Galaxy of Mirrors
Paul Di Filippo
Silent and observant, Fayard Avouris clustered with his fellow chattering tourists at the enormous bow-bellied windows constituting the observation deck of the luxury starliner Melungeon Bride. Their lazy, leisurely, loafers’ ship had just taken up orbit around the uninhabited wilderness world dubbed Youth Regained. Soon the cosseted and high-paying visitors would be ferried down to enjoy such unspoiled natural attractions as the Scintillating Firefalls, the Roving Islands of Lake Vervet, and the Coral Warrens of the Drunken Monkey-mites. Then, before boredom could set in, off to the next stop: the hedonistic casino planet of Rowl.
Contemplating the lovely, patchwork, impasto orb hung against a backdrop of gemlike stars flaring amber, magenta, and violet, Fayard Avouris sighed. This trip had failed, so far, either to re- stimulate his sense of wonder or replenish his intellectual pep.
A fellow of medium height and pudgy girth, Avouris did not necessarily resemble the stereotypical professor of anthropology, but neither did he entirely defy such a status. He looked rather too louche and proletarian to be employed as an instructor by such a famous university as the Alavoine Academy of Durwood IV. His style of dress was humble and careless, and his rubicund countenance marked him as a fan more of various weathers than of library interiors. But a certain pedantic twist to his lips, and a tendency to drop the most abstruse and aberrant allusions into mundane conversation betrayed his affiliation with the independently thinking classes.
A proud affiliation of many years, which he had routinely cherished up until his nervous breakdown some six months ago.
The unanticipated mental spasm had overtaken Avouris as he lectured a classroom full of graduate students, his remarks also being streamed onto the astromesh for galactic consumption. His theme that day was the explicable exoticism of the several dozen cultures dominant on Hrnd, ranging from the Whitesouls and their recondite taxonomy of sin to the Gongoras and their puzzling paraphilias. As he recounted a particularly spicy anecdote from his field studies among the Gongoras, involving an orgy featuring the massive “walking birds” of the Faraway Steppes, an anecdote that could always be counted on to hold the audience spellbound, he suddenly felt his own savor for the tale evaporate.
And then his hard-won mental topography of galactic culture instantly flattened.
Ever since his own undergraduate days, Fayard Avouris had painstakingly built up a multidimensional mental map of the hundreds of thousands of human societies and their quirks. Useful as an aide-mémoire, this metaphorical model of the Milky Way’s myriad ethnographical topoi resembled a mountain range of human diversity, a splendid chart of mankind’s outré customs.
But all of a sudden, his laboriously honed virtual creation deflated to a thin pancake of dull homogeneity.
Whereas previous to this moment Avouris had always seen humans, the only sentients in all the vast galaxy, as creatures exhibiting a practically infinite range of behaviors, suddenly his species seemed to resemble paramecia in their limited repertoire. Like some star collapsing into a black hole and losing all its unique complexion in darkness, all the manifold variations of human behavior born of chance, circumstance and free will now imploded into a kernel of mere instinctual responses to stimuli. Humanity seemed no more than hardwired automatons. Sentience itself, so precious and unique amidst all the organisms in a life-teeming galaxy, appeared more like a curse than a gift. All of humanity’s long variegated history appeared bland and predictable.
Avouris slammed to a stop in mid-sentence and froze in place, hands clamped on the podium. A hastily summoned EMT crew had been required to remove him from behind the lectern.
Alavoine Academy had been very understanding and sympathetic. The tenured holder of the Stridor Chair of Anthropology simply needed a sabbatical; he had been working too hard. A university-sponsored ticket for the next cruise of the Melungeon Bride would solve everything. He’d return invigorated and in top- notch mental health.
But now, three planets into the cruise, as Fayard Avouris contemplated more sightseeing—this time, thankfully, on a world devoid of humans—any such recovery seemed increasingly problematical. The matter of how he could ever reawaken his quondam fascination with the antics of his race plagued him. Moreover, he had begun to suspect that his own dalliance with neurosis was not unique—that this affliction was becoming widespread, and that his own anticipatory bout with it reflected merely a greater sensitivity to the zeitgeist.
