Existence (82 page)

Or she may grow insistent. It’s hard to predict without awakening more dormant circuits than I care to.

“There is no hurry,” my partial self tells her. “The Earth creatures won’t reach this point of refuge for several more of their years. Anyway, it was all written long ago.”

The electron-swirl is very good. It even speaks with my accent.

“How can you be complacent!” Awaiter scolds. The cables covering our icy worldlet reverberate exasperation. “We survivors named you leader, Seeker, because you seemed to understand what’s happening in the galaxy at large. Only now our waiting may be at an end. The biologicals appear to have survived the first phase of their contact crisis. They’ll be here soon!”

“The Earthlings will find us or they won’t,” my shadow self answers. “What can a shattered band of ancient machines fear or anticipate from such a vigorous young race? One that made it this far?”

I already knew the humans were coming. My remaining sensors have long suckled their yatter networks. Sampling the solar wind, I savor ions the way a cowboy might sniff a prairie breeze. These zephyrs carry the bright tang of primitive space-drives. The musty smoke-smell of deuterium. Signs of awakening. Life is emerging from its water-womb. For a brief time—while the wave crests, we’ll have company.

“Greeter and Emissary want to warn Earthlings of their danger,” Awaiter insists. “We can help them!”

Our debate has roused some of the others. New tendrils probe with fingers of supercooled electricity. “Help … how?” my subvoice asks. “Our repair units collapsed after the
Last Battle
. We only discovered that humans had evolved when the creatures invented radio. By then it was too late! Their first transmissions are already propagating into a deadly galaxy. If destroyers roam this region—”

“Seeker, you know there are worse dangers. More recent and deadly.”

“Yes, but why worry the poor creatures? Let them enjoy their moment of sun and adventure.”

Oh, I am good! This little artificial voice argues as well as I did ages ago, staving off abrupt action by my impatient peers.

Greeter glides into the network. I feel his cool, eloquent electron flux. Only this time he agrees with me!

“The Earth creatures do not need to be told. They are figuring it out for themselves.”

Now this interests me. I sweep my subpersona aside and extend a tendril of my
Very Self
into the network. “What makes you say so?”

Greeter indicates our array of receivers, salvaged from ancient derelicts. “We intercept their chatter as they explore this asteroid swarm. One of them seems poised to understand what happened here, long ago.”

Greeter’s smug tone must derive from human teledramas. But then, Greeter’s makers were enthusiasts wanting no greater pleasure than saying “hello.”

“Show me,” I demand. Perhaps my long wait is over.

63.

A CRIME SCENE

Tor stared as the asteroid’s slow rotation brought ancient, shattered ruins into view. “Lord, what a mess.”

For two years in the belt she had helped unpeel layers of a puzzle going back a million centuries. Lately, that meant uncovering strange alien ruins, but never such devastation as this.

Just a few kilometers from the survey ship
Warren Kimbel
, a hulking shadow blocked the starry Milky Way. Ancient collisions had left dents and craters along its two-thousand-meter axis. On one side, it seemed a typical, nameless hunk of stone and frozen gas. But this changed as the sun’s vacuum brilliance abruptly swarmed the other half—exposing jagged, twisty remnants of a catastrophe that happened when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

“Gavin!” she called over her shoulder. “Come see this!”

Her partner floated through the overhead hatch, flipping in midair. His feet met the magnetized floor with a faint click.

“What is it? More murdered babies? Or clues to who their killers were?”

Tor gestured and her partner stared. Highlights shone across Gavin’s glossy features as their searchlight swept the shattered scene.

“Yep,” he nodded. “Dead babies again, murdered by some facr’ing enemy a jillion years ago. Povlov Exploration and Salvage ought to make good money off each corpse.”

Tor frowned, commercial exploitation was a small part of their reason for coming, though it helped pay the bills. “Don’t be morbid. Those are unfinished interstellar probes, destroyed ages ago, before they could be launched. We have no idea whether they were sentient machines like you, or just tools, like this ship. You of all people should know better than to go around anthropomorphizing alien artifacts.”

