Читать книгу Phase Space - Stephen Baxter - Страница 18

She was flying.

She felt light, insubstantial, like a child in the arms of her father.

Looking back she could see the Earth, heavy and massive and unmoving, at the centre of everything, a ball of water folded over on itself.

Rising ever faster, she passed through a layer of glassy light, like an airliner climbing through cloud. She saw how the layer of light folded over the planet, shimmering like an immense soap bubble. Embedded in the membrane she could see a rocky ball, like a lumpy cloud, below them and receding.

It was the Moon.

Philmus woke, gasping, scared.

Another Dante dream.

… But was it just a dream? Or was it a glimpse of the thoughts of the deep chemical mind which – perhaps – shared her body?

She sat up in bed and reached for her tranqsat earpiece. It had been, she thought, one hell of a case.

It hadn’t been easy getting into the Vatican, even for a UN sentience cop.

The Swiss Guard who processed Philmus was dressed like something out of the sixteenth century, literally: a uniform of orange and blue with a giant plumed helmet. But he used a softscreen, and under his helmet he bore the small scars of tranqsat receiver implants.

It was eight in the morning. She saw that the thick clouds over the cobbled courtyards were beginning to break up to reveal patches of celestial blue. It was fake, of course, but the city Dome’s illusion was good.

Philmus was here to study the Virtual reconstruction of Eva Himmelfarb.

Himmelfarb was a young Jesuit scientist-priest who had caused a lot of trouble. Partly by coming up with – from nowhere, untrained – a whole new Theory of Everything. Partly by discovering a new form of intelligence, or by going crazy, depending on which fragmentary account Philmus chose to believe.

Mostly by committing suicide.

Sitting in this encrusted, ancient building, in the deep heart of Europe, pondering the death of a priest, Philmus felt a long way from San Francisco.

At last the guard was done with his paperwork. He led Philmus deeper into the Vatican, past huge and intimidating ramparts, and into the Apostolic Palace. Sited next to St Peter’s, this was a building which housed the quarters of the Pope himself, along with various branches of the Curia, the huge administrative organization of the Church.

The corridors were narrow and dark. Philmus caught glimpses of people working in humdrum-looking offices, with softscreens and coffee cups and pinned-up strip cartoons, mostly in Italian. The Vatican seemed to her like the headquarters of a modern multinational – Nanosoft, say – run by a medieval bureaucracy. That much she’d expected.

What she hadn’t anticipated was the great sense of age here. She was at the heart of a very large, very old, spider-web.

And somewhere in this complex of buildings was an ageing Nigerian who was held, by millions of people, even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, to be literally infallible. She shivered.

She was taken to the top floor, and left alone in a corridor.

The view from here, of Rome bathed in the city Dome’s golden, filtered dawn, was exhilarating. And the walls of the corridor were coated by paintings of dangling willow-like branches. Hidden in the leaves she saw bizarre images: disembodied heads being weighed in a balance, a ram being ridden by a monkey.

‘ … Officer Philmus. I hope you aren’t too disconcerted by our decor.’

She turned at the gravelly voice. A heavy-set, intense man of around fifty was walking towards her. He was dressed in subdued, plain black robes which swished a little as he moved. This was her contact: Monsignor Boyle, a high-up in the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Science.

‘Monsignor.’

Boyle eyed the bizarre artwork. ‘The works here are five hundred years old. The artists, students of Raphael, were enthused by the rediscovery of part of Nero’s palace.’ He sounded British, his tones measured and even. ‘You must forgive the Vatican its eccentricities.’

‘Eccentric or not, the Holy See is a state which has signed up to the UN’s conventions on the creation, exploitation and control of artificial sentience –’

‘Which is why you are here.’ Boyle smiled. ‘Americans are always impatient. So. What do you know about Eva Himmelfarb?’

‘She was a priest. A Jesuit. An expert in organic computing, who –’

‘Eva Himmelfarb was a fine scholar, if undisciplined. She was pursuing her research – and, incidentally, working on a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy – and suddenly she produced a book, that book, which has been making such an impact in theoretical physics … And then, just as suddenly, she killed herself. Eva’s text begins as a translation of the last canto of the Paradiso –’

‘In which Dante sees God.’