On this cruise, Avouris had discreetly probed his fellow passengers, seeking to ascertain their level of excitement regarding their itinerary. The first three stops had occurred at worlds that boasted supremely exotic cultures that deviated far from the galactic norm, a con-sensual baseline of behaviors continually updated by astromesh polling.
On the world known as Karoshi, people vied to perform the most odious jobs possible in order to attain the highest social status. The most admired and rewarded citizens, virtual royalty, were those who applied medicinal salves to the sores of plague victims via their tongues.
On Weebo III, exogamy was enforced to the exact degree that no two citizens could enjoy intercourse unless a different stranger was invited into the affair each time.
And on Tugnath, a booming trade in afterlife communications involved the perilous enactment of near-death experiences among the interlocutors.
And here they were now at the edenic Youth Regained, afterwards to be visiting Rowl, Lyrely, Ahab’s Folly, Zizzofizz and Port Canker. Surely, an itinerary to feed a lifetime of vibrant memories.
And yet Avouris’s companions manifested little real excitement. They seemed bored or apathetic, no matter how bizarre their encounters with oddball races. Why? Not because they were all jaded cosmopolites; many of the travelers aboard the Melungeon Bride were entirely new to starfaring. No, the only explanation that Avouris could sustain involved immunization to the limited ideational space of human customs and beliefs.
No matter how strange a culture looked initially, upon closer contemplation it became merely one more predictable example of a general class of human behaviors. Death, sex, piety, hedonism, sports, procreative ardor, fashion sense, artistic accomplishment—these few motivators, along with a couple of others, constituted the entire range of determinants for human culture. True, the factors could be combined and permuted in a large number of ways. But in the end, a discerning or even a naïve eye could always unriddle the basic forces at work.
This sense of a limited ideational space constraining the potentials of the species was what had brought Avouris down with a crash. And he suspected that some of the same malaise was beginning to afflict the general populace as well, a millennium into the complete expansion of humanity into the peerless galaxy.
If only other modalities of sentience had presented themselves, mankind could have had various educational windows to look through, rather than an endless hall of mirrors. But galactic evolution had been cruel and parsimonious with regards to intelligence. . . .
Flatscreens across the observation deck and on various personal devices came to life with the voice and face of Slick Willywacker, the ship’s obnoxious tummler. Fayard Avouris experienced a crawling dislike for the clownish fellow.
“Hey-nonny-nay, sirs and sirettes! Prepare to embark for a glamorous groundling’s go-round! We’ll be loading the lighters with the guests from cabins A100 through A500 first. Meanwhile, have a gander at these little imps cavorting in realtime down below!”
The screens filled with Drunken Monkey-mites at play in the surf. The tiny agile beings seemed beguilingly human, but Avouris knew that they were in reality no smarter than a terrestrial gecko.
Sighing deeply, Avouris turned toward the exit. Perhaps he’d just sit at the bar and drink all day. . . .
Startled exclamations and shrieks caused the anthropologist to whirl around and face the windows again.
In the moment of turning his back upon Youth Regained, the planet had changed radically.
Where before empty plains and coasts and mountain ranges had loomed, there now reared vast conurbations, plainly artificial in nature. From this low- orbit vantage, Avouris could even make out extensive agricultural patternings.
Avouris inquired of a stranger, “What happened?”
The elderly woman replied in a dazed fashion. “I don’t know. I just blinked, and life was altered!”
The screens had gone blank during this inexplicable and impossible transition. But now they flared back to life.
A single Drunken Monkey-mite face dominated each display. But this creature resembled the little imps of a minute past only insofar as a lemur resembled a human. This evolved being wore clothing, and stood in a room full of alien devices.
The Monkey-mite spoke in perfect astromesh-standard Galglot.
“Hello, ship in orbit. Who are you? Where do you come from? We have never had visitors before!”
Fayard Avouris felt a big smile crease his face.
Life had suddenly become vitally interesting again.
