Godlike Machines (11 page)

“My name isn’t Georgi.”

Doctor Grechko nods solemnly. “No matter what you may currently believe, you are Doctor Georgi Kizim. You’re even wearing his coat. Look in the pocket if you doubt me—there’s a good chance you still have his security pass.”

“No,” I insist. “I am not Georgi Kizim. I know that man, but I’m not him. I just took his coat, so that I could escape. I am the cosmonaut, Dimitri Ivanov. I was on the
Tereshkova.
I went into the Matryoshka.”

“No,” Doctor Grechko corrects patiently. “You are not Ivanov. You are not the cosmonaut. He was—is, to a degree-your patient. You were assigned to treat him, to learn what you could. Unfortunately, the protocol was flawed. We thought we could prevent a repeat of what happened with Yakov, but we were wrong. You began to identify too strongly with your patient, just as Doctor Malyshev began to identify with Yakov. We still don’t understand the mechanism, but after the business with Malyshev we thought we’d put in enough safeguards to stop it happening twice. Clearly, we were wrong about that. Even with Ivanov in his vegetative state ...”

“I am Ivanov,” I say, but with a chink of doubt opening inside me.

“Maybe you should look in the coat,” Nesha says.

My fingers numb with cold, I dig into the pocket until I touch the hard edge of his security pass. The hatted man’s still keeping a good hold on my arm. I pass the white plastic rectangle to Nesha. She squints, holding it at arm’s length, studying the little hologram.

“It’s you,” she says. “There’s no doubt.”

I shake my head. “There’s been a mistake. Our files mixed up. I’m not Doctor Kizim. I remember being on that ship, everything that happened.”

“Only because you spent so much time in his presence,” Grechko says, not without compassion. “After Dimitri fell into the intermittent vegetative state, we considered the risks of contamination to be significantly reduced. We relaxed the safeguards.”

“I am not Doctor Kizim.”

“You are. Just as Malyshev believed he was Yakov, you believe you’re Ivanov. But you’ll come out of it, Georgi—trust me. We got Malyshev back in the end. It was traumatic, but eventually his old personality resurfaced. Now he remembers being Yakov, but he’s in no doubt as to his core identity. We can do the same for you, I promise. Just come back with us, and all will be well.”

“Look at the picture,” Nesha says, handing the pass back to me.

I do. My eyes take a moment to focus—the snow and the cold are making them water—but when they do there’s no doubt. I’m looking at the same face that I’d seen in the mirror in Nesha’s apartment. Cleaned and tidied, but still me.

“I’m scared.”

“Of course you’re scared. Who wouldn’t be?” Grechko stubs out the cigarette and extends a gloved hand. “Will you come with us now, Georgi? So that we can start helping you?”

“I have no choice, do I?”

“It’s for the best.”

Seeing that I’m going to come without a struggle, Grechko nods at the man with the syringe to put it back in his pocket. The other hatted man gives me an encouraging shove, urging me to start walking along the landing to the waiting elevator. I resist for a moment, looking back at Nesha. I crave some last moment of connection with the woman I’ve risked my life to visit.

She nods once.

I don’t think Grechko or the other men see her do it. Then she pulls her hand from her pocket and shows me the musical box, before closing her fist on it as if it’s the most secret and precious thing in the universe. As if recalling something from a dream, I remember another hand placing that musical box in mine. It’s the hand of a cosmonaut, urging me to do something before he slips into coma.

I have no idea what’s going to happen to either of us now. Nesha’s old, but not so old that she might not have decades of life ahead of her. If she’s ever doubted that she was right, she now has concrete proof. A life redeemed, if it needed redeeming. They’ll still humiliate her at every turn, given the chance. But she’ll know with an iron certainty they’re wrong, and she’ll also know that everything they stand for will one day turn to dust.

“Am I really Doctor Kizim?” I ask Grechko, as the elevator takes us down.

“You know it in your heart.”

I stroke my face, comparing what I touch with the memories I feel to be real. “I was so sure.”

“That’s the way it happens. But it’s a good sign that you’re already questioning these fundamental certainties.”

“The cosmonaut?” I ask, suddenly unable to mention him by name.

“Yes?”

“You mentioned him being in an intermittent vegetative state.”

“He’s been like that for a while. I’m surprised you don’t remember. He just lies there and watches us. Watches us and hums, making the same tune over and over again. One of us recognized it eventually.” With only mild interest Grechko adds, “That piece by Prokofiev, the famous one?”

