Smallworld (13 page)

“By putting new nameplates on them?”

“They made a big deal of telling me their processing capacities had been deliberately downgraded! And they’re incapable of self-reproduction!”

“Lobotomized and gelded,” said the Anchorite. “Well, I don’t know what that would make you, but it’d make me
mad.
”

Magus ignored the provocation. “With the HM1000, we can extract the radioactives we already know lie under the South End. We will be rich beyond the most perfervid dreams of avarice.”

“Gus,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus gently, “the density of the radioactive seams under the South End are what keeps Mount Ararat stable. If they were mined out, the C of G of the planet would shift two or three kilometres closer to us. That would bring us closer to the Mote and mean surface gravity maybe one and a half times what we have now—close to Earth normal, the hellish gravity of our ancestors, bad for crops, bad for brittle young bones grown under point five G, bad for landing that contraption of yours, quite apart from killing us all as the barycentre shifted.”

“It could do worse,” said the Anchorite. “It could put the Mote on the move.” He regarded the deck plating guiltily. “The neutronium mote that contains this world’s gravity does not just sit at rest, entombed in rock. Rather, it is balanced very carefully in a self-maintaining spherical vacuum chamber operating very much like a three-dimensional arch. The weight of Mount Ararat presses round on all sides, yet the Arch transfers that weight perfectly around itself, preventing any part of the world from falling into the Mote. And as the Arch chamber is filled with vacuum, the Mote can grow no larger.”

“How do you know all this?” said Magus suspiciously.

“I have been there,” said the Anchorite. “Not personally, of course—I sent a servant. I am uncertain whether the Arch is a natural formation or an artificial. It appears to be made of nothing more complex than fused rock, which could be a natural consequence of proximity to the Mote.”

Magus nodded. His ambition to amass tremendous stacks of wealth had already, in his mind, smashed this minor world-sized obstacle aside. “In any case, I
planned
for all of this. As the HM1000 mines, the GreenQueen will coat the South End’s surface with equivalent quantities of high-yield fertilizer, replacing the lost mass. It will all be done very scientifically.”

The Anchorite was incensed. “There are no other places like Mount Ararat anywhere in the observed universe! What existing model did you employ?” He changed the subject unexpectedly. “Did you deliver the mail I trusted to you?”

Magus’s grin might have been painted on a punchbag. “I did.” He fished in a tunic pocket. “And received a reply.” He passed an old-fashioned printed-matter envelope to the Anchorite, who opened it feverishly with one long yellow fingernail thick as a paperknife blade.

The Anchorite examined the letter’s contents and looked up at Magus.

“Your proposed course of action literally threatens the balance of the world,” he said. “I have an alternative proposal, an external investor who would put money enough into Mount Ararat to make us all rich as graveyard dirt without any unfortunate gravitational side-effects.” He looked deeply into Magus’s eyes. “Do I have your promise that you will not activate your Von Neumann devices until I have had time to lay my proposal before all of Ararat?”

Magus frowned sulkily. “They are not Von Neumann devices,” he complained. “But I will delay activation. The machines will be unloaded and left in a standby state.”

“That, at least, is something,” said the Anchorite. “Thank you.”

He nodded at Magus and at Magus’s father, and departed.

“Gus,” said Gus’s father, “you don’t want to needle the hermit so.”

“What? Uncle Anchorite? He is a fluffy pussy cat of immense proportions.”

“That man,” said Reborn-in-Jesus senior, “may have been an uncle to you all when you were children; but he came here because he had nowhere else to go, and you are not a child any more. I’ve no idea what terrible things he did before he came here, but I know he’s committed iniquities since. The South End Yard is full of people who came to Mount Ararat thinking they’d run things other than in the way the hermit wanted them. Don’t rile him, son. You may think he’s domesticated, but mark my words, he’ll kill you and every living person on this planet if he once thinks his space is being invaded.”

With a final warning stare, Reborn-in-Jesus senior turned on his heel and walked back down the ramp into the middle of his family and a chorus of “WHATCHA GET, DADDY? WHATCHA GET? WHATCHA GET? WHATCHA GET?”

In the charcoal glow of Ararat night, with the A Ring hanging on the south horizon, cut off by the terminator in mid-orbit like a sabre blade, and the sky spangled with an embarrassment of stars, the two Von Neumann units stood alien and illegal in the craters they had made in the soil when unloaded.

