The Wanderer

“It may be that your own primitive visions of heaven — and especially your ambiguous attitude toward it: that heaven is both a great wonder and a great bore — are merely valid intuitions of that government.

“Security and safety are its watchwords. It is conservative, ruled by the old, who are everywhere a great majority since the achievement of immortality. It is painstaking, patient, just, merciful — but only to the weak! — and infinitely stubborn. Its records alone, etched on molecules, occupy the artificial planets of two star clusters. Its chief aim is simply to remember and treasure — but only as a memory! — everything that has ever happened.

“Any minimally intelligent, respectable, safe race of beings can confidently expect from it support for their life-ways. It is always against the expenditure of energy for any purpose except conservation and security: it opposes the exploration of hyperspace, or even its use, except for the transport of its police. Its greatest fear is of something that might seriously injure or altogether disrupt the universe, for now that — bar hyperspace — it is no longer possible to think of safety in infinity and the unexplored, a great cosmic death-dread has arisen.

“Yet since even immortals must reproduce, if only at a minimal rate, to keep up the illusion that they are still truly alive, the government must continually find space for new beings. They’ll be coming for your space soon, Paul. There’s been a change in the policy toward the remaining wild worlds. Heretofore they were looked on as preserves of novelty, to be shielded until they grew to galactic stature. But now their living surface is needed, and their matter, and the energy of their suns. They are to be integrated into the cosmic super-culture. Carefully, thoughtfully, and with kindness — but it will happen to you and probably within the next two hundred of your years. And it will not be a slow process — once it begins, all the wild worlds will be occupied and integrated within decades.

“To reduce its policies to a single statement, the aim of the cosmic government is to conserve intelligence until the cosmos dies. There was a time when this meant ‘forever,’ but now we see it means until mind is maximized, until all matter that can be is shaped to the service and sustaining of intelligence, until entropy is reversed to the greatest degree possible within the limits of this universe.

“They look on this as the millennium. We look on it as death.

“My people are the Wild Ones — the younger races, races like my own which grew from solitary killers, which have lived closer to death and valued style more than security, freedom more than safety; races with a passionate sadistic tinge; or coldly scientific, valuing knowledge almost more than life.

“We rate growth above immortality, adventure higher than safety. Great risks and dangers do not trouble us.

“We want to travel more substantially in time. Not just observe, but change the past, make it a fuller one, revitalize the countless dead, live in a dozen — a hundred! — presents and not one, go back to the beginning and rebuild.

“We will explore the future time-wise, too, not just to reassure ourselves that there’s a comfortable hearth fire dying there — Intelligence in its last bed and moribund. We’d grow another cosmos to live on in!

“We want to range through mind more thoroughly — that crumpled rainbow plane inside our skulls. Although telepathy and psi are commonplace, we still don’t know if there are other worlds upon the other side of the collective inward darkness — and how to visit them, an undared dream.

“We’d change all that: explore the realms of the spirit like strange continents, sail them like space, discover if all our minds rest like tiny rainbow seashells on the shores of the same black, storm-beaten, unconscious sea. Maybe that way there lie untrodden worlds. Also, we want machines that make thoughts real — another little job no one has done.

“But mostly we would open hyperspace — not use it just for rapid coastal trips, navigating only its surge-troubled fringes and keeping always in sight, however dimly, the shores and headlands of our own particular cosmos…but boldly sail beyond the universal shelf into the deep unknown with its vaster storms. That is a task for galaxies, not for planets — one or a hundred — though we will take our chances if we must.

“We think that countless cosmoses besides our own ride in the whirlwind void of hyperspace — a billion trillion scraps in the tornado, a billion trillion snowflakes in the storm. These won’t be cosmoses like ours, we think, but built of different basic particles — or never particles at all, but ever-changing continuities. Worlds of solidity or holes in that. Worlds without light. Worlds in which light may move as slow as spoken words or swift as thought. Worlds in which bits of matter grow on thought as here mind seems to grow on molecules.