Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

said. ’My mother spent a long
time making me understand. You just have to open your mind.’
    ’I am no fool,’ he said sharply. ’I can imagine a map of all the
logical possibilities of a universe. But it would be just that - a
map, a theoretical construct, a thing of data and logic. It would not
be a place. The universe doesn’t feel like that, I feel time passing.
I don’t experience disconnected instants, Reth’s dusty reality.’
    ’Of course not,’ said Reth. ’But you must understand that
everything we know of the past is a record embedded in the present -
the fossils and geology of Earth, so cruelly obliterated by the Qax,
even the traces of chemicals and electricity in your own brain that
comprise your memory, maintaining your illusion of past times. Sarfi
herself is an illustration of the point. Gemo, may I - ?’
    Gemo nodded, unsmiling. Hama noted he hadn’t asked Sarfi’s
permission for whatever he was about to do.
    Reth tapped a data slate. Sarfi froze, becoming a static,
inanimate sculpture of light. Then, after perhaps ten seconds, she
melted, began to move once more.
    She saw Hama staring at her. ’What’s wrong?’
    Reth, ignoring her, said, ’The child contains a record of her own
shallow past, embedded in her programmes and data stores. She is
unaware of intervals of time when she is frozen, or deactivated. If I
could start and stop you, Hama Druz, you would wake protesting that
your memories contained no gaps. But your memories themselves would
have been frozen. I could even chop up your life and rearrange its
instants in any way I chose; at each instant you would have an intact
set of memories, a record of a past, and you would believe yourself
to have lived through a continuous, consistent reality.
    ’And thus the maximal-reality dust grains contain embedded within
themselves a record of the eras which >preceded< them. Each
grain contains brains, like yours and mine, with >memories<
embedded in them, frozen like sculptures. And history emerges in
configuration space because those rich grains are then drawn, by a
least-energy matching principle, to the grains which >precede<
and >follow< them… You see?’
    Sarfi looked to Gemo. ’Mother? What does he mean?’
    Gemo watched her clinically. ’Sarfi has been reset many times, of
course,’ she said absently. ’I had no wish to see her grow old,
accreted with worthless memory. It was rather like the Extirpation,
actually. The Qax sought to reset humanity, to abolish the memory of
the race. In the ultimate realisation, we would have become a race of
children, waking every day to a fresh world, every day a new
creation. It was cruel, of course, but theoretically intriguing.
Don’t you think?’
    Sarfi was trembling.
    Now Reth began telling Gemo, rapidly and with enthusiasm, of his
plans to explore his continent of configurations. ’No human mind
could apprehend that multi-dimensional domain unaided, of course. But
it can be modelled, with metaphors - rivers, seas, mountains. It is
possible to explore it…’
    Hama said, ’But, if your meta-universe is static, timeless, how
could it be experienced? For experience depends on duration.’
    Reth shook his head impatiently. He tapped his data slate and
beckoned to Sarfi. ’Here, child.’
    Hesitantly, she stepped forward. Now she trailed a worm-like tube
of light, as if her image had been captured at each moment in some
invisible emulsion. She emerged, blinking, from the tube, and looked
back at it, bewildered.
    ’Stop these games,’ Hama said tightly.
    ’You see?’ Reth said. ’Here is an evolution of Sarfi’s structure,
but mapped in space, not time. But it makes no difference to Sarfi.
Her memory at each frozen instant contains a record of her walking
across the floor towards me - doesn’t it, dear? And thus, in static
configuration space, sentient creatures could have experiences,
afforded them by the evolution of information structures across
space.’
    Hama turned to Sarfi. ’Are you all right?’
    She snapped back, ’What do you think?’
    ’I think Reth may be insane,’ he said.
    She stiffened, pulling back. ’Don’t ask me. I’m not even a mayfly,
remember?’
    ’It is comforting to know that configuration space exists, Hama,’
Gemo said. ’Nothing matters, you see: not even death, not even the
Extirpation. For we persist, each moment exists for ever, in a
greater universe…’
    It was a philosophy of decadence, Hama thought angrily. A
philosophy of