HAGGER

From Biohack Mirror

Chapter 17 - Agathange

Much of death depends on state of mind. -Maurice Gabriel-Thomas, Swarming Centuries Programmer

Who can know what it is to be a god? Who can say which of the carked races of man-the Elf-men of Anya and the Hoshi, the Newvanian Arhats and all the others-have attained to the godly, and which are extremely long-lived women and men wearing bizarre and sometimes beautiful bodies?

How much wisdom must a race acquire before it is deemed worthy of the godhead? How much knowledge, how much power, how final an immortality?

Are the god-kings of the Eriades cluster-they who build a ringworld around Primula Luz-are these human computers merely clever men or something more profound? I do not know. I know little of the art of eschatology, of its tidy classifications and endless debates. Kolenya Mor argues that what really matters is not the status of a race, but its direction. Are the Agathanians, for instance, moving godward or have they reached an evolutionary dead-end? To me, who came as a corpse to the mysterious planet called Agathange, there was only one criterion upon which to judge the question of Agathanian godhead, and it was this: How much of the great secret did they know? Did they, who swam through Agathange's warm, eternally blue waters, possess the secret of life and an answer to death?

I have said before that Neverness is the most beautiful city on all the planets, but Icefall, while beautiful in its own frigid way, is not the most beautiful of the planets. Agathange is the most beautiful planet.

As seen from deep space, she is a glittering blue and white jewel floating in a diamond-etched bowl of black amber. (I should mention that I had my first glimpse of the whole planet only after my resurrection and departure. Upon my arrival, of course, I saw nothing because I was dead.) The stars surrounding Agathange swim with light; looking upward from the luminous, lapping waves the sky is brilliant. Only on cloudy nights is the sea dark, and even then it is the darkness of quicksilver and cobalt rather than that of obsidian or black ink. The sea-the single ocean which covers all the planet except for a few small islands-is warm and peaceful. It teems with fish and other sea life. Schools of taofish and konani numbering in the tens of millions swim through the sparkling waters of the shoals and shallows, while in the deeps of the true ocean, the larger ranita hunt other fish which have no names. Flying fish, perhaps drunk with the sheer delight of racing through the tropical whorls and hollows, school in such profusion that the sea's surface for miles often seems aquiver with a carpet of arching silver. It was this overwhelming abundance of life, I think which led the first Agathanians to cark their human bodies into seal-like shapes, to escape into the whisperless depths and fill the ocean with their mutable, godling children.

"Properly, the Agathanians are god-men, not gods," as Kolenya Mor later told me. "They do not seek personal immortality; they do not desire to escape the prison of matter, as the Ieldra did, nor do they attempt to remake the universe to their liking." They had come to Agathange, she said, on the first wave of the Swarming. The most common story of their origin-and the one that happens to be true-is this: Long ago, at the end of the Holocaust's third interlude, a group of ecologists fled Old Earth in one of the first deep ships. With them they carried the krydda-preserved zygotes of narwhals, dolphins, sperm whales and other extinct sea mammals. When they discovered a world of fecund oceans and sweet, untainted air, they quickened the zygotes and nursed the baby whales through their childhood terrors of sharks and other predators.

When the whales had grown-and grown-and had absorbed the oceans of whalesong preserved within the ship's computer, the ecologists released them into the blue bed of the sea. They saw how happy the animals were, and they held a celebration, drinking casks of centuries-old wine and smoking a seaweed they discovered and named toalache. Days later they came to their right senses. They were envious and sad because they could never know the joy of the whales they saved. The master ecologist said that man, with his monkey hands and desire to own pieces of land and other things, had nearly ruined the Earth. Man was an unfortunate terrestrial species flawed by form and by nature. Ah, but what if that form and nature were changed? And so the ecologists smoked their toalache, and they saw visions of their life as it could be, and they bred their children to have pointed noses and flippers and fluked tails.

They named their watery world Agathange, which means, "place where all things move toward the ultimate good." There, for thousands of years, the Agathanians carked and bred their children, whether to ultimate good or evolutionary abomination not even the eschatologists can say.

Perhaps seeking her own ultimategood (or perhaps simply because she had given me life and she loved me), my mother determined to bear my ruined, krydda-preserved body to Agathange. She knew in detail the story of Shanidar. Once, the god-men had restored him to life-could they do less for a pilot of our famous Order? She found passage on a deepship traveling out beyond the Purple Cluster. She surrendered my corpse to a group of Agathanians (actually, they were more of a family) who called themselves the Host of Restorers. She was then invited to leave Agathange, to wait in one of the tiny hotels which orbit the planet, while the Restorers worked-or failed to work-their miracles.

She waited a long time. The painstaking repair of my brain lasted the greater part of two years. (I am speaking of Neverness years, of course.

