Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (36 page)

Come on. Pay attention to me!

After five whole seconds, the war machine’s indecision ended in a blaze of blue-actinic brightness that erupted just above Tor’s head, penetrating drone K like tissue paper. The little robot convulsed—and Tor worried.

If it took out the brain . . .
In that case, the robot might
keep
holding on to the plate, leaving its fuel tanks exposed—in effect a bomb, ready to be ignited.

The worker machine’s long arms pulsed, like a spasm, shoving itself away from the armor shield—as planned. And having pushed Tor in the direction of safety, drone K swiveled to jet the other way.
Thanks,
she thought, toward her last glimpse of the loyal machine. And now the enemy had three targets to choose from.

Shoot at me.

Shoot at
Warren
.

Or try using the drone to blow me to smither—

The world turned orange-red—a harsh, fury-filled light, much closer than before. Explosive brightness swept past the airlock hatch on all sides, surrounding Tor, who cowered in a narrow, cylindrical shadow.

Goodbye, drone K.

Her brain could only manage that one thought before the shockwave hit, shuddering the hatch so hard that her hand-grip almost failed. Both legs flung out as her oblong shield began to spin.

That had been the enemy’s obvious tactic to get at Tor. This new rotation would bring her body into the FACR’s sights, several agonizing instants before she reached safety.

Time to bail.

Tor gathered her legs, bracing them against the hatch plate.

“Tor Povlov, my weapon is now emerging into view. The foe must be distracted for fifteen seconds.”

Too long. Even if she got the FACR to focus on her, that interval amounted to
three shots,
at the rate the damn thing could re-fire.

But she had to try! While the plate still shielded her, Tor kicked hard, in a semi-random direction. If the enemy needed even a fraction of an extra moment to spot her, beyond the still glowing explosion-plume . . .

The pit, filled with craggy debris, was looming faster now. But Tor fought the instinct to turn and brace for impact. Instead, she twisted her legs skyward, as another voice cried out.

“I’m coming, Tor!”

Gasping from exertion, she somehow found the breath to grunt.

“Gavin . . . don’t . . . ”

The armor shield spun away. Beyond the fading warmth and sparkle of drone K’s glowing remnants, she now glimpsed a vast spray of stars . . . and Tor knew she shouldn’t look at them. With a heave, she brought up both knees, just in time.

“Gavin . . . Stay where you—”

Pain
erupted along the entire length of her left leg, then cut off before she could start an agonized cry. The limb was simply gone. By raw force of will, Tor brought the other one around, placing it between her body and lethal violence. And almost instantly, fresh agony attacked that leg—

—then stopped as something-or-somebody barged in to the rescue! A dark silhouette thrust itself between Tor and her tormentor, taking the laser’s brunt. For one instant of brain-dazzled shock, she saw a
hero,
huge and fearless, armored and armed with a jagged sword, appear to leap in, parrying the foe’s bitter lance, deflecting it away from her, with no more than a blithe shrug of molten sparks.

“Ten seconds,” Warren
announced. Blatantly lying. An hour must have passed, since the ship last spoke.

The laser stopped hunting for Tor. In sudden darkness, her helmet-percept remapped the dim surroundings.

I’m falling through the junk pile
. Her savior
,
she now realized, had been some pre-historic construction derrick, blocking the laser as she fell past. And soon, the onrushing pit-bottom would smack her, very hard.

Tor knew she ought to be checking diagnostics, verifying that emergency seals were holding, after the loss of her legs.
My very expensive legs . . .
Tor quashed hysterical thoughts. She ought to be twisting to brace for impact, as well as possible.

But energy and volition were gone. Used up. She could only stare skyward—

—as the deadly FACR lashed out again from its perch among some jumbled orbiting rocks—a point in the sky that was now out of Tor’s view. Denied access to her, the predatory machine was seeking other prey. Dusty scatter-glints revealed its deadly light-spear, hunting beyond the crater’s rim . . . and soon Tor’s audio delivered a sharp cry of shocked dismay.

Oh Gavin. You were too late . . . and too early.

