by Ben Bova
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
Ignatiev felt close to tears. But he did not cry. He was too furious for crying.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“Are you ready to return to your quarters?” the avatar asked.
Ignatiev looked at the squad of humans sitting, squatting, kneeling on the grass. Not a word from any of them. They were too stunned, too bewildered to reply. Too disheartened, he thought.
The orange sun was dipping toward the distant mountains. Long shadows were creeping across the field in which they sat. A gentle breeze was ruffling the grass, moaning softly, like a banshee mourning the loss of a lover.
Feeling tired, hopeless, helpless, Ignatiev said to the avatar, “Yes, let’s go back.”
A square structure rose out of the ground and its doors slid silently open. Wearily, the team of explorers climbed to their feet and shuffled into the waiting transporter in complete silence.
But Ignatiev wondered to himself, How do they do that? How do they manipulate the elements to make a transporter arise when and where they want it?
Standing in the transporter cab next to him, the avatar said, “It’s really a simple matter, Professor. We will show you how it is done, if you like.”
Ignatiev nodded slowly. “I would like that.”
He felt the transporter dropping away, down into the bowels of the planet.
“You can take off your helmets, if you like,” the avatar said to the group. “You can breathe the air here quite normally.”
Ignatiev thought, Better to let us choke to death here and now. He saw no reaction to his thought from the avatar. It remained perfectly calm, perfectly at ease.
Perfectly indifferent, Ignatiev thought.
* * *
Once back in his quarters with Gita, Ignatiev slowly wormed his arms out of the protective biosuit, then sat on the edge of the bed to pull his legs free. Gita did the same, wordlessly.
“It’s sobering, isn’t it?” he muttered as he stood up and started folding the suit.
She looked up at him, and a shadow of a smile touched her lips.
“You mean you don’t want any vodka?”
He almost smiled back at her. “Maybe later.”
“You’re tired.”
“I feel humiliated,” Ignatiev confessed. “The blasted machines have us completely under their control. They call the tune and make us dance to it.”
“And there’s nothing we can do about it,” Gita agreed.
Ignatiev took the folded suit, placed the bubble helmet atop it, and carried it into the sitting room, where he placed it on the end table beside the couch. “I’ll return it to the storage rack tomorrow,” he muttered.
Gita also brought her suit into the sitting room and put it down gently beside Ignatiev’s.
“Alex, what are we going to do?”
Slumping down tiredly on the couch, he replied, “We’re going to spend the rest of our lives here, apparently. We’ll never get back to Earth.”
Gita sat beside him. “We can study the species up on the surface, I suppose.”
“I’d like to study the machines and their society.”
“If they’d allow us to.”
He sighed mightily. “Yes, if they allow us to.”
“Are you going to inform the rest of the people, up on Intrepid?” Gita asked.
“If they allow us to,” Ignatiev repeated.
The avatar appeared before them. “You can communicate with your teammates in the orbiting starship.”
Ignatiev stared at the humanlike figure. “That’s very gracious of you,” he said, his voice dripping irony.
“You realize that what we are doing,” the avatar said, “is for our own good—and yours. You can live long and full lives here. We will give you everything you want.”
“Except freedom,” Ignatiev countered. “Except the freedom to return to our home.”
The avatar replied, “I’m afraid that will be impossible.”
Ignatiev got up from the couch and drew himself to his full height—several centimeters shorter than the avatar. “Very well,” he said, his voice stronger, firmer than it had been. “If we must remain here, we will do what scientists do. We will study this planet, its biosphere, and your society of machines.”
“Good,” said the avatar, with something approaching warmth.
Then it winked out, leaving Gita and Ignatiev alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Alexander Alexandrovich Ignatiev sat stretched out on the sitting room’s reclining chair. He seemed asleep, his eyes closed, his hands resting limply on his lap. But beneath his eyelids, his pupils were moving rapidly back and forth, as they would in REM sleep. And his fingers twitched as if jabbed by minute electric charges.
Ignatiev’s electronic presence was sitting at the head of the conference table aboard Intrepid, with the heads of each department among the ship’s staff arrayed along the polished table and nearly a dozen more scientists and technicians—Gita among them—sitting along one wall of the long, windowless room.
“A prehuman?” asked Vivian Fogel, director of the anthropology department. She was a petite slip of a woman with short-cropped ash-blond hair and a ruddy, hard, weather-seamed complexion. “Are you certain?”
Ignatiev said, “See for yourself,” and called for Aida to project the camera views of the creature they had seen.
“My god,” Fogel muttered, awed. “It’s almost like seeing Homo habilis.”
“The important thing,” Ignatiev said, his voice firm, “is that this species has evolved since the last death wave swept past this region, more than sixty million years ago. And it will be killed when the next death wave arrives.”
“Killed?” blurted Mandabe. “Do you mean that the machines will do nothing to save it?”
“That is what they have told me,” Ignatiev replied.
“But they can’t do that! They mustn’t!”
