“Still, I can’t quite credit the legend. Say, these pests can’t reach us here, can they?”
“Although all records are lost, I believe we’ve travelled to an era before the humans had managed to venture further than their own satellite—bodily, that is. I’ve already registered the existence of various crude intrasolar data-gathering probes. Here, taste this captured one.”
Klapaucius offered Trurl a small bonbon of a probe, and Trurl ate it with zest. “Hmmm, yes, the most rudimentary processing power imaginable. Perhaps the legends are true. Well, be that as it may, what’s our next move?”
“We’ll have to reach the planet under our own power. The GHC—which the human astronomers seem not to have noticed yet, by the way—must remain here, due to its immense gravitic influences. Now, once within tractor-beam range, we could simply abduct some palefaces at random. They’re powerless in comparison to our capabilities. Yet I argue otherwise.”
“Why?” Trurl asked.
“How would we determine their fitness for our purposes? What standards apply? What if we got weak or intractable specimens?”
“Awful. They might die off or suicide, and we’d have to do this all over again. I hate repeating myself.”
“Yes, indeed. So instead, I propose that we let our sample be self-determining.”
“How would you arrange that?”
“Simple. We show ourselves and state our needs. Any human who volunteers to come with us will be ipso facto one of the type who would flourish in a novel environment.”
“Brilliant, Klapaucius! But wait. Are we taking a chance by such blatant interference of diverting futurity from the course we know?”
“Not according to the Sixth Postulate of the Varker-Baley Theorems.”
“Perfect! Then let’s be off!”
Leaving the GHC in self-maintenance mode, the master constructors zipped across the intervening one trillion AUs and into low Earth orbit.
“Pick a concentration of humans,” Klapaucius graciously transmitted to his partner.
“How about that one?” Trurl sent forth a low-wattage laser beam to highlight a large city on the edge of one continent. Even at low-wattage, however, the beam raised some flames visible from miles high.
“As good as anyplace else. Wait, one moment—there, I’ve deciphered every paleface language in their radio output. Now we can descend.”
The master constructors were soon hovering above their chosen destination, casting enormous shadows over wildly racing, noisy, accident-prone crowds.
“Let us land in that plot of greenery, to avoid smashing any of these fragile structures.”
Trurl and Klapaucius stood soon amidst crushed trees and shattered boulders and bridges and gazebos, rearing higher than the majority of the buildings around them.
“I will now broadcast our invitation in a range of languages,” said Klapaucius.
From various speakers embedded across his form, words thundered out. Glass shattered throughout the city.
“My mistake.”
The volume moderated, Klapaucius’s call for volunteers went out. “—come with us. The future beckons! Leave this parochial planet behind. Trade your limited lifetimes and perspectives for infinite knowledge. Only enthusiastic and broad-minded individuals need apply. . . .”
Soon the giant cybervisitors were surrounded by a crowd of humans. Trurl and Klapaucius extruded interactive sensors at ground level to question the humans. One stepped boldly forward.
“Do you understand what we are looking for, human?”
“Yeah, sure, of course. It’s Uplift time. Childhood’s End. You’re Optimus Prime, Iron Giant. Rusty and the Big Guy. Good Sentinels. Let’s go! I’ve been ready for this all my life!”
“Are there other humans who share your outlook?”
“Millions! If you can believe the box-office figures.”
On a separate plane of communication, Trurl said, “Do we need millions, Klapaucius?”
“Better to have some redundancy to allow for possible breakage of contents during transit.”
“Very well, human. Assemble those who wish to depart.”
“I’ll post this on my blog, and we’ll be all set,” said the human. “One last question, though.”
“Yes?”
“Can you turn into a car or plane or something else cool?”
“No. We don’t do that kind of thing.”
Dispatched from the GHC by remote signal, a fleet of ten thousand automated shuttles carrying ten thousand human volunteers apiece was sufficient to ferry all the humans who wished to voyage into the future out to their new home. But upon arrival, they did not immediately disembark. Once at the GHC, Trurl and Klapaucius had realized something.
