The Fleet of Stars Read online

  "Robots and computers—computers are a subclass of robots, actually—can seem to think," the man said. "Many of them are able to do a wide variety of things, to learn from experience, make decisions, carry on conversations, and generally behave like people. But they are limited. No matter how clever and powerful their programs, what they basically do is carry out an algorithm. The development of true artificial intelligence— conscious, creative minds like ours—had to wait till the quantum aspect of consciousness was understood. You've been told something about quantum mechanics. You'll hear more.

  "Meanwhile, rather early on, the researchers found how to make a download." He laughed. '.'I'm throwing some rather big words at you. Ask me or your home terminal about them when you've mulled them over.

  "Knowing what they did about atoms and quanta, the researchers became able to scan a nervous system molecule by molecule. They could record the basic patterns of memory and personality, and then map these into a program for a neural net that was an analogue of the person's personal brain. A download like that was a.sort of copy of a person's mind. They could give it sensors, a speaker, a machine body. You haven't heard much about downloads because there have never been more than a few. Hardly anybody has liked that kind of existence. It's mainly become a transition stage for synnoionts after they die. I'll tell you later about synnoionts.

  “The thing is, experience with downloads showed how to make the first sophotects, electrophotonic hardware and software that actually thinks, is aware, and knows that it thinks and is aware. Given these machines, the whole cybercosm soon began to improve and evolve itself. That evolution went faster and faster, further and further. We don't know where it will end, or if it ever will."

  The speaker paused before he went back to ordinary speech. "Don't get me wrong, please. A sophotect is not a single being with a single mind like you or me. All sophotects can draw on the same global database. They can link and unlink, merge and unmerge, just as they choose. A particular sophotect—for instance, our counselor here in Tychopolis—can have its own personality, but it comes out of the whole. Its mind is not separate like an island in a lake; it's more like a wave on the water. The wave is distinct from every other wave, and it may go on for quite some time, but it happens within a larger whole, and it can join with others to form a new and different wave.

  "What we call the cybercosm is really the entire system of machines, computers, robots, and sophotects, all One. If you want to think of it as a pyramid, with your everyday appliances and power tools at the bottom, why, then the top, the peak, is the Teramind."

  He smiled. "But don't worry. The Teramind doesn't rule us, or anything like that. We have no more relationship with it, really, than we do with the stars— magnificent, but strange and far away. The cybercosm, its ordinary part that surrounds us, is our partner."

  Fenn had bristled when the speaker so lightly dismissed the stars, but kept his mouth shut.

  Later, when he had studied more history and civics, he began to gnaw out his own interpretation of the universe in which he found himself.

  Before the Synesis, he learned, was the World Federation. And before the World Federation, old men—“governments," they were called—had somehow, again and again, compelled young men to kill each other, along with vast incidental destruction, for causes that the old men claimed were important. Governments had also robbed, regimented, and terrorized their subjects, often in the most incredible fashions. Toward the end, they generally did it in the name of something called "democracy."

  And yet.. . that was when humans first went forth into space.

  Like many a youngster, Fenn toppled in love with the legend of Anson Guthrie. In Fenn, though, the passion endured as he grew up, unquenched by common sense. Fireball Enterprises, free men and women faring out to the planets; their final, unresolvable conflict with the Federation; the dissolution of the company, but the exodus of some to Alpha Centauri, accompanied by equally rebellious Lunarians, under Guthrie's leadership—Guthrie, long dead, yet alive and indomitable in his download.... How was it today with their descendants?

  They knew beforehand that Demeter, the planet they sought, would come to wreck within a thousand years. By now, the catastrophe had happened. Fenn had seen the spectacular images sent back by robot observers. They included nothing about the settlers. Were the Lunarians still there on the asteroids they had colonized? What of the Terrans on Demeter? Did any escape? How, and to where?

  The indifference of the cybercosm had been matched by that of the people here at home. Fenn wondered why hardly anybody seemed curious; soon the whole business was well-nigh forgotten. He heard in reply that efforts to find out would have been difficult, and unrewarding at best, provocative of hostility at worst. The colonists had severed communications centuries ago, declaring themselves alienated from an Earth, a Solar System, turning unhuman.

