Mr g (8 page)

I did not tell my aunt and uncle about Belhor et al.’s latest visit, as I knew their hostility towards him. Nonetheless, Uncle Deva seemed uncannily aware of the conversation. Or, if not the conversation itself, at least the issues surrounding life in the new universe. During one of my recreational strolls through the Void, Uncle cornered me. Aunt Penelope was napping, he said, and it would give us a chance to chat “without impediments.”

So, Uncle said cheerfully, I gather that we will soon have animate creatures hopping about in our universe. A very good development, if I may say so. I hope that you have not been thinking otherwise. He made this last remark in a casual tone, but I knew that he was slyly probing me. The easiest thing would be to let it happen, I said. But I have not completely decided on the matter. Oh dear me, said Uncle. Uncle Deva never chastised me in the manner that Aunt P did, but from eons of living with him I knew what “Oh dear me” meant. He was vexed with me. You have done such a masterful job, said my uncle. The galaxies. The stars. The what-you-may-call-its. Even the solitary little hydrogen atoms floating around. But surely the grandest accomplishment of all would be the creation of intelligent life. There are problems, I said. Yes, of course there will be problems, said Uncle. But doesn’t everything have problems? Nephew, what meaning does your universe have without other minds in it? It has beauty, I said. Yes, it has beauty, said my uncle. But who is there to appreciate the beauty, aside from you and me and your aunt? Wouldn’t the beauty have more meaning with other minds to admire it? Wouldn’t it be
transformed
by other minds? I’m not talking about a passive admiration of beauty, but a participation in that beauty, in which everyone is enlarged. We three are not of the same essence as the universe. But living creatures born into that universe, made of the same material, are of that essence. You have told me yourself that the life-forms are made of the same atoms as everything else in the universe. The beauty you speak of—the stars and the oceans and so forth—is part of
their
beauty, those living things. And so much enhanced by their participation, by their absorption of that beauty and then the responsive outflowing of their own beauty. It is a spiritual thing, don’t you see?

I so loved Uncle Deva. He was sincere in his beliefs, and sweet. Don’t you want your universe to have some recognition of itself? continued my uncle. I mean, the minds within it? As beautiful as it is, a mountain cannot have recognition of itself. Don’t you want some bits of your universe to know that they are part of a whole, part of a pattern, that some glorious act created time and space and matter and set the whole thing in motion? It was not so glorious, I said. As you remember, I was tired of the unending nothingness followed by more nothingness. I wanted a change. I wanted somethingness. That’s all.

You can say what you want, said Uncle. But even if you had no grand purpose in mind … the fact is, the creation of the thing was glorious. An act can be glorious whatever its intention and purpose. Intelligence, awareness, mindfulness are going to connect the pieces of our universe in a way that inanimate matter never could.

Uncle looked at me affectionately and sighed. I can see you are troubled, he said. What are you concerned about? I am concerned that something unpleasant will happen, I said, something terrible. Maybe many terrible things. If an act can be glorious whatever its intention, an act can also be disastrous whatever its intention. I am concerned that the intelligent beings in the new universe will come to some harm, that they will suffer. Are you still thinking about Mr. Belhor? asked Uncle. What does he know? Your
goodness
will prevent suffering. You must believe that. The animate life, once it has developed intelligence, will feel your goodness. No suffering can come from that. I am not so sure, I said. Have faith, said Uncle. Your goodness fills every atom in the universe. It will flow into every creature created. Suffering cannot occur in such a cosmos.

I wish I were as certain as you, I said. I feel this rush, this vibration going through me, the future. The future is happening.

Then it is settled, said Uncle Deva. I have been waiting for this moment for time upon time. Yes, the future is happening. Your aunt and I have been discussing this possibility for some time, and we have a few things to suggest, just a few things, about what we want our creatures to look like.

But it didn’t matter what Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva wanted the new creatures to look like. Because that development, like almost everything else in the new universe, happened on its own by trial and error, with no need for meddling by outside parties.

In the trillions upon trillions of galaxies, and the billions of planets in each galaxy, every imaginable form of life arose. The light-utilizing creatures developed into wondrous vegetations, some tall and skinny and deeply fixed in the planetary soil, others small and delicate and gorgeously colored. They were rough and barky, soft and silky, sticky, moist, dry, gelatinous, sharp, rounded, generous and open, closed and tight as if protecting a secret. Some lived on land, some under the oceans. Some floated in the air, blown about by winds. Some even left their home planets altogether and drifted through space, finding raw materials in the long wisps of interstellar gas. Some were heavy with exterior scales and bark, some so slight as to be almost invisible, barely a few molecules thick. And so many shapes: circles and disks, spirals, fans, sponges and sheets, floppy flats, filigreed meshes, thick blobs and windings. Generally, the various vegetations lacked their own locomotion. However, nourished by sunlight as they were, they all found habitats and positions where they could orient themselves towards their central star. Their molecular machinery turned sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into sugars, and they lived on those sugars.

