The Fleet of Stars Read online

  "Ah, yes," he said. "Let her in, by all means." Eagerness radiated any slight regrets out of him. His human contacts—personal, rather than in the course of his being what he was—were fewer than he could have wished. It was one of the prices a synnoiont paid. He turned about to the entrance, a short and tubby man, grizzled, in an elegant robe.

  Kinna Ronay appeared. She stopped when she saw him. He lifted his hand, palm outward, in salutation. "Well met, my dear," he said in the Anglo she spoke at home.

  "Th-thank you, sir," she answered low.

  He considered her. At nine Martian years of age, she stood tall, slim, fine-boned, in plain tunic and slacks. Banged, bobbed just below the ears, never perfectly kempt, her light-brown hair curled against a skin fair enough for a vein to show blue in the throat. The eyes were big and gray under arching brows, the nose tip-tilted, the lips sweetly curved above a firm little chin. That delicacy, and the high voice, could fool a man, Chuan knew. She moved with the litheness of a lifetime canyoneer, and went in for acrobatics; her hands were short and strong, the hands of a manual worker who was also a craftswoman.

  But she wasn't sure how to deal with this evening. "Oh, come now," he said into her shyness. "Are we not old friends?"

  "You ... you've known my parents a long time," since before her father was first elected a deputy. Afterward, the two men were bound to have meetings. In their particular case, the meetings had not occurred only when the House of Ethnoi was in session.

  "And I have watched you grow up." Chuan laughed. "Piecemeal, true, and usually through an eidophone— but I remember well and pleasantly every visit of mine to Sananton. Therefore I thought I would make you welcome to our city, now that you will be staying awhile."

  "You're very kind."

  "Not at all. My pleasure. And I do owe your family something," for hospitality, cheer, the fact that they liked him just as a human. "Please be seated."

  Kinna took a chair but did not at once relax into its form-fitting embrace. Chuan sat down opposite her, across a low table, and signaled to the house. A servitor glided in bearing a tray of wine and canapes. Music awakened. Kinna smiled. He had entered in his private database that she was fond of ancient compositions. Mozart appealed to him too.

  "We will dine shortly," he said, "but first let us catch up with one another's doings. So you will be at the university. Time goes, time goes."

  Yet David and Helen wouldn't lose her as his parents had lost him. He was forever grateful to them that they had let him be enrolled in the Brain Garden when tests revealed he had the rare aptitudes. It had opened magnificences beyond their imagination. He had since paid his filial calls on them while he remained on Earth, and he still sent his filial messages. But it was to strangers.

  Their polity—not the vale in the Southeastern Union where they dwelt; the Padmayana sect to which their allegiance was registered—had become as alien to him as the folkways of a troop of monkeys. Nothing like that would happen to Kinna.

  She was fast regaining poise. "Why have you invited me?" she asked, boldly beneath the politeness. "I'm one new student among several hundred. You're the synnoiont of Mars."

  Chuan raised his brows. "Must I have had an ulterior motive?"

  "I'm sorry!" she blurted, contrite. "I didn't mean— What I meant was, well, you've so much else to do, too much, and it's important."

  "In the long run, you are more important. You, young people like you, are the future. I will admit to hoping that through you I can learn something about the ... factor ... you represent."

  She grew earnest. “Then why not cultivate somebody studying, oh, psychotechnics, with an idea of going into the Coordination Service? S/he might make a real difference someday."

  “Or perhaps not. It depends more on the person than on the subject matter. You, for example ..." He let his words trail off into a leading pause, took up his glass, and sipped. The wine was a local chablis type, synthetic but therefore reliable. Its faint, flowery aroma evoked springtime in the northlands of Earth.

  "Me? No, really," Kinna protested. "Biotechnics, because Sananton will need it," and in the laboratories here, she could get hands-on instruction such as no simulation quite equaled. "Literature and history, because I'm interested." And the social interplay, another kind of education, another reason to bring students bodily together in the same buildings. They would also be together in the sports halls and parks and taverns and—"Not exactly worldshaking, is it?" Her diffidence returned. "I'm sorrv." she repeated. "I'm not trying to contradict you. I just don't see what you're flying at." She smiled. "To be expected, I suppose," of the ordinary human confronting the awesome, synnoiont.

