When Srahr wrote his Book and told them what She is, they saw it was true and accepted it. They still carry it within them like the code of an ancient disease. It told them they were almost nothing, that they had nowhere to turn except away from each other and nowhere to go except into regression and decline. Sometimes I think they were right, sometimes not. What Srahr wrote, and what I will write, has more than just darkness about it; there’s also a suggestion of infinity. The more you know, the more room there is for the unknown. Like something continually halving itself where the halves get bigger.
The first part of what I write can be easily proved, because the orders of magnitude demonstrate it. They’re well known. Our galaxy’s magnitude relative to the universe is quite negligible, perhaps no more than the magnitude of an atom, and we’re only minor parts of the minor parts of that atom. We really are, in physical terms, almost nothing. And we can’t see the whole universe because it’s too big. Our encounter with Faith was only a momentary ripple in the lesser regions of one of its lesser galaxies.
The next part can’t be objectively proved, but it’s what I finally saw as the engagement ended, and it fits all the observed data. When it comes to observed data, nobody since Srahr has observed Her more than me.
•
We fought Her through a solar system, and piece by piece I got to know Her, one new thing after another, though I never put all the pieces together until the very end. Her abilities are the key. Her abilities explain not only how, but why; they’re everything She is.
Her abilities meant that She knew all Her opponents, past and present and future. That She knew them before they existed, and after She defeated them. That they were always part of Her and always would be.
Her abilities meant that no system She attacked would ever defeat Her, and that every system She attacked would, after She left, sink into chaos or decline.
Her abilities meant that She knew everything we were, all our motives and memories. She could put it all into silver replicas of us that were better than the originals, and then make us kill them. We recovered from that, but only just.
Her abilities meant that She could send a second generation of replicas into the Bridge, my Bridge; replicas of what we were or might become, all misleading and all true. We never entirely recovered from that, though we did go on fighting Her somehow.
Her abilities meant that She could influence us by creating events to which She knew, exactly, how we’d react. She did it so accurately that mere telepathy, or possession, wasn’t necessary. At times She seemed to know our thoughts before we did, but what She really knew was us.
Her abilities meant that She could confuse and block our scanners and probes, letting them detect only what She wanted them to detect, and leaving them otherwise useless.
Her abilities meant that She could change the building-blocks of matter, could create and re-create Her spiders and our replicas from silver liquid and white light; that She could take parts of Herself, and parts of us She’d collected, and convert them to energy to go on fighting even after the damage we’d done should have destroyed Her.
Her abilities meant that She could control the basic laws of conversion of matter to energy, slow them down thousands of times to a steady state, and diffuse them through Herself. Rewrite the laws in Her own language.
Her abilities meant that She could make a universe, apparently just for tactical reasons, and use its few minutes of life to move us and Herself through the Gulf to Sakhra.
Her abilities enabled Her to outfight, outmanoeuvre, outthink and outperform every opponent She ever met or would ever meet: the next opponent and the next and the next, into eternity or for as long as the universe lasts.
Her abilities were exactly what She would need if She was the universe’s own, official, designated antibody. I notice I’ve lapsed into the past tense. She is the universe’s own, official, designated antibody, and will be for eternity or for as long as the universe lasts.
•
I realized what She was just before the end of the engagement, when everything ended for me…. No, I shouldn’t say that, it’s what Smithson used to call self-indulgent. What ended was important to me personally, but it doesn’t belong here. I’ll start again.
I realised what She was just before the end of the engagement. The only way Srahr could explain his conclusion, and the only way I can explain mine after fighting Her across a solar system, is that the orders of magnitude were not made for inanimate objects; they were made for living cells in a living body, for galaxies in a universe.
The universe is a living thing, perhaps the final or even the only living thing. The only question is whether it’s also sentient; a question to which I’ll return presently.
I don’t have the tone for this. The proper tone should be apocalyptic, or at least revelatory, but I’m incapable of either. I’ve learnt to see things differently now, and all I see are multiple levels of irony; the result of being around Sakhrans for too long. So our galaxy is only a cell in a living body too large to see, and the body organises and defends and preserves itself, either consciously or blindly, against disease. Disease is an imbalance in one part of a body, something spreading too fast. Civilisations which spread across solar systems become diseases; they threaten an imbalance, so She visits them and leaves them in regression or chaos. Our engagement with Her, into which we poured everything we had, was only a momentary spasm in some minor organ, not even noticed unless the body is sentient; a question to which I’ll return presently.
•
So She’s the universe’s perfect, invincible instrument, yet we damaged Her so badly that She couldn’t go on to Sakhra. Does that mean we proved Her inadequate? Does that mean there will be another generation of antibodies to replace Her, even more beautiful and brilliant than She is?
The universe made Her, but did it make Her consciously, or blindly? Could something like Her really be made blindly? Just reflexively secreted? Perhaps: antibodies and enzymes and secretions are made blindly, but if you see them as pieces of functional design, they’re as beautiful and brilliant as She is.
And whatever made the universe which made Her, was that acting consciously, or blindly? How high up the orders of magnitude do you have to go before you get to the final sentience? Maybe you never do. Maybe it’s neverending. Or maybe there isn’t a final sentience. Maybe sentience is the inferior quality, and doesn’t have a higher ultimate version but belongs lower down. Maybe the final nature of the final living thing is nonsentience.
We don’t see evidence of sentience in the universe, or even nonsentience, or indeed anything at all, but we wouldn’t. The universe is too big. We don’t see it all, or even a meaningful part of it. Orders of magnitude: the fraction we see is incomparably vast and we’re incomparably small. Almost nothing.
If it was sentient we could at least say it was a higher form of us, but I believe it isn’t. I believe it’s not alive enough to know it can ever die. I think its constructs, like Faith, aren’t the work of conscious thought or intelligence, but of blind reflex. They’re secretions. And we’re the sentient and thinking lesser parts of a vast but nonsentient and nonthinking organism.