Godlike Machines (42 page)

“You know as well as I do that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Such loops and twists come at a cost to the Structure. It’s not infinitely elastic; it can only stretch so far. It must release tension in small ways or else it would’ve snapped long ago. You might have seen something like this in your travels. Timelines truncated, perhaps, or strange sheer effects, particularly near those most afflicted by temporal back-flips.

“Does that ring any bells?

“I see. ‘The Director,’ eh? I suppose to someone without access to my data it might look like an intelligent being at work in the mine. And we—we flawed, we brilliant, we imaginatively blind—we persist in seeing the universe through our human-shaped glasses. We perceive an invisible hand where there is none at all. It’s just the tangled fabric of cause and effect in the Structure adjusting itself, sealing off complicated ends, healing.

“And that other legend you related about me—my fortress of death, which killed the others you say preceded you here. I surmise now that it’s nothing more than another presentation of this same phenomenon. My clocks connect me to many, many conflicting arrows of time, gathered by harmless, unconscious machines and reported to me here, where I observe them. It’s like being surrounded by archers. I have been, unknowingly, caught in a vortex of twisted causality. While I remain connected to the clocks, I myself am safe, but anyone who gets too close will be erased from the Structure’s sum state. Instantly and without reprieve.

“That is a grim realization for someone such as I, who never intended harm to anyone.

“You? Well, if I had to guess I would say that you are protected by virtue of the fact that you are midway through causal loops of your own. You can’t be erased from the Structure here and now because you have actions to perform elsewhere and elsewhen. Your certain fate protects you, even while it guarantees your eventual death.

“And yes, you are most probably a danger to those around you. Perhaps a single loop could be tolerated, but two crossing loops . . . ? Bound to be inimical to the grand design, whatever that is.

“You seem downhearted, and I assure you that I both sympathize and apologize. My friends, I am speculating wildly. There hasn’t been time enough to conduct systematic experiments—or so I have been telling myself these past weeks. Were Honeyman here, he would remind me of the important of the scientific method before coming to any firm conclusions. Physicists like me are plagued by engineers like him. No answers come from idle speculation, just more questions. Of those we have plenty enough already.

“Remember that my theories are open for disproof to one and all. I could be nothing but a mad old hermit obsessed with clocks whose word you’d do best to ignore. Forget my delusions; go back to your lives and enjoy them while you can. You have been successful where so many others have failed, coming this far! And you’ve shown me a thing or two that I’d managed to miss, that’s for sure.

“Honeyman has been silent for an age, or so it seems me. I have missed my old friend, you know. Perhaps it really has been an age. It would be a terrible thing if the arrows of time twisted unfavourably and claimed him before I could tell him all about the execution failure we discovered together-marvellous and terrifying, and exactly the sort of thing he would build if given his head . . .”

We left Trelayne staring contemplatively at the thick bunch of cables connecting his workstation to the clocks scattered all across the Structure.

Cotton didn’t speak, for all that I tried to engage her. She had barely said a word through the last half of our interrogation of Trelayne. I had been the one asking questions, guiding the old man through his rambling mix of recollections and speculations. She had withdrawn into herself, and I resisted the impulse to remonstrate with her that this was the culmination of her life’s work. She had said herself that it would complete her, and therefore her disengagement seemed counterproductive.

A moment’s thought would have revealed to me what was going through her mind. But I had my own problems to work through-first and foremost how to convey to you, Master Catterson, all that we had learned. Weapon, accident, or trap? The nature of the mine was no closer to my understanding, even having met Trelayne and listened to all he said.

Of more immediate importance was the revelation that our time-loops were the sole things protecting us from the Structure’s causality-repairing censorship. Once my loop was closed, by putting Cotton in place in Gevira for my former self to examine, what was to stop my being wiped out of existence? Nothing. Cotton, by killing herself and expecting me to finish the job, was effectively killing me too.

That I was distracted at the crucial junction is regrettable but I hope forgivable.

I do not dare believe that events would have unfolded any other way than as they did, as they were always going to, in the end.

When we arrived at Uvaya, a sole Terminus agent was waiting for us.

“Finish it,” he said, removing his pressure mask and tossing it to me.

