Divergence a-3

by Tony Ballantyne

  Maurice and Edward watched it expectantly. Constantine had literally jumped from the hatch of the Uninvited in the direction of the Bailero —they had all watched him do so. They had seen him sailing through space, a black pressurized bag slung over his shoulder.

  “Here he comes,” said Kevin.

  The spotlight strengthened in intensity, and then Constantine rose up into the interior of the Bailero, arms outstretched. The robot must have had some sort of independent motor source, Maurice realized, for it changed direction in flight and then quickly dropped back down to the frost-patterned floor. Briskly, it walked towards them. It paused just at the foot of the ramp.

  Maurice gave Edward a nudge, and the young man extended his hand.

  “Welcome aboard.”

  “Glad to be on board,” said Constantine.

  Edward led the way up the ramp of the Eva Rye, past the entrance to the little hold and along the corridor towards the conference room.

  Judy and Saskia met them there.

  “I’m Constantine Storey,” the robot said. “Thank you for taking me on board.”

  “I’m Saskia. This is Judy.”

  The robot was fiddling with the seal of the black pressure bag. “I have your payment here,” he said. They all crowded a little closer as the robot struggled with the seal. His right hand was badly deformed, Maurice noticed; the three scars on his right-hand side were repeated on his lower arm. Maurice wondered what had happened to him.

  Eventually, the robot worked the seal open. He reached into the bag, feeling about for something. Whatever it was seemed to be moving.

  “What is it?” asked Edward. “What have you got in there?”

  “Something that the FE software thought you needed,” said Constantine. “I can sort of see why. We’re almost at Earth now.”

  “Good,” Judy said with quiet resignation. “I feel like I’ve been traveling there for the past ten years.”

  “Oh?” Constantine said. “I have been doing so for over a hundred. Ah, got it!”

  At last he had what he was searching for. But now something was climbing out of the bag by itself: dark brown and tan, first a paw emerged and waved itself in the air. The robot withdrew his hand fully, holding a furry bundle of white, brown, and tan.

  “It’s a kitten!” Saskia squealed excitedly.

  “Two kittens,” Constantine said as a second bundle, tabby this time, dropped from his bag to the ground and then eeled its way across the floor, ears down flat.

  “And what on earth are we going to do with them?” Maurice asked.

  “Stroke them, of course,” said Saskia. “They’re sweet!”

  constantine 6: 2252

  Everybody loves kittens.

  “I don’t,” said Maurice. “They smell, they make a mess, and what are they going to do on this spaceship anyway? It’s cruel to have them cooped up in here.”

  “They can hardly be described as cooped up,” said Judy, waving her hand to indicate the enormous space of the hold. She was sitting cross-legged on the rubber floor, smiling as she dragged a length of silk ribbon back and forth for the patchwork kitten to chase. Its supple, darting movements contrasted with the plodding of the two colossal venumbs seen in the distance at the far end of the hold. The polished wood of their bodies looked like bone. Behind them lay the shuttle on which Judy had been sent from the Free Enterprise . A low, sleek arrow with six seats on board, and space for little else. Constantine’s derm was half ripped away from the right side of his body. His head was a dented metal shell from which two eyes stared, his whole right side was badly scarred, his right arm still had only restricted movement. Even so, he felt a less damaged individual than the crew of the Eva Rye . Look at poor Edward, he thought, always on the defensive. Always trying to understand .

  “Anyway, they can catch mice,” he was saying, his eyes drawn enviously back to the tabby kitten that Saskia was rubbing behind the ears.

  “We don’t have any mice,” Maurice said. “We’re on a spaceship.”

  “They might come on board with the cargo,” Saskia said contentedly. Her smile did not waver as the kitten wriggled free of her grasp and dropped to the floor. Edward reached for it, but naturally it headed straight for Maurice, the cat hater.

  “Yes, mice might indeed try to come aboard,” Maurice said, kicking out at the kitten: it mewed and pattered away across the dark rubber of the floor. “And they would fail in the attempt as the ship’s manifest net would detect and eject them.”

