Many are the stories we tell ourselves of the inevitable parting of lovers when they’re from different worlds: selkies, gu huo niao, Hagoromo, swan maidens . . . What they have in common is the belief by one half of a couple that the other half could be changed, when in fact it was the difference, the resistance to change, that formed the foundation of their love. And then the day would come when the old sealskin or feather cape would be found, and it would be time to return to the sea or the sky, the ethereal realm that was the beloved’s true home.
The crew of Focal Point would spend part of the voyage in hibernation; but once they reached their first target point, 550 AU from the Sun, away from the galactic center, they would have to stay awake and listen for as long as they could. They would guide the ship along a helical path away from the Sun, sweeping out a larger slice of the galaxy from which they might detect signals. The farther they drifted from the Sun, the better the Sun’s magnification effect would be due to the reduction of interference from the solar corona on the deflected radio waves. The crew was expected to last as long as a few centuries, growing up, growing old, having children to carry on their work, dying in the void, an outpost of austere hope.
“You can’t make a choice like that for our daughter,” I said.
“You’re making a choice for her too. How do you know if she’ll be safer or happier here? This is a chance for transcendence, the best gift we can give her.”
And then came the lawyers and the reporters and the pundits armed with sound bites taking sides.
Then the night that you tell me you still remember. It was your birthday, and we were together again, just the three of us, for your sake because you said that was what you wished.
We had chocolate cake (you requested “teo-broom”). Then we went outside onto the deck to look up at the stars. Your mother and I were careful to make no mention of the fight in the courts or the approaching date for her departure.
“Is it true you grew up on a boat, Mommy?” you asked.
“Yes.”
“Was it scary?”
“Not at all. We’re all living on a boat, sweetheart. Earth is just a big raft in the sea of stars.”
“Did you like living on a boat?”
“I loved that boat—well, I don’t really remember. We don’t remember much about what happened when we were really young; it’s a quirk of being human. But I do remember being very sad when I had to say good-bye to it. I didn’t want to. It was home.”
“I don’t want to say good-bye to my boat, either.”
She cried. And so did I. So did you.
She gave you a kiss before she left. “There are many ways to say I love you.”
? ? ?
The universe is full of echoes and shadows, the afterimages and last words of dead civilizations that have lost the struggle against entropy. Fading ripples in the cosmic background radiation, it is doubtful if most, or any, of these messages will ever be deciphered.
Likewise, most of our thoughts and memories are destined to fade, to disappear, to be consumed by the very act of choosing and living.
That is not a cause for sorrow, sweetheart. It is the fate of every species to disappear into the void that is the heat death of the universe. But long before then, the thoughts of any intelligent species worthy of the name will become as grand as the universe itself.
? ? ?
Your mother is asleep now on Focal Point. She will not wake up until you’re a very old woman, possibly not even until after you’re gone.
After she wakes up, she and her crewmates will begin to listen, and they’ll also broadcast, hoping that somewhere else in the universe, another species is also harnessing the energy of their star to focus the faint rays across light-years and eons. They’ll play a message designed to introduce us to strangers, written in a language based on mathematics and logic. I’ve always found it funny that we think the best way to communicate with extraterrestrials is to speak in a way that we never do in life.
But at the end, as a closing, there will be a recording of compressed memories that will not be very logical: the graceful arc of whales breaching, the flicker of campfire and wild dancing, the formulas of chemicals making up the smell of a thousand foods, including cheap wine and burned hot dogs, the laughter of a child eating the food of the gods for the first time. Glittering jewels whose meanings are not transparent, and for that reason, are alive.
And so we read this, my darling, this book she wrote for you before she left, its ornate words and elaborate illustrations telling fairy tales that will grow as you grow, an apologia, a bundle of letters home, and a map of the uncharted waters of our souls.
There are many ways to say I love you in this cold, dark, silent universe, as many as the twinkling stars.
? ? ?
AUTHOR’S NOTES: For more on consciousness as compression, see:
Maguire, Phil, et al. “Is Consciousness Computable? Quantifying Integrated Information Using Algorithmic Information Theory.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.0126 (2014) (available at arxiv.org/pdf/ 1405.0126).
For more on natural nuclear reactor piles, see:
Teper, Igor. “Inconstants of Nature,” Nautilus, January 23, 2014 (available at nautil.us/issue/9/time/inconstants-of-nature).
Davis, E. D., C. R. Gould, and E. I. Sharapov. “Oklo reactors and implications for nuclear science.” International Journal of Modern Physics E 23.04 (2014) (available at arxiv.org/pdf/1404.4948).
For more on SETI and the Sun’s gravitational lens, see:
Maccone, Claudio. “Interstellar radio links enhanced by exploiting the Sun as a gravitational lens.” Acta Astronautica 68.1 (2011): 76–84 (available at snolab.ca/public/JournalClub/alex1.pdf).
THE WAVES
Long ago, just after Heaven was separated from Earth, Nü Wa wandered along the bank of the Yellow River, savoring the feel of the rich loess against the bottom of her feet.
All around her, flowers bloomed in all the colors of the rainbow, as pretty as the eastern edge of the sky, where Nü Wa had to patch a leak made by petty warring gods with a paste made of melted gemstones. Deer and buffalo dashed across the plains, and golden carp and silvery crocodiles frolicked in the water.
But she was all alone. There was no one to converse with her, no one to share all this beauty.
She sat down next to the water, and scooping up a handful of mud, began to sculpt. Before long, she had created a miniature version of herself: a round head, a long torso, arms and legs and tiny hands and fingers that she carefully carved out with a sharp bamboo skewer.
She cupped the tiny, muddy figure in her hands, brought it up to her mouth, and breathed the breath of life into it. The figure gasped, wriggled in Nü Wa’s hands, and began to babble.
Nü Wa laughed. Now she would be alone no longer. She sat the little figure down on the bank of the Yellow River, scooped up another handful of mud, and began to sculpt again.
Man was thus created from earth, and to earth he would return, always.
? ? ?
“What happened next?” a sleepy voice asked.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow night,” Maggie Chao said. “It’s time to sleep now.”
She tucked in Bobby, five, and Lydia, six, turned off the bedroom light, and closed the door behind her.
She stood still for a moment, listening, as if she could hear the flow of photons streaming past the smooth, spinning hull of the ship.
The great solar sail strained silently in the vacuum of space as the Sea Foam spiraled away from the sun, accelerating year after year until the sun had shifted into a dull red, a perpetual, diminishing sunset.
There’s something you should see, Jo?o, Maggie’s husband and the first officer, whispered in her mind. They were able to speak to each other through a tiny optical-neural interface chip implanted in each of their brains. The chips stimulated genetically modified neurons in the language-processing regions of the cortex with pulses of light, activating them in the same way that actual speech would have.
Maggie sometimes thought of the implant as a kind of miniature solar sail, where photons strained to generate thought.