On Agathange there is only one season-forever spring-and the many hosts measure time in terms of their degree of advancement toward ultimate planetary consciousness. But I am getting ahead of my story.) For most of the first year I lay suspended beneath the buoyant sea while Balusilustalu and others restored parts of my brain with temporary prosthetics. These clumsy, cortically implanted biochips were only meant to get my heart and limbs and lungs moving again; the tiny computers were too crude to help me regain much of my speech function, nor was I able to remember large portions of my life. My first thought after awakening among a host of a thousand, black, gliding, slippery bodies was that I had gone over to the other side of day, and the doffels of all the seals I had killed had come to ask me why I was insane.

It is a truism, a discovery of the ancient scryers, that any civilization made by gods will appear to humans as incomprehensible and miraculous. How, then, can I describe the Agathanian miracle when I still do not comprehend all the details, the complexities of their fabulous technology? I will tell of what I know: The ocean was full of created organisms, many of which were one third computer, one third robot, one third living thing. Most of these tiny tools were microscopic in size. There were programmed bacteria of every size and shape, eubacteria, spherical cocci, and spirochetes with their whiplike tails.

They floated among the engineered phytoplankton; the water was rich with flagellates, single-celled and colonial algae, diatoms with their beautiful symmetry, the little jewels of the sea spinning out silicates or carbon fibers or whatever else they had been designed to manufacture.

Mostly though, the Agathanians were concerned with the manipulation of proteins. The entire ocean was a stew pot for making, dissolving, and reassembling proteins. It was an ancient technology: Restriction enzymes, which were nothing more than protein machines, were used to cut, rearrange and splice bits of a bacterium's DNA. But the Agathanians, being gods, had unraveled more of the mysteries of DNA than our City's splicers ever would. They had created wholly new forms of DNA. And in the trillions of cells of the created organisms all through the waters of Agathange, the DNA was transcribed, its information read and copied into RNA. And the RNA instructed the cells' natural molecular machines, the ribosomes, to build proteins: new enzymes, hormones, muscle protein, hemoglobin, neurologic circuitry to weave into the miniscule computer-brains of new bacteria, protein of every conceivable shape and function, a potentially infinite variety of protein.

"The variety of life is endless," Balusilustalu would say to me one day.

"What do human beings know of life? So little, so little, ha, ha! On Agathange even some of the bacteria-ah, but are they bacteria or are they computers, do you know?-even the pyramid bacteria are intelligent.

There are infinite possibilities."

As on other worlds, the ocean swarmed with copepods, salps, annelid worms, sponges, and jellyfish, and with squid, swallowers, sharks and other fishes higher on the food chain. But in the water there were other things as well, bizarrely shaped animals which looked like crushing or cutting machines, and there were machines which looked like animals. The Agathanians made these things, or I should say, they designed assembler enzymes to make them. (I will call them assemblers because they were really enzymelike machines.) The ribosomes of programmed bacteria pumped out assemblers designed for specific tasks. Assemblers sifted through the water, constructing large molecules by seizing and bonding bits of carbon or silicon, atoms of gold, copper, sodium, any and every element dissolved into the warm, salty stew of the ocean. Lipid molecules, hormones, chlorophyll, and new twists of DNA-the assemblers welded them into organisms which were half plant, half animal. Assemblers bonded carbon atoms layer upon layer, and so the sea-nymphs spun their networks of diamond fibers, building their beautiful, glittering nests.

Assemblers bonded atom to atom, sticking them together like marbles with glue. The Agathanians could-and didassemble atoms into any arrangement permitted by natural law. They linked molecular conductors to voltage sources within'living tissues and shaped electric fields directly and in new ways. If they had wanted to, they could have built a city beneath the waters; I believe they could have made a whale as big as a deepship; perhaps they could have woven circuitry into a whale's nerves and diuscles and created a living lightship to sail the cold currents of space. There was nothing they could not fabricate, disassemble and re-create molecule by molecule, neuron by neuron, including a man.

And so Balusilustalu and my host of Agathanians altered my body to breathe both air and water. Somehow they sliced through my brain and managed to keep my cortex free of phytoplankton and seaworms and other muck. For my comfort, they raised up an island, from the sea bed. They made the trees to grow and blossom and bear fruit, all within a few days. Other things did not happen so quickly. Inside I was changing slowly, day by day, one cell at a time. By the end of my first year on Agathange, I was spending half my time in the water, half on land. I wandered my little island, wondering who I was and why I was alone. I picked tart fruits from the trees; they tasted like snow apples. But they were more sustaining than snow apples. Indeed, the Host of Restorers had designed a single food which nourished me better than the fish swimming through the island's lagoon would have done. Soon, however, I tired of eating fruit. I began to crave silvery fish, to crave meat, anything that twitched or swam or moved. I longed to shape a tree branch into a pronged trident, to spear a fat wingfish, to fillet it with my overgrown fingernails and suck down the salty meat. But I was forbidden to do so. Balusilustalu had pronounced that I was to enter the water only during those semiconscious moments when my brain was opened.

