, although the darkness shakes with the beating of the hearts they once had.
“Again,” Laurinda says.
