A Maze of Stars

by John Brunner

  So there would have to be a ship. There would have to be the Ship—huge enough to carry settlers for all the new worlds, durable enough to supervise their development over at least several thousand years, and, into the bargain, intelligent. The technology existed; there would be no objection from the lazy mass of humanity so long as their easeful daily lives were not disturbed—the craft would in any case have to be built in space, using materiel from barren asteroids—but that last factor posed a problem.

  Mere machines had known limitations, though they could achieve self-awareness, and for ages they had possessed many other characteristics of living organisms: They could grow, they could repair themselves to some extent, they could adapt to changing circumstances or newly acquired information. But they could barely comprehend emotion and never display imagination. They could cross-refer data in quantities far exceeding the capacity of organic brains, but they could not be taught to hypothesize with data not yet available.

  Therefore, that faculty must be overlaid on a machine substrate. A perfect analog of an aware mind must serve as a template. Ancient records confirmed that this had been attempted in the past with some success—to prolong the lives of accident victims or to permit exploration of environments too hazardous for ordinary machines—but the latter reason had declined as the species became slothful, and advances in limb and organ reconstruction had rendered the former obsolete.

  Nonetheless, there had been progress in spite of all. Now, if need be, not one but many personalities could be engrafted. At once there were volunteers.

  However, careful analysis revealed another risk. Were supervision of the new worlds to be entrusted to a basically human personality, it might prove to have, as it were, blind spots. It was beyond doubt that when the Ship actually traversed the Arm of Stars, it would meet with crises no reports from automatic survey vessels could have warned against. Similarly, a human mind accustomed to the circumstances in which he or she had grown up, been educated, lived life hitherto, might unconsciously be biased toward precisely that status quo it was imperative to shatter.

  Work had already begun on the Ship; its colossal hull was taking shape among a cluster of planetoids rich in metals and inert organics. Designed by machines, it was being constructed by machines, yet it was destined to become more than a machine.

  Would the task after all prove vain?

  Then one of those engaged in planning offered a way out of the impasse. What if the intelligence to be superimposed were to be copied from a species apparently immune—as yet; there were theoretical grounds for arguing that all creatures highly enough developed to think were to some extent vulnerable—to the hive impulse? Was there a species whose existence thus far had never become stable enough to encourage it? Best of all, was there one whose biology was close to the human so that it might feel at least a hint of loyalty to kindred?

  Was there one, in short, on the birthworld?

  The idea seemed laughable. Yet on that worn-out cinder of a planet, which millennia ago had been consigned to machines for repair and restoration, they found what they were looking for. Free of human interference, in the vast ocean deeps (petty, they were, beside some found on other worlds humanity had occupied), creatures moved in darkness who had never known what comfort or stasis might be. They moved because they always had to move; they fed as best they could, and bred, and went on moving. Once they had suffered predators; those had long been extinct, so some of them were very old and of gigantic size. Their nervous systems had evolved to match. There was no doubt they were intelligent.

  To people whose cousins on other planets, in the first brave days of expansion, had devised means of communicating with entirely alien beings, establishing contact with them was not difficult. It took a century, but then, so did the construction of the Ship.

  Not to mention the recruitment of its passengers.

  With intelligence goes, inseparably, the capacity for boredom. Exposed to knowledge of the outer universe, one of the great old lords of the abyss was tempted, yielded, agreed to let itself be studied and eventually copied in return for novel concepts it could dream about. (Dreaming too goes with intelligence.) Unharmed, it returned to its home and perhaps was happy. Was that possible? Even in this lucid condition Ship had no opinion on the matter. It had been changed so much, it scarcely recalled its former circumstances—had doubtless been encouraged to forget them. Now it was different. Now it was something else.

  And then, to guard against the inverse risk—that the chosen model for the Ship’s intelligence had other, overlooked weak points, they added one final touch. They chose from among those whom tests confirmed to be most committed to ensuring a future brighter than more of the same for ever a wide range of human personalities to copy, and structured them into their vessel as the forebrain overlies the hindbrain in a human head. Endowed with powers of judgment and of censorship, they acted as custodians of its instructions. For there was one thing their aquatic cousin must not know beforehand—must be left to learn through often bitter experience.

  If their project worked out as intended, their helper would be conscious without liberty of action.

  In other words, it would become a slave.

  Some who had volunteered to be copied into the Ship withdrew on learning that; it smacked of old barbarity, and though they realized new kinds might well appear on the new worlds, they were repelled. To use even a nonrational animal— for food, for transport, as a source of raw materials—had for millennia been deemed repugnant and uncivilized. To constrain, control, and exploit an aware and reasonable creature … ! Shame!

  Yet none could think of any better course. So it was done, and the voyage began.

  GIVEN THE UNPARALLELED COMPLEXITY OF THE VENTURE, IT went tolerably smoothly. A few times during the initial sweep Ship had to register objections—of the mild kind it was restricted to—about overanxiety on the part of its human supervisors, for on occasion they risked making themselves known to the passengers. This was contrary to the original intention;

  the idea was that those aboard should never become aware of anything beyond the personality of Ship for fear they might suspect they were subjects in an experiment rather than honorable volunteers disdainful of their fellows’ sluggish contentment. As it turned out, some knowledge of another presence did leak out in the form of shared dreams about luminous intruders, too bright to stare at, that were nonetheless also human.