"You do not understand the sea, and you do not know what you are permitted to eat, and you do not know what is permitted to eat you," she said to me one day after she had restored the perception of the color azure to my visual cortex. (I call Balusilustalu "she" even though she was not entirely female. But she, like almost every Agathanian, was much more female than male.) She was flopped up on the beach of my island, laughing at me so hard that her long torso jiggled, rings of beautiful fat rippling beneath her glistening skin. On her flippers she had claws; she used these claws to draw figures of animals on the wet beach sand.

For an Agathanian, her neck was very long and sinuous, as graceful as a swaying seasnake. I should mention that the god-men-the god-women-did not all look alike. Some took on the appearance of sea-cows while others were like dolphins, otters or even whales. They bred their children to a thousand different shapes; a City ecologist would swear they were not of a single species. But for all their differences, they shared a common feature: Their eyes were human. Balusilustalu had large brown eyes, intelligent eyes, eyes full of irony and humor. She looked at me with those eyes, all the while speaking to me in her sophisticated language of barks and grunts and clicks. I understood this language clearly.

Later, after the translating biochips had been removed from my brain, it would all sound like gobbledygook.

But she knew everything about my human speech. "Meat's meat," I said, not remembering then that I was a man of the City. "A man must hunt meat to live."

"You are a stupid man, ha, ha, not a shark-eat the fruit of the trees; the trees are for you."

She seemed contemptuous of me in the same way a new journeyman feels superior to a novice. Did she expect me to spend my days climbing trees as if I were a monkey? In no matter was her contempt more obvious than at my attempt to understand Agathanian society. "Even if your brain were whole," she said, "you could not hear the sea talking to you. "You are a mathematical man seeking immortality for yourself, ha, ha! What can you know of the World-soul?" But then, "Wait, wait, we must wait until you remember yourself, and then wait some more to see if you understand the simple things."

After a while, after I had regained the full use of my muscles, I began to remember. Whole pieces of my personal history would come to me, appearing for an instant tenuous and insubstantial, like sea foam, and then churning, vanishing into the breaking crests of memory. It was an unsettling, eerie feeling. Like a child at night, sometimes I would awaken from the sea not quite knowing who I was or how I had come to be there. I would float up and over the dark waves, rising and falling, looking up at the stars. I had dreams. Sometimes I thought I was Mallory Ringess, an innocent novice learning the Boolean algebras; I was teacher, hunter, journeyman, "Little Fellow," father and son, and sometimes, during those lucid moments when I opened my eyes to the dark ecstasies beneath the slipping waves, I was a pilot and I was a fish-I was a pilot-fish-come to learn the secrets of the ageless sea.

One day, when I thought I had remembered all the events of my life excepting the times when I first had murdered and had come to be murdered, and all those moments in between, one day when the sky was full of puffy, white clouds and the sea was quiet and still, Balusilustalu nudged my floating body with her nose and said, "Now we will remake your brain properly; when we are done, you will know you have a brain."

She led me out to the deeper waters where the others of the Host were waiting. The Agathanians enveloped me. A hundred cold noses poked every part of my naked body. Tongues licked my skin. There was a flurry of flippers beneath me and by my sides. Salty foam washed into my mouth.

For a moment, Pakupakupaku and Tsatsalutsa and many others lifted me out of the water on their backs. My tiny island wavered in the distance, a speck of gold and green against the sparkling blue sea. There were whistles and barks and puckering sounds. From all around us came answering barks and yodels; the sea was suddenly alive with smooth, black gliding shapes. I counted six hundred and thirty of the Host before I was dunked beneath the water and I had to stop counting. (I later learned that there are about a thousand Agathanians to a host and some ten thousand hosts scattered across the ocean.) Balusilustalu-or perhaps it was Mumu or Siseleka-let loose a series of high-pitched squeaks and clicks. She was talking to the dolphins and whales, I thought, and soon the water rippled with massive shapes. "We are calling the deep gods to witness your rebirth," Balusilustalu said. I marveled that the clever Agathanians had formed their tongues and speech organs so they could articulate not only their own languages, but also whalespeak and whalesong.

All this time they were touching each other and barking; information was passing from nose to nose and from throat to ear. The touching suddenly became friskier, more intimate, more urgent. There in the swirling water some of the host lay up against others, and they opened their slits to deep caresses, and the coupling began. Above me, beneath me and on all sides, many were coupling with gusto and abandon, and then more than many-I watched and listened in fascination while the water filled with their barks and groans. At first I did not understand what was happening. I thought the gods had gone crazy with their sex. But soon I became aware of a knowledge within me. A part of the miracle was revealed to me, whether by telepathy or information stored in my brain's biochips I did not know. The godvoice whispered to me while I floated beneath the water, listening, and this is what I knew: that when an adult of a host is ready to mate, she, the First Mother, creates an egg in one of her ovaries. She finds a partner and a coupling then occurs.

