Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (68 page)

*

The messages from the solar system had included scientific discussions. They had even included presentations prepared for "nonspecialists." Morgan had followed a few of the presentations as well as he could and he had concluded the human species had reached a point of diminishing returns.
Morgan would never possess the kind of complexified, ultra-enhanced brain his successors in the solar system had acquired. Every set of genes imposed a ceiling on the organism it shaped. If you wanted to push beyond that ceiling, you had to start all over again, with a new organism and a new set of genes. But Morgan believed he could imagine some of the consequences of that kind of intellectual power.
At some point, he believed, all those billions of superintelligent minds had looked out at the universe and realized that another increase in brain power would be pointless. You could develop a brain that could answer every question about the size, history, and structure of the universe, and find that you still couldn't answer the philosophical questions that had tantalized the most primitive tribesmen. And what would you do when you reached that point? You would turn your back on the frontier. You would turn once again to the bath and the banquet, the harp and the dance.
And changes of raiment.
And love.
And sleep.

*

The situation on the ship was almost the mirror image of the situation in the solar system. On the ship, forty-eight percent of the population belonged to Ari's communion. Only nineteen percent had adopted the EruLabi creeds. But how long could that last? Morgan had been watching the trends. Every few years, someone abandoned the Doctrine of the Cosmic Enterprise and joined the EruLabi. No one ever left the EruLabi and became a devoted believer in the Cosmic Enterprise.
The discovery that 82 Eridani was surrounded by lifeless planets had added almost a dozen people to the defectors. The search for life-bearing planets was obviously a matter of great significance. If consciousness really was the purpose of the universe, then life should be a common phenomenon.
In 2315, just four years after the final dissolution of the Eight, the
Island of Adventure
had received its first messages from Tau Ceti and Morgan had watched a few more personalities float away from Ari's communion. The ship that had reached Tau Ceti had made planetfall after a mere one hundred and forty years and it had indeed found life on the second planet of the system. Unfortunately, the planet was locked in a permanent ice age. Life had evolved in the oceans under the ice but it had never developed beyond the level of the more mundane marine life forms found on Earth.
Morgan had found it impossible to follow the reasons the planet was iced
over. He hadn't really been interested, to tell the truth. But he had pored over the reports on the undersea biota as if he had been following the dispatches from a major war.
One of the great issues in terrestrial evolutionary theory had been the relationship between chance and necessity. To Ari and his disciples, there was nothing random about the process. Natural selection inevitably favored qualities such as strength, speed, and intelligence.
To others, the history of life looked more haphazard. Many traits, it was argued, had developed for reasons as whimsical as the fact that the ancestor who carried Gene A had been standing two steps to the right when the rocks slid off the mountain.
The probes that had penetrated the oceans of Tau Ceti IV had sent back images that could be used to support either viewpoint. The undersea biota was populated by several hundred species of finned snakes, several thousand species that could be considered roughly comparable to terrestrial insects, and clouds of microscopic dimlight photosynthesizers.
Yes, evolution favored the strong and the swift. Yes, creatures who lived in the sea tended to be streamlined. On the other hand, fish were not inevitable. Neither were oysters. Or clams.
If the universe really did have a purpose, it didn't seem to be very good at it. In the solar system, theorists had produced scenarios that proved life could have evolved in exotic, unlikely environments such as the atmosphere of Jupiter. Instead, the only life that had developed outside Earth had been the handful of not-very-interesting microorganisms that had managed to maintain a toehold on Mars.
The purpose of the universe isn't the development of consciousness,
one of the EruLabi on board the
Island of Adventure
suggested.
It's the creation of iceballs and deserts. And sea snakes.

*

Ari's enhancements included a gland modification that gave him the ability to switch off his sexual feelings at will. His pairing with Savela Insdotter had lasted less than two decades, and he had made no attempt to establish another pairing. Ari had spent most of the voyage, as far as Morgan could tell, in an asexual state.
There were times, during the last decades of the voyage, when Morgan felt tempted to emulate him. Morgan's next pairing only lasted twelve years. For the rest of the voyage, he took advantage of the small number of sexual opportunities that came his way and distracted himself, during his celibate intervals, with intellectual projects such as his political studies.
The ship's medical system could install Ari's sexual enhancement in thirty minutes, as part of the regular medical services included in the standard embarkation agreement. Morgan put the idea aside every time he considered it. He had learned to cherish his feelings about women, irrational as they might be. There was, he knew, no real reason why he should respond to the flare of a woman's hips or the tilt of a female neck. It was simply a bit of genetic programming he hadn't bothered to delete. It had no practical value in a world in which children were created in the workshops of genetic designers.
But he also knew he would be a different person if he subtracted it from his psychological makeup. It was one of the things that kept you human as the decades slipped by.

*

In 2381— forty-six years before it was scheduled to reach its destination— the
Island of Adventure
intercepted a message from the probe that had been sent to Rho Eridani. Neither of the stars in the double system possessed planets. The
Green Voyager
was crawling toward an empty system.

