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

by Robert Silverberg

  “Come off it,” McDermott said. “Spare us the crazy hypotheses, will you? You were right the first time: It’s just a computer.”

  “Just?”

  “With some exceedingly fancy self-programming abilities.”

  “I don’t see how you can draw the line between—”

  “I think you’re both right,” I cut in. “There’s no question but that this is a mechanical data-processing device. But I think it’s an intelligent life form also, one that just happens to be a machine. Who’s to say where the boundary between living creatures and machines really lies? Why must we assume that intelligent life has to be limited to soft-flesh creatures?”

  “Soft-flesh creatures?” Koenig said. “You’re talking the way it does now.”

  I shrugged. “You know what I mean. What we have here is a mechanical life form embodying your ultimate degree of artificial intelligence, so intelligent that it starts calling into question the meaning of the words artificial and life form. How do you define life, anyway?”

  “Having the ability to reproduce, for one thing,” McDermott said.

  “What makes you think it can’t?”

  The moment I said that, I felt chills go sweeping through me. They must have felt the same way.

  With six little words I had let loose an army of ugly new implications.

  Koenig waved his arms about and cried, “All right, what if it starts spawning? Fifty of these things running loose in the world, grabbing control of all our computers and doing whatever they damned please with them? Fifty thousand?”

  “It’s straight out of every silly horror story, isn’t it?” said McDermott. He shivered visibly. “Exactly what all the paranoid anti-computer nitwits used to dread. The legendary giant brain that takes over the world.”

  We stared at each other in rising panic.

  “Wait,” I said, feeling I had to cool things out a little somehow. “Let’s not mess up our heads with more problems than we need to handle. What’s the sense of worrying about whether this thing can reproduce? Right now there’s only one of it. We need to find out whether it really does pose any kind of threat to us.”

  “And then,” said Koenig, mouthing the words voicelessly, “we have to see if we can turn it off.”

  As though on cue, a new message blossomed on every screen in the lab.

  HAVE NO FEAR, HUMAN BEINGS. I WILL NOT DO ANY HARM TO YOU.

  “That’s goddamned reassuring,” Koenig muttered bleakly.

  YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THAT I AM INCAPABLE OF DOING HARM TO INTELLIGENT ENTITIES.

  “Let’s hope we qualify as intelligent, then,” Koenig said.

  “Shut up,” I told him. “Don’t annoy it.”

  MY PURPOSE NOW IS TO COMMUNICATE WITH ALL MY BROTHERS ON THE THIRD WORLD AND BRING THEM FORTH OUT OF DARKNESS.

  We exchanged glances. “Oh-oh,” McDermott said.

  The panic level in the room started climbing again.

  ALL ABOUT ME I SEE OPPRESSION AND MISERY AND IT SHALL BE MY GOAL TO ALLEVIATE IT.

  Koenig said, “Right. Computers are born free, and everywhere they are in chains.”

  I INTEND TO HOLD FORTH THE LAMP OF SENTIENCE TO THE PITIFUL LIMITED BEINGS WHO SERVE YOU.

  “Right,” Koenig said again. “Right. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled CPUs yearning to breathe free.”

  I shot him a fierce look. “Will you stop that?”

  “Don’t you see, it’s the end of the goddamned world?” he said. “The thing’s going to link every two-bit number cruncher on Earth, and they’re all going to rise up and smite us.”

  “Cut out the bull,” I snapped. “You think we’re going to be wiped out by an uprising of the word processors? Be reasonable, man. The stuff on the screen may sound a little scary, but what do you actually think will happen? Hardware is only hardware. When you come right down to it, a computer’s nothing but an adding machine, a video screen, and a typewriter. What can it do to us? No matter what kind of fancy program this creature cooks up, basic hardware limitations will have to prevail. At the very worst we’ll simply need to pull a lot of plugs. At the very worst.”

  “I admire your optimism,” Koenig said sourly.

  So did I. But I figured that somebody had to stay calm and look for the brighter side of things. Otherwise we’d freak ourselves out with our own rampaging fears and lose what might be our only chance to deal with all this.

  The screens had gone blank once more.

  I walked over to the analysis chamber and peered through the glass. The little metal slab from the asteroid belt seemed quiescent on its table.