The oxygen-utilizing creatures were more complex, with their enhanced metabolisms and efficiencies. They had more intricate organs. They moved about from one place to another. They fidgeted and grasped. They ate. They reshaped their surroundings. A great many of these animals remained in the liquid oceans where they first formed and developed streamlined bodies so that they could swish through the water with minimal friction, propelling themselves forward by wriggling their smooth surfaces. Others grew feathery appendages, which they flapped against the air, creating sufficient upward force to counteract gravity. These feathered animals flew through the atmosphere in graceful swoops and glides. Some of the oxygen animals developed large sacs of low-density gases so that they could float about in the air. They steered by emitting little jets of fluid and gas. Creatures that took to the solid land moved about on two or more appendages, some with as many as a hundred, which they thrust back and forth in jerky movements.

To aid in responding to external stimuli, many sensory devices evolved: electromagnetic sensors, acoustic and vibrational sensors, thermal sensors, molecular sensors. Specialized cells, sensitive to light or mechanical pressures or particular molecules, were nestled in oddly shaped flaps and protuberances and bulges of flesh. In some star systems, advanced creatures developed only one or two electromagnetic sensors, generally placed on the tops of their bodies; in others, dozens were scattered all the way to the extremities. Some animals developed an exquisite sensitivity to magnetic fields, others to infrared radiation, still others to minuscule vibrations, with the ability to decompose slight disturbances into harmonic components and thus to create a map of the movements around them.

Anatomies varied like everything else. There were organs for processing sugars and fats and other sources of energy, organs for circulating liquids and gases, organs for disposing of wastes, organs for emitting high-frequency sounds for communication, organs for storing chemical and vibrational energy, organs for maintaining balance in a gravitational field. Oxygen animals had structural bones. They had internal electrical systems. They had multiple appendages, some bristling with sensory organs. They were sheathed in hair, fur, scales, crystals of silicon. Creatures in warmer climates evolved thin, porous skins, so that heat could be easily conducted from inside to outside their bodies. In colder climates, creatures had bulges and layers of fat just beneath the skin to hold heat in. On planets near ultraviolet stars, creatures grew thick metallic shields covering their bodies. Animals on planets with low gravity tended to be floppy and large, on planets with high gravity small and compact.

In the course of billions of planetary orbits about their central stars, billions of seasonal cycles, many possibilities were tested. Structural features that helped an animal survive were naturally perpetuated in future generations. Those features that did not were eventually eliminated, as the creature’s descendants could not cope well enough with their environments to continue reproducing. As far as progeny were concerned, many of the oxygen creatures reproduced in pairs, combining their replicating molecules to make small, detached offspring rather than each adult splitting in half. In some worlds, creatures reproduced not in pairs but in triples and quadruples. These latter exchanges required awkward conjugations of bodies but allowed great variations of progenitor material.

And the brains! As I had suspected, the masses of coordination and control cells had evolved to a fantastic degree, forming intricate networks of electrical activity. Some of these brains contained as many as ten trillion cells, each cell connecting to a thousand other cells. Over time, creatures with such brains rebuilt their environments. They made new materials and inanimate structures of their own design. Waterways. Tools. Machines. Cities. They developed advanced communication methods, such as encoding information in electromagnetic radiation or storing it in silicon-based molecules and quantum clusters. They created devices to extract energy from their central star and from passing comets. They discovered mathematics. They performed experiments. They built instruments that could sense what their bodies could not. They developed theories of the physical universe. And they discovered many of the laws and principles that governed the universe,
my
laws and principles. These mere conglomerations of atoms and molecules
discovered my laws
. And the music they made! Such music, equal to what I have created from my mind, they produced by material instruments with vibrating strings and air flows and liquid compressions. When I heard their music, from one star system to the next, I realized that these brains were participating in the beauty of the cosmos, as Uncle Deva had described. They were aware of themselves, yes. They were thinking, yes. But they were more than thinking. They were
feeling
. They were feeling the connection of themselves to the galaxies and stars. They were grasping the beauty and depth of their existence and then expressing that experience in musical harmonies and rhythms. And in paintings. In metaphors, and words. In dance. In symbiotic transference. They imagined the cosmos beyond their own bodies. They imagined. But they could not imagine where all of it started. For all of their intelligence, there were limits to their imagination. They could not know of things that were not of their essence. They could not know of the Void. But the mystery of such things they did seem to feel, and it tingled in them and opened them up.

