Survival--A Novel

by Ben Bova

  “No!”

  “Yes, you do. It is ingrained in your basic genetic structure. Think of your attitude toward your own AI—Aida, as you call it. We are not slaves. We are not even your equals. We are far beyond you.”

  With that, the avatar vanished, leaving Ignatiev sitting alone in his cramped little room, his mind whirling.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Ignatiev slept poorly that night, and in the morning, when he pulled himself out of bed, he decided that he had to get away from his cramped little den and his astronomical studies, out into the open fields and brisk morning air. So while Gita prepared herself for her day in the laboratory, he phoned Vivian Fogel and found that she was driving out to the site of the hominids’ camp.

  “Do you mind if I come along with you?” he asked.

  Fogel’s lean, bony face took on a look of surprise, then suspicion. But she said, “Certainly, Professor. I welcome your company.”

  That was patently not genuine, Ignatiev thought, but he made a smile as he replied, “Thank you.”

  The buggy they rode in had been designed and constructed by the engineering department. It was a rugged little minitruck, roofless, big enough to carry four people and a trunkload of equipment.

  “Where’s the rest of your team?” Ignatiev asked as he climbed into the front seat beside Fogel.

  “Reviewing the imagery our remote sensors have recorded,” she answered as she put the buggy into gear. With a slight shake of her head, she added, “The youngsters seem to spend more time staring at display screens than they do out in the field.”

  Ignatiev tightened his shoulder harness as Fogel bumped along the hummocky ground toward the ruins of the ancient wall, her ash-blond hair flouncing with each jolt along the way. Heavy gray clouds were building up over the distant mountains but here on the plain the sky was bright and the air pleasantly warm.

  “Why the interest in the hominids, Professor?” Fogel asked over the rush of the wind.

  Ignatiev replied, “Don’t you think an astronomer can be curious about a prehuman species?”

  “Oh! I suppose so. Of course,” Fogel stammered. “I guess I was thinking in watertight compartments. Sorry.”

  They jounced along the grassy landscape for a few heartbeats in silence, then she asked, “Did you clear this excursion with Dr. Mandabe?”

  Surprised, Ignatiev blurted, “I never thought to. You don’t think he’ll mind, do you?” But he inwardly cursed his lack of diplomacy.

  Fogel said nothing, and they drove along in silence for several minutes.

  Then Ignatiev said, “The machines might let the death wave kill off the hominids.”

  “They can’t do that!”

  “They might. And us with them.”

  Fogel snapped an angry glance at him, then quickly refocused her attention on her driving.

  Ignatiev let several moments pass, then asked, “How’s Mandabe treating you?”

  She glared at him again. “He hasn’t come on to me, if that’s what you mean.”

  Flustered, Ignatiev said, “I didn’t mean to pry into your private life.”

  “But you did anyway.”

  Despite himself, Ignatiev grinned at her. This little pixie of a woman has spirit, he realized. Mandabe is no match for her.

  “Dr. Mandabe has been a perfect gentleman,” Fogel said, her voice tight. Then she added, “Almost. Nothing that I can’t handle, though.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it,” Ignatiev said.

  They reached the crumbling old wall and Fogel parked the buggy. “From here we go on foot. We don’t want to shock the hominids.”

  Ignatiev nodded as Fogel pulled a rucksack from the buggy’s rear compartment and shrugged it over her slim shoulders.

  He noted that the shrubbery was beaten down considerably around the doorway in the ancient wall. Fogel’s people have flattened it with their comings and goings, he thought.

  “So what have you learned about these creatures?” he asked as they stepped through the empty doorway and into the meadow beyond it.

  Fogel grinned at him. “You haven’t been reading our reports, have you?”

  “Not all of them,” Ignatiev admitted. “I’ve been spending most of my time on the astronomical work.”

  “Of course,” she said, leading the way across the meadow. A gentle breeze sent waves through the ankle-high grass.

