So long ago. So long ago. And yet, looking into those enormous
brown eyes I remember as though it is but yesterday. The wseet ‘bama
sun, and the warm June breezes on my face, and the cool grass thick
beneth my feet like God’s carpeting. Yes, I remember it all too
well; all I need do is close my eyes, and drift a moment or two, and
I am there …
Late
twentieth-century Earth. A tiny place, but full of troubles. Crime,
disease, poverty, hatred, riots, Los Angeles, Saddam Hussein, the
Middle East, oil, fire, greenhouse effect, ozone depletion, potential
global catastrophe, AIDS, nuclear weapons, overpopulation …
My
biological family was poor even by the standards of the time, trashy
poor some would have said though we never knew it, never thought that
way, were proud of what we had and built and did. Father worked in
the ball bearing factory all day, mother did housekeeping and what
odd jobs she could find, when she could. There was enough to eat, a
roof over our heads, a school and a church. Especially, we thought,
a church.
I
can still see that church clearly. A vast, sprawling eggshell of a
structure, high up on a hill, gazing down on all of us like a
portrait, watching us wherever we went. Every Sunday the folks
packed us off, and one by one we walked the dusty road up the hill
and filed into the great shell where we sat. A sea of noisy black
faces on white pews, listening to the Reverend Stetson telling us
about God and Jesus and the hereafter and the faith of little
children.
Faith
was the central element in our lives, the fulcrum about which our
lives turned. I know that is difficult to even imagine now, let
alone believe, but it is true. Faith was out air and water and
bread; it burned in the hearth, and sent smoky tendrils up into the
stratosphere. It was our wire into the cosmos. It vibrated in the
very cores of our beings. Father came home every evening coated with
it, a grime no amount of soap and water would have ever washed off –
even if we’d tried, which of course we didn’t. Mother thrashed
and upbringing into us with it.
Sitting on his
lap, looking up into those moist, old eyes. I was five or six, maybe
even younger, small for my age but nanoedge sharp even then. He knew
it too, and I knew it from the expression in those eyes and face, the
way he saw opportunity and danger at the words that had just issued
from my lips – I knew I had asked the forbidden question.
“You must find Jesus in your heart,” he answered it; “You
must open your heart to Him, and then He will fill you with His love.
That is the only way you can know Him; the only way to heaven.
There is no other way.”
I’ve cheated
you, the accusation screams
through my head, like a cry of damnation. But the brown eyes are
still upon me, still innocent, trusting, still damp with expression.
Mine are filled with tears.
I
was the youngest of seven, or eight – or was it even nine? I don’t
clearly remember anymore. Also, the brightest. Maybe it was my
brothers and sisters beating on me, too. Whatever, I got a full
scholarship, got packaged off to the University. Hugs and kisses
from everyone, including the Reverent Stetson himself, now a
doddering old man. Myself. I was seventeen.
Could
I really have been seventeen once? It’s a dream to me now; no, a
nightmare in a swirling fog: urban warfare, deindustrialization,
MacPherson, Green Revolution, animal rights, tuberculosis and
smallpox, desertification, global cooling, mass extinctions, Moscow,
South Africa, Kotube …
And
yet in the midst of all this now inconceivable carnage, flowers did
bloom in the desert. Remember cancer from your history plugins?
This was when it was at last licked for good. And a host of other
genetic slow terminations. Other important developments to recall:
the first permanent space station, return to the Moon,
commercialization of fusion power, and the first practical
human-computer interfaces. Of course, looking back it seems like
hell now – it was hell, by any standards, but a few rungs of the
ladder were ascended. More importantly, we ascended them.
My
major was engineering, with minors in astronomy and electronics, not
a common combination even then, but I’d always had my own ideas.
I’d grown up in an isolated backwater of a world, and when I
realized there was more I wanted it. Joined the National Space
Society, the L-5 Society, you name it I joined it. I was determined
for a career on the High Frontier. Mother didn’t understand of
course: she thought it was my duty to spend my life improving the
lot of those “down here, where all th’ needin’ ‘n’
suff’rin’ is; why, there’s nothin’ ‘n’ no one up there
t’help.” Reverend Stetson just shook his head sadly and said
he’d pray for me.
Father
wasn’t there. The bearing factory had shut down a year ago,
replaced by robots in South Korea or Mexico or some place like that,
and the government had sent him to a school in another state, to
learn computer programming on twenty year old machines that nobody
used anymore. I never saw him again. I’d hoped he was at last
with his God.
