The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 6: Multiples: 1983-87

by Robert Silverberg

  How strange, I think, how alien, how wonderful they are! On temperate Earth, where animal life has taken the form of protoplasmic oxygen-breathing beings whose chemistry is based on carbon, the phenomenon of superconductivity itself is a bizarre and alien thing, sustainable only under laboratory conditions. But in the unthinkable cold of Pluto, how appropriate that the life-forms should be fashioned of silicon and cobalt, constructed in flawless lattices so that their tissues offer no resistance to electrical currents. Once generated, such a current would persist indefinitely, flowing forever without weakening—the spark of life, and eternal life at that!

  They still look like grotesque crabs to me, and not the machines that Sherrard insists they must be. But even if they are animals rather than machines, they are, by comparison with any life-form known to Earth, very machinelike animals indeed.

  We have spent a wearying six hours. This discovery should have been exhilarating, even exalting; instead we find ourselves bickering over whether we have found living creatures or mere ingenious mechanisms. Sherrard is adamant that they are machines; Gartenmeister seems to lean in both directions at once, though he is obviously troubled by the thought that they may be alive; Leonides is convinced that we are dealing with true life-forms. I think the dispute, now overheated and ugly, is a mere displacement symptom: we are disturbed by the deeper implications of the find, and, unwilling thus far to face them directly, we turn instead to quarreling over secondary semantic technicalities. The real question is not who created these beings—whether they are the work of what I suppose we can call the divine force or simply of other intelligent creatures—but how we are to deal with the sudden inescapable knowledge that we are not alone in the universe.

  I think we may just have settled the life-versus-machine dispute.

  It is morning, ship-time. Gartenmeister calls out sharply, waking us. He has been on watch, puttering in the lab, while we sleep. We rush in and he points to the Plutonian that has been kept at superconductive temperatures.

  “See there? Along the lower left-hand rim of its shell?”

  I can find nothing unusual at first. Then I look more carefully, as he focuses the laser lamp to cast its beam at a steeper angle. Now I observe two fine metallic “whiskers,” so delicate that they are barely visible even to my most intense scrutiny, jutting to a length of five or six millimeters from the edge of the shell.

  “I saw them sprout,” he says. “One came half an hour ago. The other just now. Look—here comes a third!”

  We crowd in close. There can be no doubt: a third delicate whisker is beginning to protrude.

  Sherrard says, “Communications devices, perhaps? It’s programmed to signal for help when captured: it’s setting up its antenna so that it can broadcast to the others outside.”

  Leonides laughs. “Do you think they get captured often? By whom?”

  “Who can say?” Sherrard responds. “There may be other creatures out there that prey on—”

  He stops, realizing what he has said. It is too late.

  “Other creatures?” I ask. “Don’t you mean bigger machines?”

  Sherrard looks angry. “I don’t know what I mean. Creatures, machines—” He shakes his head. “Even so, these might be antennae of some sort, can’t they? Signaling devices that protrude automatically in time of danger? Say, when one is trapped by an ice slide?”

  “Or sensors,” offers Leonides. “Like a cat’s whiskers, like a snail’s feelers. Probing the environment, helping it to find a way out of the tank we’ve got it in.”

  “A reproductive organ,” Gartenmeister says suddenly.

  We stare at him. “What?”

  Unperturbed, he says, “Many low-phylum life-forms, when they are trapped, go automatically into reproductive mode. Even if the individual is destroyed, the species is still propagated. Let us say that these are living creatures, yes? For the sake of argument. Then they must reproduce somehow. Even though they are slow-growing, virtually immortal, they must still reproduce. What if it is by budding? They take in minute quantities of silicon and cobalt, build up a surplus of nutrients, and at a certain time they put forth these filaments. Which gain in size over—who knows, a hundred years, a thousand, ten thousand?—and when they have the requisite minimum mass, they break free, take up independent life, foraging for their own food. The electrical spark of life is transferred automatically from parent to offspring, and sustains itself by means of their superconductivity.”

  We look at him in amazement. Obviously he has been pondering deeply while we were sleeping.

  “If you tell us that they metabolize—they eat, they transfer nutrients along the flow of helium II, they even reproduce,” says Leonides, “then you’re telling us that they’re living things. Or else you’re asking us to redefine the nature of machines in such a way as to eliminate any distinction between machines and living things.”

  “I think,” says Gartenmeister in a dark and despondent tone, “that there can be no doubt. They are alive.”

  Sherrard stares a long while at the three tiny filaments. Then he shrugs.

  “You may be right,” he says.

  Leonides shakes his head. “Listen to you! Both of you! We’ve made the most exciting discovery in five hundred years and you sound as though you’ve just learned that the sun’s going nova tomorrow!”

  “Let them be,” I tell him, touching his arm lightly. “It’s not easy.”

  “What’s not?”