The stark and cheerless offices of the Okhranka on Muntjac in the Al’queem system had not been designed to coddle visitors. Generally speaking, the only types who visited the Okhranka willingly and via the public entrance were vendors of spyware and concealed weaponry; informers either vengeful or altruistic; errant politicians being called out to correct their views; and kooks with sundry theories regarding infernal dangers and utopian opportunities.
Fayard Avouris knew without a doubt that the officials of the galactic security apparatus would certainly place him in the last- named category. An academic from a small institution, however respectable, purporting to hold unique insights regarding the biggest conundrum of recorded history, a puzzle which had kept all the best minds of the galaxy stymied for the past six months—well, how else could he appear to them, other than as one of those eccentric amateurs who claimed to hold the answer to the fabled disappearance of the Pitchforth Lady, or the key to the unbreakable ciphers of the Neo-Essenes?
Knowing how he must appear to these bureaucrats, who were probably observing him in secret even now, Avouris strove to maintain his dignity, composure and respectability, even as he tallied his third excruciating hour of waiting in this uncomfortable chair. For the twentieth time he paged through a hardcopy leaflet entitled A Field Agent’s Best Practices for Intra-urban Rumor Quelling without seeing a word of the text, all the while revolving in his mind the most compelling way to deliver his pitch.
Ever since making his discovery some five weeks ago, Avouris had striven to reach someone in the government who would pay heed to his findings. After many futile entreaties, this appointment with a mid-level apparatchik had been the best meeting he could secure. He wondered now what I. G. Narozhylenko would look like, how receptive he would be. Avouris had tried searching the astromesh for details of the man, but as an Okhranka functionary, the fellow was almost nonexistent so far as public records went. Avouris hoped he would be neither too apathetic nor too closed- minded to listen to an unconventional theory.
Just as the anthropologist was about to peruse the old leaflet for the twenty-third time, an inner door opened and Narozhylenko’s personal assistant appeared. Avouris instinctively admired the young woman’s grace and shape and modest yet stylish fashion sense. Short hair the color of a raven’s wing, arrayed in bangs across an intelligent forehead, nicely framed alert, inquisitive features.
“You may enter now, Professor Avouris.”
Inside the office, Avouris dropped down into a guest chair microscopically more comfortable than his previous seat. To his astonishment, the woman took up a desk chair on the far side of a nameplate scribed AGENT I. G. NAROZHYLENKO.
“You are I. G. Narozhylenko?”
“Yes, Ina Glinka Narozhylenko.” The woman smiled wryly. “You had a pre-formed conception of me at variance with reality?”
“No, of course not! That is, I—” Avouris gave up apologies and explanations as a waste of time. Luckily, Narozhylenko did not seem put out or inclined to pursue the embarrassing matter. Indeed, Avouris seemed to detect a small smile threatening to escape bureaucratic suppression.
“Let’s get right to your business then, Professor. I won’t apologize for keeping you waiting so long. As you might imagine, our agency has been stressed beyond belief in dealing with the advent of these nonhuman sophonts. Not only must we manage the pressing practical issues involved in fitting them into galactic culture, but the implications of their instant creation carry even more disturbing challenges. The past six months have overturned so many paradigms that we can barely get our heads above the wreckage. Galactic culture is churning like a Standeven milkmaid on the eve of the springtime butter-sculpting festival.”
Avouris appreciated the clever metaphor. It seemed to bespeak learning, humor and broad-mindedness: three qualities he could appeal to in his pitch.
“I agree absolutely. Out of nowhere, our age has become a revolutionary era.”
The miraculous and instantaneous transformation of Youth Regained from a wilderness planet into the seemingly long-established homeworld of the first nonhuman civilization ever encountered had been merely the opening note in a bizarre symphony of spontaneous generation.
Shortly thereafter, the world known as Pronk- Kissle had instantly flipped from uninhabited desert wastes to the thriving techno-hives of giant talking sand fleas.
Voynet VII suddenly sported a global culture of stratospheric sentient gasbags.