I
was on the first International Mars Expedition in 2036, just before
the big breakthroughs in age control. We stood on the ocher sands
looked into the Martian twilight, and felt a billion years and the
entire cosmos seep into our bones. Earth was a tiny, if still tragic
and bright, sapphire in the sky, the Moon and even tinier diamond
beside it. There are moments in each life that remain fresh with you
forever; that was one of mine (as, of course, is the one now). The
expedition had cost half a trillion dollars, but any fool could that
it had been worth it; at that moment nine billion faces back home
were gazing up at hope instead of down at their troubles. It was a
moment that set the pace of humanity for centuries to come. I
wouldn’t have traded it for all the gods in all the scriptures in
history.
I
stroke the furry face before me, and curse myself for having thought
that thought. I’m sorry.
We
could have stayed in orbit. We could have contented ourselves with
looking down with our telescopes and probes. We would have learned
just as much, and they never would have known.
But
we couldn’t do that, no. We had to be God. Of course, we don’t
tell ourselves that; we persuade ourselves instead that we are doing
them a great favor, by showing them what is possible. That they will
take hope from our example, the same hope those nine billion took so
long ago. But deep inside we all know it is a fraud. We know they
won’t see it that way. And that that is the real reason we came
down – to be worshiped. God damn us all to Hell.
I
returned from the Mars expedition to learn that the Reverend had
finally passed on to his reward, whatever it was. A heart attack in
the middle of delivering his Sunday sermon – that’s right, he’d
refused a biogenned back-up. He was ninety-two.
Mother
had just reached her seventieth herself. I comforted her – tried
to comfort her, that is – by talking about the future, about the
developments proceeding with exponential fury in the genetics and
nanotechnology laboratories. “In a few more years they’ll not
only be able to stop aging process in humans but even reverse it.
You’ll have eternal life, and eternal youth.”
But
of course she was horrified at such a prospect: “All my life life
I been gettin’ ready t’meet the Lord, ‘n’ now you want t’take
it away from me? What’s the matter with you, boy?”
I
tried arguing as usual, until I realized it was hopeless, that this
person – my mother or not – had spent her entire life preparing
for the day she would face her putative maker, and that to steal that
climax of her life was to steal her life, too. That I had no right
to such a theft, whatever my intentions.
That
night I cried like a baby, cried myself to sleep for the first time
in as long as I could remember.
That
was the last time I ever went home, at least physically. Talents
like mine were needed elsewhere than on a minuscule planet,
particularly one so long on problems and short on hope. I spent the
next half century expanding and developing the new empire: L-5, Mare
Imbrium, Cydonia, the Belt, Ganymede, Triton … I was a planner, a
builder, a solver, a trouble-shooter (and sometimes, maker), an
explorer and a rogue. And I was successful everywhere, at all of
these. Successful and happy. I even became famous. In other words,
I completely forgot where I had come from. I forgot everything.
It
was glorious and exhilarating and an plain, simple fat lot of fun,
but of course it didn’t last forever, couldn’t last forever. For
at the edge of every frontier is yet another frontier, and the spirit
inexorably yearns for that one too. And yet – the stars! Even the
closest was ten thousand time further away than the great distance I
had ever traversed. It was a journey I could not comprehend. Even
immortality seemed to short a time to cross such gulfs. But cross
them I would, of that I had no doubt; I just did not know how –
yet.
The
moment they came bounding out of their huts toward us we knew we had
made a tragic mistake. We’re the answer to their deepest
prayers; the realization, at once deniable and irrevocable,
flashed through our thoughts. We didn’t even have to look at each
other to know that all had picked up the thought simultaneously.
Perhaps
if we had been expecting intelligent life … but that had been the
furthest thought from our expectations when we’d entered their
system. After all, didn’t the research of Barkley and Bleigh prove
once and for all that life – even at the simplest level – was so
improbable that would not occur that once in a thousand galaxies?
And didn’t the Fermi Paradox (if intelligence were common in the
universe it would have come to us long ago) confirm our solitude?
Where, and how, had we so badly miscalculated? Or was it just our
misfortune?
Our misfortune?!
To
the Alpha centauri system and back was a little over seventy years that
first time. When we got home, we discovered that Earth had finally
solved its population problem, hence its resources problem, once and
for all. And that by then the space needed for sentient minds in the
net was essentially infinite, and people who still wanted families
could raise virtual ones to their hearts’ contents.
Many
did, as well as live other lives fulfilling to them, lives our
ancestors could never have dreamed of, but for we few (we band of
brothers and sisters?) they were empty lives, devoid of – of – to
tell the brutal truth, we could not have told what it was devoid of.
All we knew was that if humanity had solved all its problems, had
conquered all the dangers of living in but one solar system, then
that system was not the place for us anymore.
We
needed faster starships. We needed to press as close to Einstein’s
limit as possible, even surpass it if possible. No, not really; with
our unlimited life spans, and youths, it shouldn’t have matter how
long it took us to fill the universe. But matter it did, terribly
and with a relentless compulsion. For we were still human in spirit,
if not in body anymore, all too human, with minds sculpted by
millions of years of natural selection to think in terms of mere
years and decades at most. We were far too impatient in the pursuit
of what gave us primitive joy. So we set ourselves to continue
pursuing our dream.
