Existence (83 page)

This particular copy of Courier of Caution had been imprinted into a cube, almost a meter on each side—one of humanity’s first experiments in utilizing alien simulation-tech. There were already attempts to upload some human minds, though what to do with the technique was still hotly debated.

Courier had other copies, of course. And with each duplication, the extraterrestrial envoy modified his simulated appearance, stretching the four-piece mouth that many found disturbing, into something more humanlike. And the ribbonlike vision strip now resembled something like a pair of earthly eyes. The voice was already adapted completely. Whether Chinese, English, or any other tongue, Courier now spoke like a native.

“I am here, Gerald. Sorry to have delayed matters. Now we can begin.”

Good old Courier. Everything is always about you, isn’t it?

Back in the old days, Gerald might have glanced at his wrist phone to tell time, or grunt-queried for a pop-up clock to appear inside his contaict lens. Now, he simply knew, to whatever accuracy required, how much time remained until First Light.

“You caused no delay. We have another minute,” he told this version of the alien entity who had crossed so many parsecs, coming down to Earth in a blaze of fire and luck, to pass along an ancient warning.

“Come. I saved you a spot.”

THE LONELY SKY

How can the universe seem both crowded and empty at the same time? Let’s start by returning to those scholars and theoreticians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Experts were already casting doubt on an old dream—interstellar empire. If organic beings like us ever managed to voyage between stars, it would be through prodigious, exhausting effort. A tenacious species here and there might colonize a few dozen worlds with biological descendants. Even perhaps a small corner of the Milky Way. But hardly enough to dent the Fermi Paradox.

Most organics would stay home.

What of machines? Designed to “live” in space, requiring no supplies of air, food, or water and oblivious to time, robots might stand the tedium and dangers of interstellar flight. Launched toward a neighboring system and forgotten as they crossed the Great Vacuum Desert.

Even if they travel far below lightspeed, can’t a mature, long-lived culture afford to wait millennia for fascinating data about other worlds? Our universe seems to school patience.

But even for probes, the galaxy is awfully big. It’s one thing to send a few sophisticated machines, capable of self-repair, performing scientific observations at a few nearby systems and transmitting data home … and quite another to launch probes toward
every
site of interest! That could impoverish a civilization.

What was needed? Some way to get more out of the investment. A lot more.

—Tor Povlov

65.

LURKERS

Greeter is right. One of the humans seems to be on track.

We crippled survivors tap into the tiny Earthship’s strangely ornate computers. Eavesdropping isn’t as trivial as tuning in to the chatty storm that emanates from Earth. But at last it’s done and we can read the journal. The musings of a clever little maker.

Her thoughts are crisp, for a biological. Though missing many pieces to the puzzle, she seems bound—even compelled—to explore wherever the clues lead.

WORDS.

So quaint and organic, unlike the seven dimensional gestalts used by most larger minds.

There was a time though, long ago, when I whiled away centuries writing poetry in the ancient Maker style. Somewhere deep in my archives there must still be files of those soft musings.

Reading Tor Povlov’s careful reasoning evokes memory, as nothing has in a megayear.

THE LONELY SKY

Legendary scientist John Von Neumann first described how to explore the universe. Instead of going broke, aiming a great many probes at every star, dispatch just a few
deluxe
robot ships to investigate nearby systems!

These—after their explorations were complete and results reported—would then seek out local resources, to mine and refine raw materials, then proceed to make
copies
of themselves. After next building fuel and launching facilities, they would take a final step—hurling their daughter-probes toward still farther stellar systems.

Where—upon arrival—each daughter would make still more duplicates, send
them
onward. And so on. Exploration could proceed faster and farther than if carried out by living beings. And after the first wave, there’s no further cost back home. Information pours back, century after century, as descendant-probes move on through the galaxy.

So logical. Some calculated: the method could explore every star in the Milky Way a
mere three million years
after the first probes set forth—an eyeblink compared to the galaxy’s age.

