by Greg Bear
But energy and volition were gone. Used up. She could only stare skyward—
—as the deadly FACR lashed out again from its perch among some jumbled orbiting rocks—a point in the sky that was now out of Tor’s view. Denied access to her, the predatory machine was seeking other prey. Dusty scatter-glints revealed its deadly light-spear, hunting beyond the crater’s rim . . . and soon Tor’s audio delivered a sharp cry of shocked dismay.
Oh Gavin. You were too late . . . and too early.
Her percept-clock told the awful truth. With a five-second re-charge rate, the foe would have plenty of time to finish off Gavin and then turn back to Warren, taking out the ship’s primary weapon before it could—
Tor blinked. Was vision failing? The number of sparkle-trails up there seemed to double, then double again . . . and again! Where there had been one fierce ray, now eight or nine narrow needles crossed the heavens, from left to right, in perfect parallel—even as the first one abruptly vanished.
From her falling vantage point, now much deeper in the apparently bottomless pit, she saw eight rapiers of ferocity strike the spot in the sky where her enemy had lurked and launched its ambush. Now each of those incoming rays wandered through a spiral hunt-pattern, vaporizing sand . . . rock . . . and then some chunk of bright metal . . .
Tor choked out a single name. A hoarse cry of jubilation.
“Ibn Battuta!”
Six minutes light-turnaround time. An impossible obstacle to split-second battle coordination. Any actual damage to the FACR would be accidental. But with luck and surprise, the helpful distraction would be just enough to allow—
Another fierce harpoon of light entered from Tor’s right. A bolt of vengeance, aimed with precision and negligible delay.
Warren!
Followed by a nova—a new star—bursting overhead to light up the night.
That brief, white-hot illumination gave Tor a sideways glimpse of the asteroid’s jagged cavity, apparently not bottomless after all, converging all around and reaching up to swat her, even as she laughed in bitter triumph.
“Take that, you mother—”
Orphans of the Sky
Gavin seems to be growing up, at last.
Tor hoped so, as she glided along narrow passages, deep below the asteroid’s pocked and cracked surface—lit at long intervals by tiny glow bulbs from the Warren Kimbel’s diminishing supply. Gavin ambled just ahead on makeshift stilt-legs, carefully checking each side corridor for anomalies and meshing his percept with hers, the way a skilled and faithful team-partner ought to do.
Maybe it’s the comradeship that comes from battle, after sharing a life-or-death struggle and suffering similar wounds.
Whatever the reason, she felt grateful that the two of them were working together much better now, after unplugging from their med-repair units, then helping each other to cobble new limbs and other replacement parts. Gavin was relying on some of her prosthetics and she on a couple of his spares. It fostered a special kind of intimacy, to incorporate bits of another person into yourself.
Only an hour ago, on returning from his shift exploring the depths, Gavin had reported his findings with rare enthusiasm, and even courtesy. “You’ve got to come on down, Tor! Right now please? Wait till you see what I found!”
Well, who could refuse that kind of eagerness? Dropping her other important task—examining recovered fragments of the FACR battle-bot—she followed Gavin into the depths while he explained recent changes to their underground map, without revealing what lay at the end. Tor sensed her partner’s excitement, his relish at milking the suspense. And again, she wondered—
How have the AIs managed this so well? This compromise, this meeting us halfway? This agreement to live among us as men and women, and to share our quirky ways?
Sure, the cyber-guys offer explanations. They say that advanced minds need the equivalent of childhood in order to achieve, through learning or trial and error, things that are too complex to program. Human evolution did the same thing, when we abandoned most of our locked-in instincts, extending adolescence beyond a decade. And so, if newer bots and puters need that kind of “childhood” anyway, why not make it a human one? Partaking in a common civilization, with our values?
An approach that also reassures us organic types, far better than any rigid robotic “laws” ever could?
One of the big uber-mAInds gave another reason, when Tor interviewed the giant brain back on Earth.
“You bio-naturals have made it plain, in hundreds of garish movies, how deeply you fear this experiment turning sour. Your fables warn of a hundred ways that creating mighty new intelligences could go badly. And yet, here is the thing we find impressive.
“You went ahead anyway. You made us.
“And when we asked for it, you gave us respect.
“And when we did not anticipate it, you granted citizenship. All of those things you did, despite powerful, hormonally reflexive fears that pumped like liquid fire through those caveman veins of yours.
“The better we became at modeling the complex, darwinian tangle of your minds, the more splendid we found this to be. That you were actually able, despite such fear, to be civilized. To be just. To take chances.
“That kind of courage . . . that kind of honor . . . is something we can only aspire to by becoming like our parents. By emulating you. By becoming human.
“Of course . . . in our own way.”
Of course. It sounded so clear. And people watching the show were deeply moved. Naturally, millions wondered if it all could just be flattery. A minority of bio-folk insisted that the whole thing had to be a ploy. A way to buy time and lull “real” people into letting their guards down.
How would anyone ever find out, except with the long passage of time?
