As humankind’s left hand shaped the tools with which it would break space-time’s quarantine of worlds, the right hand preferred to play with its interior mental landscapes. Human hearts continued to war with themselves, and with each other, and craved to keep their dilemmas. They were proud of the wild, contrary beasts in their breasts, the struggling armies in their brains, which kept their deep eyes open to the clash of truth against truth. Far-travelers had always known the perversity of the infinite regress, of the truth known by inspection but unprovable, and that the opposite of a profound truth might sometimes be another great truth. For truth had colors, flavors, and textures that clashed with each other, yet were not diminished or made false by the struggle.
Justine and Ibby saw quantum drives installed in the first fifteen Rocks, and this brought the habitats together in one quadrant of the northern sky. The gathering took twenty-five years. Meanwhile, groups from Earthspace and the fifteen Rocks reclaimed the empties.
Justine’s mind drifted outward. Ibby felt left behind.
“The last century and a half of trying to make a better world,” she said to him one day, “has brought rigidities to our Earthspace societies—rigidities of will and planning, and exclusion. Maybe something should always be left wild, in the very heart of stability, rather than let go, as we are letting the Rocks go.”
She sat up in the grass of Rock Fifty-three, and looked at Ibby, who was standing a few meters away. Above him was projected the entire matrix of human history, as constructed according to his project—a huge red sphere, transparent and filled with smaller spheres, each linked by seemingly solid lines of force. Each smaller sphere repeated the structure, down to a hundred levels of repetition, and each contained arrays of fact that could be accessed with enhancement.
“There’s so little to add now,” Ibby said, “trivial bits of the past beyond which we cannot penetrate, short of developing time travel.” He turned and looked back at where she lay. “There’s nothing left to do.”
They had come here to secure the systems of the engineering level, and to learn what they could of the people who had died, as Ibby and she had done in every Rock, by playing back a century of recorded fragments.
The panoptic records were never perfect, because the equipment had not been designed to enter every dwelling or follow every individual. It was the kind of record that idle gods might have made, picking up individuals at random, sweeping across larger gatherings with a blind eye, and occasionally noting the dead as an accountant might grimace at a penny error.
Here, as in many habitats where reproduction had been possible, capable couples had turned away from parenthood. This refusal had been most trenchant in populations that knew they would never return, or had discovered that they had not returned at the appointed time. Still others had been too old, or infertile at the time of incarceration, and the few births that had occurred had not been sufficient to set generations in motion.
Ibby had pitched an old-fashioned tent in the grass, and after some weeks Justine had come to appreciate the desolate beauty of the basic design that she had now seen so often. The grass she linked in her mind with yellow suns—the grass of the universe. The soft, clay-like soil was a comfort to her feet as she walked on it. Once in a while she would come upon human bones in the grass, and remind herself how common a sight it had been throughout human history; and then she would wonder how common dead civilizations might be in the starry grass of the universe.
Ibby blinked his big display off, and came to sit at her side.
“What will we do,” he asked, “when they are all gone?”
One by one, the renovating Rocks were making the decision to leave rather than return to the inner solar system. Several had already gone, accelerating to relativistic speeds that would carry them dozens of light-years, for a start. How far would they have to go, from system to system, before they stopped looking back to the Sun?
Great Clarke had once said that “no man will ever turn homeward from beyond Vega, to greet again those he knew and loved on Earth.” But he had been thinking in shorter lifespans and of travelers who were coming out from Earth for the first time, not peoples who had prepared for a starhopping way of expansion, in which each solar system became a source of raw materials and a colony base for further exploration, leaving secure what was gained and moving outward.
“What will we do,” he asked again, “when they are all gone?”
“Oh, go with—after them,” she said with resolve, then saw the look of dismay on his face. “Not right away, of course,” she added to anticipate his response.
“I don’t think I could,” he said sadly.
She looked at him with feigned surprise.
“Surely you suspected,” he said.
She wanted to say no, that it was a complete surprise, as if somehow that would make it so.
“Why not?” she asked, convinced that he could give no good answer.
“I’ve lived too long with this human history. I don’t think I could start with another—not now, when it’s been so well organized and made so accessible, so well classified even to sources a thousand times removed. I’m a point-center in my big display, and I don’t have the heart to remove myself.”
“But you won’t be removing yourself. We’ll take it with us. We’ll need it!”
He smiled at her. “This vast split in humanity that is coming will decide more than anyone can guess. No other division will ever equal it. The deferment of decision about our own kind may finally be at an end. We may be at an end.”
“But we’ve always changed, diverged…”
“Not in the way that is coming. These changes will have no continuity with the past. To keep it with us will only weigh down and confuse the new lessons that will have to be learned. The past may never again have as much importance as it had during the centuries of human beginnings.”
“You seem so certain, Ibby.”
He shrugged with what she would later describe as the weariness of histories, and said, “I’ve had my say about my own kind. My reactions have gone from hopeful to critical optimism, from disappointment to bitter hatred, hatred of the kind we found in Tasarov’s writings—and more often now to laughter. Between hatred and laughter, I prefer the laughter. And I feel most for the fools at home who are at an end.”
“Why laughter, Ibby?”
“Oh, it’s not mockery—but a kind of divine understanding that we achieve ourselves. There’s a lot of reason in laughter.”
She touched his hand and held it. “You’ve tied yourself in a knot, and I did not see it.”
“A knot which should not be untied. I’ve spent a long time tying it, and the problems it represents cannot simply be dissipated by untying it. This knot has unsolvable character, because it can’t even be cut. There would be nothing left. A man is best known, understood, measured, even valued, not by his settled conclusions, but by the dilemmas he keeps. They are the best markers of fleeting truth on the perverse road of time. My problem, Justine, is that I no longer have any dilemmas. And worse, I don’t want any new ones. I am a finished piece of work.”
“Oh, Ibby, that can’t be!”
“But it is. You must let me go.”
“How can I?”
“You can,” he said, “and you will—because you cannot bear to give up what is to come.”
“And you can give it up?” she asked.
“I can’t give up what was—because it stands within me like some massive foundation stone. Oh, I know it is cracking, but it holds me up, and will until my mind is full, and I will either forget or perish.”
“Ibby…” she started to say.
But he said, “If in some far futurity, we meet again, all new with forgetfulness, it will not be me, and it will not be you.”