Ben Bova by Children of the Mind
Author:Children of the Mind [Mind, Children of the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
CHAPTER 9
âIT SMELLS LIKE LIFE TO MEâ
âWhy do you say that I am alone?
My body is with me wherever I am, telling me endless stories of hunger and satisfaction, weariness and sleep,
eating and drinking and breathing and life.
With such company who could ever be alone?
And even when my body wears away
and leaves only some tiny spark
I will not be alone
for the gods will see my small light
tracing the dance of woodgrain on the floor
and they will know me,
they will say my name
and I will rise.â
from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao Dying, dying, dead.
At the end of her life among the ansible links there was some mercy. Janeâs panic at the losing of herself began to ebb, for though she still knew that she was losing and had lost much, she no longer had the capacity to remember what it was. When she lost her links to the ansibles that let her monitor the jewels in Peterâs and Miroâs ears she didnât even notice. And when at last she clung to the few last strands of ansibles that would not be shutting down, she could not think of anything, could not feel anything except the need to cling to these last strands even though they were too small to hold her, even though her hunger could never be satisfied with these.
I donât belong here.
Not a thought, no, there wasnât enough of her left for anything so difficult as consciousness. Rather it was a hunger, a vague dissatisfaction, a restlessness that beset her when she had run up and down the link from Jaktâs ansible to the Lusitanian landside ansible to the ansible on the shuttle that served Miro and
Val, up and down, end to end, a thousand times, a million times, nothing changing, nothing to accomplish, nothing to build, no way to grow. I donât belong here.
For if there was one attribute that defined the difference between aiuas that came Inside and those that remained forever Outside, it was that underlying need to grow, to be part of something large and beautiful, to belong. Those that had no such need would never be drawn as Jane had been drawn, three thousand years before, to the web that the hive queens had made for her. Nor would any of the aiuas that became hive queens or their workers, pequeninos male and female, humans weak and strong; nor even those aiuas that, feeble in capacity but faithful and predictable, became the sparks whose dances did not show up in even the most sensitive instruments until they became so complicated that humans could identify their dance as the behavior of quarks, of mesons, of light particulate or waved. All of them needed to be part of something and when they belonged to it they rejoiced: What I am is us, what we do together is myself.
But they were not all alike, these aiuas, these unmade beings who were both building blocks and builders. The weak and fearful ones reached a certain point and either could not or dared not grow further.
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