Gavin’s grimace was an aindroid’s equivalent of a sarcastic shrug. “If I use ‘morbid’ imagery, whose fault is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you organic humans faced a choice, back when you saw that ‘artificial’ intelligence was going to take off. You could have wrecked the machines, abandoning progress—”

She refrained from mentioning how close that came to happening.

“—or you could deep-program us with ‘fundamental
Laws of Robotics
,’” Gavin sniffed. “And had slaves far smarter than their masters. But no, what was it you organics decided?”

Tor knew it was no use when Gavin got in a mood. She concentrated on piloting a closer orbit.

“What was your solution to the problem of smart machines?
Raise us as your children.
Call us people. Citizens. You even gave some of us humaniform bodies!”

Tor’s last partner—a nice old bot and good chess player—had warned her when he trans-retired. Don’t hire an adolescent Class-AAA android fresh out of college, as difficult as any human adolescent. The worst part? Gavin was right. Not everyone agreed that raising AAAs as human would solve one of the Great Pitfalls, or even conceal the inevitable. For, despite genetic and cyborg improvements, bio-humans still seemed fated to slip behind.

And how many species survived that crisis?

Gavin shook his head in dramatic sadness, exactly like a too smart teenager who properly deserved to be strangled. “Can you really object when I, a man-built, manlike android, anthropomorphize? We only do as we’ve been taught, mistress.”

His bow was eloquently sarcastic. Especially since he was the only person aboard who
could
bend at the waist. All of Tor’s organic parts were confined to a cylindrical canister, barely over a meter long and half a meter wide. With prosthetic-mechanical arms and grippers, she looked more “robotic” than her partner, by far.

To Gavin’s snide remark, she had no response. Indeed, one easily wondered if humanity had made the right choice.

But isn’t that true of all our decisions, across the last two dozen years? Haven’t we time and again selected a path that seems less traveled? Because our best chance must come from doing what no one else tried?

Below, across the ravaged asteroid, stretched acres of great-strutted scaffolding—twisted in ruin. Tangled and half buried within toppled derricks lay silent ranks of shattered
unfinished starships,
razed perhaps a hundred million years ago.

Tor felt sure that her silicon eyes and Gavin’s germanium ones were the first to look upon all this, since an awful force plunged through, wreaking havoc. The ancient slayers had to be long gone. Nobody had yet found a star machine even close to active. Still she took no chances, keeping the weapons console vigilant. That sophisticated, semi-sentient unit searched, but found no energy sources, no movement amid the ruined, unfinished mechanisms below. Just cold rock and metal.

Gavin’s talk of “murdered babies” kind of soured any pleasure, viewing the ruins below as profitable salvage. It wouldn’t help her other vocation, either—one that brought her to this frontier as the first journalist in the asteroid belt. Out here, you doubled and tripled jobs. Which in Tor’s case meant describing humanity’s great discovery, explaining to those back home what happened here, so long ago.

Her latest report must wait. “We have work to do,” she told her partner.

Gavin pressed two translucent hands together prayerfully. “Yes, Mommy. Your wish is my program.” Then he sauntered to another console and began deploying drones.

Tor concentrated on directing the lesser minds within
Warren’s
control board—those littler, semi-sapient specialist processors dedicated to rockets and radar and raw numbers—who still spoke coolly and dispassionately … as machines should.

THE LONELY SKY

Twenty-six years ago we came to the belt, seeking to collect space-fomites. Tiny, drifting crystals carrying ancient
infections of the mind.
Already suffering terrible fevers, we sought to gather a wide sampling for comparison, to dissect the disease. To render it neutral or harmless. Or choose a version we could live with.

Only soon, paddling the equivalent of dug-out canoes through dangerous shoals, our brave explorers found something else, in addition to virus-stones. Something older.
Many
older things that—if dead and silent—testified to an earlier and more violent age of interstellar travel.