*

In 2398— one hundred and ninety-five years after the ship had begun its journey— the medical system replaced Morgan's heart, part of his central nervous system, and most of his endocrine glands. It was the third time Morgan had put himself through an extensive overhaul. The last time he had recovered within three years. This time he spent eight years in the deepest sleep the system could maintain.

*

The first program capsules left the ship while it was still careening around the 82 Eridani system, bouncing from planet to planet as it executed the five-year program that would eliminate the last twenty percent of its interstellar speed. There were three capsules and their payloads were packages a little smaller than Morgan's forefinger.
One capsule malfunctioned while it was still making its way toward the small moon that orbited the third planet at a distance of 275,000 kilometers. The second lost two critical programs when it hit the moon at an angle that was a little too sharp. The third skimmed through the dust just the way it was supposed to and sprouted a set of filaments. Sampling programs analyzed the moon's surface. Specks that were part cell and part electronic device began drifting down the filaments and executing programs that transformed the moon's atoms into larger, more elaborate specks. The specks produced machines the size of insects, the insects produced machines the size of cats, an antenna crept up the side of a small crater, and an antenna on the
Island of Adventure
started transmitting more programs. By the time the ship settled into an orbit around the third planet, the moon had acquired a complete manufacturing facility, and the lunar fabrication units had started producing scout machines that could land on the planet itself.

*

Morgan had thought of the terraforming scheme as a political ruse, but there were people on the ship who took it seriously. With the technology they had at their disposal, the third planet could be turned into a livable world within a few decades. For people who had spent their entire lives in enclosed habitats, it was a romantic idea— a world where you walked on the surface, with a sky above you, and experienced all the vagaries of weather and climate.
The only person who had raised any serious objections had been Ari Sun-Dalt. Some of the valleys they could observe from orbit had obviously been carved by rivers. The volcano calderas were less spectacular than the volcanoes of Mars but they were still proof the planet had once been geologically active. They couldn't overlook the possibility life might be hiding in some
obscure ecological network that was buried under the soil or hidden in a cave, Ari argued.
Most of the people on the ship greeted that kind of suggestion with shrugs and smiles. According to Morgan's sampling programs, there were only about ten people on the ship who really thought there was a statistically significant possibility the planet might have generated life. Still, there was no reason they couldn't let Ari enjoy his daydreams a little longer.
"It will only take us an extra two or three years," Ari said. "And then we'll know we can remodel the place. First we'll see if there's any life. Then we'll do the job ourselves, if the universe hasn't done it already. And bring Consciousness to another world."
For Ari's sake— he really liked Ari in many ways— Morgan hoped they might find a few fossilized microorganisms embedded in the rocks. What he did not expect was a fossil the size of a horse, embedded in a cliff, and visible to any machine that came within two kilometers of it.

*

Three and a half billion years ago, the planet had emerged from the disk of material that surrounded its sun. A billion or so years later, the first long-chain molecules had appeared in the oceans. And the history of life had begun. In the same way it had begun on Earth.
The long-chain molecules had formed assemblies that became the first rudimentary cells. Organisms that were something like plants had eventually begun to absorb the CO
produced by the volcanoes. The oxygen emitted by the quasi-plants had become a major component of the atmosphere. The relentless forces of competition had favored creatures who were more complex than their rivals.
And then, after less than two billion years of organic evolution, the laws of physics had caught up with the process. No planet the size of this one could hold an atmosphere forever.
The plants and the volcanoes could produce oxygen and CO
almost
as fast as the gas molecules could drift into space. But almost wasn't good enough.

*

They didn't piece the whole story together right away, of course. There were even people who weren't convinced the first find was a fossil. If the scout machines hadn't found ten more fossils in the first five daycycles, the skeptics would have spent years arguing that Exhibit A was just a collection of rocks— a random geologic formation that just happened to resemble a big shell, with appendages that resembled limbs.
On Earth, the dominant land animals had been vertebrates— creatures whose basic characteristic was a bony framework hung on a backbone. The vertebrate template was such a logical, efficient structure it was easy to believe it was as inevitable as the streamlined shape of fish and porpoises. In fact, it had never developed on this planet.
Instead, the basic anatomical structure had been a tube of bone. Creatures with this rigid, seemingly inefficient, structure had acquired legs, claws, teeth and all the other anatomical features vertebrates had acquired on Earth.
Thousands of species had acquired eyes that looked out of big eyeholes in the front of the shell, without developing a separate skull. Two large families had developed "turrets" that housed their eyes and their other sense organs but they had kept their brains securely housed in the original shell, in a special chamber just under the turret.
On Earth, the shell structure would have produced organisms that might have collapsed from their own weight. On this planet, with its weaker gravitational field, the shells could be thin and even airy. They reminded Morgan of building components that had been formed from solidified foam— a common structural technique in space habitats.