(All Agathanians possess membrums, huge ones with triangular red tips bigger than Bardo's, but they do not have testes because they do not need them.) The First Mother thrusts her membrum into the slit of the Second Mother. The egg is squirted into a peculiarly crafted organ called the bakula. In the bakula the egg is partially fertilized. The Second Mother injects the egg with carefully designed strands of germ plasm in much the same manner that a virus infects a host cell with its DNA. Then she passes the egg out her membrum to a third partner where the same process occurs again, and so on many, many times. Finally, when the egg has been passed from bakula to bakula-the Agathanians sometimes refer to this doughnut-shaped protein factory as the "organ of change"when all the mothers have contributed to the egg's heritage and the fertilization is complete, the Last Mother accepts the zygote into her womb where the fetus grows. Thus each Agathanian is the daughter of the entire host.

"But today we are not making daughters," Balusilustalu said to me as I watched the Host passing their plasm back and forth beneath the sea. "We are making something else, oh, ho!"

What they were making is difficult to describe. In some ways the seed inside the Agathanian's bakulas was like a bacterium, like a "neurophage," since it was designed to consume and replace dead, disassociated neurons. In other ways, it was much more like an information virus. Each mother of the Host wove chains of carked DNA, tiny association strings, into the information virus. The mothers moved through the water, touching each other inside, reeling in ecstasy, and they passed the virus from bakula to bakula. And so the impulsive Tenth Mother added association strings according to her inspiration while the wiser Five Hundredth Mother deleted strings and added still others. When the virus was almost finished, Balusilustalu took it into her bakula where she made the final changes.

"We will put it into your brain now," she said. "I invite you to accept the gift of my sisters."

I must admit that I did not want to accept any gift. Even though I was not completely myself, I was aware enough to be very afraid. I am not sure how they opened my brain. I think they used disassemblers to gently split the collagens of my scalp, to dissolve the bone of my skull. I felt as if my whole body were being laid open and spread out tissue by tissue, layer by layer, cell by cell. The water was red and ropy with strands of blood. Parts of me floated in the warm salty sea, unfolding, unraveling slowly. They removed some of the biochips from my brain. When they put the virus inside me, I screamed. There was no pain, but I screamed because I was afraid the virus would destroy rather than heal me. The scream must have carried through the dense, rippling water out to where the circle of bluntheaded sperm whales waited. I heard a series of bubbling groans, which I interpreted as laughter. And then Balusilustalu spoke, without moving her mouth, and I heard her voice inside me.

-The deep gods are wondering why apes always scream when they are born?

Ha, ha-because they are stupid, I told them.

-No, I'm dying, you're killing me.

-We are restoring you to what you could be. -To live, I die. The virus will kill me, I know.

-You are so simple, oh, ho! What we have made for you is not really a virus.

-What is it?

-We are gods, are we not, ha, ha! We have made this seed in our bodies to restore you. You may call it godseed.

-Viruses infect, this hierarchy of DNA, the more primitive programming, killing the higher cells-the ecologists taught me this when I was a novice.

-So stupid! The godseed will seek dead brain cells; so many parts of your brain have died.

-Too bad, too bad, as Bardo would say.

-The godseed is intelligent, in a way. It introduces association strings into dead neurons, revitalizing them for a short time. The godseed will take over the programming of the DNA.

-I'm being taken over, too bad.

-Listen, Man, this is the art ofagathange: The association strings reproduce themselves a thousand times over. Replication and life, stupid Man. The new strings organize themselves, clumping together like sea worms, forming thousands of interconnections. And when they grow, the neuron bursts and dies. And the new godseed is born, thousands of godseeds.

-journeymen die; why don't you leave me alone?

-When the millions of godseeds have migrated across your brain, we will remove the rest of the biochips. The biochips are impossibly clumsy.

They are good for moving your legs or so you can wag your stupid tongue but useless for remembering mathematics and other memories that have been enfolded.

-Enfolded? -The brain is like a hologram; the whole is enfolded within the part. -No.

-Let me explain.

-No, no, I'm dying and I'm afraid.

For a long time I floated in the water, bobbing up and down in the undulations of the gentle current. Somehow I was fed. In my mouth were the tastes of salt and blood, the rank flavor of seal-skin and piss.

