She was right, of course.
The blight, I realized, when I had had a chance to weigh the bad news more carefully, was a truemarriage of life and death, of whose perfection I had never dared to dream. I realized too that I, of all people, should always have known that something like the blight would exist—that something like it mustexist—in order that the History of Death might not be complete and might not even be computable by anyone as humble as a human being. I, of all people, should always have known that the war between humankind and death wasn’t one that could be settled for long by any mere treaty of technology, because it was at bottom a real conflict of interest.
I had imagined the war against death, for a while, as a local struggle for the small prize of the human mind, but I should always have realized that it was a much larger matter than that—that from its very beginning it had been a battle for no less a prize than the universe itself.
The human mind had so far been content with limited objectives, but it had always been evolving, not merely in terms of its own ambitions and dreams, but in terms of the cosmic frame of meaning. Within the frame, its objectives had always been infinite and eternal—and it had always tried, in its limited fashion, to recognize that fact in its aspirations and its accomplishments.
In time, I knew, spores of the new kind of death-life must and would reach Earth’s solar system, whether it took ten thousand years or a million. In the meantime, the systembound must do what they could to erect whatever Type-2 defenses they could contrive. While the opportunity for action remained, allhumankinds must do their level best to purge the worlds of other stars of its vile empire in order to reclaim them for real life, for intelligence, and for evolution. Those were the facts of the matter; they spoke for themselves.
When Emily left Earth for the last time I was still living in Severnaya Zemlya. When she had gone, I went out on to the great ice sheet in my newly repaired snowmobile, navigated by the only silver I had ever learned to count as a friend.
“This wilderness has been here since the dawn of civilization,” I told him, when we paused at the summit of a white mountain. “If you look southward, you can see the edge where newborn glaciers are always trying to extend their cold clutch farther and farther into the human domain. How many times have they surged forth, I wonder, in the hopeless attempt to cover the whole world with ice, to crush the ecosphere beneath their relentless mass?”
“I fear, sir, that I do not know,” the navigator informed me, in an apologetic tone that was definitely contrived for irony’s sake.
I looked upward through the transparent canopy of the air, at the multitude of stars sparkling in their bed of endless darkness.
“Please don’t broadcast this to the world,” I said, “but I feel an exhilaratingly paradoxical sense of renewal. I know that although there’s nothing much for me to do for the present moment, the time will come when my particular talent and expertise will be needed again. Some day, it will be my task to compose anotherhistory, of the next phase in the war that humankind and all its brother species must fight against Death and Oblivion.”
“Yes, sir,” said the dutiful silver. “I hope that it will be as successful as the last.”
“Stop calling me sir,” I said. “We’ve been through too much together for that kind of nonsense. I can’t think of you as an itany longer, so you shouldn’t think of me as a sir.You can call me Mortimer—Morty, even.”
“As you wish, Morty,” said the machine, humbly. If he had escaped robotization, it was only by a hairsbreadth. Like Emily, like the alien Ark-dwellers, like Khan Mirafzal, like Garden Earth, and like me the snowmobile’s navigator still had a great deal of evolving to do.
He still has—but we’ll do it or die trying, and if we die we’ll pass on what we know to those who come after us.
And so ad infini turn.
It might take us a thousand or a million years to get to where we need to be, but we’re prepared to be patient.