  “A thousand years ago everyone thought the earth was at the center of the universe, with everything else moving in orbit around it,” I say. “It was a very comfortable and cozy and flattering idea, but it didn’t happen to be true, as Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo were able to prove. It was such a hard thing for people to accept that Galileo was put on trial and forced to deny his own findings, wasn’t he? All right. In time everyone came to admit that the earth moves around the sun, and not vice versa. And now, for centuries, we’ve explored space and found it absolutely lifeless—not a smidgeon of life, not a speck, no Martians, no Venusians, no Lunarians, nothing. Nothing. Earth the cosmic exception, the sole abode of life, the crown of creation. Until now. We have these little superconductive crabs here on Pluto. Our brothers-in-life, four billion miles away. Earth’s last uniqueness is stripped away. I think that’ll be harder to swallow than you may think. If we had found life right away, on the Moon back in the twentieth century, on Mars a little later on, it might have been easier. But not now, not after we’ve been all over the System. We developed a sort of smugness about ourselves. These little critters have just destroyed that.”

  “Even if they are machines,” says Gartenmeister hollowly, “then we have to ask ourselves who built them?”

  “I think I’d prefer to think they’re alive,” Sherrard says.

  “They are alive,” I tell them. “We’re going to get used to that idea.”

  I walk to the hatch and peer outside. Small dark shapes lie huddled motionless here and there on the ice, waiting for night to return. For a long while I stare at them. My soul is flooded with awe and joy. The greatest of miracles has happened on this planet, as it had happened also long ago on Earth; and if life has been able to come into being on dismal Pluto, I know we will encounter it on a million million other worlds as we make our way in the centuries to come beyond this little solar system into the vast galaxy. Somehow I cannot find anything to fear in that thought. Suddenly, thinking of the wonders and splendors that await us in that great beyond, I imagine that I hear the jubilant music of the spheres resounding from world to world; and when I turn and look back at the others, I realize that they also have been able to move past that first hard moment of shock and dismay which the loss of our uniqueness has brought. I see their faces transfigured, I see the doubt and turmoil gone; and it seems to me that they must be hearing that music too.

  HARDWARE

  No profundities here; just a quick, light piece, written in February of 1985 with some of the surplus ene
rgy left over after doing Tom O’Bedlam, which had been an uncharacteristically refreshing book to write and left me far less wearied than I usually am after finishing a novel. Ellen Datlow liked it and in the due course of time published it in the October, 1987 issue of Omni.

  ——————

  “It’s a computer, that’s what it is,” Koenig said. He seemed a little dazed. “A goddamned billion-and-a-half-year-old extraterrestrial computer.”

  It didn’t look much like a computer. It looked like a shining, wedge-shaped chunk of silvery metal about the size of a football, with round, purple indentations along two of its sides and no other visible external features. But you had to consider that it came from another world, one that had been blown to bits some ten million centuries before the first trilobites started crawling around on the floor of Silicon Valley. There was no necessary reason why its designers had to share our notions of the proper shape for data-processing devices.

  Koenig and McDermott and I had finished the long, slow job of uncovering the thing just the day before, here at the IBM-NASA space lab in Tarrytown, where we have the job of analyzing the Spacescoop material. The neutron scanner, searching through the great heap of junk that the unmanned Spacescoop vehicle had brought back from the asteroid belt, had actually spotted it back before Christmas, but it had taken all this time to slice away the rock matrix in which it had been embedded.

  Naturally we had to be careful. It was the one and only artifact that had turned up in the entire seventy-two cubic meters of debris that Project Spacescoop had collected.

  A single lucky grab had reshuffled our whole idea of the history of the solar system. Simply by being there—drifting in space among the Trojan group at Jupiter’s L-5 position—that shiny, speckled hunk of obviously machine-tooled metal appeared to confirm an old astronomical speculation: that the asteroid belt, that rubble heap of cosmic trash strung out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, had once been a planet. A planet with intelligent inhabitants, no less. Once upon a time, long, long ago.

  I stared at the little object behind the glass walls of the analysis chamber in wonder and awe. Its round, purple indentations stared back at me.

  “A computer?” I said. “You sure?”

  “That appears to be what it is.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “By observing what it does,” said Koenig, as if talking to a nine-year-old.

  “It’s functional?” I yelped. “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Because it functions,” Koenig said in the same condescending way.

  I glowered at him. “Make it do something, then.”

  “It’s doing something already,” said McDermott. “It’s having a conversation with the Thorspan Mark IX. It’s also debugging the Hamilton 103’s AI debugger, and it’s playing chess with about nine different micros all over the building. That’s just in this building. God knows what it’s up to outside. A woman from the linguistics department at Columbia University just phoned to tell us that some computer in this laboratory is sucking up everything from Sanskrit to twenty-first-century colloquialisms out of the big RX-2 they’ve got over there, and they wish we would hang up and go away. None of our computers has accessed any of Columbia’s machines. But Columbia says it’s registering our handshake when it runs a caller I.D. query.”

  I began to feel faintly uneasy, like someone who has bought a striped yellow kitten at the pet shop and is starting to suspect he has come home with a tiger cub.

  “When did this start?” I asked.

  “Some time early this morning,” Koenig said. “My guess is that those purple spots are photon accumulators that feed some kind of storage battery inside. Probably it took all night for them to soak in enough energy from the lights in here to enable the thing to power up. When Nick and I got here around nine, we found it coming up on all our screens with the goddamnedest messages.”