(The Agathanians gave as little thought to their excretions as does a baby in a tub of warm water. But the ocean was very large so the clouds of dark, orange piss dissipated quickly.) Long days gradually faded into long nights, and night became day, and the rhythms of the light and dark were lost into the deeper rhythms of the sea. And always, the sound of the Host barking and moaning and talking, and the piping of the dolphins as they chattered among themselves, and the huge sound of the sperm whales merging with the long, black roar of the sea-all these sounds surrounded me, beating at my skin in endless waves of sound. I felt the sound in my bones. I felt as if I were swallowing sound, as if the sound of the sea nourished and sustained me. Dark rhythms raced along my blood, and again there was sound in my brain. The Host glided through the water, passing the song and substance of created life back and forth, back and forth as they touched and sang and emptied themselves into one another. Again they opened my brain, and again they touched the deep parts of me with their virus, with their godseed. And again, many times. The Agathanians sang of the stupidity of human beings, and they sang of humans' cleverness, too. They sang of the World-soul and of darkness and light. As the virus did its work I floated in an expanding ocean of sound. The song of the Host gradually grew clearer. I began to understand things. Sad, mournful notes sounded inside, and I remembered that I had once murdered a seal. Then there was a single high-pitched tone, like the anguished shriek of a shakuhachi. I remembered murdering a man called Liam, and I lived again the moment of my death. The sound of death, the sounds of life: Waves broke over my head, and a seagull beat the air with his wings and cried out above the distant beach, and I remembered things which should have remained obliterated; I remembered learning to count as a child; I remembered elegant theorems and how to knap a blade of flint; I remembered that Leopold Soli was my father; perhaps for an instant I remembered all the events of my life. I remembered things I had never known. Strange, new memories came to me. I knew these memories were the work of the virus inside me. I listened to the song of the sea, the song of the Host of Restorers and all the other hosts. The song of life.

-Because it is fun! And too, we restore you because of who you are, Mallory Ringess, the pilot who will never die, ha, ha! We give you our memories because you must know.

-I don't want to know anything.

-Oh, ho, listen, Man, and we'll tell you everything! Do you hear the waves whispering the secret? We know you know, Man. The secret of life is just sheer joy, and joy is everywhere. joy is what we were made for.

It is in the rush of the nighttime surf and in the beach rocks and in the salt and the air and in the water we breathe and deep, deep within the blood. And the sifting ocean sands and the wriggling silverfish and the hooded greens of the shallows and the purple deeps and in the oyster's crusty shell and the pink reefs and even in the muck of the ocean's floor, joy, joy, joy!

-No, life is pain, I know. There's a poem; I remember some of it: "We're born in our mother's pain and perish in our own."

-Life will not perish. We give you these memories so life will not perish.

-I remember the song of the Host of Restorers.

-All of the hosts are restorers. That is what we are; that is what we do. -I don't want to be restored like this.

-It is a great song, isn't it? Do you hear the song? -I'm afraid.

-Ha, ha!

The song of Agathange is a great song, but it is not a song most human beings would care to hear. Some parts, of course, given the wholly human heritage of that mysterious race, are understandable. Humans and god-men (or even most gods, I think) share the knowledge that matter and consciousness are inseparable. The knowledge is old; ages ago the mechanics found that it was impossible to describe the behavior of subatomic particles without considering the effects of consciousness on the objects they were studying, just as it was impossible to explain the disasterous thermodynamics and poisoning of the Earth, all the while ignoring the conscious and criminal actions of billions of human beings.

(This was, of course, before most mechanics gave up their silly notion of searching for an ultimate particle. It is an unbelievable fact that the ancients had "discovered," described and catalogued thirty thousand three hundred and eight discrete particles-leptons, gluons, photinos, charms, gravitons, quons, quarks, upside-down quiffs and other figments of their equations-before they abandoned their hopeless quest.) So, the Agathanians revere the unity of consciousness and matter, and they have pushed their belief to the logical end. The ten thousand hosts of restorers were trying to awaken the whole of their planet to greater consciousness. The song tells of the great restoration: The first ecologists had not trusted their miniscule consciousnesses. Had man's consciousness saved Old Earth? No, and neither would Agathange be saved, because man was man, and someday-even though they made themselves like seals and took to the sea-the natural harmonies would be broken. Only by creating a consciousness far beyond their own, a World-soul, could they sing a song of total joy, which, after all, is what they sought to do.

When my brain had healed sufficiently for me to understand the most ancient harmonies of the sea, Balusilustalu permitted me to hunt the fish of my island's lagoon. I spent long afternoons remembering, and spearing sandfish and shohi and silvertail. I slept on the beach and burnt my fair, Alaloi skin under the bright, pink sun's glare. Often I would swim out away from the lagoon into the offshore current where the migrating whales frolicked and scooped up great mouthfuls of krill. The water churning red with tiny crustaceans, the spouts of the humpbacks and the sei and bluefins, the tang of sea-salt and foam-I remembered the sea as if I had lived in the water for a million years. But I was still afraid of the sharks and predators swimming beneath the waves, afraid, too, of less tangible things. Often I would swim like a pup surrounded by the safety of the Host. And when they opened my brain, the soothing thoughts of Balusilustalu and the others washed through me:

-Do not be afraid of losing yourself. There is the part and there is the whole, and both exist at once.