“That would be murder!” Fogel accused. “Genocide!”
“That creature could evolve into an intelligent species!”
Ignatiev let them protest for a few moments more, then said, “The machines apparently don’t care about the survival of organic species. They are interested only in their own survival.”
“But that … that’s heinous!” said the usually mild-mannered head of the astronomy department.
“I agree,” said Ignatiev. “But they do not.”
Fogel asked, “Why do the machines maintain their biosphere facility, then? Why do they repopulate the surface after a death wave sterilizes the planet?”
With an elaborate shrug, Ignatiev answered, “I have asked that very question. Their answer seems specious to me, at best.”
“They’re not telling us the whole story?”
“I think not.”
“How can we get them to be more honest with us?”
Ignatiev shrugged again. “If I knew, I would tell you.”
Abruptly the machines’ avatar appeared, standing beside Ignatiev’s chair. As usual, it wore a military-type uniform, but this time its color was a shimmering pale lavender.
“Excuse us for intruding like this,” it said. “We feel that you do not understand our motivation.”
“Damned right!” Mandabe snapped.
As relaxed as if it were lecturing a roomful of students, the avatar said, “Our history is much longer than yours. We have seen several death waves sweep through the galaxy, killing organic life wherever it existed. Your own existence is based on the fact that there was a long-enough interval between death waves for your species to arise.”
“Not every life form on Earth was killed by the earlier death waves,” said Vivian Fogel, almost accusingly.
Unperturbed, the avatar answered, “That is because your world is quite distant from the galaxy’s core, where the gamma emissions originate. Still, the death wave that is currently spreading across the galaxy is quite a powerful one. It would scour your planetary system clean of
life if the machines you call the Predecessors had not provided you with the necessary shielding.”
Feeling the discussion was drifting away from its original topic, Ignatiev asked, “But why won’t you shield the organic life forms here from the coming death wave?”
“To what avail?” the avatar asked back. “Organic life forms are inherently short-lived. They perish very quickly. But in many places they live long enough to give rise to machine intelligence. Machines live long. Perhaps some machine species can be immortal.”
“But you refuse to help the organic species to survive the death wave.”
“Why bother?” asked the avatar. Then it disappeared.
* * *
The men and women around the conference table gaped at the emptiness where the avatar had stood a moment earlier.
“It’s a cold-blooded sonofabitch,” said one of the engineers, down toward the end of the table.
“It doesn’t have any blood,” groused the man next to him.
“The question is,” Ignatiev said, “what are we going to do about this?”
“What can we do?” Fogel asked, her voice trembling.
“Only what they allow us to do,” Ignatiev answered.
“How about mass suicide?” Jackson quipped.
Gita said, “I think that would please the machines. We would be ridding them of a problem.”
“We ought to set up the shielding generators on the surface,” Jackson said, with some heat. “Protect ourselves from the death wave and protect the local biosphere.”
Ignatiev nodded agreement, but warned, “I would think that if the machines could neutralize this ship’s propulsion system they could disable the shielding generators just as easily.”
“But would they?” Fogel asked. “I mean, it’s one thing to let the death wave wipe out unprotected species, but it’s a matter of a different order to prevent our shielding the biosphere.”
“You’re talking about ethics,” said Mandabe, his deep voice like a rumble of distant thunder.
“Do the blasted machines have any ethics?” someone asked.
Ignatiev answered, “They have a drive to survive.”
“Which doesn’t extend to other species,” Jackson snarled.
“Apparently not.
“One thing is certain,” Ignatiev continued. “We can’t surprise them. They can read our thoughts. They know what we’re saying and what we’re thinking.”
“So we can’t surprise them.”
“I’m certain that we can’t,” Ignatiev agreed.
“What should we do, then?”
“Follow Jackson’s suggestion,” Ignatiev replied. “See if the machines allow us to actively protect the biosphere.”
“And ourselves,” Mandabe added.
“But if they don’t?” one of the biologists asked.
“Then, in two hundred years any of us still alive will be killed by the death wave. Together with every living thing on the surface of the planet.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The meeting ended. Ignatiev opened his eyes and found himself stretched out on the recliner in his sitting room. Gita, lying on the couch, was beginning to stir to life also.
She pulled herself up to a sitting position, then slowly got to her feet, complaining, “I always feel shaky after one of these sessions.”
“We’re not accustomed to being in two places at the same time,” Ignatiev said, raising himself to stand on slightly wobbly legs.
The machines’ avatar appeared by the sitting room’s front door.
“You have decided to challenge us,” it said. Its tone was flat and calm, neither surprised nor threatening. Yet Ignatiev sensed that it was displeased.
“We have decided,” he answered, “to follow our own ethical sense.”
“And your drive for survival,” the avatar pointed out.
With a lopsided little smile, Ignatiev admitted, “That too.”
“Emotional thinking.”
Gita said, “We are emotional creatures. Our emotions have helped us to survive, over the ages.”