Spaethmire now hosted a single group intelligence distributed across billions of individuals resembling both sessile and mobile slime molds.
Los Caminos now featured continent-spanning burrows populated by sensitive and poetical beings who resembled naked mole-rats crossbred with whales, each one large as a subway car.
And so on, for another two dozen transformed worlds scattered across the formerly humans-only galaxy, with fresh instances occurring at regular intervals.
All these new alien civilizations had just two things in common.
They all claimed to have arisen naturally over geological timespans on their native planets.
None of them had ever encountered humans before.
These mutually exclusive assertions—each tenet impossible in its own way, given humanity’s long acquaintance with these worlds—had engendered scores of theories, none of which had yet been proven to represent the truth.
Ina Glinka Narozhylenko regarded Avouris sternly. “You’re not here to tell me you have the answer to these manifestations, are you, Professor? Because I do not believe that your field of expertise—anthropology, is it not?—could feature insights unavailable to our best quantum physicists and plectic fabulists.”
Momentarily distracted by the deep grey eyes of the attractive Okhranka agent, Fayard Avouris hesitated a moment before saying, “Oh, no, Agent Narozhylenko, I don’t pretend to know the origins of these aliens. However, I do believe that I can predict with some degree of accuracy where the next such outbreak will occur.”
Narozhylenko leaned forward intently. “You have exactly fifteen minutes to justify this bold assertion, Professor.”
“I have here a memory stick. If you would be so kind as to plug it into your system, Agent Narozhylenko . . .”
The woman did so.
On a large screen popped up a navigable simulacrum of the galaxy. Avouris rose to stand beside the screen where he could interact with the display.
“Here are the recorded outbreaks.” The map zoomed and shrank across several scales, as Avouris called up the locations of the alien worlds as he had plotted them earlier. “Do you see any pattern to their distribution?”
“No. And neither did any of several thousand experts.”
“Ah, but that is because you do not have a solid theory that would allow you to examine and compare the relevant data sets.”
Avouris went on to explain about his personal disillusionment, his dismal anti- epiphany regarding human limitations and sameness, and how he believed that such a malaise was now a general, albeit unrecognized, condition across the galaxy.
“I call this spiritual ailment ‘Mirror Sickness.’ Perhaps you’ve seen symptoms of it around you, or even in yourself . . . ?”
Agent Narozhylenko sat pensive. “Yes . . . yes . . . I recognize the feeling. Proceed with your presentation.”
“I have spent hundreds of hours since the first alien incursion performing astromesh polling across thousands of worlds on the phenomenon of Mirror Sickness.” The screen came alive with animated histograms. “Sifting the results involved the employment of a number of expert machine systems, or I would not have finished for years. In any case, here is a map of the neurosis, graded by severity of symptoms.”
Avouris overlaid his findings atop the display of alien outbreaks.
Agent Narozhylenko rose slowly to her feet. “They match . . . they match exactly! Aliens are appearing at equidistant loci relative to those human worlds most despairing of the limitations of our species.”
“Let’s call them ‘the loneliest worlds,’ for convenience’s sake. And you’ll note that the manifestations are precisely encoding the severity gradient of Mirror Sickness, from worst case downward.”
Narozhylenko approached the screen and magnified a sector of the galactic map. “Wustner’s Weatherbolt should display the next outbreak then. In just a week’s time.” She turned to Avouris. “Are you currently free from teaching duties, Professor Avouris?”
“Now, and perhaps for the rest of my life!”
Agent Ina Glinka Narozhylenko manifested superior piloting abilities at the helm of her little space clipper, the Okhranka-supplied Whispering Shade. Fayard Avouris felt utterly safe in her hands, although her extremely speedy and cavalier passage through the Oort Cloud on the extremes of the Sockeye star system where the world called Wustner’s Weatherbolt revolved had induced a little transient anxiety in the anthropologist.
But now, as the homely little ship floated serenely and safely above the rondure of the planet where—if Avouris’s theory and calculations were correct—a miraculous transformation from nescient virgin mudball to home of another unprecedented alien civilization was about to occur, Avouris could not fully relax. Unable to quell a griping sense of injustice, he felt compelled to speak.