-I am a man! I could never be one of the Host.

-And the women of Old Earth nearly succeeded in creating a planetary consciousness. Ten billion women and children-each one like a neuron in a brain. And all their touching and talking and copulating and writing and fighting and singing-all the instances of intercommunication, just like the interconnecting synapses of a neuron. Ha!

-Why did we fail?

-Why does a manchild pull the wings off flies? -I don't want to be part of a planetary brain.

-Ha, ha, but it wants you to be a part of.. . the whole. At least for a time.

-No, no.

-And that is why our ancestors failed. The nascent consciousness of Mother Earth was damaged by its youthful carelessness. In a way, it was never born. The parts were never truly aware of the whole.

-They were afraid, I think.

-Ha, ha, they were stupid! Is a fish aware of the sea, or only the immediate water in which she swims? What does a single neuron in your brain know of mathematics or music or love? We can never be completely aware of the entire dimensionality of the whole, but we can know some of the things it does.

-And the ten thousand hosts-what do you do, then?

-Miraculous things! We're gods, aren't we, oh, ho? We are the brain of Agathange, and when we weep there is rain, and when we sigh the wind blows. When the coral die at the right place, their skeletons form the reefs of the sea. We create new species when there is need, sometimes just because it is fun. And the other things, the higher things, the ecologies and harmonies-we tremble to tell you about these things, we are on the verge of telling you, we want to tell you, we must but ... -But? -But you are too stupid, ha, ha! As even the individual Agathanians, Balusilustalu, Mumu and Pakupakupaku are too stupid. But we at least are aware of the whole; the whole is us, and it is aware of us.

-And the whales?

-As your cortex is to the more primitive parts of your brain, so are the whales to the hosts. You might say the whales are the soul of Agathange.

But that would be a simplification, ha, ha!

-So many hierarchies and layers of intelligence; I'd be afraid of losing myself.

-Stupid, stupid man! The hologram is preserved; all is preserved. -I am afraid.

My great fear was not that the planetary consciousness would absorb me.

Could a man with hair and fingers and a mathematical brain be absorbed by a host of seal-men? And even if they could change my flesh and cark my brain to their whims-and I had to admit they could-why would they want to? What value did Mallory Ringess, a simple pilot of an archaic Order, possess to a race of gods? No, my great fear, what I dreaded above all was losing my selfness to the virus that they had put inside me. The longer I swam among the Host and the more my brain "healed," the more fearful I became.

As the days passed, I gradually realized that the Agathanians had great power over matter and consciousness. (And to complete the semimystical quincunx of the mechanics, over energy, spacetime and information as well. Especially over information.) I noticed that wherever the Host swam, it never rained, nor did the wind blow too hard or the waves grow too steep. Even the sharks were somehow kept at bay. These great, sleek beautiful murderers ate only a few of the oldest Agathanians, those who were ready to "go on," as they put it. The sharks left the pups-the children-alone. I never understood how Mumu and Siseleka were able to swim right up to a great white shark and impudently touch flipper to fin. It was a mystery why they would wish to do so, unless it was to impress me with their love of nature, and more importantly, of nature's love for them. Only once did I doubt their power. Only once did nature seem as far beyond their control as the sun is to a sunfish.

One day a pod of orcas, with their even-spaced, conical teeth and grim smiles, appeared as if from nowhere. In no time, Siseleka and seven others were torn apart and swallowed piecemeal. The blood was so thick in the water that even the sharks became crazed. There was a slaughter, then. Somehow the sharks died even as they bit at mouthfuls of water.

During this confusion one of the orcas forced his way into the center of the Host. He gobbled down eight screaming children as if they were oysters. When he was full-he must have been full, I thought-he whacked-his great tail up under a baby, propelling her up out of the water over the backs of her mothers and into the waiting jaws of another orca. Three times this trick was repeated, and each time a hapless child disappeared into the belly of a smiling black and white beast. Then, as quickly as they had come, the orcas were gone, and the red waters grew still.

The Host's sobs, shrieks, cries, whistles and moans continued for a long time. A few of the mothers took me under the water and engulfed me with layers of seal bodies which writhed and quivered around me. When it seemed the orcas had eaten their fill, the song of the Hosts returned to the sea. Perhaps the Agathanians were taking inventory of their losses or were merely soothing each other. Perhaps they were busy with their "higher things." I was terrified. by the dangers, without and within. I wanted only to be back on my island, to pull myself to safety up the branches of a tree. But after a while the many singing voices calmed and reached a harmony; the shrieks and barks flowed into words, the words into thoughts.

-The price, the price, there is always a price, ha, ha! -But you're gods! When you weep there is rain, you said.