“Troika,” I say, as the door opens. “Yes, I know it well.”

They take me out into the snow, to the Zil that must have been waiting out of sight. The man with the syringe walks ahead and opens the rear passenger door, beckoning me into it as if I’m some high-ranking party official. I get in without causing a scene. The Zil’s warm and plush and silent.

As we speed away from Star City, I press my face against the glass and watch the white world rush by as if in a sleigh-ride.

RETURN TO TITAN

Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter is one of the most important science fiction writers to emerge from Britain in the past 30 years. His “Xeelee” sequence of novels and short stories is arguably the most significant work of future history in modern science fiction. Baxter is the author of more than 40 books and over 100 short stories. His most recent book is
Stone Spring,
first in the ‘Northland’ trilogy.

Members of the Poole family have shown up in Baxter’s Xeelee series, most recently in
Transcendant,
the story collection that closed the “Destiny’s Children” sequence. In “Return to Titan” Baxter sends Harry Poole, his son Michael, and an unlikely crew into the outer reaches of our solar system to do a little business and explore something very strange indeed.

PROLOGUE

Probe

The spacecraft from Earth sailed through rings of ice.

In its first week in orbit around Saturn it passed within a third of a million kilometers of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Its sensors peered curiously down at unbroken haze.

The craft had been too heavy to launch direct with the technology of the time, so its flight path, extending across seven years, had taken it on swingbys past Venus, Earth, and Jupiter. Primitive it was, but it was prepared for Titan. An independent lander, a fat pie-dish shape three meters across, clung to the side of the main body. Dormant for most of the interplanetary cruise, the probe was at last woken and released.

And, two weeks later, it dropped into the thick atmosphere of Titan itself.

Much of the probe’s interplanetary velocity was shed in ferocious heat, and the main parachute was released. Portals opened and booms unfolded, and more than a billion kilometers from the nearest human engineer, instruments peered out at Titan. Some 50 kilometers up the surface slowly became visible. This first tantalizing glimpse was like a high-altitude view of Earth, though rendered in somber reds and browns.

The landing in gritty water-ice sand was slow, at less than 20 kilometers per hour.

After a journey of so many years the surface mission lasted mere minutes before the probe’s internal batteries were exhausted, and the chatter of telemetry fell silent. It would take two more hours for news of the adventure to crawl at lightspeed to Earth, by which time a thin organic rain was already settling on the probe’s upper casing, as the last of its internal heat leaked away.

And then, all unknown to the probe’s human controlers back on Earth, a manipulator not unlike a lobster’s claw closed around
Huygens’s
pie-dish hull and dragged the crushed probe down beneath the water-ice sand.

I

Earthport

“There’s always been something wrong with Titan.” These were the first words I ever heard Harry Poole speak-though I didn’t know the man at the time-words that cut through my hangover like a drill. “It’s been obvious since the first primitive probes got there 1600 years ago.” He had the voice of an older man, 70, 80 maybe, a scratchy texture. “A moon with a blanket of air, a moon that cradles a whole menagerie of life under its thick atmosphere. But that atmosphere’s not sustainable.”

“Well, the mechanism is clear enough. Heating effects from the methane component keep the air from cooling and freezing out.” This was another man’s voice, gravely, a bit somber, the voice of a man who took himself too seriously. The voice sounded familiar. “Sunlight drives methane reactions that dump complex hydrocarbons in the stratosphere—”

“But, son, where does the methane come from?” Harry Poole pressed. “It’s destroyed by the very reactions that manufacture all those stratospheric hydrocarbons. Should all be gone in a few million years, ten million tops. So what replenishes it?”

At that moment I could not have cared less about the problem of methane on Saturn’s largest moon, even though, I suppose, it was a central facet of my career. The fog in my head, thicker than Titan’s tholin haze, was lifting slowly, and I became aware of my body, aching in unfamiliar ways, stretched out on some kind of couch.

“Maybe some geological process.” This was a woman’s voice, a bit brisk. “That or an ecology, a Gaia process that keeps the methane levels up. Those are the obvious options.”

“Surely, Miriam,” Harry Poole said. “One or the other. That’s been obvious since the methane on Titan was first spotted from Earth. But
nobody knows.
Oh, there have been a handful of probes over the centuries, but nobody’s taken Titan seriously enough to nail it down. Always too many other easy targets for exploration and colonization-Mars, the ice moons. Nobody’s even walked on Titan!”