  He found he had lost a part of his own self-assurance. "No, I am sorry," he said. "My clumsiness. I intended to say a very simple thing, and said it badly. I am not as adept in ordinary relationships as I wish to be." He sighed. "That goes with my .. .condition." He leaned forward and looked into her eyes. "Kinna, you of all people should know what I am. A liaison, an interpreter, between humankind and the cybercosm—trying to explain or to help wherever I can, and believe me, often it is the cybercosm that needs the explanation or the help— that is all. If my role were crucial, would not Mars, an entire planet, have been assigned more like me?"

  "I have wondered," she confessed.

  He sipped again, and was glad to see her lift her glass. "If you can give me some more insight, that will be fine," he said, "but truly, I invited you this evening out of friendship. Don't be afraid of an old man. I will send you back to your quarters in plenty of time for a good night's rest. I need one myself. But I am—may I be your honorary uncle? And if ever I can inform or advise or assist you in any way, I shall be hurt if you don't ask it."

  She wasn't entirely a naive little girl from the outback. Nor was Crommelin especially big or wicked. Yet she bore an innocence that he would grieve to see torn.

  Her smile flashed out in full. "Thank you, trouvour."

  Doubtless she had picked up the Lunarian word in Belgarre, which he knew she frequented. Its meaning went subtly deeper than "friend." Warmth kindled inside him.

  Increasingly at ease, they talked of this and that. As was bound to happen, conversation drifted to the news from Centauri. After weeks without further developments, it was no longer a sensation, but conjectures, opinions, attempted analyses, emotional outbursts, lame jokes, talk, talk, talk went on.

  —"I fear that to many people I have come to be, not exactly enemy, but an agent of the inhuman Teramind and its mysterious purposes," Chuan said sadly.

  "Not you!" She reached out to touch his hand.

  "You are sweet," he murmured. "That means a great deal to me." He drew breath. "You do realize, do you not, there is no such thing as an agent of the Teramind?"

  She sat back. Wariness crept into her tone. "Not at all?"

  "How could there be? Why should there be? Can you govern the private lives of microbes? Do you care to? I assure you, the supreme intellect of the known universe has better things to engage it than ruling over us."

  "But what then does it want?"

  “What do you want? To be what you are, the best way you can, am I right?" He was anxious to make himself clear to her. "The basic difference is in how intelligence came about, how it evolved. Let me repeat what you have probably been taught, because it never seems to be emphasized as I think it should be. Machine evolution is not Darwinian, blind, the result of natural selection and sheer accident working on germ plasm that mutates randomly. Machine evolution is Lamarckian, purposive, directed toward an end. It always has been, ever since the first hom-inid chipped a piece of stone to shape. Once machines began to think, they naturally set about improving the hardware and software that did the thinking. The new models were able to make models more powerful, and so it has gone onward. So it continues to go."

  "Yes, I know, and"—Kinna hesitated—"I try not to let it scare me. What I meant was, what worries a lakh of people, are—those microbes you mentioned. Some of t
hem will make us sick if we don't keep them under control. Suppose somehow we interfered with the cybercosm, got in the way of what it's aiming after, like disease germs—''

  "You must know better than to shudder at that hoary bugaboo," he reproached her. "We have no conflict nor cause for conflict. Humans and sentient machines are partners. Partners have their separate lives to lead, interests to pursue, outside the partnership, but this need not affect it, except insofar as their differing abilities join together to strengthen it."

  "We keep being assured of that." She cocked her head and gave him a level look. "But it isn't really so simple, is it?"

  "No." He wished he could show her the infinite, exquisite complexities. But she could never experience them directly, and otherwise he had only words, an outworn coinage they were trading back and forth as if they had not heard the account done over and over and over. "Is anything ever completely simple? You, however, you have not grown hostile to the cybercosm, have you?" Please not.