‘ … Loosely speaking. And then the physical theory, expressed in such language and mathematics as Eva could evidently deploy, simply erupts.’

Himmelfarb’s bizarre, complex text had superseded string theory by modelling fundamental particles and forces as membranes moving in twenty-four-dimensional space. Something like that, anyhow. It was, according to the experts who were trying to figure it out, the foundation for a true unified theory of physics. And it seemed to have come out of nowhere.

Boyle was saying, ‘It is as if, tracking Dante’s footsteps, Eva had been granted a vision.’

‘And that’s why you resurrected her.’

‘Ah.’ The Monsignor nodded coolly. ‘You are an amateur psychoanalyst. You see in me the frustrated priest, trapped in the bureaucratic layers of the Vatican, striving to comprehend another’s glimpse of God.’

‘I’m just a San Francisco cop, Monsignor.’

‘Well, I think you’ll have to try harder than that, officer. Do you know how she killed himself?’

‘Tell me.’

‘She rigged up a microwave chamber. She burned herself to death. She used such high temperatures that the very molecules that had composed her body, her brain, were destroyed; above three hundred degrees or so, you see, even amino acids break down. It was as if she was determined to leave not the slightest remnant of her physical or spiritual presence.’

‘But she didn’t succeed. Thanks to you.’

The fat Monsignor’s eyes glittered. He clapped his hands.

Pixels, cubes of light, swirled in the air. They gathered briefly in a nest of concentric spheres, and then coalesced into a woman: thin, tall, white, thirty-ish, oddly serene for someone with a sparrow’s build. Her eyes seemed bright. Like Boyle, she was wearing drab cleric’s robes.

The Virtual of Eva Himmelfarb registered surprise to be here, to exist at all. She looked down at her hands, her robes, and Boyle. Then she smiled at Philmus. Her surface was slightly too flawless.

Philmus found herself staring. This was one of the first generation of women to take holy orders. It was going to take some getting used to a world where Catholic priests could look like air stewardesses.

Time to go to work, Philmus. ‘Do you know who you are?’

‘I am Eva Himmelfarb. And, I suppose, I should have expected this.’ She was German; her accent was light, attractive.

‘Do you remember –’

‘What I did? Yes.’

Philmus nodded. She said formally, ‘We can carry out full tests later, Monsignor Boyle, but I can see immediately that this projection is aware of us, of me, and is conscious of changes in her internal condition. She is self-aware.’

‘Which means I have broken the law,’ said Monsignor Boyle dryly.

‘That’s to be assessed.’ She said to Himmelfarb, ‘You understand that under international convention you have certain rights. You have the right to continued existence for an indefinite period in information space, if you wish it. You have the right to read-only interfaces with the prime world … It is illegal to create full sentience – self-awareness – for frivolous purposes. I’m here to assess the motives of the Vatican in that regard.’

‘We have a valid question to pose,’ murmured the Monsignor, with a hint of steel in his voice.

‘Why did I destroy myself?’ Himmelfarb laughed. ‘You would think that the custodians of the true Church would rely on rather less-literal means to divine a human soul, wouldn’t you, officer, than to drag me back from Hell itself? – Oh, yes, Hell. I am a suicide. And so I am doomed to the seventh circle, where I will be reincarnated as a withered tree. Have you read your Dante, officer?’

Philmus had, in preparation for the case.

The Monsignor said softly, ‘Why did you commit this sin, Eva?’

Himmelfarb flexed her Virtual fingers, and her flesh broke up briefly into fine, cubic pixels. ‘May I show you?’

The Monsignor glanced at Philmus, who nodded.

The lights dimmed. Philmus felt sensors probe at her exposed flesh, glimpsed lasers scanning her face.

The five-hundred-year-old painted willow branches started to rustle, and from the foliage inhuman eyes glared at her.

Then the walls dissolved, and Philmus was standing on top of a mountain.

