Godlike Machines (50 page)

The captain and every engineer vanished.

They were projections, Alone realized. The real humans were tucked inside some safe room, protected from the coming onslaught by distance and thick reaches of enduring hyperfiber.

He was injured and dying. But the damage was specific and still quite narrow, and the faltering mind lay exposed like never before. And that was when the Voice that had always been speaking to him and to every soul that stood upon or inside the deep ancient hull could be heard.

“I am the Ship,” the Voice declared.

“Listen!”

13

In a place that was not one place, but instead was everywhere, Those-Who-Rule received unwelcome news. There was trouble in Creation, and there was sudden talk of grand failures. A portion of the everywhere was in rebellion. How could this be? Who would be so foolish? Those-Who-Rule were outraged by what they saw as pure treachery. Punishment was essential, and the best punishment had to be delivered instantly, before the rebellion could stretch beyond even Their powerful reach. A ship was aimed and set loose, burrowing its way through the newborn universe. When it reached its target, that ship would deliver a sentence worse than any death. Nonexistence was its weapon-oblivion to All—and with that one talent, plus an insatiable hunger for success, the ship dove on and on until it had passed out of sight.

But then the revenge lay in the past. A moment later, upon reflection, Those-Who-Rule questioned the wisdom of their initial decision. Total slaughter seemed harsh, no matter how justified. In a brief discussion that wasted time on blaming one another, these agents of power decided to dispatch a second ship—another vessel full of talents and desires and grand, unborn possibilities.

If the second ship caught the first ship-somewhere out into that mayhem of newborn plasmas and raw, impossible energies-disaster would be averted. Life and existence and death and life born again would remain intact. But the universe was growing rapidly, exploding outwards until two adjacent points might discover themselves separated by a billion light-years.

The chase would be very difficult.

And yet, the second ship’s goal could be no more urgent.

Through the fires of Creation, one ship chased the other, and nothing else mattered, and nothing else done by mortals or immortals could compare to the race that would grant the universe permission to live out its day.

Alone listened to the insistent relentless piercing voice. And then he felt his center leaking, threatening to explode. That was when he interrupted, finally asking, “And which ship are you?”

The Voice hesitated.

“But you can’t be the first ship,” Alone realized. “If you were carrying this nonexistence ... then you wouldn’t know about the second ship chasing after you, trying to stop your work ...”

In a mutter, the Voice said, “Yes.”

“You must be the second Ship,” he said. “What other choice is there?”

“But a third choice exists,” the Voice assured.

“No,” said Alone.

Then in terror, he said, “Yes.”

“I am,” the Great Ship said.

“Both,” Alone blurted. “You’re that first ship bringing Nothingness, and you’re the second ship after it has reached its target.”

“Yes.”

“But you can’t stop the mission, can you?”

“I have tried and cannot, and I will try and nothing will change,” the Great Ship declared. Sad, yet not sad.

“You’re both ships, both pilots.”

“We are.”

“Working for opposite ends.”

“Yes.”

“And the humans are happily, foolishly riding you through their galaxy.”

“Doom everywhere, and every moment ending us.”

Alone felt weak, and an instant later, stronger than ever. As his energies flickered, he said, “Tell them. Why can’t you explain this to them?”

“Why won’t they hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Yes.”

“I could tell them for you.”

“If you had survived, you would explain. Yes.”

“But.”

“It is too late.”

Alone said nothing.

The Great Ship continued to talk, repeating that same tale of revenge and the chase, of nonexistence and the faint promise of salvation.

But Alone had stopped listening. He heard nothing more. With just the eye of his mind, he was gazing back across tens of thousand of years, remembering every step, marveling how small his life appeared when set against the light of far suns and the deep abyss of Time.

HOT ROCK

Greg Egan

Greg Egan
(www.gregegan.net)
published his first story in 1983, and followed it with more than 50 short stories and seven novels. During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction-mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes
—
that established him as one of the most important writers working in science fiction. His work has won the Hugo, John W Campbell Memorial, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, and Seiun awards. His latest books are a new novel,
Zendegi,
and a new collection,
Oceanic.

