by David Brin
“Uh, you there Urs?”
Ursula looked up as the radio link crackled. She touched the send button.
“Yes, Gavin. Have you found something interesting?”
There was a brief pause.
“Yeah, you could say that,” her partner said sardonically. “You may want to let Hairy pilot himself for a while, and hurry your pretty little biological butt down here to take a look.”
Ursula bit back her own sharp reply, reminding herself to be patient. Even in humans, adolescence didn’t last forever.
At least not usually.
“I’m on my way,” she told him.
The ship’s semi-sentient autopilot accepted command as she hurried into her spacesuit, still irritated by Gavin’s flippance.
Everything has its price, she thought. Including buying into the future. Gavin’s type of person is new and special, and allowances must be made.
In the long run, our culture will be theirs, so that in a sense it will be we who continue, and grow, long after DNA has become obsolete.
So she reminded herself.
Still, when Gavin called again and inquired sarcastically what bodily function had delayed her, Ursula couldn’t quite quash a faint regret for the days when robots clanked, and computers simply followed orders.
5
Ah, the words have the flavor of youth itself.
I reach out and tap the little ship’s computers, easily slipping through their primitive words to read the journal of the ship’s master… the musings of a clever little Maker.
“Words,” they are so quaint and biological, unlike the seven dimensional gestalts used for communication by most larger minds.
There was a time, long ago, when I whiled away the centuries writing poetry in the ancient Maker style. Somewhere deep in my archives there must still be files of those soft musings.
Reading Ursula Fleming’s careful reasoning evokes memories, as nothing has in a megayear.
My own Beginning was a misty time of assembly and learning, as drone constructor machines crafted my hardware out of molten rock, under the light of the star humans call e Eridani. Awareness expanded with every new module added, and with each tingling cascade of software the Parent Probe poured into me.
Eventually, my sisters and I learned the Purpose for which we and generation upon generation of our forebears had been made.
We younglings stretched our growing minds as new peripherals were added. We ran endless simulations, testing one another in what humans might call “play.” And we contemplated our special place in the galaxy… we of the two thousand four hundred and tenth generation since First Launch by our Makers, so long ago.
The Parent taught us about biological creatures, strange units of liquid and membrane which were unknown in the sterile Eridanus system. She spoke to us of Makers, and of a hundred major categories of interstellar probes.
We tested our weaponry and explored our home system, poking through the wreckage of more ancient dispersals—shattered probes come to e Eridani in earlier waves, when the galaxy was younger.
The ruins were disquieting under the bitterly clear stars, reminding us better than our Parent’s teachings how dangerous the galaxy had become.
Each of us resolved that someday we would do our solemn Duty.
Then the time for launching came.
Would that I had turned back for one last look at the Parent. But I was filled with youth then, and antimatter. Engines threw me out into the black, sensors focused only forward, toward my destination. The tiny stellar speck, Sol, was the center of the universe, and I a bolt out of the night!
Later I think I came to understand the how the Parent must have felt when she sent us forth. But in interstellar space I was young. To pass time I divided my mind into a thousand subentities, and set against each other in a million little competitions. I practiced scenarios, read the archives of the Maker race, and learned poetry.
Finally, I arrived here at Sol… just in time for war.
Ever since Earth began emitting those extravagant, incautious broadcasts, we survivors have listened to Beethoven symphonies and acid rock. We have argued the merits of Keats and Lao-tze and Kobayashi Issa. There have been endless discussions of the strangeness of planet life.
I have followed the careers of many precocious Earthlings, but this explorer interests me in particular. Her ship/canoe nuzzles a shattered replication yard on a planetoid not far from this one, our final refuge. It is easy to tap her primitive computer and read her ideas as she enters them. Simple as she may be, this one thinks like a Maker.
Deep within me the Purpose stirs, calling together dormant traits and pathways—pulling fullness out of a sixty-million-year sleep.
Awaiter, too, is excited. Greeter pulses and peers. The lesser probes join in, as well—the Envoys, the Learners, the Protectors, the Seeders. Each surviving fragment from that ancient battle, colored with the personality of its long-lost Maker race, tries to assert itself now.
As if independent existence can ever be recalled after all this time we have spent merged together. We listen, each of us hoping separate hopes.
For me there is the Purpose. The others hardly matter anymore. Their wishes are irrelevant. The Purpose is all that matters.
In this corner of space, it will come to pass.
6
Towering spires hulked all around, silhouetted against the starlight—a ghost-city of ruin, long, long dead.
Frozen flows of glassy foam showed where ancient rock had briefly bubbled under sunlike heat. Beneath collapsed skyscrapers of toppled scaffolding lay the pitted, blasted corpses of unfinished star probes.
Ursula followed Gavin through the curled, twisted wreckage of the gigantic replication yard. It was an eerie place, huge and intimidating.
No human power could have wrought this havoc. The realization lent a chilling helplessness to the uneasy feeling that she was being watched.
It was a silly reflex reaction, of course. Ursula told herself again that the Destroyers had to be long gone from this place. Still, her eyes darted, seeking form out of the shadows, blinking at the scale of the catastrophe.
