Before the Goliath Sinks, Act Two: Strangers for Ever, She Opens to Her the Dream That Holds the Earth

It was a message out of the Silent Sea.

A weak electromagnetic signal, its strength falling away as the distance it crossed grew, until against the background noise of the universe, which never stops, it was almost too faint to make out.

— Like a drop of water falling into an ocean, and the ripples it makes covered over by a thousand rolling waves.

So said the engineer, who was never anywhere and yet seemed to be everywhere. All the same, he spent a long time fishing that drop of water out of the ocean, laying it on a slide and studying it closely, trying to find what secret was left inside it.

— Our world is destroyed and born again, and therefore our world will endure for ever. Far away, in a place so vast it has lost its end, the glory that belongs to the Kaletians has never faded.

The linguist tried to read that signal. It seemed to be a script that had vanished from history long ago; the people who used it, the Kaletians, were destroyed six hundred stellar years back. The historian explained that the Kaletians had lived on three planets turning in a regular pattern, their orbits crossing one another, moving steadily around the Kaletian star.

The Kaletians were an extremely slow-developing species. At first it took them sixty stellar years to acquire reason, and another hundred and sixty to learn that there were others of their kind on the other two planets. At last, in the three hundred and sixtieth stellar year, the three touched one another and merged, and formed what the records of civilisation now call the Kaletians. So the biologist added.

But twenty stellar years later their orbits were destroyed by a radiation wave the Decci fired. One star fell first into the burning fire of their sun; then, the remaining two, having lost the pull that balanced them, collided at last and were destroyed. Kaletia now is a cold, dead system. So the physicist explained.

A great pity. The Kaletians could write very beautiful poetry. Even today their poems are still sung in many places. So the linguist added, regretfully.

— Perhaps — and I say perhaps — the Kaletians were not wiped out at all, but are still alive inside the Silent Sea?

At the linguist’s guess, contempt and anger showed in the Colonel’s eye.

— That is impossible. Because I destroyed them with my own hands.

And saying it, he crushed that message with his own hands.

Perhaps this is only a reflection. The physicist, his voice unsteady, tried to explain: a signal the Kaletians sent out before their destruction had been echoing through the universe all this time, crossing a great deal of time to arrive here at last, and then had been reflected back by the Silent Sea for us to receive. So we might say this was a last word from the Kaletians, delivered late.

— A pitiable last word.

The Colonel closed the matter and ended the conversation. He no longer spoke to any of us; he ordered the shadow soldiers to open the engines fully and drive the vessel towards the Silent Sea at speed. As the strongest conqueror in the known universe, he believed that every ghost attempting to block the Decci would be crushed a second time by this beast.

— Why do you not speak.

When everyone else had gone, the linguist asked me.

— You know those languages, don’t you? I have heard that the Keibir dream is like an enormous database.

Yes. Perhaps the Keibir dream is an enormous database. Every Keibir who has gone out on a journey, or ever did, puts the self into it. Each self is like an atom: in that huge dream they attract one another, collide, merge, and at last make something new. Every Keibir is both a self and other people.

Inside the experience of that enormous self, I have been to Kaletia and seen those three planets with my own eyes. Just as the physicist said, they moved around their star in regular order — but what he did not know is that those planets were as brilliant as diamonds, like fragments of light fallen into the world. The Kaletians developed slowly, and their technology was poor, just as the biologist said — but what he did not understand is that those creatures were kind and warm, and offered broth and songs to every species that came into their system. And they did once possess a beautiful, complicated poetry that nobody in the whole universe could match, as the linguist sighed over.

— But I am only a cartographer.

I answered her.

— I gave the Decci the map. I let him find where Kaletia was.

Information is a thing that objectively exists in this universe, and it does not disappear for the sake of any one being’s will.

As the Silent Sea drew nearer, after the Kaletians’ last words we received more and more messages that belonged to nobody. In the almost infinite, tangled noise of the universe, the engineer worked to pick out the signals in which a pattern could be read.

