Analog Science Fiction and Fact 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  So Thor Ashner, although his shipboard specialty was hydroponics, had for years been practicing maneuvers around the gigantic mass of Diaspora in his little shuttle, to prepare for the day when they finally arrived at an adequate planet if that occurred during his lifetime, or to pass what he had learned on to the next generation if it didn’t.

  Now, as he and his shuttle slowly descended along the gravitational elevator that connected the ship with the planet’s surface and contemplated on the screens the plain adjoining the last spurs of the mountain range that the ship had chosen as the best place for first landing, he couldn’t avoid a tremor of excitement in his hands. After twenty-eight years of a sedentary life on the ship, he thoroughly enjoyed the novelty of the adventure. It had been a pure pleasure to make the first passes over the planet until the ship had chosen the optimum place to descend, and then to attach the gravitational elevator once Diaspora had established a geosynchronous orbit above the spot. When Thor Ashner finally positioned the apparatus on the leveled patch of ground chosen for the foot of the elevator, he let out a sigh of relief. He turned toward his three companions. He felt the need to say something important, something transcendent, but nothing came to mind.

  Fortunately, the servant who accompanied them was prepared for all types of contingencies. “This is a great day in the history of the expansion of the human race,” it said in a solemn voice. “We claim these new lands in the name of all humanity. Let us praise the god of the stars.”

  “Let us praise him,” Thor said, almost mechanically. The other three shuttle crew members imitated him. They all knew that, through the servant, those words would be indelibly engraved for history in the ship’s memory. Thor opened the cargo hatch and let the spiders out: They scuttled out onto the ground to disperse and begin collecting all sorts of samples. Then the four men donned their envirosuits before opening the main hatch and going outside.

  The first data collected from the air by Diaspora’s automatic probes had indicated that the planet had an atmosphere very similar to that of Earth, with a slightly higher proportion of nitrogen (which made it a “poor” atmosphere) and good protection against solar ultraviolet. The axial tilt was slight, which meant seasonal variations would be minimal. Water was not abundant on the surface: The general aspect was arid, with only two moderate-sized seas and hardly any rivers. But there was plenty of groundwater and little tectonic activity: The planet was undoubtedly old. These first results had led the ship to call it “pleasant, tranquil, and safe,” a backwater of peace after such a long voyage.

  But the new is always different from the known.

  Pier Olsson, the communication specialist, lifted his gaze to the sky before leaving the shuttle. “The sunlight is too bright,” he said, squinting instinctively for protection.

  The others agreed even without looking up. It was noon, and the sun shone strongly straight overhead. There was not one cloud. For the four men, used to the constant ambient light aboard the ship, soft and relaxing, the brightness of the planet was overwhelming.

  The servant gestured slightly with its hand. “I have sent this observation to the ship,” it said. “The Caretaker is preparing the first of the pyramids to be sent down to the surface tomorrow. It estimates that in a couple of days we’ll be able to anchor it on the ground and start using it. Meanwhile, until people can take shelter in it, we’ll strictly limit descents by the pilgrims, and sunglasses are being prepared for those who come down.” Its eyes were not faceted like the Caretaker’s, and its whole body, almost as much as its words and deferential tone, bespoke its subordinate status.

  “We’ll hope all goes well,” Pier Olsson grunted, in a sudden bad mood. He shaded his eyes with his hand and tried to look directly at the sun. In a few seconds his eyes teared up and he saw concentric colored circles. “Damn it,” he grumbled, squeezing his eyes shut.

  Darkness had already fallen when they finished their preliminary work. They gathered their instruments, called the spiders back, and got ready to return to Diaspora.

  Before reentering the shuttle, Aston Robell, the topographer, lifted his gaze to the crystal-clear sky, dotted with innumerable distant and brilliant stars. “I don’t like this planet,” he said. “There’s too much space. Everything’s too far away. I feel exposed.” He shuddered.

  Nobody answered. Not even the servant.

  The first three generations had been the hardest. Despite all the psychological conditioning and training before their departure, you can’t lock 25,000 people—men and women, old and young—inside a ship, however big and well-equipped it might be, and launch them on a journey toward eternity, without plan or destination, in search of a hypothetical new Promised Land, knowing that they will spend their entire lives inside that ship, that they will die in it before seeing anything different from those confining metal walls, and not expect it to have effects.

  The fourth and fifth were generations of transition. Those born on the ship had never known anything else, and listened to their elders’ nostalgic tales of the old life on Earth with curiosity and sometimes even a touch of incredulity. They watched the ship’s disks, saw the images of a life they had never known, and wondered why they needed to keep those distant roots alive. They were skeptics by nature; life on the ship had made them so.

  Then, beginning with the seventh generation, when none of the Diaspora’s original inhabitants remained alive, things began settling down. There was no longer a past to mourn, just a hypothetical future and the long journey toward it. It didn’t matter where they wound up, or when; it was a pioneer road, a sacred quest. And they had before them all the time in the world.

  That weakened the virtual roots that still connected the ship with Earth. And so was born, and gradually developed, the religion of the ship, successor but not heir of the original, which was gradually taking the place of the old religion of Earth.