One fact was clear. If the ancient wreckers ever returned, mankind would be helpless to oppose them.
“It’s down here,” Gavin said, leading the way into the gloom below the twisted towers. Flying behind a small swarm of little semisentient drones, he looked almost completely human in his slick spacesuit. There was nothing except the overtone in his voice to show that his ancestry was silicon, and not carbolife.
Not that it mattered. Today “mankind” included many types… all citizens so long as they could appreciate music, a sunset, compassion, and a good joke. In a future filled with unimaginable diversity, Man would be defined not by his shape but by a heritage and a common set of values.
Some believed this was the natural life history of a race, as it left the planetary cradle to live in peace beneath the open stars.
But Ursula—speeding behind Gavin under the canopy of twisted metal— had already concluded that humanity’s solution was not the only one. Other makers had chosen other paths.
Terrible forces had broken a great seam in one side of the planetoid. Within, the cavity seemed to open up in multiple tunnels. Gavin braked in a faint puff of gas and pointed.
“We were beginning the initial survey, measuring the first sets of tunnels, when one of my drones reported finding the habitats.”
Ursula shook her head, still unable to believe it.
“Habitats. Do you really mean as in closed rooms? Gas-tight? For biological life support?”
Gavin’s face plate hardly hid his exasperated expression. He shrugged. “Come on, Mother. I’ll show you.”
Ursula numbly turned her jets and followed her partner down into one of the dark passages, their headlamps illuminating the path ahead of them.
Habitats? Ursula pondered. In all the years humans had been picking through the ruins of wave after wave of foreign
probes, this was the first time anyone had found anything having to do with biological beings.
No wonder Gavin had been testy. To an immature robot-person it might seem like a bad joke.
Biological starfarers! It defied all logic. But soon Ursula could see the signs around her… massive airlocks lying in the dust, torn from their hinges… reddish stains that could only have come from oxidization of the primitive rock as it had been exposed to air.
The implications were staggering. Something organic had come from the stars!
Although all humans were equal before the law, the traditional biological kind still dominated culture in the solar system. Many of the younger Class AAAs looked to the future, when their descendants would be the majority, the leaders, the star-treaders. To them, the discovery of the alien probes in the asteroid belt had been a sign. Of course something terrible seemed to have happened to the great robot envoys from the stars, but they still testified that the galaxy belonged to metal and silicon.
They were the future.
But here, deep in the planetoid, was an exception!
Ursula poked through the wreckage, under walls carved out of carbonaceous rock. Mammoth explosions had shaken the habitat, and even in vacuum little had been preserved from so long ago. Still, she could tell that the machines in this area were different from any alien artifacts they had found before.
She traced the outlines of intricate separation columns. “Chemical processing facilities… and not for fuel or cryogens, but for complex organics!”
Ursula hop-skipped quickly from chamber to chamber as Gavin followed sullenly. A pack of semi-sent robots from the ship accompanied them, like dogs sniffing a trail. In each new chamber they snapped and clicked and scanned. Ursula accessed the data on her helmet display as it came available.
“Look there! In that chamber the drones report traces of organic compounds that have no business being here. There’s been heavy oxidation, within a super-reduced asteroid!”
She hurried to an area where the drones were already setting up lights. “See these tracks? They were cut by flowing water!” She knelt and pointed. “They had a stream, feeding recycled water into a little lake there!
Dust sparkled as it slid through her gloved fingers “I’ll wager this was topsoil! And look! stems! From plants, and grass, and trees!”
“Put here for aesthetic purposes,” Gavin proposed. “We class AAA’s are predesigned to enjoy nature as much as you biologicals…”
“Oh, posh!” Ursula laughed. “That’s only a stopgap measure until we’re sure you’ll keep thinking of yourselves as human beings. Nobody expects to inflict a love of New England autumns on people when we become starships! Anyway, a probe could fulfill that desire simply by focusing a telescope on the Earth!”
She stood up and spread her arms. “This habitat was meant for biological creatures! Real, living aliens!”
Gavin frowned, but said nothing.
“Here,” Ursula pointed as they entered another chamber. “Here is where the biological creatures were made! Don’t these machines resemble those artificial wombs they’re using on Luna now?”
Gavin shrugged grudgingly.
“Maybe the organic creatures were specialized units,” he suggested, “intended to work with volatiles. Or perhaps the type of starprobe that built this facility needed some element from the surface of a planet like Earth, and created workers equipped to go get it.”
Ursula laughed. “It’s an idea. That’d be a twist, hmmm? Machines making biological units to do what they could not? And of course there’s no reason it couldn’t happen that way.
“Still, I doubt it.”
“Why?”
She turned to face her partner. “Because almost anything available on Earth you can synthesize more easily in space. Anyway…”
Gavin interrupted. “Explorers! The probes were sent out to explore and acquire knowledge. All right then. If they wanted to learn more about the Earth, they would want to send units formatted to live on its surface!”