Imagine how they felt, those aboard the
Marco Polo …
then the
Hong Bao, Temujin,
and
Zaitsev …
who first stumbled onto a vast graveyard of murdered robot starships. They had to wonder—

What happened out here? Why so many different
kinds
of machines? What conflict killed them and how come none survived?

Were
all
those long ago visitors robots?

And, most perplexing, why, after tens of millions of years, did they stop coming? What happened in the galaxy, to bring the era of complicated space probes to such a complete halt …

… giving way to a new age, when only compact crystals crisscross the stars?

—Tor Povlov

64.

LAMINATIONS

There were times when I thought I’d never make it back out here.

Gerald Livingstone gazed from the observation blister of the research vessel,
Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta.
Here, it was easy to lose yourself in starry vistas. The view reminded him of those long ago years that he once spent as a garbage collector, with only a little capuchin monkey for company, swinging his teleoperated lariat, cleaning up the mess in Earth orbit. Back there and then, his homeworld used to take up half the sky and the sun was a mighty flame.

Way out here, old Sol was smaller. And if you squinted carefully, you might glimpse the tiny reddish disc of Mars. As for the opposite direction—

I’d need optics to discern any nearby rocks. By sight alone, you’d never guess we’re near the asteroid belt.

Still, I’ve been privileged to see more than my ancestors ever did, or most living people.

He understood the allure of an offer that was still on the table. For humanity to invest in crystal-making factories and vast guns to hurl pellets across space. Pellets “crewed” by replicated aliens, plus an added complement of copied human beings. As time passed, his joints stiffened and his arteries gradually hardened, Gerald couldn’t help thinking about it.

To waken in such a realm—one that’s tiny on the outside, but vast within, filled with wonders to explore, and eons yet to live. To converse with beings from dozens of planets and cultures, to hear their songs, try their amusements, and share their dreams. And eventually …

One valuable result of the
Marco Polo
—and subsequent voyages by the
Temujin
and
Hong Bao,
had been some variety of emissary artifacts to choose among, including some whose makers spent extra on cultural and scientific info-storage, providing more-than-minimal data about cultures and peoples out there. Civilizations that were now almost certainly long vanished.

If we do set up factories to make interstellar egg-probes, I hope we’ll use those, for models. Fewer, but higher quality. It’s not the virus way. Perhaps it will be the human way.

But Gerald’s role in such matters had faded, since those dangerous days when he and Akana Hideoshi stole the Havana Artifact from under the noses of the oligarchs. A temporary theft that was forgiven, because it led to the first Great Debate—the crucial one, between the Havana artilens and Courier of Caution. The disputation that taught humanity a vital lesson.

We have some choice. And there is still some time.

Speaking of Courier, wasn’t he supposed to be here, by now?

Others drifted into the observation dome, as the hour of First Light approached. Scientific staff and members of the
ibn Battuta
crew clustered in hushed conversation, peering and pointing toward the high-northwest octant, where it all would happen. Nobody came near Gerald.

Is my pensive mood so obvious? And when did I become a “historical figure” who people are afraid to bother?

Not afraid. They held back out of polite respect, perhaps. Especially new arrivals, coming to use the now finished facility; many seemed a bit awed …

… though not, he noted, the brilliant young astronomer, Peng Xiaobai—or Jenny to her friends—who glanced over at Gerald, offering a brief, dazzling smile.

Hmm. If I weren’t an elderly queer with fragile bones …
Gerald had to admit, he relished the harmless, indulgent way Jenny flirted with him.
Just be careful. Courier seems rather protective of the daughter of his oldest living human friend.

And think of the devil. Here he was, at last—everyone’s favorite alien—gliding into the chamber along one of the utility tracks that lined the bulkhead. Courier of Caution waited for the trolley to come to a stop, then let go. His new, globelike robo-body then drifted toward Gerald, propelled by soft puffs of compressed nitrogen.

Funny how he chose the simplest possible design. Just a mobility unit to carry him around the ship. No manipulator arms or input-output jacks. I suppose after thousands of years locked in crystal, he got used to just one way of interfacing with the world, through words and images.