LITMIR.BIZ

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if she were ever wary of bizarre accidents, she looked up into the starry sky to look for birds. She pointed to the robot lasers lining the veranda’s high walls, aimed at the dark sky, and she said, ‘But I’m not afraid of birds any longer.’

      What she had said was of course true. Life is dangerous. Because of the laws of antichance, pilots – and everyone else in our Order – almost never lived as long as Soli had. Which explains why the younger pilots called him ‘Soli The Lucky.’

      ‘It’s a dangerous universe,’ I said. ‘And mysterious, but there are beauties – you admit you’re a student of beauty.’

      ‘What do you mean by beauty?’ she wanted to know as she placed her hand between her breasts, which were brown and withered as old leather bags. She sniffed the air in my direction and wrinkled her tiny nose. Plainly, she did not like the woolly smell of my sweat-stained kamelaika. It was annoying that she looked at me as if I were the barbarian, not she.

      I pointed to the moon shining above us. I told her that the moon was really a huge bio-computer, the brain and substance of a goddess. ‘It shines like silver, and that’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘But it shares its shining intelligence with a million other moons, and just to imagine the possibilities … that’s a different, higher kind of beauty.’

      She looked at me as a logician looks at a babbling autist and said, ‘I don’t think the moon is a computer. Why should you lie to me? Computers aren’t beautiful, I don’t think.’

      I said, ‘I wouldn’t lie to you.’

      ‘And what do you mean by goddess?’

      When I had explained to her about higher intelligences and the classifications of the eschatologists, she laughed at me and said, ‘Oh, there’s God, I suppose. Or there used to be – I can’t remember anymore. But to think the moon thinks, well, that is insane!’

      Suddenly she glared at me with her old, old eyes and shook like a tent in the wind. It must have occurred to her that if I were insane, I might do something risky and was therefore a threat to her longevity. When she looked at me again, I noticed that the robots were pointing their lasers at me. She spoke to her computer and said, ‘The moon is made of … of elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.’

      ‘The elements of protein,’ I said. ‘The neurologics of computers are often made of protein.’

      ‘Oh, who cares what things are made of? What matters is peace and harmony. And you are dangerous to our harmony, I think.’

      ‘I’ll leave, if that’s what you want.’

      In truth, I couldn’t wait to leave that hot, stifling planet.

      ‘Hai, you must leave. The longer you stay, the more dangerous you become. Please, tomorrow will you leave? And please, do not talk to the children anymore. They would be frightened if they thought the moon was alive.’

      I abandoned the people to their pleasures and their decadent harmonies. In the middle of the long night, I rocketed away and fell again into the manifold. Again I fenestered inward towards the centre of the Entity’s brain. I was more determined than ever to seek the nexus of her intelligence, if indeed such a nexus existed. The further I fell, the more moon-brains I discovered. Near one hot, blue giant star, there must have been ten thousand moons clumped together like the cells of an embryo. I had an intense feeling that I was witnessing something I was not meant to see, as if I had caught my mother naked in her morning bath. Were the moons somehow reproducing themselves, I wondered? I could not tell. I could not see into the centre of the clump because the space there was as black as a black hole. Even though I knew it would be chancy to fall any further, I was afire with the possibilities of new, godly life, so I made a point-to-point mapping into the centre of the gathered moons.

      Immediately, I knew that I had made a simple mistake. My ship did not fall out into the centre of the moons. Instead, I segued into a junglelike decision tree. A hundred different pathways opened before me, dividing and branching into ten thousand others. I was sick with fear because I had only instants to decide upon the correct branching, or I would be lost.

      I reached out with my mind to my ship, and slowtime overcame me. My brain rushed with thoughts, as snowflakes swirl in a cold wind. As my mentations accelerated, time seemed to slow down. I had a long, stretched-out instant in which to prove a particularly difficult mapping theorem. I had to prove it quickly, as quickly as I could think. The computer modelled my thoughts and began infusing my visual cortex with ideoplasts that I summoned up from memory. These crystal-like symbols glittered before my inner eye; they formed and joined and assembled into the proof array of my theorem. Each individual ideoplast was lovely and unique. The representation of the fixed-point theorem, for instance, was like a coiled ruby necklace. As I built my proof, the coil joined with feathery, diamond fibres of the first Lavi mapping lemma. I was thinking furiously, and the ideoplasts froze into place. The intricate emerald glyphs of the statement of invariance, the wedgelike runes of the sentential connectives, and all the other characters – they formed a three-dimensional array ordered by logic and inspiration. The quicker I thought, the quicker the ideoplasts appeared as if from nothingness and found their place in the proof array. This mental manipulation of symbol into proof has a special name: We call it the number storm because the rush of pure mathematical thinking is overwhelming, like a blizzard in midwinter spring.

      With the number storm carrying me along towards the moment of proof, I passed into dreamtime. There was an indescribable perception of orderedness; there was beauty and terror as the manifold opened before me. The number storm intensified, nearly blinding me with the white light of dreamtime. I wondered, as I had always wondered, at the nature of dreamtime and that wonderful mental space we call the manifold. Was the manifold truly deep reality, the reality ordering the shape and texture of the outer universe? Some cantors believe this (my mother is not one of these), and it is their faith that when mathematics is perfectly realized, the universe will be perfectly understood. But they are pure mathematicians, and we pilots are not. In the manifold there is no perfection. There is much that we do not understand.

      I was deep in dreamtime when I realized I did not understand the type of the decision tree branching all about me. I was close to my proof – I needed only to show that the Lavi set was embedded in an invariant space. But I could not show this, and I did not know why. It should have been a simple thing to do. When the tree divided and split into a million and then a billion different branches, I began to sweat. Dreamtime intensified into that terrifying, nameless state I thought of as ‘nightmaretime.’ Suddenly I proved that the Lavi set could not be embedded in an invariant space. My heart was beating like a panicked child’s. With my panic came despair, and my proof array began to crash, to shatter like ice crystals ground beneath a leather boot. There would be no proof, I knew. There would be no mapping to a point-exit in real space. I would not fall out around any star, near or distant. I was not merely lost in a hideous decision tree, I had stumbled – or been propelled – into an infinite tree. Even in the worst of decision trees, there is a probability that a pilot will find the correct branch among the billion billion branchings. But in an infinite tree, there is no correct branch, no branch leading to an exit into the warm sunlight of realspace. The tree spreads outward, one branch growing into another, and into ten centillion others, on and on, dividing and redividing into infinity. From an infinite tree there is no escape. My neurons would gradually disassociate, synapse by synapse, leaving me to play with my toes as a child plays with the beads of an abacus. I would be insane, blinded by the number storm, frozen in forever dreamtime, forever drooling into infinity. Or, if I turned away from my ship-computer and let my mind go quiet, there would be nothing, nothing but an empty black coffin carrying me into the hell of the manifold.

      I knew then that I had lied to myself utterly. I was not ready to chance everything to experience a goddess; I was not ready to face death at all. I remembered I had chosen my fate freely. I could only blame myself and my foolish pride. My last thought, as a scream formed upon my lips and I began hearing voices inside me, was: Why is man born to self-deception and lies?

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