Distress

Nothing could have been created without the full knowledge of how it was done: without the unified TOE, physical and informational. No Keystone could have acted in innocence, forging the universe unaware.

But that knowledge was impossible to contain. Kaspar had been right. The moderates had been right. Everything which had breathed fire into the equations would now unravel into empty tautology.

I raised my face to the blank sky, ready to part the veil of the world and find nothing behind it.

Then Akili called my name, and I stopped dead. I looked down at ver—beautiful as ever, unreachable as ever.

Unknowable as ever.

And I saw the way through.

I saw the flaw in Kaspar's reasoning which had kept it from becoming the Keystone: an unexamined assumption—an unasked question, not yet true or false.

Could one mind, alone, explain another into being?

The TOE equation said nothing. The canonical experiments said nothing. There was nowhere to look for the answer but my own memories, my own life.

And all I had to do to tear myself out of the center of the universe—all I had to do to prevent the unraveling—was give up one last illusion.

EPILOGUE

As the plane touches down, I begin recording. Witness confirms:

'Cape Town, Wednesday April 15, 2105. 7:12:10 GMT.'

Karin De Groot has come to the airport to meet me. She looks astonishingly healthy, much more so in the flesh—though, as with all of us ancients, the losses are etched deep. We exchange greetings, then I glance around trying to take in the profusion of styles in anatomy and dress—no more than anywhere else, but every place has a different mix, a different set of fashions. Imposing retractable cowls full of dark violet photosynthetic symbionts seem to be popular throughout Southern Africa. Back home, sleek amphibian adaptions for underwater breathing and feeding are common.

After the Aleph moment, people had feared that the mixing would impose uniformity. It had never happened—any more than, in the Age of Ignorance, the brutal, inescapable truths that water was wet and the sky was blue had forced everyone on the planet to think and act identically. There are infinitely many ways to respond to the single truth of the TOE. What's become impossible is maintaining the pretense that every culture could ever have created its own separate reality—while we all breathed the same air and walked the same ground.

De Groot checks some schedule in her mind's eye. 'So you didn't come straight from Stateless?'

'No. Malawi. There was someone I had to see. I wanted to say goodbye.'

We descend to the subway, where the train is expecting us and lights a path for our eyes to the carriage door. It's almost fifty years since I've been in this city, and most of the infrastructure has changed; in unfamiliar surroundings, the TOE blazes out of every surface, unbidden, like an exuberant child boasting of the bright new things ve's made. Even the simplest novelties—the non-slip dirt-eating coating on the floor tiles, the luminous pigments of the living sculptures—catch my attention as they spell out their unique ways of coexisting.

Nothing is incomprehensible. Nothing can be mistaken for magic.

I say, 'When I first heard that they were building the Violet Mosala Memorial Kindergarten, I imagined she would have been insulted. Which only goes to show how little I knew her. I don't know why I was invited.'

De Groot laughs. 'I'm just glad you didn't come all this way for the ceremony and nothing else. You could have done it on the net; no one would have minded.'

'There's nothing like being there.'

The train reminds us of our stop, holds the doors for us. We walk through the neat suburbs not far from the house where Mosala spent her childhood, though the streets now are lined with species of plants she would never have recognized. She never saw trees growing on Stateless, either. People stride past us, glancing up at the elegant logic of the cloudless blue sky.

The kindergarten is a small building, reconfigured into an auditorium for the occasion. Half a dozen speakers are here to address the fifty children. I lapse into reverie until one of Violet's grand-daughters, working on the Halcyon, explains the starship's drive; the core principle, close to the TOE, is easy to grasp. Karin De Groot speaks about Violet, anecdotes of generosity and intransigence. And one of the children sets the stage for me, telling the others about the Age of Ignorance.

'It hangs like a stalactite from the Information Cosmos.' The present tense is sophistication, not solecism; relativity demands it. 'It's not autonomous, it doesn't explain itself—it needs to be joined to the Information Cosmos, in order to exist. We need it, too, though. It's a necessary history, a logical outgrowth if you try to extend time before the Aleph moment.'

Ve summons vivid diagrams and equations into the air. The brilliant stellar cluster of the Information Cosmos, wrapped densely in explanatory threads, holds up the simple drab cone of the Age of Ignorance, which points back to the physical Big Bang. Vis audience of less precocious four-year-olds struggle with the concepts. Time before the Aleph moment? Grandparents notwithstanding, it almost defies belief.

I rise to my feet and recite my prepared version of the events of fifty years ago—getting laughs of incredulity in all the right places. Ownership of genes? Centralized authorities? Ignorance Cults?

Ancient history always sounds quaint, old victories preordained, but I try to convey some sense of how long and hard their ancestors struggled to learn everything they now take for granted: that law and morality, physics and metaphysics, space and time, pleasure, love, meaning… are all the burden of the participants. There are no immovable centers, dispensing absolutes like manna: no God, no Gaia, no beneficent rulers. No reality but the universe explained into being. No purpose to life unless we create it, together or alone.

Someone asks about the turmoil in the days after Aleph.

I say, 'Everyone found the truth hard to swallow. Orthodox scientists—because the TOE had turned out to be grounded in nothing but its own explanatory powers. The Ignorance Cults—because even the participatory universe, the most subjective reality possible, was no synthesis of their favorite myths—which could never have created anything—but the product of universal scientific understanding of what coexistence really meant. Even the Anthrocosmologists turned out to have been wrong; they'd been so obsessed with the idea of a single Keystone that they'd barely considered the possibility that everyone, equally, could play that role. They'd missed the most stable, and symmetrical, solution: where every mind obeys the TOE—but it takes all of them, together, to create it.'

One astute listener sees that I'm dodging the issue—a child I would have called 'human,' in the days before the H-word exploded and it was finally understood: the TOE is all we have in common.

'Most people weren't scientists, cultists, or Anthrocosmologists, were they? They had no stake in these ideas. So why were they so sad?'

Sad. There were nine million suicides. Nine million people we could not hold up, when all illusions of solidity vanished. And I'm still not certain that there was no other way—that I found the only possible bridge into the Information Cosmos. If I'd let myself descend into the madness of Distress, would someone else have asked a different last question, and found another way through?

No one has accused me, no one has judged me. I've never been damned as a criminal, or hailed as a savior. The idea that a single Keystone could ever have explained ten billion people into existence is absurd, now. In retrospect, Distress is seen as no different from the naive illusion that every galaxy is rushing away from us—