-We're still human, deep inside, and when there is blood we weep. -You said the whales are the higher gods. I don't understand-are they insane?

-Oh, the debts, the sins of our fathers. The consciousness of Agathange is not quite achieved, not quite perfect. The price.

-Tell me about the orcas.

-Listen to the music of the rising waves. -Is part of your planetary brain insane? -Listen to the rush of the drifting clouds. -Tell me.

-Listen to the sound of your own beating heart. -No!

-The price, the flaws. The universe is flawed.

-Is my brain flawed? Tell me about the virus-what will it do? -The universe is perfect, too, and your brain is perfect or will be soon, oh, ho! And you must not call it a virus. The godseed is perfect. The godseed is only for you. The mind of the hosts has surrounded you and modeled your brain. Our mind is a computer, like your Order's akashic computers or the neurologics of your ship. Only much more powerful and profound, oh, ho! We're gods, are we not? Your brain is like a perfect hologram. And in a hologram, isn't information about the whole preserved in every part? And in our bakulas, which listen to our mind's computer, we make the godseed. The godseed "reads" the hologram of your brain. It unfolds it, you are being unfolded now, ha, ha! The godseed knows the exact order in which your neurons must be replaced. The godseed "sees"

the connections which must be made to the living neurons.

-And my memories?

-Memory is a nonlocal phenomenon. Memory can be created but not destroyed. Every part of your brain contains all of your memories. The godseed preserves memory.

-And myself?

-Ha, ha, you are Mallory Ringess, aren't you?

-Is my sense of selfness preserved? Will I still be myself? How will I know?

-What is the sound of the rising sun? -I feel like I'm drowning.

-Drowning in a sea of information, oh, ho! Information, information everywhere! Information in the conch's spiral shell, and in the song of the hosts: information; information passing beneath the sea, passing from the true information viruses to the mothers, and from mother to virus; and the viruses infect the otters and the octopuses, the sunfish and diatoms. This is what a true information virus is: It keeps our DNA informed of the changes of the other species. As it informs us, we inform the life of the sea, passing the information, always passing, back and forth from creature to creature and from plant to plant, under the sea across all the waters of Agathange. Let us open you to the sea of information.

-No! -Don't be afraid. All will be restored. -I'm afraid of dying.

-Information is like water, and you are dying of thirst.

There was a moment of stillness, then, hard to remember, impossible to fully forget. They opened me, and the tides of consciousness rushed in.

I think I became a part of Agathange, a part of the living mind of the planet. I heard things; I felt the planet moving beneath me. Information passed from me into the sea, while each living creature and plant informed me of its existence. My consciousness was embodied in every clam, whale or starfishi am sure of it. I was a lobster feeling with my claws through the bottom sand for decaying tidbits; I was the blue-green algae floating on the currents, soaking up sunlight, and I was a diatom and an arrowworm and a kerfer slicing open the soft tissues of a jellyfish. I was a great sperm whale who sang the ecstasy of his mating and moaned the joy of her giving birth. I was many things and one thing, enfolding the world in my tentacles, in my flippers, in my arms. And always information was passing, from plant to animal, from eaten to eater, from virus to bacteria, from mother to daughter. There was a brilliant pattern to this information, a vision as clear as diamond, but now there are only memories of vision; like starlight diffusing through deep blue waters, the memories are tenuous and dim. I was at once myself, a tiny cell with tiny human consciousness, and I was a vast being aware of the information flooding through the universe. I knew things. To me as a man, the knowledge was impossibly complex. But as Agathange the planet, when I looked out at the stars, I was aware of the beauty and simplicity. In ways I still do not understand, this awareness changed me and has never stopped changing me, and I am afraid it never will.

When I awoke I was lying on the beach with the heels of my feet stuck down into the wet sand near the water's edge. There was sand in my mouth, sand in my hair, ears and eyes. I moved my parched, gummy lips to speak and my teeth ground against particles of grit. A seagull cried out. All along the line of crashing surf, the waves were white and foamy. The pink sun was sliding down the western sky, and I wondered how long I had been lying there. My skin was hot, burnt red as a bloodfruit.

I clasped my hands to my head and ran my fingers across my scalp, searching for some fissure, scab or scar to prove my brain had been opened. But I found only a few pieces of crackling, black seaweed clinging to the hair. (To the black and red hairs.) I closed my eyes, then. I looked inward to the interior of my brain; I looked for memories which might seem unreal. I tested my mathematical powers. I proposed arbitrary axioms and created a logic, and I invented some pretty theorems. I did other things. For a long time I thought deeply, brooding about the problem of identity I had first faced within the Entity. How would I know if my true self had changed? And if it had changed, subtly changed so I never knew, if I were somehow different or diminished, would it matter?

