Gregory Benford
THE FINAL NOW
We are blooming flowers on the plain—which He picks.
He suddenly thought that they had not seen anyone for quite a while. Amid the vast voyages, adventures, striking vistas—and yes, while basking in symphonies of sensation—they had not needed company.
Even as twilight closed in. But now—
“Do you recall—?” He asked, turning to Her, and could not recall an ancient name. Names were unimportant, mere symbols, yes… but He did remember that names had existed to distinguish between multitudes. When? First task: to name the beasts. When had He and She said that?
“I do,” She said mildly, for She was always mild. “Any: one. A logical category.”
“They were Other, yes. I recall. Lesser but Other.”
“Just so.”
Thoughts rippled light-quick among them. The concept of Other as separate and different commingled in a burst of flavors–musky, crisp, sweet, sad, noisy—and tempted him. Somehow, in the long run of time they shared, the portions of himself and herself had moved away from overt Others, leaving the two of them to interweave as their binary Self. The details of why had quite washed away.
Yet the Others were part of him and her, and He and She could bring them forward when needed or desired. And desire played a role in all of this. Memories strummed, mellow notes rang redly, old victories sang and trilled.
The Others were good company, He thought.
Desire radiated from them both. They were, of course, the two who gave tension to this finite, bounded existence. This universe. Duality was fundamental, as was helicity itself, which necessarily had to be included in this exponentially expanding space-time.
How long now, since the Beginning? He wondered. The question did not actually have deep meaning, He saw, because in the early stages space and time were so entwined, feeding each other. Duration did not endure, after all.
Still, the end of all this was sharp, clear. The accelerating expansion had calmed, died, and the great coolness descended. Time coiled now, in the final, languid waltz between space and time.
She nodded at the firmament around them, saying, “Let us have Others again.” —and brilliant acrid displays frothed, with ruby scents, soft gliding pleasures and deep bass rolls, all blending with the views. They swam in coasting galactic clusters, amid simmering amber stars, and worlds and variety beyond measure—or at least, measures that He and She now cared about. In the long past times, near the very start of all this, they had needed to be more careful. Not now.
The firmament shuddered, rumbled, brimmed. A fresh persona came gliding toward them, swimming in liquid light.
“You called me forth?” the self said, and He saw it had no sex. It did not need any. She and He did need that, had from the Beginning. Sultry love and sex were the essence of the great dance. But sex was not necessary in their subselves, the Others.
“You are One,” He said.
“Yes! Such joy,” One said with liberated intelligence. “You wanted me to become overt, not buried in your inner self? Why?”
Fondly, He recalled that this ancient way—allowing a subself to manifest, bringing a different, fresh perspective—meant questions. Always questions. “For company. If needed, many of you, for… interest.”
To have someone independent to talk to, He thought but did not say. To summon up insights that lie within the two of us, but that we cannot express overtly. To be vast meant having parts of yourself that you could not readily find. The uncoiling of space-time had taken long eras of detail that rolled on without inspection—that was the function of natural law.
One said, “I was in my mortal time a human. We had many visions of you.”
“Human?” asked She.
“One of the ancient variants,” He explained, for to Him went the tedious detail work of categories. “They appeared quite early. A type that our worlds quite commonly brought forth.”
He looked long at One and took pity upon this pale mote before them. “You are from a common kind, those of four appendages. A local optimum, from natural selection, acting where beings sprung from the most likely place where life began—that is, in the realm of gravitation. You and others such must fight and profit from the press of gravity.”
She remembered. “Ah. The dwellers among worlds, yes—they are among our best work.”
Still, He recalled, the total amount of information that One could absorb in its mortal lifetime was about 1016 bits, which severely limited what it could distinguish. Since its death, it had dwelled within He and She, and so had taken in vastly more. But knowledge was not wisdom, as made clear by One’s inner confusions, which He could see easily.
One hesitated. “May I ask… why? Why did you call me forth?”
She said, “Because this is the end time. We want to bask in your light once more.”
The One seemed to fathom this compliment, though of course it could not be true. “We had a poet, Milton, who thought you would suffer from loneliness.”
Together they laughed—and the One was startled that they did. This made them laugh again. “A hominid narrow idea,” She said, mirth rippling through her.
He reached into her and felt the surges of emotion, saw echoes them in his own, larger self, and loved her all the more. Alone? Never.
Around them time hammered on, as it must—that was one of the basic constraints designed in from the Creation, of course. He realized that the One was worrying through an ancient problem, one expressed in musty eras and epochs long past. But persistent.
“Is there a fresh challenge, then?” One said.
She said, “In a way. The laws grind.”
One said, “Of course. That is the way You set.”
“Just so,” She said. “But now it leaches meaning from all.”
“That was inevitable?” One wondered.
“Disorder gathers unavoidably,” He said.
One registered sharp colors of surprise. “Can you not—?”
“A finite system may be capable of an infinite amount of computation, in due time,” He said. “But it can only store a finite number of memories.”
“And you are finite?” One was perplexed.
“Necessarily,” She said. “We dwell in a bounded space-time.”
He said, “The initially finite must remain so.”
She added, “Any additional mass with which to build new ’memory’ has redshifted beyond the event horizon, no matter where we are—and is therefore unavailable.”
The One said slowly, “Inescapably?”
“Life itself is doomed to mortality,” He said with finality. This was going slower than it should. He had forgotten that about Others.
One said strongly, “I do not accept this.”
At last, the point. She said with love and deep feeling, “Then strive to alter.”
A vast age passed. The last suns dimmed into red sleep. Through it all, One and those he represented—the faithful—labored long and hard. Crafty and deft, they could manifest in the universe through mechanisms He and She opened for them. It was at least amusing to watch, and always interesting. This was how the universe taught itself.
The faithful built great arches of slumbering mass, cobbled together from whole clusters of dead galaxies. The basic energy of the expansion then stretched these fresh structures. Vast motors worked like elastic bands, extending and releasing, harnessing the swelling of space-time itself. These extracted useful energy, avoiding the dead end of collapsed matter. Energies burst forth and new life forms of plasma flourished. The faithful watched these beings, far larger than the dark galaxies, frolic in what was, for them, a fresh new universe.