  The kitten took one look at Constantine, mewed again, and ran for the far end of the hold towards the great wooden venumbs.

  “Do you always snipe at each other like this?” Constantine asked.

  “Oh, no,” Saskia said seriously, “we used to be a lot worse.”

  Maurice gave him a sharp look. “Are you laughing at us?”

  “Honestly, no! I think it’s good that a crew about to cross into Earth’s solar system can be so relaxed about it.”

  “That’s because there’s precious little else we can do about our present circumstances,” Saskia said.

  “You know, I think we should call that one Paws.” She pointed to the remaining kitten, and the group paused to watch it spread wide its little white paws before swiping in an attempt to catch the ribbon.

  “Look how she uses them like little hands.”

  “We can still make a plan,” Edward said earnestly, turning to face Constantine. “That’s why we’re here.”

  There was a creaking sound from the far side of the large hold as one of the huge wooden shapes slowly turned in a circle, apparently looking for something. Constantine wondered where they had originated. He had never seen venumbs that size before. Wooden skeletons: they would have to be carved from tree trunks to be so big. Beautiful white ash, planed into smooth curves that bent and flexed as the monsters pressed their splaying feet down on the floor. Incredibly shiny joints flashing in the antiseptic light. But what were they doing on board this ship?

  “Plan to do what?” Maurice asked bitterly. “The ship lands on Earth. The Watcher has us under its gaze. We never get away. Period.” He sighed. “What do you suggest we do?”

  “We should listen to Edward,” interrupted Saskia. “That’s what the Stranger recommended, and I for one think that’s right.”

  Maurice pressed his mouth tightly shut. Constantine ignored him. The wooden monster was coming closer. It didn’t have a head, just a long neck made of white wooden vertebrae strung together by chrome.

  “Okay,” Maurice said stubbornly. “Edward, tell us, what should we do?”

  Edward looked puzzled at Maurice’s question. “I don’t know,” he said, frowning. “That’s why I think we should make a plan.”

  Judy let go of the ribbon and climbed to her feet. The air was cold in the large hold, sharp like a winter’s morning. Constantine had possessed lungs once; he could imagine what it was like to breathe the air of the hold, to feel it light him up, bright and alive.

  “I think Edward has got the right idea,” Judy said briskly. “Look at us. We’ve already spent too long just letting events buffet us around.”

  “Look at us ?” said Maurice. “Since when were you part of the crew?”

  “That’s not very nice, Maurice.” Edward placed a big hand on Judy’s shoulder. “Judy is our friend. Go on, Judy.”

  “Not just me. Aren’t we forgetting somebody?” Judy said. “You’ve agreed to take Constantine to Earth, too.”

  All the faces swung towards Constantine. Why were they all so pale? Except for Edward, of course. Did they realize they were all so black-and-white? Just like this ship, of course. Someone was playing games here….

  “Yes,” Maurice said. “Why exactly do you want to go to Earth?”

  Constantine had been waiting for this question.

  “Because I have a message for the Watcher,” he replied.

  Constantine Storey didn’t mind the rain. Up here in the mountains the spaces defined between the
sheer peaks and rough-hewn walls seemed to be completed by the lashing downpour. Or at least that’s what Constantine thought.

  But what does it mean to think? he wondered. No one else came up here amongst the newly born peaks, raw and cracked and splintered and perpetually washed with cold rain. No other mind, so far as he knew, had ever looked upon the hidden valleys, had climbed the columns that rose up here, pressed against the sky.

  Coldness, wetness, the feeling of vertigo from clinging to harsh rock and looking down into the pitiless depths below, all of these things were just random patterns that fluttered through the currents of his mind.

  …and if those thoughts were to cease?

