Dan Simmons

“The Core knows what Teilhard de Chardin and other sentimentalists refused to acknowledge: evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe.

Information is always to be treasured, Raul. It is behind only love and honesty in a person’s attempt to understand the universe.

“And the sad fact is that all nanotech life out of our control—out of anyone’s control. The essence of nanotech life’s evolution is autonomy, self-will, and goals which have nothing to do with those of the harboring life form.”

“Humanity, you mean,” said Lourdusamy.

“Precisely.”

“Pascal’s Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically...shallow.”

“Perhaps because it posits only two choices,” said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. “Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation,” she said.

“Those last two aren’t the same thing,” I said.

“No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’”

“A spiritual agoraphobic,” I said.

Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. Her.

“Religion seems to have always offered that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.”

“We know for a fact that the Buddha refused to speculate with his disciples on whether there was such a thing such as life after death. ‘Such questions,’ he said, ‘are not relevant to the practice of the Path and cannot be answered while bound by the restraints of human existence.’ Most of Buddhism, you see, gentlemen, can be explored, appreciated, and utilized as a tool toward enlightenment without descending into the supernatural.”

I ached everywhere. It was hard to separate the dull agony of the shattered leg from the ache in my head and my back and my guts. My skull felt as if there were a ball of mercury in it that shifted ponderously long seconds after my head itself turned. The vertigo made me sick again, but I had nothing left to vomit. I hung on the tangle of branches and contemplated the glories of adventure.

“I am of no faith,” said Aenea. “If one defines faith as belief in the supernatural.”

Twenty kilometers. At an average speed of 120 klicks per hour, we should cover the distance in ten minutes. Ten freezing, adrenaline-pumping, gorge-rising, terror-beating-against-the-ribs, react-in-a-microsecond-or-die seconds.

“Humanity has evolved—as far as it has evolved,” continued the old priest, “with no thanks to its predecessors or itself. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”

“Empathy,” Aenea said softly.

“What was the Depression?”

“Bad economic times in their pure capitalist nation-state,” Aenea said. “Remember, the economy wasn’t really global then, and it depended upon private money institutions called banks, gold reserves, and the value of physical money—actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930s, the hallucination turned nightmare.”

I heard the hiss and felt the blessed numbness spreading. If there is a God, I thought, it’s a painkiller.

While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe.