The Dreamers

The Dreamers

By Stephen Baxter

From the beginning, even when the universe was still very young, there was life.

Life self-organized, from collections of more or less simple chemicals, blindly following the laws of chemistry and physics, guided by mathematical rules evidently inherent in reality. Microbial life, single-cell life, viral life... Some scientists used to think life could have emerged even when the Big Ban glow was still bright, and the whole universe was warm enough to be one big habitable zone.

On world with similar surface conditions, similar kinds of life emerged... Life spread, too, as rogue comets and asteroids blasted the surfaces of the young worlds, and handfuls of bugs buried deep in rock fragments survived chance journeys between the planets, and, more rarely, between the stars. Panspermia bubbles formed, worlds with similar conditions hosting related forms of life, sharing common origins. Across the Galaxy such bubbles jostled, and even permeated; world of warm-Earth life could share stellar systems with worlds of cold-Titan life, as you've seen for yourselves.

And life spread inward too, down into the guts of the world, following deep water flows, mineral seeps, leaks of heat energy, radioactivity... The interiors of worlds, too deep even for the immense bombardments of the young cosmos to do any damage, were warm, safe cradles in those early days, and life got down there pretty quickly – on Earth we found deep bugs all over the world, all of similar species. The deep rock is a static shelter, though, and relatively starved of energy. Life was slow to spread, even slow to procreate. To survive on such thin resources, living things learned to repair rather than to reproduce. But gradually a kind of complexity grew and spread, as the microbes gathered themselves into mutually supportive colonies, and the colonies combind into supercolonies.

A threshold was passed. Consciousness emerged.

The Dreamers. Photo by Elena.

On Earth, most of the biomass of the planet – most of its weight of living stuff – dwells in the deep subsurface rocks. For most of their history, humans never even suspected it existed. And it is aware, a constellation of huge, slow minds. These are the Dreamers. They remember their birth, when the universe was young.

And world after world woke up...

From the beginning the great communities of Dreamers apprehended something of the universe around them.

They sensed the early battering of their worlds by the debris of planetary formation. They were tugged by the subtle tides exerted by their worlds' parent stars and sister planets. They could feel the slow geological evolution of their host world – an evolution shaped from the beginning by life itself; there's evidence that the presence of life on a planet like Earth, for instance, even helps stabilize the formation of continents.

Even multicellular life, when it evolved – infrequently, sporadically – served as a kind of sensory mechanism for the living worlds.

For some worlds, given the right conditions, with an atmosphere reasonably transparent to the parent star's radiation, energy could pour down from the sky onto the land and into the upper layers of the oceans, and the familiar miracles of complex life could come about. Photosynthesis, a chemical means to exploit the energy of stellar radiation. Grand rebuildings of oceans and atmospheres through the injections of such gases as oxygen or methane. The evolution of secondary forms of life – like Earth's animals – to feed off those products. But the outer layers of complex planetary life, so important to creatures like humans, were all but an irrelevance to the Dreamers. They only ever amounted to a trivial fraction of any world's total biomass. And the complex creatures were usually not even aware of the noostrata that pemeated the rocks beneath their feet.

Yet, through the frantic reactions of the complex forms, animals and plants, to external events like asteroid strikes or stellar flares or supernova explosions, the Dreamers came to know the universe in more detail.

Even then, far back in cosmic time, the Dreamers began to get the first hints of the approach of the End Time.

And then there was communication, between Dreamer worlds.

Dreamers worlds. Illustration by Elena.