Macrolife Read Online Free Page B

intelligence, master space, and give rise to new macrolife. Our universe is very large, and time is long. Successive hierarchies, shells, are possible. This may equally be true of the succession of universes themselves.
    This final, remarkable section—with its dialogue between the reconjugated ancient man and metalife falling apart under stress, with its triumph over time—is the most moving, sustained, and poetic sequence in the novel (always with a lucid poetry). It opens up whole cycles of possibility, just as the hundred-billion-year “gap” in the book’s chronology leaves riches yet to be explored in subsequent, varied macrolife novels that Zebrowski plans.
    Cave of Stars appeared in 1999, a fascinating and deeply thoughtful account of a giant habitat’s fatal encounter with a dirtworld. Actually, to say “giant” belies the reality, since a habitat a hundred kilometres long, constructed of concentric shells around an original asteroid core, contains more internal space than the entire surface of a planet, space enough for numerous alternative worlds such as an entire sea-world especially tailored for adapted humans with gills who have opted for an aquatic existence.
    Other citizens exercise their freedom of choice by entering virtual realities; or they may need to enter these temporarily for medical reasons. Whichever the case, VR tends to become addictive, posing a subtle threat to such a habitat, namely, that not enough citizens may remain in the real world to continue guiding its destiny and make vital choices. Lotus-eating and virtual adventures may occupy all their attention. Indeed, certain philosophers aboard this particular habitat speculate that it in itself may be a virtual reality, a sophistical argument soon refuted by events—with all the brusqueness of Dr. Johnson kicking a big stone to refute by demonstration Bishop Berkeley’s notion of the nonexistence of matter. Overconfidence in superior technology makes this habitat vulnerable to destruction by one bigoted dirtworlder, who also holds keys of power, for he is the pope of a conservative Catholic Church which has survived upon that world, determined to prevent progress.
    Arthur Clarke has variously observed that religion is a form of psychopathology—a neurological disorder—that within a few centuries from now all the old religions will accordingly have been discredited, and that civilization and religion are incompatible. In this sense a disciple of Clarke, Zebrowski destroys the last redoubt of Catholicism in spectacular fashion in Cave of Stars , although not before the last pope has committed an ultimate atrocity.
    Cave of Stars contains a neat definition of what macrolife is: “a mobile…organism comprised of human and human-derived intelligences. It’s an organism because it reproduces, with its human and other elements, moves and reacts on the scale of the Galaxy.” It is larger inside “than the surface of a planet. And larger still within its minds.”
    Macrolife itself, the feature-length pilot novel (naughtily to adopt a TV category), already spans the whole of time from the present to the end of the universe and beyond. Its sheer sweep, its grandeur of concept, its daring, integrity, and rational intelligence put to shame those science fictioneers who can only fill up the next hundred billion years with space wars and other high jinks orchestrated by heroes who are only giant dwarfs, fantasy projections of our as-yet rather primitive selves.
    Integrity, yes, and honesty. Here is a piece of fiction that may well be more than fiction, which demanded to be written, and to be written in its own terms. Macrolife is a work of grandeur and intelligence. With it, George Zebrowski’s career as a mature prophetic writer really commenced, just as the real career of the human race may be only now commencing, just as we are still in the early youth of the universe itself. In