Before the Goliath Sinks, Act Three: She Brought the Future Back from Infinite Possibility

Through days of storm in space we had lost our sense of time, and even our certainty about ourselves; by the time the great ship came to the edge of the Silent Sea, we had come at last to the edge of madness.

At some point the biologist disappeared; perhaps he had fled sixteen days and nights before. The historian shut herself in her room, and we could no longer detect any sign of life from her. The physicist knelt at the Colonel’s feet and closed his eyes among his pleas and his weeping. The engineer — the faithful engineer — went on performing his work, driving this great ship on into the dark.

Those unconverted messages were like radiation nothing could screen; they went on passing through the shields and stabbing at every one of us still alive. Perhaps it was radiation of some particular wavelength, affecting the magnetic field where we were; but however the calculations were made, nothing could stop the black soldiers from coming apart, piece by piece, under it. Lives mass-produced from simple combinations of micro-molecules, it seemed, could dissolve out of this world just as easily.

The Colonel had no time left to replenish his stock of soldiers, because even the Decci, strong as they are, had by now been made weak by that strange power, and were losing their minds.

— You will die. All of you will die.

The cowardly had already begun trying to flee. The yellow of the Colonel’s eye was dimming, and the will inside it had not gone.

— The Decci never die easily.

In that ambition of the Colonel’s, which had nothing under it, everything was on the point of falling.

— No! We will not go out there to die!

Somebody was shouting; I saw the first officer try to seize the controls. In the space of a blink his head was in the Colonel’s hand. Blue blood began to spread across the compartment, and with it a soundless fear.

He was bellowing, out of control, ordering the engineer to drive the great ship into that sea of stars we had pursued so long and which now lay just in front of us.

Against that uncanny ocean the great vessel was a little skiff. A storm of particles formed by gamma rays, blowing from somewhere nobody knew, was raising invisible waves against the deck. A heavy, mournful roaring struck the ship’s hull and came through the bulkheads, and began to murmur beside our ears.

In the confusion the linguist came to me. In her eyes was a clearness that madness had not stained, and much else I could not read. She had brought a suit, fuel, and the starter for a lifeboat.

— Leave this place, Keibir.

She said.

The roar was deafening. It was the bellow of a great beast whose heart was being torn out, and in front of a darkness with no end, this vessel fell like a speck of dust. I could see space being twisted out of shape, countless fragments drawn into the Silent Sea under that enormous gravity, crossing the silent screen of the universe like little sheaves of light and leaving star trails that were gone the moment they appeared.

I knew that the instant this ship crossed the threshold it would sink into that sea of stars like a lump of iron into quicksand. That is silence; that is death; that is total disappearance and an ending without end.

— Leave with me. Let us set out on the journey together.

I put out my hand to the linguist. The lifeboat hung there, unsteady, and the countdown to the launch was sounding beside my ear.

— You are not like me.

She said.

She looked at me, and behind her the Silent Sea was rising slowly: an infinity with no end anywhere in sight. In my mother’s telling, in the Keibir dream, in the ancient legends of this universe, that place of death had appeared over and over — and now it was in front of me.

Nobody knows how to describe what I was looking at. It was like the dark you fall into when every sense organ is shut off: deep, secret, without boundary, without end, without reason or value, refusing every explanation. In the instant of seeing it, every rule by which this world runs simply went away, and all that occupied the whole of your mind was that closing blackness, and a fear whose edges could not be seen.

— I am Keibir. I am the star cartographer who records everything unknown.

At the instant the lifeboat launched, I undid the harness and threw myself out — towards the Silent Sea, towards that great ship, towards where the linguist was.

Silence. A silence like death. At the moment the threshold was passed, the ship’s quantum engines stopped their roaring, the noise was wiped away in an instant, and everything after that vanished at the far edge of this universe’s horizon.

Falling. I was falling, falling towards the Silent Sea.

It was an instant beyond brief and at the same time unbearably long. Every memory of the Keibir came surging endlessly into my thoughts; their maps record everything in this world — life, civilisation, language, history — everything that has existed and everything that is existing. Except for one thing: what the Keibir are able to record is only the one possibility, out of all of them, that has been made certain.

Falling. Gravity had hold of me, and I was falling at a speed nothing could calculate.

In the chaos the energy gradients were being lost; complex molecular structures were coming apart in the disorder.

Out of the depth of the Silent Sea, messages beyond counting poured into my field of vision, far vaster and far more intricate than any signal we had received. Even inside the Keibir dream I could not read those languages. Yes: we had always thought we were reading out a pattern from the noise of the universe, but in fact all that noise was language, and narrow as we are, we could only understand the part of it that lay inside our own horizon.

— Keibir!

The linguist’s voice. Her call pulled my mind back out of that endless current of information. Above the great vessel, about to go over, a tiny point of light was coming towards me. It was the Goliath.

— Keibir!

The linguist was flying the Goliath, coming towards me through the chaos. She undid her harness and climbed out of that narrow pilot’s seat, and in the rush of the fall she put out her hand to me. Just before I went entirely into the whirl of the Silent Sea, the linguist caught me. She shoved me hard, out towards the universe — and at once the gravity of the Silent Sea began to pull me back down towards the abyss.

She looked at me, and turned the Goliath round, towards the depth of the Silent Sea.

