The Propagational Library (7): Thenward

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[Image: a portion of the Eagle Nebula, at some time in the far distant future. To enlarge, just click it. To see the truly spectacular structure of which this is only a part, see here.]

He’d used roughly the same sort of lunge when he wanted physically to move, from one place to another, very distant place. And it followed roughly the same sort of calculation — what he once would have called dead reckoning, or (more aptly) seat-of-the-pants navigation: a guesstimate. You look in the direction you want to go; using some actual physical sensory mechanism, or (eventually) unconscious experience, you judge the effort to move that distance and no further; you apply that effort, using whatever means you have available. Even after a few weeks of practice, given sufficient physical tools — muscles and skeleton — the simplest human infant back on Earth had gotten over the fear of movement, had picked up the elementary knack of unconsciously displacing limbs (or entire body) a fraction of a millimeter in an intended direction. You learned, given enough time, how to assemble data from all your other senses into the single collective sense of proprioception: awareness of your nearness to or distance from objects, other creatures, general three-dimensional locations even when not occupied by anything in particular. You go (or imagine yourself going) up and forward or back a certain way, and over a certain other way, and there you are.

Later, you learned to do the same thing with intangible goals and objectives. You could sense how near you were, how far, what route you’d have to take. And given enough intention and enough resources, you could get there.

After his eons of consideration and sleep, The Librarian thought he understood: the sense of proprioception and of actual movement was the same sense used to attain an ambition, to make a single choice from among many, to approach and charm a lover. They differed only in small, insignificant, wholly immaterial respects. Those differences aside, consciousness did exactly the same sort of sidesteps, handsprings and backflips, and shufflings-along to get from a given here to a given there.

From that understanding, he easily envisioned movement through time: you were here; you knew, or could guesstimate, how distant your goal; you plotted a route; you set aside the time to get there. And you went. To move through time, everything was the same (up to the actual going) except for one: you had to set aside enough space to get there. Human bodies had never had (could never have had) enough space to pull it off. The Librarian? He had all the space in the universe.

So: he knew when he had been at his target, awake outside the black wall of the nebula; he knew roughly its distance in time from his now. And he knew its direction, of course: backwards. He took all the space he thought he would need to travel to then. And he lunged, well, thenward.

—-

When he stirred awake, or (as he imagined, more accurately) came to, at first he thought that the effort must have rendered him senseless, knocked him out.

But then he saw the outline of a towering bulge in an enormous black shadow directly in front of him, and he recognized it as a feature of that black shadow: the nebula. He’d been asleep when he first saw it, he remembered that much. Maybe he hadn’t been restored to consciousness after being knocked out by the effort of time travel; maybe he’d just relived that moment of plain old awakening—

But if he were reliving that moment, then he shouldn’t be remembering everything that had happened afterwards, should he? Could he, even? Wouldn’t his awareness be exactly as it had been then?

He didn’t see the little flickering pinpoint of light he remembered from his first time here. Maybe this wasn’t that time after all, because he distinctly remembered looking at the giant cloud of blackness—

Oh, there it was. Exactly as he recalled. It almost twinkled—

Off to his right side, the two members of a binary stellar system collided, releasing a flash of light and heat and gamma rays. He watched it for a split-century, and when he turned his attention back towards the nebula the flickering white pinpoint was gone, just like that.

Suddenly he knew: he’d already been here. The binary-star collision: he’d already observed it, already lived through its extended burst of cross-spectrum radiation. Yet his memories of what would yet happen were intact as well. He was, again, not just there but then. He just… just knew more now than he did on his first pass.

One more experiment, just to confirm: he remembered about how long it had been since he first awoke outside the nebula, the black cloud (as he remembered it, the pinpoint flickered again). He remembered the sensation of lunging, experienced in that far-off future, and the steps he’d taken to experience it; he dialed it down a good ways, and didn’t so much lunge as sort of nudge himself back to the time he—

He woke up this time in a tremendous state of excitement. There it was — the nebula, the giant vertical bulge in its center — and yes, after waiting a little bit, and turning to his right: there was the binary-star collision, the burst of radiation.

But no little flickering light, no star or mini-nova or what-have-you between him and the huge dark cloud — ah, there it was… That didn’t make sense. If he were in fact re-experiencing the moment, then the sequence should have been 1, nebula; 2, pinpoint; and 3, stellar collision. Instead, it had been 1, 3, 2. Maybe one more try… He nudged thenward again (more smoothly, he was getting used to the exertion required); woke up outside the black cloud — pinpoint of light! — the dark swollen shape of gas and dust (light going out); noticed the binary stars’ crash out of the corner of his vision (back to 1, 2, 3!), but didn’t care about it, he cared only about that little candle of light, the black cloud — there it is again!

And suddenly he understood that, too. He tried thinking, in succession: nebula (light winks out); cloud (light winks on); ball of gas and dust (out); giant black thunderhead (on)…

The little pinpoint of light wasn’t a star or other heavenly body, indeed not a physical something at all. He wasn’t even seeing it. He was just knowing it. It was nothing, no thing at all. It was an idea — specifically, the idea of cloudness (and on came the light). Cloud cumulus cloud cloud, he thought, not a single word repeated over and over but the idea, and the white light pulsed, throbbed, four distinct times. He thought back to his former life, to the sight of salmon-pink clouds at sunset over the bay, and no light came on. He thought of cyclonic clouds, satellite-imaged from space: no light. The flat silver-gray of an overcast sky: nothing. A giant nebula, for all the world resembling a giant stormcloud: bright white pinpoint. It didn’t make any difference which way he faced, he realized; it was simply more visible in certain directions than in others.

Back thenward he nudged, and ran through the steps again.

That was it. Absolutely and undeniably it. He could see the idea of, specifically, dark cloudness. What’s more, once he had run through the whole thing a dozen times, a hundred, a thousand, he knew what he was doing, knew just what to do to see other ideas as well. He was surrounded by a cloud of ideas…

He thought back to the moment just before Gabriel Naude — Gabe1 — had ceased to exist. He remembered the cloud of silver glitter he’d seen swirling around Gabe1‘s head. He remembered looking down on Earth as it ruptured, all those human lives winking out, releasing billions of similar clouds, and he remembered his own wake of gleaming dots trailing behind him.

Not particles of light at all; nothing sensible to eyes or photometers or spectrometers or photoelectric cells; not photons. Ideas: tiny fragments of directed consciousness.

And now he knew what he must do next.

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A heck of a chapter to tackle on first returning to the Propagational Library project: almost entirely abstract, describing (almost suggesting) action of a peculiarly indescribable sort. The Librarian is gonna need to talk to somebody soon, isn’t he?

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