CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE PURPOSE OF LIFE

I was one of the lucky ones, in the sense that the ones who abducted me took the trouble to explain what they were doing, and to reassure me that I’d be perfectly safe.

I did spend some waking time on an operating table, but I wasn’t shackled and there were no needles or unbearably bright lights. I don’t even remember the worms—they’d done that while I was still asleep—although it did make me feel sick when the android told me about them. I think I’m right in calling him an android, although he might have been a robot—I’ve never been entirely clear about the difference between them. Anyhow, he was the spitting image of Michelangelo’s statue of David, right down to the delicate marble complexion and the…well, let’s just say that although they’d animated him, they hadn’t given him any clothes to wear.

I never saw the aliens themselves—just the David they’d built to act as a go-between, to explain what they were going to do to me, and why. I think he was telling me the truth, though; if the aliens had wanted to be dishonest, they wouldn’t have let David tell me about the worms.

It’s a cliché, I know, but the first thing I said when I woke up was: “Where am I?”

David was already standing there, waiting beside the operating table. The lighting was soft, so it wasn’t immediately obvious that he was a statue, especially as he was able to move and talk, but he couldn’t exactly pass for human either.

“You’re in a research facility,” he said. “We need your help. We’re sorry that we couldn’t ask nicely, but there are very powerful reasons why we have to be extremely discreet. We’ll have to play some slight tricks with your memory, I’m afraid, before we send you home, but we will send you home, safe and sound. In the meantime, you’ll have quite an adventure. If you can get into the right frame of mind, you’ll find it very interesting. If you remember it at all, you’ll remember it as a dream. Whether you remember it will probably depend on how good you are at remembering dreams; some people are, and some aren’t. It won’t be a horrible nightmare, though—nothing that will leave you with post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

“You’re just a puppet, aren’t you?” I said. “You’re fronting for aliens who are so horrible to look at they don’t think I could bear it.”

“The fact that you’ve jumped to that conclusion suggests that you could certainly bear it,” he said. “We’re not that horrible—but we’re a long way from human. That’s why we had to recruit you, I’m afraid. We can’t set up an immediate mind-link with the subjects in whom we’re interested. We could do the necessary preliminaries step-by-step, but as we’ve already done the laborious ground-work on the human species, it’s a great deal less time-consuming to use you as an intermediary, exploiting the basic physiological similarity between you to transpose the subject’s mental experiences into your brain, and read it off from there.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, pulling out another one from the cliché-supermarket.

“I apologize for my incompetence,” David said. “All we want you to do is to lie down in a bed, quietly, and go to sleep. In the bed next to you there will be another person, who looks very similar to you—I don’t just mean that she looks human, but that she looks like you. The resemblance is really quite uncanny, considering that she’s from eight hundred million years downstream. In the fullness of time, all kinds of fragmentary patterns repeat, some more often than others. We’re interested in that process of repetition, of course, but we’re even more interested in the slight variations.

“What we want to do is to make a record of this other person’s mind—her memories, her life-story. In time, we could tune our apparatus to do that directly, feeding information from neuroworms embedded in her brain into our own multiplexus, but it would take a long time and we’d probably need to analyze a couple of hundred subjects to make the basic calibrations. Fortunately, we’ve already been working on humans for the best part of a subcentury, and we have an abundant supply of expert neuroworms, which can read off the contents of a human brain with no difficulty at all—especially humans we’ve already decanted—so.…”

“Hang on,” I said. “What do you mean, already decanted.”

“You’ve been here before, Megan. You probably don’t remember it, except maybe as a distant dream. That knowledge should help to reassure you that you won’t come to any harm. This time won’t be very much different from the last, and it will probably leave no more trace in your memory. This time, though, you’ll be working for us rather than serving as a subject yourself. It’s an oversimplification, but in essence, you’ll be reading the subject’s mind and we’ll be reading yours, because it’s a lot easier to set up that kind of indirect link than it would be to set up a direct one.”

“And what are neuroworms?” I wanted to know.

“Wireless telepathy is fiendishly difficult, exceedingly vague, and frequently unreliable,” David told me. “Good mind-reading requires actual neuronal connections. Inorganic wires are almost as inept as no wires at all. We use biological connectors—artificial neuronal constructs. They’re not really worms, but the resemblance encourages the terminology.”

“And you’re going to stick these worm-things into my brain?”

“We already have. Please don’t be alarmed. You can’t feel a thing, because there’s nothing to feel. We did it while you were unconscious because you might have found it mildly disturbing to feel them going up your nose, but there wasn’t any pain and there won’t be. We’ll connect them to the subject’s apparatus through your ear, so you won’t be able to see anything unpleasant.”

