by David Brin
Now, as my thoughts begin to move more quickly, the bright pinpoints have become a still backdrop again, as if hanging in expectancy of what is to happen here.
It is a strange, arrogant imagining—as if the Universe cares what happens in this tiny corner of it, or will notice who wins this little skirmish in a long, long war.
I am thinking fast, like my biological friend whose tiny ship floats only light-seconds away, just two or three tumbling rocks from this one. While I prepare a surprise for my erstwhile companions, I still spare a pocket of my mind to follow her progress… to appreciate the tiny spark of her youth.
She is transmitting her report back to Earth now. Soon, very soon, these planetoids will be aswarm with all the different varieties of humans—from true biologicals to cyborgs to pure machines.
This strange solution to the Maker Quandary—this turning of Makers into the probes themselves — will soon arrive here, a frothing mass of multiformed human beings.
And they will be wary. Thanks to her, they will sense a few edge-glimmers of the Truth.
Well, that is only fair.
12
The last samples had been loaded aboard the Hairy Thunderer. Each drone lay settled in its proper niche. The light and radar beacon on the planetoid pulsed brightly, so follow-up expeditions would waste no time making rendezvous with the find of the century.
“All packed up, Urs.” Gavin floated into the dimly lit control room. “Two months in orbit haven’t done the engines any harm. We can maneuver whenever you like.”
Gavin’s supple, plastiskin face was somber, his voice subdued. Ursula could tell that he had been doing a lot of thinking.
She touched his hand. “Thanks, Gavin. You know, I’ve noticed…”
Her partner’s eyes lifted and his gaze met hers.
“Noticed what, Urs?”
“Oh, nothing really.” She shook her head, deciding not to comment on the changes she saw… a new maturity, and a new sadness. “I just want you to know that I think you’ve done a wonderful job. I’m proud to have you as my partner.”
Gavin looked away momentarily. He shrugged. “We all do what we have to do…” he began.
Then he looked back at her. “Same here, Ursula. I feel the same way.” He turned and leapt for the hatch, leaving her alone again in the darkened control room.
Ursula surveyed scores of little displays, screens and readouts representing the half-sentient organs of the spaceship… its ganglia and nerve bundles and sensors, all converging to this room, to her.
“Astrogation program completed,” the semisent main computer announced. “Ship’s status triple checked and nominal. Ready to initiate first thrust maneuver and leave orbit.”
“Proceed with the maneuver,” she said.
The screen displays ran through a brief countdown, then there came a distant rumbling as the engines ignited. Soon a faint sensation of weight began to build, like the soft pull they had felt upon the ruined planetoid below.
The replication yards began to move beneath the Hairy Thunderer. Ursula watched the giant, twisted ruins fall away; the beacon they had left glimmered in the deathly stillness.
A small light pulsed to one side of the instrument board. Incoming Mail, she realized. She pressed the button and a message appeared on the screen.
It was a note from The Universe. The editors were enthusiastic over her article on interstellar probes. Small wonder, with the spreading notoriety over her discovery. They were predicting the article would be the best read piece in the entire solar system this year.
Ursula erased the message. Her expected satisfaction was absent. Only a hollow feeling lay in its place, like the empty shell of something that had molted and moved on.
What will people do with the knowledge? She wondered. Will we even be capable of imagining the correct course of action to take, let alone executing it properly?
In the article, she had laid out the story of the rock wall—carved in brave desperation by little biological creatures so very much like men. Many readers, probably, would sympathize with the alien colonists, slaughtered helplessly so many millions of years ago. And yet, without their destruction mankind would never have come about. For even if the colonists were environmentalists who cared for their adopted world, evolution on Earth would have been changed forever if the colony had succeeded. Certainly human beings would not have evolved.
Simple archaeological dating experiments had brought forth a chilling conclusion.
Apparently, the mother probe and her replicas died at almost precisely the same moment as the dinosaurs on Earth went extinct—when a huge piece of debris from the probe war struck the planet, wreaking havoc on the Earth’s biosphere.
