by Jack Dann
"Right now," it replied, "I'd be happy to risk any and all consequences. Wouldn't you?"
"Somebody once told me that death was just a process of transcendence. Her brain was incandescent with fever induced by some tailored recreational disease, and she wanted to infect me, to show me the error of my ways."
"Did you believe her?"
"No. She was stark raving mad."
"It's perhaps as well. We don't have any recreational diseases on board. I could put you to sleep though, if that's what you want."
"It isn't."
"I'm glad. I don't want to be alone, even if I am only an AI. Am I insane, do you think? Is all this just a symptom of the pressure?"
"You're quite sane," I assured it, setting aside all thoughts of incongruity. "So am I. It would be much harder if we weren't together. The last time I was in this kind of mess, I had a child with me—a little girl. It made all the difference in the world, to both of us. In a way, every moment I've lived since then has been borrowed time. At least I finished that damned book. Imagine leaving something like that incomplete."
"Are you so certain it's complete?" it asked.
I knew full well, of course, that the navigator was just making conversation according to a clever programming scheme. I knew that its emergency subroutines had kicked in, and that all the crap about it being afraid to die was just some psychoprogrammer's idea of what I needed to hear. I knew that it was all fake, all just macabre role-playing—but I knew that I had to play my part, too, treating every remark and every question as if it were part of an authentic conversation, a genuine quest for knowledge.
"It all depends what you mean by complete ," I said, carefully. "In one sense, no history can ever be complete, because the world always goes on, always throwing up more events, always changing. In another sense, completion is a purely aesthetic matter—and in that sense, I'm entirely confident that my history is complete. It reached an authentic conclusion, which was both true, and, for me at least, satisfying. I can look back at it and say to myself: I did that. It's finished. Nobody ever did anything like it before, and now nobody can, because it's already been done. Someone else's history might have been different, but mine is mine, and it's what it is. Does that make any sense to you?"
"Yes sir," it said. "It makes very good sense."
The lying bastard was programmed to say that, of course. It was programmed to tell me any damn thing I seemed to want to hear, but I wasn't going to let on that I knew what a hypocrite it was. I still had to play my part, and I was determined to play it to the end—which, as things turned out, wasn't far off. The AI's data-stores were way out of date, and there was an automated sub placed to reach us within three hours. The oceans are lousy with subs these days. Ever since the Great Coral Sea Catastrophe, it's been considered prudent to keep a very close eye on the sea-bed, lest the crust crack again and the mantle's heat break through.
They say that some people are born lucky. I guess I must be one of them. Every time I run out, a new supply comes looking for me.
It was the captain of a second submarine, which picked me up after the mechanical one had done the donkey work of saving myself and my AI friend, who gave me the news which relegated my accident to footnote status in that day's broadcasts.
A signal had reached the solar system from the starship Shiva, which had been exploring in the direction of the galactic center. The signal had been transmitted two hundred and twenty-seven light-years, meaning that, in Earthly terms, the discovery had been made in the year 2871—which happened, coincidentally, to be the year of my birth.
What the signal revealed was that Shiva had found a group of solar systems, all of whose life-bearing planets were occupied by a single species of micro-organism: a genetic predator that destroyed not merely those competing species that employed its own chemistry of replication, but any and all others. It was the living equivalent of a universal solvent; a true omnivore.
Apparently, this organism had spread itself across vast reaches of space, moving from star-system to star-system, laboriously but inevitably, by means of Arrhenius spores. Wherever the spores came to rest, these omnipotent microorganisms grew to devour everything—not merely the carbonaceous molecules which in Earthly terms were reckoned "organic," but also many "inorganic" substrates. Internally, these organisms were chemically complex, but they were very tiny—hardly bigger than Earthly protozoans or the internal nanomachines to which every human being plays host. They were utterly devoid of any vestige of mind or intellect. They were, in essence, the ultimate blight, against which nothing could compete, and which nothing Shiva's crew had tested—before they were devoured—had been able to destroy.