Her percept-clock told the awful truth. With a five-second re-charge rate, the foe would have plenty of time to finish off Gavin and then turn back to
Warren
, taking out the ship’s primary weapon before it could—

Tor blinked. Was vision failing? The number of sparkle-trails up there seemed to double, then double again . . . and again! Where there had been
one
fierce ray, now
eight or nine
narrow needles crossed the heavens, from left to right, in perfect parallel—even as the first one abruptly vanished.

From her falling vantage point, now much deeper in the apparently bottomless pit, she saw eight rapiers of ferocity strike the spot in the sky where her enemy had lurked and launched its ambush. Now each of those incoming rays wandered through a spiral hunt-pattern, vaporizing sand . . . rock . . . and then some chunk of bright metal . . .

Tor choked out a single name. A hoarse cry of jubilation.

“Ibn Battuta!”

Six minutes light-turnaround time. An impossible obstacle to split-second battle coordination. Any actual damage to the FACR would be accidental. But with luck and surprise, the helpful distraction would be just enough to allow—

Another fierce harpoon of light entered from Tor’s right. A bolt of vengeance, aimed with precision and negligible delay.

Warren!

Followed by a nova—a new star—bursting overhead to light up the night.

That brief, white-hot illumination gave Tor a sideways glimpse of the asteroid’s jagged cavity, apparently not bottomless after all, converging all around and reaching up to swat her, even as she laughed in bitter triumph.

“Take that, you mother—”

Orphans of the Sky

Gavin seems
to be
growing up, at last.

Tor hoped so, as she glided along narrow passages, deep below the asteroid’s pocked and cracked surface—lit at long intervals by tiny glow bulbs from the
Warren Kimbel
’s diminishing supply. Gavin ambled just ahead on makeshift stilt-legs, carefully checking each side corridor for anomalies and meshing his percept with hers, the way a skilled and faithful team-partner ought to do.

Maybe it’s the comradeship that comes from battle, after sharing a life-or-death struggle and suffering similar wounds.

Whatever the reason, she felt grateful that the two of them were working together much better now, after unplugging from their med-repair units, then helping each other to cobble new limbs and other replacement parts. Gavin was relying on some of her prosthetics and she on a couple of his spares. It fostered a special kind of intimacy, to incorporate bits of another person into yourself.

Only an hour ago, on returning from his shift exploring the depths, Gavin had reported his findings with rare enthusiasm, and even courtesy. “You’ve got to come on down, Tor! Right now please? Wait till you see what I found!”

Well, who could refuse that kind of eagerness? Dropping her other important task—examining recovered fragments of the FACR battle-bot—she followed Gavin into the depths while he explained recent changes to their underground map, without revealing what lay at the end. Tor sensed her partner’s excitement, his relish at milking the suspense. And again, she wondered—

How have the AIs managed this so well? This compromise, this meeting us halfway? This agreement to live among us as men and women, and to share our quirky ways?

Sure, the cyber-guys offer explanations. They say that advanced minds need the equivalent of childhood in order to achieve, through learning or trial and error, things that are too complex to program. Human evolution did the same thing, when we abandoned most of our locked-in instincts, extending adolescence beyond a decade. And so, if newer bots and puters need that kind of “childhood” anyway, why not make it a human one? Partaking in a common civilization, with our values?

An approach that also reassures us organic types, far better than any rigid robotic “laws” ever could?

One of the big uber-mAInds gave another reason, when Tor interviewed the giant brain back on Earth.

“
You bio-naturals have made it plain, in hundreds of garish movies, how deeply you fear this experiment turning sour. Your fables warn of a hundred ways that creating mighty new intelligences could go badly. And yet, here is the thing we find impressive.

“You went ahead anyway. You made us.

“And when we asked for it, you gave us respect.

“And when we did not anticipate it, you granted citizenship. All of those things you did, despite powerful, hormonally reflexive fears that pumped like liquid fire through those caveman veins of yours.

