“Nothing is sure. Besides, what I have to ask of you should be done soon, before you grow more frail.”
Eiko held out her arms, as if a body were there to embrace. “However I can help you, dear friend, I, I shall be happy. Honored.” In truth. It was not alone Kyra-who-had-been that spoke, it was the living planet.
“Don’t promise till you’ve heard.”
A stillness fell. The breeze blew stronger, sending waves uphill through the grass. Eiko listened to it. Needles stirred along the knurly bough where the raven sat.
“You know I’m being overwhelmed,” Kyra said.
Eiko nodded. “I have heard. The burden on you grows too great.”
“It was never a burden. I don’t want to lay it down. But I need help. This life, around the whole world—” Kyra paused again. “I’ve guided it well, mostly. So well that it’s grown into more than I can cope with or understand, more than I can be.”
“I thought—sophotects—”
Kyra sighed. “They talk of it, the scientists. Most of them take it for granted, I suppose. That in the next ten or fifteen years I’ll first be supplemented, then supplanted, by an artificial intelligence.”
“Do you resist this? You’ve spoken well of machines.”
“I have. I was one once, and content to stop existing.”
Eiko halted the words at her teeth: As I am content. It wasn’t the same. She, Eiko, knew none of the inner despair she thought must have been the download’s: for she would depart in the fullness of her days.
“No longer,” Kyra went on. “You’re right. I live, I want to live, there’s meaning in it. Besides, I don’t believe a robot mind should rule Demeter.”
“It would be superior to yours or mine,” Eiko ventured.
“Intellectually. Maybe even in its feelings, its spirit, whatever it may have. But it isn’t us.”
Foreknowledge came, bearing sudden calm. Eiko nodded. “The unspoken, almost unadmitted reason we moved to Centauri,” Earthfolk and Lunarians.
“We fled. What a sophotect would bring us is conscious control of everything, everything. Should that be, everywhere and forever, through as far as the ships may ever go across the universe?”
“More than one path to enlightenment.”
“Have you guessed what I’ll ask of you, Eiko?”
“You wish me to download and join you.”
“I’m not grabbing at dustmotes. I’ve thought and I’ve felt—sensed, with a wholeness beyond thought—I believe we together—maybe others later, I don’t know—but we would become more than the two of us. I believe we could find our way to unity, a unity that will last, of life around this world.”
Sunlight and shadow, Eiko’s father reminded her of exponential functions and threshold effects. He smiled and went away again into the wind. “It may be,” she said, “though I—the download would not be I.”
“Nor am I Kyra Davis,” the voice breathed. “But I was. I remember.”
Eiko found no answer.
“I know,” she heard after a moment. “You imagine your poor bereft ghost-self, and wouldn’t condemn it to that. But this is different, Eiko. It’s life. Not human, no. In some ways, less. But life.”
Resolution returned. “In some ways, perhaps more. In what it does, what it serves, indeed more.”
“Don’t decide at once. I’d never force you, dear. Think.”
“Meditate,” Eiko said, half to herself. “Seek.”
“Blessings.”
B rose above the sea, brilliance into brightness, like a drifting seed of fire. The lark took up his song anew. Eiko gazed at the light-changeable roughnesses in the cypress bark across from her. Warmth had raised such a rosemary odor that she could well-nigh taste it. Rosemary for remembrance, she remembered. Was Kyra still present, loving her but granting her a silence? Eiko felt no need to ask. After a while the raven spread his wings, their blackness cracked the air, and flew off. Eiko made an offering to Demeter:
This high summer’s day—
Beneath it, a winter night
Amid the same stars.
* * * *
58
Your impression is incorrect. Humans are not becoming subordinate to the sophotectic complex, nor even dependent on it. The machines that have liberated them from the necessity of work are vastly simpler, individuals, associations, communities, and cultures develop in their diverse ways, and the need to prevent violence between them is now infrequent. If world population continues to decline, that is both ecologically and psychologically desirable. It is true that an increasing percentage of superior humans and metamorphs integrate themselves with the system, but this does not transform, rather it transcends their nature. They realize their fullest potential and then go beyond it.
* * * *
I
n the beginning, antimatter production was a joint enterprise. Lunarians and Earthborn shared skills, resources, and robots to build the facilities on Hephaistos and in orbit around that inmost planet of A. Before many years, however, the Lunarians on their own added much to those installations. It was natural, for their swiftly expanding spatial engineering was voracious of energy and their ambitions for the future seemed insatiable. Nevertheless the sheer scale of the new making astonished Demetrians. When questioned, Lunarian leaders spoke of such things as eventual interstellar voyages, but never very specifically, unless among themselves. Guthrie opined that they weren’t quite sure either, and that a good deal of what they did was for other than economic reasons—challenge, prestige, rivalry between their lords.
The cryoelectrics by which antimatter was normally stored would not suffice for such huge quantities; the number of units required would become absurd. The solution to this problem was characteristically grandiose.