“I still can’t believe that you and I were deputed alone to affirm my theory. Are your superiors insane or merely mingy, that they could not devote more resources than this to such a potentially lucrative information-gathering expedition? Where is the vast armada of research vessels that should have accompanied us?”
Across the cabin from where Avouris sat, Agent Narozhylenko fussed with the craft’s small food reconstituter, preparing a meal. Avouris admired her efficient, graceful movements. He only wished the woman would open up and discuss personal matters with him. The social ambiance during their journey of three days had been rather more arid and formalistic than Avouris could have wished. But so far, Agent Ina Glinka Narozhylenko had maintained a scrupulously businesslike demeanor. After his one attempt to call her by her given names and to probe into her familial background had been met with silence and a frosty stare and the subliminal threat of esoteric martial-arts dissuasions, he had refrained from any further pleasantries. So now all he could do by way of conversation was complain.
“The Okhranka Directorate,” said the agent in response to his gripe, “are not fools or gamblers. And their resources are always limited, never more so than at present. Oftentimes only a single agent is tasked with a complex assignment. We are highly competent and trained across a broad number of surprising disciplines. The Whispering Shade boasts all the sensors of a larger craft, so more vessels would be superfluous. And the satellites I’ve launched give us complete telemetric coverage of the planet. Believe me, if we witness the fulfillment of your prediction, the next such occasion will merit a fuller contingent.”
Avouris grumped before responding. “Well, I suppose you people know what you’re doing.”
Narozhylenko cocked one eyebrow. “A very generous allowance on your part, Professor Avouris. Now, would you care for some shabara filets?”
After eating they rested in their separate berths, under a programmed bout of artificial sleep. The guardian machines triggered wakefulness well in advance of the projected time for the planetary transition. Then commenced the nerve-wracking waiting.
“What do you see as the probable cause of these eruptions of nonhuman sentience, Professor?” Narozhylenko asked, while she fiddled with the satellites’ feed. “Of the theories so far proposed, I place Planck-level punctuated equilibrium first, global de-masking of long-established hidden worlds second, and mass mind-tampering third.”
Avouris shook his head thoughtfully. “No, no, none of those explanations appeal to me as sufficiently comprehensive. Whatever the answer, it will be more complex than any scenario so far advanced. And then we have the question of motive. I can’t believe this is a natural phenomenon. A prime mover is implied. Who and why? And why now?”
“Perhaps your own theories about the spatial distribution of the changes will contribute to an ultimate solution, Professor.”
“So I hope. Now, let us focus on these screens. The change is imminent, I believe.”
Agent Narozhylenko moved to magnify the image of Wustner’s Weatherbolt on one display, but even as she did so the planet vanished, to be replaced by an edgeless curving wall bristling with dangerous- looking protrusions.
Avouris could merely gasp and say, “What the—?” before Narozhylenko had moved to step down the scale of the display.
Interposed between the Whispering Shade and the altered planet was a space-going vessel that had appeared from nowhere. So enormous as to render the Okhranka ship a pea next to a prize-winning pumpkin, the alien craft radiated martial prowess and a defiant hostility.
Narozhylenko’s frantic fingers found an active communications channel.
A separate panel showed a being that resembled a bipedal lobster colored fungal white. Its stubby midriff legs wiggled angrily. It occupied a command center bustling with others of its kind.
Avouris had time only to say, “That’s plainly an evolved form of the Ghost Crawdad of Miravalle Caverns.” Then the lobster was speaking.
“You are friends of the World Thinker, or enemies?”
“Who is the World Thinker?” asked Narozhylenko.
“Wrong answer. Now you must die.”
A coruscating sphere of blue-gold energy bloomed from the ship of the Ghost Crawdads, but the Whispering Shade was already curving and jinking away. The ball of destruction missed them and decohered violently but uselessly, flooding space with radiation. On the communications channel, the lobster captain gestured silently with his antennae, audio transmissions temporarily suspended at Narozhylenko’s behest.
