Soon, I began to make out an odd sort of regularity about this foam. On one side, for instance, my void was marked off by a flat plane of galaxies. This plane, of matter gathered together so densely that it glowed significantly more brilliant than the general background, was so marked and clearly defined — so flat and extensive — that the thought popped into my fecund mind that it might not be a natural arrangement.

Now I looked about more carefully. Over here, I thought, I could see another plane — clean and well-defined — and there I made out a sort of lance of light, utterly rectilinear, which seemed to span space from side to side — and there again I saw a void, but in the shape of a cylinder, quite clearly delineated…

The Watcher was rolling about before me now, his tentacle-clumps bathed in star-light, and his eyes were wide and fixed on me.

Artificial. The word was inescapable — the conclusion so clear that I should have drawn it long before, I realized, had it not been for the monstrous scale of all this!

This Optimal History was engineered — and this artifice must be what the Watcher had brought me on this immense journey to understand.

I recalled old predictions that an infinite universe would be prone to disastrous gravitational collapse — it was another reason why our own cosmos could not, logically, be infinite. For, just as the earth and other planets had coalesced from knots in that turbulent cloud of debris around the infant sun, so there would be eddies in this greater cloud of galaxies which populated the Optimal History — eddies into which stars and galaxies should tumble, on an immense scale.

But the Watchers were evidently managing the evolution of their cosmos to avoid such catastrophes: I had learned how Space and Time are themselves dynamic, adjustable entities. The Watchers were manipulating the bending, collapsing, twisting and shearing of Space and Time themselves, in order to achieve their objective of a stable cosmos.

Of course there could be no end to this careful engineering, if this universe were to remain viable — and, I thought, if the universe was eternal, there could have been no beginning to it either. That reflection troubled me, briefly: for it was a paradox, a causal circle. Life would be required to exist, in order to engineer the conditions which were prerequisite to the existence of Life here…

But I soon dismissed such confusions! I was, I realized, being much too parochial in my thinking: I was not allowing for the Infinitude of things. Since this universe was infinitely old — and Life had existed here for an infinitely long time — there was no beginning to the benign cycle of Life’s maintenance of the conditions for its own survival. Life existed here because the universe was viable; and the universe was viable because Life existed here to manage it… and on, an infinite regression, without beginning — and without paradox!

I felt loftily amused at my own confusion. It was clearly going to take me some time to come to terms with the meaning of Infinity and Eternity!

My Watcher halted and rotated in space like some fleshy balloon. Those huge eyes came towards me, dark, immense, the glare of the light-drenched sky reflected in pupils the size of saucers; at last, it seemed, my world was filled by that immense, compelling gaze, to the exclusion of all else — even the fiery sky…

But then the Watcher seemed to melt away. The scattering of distant constellations, the foamy galactic structure — even the glare of the burning sky — I saw them no more — or rather, I was aware of these things as an aspect of reality, but only as a surface. If you imagine focusing on a pane of glass before you — and then deliberately relaxing the muscles of your eye, to fix on a landscape beyond, so that the dust on that pane disappears from your awareness — then you will have something of the effect I am describing.

But, of course, my change in perception was caused by nothing so physical as a tug of eye muscles, and the shift in perspective I endured involved rather more than depth of focus.

I saw — I thought — into the structure of Nature.

I saw atoms: points of light, like little stars, filling space in a sort of array which stretched off around me, unending — I saw it all as clearly as a doctor might study a pattern of ribs beneath the skin of a chest. The atoms fizzed and sparkled; they spun on their little axes, and they were connected by a complex mesh of threads of light — or so it seemed to me; I realized that I must be seeing some graphical presentation of electrical, magnetic, gravitational and other forces. It was as if the universe was filled with a sort of atomic clockwork — and, I saw, the whole of it was dynamic, with the patterns of links and atoms constantly shifting.

The meaning of this bizarre vision was immediately clear to me, for I saw more of the regularity here which I had observed among the galaxies and stars. I could see — suffused in every wisp of gas, in every stray atom — meaning and structure. There was a purpose to the orientation of each atom, the direction of its spin, and the linkages between it and its neighbors. It was as if the universe, the whole of it, had become a sort of Library, to store the collective wisdom of this ancient variant of Humanity; every scrap of matter, down to the last stray wisp, was evidently catalogued and exploited… Just as Nebogipfel had predicted as the final goal of Intelligence!

But this arrangement was more than a Library — more than a passive collection of dusty data — for there was a sense of life, of urgency, all about me. It was as if consciousness was distributed across these vast assemblages of matter.

Mind filled this universe, seeping down into its very fabric! — I seemed to see thought and awareness wash across this universal array of fact in great waves. I was astonished by the scale of all this — I could not grasp its boundless nature — by comparison, my own species had been limited to the manipulation of the outer skin of an insignificant planet, the Morlocks to their Sphere; and even the Constructors had only had a Galaxy — a single star-system, out of millions…

Here, though, Mind had it all — an Infinitude.

Now, at last, I understood — I saw for myself — the meaning and purpose of infinite and eternal Life.

The universe was infinitely old, and infinite in extent; and Mind, too, was infinitely old. Mind had gained control of all Matter and Forces, and had stored an infinite amount of Information.

Mind here was omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. The Constructors, by means of their bold challenge to the beginnings of time, had achieved their ideal. They had transcended the finite, and colonized the infinite.

The atoms and forces faded to the background of my immediate attention, and my eyes were filled once more with the unending light and star-patterns of this cosmos. My Watcher companion had gone now, and I was suspended alone, a sort of disembodied point of view, slowly rotating.

The star-light was all about me, deep, unending. I had a sense of the smallness of things, of myself, the irrelevance of my petty concerns. In an infinite and eternal universe, I saw, there is no Center; there can be no Beginning, no End. Each event, each point, is rendered identical to every other by the endless setting within which it is placed… In an infinite universe, I had become infinitesimal.

I have never been much of a poetry buff, but I remembered a verse of Shelley’s: on how life, like a dome of many-colored glass/ stains the white radiance of Eternity… and so forth. Well, I was done with life now; the covering of the body, the shallow illusion of matter itself — all that had been torn from me, and I was immersed, perhaps forever, in that white radiance of which Shelley spoke.