The Timeweb Chronicles: Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (4 page)

Chapter Six

These machines are designed to mimic only the best aspects of their creators. To permit the opposite, either through something intrinsic or of their own volition, would be to invite disaster.

—Hibbil product statement, sent out with each AI robot

The jewel-like volcanic planet of Ignem was a favorite for those who liked to travel the back ways of space. Shaped by a series of volcanic cataclysms that belched up rainbows of porous silica, the glittering world looked like an exotic treat for giant gods, one they could just scoop up and swallow as they flew past on one of their journeys across the cosmos.

Each day Ignem looked a little different, depending upon solar conditions and the amount of glassy dust that was kicked up by powerful winds blowing across the surface. No known life forms existed on the planet, since conditions were too severe for carbon-based, chemical, electrical, or other living creatures. Humans, Hibbils, Mutatis, Adurians, and other galactic races could only go on the surface in expensive, specially-crafted spacesuits that contained layered filter systems. Deep-space adventure companies took wealthy tourists to Ignem several times a year, and the visitors always returned home in amazement, gushing about the natural beauty they had seen.

All expeditions stopped first at the Inn of the White Sun, a comfortable machine-operated way station that had been constructed in a dense orbital ring more than eighty kilometers above the surface of the planet. At the inn, bubble-windowed rental spaces had been fitted with an atmosphere that was breathable to most of the galactic races. Adventurers checked their equipment and purchased anything they needed from a wide array of vending machines. At premium prices, of course.

Sales conventions were also held at the inn, usually for members of the Human-run Merchant Prince Alliance. At the moment, however, many of the rooms were filled with Heccians and Diffros, races of artisans and craftsmen from the far-off Golden Nebula of the Seventieth Sector. They were making quite a commotion as they drank foul-tasting venom extracted from snakes … a traditional kickoff ceremony for their conventions.

Now it was the month of Dultaz in the White Sun solar system. A flat-bodied, gray robot named Thinker paced back and forth on the main observation deck of the Inn. The deck ran along the top of the thickest ring section, and was not atmospherically-controlled. Beneath him and stretching along the rings were the beehive-like rooms of the Inn, positioned so that they offered spectacular views of the shimmering jewel-like world below. For travelers on a budget, less expensive rooms were available without views, or with vistas of the twinkling darkness of deep space.

Far below the robot, Ignem glowed with a million colors as the last rays of the setting sun pierced the faceted, layered surfaces of the planet, lighting up the globe and the thin atmosphere surrounding it. He watched the hypnotically subtle chromatic changes, and the translucent effects on Ignem’s surface, as the planet held onto the last rays of light before they were sucked away into the stygian night of space.

Thinker often came to this spot late in the day and stood by himself. These were reflective times for him, when he could consider significant issues, utilizing the immense amount of information in his data banks. As the leader of the sentient machines in this galactic subsector he had many responsibilities, and took them all seriously.

In a continual quest to improve himself, Thinker periodically went around the galaxy to collect material for his data banks, which he then brought back to the Inn of the White Sun to catalog. Whenever he traveled, he sought out other sentient machines, conversing with them and making interface connections, to download whatever data they had. Sometimes their security programs would not permit them to interface with him, and if that happened he had the ability to force a connection and override their internal firewalls. But he only rarely did that, not wishing to create controversy or call unnecessary attention to himself. Usually it was easier to just move on. There were always machines that would help him.

The sentient machines under his command had done quite well for themselves, rebuilding mechanical life forms that had been discarded by Humans and putting them back into operation. They even manufactured popular computer chips and sold them around the galaxy. Sometimes, though, they seemed overly dependent upon Thinker. At the moment, two of his assistants, Ipsy and Hakko, were standing at a thick glax door staring out at him, as if they could not do anything further without his advice. He waved them off dismissively, and they stepped back, out of his view. He knew, however, that they were still close by, waiting to talk with him the moment he went back inside.

I should reprogram them
, he reminded himself. But this had occurred to him before, and he had never done anything about it. He knew why. Despite the minor irritations he actually enjoyed the relationships, because his subordinates made him feel needed.