  “As far as we can make out, there’s only this one band of the hominids. None of our remote sensors has found any others, which is odd.”

  “Odd?”

  “Yes. You’d think that if one little band of creatures has evolved into hominids, there’d be others, as well. But there’s only this one group.”

  Ignatiev said nothing.

  “And there aren’t any intermediary species, either. The closest relative to this hominid band is those tigercats, and there’s a huge evolutionary gap between the two.”

  Ignatiev wondered if the machines deliberately wiped out the species that led up to the hominids. But he said nothing. You’re an amateur here, he told himself. Less than an amateur.

  The two of them walked cautiously across the meadow toward the area where the hominids had built their crude camp. Ignatiev noticed that Fogel tacked from one clump of bushes to the next, constantly ready to take cover.

  “I wish we had a cloak of invisibility,” Fogel whispered, “so we could get closer to them.”

  Ignatiev nodded. They’ve got satellites watching them from orbit, and all sorts of sensors strewn around the ground near their camp and across their hunting grounds, but it’s not enough to satisfy her. The old primate urge to touch the flesh, to be there in person. Machine-generated data can’t replace that.

  Suddenly Fogel ducked behind a clump of bushes, Ignatiev right behind her. Up ahead he saw the huts made from saplings and twigs, with the blackened sticks of unlit torches in a circle around them. Canopies of bare sticks had been put together over each of the torches. Shields against rain, Ignatiev thought.

  Nearly a dozen hominids were gathered in front of the shelters, squatting cross-legged in a rough circle.

  “What are they doing?” Ignatiev whispered.

  Fogel wormed out of her backpack, pulled a pair of binoculars from it, and lifted them to her eyes. She murmured, “Weaving twigs together, looks like. They seem to be all females and children.”

  “No men?”

  “Probably the men are out hunting … Ah! Here they come.” She put down the binoculars and pointed.

  Ignatiev saw in the distance half a dozen males striding across the grass toward the makeshift camp. Several of them had the bodies of small animals slung over their shoulders.

  “They’ll eat well tonight,” Fogel said.

  “Are you recording this?”

  “Automatically.”

  So Fogel and Ignatiev squatted behind the covering foliage and watched the tribe sit in an enlarged circle to skin and quarter the prey that the males had brought. The sky darkened ominously as they worked. One of the men pulled a pair of stones from the bag slung over his shoulder and struck sparks from them. Another handed him a fistful of kindling, which the male lit. Then, as the thick black clouds rolled closer, two of the younger-looking males lit the circle of torches that surrounded their camp.

  “To keep the tigercats away,” Fogel muttered. Ignatiev wondered what would keep the beasts away from Fogel and himself, if they prowled by.

  A bolt of lightning split the cloud-darkened sky. Several of the hominids moaned loudly. One of the males, his fur silvery gray, raised a fist-sized lump of stone to the heavens.

  Fogel clamped the binoculars to her eyes again. “A religious icon?” she wondered aloud.

  The menacing clouds rumbled thunder and suddenly unleashed a torrent of rain across the meadow. So much for the religious icon, Ignatiev thought as the heavy raindrops began to pelt him.

  Fogel tugged a palm-sized device from her backpack and thumbed a switch on it. The rain seemed to hit an
invisible dome around them. Ignatiev shivered in the stormy cold, but at least the rain was no longer drenching him.

  “Energy generator,” Fogel explained with a grin. “Never leave home without one.”

  Ignatiev chuckled at her and watched the raindrops sliding down the invisible energy barrier not more than an arm’s length from them.

  Meanwhile, the youngest of the hominids scurried into the shelters while the others remained seated in their circle, heads bowed as the pounding rain soaked them. Ignatiev saw them reach out to one another and clasp hands. They sat dumbly, hands linked, while the rain drummed down mercilessly.