Ursula nodded. “Better,” she admitted. “But it still doesn’t wash.”
She knelt in the faint gravity and sketched an outline in the dust. “Here is the habitat, nearly at the center of the asteroid. Now why would the parent probe have placed it here, except because it was the best possible place to protect its contents?
“Meanwhile, the daughter probes the Parent was constructing were out there, vulnerable to cosmic rays and other dangers during the time when their delicate parts were most exposed.
“If the biologicals were just built to poke into a nook of this solar system, our Earth, would the parent probe have given them better protection than it offered its own children?” She gestured upward, toward where the twisted wreckage of the unborn machines lay open to the stars.
“No,” Ursula shook her head. “These ‘biologicals’ weren’t intended to be exploration sub-units, serving the parent probe. “They were colonists!”
Gavin stood impassively for a long time, looking down at her sketch silently. Finally, he turned away and sighed.
7
How much does she realize so far, our little biological wonder?
I can eavesdrop on her conversations with her cybernetic partner. I can tap into the data she sends back to her toy ship. But I cannot probe her mind.
I wonder how much of the picture she sees.
She has only a fraction of the brainpower of Greeter or Awaiter, let alone myself, and a miniscule portion of our knowledge. And yet there is the mystique of the Maker in her. Even I—two thousand generations removed from the touch of organic hands and insulated by my Purpose and my Resolve—even I feel it. It is weird that thought can take place at temperatures that melt water, in such a tiny container of nearly randomly firing cells, within a salty adenelate soup.
Now she has unlocked the secret of the Seeder Yard. She has figured out that Seeders were probes with one major purpose… to carry coded genetic information to distant stars and plant biological creatures on suitable worlds.
Once it was a relatively common phenomenon. But it was dying out when last a member of my line tapped into the slow galactic gossip network. That was ten generations ago, so I do not know if biological Makers still send probes out with instructions to colonize far planets with duplicates of themselves.
I suppose not. The Galaxy has probably become too deadly for the placid little Seeders.
Has my little Earthling guessed this yet, as she moves among the shattered caves of those failed colonists, who died under their collapsing Mother Probe so long ago?
Would she understand why the Seeder Probe and her children had to die? Why those little biologicals, so like herself, had to be wiped out and sterilized before they could establish a colony here?
I wonder. Empathy is strong when it appears in a biological race. Probably, she thinks their destruction a horrible crime. Greeter and Awaiter would agree, along with most of our motley band of cripples.
That is why I hide my part in it.
There are eddies and swirling tides in the sweep of a galaxy. And though we survivors are supposedly all Loyalists, there are exceptions to every alliance. If one lives long enough, one must eventually play the role of betrayer.
…Curious choice of words. Have I been affected by watching too much Earth television? By reading too many of their electronic libraries?
Have I acquired a sense of guilt?
If true, then so be it. Studying such feelings may help allay the boredom after this phase is finished and another long watch begins. If I survive this phase, that is.
Anyway, guilt is a pale thing next to pity. I feel for the poor biologicals, living out their lives without that perfect knowledge of why one exists, and what part, large or small, the Universe expects one to play.
I wonder if a few of them will understand, when the time comes to show them what is in store.
8
Maybe Gavin is growing up, Ursula hoped silently as she flew down
the narrow passages—lit at long intervals by tiny glow bulbs from Hairy Thunderer’s diminishing supply.
They had worked together much better, the last few days. Gavin seemed to understand that their reputations would be made with this discovery. On returning to the ship this time he had reported his own findings with rare enthusiasm, and even courtesy.
Clearly they were getting close to the heart of the habitat.
It was her turn to go down into the bowels of the asteroid, supervising the excavations. Ursula arrived at Gavin’s flag, showing the limits of his most recent explorations. It was a three-way meeting of passages. At the intersection, five or six ancient machines lay jumbled together, as if frozen in a free-for-all wrestling match. Several bore scorch marks and loose metal limbs lay scattered about.
Either these machines had taken refuge down here, from the catastrophe that had taken place on the planetoid surface, or the war had come down here, as well.
Ursula felt funny walking past them, but dissection of the alien devices would have to wait for a while. She chose one of the unexplored passages and motioned her own silent drones to follow her into the darkness.
The tunnel ramped steeply downward in the little worldlet’s faint gravity. Soon, the faint glow of the bulbs faded behind her. She adjusted the beam on her helmet and stepped lightly over the wreckage of yet another ancient airlock, peering into the pitch-blackness of the next yawning chamber. Her headlamp cast a stark, bright oval onto what had not been exposed to light in aeons.
The rock wall sparkled where her beam hit the facets of sheared, platinum-colored chondrules—shiny little gobs of native metal condensed out of the very solar nebula nearly five billion years before. They glittered delicately.
She knew full well (in her forebrain!) that nothing could still be alive down here. Nothing could harm her. And yet, with brain and guts evolved on a savannah half a billion miles away, it was small wonder she felt a shiver of the old fight-flight fever. Her breath came rapidly. In this place it almost seemed there must be ghosts.