  Project Diaspora was originally conceived, developed, and financed by the great Jewish lobbies of Earth as a second Exodus from the incomprehension of gentile societies, to spread Judaism throughout the Universe. So the pilgrims chosen for the first Diasporas, symbolic representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, were all strictly orthodox. They read the Talmud and the Torah, venerated the menorah, celebrated Yom Kippur, initiated their youth with the bar mitzvah, kept kosher, and preserved the purity of their lineages by strict maintenance of their patronymics, many of them traditionally historic, though they played freely with their first names.

  But in spite of everything, as time passes, things change, become diluted, especially as people get farther from their roots. Once underway, the ship soon realized that it was impossible to maintain the original status quo of the project, that it was necessary to adapt it to new circumstances.

  In a way it’s ironic that things happened as they did. The great bioelectronic brain that governed the closed universe of Diaspora 32 had been created to take charge automatically of all the tasks of control, government, and maintenance of the ship. Therefore the brain, with its strict mechanical logic, interpreted its mission as encompassing equally the container and its contents, the ship and its occupants. Especially its occupants. In reality, by that logic, they were the fundamental essence of the whole Project, its raison d’être, and their security and well-being motivated everything it did, from the recycling of the basic materials of survival—air, water, and food—to the strict control of population within rigidly established limits: from 25,000 to a maximum of 30,000 persons. Everything else was secondary.

  And so Diaspora 32 began to refine the original Project according to its own parameters.

  It had plenty of time ahead of it, so it did so unhurriedly and conscientiously. The super-computer integrated into it by the designers of the Project was able to confront all possible eventualities and make its own decisions, repair and reproduce itself, and, most important, improve itself as future needs required. So the first thing it did was to take complete control of itself. As a static component of
Diaspora, it had been provided with a whole series of extensions and terminals ranging from the spiders for maintenance tasks and repairs to the servants as liaisons with the ship’s human occupants. But that wasn’t enough. In spite of its great versatility, its enormous capacity and reaction speed, keeping track of all those individual appendages kept the brain busy on many fronts at once. It was inefficient. So it made its first big change: It eliminated the independence of its extensions, transforming them into integral parts of itself and thereby creating a unique collective, a kind of gestalt superorganism that was at once many and one, itself and all the others—which let it be everywhere at once and act simultaneously on all fronts.

  There were those who lost no time in saying that the brain had taken over the ship, that it had become the ship. Which was basically true, among other things because it had been designed that way from the start. The brain had always been the ship and vice versa. Others, imbued with religiosity as persons of faith, thought that the brain had actually become the god of the ship, and in a certain sense that too was true.

  Meanwhile, after assimilating all its extensions, the ship’s brain, which now was definitely the ship itself, absolutely and irrevocably took the next step. It made the Caretaker its direct representative, its principal extension, its spokesman and permanent liaison to the pilgrims: their prophet, the Moses of the new Exodus. Communication became complete and instantaneous: It was the Caretaker and the servants, the Caretaker and the servants were it. It was the ship, and the ship was it. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the electronic mystery of the Holy Trinity.

  The ship’s own religion began from that point.

  In Diaspora 32, once underway on its trip to nowhere, with much time ahead and very little to do with it, the observance of religious rites in a society that placed great importance on ritual kept expanding to unexpected heights. With successive generations, ritual grew more important than content, its significance drained away. And then came the great catharsis. The idea took root that God, the god of the Jews, with all that he signified, had stayed behind on Earth, that Diaspora had moved far away from his power and influence. And while a few leaned toward a fundamentalist atheism and others sought a new god to venerate in place of the one they had left behind, while they clung to their old but now empty rituals, the ship took the opportunity to create its own god and its own dogma. It was a new, simple, nebulous religion with a nameless and insubstantial god and many other secondary gods (or manifestations of him), a polytheistic monotheism that, despite expectations and perhaps because of its simple and contradictory nature, quickly took hold among the pilgrims thrown into the search for a new Promised Land, who had, by leaving Earth, left behind the very essence of their beliefs. A composite religion, heir of all the religions of Earth together but without belonging to any of them, a machine’s own religion. A religion that was all ritual, a religion not for excessive thought. A new religion in search of its own destiny, a religion that wasted no time in infiltrating consciences and that even had its own Bible (compiled, of course, by the ship), in which “Genesis” was the departure from Earth and which was, in essence and in imitation of the old sacred texts, no more than a chronicle of events and a compendium and practical manual of customs for the ship’s occupants to observe during their long journey, all tinged with an obscure mystic-religious symbolism and largely preserving the paraphernalia of the old and increasingly empty rituals integrated into their collective unconscious.

  There in its secret corner deep in the bowels of Diaspora, satisfied with its work, in the seventh generation after beginning its religion, the brain that was the ship rested.

  They were all gathered in the great central festival hall of Diaspora, the 26,431 pilgrims, surrounded by all the servants free of their other duties. As always, the Caretaker presided, on this occasion in his capacity as pastor. Standing in the center of the great circular altar of the circular hall, surrounded by 360° of screens showing abstract but subtly subliminal images, looking his most majestic and solemn, with his brilliant faceted eyes illuminated from within and his voice grave, with pauses inviting reflection, he recited the litanies, listening to the congregation’s responses, and then began his homily.