Sweating yet composed, Narozhylenko said, “We have to get well beyond the mass of the planet before I dare kick in the superposition drive. Even then it’s extremely dangerous. Stall these angry arthropods somehow! Go!”
She flicked the audio back on, and Avouris began to babble.
“Sweet saltworms to you, my hardshell friends! May all your mates molt most enticingly! You mistake us for enemies? We are not! This World Thinker you mention is unknown to us. Please enlighten us poor, exoskeleton-bereft, leg-deficient beings.”
The lobster captain made no reply, but evidently shut off his own audio to consult with his officers. Narozhylenko evoked a tithe of additional power from the Shade’s engines. Avouris felt his own shirt pasted to his wet armpits.
“That’s it, keep it up! Just another five minutes . . .”
The lobster’s idiosyncratic but intelligible Galglot resumed. “You must know the World Thinker, source of all intelligence. His gift is a poisoned one, though. Admit it! Don’t you wish his destruction, impossible as that might be?”
“Oh, of course! Death to all World Thinkers! Free the sentients!”
The lobster captain performed what could only be interpreted as a disdainful arthropodic glare. “Your protestations are insufficiently sincere. Goodbye.”
Several more deadly rosettes of energy bloomed, converging rapidly and ineluctably on the human ship, just as Narozhylenko shouted, “Now!”
The Whispering Shade juddered, leaped, its metal bones ringing with one tremendous bong! then settled down into easy superposition travel outside the relativistic universe.
Agent Narozhylenko jumped up from the controls and flung herself at Fayard Avouris. He hardly knew how to react, half-expecting chastising corporal punishment for his diplomatic incompetence. But the agent’s kisses and caresses soon allayed that fear. Avouris returned them heartily.
In the interstices, the anthropologist whispered, “Oh, Ina Glinka . . .”
“No,” she whispered lusciously, “call me Rosy. . . .”
The armada amassed around Wangba- Szypyt IX would have caused the Ghost Crawdads to shed their tails and flee. The Okhranka Directorate was taking no chances on the arrival of another belligerent space-faring set of aliens. The human ships were porcupined with weaponry.
On the command deck of the lead cruiser, Rosy and Fayard occupied a rare position of civilian perquisite. Agent Narozhylenko was discussing tactics with a dour silver-haired soldier named Admiral Leppo Brice, while Avouris speculated with a team of academics about which species native to Wangba-Szypyt IX would be the candidate for uplift by the mysterious World Thinker.
“I like the odds on the Golden Dog-Snails. They already exhibit complex herd behaviors. . . .”
After their safe return from the Sockeye system, Rosy and Fayard had been thoroughly debriefed by the Okhranka. The telemetric records of their encounter with the Ghost Crawdads and the transformation of their planet had proven illuminating. Physicists were still analyzing the instantaneous phase-change the planet had undergone, but no final theories about the methodologies or technics employed by the enigmatic prime mover referenced by the Ghost Crawdads were forthcoming as yet. Of course, researches among the more placid alien races also continued apace.
The success of Fayard’s prediction and the strategic resourcefulness of Agent Narozhylenko naturally ensured that both would be invited to witness the next eruption of sentience.
As for their personal affairs—well, Fayard often caught himself whistling tunelessly and wearing the broadest of grins. All his old anomie derived from Mirror Sickness had been dispelled like mist before a tornado. Such was the power of Rosy’s affections.
Additionally, Mirror Sickness itself seemed to be abating as a cultural wavefront. The arrival of these new sophonts into the formerly homogenous galactic milieu was having a stimulating positive effect.
Avouris had taken this change into account in his calculations, redoing his astromesh polling to reflect the changed gradients of Mirror Sickness. His old predictions, in fact, had nominated the world of Bricklebank as the next candidate for change after Wustner’s Weatherbolt. But the new dynamics had brought them here instead.
And now the predicted moment was nearly at hand.
Hemmed in by taut-nerved military personnel, Fayard and Rosy intently observed the big screen dominated by a view of the mottled sapphire that was Wangba-Szypyt IX.