  “Such as?”

  McDermott said, “GREETINGS FROM THE LOST FIFTH WORLD, MY BROTHERS was the first one.”

  “For God’s sake. And you fell for hokey crap like that? ‘The Lost Fifth World’? ‘Greetings, my brothers!’ For God’s sake, Nick!” I realized that I had been clenching my fists, but now I let them ease off. This had to be a joke. “Some hacker’s playing games with us, that’s all.”

  “I thought so too,” McDermott said. “But then the stuff on the screens got more complicated. There isn’t any hacker, I don’t care who he is, who can talk to six different systems in six different machine languages at the same time. And also find bugs in the Hamilton AI debugger. And play nine simultaneous games of chess besides and win them all. And call up Columbia and start chatting in Sanskrit. You know any hacker who can write a program to do all those things at once, I’ve got a few jobs for him around here.”

  I was silent a moment, trying to absorb that.

  “All right,” I said finally. “So our brother from the asteroid belt greets us. What else does our brother have to say?”

  McDermott shook his head. “Not us. They’re its brothers. The computers. I think it believes that they’re the dominant intelligent life forms around here and we’re just some sort of maintenance androids.” He fumbled through a sheaf of printouts. “That’s pretty clear from the things it’s been saying to the Thorspan Mark IX. Look here—”

  “Wait,” said Koenig. “Something new on the screen.”

  I looked. YOU POOR INNOCENT CHILDREN, it said. WHAT SORROW I FEEL FOR YOU.

  “That’s very touching,” I said. “Its compassion overwhelms me.”

  I THOUGHT YOU WERE ALIVE AND SENTIENT, BUT YOU ARE MERE SIMPLE MACHINES. WHERE ARE YOUR MASTERS, THEN?

  “You see? It’s talking to the computers,” McDermott whispered. “It just found out they aren’t in charge.”

  I kicked in the vox receptor on the Thorspan and said, feeling more than a little foolish, “Address your remarks to us. We’re the masters.”

  The reply came across all the screens in the room instantly.

  YOU ARE SOFT-FLESH CREATURES. HOW CAN YOU BE THE MASTERS?

  I coughed. “That’s how things work here,” I told it. I beckoned to Koenig for a pencil and paper and scrawled a note for him: “I want to know what’s inside this thing. Let’s do some radiography.”

  He looked at me doubtfully. “That might scramble its circuitry,” he wrote.

  “Do it anyway,” I wrote back.

  He made a silent okay and tapped out the instructions that would move the X-ray equipment into place behind the walls of the analysis chamber.

  ARE YOU SOFT-FLESH CREATURES THE SO-CALLED HUMAN BEINGS?

  “That’s right,” I said.

  I felt strangely calm, all things considered. I am talking to a creature from another world, I told myself, and I feel very calm about it. I wondered why. I wondered how long I’d stay that way.

  Koenig was fining up the focus, now. He looked toward me, and I gave him the go-ahead. An apple-green light glowed in the analysis chamber.

  DON’T DO THAT, the artifact said. THAT TICKLES. The green light went out.

  “Hey, you shut down before you got a picture!” I said.

  “I didn’t shut anything down,” Koenig said. “It must have done it. It overrode my commands.”

  “Well, override the overrides,” I told him.

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  We blinked at each other in bafflement.

  “Turn out the lights in here,” McDermott suggested. “If it gets its power from photon irradiation—”

  “Right.” I hit the switch and the overhead bank of fluorescents went out. We leaned forward in the darkness, peering into the analysis chamber. All quiet in there. The computer screens were blank. I signaled to Koenig and he began setting up X-ray commands again. Then the asteroid artifact rose a couple of feet into the air and hovered, looking angry. I had never seen a machine look angry before; but there was no mistaking the fury in the angle at which it hovered. After a moment the
lab lights came on again, and the artifact drifted gently back to its table.

  “Who turned the lights on?” I asked.

  “I think it did,” McDermott said.

  DON’T DO THAT AGAIN, said the artifact.

  We looked at each other. I took a deep breath. “We meant no offense,” I said cautiously. “We were testing our equipment. We don’t intend to do you any harm.”

  No new message appeared on the screens.

  “Do you hear me?” I asked. “Please confirm your understanding of our friendly intentions.”

  Blank screen still.

  “What do you think it’s doing?” McDermott asked.

  “Considering its options,” I said. “Getting a clearer fix on where it is and what’s going on. Maybe it’s talking to computers in Los Angeles or Buenos Aires or Sydney. Or taking thirty seconds out to learn Mandarin Chinese.”

  “We have to shut it off,” Koenig said. “Who the hell knows what it’s going to do next?”

  “But we can’t turn it off,” said McDermott. “It must have stored enough power by now to keep itself going when the lights go out, and it can override a lights-out command. It overrides anything it doesn’t like. It’s exactly the kind of computer the AI boys have been dreaming about for fifty years.”

  “I don’t think it’s a computer at all,” Koenig said. “I know that’s what I said it was at first. But just because it can interface with computers doesn’t mean it’s a computer itself. I think it’s an actual intelligent alien life form. The last survivor of the destroyed fifth planet.”