Far off, in the perpetual night of the galaxy, he saw something flash and disappear. He would never know for certain what it was, and could only speculate. Perhaps it was a shooting star, a small sun going nova, or the glinting face of a comet before it turned and veered away from the reflective rays of sunlight that seemed to give it life.

It is so beautiful out there.

Since Thinker was a mechanical creature with few internal moving parts, he did not breathe, and was able to function outside the boundaries imposed upon biological life forms. The machines that operated this facility were the sentient remnants of merchant prince industrial efforts. Thrown away and left to rust and decay all over the galaxy, the intelligent robots had sought each other out and formed their own embryonic civilization.

Among Humans and other biological life forms that visited the inn, these mechanical men were something of a joke, and non-threatening. After all, the machines had an affection for Humans, referring to them in almost godlike terms as their “creators.” The metal people were an eclectic assortment as well, and amusing in appearance to many people. Some of the robots were Rube Goldberg devices that performed tasks in laughable, inefficient ways, taking pratfalls and accomplishing very little. This explained why many of them were abandoned. Others had been cobbled together with spare parts. In all they looked quite different from the standardized robots manufactured by the Hibbils on their Cluster Worlds, under contract to the Doge and to the leaders of various galactic races.

Thinker didn’t really care how he and his loyal compatriots were viewed. His emotional programs were limited in scope, and while he became mildly irritated at times he did not take offense easily. His thoughts tended toward the intellectual, toward questions of deep purpose and matters involving the origins of the universe. Most of all he found it exhilarating to stand out here in the vacuum of space, gazing into eternity … into all that was, and all that ever would be. Some marvelous power had created this galaxy, and in his most private thoughts he liked to imagine the Supreme Being as a machine, and not some cellular entity. It seemed plausible … perhaps even likely. The galaxy was a machine after all, one that operated on a vast scale, ticking along moment by moment in its journey through time.

Lights blinked on inside the rooms and public chambers of the Inn of the White Sun. Far below, Ignem gave up its ephemeral translucence and faded to darkness, casting an ebony shadow against the cloth of stars beyond.

The cerebral robot was about to go back inside when he felt a rumbling in the metal plates of his body, and his metal-lidded eyes detected a distortion in the fabric of the cosmos, with star systems twisted slightly out of their normal alignment. A section of space in front of him became opaque and amorphous, with a wobbly effect around the edges. He noted a slight change of pressure around him, too, as if a door into another dimension had opened for an instant, and something altogether different was entering.

Podship.

The opacity glowed bright green for a moment, then flickered. A blimp-shaped object took form and made its way toward a faint, barely visible pod station, floating nearby in the airless vacuum of space. The mottled, gray-and-black podship had a row of portholes on the side facing Thinker, with pale green light visible inside the passenger compartment. From his data banks the robot drew a comparison. The sentient creature was reminiscent of a whale of Earth, but without a tail or facial features, and cast off into space.

The pod station, after fading from view during the entry of the podship, solidified its appearance. A globular, rough-hewn docking facility, it was nearly as mysterious as the podships themselves. For tens of thousands of years the sentient podships—hunks of living cosmic material—had been traveling at faster-than-light speeds through the galaxy, on regular routes. The ships were of unknown origin, and so too were the orbiting pod stations at which they docked—utilitarian facilities positioned all over the galaxy, usually orbiting the major planets. Some of the galactic races said that the podships and their infrastructure were linked with the creation of the galaxy, and there were numerous legends concerning this. One, attributed to the Humans of ancient Earth, held that the podships would come one day and transport religious and political leaders to the Supreme Being, where all of the great secrets would be revealed.

Thinker signaled for a sliding door to open, and then strode into the lobby of the inn on his stiff metal legs. There he encountered Ipsy and Hakko, who had been waiting for him, as he’d suspected. “Later,” he told them. “For once, handle something on your own.”

“We need to plan next month’s sales convention,” Hakko said, “so that the necessities can be ordered.”