The capture of Proxima by A and B had wreaked havoc on the outer comet cloud of the double star, flinging many away and many others inward. In that epoch, planets and moons suffered tremendous bombardments, and the space around them remained afterward more hazardous than around Sol’s family. The inner cloud was troubled too, but less so, chiefly by acquiring new members traveling eccentric and skewed paths, which brought about further collisions. Perhaps a series of these was responsible for the orb that humans named Hades after an exploratory probe found it. Mostly ice, it possessed a rocky core which brought its mass close to one percent of Earth’s. Thus it had a respectable gravity field. The core being solid and nonferrous, it generated no magnetic field to complicate things. At its distance from the suns, their winds were barely measurable.
The Lunarians ferried their excess antimatter out to those far reaches. They put it in orbit around Hades. The bulk of it was antihydrogen, but a fair proportion was antihelium, plus a significant amount of heavier nuclei aggregated into solid spherules. Outside this ring was another of ordinary gas. Between the two went four small asteroids to be shepherd satellites, maintaining stability through the whole fantastic configuration.
The project was enormous, it strained capabilities, but once completed it soon repaid every cost. Robotic ships need only take their cargoes to it and, with due precision, discharge the stuff into the inner ring. Losses were continuous but slight; the outer ring gave considerable protection, and cosmic rays from other directions did not gnaw away more than could be tolerated. From time to time, every five or ten years, the orbit of a shepherd needed some adjustment. For this purpose it had a motor. That was not the powerful one which had brought it here, whose exhaust would have been disruptive, but one, well supplied with fuel, that could apply sufficient gentle nudges. A Lunarian engineer went out and oversaw the operation from a safe distance.
So the hoard accumulated, decade by decade until the catastrophe.
It was catastrophe in the mathematical sense, an event impossible to foresee, from which avalanched more. Alarms wailed in Perun. A computer analyzed the incoming signals and flashed their message. Lunarians cursed. Those who thought they might be called upon busied themselves. Word flew to
their chieftains.
Instruments at Hades reported a large body bound from uncharted deeps toward a meeting with them. Defensive devices in situ, which had prevented several meteoroidal accidents, were inadequate to cope with something of asteroidal mass. Ordinarily the warning would have come in time for the Lunarians to dispatch amply powerful agents. This object, though, was on a trajectory not elliptical but hyperbolic. It must be a comet from the outer cloud, which, through some unlikely encounter, had gained more than escape velocity. Before humans could arrive at any endurable acceleration— no robots at Centauri had the intelligence necessary—the invader would work its harm and be gone.
One might lament the lack of immersion systems enabling flesh to survive scores of sustained gravities, but that was futile. None existed. There had never been any reason to suppose they would find enough use to be worth the cost of developing and building them.
“Get technicians from Demeter,” proposed a councillor. “They can reach the scene twice as fast as us.”
“It would take too long to recruit them and teach them all the intricacies,” Rinndalir replied. “Nor should we reveal so much of our works or make ourselves so beholden. At two gravities, a picked crew with biomedical support can make the crossing in a spin period and arrive still fit for battle.” The weight and the day were of Earth’s Moon. “Already I know who my followers shall be.”
“Your followers, lord?”
“I have more experience in deep space than most.”
“True. Your occasional partner, the pilot Davis—”
“Irrelevant. Together we have done things valuable to both races, but this expedition is mine.”
“With due penance, lord, may I suggest that at your age—”
“You may not. Shall I concede the honor to, say, Asille of Arcen? Shall I accept the puissance that would flow to her? I will it otherwise.” Rinndalir laughed. “Moreover, what a game to play!”
Therefore two ships raged across the dark for a Lunar day and night. Sometimes Rinndalir heartened the crews in their suffering, sometimes he threatened or punished, sometimes he amused; and they endured.
At transit’s end, A and B were no more than the brightest of the stars, close together, and red Proxima had noticeably waxed. Hades sheened faintly athwart that night, a great globe scarred and crazed. Naked eyes barely picked out the light-points that were shepherds. Amplification and false color showed the inner ring as a misty blue glow. Streamers from it became lightning bolts where they met the outer one. A traveling corposant kindled to equal hellishness as it plunged through the inner band, sullenly dimming again when it left.
Rinndalir knew what was happening. Computers predicted it before he set forth. The comet, passing close, had badly perturbed all four satellites, and the system was no longer stable. Shepherd Chetyrye was the worst case, thrown into an orbit cleaving through as much as a fourth of the antimatter on each pass. Annihilation released energies that had by now boiled kilograms of precious gas irretrievably away, ruined the asteroid’s motor, and melted a surface turned lethally radioactive. The ring was going chaotic. Could the destruction be halted at once, repair was feasible, bringing the undamaged three back to their stations and then adding a new companion. But soon it would be too late.