  Fenn's preceptors pointed out to him that nothing of the kind had occurred—he need only look around him— and that the fate of a few eccentric malcontents was scarcely even of academic interest. This attitude had long since become the received wisdom. The stars are too remote. The removal of Guthrie's handful to the nearest of them exhausted the resources of mighty Fireball. Nothing of the kind will ever happen again. Why should it, when everything one might sanely want is available, either in material form or as virtual experience? Besides, practically every planet around every sun is dead, always has been, always will be.

  Let the cybercosm operate its network of astronomical instruments across the Solar System as far as the solar gravitational lenses. Let it dispatch unmanned mini-probes, which beam back their findings, revelations arriving after decades or centuries or millennia, word of a fascinating but inanimate and ultimately meaningless universe. That is rational. And is not rationality what divides the human and the sophotect from the brute?

  It need not be cold. On its own terms, it cannot be; it must take account of emotional needs. Sophotects have them too—conation, curiosity, whatever yearnings drive their ongoing evolution. As for humans, give them peace, give them abundance, give them informational access to the riches of their past and present, set them free to lead their lives as they see fit. Sophotects ask for no more than their single vote in the Federation Parliament, plus their obvious right as sentient beings to protection from abuse. Their collectivity is an advisor, a partner....

  And thus the Federation developed into the Synesis, government into guidance; and Terrans no longer plied the spacelanes or dreamed about the stars.

  Fenn raged.

  3

  DOWNLOAD GUTHRIE CAME back to function—to awareness, to life.

  "Instruments," he ordered. A flood of data entered him. Connected as he was to the c-ship, sensing with its sensors, he received information—about fields, gradients, vectors, masses, particles, quanta, all ambient space—not only as measurements; in a score of distinct ways, he felt it.

  Or saw it. Alpha Centauri A blazed ahead. When he stopped down its brilliance in his optics, he perceived the disk maned with corona and elflock prominences, winged with zodiacal light. The companion sun, B, at its present distance was a dazzling spark. Proxima, the third member of the system, dim and remote, lay well-nigh lost among the constellations. Sol, four and a third light-years hence, gleamed in Cassiopeia, not quite the chief of the background stars.

  From outside his electromagnetic shielding, he heard radiation seethe and tasted its sharpness.

  Decelerating at a rate that would have pulped any organic organism, the ship passed close enough by the remnants of Demeter and Phaethon for Guthrie to observe them in fullness. Still molten from the collision, a globe greater than Earth glowed red, streaked with blacknesses of smoke and slag. Outbursts racked it, mountain-sized fire-geysers whirling up and away, whipped along by a spin gone crazy. Rocks enclouded it, meteoroids, asteroids, shards blasted off into random orbits, chaotically dancing gleams in vision. He saw a big one crash back down; incandescence fountained, waves ran
over the tortured surface. But many pieces had already begun to form a set of rings, lacy, a hint of exquisiteness to come. A thickening amidst them foretold a moon as big as Luna, or bigger, perhaps to be as meaningful in the far future.

  That thought held no comfort. The sight tore at Guthrie. He too bore the memories of the prototype who stayed behind to perish with Demeter Mother, his beloved. His too was the spirit that for centuries had been machine, as it now again was in him, but had seen blossoming spread across the planet, until at last he could be reborn as a living young man and a woman was created to walk at his side. Also a download can grieve.

  A monitory shiver passed through the force-field. Detectors reacted, a computation ran lightning-swift, the ship veered. She had almost hit a fragment. Countless thousands, cast free or perturbed loose, were drifting out through the system. Surely no large fraction of them had as yet been identified. Even when the task was complete, Alpha Centaurian space would be hazardous to travelers, maybe for millions of years.

  Lunarians ought to enjoy that, Guthrie thought.

  The encounter had brought his mind back to practicalities. The quality of emotions was not the same for him in this form of existence as it was in the flesh, and he could set them aside more easily. That did not mean they went away. However, eagerness and a certain tension came to the forefront.

