The Timeweb Chronicles: Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (30 page)

Chapter Sixty-One

In sentient machines, as in biological creatures, allegiance is always emotion-based. And that makes it notoriously unreliable.

—Thinker, internal observation

On the planet Ignem, far beneath the orbital ring containing the Inn of the White Sun, the flat-bodied robot moved with uncharacteristic vigor, examining each mechanical soldier in the parade formation, using his interface probe to check their operating programs.

Thinker had to move quickly. There wasn’t much time to get the army ready. Beyond the formation, he saw smoke drifting over a volcano. But that was normal for Ignem, and certainly not the problem that had him so very, very concerned.

Thinker’s sensor probe darted out of one hand and snapped into a port on the side of the robot in front of him, making its interface connection.

Data poured into Thinker’s analytical brain. After only a few seconds, he shook his head. Another defective machine. Too many of them. Simultaneously, his officer robots moved along the ranks, checking the battle fitness of other soldiers.

“Remove this robot from the ranks,” Thinker said to an aide behind him, “and take him in for servicing.” Thinker downloaded a list of needed repairs into the robot, disconnected his probe, and moved on to the next one.

The next in line was not really a robot at all. Giovanni Nehr stood ramrod straight, wearing machinelike armor that he had received after volunteering to serve the mechanical army. Gio’s request had been unusual, and totally unanticipated by the robot leader. At first, Thinker had resisted.

“I’ll be the best fighter in the army, sir,” he had promised. “Just give me the chance to prove myself, please.” He went on to admit that he’d had a falling out with his famous brother, and would prefer to follow an entirely new career.

“Well, this would certainly qualify as that,” Thinker had said.

The two of them had laughed and clasped hands, metal against flesh.

Now, Thinker thought the new recruit looked quite good despite the dents in his armor. It occurred to the robot leader, though, that he could not interface with this Human to download the contents of his mind, the way he could with the mechanical soldiers. How useful it would be, Thinker realized, if he had that ability, since he still had questions about Giovanni Nehr.

For several seconds, Thinker paused and allowed his internal programming to search through the various data banks, determining if a complete machine to Human interface was possible. The data revealed a number of obstacles, but he thought it just might be possible. At the first opportunity he would perform a deeper analysis, and see if the technology could be developed.

Saying nothing to Nehr, Thinker moved on down the line.

The recycled fighting robots looked at their commander with sensor-blinking surprise as he hurried among them, inspecting components and issuing terse commands. In the past he had moved slowly and deliberately, a robot of thought, not of action. But he always knew he could get around quicker if he had to; it had only been necessary to activate one of the backup programs he had for emergencies.

The situation he faced at this time was exactly that.…

In the afternoon, Thinker inspected his manufacturing and assembly plants, a hive of buildings constructed at the jewel-like base of a volcano. Like the robots under his command, and like himself for that matter, the structures and machinery inside were all cobbled together from whatever parts the enterprising robots could locate, scavenged from dump heaps all over the galaxy and brought here.

He could order replacement parts from the Hibbils, but that would be prohibitively expensive. Besides, he didn’t trust those deceptive little fur balls, having discovered some of the insidious programs they had installed in sentient machines. Thinker preferred to make his own new parts, or rebuild old ones. Here on Ignem, his blast furnaces heated up metals, plax, and other materials for re-use. He had assembly lines in which mobile and fixed robots worked on old bodies and interior components.

Deep in thought, Thinker strutted down the main aisle of his largest assembly plant. For a moment he paused to watch the blue light of a laser soldering machine as it fused the sealing strip on a synaptic board, one of the brain components of a Series 1405 automaton. He hated using such old machines, since they didn’t have nearly as many features as the newer ones, but at least this series had always been reliable.

Yet, his thoughts were elsewhere.

Jimu and his squad were supposed to have returned by now. Instead, Thinker had learned they were staying with the Doge, as members of his elite Red Beret corps. From the reports reaching Thinker, he knew that the initial mission had been successful, as Jimu had saved the Doge’s life. But in doing so, the infernal robot had ingratiated himself so much to Lorenzo that the nobleman had praised Jimu and offered him a career in the Red Berets … an offer that was accepted.

