The kernel burst. That was no disaster, it was an unfolding. The atom embraced him, yielded to him, his being responded to her every least wild Side 95
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
movement, he knew her. Radiance exploded outward. The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.
“Cosmology,” said Joelle the omnipotent. He fumbled to find her in a toppling darkness. She enfolded him and they flew together, up a laser beam, through a satellite relay, to an observatory in orbit beyond the Moon.
Briefly he spied the stars as if with his eyes, unblurred by any sky.
Their multitudes, steel-blue, frost-white, sunset-gold, coal-red, almost glittered the night out of heaven. The Milky Way rivered in silver, nebulae glowed where new suns and planets were being born, a sister galaxy flung her faint gleam across Ginnungagap. But at once he leagued with the instrumentality which was seeking the uttermost ends of space-time.
First he was aware of optical spectra. They told him of light that bloomed from leaping and whirling gas, they told him of tides in the body of a sun-a body more like the living cell than he could have imagined before-and of the furnaces down below where atoms begot higher elemental generations and photons racing spaceward were the birthcry. And in this Brahma-play he shared.
Next he felt a solar wind blow past, he snuffed its richness, tingled to its keenness, and knew the millennial subtlety of its work. Thereafter he gave himself to radio spectra, cosmic ray spectra, magnetic fields, neutrino fluxes, relativistics which granted a star gate and seemed to grant time travel, the curve of the continuum that is the all.
At the Grand Canyon of the Colorado you may see strata going back a billion years, and across the view of them a gnarly juniper, and know something of Earth. Thus did Eric learn something of the depths and the order in space-time. The primordial fireball became more real to him than the violence of his own birth, the question of what had brought it about became as terrifying.
With it, he bought the spirals of the galaxies and the DNA molecule with energy which would never come back to him, and saw how it aged as it matured, even as you and I; the Law is One. He lived the lives of stars: how manifold were the waves that formed them, how strong the binding afterward to an entire existence!
Amidst the massiveness of blue giants and black holes, he found room to forge planets whereon crystals and flowers could grow. He beheld what was still unknown-the overwhelming most of it, now and forever-and how Joelle longed to go questing.
Yet throughout, the observer part of him sensed that beside hers, his perception was misted and his understanding chained. When she drew him back to the flesh, he screamed.
They sat in the office. Her desk separated them. She had raised the blind on the window at her back and opened it. Shadows hastened across grass, sunlight that followed was bright but somehow as if the air through which it fell had chilled it, the gusts sounded hollow that harried smells of damp soil into the room, odors of oncoming autumn.
She spoke with all her gentleness. “We couldn’t have talked meaningfully before you’d been there yourself, could we have, Eric?”
His glance went to the empty couch. “How meaningful was anything between us, even at first?”
She sighed. “I wanted it to be.” A smile touched her. “I did enjoy.”
“No more than that, enjoy, eh?”
“I don’t know. I do care for you, and for everything you taught me about. But I’ve gone on to, to where I tried to lead you.”
“How far did I get?”
She stared down at her hands, folded on the desk in helplessness, and murmured, “Still less than I feared. It was like showing a blind man a painting.
He might get a tiny idea through his fingertips, texture, the dark areas faintly warmer than the light-but oh, how tiny!”
“Whereas you respond to the lot, from quanta to quasars,” he rasped.
She raised her head, challenging their shared unhappiness. “No, I’ve barely begun, and of course I’ll never finish. But don’t you see, that’s half of the wonder. Always more to find. Direct experience, as direct as vision or touch or hunger or sex, experience of the real reality. The whole world humans know is just a passing, accidental consequence of it. Each time I go to it, I know it better and it makes me more its own. How could I stop?”