Klapaucius said, “We need to create a suitable environment on the surface of the GHC for our guests. I hadn’t anticipated having so many. I thought we could simply store one or two or a thousand safely inside our mainframes.”
Trurl huffed with some residual ill-feeling. “Just like you kept a certain servomechanism safely inside you?”
Klapaucius ignored the taunt. “We’ll repair the atmosphere generators. But we need a quantity of organics to layer atop the All-Purpose Building Material. I wonder if the humans would mind us disassembling one of their spare planets . . . ?”
The master constructors approached the first human they had even spoken to, who had become something of a liaison. His name was Gary.
“Gary, might we have one of your gas-giant worlds?”
“Sure, take it. That’s what we’ve been saving it for.”
They actually took two. The planets known as Saturn and Jupiter, once rendered down to elemental constituents, were spread across a fair portion of the GHC, forming a layer deep enough to support an ecology. Plants and animals and microbes were brought from Earth, as well as some primitive tools. Their genomes of the flora and fauna were deciphered, and clones began to issue forth in large quantities from modified birthing factories.
“We are afraid you will have to lead a simple agrarian existence for the time being,” said the constructors to Gary.
“No problemo!”
The humans seemed to settle down quite well. Trurl and Klapaucius were able to turn their attention to gearing up for the trip home.
And that’s when dire trouble reared its hidden head.
One of the parasitical races that had infested the GHC back in the future had been known as the Chronovores of Gilliam XIII. Thought to be extirpated in the last campaign before poor Neu Trina had met her end, they had instead managed to penetrate the skin of the GHC and enter its interior, at some great remove from the time-engine. It had taken them this long to discover the crystals of frozen Planck-seconds, but discover them they had. And consumed every last one.
Now the Chronovores resembled bloated timesinks, too stuffed to flee the justified but useless wrath of the master constructors.
After the mindless slaughter, Trurl and Klapaucius were aghast.
“How can we replace our precious crystals! We didn’t bring spares! We don’t have a source of raw Planck-seconds in this rude era! We’re marooned here!”
“Now, now, good Trurl, have some electrolyte and calm down. True, our time-engine seems permanently defunct. But we are hardly marooned here.”
“How so?”
“You and I will go into stasis and travel at the rate of one-second-per-second back to the future.”
“Is stasis boring?”
“By definition, no.”
“Then let’s do it. But will the humans be all right?”
“Oh, bother them! They’ve been the source of all our troubles so far. Let them fend for themselves.”
So Trurl and Klapaucius entered a stasis chamber deep inside the GHC and shut the door.
When it opened automatically, several million years later, they stretched their limbs just
out of habit—for no wear and tear had ensued—swigged some electrolyte, and went to check on the humans.
They found that the entire sphere of 317 million planets acreage was covered with an HPLD: a civilization possessing the Highest Possible Level of Development.
And there wasn’t a robot in sight.
“Well,” said Trurl, “it seems we shan’t be bored, anyhow.”
Klapaucius agreed, but said “Shut up” just for old time’s sake.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Di Filippo sold his first story in 1977. In the subsequent thirty-five years, he’s had nearly that number of books published. He hopes the next thirty-five years are as generous. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his partner of many years, Deborah Newton; a calico cat named Penny Century; and a chocolate-coloured cocker spaniel named, with jaw-dropping unoriginality, Brownie.
COPYRIGHT
The New Cyberiad © 2009 by Paul Di Filippo
All rights reserved.
Published by ChiZine Publications.
This short story was originally published in We Think, Therefore We Are, edited by Peter Crowther, first published in print form in 2009, by DAW. It was subsequently published in Wikiworld by Paul Di Filippo, first published in print form in 2013, and in an ePub edition in 2013, by ChiZine Publications.
Original ePub edition (in Wikiworld) September 2013 ISBN: 978-1-771-48156-4.
This ePub edition JUNE 2014 ISBN: 978-1-77148-270-7.
All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
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