The Many Worlds of Poul Anderson

by Roger Elwood

  Irrelevantly, for the first time in his century and a half of existence, Zero realized how few persons he had ever observed with his own direct optics. How few he had touched. Now and then, for this or that purpose, several might get together. A bride’s male kin assisted her on her journey to the groom’s dwelling. Individuals met to exchange the products of their labor. But still—this rally of all functional males at Broken Glade, to hunt the monster, would be the greatest assemblage in tradition. Yet not even Hundred had grasped its uniqueness.

  For persons were always communicating. Not only practical questions were discussed. In fact, now that Zero thought about it, such problems were the least part of discourse. The major part was ritual, or friendly conversation, or art. Zero had seldom met Seven as a physical entity, but the decades in which they criticized each other’s poetry had made them intimate. The abstract tone constructions of Ninety-six, the narratives of Eighty, the speculations about space and time of Fifty-nine—such things belonged to all.

  Direct sensory linkage, when the entire output of the body was used to modulate the communication band, reduced still further the need for physical contact. Zero had never stood on the seashore himself. But he had shared consciousness with Fourteen, who lived there. He had perceived the slow inward movement of waves, their susurrus, the salt in the air; he had experienced the smearing of grease over his skin to protect it from corrosion, drawing an aquamotile from a net and feasting. For those hours, he and the sea-raker had been one. Afterward he had shown Fourteen the upland forest… .

  What am I waiting for? Consciousness of his here-and-now jarred back into Zero. The monster had not pursued. The units on his back had grown quiescent. But he was still a long way from home. He rose and started off again, less rapidly but with more care to obliterate his traces.

  As the hours passed, his interior sensors warned him increasingly of a need for replenishment. About midday he stopped and unloaded his three prizes. They were feebly squirming and one of them had worked an arm loose. Rather than lash them tight again, he released their limbs and secured them by passing the rope in successive loops around their middles and a tall stump, then welding everything fast with his torch.

  That energy drain left him ravenous. He scouted the forest in a jittery spiral until he found some accumulators of the calathiform sort. A quick slash with his pry bar exposed their spongy interiors, rich with energy storage cells and mineral salts. They were not very satisfying eaten unprocessed, but he was too empty to care. With urgency blunted, he could search more slowly and thoroughly. Thus he found the traces of a burrow, dug into the sand, and came upon a female digger. She was heavy with a half-completed new specimen and he caught her easily. This, too, would have been better if treated with heat and acid, but even raw the materials tasted good in his grinder.

  Now to get something for One. Though she, better than he, could slow down her functioning when nourishment was scarce, a state of coma while the monster was abroad could be dangerous. After hunting for another hour, Zero had the good luck to start a rotor. It crashed off among the rods and crystals, faster than he could run, but he put a crossbow bolt through its hub. Dismembered and packed into his carrier, it made an immensely cheering burden.

  He returned to his prizes. Moving quietly in comparison to the windy clatter of the forest, he came upon them unobserved. They had quit attempting to escape—he saw the wire was shiny where they had tried to saw it on a sharp rock—and were busy with other tasks. One of them had removed a boxlike object from its back and inserted its head (?) and arms through gasketed holes. A second was just removing a similar box from its lower section. The third had plugged a flexible tube from a bottle into its face.

  Zero approached. “Let me inspect those,” he said, before thinking how ridiculous it was to address them. They shrank away from him. He caught the one with the bottle and unplugged the tube. Some liquid ran out. Zero extended his chemical sensor and tasted cautiously. Water. Very pure. He did not recall ever having encountered water so free of dissolved minerals.

  Thoughtfully, he released the unit. It stoppered the tube. So, Zero reflected, they required water like him, and carried a supply with them. That was natural; they—or, rather, the monster they served—could not know where the local springs and streams were. But why did they suck through a tube? Did they lack a proper liquid-ingestion orifice? Evidently. The small hole in the head, into which the tube had fitted, had automatically closed as the nipple was withdrawn.

