Utriusque Cosmi: A Space Rapture

First you have to be one of the select few. Then you have to leave something behind - your body. If you do an alien named Erasmus offers you rescue on doomsday, a science fiction version of the Rapture. At least that’s the way it works in Robert Charles Wilson’s “Utriusque Cosmi.” Despite originally being an alien machine, Erasmus shares a name with both the Christian Humanist Desiderius Erasmus and the third century St. Erasmus a.k.a. St. Elmo, the patron saint of sailors. The interstellar fleet to which Erasmus belongs travels to planets facing doom. The Fleet can upload and preserve the minds of those whom it chooses to save. However, the Fleet faces an enemy, and although the after-life aboard the fleet spans eons, it still isn’t permanent. Turns out there are raptures on top of raptures. “Utriusque Cosmi” shows us the end of a family, the end of a world, and the end of a universe, but each ending leads to new beginnings. 

When characters evolve so far from our own form and mode of living, there’s a risk that the reader won’t identify with them. Wilson avoids this perhaps by cheating a little in having his narrator, Carlotta Boudaine, remain very much like a twenty-first century woman emotionally and psychologically even after billions of years of living as disembodied data. Even with considerable amounts of those years spent in a form of suspended animation, the uploaded Carlotta still has a conscious and active life which dwarfs the longest human life spans. All that extra life experience, and all that time away from a physical body could cause incomprehensible changes. Yet, even when she’s billions of years old, Carlotta remains as understandable as the sixteen-year-old who was raptured up.

With the rapture angle, this story fits the “truth behind the legends” category. Think of Erich Von Dankien’s The Chariots of the Gods if it were science fiction instead of pseudoscience or pseudo-history. In fact, think of Jack Kirby’s comic The Eternals. Kirby presents us with a race of immortal superhumans created by alien experimentation. The Eternals interacted with mankind, and distorted retellings of these encounters became the ancient myths with the Eternals being the gods and heroes. Likewise the Deviants, another race created by alien experimentation, were the inspiration for the monsters of myth and legend. An earlier prose novel, Wallace West's Lords of Atlantis, in which humans from the planet Mars become the basis for the Olympian gods, is another example. In this case, the religious idea of the Rapture can be seen as a distorted prediction of a coming event. 

This was the nearest image I could
find to Carlotta's description of
Utriusque Cosmi. It has an angel
above, but no devils.

Wilson’s narrator, Carlotta Boudaine, mentions that Utriusque Cosmi is the title of a drawing she saw in a book about Elizabethan drama. She describes it as illustrating what Europeans of the 1600s thought the universe was like. The drawing showed angels in heaven above, devils in Hell beneath, with a naked man stretched between them. Carlotta learns that things are more complex than that because even the angels have angels of their own, and the devils have devils of their own. Carlotta doesn’t mention that Utriusque Cosmi is also the title of a book by Robert Fludd (1574-1637). A Google search for Utriusque Cosmi brings up images similar to what the narrator describes, and text often identifies these images as front-pieces for Fludd’s book. 

The story also contains references which might interest H.P. Lovecraft fans. Referring to the enemy chasing the Fleet, Carlotta calls them the Old Ones or the Great Old ones. Again, maybe this is meant to be another “truth behind the legends” except we know Lovecraft’s Old Ones, like the Necronomicon, are his creations rather than actual legends. 

“Utriusque Cosmi” first appeared in The New Space Opera 2, but I read it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois. This is the first of a number of stories in YBSF 27 dealing with some form of suspended animation. Carlotta and her fellow Fleet members no longer have physical bodies, but they still face an eventual sort of death. Fleet members can extend their lives by “timesliding” i.e. spacing out the moments when they’re awake and living. The narrator and other uploaded minds are part of the Fleet’s data stream. The Fleet can turn off uploaded minds for a time and then turn them back on. Moments of active perception are called saccades and members of the Fleet can space their saccades as far apart as they want so that a thousand years seems like only a few seconds. (Outside of this story, Saccade means “a rapid movement of the eye between fixation points.”) Since many of YBSF 27’s stories deal with interstellar travel by societies incapable of faster than light travel, they involve suspended animation. Although it involves “timesliding” instead, “Urtrisque Cosmi” shares a certain feeling, a certain rhythm, a certain feeling of disconnect with stories like “The Island” and “Solace” where space traveling characters go into suspended animation and periodically awake years later often finding that life has occurred and things have changed aboard ship during their long sleep. 

I liked the line “Memory plays tricks that history corrects.” (YBSF 27 16) Carlotta’s uploaded mind time travels hoping to deliver a message to her pre-rapture self. In “Utriusque Cosmi,” endings lead to new beginnings, but the story raises questions as to what the best metaphor is for this process. Is it a circle? Or is it a linear progression from level to level with each higher level having similarities to the one before it? 

“As above, so below.”