Sometimes after work she went to the very bowsprit of the city and stood watching the city slide forward on the tracks, making the hills on the horizon shift against the stars. The hills, as always, were either very black or very white. The constant shift from black to white (only occasionally the reverse) made the landscape a kind of mobile, her position at the bow part of a heraldic image—an elite riding the point of history like the figurehead of a ship—but the ship rode on tracks visible to the horizon, its course set in a powerful path dependency. And the whole thing if halted would burn to a crisp. And under it all ran a horrible black tunnel, a cloacal umbilicus running back to some original sin. Yes, this was her world, all right: a ride into the dark and the stars, on tracks she couldn’t easily leave. She was a citizen of Terminator, living in a little bubble of green, gliding over a black-and-white world.

In the evenings after work Swan walked up to her room on the fourth terrace down from the top of the Dawn Wall. She would change clothes and then walk to a restaurant, or to Mqaret’s rooms.

“It’s good to be home,” she said to Mqaret. “Thank God we rebuilt.”

“We had to,” Mqaret said.

“What about your work?” Swan asked him. “Didn’t you lose all kinds of stuff?”

Mqaret shook his head. “Everything was backed up. We lost the experiments in progress, but nothing else. And there are equivalent experiments going on in lots of places.”

“Did the other labs help you get going again, like with the animals?”

“Yes. It was mostly our Mondragon insurance, but people were generous. Although a lot of it we had to reassemble ourselves, that’s just the way it is.”

“And how are things going, are you learning useful things still?”

“Yes, useful, sure.”

“Anything about the thing from Enceladus? Didn’t you say you might learn something important from that?”

“It looks like it sits in the human gut mostly, getting by on detritus that runs into it. In that state it lays low, and exists like a lot of the bacteria in your gut. But if a lot of extra detritus appears, it multiples and mops it up, then when that’s gone it dies back. Plus also a very little Enceladan predator is lurking in there too. So together they function almost like an extra set of T cells. They don’t even add much to your fever.”

“I know you still think I shouldn’t have done it.”

He made his eyes go round as he nodded slowly at her. “No doubt about that, my dear. But I will say that because of you and the other foolish people who ingested it, we know more than we would have otherwise. And it seems like it might turn out all right. Because you ended up surviving an awful lot of radiation, and that’s probably because your aliens helped to clear your system of all the dead cells flooding it. That’s one of the worst impacts of radiation, the sudden flood of dead stuff everywhere.”

Swan stood staring at him, trying to think what it might mean. For a long time she had refused to face the fact that she had been so stupid as to have eaten the alien bugs. She had gotten expert in not thinking about it. To go mad—to hear the birds speaking in Greek… she knew that part could happen. But to have something good come from it…

“That’s what you saw in my blood?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Well,” she said, “I hope you’re right.”

He gave her a look. “I’ll bet you do.” He shook his head unhappily. “We’re trembling on the brink, my dear. You don’t want to fall off now.”

“On the brink like always, right?”

“I don’t mean the brink of death. I mean the brink of life. I wonder if we might not be on the edge of a breakthrough in our longevity treatments. Some kind of gestalt leap forward. And pretty soon. There’s so much we’re coming to understand. So, you know. You could live for a thousand years.”

He stared at her, letting the words sink in, watching her to make sure they would begin to percolate. She registered that, and he went on.

“I won’t live long enough to see it. I think we may still be fifty years out from solving certain last problems. But so, you… you should take care.”

He gave her a hug that was gentle, even a little tentative, as if she might break, or was poisonous. But his look was still so warm. Her grandparent loved her and worried about her. And had discovered that her rash act might have found out something useful. It was a bit like St. Elizabeth’s miracle of the roses; caught in the act, but saved by a metamorphosis. It confused her.

Extracts (12)

Isomorphies appear across our conceptual systems. One sees patterns like this—

subjective, intersubjective, objective;

existential, political, physical;

literature, history, science;

—and one wonders if these are different ways of saying the same thing?

Are the dichotomies “Apollonian/Dionysian” and “classical/romantic” two ways to speak of the same thing?

Can there be false isomorphies, as in the “seven deadly sins” of aging, which deliberately evokes the Christian religious system though this is completely irrelevant to aging?

Is isomorphic the same as consilient? The “standard model” in physics would hope and expect to be the foundation of all the disciplines, all consilient with its fundamental findings. Thus physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, history, the arts all interpenetrate each other and cohere if considered as a single convergent study. The physical studies scaffold our understanding of the life sciences, which scaffold our understanding of the human sciences, which scaffold the humanities, which scaffold the arts: and here we stand. What then is the totality? What do we call it? Can there be a study of the totality? Do history, philosophy, cosmology, science, and literature each claim to constitute the totality, an unexpandable horizon beyond which we cannot think? Could a strong discipline be defined as one that has a vision of totality and claims to encompass all the rest? And are they all wrong to do so?

Is the totality simply praxis, meaning what we do with ourselves and our world? Is there no such thing as totality, but only convergence? Convergence of all our fields of thought into human actions?

At the time of our study, these issues were very confused, and different disciplines took differing attitudes. Some fields focused on strictly human problems. This limited focus was deliberate, a statement about meaning that said that human life should be the subject of study for human beings until we reach a point where we are all well enough we can afford to think about other things.

Some in physics and other disciplines replied to this idea by asserting that many extrahuman realms have decisive effects on the achievement of human justice, so the strongest humanism would arise from a focus including physics, biology, and cosmology, also consciousness science. Justice would be considered as partly a consciousness state, and partly a particular physical or ecological state among symbiotic organisms.

Those holding the anthropocentric view argued that if focusing on the extrahuman realm could have helped to achieve justice among humans, it would have already. Because humans had been extremely powerful for centuries, and yet justice had not arrived.

Physics advocates riposted with the assertion that this failure had happened only because the larger physical reality was still being excluded from the project of justice.

These mirror arguments rebounded back and forth for a long time, not just in the Dithering but all the way into the Balkanization and the fateful year 2312. And so humanity hung suspended in the face of its unenacted project. They knew but they didn’t act. The reader may scoff at them; but it takes courage to act, and perseverance too. Indeed if the reader’s own time is still imperfect, though it be ever so long after the time described here, the author would not be surprised to hear it.