  The other two had removed their boxes. Zero studied these and their contents. There were fragments of mushy material in both, vaguely similar to normal body sludge. Nourishment or waste? Why such a clumsy system? It was as if the interior mechanism must be absolutely protected from contact with the environment.

  He gave the boxes back and looked more thoroughly at their users. They were not quite so awkward as they seemed at first. The humps on their backs were detachable carriers like his. Some of the objects dangling at their waists or strapped to their arms must also be tools. (Not weapons or means of escape, else they would have used them before now. Specialized artificial attachments, then, analogous to a torch or a surgical ratchet.) The basic bipedal shape was smoother than his own, nearly featureless except for limb joints. The head was somewhat more complicated, though less so than a person s. Upon a cylindrical foundation grew various parts, including the sound-wave generators which babbled as he stood there watching. The face was a glassy plate, behind which moved … what? Some kind of jointed, partly flexible mechanism.

  There was no longer any possibility of radio communication with—or through—them. Zero made a few experimental gestures, but the units merely stirred about. Two of them embraced. The third waved its arms and made sonic yelps. All at once it squatted and drew geometrical shapes in the sand, very much like the courtship figures drawn by a male dune-runner.

  So … they not only had mechanical autonomy, like the spy eyes of a boxroller, but were capable of some independent behavior. They were more than simple remote-control limbs and sensors of the monster. Most probably they were domesticated motiles.

  But if so, then the monster race had modified their type even more profoundly than the person race had modified the type of its own tamed motiles down in the lowlands. These bipeds were comically weak in proportion to size; they lacked grinders and liquid-ingestion orifices; they used sonics to a degree that argued their radio abilities were primitive; they required ancillary apparatus; in short, they were not functional by themselves. Only the care and shelter furnished by their masters allowed them to remain long in existence.

  But what are the masters? Even the monster may well he only another motile. Certainly it appeared to lack limbs. The masters may he persons like us, come from beyond the sea or the mountains with great new skills.

  But then what do they want? Why have they not tried to communicate with us? Have they come to take our land away? The question was jolting. Zero got hastily into motion. With his rack loaded, he had no room for his prizes. Besides, being crammed into it for hours was doubtless harmful to them; they moved a good deal more strongly now, after a rest, than when he first took them out. He simply left them tied together, cut the wire loose from the stump, and kept that end in one hand. Since he continued to exercise due caution about leaving a trail, he did not move too fast for them to keep up. From time to time they would stagger and lean on each other for support—apparently their energy cells polarized more quickly than his—but he found they could continue if he let them pause a while, lie down, use their curious artifacts.

  §

  The day passed. At this time of year, not long past the vernal equinox, the sun was up for about twenty hours. After dark, Zeros captives began stumbling and groping. He confirmed by direct sense perception that they had no radar. If they ever did, that part had been wrecked with their communicators. After some thought, he fashioned a rough seat from a toppled bole and nudged them to sit upon it. Thus he carried them in two ha
nds. They made no attempt to escape, emitted few sounds, obviously they were exhausted. But to his surprise, they began to stir about and radiate sonics when he finally reached home and set them down. He welded the end of their rope to an iron block he kept for emergencies.

  Part of him reflected that their mechanism must be very strange indeed, maybe so strange that they would not prove ingestible. Obviously their cells went to such extremes of polarization that they became comatose, which a person only did in emergencies. To them, such deactivation appeared to be normal, and they roused spontaneously.

  He dismissed speculation. One’s anxious voice had been rushing over him while he worked. “What has happened? You are hurt! Come closer, let me see, oh, your poor arm! Oh, my dear!”

  “Nothing serious,” he reassured her. “I shot a rotor. Prepare yourself a meal before troubling about me.”