  He stepped from the ledge and began the long fall into the shadows. The feel of the downpour lessened on his back as the speed of his descent approached that of the raindrops around him. He waved his arms and fancied he could touch the individual drops that hung in the darkness around him. There is a pattern to these drops, he thought, defined by their size and purity and their distance between each other. The pattern is affected by wind resistance and minute changes in air pressure, even the increasing effect of gravity as they grow closer to the planet. Weyl and Ricci distortion. There is a pattern here that is probably unique throughout the universe…and when they hit the rocks below, that unique pattern will be lost and no one will mourn its passing.

  Buffeted by wind and rain, his body reached terminal velocity. Shadows raced upwards around him, the pale moon lost high above.

  And yet, when I hit the ground, what would people mourn? Not the loss of my body but rather the unique pattern that represented my thoughts; the potential which that unique pattern had to go on unfolding, to become me. What is the difference between the pattern of my mind and the pattern of the rain? At what point does a pattern assume significance? At what point can it be labeled thought? Maybe tonight I will have the answer.

  But not by dying.

  Constantine Storey was a human mind alive in a robot’s body. At one point in his life, the unique pattern that had been his self at that moment in time—burning brightly amongst the neurons of his brain—had been carefully lifted from his head and dropped into a processing space within a robot’s body. Virtual neurons had gone on firing, following in the unfolding symbolic series that his human brain had defined, and a new Constantine had come into being. Only this Constantine was alive in an enhanced body.

  He allowed the reflexes of his new body to take over, and he reveled in the sensation of becoming a superman.

  A sheer cliff face approached in the darkness, steeply angled. Robot legs kicked out and changed his angle of descent, increasing the horizontal component of his motion. Constantine held his arms wide as he dived across a narrow valley. Hands slammed onto a ledge, cracking rock, pushing him forwards and onwards, absorbing some of his downward velocity. He rolled down another slope, shedding more speed, then he jumped through the downpour, aiming for the knife edge of rock that stretched between two peaks.

  He kicked out once, twice, three times, pushing himself back and forth between rocky walls, and landed lightly at his target, knees flexing to absorb the remaining energy of his fall. He gazed out towards the ziggurat that lay on the plain beyond the mountains. Something was awakening inside it.

  In the hold, one of the wooden venumbs was approaching. Constantine thought it looked as if it was sniffing for something; it put him in mind of a dog scenting trouble. The rest of the crew seemed

  unconcerned, and he continued with his story.

  Constantine had been led to believe there were possibly three ways intelligence could arise. The first two methods were generally accepted as having been convincingly proven. Intelligence could appear as the result of evolution. Human intelligence was an example of this. Second, intelligence could be written. The AIs of Earth did this all the time, writing new minds to order, minds to fill spaceships and robots and Von Neumann Machines. Could I write a mind? Could I sit down and describe a scene, a thought and an emotion so well that it took life on the page? No, the page is not a suitable medium to allow movement, and this language is too ambiguous and overblown to capture the simplicity of the underlying mechanism of thought. Constantine had once been told that a mind was a sentence that could read itself. A book might have thoughts written within it, but something external had to be applied to the book in order to read the words. But what if words could be written in some medium that allowed the words to take on a life of their own and refer back to themselves? What if the instructions telling the book how to read itself were also written in the book itself?

  The periphery of the rainstorm was at the edge of the mountains. Constantine stood at the borderline of the storm, seemingly at the edge of a new world. Down there, on that dry, sleeping plain, something wonderful was awakening. The ancient machinery that filled the stone halls of the ziggurat had lain in wait for nearly forty years. A baited trap. Something was beginning to move in there. Patterns rippled through the many-dimensional volumes enclosed by the processing spaces, repeating themselves, reflecting, constructing new patterns…

  A third possible way that intelligence could arise had also been postulated: divine intervention. A dizzying feeling gripped Constantine at the enormity of what he was witnessing. This was what the Watcher believed: it believed itself to be the result of an interstellar computer virus, written long ago. It had set up the ziggurat on this forgotten planet in order to test this theory. It had filled the ziggurat with ancient machinery, hoping to catch the virus there. Constantine had been brought to this planet by the Watcher in order to observe what happened there. A suitable vessel had been left open under the vast star-lit night, and Constantine had been charged with waiting for something to pour down from the unguessed heavens and fill it with the spirit.

