me?"
His gaze dissects me like a blue-diamond scalpel. He doesn't immediately answer the question. "Tell me something about the future, Jasper. Tell me about one of the days you've lived that I haven't yet."
I have anticipated this. "No."
"Why not? Are you worried about changing the future? I wouldn't have thought that possible, since it's already in your past."
"It isn't possible, and I am not a circus performer."
"What if I were to give you a detailed history of our campaign here on Earth? Troop deployments, supply lines, objectives, everything. You could take that information back into the past and use it while working out your tactics on those days you haven't lived. Would that cause a conflict?"
"It would if I were to do it. I won't."
"But you could. That's what you're telling me. And in a sense, you already have. You've used this supposed trick of yours to stay one step ahead of me, until we caught you in a way you didn't foresee."
"I do what I can to survive, and to keep the ones I hold dear alive too. That's all anyone does."
"True enough." Again the blue gaze pierces me, then darts away. "You haven't told me why, yet—why you're like this. Is there a reason, or were you just born that way? A freak, a sport?"
"I am neither," I tell him, my tone wounded, and I wish momentarily that I had never tried to explain. The concept stands so clearly in my mind that I am dismayed he does not grasp it immediately. "Anachronism, a mistake in time, is inevitable for beings with memory. We hold the history of humanity in our heads—millions of novels, inventions, maps, formulae, everything. Is it any wonder they begin to overlap?
"This overlapping forms a glue that binds human culture together down almost a million years. But alone it is not enough to take us to the next stage of our evolution. Bigger, longer-lived, more powerful, yes; but to become fundamentally different, we need something more powerful than memory alone."
"Fundamentally different how?" he asks.
"Well, humanity has always aspired to become like its gods. The god latter-day humanity needs is one that doesn't know the meaning of the word 'anachronistic' The overlapping of memory is inferior to the overlapping of time itself. Do you see? When we genuinely experience all times as one, there will be no mistakes in time. When we have become achronistic rather than merely anachronistic, we will go from being well-dressed apes to God manifest—beyond time, beyond death, beyond human."
I study him, seeking any sign at all that he has begun to understand. But, in truth, I'm not surprised that Bergamasc resists the pull of nonlinear chronologies. He is a military man, heavily steeped in macroscopic notions of cause and effect. It will take him time to accept that macroscopic phenomena are ephemeral, that the universe dances to unimaginably complex rhythms at the scales of the very small and the very large. We are sandwiched between them, bacteria caught in two glass slides, and we are foolish to forget the eye peering down the microscope at us.
"To what end?" Bergamasc asks, tugging at the fraying limits of his understanding like a bulldog. "There is no end, and no point. I mean, look at you. One day you're here; tomorrow you could imagine yourself free again. In that sense, you can escape these bars as easily as falling asleep. But the bars aren't ever going away, Jasper. What sort of life is that?"
"It's beyond such concepts, beyond time itself."
"Again, you would say that."
"Because it's the truth. Human consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising out of the complexity of our brains. We can make our brains larger in order to make our consciousness more powerful, but that's ultimately an evolutionary dead end. We have to become the phenomenon itself. We have to rise above our limitations."
He nods at that. "The death of the Forts has proved that no one is invincible. Even if your brain is as big as a galaxy, it's still based on some kind of
His gaze dissects me like a blue-diamond scalpel. He doesn't immediately answer the question. "Tell me something about the future, Jasper. Tell me about one of the days you've lived that I haven't yet."
I have anticipated this. "No."
"Why not? Are you worried about changing the future? I wouldn't have thought that possible, since it's already in your past."
"It isn't possible, and I am not a circus performer."
"What if I were to give you a detailed history of our campaign here on Earth? Troop deployments, supply lines, objectives, everything. You could take that information back into the past and use it while working out your tactics on those days you haven't lived. Would that cause a conflict?"
"It would if I were to do it. I won't."
"But you could. That's what you're telling me. And in a sense, you already have. You've used this supposed trick of yours to stay one step ahead of me, until we caught you in a way you didn't foresee."
"I do what I can to survive, and to keep the ones I hold dear alive too. That's all anyone does."
"True enough." Again the blue gaze pierces me, then darts away. "You haven't told me why, yet—why you're like this. Is there a reason, or were you just born that way? A freak, a sport?"
"I am neither," I tell him, my tone wounded, and I wish momentarily that I had never tried to explain. The concept stands so clearly in my mind that I am dismayed he does not grasp it immediately. "Anachronism, a mistake in time, is inevitable for beings with memory. We hold the history of humanity in our heads—millions of novels, inventions, maps, formulae, everything. Is it any wonder they begin to overlap?
"This overlapping forms a glue that binds human culture together down almost a million years. But alone it is not enough to take us to the next stage of our evolution. Bigger, longer-lived, more powerful, yes; but to become fundamentally different, we need something more powerful than memory alone."
"Fundamentally different how?" he asks.
"Well, humanity has always aspired to become like its gods. The god latter-day humanity needs is one that doesn't know the meaning of the word 'anachronistic' The overlapping of memory is inferior to the overlapping of time itself. Do you see? When we genuinely experience all times as one, there will be no mistakes in time. When we have become achronistic rather than merely anachronistic, we will go from being well-dressed apes to God manifest—beyond time, beyond death, beyond human."
I study him, seeking any sign at all that he has begun to understand. But, in truth, I'm not surprised that Bergamasc resists the pull of nonlinear chronologies. He is a military man, heavily steeped in macroscopic notions of cause and effect. It will take him time to accept that macroscopic phenomena are ephemeral, that the universe dances to unimaginably complex rhythms at the scales of the very small and the very large. We are sandwiched between them, bacteria caught in two glass slides, and we are foolish to forget the eye peering down the microscope at us.
"To what end?" Bergamasc asks, tugging at the fraying limits of his understanding like a bulldog. "There is no end, and no point. I mean, look at you. One day you're here; tomorrow you could imagine yourself free again. In that sense, you can escape these bars as easily as falling asleep. But the bars aren't ever going away, Jasper. What sort of life is that?"
"It's beyond such concepts, beyond time itself."
"Again, you would say that."
"Because it's the truth. Human consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising out of the complexity of our brains. We can make our brains larger in order to make our consciousness more powerful, but that's ultimately an evolutionary dead end. We have to become the phenomenon itself. We have to rise above our limitations."
He nods at that. "The death of the Forts has proved that no one is invincible. Even if your brain is as big as a galaxy, it's still based on some kind of
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