  He lowered himself to the cave floor beside her great beautiful bulk. The glow globes, cultivated on the rough stone walls, shed luster on her skin and on the graceful tool tendrils that curled forth to embrace him. His chemical sensor brought him a hint of solvents and lubricants, an essence of femaleness. The cave mouth was black with night, save where one star gleamed bright and somehow sinister above the hills. The forest groaned and tolled. But here he had light and her touch upon his body. He was home.

  She unshipped the rack from his shoulders but made no motion toward the food-processing cauldron. Most of her tools and all her attention were on his damaged arm. “We must replace everything below the elbow,” she decided; and, as a modulation: “Zero, you brave clever adored fool, why did you hazard yourself like that? Do you not understand, even yet, without you my world would he rust?”

  “I am sorry … to take so much from the new one,” he apologized.

  “No matter. Feed me some more nice large rotors like this and I will soon replace the loss, and finish all the rest, too.” Her mirth fluttered toward shyness. “I want the new one activated soon myself, you know, so we can start another.”

  The memory of that moment last year, when his body pattern flowed in currents and magnetic fields through hers, when the two patterns heterodyned and deep within her the first crystallization took place, glowed in him. Sensory linkage was a wan thing by comparison.

  What they did together now had a kindred intimacy. When she had removed the ruined forearm and he had thrust the stump into her repair orifice, a thousand fine interior tendrils enfolded it, scanning, relaying, and controlling. Once again, more subtly than in reproduction, the electrochemical-mechanical systems of One and Zero unified. The process was not consciously controllable, it was a female function; One was at this moment no different from the most primitive motile joined to her damaged mate in a lightless burrow.

  It took time. The new person which her body was creating within itself was, of course, full size and, as it happened, not far from completion. (Had the case been otherwise, Zero would have had to wait until the new one did in fact possess a well-developed arm.) But it was not yet activated; its most delicate and critical synaptic pathways were still only half finished, gradually crystallizing out of solution. A part could not lightly nor roughly be removed.

  But in the end, One s function performed the task. Slowly, almost reluctantly, Zero withdrew his new hand. His mind and hers remained intertwined a while longer. At last, with a shaky little overtone of humor, she exclaimed, “Well, how do your fingers wiggle? Is everything good? Then let us eat. I am famished!”

  Zero helped her prepare the rotor for consumption. They threw the damaged forearm into the cauldron, too. While they processed and shared the meal, he recounted his experiences. She had shown no curiosity about the three bipeds. Like most females, she lacked any great interest in the world beyond her home, and had merely assumed they were some new kind of wild motile. As he talked, the happiness died in her. “Oh, no,” she said, “you are not going out to fight the lightning breather, are you?”

  “Yes, we must.” He knew what image terrified her, himself smashed beyond hope of reconstruction, and added in haste: “If we leave it free, no tradition or instinct knows what it may do. But surely at the very least, so large a thing will cause extensive damage. Even if it is only a grazer, its appetite will destroy untold acres of accumulators; and it may be a predator. On the other hand, if we destroy it, what a hoard of nourishment! Your share and mine will enable us to produce a dozen new persons. The energy will let me range for hundreds of miles, thus gaining still more food and goods for us.”

  “If the thing can be assimilated,” she said doubtfully. “It could be full of hydrofluoric acid or something, like a touch-me-not.”

  ‘Tes, yes. For that matter, the flier may be the property of intelligent beings: which does not necessarily mean we will not destroy and consume it. I intend to find out about that aspect right now. If the monsters auxiliaries are ingestible, the monster itself is almost sure to be.”

  “But if not—Zero, be carefull”

  “I will. For your sake also.” He stroked her and felt an answering vibration. It would have been pleasant to sit thus all night, but he must soon be on his way to rendezvous. And first he must dissect at least one specimen. He took up his pry bar.

  V

  Darkington awoke from a nightmare-ridden half sleep when he was dumped on the cave floor. He reached for Frederika and she came to him. For a space there was nothing but their murmuring.