  "Never to you, trouvour," she said softly.

  "To certain aspects of it, then?" he persisted. If he lured her fears out into the open, perhaps he could slay them for her. It was disheartening that she, intelligent, alert, born and bred to practicality, had any.

  Kinna frowned, pondering. "No," she replied after a moment, "not that either. But I do wonder, more and more. Why were we kept all those years in the dark? If the Proserpinans hadn't made contact, and told the Lunarian Martians something about it, would we ever have been informed? And why is what we hear still so little and so vague, like about, oh, the field-drive ships or the solar lens? What the Prefect and all the others have said just doesn't satisfy."

  Chuan had been marshaling his arguments in the expectation of this. "Dear, if the cybercosm ever chose to deceive us, can't you imagine how it would corrupt every communication channel and database to enclose us in a dreambox universe? Or, absurd nightmare, can't you imagine how its machines could turn on us and destroy us? The fact is that none of this has happened or ever will. It cannot. It goes against the very nature of the cybercosm.

  "Morality is a function of consciousness. Something without a brain—a stone or a microbe, say—may be useful, or harmful, or neutral; but it cannot be either good or evil. Morality amounts ultimately to the reverence of consciousness for consciousness. And what is. sophotectic consciousness, from the Teramind on down to the lowliest special-purpose electrophotonic monitor, what is it but pure intellect, free of animal instincts and passions, free of everything except intellect itself? Its desire toward us is not to crush or confine our minds, but to help them grow—which it cannot do unless that becomes our own desire."

  I have been there and I know.

  He attempted a laugh. "Enough! I didn't mean to preach. As for why the news has been belated and is sparse, I can but assure you that the reasons given us are true. Communication lags of years, transit times longer still. Difficult, ambiguous, fitful relationships with Proserpina. Worse with respect to the Lunarians of Centauri, as far away and suspicious of us as they are. Virtually no direct contact yet with the Terrans at other stars. Closer to home, as regards things like the field drive, prudence. We hope for progress, but we cannot afford a sudden social and technological revolution. History shows what a ghastly risk that would be."

  "I've heard all this," she said.

  He could not resist: "Then why have you been asking me?"

  "Because ..." Her voice stumbled. "Something else, that's maybe part and parcel of all the rest—anyhow, it makes me wonder about everything else—Why have they decided to let Mars die again? And who, or what, are they?"

  "Do you refer to the termination of ice obtainment for the planet?"

  "Yes—"

  "You have heard this too. I know you feel intensely about it," he said,as gently, as he was able. "All Martians do. Once more I am forced to give you the standard answers, because they are the right ones. The resources of the Solar System are large, but they are not infinite. Fresh sources of cometary material are now remote, expensive to reach and exploit, and might become a cause of conflict with the Proserpinans. Why should Earth continue to subsidize a handful of people, when they can quite well emigrate or else convert their habitations? I am sorry to sound harsh, Kinna. My personal choice would be to keep supplying Mars with water, whatever the cost. Our race has built something unique here. But I am a single citizen. Yes, I have more input to the cybercosm than you do, but it is only the input of a single, mortal organism. And, yes, the cybercosm's advice is influential, but when the Council of the Synesis confers, the cybercosm has just one vote. Kinna, this was a human decision."

  "I'm not so sure about that influence." In haste, as if aware she had hurt him: "Oh, you're right, we are going around and around the same orbit that everybody else has been in for too freezing long. Nevertheless—well, I can't help sympathizing with the Threedom."

  He smiled. "Young people do tend to see rebels as romantic."

  She straightened in her chair. He saw her flush, he heard indignation. "Rebellions don't happen by chance!"

  It was his turn to apologize. "I am sorry. I did not mean to patronize. My social clumsiness. I wanted this to be a pleasant evening."

  She perceived his sincerity and responded. "Oh, of course. Let's drop the whole miserable subject."

  "Tell me what you have been doing," he suggested.