— You are not like me. You still have the dream.

She pressed the ignition. In that instant, on the Goliath’s last roar of its engines, the huge thrust out of the stern threw me far off into the sea of stars, and I drifted, flew at speed, further and further from that abyss.

And the Goliath went on like a meteor, racing into the depth of the Silent Sea. That familiar ship grew smaller and smaller in my field of vision, became a flickering point, and disappeared into the dark.

I drifted, like a bird that cannot find its nest flying in the open air, small fragments of meteorite going past me trailing a strange light, like footprints a wandering nebula left in the waste.

I do not know how long it was. When I woke again, the suit’s automatic homing had brought me to the side of that lifeboat. It hung quietly in the dark, holding me carefully, like a mother.

I looked at that extinguished system, and could no longer find the great vessel, or the ambitious Decci, or the hurrying black soldiers, or the cold biologist, the timid historian, the talkative physicist, the silent engineer… The Silent Sea had gone. Its leaving was as soundless as its coming. That legendary calamity, that legendary power which swallows everything, left me only a few memories that may or may not be true, and which have grown desolate now with time.

Until the communication system came back to normal, and the crackling noise came up: the background sound that had come up so many times when we were near the Silent Sea.

— Keibir, did you see it?

The linguist’s voice came from very far away, and came into my mind.

— The Silent Sea is a high-entropy universe beyond our imagining. Energy beyond counting combines at random in the flow and creates things beyond counting. Those languages, those signals, are minds created by the infinite possibility inside the Silent Sea.

She was telling me something, and I no longer knew whether those sounds came from the communications now, or from a recording made before.

— That is a world of possibility. Beside it, how dull the low-entropy universe we live in is. Neither you nor I can see more than the one negligible possibility. But here, Keibir, what I see is infinite possibility. Every gathering of energy is forming a consciousness like what the people of Earth called a Boltzmann brain, telling of one possibility in a language we understand, or do not.

— Here, the Kaletians can still write their exquisite poems; Borsa still rules the empire that belongs to Dayaria; the Galir escaped that world-ending storm in space; and the Pengfeng found the truth that was theirs… Here there can be joy and grief, meeting and parting, pain, despair, and also the most perfect and moving of endings — because here, everything exists.

I seemed to see that great Decci vessel destroyed in the dark, like a burning ball of fire falling into an ocean and going out without a sound. The Silent Sea was still there, like an eye, watching me in silence from the dark.

Perhaps, I thought, perhaps these voices are also one negligible possibility among countless others, some consciousness brewed up by the infinite possibility of the Silent Sea. But I chose to go on listening.

— Keibir.

The linguist was still calling me softly.

— I have seen Keibir. It was never destroyed.

She said.

— Before the Goliath sinks, I can tell you about it. The way you took me to see Earth.

I am a star cartographer wandering this universe, describing an endless world with my own footsteps.

I never enter the same system twice, and I never go back to a place I have been; my life only drifts through places nobody has known.

I have seen life, and I have seen death. The things that have existed in that endless universe seem few enough to count on the fingers, and at the same time too many to count at all. Nebulae, oceans, life, civilisations, language and script, barren systems, storms about to arrive, vigorously burning young stars, red giants swallowing life in violent explosion, white dwarfs going cold in silence, clusters destroyed in the particle cloud of gamma rays… Everything I have seen, I have honestly set down on a map.

After the Silent Sea disappeared I left that dead system in the lifeboat. The road was long, and bit by bit I recorded everything that had happened.

It is as the legends say: wherever the Silent Sea reaches, nothing can remain; only an everlasting silence is left. That empty, soundless system fell into a long deep sleep, and the desolation the Silent Sea left it may need a thousand stellar years to heal. But for some reason, whenever I think now of that legendary sea of death, what my antennae feel is no longer only cold.

Not long after, I drifted to an unfamiliar system, where the young race that lives there was warm and kind. With their help, I set out again.

An unknown ahead, a direction not clear, and all I have is time filled with memory and a long, slow road. All of it is so familiar; it is as if nothing had happened and nothing had changed.

Except that this time, on this journey, I carry the linguist’s seed.

I think I shall do as my mother did: teach her how to fly a ship, tell her how to live in the universe, help her to draw star charts of her own. I shall watch her grow, and walk beside her in this world. Perhaps one day my journey too will come to its end, and like my mother before me I shall leave her this ship and every star chart I have drawn, and disappear.

I think I shall still tell her that there is a place called the Silent Sea…

I think that perhaps, one day, she will discover that it is the records of the Keibir that turn every unknown into something certain. In this dull world where only one certainty exists, the Kaletians who lived on three circling planets have been destroyed, and their most magnificent poems are scattered through history. The last sovereign of Dayaria, the brave Borsa, led his whole people in resistance and died in the Decci conquest. The Galir vanished in that storm in space three hundred stellar years ago and left not one word behind. The Pengfeng set out in search of the truth and never came back. The mighty Decci go on looking for the weapon that will conquer this universe, until they are replaced by the next generation of conquerors. Life turns in its circle, the universe goes round again, and we are still narrow creatures who can understand only our own world.

But I hope that even if the world is like this, she will never be lonely again.

In my dream, I have left her everything —

the Earth that was never destroyed, the Keibir that still exists, and the Goliath, sailing in the Silent Sea, that will never sink.