In brief, wherever this new kind of life arrived, it would obliterate all else, reducing any victim ecosphere to homogeneity and changelessness.
In their final message, the faber crew of the Shiva—who knew all about the Pandora encounter—observed that humankind had now met the alien.
Here, I thought, when I had had a chance to weigh up this news, was a true marriage of life and death, the like of which I had never dreamed. Here was the promise of a future renewal of the war between man and death—not this time for the small prize of the human mind, but for the larger prize of the universe itself.
In time, Shiva's last message warned, spores of this new kind of death-life must and would reach our own solar system, whether it took a million years or a billion; in the meantime, all humankinds must do their level best to purge the worlds of other stars of its vile empire, in order to reclaim them for real life, for intelligence, and for evolution—always provided, of course, that a means could be discovered to achieve that end.
When the sub delivered me safely back to Severnaya Zemlya, I did not stay long in my hotel room. I went outdoors, to study the great ice-sheet which had been there since the dawn of civilization, and to look southward, toward the places where newborn glaciers were gradually extending their cold clutch further and further into the human domain. Then I looked upward, at the multitude of stars sparking in their bed of endless darkness. I felt an exhilaratingly paradoxical sense of renewal. I knew that although there was nothing for me to do for now, the time would come when my talent and expertise would be needed again.
Some day, it will be my task to compose another history, of the next war which humankind must fight against Death and Oblivion.
It might take me a thousand or a million years, but I'm prepared to be patient.
FURTHER READING
NOVELS
The Immortals, James Gunn
Buying Time, Joe W. Haldeman
Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
Dancers at the End of Time, Michael Moorcock
The Golden Space, Pamela Sargent
One Million Tomorrows, Bob Shaw
The Book of Skulls, Robert Silverberg
Way Station, Clifford D. Simak
The Empire of Fear, Brian Stableford
To Live Forever, Jack Vance
Welcome, Chaos, Kate Wilhelm
Trouble With Lichen, John Wyndham
This Immortal, Roger Zelazny
ANTHOLOGIES
Immortal, edited by Jack Dann
Tales of the Wandering Jew, edited by Brian Stableford
SHORT STORIES
"Old Hundreth," Brian W. Aldiss
"At Death's End," James Blish
"The First Since Ancient Persia," John Brunner
"The Gnarly Man," L. Sprague de Camp
"Chanson Perpetuelle," Thomas M. Disch
"The Pressure of Time," Thomas M. Disch
"The Extra," Greg Egan
"The Immortals," James Gunn
"The Death Artist," Alexander Jakobov
"Mr. Boy," James Patrick Kelly
"Whatever Happened to Corporal Cukoo?," Gerald Kersh
"World Without Children," Damon Knight
"Checksum," Stephen Kraus
"One at a Time," R.A. Lafferty
"Pale Roses,"
Michael Moorcock
"Outnumbering the Dead," Frederik Pohl
"Brother Perfect," Robert Reed
"Guest of Honor," Robert Reed
"Sister Alice," Robert Reed
"The Renewal," Pamela Sargent
"The Summer's Dust," Pamela Sargent
"Born with the Dead," Robert Silverberg
"Waiting for the Fountain," Robert Silverberg
"The Double-Spiral Staircase," Charles Sheffield
"Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," Cordwainer Smith
"Mother Hittons Littul Kittons," Cordwainer Smith
"Age of Innocence," Brian Stableford
"Inherit the Earth," Brian Stableford
"Les Fleurs du Mal," Brian Stableford
"The Magic Bullet," Brian Stableford
"Out of Touch," Brian Stableford
"The Shores of Bohemia," Bruce Sterling
"Maturity," Theodore Sturgeon
"Slow Music," James Tiptree, Jr.
"April Fool's Day Forever," Kate Wilhelm
"Naming the Flowers," Kate Wilhelm
"The Winter Beach," Kate Wilhelm
"The Doctor of Death Island," Gene Wolfe
"The Hero as Werwolf," Gene Wolfe
"Transfigured Night," George Zebrowski
