When Caitlin heard, she said, “That’s not chemistry. It’s alchemy.”
Indeed, self-replicating structures on a subatomic rather than molecular level went beyond the physics known to human or Betan. Once she had encountered the Oracle, though, Joelle moved rather quickly toward understanding. In the mystical ecstasy of this deeper entrance into the Ultimate, she lost sorrow as she lost self.
She could have no discourse directly with the inhabitants of the pulsar.
They were too short-lived. A few seconds, a few turnings of heaven, and such a less-than-microscopic being had finished its span. But so swift, so furiously energetic were the processes within it that those seconds encompassed more perception and experience, more living, than a human century. To it, she was as inert as a stone was to her.
The Oracle gave her a slowed-down playback from certain lives. She could follow mere snatches, random fragments, of the stories. The heroes were too alien to her. She did come to see that they had been heroes.
Exploring through a billion generations, they discovered the Fire Fountains, which raged in magnificence upward and upward beyond sounding. In the haze of radiation that filled the world they knew, they had had no idea of a sky. Now- There were mountains, many of which endured for whole years by Earth reckoning, the tallest of which reared twelve and thirteen millimeters high.
Seekers of knowledge set themselves to follow the course of the Fire Fountains by climbing.
Dynasties of the bold came to be, parent, child, grandchild, great-grandchild, who toiled, suffered, risked, and at last died in the great venture. Civilizations rose, flourished, and fell while the climbers fought their way on, a generation bequeathing to the next a base that was farther aloft. Many among them perished and more despaired when they reached the limits of air. But a council of the undaunted prevailed, and work began on a tunnel up through a chosen mountain.
A million lifetimes later, through a transparent dome, a colony at the peak beheld whither the Fire Fountains went – beheld the stars.
Was that sheer indomitability? Joelle wondered. Or did the Oracle give them… heart… to continue striving through the human equivalent of a geological era?
She lacked language to ask that question, and doubted in any case that the Oracle would make such a claim. It was beyond pride.
It had been fashioned by the Others to dwell on the pulsar. Gigantic beside the natives, virtually immortal, it kept its place, which became a shrine unto them. Self-aware, of an intelligence to match hers when she was in holothesis, it still felt no loneliness, no dullness, ever: for it shared in the doings, the thoughts, the very souls of yonder entities. (She speculated about quasitelepathy via modulation of the strong nuclear forces, but the vocabulary she had in common with it was too primitive – a kind of sign language – for her Side 156
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The to inquire.) It would counsel them when they wished, though she got an impression its pronouncements were deliberately as ambiguous as those spoken at Delphi, lest it cause in them a pseudomorphosis that would stunt the maturing of their innate powers. It had recorded and gave back to them, when they desired, entire histories of theirs, vanished nations, forgotten achievements.
Mainly, it mediated between them and outsiders. Messages passed from it to the station and back over a medium which could carry them. (Quark beams?) The station relayed by various means, including radio. The Oracle slowed down or speeded up transmissions according to who was receiving.
Thus, through it, the inhabitants of the star and the visitors who fared hither to learn about the star were enabled to know something of each other.
That might be the closest these people could come to sharing in the brotherhood which the Others fostered. Or it might not.
Brodersen secured himself by handgrip on a table and confronted his folk in the common room. At his back, a viewscreen showed the revolving rays – sword blades, clock hands – nearer, brighter. Soon the shield must ward off that wrath.
“We can’t stay here much longer,” he told them. “You know that. Even before free fall causes irreversible changes in us, we’ll have exceeded a safe radiation dosage. The background count is just too God damn high, and our protections are inadequate.