Quotes from David Zindell's "War in Heaven" Life moved ever outward into infinite possibilities and yet all things were perfect and finished in every single moment, their end attained. Always, life supplied life to itself and grew ever vaster and more complex. Living things created burrows beneath the snow and songs sailing out to the stars; they made lightships and honey, pearls and poems and computers that generated entire universes of their own kind of life. Life swirled and pulsed and blazed in terribly beautiful patterns across the stellar deeps. The sun and the moons spun ecstatically with life's wild fire, and the photons danced along the rivers of light that streamed from star to star. Life, like and infinite flower, opened everywhere out into the universe, and into all possible universes, touching all matter, all space, all time with its perfect golden petals and sweet fragrance. And it all grew deeper and deeper, and brighter and brighter like a star swelling to an impossible brilliance that could have no limit or end. Yes, yes, yes. - Well, it's a cruel universe, isn't it? Sometimes I think it all just falls worse and worse. - No, it is just the opposite. It is the way creation must always be. He tried to explain that the great changes rippling through his being had little to do with mysticism, in the sense of being magical or mystifying. "Truly, it is just pure technology, yes? This is what technology is: just consciousness reflected upon itself, gaining ever more control of itself and creating new forms." The way for humankind is not back after all. There is no return to simplicity this way. No true halla. I used to think of halla as a kind of perfect harmony of flowers and sunlight and good clean life and death out on the sparkling snow. A perfect balance that life might somdeay achieve - without war, without disease, without madness, without asteroids and wild stars that can annihilate ten thousand species of animals almost overnight. But no. The universe is not made this way. True halla is the vastening of life. The deepening into new forms and possibilities that we call evolution. All rules and boundaries must someday be broken. How else can we go beyond ourselves? A thallow chick must break out of his egg, but this does not mean that the shell is without value. You must remember that an oak tree is not a crime against the acorn. - But how is it possible? How could it be possible that everything is really all right? - How could it not be possible? - ...If you were to ask me who I thought Bardo really is, I suppose I should say he's a man who wants to evolve as much as any other man. - Then evolve. ... the gods restrain each other from trying to be as God. And how the gods try to find ways of evade each other's restraints. But the computer was made to simulate whole universes. You cannot even dream what blessed simulations are possible. Human beings will always need such computing power even as they need computers. And so at last he stood before the universe naked in his soul and saw it as it really was. He saw that if consciousness was just the flow of matter within his brain (or the vibrations of atoms within a rock), then the consciousness of the universe was just the flow of everything: rocks and photons and starfire and blood. And everywhere - in the great Grus Cluster of galaxies no less a cathedral on a small, ice-bound planet - this flow grew ever more complex. This infinite organism that was the universe, in all its infinite patience and curiosity, brought forth endless new planets and peoples and stars blazing with infinite possibilities. The Wild Always, man had felt the urge to discover the true image of humanity, the shape and substance of what man might someday become. This is the secret of life, of human life, the true secret that men and women have sought as far back as the howling moonlit savannas of Afarique on Old Earth. On Old Earth there were beautiful tigers who burned with life in the forests of the night. And then there were crazed, old, toothless tigers who preyed upon human beings. It is possible to completely affirm the world that brought forth tigers into life and still say no to an individual tiger about to devour your child. Who programs the programmer? Ishq Allah maboud 'lillah: I am program, programmer and that which is programmed. Truly, I cannot know what you are. Conscious or not, aware of your own awareness or only a program running a machine. But you are only you, yes? This is the marvel. You cannot be other than what you are. Isn't this enough? Ede, of course, as a man, as his original self before he had dared to become a god, had deeply felt the logic of the real universe. Like any man, he had felt doubt. But he had scorned his fears and uncertainty as most ignoble emotions. He was after all Nikolos Daru Ede, the founder of what would become man's greatest religion. He must always be a man of genius and a vision and, above all, faith. It was his genius, as an architect, to find a way to model his mind in the programs of what he called his eternal computer. It was his vision, as a philosopher, to justify the carking of human consciousness from living brain into the cold circuits of a machine. And it was his faith, as a prophet, to show other men that they could transcend the prison of their bodies and finally conquer death. May all our thoughts be beautiful. May all our words be beautiful. May all our actions be beautiful. The Yasa of the Sani There is no matter without form, and no form not dependent upon matter. - saying of the cetics. For that is the beauty of organization, for that when one reaches out to logically arranged data with the proper senses , the flowing information pools fall into form and become more like snowflakes, frozen waterfalls, crystal mountains. They played for the sake of play alone, and their only concern was the ultimate evolution of their game.