Once I tried to express all this to Gea. She told me to go outside, to the scrap of garden I share with the other tenants of this block, and to find an old piece of rotten log. I did as she asked. I found a chunk of crumbling wood, and turned it over. Roots and strands of fungi pulled apart, as if the ground didn’t want to let it go, and a damp, cold, musty smell rose up from the thick dark earth that had been hidden beneath.
There was a whole shadowy world in there. A spider, her belly heavy with a white silk egg case, scuttled away to the shade. Millipedes coiled up into tight little spiral. A centipede squirted its slow way through a heap of bark fragments. But these naked-eye critters were the megafauna of Log-world. Following Gea’s advice, I hacked off a chunk of the log with a knife, shook it out over a white handkerchief spread on the ground, and examined what fell out with a magnifying glass. I saw worms and mites and a dozen other sorts of creatures, wildly diverse in their body plans, all crawling around on my handkerchief. And even that wasn’t the end of it. Gea showed me magnified images of droplets of water, each one just swarming with billions of bacteria. The deeper you dig down the more tiny ecologies just keep popping up.
OK, we humans have made a mess of the biosphere at some levels. But the big, visible living things up here on Earth’s surface are only a scraping of the planet’s true cargo of life. Nothing we can ever do is going to make much of a dent in that crude, overwhelming fact.
Such reflections are humbling. But they also comfort me. We shouldn’t feel so bad about ourselves. We’re just animals in an ecology, too. Gea says she is trying to promote this kind of “microaesthetic,” to help us humans get a sense of perspective about themselves. Vander was right; she does care about us.
Gea is a surprisingly good companion. She is smarter than me after all, and she will, with any luck, live forever. Also the way she rolls about on my tabletop shooting sparks from her belly makes me laugh.
So here I am. I listen to the sea lapping at the bottom of my avenue, and the laughter of children, and I watch the sunlight dapple on the drowned roads, and I dream of starships. Things could have turned out a lot worse for me, I guess.
But I’ll always miss Morag.
Alia found herself perched on a small platform, right at the apex of the cathedral’s mighty tetrahedral skeleton. The three great pylons of the frame swept away beneath her to touch the rust-red ground of Earth. Beneath the frame the undying community huddled in the ruined domes of Conurbation 11729.
The air was cold, and a stiff breeze blew. The platform’s material shone brighter than daylight, and it underlit Drea’s face as the sisters clutched at each other, exhilarated by the Skimming.
“Drea — what are we doing here?”
Drea stepped aside with a flourish to reveal a blocky artifact. “We’re here for this,” she said. It was Alia’s Witnessing tank, her most precious relic of childhood. “Look.”
Within the tank Michael Poole, a figurine no taller than Alia’s hand, sat quietly in a chair. From a window a warm light reflected from sun-dappled water poured into his room. Drea said, “When the Transcendence shuts down the Witnessing tanks won’t work anymore.”
“I suppose they won’t.”
“I thought you’d want to see him one last time…” Drea leaned over the tank. “This is a time in his life after his encounter with the Transcendence. At this point in his lifeline, he remembers you, Alia.”
If he remembers anything at all, Alia thought uneasily, after his shattering self-sacrifice. “I grew up with Michael Poole. Through watching his life, I learned about mine. He was always a constant friend, even though he is half a million years dead. And then, through the Hypostatic Union with his son—”
“You touched him.”
“In a way. The Witnessing worked, you know. I got to know Poole, and I became a better person for it. I think so anyhow.”
“I think you loved him, didn’t you? Perhaps you still do.”
“But he never loved me, Drea. There was only ever Morag.”
Drea said earnestly, “It’s best this way, that it ends.” She trilled a few notes. “Every song must end — and indeed an ending, if it is exquisite enough, is part of the beauty of the song itself.”
But, Alia wondered, as she stared at Michael Poole’s empty face, must the ending of this particular song be quite so bittersweet? She felt huge forces gathering, as if the cosmos itself were focusing on this point-event in space and time. “It’s going to happen soon.”
Drea clutched her hands, watching her face with concern.
The Transcendence whirled around her, great clouds of anguish and determination. In a moment immense invisible muscles would flex — and a wave of difference would wash around the arc of the universe, from the furthest future and seamlessly into the deepest past. The universe would come apart, closed chains of cause and effect shattering, and when those chains knitted themselves up again, everything would be subtly different. And the powers the Transcendence had taken to itself, the power to meddle with the deepest past, would be put aside forever.
But in these last minutes, those powers still existed. And suddenly she knew what she must do.
Alia raised her face to the blue sky of Earth. Through the muddy daylight she thought she could see the Transcendence, the necklace-chains of minds, the drifting bergs of memory. “Do this one last thing,” she pleaded. “Spare him! Spare Michael Poole!”
Maybe it would work out for him this time. At least this way there was a chance. And after all, what was the point of being a god if you couldn’t perform the occasional miracle?
Spacetime flexed — she felt it, deep in the core of her being. And Drea gasped.
Alia looked down. The Witnessing tank was no longer clear; the image was broken, turbulent, like a pool of water stirred up with a stick. But in the last instant before the link collapsed forever, Alia saw Michael Poole turn toward the door, and stand, a look of shock on his face.
As Morag walked into the room.