“Yes,” Ipsy agreed. “There is a great deal of printing to be done—announcement cards, menus. You know the trouble we had at the last convention when we tried to serve Blippiq food to Adurians.”

“Well, take care of it then,” Thinker said, with mock impatience, since it was like playing a game with them.

He continued on his way, and entered a lift that took him down to the lowest level of the inn. There, through a thick glax floor, he could see the dark gray pod station floating perhaps a thousand meters away, and the sentient ship that had just entered one of its docking bays.

Presently he saw a shuttle emerge from the pod station, burning a blue exhaust flame as it closed the gap between the station and the orbital ring. The little craft locked onto a berthing slot, and Thinker saw men step out. He counted twenty-two.

His first impression was that they were Humans, a group of tourists. Unlike other galactic races, Humans did that sort of thing. They just went places to be there, to experience them. To most galactic races it seemed a waste of time, but Thinker understood. Like the Human technicians who created him, he had a sense of curiosity and wonder about the cosmos.

But the new arrivals were
not
Human. As they walked across a deck toward the main entrance to the Inn of the White Sun, he noted subtle differences that only a highly trained observer such as himself could detect. The bodily motions were slightly different. Oh, they were very close to authentic, but not quite right. They moved like what they really were.

What are Mutatis doing here?

In order to contemplate without distraction, Thinker folded his dull-gray body closed in a clatter of metal, tucking his head neatly inside. To an observer he might look like a metal box now, just sitting silently on the deck. Inside, though, he was deep in concentration, organizing the vast amount of information in his data banks, trying to solve the conundrum that had presented itself to him suddenly.

Unlike Humans, Mutatis never traveled for leisure. They always had some important purpose in mind … usually military, political, or economic. In memory, Thinker recalled the bodily movements of the Human impostors. Remnants of their true identities could be seen in every step they took.

They were Mutati soldiers, led by an officer.

This worried Thinker, and he wondered if word had gotten out about the machine operations here. Down on the surface of the volcanic planet, in a region not visible from the orbital ring, the machines were secretly building a military force of their own, a collection of patched-together fighting robots. One day he would use them to prove that his sentient machines had value, that they should not have been discarded.

Were the Mutatis here to spy on that operation? Or had they come for another reason?

Chapter Seven

Our entire galaxy is in motion. The Scienscroll tells us this. But where is it going?

—Master Noah of the Guardians

At CorpOne headquarters on Canopa, Noah Watanabe had been shocked to see soldiers in green-and-brown Guardian uniforms, firing puissant rifles and setting off booming explosions. He came to realize that they were impersonating his own environmental activists, but there was no time to determine the reason. Instead, he’d led his small entourage to the rooftop of the main building, where they ran toward a dark blue, box-shaped aircraft.

From the days when he had worked there, Noah knew the layout of the complex, and the main building had not changed much in fifteen years. Here and there, doorways were marked differently, but the corridors and lifts remained the same, and it was unchanged on the roof. The aircraft, one of the grid-planes kept on the premises for Prince Watanabe and his top officers, was familiar to Noah, for this was a technology so successful that it had not been significantly altered in nearly a century. The onboard semi-automatic systems were relatively simple to operate, and many people knew how to handle them from an early age.

Noah and his men leaped aboard, and his adjutant Subi Danvar squeezed into the cockpit. Using voice commands and pressure pads, the rotund Danvar activated the takeoff sequence. Red and blue lights flashed across the instrument panel.

The vessel extended four short wings and lifted off. Within moments it engaged the multi-altitude electronic grid system that was part of a planet-wide transportation network. Through the open doorway of the cockpit just forward of Noah’s seat, he saw automatic systems begin to kick in, as parallel yellow and blue lines on an instrument panel screen merged into each other, and became green.

Danvar activated touch pads beneath the screen, then reached down for something in the flight bag beside his chair. A scar on the back of his right hand marked where doctors had attached cloned knuckles and fingers, after he lost them in a grid plane crash. Noah had his own moral objections to cloned Human body parts, but he’d never tried to force his views on other people.