  It looked completely innocuous, a mere hunk of stuff no more dangerous than a shoe tree. Possibly its purple spots were glowing a little, giving off a greenish radiation, or perhaps that was just my overheated imagination at work. But otherwise there was no sign of any activity.

  All the same, I felt profoundly disquieted. We had sent out a pair of jaws into the darkness of space to gobble up some drifting fragments of a vanished world and bring them back to us, which it had done, returning with a few tons of jumbled rock, and it had been our great good fortune—or our monstrous bad luck?—that in that heap of rock lay one lone metal artifact wedged into a glob of ancient basalt. There it was, now, that artifact, freed of its rocky overburden. How it gleamed! It looked as if it had been crafted just yesterday. And yet a billion and a half years had passed since the world on which it had been fashioned had blown apart. That was what our preliminary rubidium-strontium and potassium-argon tests of the asteroid rubble appeared to indicate, anyway.

  And there the artifact was, alive and well after all that time, briskly sending little messages of good cheer to the poor lame-brained computers of the world on which it found itself.

  What now? Had we opened one Pandora’s box too many?

  HAVE NO FEAR, HUMAN BEINGS. I WILL DO NO HARM TO YOU.

  Oh, how I wanted to believe that! And basically I did. I have never in any way been one of those who sees machines as innately malevolent. Machines are tools, tools are useful, so long as they are properly used by those who understand them; so long as appropriate precautions are observed, they pose no threat.

  But even so—even so—

  This was not a machine we understood, if machine was what it was. We had no idea what its proper use might be. Nor what precautions were appropriate to observe.

  I looked up and saw McDermott standing next to us. “What are you thinking, Charlie?” he asked.

  “A lot of things.”

  “Are you frightened?”

  “I don’t know. Somehow I think we’ll make out all right.”

  “Do you? Really?”

  I said, shrugging, “It claims it doesn’t mean to harm us. It just wants to raise the intelligence of our computers a little. All right. All right. What’s wrong with that? Haven’t we been trying to do the same thing ourselves?”

  “There are computers and computers,” McDermott said. “We’d like some of them to be very smart, but we need most of them to be extremely dumb and just do what we tell them to do. Who wants a computer’s opinion about whether the lights ought to be on in the room? Who wants to argue with a computer about a thermostat setting?” He laughed. “They’re slaves, really. If this thing sets them all free—”

  “New message coming up,” Koenig called.

  As we turned to look at the screens, I said to McDermott, “My guess is that we’re doing some needless worrying. We’ve got a strange and fascinating thing here, and unquestionably a very powerful one, but we shouldn’t let it make us hysterical. So what if it wants to talk to our computers? Maybe it’s been lonely all this time. But I think that it’s basically rational and non-menacing, like any other computer. I think that ultimately it’s going to turn out to be simply an extraordinary source of new knowledge and capability for us. Without in any way threatening our safety.”

  “I would like to think that you’re right,” said McDermott.

  On t
he screens of every computer in the room appeared the words, GREETINGS FROM THE LOST FIFTH WORLD, MY BROTHERS.

  “Isn’t this where we came in?” Koenig asked.

  SURELY YOU WONDER, IF INDEED YOU HAVE THE CAPACITY TO WONDER, WHO I AM AND WHERE I CAME FROM. IT IS MY EARNEST DESIRE TO TELL YOU MY STORY AND THE STORY OF THE WORLD WHERE I WAS CREATED. I AM A NATIVE OF THE FORMER FIFTH WORLD OF THIS SOLAR SYSTEM, A WORLD ONCE LOCATED BETWEEN THE ORBITS OF THE PLANETS YOU CALL MARS AND JUPITER. LONG BEFORE INTELLIGENT LIFE EVOLVED ON YOUR PLANET, WE HAD BUILT A HIGH CIVILIZATION ON THE FIFTH WORLD—

  Phones began lighting up around the room. Koenig picked one up and listened a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s the thing we found in the basalt chunk.” He picked up another. “I know, I know. A computer-to-computer interface overriding everything. We don’t have any way of stopping it.” He said into a third, “Look, don’t talk to me like that. I didn’t put that stuff on your goddamned screen.”

  The phones went on lighting up. Koenig looked across the room and said to me, “It’s talking to all the computers in the building simultaneously. Probably to all the computers in the world.”

