Rimskaya, morose as he is, has continued working, and has even made some significant contributions to the researches. He believes he has found a definition of information: the potential that exists between all time-like dimensions (time itself, and the fifth dimension separating world-lines, for instance) and space-like dimensions. Wherever space and time interact, there is information, and where information can be ordered into knowledge, and knowledge can be applied, there is intelligence.

Lest anyone reading this journal of a primitive man should think we spend our time mired in abstractions, let me also say that I am discovering the richness available to those who are willing to alter their major characteristics. The variety of emotions available to a reconfigured human mind, thinking thoughts impossible to its ancestors. . . 

The emotion of -*-, describable only as something between sexual love and the joy of intellection—making love to a thought? Or &&, the true reverse of pain, not "pleasure" but a "warning" of healing, growth and change. Or (^+^), the most complex emotion yet discovered felt by those who consciously endure the change between mind configurations, and experience the broad spectrum of possibilities inherent in thinking and being.

I have barely begun to taste the varieties of human love. Personalities are not necessarily isolated here; I can belong to a wide spectrum of personality aggregates, and yet still retain my individuality. . . . I lose nothing and gain a thousand new tastes of human affection.

What use is it to try to measure the distances we have traveled? What use is the personality of the old Pavel Mirsky to comprehend them? Soon, I firmly resolve, I will gather up my courage and join with the extended personalities in City Memory.

And yet with all this to occupy me, I still mourn. I still weep for the lost part of myself, still feel sad for a land I cannot return to, a land doubly inaccessible now. But the weeping is buried deeply, where even Talsit sessions have difficulty reaching. . . perhaps lodged in the one area it is illegal to modify, known as Mystery. How ironic, that in this way I still feel like a Russian, and that so long as any part of me exists, it will be Russian!

Because I share the same Mystery with the old Pavel Mirsky, I feel continuity. I feel. . . 

An urge for the stars, yes, but more than that.

When I was a child in Kiev (or so a few dim portions of my memory inform me) I once asked my stepfather how long people would live when the Worker's Paradise was achieved. He was a computer technician, very imaginative, and he said, "Perhaps as long as they wish. Perhaps a billion years."

"How long is a billion years?" I asked him.

"It is a very long time," he said. "An age, an eternity, time enough for all life to rise and all life to end. Some people call it an eon."