Seeklight

I didn’t know his name, so it took me two days to find him. He remembered me from the starship—he said he was afraid of ever forgetting anybody again. The older part of that city was built on great steel piers over the ocean. We sat on a little deserted platform that jutted farthest out into the sea-wind, while the waves made the supporting shafts tremble, although they were anchored to the rock beneath the ocean bottom.

He told me he had made money to live in odd, scuffling ways—the sorts of things people do who are too obsessed with something inside them to notice or care what other people think of them. I didn’t find out what that something was. There would be long silences while he looked out at the dark water.

When the sun started to set and the air grew cold, I decided to leave him. Before I could get up he turned his head towards me and held my gaze. His eyes weren’t the same flat spaces they had been aboard the starship. They read the question beneath all the others I had asked.

“Information, theory,” he said simply. His eyes didn’t move from mine. “I learned it from the communications officer aboard the starship. When I first saw him—he looked in on me while I was still just lying there waiting to die—he reminded me of another man I knew a long time ago, one who had spent his life travelling aboard a different kind of ship. Maybe it was just a kind expression on the officer’s face that was the same. Anyway, after a while I found my way to the ship’s communications room.

He let me stay there for hours while he monitored the messages that came to the ship. All the worlds in the galaxy seemed to speak in that little room. That’s where I learned this language—the world I was born on has different ones.”

“After I could speak it, the communications officer spent his time talking to me. He was a lonely man, too, and appreciated having something human near him. I don’t know what I was listening for. I don’t even remember most of what he said—he talked about everything. One time, though, he said something about entropy, noise and death, and I asked him what he meant.”

I waited while he looked out at the ocean for a moment, then turned back to me.

“Entropy,” he continued, “can be defined in terms of signal-to-noise ratios. That’s how the communications officer would think of it. As things degenerate, the noise level becomes greater and greater until it drowns out the signal. That signal becomes lost, eaten away by chaos. Noise equals death.”

“But I have—within me—a signal that hasn’t died.”

He touched his chest with the fingers of one hand.

“A signal that’s still intact, untouched by the noise of time, passed down by my father and his fathers before him, in a way you know nothing of. And even though all the people who ever lived died—it’s all right. Because they’re part of that signal now.

That human message. So I can’t give up now, die and let noise, darkness, overtake first that world and then all the others. When I’ve mastered the signal, the power, when I can defeat entropy, I’ll go back, and then…”

He fell silent and turned away again.

I got up and held my arms against the cold. The last light was reddening the ocean. Before I walked back into the sections of the city that had warmth and people like me, he looked up and almost smiled. Behind his eyes, he was seeing something else.

“Rennie always hated it,” he said, “when people did things without having what she thought were good reasons but it’s still all right.”

I hurried away. When I looked back I could see his outline sharp against the dying light.