I caught the mask automatically, struck by how much like a Guildsman this man looked—except for his eyes, which had the far-horizons look of someone who had spent too long deep in the mines.

I had expected Osred Guyonnet.

Instead, he was me.

I felt the Structure flex around me, and I wondered how many timelines were being truncated as we stood in each other’s presence. Who was paying the cost of this strange encounter? Who must have died in order that we might meet?

It was over in a second. Without another word, he turned and walked away. A transcendent shaft opened its portals for him. He stepped inside and was gone.

Cotton gasped and folded awkwardly to the floor.

I was at her side, all thoughts of my self and this strange new development forgotten.

“Cotton, what’s wrong?”

Her pupils were pinpricks and her skin had turned a deathly shade of gray. There was no strength in her hands as they reached for me.

I knew the answer to my question even as I pleaded with her to respond. She must have started the process in the shaft for it to be so advanced now.

“E. C., talk to me!”

“Always going to end here, Donnie Boy.”

“Don’t listen to him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’“

“He wasn’t talking to me. We got the answers—”

I leaned in close, barely able to hear her.

“—got the answers we deserved. Tell everyone. You know—I—”

Her last words emerged as little more than a sigh.

“—can’t live—we can’t—”

I cradled her in my arms as the metabolic cascade ran its course. It ruined her mind first, then spread through her nervous system. Her organs succumbed one by one, with lungs and heart failing last of all. I held her tightly, relishing her body’s warmth while it lasted.

The first time I touched her she had been cold, and I knew the last time would be the same, but I did not want to remember her that way.

When the last electrical activity had died away in her brain stem, I laid her flat on the ground, closed her brown eyes, and went about finding a way to transport her to Gevira.

I have reached the conclusion of my account, but not the end of my life. Although that I have a future I am now certain, how long that future will last I cannot know in detail. It may be hours, or months. Years, even. At least I know that despair will not immediately claim me, as it claimed Emma-line Celeste Cotton.

An hour ago, I put her body where it will be discovered by Security Officer Gluis just minutes before his own death. In theory, I suppose, I could have refused to see it through. I remain a creature of free will, despite this cocoon of causality in which I find myself. But the moment I learned the true nature of the mines, I knew I would return to Gevira. I had to get in touch with you, Master Catterson. I am the vanguard of an invasion, as Huw Kindred said, and if I don’t make the results of my observation known someone else is sure to follow. Some other Guildsman will devise similar theories to mine, never knowing just how inadequate his imagination will be.

I have parcelled up my notes—all except Cotton’s precious life story—in the hope of sparing my predecessor both his misconceptions and my fate.

I understand now that that glimpse of my future self—and the surety that I was caught in another loop even before the first closed—is both my insurance and my curse. I cannot die on Gevira when I have a role to play elsewhere, no matter how small. This is my very human attempt to survive the machine of nature, and humanity’s greatest folly. “Execution failure” indeed.

Knots in time bind as well as protect. What would happen if I tried to leave the mines before fulfilling the future ahead of me? What damage could I wreak on spacetime and those around me, upon the Great Ship, upon the Guild, and upon you—teacher, master, and confessor these last few days?

The old man who addressed me on the surface of Panaion was absolutely right when he said that my return to the mines was bound to be a one-way trip.

To him I also spoke of duty, as I have to you, Master Catterson, and to Cotton. I am coming to believe that her final instruction to me is the highest—perhaps the only-form of duty I could consider following now.

“Tell everyone.”

Take this transmission as a warning, if you will. Do not be blinded by the mines’ wonders to the threat it entails. While the potential it offers for the Guild’s expansion appears limitless, at what cost would it come? I have seen it kill many whose lives were devoted to understanding its nature—not just E. C. Cotton, but Huw Kindred and Osred Guyonnet as well. How can we strangers to its halls hope to fare any better?

Although the mines were not designed as a trap, that is what they have undoubtedly become. Any incursion is doomed to failure. Send no more Guildsmen to suffer as I have suffered, through ignorance and pig-headedness, however deservingly.

