Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten

Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 10

CHAPTER TEN

Where do these scenes come from? How can the whales know so much, or do they just make it up, to put the souls of tired men at ease? How many paths behind my own perceptions are still mine? Am I still free to choose what I believe?

And yet I must believe this vision of Backdoor, the food plants growing, the sabotage undone. Backdoor was never totally abandoned. I see a woman with curly blond hair, hidden under the floorboards all the time the mindless trooped over the fallen town. And all the time Don Andrews was on Earth, this strange and lonely woman tried to warm the empty hallways, and make the echoes her companions.

I see her working as she always has, alone. She is the engineer who built the vessels for the colonists in the cathedral. But she is not building ships any longer. Now she is building something else. Don Andrews never mentioned her, that night when he arrived to see us at the campus. I can remember walking with him to the room we kept for our infrequent guests. I was carrying a lantern. The halls were without light.

"The medium is very capable," he told me, "more than any of the people who created it. But something still is missing. It has hit a block in its development."

I wondered what he meant by this, but all I could sense was the nearness of insanity. We reached the room where we kept a spare cot, and he stopped me in the doorway.

"Have you ever thought of what perfection means?" he asked.

I can be as philosophical as the next person, so I responded, "Perfection is what you never get, and what wouldn't be perfection if you did."

He seemed impatient. "But beyond us, I mean. We are not capable. I mean the perfect memory, the end to second thoughts. The Culminate."

I watched his wild eye by the lantern. It was a children's story. The Culminate was the mythical creature that improved itself until it was perfect, the final endpoint of all evolution.

But then he started to go on with such fervor that I did not understand till later what he meant. His words were of a belief I could not share.

He said he saw perfection at the end of evolution, a mass of circuits that could reach the pinnacle of design, the best that best could be. The Culminate. He actually planned to build it.

"What would you do, if you were a Culminate?" he asked. "What is left when you are perfect, except to start again? Life on Earth may have been started by a Culminate, billions of years ago. A single molecule dropped into the primordial soup, knowing the human race would come along eventually, or something like it that could make another Culminate, a child. This could be the whole reason for life on Earth. Don't you see? And it could save us!"

I cannot abide it when someone tries to sell me his religion. "That's fine," I said, and bidding him good night, I walked away and analyzed my disappointment. I had thought better of Don Andrews. From the start, I had never trusted him, but at least it had always seemed his secrets had working parts, until this talk about the Culminate. But now I think he may be right. Perhaps I was too quick to doubt. Myths are myths, but what they mean is flexible, and what cannot be known is very great. Lately I find myself infected by his unreasonable hope, his goal. For I have seen through the whales that Backdoor is alive and full of sweet air.

And where there is that vision, I find room to dream. Why else would there be such a place as Backdoor, with its relay beacons disabled, in complete isolation? Is it really where a race can be reborn, where a past can be forgotten? May we yet see our reflection young and at peace, if only for a few of us, if only for a while? If it takes this insane vision to drive us there, then so be it.

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