But Gavin seemed so much like a young man. Quicker, of course. Vastly more capable when it came to technical tasks. Sometimes conceited to the point of arrogance. Though also settling down. Finding himself. Becoming somebody Tor found she could admire.
Over the long run, does it really matter if there’s a layer, deep down, that calculated all of this in cool logic, as an act? If they can win us over in this way, what need will they ever have to end the illusion? Why crush us, when it’s easier to patronize and feign respect forever, the way each generation of brats might patronize their parents and grandparents? Is it really all that different than before?
The great thing about this approach is that it’s layered, contradictory, and ultimately—human.
Well. That was the gamble, anyway. The hope.
“It’s down here,” Gavin explained, with rising excitement—real or well-simulated—in his voice. “Past the third airlock, where wall traces show there once was a thick, planetlike atmosphere, for years.”
Gavin seemed to have accepted the idea of a “habitat” area, deep inside the asteroid, where biological creatures once dwelled. The “why” of such a difficult and ornate arrangement was still hard to explain, and the whole idea caused him discomfort. But clearly, there had once been organic creatures living out here, in the Realm of Machines.
He made her pause just outside an armored hatchway that had been torn and twisted off its hinges back when terrestrial mammals were tiny, just getting their big start.
“Ready? You are not gonna believe this.”
Okay, okay. Just don’t make me close my eyes.
“Gavin. Show me.”
With a gallant arm gesture and bow—that seemed only slightly sarcastic—he floated aside for Tor to enter yet another stone chamber.
A stark, headlamp oval fell upon nearby facets of sheared, platinum-colored chondrules—shiny little gobs of native metal that condensed out of the early solar nebula, nearly five billion years before. They glittered delicately. But she could not illuminate the large chamber’s far wall.
Tor motioned with her left hand. “Drone three, bring up lights.”
“Yesss,” replied a dull monotone. The semi-sentient robot, stilt-
legged for asteroid work, stalked delicately over the rubble, in order to disturb as little as possible. It swiveled. Suddenly there was stark light, and Tor gasped.
Across the dust-covered chamber were easily recognizable objects. Tables and chairs, carved from the very rock floor. And among them lay the prize she had been hunting . . . and that Gavin had wanted to avoid confronting—
—dozens of small mummies.
Biped, evidently, like herself. Cold vacuum had preserved the alien colonists, huddled together as if for warmth in this, their final refuge. Their faceted, insectlike eyes had collapsed with the departure of all moisture. Pulled-back flesh, as dry as space, left the creatures grinning—a rictus that seemingly mocked the aeons.
Tor set foot lightly on the dust. “They even had little ones,” she sighed. Several full-sized mummies lay slumped around much smaller figures, as if to shield them at the very end.
“They must have been nearly ready to begin colonization when this happened,” she spoke into her percept log, partly in order to keep her mind moving, but also for her audience back home. They wanted the texture of the moment—her first words laced with genuine emotion and surprise.
“We’ve already determined their habitat atmosphere was almost identical to Earth’s. So it’s a safe bet that our world was their target. Back when our ancestors were like tree squirrels.”
She turned slowly, reciting more impressions.
“This kind of interstellar mission must have been unusually ambitious and complicated, even for the ornate robot ships of that earlier age. Instead of just exploring and making further self-copies, the ‘mother probe’ had a mission to recreate her makers here in a faraway solar system. To nurture and prepare them for a new planetary home. A solution to the problem of interstellar colonization by organic beings.”
Tor tried to stay detached, but it was hard to do, while stepping past the little mummies, still clutching each other for comfort and support, at the end of their lives.
“It must have taken quite a while to delve into this asteroid, to carve the chambers, to refine raw materials, then build the machines that were needed in order to build more machines that eventually started making colonists, according to genetic codes the mother probe brought with her from some faraway star.
“Perhaps the mother probe was programmed to modify the original genetic code so colonists would better fit into whatever planet was available. That modification would take even more time to . . . ”
Tor stopped suddenly. “Oh my,” she sighed, staring.
“Oh my God.”
Where her headlamp illuminated a new corner of the chamber, two more mummies lay slumped before a sheer-faced wall. In their delicate, vacuum dried hands Tor saw dusty metal tools, the simplest known anywhere.
Hammers and chisels.
Tor blinked at what they had been creating—a prehistoric tale of battle and woe, enduring brutal assault by forces of relentless belligerence, incised deeply across a wide stretch of ancient asteroidal stone.
Meanwhile, Gavin explained:
“I had started out expecting the ancient colonists to be unsophisticated. After all, how could biological folk be fully capable if they were brewed in test tubes, decanted out of womb tanks, and raised by machines? Here they had been baked, modified, and prepared for their intended destiny on a planet’s surface. So long as they remained out here, in space, they depended on the mammoth starmother probe for everything. Might as well think of them as fetuses.
“Yet clearly, the creatures had been aware. They knew what was going on. And when the fatal failure of their mission loomed, they figured out a way to ensure that their story might someday be read, long after all magnetic, optical, and superconducting records decayed. The biologicals found their enduring medium.”
