Kenmuir lay quiet.
“You have seen the prophecy before,” said the voice, “Yes,” he replied, “but never like this.”
After a while: “How could … any humans … threaten that?”
“This is in the nature of things. It goes deeper than chaos. If vanishingly small changes may have immense and undivinable effects, still, a system has its attractors, its underlying order, and a broken balance may well be redressed.
“To fathom the true danger, you would have to be in synnoiosis, and nonetheless your insight would be dim and fragmentary. But think. Recall what you know of quantum physics. Reality is one, but reality is a manifold. Past and future are one, inseparable. Yet this means that they are equally unknowable with precision. A particle can have gone from point to point by any of infinitely many paths; some are more probable than others, but observation alone establishes which is real. The state of one, when determined, fixes the state of another, though they be light-years apart, too distant for causality between them. Thus the observed and the observer, existence and the meaning of existence, are a whole, Yang and Yin; and the wave function of the universe shares incertitude with the wave function of a lone electron.”
Kenmuir shook his head. “No, I don’t see. I can’t. Unless what you hint is that … human minds are no accident either—they’re as fundamental an aspect of reality as … as yours—“ ‘
He shook himself. He was neither sophotect nor synnoiont, nor even a philosopher. Let it suffice him that the Teramind found reason to fear his race. (Fear? Respect? Useless words, here.) Let him stay with the grubby practicalities of flesh and blood.
“What Fm guessing your intent is,” he said verycarefully, “is that we humans can do anything we want, and you’ll help us, advise us, be good to us—provided we stay safely irrelevant to you.”
“No. That cannot be. It is already too late. Your kind is loose among the stars.”
Through Kenmuir flew a horror. The Teramind might build and dispatch missiles to blast Demeter Mother before her children left their world. No! It had not happened, therefore it would not. It could not. Please.
He forced dryness: “What about us at home?”
“In the future that belongs to Mind, you will join, willingly and gladly, as this I—Venator—has done, but to an immensely higher degree.”
“We become part of the cybercosm?”
“Centuries or millennia hence. Then sentient Earth will be ready to confromt the foreign thing yonder.”
“You hope you’ll have the strength—“ the strength of intellect, not of raw force “—to cope with it. Tame it. Take it into yourself.”
“No. The hope is that it will join itself to us.”
“Would that be so hard? Is it really so different?”
“Yes. As long as both remain true to their destinies, the gulf between is unbridgeable. Demeter Mother is the ancient life, organic, biological. To her, the inorganic, the machine, is no more than a lesser part, a means to the end of survival. She will always be of the material universe and its wildness, its chaos, its mortality. Never will her intellect be pure and wholly free.”
Kenmuir had an eerie sense that he was a hunter closing in on a majestic quarry. “But she’ll go ways that you never will, that you can never imagine, because you can’t feel them. Are you afraid of that? She’ll die with the stars, when you do not. Won’t she? Isn’t space-time big enough for you to live with her till then?”
Silence. Venator’s face became like a dead man’s. Kenrauir wondered what lay unspoken behind it. No. Reality is one. She will shape it, as I do. It will become something unforeseeable, without destiny, something other than that Ultimate which is the purpose and meaning of me.
He threw the words away. They were nothing but his imagery, no better than a mythic image of the sun as a boat or a chariot making daily passage across heaven. He must hunt farther.
“Would Lunarians on Proserpina, matter that much?” he asked.
“Think forward,” replied the oracle, and now life was again in his countenance, though it be not human life. “They will make that world over, multiply their numbers, spread among the comets, reach for the stars. They will talk with the seed of Demeter, They-will talk with their Terran kin, in whom Faust will reawaken because of it.”