Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (69 page)

*

For Ari, the discovery was the high point of his lifespan— a development that had to be communicated to the solar system at once. Ari's face had been contorted with excitement when he had called Morgan an hour after the machines reported the first find.
"We've done it, Morgan," Ari proclaimed. "We've justified our whole voyage. Three thousand useless, obsolete people have made a discovery that's going to transform the whole outlook in the solar system."
Morgan had already been pondering a screen that displayed a triangular diagram. The point at the bottom of the triangle represented the solar system. The two points at the top represented 82 Eridani and Rho Eridani. The
Island of Adventure
and the
Green Voyager
had been creeping up the long sides of the triangle. The
Green Voyager
was now about three light years from Rho— thirty-three years travel time.
Morgan transferred the diagram to Ari's screen and pointed out the implications. If the
Island of Adventure
transmitted an announcement to the solar system, the
Green Voyager
would pick it up in approximately seven years. If the people on the
Voyager
thought it was interesting, they could change course and reach 82 Eridani only twelve and a half decades after they intercepted the message.
"That gives us over one hundred and thirty years to explore the planet," Ari argued. "By that time we'll have learned everything important the fossils have to offer. We'll have done all the real work. We'll be ready to move on. And look for a world where we can communicate with a
living
Consciousness."

*

Unfortunately, the situation didn't look that straightforward to the rest of the community. To them, a hundred and thirty years was a finite, envisionable time period.
There was, after all, a third possibility— as Miniruta Coboloji pointed out in one of her contributions to the electronic debate.
The
Green Voyager
may never come this way at all,
Miniruta argued.
They may reack Rho thirty-three years from now pass through the system, and point themselves at one of the stars that lies further out. They've got three choices within fourteen light years. Why can't we just wait the thirty-three years? And send a message after they've committed themselves to some other star system?
For Ari, that was unthinkable.
Our announcement is going to take twenty
years to reach the solar system no matter what we do. If we sit here for thirty-three years before we transmit, it will be fifty-three years before anyone in the solar system hears about one of the most important discoveries in history. We all know what's happening in the solar system. Fifty-three years from now, there may not be anyone left who cares.
Once again Morgan labored over his screens. Once again he recruited aides who helped him guide the decision-making process. This time he engineered a compromise. They would send a brief message saying they had "found evidence of extinct life" and continue studying the planet's fossils. Once every year, they would formally reopen the discussion for three tendays. They would transmit a complete announcement "whenever it becomes clear the consensus supports such an action."

*

Ari accepted the compromise in good grace. He had looked at the numbers, too. Most of the people on the ship still belonged to his communion.
"They know what their responsibilities are," Ari insisted. "Right now this is all new, Morgan. We're just getting used to the idea that we're looking at a complete planetary biota. A year from now— two years from now— we'll have so much information in our databanks they'll know we'd be committing a criminal act if we didn't send every bit of it back to the solar system."

*

It was Ari who convinced them the planet should be called Athene. Athene had been a symbol of wisdom and culture, Ari pointed out, but she had been a war goddess, too. And didn't the world they were naming bear a distinct resemblance to the planet the ancient humans had named after their male war figure?

*

The information pouring into the databanks could be examined by anyone on the ship. In theory, anyone could give the exploration machines orders. In practice, the exploration of the Athenian fossil record soon came under the control of three people: Ari, Morgan— and Miniruta Coboloji.
Morgan had been watching Miniruta's development ever since he had lured her away from the Eight. Physically, she was a standard variation on the BR-V73 line— the long, willowy female body type that had been the height of fashion in the lunar cities in the 2130s. Her slim, beautifully crafted fingers could mold a sculpture— or shape a note on a string instrument— with the precision of a laser pointer.
It was a physical style that Morgan found aesthetically appealing, but there were at least two hundred women on the ship who had been shaped by the same gene cluster. So why was Miniruta the only BR-V73 who crept into his thoughts during the more stressful hours of his celibate intervals? Was it because there was something desperate about the need for affiliation he had uncovered in her personality profile? Did that emotional vulnerability touch something in his own personality?
Miniruta's affiliation with the Doctrine of the Cosmic Enterprise had lasted four decades. Ari claimed her switch to the EruLabi worldview had been totally unexpected. Ari had gone to sleep assuming she was one of his most
ardent colleagues and awakened to discover she had sent him a long message explaining the reasons for her conversion and urging him to join her.
During the decades in which she had been a member of Ari's communion, Miniruta had followed Ari's lead and equipped herself with every pharmaceutical and electrical enhancer she could link to her physiology. The electronic enhancers had all been discarded a few tendays after she had joined the EruLabi. Her pharmaceutical enhancers had been dispensed with, item by item, as she had worked her way up the EruLabi protocols. She had been the second EruLabi on the ship who had made it to the fourth protocol and accepted its absolute prohibition of all non-genetic mental and physiological enhancers.
Morgan could now talk to her without struggling. His own pharmaceutical enhancers erased most of the intellectual gap that separated two people who had been brought into the universe twenty years apart. He had been surprised when he had discovered Miniruta was spending two-thirds of every daycycle with the data from the fossil hunt, but he had soon realized she had a philosophical agenda.
To Miniruta, the course of evolution on Athene proved that evolution was a random process. "Ari's right, Morgan," Miniruta said. "This planet can teach us something we need to understand. But it's not the lesson Ari thinks it is. It's telling us there isn't any plan. There's no big overall objective— as if the universe is some kind of cosmic totalitarian state. The only reality is individuals. And their needs."