Having written very little during the first half of the decade, Egan has returned to science fiction recently with a handful of excellent stories, arguably the best of which is this rich, strange story that follows.

1

Azar turned away from her assembled friends and family and walked through the departure gate. She tried to keep her gaze fixed straight ahead, but then she paused and looked over her shoulder, as if there might yet be a chance for one more parting gesture. It was too late; there was nobody in sight. She had left her well-wishers far behind.

She managed a nervous laugh at the sheer seamlessness of the transition; she hadn’t registered so much as a shift in the light. The corridor around her appeared unchanged, its walls bearing the same abstract blue-and-gold mosaics as the one she had entered, but when she walked to the far end and turned to the right, she found herself in a glass-walled observation deck, looking out into the rich blackness of space.

Doorway to the stars
was the style of travel she had chosen, just one among dozens of decorative scenarios she might have wrapped around the raw, imperceptible act itself. There was no doorway; stepping through the departure gate had merely been a gesture of consent, the signal she had chosen to initiate her journey. In mid-stride, her mind had been copied from the processor that sat within her birth flesh, encoded into gamma rays, and transmitted across 1,500 light years. In a subjective instant, she had been transported from her home world of Hanuz into this scape, which mimicked a capacious habitat orbiting the planet Tallulah. She really was orbiting Tallulah, but the habitat, and the body she perceived as her own flesh, were illusory. The machine she now inhabited was scarcely larger than a grain of rice.

Azar pressed her palms to her eyes and composed herself. If she turned around and marched back through the gate it would take her home with no questions asked, but 3,000 years would have passed since her departure. That price had been paid, and no second thoughts, no hasty retreat, could reverse it. All she could do now was try to make it worthwhile.

The observation deck was unlit, but a gentle glow from the floor tracked her footsteps as she crossed to the far side and looked down on Tallulah. The scape’s illusory gravity almost made her feel that she was on solid ground, gazing eastwards on a cloudless night from some mountain eyrie at a rising moon: a new moon, its gray disk lit only by starlight. But she knew that however long she waited, dawn would not come creeping across the limb of this disk; no crescent, no sliver of light would appear. Tallulah had no sun; it had been an orphan for at least a billion years, drifting untethered through the galaxy. Yet distant astronomers had surmised—and the instruments here and now confirmed—that its surface was awash with running water. In the cold of interstellar space even its atmosphere should have been frozen down to a sludge of solid nitrogen and carbon dioxide, but instead its long night was alive with balmy breezes wafting over starlit seas.

“Salaam! You must be Azar!” A tall, smiling woman strode across the deck, stretching out her arms. “I’m Shelma.” They embraced briefly, just as Azar would have done when meeting someone for the first time back on Hanuz. This was no more a coincidence than Shelma’s human appearance and common phonetic name: for the sake of mutual intelligibility, the scape was translating every sight, every word, every gesture that passed between them.

Shelma turned to face the blank gray disk, and her eyes lit up with pleasure. “It’s beautiful!” she exclaimed.

Azar felt slightly foolish that she’d been so slow to take a proper look herself. Tallulah’s surface would be emitting a far-infrared glow, but its atmosphere was virtually opaque at that frequency, so the easiest way to see any detail would be to increase her sensitivity to the usual visible spectrum. She willed the change—and the scape obliged, just as if her eyes were real.

The ocean sparkled in the starlight. Two broad continents shared the hemisphere below. Long mountain ranges, vast bare plains, and expanses of mysterious vegetation colored the shadowless land.

“It is lovely,” she said. Every world had its own peculiar beauty, though, and Azar would not have sacrificed 3,000 years just to gaze upon even the most ravishing landscape.