The avatar started to reply, hesitated, then finally said, “Your emotions may have been a helpful survival trait in your distant past, but now they can be dangerous. They have led you into conflicts, angry confrontations, even destructive wars.”
“That was in the past,” Ignatiev said. “We’ve gotten beyond all that now.”
“Have you? How close are your people to primitive fears and hatreds, to subjugating one another, to the mass murders that you misname as patriotic wars?”
Ignatiev hesitated.
But Gita replied firmly, “We have learned from the past. We have built an interplanetary society based on human freedom and equality.”
“And so here you are,” the avatar said, “two thousand light-years from your home, eager to impress your values and your self-perceived goodness on our society, our culture.”
“We’ve come here to help life forms that face extinction,” Gita said.
Ignatiev added, “And to study your civilization, to learn from you.”
“Then learn this,” the avatar said, with something approaching passion in its tone. “All organic species die. Only machines have the possibility of living forever.”
And with that, the avatar disappeared.
* * *
“It got angry,” Ignatiev said, his voice hollow with surprise.
Staring at the spot where the avatar had been a moment earlier, Gita said, “Could it be learning from us?”
“I wonder. Maybe it’s just adopting some of our mannerisms in an effort to make us understand it better.”
“I wonder,” she echoed.
Ignatiev stepped closer to her, held out his arm, and clasped her hand in his. “Are we teaching the machines how to be emotional?”
She shook her head. “I doubt it. Perhaps we’re just reading into its statements what we want to hear.”
His head sinking low with thought, Ignatiev returned Gita to the couch and they sat together, side by side.
“One thing is apparent,” he said, gazing into her deep brown eyes. “It didn’t forbid us from setting up shielding generators.”
“It didn’t have to,” Gita pointed out. “The machines won’t let us move people or equipment from Intrepid to the planet’s surface. That’s a nonstarter.”
“Is it?” he wondered. “Somehow I get the impression that they want to see how far we’ll go with this scheme.”
Her face brightening, Gita asked, “Could they be testing us?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
For a silent several moments Ignatiev and Gita stared at each other, each locked in their private thoughts.
“Testing us,” Ignatiev repeated at last. “Why? What would be the point?”
“To see how far we’re willing to go to save the biosphere up on the surface.”
“And ourselves.”
“That too,” she said.
Ignatiev mulled over the idea. Testing us, he thought. Trying to discover how determined we are. How an emotion-driven intelligence reacts to dealing with a totally emotionless machine entity.
“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “this is their way of studying us.”
“Studying us?”
“There’s one way to find out,” he said.
“How?”
Ignatiev called, “Aida, please call Jugannath Patel.”
The artificial intelligence did not reply. But Patel’s delicate, moist-eyed features took form in the holographic viewer above the fireplace. From what Ignatiev could see, the young man was at a workbench, surrounded by electronic equipment in various stages of disassembly.
“Professor Ignatiev!” Patel said, obviously surprised. “You have established contact with us.”
Matter-of-factly, Ignatiev replied, “The machines have apparently relented, a bit.”
“I am very glad to see you. I find it very difficult to have a true conversation with you at the committee meetings.�
��
Ignatiev nodded, knowing that he was in for god knows how long a palaver with the head of the digital technology team. So he sat and listened patiently while Juga talked and talked. Gita got up from the couch and headed to the kitchen. Patel spoke of his frustration at the machines’ cutoffs of communications between Intrepid and the team on the ground.
“Except for the committee meetings we have not been able to communicate with you. This is very frustrating. Very frustrating indeed.”
Ignatiev nodded sympathetically and tried to smile as Patel chattered on about his frustrations. Gita came back from the kitchen with two cups of hot tea and handed one to Ignatiev while Patel continued reciting his aggravations.
Ignatiev sipped at the nearly scalding tea, then broke into Patel’s monologue.
“Juga, we don’t know how long the machines will allow us to communicate like this.”
The younger man nodded vigorously. “That is why—”
“I need your help. Immediately.”
Patel seemed to sit up straighter. “My help? Of course. Anything. What can I do?”
Swiftly, Ignatiev outlined his plan to bring shielding generators to the surface of Oh-Four. The Punjabi’s eyes widened as he realized what the professor was proposing.
“Bring the generators down to the surface? Emplace them in the locations that the planetologists have selected? Will the machines allow that?”
Smiling guardedly at Patel, Ignatiev replied, “We won’t know until we try it.”
“But such an effort will require several shuttle missions from Intrepid here in orbit to the ground. And landing teams of technicians to place the generators in their proper locations and turn them on.” Before Ignatiev could respond, Patel added, “And to test them.”
“It will be a considerable effort, I agree,” said Ignatiev. “Will you be willing to take the responsibility for managing the job?”
“Me? You want me to be in charge?”
“Yes. You.”
Patel’s big, liquid eyes went wider than ever. “But, Professor, I am only the head of the digital technology section.”
“You are a reliable and resourceful man,” Ignatiev answered. “I want you to run the operation.”