I have to admit that it was because I didn’t want to think too much about brainworms dangling out of my nose and my ears that my next question was: “Why?”

“We’re scientists, Megan. We study climax communities—the whole sequence, or as much of it as we can access. Upstream is mostly easy, but downstream is a different matter, because the boomerang effect doesn’t work both ways and the time police are more restrictive there. We’re trying to make sense of the sequence. We’re trying to discover whether there’s any direction to Earthly evolution—whether it has any kind of long-term objective or purpose, or whether it’s just a series of arbitrary explosions of adaptive radiation, in which self-conscious intelligence is merely an occasional and entirely haphazard by-product.”

I didn’t understand much of that, either, but it would have been a waste of time to say so. “That’s why you took me the first time?” I said, trying to stick to what I did half-understand. “You were learning about humans. And because you’ve already learned about humans, you think you can use me again, to help you learn about some other almost-human race that’s evolved somewhere else.”

“Very good, Megan. You’ve got it. It’s somewhen else rather than somewhere, but that’s a trivial difference.”

“So when I asked where am I, I should have asked when am I?”

“Not exactly. You’re still in a research facility. Actually, the when of here and now’s a little difficult to specify in calendrical terms. I’m afraid there’s no point my trying to explain the subtleties of the relativity of space-time and matter to a human. The eight hundred million years separating you from your apparent twin is measurable, though. In one sense, that’s trivial too, because even complex entities are bound to be replicated, given time enough, and DNA’s possibilities aren’t by any means endless, but in another sense…we really don’t know yet whether there’s an underlying pattern, or whether there are only pseudopatterns generated by the play of chaos. Then again, in one sense we have all the time in eternity to play with, but in another, we’re in something of a hurry. We’re going to move you now, and get you hooked up. I hope that I’ve told you enough for you to make sense of your experience, because making sense of it is what we need you to do. Either way, we’ll chat again before we send you home.”

Having said that, without giving me a chance to ask another silly question, he reached out a marble hand and touched me on the forehead.

The hand wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t soft either. There was no pain, but it put me out like a light, and when I woke up again.…

Actually, I suppose I didn’t wake up again. In all probability, I hadn’t even woken up once.

I never actually saw my supposed twin from eight hundred million years in the future, although I saw through her eyes, so I don’t know how exact our facial resemblance was. There were no mirrors in her world, and there was nothing in her memories about ever having paused beside a still pool to stare into it, wonderingly, in order to contemplate her own reflection. She was no narcissist. Nor, in spite of what David had said and the aliens who’d made him might have thought, was she any mere echo, of me or of humankind.

Her name was Lili, although the syllables didn’t have any resonance of meaning in her world akin to the resonances they carry in ours. They had no flower called a lily, and they’d certainly never had a Marlene Dietrich droning away while standing under a fake lamp-post.

I can’t possibly describe the experience I shared with Lili in terms of the order in which the information came to me. I suppose, given that time and experience are linear—or seem that way to us—the impressions must have arrived in sequence, but the sequence didn’t become meaningful until I could rearrange the bits and string them together in a way that made sense, and that meant reconstructing them into a very different linearity—into a life-story. It was her memories that I was exploring and storing, and memories have an innate chronological order of their own, which is very different from the order in which they’re likely to present themselves to an adult mind, whether it’s awake or asleep. That chronological order is the one I had to recapture for the aliens, and for you.

Maybe it would have been far less chaotic if we’d both been awake, subjecting our trains of thought to the discipline of consciousness—but if we’d been awake, we’d also have been distracted by the flux of sensory input. Given that we were both asleep, I suppose there’s a possibility that it was all some kind of crazy dream, from beginning to end—her dream, or mine, or some lunatic collaboration between us—but I don’t believe that it was. I think the neuroworms connecting her grey matter with mine were able to impose a discipline of their own, to make her remember and to help me to take her memories aboard in my own brain, sort them out and organize them coherently, and store them as if they were memories of another life I’d lived, alongside or instead of my own.

I sometimes wonder, now, if the aliens who’d made David—or others like and unlike them—had done something similar with other humans they’d analyzed and catalogued, and whether those other twice-used humans might be able to recover those other lives in their own dreams, or under hypnosis…and whether, if so, the human race that exists here and now might be a kind of reservoir of neuroworm-decanted memories of other lives in other times, not just from eight hundred million years in the future but from other parts of the sequence, other parts of the pattern…but you can speculate about that for yourselves, just as easily as I can. What you want to hear is what I found out about Lili, reorganized into a coherent narrative of a life half-lived, and a destiny still expected.