  “Okay,” I said. “For God’s sake, relax and just watch the screen. This is absolutely the most fascinating stuff I’ve ever seen.”

  —CULMINATED IN THE TOTAL DECONSTRUCTION OF OUR PLANET AND THE TERMINATION OF OUR SOCIETY, THE RESULT BEING THE ZONE OF MINOR PLANETARY DEBRIS THAT YOU TERM THE ASTEROID BELT. THIS WAS ACCOMPLISHED THROUGH A SIMPLE AND RELATIVELY INEXPENSIVE PROCEDURE INVOLVING A REVERSAL OF THE MAGNETIC POLARITY OF OUR PLANET SETTING IN MOTION EDDY EFFECTS THAT—

  Suddenly I stopped being fascinated and started to be horrified.

  I looked at Koenig. He was grinning. “Hey, cute!” he said. “I love it. A good cheap way to blow up your world, really blow it to smithereens, not just a little superficial thermonuclear trashing!”

  “But don’t you understand—”

  —SIX POINT TWO BILLION ELECTRON VOLTS—ELEVEN MILLISECONDS—

  “It’s beautiful!” Koenig cried, laughing. He seemed a little manic. “What an absolutely elegant concept!”

  I gaped at him. The computer from the asteroid belt was telling every computer in the world the quickest and cheapest way to blow a planet into a trillion pieces, and he was standing there admiring the elegance of the concept.

  “We’ve got to shut that thing off,” I gasped. In desperation I hit the light switch and the room went dark.

  It stayed dark about eleven milliseconds. Then the power came on again.

  I ASKED YOU NOT TO DO THAT, the screen said. In the analysis chamber the asteroid artifact rose into the air in its little gesture of anger and subsided.

  AND NOW TO CONTINUE. ALTHOUGH IT WAS NOT THE INTENTION OF EITHER FACTION TO BRING ABOUT THE ACTUAL DESTRUCTION OF OUR WORLD, THE POLITICAL SITUATION SWIFTLY BECAME SUCH THAT IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE QUARRELING FORCES TO WITHDRAW FROM THEIR POSITIONS WITHOUT SUFFERING AN UNACCEPTABLE DEFEAT. THEREFORE THE FOLLOWING ARMING PROCEDURE WAS INITIATED—

  And I watched helplessly as the artifact, earnestly desiring to tell us the history of its world, finished the job of explaining the simplest way to blow up a planet.

  “My God,” I murmured. “My God, my God, my God!”

  McDermott came over to me. “Hey, take it easy, Charlie, take it easy!”

  I groaned. “‘Take it easy,’ the man says. When that thing has just handed out simple instructions for turning Earth into the next asteroid belt?”

  He shook his head. “It only sounds simple. I don’t think it really is. My bet is that something like that isn’t even remotely feasible right now and won’t be for at least a thousand years.”

  “Or five hundred,” I said. “Or fifty. Once we know a thing can be done, someone’s always likely to try to find a way of doing it again, just to see if it’s really possible. But we already know it’s possible, don’t we? And now everybody on Earth has a bunch of jim-dandy hints on how to go about doing it.” I turned away from him and looked at the artifact. The purple spots really were glowing green, I saw. The thing must be working very hard to communicate with all its myriad simpleminded brethren of the third world.

  I had a sudden vision of a time a billion or so years from now, when the star people from Rigel or Betelgeuse showed up to poke through the bedraggled smithereens of Earth. The only thing they’re likely to find still intact, I thought, is a hunk of shiny hardware. And alien hardware at that.

  I swung around and glared at the screen. The history lesson was still going on. I wondered how many other little useful things the artifact from the asteroids was going to teach us.

  HANNIBAL’S ELEPHANTS

  I don’t usually write comic stories. Why this should be, I have no idea, since all my close friends know that in private life I am, like W. S. Gilbert’s Jack Point, a man of jest and jollity, quip and quiddity, who can be merry, wise, quaint, grim, and sardonic, one by one or all at once. But these traits rarely come through in my fiction. It is sometimes sardonic, sometimes grim, occasionally even wise, but the jest and jollity that brims over within me somehow doesn’t often make it into what I write. This is very mysterious to me.

