Code Of The Lifemaker

by Hogan, James

  conceptual abilities to utilize more than a tiny fraction of the potential

  they're surrounded by. But with us giving direction and them providing the

  working skills, it should be possible to get the act together and run it for

  mutual benefit."

  Whaley looked at him curiously for a second or two. "I can see our angle," he

  said. "What's in it for the Taloids?"

  Methers spread his hands. "What every backward race wants when it meets a more

  advanced culture—access to greater wealth and power, security, knowledge . . .

  whatever."

  "That's true of the Taloids too?" Whaley sounded surprised.

  "I wouldn't mind betting on it, anyhow," Methers said.

  Gorsche nodded. "Genoa is also a fairly small state that's constantly being

  attacked by larger enemies, and Padua is one of them. I'd have thought there's a

  good chance that the Genoese would be extremely appreciative of any help we

  might give them for defending themselves. And that incident with the Paduans

  will have provided a very convenient demonstration of the kinds of things we

  could offer."

  Ramelson looked from side to side. All the faces were watching him expectantly,

  waiting for his endorsement of the policy being proposed. He sat back and

  drummed his fingertips absently on the arms of his chair while he thought over

  what had been said. At last he nodded. "It's certainly worth exploring further,

  anyway. Do I take it that the other people you've put this to are in agreement

  also?"

  Gorsche nodded. "It's more or less Dan Leaherney's own recommendations, and the

  president has approved," he said.

  Ramelson looked satisfied and turned to Buhl. "Then let's get a confidential

  policy memorandum off to Caspar, confirming our position," he said. "The sooner

  he knows where he stands, the sooner we'll start seeing some results."

  "That's what I wanted to discuss next," Buhl said, reaching for some papers in

  his briefcase. "In fact I've got a draft here for you to look at. Maybe we can

  go through it while we're all here together."

  On the other side of Washington, D.C., Walter Conlon and Patrick Whittaker were

  having breakfast at a Howard Johnson's. "I imagine Gerry Massey must be pretty

  pissed," Whittaker said. "After the job that he and Vernon did all through the

  voyage out ... I mean, they've collected enough proof to debunk just about

  everything that Zambendorf has said and done since the mission left."

  "That's right," Conlon agreed over a plate of scrambled eggs and hashbrowns, but

  without sounding especially perturbed.

  Whittaker looked puzzled. "But hasn't it all been a waste of time?"

  "Why?"

  "Well . . . who cares anymore?" Whittaker shrugged. "Compared to what's happened

  on Titan now, all that's trivial, isn't it? Anyone who tried to make a big thing

  now out of whether or not Zambendorf had pulled a few tricks would just be

  making an ass of himself, and Massey's smart enough to know it. I assumed that

  was why Massey and Vernon haven't been announcing any great revelations."

  Conlon shook his head. "They probably watched Zambendorf just to help pass the

  time during the voyage," he said. "Massey's also smart enough to have figured

  out that I wouldn't have sent him all that way just to expose a stage psychic .

  . . not after he learned where the mission was really bound for and why,

  anyway."

  Whittaker frowned. "You mean his job never was to blow Zambendorf out of the

  water?"

  "Not unless he wanted to, anyhow," Conlon said, without looking up from his

  meal. "No—GSEC and the rest had their cover story, so I had to have mine. Massey

  figured that out a long time ago. Before the mission left I arranged with one of

  the ship's senior communications officers for Massey to have access to a private

  channel direct into my section of NASO at Washington, free from any restrictions

  or censoring . . . purely as a precaution. Massey wasn't told about it until

  they were well into the voyage."

  "So what's he really there for?" Whittaker asked, intrigued.

  "I don't know," Conlon said. Whittaker looked totally bemused. Conlon explained,

  "I'm not absolutely certain why GSEC sent Zambendorf there, but it wasn't to

  entertain at parties in the officers' mess. I suspect they intend to use his

  ability to influence public opinion as an aid to pushing the government in a

  direction that suits their interests."

  Whittaker looked horrified. "You're joking, Walt."

  "Uh-uh." Conlon shook his head. "His antics could become a significant factor in

  the formulation of major international policy."

  "But what, specifically?" Whittaker asked. "What exactly do they intend doing

  with him?"

  "They couldn't have had any definite plans until they found out what exactly the

  situation was on Titan," Conlon said. "But they've learned a lot by now that

  they didn't know then. I've got a feeling that someone should be passing more

  specific orders to Zambendorf very soon now. And when Zambendorf finds out what

  he's really there for, that's when Massey will know what his job is."