  And, unbelievably, it was happening now. The event that Constantine had not really believed would happen, the one he had waited nearly forty years to observe—and it was happening. Something was straining within the ziggurat, something was straining to be. A thread was blowing back and forth across the ranks of symbols aligned in the processing spaces that filled the building. If the Watcher’s theory were correct, then the same virus that had caused the Watcher to be born would now be taking root in the ziggurat.

  Constantine had robot eyes; he was looking straight into the processing spaces. He jumped. Something was looking back at him: eyes, unaware of themselves, receptors for the patterns that flickered across them from outside.

  Constantine stepped from the rainfall into the still night beyond. He descended the mountainside, preparing to receive the message that would be carried to humanity. A low growl sounded. It began to climb in pitch. It was joined by another, and another. Sirens began to sound, rising howls in the night that sent the sleeping colonists tumbling from their beds. Arc lights slammed on and the sides of the ziggurat were lit up in red and yellow. The ziggurat was armed—Constantine felt a hollowness inside at the thought. This was the secret pain he had carried inside himself for the past forty years. The Watcher wanted proof, not competition. The Watcher controlled a vast area of space; it did not want a challenger for its domain. There was a bomb in the ziggurat….

  Judy gasped.

  “What is it?” asked Constantine.

  “Nothing,” said Judy. “Go on…”

  Random symbols emerged from the processing space. They carried the edge of meaning

  …Would you like to engage…

  Constantine could see what was forming in there. But it was not at all what he had expected…

  The siren’s note changed and horror lanced through him. No! He had to stop it. This was not what anyone had expected. He began to run across the plain. It was too far…

  …and a magnetic pulse washed across the night. The howl of the sirens rattled and died. Motors stopped. Constantine only just got his own shields up in time to save his mind. But the rest of his body caught the full force of the pulse…

  The rest of the crew were t
oo busy gazing at Constantine to notice the way the venumbs were moving about.

  “What happened?” pressed Saskia.

  “Should they be doing that?” Constantine asked, pointing to the white body of one of the great wooden dinosaurs. It was twisting around on itself, almost overbalancing.

  “They’re fine,” Maurice said, not bothering to look. “Answer her.”

  Constantine shrugged. “Okay. We killed it. The Watcher killed it. Once it had proof of its theory, it killed that being.”

  “But why?”

  “I told you, it didn’t want competition. Look at the Enemy Domain. That was a result of the rise of another AI. The Watcher didn’t want a repeat of that conflict. It doesn’t trust other powerful AIs.”

  “That’s a good excuse,” Maurice muttered sarcastically.

  “What happened to you ?” Saskia asked, ignoring the interruption.

  “The colonists found me three days later. I was half buried in mud, my body completely shut down, most of the circuits tripped by the magnetic pulse. The colonists argued for a whole day about whether they should jump-start me. They were angry about what had happened to them, feeling as if they had been tricked, and indeed they had been. The Watcher’s scheming had left them marooned on a planet where nothing now worked. All their machinery was ruined.”

  Constantine had worked long and hard himself to build that colony. The memory of a Geep, half submerged in the mud, its motor beyond repair, rose up in his mind.

  “But they obviously got you started in the end,” Maurice was saying.

  “Yes, they started me in the end.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  There was an edge to Judy’s voice that none of them had heard from her before. She had folded her arms across her chest, and there was a haunted look in her eyes.

  “Are you okay, Judy?” Edward asked hesitantly.

  She didn’t appear to hear him.

  “Why are you here, Constantine?” Judy shouted. “What happened to you? What did you see inside that ziggurat?”

  Constantine patted her arm. Then Maurice and the rest of the crew looked on in astonishment as the robot placed a plastic hand behind her head and drew her close in a gentle embrace. “You knew, Judy, didn’t you? You knew about the ziggurat.”