*

To Ari, the critical question was the evolution of intelligence. Obviously, life had died out on Athene before intelligent creatures could build cities or turn meadows into farms. But wasn't there some chance something like the first proto-humans had evolved? If that first glimmer of tool-making, culture-creating intelligence had appeared on the planet, wouldn't it prove that evolution really did lead in a particular direction?
"I'll grant you the vertebrates were obviously an accident," Ari said. "But you can still see an obvious increase in intelligence if you look at the progressions we've been uncovering. You can't go from stationary sea creatures to land creatures that were obviously highly mobile without a lot of development in the brain. Intelligence is the inevitable winner in the selection process. The life forms that can think better will always replace the life forms with less complex nervous systems."
"The way human beings replaced the cockroach?" Miniruta asked. "And the oyster?"
Miniruta was speaking VA13. The lilt in her voice expressed a casual mockery that Morgan would have found devastating if she had directed it at him.
"We were not in direct genetic competition with the cockroach and the oyster," Ari said in Tych. "The observable fact that certain lines remained static for hundreds of millions of years doesn't contradict the observable fact that natural selection tends to produce creatures with more highly developed brains. We could have destroyed every species on the Earth if we had wanted
to. We let them live because we needed a complex biosphere. They survived because they satisfied one of
our
needs."

*

To Morgan, most of the information they were gathering proved that natural selection really was the powerful force the theorists had claimed it was.
Certain basic patterns had been repeated on both planets. Life forms that had been exceptionally massive had possessed jaw structures that indicated they had probably been herbivores— just as terrestrial herbivores such as the elephant had been the largest organisms in their habitats. Life forms that had possessed stabbing teeth and bone-crunching jaws tended to be medium-sized and looked as if they had probably been more agile.
But the process obviously had its random qualities, too. Was it just a matter of random chance that vertebrates had failed to develop? Had the shell creatures dominated the planet merely because certain molecules had fallen into one type of pattern on Earth and another pattern on Athene? Or had it happened because there was some difference in the conditions life had encountered on the two planets?
To Morgan, it didn't matter what the answer was. Evolution might proceed according to laws that were as rigid as the basic laws of physics, or it might be as random as a perfect game of chance. He would be happy with either answer. He could even be content with no answer.
That was one of the things people never seemed to understand about science. As far as Morgan was concerned, you didn't study the universe because you wanted to know the answers. You studied it to
connect
. When you subjected an important question to a rigorous examination— collecting every scrap of evidence you could find, measuring and analyzing everything that could be measured and analyzed— you were linked to the universe in a way nothing else could connect you.
Religious mystics had once spent their lives trying to establish a direct contact with their version of God. Morgan was a mystic who tried to stay in contact with the cosmos.

*

Ari had assigned three groups of exploration machines to a hunt for campsites. The teams concentrated on depressions that looked as if they had once been rivers and probed for evidence such as stone tools and places where a large number of animal fossils had been concentrated in a small area. They found two animal deposits within their first three tendays and Ari quickly pointed out that the animals had clearly been disassembled.
"These aren't just tar pits or places where a catastrophe killed several animals accidentally," Ari argued. "Note how the remains of the different species are all jumbled up. If they had been killed by a rockslide from the surrounding heights— to name just one alternate possibility— the remains of each animal would have tended to stay together. The pattern we're looking at here is the pattern we'd expect to see in a waste pit."
Miniruta tossed her head. "If they were butchered," she said in VA13, "then somebody had to use tools to cut them up. Show us a flint tool, Ari. Show us some evidence of fire."