I think the aliens might have made a mistake, based on superficial appearances, when they jumped to the conclusion that Lili and I really were alike, and that the future race to which she belonged really was as close to human as the complex chromosomal play of DNA is ever likely to produce again. Even though they had their own elaborate neuroworm technology, the aliens may not have suspected what kind of creature Lili really was. They might have assumed, because she looked like me outside, that she’d be like me inside, where it really counted.

But she wasn’t.

Her flesh wasn’t her own. Even her brain and its resident mind weren’t her own—not really. Even her memories weren’t entirely hers.

That other human race, which will evolve eight hundred million years from now, will be self-conscious, like us. It will be intelligent, like us—but it won’t be free. It will be a subject species, a kind of domestic animal. It will be a manufactured product rather than the culmination of a process of natural selection, created by selective breeding and direct biological engineering so that its individuals might serve as hosts for indwelling parasites. Those parasites will look like giant worms, living in the gut of the future human race like hookworms or tapeworms in a human gut, but the comparison will end there. It might be more accurate to say that they’ll be like snails, wearing human beings the way snails wear shells.

Lili was born with the parasite inside her, but she didn’t know it was there at first. It had been put into her mother when her mother was about half way through her pregnancy, snaking its way up into the womb where Lili was as yet no more than an embryo and making its way into her half-formed intestines. It was very tiny then, just like Lili; it grew along with Lili, but Lili didn’t find out that it was there for quite some time. She still didn’t know it was there when she learned to talk, and began to learn all the other things she needed to know in order to live within her tribe. Her parents could have told her, and older children could have told her—but they didn’t. There was a time for her to learn the truth, and a time for her to be innocent.

Lili’s tribe lived by the sea, in a region whose climate seemed placidly sub-tropical to me. They were basically fisher-folk. They had a few vegetable-patches scratched out above the high-tide line, in which they grew various kinds of tubers. They also sent expeditions to harvest the natural produce of the savannah that stretched inland from where they lived—all vegetable produce; they weren’t hunters, even though there were vast hordes of herbivores on the savannah. It was the sea that provided the basic elements of their diet, though.

They ate fish, but they ate shellfish and seaweed in greater abundance. They had primitive boats, made of hides stretched over wooden frames, but most of their food-gathering was done at low tide; they studied the phases of the moon very attentively, because their most abundant harvests were achieved when the moon was full or new, when the influences of sun and moon combined to produce the highest and lowest tides.

They had ovens, where they baked pots as well as cooking food, using wood for fuel. They did a certain amount of metal-working, but they were basically stone-and-ceramic technologists. Metal blades were very precious, and used with great care. The tools they used most frequently were pounding tools for breaking the shells of mollusks and crushing seaweed into pulp.

They seemed to be a happy and contented tribe. They led secure lives, even though the savannah had more than its fair share of dangerous predators—not just mammals, birds and reptiles, but monsters unknown in our world. They did suffer occasional losses to those predators, which occasionally raided their villages by night, but when they went foraging on the savannah they were guarded; they were also guarded in their homes by day and by night, although they rarely saw their guardians They were secure in their contentment because they were protected, watched over and defended by the most jealous of all the monsters that stalked the savannah. Sometimes, their guardians failed in their protective duty, but not often.

Lili was happy and contented too, and not just while she was innocent. When she learned about the thing that lived inside her, it changed her conception of herself and her species, but it didn’t terrify her. Why should it? Everyone had one—everyone, at least, who was under the age of forty. When a host reached forty or thereabouts, the parasite moved on to the next phase of its life-cycle. It wasn’t really a worm, you see; it was a larva. It was only a parasite for part of its life. After that…well, its adult phase is difficult to describe, but you need to get past the idea of caterpillars turning into butterflies, or even into dragonflies. These monsters were a whole other order of being.

They were beautiful, in their way—textured like marble—but they were also incredibly hideous. They had more than twenty senses, and organs to suit, and they had all the kinds of limbs you can imagine, with some to spare. They started off quite small, but there was a lot to eat on that savannah—the Earth will have a lot more biomass then than it does now—and they kept growing for centuries, if they survived that long. They were the top predators, but they weren’t short of rivals. They also had parasites of their own, and things could get pretty rough between themselves, especially in the mating season. One reason why they had so many limbs was that so many of them were modified as weapons. When they competed for mates, they didn’t hold back; Lili had seen several such contests, albeit from a safe distance.