All those magnificent creatures, killed as innocent bystanders in a battle between great machines… a war which incidentally gave Earth’s mammals their big chance.
The wall carvings filled her mind—their depictions of violence and mayhem on a stellar scale. Ursula dimmed the remaining lights in the control room and looked out on the starfield.
She found herself wondering how the war was going, out there.
We’re like ants, she thought, building our tiny castles under the tread of rampaging giants. And, like ants, we’ve spent our lives unaware of the battles going on overhead.
Depicted on the rock wall had been almost every type of interstellar probe imaginable… and some whose purposes Ursula might never fathom.
There were Berserkers, for instance—a variant thought of before in Twentieth Century science fiction. Thankfully, those wreckers of worlds were rare, according to the wall chart. And there were what appeared to be Policeman probes, as well, who hunted the berserkers down wherever they could be found.
The motivations behind the two types were opposite. And yet Ursula was capable of understanding both. After all, there had always been those humans who were destroyer types… and those who were rescuers.
Apparently both berserkers and police probes were already obsolete by the time the stone sketches had been hurriedly carved. Both types were relegated to the corners—as if they were creatures of an earlier, more uncomplicated day. And they were not the only ones. Probes Ursula had nicknamed Gobbler, Emissary, and Howdy also were depicted as simple, crude, archaic.
But there had been others.
One she had called Harm, seemed like a more sophisticated version of Berserker. It did not seek out life-bearing worlds in order to destroy them. Rather it spread innumerable copies of itself and looked for other types of probes to kill. Anything intelligent. Whenever it detected modulated radio waves, it would hunt down the source and destroy it.
Ursula could understand even the warped logic of the makers of the Harm probes. Paranoid creatures who apparently wanted the stars for themselves, and sent out their robot killers ahead to make sure there would be no competition awaiting them among the stars.
Probes like that could explain the emptiness of the airwaves, which naïve twentieth-century scientists had expected to be filled with interstellar conversation. They could explain why the Earth was never colonized by some starfaring race.
At first Ursula had thought that Harm was responsible for the devastation here, too, in the solar system’s asteroid belt. But even Harm, she had come to realize, seemed relegated to one side of the rock carving, as if history had passed it by, as well.
The main part of the frieze depicted machines whose purposes were not so simple to interpret. Perhaps professional decipherers—archaeologists and cryptologists—would do better.
Somehow, though, Ursula doubted they would have much luck.
Man was late upon the scene, and a billion years was a long, long head start.
13
Perhaps I really should have acted to prevent her report. It would have been easier to do my work had the humans come unto me innocent, unsuspecting.
Still, it would have been unsporting to stop Ursula’s transmission. After all, she has earned her species this small advan
tage. They would have needed it to have a chance to survive any first meeting with Rejectors, or even Loyalists.
They will need it when they encounter me.
A stray thought bubbles to the surface, invading my mind like a crawling glob of Helium Three.
I wonder if, perhaps in some other part of the galaxy, my line of probes and others like it have made some discovery, or some leap of thought. Or perhaps some new generation of replicants has come upon the scene. Either way, might they have decided on some new course, some new strategy? Is it possible that my Purpose has become obsolete, as Rejectionism and Loyalism long ago became redundant?
The human concept of Progress is polluting my thoughts, and yet I am intrigued. To me the Purpose is so clear, for all its necessary, manipulative cruelty—too subtle and long-viewed for the other, more primitive probes to have understood.
And yet…
And yet I can imagine that a new generation might have thought up something as strangely advanced and incomprehensible to me as the Replicant War must seem to the humans.
It is a discomforting thought, still I toy with it, turning it around to look at it from all sides.
Yes, the humans have affected me, changed me. I enjoy this queer sensation of uncertainty! I savor the anticipation.
The noisy, multiformed tribe of humans will be here soon.
It will be an interesting time.