Another man, a third, said, “But the practical problems— the heat loss in that cold air-it was always too expensive to bother, Harry. And too risky ...”

“No. Nobody had the vision to see the potential of the place. That’s the real problem. And now we’re hamstrung by these damn sentience laws.”

“And you think we need to know.” That gravel voice.

“We need Titan, son,” Harry Poole said. “It’s the only hope I see of making our wormhole link pay for itself. Titan is, ought to be, the key to opening up Saturn and the whole outer System. We need to prove the sentience laws don’t apply there, and move in and start opening it up. That’s what this is all about.”

The woman spoke again. “And you think this wretched creature is the key.”

“Given he’s a sentience curator, and a crooked one at that, yes ...”

When words like “wretched” or “crooked” are bandied about in my company it’s generally Jovik Emry that’s being discussed. I took this as a cue to open my eyes. Some kind of glassy dome stretched over my head, and beyond that a slice of sky-blue. I recognized the Earth seen from space. And there was something else, a sculpture of electric blue thread that drifted over a rumpled cloud layer.

“Oh, look,” said the woman. “It’s alive.”

I stretched, swivelled and sat up. I was stiff and sore, and had a peculiar ache at the back of my neck, just beneath my skull. I looked around at my captors. There were four of them, three men and a woman, all watching me with expressions of amused contempt. Well, it wasn’t the first time I’d woken with a steaming hangover in an unknown place surrounded by strangers. I would recover quickly. I was as young and healthy as I could afford to be: I was around 40, but AS-preserved at my peak of 23.

We sat on couches at the center of a cluttered circular deck, domed over by a scuffed carapace. I was in a GUTship, then, a standard interplanetary transport, if an elderly one; I had traveled in such vessels many times, to Saturn and back. Through the clear dome I could see more of those electric-blue frames drifting before the face of the Earth. They were tetrahedral, and their faces were briefly visible, like soap films that glistened gold before disappearing. These were the mouths of wormholes, flaws in spacetime, and the golden shivers were glimpses of other worlds.

I knew where I was. “This is Earthport.” My throat was dry as moondust, but I tried to speak confidently.

“Well, you’re right about that.” This was the man who had led the conversation earlier. That 70-year-old voice, comically, came out of the face of a boy of maybe 25, with blond hair, blue eyes, a smooth AntiSenescence marvel. The other two men looked around 60, but with AS so prevalent it was hard to tell. The woman was tall, her hair cut short, and she wore a functional jumpsuit; she might have been 45. The old-young man spoke again. “My name is Harry Poole. Welcome to the
Hermit Crab
, which is my son’s ship—”

“Welcome? You’ve drugged me and brought me here—”

One of the 60-year-olds laughed, the gruff one. “Oh, you didn’t need drugging; you did that to yourself.”

“You evidently know me—and I think I know you.” I studied him. He was heavy set, dark, not tall, with a face that wasn’t built for smiling. “You’re Michael Poole, aren’t you? Poole the wormhole engineer.”

Poole just looked back at me. Then he turned to the blond man. “Harry, I have a feeling we’re making a huge mistake trying to work with this guy.”

Harry grinned, studying me. “Give it time, son. You’ve always been an idealist. You’re not used to working with people like this. I am. We’ll get what we want out of him.”

I turned to him. “Harry Poole. You’re Michael’s father, aren’t you?” I laughed at them. “A father who AS-restores himself to an age younger than your son. How crass. And, Harry, you really ought to get something done about that voice.”

The third man spoke. “I agree with Michael, Harry. We can’t work with this clown.” He was on the point of being overweight, and had a crumpled, careworn face. I labeled him as a corporate man who had grown old laboring to make somebody else rich—probably Michael Poole and his father.

I smiled easily, unfazed. “And you are?”

“Bill Dzik. And I’ll be working with you if we go through with this planned jaunt to Titan. Can’t say it’s an idea I like.”

This was the first I had heard of a trip to Titan. Well, whatever they wanted of me, I had had quite enough of the dismal hell-hole of the Saturn system, and had no intention of going back now. I had been in worse predicaments before; it was just a question of playing for time and looking for openings. I rubbed my temples. “Bill-can I call you Bill?—I don’t suppose you could fetch me a coffee.”

“Don’t push your luck,” he growled.