By the time Lili was half way to adulthood she knew that every meal she ate was feeding a larva as well as herself, that when she grew fat it wasn’t really her growing fat, but the larva inside her. She knew, too, that when she was old enough to marry, she and her husband would both be feeding larvae, and that when she fell pregnant, she would be feeding the larva as well as her own infant, before and after the unborn infant acquired a parasite of its own. None of that seemed horrible to her. She was cheerful. She was contented. She was secure.

She learned to fish, and to cook, and to gather the produce of the savannah. She learned to sing, to play games, to flirt and be courted. She learned to love the monsters that protected her, always on her side because she was carrying one of their young. She learned all the knowledge of her tribe, and all its folklore. She learned what I’ll call its religion, for want of a better word, although it was really just a matter of biology. She learned the reason for her existence. Her tribe didn’t have the sort of god that our tribes and nations have always had to make do with, because they didn’t need that kind of god. They knew where they came from, and what the purpose of their existence was.

I’m telling you this more in the manner of a lecture than a story, because that’s the way I eventually organized the information, but you need to remember that it wasn’t told to me as a lecture, I remembered it all, haphazard bit by haphazard bit, and while I pieced it all together I pieced it together as a life that I’d lived. I remembered it as a happy life, a beautiful life, a life worth living. All the while, there was something else in me—another set of memories, another life, another intelligence—that couldn’t look at and live in Lili’s memories in quite the same way as Lili, but while I was there, giving Michelangelo’s David a helping brain, I was Lili, and her memories were as much mine as my own, and they were happy, serene, idyllic.

Hers was a childhood like none that was ever possible for any human of our kind, Hers was an adolescence that was never possible for any girl of our sort. Hers was a young adulthood that was…well, you get the picture. She wasn’t yet thirty when she was taken by the time-traveling aliens, and put to bed so that I could read her mind. She’d had two children of her own, and expected to have one or two more.

As I said, though, her mind wasn’t really her own—not entirely. The larva lived in her gut—which isn’t, technically speaking, inside the body’s flesh at all—but it put out feelers. By feelers I don’t mean the kind of antennae that insects wear on their heads. I mean real feelers: natural neuroworms. The larva didn’t just share her meals; it shared her thoughts, and it used her brain to think thoughts of its own.

While Lili learned, the Lili-larva learned, and some of what the larva had to learn was what any larva of its kind needed to know in order to comprehend and continue its own life-trajectory. It learned those things, in large measure, the same way Lili learned about matters beyond the immediately practical: from speech and story, exemplary dramatization and educational exposition. Its primary education came, for the most part, out of the mouths of human beings, who had to carry the heritage of their parasite species in their myths and memories as well as their own. Some of it, though, came from the mouths of monsters. The monsters had mouths as well as everything else—including mouths that could formulate human speech.

The Lili-larva was happy too, while it was a larva. It knew that it had sterner challenges ahead, when it became an adult, but while it was a larva its larvahood was comfortable, protected, idyllic. The Lili-larva took part in Lili’s games, Lili’s thoughts, Lili’s own happiness…just as I did.

The adults of Lili’s species worked hard while they were under forty, not just on their own behalf but on their larvae’s behalf. Sometimes, they even did work for the monsters. They loved work. They derived a great deal of pleasure from it—perhaps, though not necessarily, because they had neuroworms sticking into the pleasure-centers in their hind-brains, which rewarded them every time they did anything to further their purpose in life, to serve the monsters. After forty or thereabouts, they didn’t work any more. After forty, they were fattened up to be eaten. Sometimes the adult monsters that emerged from the pupae formed by the larvae they’d nurtured took part in the feast. Sometimes they didn’t. They didn’t have any particular sentimentality about that kind of relationship.

I can’t tell whether the adults who were eaten, when they reached the age of forty-two or forty-three, enjoyed being eaten. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. I know, though, that Lili was looking forward to being eaten—that she regarded it as a privilege to be treasured and devoutly desired, an entirely appropriate consummation of the purpose of her existence. She hadn’t the slightest desire to avoid being eaten. The pseudohumans of eight hundred million years hence will know that they must die, but they won’t experience any angst in consequence. They’ll love being alive, while they’re working for their larvae and their children, and for the monsters that made them, but they won’t mind the thought of dying in the least. Lili didn’t, at any rate…not, at least, while she was lying on that bed in that research establishment somewhen inexpressible, dreaming the dreams that I was translating for the aliens who had made Michelangelo’s David.

