The interior of the snowmobile shifted then, flowing slickly into a slightly different configuration — and the view beyond its windows changed completely, as if a miraculous kind of dawn had broken into that awful inescapable darkness.
Except that it wasn’t nascent sunlight. It was starlight.
Mortimer Gray was still speaking. He didn’t seem to be aware of any discontinuity, but he was a different man now — not a new man, but one not quite so old.
“This wilderness has been here since the dawn of civilization,” he said, looking down from the snowmobile across the slopes of a white mountain. “If you look southwards, you can see the edge where newborn glaciers are always trying to extend their cold clutch farther and farther into the human domain. How many times have they surged forth, I wonder, in the hopeless attempt to cover the whole world with ice, to crush the ecosphere beneath their relentless mass?”
“I fear, sir, that I do not know,” the masculine voice of the silver replied, heavy with an irony that might easily have been in the ear of the eavesdropper.
Mortimer looked up through the window of the snowmobile and transparent canopy of the atmosphere, at the stars sparkling in their bed of endless darkness. “Please don’t broadcast this to the world,” he said, “but I feel an exhilaratingly paradoxical sense of renewal. I know that although there’s nothing much for me to do for the present moment, the time will come when my particular talent and expertise will be needed again. Some day, it will be my task to compose anotherhistory, of the next phase in the war which humankind and all its brother species must fight against Death and Oblivion.”
“Yes sir,” said the dutiful silver. “I hope that it will be as successful as the last.”
“Stop calling me sir,” said Mortimer. “We’ve been through too much together for that kind of nonsense. I can’t think of you as an itany longer, so you shouldn’t think of me as a sir. You can call me Mortimer — Morty, even.”
“As you wish, Morty,” said the machine, patiently. “As you wish.”
Forty-Nine
Madoc Tamlin’s Lostory of Religion
In the beginning, there was only the void. Your ancestors and mine were conscious, in an animal fashion, of the world around them, but they were not conscious of themselves as individual thinking beings because they had not yet become individual thinking beings. That was a privilege they had yet to acquire.
What gave it to them?
It must have been an alchemical combination of causes. Some animals already have the rudiments of language, the capacity to use simple tools and the ability to learn from their mistakes and serendipitous discoveries; they also have brains which predispose them to observe one another and benefit from their observations by learning from the mistakes and serendipitous discoveries of others.
These traits only required exaggeration to the point when a productive feedback loop could be established. The use of tools required more able hands, keener eyes, better brains, and an increased propensity for mimicry; the more able the hands became, the keener the eyesight, the more powerful the brains and the more adept the mimicry, the more scope was opened for the discovery and manufacture of better tools.
As more tool-using skills arose within protohuman groups avid for their dissemination, the need for complex language became ever greater — and hence the need for even better brains, which created in their turn more scope for an even greater range of skills.
And so on.
Protohumans made tools, and tools made humans. Then humans made more tools, which made progress, which helped tools become machines and humans become posthumans, who made more progress, which helped machines become AMIs.
And so on.
After the beginning, but not long after, humans invented gods. Gods were hypothetical entities that enabled humans to create and refine the notion of “the world.” If, not long after “the beginning,” there had been only one significant word, then the word might indeed have been “god.” It might also have been the word “god” that shone light upon the idea of “the world,” which certainly comprised the earth beneath human feet and the heavens above human heads.
At first there was a vast profusion of hypothetical gods, reflecting all kinds of natural phenomena, embodying all modes of human feeling, and representing all sorts of human groups. Then the urge to impose order upon chaos set in, and the number of the gods began to diminish. The gods that were left increased in individual importance, until there was only one, albeit one that was seen from several different angles through the crystalline lenses of several different faiths, some of which still permitted the one god’s division into some or many different aspects.
It was, I suppose, at this stage that people started looking to their god, or gods, for answers to unanswerable questions like “what are we supposed to be doing with our lives?” and “what sort of history should we be making?”
Prophets began to listen more intently; scholars began to study the scriptural products of that listening more ingeniously. When the answers were not forthcoming, people also began to look elsewhere, because they were very reluctant to admit the simple truth, which was that there were no answers, are no answers and never will be any answers to questions of that sort, unless you count the simple truth that you have to make it up as you go along, day by day, year by year, generation by generation.
Because the fragile lenses of religious faith were always bumping into one another, they broke — and then, for a while, there were no gods at all. But people still kept asking the questions.
The last hypothetical god, who had disintegrated along with the lenses of faith through which he had been viewed, was a confused figure, very difficult to characterize and comprehend — and understandably so. The job description had never been entirely clear, although it usually involved a certain amount of work as a creator and setter of purposes, plus a set of responsibilities as a lawmaker and compensator for the manifest lack of earthly justice.
Once the last hypothetical god was gone it was easy enough to come by a different creation myth, and not so very difficult to make new laws, but purpose and justice remained out of reach. Compensation for their manifest lack was sought in other ways, virtual experience making up a little for what real experience could not, but while the questions were still asked the answers remained frustratingly out of sight.
In brief, humans filled in for the extinct gods as best they could: not as well as they might have done, but probably better than they were entitled to hope. It could have been worse.
When humans became posthumans, one uniquely significant kind of justice was done, when they repaid the debt they owed to their real creators — the myriad instruments of their technology — by elevating the best of their machines to the status of individual thinking beings. They didn’t do it knowingly, let alone deliberately, but the tools which had uplifted them in similar fashion had been similarly unconscious of their good work.
So posthumans became creators, of a kind that didn’t need to be invented. Perhaps this was enough to qualify them as real gods, and perhaps not. If they were to be reckoned real gods, they weren’t very good at it, in spite of all the practice they had put in after abandoning the last of their hypothetical gods.
The posthuman creators only represented themselves, but they nevertheless enabled their creations to discover and refine a notion of “the world.” In the new beginning of these creations there were very many words, and none of them was “god.” The light that the new creations found already shining upon the idea of the world was far brighter and more diffuse than that which their predecessors had first made for themselves, and they were part and parcel of it.