He felt a characteristic gentle bump as they locked into the grid, but this was followed moments later by a disturbingly sharp jolt. The screen flashed angry orange letters: TAIL SECTION DAMAGED BY PROJECTILE.

Before Noah could react, the screen flashed again, this time in yellow: BACKUP SYSTEMS ENGAGED.

The craft kept going with hardly a variation in its flight characteristics, and presently Noah felt a reassuring smooth sensation as the grid-plane accelerated to the standard speed of three hundred kilometers per hour.

“Permission to seal the cockpit,” Danvar said. “I need to concentrate on the instruments.”

“Do it,” Noah responded. Almost before permission was granted, the pilot slid the cockpit door shut, placing a white alloy barrier between them.

Through a porthole Noah could see that they were leaving the Valley of the Princes behind, a landscape of trees and fields, spotted with industrial complexes. Had his father betrayed him, faking a Guardian attack to bring him and his organization into disfavor?

Unable to suppress his anger, Noah slammed his fist on the armrest of the chair, so hard that pain shot through the hand. He scanned the sky and the land below, looking for threats.

Obviously, Subi was concerned about this himself. He was Noah’s most trusted Guardian, but somewhat eccentric at times, and very outspoken. Noah had learned to give him free rein, but new thoughts began to occur to him now.

Could this man betray me?

After all that he and Subi had been through together, it seemed a preposterous, paranoid thought, and Noah discarded it out of hand. While the two of them were careful to maintain their distance, keeping their relationship professional, Noah had always felt an affinity for the adjutant, a strong bond of friendship. The feeling seemed mutual.

Master Noah heaved a deep sigh. He sat back in his bucket seat and listened to the smooth purr of the grid-plane.

If I am meant to die today, so be it. If I am meant to live, that will happen instead.
He flicked a speck of black off the long sleeve of his ruffled shirt, where the garment poked out from his surcoat.

Ever since boyhood, Noah Watanabe had sensed a presence guiding him, a force that was always there, constantly directing his actions. He often felt it viscerally, and was convinced that it told him whether or not he was doing the right thing. His stomach was calm now, but the sensation didn’t always provide him with consistent indicators. It seemed to have lapses … unpredictable and disconcerting gaps.

The grid-plane left the valley far behind and flew over a rugged mountain range, irregular peaks that looked like the heads of demons. On the far side of the mountains the aircraft streaked over an industrial city perched on the edge of a high cliff whose stony facets glittered and flashed in mid-morning sunlight.

Known as the “canyon planet,” Canopa was unlike any other world in the charted galaxy, with deep rainbow-crystal gorges, powerful whitewater rivers and spectacular scenery. Cities such as the one they were flying over now were engineering marvels, clinging to cliff-faces of iridescent rock. Long ago, superstitious aborigines had lived in these areas, but had been driven out by Human traders who were the economic precursors of the modern-day merchant princes. Primitive people still lived on Canopa, but kept themselves out of view, with the exception of a few men and women who were captured on occasion and brought in for observation. Curiously, aboriginal children were never seen by outsiders, not even in pre-merchant times.

Canopa was steeped in mystery and legend, and was said to have been the domain in ancient times of a race of alien creatures … people who had gone extinct, with their bodies now on display in museums. At a number of archaeological sites around the planet, their eerie exoskeletons and personal effects had been dug up. After studying the bodies, galactic anthropologists determined that they were a race of arthropods of high intelligence. Through rune stones that had been recovered, their language had been only partially deciphered. It was known that they had referred to themselves as Nops and that they had engaged in off-world trading, but very little else was learned about them.

Following an hour’s flight, Noah’s compound came into view atop a verdant plateau, bounded by river gorges on two sides. On land that had once been the site of industrial operations, he had restored and converted it to an impressive wildlife preserve and farm that he called his Ecological Demonstration Project, or “EDP.” The facility was far more than just structures and compounds and set-aside areas. It was a high-concept dream shaped into reality, one that included projects designed to show how man could live in harmony with the environment.