When Tallulah had first shown up in telescopic surveys, long before Azar’s birth, people had soon realized that the best chance to visit it would come when it passed fortuitously close to an imaginary line joining the distant systems of Hanuz and Bahar. If the two worlds cooperated by launching probes that arrived simultaneously, the two spacecraft could brake against each other, sparing both of them the massive amounts of fuel needed to decelerate.

Accordingly, Mologhat 1 and 2 were sent on their way, launched in time to meet at Tallulah and merge in an intricate electromagnetic embrace. But then the news had reached Hanuz that Bahar would not be leaving the mission in the hands of insentient robots: a traveler would follow the Bahari probe, to wake inside the unified Mologhat Station and supervise the exploration of the orphan world.

No native-born traveler had left Hanuz for millennia, and Azar’s people were not so crippled with pride that the absence of a representative of their own would have been intolerable. The software they had already sent with Mologhat 1 was perfectly capable of protecting their interests in the mission; they might have simply left the Bahari to their alien ways without lessening their own enjoyment of whatever discoveries followed. And yet, a ripple had spread across the planet, a shocked whisper:
One of us could go, could be there, could live through it all in person.

“A billion years in deep space,” Shelma marveled, “and not an iceberg in sight.”

“It’s hard to believe,” Azar replied. The endless night on Tallulah rivaled the height of summer on Hanuz. When a planet was stripped of its sun, the decay of long-lived radioisotopes could eke out enough warmth over billions of years to keep its core molten—but even with abundant greenhouse gases to trap the heat, that could not account for Tallulah’s surface temperature. However warm its heart, its skin should have felt the chill by now.

Mologhat had been orbiting Tallulah for three years before their arrival, and Azar now ingested the results of its observations. No obviously artificial structures were visible on the surface, but a faint stream of neutrinos was radiating out from deep in the planet’s crust. The spectrum of the neutrinos did not correspond to the decay of any known radioisotopes, natural or otherwise; nor did it match the signatures of fission or fusion. Someone had worked hard to keep this orphan warm, but it was far from clear how they had done it—and impossible to say whether or not they were still around.

“What do you think?” Azar asked Shelma. “Is there anyone home?”

“People have been beaming signals at Tallulah for 30,000 years,” Shelma said, “and never raised a peep. So they’re either dead, or resolute hermits.”

“If they want to be left in peace, we have no right to disturb them.” Azar hoped that this declaration was redundant, but she wanted the ground rules absolutely clear.

“Of course,” Shelma agreed. “But if they insist on playing dead to perfection, all they’ll get are the rights of the dead. Which, while not negligible, are somewhat diminished.”

Once a civilization became extinct—not merely mutating into something new, but leaving no sentient heirs whatsoever—it was widely accepted that its history devolved into a common legacy that anyone was entitled to investigate. If sovereignty really had ceased to be an issue, Tallulah was certainly worth exploring. Tens of thousands of orphan planets had been found in the past, but only a few dozen had shown signs of habitation, and those worlds had yielded nothing but sad ruins buried beneath the permafrost. In the age of the Amalgam—the meta-civilization that now ringed the galaxy—the extinction of an entire world was unthinkable; if a catastrophe could not be averted, people who already had a robust digital form could be evacuated in seconds, and even those who had chosen purely biological modes could be scanned in a matter of days at the most.

The people of Tallulah, it seemed, had been halfway in between. When some cosmic mishap tossed them from their stellar hearth they had been unwilling or unable to evacuate, but they had not stood by and watched the air around them fall to the ground like snow. Whether trapped by their fate or just stubbornly resolved to ride it out, they had found a way to survive it. If they had since succumbed to some other tragedy, or merely surrendered to the passage of time, Azar saw no disrespect in digging up their secrets. Their achievements had endured for a billion years; they deserved recognition and understanding.

2

Mologhat’s orbit was a discreet 100,000 kilometers from Tallulah, but it had dispatched a swarm of microprobes into smaller, faster orbits of various inclinations, providing complete coverage of the surface. If there had been any lingering suspicion that the heating of the crust might have been due to some freakish natural process, the details put that idea to rest: not only was the temperature modulated by latitude, diminishing toward the planet’s rotational poles, the records showed that it cycled over a period of about three months, creating imitation seasons. These nostalgic echoes of a long-lost circumstellar orbit were so clear that Azar was surprised they’d put the heat source in the ground at all, rather than launching an artificial sun.