  20

  GRAHAM SPEARMAN PEERED INTO THE WINDOW OF THE COLD chamber in one of Orion's

  biological laboratories, where an automatic manipulator assembly was slicing

  test specimens from a sample of brownish, rubbery substance recovered from the

  wreckage of the bizarre walking wagons destroyed in the encounter with the

  Paduan Taloids. The cold chamber was a necessity since most Taloid pseudoorganic

  materials tended to decompose into evil-smelling liquids at room temperature. In

  the work area around Spearman, the displays and data presentations were showing

  some of the findings from electron and proton microscopes, gas and liquid

  chromatographs, electrophoretic analyzers, isotopic imagers, x-ray imagers,

  ultrasonic imagers, and just about every kind of spectrometer ever invented.

  Spearman had already described the incendiary chemical thrown by the catapults

  mounted on several of the Paduan war vehicles; it had turned out to be a

  substance rich in complex oxygen-carbon compounds that would be highly

  inflammable in Titan's reducing atmosphere once ignition temperature had been

  attained by the reaction of a fast-acting outer acid layer upon a metallic

  target surface. The catapults themselves had been shown by video replays also to

  be organic, and suggested enormous, finely sculptured vegetables that ejected

  their missions either by releasing stored mechanical strain-energy or by

  compressed gas accumulated internally.

  In his late thirties, with thick-rimmed spectacles and a droopy mustache, and

  wearing a tartan shirt with jeans, Spearman was the easygoing kind of person

  that Thelma could find interesting without running the risk of ending up being

  used as an ideological dumping ground if she spent time talking to him. The

  problem with many scientists, she found, especially the younger ones, was that

  their successful intellectual accomplishment in one field could sometimes lead

  them to overestimate the value of their views on anything and everything, which

  tended to make conversation a survival skill by turning every topic into a

  minefield. Spearman provided a
refreshing contrast by holding no political

  opinions, having no pet economic theory for solving all the world's problems at

  a stroke, and no burning conviction about how other people should conduct their

  lives to make it a better place.

  "I've never seen anything quite like this," he said, turning back and waving an

  arm to indicate the sample behind the window. "It's capable of growing under the

  direction of large, complex director molecules, sure enough, but you couldn't

  say it's alive. It's kind of halfway in between. ... It has a primitive

  biochemistry, but nothing approaching life at the level of cellular metabolism.

  You see, there aren't any cells."

  Thelma looked intrigued as she swiveled herself slowly from side to side in the

  operator's chair in front of the microscopy console, while Dave Crookes listened

  from where he was leaning just inside the doorway. "Then what's it made of?"

  Thelma asked. "How does it grow without cells?"

  Spearman sighed. "A comprehensive answer will probably take years to unravel,

  but for the moment think of it as something like an organic crystal, but more

  complicated . . . with variations in structure that you don't get in crystals."

  He gestured at the sample in the cold chamber. "That's a part of one of the

  legs. It does have a rudimentary vascular system to transport nutrients for

  renewing itself, an arrangement of contractile tissues that enable it to move,

  and a network of conductive fibers that transmit electrical discharges in

  response to applied mechanical force. And that's about all. What it suggests is

  that the complete structure could respond by moving itself if something pulled

  it—a kind of passive friction-reducer."

  "An organic wheel," Thelma said.

  Spearman grinned. "Sure—that's just about what it is."

  "But it couldn't do anything else, like reproduce itself or something like

  that?" Crookes asked.

  Spearman shook his head. "No way. As I said, it can move and regenerate its

  form—parts of it anyway. But there's no way you could say it's alive."

  Thelma frowned to herself. "So how could something like that ever have evolved

  in the firsi place if it can't reproduce itself?" she asked.

  "It couldn't have," Spearman replied simply.

  "So where did it come from?"

  "The only thing we can suggest is that the Taloids created it."

  Thelma and Crookes exchanged puzzled glances. "But how could they have?" Crookes

  protested. "I mean, their technology is back in the Middle Ages. You're talking

  about something that might be crude compared to the living cells we know, but

  surely it's still a pretty impressive feat of bioengineering."

  "Astonishing," Spearman confirmed. "In fact I don't think any genetic

  engineering of ours could touch it—not without naturally occurring

  macromolecules already available to work with, anyhow."

  "Well, that's the point," Thelma said. "How could the Taloids have done it?"

  Spearman moved a few paces across the lab, then turned and spread his hands.

  "We've already found plenty of examples of quite complex hydrocarbons and

  nitrogenous compounds in the soil, very much like the molecules believed to have

  been precursors of life on Earth. But apparently they never progressed much

  further on Titan, probably because of the low temperature and absence of strong

  ionizing radiation and other mutagenic stimulants. Well, our best guess is that

  the Taloids somehow learned to manipulate such raw materials, and over a period

  of time developed techniques for manufacturing the kind of thing you see here."

  He waved toward the cold chamber again. "And I mean manufacturing. That stuff

  didn't grow naturally. It accounts for their peculiar houses too, as well as a

  lot of other things we've seen."