“My ship will strike,” Rinndalir radioed to the other vessel. “Stand by to dare a second attempt, should mine fail.”
The scheme was simple in principle. To initiate a change in the course of an asteroid, spatial engineers often hit it with a missile of the kind that Fireball folk, back in the Solar System, had called a mountain mover. A shaped nuclear detonation dug a shaft into which the main warhead burrowed before it let go its charge of antimatter. Thereupon a plasma volcano erupted in such violence that the body slipped into a new path, which was afterward refined by means more elegant. Thus had Golcondas of industrial minerals swung to where they could conveniently be processed, no longer taken out of the hide of Mother Earth.
Chetyrye was special. It could stand only a single assault like that, without breaking up into fragments still more destructive. In order to get it permanently away from the trouble zone, the blast must occur near the point of maximum effectiveness, when the renegade shepherd passed closest to Hades. This was inside the antimatter ring. However, because the ship could not be so near the explosion and live, the missile must pass through the band on its way. If it crossed the entire breadth, cumulative radiation for which its control systems were never intended would make idiots of them and it would run pilotless, targetless. Hence, before launching it, the ship herself must plunge halfway into the ring, a living hand at her helm.
Rinndalir ordered every precaution, screen fields at full potential, all four crewmen in spacesuits, mission profile calculated to the decisecond. But when he touched the console and felt the surge forward, he snarled like a tiger beholding its enemy.
Hades swelled before him in craters and crevasses, instruments blinked and shouted, the moment was come, he cast his spear, weight came down like a hammer as he darted back toward refuge.
Thunders crashed. Fire blazed from end to end of the hull. A crewman perished, drilled through the breast. Lights went out, blindness fell, split by bursts of radiance. Those were illusions, how the brain perceived ions ripping into retinae.
Backups kicked in. Rinndalir saw again, blurrily. “Haro, haro,” he called over intercom and radio. “How fare you? What has happened? Did our shot strike home?”
Two males replied from their shipboard posts. A voice afar said: “My lord, the telemetry appears to show that you encountered a solid antiparticle of pebble size. It pierced your hull and bounced about on jets of disintegration until it exited.”
“Can you number the radiation dose that was ours?”
“Not precisely, lord, but unequivocally lethal beyond any healing art. Honor be yours.”
Rinndalir grinned. “Mindless bad luck be mine. I had some tricks yet to play on Asille of Arcen.” Air whistled past his helmet, blowing into emptiness. He finger-shrugged. “How went the launch?”
“It struck truly, lord. The moonlet is well outbound.”
“Now that’s a wrong done me. I had hoped to watch those glorious fireworks.” Rinndalir commenced discussion of rendezvous procedures. His crippled ship would stay on trajectory and a gang from the other board her. His surviving crew told him, after inspection, that, given a little mending, she could limp home under low thrust.
“You’ll go to treatment in the swifter craft, do you choose,” he said to them. “You may perhaps live for months. Do you choose?”
They did. They were commoners, with kindred and, in Lunarian fashion, loves.
“Then I may leave you,” said Rinndalir.
He was not sure whether he felt the radiation burning him from within or the marrow rotting from his bones. Nor did he care. The meters told him enough. Nausea would not set in for a time more than he required. He unharnessed and pushed, free-falling, down passages where light shone queerly because they were airless, to the main personnel lock. His crewmen waited there for him. They had brought their dead comrade along. Rinndalir’s hand drew the sign over the corpse that meant You are one with me. They helped him secure a drive unit to his spacesuit.
“Have you a word for sending, lord?” asked the senior of them.
“Nay.” Rinndalir thought. “Yes. Convey to . . . Pilot Kyra Davis on Demeter . . . that I remembered her.”
“Your word shall be ours, lord. Fare you well into your death.”
Rinndalir acknowledged with a nod and entered the lock chamber. The outer valve opened, framing a thousand stars. He passed through and kicked himself free.
A short while he drifted. The ship receded from him and he was alone. The only sounds left were breath and the knocking of his heart. Gyrating slowly, he saw the cold river of the galaxy stream past.
“Have done,” he said. It echoed in his helmet. He took bearings and started his jets. Blood and muscles responded to thrust.
Before him steadied the sight of the ice world.
He re-entered the inner ring. Antimatter seethed around him, riddled him, set him invisibly afire. He was long dead when he fell down onto Hades.
* * * *
59
As comprehension of the material universe deepens, the need for it declines. In the Solar System are all the matter, and energy which is its other aspect, that we shall ever require. When the sun burns life off Earth, when it swells to a red giant, when it dwindles to a white dwarf and finally goes dark, our habitats will take no harm: although “habitat” is a misleading word for what will exist long before then. We plan no further probings into a universe devoid of any fundamental new mysteries. Our explorations and our creativity are into the infinite realms of intellect. Pure mathematics is the simplest example. Most of what is opening to us is indescribable to you.
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