Jimu is no longer under my command
, Thinker thought. He had sent numerous messages to Jimu by courier, but had received no responses. Still, Thinker had obtained a great deal of information about his activities.

At this very moment, the wayward robot was doing something very, very troubling. On the resource-rich planet of Canopa, under the auspices of the powerful Doge, he was increasing the number of fighting robots under his own command. The original squadron of twenty had multiplied, and at last report comprised more than four hundred. Jimu was highly intelligent, with fine internal programming. On more than one occasion, he had proven his survival abilities, and Thinker, recognizing talent, had promoted him.

But perhaps the promotion had been premature. In retrospect, it seemed to him that Jimu had been exceedingly emotional by robotic standards, overzealous and too dedicated to Humans. It was a fine line, but clearly Jimu had gone too far. He should have completed his mission, saving the Doge’s life, and returned. Now he was something of a loose cannon.

This concerned Thinker greatly, but not for selfish reasons, not because Jimu was in a position of high influence and becoming well-known in his own right. To the contrary, Thinker’s motivations were pure, and he honestly believed that Jimu needed guidance. A sentient robot couldn’t just go off half-cocked and start building an army. He needed extensive education and preparation before taking that step. He needed a great deal of wisdom and moral instruction, and a huge amount of specific knowledge in his data banks. Otherwise, the army would not receive the proper programming, and could become a liability instead of an asset.

In particular, without the fail-safe mechanisms that Thinker always installed in the programming of sentient machines who followed him, they could go out of control and cause a lot of damage. Thinker had seen it happen before. It was called a robotic chain reaction. After one machine went bad it infected others, and they all went bad. Like a mob or a wolf pack, they took on new and menacing personalities, wreaking havoc against any biological organism unfortunate enough to cross their path.

Jimu had the fail-safe in his own programming. Thinker had installed it himself when he interfaced with him. But Jimu still didn’t know how to build an army; he didn’t know how to reprogram other robots to keep them from breaking down, and perhaps going berserk.

Thinker had no personal concerns, no petty jealousies. If Jimu had expressed a desire to build an army himself, and if it made sense to do so, Thinker would have set him on a training course to make it possible. But that had never occurred. The proper procedures had not been followed.

I should have handled him more carefully
, he thought glumly,
given him a tight internal program that compelled him to complete the one mission only. I’m no perfect army builder myself.

Hearing a machine voice, Thinker swiveled his head and looked around. The plant superintendent, Saccary, stood behind him. A small robot with an unusual porcelain-like face containing synthetic Human features, Saccary asked, “I have a hundred more of these automatons backed up for repairs, with worn out synaptic board sealing strips , but I’m running out of parts.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, sir. May I give you a list of other parts we need?”

Thinker nodded stiffly and then moved on, accompanied by the superintendent.

With the Jimu matter dominating his concerns, Thinker slipped into a deep mental state in which he split his exterior self away from the inner core of his consciousness. The exterior self continued to interact with Saccary, accessing data banks for information and conversing with him, but at the core of his conscience Thinker didn’t hear or sense any of that. A volcano could erupt, sending everything flying and tumbling, and if his brain survived he might go on with his line of deep, uninterrupted thought.

In all of the galaxy, no robot was more altruistic or loyal to Humans than Thinker, more totally selfless. He knew this to be so with an almost absolute certainty, since he had downloaded the programs of thousands of robots into his own circuitry, and had analyzed them. Thinker did not consider himself morally superior out of any sense of pride; rather, he knew it to be the simple, unadorned truth.

Now he needed to deal with the crisis quickly, before Jimu built a force that was too large. At the pace the rogue robot had been increasing his numbers, he would one day exceed Thinker’s own army, which had slowed its growth rate due to a limited availability of key raw materials. Jimu, with his central location and the blessing of Doge Lorenzo del Velli, had no such limitations.