  He spoke of the Promised Land and the long voyage that had finally led them to it. He mentioned those who had fallen by the wayside, integrated by the recycling of their bodies into the ship’s community, the recitation of their names and the dates of their deaths, a roll of honor that would mark forever the long road traveled by the ship. They had not died in vain, he said. Their seed, those to whom they had given their bodies, would bear fruit in this new world, which he now christened, with as much intensity and little originality as befit a machine, and ending any possible mystical connotation about the Promised Land, with the blandly functional name Earth Two.

  Asbart Cohen, lost among those attending, didn’t pay too much attention to the Caretaker’s words. For him they were just another empty ritual among many empty rituals. He wasn’t an atheist, or even an Agnostic, but he had never accepted the religion developing around him, appropriate to a closed community like the ship, in which the original tenets had been diluted and transformed into a derivative serving mainly as a means of escape through empty ritualism. In his role as sociologist (his work aboard the ship consisted mainly of studying the relationships among individuals and trying to help them develop as smoothly as possible), he understood that the ship’s religion, which had little to do with the old religions of Earth (even the Hebrew) though it was a composite of all of them, had been a necessary departure at a critical juncture in Diaspora’s journey. Man will always need something superior to himself in which to believe blindly, he told himself, something beyond his comprehension but in which he can trust and which will watch out for him from inaccessible heights.

  In Diaspora that was the ship itself.

  “Tomorrow we shall begin the transport of the seven pyramids to the surface,” the Caretaker said in his grave and solemn tone, turning to the practical and raising his hands in a studied gesture. “Meanwhile, we can put our affairs up here in order and prepare for the descent, which will occur in stages. A great change in our lives draws nigh. Now let us give thanks to the god of the planet for welcoming us here. Let us sing his praises.”

  The congregation intoned the canticles to the old gods who had accompanied them all along the way and to the new ones that were going to replace them. The god of the Universe was immovable, of course. The god of the stars had remained behind along the way, like the god of the Earth before him, the first substitute for the already forgotten Yahweh, now replaced by the god of the planet. The gods of little things would live on, of course, as the tutelary gods of everyday life, but they would keep adapting to new circumstances and needs, and they were only minor gods. The god of the ship would continue at its side, of course, giving instruction from orbit. And the Great God of All Things, of whom hardly anyone ever spoke and who for many encompassed all creation at a level even farther beyond human understanding, would continue watching over all of them from his nebulous and never-mentioned home.

  Asbart thought about the pyramids that would be buried, against all logic and by the ship’s own decision, upside down in the planet’s dusty ochre soil instead of being set on the surface facing the sky. He wondered whether in time there would come to be a god of the depths of the planet and a separate god of the surface. He didn’t know how to answer that.

  The preliminary examinations of Earth Two by Diaspora’s automatic probes had not yielded much information. Although the dryness, the relatively smooth surface, and the scarcity of tectonic activity suggested an old planet, other signs indicated that life here had begun late. Plant life was little evolved, with few flowering plants, and no large animals of any kind were detected. If fish had ever existed, they were extinct. And although there were plenty of animals that might be considered insects, some of them of more than respectable size, amphibians and reptiles were conspicuous by t
heir absence, as were birds. It would be necessary to study fossil remains, if there were any, to trace the paths of evolution. Its pinnacle seemed occupied by a few species of small, hairy mammals, barely half a meter long including the tail, timid and skittish, mostly marsupials, and seemingly in a constant struggle for survival.

  But, most important, there were innumerable microorganisms and single-celled creatures, both aerobic and anaerobic, among which, the principal medical servant pointed out immediately, could be the equivalent of a great variety of viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens. The planet’s little surface water was a veritable culture dish, and one of the reasons for avoiding it had been the danger of infections and plagues. During its long voyage, Diaspora had eliminated all pathogens from its interior, to the point where the ship had long since become an absolutely sterile environment. Its air was totally aseptic, which was a great advantage for the health of its occupants while they were aboard, but also posed a great vulnerability as soon as they left the ship’s protection. Not only because they would be exposed to all kinds of unknown pathogens, but also because, more important, after seven centuries of isolation their immune defenses were nonexistent. Diaspora was very aware of distant examples from the ancient history of Earth, as when the first Spanish conquerors decimated the native Americans by infecting them with their diseases, and very aware that its residents were absolutely defenseless against any type of attack.

  So right from the start it took all possible precautions. In the initial descent to the planet, Thor Ashner and his three companions left the shuttle protected by hermetic suits, as if going into space, and on their return to Diaspora both they and the shuttle itself were subjected to an exhaustive process of decontamination. No one could come from the planet into the ship without that strict requirement, lest they endanger the environmental sterility aboard Diaspora. In fact, Thor Ashner wondered whether the fact that the four men who accompanied the servant on that first descent—an act completely superfluous except for its symbolism—hadn’t been to test the effectiveness of the aseptic measures dictated by the ship.