And
succeeded.
A thousand years
later. It still seems like
eternity to us, when we think it out loud. Yet it is but an
eyeblink: Homo sapiens
(to the extent we can still be called that) is but one half of one
percent older; the Atlantic
Ocean has widened just another part in a hundred thousand; the Sun
has completed only one two-hundred thousandth of its orbit about the
Milky Way galaxy. We have touched some ten thousand system, yet a
hundred times that many still lie within our immediate reach, and ten
trillion times that sun lay beyond. It is only arrogance that makes
us feel old.
In
short, we should have known better. The moment we glimpsed this new
tiny sapphire, with its own tinier diamond beside it, we should have
stopped, pulled back, and reached into our stores of wisdom, such as
they are. Hell, we should have been on guard the moment we entered
the system: a single G2 star, age approximately four billion years,
low angular momentum, metals, an Oort cloud. The fact that we had
been through a hundred similar systems should not have made us lax.
But
it did. And when we tasted water in all three phases, along with
both oxygen and an ozone layer, we lost our grip on reality. So we
swooped in for a closer look. When we found chlorophyll, we dove
closer still.
And
found them.
The
sculpted hives of vegetation, clustered around lakes and river
deltas, were clearly visible from orbit. Through our scopes we could
easily make out the mud and straw huts, and the dirt roads they
traveled on.
They
are much like us, in many ways. Forget the fur, and the six fingers
(including fully opposable on each of six limbs, and the short stubs
of tails no doubt left over from tree dwelling ancestors. They’re
still eggheads, with (big!) binocular eyes that glow brightly with
intelligence and curiosity. It will take time to completely decipher
their language, but its equal to human complexity is instantly
obvious in the richness off vocabulary and bodily expressions. Their
emotions range the full spectrum, from simple fear and anger all the
way to humor and reverence (don’t ask me how – you can just tell,
that’s all). And if all this isn’t enough, then know that at
night they sit and gaze up at their moon – somewhat larger than
ours – and the stars and wonder, and argue.
Yes,
they are children in many ways, but in another ten thousands years or
so, they will be where we are now.
Excuse
us, for a moment I forgot. But looking into those eyes with their
bright irises reminds me again, with stark cruelty: would have
been where we are now.
Lord, can you
forgive us?
Where
would we be now, if ten thousand years ago, or even a thousand, our
gods had descended from the sky, and touched us with their reality?
Of course, maybe they had. Maybe that’s why the journey had taken
only ten thousand years. And so many billions of lives that might
have been spared. We have been too content to sit back, and for
salvation to come to us.
Where
would my parents be now if …
No, you’re
evading you own guilt. The present.
The
brown eyes gze softly into mine, that most innocent of trusts. I’m
not sure why, but I reach out again, and touch that face with my
crooked fingertips, as though I could reach directly into the mind
and remove the memory of what it has experienced today, as though I
could make it forget.
Do not despair,
young one.
I
pull away, shocked my the lightning of the thought. My breathing is
suddenly fast, and ragged. “What …?”
It
says nothing, but takes my hand and places the fingers carefully
against its temple and forehead. There, that’s better.
Soon you will not need physical contact, perhaps in another million
or so of your years, but it is not a great encumbrance for now. It
is even comforting, in its own way.
“How
– who – did you say a million years?”
A day in the
lifetime of the cosmos. Which, as you have chosen me for the honor,
allow me to welcome you into. Your first steps were certainly
exciting to watch!
I
try to say something intelligible, but my faculties fail me.
Oh come on, you
didn’t really think we would allow to make such a terrible mistake,
did you? We didn’t allow it to happen to you, and we would never
permit you to do it to another species. No, these beings will reach
adulthood just as you have, by their own glorious efforts.
Adulthood?
Well, let us say,
provisional adulthood. Adolescence. You’ve made it.
Congratulations. Your folks must be proud of you.
Before
I can react to that statement, I am standing on God’s carpeting,
with the Sun on my face and the soft breezes in my hair. I am not
alone; mother and father, and Reverend Stetson, are beside me. I am
seventeen.
“This
is cruel!”
Limited
perception always is. That too, you will outgrow.
I
am on the ocher Martian sands, a pair of worlds at my fingertips.
Faith has
sustained you this far. But now it is time for you to move on. Your
first responsibility. I am back
with reality again, the warmth of fur upon me. Here.
Making sure they don’t run around with scissors, or put things in
their mouths, and learn to share their toys. Discreetly, of course.
You know how to do that…
Strangely
enough, I do. More importantly though, I am ready.
