Chapter 39 Chapter 4 Reborn

David Bowman tossed and turned in his sleep.He wasn't awake, and he wasn't dreaming, but he wasn't completely unconscious.Something invaded his thoughts like morning fog in a forest.He felt it only dimly, for the shock of total comprehension would destroy him as much as the fire now blazes beyond the walls.Under the dispassionate scrutiny of the Creator, Bowman feels neither hope nor fear; all emotion has been filtered out. He seemed to be floating in free space, and in all directions stretched infinitely around him a geometric grid of black lines, on which were moving small dots of light—some moving slowly, others with dizzying speed.

This image or hallucination lasted only for a moment.Then, the crystal-like planes and grid lines, and the composition of the dots of light interlaced and moving quickly disappeared; and David Bowman also entered a field of consciousness that no one had ever experienced. At first, it seemed like time was running backwards.Even this miracle he was ready to accept, but he realized at once that the reality was much more subtle. The wellspring of memory is unblocked; he relives his past in a manipulative situation.The hotel suite—the space capsule—the burning view of the red sun—the luminous core of the galaxy—the gate through which he re-entered the universe.Not only the image, but also all his sensory impressions and all the emotions at that time were flowing backwards, and the flow was faster and faster.His life was like a tape recorder being played backwards at an ever-increasing speed.

Now he's back on Discovery again, with Saturn's rings stretching across the sky. And farther back, he's reliving that last conversation with Hal; he's watching Frank Poole leave for his last mission; hearing the voice of Earth again, assuring him that everything is going well. Even as he relives the events, he knows that all is well indeed.Time is going backward along the long corridor of time, and the experience of knowledge in the mind is being washed away and sent back to childhood.Of course, nothing is lost; every moment of his life is being safely stored.While one David Bowman ceases to exist, another David Bowman is attaining immortality.

Faster and faster, he was reliving forgotten years, back to a simpler world.The face he once loved, but thought he had no memory of, showed a sweet smile in front of his eyes again.He smiled happily in reply, feeling no pain at all. Now, at last, that steady retreat has slowed; the wellspring of memory is nearly dry.Time flows more and more slowly, and gradually tends to stagnate—like a pendulum in motion, swinging to the limit of the arc, it seems to stop completely for a while, and then starts a new amplitude. At last the moment of complete standstill passed; the pendulum swung in the opposite direction.On a binary star 20,000 light-years away from Earth, in an empty chamber floating in flames, a baby opened its eyes and began to cry.

Later, the baby calmed down as he realized he was not alone. A frightening rectangle of light formed in the air.The rectangle solidifies into a crystal plate, which turns from transparent to cold light soaked in milky white.Indistinct, flickering images swim across the surface and depths of crystalline plates.The images converged into beams of light and shadows, and then intersected into spokes of a wheel, radiating in all directions, and began to rotate at a speed consistent with the vibrating rhythm filling the entire universe at this time. Such a spectacle would certainly captivate any child—or any ape for that matter.But as it was three million years ago, it is only an outward manifestation of power, not so clearly understood.It is only a toy to confuse the senses, but its real function takes place in the depths of the mind.

The baby stared straight into the depths of the crystal plate with eyes more piercing than that of a human being, and saw - although did not understand - the mystery behind it.The baby knows that he has returned to his old home, where his own race and many others originate; yet he dares to know that he cannot stay.In another twinkling of an eye, he is reborn, but unlike any previous birth. The moment has come; the glowing figure no longer reflects the crystal's inner secrets.As soon as the image disappears, the four walls of the barrier gradually disappear into the "non-existence" from which they came temporarily.Only the red sun remained in the sky.

The metal and plastic of the forgotten pod, as well as the clothing worn by the entity claiming to be David Bowman, were instantly incinerated.The last connection with the earth is over, all dissolved into the atoms from which they were originally composed. The baby, however, pays little attention to all this, preoccupied with adjusting to the comfortable red light of his new surroundings, and briefly needs the shell of the substance to focus his powers.His indestructible body was the image he had of himself at the time; however powerful he was, he knew he was still a baby.He will remain a baby until he decides to take on a new form, beyond the necessary substance.