She staggered. She felt light on her feet, as if giddy.

She always hated Virtual transitions.

The Monsignor was moaning.

She was on the edge of some kind of forest. She turned, cautiously. She found herself looking down the terraced slope of a mountain. At the base was an ocean which lapped, empty, to the world’s round edge. The sun was bright in her eyes.

A few metres down, a wall of fire burned.

The Monsignor walked with great shallow bounds. He moved with care and distaste; maybe donning a Virtual body was some kind of venial sin.

Himmelfarb smiled at Philmus. ‘Do you know where you are? You could walk through that wall of fire, and not harm a hair of your head.’ She reached up to a tree branch and plucked a leaf. It grew back instantly. ‘Our natural laws are suspended here, officer; like a piece of art, everything gives expression to God’s intention.’

Boyle said bluntly, ‘You are in Eden, officer Philmus, at the summit of Mount Purgatory. The last earthly place Dante visited before ascending into Heaven.’

Eden?

The trees, looming, seemed to crowd around her. She couldn’t identify any species. Though they had no enviroshields, none of the trees suffered any identifiable burning or blight.

She found herself cowering under the blank, unprotected sky.

Maybe this was someone’s vision of Eden. But Philmus had been living under a Dome for ten years; this was no place she could ever be at peace.

‘What happened to the gravity?’

Himmelfarb said, ‘Gravity diminishes as you ascend Purgatory. We are far from Satan here … I can’t show you what I saw, officer Philmus. But perhaps, if we look through Dante’s eyes, you will understand. The Divine Comedy is a kind of science fiction story. It’s a journey through the universe, as Dante saw it. He was guided by Virgil –’

‘Who?’

The Monsignor said, ‘The greatest Latin poet. You must have heard of the Aeneid. The significance to Dante was that Virgil was a pagan: he died before Christ was born. No matter how wise and just Virgil was, he could never ascend to Heaven, as Dante could, because he never knew Christ.’

‘Seems harsh.’

The Monsignor managed a grin. ‘Dante wasn’t making the rules.’

Himmelfarb said, ‘Dante reaches Satan in Hell, at the centre of the Earth. Then, with Virgil, he climbs a tunnel to a mountain in the southern hemisphere –’

‘This one.’

‘Yes.’ Himmelfarb shielded her eyes. ‘The Paradiso, the last book, starts here. And it was when my translation reached this point that the thing I’d put in my head woke up.’

‘What are you talking about?’

The priest grinned like a teenager. ‘Let me show you my laboratory. Come on.’ And she turned and plunged into the forest.

Irritated, Philmus followed.

In the mouth of the wood it was dark. The ground, coated with leaves and mulch, gave uncomfortably under her feet.

The Monsignor walked with her. He said, ‘Dante was a study assignment. Eva was a Jesuit, officer. Her science was unquestioned in its quality. But her faith was weak.’

Himmelfarb looked back. ‘So there you have your answer, Monsignor,’ she called. ‘I am the priest who lost her faith, and destroyed herself.’ She spread her hands. ‘Why not release me now?’

Boyle ignored her.

The light was changing.

The mulch under Philmus’s feet had turned, unnoticed, to a thick carpet. And the leaves on the trees had mutated to the pages of books, immense rows of them.

They broke through into a rambling library.

Himmelfarb laughed. ‘Welcome to the Secret Archive of the Vatican, officer Philmus.’

They walked through the Archive.

Readers, mostly in lay clothes, were scattered sparsely around the rooms, with Virtual documents glittering in the air before them, page images turning without rustling.

Philmus felt like a tourist.

Himmelfarb spun in the air. ‘A fascinating place,’ she said to Philmus. ‘Here you will find a demand for homage to Genghis Khan, and Galileo’s recantation … After two thousand years I doubt that anybody knows all the secrets stored here.’

Philmus glanced at Boyle, but his face was impassive.

