By the time that Egon
Lincoln arrived on Titan, most of the surface had already been mapped. Of the dozens of moons, minimoons,
micromoons, and moonlets orbiting Saturn, Titan was the prize and it did not
take long to explore, claim, and even to litter it in the name of
humanity. Just like Earth.
That piece of debris, a
robotic camera, was left where it went dead as a kind of marker, a stake in the
discovery it made. This was a small
gesture in the grand scheme of things since what the robot found had already
been there for millions of years.
The first images back to
the colony were shocking but soon gave way to analysis and study. There in the middle of a craggy plain under
the far stars was a dome, perfectly black and smooth. Holowaves, spectral
scanning, and even an unmanned archeoprobe could not reveal anything more. It was no doubt the first sign of alien
intelligence yet seen in our solar system but whether it was a device or a
sentinel or a bomb or a doorway was yet to be determined. For that they needed to send someone, a
person, and that was Egon Lincoln’s job.
There had been other
moments. Hopeful ones in which Egon used
his semiotic skills to determine if some discovered scrap had been created by
other sentient beings. Scratches on a
cavern wall on Ganymede that were actually etched by a plasma river. A complex geometric pattern on the surface of
Europa that turned out to be formed by exo-fungi. There was life out there all right, but none
of it smart. Until now. Maybe.
In spite of this, as he
rode the rover to the dome, Egon knew that he carried the hope of the world
with him. It was a silent wish that all the
problems among humans might diminish in light of finding that there were others out there with answers. This was
a great weight he carried but there was more.
His own private yearnings, for example, to make a difference, to find
something monumental, something that might erase his years of frustration and
disappointment. To finally have his life
of searching and probing mean something.
To matter in some way.
As he left the rover and
finally stood before the dome, Egon tried to control his anticipation, to
stifle his hunger. It was hard to be
objective with his pulse racing.
Besides, he knew very well that nature was herself an architect, capable
of producing the most astonishing structures through natural forces or even by using
the simplest of critters. Just because
it looked engineered, even beautifully so, did not mean that someone somewhere
made this thing.
He had plenty of
equipment on his rover but he liked to rely on his intuition first. And so he rather casually walked over to the
dome and got down on his knees before it.
It was nothing more than a half-sphere, about two feet tall and four
feet wide. It loomed larger in the
images. In the sheen of the black
surface he could see his own reflection and the craggy terrain behind him. The surface was pristine, no dents or
markings. It did not glow or vibrate or,
as he knew from previous measures, emit any kind of energy at all. Egon closed his eyes and
placed his hands on the surface of the dome, as if to commune with it. As if touching it might unlock it in some way
or at least give him a feeling about it one was or another. Which might have been a ridiculous gesture
except for one thing….it worked.
In an instant, Egon felt
taken over by some force. Not a physical
presence, but a cognitive one. As though
his consciousness – which, like anyone else, he felt that he proudly owned - was
now being leased by someone else. As
when dreaming and here, alone on a lonely rock, on his knees and touching a
mysterious dome, Egon Lincoln dreamed. But
not just a dream, an envisioning.
He dreamed the story of
the whole universe, as though floating above a great city that was time itself,
with lights like lives and shadows fate, and streams of energy slithering
through and through.
In his mind’s eye, he
vividly saw the spark of being, glowing like an ember in a purple sea of
nothing-to-see. Then the molten stars
forming and the galaxies expanding, the great spinning that holds space in its
thrall. He saw the churning whorls that
wound around baby stars and watched the earth congeal from dusty dust. The iron core, the foggy brew, and the sea
like a vast expanding. He thought to
disconnect himself but the dream was too stunning to end and so he held on.
The heat of the water
rose and from a kind of molecular bath he saw viruses form, then cells piling
onto cells, the great architecture of life forming, and the sponges and the
starfish, and all of it pushed up from the mire by the force unseen,
unnamed.
As though history itself
had been unloosed, Egon saw in his guided dream the worms and their hopes for
enlightenment, then the fish with their willing wanting, and then the lizards,
so noble and stern, come to rule the earth.
And the mammals were born and love was new and the dinosaurs with their
pride in families and their bulky sense of duty, and the eons passed, millions
of years but only a gasp in the breath of life.
And only a single blink in this moment.
Soon humans walked the
earth and all the varied, troubled, wondrous, tragic ages of men and women
dawned and dusked. From mud to brick to
wood to steel to titanium to solid hydrogen, civilizations sparked like quarks,
and all the multitudes that passed though all the way to the New Birth and
beyond.
He dreamed through to the
Second Age of China and the Seventh Eon beyond Nation States, and the Great
Exodus and the Aftermath. In time came
the Transition when the Gan came to power, and Burgeners, Solomon cities, and
the rise of the Cenidae, their passion, their sublime cathect of sympathy. And on and on the dream went dreamily into
the Ages of Derbil and Selestum and the three Danidey and the Kill and the
Alpha and then the great Stepping-into-the-Pale-Corridor, and beings and worlds
he could not name without the right sounds for them.
Egon stirred as a sound
intruded – a signal from the base - but he did not move or wake and dreamed of
things he could never have dreamed of envisioning. Of the Minos bearers and the Melarians and
their bright winter wars, and of the Windwater, the great Whisper Kingdom from
the far star, the carrier of the quantumRose, and the soldier poets of
Ei814…all this he saw as clearly as a wish in a child’s wonder.
He dreamed of the time
beyond people, of the ghostbeings in their touchless towers and he heard the
music of their holophony, so spicy yet so tender. And then the Running and the New
Beginning. And the ages of the conscious
mind came and went like birds winging, and all the planets were washed clean
and storms rose and softened the plains and new truths were born. The dark matter turned to light and then dark
again through many cycles.
Past the edges of the
cosmos, he dreamed into the realm of the Nebulae and the billions of ocean
worlds, when thought became matter and light could be held in the hand and used
to sing. There at the very end of the
collapsing cosmos, he could detect a distant understanding and the acceptance
of time itself as an infolding embrace.
And when the final branes
colloided and all of it all came tumbling back, back and back and back into a
single pointpin of all there was and ever will be, life itself all enwrapped
and enriddled, the final move by the starmaker to begin again, the something
that comes from absolute nothing…even then the dream did not end.
Because that very point,
smaller than the smallest notion, a mere speck in the swoon of sooner-or-later,
became the impetus for a new conception, another theory of thing and thought,
and in a moment that took no time at all, without hesitation and full of will,
it exploded in light and heat and expanded and bloomed and then it started once
more, the begin and the become all over again.
New day, new universe, world without end, amen.
When he woke up, Egon was
lying on the ground before the dome and he realized that he must have broken
the connection and passed out. Or maybe it
was the other way around.
He saw then just what the
dome was. It was an encyclopedia of the
universe, a timeline of time itself, placed here by some vast intelligence,
some future iteration of humanity perhaps.
An immense telling way beyond his own ability to grasp yet for the first
time in a long time, he felt at peace.
There was no hint of even his own finely tuned frustration. It seemed to
him in his heart and in his onceness, as well as it can seem to any dim
dreamer, that everything was just what it was, that life was endless and
edgeless and eternally reforming. And that
any human being was only a teeny instant in a perpetual cosmos.
Sitting there on the skin
of a moon of an outer planet in one of a billion universes, feeling his own
heart beat lost in the indifferent and majestic scheme of time, he knew he was
less than he ever imagined. But somehow this
understanding filled him not with despair but with joy. He was alive, right then and there, and he
knew it. Breathing, feeling,
knowing. And that was all that mattered
for him to matter at all.
He looked up at the sky
and thought for once that the stars up there were not so distant after all.
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