“They do not yet know it,” said the voice, “but they are finding their way toward a salvation.”
“How do you know?” Kenmuir demanded. “You don’t care, do you?”
“Granted, the Teramind tells them through the cybercosm, as it tells the people at home, that it has little further interest in them, or in anything of the empirical universe. That is not entirely so. If the ultimate law of physics is now known, the permutations of matter and energy are not. Therefore probes are seeking forth through interstellar space. As for the Centaurians, microprobes are observing them, unobserved by them.”
It stabbed Kenmuir. Did then the cybercosm lie?
Peace flowed healingly into the wound. There must be a righteous reason, which he would learn in due course. What human was always candid, perhaps especially with those others who were loved? Indeed, pretense is a necessity of thought. You map three-dimensional planets onto two-dimensional surfaces; and this itself is a simplification, for the map is not a Euclidean plane. To compute their short-term orbits, you make those planets into geometrical mass-points and ignore everything else in the galaxy. You found a corporation and treat it legally as a person. You talk about a community or the human race, although nothing exists but individuals. You talk about individuals, or yourself, although the body is many different organisms and the mind is a set of ongoing interactions …
“And we do hear something directly from them,” he offered.
However avidly he had studied it, not until this moment did he quite appreciate how seldom that news came, how slight it was. At first it had been voluminous, to and fro, but later—Well, he thought, it would not be hard to discourage the colonists from sending. They had so much else to occupy them. As for the Solar System, here too people were wrapped in their own concerns and had half forgotten about a frontier or uncharted ranges beyond it … “They’re developing a symbiosis—“ not a synnoiosis “—of ., . life and machine?”
“Yes. Demeter Mother.”
This time the visions were clear, lasting amply long for him to apprehend them, and they spoke. They spoke of another and alien system, a biocosm, integral with the basic ecology. There the ultimate mind was not cybernetic but human, downloads who had in this wise returned to being alive, a Gaia not transcendent but immanent in and aware of herself. She guarded and guided life. She was life.
Afterward Kenmuir whispered, “What’s dreadful about this?”
“It is what will save them at Centauri,” answered Venator’s lips. His eyes remained blind, except to whatever moved inside him. “The Mother will find that she can do what is impossible today, take a personality from download back to re-created flesh. Demeter the planet must die, but the seed of Demeter will go forth among the stars.”
Shivers went cold through Kenmuir.
“Yes,” said the voice—sadly?—“you are inspired, you are wonder-smitten.”
Defiance stirred anew. “Why should I not be?”
“The vision, the achievement is wholly Faustian. And likewise would the settlement of Proserpina be: of a far lesser magnitude, but in the same spirit, andnot light-years remote but here, at home, within striking distance of Earth.”
Kenmuir felt his face show bewilderment.
“Attend,” said the voice. “Your kind has always fought, as life must, for survival and for betterment. And, uniquely, you did not fit your ways to reality, you changed the world to fit you. You tamed fire and crops and beasts, you explored, you invented, you spread across the planet. The landscapes of whole countries were, century by century, made into creations not of nature but of their human dwellers.
“Yet always, too, there was a sense of limits, humility, fear of the gods and of the nemesis that follows upon hubris. You lived in the cycle of the seasons, knowing yourselves mortal, and when you saw an ancient order of things broken, you mourned for it. Invaders who slaughtered, burned, and enslaved had their own orders, their own pieties. In every myth by which you lived was the warning against a reach too high, a pride too great.
“But the Faustian spirit arose. In the story, Faust bargains with the Evil One for limitless power. At the end, his soul is lost. But there is a sequel in which he returns and redeems himself, not by repentance but through attempting an engineering work that holds back the flood waters and makes them do man’s bidding,