Suddenly, abruptly, a cowling motored back on the top of the HiveMind1000, and an antenna unfolded quickly enough to spear insects out of the air, spreading itself swiftly into a dandelion clock of sensors that rippled in the radiophonic breeze. A similar opening gaped in the top of the GreenQueen, extruding a laser sampler that span round in dangerous abandon, firing invisible bursts of coherent x-rays up into the A Ring, and observing the resultant twinkles of vapourising rock and ice, classifying them spectrally through a single coaxially-mounted telescope.

Nanobot hoppers opened in the HM1000, and a grey motile sludge began pouring from its innards, detouring around commercially inviable rocks, intelligent slime swarming in the direction of the South End. The GreenQueen, meanwhile, disgorged a multiheaded tube resembling a fungal sporangium, ranged it at the stars, and began coughing out tiny payloads high into the sky, each one glowing with the speed of its ascent before it even started to put out the warm laval glow of plasmadrive. Before long, the sky was filled with incandescent teardrops, and the earth was home to a river flowing uphill in the direction of the South End. A goat, strayed far from pasture, stood bleating as the nanostream engulfed the rock it stood on. The beast had been eating the black mutant roses from the South End Yard, which put roots down into radioactive bedrock. It had unstable transuranic particles burning out gamma into its gut, producing huge tumours that would have killed it eventually. The antenna assembly rustled as it sensed the slight local spike in radioactivity and ordered the nanostream to the attack. The goat bleated helplessly as the grey fluid surged up its flanks, producing tiny sparks of waste heat as individual workers tunnelled into its flesh, opening holes for their brood fellows to gain access. The goat employed all the tactics in its artiodactyl arsenal, trying to run, jump, kick, and bite, but bit nothing, slipped wherever it put its foot, kicked as if in quicksand. Within a minute, the grey liquid was draining back out of the deep holes bored in the animal’s flanks, leaving the tumours half uneaten, having taken only the cancer’s cause. The nanostream surged off urgently towards the South End, sending a small part of itself back towards the Hive Mind with the precious particles it had harvested. The goat, shivering, bleeding heavily from internal injury, began to limp dazed in the direction of home.

“MOM! THERE’S A DEAD GOAT ON THE PORCH!”

Mom, half asleep and cocooned in shawls, stared out bleary-eyed. Goats were expensive, dead goats doubly so.

“Looks like it got et by a Neutroniosaurus,” said Day-of-Creation, marvelling. Shun-Company inspected the carcass critically. The Neutroniosaurus was an indeterminately-legged, fallout-breathing smallchildivore created by Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus to dissuade his family from straying out after dark near the South End Chasm. It ate orphans for preference, though it was not above taking a toe or two, or a leg, or sometimes a particularly knobbly knee from children who had mommies and daddies.

“No Neutroniosaurus,” said Shun-Company, “did that.”

“Why, mommy?” said little Measure, holding on to her mother’s leg. “Why? Why? Why?”

“Because of the distinctive jagged bite of a Neutroniosaurus,” said Shun-Company. “And because Y has a long tail.”

“
Why
does Y have a long tail, mommy?”

Unity, tall, slender, impossibly long-legged, turned up her nose at the carcass. “That’s not magpies nor hyraxes.”

“It’s the Devil, mommy! The Devil did it!”

Shun-Company shook her head. “It’s not Devil-work. The Devil doesn’t bother itself with goats, and the Devil cuts clean. This looks almost like the poor bleater was held down while acid was poured over it. Ate right into its rumen, look.”

“Can we eat it now it’s dead, mommy? We always eat the dead ones. Can we, can we, can we?”

Shun-Company drew her shawl about herself and looked out at a sky that was suddenly, unaccountably raining glistering golden teardrops spiralling round the world into the South End.

“I don’t think it’s going to be safe to eat this one, precious.”

“They’ve turned themselves on.” Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus sat at the head of the dining table the family had saved up for, made of real wood from Earth that had got to the 23 Kranii system before the light from the death of Christ.

“They’re still self-aware,” said the Anchorite, seated at the other end of the table, where Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus usually sat. “Independent thought processing downgraded, maybe, but they can turn themselves on and off. That in itself is a violation of the anti-AI laws. If we’re caught in possession of them, we’ll be in more shit than they can spread over our South Pole in a lifetime.”