  The hours that followed did indeed prove delightful. He was reminded of drinking from a mountain spring in his boyhood on Earth. She seemed to enjoy herself too. As he bade her good night, he honed silently that she would look on him as more than a protector, that she would come back once in a while just to talk.

  He stood alone at the viewport, staring out, not really seeing. City lights glittered widely across Crommelin Basin, a star cluster brighter than any in dust-hazed heaven. The few that moved belonged to vehicles. Mostly, though, people stayed indoors after dark. Chuan had been to Antarctica once, for the direct experience of snow and ice and aurora. When he returned from their splendor to Amundsen, the brilliance and gaiety, even the warmth of the town, seemed tawdry. No such thing on Mars. The higher latitudes and their monstrous winter nights were left to robots working the mines. Mars had no auroras, either.

  If all went well, in another nineteen terrestrial years he would go back to Earth and an easier post.

  He wasn't sure he would want to.

  Why should he? His blood kin were foreigners to everything he had become. He had never married, nor formed any other alliances that lasted any length of time. Synnoionts seldom did, nor did they have children. They could not possibly be good parents. Besides, DNA was obsolescent. The true heritage, the true evolution, was that of intellect. Yet Chuan had wondered what it might have been like to have had children of his own.

  He pulled his thoughts away..Clearly, his mild depression was due to the letdown when this evening ended. A euthymic ought to dissolve it, and then he could sleep. But no, chemical consolations were temporary. Perhaps an hour in the dreambox would serve. Not an encounter, to be sensed and later remembered as fully as a reality, with comradely men or glorious women or some great philosopher; he had long since outgrown those. But the right terrestrial landscape, serene and lovely, perhaps made by humans through century after loving century, or perhaps purely natural, there in the past before humans ever beheld it.... Yes, he truly had no reason to return to Earth, except as a download after his bodily death.

  As for the dreambox, though—He decided against it. That it was illusion, artifice, mattered less than that tonight it would be a retreat from himself. He did not need relief so much as he needed affirmation. Let him make linkage instead.

  Turning, he left sky and city behind him and sought the room that only he might enter.

  Anyone uninitiated would have seen it as bare as a monk's cell—a cabinet, a couch, a control pattern of enigmatic simplicity, cold white light, silence. Chuan took out his interlink and coiffed his head with its nodule-studded mesh.
He lay down, connected circuits, relaxed his body, thought his command.

  Inside his skull, another network, implanted by nano-machines when he was a cadet, began to interact with the first, and with his brain. The triad came to harmony. It opened itself to the system that governed the cybercosm—sophotectic intelligences, computers, databases, scanners, sensors, an entity encompassing the planet— and it became an integral part thereof.

  Metaphors, hints, fragments, distortions. Words do not reach to the intricacies and subtleties of what went on. Nor do the equations of relativistic quantum mechanics describe that immense, multiple, and changeably faceted psyche, its awarenesses ranging from the tides within an atomic nucleus to the curvature of all space-time, its bil-lionfold guidances of machines and processes around the globe and out into satellite orbits, its thoughts and conation, the will, beneath them, driving the whole more powerfully than did the energies pulsing through it. For Chuan, it was transcendence and transfiguration.

  He became able to remember how much mightier the cybercosm and his oneness with it were on Earth. Almost, he relived the three times there when he was briefly granted Unity, taken up into the circuits near the Teramind like an ion into the electric field near a lightning bolt. And he knew again, not in symbols or in yearnings but as absolute knowledge, that this was why he or his download must in the end return to Earth: that his identity could pass into the Whole.

  So had mystics sought to lose themselves in God. Some did yet. Chuan's reward was certain, unless brute chance destroyed him first. And the consciousness that took him unto itself would grow onward, creating its own heaven above heaven, universe without end.

  The lesser entity on Mars was enough for him this night—untellably more than enough. Nerve-tingles from the greater integrality pervaded it, borne on laser beams out of Earth, Luna, Mercury, the asteroids, the outer moons, everywhere that the machines of the cybercosm were.