Ah, but there’s a rub! As Fermi would have asked:
In that case, where are all the probes?

When humans discovered radio, then spaceflight, no extra-solar explorer-machines announced themselves. No messages welcomed us into a civilized sky. At first, there seemed just one explanation.…

—Tor Povlov

66.

A PRICE FOR CONTINUITY

“Uh, you awake in there Tor?”

She looked up from her report as the radio link crackled along her jaw bone. Glancing out through the observation pane, she saw Gavin’s tethered form drifting far from the ship, near a deep pit along the asteroid’s flank, wherein the ruined shipyard lay hidden from the sun. Surrounded by salvage drones, he looked quite human, directing less sophisticated, noncitizen machines at their tasks.

She clicked. “Yes, I’m in the control tub doing housekeeping chores. Find something interesting?”

There was a brief pause.

“Could say that.” Her partner sounded sardonic. “Better let
Warren
pilot itself a while. Hurry your pretty little biological butt down here to take a look.”

Tor bit back a sharp reply, reminding herself to be patient. Even in organic humans, adolescence didn’t last forever. Not usually.

“My butt is encased in gel and titanium that’s tougher than
your
shiny ass,” she told him. “But I’m on my way.”

The ship’s semi-sentient autopilot accepted command as Tor hurried into her spacesuit—a set of attachments that clicked easily onto her sustainment capsule—and made for the airlock, still irritated by Gavin’s flippancy.

Everything has its price,
she thought.
Including buying into the future. Gavin’s type of person is new, and allowances must be made. In the long run, our culture will be theirs. In a sense it will be we who continue, and grow, long after DNA becomes obsolete.

Still, when Gavin called again, inquiring sarcastically what bodily function had delayed her, Tor wondered:

Whatever happened to machines of loving grace?

She couldn’t quash some brief nostalgia—for days when robots clanked, and computers followed orders.

THE LONELY SKY

Let’s recreate the logic of those last-century philosophers, in an imagined conversation, as if two of the old greats were here today, arguing it out.

*   *   *

JOHN VON NEUMANN:
“Whether or not it someday becomes possible for living people to travel between the stars, what curious race could resist the temptation to at least send
mechanical representatives
? Surrogates programmed to explore and say ‘hello’?

“The first crude probes to leave our solar system—
Voyager
and
Pioneer
—demonstrated this desire, carrying simple messages meant to be deciphered by other beings, long after the authors were dust.

“And preliminary studies for more advanced missions were made—first in the 1970s by the British Interplanetary Society. Early in the 2000s, NASA funded a ‘Hundred-Year Starship’ program. Among the technologies investigated? How to make machines that can cross the great expanse, then use local resources in some faraway system to make and launch more probes to yet more destinations.

“Should we ever dispatch a wave of such representatives, even once, from that point onward our ambassadors will know no limits. Their descendants will carry our greetings to the farthest corners of the cosmos.

“Moreover, anyone out there who is enough like us to be interesting would surely do the same.”

I can imagine Von Neumann saying all this with the optimistic confidence of well-turned logic—only to hear a grouchy reply.

ENRICO FERMI:
“Well. Perhaps. But answer me this: if self-reproducing probes are such efficient explorers, why haven’t these marvelous mechanisms said hello to us, by now?

“Shouldn’t they already be here? Great-great-greatissimo grand-daughters of the original devices, sent by alien civilizations that preceded ours by millions of years? Sturdy and built to wait patiently for eons, they would surely have noticed—and eagerly responded—when we first used radio!

“Suppose one lurking envoy happened to fail. Shouldn’t more than a few have accumulated by now, across the Earth’s four billion years? Yet we’ve heard no messages congratulating us for joining the ranks of space faring people.

“There is but one logical conclusion. No one before us attained the ability to send such things! Aren’t we forced to surmise we are the first curious, gregarious, technologically competent species in the Milky Way? Perhaps the only one, ever?”