Himmelfarb went on, ‘This is also the heart of the Vatican’s science effort. It may seem paradoxical to you that there is not necessarily a conflict between the scientific world-view and the Christian. In Dante’s Aristotelian universe, the Earth is the physical centre of all things, but God is the spiritual centre. Just as human nature has twin poles, of rationality and dreams. Dante’s universe, the product of a thousand years of contemplation, was a model of how these poles could be united; in our time this seems impossible, but perhaps after another millennium of meditation on the meaning of our own new physics, we might come a little closer. What do you think?’

Philmus shrugged. ‘I’m no Catholic.’

‘But,’ said Himmelfarb, ‘you are troubled by metaphysics. The state of my electronic soul, for instance. You have more in common with me than you imagine, officer.’

They reached a heavy steel door. Beyond it was a small, glass-walled vestibule; there were sinks, pegs and lockers. And beyond that lay a laboratory, stainless steel benches under the grey glow of fluorescent lights. The lab looked uncomfortably sharp-edged by contrast with the building which contained it.

With confidence, Himmelfarb turned and walked through the glass wall into the lab. Philmus followed. The wall was a soap-bubble membrane that stretched over her face, then parted softly, its edge stroking her skin.

Much of the equipment was anonymous lab stuff – rows of grey boxes – incomprehensible to Philmus. The air was warm, the only smell an antiseptic subtext.

They reached a glass wall that reached to the ceiling. Black glove sleeves, empty, protruded from the wall like questing fingers. Beyond the wall was an array of tiny vials, with little robotic manipulators wielding pipettes, heaters and stirrers running on tracks around them. If the array was as deep as it was broad, Philmus thought, there must be millions of the little tubes in there.

Himmelfarb stood before the wall. ‘My pride and joy,’ she said dryly. ‘Or it would be if pride wasn’t a sin. The future of information processing, officer, perhaps of consciousness itself …’

‘And all of it,’ said the Monsignor, ‘inordinately expensive. All those enzymes, you know.’

‘It looks like a DNA computer,’ Philmus said.

‘Exactly right,’ Himmelfarb said. ‘The first experiments date back to the last century. Did you know that? The principle is simple. DNA strands, or fragments of strands, will spontaneously link in ways that can be used to model real-world problems. We might model your journey to Rome, officer, from –’

‘San Francisco.’

The air filled with cartoons, twisting molecular spirals.

‘I would prepare strands of DNA, twenty or more nucleotide bases long, each of which would represent a possible transit point on your journey – Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris – or one of the possible paths between them.’

The strands mingled, and linked into larger molecules, evidently modelling the routes Philmus could follow.

‘The processing and storage capacity of such machines is huge. In a few grams of DNA I would have quadrillions of solution molecules –’

‘And somewhere in there you’d find a molecule representing my best journey.’

‘And there’s the rub. I have to find the single molecule which contains the answer I seek. And that can take seconds, an eternity compared to the fastest silicon-based machines.’ The cartoons evaporated. Himmelfarb pushed her Virtual hand through the wall and ran her fingers through the arrays of tubes, lovingly. ‘At any rate, that is the challenge.’

Monsignor Boyle said, ‘We – that is, the Pontifical Academy – funded Eva’s research into the native information processing potential of human DNA.’

‘Native?’

Abruptly the lab, the wall of vials, crumbled and disappeared; a hail of pixels evaporated, exposing the Edenic forest once more.

Philmus winced in the sunlight. What now? She felt disoriented, weary from the effort of trying to track Himmelfarb’s grasshopper mind.

Himmelfarb smiled and held out her hand to Philmus. ‘Let me show you what I learned from my study of Dante.’ The young priest’s Virtual touch was too smooth, too cool, like plastic.

The Monsignor seemed to be moaning again. Or perhaps he was praying.

‘Look at the sun,’ said Himmelfarb.

Philmus lifted her face, and stared into the sun, which was suspended high above Eden’s trees. She forced her eyes open.

It wasn’t real light. It carried none of the heat and subtle weight of sunlight. But the glare filled her head.

She saw Himmelfarb; she looked as if she was haloed.

Then she looked down.

They were rising, as if in some glass-walled elevator.

