Darwinia

The universe, the picket said, is immensely old. Old enough to have produced scientific civilizations long before human beings perfected the stone axe. The human race was born into a galaxy saturated with sentience. Before our sun congealed from the primal dust, the picket said, there were already wonders in the universe so large and subtle that they seem more magic than science; and greater wonders to come, enterprises literally eons in the making.

He described the galaxy — our little cluster of some several million stars, itself only one of several billion such clusters — as a kind of living thing, “waking up to itself.” Lines of communication connect the stars: not telegraph or even radio communication but something that plays upon the invisible essence (the “isotropic energy,” by which I gather he means the aether) of space itself; and these close-seined nets of communication have grown so intricate that they possess an intelligence of their own! The stars, he suggested, are literally thinking among themselves, and more than that: remembering.

Preston Finch used to quote Bishop Berkeley to the effect that we are all thoughts in the mind of God. But what if that’s literally true?

This Guilford Law was a physical animal until the day he died, at which point he became a kind of thought… a seed sentience, he called it, in the mind of this local God, this evolving galactic Self.

It was not, he said, an especially exalted existence, at least at first. A human mind is still only a human mind even when it’s translated into Mind at Large. He woke into the afterlife with the idea that he was recovering from a shrapnel wound in a French field hospital, and it required the appearance of a few of the predeceased to convince him he had actually died! His “virtual” body (he called it) resembled his own so closely that there seemed to be no difference, though that could change, he was told. The essence of life is change, he said, and the essence of eternal life is eternal change. There was much to learn, worlds to explore, new forms of life to meet — to become, if the spirit so moved him. His organic body had been limited by its physical needs and by the brain’s ability to capture and retain memories. Those impediments were lifted.

He would change, inevitably, as he learned to inhabit the Mind that contained him, to tap its memories and wisdom. Not to abandon his human nature but to build on it, expand it.

And that, in sum, is what he did, for literally millions of centuries, until “Guilford Law,” the so-called seed-sentience, became a fraction of something vaster and more complex.

What I was talking to this morning was both Guilford Law and this larger being — billions upon billions of beings, in fact, linked together and yet retaining their individuality.

You can imagine my incredulity. But under the circumstances any explanation might have seemed plausible.

Can you read this as anything other than the raving of a man driven mad by isolation and shock?

The shock is real enough, God knows. I grieve for what both of us have lost.

And I don’t expect you to believe me. All I ask is your patience. And your good will, Caroline, if that stock is not exhausted.

I asked the picket how any of this could have happened. I was Guilford Law, after all, and I hadn’t died in any German war, and that was as plain as the rising of the sun.

“Long story,” he said.

I said I wasn’t going anywhere.

The afterlife, the picket said, wasn’t what he had expected. Most fundamentally, it wasn’t a supernatural afterlife — it was a man-made (or at least intelligent-creature-made) paradise, as artificial as the Brooklyn Bridge and in its own immense way equally finite. Recovered souls from a million planets were linked together in physical structures he called “noospheres,” planet-sized machines which traveled the galaxy on endless voyages of exploration. A paradise, Caroline, but not heaven, and not without its problems and enemies.

I asked him what enemies these gods could have.

“Two,” he said.

One was Time. Sentience had conquered mortality, at least on the scale of the galaxy. Since before the advent of mankind, any arguably sentient creature that died within the effectual realm of the noospheres was taken up into paradise. (Including every human being from Neanderthal Man to President Taft and beyond. Some, he implied, had required a fair degree of “moral reawakening” before they could adjust to the afterlife. I gather we’re not the most craven species in the galaxy, but we’re not the most angelic by a long shot.)