My bridges are all burned now, but to be condemned to spend the rest of my days here is perhaps not the worst fate imaginable for a man such as I—even if I may wander its labyrinthine halls forever, extolling the truth and being ignored for it. I write this in the hope that the temporal tides have not already flung me up on some future shore, one in which you have abandoned hope of ever hearing from me again. If the suspicion of my demise has become a certainty in some minds, Master Catterson, I ask you to suspend all judgement on that score, if no other.

As you suspected, the citizens of Gevira uncovered something utterly strange and deadly beneath the veneer of their civilisation. Thus ends my account of it. I leave to you the divination of the will of the Guild, and the way forward for the people I once called my own.

ALONE

Robert Reed

Robert Reed was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1956. He has a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the Nebraska Wesleyan University, and has worked as a lab technician. He became a full-time writer in 1987, the same year he won the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, and has published eleven novels, including
The Leeshore, The Hormone Jungle,
and far future science fiction novels
Marrow
and
The Well of Stars.
An extraordinarily prolific writer, Reed has published over 180 short stories, mostly in
F&SF
and
Asimov’s,
which have been nominated for the Hugo, James Tiptree Jr. Memorial, Locus, Nebula, Seiun, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and World Fantasy awards, and have been collected in
The Dragons of Springplace
and
The Cuckoo’s Boys.
His novella “A Billion Eves” won the Hugo Award last year. Nebraska’s only SF writer, Reed lives in Lincoln with his wife and daughter, and is an ardent long-distance runner.

More than a decade ago Reed launched a continuing series of stories that featured one of the great godlike machines in modern science fiction, the Jupiter-sized ‘Great Ship,’ which was found abandoned in space, salvaged by humans, and sent on a grand tour of the galaxy. In “Alone,” Reed returns to the Great Ship and looks at an unlikely seeming passenger who has been onboard for far longer than seems possible.

1

The hull was gray and smooth, gray and empty, and in every direction it fell away gradually, vanishing where the cold black of the sky pretended to touch what was real. What was real was the Great Ship. Nothing else enjoyed substance or true value. Nothing else in Creation could be felt, much less understood. The Ship was a sphere of perfect hyperfiber, world-sized and enduring, while the sky was only a boundless vacuum punctuated with lost stars and the occasional swirls of distant galaxies. Radio whispers could be heard, too distorted and far too faint to resolve, and neutrino rains fell from above and rose from below, and there were ripples of gravity and furious nuclei generated by distant catastrophes—inconsequential powers washing across the unyielding, eternal hull.

Do not trust the sky, the walker understood. The sky wished only to tell lies. And perhaps worse, the sky could distract the senses and mind from what genuinely mattered. The walker’s only purpose was to slowly, carefully move across the Ship’s hull, and if something of interest were discovered, a cautious investigation would commence. But only if it was harmless could the mystery be approached and studied in detail. Instinct guided the walker, and for as long as it could remember, the guiding instinct was fear. Fierce, unnamed hazards were lurking. The walker could not see or define its enemies, but they were near, waiting for weakness. Waiting for sloth or inattentiveness. Regardless how curious it was or how fascinating some object might be, the walker scrupulously avoided anything that moved or spoke, or any device that glowed with unusual heat, and even the tiniest example of organic life was something to be avoided, without fail.

Solitude was its natural way.

Alone, the ancient fear would diminish to a bearable ache, and something like happiness was possible.

Walking, walking. That was the purpose of existence. Select a worthy line, perhaps using one of the scarce stars as a navigational tool. Follow that line until something new was discovered, and regardless whether the object was studied or circumvented, the walker would then pick a fresh direction—a random direction—and maintain that new line with the same tenacity.

There was no need to eat, no requirement for drink or sleep. Its life force was a minor, unsolvable mystery. The pace was patient, every moment feeling long and busy. But if nothing of note occurred, nothing needed to be recalled. After a century of uninterrupted routine, the walker compressed that blissful sameness into a single impression that was squeezed flush against every other vacuous memory—the recollections of a soul that felt ageless but was still very close to empty.

