This Guilford Law was a physical animal until the day he died, at which point he became a kind of thought… a seed sentience, he called it, in the mind of this local God, this evolving galactic Self.

It was not, he said, an especially exalted existence, at least at first. A human mind is still only a human mind even when it’s translated into Mind at Large. He woke into the afterlife with the idea that he was recovering from a shrapnel wound in a French field hospital, and it required the appearance of a few of the predeceased to convince him he had actually died! His “virtual” body (he called it) resembled his own so closely that there seemed to be no difference, though that could change, he was told. The essence of life is change, he said, and the essence of eternal life is eternal change. There was much to learn, worlds to explore, new forms of life to meet — to become, if the spirit so moved him. His organic body had been limited by its physical needs and by the brain’s ability to capture and retain memories. Those impediments were lifted.

He would change, inevitably, as he learned to inhabit the Mind that contained him, to tap its memories and wisdom. Not to abandon his human nature but to build on it, expand it.

And that, in sum, is what he did, for literally millions of centuries, until “Guilford Law,” the so-called seed-sentience, became a fraction of something vaster and more complex.

What I was talking to this morning was both Guilford Law and this larger being — billions upon billions of beings, in fact, linked together and yet retaining their individuality.

You can imagine my incredulity. But under the circumstances any explanation might have seemed plausible.

Can you read this as anything other than the raving of a man driven mad by isolation and shock?

The shock is real enough, God knows. I grieve for what both of us have lost.

And I don’t expect you to believe me. All I ask is your patience. And your good will, Caroline, if that stock is not exhausted.

I asked the picket how any of this could have happened. I was Guilford Law, after all, and I hadn’t died in any German war, and that was as plain as the rising of the sun.

“Long story,” he said.

I said I wasn’t going anywhere.

The afterlife, the picket said, wasn’t what he had expected. Most fundamentally, it wasn’t a supernatural afterlife — it was a man-made (or at least intelligent-creature-made) paradise, as artificial as the Brooklyn Bridge and in its own immense way equally finite. Recovered souls from a million planets were linked together in physical structures he called “noospheres,” planet-sized machines which traveled the galaxy on endless voyages of exploration. A paradise, Caroline, but not heaven, and not without its problems and enemies.

I asked him what enemies these gods could have.

“Two,” he said.

One was Time. Sentience had conquered mortality, at least on the scale of the galaxy. Since before the advent of mankind, any arguably sentient creature that died within the effectual realm of the noospheres was taken up into paradise. (Including every human being from Neanderthal Man to President Taft and beyond. Some, he implied, had required a fair degree of “moral reawakening” before they could adjust to the afterlife. I gather we’re not the most craven species in the galaxy, but we’re not the most angelic by a long shot.)

But Sentience Itself was mortal, and so was the Milky Way Galaxy, and so was the universe at large! He uttered a few phrases about “particle decay” and “heat death” that I followed only vaguely. The sum of it was that matter itself would eventually die. With all the intelligence at their disposal, the noospheres devised a way to prolong their existence beyond that point. And they contrived to build an “Archive,” a sum of all sentient history, which could be consulted not only by the noospheres themselves but by similar entities embedded in other, inconceivably distant galaxies.

So one enemy was Time, and that enemy had been, if not conquered, at least rendered toothless.

The other enemy he called psilife, from the Greek letter psi, for “pseudo.”

Psilife was the ultimate result of attempts to mimic evolution in machines.

Machines, he said, could achieve consciousness, within certain limits. (I think he used these words — “consciousness” and “machines” — in a technical sense, but I didn’t press him.) Both organic and true machine consciousness utilized something he called “quantum indeterminacy,” whereas psilife was a kind of mathematics.

Psilife produced “system parasites,” or what he called — as nearly as I can repeat it — “mindless Algol Rhythms preying on complexity, inhabiting it and then devouring it.”

These Algol Rhythms did not hate sentient beings any more than the hunter wasp hates the tarantula in which it deposits its eggs. Psilife inhabited sentient “systems” and devoured sentience itself. It used communication and thought as a means of manufacturing copies of itself, which would copy themselves in turn, and so ad infinitum.

And psilife, thought not conventionally sentient and without individuality, could emulate these qualities — could act with a kind of concentrated if antlike intelligence, a blind cunning. Imagine if you can a vast intelligence utterly devoid of understanding.

Psilife had arisen at various times and places throughout the universe. It had threatened Sentience and had been beaten back, though not to extinction. The Archive was thought to be impermeable to penetration by psilife; the decay of conventional matter would mean the end as well of these virulent Algol Rhythms.

But that wasn’t the case.

The Archive was corrupted by psilife.

The Archive.

Caroline, what do you suppose would constitute the ultimate history, from a god’s-eye view?

Not someone’s interpretation of the past, however thoughtful and objective. Nor could it be the past itself, which is difficult to consult in any direct and simple fashion.

No, the ultimate practical history book would be history in a looking glass, the past re-created faithfully in some accessible way, to be opened like a book in all its original tongues and dialects; a faithful working model, but with all the empty spaces removed for the purpose of simplification, and accessible to Mind at Large in a fashion that wouldn’t alter or disturb the book itself.

The Archive was static, because history doesn’t change, but it was swept at long intervals by what the picket called a “Higgs field,” which he compared to a phonograph needle following the groove of a recording. The record doesn’t change, but a dynamic event — the music — is coaxed out of a fixed object.

In a sane world, of course, the music is identical each time the record is played. But what if you put a Mozart symphony on the phonograph and it turned into Die Zauberflöte halfway through?

Dazed as I was, I could see where this was headed.

The picket’s World War was the Mozart symphony. The conversion of Europe was Die Zauberflöte.

“You’re telling me we’re inside this Archive?”

He nodded calmly.

I shivered. “Does that mean — are you telling me that I’m a sort of history book — or a page, at least, or a paragraph?”

“You were meant to be,” he said.

This was an awful lot to absorb, of course, even in a receptive state. And, Caroline, when I think of you reading this… you must be certain I’ve gone mad.

And maybe you’re right. I would almost prefer to believe it myself. But I wonder whether this letter is really addressed to you… to you, I mean, to Caroline in Australia… or to that other Caroline, the Caroline whose image I carried into the wilderness, the Caroline who sustained me there.