Across the Sea of Suns (30 page)

Those organic dreamers were doomed to a poignant end. Evolution worked remorselessly in a cycle of birth, begetting, and death. Each life-form had to make room for its children, or else the weight of the past would bear down on any mutation, smothering change. So death was written into the genetic code. Evolution’s judicial indifference selected for death as well as life.

The coming of intelligent entities meant the birth of tragedy, the dawning realization of personal finiteness. Given the distance of habitable planets from a star, deducing the surface temperature, factoring in the physical constants that predicated chemistry—it was not hard to work out the approximate lifetime that evolution would ordain for human-sized intelligent life: a century or so. Which meant there was barely time to look around, understand, and work for a few frantic decades, before the darkness closed in. At best, an intelligent organism could make its mark in one or two areas of thought. It came and vanished in a flicker. Through its lifetime the night sky would not appear to move at all. The galaxy seemed frozen, unchanging.

Unmoving stars, distant targets. The organic beings, knowing of their own coming deaths, could still dream of going there. Yet on their voyages they were subject to the speed limit set by light. If light’s velocity had been higher, allowing rapid flight between stars, there would have been a huge price to pay. Nuclear forces would be different; the stars’ slow percolating of the heavy elements would not work. The long march upward that led to human-sized creatures would never have gotten started.

So it all knitted together: To arise naturally out of this universe meant a sure knowledge of impending death. That foreshortened all perspectives, forcing a creature to think on short time scales—times so truncated that a journey between stars was a life-devouring odyssey.

“—doesn’t explain the Swarmers, doesn’t account for the EMs adequately,” Carlotta was saving. “Your explanation has too many holes. Too many unjustified assumptions.”

“He hasn’t had help with a detailed analysis, remember that,” Nikka put in.

“No,” Nigel said, “Carlotta’s right. It needs work. Conceptual work.”

He sat back while the women discussed the latest gravlens images, his mind still wandering. He watched Carlotta’s quick, deft movements. She spent a lot of time on her dress, making artful concoctions from the skimpy supplies available. He was losing touch with her. She saw more of Nikka than of him, and knew a lot of the crewmen who were multisocketed now. Those people spent not only their working hours but their recreation as well, plugged in, taking part in—what was the phrase?—“computer-assisted socialization.” Meanwhile, Theory Section was producing no new hypotheses, nothing beyond a bland compiling of data. As the light-years piled up, the crew was turning inward, away from the awful emptiness that lay beyond
Lancer
’s stone buffers. Few went outside anymore, to gaze upon the relativistically Dopplered rainbow unaided. Weeks went by without his hearing even a mention of Earthside in casual conversation. In the face of immensity, something ingrained in humans made them reduce matters to the local, the present, the specific.

Admittedly, Lancer was packed with ambitious, intelligent folk. Given the years in flight, social diversions had undoubtedly been on from the start. But this … No, something rang wrong. Something beyond his curmudgeon’s distrust. Ted Landon and the rest could tune down this sort of thing if they desired. But a crew distracted was a crew easily misled, easily manipulated. And from such a muddle, a strong leader often eventually emerged when a crisis finally came.

He watched Carlotta stirring the orange ice shards in her noisy drink. He thought of Magellan, voyaging with thin hopes and not enough oranges to stave off scurvy. And of the
Titantic
, which sailed with absolute certainty and oranges galore.

“—wouldn’t they?” Carlotta was asking him a question.

“I don’t catch the drift,” he said to cover his day-dreaming.

“I mean, what’s going to force them to evolve higher intelligence?”

“Self-replicating machines can forage for raw materials anywhere. Lord knows they work better in space than we do—we’re hopeless, messy sods. But resources always run out. That will ensure competition.”

“It takes so
long
to exhaust a whole solar system,” Nikka said.

“Um. Yes. Hard for us to think on that time scale, isn’t it? Perhaps a reasonably bright machine needn’t wait around for evolution to do its work, though. It can augment its intelligence by adding on units, remember. Manufacturing, then delegating tasks to its new subsystems. Boosts the thinking speed, which is at least a step in the right direction. Simpler than willing yourself to have more brain cells, which is what
we’d
have to do.”