  Communication across the interstellar reaches had always been sparse; and then he'd spent thirty years, switched off, making the passage himself. A lot could have happened. He strained his sensors ahead and commenced broadcasting. "Aou," he called in the lilting Lunarian tongue. "Spacecraft Yeager here, inbound from Beta Hydri, emissary aboard, as our message declared."

  They were expecting him. The laser beam bearing the word had left Amaterasu shortly before he did, and would have arrived about three Earth-years ago. He wasn't much off his ETA, either; and till just lately, his speed had raised a shout in the interplanetary medium. The ship wasn't big, and her mass tanks were nearly empty, but probably optics were registering her, and maybe, by now, gravities.

  A screen flickered. An image solidified in it: a Lunarian male face of the blond sort, milk-fair, beardless, finely sculptured, with thin nose, Asian cheekbones, big oblique eyes, platinum hair falling down past ears that were not convoluted like those of Terrans. "Well beheld," he said courteously, although Guthrie was merely transmitting audio. "You are awaited, donrai. Your welcoming shall be at Zamok Sabely'."

  So Phyle Ithar continued dominant? He'd soon find out. Robots exchanged data. Yeager shifted course for a rendezvous at Demeter's L-5 point: same orbit, essentially, but sixty degrees behind the slain planet. It dwindled aft into darkness, an ember.

  Robotic manipulators helped him make ready. Besides the organometallic case holding his electrophotonic brain, with batteries, sensors, speaker, and other ancillary apparatus—altogether, about the size of a human head— the ship's payload amounted to very little more than a body for him. Even given a field drive energized by matter-antimatter annihilation, when you boosted velocity to fly close on the heels of light, and decelerated at journey's end, mass ratios mounted up. Every gram counted.

  The body was humanoid, vaguely suggestive of a suit of darkly sheening plate armor, not the best model but, he had decided, the most effective for his purposes here. It ought to relax a bit the Lunarians' ingrained suspicion of sentient machines, if only in their subconscious. The manipulators installed him in it. When he had fitted his eyeglobes on their stalks into appropriate sockets inside the turret, he had vision around a hemisphere, wherever he chose to concentrate it. He could magnify, or look into the ultraviolet or infrared, should occasion arise. His hearing was equally versatile. Indeed, he possessed equivalents of most of the numerous senses and capabilities a man has, plus several extras. A few were lacking, notably hunger, thirst, and above all, sexuality; but you can't have everything, and he'd get those back when he returned to Amaterasu, assuming he ever did.

  Zamok Sabely swelled in view. It was not an asteroid, hollowed out or roofed over, like most Centaurian dwelling places. An original stone, maneuvered into position, had long since been converted entirely to structures. These had been added to over the centuries until the whole was huge. Spokes lanced a hundred kilometers out from a faceted hub, through an intricacy of cables and passages, to a rim clustered and flashing with lights of every hue; solar collectors stretched onward like roadways; the assemblage wheeled around and around against the heavens. Yet it was so balanced and harmonious, beautiful as any masterpiece of engineering is beautiful, that from afar it resembled jewelwork and when he drew near, it brought back memories of medieval cathedrals on Earth. The very guns, defense against meteoroids, were like spires, and the guardian robotic vessels could have been attendant angels.

  Not too damn appropriate to Lunarians, Guthrie thought wryly. But they had a gift for esthetics to match the ancient Hellenes or Japanese—who'd been tough customers themselves.

  He had turned control of Yeager over to the spaceport, after mentioning that there was no need to dock her. Prior to inserting her in parking orbit, it matched her velocity to its rotation. He went out through the single lock, gauged the factors from experience as well as from instrument readings he had taken, and jumped. A flight of a few hundred meters brought his gripsoles into contact with a landing stage. A portal valved for him and he cycled through.