— In the name of the sovereign of Dayaria, we go to meet the conqueror from the far system.

Written in the pictographic script of Dayaria, perhaps by the hand of Borsa, the last lord. Not long after, the Dayaria nebula was destroyed by the Decci emperor, the conqueror.

— The Galir will love this land for ever, our dear homeland.

Written in the symbol language of the Galir. That race, who loved to look up at the stars, is said to have been wiped out in a storm in space three hundred stellar years ago.

— We came to know script, language, reason and pain, and therefore we chose to set out in search of the truth.

Written in the wave-frequency language of the Pengfeng. The Pengfeng were devout seekers of knowledge; they gave up their homeland willingly for the sake of knowledge and wandered the world, and were lost from sight a hundred and thirty stellar years ago.

The Jiase, the Pilku, the Len, the Blackrock, the Andromedans, the Sanyun… almost every civilisation the universe has ever recorded was sending out something of its own. Even the linguist, learned as she was, could not for a while break open the breadth and the intricacy of those languages. Besides last words there were confessions, deep calls, even trivial daily matters and thoughts that flashed past and were gone.

The vessel was like a net spread in an ocean, with shoals of fish beyond counting passing through it, striking it and being caught by us — and, dull as we were, we could not understand why those hundreds of millions of fish had come, or where they were going. The Silent Sea was like a mouth wrapped round infinity, ceaselessly giving out messages that left a person dazed and lost.

On that journey of falling towards a place nobody knows, we drew further and further from the centres of this universe’s civilisations and stepped, one pace at a time, into a wilderness of which nothing is known. And precisely because the background was so desolate, those tangled messages, growing clearer and easier to make out, wove a great poem across the vast sea of stars, and pulled us further and further into illusion.

Soon we could see the Silent Sea in outline. It stood there, watching us with a quietness and a gentleness that seemed to have existed for ten thousand stellar epochs. In those fathomless black eyes, the Decci ship was a grain of dust about to fall into the ocean.

The Silent Sea was saying something to us, in languages we could understand and languages we never had. Those voices were so clear now that we no longer needed the receivers or the decoding; our bodies alone took in their existence. Every sense magnified the sound, and in that telling that went on day and night the signals pierced the dark and went into our spirits like needles.

And with them came changes in the body.

The biologist grew more violent. His smooth tail was covered in filth and he was never again seen to groom it. The historian grew more solitary; she would often give off a frightened humming from inside the gaps in the machinery. The physicist could no longer hold on to reason, and spent most of his time numbing his nerves and his thinking with some unnamed liquid. And the engineer — perhaps, somewhere I could not see, he was still faithfully recording those messages from nowhere.

Under the influence of those signals, the first to fall into madness were the fragile manufactured soldiers. They shrieked in the dark, ran, and drove their blades into one another’s bodies. The dead were put into the fusers and made again; those who had fled drifted into an incurable madness. Perhaps, in the heart of an artificial man who had never had a heart, a fear of eternal life had been born for the first time.

— Those voices are nothing but the muttering of ghosts in the sea of stars.

The technology the Colonel was so proud of lost its power in front of the unknown. The shielding he had built could remove, at the very most, one hundred-millionth of that storm of information. And so all that was left of him was a stubborn will and the pride of the Decci. He tried to resist the whole of it with a conqueror’s courage, ordering the black soldiers to keep strict control, forbidding any creature aboard this ship to flinch now.

The linguist spoke less, and she was the only one still doing her own work. In the empty hall of the ship she sat all day, translating the languages in those messages, ancient or young.

— Why do you not ask for my help.

Watching her bent over her work, I asked a question for the first time. Her face was worn out and there was still a light in her eyes.

— I am a linguist. Reading languages is my work.

— The languages you are reading have all existed in my dream.

I told her that everything, all of it, the Keibir dream records faithfully — this whole universe.

