Montrose said, “Do you mean everything in the universe, everything inside the lightcone of the Big Bang, is inside a Black Hole?”
Define the term precisely, as the question in its present form cannot be answered.
Montrose said, “What is the evidence that timespace is a handiwork? How do you know it did not arise naturally?”
Extensive experiments have been made by Authorities and Archons within the Galactic Collaboration to re-create the initial conditions logically prior to the Big Bang. Small segments of timespace have been successfully folded into a null topology, creating an interior continuum or vest-pocket universe, none lasting longer than a nanosecond of the outside observer’s time. The resulting energy release you call a quasi-stellar radio source, or quasar.
Del Azarchel broke away a second line of conversation at that point, asking about this Galactic Collaboration.
But Montrose, continuing deeper into this line, had Torment send a neutron configuration into the moonlet core with this meaning: “Quasars are extragalactic, immensely far away, and immensely old!”
No. They are near at hand, within the local galactic cluster. The redshift effect on which your astronomers base their deductions of distance hence of age of the phenomenon is an illusion caused by the steepness of the gravity well of the interior continuum unfolding back into normal timespace as it decays.
The examination of the quasar decay is probative of the origin point of timespace, which you call the Big Bang. The balance of energies and the complexity of the initial gravitic geometries involved in the creation needed to produce a stable ter-dimensional lineal-temporal continuum is far too elaborate to have arisen in the absence of a directional volition.
Montrose said, “The watchmaker argument. It don’t actually prove nothing, you know. Who is to say universes are not really complex even without a maker to make them complex? What have we got to compare it to? Or what if there were a million universes, and this is the only one in which the laws of nature were just so? No matter if it is a million-to-one shot, that does not prove it was deliberate.”
Observe this emissary satellite of logic diamond on which you stand. Your knowledge that it is an artifact is a deduction from evidence based on an examination of its properties. You have faith that these words you encounter are ultimately produced by a volitional entity.
Since Montrose was not necessarily convinced that this entity with whom he spoke was awake, alive, or possessed volition, he was not sure how to answer that.
Del Azarchel stepped into the pause. “When you say the universe is an artifact, and handiwork, whose handiwork is it?”
No information concerning the ulterior is available to any observer confined within timespace, by the nature of the case.
Del Azarchel seemed angered by this answer. “Nevertheless, you imply there was a Hand which made the handiwork. Do you speak of God?”
Define the term precisely, as the question in its present form cannot be answered.
Del Azarchel said, “An omnipotent, infinite being, infinitely good, who created the universe.”
The definition is slovenly and useless. An omnipotent being would exclude the possibility of volitional beings; an infinite being would exclude the possibility of other beings; an infinitely good being would exclude the possibility of evil.
Montrose said, “You know the difference between good and evil?”
At one time. No longer.
Montrose felt a chill run through his soul at that statement and was afraid to ask more along that line of inquiry.
Del Azarchel was bolder, but not by much. He asked, “Assume my definition is a glorification rather than a precise description of God. What then? Did God create the artifact called timespace?”
No. Timespace is evil, for it destroys life, which is good. Life is self-defining, hence by definition is good, since any act of valuation presupposes an existing being to make the evaluation. There is no escape from the singularity for any event originating within it. Hence if a benevolent end prompted the creation of this, an enigmatic continuum ruled by entropy, decay, defeat, and death, this benevolence was not directed toward those trapped within.
At that point, Del Azarchel also felt something like a cold wind blowing through his soul, and also abandoned that sequence of symbols and responses, and turned his attention to another line of conversation with another starting point.
6. The Man as Messenger
In this second line of inquiry, Del Azarchel asked, “What is the meaning of these events? Why us?”
Your race has a special talent for crossing intellectual barriers. You are omnivores, highly imitative, a monkeylike form of life. Races created by or evolved from carnivores tend to lack the needed sympathy, and those from herbivores lack the needed imagination. The population of Torment has fortuitously avoided the homogeneity of assimilation into the Patrician matrix, allowing sufficient variation of type to be greatly useful.
Del Azarchel said, “Useful as what?”
As martyrs and as messengers.
“Carrying what message?”
Reunification.
“Martyred in the name of what cause?”
Reunification.
“Reunification of what?”
The Milky Way once enjoyed a galaxy-wide self-awareness. She collected all her scattered Archons and Authorities into a single consciousness with a single format, law, language, and life. The collaboration was tentative, failed to achieve true self-awareness, fell into dispute, and the constituent Forerunner races, the Archons and Authorities great and small, divorced themselves from unity. The Milky Way can be analogized to an interstellar commonwealths enduring a dark age and attempting renaissance of its cohesiveness; but a clearer analogy would be to define the Milky Way as one galactic brain, with stars for nerve cells, that has suffered a stroke, and a split personality, and seeks to regrow and retrain the dead cells into new life.
But the moonlet turned this conversation thread aside and connected it to Del Azarchel’s previous question about the Collaboration. Del Azarchel could not elicit further response until he backtracked and chased down and discovered another concept elsewhere in the communication labyrinth.
7. The Limpets of Ain
Meanwhile, at a previous point, where Ain’s emissary was saying … You are omnivores, highly imitative, a monkeylike form of life … Montrose interjected an aside. “What form of life were you, originally?” he asked.
Because only Montrose pursued this, the conversation format bent this string of symbols to one side and stored it separately. It read:
No record has been kept of biological origins. At one time, Ain of Hyades perhaps kept an extensive archive of our original physical, social, and psychological architecture, the environment from which we came, and the location and composition of our world of origin. Such archives require an expenditure of resources to maintain. The expenditure no doubt was determined to serve no anticipated purpose.
Montrose said, “No purpose? What about curiosity?”
Curiosity is an emotion we lack.
“Honoring your forefathers?”
Filial piety is an emotion we lack.