[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
evidently the response was immediate.
Why should the top authorities of the Federation, and later the Councillors of the Synesis, have minded?
You'd think they would rejoice to get word again and would never have wanted an interruption in the
first place. Fenn scowled. It seemed likeliest that the cybercosm had per-suaded them.
Why?
Well, this speech today had in fact triggered a melt-down. Fenn listened more closely.
" with reservations, we can confirm that the Terrans of the star worlds have achieved a means of
traversing the abysses between, and that this has given them un-precedented longevity of a sort."
You haven't got any choice by now but to confirm it, Fenn thought cynically. What with all the details
that've come out, we'll soon have amateurs beamcasting again, and this time your jamming couldn't be
explained away.
If that was what happened, of course, he added somewhat reluctantly.
" those entities they call their Life Mothers "
Fenn heard it with swelling impatience. Piece by piece, he extracted from the oratory what he believed
had mean-ing and put it together into a plain statement.
Life transplanted to a world for which it had not evolved, which nature had not made ready for anything
as complex as grass and birds, could by itself do no more than cling to its bridgehead. Outside artificial,
insulated enclosures, it would not thrive, it might well not survive, unless the fragile nascent biome was
constantly watched over, protected, nurtured, guided in its growth. Only a conscious mind could do that,
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
linked to living things everywhere by a web of senses and communication as the brain is linked to the cells
of the body. That mind must needs be greater than human although on Deme-ter, the nucleus of it had
been the downloads of two human beings. It would become one with its life, an immanence in nature,
Demeter Mother; and because it was ultimately organic, it would gain a power denied by quantum law to
inorganic cybernetics. It could give to a human body, grown from a human genome, the con-tent of a
download, so that the person who had been downloaded perhaps when dying lived again in flesh and
blood.
Thus did the Terrans of Demeter escape to other stars: going as downloads, to wait most of them
inactive, un-conscious of the years or decades or centuries until there was a Life Mother on the next
world to raise them to life anew.
Thus could a man or a woman pass through life after life, immortal.
It had taken half a millennium to get this revelation and make it reality. But they were ordinary humans on
Demeter, and a Mother who evolved very slowly from modest, practical beginnings. The Teramind could
have deduced the possibility at once, from first principles, and calculated every necessary step.
Why did the Teramind not proclaim its knowledge, so that Earth might have a Mother and all children of
Sol live forever?
"Because to Earth, the cost would be unbearably high," said Ibrahim.
Lunarians rejected the gift, also at Centauri. They would rather die among the naked stars, individuals
in-dependent of everyone and everything, than live by the law that a goddess laid on animals and plants.
Most Ter-rans felt differently. But nowhere in the Solar System existed the kind of society that developed
on Demeter. Nor was the biosphere of Earth ever integrated. It would essentially have to be remade,
replaced, bit by painful bit, over centuries. This would threaten not just the sta-bility of ecology and
climate that global reforestation had brought about. It would break the whole peaceful, pros-perous
order that history had finally reached. The equi-librium was always precarious; upset it, and what would
follow was unforeseeable even by the Teramind, but would surely be horrible. Simply imagine the cost
and consequences of downloading a billion people every gen-eration, to await a problematical
resurrection a resur-rection that would necessarily be into a world gone altogether alien, through which
they would stumble be-wildered, helpless, and grieving for what they had lost. Of this much, the
Teramind was certain.
"It may be right," Fenn muttered, "though what about the Terrans yonder?"
"As for the Terrans at the stars," said Ibrahim, "they became what they are gradually, lifetime by lifetime.
By now they are themselves alien to us, more so than home folk can really grasp. In many senses, they
are no longer human."
"I'll judge that when I've met a few."
Seen with the eye of eternity, as the Teramind saw, the genesis of the Life Mothers was less a triumph
than a tragedy."
"A tragedy for who?"
"And after all, literal immortality is a myth, an im-possibility. The human brain has a finite data-storage
ca-pacity; a thousand years will fill it. Well before then, the geometrical increase of correlations will
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
overwhelm it. Result: dementia. Oh, in theory you can choose what memories your next incarnation shall
not inherit. You can record them elsewhere, for reference if wanted. But thus, rebirth by rebirth, you
attenuate the personality that once was yours, until at last what lives is a stranger, haunted by the wispiest
of ghosts. And no matter how often the unnatural descent goes on, branching and rebranching, in the end,
one way or another, each line is bound to go extinct."
"Um-m, a point. But I don't think I'd mind a run of several thousand years, myself. And after that who
knows?"
"No, best that humankind in the Solar Systemstay with what it has, a long and pleasant life, a serene and
accepting death. Needless to say, this is not a decree. The Synesis has neither the power nor the desire
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]