  In the long run, fortunately, that gave rise to nothing worse than the widespread legend of the Perfect, later held by some to be what humanity had become in the parent galaxy since their ancestors’ departure—would that were so, as Ship had often thought, for then I’d have been spared my loneliness— while others claimed they were what their own descendants would evolve into, capable of going wherever they chose in space and time without machines.

  So the legend was known on every world of the Arm where humans still could think and speak to one another. And all because a few nervous individuals risked investigating the passengers in case Ship had—well—slightly misunderstood …

  And also, at last, although here was the point at which Ship’s comprehension was stretched to the limit, the final mystery was clarified: why its returns were scattered back and forth in time.

  They weren’t.

  It was simply that those who might as well be called the Perfect, for they had progressed as far as humankind was capable, were reviewing what they knew in what order seemed best… Ought one any longer to say “they”? Had they not long ago become singular? (Or far in the future; it amounted to the same. It was not the least part of Ship’s torment that it could never tell the difference between what it experienced in reality and what it reexperienced when it was being used as a vehicle for memory.) “They/it,” then; or “it/they.”

  For even without the literal effect of genes, without the physical heritage they had been born to, resident in an artificial structure, they had demonstrated the inexorability of evolution—or fate,
or destiny; the terms seemed interchangeable. (The image of the Norns and Parcae still held good.)

  Constantly communicating, constantly accessing their shared memories, they had let the borders between one identity and another wear away. Those who had sacrificed the most to escape such a fate had become not just a hive species but a hive mind, as far beyond Ship busy with its internal administration and the success or plight of the worlds it had seeded as that same Ship had passed beyond its former self, long dead in the ocean of the birthworld. (Had it been happy in the end? Could it have, restored to the dark after viewing the stars?)

  At the extremity of the Arm the Perfect confronted the gulf between the galaxies. Now—still, after how long?—it/they was brooding over how that gulf might be bridged. It would take immense resources; never mind, the galaxy would last long enough. All that was needful was to return, equipped with full knowledge of what must be done, and enlist the support of the entire species. (Was it not the bitterest of ironies that they/it should commit itself/themselves to such a human act with no hope of arriving at its/their goal in any form their ancestors would recognize as human?) Placid, unrebellious, eventually millions of people would embark in ships far greater than the Ship—

  (For an instant it imagined it might one day cease to feel lonely; then cruel truth dawned. Such ships would be too far advanced for them to have anything in common.)

  —content to live their lives amid illusion between the thousands of tachyonic jumps each one must make. It had been calculated that sometimes a century would pass while energy was being stored for the next, but there were hints of a way of drawing power directly from the vacuum …

  Meantime, the Perfect called up data by which to guide the project, and what to them/it was recollection was to the Ship a perfect reenactment, a repetition of an old reality. Now it/ they wished to review a recent happening; next, events in the far distant past. There was an order, reflected in what Ship recollected at a given stage, but dictated by patterns of logic it could never share …

  Wait! How can that be? If my actions were affected by what I was allowed to remember of the future, and I clearly recall that they were—or seemed to be—what use is this review of them? They are not experimentally pure; they’ve been affected by what was yet to come! Perhaps there’s a leakage from the superconscious level that they cannot stanch—or maybe it’s deliberate, permitted… ?

  Even as Ship struggled to resolve the paradox, the flood of knowledge started to recede. There was, there must be, an explanation, but it was forever locked away beyond the divide between it and it/them.

  And they/it had started to remember again …

  Embittered, frustrated, Ship sought what consolation it could from a question that did have an answer, though it was hollow and unsatisfying.

  When am I?

  Now.

  Perhaps a hint of Ship’s misery affected the cold remote mind of the Perfect. Perhaps it awoke an answering echo among the residue of those who had struggled with their consciences before condemning an intelligent being to enslavement and were still ashamed. The last ripple of that ocean of data in which it had been overwhelmed (for half eternity, for a brief fraction of a second) washed around its own awareness and bore a taste, an odor, a hue, that might conceivably be recognized as indebtedness.

  Maybe even … gratitude?

  It’s all the reward that I shall ever get.

  Therefore:

  It will just have to do.

  This was the beginning of a sweep. Accordingly, the planet below must be Trevithra. But its sky did not sparkle. Was that because the defenses against indrifting spores had not been installed or because they had been discontinued, obsolete?

  There was, as ever, only one way to find out.

  About the Author

  John Brunner was born in England in 1934 and educated at Cheltenham College. He sold his first novel in 1951 and has been publishing SF steadily ever since then. His books have won him international acclaim from both mainstream and genre audiences. His most famous novel, the classic Stand on Zanzibar, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1969, the British Science Fiction Award, and the Prix Apollo in France. Mr. Brunner lives in what was called of old the Summer Country, in Somerset, England.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  About the Author