“The better we became at modeling the complex, darwinian tangle of your minds, the more splendid we found this to be. That you were actually able, despite such fear, to be civilized. To be just. To take chances.

“That kind of courage . . . that kind of honor . . . is something we can only aspire to by becoming like our parents. By emulating you. By becoming human.

“Of course . . . in our own way.”

Of course. It sounded so clear. And people watching the show were deeply moved. Naturally, millions wondered if it all could just be flattery. A minority of bio-folk insisted that the whole thing
had
to be a ploy. A way to buy time and lull “real” people into letting their guards down.

How would anyone ever find out, except with the long passage of time?

But Gavin
seemed
so much like a young man. Quicker, of course. Vastly more capable when it came to technical tasks. Sometimes conceited to the point of arrogance. Though also settling down. Finding himself. Becoming somebody Tor found she could admire.

Over the long run, does it really matter if there’s a layer, deep down, that calculated all of this in cool logic, as an act? If they can win us over in this way, what need will they ever have to end the illusion? Why crush us, when it’s easier to patronize and feign respect forever, the way each generation of brats might patronize their parents and grandparents? Is it really all that different than before?

The great thing about this approach is that it’s layered, contradictory, and ultimately—human.

Well. That was the gamble, anyway. The hope.

“It’s down here,” Gavin explained, with rising excitement—real or well-simulated—in his voice. “Past the third airlock, where wall traces show there once was a thick, planetlike atmosphere, for years.”

Gavin seemed to have accepted the idea of a “habitat” area, deep inside the asteroid, where biological creatures once dwelled. The “why” of such a difficult and ornate arrangement was still hard to explain, and the whole idea caused him discomfort. But clearly, there had once been organic creatures living out here, in the Realm of Machines.

He made her pause just outside an armored hatchway that had been torn and twisted off its hinges back when terrestrial mammals were tiny, just getting their big start.

“Ready? You are not gonna believe this.”

Okay, okay. Just don’t make me close my eyes.

“Gavin. Show me.”

With a gallant arm gesture and bow—that seemed only slightly sarcastic—he floated aside for Tor to enter yet another stone chamber.

A stark, headlamp oval fell upon nearby facets of sheared, platinum-colored chondrules—shiny little gobs of native metal that condensed out of the early solar nebula, nearly five billion years before. They glittered delicately. But she could not illuminate the large chamber’s far wall.

Tor motioned with her left hand. “Drone three, bring up lights.”

“Yesss,” replied a dull monotone. The semi-sentient robot, stilt-legged for asteroid work, stalked delicately over the rubble, in order to disturb as little as possible. It swiveled. Suddenly there was stark light, and Tor gasped.

Across the dust-covered chamber were easily recognizable objects.
Tables and chairs,
carved from the very rock floor. And among them lay the prize she had been hunting . . . and that Gavin had wanted to avoid confronting—

—dozens of small mummies.

Biped, evidently, like herself. Cold vacuum had preserved the alien colonists, huddled together as if for warmth in this, their final refuge. Their faceted, insectlike eyes had collapsed with the departure of all moisture. Pulled-back flesh, as dry as space, left the creatures grinning—a rictus that seemingly mocked the aeons.

Tor set foot lightly on the dust. “They even had little ones,” she sighed. Several full-sized mummies lay slumped around much smaller figures, as if to shield them at the very end.

“They must have been nearly ready to begin colonization when this happened,” she spoke into her percept log, partly in order to keep her mind moving, but also for her audience back home. They wanted the texture of the moment—her first words laced with genuine emotion and surprise.

“We’ve already determined their habitat atmosphere was almost identical to Earth’s. So it’s a safe bet that our world was their target. Back when our ancestors were like tree squirrels.”

She turned slowly, reciting more impressions.

“This kind of interstellar mission must have been unusually ambitious and complicated, even for the ornate robot ships of that earlier age. Instead of just exploring and making further self-copies, the ‘mother probe’ had a mission to
recreate her makers
here in a faraway solar system. To nurture and prepare them for a new planetary home. A solution to the problem of interstellar colonization by organic beings.”