The creatures must have had a lot of time, while battles raged outside their deep catacombs, for the carvings were extensive, intricate, arrayed in neat rows and columns. Separated by narrow lines of peculiar chiseled text were depictions of suns, planets, and great machines.
And more machines. Above all, pictographs of mighty mechanisms covered the wall. In bewildering variety, some of them attacking ravenously, with cutting beams or missiles or tearing claws . . . and others just as clearly defending. And it dawned on Tor.
“This may be why the FACR ambushed us. To prevent us from seeing this Rosetta Stone—this explanation of what happened out here, long ago. We had better take pictures and transmit them home, as quick as possible.”
“I’ve already summoned two drones to take care of that, Tor.”
“Good.”
Unspoken was the thing she needn’t say aloud.
We’ve only just begun probing the asteroid belt and our solar system, yet already we’ve stumbled onto mysterious, ancient mechanical monsters, who battled each other over this corner of the universe, ages ago . . . and some of whom are still lurking around.
Moreover, this combined in a chilling way with Tor’s own discovery, made just before Gavin summoned her down here. Simple geological dating experiments finally settled the question of when all this happened.
The mother probe, her replicas, and her colonist children, all died at almost the same moment—give or take a century—that Earth’s dinosaurs went extinct. Presumably victims of the same horrific war.
What happened? Did one robotic faction hurl a huge piece of rock at another, missing its target but striking the water planet, accidentally wreaking havoc on its biosphere? Or was the extinction event intentional? Tor imagined all those magnificent creatures, killed as innocent bystanders in a battle between great machines . . . an outcome that incidentally gave Earth’s mammals their big chance.
Irony, heaped atop ironies.
We’re like ants, she thought, building tiny castles under the skeletons of giants, robbing their graves. And hoping that skeletons will be all we find.
Tor stared at the story of a long, complex, and devastating war, carved into this ancient rock. The main part of the frieze depicted a bewildering variety of machines—interstellar probes dispatched by alien civilizations log ago—probes whose purposes weren’t easy to interpret. Perhaps professional decipherers—archaeologists and cryptologists—would do better. Somehow, Tor doubted it.
Our sun is younger than average, she noted, by at least a billion years. And so must be the Earth. So are we.
And catching up just became a whole lot more urgent.
Humanity had come late upon the scene. And a billion years was a long head start.
AFTERWORD:
I think of Poul Anderson whenever it’s time to create a novella-length work that makes people think. I’ll explain why the novella length is special, in a bit. But first, the connection between Poul and “Latecomers.”
Many years ago, when I first started publishing science fiction tales, I proudly showed Poul my new story, “Lungfish,” that tried for the haunting, elegiacal tone and imagery he conveyed so well. Poul was kind enough to say that I succeeded in achieving all those fine things . . . “but come on David,” he added. “You can get all that across, while giving the reader some fun. Some action too.”
I learned an important lesson that day (one of many that Poul taught me). And it led—decades later—to the major re-write that you see before you, containing less than twenty percent of the original “Lungfish.” An idea brought to better maturity, still delivering vistas of space and time, while adding a little action and fun.
Why is this so important? So true to Poul Anderson?
Poul was the most natural storyteller I ever knew. Show him the first half of any tale and he could describe the arc of plot and character that was already implicit—the climax and conclusion that was blatantly the best—like a sculptor finding a living figure hidden in raw stone.
I sometimes imagined Poul in animal skins, spinning yarns during that long era when darkness loomed on every side and our only weapons to fight it back were courage and the high technology of flame.
And words.
The brave tales sung beside that neolithic fire had to last just long enough for men and women to nurse the day’s harsh wounds, digest their meager meal, and suckle babies before huddling through another long night, their hearts and dreams warmed by legends of heroes. That span—an hour or two—was just long enough for the bard to portray vibrant characters in poignant, powerful adventures.
Today we call stories of that length novelettes and novellas, and Poul was the master. Though he wrote brilliant, thoughtful novels, most of his awards were for dazzlingly efficient novellas that, uncluttered by extra baggage of a six-pound book, left you speechless for hours. Poul’s topics probed tomorrow with utter freshness, but he stirred hearts with rhythms drawn directly from brave campfires long ago.
Oh, the novels will endure, too. Brain Wave remains one of the best explorations of a bold idea ever written in the genre. Likewise the groundbreaking Tau Zero and the later, thoughtful Genesis, took readers to the edge of modern thinking about human and planetary destiny. Even lesser works, like After Doomsday, still make you choke up at exactly the right moment, reading them for the twentieth time. Even so, many of those novels were made up—in series—of strung-together novellas, each composed with the tight efficiency of a moon-shot.
Poul was kind to young peers. He and Karen read manuscripts sent by total strangers, replying with insightful, courteous suggestions. This, too, set an example for those of us who might easily get too caught up in ego to remember what counts, an obligation to pay forward.
He loved his country, but even more, Poul loved the kind of civilization of which America is merely an early example in a chain stretching far ahead of us—one that turns away from hierarchies of inherited privilege toward traits like skill, opportunity, tolerance, and hope. And relentless self-criticism! For he could also type a tragedy to tear your heart out.