  Eventually they crouched on the sand and looked about. The giant that captured them had welded the free end of the wire rope to an immovable chunk of raw iron. Darkington was attached at that side, then the girl, and Kuroki on the outer end. They had about four feet of slack from one to the next. Nothing in the kit remaining to them would cut those strands.

  “Limestone cave, I guess,” Kuroki croaked. Behind the faceplate he was gaunt, bristly, and sunken-eyed. Frederika didn’t look much better. They might not have survived the trip here if the robot hadn’t carried them the last few hours. Nonetheless an odd dry clarity possessed Darkington’s brain. He could observe and think as well as if he had been safe on shipboard. His body was one enormous ache, but he ignored that and focused on comprehending what had happened.

  Here near the entrance, the cave was about twenty feet high and rather more wide. A hundred feet deeper inward, it narrowed and ended. That area was used for storage: a junk shop of mechanical and electronic parts, together with roughly fashioned metal and stone tools that looked almost homelike. The walls were overgrown with thin wires that sprouted scores of small crystalline globes. These gave off a cool white light that made the darkness outside appear the more elemental.

  “Yes, a cave in a sheer hillside,” said Frederika. “I saw that much. I kept more or less conscious all the way here, trying to keep track of our route. Not that that’s likely to do us much good, is it?” She hugged her knees. “I’ve got to sleep soon .. . oh, but I have to sleep!”

  ‘We have to get in touch.” Kuroki’s voice rose. (Thank heaven and some ages-dead engineer that sound mikes and earphones could be switched on by shoving your chin against the right button! With talk cut off, no recourse would have remained but to slip quietly into madness.) “I tried to show that tin nightmare we’re intelligent. I drew diagrams and—” He checked himself. ‘Well, probably its builders don’t monitor it. We’ll have another go when they show up.”

  “Let’s admit the plain facts, Sam,” Frederika said tonelessly. “There aren’t any builders. There never were any.”

  “Oh, no.” The pilot gave Darkington a beggar’s look. “You’re the biologist, Hugh. Do you believe that?”

  Darkington bit his lip. “I’m afraid she’s right.”

  Frederika’s laugh barked at them. “Do you know what that big machine is, there in the middle of the cave? The one the robot is fooling around with? I’ll tell you. His wife!” She broke off. Laughter echoed too horribly in their helmets.

  §

  Darkington gazed in that direction. The second o
bject had little in common with the biped shape, being low and wide —twice the bulk—and mounted on eight short legs which must lend very little speed or agility. A radio lattice, optical lenses, and arms—two, not four—were similar to the biped’s. But numerous additional limbs were long goosenecks terminating in specialized appendages. Sleek blued metal covered most of the body.

  And yet, the way those two moved—

  “I think you may be right about that also,” Darkington said at last.

  Kuroki beat the ground with his fist and swore. “Sorry, Freddie,” he gulped. “But won’t you explain what you’re getting at? This mess wouldn’t be so bad if it made some sense.”

  “We can only guess,” Darkington said.

  ‘Well, guess, then!”

  “Robot evolution,” Frederika said. “After man was gone, the machines that were left began to evolve.”

  “No,” said Kuroki, “That’s nuts. Impossible!”

  “I think what we’ve seen would be impossible any other way,” Darkington said. “Metallic life couldn’t arise spontaneously. Only carbon atoms make the long hookups needed for the chemical storage of biological information. But electronic storage is equally feasible. And … before the Traveler departed … self-reproducing machines were already in existence.”

  “I think the sea rafts must have been the important ones.” Frederika spoke like someone in dream. Her eyes were fixed wide and unblinking on the two robots. “Remember? They were essentially motorized floating boxes, containing metallurgy processing plants and powered by solar batteries. They took dissolved minerals out of sea water, magnesium, uranium, whatever a particular raft was designed for. When it had a full cargo, it went to a point on shore where a depot received its load. Once empty, it returned to open waters for more. It had an inertial navigation device, as well as electronic sensors and various homeostatic systems, so it could cope with the normal vicissitudes of its environment.