“It’s not shit,” said Magus uncomfortably from halfway down the table. “It’s a complex highly nutritious mulch of polypeptides, nitrates and soil salts necessary for a growing plant.”

“It’s brown and it smells like shit,” growled the Anchorite. “It’s shit.”

“You’ve been to the South End?” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “Wasn’t that dangerous?”

“Very,” said the Anchorite. “The
highly nutritious mulch of polypeptides
is now so deep out there in places a man can’t move in it. I had to take a bath when I got home! A
bath!”

Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus and his son looked at one another.

“I own a bath,” said the Anchorite, in tones daring them to disagree.

Magus cleared his throat awkwardly. “Uh, there’s been no C-of-G shift.”

“There’s a crack in the earth all the way down the Meridian Field already,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “And if you’d troubled to get up early and help your father with the harvesting, you’d know that. If it propagates any further it’ll come clean through this room, and then we’ll have a hell of a draught in here.”

“There have been rockfalls,” said the Anchorite, “all the way around the Chasm. Mainly on the South Wall, but doing damage enough on the North, where I need hardly remind you I live. We must shut these machines down.”

“What power source do they use?” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.

“Normally fusion,” said the Anchorite. “Though they’ll take fissionables at a pinch, and they can black their skins to collect solar energy. Anywhere there’s deuterium, sunlight or uranium, they can survive and make little copies of themselves. And there’s all three here. And,” he said, wagging a finger at Magus and his father, “the human body contains an average of two grammes of deuterium.”

“These two machines have had their self-replication functions disabled,” said Magus hotly.

“Yes, just like they’ve had their standby functions disabled. But he’s right,” said the Anchorite. “If they’d been fully functional VN units, they’d have been nose to tail all down the Saddle by now. As it is, there’s still just the two of them, plus a big pile of transuranic ingots, neatly sorted by element and labelled. Piled outside your ship ready for loading. Though they haven’t touched the ship. Probably didn’t taste too good,” he said archly.

“So there’s less danger, then,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “Than from a working VN unit, I mean.”

“In the short term. But whoever decided to frig these things’ programming and demote them to upmarket mining machinery forgot that a non-self-reliant machine can’t make decisions on its own. They’ll continue until every last speck of actinium and californium is eaten out of this planet and replaced with crust which is a kilometre deep, brown, and highly nutritious.”

“The mote,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus in panic. “Could they eat down to the mote?”

“No.” The Anchorite shook his head. “The mote’s made of neutronium overlaid with highly compressed crystalline iron. They’ll be neither programmed nor equipped to mine neutronium, and iron won’t interest them. Too commonplace.”

“The ship,” said Magus suddenly.

The Anchorite glared at Magus for daring to interrupt.

“Why haven’t they eaten into the ship?” continued Magus. “It’s full of transuranics. They’re in the circuitry, in the FTL unit, alloyed into the hull, everywhere. And yet the nanos from the HiveMind haven’t touched it.”

“They have some conscience programming, at least,” said the Anchorite. “They wouldn’t attack me either. I was stood in the middle of a stream of them. They tickled my ankles. Occasionally, they nip. Testing my DNA, you see. They recognize human genetic material and avoid it. But when machines can make other machines, and if they’re clever enough, they can figure out that the conscience factor is holding their creations back, and design it out of them. And even if that HiveMind can’t make copies of itself, it can make all the nanominers it wants. There’s a big grey river of them stretching from the Saddle right to the walls of the South End Yard, and you can’t tell me all of those fit into the box they came in.”

“Then how are we going to get rid of them?”

“Why don’t I just lift the HiveMind back into the cargo bay?” said Magus innocently.

The Anchorite shook his head. “The system has to be shut down gracefully. If you cut off the queen unit, it still leaves the nanos. Granted, no more nanos will get made, but it also removes the nanos’ guiding intelligence. Individually, being the size of a pinhead, they aren’t too bright, which means they tend to carry on doing what they were originally told to, and when Ararat runs out of the ores they were first programmed to fetch, they might indeed then switch to a lower-grade metal, like iron.” He polished the seat with his backside uncomfortably. “Which the human body contains around half a kilo of. No, young Magus, the best thing you can do is draft a letter to the folks you got these units off, and inform them there will be no payment unless they get a maintenance engineer down here stat. How much did you pay them?”