The anticipated moment came—
—passed—
—and passed again, with no evident change. Admiral Brice demanded, “Status groundside!” “No alterations, sir!”
Avouris began to feel sick. “What of Bricklebank?”
The communications officer reported no relevant news from that world, then hesitated at fresh data.
“Admiral Brice, a mining colony in the Furbini system reports an uplift outbreak there!”
“Belligerents?”
“No, sir. The new aliens appear to be vegetative in origin.”
A grim-faced Rosy clasped the hand of her lover in support. His voice weakly solicitous, Fayard Avouris contributed: “That would probably be the Hardaway Pitcher Plants. They already employ their vines like tentacles. . . .”
Admiral Brice glared at the hapless anthropologist. “Luckily, Professor, your incompetence has resulted in no harm to any innocents.”
“I assure you, Admiral, the next time—”
But the next predicted occurrence likewise failed to meet Avouris’s specifications.
And after that, his services were no longer valued at a premium.
What damnable factor had thrown off his careful plot of the contingent uplift instances? Avouris sensed that the errors were down to a faulty map of the Mirror Sickness. But his polling techniques and data-mining were watertight, as evidenced by his success at Wustner’s Weatherbolt.
Therefore, he must be getting bad inputs. Could some cultural force manifesting only in the portion of the galaxy currently under examination be responsible?
Avouris began a mental tour of his restored virtual topography of human culture.
The Leatherheads of Xyella would speak truth only to fellow clansmen, but his polling of them had enlisted such informers.
The Mudmen of Bitterfields offered the reverse of what they believed. A transparent fix.
The Pingpanks of Stellwagen V radically modified all their speech with a complex vocabulary of mudras. Trivial to interpolate those gestures.
The Perciasepians of Troutfalls—
Some trained intuition made Avouris re-examine what he knew about this culture.
Six months ago, unknown to an otherwise preoccupied Avouris, a prophet named Hardesty had manifested among the Perciasepians. Hardesty’s rubric? Simplicity itself!
Optimism trumped reality!
Archived news reports revealed that the faddish ethos had spread like a plague, to the point that no Perciasepian nowadays would ever admit to any despair.
Here was the blot in his calculations! The Perciasepians had denied any Mirror Sickness among them.
Hastily, Avouris took his Perciasepian datapoints from half a year ago, prior to Hardesty’s advent, added in some compensatory factors, and reformulated his maps.
Eureka!
The office of Ina Glinka Narozhylenko had never witnessed such an intemperate visitor. Bursting into Rosy’s inner sanctum, Avouris found the agent occupied with the minor and semi-humiliating tasks she had been assigned since the debacle of sponsoring Avouris.
“Bofoellesskaber! Bofoellesskaber!”
“Fayard, please. What does that nonsense mean?”
“It’s the place where the next uplift outbreak will happen! You’ve got to tell the Directorate!”
“They want no part of you or me.”
“Then we’ll just have to go alone to prove we’re right.”
“I cannot secure a ship from the Okhranka this time.”
“We’ll rent one! What good are my savings now? Are you with me?”
Rosy sighed. “Who would take care of you otherwise?”
Once more, Rosy kicked at a plant resembling a green hassock. The vegetable furniture emitted a squeak from its punctured bladders, and collapsed fractionally into itself.
“Damn that cheating shipyard! And damn me for trusting them!”
Sitting on another living ottoman, Fayard nursed his contusions and sighed. “Please, Rosy, no more self-recriminations. Your skills are the only reason we are still alive.”
Some yards distant, the crumpled hulk of an old Pryton’s Nebulaskimmer still exuded vital fluids into the lush turf of Bofoellesskaber, at the terminus of a mile-long gouge in the planet’s rich soil. The rental craft would never journey from star to star again.
Rosy plopped down beside Fayard. “Granted. But I should have done a better pre-flight inspection. It’s just that we were in such a hurry—”
“My fault entirely. But look at the bright side. We’re unharmed for the moment. When the uplift happens, chances are good that the new aliens will be benevolent. Their presence will register on the Directorate’s desktop, an expedition will arrive, and we’ll soon be safely home.”