“Look, I’m the computer hack here,” Carlotta said. “I say artificial intelligence isn’t that easy. Earthside’s huge machines are sharp, sure, but it’s not just a question of adding more capacity.”

“Granted. But we’re talking about millions of years of evolution here—perhaps billions.”

“That’s a big, glossy generalization you’re making,” Carlotta said.

“So it is. I suppose I ought to think matters through better.”

“Listen,” Carlotta pressed him, “this is
science
. You’ve got to make a prediction if you want people to listen.”

“Right. Here it is. A Watcher will appear around every world where technology is
possible
. Or where it once was and might come again. They’re cops, you see. But they only police spots where technology might come from a naturally arising species. An organic one.”

Carlotta frowned. “Let’s see … That fits—”

Nigel broke in eagerly, “The robots which were shuttling ice at Wolf 359, for example. No Watcher there, because those patient little fellows are an early form of a machine society. Give ’em a few million years of exposure to cosmic rays, a shortage of materials—they’ll evolve. Become a member of the club.”

“Club?” Nikka asked.

“A network of ancient machine civilizations. They sent the Watchers.”

“I still don’t understand why the concentration on machines versus us,” Nikka said.

“Partly I’m relying on what the
Snark
said, and events afterward.”

“Well, Nigel,” Carlotta said diplomatically, “most people think you were, you know, off the deep end back then… .”

“I never claimed to be a conservative Republican. But there’s good reason to believe machines left over from a nuclear Armageddon won’t be friendly as lap dogs.”

“Why?”

“They started off with a genocide. One we caused. They’ll remember that.”

He wrote up his theory and duly gave a seminar for ExoBio and Theory sections. It was politely received.

The Watcher around Epsilon Eridani, he said, was there to be certain that no organic form arose again (or returned from nearby stars—there might be colonies). Something—the Watcher?—had destroyed the native organic civilization. It had incinerated the planet in such a way that the Skyhook remained.

Why leave the Skyhook? Most likely, because the Watcher wanted an economical way to send expeditions to the surface, where remnants could be sought out and exterminated.

He reviewed the observations of the oil haulers of Pro-cyon. At highest magnification the machines looked well-designed, sprouting antennas and hatches. Nigel deduced that they were perhaps a bit further advanced beyond the Wolf 359 ice luggers. Still carrying out mechanical tasks, but not running on instructions left over from a long-dead society. Instead, they seemed to be integrated into some interstellar economic scheme. An ocean of oil was a great boon, of course—but not merely for making energy. Anything that could cross between stars would not be hobbled by a chemical-energy economy. They might well need plentiful lubricants, though.

Isis was harder to explain. The EMs had engineered themselves to use radio as their basic sense. Was this to deceive the two Watchers into considering them a protomachine society?

That would imply a certain rigidity and literal-mindedness in those Watchers. Maybe they were old, decaying? Or else biding their time, studying the EMs. The fact that one Watcher attacked any attempt to inspect it tended to support the second point of view.

Nigel used all the data he could muster. He compared spectra and diagnostics of the various Watchers, estimated their ages (all gave billion-year upper bounds), and correlated as many variables as he could plausibly justify. There was no clean way to show a common origin for the Watchers. On the other hand, he pointed out, there was no reason to believe the Watchers had been constructed at the same place or time.

His theory did not muster much support. He had not expected it to.

The prevailing notion in Theory Section was the simplest—Occam’s razor triumphant. All these worlds, Theory said, were the husks of war-obliterated cultures. They proved that intelligent life was plentiful but suicidal. The Watchers were simply a common form of weapon, reinvented again and again in separately evolving societies. Battle stations. By the time a race developed one, it was close to annihilation.

As for Isis—the specifics of the great war that doomed that world were now mired in the EM legends. And legends were notoriously unreliable sources of hard facts. The EMs had modified their own bodies to survive, pure and simple, in the ruin they had made.

Neither side could explain the Swarmers and Skimmers. Nigel stood before the audience and countered arguments as best he could. He had a vague sense that the Skimmers and the EMs were somehow similar, but knew enough not to venture such an idea without an underpinning of hard explanation.