“Just tell me why you kidnapped me.”

“That’s simple,” Harry said. “We want you to take us down to Titan.”

Harry snapped his fingers, and a Virtual image coalesced before us, a bruised orange spinning in the dark: Titan. Saturn itself was a pale yellow crescent with those tremendous rings spanning space, and moons hanging like lanterns. And there, glimmering in orbit just above the plane of the rings, was a baby-blue tetrahedral frame, the mouth of Michael Poole’s wormhole, a hyper-dimensional road offering access to Saturn and all its wonders—a road, it seemed, rarely traveled.

“That would be illegal,” I pointed out.

“I know. And that’s why we need you.” And he grinned, a cold expression on that absurdly young face.

II

Finance

“If it’s an expert on Titan you want,” I said, “keep looking.”

“You’re a curator,” Miriam said, disbelief and disgust thick in her voice. “You work for the intraSystem oversight panel on sentience law compliance. Titan is in your charge!”

“Not by choice,” I murmured. “Look-as you evidently targeted me, you must know something of my background. I haven’t had an easy career ...” My life at school, supported by my family’s money, had been a series of drunken jaunts, sexual escapades, petty thieving, and vandalism. As a young man I never lasted long at any of the jobs my family found for me, largely because I was usually on the run from some wronged party or other.

Harry said, “In the end you got yourself sentenced to an editing, didn’t you?”

If the authorities had had their way I would have had the contents of my much-abused brain downloaded into an external store, my memories edited, my unhealthy impulses “re-programmed”, and the lot loaded back again—my whole self rebooted. “It represented death to me,” I said. “I wouldn’t have been the same man as I was before. My father took pity on me—”

“And bought you out of your sentence,” Bill Dzik said. “And got you a job on sentience compliance. A sinecure.”

I looked at Titan’s dismal colors. “It is a miserable posting. But it pays a bit, and nobody cares much what you get up to, within reason. I’ve only been out a few times to Saturn itself, and the orbit of Titan; the work’s mostly admin, run from Earth. I’ve held down the job. Well, I really don’t have much choice.”

Michael Poole studied me as if I were a vermin infesting one of his marvelous interplanetary installations. “This is the problem I’ve got with agencies like the sentience-oversight curacy. I might even agree with its goals. But it’s populated by time-wasters like you, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to achieve, and all it does is get in the way of enterprise.”

I found myself taking a profound dislike to the man. And I’ve never been able to stomach being preached at. “I did nobody any harm,” I snapped back at him. “Not much, anyhow. Not like you with your grand schemes, Poole, reordering the whole System for your own profit.”

Michael would have responded, but Harry held up his hand. “Let’s not get into that. And after all he’s right. Profit, or the lack of it, is the issue here. As for you, Jovik, even in this billion-kilometers-remote “sinecure” you’re still up to your old tricks, aren’t you?”

I said nothing, cautious until I worked out how much he knew.

Harry waved his hand at his Virtual projection. “Look—Titan is infested with life. That’s the basic conclusion of the gaggle of probes that, over the centuries, have orbited Titan or penetrated its thick air and crawled over its surface or dug into its icy sand. But life isn’t the point. The whole
System
is full of life-life that blows everywhere, in impact-detached rocks and lumps of ice. Life is commonplace. The question is sentience. And sentience holds up progress.”

“It’s happened to us before,” Michael Poole said to me. “The development consortium I lead, that is. We were establishing a wormhole Interface at a Kuiper object called Baked Alaska, out on the rim of the System. Our purpose was to use the ice as reaction mass to fuel GUTdrive starships. Well, we discovered life there, life of a sort, and it wasn’t long before we identified sentience. The xenobiologists called it a Forest of Ancestors. The project ground to a halt; we had to evacuate the place—”

“Given the circumstances in which you’ve brought me here,” I said, “I’m not even going to feign interest in your war stories.”

“All right,” Harry said. “But you can see the issue with Titan. Look, we want to open it up for development. It’s a factory of hydrocarbons and organics, and exotic life forms some of which at least are related to our own. We can make breathable air from the nitrogen atmosphere and oxygen extracted from water ice. We can use all that methane and organic chemistry to make plastics or fuel or even food. Titan
should
be the launch pad for the opening-up of the outer System, indeed the stars. But we’re not going to be allowed to develop Titan if there’s sentience there. And our problem is that nobody has established that there isn’t.”