“Not only would that have given them light from above,” she suggested to Shelma as they strolled through Mologhat’s library, “they could have kept the old diurnal rhythm too.” Heat conduction from deep in the crust would have washed out any cycle as short as a typical planetary day.

Shelma said, “It’s a lot of extra work to make a microsun efficient—to keep it from pouring energy out into space.”

“That’s true.”

“And perhaps they were insecure as well,” Shelma added, sliding out an image from the stack beside her that showed an animated model of Tallulah’s weather patterns. “They were already on the verge of losing one sun. They might have preferred to keep their energy source buried, rather than risk being parted from this one too.”

“Yeah. Still, it’s interesting that they tweaked the biosphere for such a radical shift-ground heat replacing sunlight—but kept the seasons.”

Shelma smiled. “Days, seasons, you’ve got to have something. People go mad without change.” Both she and Azar had chosen to retain sleep cycles, their software following the dictates of their ancestral phenotypes. But Azar knew that the Baharis’ ancestors were nocturnal; what Azar perceived as the station’s night would be day to Shelma, and vice versa.

Azar pulled out a map of vegetation density. Using synthetic aperture methods, the microprobes had resolved details on Tallulah’s surface down to about a tenth of a meter, and even at that coarse resolution they had identified thousands of different kinds of plants. Spectroscopy could not untangle the detailed biochemistry from orbit, but the biosphere was clearly carbon-based/anaerobic, with the plants synthesizing carbohydrates but releasing no free oxygen.

Shelma spread her arms to take in the whole collection of data around them. “Everything here is open to interpretation. We’re going to need to make landfall to get any further.”

“I agree.” Azar was nervous, but relieved by the verdict. She was glad she hadn’t traveled this far just to find that Tallulah was clearly occupied by hermits, and there was nothing left to do but abandon them to their solitude.

“The question, then,” Shelma said, “is how we want to do it.” She began reeling off options. They could sprinkle a few nanotech spores on the surface, then sit back and wait for the army of robot insects they built to scour the planet. Or they could leave Mologhat and travel to the surface themselves, in various ways. Of course they could always combine the two, delegating most of the exploration while still being in the thick of it.

Azar had studied all of these methods before her departure, but Shelma sounded too blase to be merely reciting theoretical knowledge. “You’ve done this kind of thing before, haven’t you?”

“Dozens of times.” Shelma hesitated. “This is your first time out-of-system?”

“Yes.” That wasn’t a lucky guess; everyone knew about the dearth of travelers from Hanuz. “It’s hard for us,” Azar explained. “Leaving everyone we know for hundreds of years. You don’t mind doing that?”

“My ancestors were solitary for part of their life cycle,” Shelma said, “and sociable for the rest. Now we’re flexible: we can switch between those modes at will. What I don’t understand is why you don’t just travel in packs, if that would make things easier.”

Azar laughed. “I know some people do that, but our social networks are so tangled that it’s hard to find a truly self-contained group—least of all a group where everyone can agree on a single destination. And if they do, they’re more likely to emigrate than to take a trip and come home again.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, forget about Hanuz. We need to make some decisions.” Azar wasn’t going to sit around on Mologhat while robots had all the fun, but there were practical limits on how far she could go just to get some dirt beneath her fingernails. If she had her own standard body reconstructed down on the surface, tweaked to survive the local conditions, she’d spend all her time foraging for food. Mologhat had only a few micrograms of its original antimatter store left; the few hundred megajoules that would generate were enough for its own modest needs, but pilfering any of it to power a 60-kilogram behemoth would be insane; she could burn up the whole lot in a month. If Tallulah had had a reasonable abundance of deuterium she could have powered her body with D-D fusion, but the isotope was rare here.