Eyes shrank and new eyes grew, changing talents. With that powerful, piercing vision, the walker watched ahead and beside and behind. Nothing was missed. And sometimes for no obvious reason it would stop, compelled suddenly to lower several eyes, staring into a random portion of the hull. From the grayness, microscopic details emerged. Fresh radiation tracks still unhealed; faint scars being gradually erased by quantum bonds fighting to repair themselves. Each observation revealed quite a lot about the hyperfiber, and the lessons never changed. The hull was a wonder. Fashioned from an extremely strong and lasting material—a silvery-gray substance refined during a lost age by some powerful species, perhaps, or perhaps a league of vanished gods. They were the masters who must have imagined and built the Ship, and presumably the same wondrous hands had sent their prize racing through the vacuum. A good, glorious purpose must be at work here; but except for the relentless perfection of the Great Ship, nothing remained of their intentions, their goals, or even an obvious destination.

When the walker kneeled, the hull’s beauty was revealed.

And then it would stand again and resume its slow travels, feeling blessed to move free upon this magnificent face.

2

There was no purpose but to wander the perfection forever: That was an assumption made early and embraced as a faith. But as the centuries passed, oddities and little mysteries gradually grew more numerous. Every decade brought a few more crushed steel boxes and empty diamond buckets than the decade before, and there were lumps of mangled aerogel, and later, the occasional shard of some lesser form of hyperfiber. As time passed, the walker began to come across dead machines and pieces of machinery and tools too massive or far too ordinary to be carried any farther once they had failed. These objects were considerably younger than the Ship. Who abandoned them was a looming mystery, but one that would not be solved soon. The walker had no intention of approaching these others. And in those rare times when they approached it—always by mistake, always unaware of its presence-it would flatten itself against the hull and make itself vanish.

Invisibility was a critical talent. But invisibility meant that it had to abandon most of its senses. Even as they strode across its smooth back, these interlopers were reduced to a vibration with each footfall and a weak tangle of magnetic and electrical fields.

Days later and safe again, the walker would rise up carefully and move on.

Another millennium passed without serious incident. It was easy to believe that the Great Ship would never change, and nothing would ever be truly new; and holding that belief close, the walker followed one new line. No buckets or diamond chisels were waiting to change its direction. As it strode on, the stars and sky-whispers silently warned that it was finally passing into unknown territory. But this did happen on occasion. Perfection meant sameness, and the walker could imagine nothing new. Then what seemed to be a flat-topped mountain began to rise over the coming horizon. Puzzled, it made note of the sharp gray line hovering just above the hull. More years of steady marching caused the grayness to lift higher, just slightly. Perhaps a mountain of trash had been set there. Perhaps a single enormous bucket upended. Various explanations offered themselves; none satisfied. But the event was so surprising, enormous and unwelcome, and the novelty so great, that the walker stopped as soon as it was sure that something was indeed there, and without taking one step, it waited for three years and a little longer, adapting its eyes constantly, absorbing a view that refused to change.

Finally, curiosity defeated every caution, and altering its direction, the walker steered straight toward what still made no sense.

At a pace that required little energy, it pressed ahead in half-meter strides. Decades passed before it finally accepted what was obvious: That while the Ship was undoubtedly perfect, it was by no measure perfectly smooth and eternally round. Rising from the hull was not one gigantic tower, but several. The nearest tower was blackish-gray and too vast to measure from a single perspective. Occasionally a small light appeared on the summit, or several tiny flecks of light danced beside its enormous bulk, and there were sudden spikes in dense, narrow radio noise that tasted like a language. Various explanations occurred to the walker. From where these possibilities came, it could not say. Maybe they arose from the instincts responsible for its persistent fears. But like never before, it was curious. It started to move once again, slowly and tirelessly pushing closer, and that was when it noticed how one of the more distant towers had begun to tip, looking as if it was ready to collapse on its side. And shortly after that remarkable change in posture, the tower suddenly let loose a deep rumble, followed by a scorching, sky-piercing fire.

But of course: These were the Ship’s engines. No other explanation was necessary, and in another moment, the walker absorbed its new knowledge, a fresh set of beliefs gathering happily around the Ship’s continued perfection. Fusion boosted by antimatter threw a column of radiant blue-white plasmas into the blackness, scorching the vacuum. This was a vision worth admiration. Here was power beyond anything that the walker had ever conceived of. But soon the engine fell back into sleep, and after thorough reflection, it decided to choose another random direction, and another, selecting them until it was steering away from the gigantic rocket nozzles.