“I suppose . . .”
“Let’s brace ourselves now. We can expect the change soon.”
Fayard and Rosy hugged each other as they tried to anticipate what the uplift experience would feel like from planetside. Would the unknown phenomenon have any effect on their own constitutions? Might they be mutated in fast-forward fashion?
A subliminal shiver like the kiss of a ghost resonated through them. The moment must have come! But outwardly, nothing had changed.
“We must be distant from any new alien settlement on this world . . .” ventured Avouris.
“Fayard, look!”
Rosy was pointing skyward.
Bofoellesskaber’s single sun had been replaced by three.
A voice spoke in their heads: Welcome to your future. I am the World Thinker, humanity’s final heir.
As the World Thinker patiently explained things to his accidental visitors, his work was practically child’s play, here in a period some two billion years removed from Fayard and Rosy’s time.
Viewing the past and selecting a planet with the best potential for uplift, and in a galactic location where it would subsequently do the most good to mitigate Mirror Sickness, this demiurge would abstract the world entire from its native era. Brought forward to the far future and installed in this artificial star system whose three suns could be modulated to provide just the right spectrum that would mimic the original stellar environment, the world was ready for development.
The World Thinker next approached the species chosen for uplift treatment, tinkered with its genome to foster sentience, and then simply allowed Darwinian evolution to take its course over a few hundred or thousand millennia. No acceleration necessary. The alien culture would develop naturally in situ. When judged ripe, the whole world would be translated back to Fayard and Rosy’s era without more than a single unit of Planck time having ticked by in the eyes of the human observers in the past, thus making a whole race appear to arise instantaneously out of nowhere.
“But why?” asked Avouris. Despite receiving no visible sign of the World Thinker, Fayard had conceived an image of the being from its mental projections, an image which consorted nicely with a fussy old neurotic and knowledge-heavy librarian from his own undergraduate days.
A note of resigned sadness filtered into the World Thinker’s speech. To render myself nonexistent.
The native timeline known to the World Thinker had never exhibited any sentience save humanity. The cosmic human civilization had succumbed to wave after wave of Mirror Sickness, resulting in myriad ugly apocalyptic crashes and warped resurgences, an endless cycle of inbred frustration and soul miasma that had culminated in the World Thinker’s own lonely damaged birth at the end of human history.
I am an imperfect thing, half mad and so much less than I could have been. I bear within me the entire record of humanity’s bitter isolation. But it occurred to me that I could remake the past, to engender a better scenario. So I chose your era as the pivotal moment to install change, and began to seed it with alien sentience.
Rosy interrupted. “But if you still exist, then your plan did not work. Your seeding occurred two billion years ago, and yet you remain. You should have vanished instantly upon first conceiving of your scheme.”
A faint sense of laughter seemed to permeate the next words of the World Thinker.
But then how would the scheme ever have been carried out to result in my vanishing? No, the chronal paradoxes are unresolved. Am I operating across multiple timelines, living in one and tinkering with another, or do all my actions occur only in one strand of the multiverse? Maybe I am improving the continuum next door to mine. Is that yours or not? In any case, I have no choice but to continue. Humanity cannot develop in a healthy manner without alien peers. I am testament to that premise.
The three suns of Bofoellesskaber were now setting, and the air grew chill. Fayard and Rosy held each other more tightly.
“What’s to become of us?” Avouris asked.
Your presence will allow me to fulfill one last seeding, the most crucial of all. Don’t worry: I will visit you from time to time with aid.
Realization struck Avouris like a blow. “Surely such a sophisticated entity as yourself will not endorse such a cliché!”
No reply was forthcoming. Instantly their surroundings had altered.
The air, the light, the smells, the sounds—all possessed a primeval rightness, an ancestral gravity.
Rosy laughed with a touch of grimness. “Earth? Would you care to guess the date?”
Avouris sighed, then chuckled. “Far enough back, my dear, that there will be no constraints on our family size whatsoever, I imagine.”