“No extraordinary effect,” Paphlagon corrected him, “no unpredictable effect. But, mind you, it accounts for everything about that rock: how it absorbs and re-radiates light, how its nuclei decay, and so on.”
“But it all sort of averages out statistically, and you can’t really tell one rock from another,” Lodoghir said.
“Yes.”
“The point being that the only crosstalk capable of being amplified by consciousness is that affecting nerve tissue.”
“Or any other consciousness-bearing system,” Paphlagon said.
“So there is a highly exclusive selection process at work to begin with in that, of all the crosstalk going on in a given instant between our cosmos and all the other cosmi that are sufficiently close to it to render such crosstalk possible, the stupefyingly enormous preponderance of it is only affecting rocks and other stuff that is not complex enough to respond to that crosstalk in a way we’d consider interesting.”
“Yes,” Paphlagon said.
“Let us then confine our discussion to the infinitesimally small fraction of the crosstalk that happens to impinge on nerve tissue. As I’ve just finished saying, this already gives us selectivity.” Lodoghir nodded at the slate. “But, whether or not Fraa Jad intended to, he has opened the door to another kind of selection procedure that may be at work here. Our brains receive these ‘signals,’ yes. But they are more than passive receivers. They are not merely crystal radios! They compute. They cogitate. The outcomes of those cogitations can by no means be easily predicted from their inputs. And those outcomes are the conscious thoughts that we have, the decisions we put into effect, our social interactions with other conscious beings, and the behavior of societies down through the ages.”
“Thank you, Fraa Lodoghir,” said Ignetha Foral, and turned to scan the slate again. “And would anyone care to tackle ‘feedback loops’?”
“We get those for free,” Paphlagon said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s already there in the model we’ve been talking about, we don’t have to add anything more. We’ve already seen how small signals, amplified by the special structures of nerve tissue and societies of conscious beings, can lead to changes in a Narrative—in the configuration of a cosmos—that are much larger than the original signals in question. The worldtracks veer, change their courses in response to those faint signals, and you could distinguish a cosmos that was populated by conscious organisms from one that wasn’t by observing the way their worldtracks behaved. But recall that the signals in question only pass between cosmi whose worldtracks are close together. There is your feedback! Crosstalk steers the worldtracks of consciousness-bearing cosmi; worldtracks that steer close together exchange more crosstalk.”
“So the feedback pulls worldtracks close to one another as time goes on?” Ignetha Foral asked. “Is this the explanation we’ve been looking for of why the Geometers look like us?”
“Not only that,” put in Suur Asquin, “but of cnoöns and the HTW and all the rest, if I’m not mistaken.”
“I am going to be a typical Lorite,” Moyra said, “and caution you that feedback is a layman’s term that covers a wide range of phenomena. Entire branches of theorics have been, and are still being, developed to study the behavior of systems that exhibit what laymen know as feedback. The most common behaviors in feedback systems are degenerate. Such as the howl from a public address system, or total chaos. Very few such systems yield stable behavior—or any sort of behavior that you or I could look at and say, ‘see, it is doing this now.’”
“Thisness!” Zh’vaern exclaimed.
“But conversely,” Moyra went on, “systems that are stable, in a tumultuous universe, generally must have some kind of feedback in order to exist.”
Ignetha Foral nodded. “So if the feedback posited by Fraa Jad really is steering our worldtrack and those of the PAQD races together, it’s not just any feedback but some very special, highly tuned species of it.”
“We call something an attractor,” Paphlagon said, “when it persists or recurs in a complex system.”
“So if it is true that the PAQD share the Adrakhonic Theorem and other such theorical concepts with us,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “those might be nothing more than attractors in the feedback system we have been describing.”
“Or nothing less,” said Fraa Jad.
We all let that one resonate for a minute. Lodoghir and Jad were staring at each other across the table; we all thought something was about to happen.
A Procian and a Halikaarnian were about to agree with each other.
Then Zh’vaern wrecked it. As if he didn’t get what was going on at all; or perhaps the HTW simply was not that interesting to him. He couldn’t get off the topic of Atamant’s bowl.
“Atamant,” he announced, “changed his bowl.”
“I beg your pardon?” demanded Ignetha Foral.
“Yes. For thirty years, it had a scratch on the bottom. This is attested by phototypes. Then, during the final year of his meditation—shortly before his death—he made the scratch disappear.”
Everyone had become very quiet.
“Translate that into polycosmic language, please?” asked Suur Asquin.
“He found his way to a cosmos the same as the one he’d been living in—except that in this cosmos the bowl wasn’t scratched.”
“But there were records—phototypes—of its having been scratched.”
“Yes,” said Zh’vaern. “so he had gone to a cosmos that included some inconsistent records. And that is the cosmos that we are in now.”
“And how did he achieve this feat?” asked Moyra, as if she already guessed the answer.
“Either by changing the records, or else by shifting to a cosmos with a different future.”
“Either he was a Rhetor, or an Incanter!” blurted a young voice. Barb. Performing his role as sayer of things no one else would say.
“That’s not what I meant,” said Moyra. “How did he achieve it?”
“He declined to share his secret,” said Zh’vaern. “I thought that some here might have something to say of it.” And he looked all around the table—but mostly at Jad and Lodoghir.
“If they do, they’ll say it tomorrow,” announced Ignetha Foral. “Tonight’s messal has ended.” And she pushed her chair back, casting a baleful glare at Zh’vaern. Emman burst through the door and snatched up her rucksack. Madame Secretary adjusted the badge around her neck as if it were just another item of jewelry, and stalked out, pursued by her servitor, who was grunting under the weight of two rucksacks.
I had grand plans for how I would spend the free time I’d won in my wager with Arsibalt. There were so many ways I wanted to use that gift that I could not decide where to start. I went back to my cell to fetch some notes and sat down on my pallet. Then I opened my eyes to find it was morning.
The hours of night had not gone to waste, though, for I awoke with ideas and intentions that had not been in my head when I’d closed my eyes. Given the sorts of things we’d been talking about lately at messal, it was hard not to think that while I’d lain unconscious, my mind had been busy rambling all over the local parts of Hemn space, exploring alternate versions of the world.
I went and found Arsibalt, who had slept less than I. He was inclined to surliness until I shared with him some of what I had been thinking about—if thinking was the right word for processes that had taken place without my volition while I had been unconscious.
For breakfast I had some dense, grainy buns and dried fruit. Afterwards, I went to a little stand of trees out behind the First Sconic chapterhouse. Arsibalt was waiting for me there, brandishing a shovel he’d borrowed from a garden shack. He scooped out a shallow depression in the earth, no larger than a serving-bowl. I lined it with a scrap of poly sheeting that I had scavenged from one of the middens that Sæcular people left everywhere they went—and that had lately begun to pock the grounds of this concent.