*

Machines burrowed and probed in the areas around the "waste pits." Scraping attachments removed the dirt and rock one thin layer at a time. Raking attachments sieved the dust and rubble. Search programs analyzed the images transmitted by the onsite cameras and highlighted anything that met the criteria Ari had stored in the databanks. And they did, in fact, find slivers of flint that could have been knives or spearheads.
Ari had two of the flints laid out on a tray, with a camera poised an arm's length above the objects, and displayed them on one of the wall screens in his apartment. Morgan stared at the tray in silence and let himself surrender to all the eerie, haunting emotions it aroused, even with Ari babbling beside him.
"On Earth," Miniruta pointed out, "we already knew the planet had produced intelligent life. We could assume specimens like that had been made by intelligent beings because we already knew the intelligent beings existed. But what do we have here, Ari? Can we really believe these objects were shaped by intelligent beings when we still haven't seen anything that resembles hands? So far, you haven't even located an organism that had
arms
."

*

There were other possibilities, of course. Ari had studied most of the ideas about possible alien life forms that humans had come up with in the last few centuries and installed them in the databanks housed in his electronic enhancers. He could produce several plausible examples of grasping organs composed of soft tissue that would only fossilize under rare, limited conditions. The tool makers could have possessed tentacles. They could have used some odd development of their lips.
Miniruta tipped back her head and raised her eyebrows when she heard Ari mention tentacles. The high-pitched lilt of her VA13 communicated— once again— the condescension that permeated her attitude toward Ari.
"The cephalopods all lived in the sea, Ari. Our arms evolved from load-bearing legs. I admit we're discussing creatures who evolved in a lower gravity field. But they weren't operating in zero gravity."
"I've thought about that," Ari said. "Isn't it possible some tentacled sea-creatures could have adapted an amphibious lifestyle on the edge of the sea and eventually produced descendants who substituted legs for some of their tentacles? On our own planet, after all, some of the land dwellers who lived on the edge of Earth's oceans eventually produced descendants whose legs had been transformed into fins. With all due respect to your
current
belief system, Miniruta— our discussions would be significantly more succinct if you weren't trying to discuss serious issues without the benefit of a few well-chosen enhancements. You might see some of the possibilities I'm seeing before I have to describe them to you."

*

As an adherent of the fourth EruLabi protocol, Miniruta only rejected permanent enhancements that increased her intellectual and physical powers. Temporary enhancements that increased pleasure were another matter. Min
iruta could still use a small selection of the sexually enhancing drugs developed in the twenty-first century, in addition to the wines, teas, and inhalants that had fostered pre-pharmaceutical social relations. She and Morgan had already shared several long, elaborately choreographed sexual interludes. They had bathed. They had banqueted. They had reclined on carefully proportioned couches, naked bodies touching, while musicians from a dozen eras had materialized in Miniruta's simulators. The EruLabi sexual rituals had cast a steady, sensuous glow over the entire six decades Morgan had spent with Savela Insdotter. He had resumed their routines as if he had been slipping on clothes that were associated with some of the best moments of his life.
They were nearing the end of a particularly satisfactory interlude when Miniruta switched on her information system and discovered she had received a please-view-first message from Ari. "I've been looking over some of the latest finds from one of your random-survey teams," Ari said. "Your idea paid off. They've handed us a fossil that looks like it left traces of soft-bodied tissue in the rocks in front of it— imprints that look like they could have been made by the local equivalent of tentacles. Your team found it in the middle of a depression in that flat area on the top of the main southern plateau— a depression that's so shallow I hadn't even noticed it on the maps."
Miniruta had decided that half her exploration machines would make random searches. Ari and Morgan were both working with intellectual frameworks based on the history of Earth, Miniruta had argued. Morgan was looking at the kinds of sites that had produced fossils on Earth. Ari was looking for traces of hunter-gatherers. "A random process," she had pronounced, "should be studied by random probing."
Now her own philosophical bias had apparently given Ari what he had been looking for. Ari would never have ordered one of his machines into the winding, almost invisible depression Miniruta's machine had followed. But that dip in the landscape had once been a river. And the river had widened its path and eroded the ground above a fossil that had formed in the sediment by the bank.
It was a cracked, fragmented shell about a third the length of a human being. Only one side of it had been preserved. But you could still see that it was essentially a tube with a large opening at one end, a smaller opening at the other, and no indications it had openings for legs. In the rock in front of the large opening, Morgan could just make out the outlines of impressions that could have been produced by a group of ropy, soft-bodied extensions.
Ari highlighted three spots on the rim of the large opening. "Notice how the opening has indentations on the rim, where the extensions leave it. They aren't very big, but they obviously give the extensions a little more room. I've ordered a search of the databank to see how many other shells have indentations like that. If there was one creature like this on the planet, there should have been other species built along the same pattern. I'm also taking another look at all the shells like this we've uncovered in the past. My first pass through the databank indicates we've found several of them near the places where we found the burial pits."