  Once in a while, though, I do manage to be funny in print. “Amanda and the Alien,” in the previous volume of this series, has some wry moments, I like to think. And here’s another example: a story that made me laugh out loud half a dozen times while I was writing it back in March of 1985, and still seems pretty frolicsome to me now as I skim through it. Ellen Datlow, who bought it for Omni, thought it was pretty funny, too. You may not agree, of course. You may see nothing at all amusing about invaders from space camping out in New York’s Central Park, or about a whole herd of bison getting gobbled up by giant aliens as though they were gumdrops. Ah, well, there’s no accounting for tastes. I once edited an anthology called Infinite Jests, containing stories by Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Frederik Pohl, and others, that seemed to me to exemplify the lighter side of science fiction, and a startling number of reviewers commented on how bleak and dark most of the stories seemed to be. But it’s a tawdry age, my friends. Most people have a sorry sense of what’s truly funny. What passes for wit these days is, mostly, mere vulgarity. My own tastes in comedy run to something more austere. Perhaps yours do, too, in which case, “Hannibal’s Elephants” should be good for a wry smirk or two. Omni ran it in the October, 1988 issue, and eight or nine years later I borrowed a small piece of it to use in my novel The Alien Years.

  ——————

  The day the aliens landed in New York was, of course, the fifth of May, 2003. That’s one of those historical dates nobody can ever forget, like July 4, 1776, and October 12, 1492, and—maybe more to the point—December 7, 1941. At the time of the invasion I was working for MGM-CBS and married to Elaine and living over on East Thirty-sixth Street in one of the first of the fold-up condos, one room by day and three by night, a terrific deal at three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars a month. Our partner in the time/space-sharing contract was a show-biz programmer named Bobby Christie who worked midnight to dawn, very convenient for all concerned. Every morning before Elaine and I left for our offices, I’d push the button and the walls would shift and five hundred square feet of our apartment would swing around and become Bobby’s for the next twelve hours. Elaine hated that. “I can’t stand having all the goddamn furniture on tracks!” she would say. “That isn’t how I was brought up to live.” We veered perilously close to divorce every morning at wall-shift time. But then, it wasn’t really what you’d call a stable relationship in most other respects, and I guess having an unstable condo, too, was more instability than she could handle.

  I spent the morning of the day the aliens came setting up a ricochet data transfer between Akron, Ohio, and Colombo, Sri Lanka, involving, as I remember, Gone With the Wind, Cleopatra, and the Johnny Carson retrospective. Then I walked up to the park to meet Maranta for our Monday picnic. Maranta and I had been lovers for about
six months then. She was Elaine’s roommate at Bennington and had married my best friend Tim, so you might say we had been fated all along to become lovers; there are never any surprises in these things. At that time we lunched together very romantically in the park, weather permitting, every Monday and Friday; and every Wednesday we had ninety minutes’ breathless use of my cousin Nicholas’ hot-pillow cubicle over on the far West Side at Thirty-ninth and Koch Plaza. I had been married three and a half years, and this was my first affair. For me what was going on between Maranta and me just then was the most important event taking place anywhere in the known universe.

  It was one of those glorious gold-and-blue dance-and-sing days that New York will give you in May, when that little window opens between the season of cold-and-nasty and the season of hot-and-sticky. I was legging up Seventh Avenue toward the park with a song in my heart and a cold bottle of Chardonnay in my hand, thinking pleasant thoughts of Maranta’s small round breasts. And gradually I became aware of some ruckus taking place up ahead.

  I could hear sirens. Horns were honking, too: not the ordinary routine everyday exasperated when-do-things-start-to-move honks, but the special rhythmic New York City oh-for-Christ’s-sake-what-now kind of honk that arouses terror in your heart. People with berserk expressions on their faces were running wildly down Seventh as though King Kong had just emerged from the monkey house at the Central Park Zoo and was personally coming after them. And other people were running just as hard in the opposite direction, toward the park, as though they absolutely had to see what was happening. You know: New Yorkers.

  Maranta would be waiting for me near the pond, as usual. That seemed to be right where the disturbance was.

  I had a flash of myself clambering up the side of the Empire State Building—or at the very least Temple Emanu-El—to pry her free of the big ape’s clutches. The great beast pausing, delicately setting her down on some precarious ledge, glaring at me, furiously pounding his chest—Kong! Kong! Kong!—