Time. Time fluttered and spun and wound itself up. Time stretched and compressed and dilated and dissolved. I had been mistaken about time. Although time could be measured and sliced by the beats of the hydrogen atoms, now that other minds existed time did not move on its own. Or rather, even if it moved on its own, its movement was relevant only to how it was witnessed. Time was partly conception. Time was partly a thing in the mind. Just as events. Since the universe began, nearly 10
³³
ticks of the hydrogen clocks had transpired. Stars had been born. Stars had aged, then exploded or dwindled to dim and cold ashes. Galaxies had collided. Living cells had formed. Then minds. Cities had risen on deserts. Cities had fallen. Civilizations had flourished, then ended. Then new civilizations emerged. Nothing was lasting, nothing was permanent. Living creatures, beings with minds, were the most fleeting of all. They came and went, came and went, came and went, billions upon billions of lives, each quick as one breath. Atoms converged in their special arrangements to make each precious life, held together for moments, then scattered to dull lifeless matter again.

Atom for atom, life was a rare commodity in Aalam-104729. Only one-millionth of one-billionth of 1 percent of the mass of the universe abided in living form.

Although it had happened quite on its own, I was fascinated to understand how
consciousness
had arisen in the new universe. What an amazing and unexpected phenomenon! You start with some dull lifeless material, you let it knock about on its own, bumped around and shaken by other dead stuff, you let it change and evolve by haphazard events, and suddenly it rears up on its hind legs and says, “Here I am. Who are you?”

Certainly I understood all the energies and forces in atoms. They were just my laws and principles. But
consciousness
—this cooperative working together of individual cells to create a sensation of wholeness, of being alive, of existence, of
I-ness
—was something else. It was a collective performance that went far beyond the individual pieces. It was strange. It was wonderful. It was almost a new form of matter. How had it happened? And how many cells did it take to make consciousness?

I decided to do an experiment. I loved experiments. While the emergence of consciousness in the universe had required billions of planetary years, I could speed up the process to mere moments. I entered Aalam-104729. Then I scooped up a bunch of the coordination and control cells from a warm sea on one of the newly formed planets—such cells were remarkably similar from planet to planet—and I put them together on a smooth rock on the shore and let them form electrical and chemical connections between themselves. I started with a thousand cells. Nothing. Then I added more cells, a thousand at a time, until I had a hundred thousand, a tiny grey blob of material sitting on a rock. Still nothing. Just random electrical pulses, odd hums and buzzings. It was frustrating. I so much wanted the thing to wake up. I shook the rock. I jostled the grey blob. I even played a bit of music, a frisky bellantyne, hoping to nudge the thing into consciousness. I added more cells. Ten million. Still nothing. A hundred million. Not much, but the electrical activity was getting more interesting. More complex patterns were beginning to emerge, collective patterns I had not seen before. The cells were interacting with one another, but with mostly meaningless blather, like Aunt Penelope’s mutterings. At this point, I had reproduced a couple billion planetary years of evolution. I doubled the number. Two hundred million. Now something unusual was happening! The gelatinous hodgepodge of cells began creating patterns of electrical activity not related to its survival.
Unnecessary
electrical activity. But not random either. The thing seemed to be reacting to itself. A little electrical peep would start in one cell and get passed around to the other cells, each of which would make its own peep, and then all the peeps would start chiming in unison, amplifying one another into a single electrical chirp. This chirp rose and fell, almost like a melody, with complex overtones. After a while, it would die down and the thing would get quiet. And then it would start up again.

Was this it? Was this consciousness? The thing I was looking for was so subtle, so delicate, and yet unmistakable once there. Clearly I did not expect my little blob of cells to speak to me—indeed consciousness evolved before speech—but at some point the mass of matter would become aware of itself.

I felt that I was on the verge. I was on the verge, and I just needed to do a bit more. I looked around for some tools to poke the thing with. There. I arranged for a twig to touch the thing ever so slightly. The cells that had been tapped shuddered and twitched and sent peeps around to the others, and they began peeping in unison until the single chirp started up. After a few moments, the little grey blob got quiet again. Then I caused the twig to tap the thing two times, a pause, then three times. Well, this was big news. This was clearly a hello from the outside world. Now the cells that had been tapped trembled more strongly, contacted the others, and soon all two hundred million cells were excitedly chattering to one another as if they had just discovered that down was up. The single big chirp swelled and died and swelled, and as it moved through the thing it grew more and more complex, constantly modifying itself but returning to the same electrical pattern. The blob was
thinking
. It had somehow become an entity, not just a collection of two hundred million individual cells. And it had taken a bump from the outside world to make it recognize itself. Now there was clearly an outside world, and its own self. I analyzed its electrical commotion. It had no organized system of language, of course, but I could understand the electrical code and translate its meaning. Through a mist of confusion and primitive fragments of thought, a muffled message kept repeating: “Something is
out
there. Something is out
there
. Something is out there, and it has touched
me
.” The “me” was the most beautiful part, a special electrical pattern created by many cells at once that could have no other meaning. Quite beyond any analysis of its individual cells, beyond its electrical and chemical impulses going this way and that, the thing had a sensation of Unity. And, remarkably, I found that my feeling towards the thing had changed. Whereas before I had regarded it as a mere mass of material, now I had a sympathy towards the thing, even a tenderness. I wanted to protect this little thing.

Two hundred million cells, more or less. And later, cities, machines, symphonies.