  Beyond, he found a passage curving gently upward to right and left, and Lunar weight on his mass. Atmosphere surrounded him with warmth and sounds, not the bustle and noise that would have filled a Terran harbor but a susurrus like surf and wind far off. No crowd had gathered. The tall persons who passed him cast him a glance without breaking stride. An escort waited, a dozen men in red-and-black livery, led by an officer who gave stately greeting. "Let us guide you to your lodging," he finished. “Then, when you are ready, the Lady Commander will be pleased to see you."

  "I can meet her at once if she likes," Guthrie answered. He refrained from adding: "I don't need bed and breakfast, and I've had a nice long nap." Eventually he must get some hours of dormancy and dream—this flesh-less incarnation remained that humanlike—but he could stay alert for daycycles on end, and right now he certainly wanted to.

  "That will be excellent, donrai." The officer touched the informant on his wrist, evidently to transmit a preset signal. They were quick on the uptake here. Of course, they'd known who was coming, and had records of his earlier period as a download.

  By slipway and sometimes shank's mare, they went on into the city, depot, market, center of commerce and culture, aerie and castle that Zamok Sabely' was. Its opulence had grown since last Guthrie trod its decks. Duramoss paved the passageways, between strips for pedestrians and motorskaters. Multicolored alloys, organics, fabrics, and gaudily flowering vines lifted to high overheads where light-patterns shifted and interwove. Music throbbed, keened, whispered through breezes of changeable scents. Arches opened on arcades, tier above tier, of shops, workplaces, taverns, gambling dens, recreation halls, foodsteads, joyhouses, establishments more esoteric, spacious and gracious or darkling and secretive, often screened by a living curtain or an induced aurora. A fire-fountain leaped and roared in the middle of a plaza. Birds trailing rainbow tails winged down a corridor of crystal.

  No matter how thronged any section was, none felt crowded. Lunarians moved as softly as they spoke, giving each other ample personal space. Most clothing was somberly sumptuous, relieved by dashes of vivid red or yellow and by flaring lines. Patterns varied from robes to skintights; a tunic and close-fitted trews were commonest, more fanciful in the cut on women than on men. Usually the left breast sported a tribal badge, symbols of every lineage on the asteroids and moons of Centauri. The custom of wearing swords appeared to have ended—maybe duels were rare nowadays—but pet ferrets or tiny metamorphic hawks sat on many a shoulder. Yes, Guthrie thought, this race had grown strong in its new stronghold, and if the ways were now quieter, the blood beneath coursed no less
wild.

  The door to which he came at last had changed little, a three-meter sheet of iridescence between gaunt, Byzantine-like mosaical figures that moved. An entry behind it bore calligraphy that flowed from poem to poem. There his escort left him.

  He went on into a hemiellipsoidal chamber lined with enormous low-gravity flowers, ferns, canes, with dwarf trees and cages of songbirds, where butterflies flittered free in subtropical warmth and odors of fecundity. At the center of the deck, a well gave directly on a view of stars. Next to a frail-seeming couch and table, Jendaire, Wardress of Zamok Sabely', Lady Commander in the Phyle Ithar, invested associate whenever the High Council of Alpha Centauri assembled, stood waiting to receive him.

  He advanced to her, halted, and snapped an archaic military-style salute. His intent was to show respect while underlining that he spoke for a separate civilization, as powerful as hers. For similar reasons, he had not yet generated a facial image but left his turret screen blank, inviting no familiarity. "Well beheld, my lady," he hailed. “I am glad and honored to be here."

  She offered him her hand. He took it and bowed above its blue-veined thinness, as if his own were a man's. "Well are you come," she replied in a musical contralto.

  Straightening, he studied her with a care that avoided impudence because he showed no eyes. Scarcely below his sheer two meters of height, she stood slim and arrow-straight. Silver shoes peeped forth under a green-and-gold gown of deceptive simplicity. Her visage was classic Lunarian: keen profile, horizon-blue irises, skin as white as the hair that fell diamond-dusted from a coronet and halfway down her back. He guessed her age as about seventy-five Earth-years. Anybody who had won to a position like hers, especially in this society, was formidable; but when she smiled, he recognized the allure and briefly wished that for him it were not theoretical.