— I have seen an immense empire held up by tens of thousands of planets, a magnificent palace standing on one enormous star, the royal house of Jesa ruling territory beyond counting and enslaving races beyond counting. They were the last Decci: full of vigour, full of ambition. They bought maps from me, so that they could go on to conquer the next world. I have been to a group of systems on the point of dying, where the burning star that once made countless lives, and that they called their god, had used up the hydrogen at its core and was slowly going towards death. Before long the faithful at their devout prayers would be swallowed by the god that had become a red giant, and would give up their lives for ever. The rebels among the faithful bought maps from me, and fled their homeland and their faith as the Keibir once did. I have walked into a newborn system, and there I stayed a very long time, in order to see a birth with my own eyes. The young core of that system was bright and dazzling, like a vigorous king granting his followers his gift — life. Those young, tender, tiny living things spent long ages before they gathered at last into a multitude, taking their energy in the most primitive and stable way, growing slowly and steadily. I left them a birth gift: a map. Perhaps in several hundred stellar years the curious among those new species will follow that map and take their first step out into the world.

The journey has never ended, and it seems it will have no end, because Keibir is gone. Among all the forms of life and all the civilisations the dream has recorded, there is no shadow of Keibir.

From beginning to end, the Keibir have understood that the journey they set out on has no way home.

The linguist looked at me a long time. Then she bent to my ear and said, in Keibir, almost too quietly to hear:

— I am going to tell you a secret.

She took me past the soldiers drifting about like ghosts and up onto the spine of the ship. That once imposing beast had grown decayed and brittle under the torment of the endless storm of information. When we stepped onto the lifeboat the deck creaked underfoot, as though the poor creature were sighing.

Disorder was pulling order apart. In the far dark, the whirl of the storm twisted everything around it out of shape. The solitary lifeboats clung to the great vessel like little skiffs. Perhaps the Colonel had never imagined that this might be a journey with no return, which was why he had provided them; but these little boats standing in their ranks had long since been forgotten.

Inside that cramped hull, the linguist finally spoke.

— The physicist said the Silent Sea might be reflecting those messages.

She said.

— If the Silent Sea is a mirror, then what it reflects must be the whole of this universe.

She said.

— Like the Keibir dream.

But the fact was a little different, and the linguist showed me her records and her calculations. The density of the messages was in inverse proportion to the distance between us and the Silent Sea; as the distance shrank, the density of those messages was swelling exponentially. And in all that tangle there were truths and lies beyond number.

The linguist explained to me: Look, this passage is an account of the Sibila. They call themselves the Sibila, and they use the same script and the same language as the Sibila. But in fact their history reads as if it had been invented out of nothing; it bears almost no resemblance to the history the Sibila actually had. And here — the linguist pointed at a picture recorded in wave-form symbols — this was left by Fenghai in the ninety-seventh stellar epoch. But in real history, the people of Fenghai disappeared as far back as the sixth.

Examples of that kind were beyond counting. In those endless messages there were things that did not exist, like the muttering of somebody in a fit, stringing together stories with no logic and no way of testing them.

— What does that mean?

— I do not know.

The linguist shook her head, exhausted.

— Perhaps one of the two, our world or the world inside the Silent Sea, is false.

— Both Keibir and Earth are false?

— I have never seen the real Earth, just as you have never seen the real Keibir. So why are we so sure that this world is the true one? Perhaps the world of the Silent Sea is the true one, and Earth has not been destroyed there.

In that moment I seemed to understand something: why that noise, which could rob even the Decci, the strongest conqueror in the universe, of their reason, had lost its power in front of this frail creature.

— Because the deepest fear comes from the unknown.

She saw through what I was thinking.

In that noise is an unknown with no end in sight, and no living thing can hold out against the fear born of the unknown. Unless—

— For us, everything since that time has been unknown. Hasn’t it?

The linguist laughed, and there was starlight in her eyes still.

— Keibir, who will never enter the same star system twice: you and I are the same. We are strangers for ever.

I looked at her. This was a person of Earth who had never seen Earth, just as I am a Keibir who has never seen Keibir.

I touched her ear with my antennae, and made her an invitation.

— Come into the Keibir dream. The real Earth is there.