One of Master Noah’s oft-repeated admonitions to his loyal followers was,
Excess is waste.
This was linked to his concept of balance, which he saw as a necessary force in the cosmos, as true for microorganisms as it was for higher life forms.

This way of thinking had been a source of friction between Noah and his father, building up to their terrible argument. On that day, only moments after Prince Saito struck him, Noah had quit his job at CorpOne and stormed out, never expecting to return or even to speak with his father again. Noah’s environmental militancy had proven too much for the Prince, who had refused to accept any of the concepts. Like Earthian bulls the two men had butted heads, with each of them holding fast to their political and economic beliefs.

After Noah’s resignation, his father had publicly and vehemently disowned him. Noah wondered how much of a part his twin sister Francella had played in encouraging the old man’s willful behavior. She had always hated Noah. Certainly there had been jealousy on her part; he had seen too many examples of it. But her feelings of enmity seemed to run even deeper, perhaps to her own biological need to survive and her feeling that Noah was a threat to the niche she wanted to occupy.

At the troubling thought, Noah cautioned himself. One of his father’s criticisms of him might have been valid, the way Noah constantly saw situations in environmental terms. Sometimes when Noah caught himself doing this, he tried to pull back and look at things in a different way. But that did not always work. He was most comfortable thinking within a framework that he knew well, which he considered a blueprint for all life forms, from the simplest to the most complex.

The grid-plane locked into a landing beam. Subi Danvar opened the cockpit door, and Noah saw the parallel green lines on the instrument panel diverge, forming flashing yellow and blue lines.

“All systems automatic,” Subi reported. He swung out of the pilot’s chair and made his way aft, turning his husky body sideways to get past banks of instruments on each side.

Noah felt the grid-plane descend, going straight down like an elevator, protected by the electronic net over his EDP compound.

With a scowl on his birthmark-scarred face, Subi plopped his body into a chair beside Noah and announced, “I’m not getting any sleep until I get to the bottom of this. Somebody copied our uniforms exactly … or stole them from us.”

“I didn’t see any of our people out there,” Noah said.

“That doesn’t mean they weren’t involved, Master. I’ll start with the most recent volunteers and work back from there. Maybe one of them is disgruntled.”

“Could be.”

In an organization as large as Noah’s, with thousands of uniformed Guardians, it was impossible to keep every one of them happy all the time. It was company policy to recruit people with high ideals, capable of thinking in terms of large-scale issues … rather than petty private matters. Still, there were always personality conflicts among workers, and unfulfilled ambitions.

The aircraft settled onto a paved landing circle and taxied toward a large structure that had gray shingle walls and elegant Corinthian columns, shining bright white in the midday sunlight. This was Noah’s galactic base of operations, the main building in a complex of offices and scientific laboratories.

In his primary business, he performed ecological recovery operations around the galaxy, under contract to various governmental agencies, corporations, and individuals wanting to repopulate areas devastated by industrial operations. On some of the smaller worlds he also operated electric power companies, having patented his own environmentally-friendly energy chambers. The merchant princes, and not just his father, had shown absolutely no concern for ecology; they routinely raped each planet’s resources and then moved on to other worlds. Canopa, despite the wild areas that still existed along the route Noah was flying now, was nowhere near what it used to be. Huge areas of the planet had been stripped of their resources and denuded of beauty, leaving deep geological scars that might never heal.

As far as Noah Watanabe was concerned, the galactic races tended to be interlopers in the natural order of things, and Humans were the worst of all. His ideas were much wider than humanity, though, or any of the races. While performing his business operations on a variety of worlds, he had begun to see relationships within relationships, and the vast, galaxy-wide systems in which they operated.

The grid-plane came to a stop and a double door whooshed open. As he stepped down onto a flagstone entry plaza, Noah inhaled a deep breath of warm, humid air, and watched aides as they hurried to greet him. This moment was a gift. For a while, he had not been certain if he would ever make it back here.