Afterwards, when they sent her home…I don’t know anything about that, do I? But I wonder, sometimes, if she’ll remember, just a little, or if she’ll dream, sometimes, about another set of memories, another life, another existence: an existence that’s only cheerful sometimes, only contented rarely, and not idyllic at all, in sum. She couldn’t see anything horrible in her parasite, or in the monsters that would eat her one day—if one of their rivals caught her first—but she might have been able to see something horrible in the fragments of me that slipped into her brain while her neuroworm-borne fragments slipped into me. She might have been able to find something horrible in the mere possibility of a creature that looked like her but had no awareness of the purpose of her life, no awareness of why she existed or where she was bound.

Maybe, I sometimes tell myself, that wouldn’t make Lili miserable at all, Maybe it would make her even happier, to know that she might be like that but wasn’t, Maybe it would just make her value her own happiness a little more. After all, I can’t say that it’s made me any happier to have shared her bliss, her joy, her contentedness. If anything, it’s only added to the burden of my own uncertainties, my own self-dissatisfaction. It would be too cruel, don’t you think, if every meeting of minds only served to make both the participants more miserable than they were before? I’d like to think that Lili went back home, eight hundred million years in the future, no worse off for her abduction, and perhaps a little better.

Not that I have any complaints myself, you understand. There’s more to life than happiness, isn’t there? Perhaps, if I’ve learned anything, I’ve learned that even happiness can be horrible, and that what people ought to be searching for isn’t happiness at all, or the purpose of life, but a different kind of reward. So I wonder, now, whether I ought to be searching for something else, if only for a different kind of happiness that’s earned, through understanding. I sometimes wonder, now, whether we might be the unluckiest intelligent species that will ever inherit or inhabit the Earth, simply because we’re the first, with no others to look back on and take inspiration from, and not the least vestige of an emergent pattern to contemplate.

I wonder other things, too—darker things. I can’t help myself. I’m almost sure that the aliens were wrong, and that Lili and I only looked alike on the outside, while being utterly different on the inside, but I can’t be sure, can I? Maybe, I sometimes can’t help thinking, it’s me that was mistaken, and the whole human race along with me. I know that we don’t have huge larvae in our guts that are destined to turn into monsters with far more senses and limbs and mouths than any sensible creature could ever need—but that doesn’t necessarily mean, does it, that our flesh and our brains and our minds are entirely our own; that there aren’t things living inside us that aren’t really us, even though anatomists think they are, and which use our brains for thinking their own thoughts, dreaming their own dreams. If they’re never apart from us, physically, I suppose there’s a sense in which they’d be part of us by definition…but still, if they had their own thoughts, their own dreams, their own happiness.…

We know, you see—all of you must know it as well as I do—that our brains are capable of entertaining other lives, other memories, other beings. Maybe they’re all put there by neuroworms, or some equivalent technology, but nature has its own technologies, doesn’t it? What human and alien artifice can produce by design, DNA can usually produce by natural selection, given time and the right challenge. We’re already full of nature’s neuroworms. How can we be sure that they’re all really us, and that none of them are conduits to alien experience? It’s unlikely, I know—but once you’ve been an instrument in an alien investigation, eight hundred million years downstream and somewhen unspecifiable, you can’t help wondering.

I can’t, anyway.

I loved Lili. I loved being with her, and I loved her. I loved her childhood, her adolescence, her children, her Lili-larva. I loved her happiness. I still treasure her happiness, whenever I can obtain a glimpse of it. I’m glad I haven’t forgotten her—although I did, for a while, and it wasn’t easy to piece her back together again, fragment by fragment, dredging her up from my dreams, sorting her out, and making her coherent—but I’d done it once and I did it again, and I take immense satisfaction in that. Michelangelo’s David would be proud of me, I think, and the aliens and monsters too. I’d like to think that it helps to prove that we humans aren’t quite as pathetic, incompetent and wretched as we might seem, within the great scheme of things, to creatures who can see that scheme, and are making headway in understanding it.

I’d like to think that some day, eight hundred million years from now, Lili will catch an occasional fugitive glimpse of me, in the deepest recesses of her dream-memory. I’d like to think, too, that she might contrive to be just a little bit happy that I was once alive. I know that she won’t have any particular reason to be happy about that, but why shouldn’t she? We’ll be together for a little while, after all, and togetherness is good, isn’t it?

Even we think that togetherness is good—and we don’t have any reason to think so that’s anywhere near as good as Lili’s, do we?