They were already above the treetops. She felt no breeze; it was as if a cocoon of air moved with them. She felt light, insubstantial, like a child in the arms of her father. She felt oddly safe; she would come to no harm here.

‘We’re accelerating,’ Himmelfarb said. ‘If you want the Aristotelian physics of it, we’re being attracted to the second pole of the universe.’

‘The second pole?’

‘God.’

Looking back Philmus could see the Earth, heavy and massive and unmoving, at the centre of everything, a ball of water folded over on itself. They were already so high she couldn’t make out Purgatory.

Rising ever faster, they passed through a layer of glassy light, like an airliner climbing through cloud. As they climbed higher she saw how the layer of light folded over the planet, shimmering like an immense soap bubble. Embedded in the membrane she could see a rocky ball, like a lumpy cloud, below them and receding.

It was the Moon.

She said, ‘If I remember my Ptolemy –’

‘The Earth is surrounded by spheres. Nine of them, nine heavens. They are transparent, and they carry the sun, Moon, and planets, beneath the fixed stars.’

The Monsignor murmured, ‘We are already beyond the sphere of decay and death.’

Himmelfarb laughed. ‘And you ain’t seen nothing yet.’

Still they accelerated.

Himmelfarb’s eyes were glowing brilliantly bright. She said, ‘You must understand Dante’s geometrical vision. Think of a globe of Earth, Satan at the south pole, God at the north. Imagine moving north, away from Satan. The circles of Hell, and now the spheres of Heaven, are like the lines of latitude you cross as you head to the equator …’

Philmus, breathless, tried not to close her eyes. ‘You were telling me about your research.’

‘ … All right. DNA is a powerful information store. A picogram of your own DNA, officer, is sufficient to specify how to manufacture you – and everything you’ve inherited from all your ancestors, right back to the primordial sea. But there is still much about our DNA – whole stretches of its structure – whose purpose we can only guess. I wondered if –’

The Monsignor blew out his cheeks. ‘All this is unverified.’

Himmelfarb said, ‘I wondered if human DNA itself might contain information processing mechanisms – which we might learn from or even exploit, to replace our clumsy pseudo-mechanical methods …’

Still they rose, through another soap-bubble celestial sphere, then another. All the planets, Mercury through Saturn, were below them now. The Earth, at the centre of translucent, deep blue clockwork, was far below.

They reached the sphere of the fixed stars. Philmus swept up through a curtain of light points, which then spangled over the diminishing Earth beneath her.

‘One hell of a sight,’ Philmus said.

‘Literally,’ said the Monsignor, gasping.

‘You see,’ Himmelfarb said to Philmus, ‘I succeeded. I found computation – information processing – going on in the junk DNA. And more. I found evidence that assemblages of DNA within our cells have receptors, so they can observe the external world in some form, that they store and process data, and even that they are self-referential.’

‘Natural DNA computers?’

‘More than that. These assemblages are aware of their own existence, officer. They think.’

Suspended in the air, disoriented, Philmus held up her free hand. ‘Woah. Are you telling me our cells are sentient?’

‘Not the cells,’ the priest said patiently. ‘Organelles, assemblages of macromolecules inside the cells. The organelles are –’

‘Dreaming?’

The priest smiled. ‘You do understand.’

Philmus shivered, and looked down at her hand. Could this be true? ‘I feel as if I’ve woken up in a haunted house.’

‘Except that, with your network of fizzing neurones, your clumsily constructed meta-consciousness, you are the ghost.’

‘How come nobody before ever noticed such a fundamental aspect of our DNA?’

Himmelfarb shrugged. ‘We weren’t looking. And besides, the basic purpose of human DNA is construction. Its sequences of nucleotides are job orders and blueprints for making molecular machine tools. Proteins, built by DNA, built you, officer, who learned, fortuitously, to think, and question your origins.’ She winked at Philmus. ‘Here is a prediction. In environments where resources for building, for growing, are scarce – the deep sea vents, or even the volcanic seams of Mars where life might be clinging, trapped by five billion years of ice – we will find much stronger evidence of macromolecular sentience. Rocky dreams on Mars, officer!’