Yes, it would matter. My eyes moved beneath shut lids, and I thought of Katharine's last words to me, and it suddenly mattered more than anything in the universe. My great fear was that the Agathanian virus would rob me of free will. It had happened before, to other men. In a way, the fundamental technology was old. The warrior-poets of Qallar and the despicable alien Scutari were known to practice this barbaric art of brain replacement. They call their art "slel-mime," and it is a horrible thing. Tiny slel-viruses- they are computers, really-invade their victim's brain. The viruses first establish colonies at critical locations throughout the cortex. One by one they take over the victim's programs, all of the human habits, beliefs, emotions, thoughts, and mental functions. The victim's brain then runs the programs of his new master. In the end, when the virus has done its work and all the brain has been remade, the man is no more than a machine.

What is inside of you is neither a true information virus nor a slelvirus. We have told you, it is godseed. The hologram is preserved.

I lay there on the beach, listening to the internal rhythms. In truth, I felt as I had always felt-perhaps a little more complex, angrier, grimmer, and too full of the world, but ... myself I stood up and looked out across the breakers where the ocean swelled and the Host of Restorers gathered. I heard the Song of Agathange in my blood. Although I remained the proud, vain, murderous man I had always been, I knew I was something more. There was a new truth, a new passion inside me-I could feel it burning somewhere behind my eyes. I almost knew what it was. Something-and not just the Song of the Hosts-had been added to me.

I looked out to sea, and I listened to the ebb-sob of the waves, and I knew that the Agathanians had left something unsaid, something unexplained.

I swam out past the lagoon, past the white and pink coral reefs into the deeper waters. Whistling dolphins raced ahead of me, and a humpback breached the surface and landed on his back with a gigantic splash. I found Balusilustalu swimming with the Host. She nudged my stomach as I talked to her in the language of the Civilized Worlds. Once again I asked her about the orcas, and again she answered me in riddles. I was given to understand that the subject was taboo, a thing she could not or would not talk about. (It is curious that for all people-even god-men-there are things which cannot be discussed. The Devaki, for instance, almost never reveal their nighttime dreams, while many of the exemplars disdain any mention of sex or sexuality. And even we pilots may not talk about those things that we may not talk about.)

One final time they opened my brain, but they did not so physically, They opened me with their thoughts, and with their love. With their need. -You are restored, and it is time for you to leave.

-There's something inside me, now. Something that I can't quite articulate, can't even think. The key-tell me about the orcas.

-Feel the freedom of the waves inside you. -Why can't a god give a man a simple answer? -You're still a stupid man, ha, ha!

-You haven't told me everything. -We've told you the secret of life.

-No, there's no secret.

-Stupid, stupid, oh, ho!

-Why did you restore me? -Because it was fun.

-Why?

-Why? Why? Why? Because you are Mallory Ringess, the pilot who has been inside Kalinda, and because she has been inside you.

-Kalinda? -You call her the Solid State Entity, but her name is Kalinda.

And Kalinda knows the secret.

-The secret of life?

-She knows the secret of the Vild. You could say it's the secret to life in this galaxy.

-I don't understand.

-The hosts sing to the life of Agathange and to the ocean, and sometimes we even sing to the sun, but we cannot stop the stars of the Vild from exploding.

-No one can. -You can, ha, ha!

-No, I'm afraid not. I'm just a stupid man. -Oh, ho, you're something more!

-What am I? -Someday you'll know. -What?

-What? What? What? You're Mallory Ringess, the man whose brain has been made as vast as the sea of Agathange. Do you not feel vaster? As the sea swells to wind and rain, so will you rise to the storms of your life.

There are possibilities, Pilot Man, and they will unfold, one by one.

Someday, when you have been even further vastened, you will ask Kalinda why the Vild is growing. We would ask her ourself, but Kalinda hates us and there are hierarchies. The lesser gods must bow to the greater.

-I'll never return to the Entity.

-Someday you will return because it is your fate to return and because we ask you to return.

-Why? -Because the stars are dying and we are afraid.

I often think that fear is the worst thing there is. The Hosts of Agathange said goodbye to me, then. They swam out into the quickest part of the current. One by one the sperm whales took in great breaths of air and dived. The dolphins smiled and whistled goodbye and followed them.

And then the gray whales and the sei whales, the bowheads and blues and others of the mysticeti disappeared beneath the sea. I saw no orcas that day, and I never learned their dark secrets. All around me, from horizon to horizon, the water was blue, empty and still. In the distance, the glistening sands of my little island beckoned. I treaded water and shook the long wet hair away from my eyes, and I looked closer. It wasn't the sand which glistened in the sun; it was the hull of my mother's shuttle.

Somehow the Hosts had informed her of my restoration and sent a ship to fetch her. She was waiting to take me home. As I began the long swim back to shore, I heard the waves of consciousness swelling and roaring within me, and I never felt so afraid or so alone.