Darwinia

That sky, the sky full of stars crisp as electricity and close as the end of his arm, that bothered him, too. “Why am I here?”

“To talk.”

“Maybe I don’t want to talk. Do I have a choice?”

“Of course you have a choice. You can cover your ears and whistle ‘Dixie,’ if you want. Wouldn’t you rather hear what I have to say?”

“You’re not exactly a font of good news.”

“Take a walk with me, Guilford.”

“You walk too much.”

“I think better on my feet,” the picket said.

Just as in burned London a quarter century ago, there was a forced calm inside him. He ought to be terrified. Everything was wrong… worse than wrong, some surge of memory suggested. He wondered if the picket was able to impose an emotional amnesia on him, to smother his panic.

Panic would be easy, maybe even appropriate.

“This way,” the picket said.

Guilford walked with the picket up the trail beyond the house, among the brush and wind-twisted trees. He looked back at his house, small and alone on its grassy headland, and saw the ocean beyond it, glass-flat and mirroring the stars.

“Am I dead?”

“Yes and no,” the picket said.

“That could be a little clearer.”

“It could go either way.”

Despite the unearthly calm Guilford felt a feather touch of dread.

“Depending on what?”

“Luck. Resolve. You.”

“Is this a riddle?”

“No. Just hard to explain.”

They climbed the trails steadily. Ordinarily Guilford would have been winded by the hike, but his lungs worked more efficiently here, or the air was thicker, or he was as invulnerable as a dream. Before long they reached the high summit of the hill. The picket said, “Let’s sit a while.”

They found a mosque tree and put their backs against it, the way Guilford sometimes sat with Nick on a summer night, looking at the stars. Stars in the ocean, stars in the sky. More stars than he had imagined there could be. The stars were visibly rotating — not around the northern axis but around a point directly overhead.

“Those stars,” he said, “are they real?”

“ ‘Real’ is a word that means more than you think, Guilford.”

“But this isn’t really the hill back of my house.”

“No. Just a place to rest.”

This is his ground, Guilford thought. Ghost territory. “How does it feel, being a god?”

“That’s not what I am.”

“The difference is subtle.”

“If you turn on an electric light, does that make you a god? Your own ancestors might have said so.”

Guilford blinked at the vault of the sky. “Hell of a light bulb.”

“We’re inside the Archive,” the picket said. “Specifically, we’re enclosed in a nodular logic packet attached to the procedural protocols of the Terrestrial ontosphere.”

“Well, that explains it,” Guilford said.

“I’m sorry. What I mean to say is, we’re still inside in the Archive — we can’t leave it, at least not yet — but we’re not exactly on Earth.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I can’t take you out of the Archive, but I can show you what the Archive looks like from the outside.”

Guilford wasn’t sure what he was being offered — and the buried sense of urgency still pricked at him — but since he had no real choice, he nodded. “Show me,” he said.

As suddenly as that, the sky began to shift. It ceased to spin. The stars moved in a new direction, south to north, the southern horizon dropping at a dizzying speed. Guilford gasped and wanted to cling to the ground even though there was no sensation of motion. The breeze persisted, warm and gentle from the sea.

“What am I looking at?”

“Just watch,” the picket said.

More stars scrolled up from the horizon, countless stars, and then retreated at a shocking speed, became blurs and bands of light… the arms, the disk of a galaxy. The starlight stabilized, became a vast and luminous wheel in the sky.

“The Archive’s ontosphere,” the picket said quietly. “It’s isness.”

Guilford couldn’t frame a response. He felt awe like a band across his chest, tightening.

Now the galaxy itself began to blur together, to form an undifferentiated sphere of light.

“The ontosphere in four dimensions.”

And that faded as suddenly. Now the sky was an immensity of rainbow-colored lines on velvet black, iridescent, parallel, stretching in every direction to infinity until he couldn’t bear to look, until looking threatened his sanity -

“The Higgs structure of the Archive,” the picket said, “visualized and simplified.”

Simplified! Guilford thought.

That faded, too.

For a moment the sky was utterly dark.

“If you were outside the Archive,” the picket said, “this is what you would see.”

The Archive: a seamless, sealed sphere of sullen orange light that filled the western horizon and was reflected in the still water of the bay.

“It contains all that the galaxy once was,” the picket said softly. “It did, at least, until the psions corrupted it. That smudge of red light over the hills, Guilford, is all that remains of the original galaxy, with all its stars and civilizations and voices and possibilities — an immense black hole devouring a few lifeless cinders.”

“Black hole?” Guilford managed to ask.