Someone from ExoBio pointed out that the Swarmers atleast demonstrated the prevalence of violence and warfare in other life-forms. There was applause after this remark. Nigel stood silent, not knowing how to counter it.

He saw the polite, well-concealed disbelief in their faces and accepted it. He merely hammered home again his prediction: Whatever they found ahead at Ross 128, if a world could possibly bring forth organic life—or had—it would have a circling Watcher. Walmsley’s Rule, someone called it.

His point made, he sat down to moderate applause. The seminar turned on to other topics in astrophysics and biology. No one, he noted, brought up the obvious exception to Walmsley’s Rule: Earth.

FIVE

Nigel stayed in their apartment much of the time. Nikka was quite fit, and did a variety of jobs around the ship. He participated in seminars and helped with assembly nets, all done over the apartment flatscreen. He liked the isolation and peace, but in fact it was forced on him by the need to tie into the blood filter four times daily. He and Nikka had put the rig together using gear from ship’s surplus; medical engineering was as easy as auto repair, most of it modular and plug-in. Still, they were tinkering with his life; Nikka checked the flow patterns every day. Of course, bypassing the medmons was a violation of shipregs, but that didn’t cause them any fretting.

He regularly tapped into the ExoBio seminars, mostly to use the interactive data bases and 3-D choice-theory-outcome representations. These last were visualizations of the overall consequences of any theory of extraterrestrial life, tracing the many strands of planetary evolution, biology, and socioeconomics. Earthside’s spotty flow of news on the Swarrners and Skimmers had to be folded into what
Lancer
and the independent probes found. There were competing schools of thought, led by specialist analysts among the crew. Nigel seldom met these savants. They existed for him as disembodied constellations of theory in the seminar representations, ways of organizing the data. Their command of interconnections was formidable. They could relate the structure of the
Marginis
wreck to the swim patterns of the Swarmers, fold it into a theory of universal languages, and come up with (a) an estimate of the probability that most galactic lifeforms still lived exclusively in oceans, (b) a best-choice scheme for achieving radio contact through use of gigawatt-level radio beacons, (c) a recalculated optimum-search strategy for probes to stars within a hundred light-years. Nigel recalled Mark Twain’s remark that the wonder of science was how vast a return of speculation you got for such a trifling investment of fact.

The snag was that you had to have some initial premise to fit it all together. Shipboard, the running consensus was that all earlier alien contacts—the
Snark
craft that Nigel spoke to briefly, and the
Marginis
wreck—had been feelers. Something, probably the Swarmers and Skimmers themselves, had probed Earth for a long time, sizing up its suitability as a biosphere. The conventional wisdom of the past, that no species would bother to invade another world, seemed no longer true.
Lancer
had found that most planets were blasted relics. It would be far easier to adapt to an existing biosphere like Earth, than to start at zero with a smashed, barren planet. So the Swarmers had probably been bioengineering themselves to adapt to Earth’s oceans, ever since they discovered it in the expedition that left the
Marginis
wreck.

The theory even explained Walmsley’s Rule. The Swarmers—or the civilization they represented, the technology that built the starships they came in—made the Watchers, to keep track of other possible life sites, other developing societies. Some Watchers survived the final war that scraped some worlds free of life; others didn’t. Man was coming late upon the galactic stage; he should expect to find some props from earlier acts—most of them tragedies. Thus went the conventional wisdom, new edition.

Nigel’s point of view was duly heard, discussed, footnoted in later work—and then the stream of theories and models and self-consistency cheeks flowed on around it, a consensus river skirting an island. He did not know enough about analysis to integrate his model with the wealth of data. He thought it probable that the
Marginis
wreck had died while destroying Earth’s Watcher. Over half a million years after its crash, the crumpled eggshell vessel had demonstrated powerful weapons—which was how Moon Operations found it. At full capability, the wreck could have blown apart whole asteroids—and Nigel suspected that was precisely what it was designed to do. Many of the worlds they’d seen by probe—and Isis, too—had been pulverized by bombardment. It was the cheapest way to damage a planetary surface in terms of energy invested. So the
Marginis
wreck had laid there as man evolved up from apes. The wreck could detect and smash any large asteroid falling toward the biosphere. But its strength ebbed. It had stood up to battering attacks, only to fade slowly as time wore it down.