And Thinker had another reason in mind, a very deep and specific worry, beyond any general concern about robotic breakdowns and chain reactions. Thinker had heard about the Doge’s attacks on Noah Watanabe, and was horrified by them. As far as Thinker was concerned, Noah was the machine leader’s own Human equivalent, the most altruistic and untainted of his kind. From the reports of travelers stopping at the Inn of the White Sun, Thinker had been inspired by stories of Noah Watanabe and the idealistic mission of the Guardians. He had always hoped to meet the man one day, and perhaps that day was coming.

Noah was the most indispensable member of his race, just as Thinker himself was to his own. Even robots, in Thinker’s alternate but highly informed way of looking at things, constituted a racial type. The mechanicals were sentient, after all, and had emotions and desires, just like biologicals. Intelligent machines were born in a sense, could reproduce themselves, and could die. Just because they had no flesh or cellular structures meant nothing. Thinker had his own definitions.

Of supreme importance, Thinker did not want Jimu’s force to contribute to the annihilation of Noah Watanabe … and he intended to counter that. He would still make efforts to contact Jimu and talk sense into him, but didn’t hold out much hope for that.

Like a sleepwalker, Thinker strutted across a landing field toward a gleaming white shuttle. With only a surface awareness of his surroundings. he boarded the craft for the ride up to the Inn of the White Sun.

In the few minutes required for the trip, Thinker searched his data banks for important information. With all of the facts that he collected around the galaxy, constantly interfacing with thousands of robots, he had the equivalent of an intelligence operation—a spy network—within his own internal circuitry. Following sightings of Noah Watanabe and his grid-plane on podships and in pod stations, Thinker traced the Guardian leader’s travels around the galaxy in recent weeks.

In actuality, the robot was going through a probability program. There were gaps in the information, but he had enough to determine that Noah was no longer on Canopa, and no longer on board his orbital station high over the planet, either.

The fugitive and a small entourage had—with near statistical certainty—escaped to a remote planet in the Plevin Star System.

Chapter Sixty-Two

We Parviis are greatly advantaged by our size, or lack of it, depending upon your perspective. With the enhancement of our magnification systems we can appear to be what we are not, while still retaining what Humans are not.

—The Parvii View of Evolution

In the thunder and blur of the mysterious explosion, Tesh, Anton and their companions felt an emptiness in the pits of their stomachs, and a sensation of extreme speed. Subi shouted that stabilizers had automatically extruded from the undercarriage of the grid-plane, attaching the craft to the floor of the bunker. Inside the cabin of the plane, objects were flying around and things were slamming into the outside of the fuselage.

Everyone held on, and they made heroic efforts to protect the still-unconscious Noah. After attempts by the others, Eshaz was able to reach Noah and wedge himself in a corner by the command console, while keeping a powerful, protective grip on the Human.

The movement settled down, and as Tesh looked at Eshaz, who was shifting his hold on Noah, she thought the Tulyan looked almost maternal, the way he cradled the unconscious man’s head and kept a blanket over him. It seemed incongruous for her to be feeling positive thoughts about one of her mortal enemies, but she couldn’t avoid the feelings.

As if he were a doctor himself, Eshaz checked the healing pad on one side of Noah’s head, satisfying himself that it was still secure and pumping nutrients into the wound. The reptilian Tulyan looked up. For a moment he exchanged glances with Tesh, and she saw kindness in his slitted, pale gray eyes. Then Eshaz again focused his attention on Noah, and whispered something to him.

Through the thick windowglax of the bunker, Tesh saw that the river was no longer visible. Instead it looked like they were in outer space, with blackness and flickering dots of light marking distant suns.

She heard Anton and Subi wondering if the cosmic view might be caused by some sort of a projection mechanism, but suddenly she had an entirely different, much more startling idea. Could it possibly be?

Abruptly, she ran to the exit hatch and touched a button to open it. Without waiting for the automatic stairway to descend and lock into place, she jumped out of the grid-plane and landed on the floor of the bunker.

“I’ll be right back!” she shouted. “Everyone wait here.”

Before Anton or any of the others could react, she ran for a passageway.

She heard shouts of confusion and concern behind her, with Anton running after her with the others, calling her name. “Tesh! Tesh! Where are you going? Come back!”