It was time to leave now—though in a sense he would never be able to leave the place of his rebirth, since he would forever belong to the entity that used this double star for unfathomable purposes.Although he doesn't know, but the future has its own destiny, the direction is clear, and there is no need to repeat his tortuous path.Relying on three million years of instinct, he now realizes that there is more than one path behind the universe. The ancient device of the Stargate had served him well, but he no longer needed it. The glowing cuboid that had once seemed nothing more than a crystalline plate still floated in front of him, as unconcerned as he was by the harmless flames of the hell below.It was full of hitherto unfathomable secrets of space and time, but at least he now knew and could hold some of them.How self-evident and necessary is its mathematical ratio of length, width and height - the sequence of squares 1:4:9!How naive is it to think that this sequence ends here and there is only three dimensions!

His mind was centered on these simple geometric principles, and as his thoughts touched the plate, the hollow frame of the plate began to drown in the darkness of the interstellar night.The radiance of the red sun faded—so to speak, from all directions at the same time; and in front of him appeared a brilliant vortex of the Milky Way. This seems to be a beautifully carved model, set off on a plastic board.But it is reality, and he has mastered all its mysteries by senses keener than sight.If he wanted, he could focus on any one of the hundred billion stars in the galaxy; he could do much more than that.

He is now floating with the current in this great river of countless suns, floating among the lonely stars on the outer edge of the closed galaxy in the center of the galaxy.He wanted to stay here, just outside the fault in the sky, in this curved dark place without any stars.He knew that this chaotic zone that has not yet been finalized—the chaotic zone that can only be discerned vaguely by the reflection of fire and mist in the distance is the material that has not been used in the universe, and it is the material for future evolution.Here time has not yet begun; light and life will reform this vacuum only after the sun that now burns is completely extinguished.

He had crossed it once before, without knowing it; and now he had to cross it again--this time of his own will alone.The thought filled him for a moment with sudden terror, completely disorienting him, shaking his new view of the universe and nearly shattering it. He was not afraid of the galactic whirlpool that frightened his soul, but he harbored a deeper uneasiness about being unborn.For he had cast aside the human time scale; now, as he silently watched the black field of the starless night, he knew it was the harbinger of the immortality he faced. Then he remembered that he was never alone, and the panic he felt slowly subsided.His clear vision of the universe was restored—not entirely through his own efforts, he knew.When he needs guidance as a toddler, he will be guided. Like a high diver regaining his courage, he regained his confidence and threw himself into the light-year long river.The Milky Way burst out of the confines of his mind; stars and nebulae whizzed past him at what seemed to be infinite speed.He passed like a shadow through the center of countless suns, and these phantom suns burst and fell behind one by one; the cold and dark cosmic dust he dreaded seemed to be no more than the wings of crows passing the surface of the sun at this time. The stars were thinning; the dazzling splendor of the Milky Way was but a memory—a place he would revisit when he was ready. He's back, exactly where he wished to stay, in the space humans call reality. In front of him was a brilliant toy that would have fascinated any "star child"—the earth in motion with all its peoples on it. He came back just in time.On a heavily populated Earth, with alerts flashing on radar screens and giant astronomical telescopes scanning the skies - so-called human history is coming to an end. A thousand miles below, he sensed that the dead planet had woken up and stretched itself in orbit.The feeble energy it contains is unlikely to threaten him; yet he prefers a clearer sky.He stretched his will, and the spinning multi-megaton bomb was silently detonated and exploded, bringing a brief false dawn to the sleeping half of the earth. Then he waited, gathering his thoughts, pondering his untested powers.Because even though he's the master of the world, he's not quite sure what he's going to do next. He'll figure it out sooner or later.