The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [50]
What I saw with my mind’s eye made a wondrous picture. I was getting excited. “So. A human brain is, what, ten to the twentieth nerve cells? Say you clustered ten to the fortieth elements of the Old Mind in that five-light-minute limit—”
“Too many. It would collapse into a proto-comet. We expect to see ten to the twenty-fifth or so before it all drifts apart, and the distance will be light-years.”
“That’s still a lot.” A billion years of data cluster into a mind, and it thinks about what it’s seen. “It kind of drifts into hyperintelligence, doesn’t it?” It’s done this before, and the memory is there. A mind forms and climbs toward evanescent godhood.
There would be an updating of the records of the universe, a flurry of problem solving, a flowering of new theory ... vast slow thought. Spaceships passing through the cloud, or even inhabited worlds, might never be noticed, or might be studied atom by atom. After a time the elements drift apart, seeking new input.
There would be no pretense that the Old Mind was a single intelligence, nothing like the illusion that a single mind occupies a human skull. Just mind forming and dissolving, carrying bits of what it’s learned, eventually linking again in a different order, in a universe noticeably changed.
No death. Just the drift.
I asked, “Are you going?”
“Sfillirrath has not decided. I think we will go.”
Many of the races I meet never expect to grow old Others never expect to die. Still, “That’s a lot of a lifetime,” I said.
“We want new races, new viewpoints, something to show an Old Mind. Else it will not converse and we will not learn.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We want a human being.”
I looked around. Usually there are human customers. All I saw were Gail and Antony, my staff. “Kind of sparse today—”
“I have been asked to ask you, Rick Schumann.”
My heart thudded hard. “I have this bar,” I said.
“You have trainees. The Draco Tavern would continue,” Shkatht said. “Rick, your kind has found only the most temporary of longevity techniques. If you were the only human being aboard Chimes In Harmony, ship’s laboratories would be brought to bear to keep you alive and in good mental health. The Old Mind converges to observe the birthing of stars and free floating planets and other wonders. We can seduce it with new viewpoints.”
“You don’t even know it’ll talk?”
Shkatht shrugged, a disturbing sight. “A convergence must evolve the concepts of communication. Some remember from earlier ages. Some won’t bother.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and I poured him tea with a different liqueur. Shkatht extruded a snorkel from his tremendous mouth and drank.
He asked, “Are you disturbed by the company?”
“I like aliens. Even so, how many humans have you got room for?”
“How many must you have?”
“I’ll think about it.” Four, well chosen, might be enough to keep each other sane.
“You have little time to think. Chimes In Harmony prepares to depart. Passengers are gathering now. Entropy is having its way with you, Rick. Think how long you might live.”
I said, “The Old Mind has immortality. It doesn’t die. What it knows doesn’t die. And if it ever—” I stopped.
Sfillirrath had emptied a bottle of maple syrup. Gail approached her with another. Sfillirrath spoke to her. She listened. Nodded.
Shkatht asked, “Why did you stop talking?”
“Shkatht, it never clusters all of itself, does it?”
“How could that be, since twelve billion years ago? It has spread itself across the universe. But we think the