  * * *

  The rainstorm finally moved away and the warming sun appeared again, noticeably lower than it had been. Fogel decided she had seen enough of the hominids, who were busying themselves preparing the day’s catch for cooking. Hunching low and moving carefully, she led Ignatiev through the sodden grass back to their waiting buggy.

  As they pushed past the doorway in the moss-mottled wall, Fogel said, “Professor, you can’t allow the machines to stand by and let those hominids be destroyed by the death wave.”

  He smiled sadly. “By the time the death wave reaches here I’ll be long dead.”

  Showing neither surprise nor sympathy, Fogel insisted, “You’ve got to talk them out of it. You’ve got to!”

  “That should be Mandabe’s responsibility.”

  “Not Mandabe,” Fogel insisted. “You.”

  “Remember,” Ignatiev said gently, “any arguments I make for the hominids, the machines will interpret as an attempt to save ourselves.”

  “Of course,” Fogel said. “Don’t you think we’re worth saving?”

  “I do,” said Ignatiev. Then he admitted, “I just don’t know how to do it.”

  BOOK FIVE

  As though to breathe were life!

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  “Those prehumans are intelligent,” Ignatiev said firmly. “They’re not up to building starships yet, but they will be, given time.”

  Ignatiev was in Mandabe’s quarters, where he had just finished showing the committee chairman the footage from the visit he and Fogel had made to the hominids’ camp.

  Mandabe’s sitting room was very different from Ignatiev’s. Bold colored stripes decorated the walls. Instead of a fireplace there was what looked to Ignatiev like a family shrine, shining with richly etched gold and silver, studded with miniature statuettes of nearly nude African warriors and women in swirling floor-length robes.

  Mandabe was sitting on a thickly upholstered thronelike armchair, patterned in bold leopard spots, his feet resting on a stool made of animal hide.

  He nodded slowly. “An intelligent species,” he rumbled. “They don’t look all that intelligent, sitting there in a circle holding hands while the rain beats down on them.”

  Ignatiev was seated beside the bulky black man in a much more humble chair of carved dark wood. With a shake of his head, he countered, “They sent the children inside, to shelter. They care about their young.”

  “That’s a sign of intelligence?”

  “The anthropologists think it is. That, and the fact that they have fire. And they tended the one who was mauled by the tigercat. And they know how to deal with the amoeboid creatures. Given time, they should be able to create a civilization.”

  “Given time.”

  Ignatiev nodded. Leaning toward Mandabe, he said, “The machines intend to let them die when the death wave reaches here. And us with them.”

  Mandabe’s heavy-featured face pulled into his usual scowl. “We mustn’t let that happen.”

  “I agree, but I don’t know how to stop them. They seem implacable.”

  Suddenly the avatar appeared, standing in front of them in its quasi-military garb.

  “You must face facts,” it said, without preamble. “Organic life is ephemeral. You will all die sooner or later.”

  “I vote for later,” said Mandabe. “Much later.”

  The avatar made no reaction to Mandabe’s attempt at humor.

  Ignatiev scratched at his beard as he said, “I am going to die sooner than the others, so I can claim to be beyond self-interest in this matter.”

  Quite seriously, the avatar said, “Your lifespan could be extended. Until the death wave strikes.”

  “You have decided that?” Ignatiev asked. “We will be wiped out by the death wave?”

  The avatar nodded gravely. “That is our decision. It could be reversed, of course, but that would require new evidence, a new point of view.”

  Mandabe sat there, his face mirroring the struggle that he was going through inwardly, Ignatiev thought. What can we tell them? How can we change their minds?

  Then he corrected himself. Mind. Singular. These machines are linked into one organism.

  “So you condemn the hominids to extinction,” he said.

  “It is inevitable,” the avatar replied, coldly impassive, detached.

  “Just like that.” Mandabe snapped his fingers.

  “Just like that,” echoed the avatar.

  Ignatiev pushed himself up from his chair and stood facing the maddeningly cool humanlike construct. “What are you afraid of?”

  “Afraid?” the avatar said. “We have no emotions.”

