Distress

Sad. There were nine million suicides. Nine million people we could not hold up, when all illusions of solidity vanished. And I'm still not certain that there was no other way—that I found the only possible bridge into the Information Cosmos. If I'd let myself descend into the madness of Distress, would someone else have asked a different last question, and found another way through?

No one has accused me, no one has judged me. I've never been damned as a criminal, or hailed as a savior. The idea that a single Keystone could ever have explained ten billion people into existence is absurd, now. In retrospect, Distress is seen as no different from the naïve illusion that every galaxy is rushing away from us—when in truth, there is not, and cannot be, any center at all.

I talk haltingly about Lamont's Area. "It made people think that they knew each other, and could speak for each other, understand each other—much more than they really could. Some of you might still have it in your brain—but in the face of the evidence, now, it's easy to ignore."

I try to explain about the delusion of intimacy, and how much was invested in it once. They listen politely, but I can see that it makes no sense to them, because they know full well that they've lost nothing. Love in the face of the truth has turned out to be stronger than ever. Happiness never really depended on the old lies.

Not for these children, born without crutches.

In vis home in the dazzling bounteous engineered jungle of Malawi, I'd told Akili I was dying. After you, there was no one. And we'd touched for the last time.

I move on quickly.

"Other people," I add, "lamented the end of mystery. As if nothing would remain to be discovered, once we understood what lay beneath our feet. And it's true that there are no more 'deep' surprises—there's nothing left to learn about the reasons for the TOE, or the reasons for our own existence. But there'll be no end to discovering what the universe can contain; there'll always be new stories written in the TOE— new systems, new structures, explained into being. There might even be other minds on other worlds, co-creators whose nature we can't even imagine yet.

"Violet Mosala once said: 'Reaching the foundations doesn't mean hitting the ceiling.' She helped us all touch the foundations; I only wish she could have lived to see you building on them, higher than anyone has built before."

I take my seat. The children applaud politely—but I feel like a senile fool for telling them that their future is unbounded.

They already knew that, of course.

author's note

Among many works which inspired me in the writing of this novel, I must single out Dreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg, Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said, and "Out of the Light, Back Into the Cave" by Andy Robertson (Interzone 65, November 1992). The excerpt from the poem Technoliberation is modeled on a passage from Aime Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.