*   *   *

The logic of this
Uniqueness Hypothesis
seemed so compelling, growing numbers of scientists gave up on alien contact. Especially when decade after decade of radio searches turned up only star static.

Of course, events eventually caught up with us, shattering all preconceptions. Starting with the First Artifact, we met interstellar emissaries at last—crystal eggs, packed with software-beings who provided an answer, at long last.

A depressing answer, but simple.

Like some kind of billion-year plant, it seems that each living world develops a
flower
—a civilization that makes seeds to spew across the universe, before the flower dies. The seeds might be called “self-replicating space probes that use local resources to make more copies of themselves” … though not as John Von Neumann pictured such things. Not even close.

In those crystal space-viruses, Von Neumann’s logic has been twisted by nature. We dwell in a universe that’s both filled with “messages” and a deathly stillness.

Or, so it seemed.

Only then, on a desperate mission to the asteroids, we found evidence that the truth is … complicated.

—Tor Povlov

67.

ANCIENT LUMINOSITY

First Light.

Drifting in a gravitational eddy—the Martian L2 point—eighty-seven petals finished unfolding around a common center, each of them electro-warping twenty kilometers of cerametal into a perfect curved shape, reflecting starlight to a single focus.

The spectacle was lent even more grandeur for spectators who watched from the
Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta
’s slowly spinning gravity wheel. The great telescope, and all of the surrounding stars, seemed to gyre in a slow, revolving waltz.

“So beautiful, like a fantastic space blossom,” murmured Jenny Peng. “I wish my parents and Madam Donaldson could have witnessed this.”

“Perhaps Lacey will see it. In time,” Courier of Caution replied in soothing tones, emitted by the resonant surface of his crystalline home. The alien entity seemed like a disembodied head floating in a translucent cube, carried by a hovering robotic drone. “Lacey’s sons ordered her cryo-frozen when she passed away. Given your present rate of technological progress, in as little as thirty years she may yet have a chance to revive and—”

“It won’t be the same,” Jenny answered, firmly. Despite her family’s longstanding relationship with Courier, they always disagreed with him over this issue, siding with the Naturalist Party on matters of life and death. “Lacey would have loved to watch this telescope unfold, but with her own eyes.”

Gerald saw Courier’s simulated mouth start opening, as if to argue that organic sensors held no advantages over solid state ones. But clearly this was an old dispute between friends. Anyway there were other things on the ancient star mariner’s mind.

“I still do not understand why we must wait so many months before turning the gaze of this magnificent machine toward my homeworld.”

Gerald had concerns of his own. He was communing with the
ibn Battuta
’s detection and defense ais, as they scanned the inner edge of the belt according to his orders—vigilantly watching for potential threats. But with a corner of his mind, he gathered words to answer Courier.

“You know why this observatory was established at the Martian L2 point. It allows us to take advantage of the Phobos staging area, but stay away from any major gravitational wells. It also means the telescope will stay mostly aimed
outward,
away from the sun. Your homeworld is in the direction of Capricorn, presently too near the sun for safe viewing. It will be more accessible in half an Earth year, or a fifth of a Mars orbit. Do try to be patient.”

That last part was a dig, of course. He watched Courier take the bait—

“Patient.
Patient?
” The vision-strip seemed to flare. “After all the millennia I endured in freezing space and fiery plummet, immured under ice, then communing with erratic primitives, worshipped, stolen, worshipped again, then buried and drowned, interrogated then drowned again…”

The alien envoy stopped abruptly and rocked back. Gerald knew Courier well enough by now for some of his mood-expressions to be familiar. Including
rueful realization.

“Ah, Gerald my friend, I see that you tease me. Very well. I will stop demanding haste. After waiting thousands of years for humans to develop technology, then dozens more for you to make up your minds and build this instrument, I suppose I can be
patient
a few more months.”