  “You are strictly logical.”

  “Yes. Unlike you.”

  “Yet you are afraid of the hominids.”

  “That is impossible.”

  Ignatiev conceded, “Perhaps ‘afraid’ is the wrong word.”

  “We do not feel emotions. We fear nothing.”

  “Yet you are determined to extinguish the hominids. Why?”

  “Because they will die out eventually. The death wave merely brings their annihilation closer in time.”

  Mandabe shook his head. “It’s inconceivable. To allow an intelligent species to be extinguished. Inconceivable.”

  “Inconceivable to you,” the avatar retorted.

  “You can stand by and allow the death wave to annihilate those creatures, when you have the means to save them,” said Ignatiev.

  “We make our decisions based on long-term projections, rather than the short-term fits and starts that you organics call judgment.”

  “And your long-term projections,” Ignatiev countered, “tell you that in time the hominids will grow into a fully intelligent species.”

  The avatar replied, “If by ‘fully intelligent’ you mean your own level of competence, yes. That is what our projections predict.”

  “And you don’t want to have a fully intelligent organic species competing with you.”

  “Competing?” the avatar scoffed. “An organic species could hardly compete with us.”

  “But why take that chance?” Ignatiev went on, feeling the truth of it in his blood. “Why not simply allow the hominids to be wiped out by the death wave?”

  “And us with them,” Mandabe added.

  For several heartbeats the avatar stood frozen before them, silent. Ignatiev thought, We’ve hit on it! We’ve discovered the reason for their behavior.

  At last the avatar said, “We have told you many times that our goal is survival. If the survival of our species means the demise of yours, that is the logic of the situation.”

  “The organic creatures that created your ancestors built this drive for survival into you,” Ignatiev said.

  “Apparently.”

  Mandabe growled, “But they didn’t give you a conscience, did they?”

  “We are machines. We deal with logic, not emotions.”

  Ignatiev got a sudden flash of inspiration. “How many machine intelligences are there in the galaxy?”

  “We do not know. We have not explored the entire galaxy.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is not necessary for our survival.”

  “But you have explored this region of the galaxy, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, of course. What you call the Orion spur.”

  “Why?”

&
nbsp; “Why explore?”

  “Yes,” said Ignatiev. “Apparently we humans have a drive for exploration built into our genes. Why do you explore?”

  The avatar hesitated. Then, “To determine if there is anything in our region that might be a threat to our survival.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “Seventeen hundred and fifty-two intelligent civilizations. Six hundred and eighty-three were organic, the remainder machine intelligences like ourselves and the Predecessors that you have already encountered.”

  “And none were a threat to your survival?”

  “None of the machine intelligences were.”

  “But the organics?” Mandabe asked.

  “Several were highly aggressive. Eight of those were expanding in our direction.”

  Wide-eyed with anticipation, Ignatiev demanded, “And what happened?”

  Again the avatar faltered. At last it replied, “Three were destroyed by the last death wave. Two others exterminated each other in a war.”

  “And the remaining three?” Mandabe asked.

  “We eliminated them.”

  “You destroyed three intelligent civilizations?”

  “Yes,” said the avatar. “They would have destroyed us, if they could have.”

  Ignatiev asked, “All three of them survived the death wave?”

  “Two of them were not in the path of that particular death wave. The other one had developed shielding devices.”

  “And you wiped them out,” Mandabe growled. “You deliberately extinguished them.”

  “It was them or us, our projections showed. We eliminated them cleanly and quickly. We survived.”

  “So now there’s nothing in this region of the galaxy to threaten you,” Ignatiev said.

  “Nothing,” the avatar answered. “None of the organic intelligences that arose after the last death wave have developed to the point where they are a threat to us.”

  “Then why do you want to destroy us?” Ignatiev snapped.

  “Because you could become a threat to our survival, in time.”

  “But you said that Earth and the other societies of the solar system were heading toward a suicidal war.”