The Monsignor said dryly, ‘If we ever get to Mars we can check that. And if you’d bothered to write up your progress in an orderly manner we might have a way to verify your conclusions.’

The dead priest smiled indulgently. ‘I am not – was not – a very good reductionist, I am afraid. In my arrogance, officer, I took the step which has damned me.’

‘Which was?’

Her face was open, youthful, too smooth. ‘Studying minds in test tubes wasn’t enough. I wanted to contact the latent consciousness embedded in my own DNA. I was curious. I wanted to share its oceanic dream. I injected myself with a solution consisting of a buffer solution and certain receptor mechanisms which –’

‘And did it work?’

She smiled. ‘Does it matter? Perhaps now you have your answer, Monsignor. I am Faust; I am Frankenstein. I even have the right accent! I am the obsessed scientist, driven by her greed for godless knowledge, who allowed her own creation to destroy her. There is your story –’

Philmus said, ‘I’ll decide that … Eva, what did it feel like?’

Himmelfarb hesitated, and her face clouded with pixels. ‘Frustrating. Like trying to glimpse a wonderful landscape through a pinhole. The organelles operate at a deep, fundamental level … And perhaps they enjoy a continuous consciousness that reaches back to their formation in the primeval sea five billion years ago. Think of that. They are part of the universe as I can never be, behind the misty walls of my senses; they know the universe as I never could. All I could do – like Dante – is interpret their vision with my own limited language and mathematics.’

So here’s where Dante fits in. ‘You’re saying Dante went through this experience?’

‘It was the source of the Comedy. Yes.’

‘But Dante was not injected with receptors. How could he –’

‘But we all share the deeper mystery, the DNA molecule itself. Perhaps in some of us it awakens naturally, as I forced in my own body … And now, I will show you the central mystery of Dante’s vision.’

Boyle said, ‘I think we’re slowing.’

Himmelfarb said, ‘We’re approaching the ninth sphere.’

‘The Primum Mobile,’ said the Monsignor.

‘Yes. The “first moving part”, the root of time and space. Turned by angels, expressing their love for God … Look up,’ Himmelfarb said to Philmus. ‘What do you see?’

At first, only structureless light. But then, a texture …

Suddenly Philmus was looking, up beyond the Primum Mobile, into another glass onion, a nesting of transparent spheres that surrounded – not a dull lump of clay like Earth – but a brilliant point of light. The nearest spheres were huge, like curving wings, as large as the spheres of the outer planets.

Himmelfarb said, ‘They are the spheres of the angels, which surround the universe’s other pole, which is God. Like a mirror image of Hell. Counting out from here we have the angels, archangels, principalities, powers –’

‘I don’t get it,’ Philmus said. ‘What other pole? How can a sphere have two centres?’

‘Think about the equator,’ whispered Himmelfarb. ‘The globe of Earth, remember? As you travel north, as you pass the equator, the concentric circles of latitude start to grow smaller, while still enclosing those to the south …’

‘We aren’t on the surface of a globe.’

‘But we are on the surface of a 3-sphere – the three-dimensional surface of a four-dimensional hypersphere. Do you see? The concentric spheres you see are exactly analogous to the lines of latitude on the two-dimensional surface of a globe. And just as, if you stand on the equator of Earth, you can look back to the south pole or forward to the north pole, so here, at the universe’s equator, we can look towards the poles of Earth or God. The Primum Mobile, the equator of the universe, curves around the Earth, below us, and at the same time it curves around God, above us.’

Philmus looked back and forth, from God to Earth, and she saw, incredibly, that Himmelfarb was right. The Primum Mobile curved two ways at once.

The Monsignor’s jaw seemed to be hanging open. ‘And Dante saw this? A four-dimensional artefact? He described it?’

‘As remarkable as it seems – yes,’ said Himmelfarb. ‘Read the poem again if you don’t believe it: around the year 1320 Dante Alighiero wrote down a precise description of the experience of travelling through a 3-sphere. When I figured this out, I couldn’t believe it myself. It was like finding a revolver in a layer of dinosaur fossils.’