If objects this vast had missed its scrutiny, what else was hiding beyond the horizon?

Walk, walk, walk.

But its pace began to slow even more. Flying vessels and many busy machines were suddenly common near the engines, and some kind of animal was building cities of bubbled glass. An invasion was underway. There were regions of intense activity and considerable radio noise, and each hazard had to be avoided, or if the situation demanded, crossed without revealing its presence.

Ages passed before the engines vanished beyond the horizon. A bright red star became the walker’s beacon, its guide, and it followed that rich light until the ancient sun sickened and went nova, flinging portions of its flawed skin out into the cooling, dying vacuum.

Younger stars appeared, climbing from the horizon as the walker pressed forward. A second sky was always hiding behind the hyperfiber body. The walker felt the play of gravity and then the hard twisting, the Ship leaving the line that had been followed without interruption for untold billions of years. After that, the sky was changed. The vacuum was not nearly so empty, or quite as chilled, and even a patient entity with nothing to do but count points of light could not estimate just how many stars were rising into its spellbound gaze.

A galaxy was approaching. One great plate of three hundred billion suns and trillions of worlds was about to intersect with a vessel that had wandered across the universe, every previous nudge and great reaches of nothingness leading to this place and this rich, perfect moment.

And here the walker stood, on the brink of something entirely new.

There was a line upon the hull that perhaps no one else could have noticed. Not just with their eyes and the sketchy knowledge available, no. But the walker recognized the boundary where the hull that it knew surrendered to another. Suddenly the thick perfect hyperfiber was replaced with a thicker but considerably more weathered version of faultless self. Even in the emptiest reaches of the universe, ice and dust and other nameless detritus wandered in the dark. These tiny worlds would crash down on the Ship’s hull, always at a substantial fraction of light-speed, and not even the best hyperfiber could shrug aside that kind of withering power. Stepping onto the Ship’s leading face, the walker immediately noticed gouges and debris fields and then the little craters that were eventually obscured by still larger craters-holes reaching deep into the hard resilient hull. Most of the wounds were ancient, although hyperfiber hid its age well. All but the largest craters were unimportant to the Ship’s structure, their cumulative damage barely diminishing its abiding strength. But some of the wounds showed signs of repair and reconditioning. The walker discovered one wide lake of liquid hyperfiber, the patch still curing when it arrived on the smooth shoreline. Kneeling down, it looked deep into the still-reflective surface. For the first time in memory, there was another waiting to be seen. But the entity felt little interest in its own appearance. What mattered was the inescapable fact that someone—some agent or benevolent hand-was striving to repair what billions of years of abuse had achieved. A constructive force was at work upon the Ship. A healing force, seemingly. Enthralled, the walker looked at the young lake and the reflected Milky Way, measuring the patch’s dimensions. Then it examined the half-cured skin, first with fresh eyes and then with a few respectful touches. A fine grade of hyperfiber was being used, almost equal to the original hull. Which implied that caretakers were striving to do what was good and make certain that their goodness would endure.

The endless wandering continued.

Eventually the galaxy was overhead, majestic but still inconsequential. The suns and invisible worlds were little more than warm dust flung across the emptiness, and still all that mattered was the Ship, dense and rich beyond all measure. Walk, and walk. And walk. And then it found itself on the edge of another crater—the largest scar yet on the hull—and for the first time ever, it followed a curving line, the crater’s frozen lip defining its path.

Bodies and machines were working deep inside the ancient gouge.

From unseen perches, it watched the activity, studying methods and guessing reasons when it could not understand. The vacuum crackled with radio noise. The sense of words began to emerge, and because the skill might prove useful, the walker committed to memory what it understood of the new language. Hundreds of animals worked inside the crater-humans they called themselves, dressed inside human-shaped machines. And accompanying them were tens of thousands of pure machines, while on the lip stood a complex of prefabricated factories and fusion reactors and more humans and more robots dedicated to no purpose but repairing one minuscule portion of the Ship’s forward face.