But none of them could keep up with her, or begin to imagine where she had gone.…

Tesh did something only a Parvii could do. To anyone observing her, she seemed to disappear. She was miniature now, having switched off the magnification system that made her look as large as the giant Humans. She ran with a blur of speed, much faster than she could have moved in her magnified state, which interfered with her natural abilities. Like most Parviis, Tesh preferred her normal size. It provided her with so many more intriguing options, involving speed, access, and personal safety.

She stood in what looked like a rocky passageway now. She touched the walls around her, felt the cold hardness. And knew something with absolute certainty.

This is not rock.

Finding the subtle but telltale burrowing marks she was looking for, she entered a minuscule opening in the stony surface, like a bee entering a hive hole. Once inside, she followed the traditional maze of passageways and now-dormant signal scramblers, designed to keep intruders and probing electronics out. She knew the way well. It was essentially the same in every podship.

Within moments, she located the large sectoid chamber, the nerve center of the pod, still glowing with a faint green luminescence and humming in a barely audible tone. This surprised her, and gave her hope. But the walls were hard, as if fossilized. Could the creature regenerate itself, coming back from its long dormancy? She had heard of cases where this had actually occurred, and of others in which the sectoid chamber was the last portion of the creature to die, like a heart that continued to beat but no longer had the strength to sustain the rest of the body.

Tesh’s own metabolism had been going at full speed, driving her forward. Suddenly it slowed, and she moved ahead cautiously. In shock, she stared at the unmistakable remains of a skeleton lying on the floor ahead of her, humanoid like herself and around the same diminutive size, with streaks of dark green and black on the bones.

A long-dead Parvii, one of her own people.

She murmured an ancient, silent prayer over the body, felt an immense welling of emotion. Even though her kinsmen were numerous, she had always been taught that even one death was significant, since it was a loss suffered by the swarm.

If uninterrupted by calamity, Parviis lived comparatively long lives, substantially more than her own seven hundred twelve years, but they were still mortal. They could be killed in accidents, or could fall victim to specific, odious diseases.

While this one lay on its side now, it appeared to have died and rigidified in a crouching position, as if it had wanted to spring out into space and rejoin a swarm, but perhaps had been too injured to do so. Crouching for a time after death, the Parvii’s flesh and internal organs had fallen away, and sometime afterward the bones fell over.

It was as Tesh had suspected. Their grid-plane had not landed in an abandoned Mutati military bunker at all. Rather, they had entered the cargo hold of what had originally been a podship that crashed into the riverbank centuries ago—and which was subsequently found by Mutatis and converted to their purposes. Hence the thick glax windows, ceramic airlocks, and added rooms. The Mutatis must have had some means of communicating with their hydromutati cousins from there, the Seatels, perhaps through some sort of technology that interacted with the telepathy of the Seatels.

Later, perhaps from an adverse military operation, or a disease, the Mutatis no longer occupied the bunker. For some reason, the Seatels were left behind. Then, when Noah’s Guardians arrived, the hydromutati telepaths killed them … and were about to kill Noah, Tesh, and the rest of their group when the planet exploded.

But why had the podship crashed on Plevin Four in the first place? Something must have gone wrong with the Parvii pilot … an illness, a misjudgment? Or some failure by the podship itself. Such events were rare, but over the course of millenniums did occur.

Another realization hit her.

We are no longer on Plevin Four. It doesn’t exist anymore.

The cosmic blackness and flickering, distant suns were stark confirmation, seen around drifting chunks of the dead world. The podship, even with improvised Mutati window walls, had survived the explosion. In its present state, with the body as cold and hard as stone, the podship had effectively armored itself against the explosion, and this had not been compromised by the Mutati alterations.

The planet is gone, and we are drifting in space. What happened?

She could not imagine. An entire planet! She had been in the midst of a huge explosion.

Above all, Tesh could not shake the intense sadness over her lost comrade, even though she had never known him personally. But she had no time for emotion.

Podships were hardy creatures, and it might just be possible to revive this one. She had to hurry. The bunker was tightly sealed, but soon her companions could run out of air. She did not have that problem. It was one of the principle advantages of Parvii evolution.