  John Webster, an English genetic engineering consultant from the Cambridge

  Institute for Molecular Biology, nodded from a stool in front of a cluttered

  workbench jammed into a corner among shelves of bottles and racks of electronic

  equipment. "That's the way it looks. It's our culture turned upside down. We

  grow our food and our offspring, and make artifacts out of metals that we

  extract from rocks; the Taloids' food and offspring are produced on assembly

  lines, while they grow artifacts—developed from organic substances which they

  discovered in their rocks and soils. That explains all those 'plantations' that

  we've been wondering about: They're Taloid factories."

  "That's right—they did the same as we did, but the other way around," Spearman

  said. "Man learned to make mechanical devices to mimic the actions of living

  organisms in his familiar environment—to lift weights and move loads, and so on.

  The Taloids found they could manufacture artificial devices too—organic ones—to

  mimic the only form of life they knew."

  "It's a good way of looking at it," Crookes agreed. "But that still doesn't

  explain how the Taloids could engineer processes at the molecular level when

  their culture is centuries behind ours." He gestured to indicate the banks of

  instrumentation and equipment all around them. "We had to invent all this before

  we even knew what a protein was, never mind how to splice genes into plasmids.

  The Taloids couldn't make anything even remotely comparable to all this stuff."

  "They never needed to," Spearman said. "They're surrounded by it already."

  It took Thelma a moment to grasp what he was saying. "You're kidding," she said

  incredulously.

  Spearman shook his head. "Man learned how to use enzymes and bacteria to make

  wine and cheese thousands of years ago without having to know anything about the

  chemistry involved. Who's to say that the Taloids couldn't have learned to

  domesticate the life forms that they found all around them too? We take wool off

  sheep to make overcoats; they take wire from wire-drawing machines." He

  shrugged. "It's the same difference."

  "Everything about them is us the other way around, and taken back three or four

  centuries," Webster said. "We were practical artisans first, and from those

  beginnings we developed engineering and the physical sciences. Biochemistry came

  later. The Taloids developed applied biology first, but without any real

  comprehension of biological science, and now they're only just beginning to

  dabble in the physical sciences."

  "That seems strange," Crookes commented. "You'd think that all the advanced

  hardware down there would have given them an intuitive comprehension of it from

  early on."

  "Why should it have?" Spearman asked. "Human beings are advanced biological

  systems, but that doesn't give them an intuitive understanding of how their

  brains and their bodies work. That knowledge could only come later, when

  suitable instruments became available . . . and it's still far from complete.

  Human consciousness operates at a level way above that of the neural hardware

  that supports our mental software, and the world of raw sensory data which that

  hardware reacts to. We don't perceive the world as consisting of pressure waves,

  photons, forces, and so on, but as people, places, and things. Our awareness

  arises from the interaction of abstract symbols that are far removed from the

&
nbsp; original physical stimuli—shut off, as it were, from any direct knowledge of its

  own underlying neurological and physiological processes. So we can think about

  the things that matter without knowing anything about what the trillions of

  nerve cells in our brains are doing, or even being aware that we have any."

  Crookes frowned for a moment. "So what are you saying—that the Taloids are

  advanced electronic systems, but that doesn't give them any intuitive

  understanding of how they work either? Their awareness operates at a higher,

  abstract level in the same way?"

  "Just that," Spearman replied.

  Thelma nodded as the implications became clearer. "So just because the Taloids

  are computers, it doesn't mean necessarily that they think with machine

  precision and possess total information recall, does it? They might not be able

  to remember a conversation from yesterday word for word, or behave the same way

  in the same situation every time . . . just like us."

  "That's what Graham's getting at," Webster said. "At its basic hardware level,

  the human brain is every bit as mechanical and predictable as an electronic

  computer chip: A neuron either fires or doesn't fire in response to a given set

  of inputs. It doesn't go through agonies of indecision trying to make up some

  microscopic mind about what to do. At that level, there isn't any mind to make

  up. 'Mind' emerges as a property of organization that becomes manifest only at

  the higher level. ... In the same kind of way, a single molecule doesn't possess

  a property of 'elephantness'; a sufficiently large number of them, however,

  organized in the correct way, do. Taloid minds are almost certainly a result of

  complexity transcending their underlying hardware in the same way."

  Spearman moved back to the cold chamber, stooped to look at what was going on

  inside, and entered a command into the control panel below the window. "If you

  showed a Taloid a piece of holoptronics from the inside of a computer processor,

  I think it'd be about as mystified as someone in the Middle Ages trying to make

  sense of a rabbit brain," he said over his shoulder. "We understand machines

  because we were able to begin with the simple and progress through to the more

  complicated—from pulleys and levers, through dynamos and steam engines, to