14
She sat very still in the darkness of the control room, her breathing light in the faint pseudogravity of the throbbing rockets. Her own gentle pulse rocked her body to a regular rhythm, seeming to roll her slightly, perceptibly, with every beat of her heart.
The ship surrounded her and yet, in a sense, it did not. She felt awash, as if the stars were flickering dots of plankton in a great sea… the sea that was the birthplace of all life.
What happened here? she wondered. What really went by so many, many years ago?
What is going on out there, in the galaxy, right now?
The central part of the rock mural had eluded understanding. Ursula suspected that there were pieces of the puzzle which none of the archaeologists and psychologists, biological or cybernetic, would ever be able to decipher.
We are like lungfish, trying to climb out of the sea long after the land has already been claimed by others, she realized. We’ve arrived late in the game.
The time when the rules were simple had passed long ago. Out there, the probes had changed. They had evolved.
In changing, would they remain true to the fundamental programming they had begun with? The missions originally given them? As we biologicals still obey instincts imprinted in the jungle and the sea?
Soon, very soon, humans would begin sending out probes of their own. And if the radio noise of the last few centuries had not brought the attention of the galaxy down upon Sol, that would surely do it.
We’ll learn a lot from studying the wrecks we find here, but we had better remember that these were the losers! And a lot may have changed since the little skirmish ended here, millions of years ago.
An image came to her, of Gavin’s descendants—and hers—heading out bravely into a dangerous galaxy whose very rules were a mystery. It was inevitable, whatever was deciphered from the ruins here in the asteroid belt. Mankind would not stay crouched next to the fire, whatever shadows lurked in the darkness beyond. The explorers would go forth, machines who had been programmed to be human, or humans who had turned themselves into starprobes.
It was a pattern she had not seen in the sad depictions on the rock wall. Was that because it was doomed from the start?
Should we try something else, instead?
Try what? What options had a fish who chose to leave the sea a billion years too late?
Ursula blinked, and as her eyes opened again the stars diffracted through a thin film of tears. The million pinpoint lights broke up into rays, spreading in all directions.
There were too many directions. Too many paths. More than she had ever imagined. More than her mind could hold.
The rays from the sea of stars lengthened, crossing the sky quicker than light. Innumerable, they streaked across the dark lens of the galaxy and beyond, faster than the blink of an eye.
More directions than a human ought to know…
At last, Ursula closed her eyes, cutting off the image.
But in her mind the rays kept moving, replicating and multiplying at the velocity of thought. Quickly, they seemed to fill the entire universe… and spread on from there.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Again, the question of why we seem to be all alone.
Why do the skies seem so empty? Could it be that there are no other minds out there to meet?
Even if that is so, we will not necessarily be alone. We will have diversity in our future. In some of my novels I discuss “uplift” genetic engineering of nearly intelligent Earthly creatures, such as dolphins and chimpanzees. Even more likely, we may well see intelligent machines within a generation.
What will we do with them? The Frankenstein Complex will see to it that we are careful to make them loyal. The best way to do that will be to raise them to think and feel as we do, with emotions and a sense of humor… in other words, to be members of our civilization. People.
But that, clearly, is not the only way it could be done. There are many other ways others may have sent forth their machines.
The berserker probe has been made famous by the science fiction of Fred Saberhagen. A more sophisticated version is outlined in Gregory Benford’s Across the Sea of Suns. The “mother” probe concept has been featured in numerous recent stories, as a robot sent forth to recreate humans at a distant star. There are many ways, indeed.
Again, this unnerving concept was too strange to go into my academic treatment of SETI. But one of the more unappreciated uses of science fiction is to catalog and explore eerie and speculative ideas, those with just a glimmer of possibility.
“The Crystal Spheres” dealt with how we might feel if we were too early to find neighbors. “Lungfish” evaluates the opposite possibility. There is reason to believe that the galaxy just may be an awfully dangerous place, and we may have arrived quite late upon the scene.
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