Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  “The exception was in one of the ship’s boats,” Kearney said. “The device closest to him was configured to work on the boats and had a torch.”

  Rice expanded that image. This time the robot ran on a track in the ceiling and was almost as big as the boat it hung over.

  The termini of the robot’s arms—the hands—could rotate to bring up any one of multiple tools. Kearney knew from close examination that the one used was an oxygen lance, but he didn’t bother volunteering that to the Board. They already looked stunned.

  “It had to be sabotage,” Shawm said. “The enemy took over the central computer and did this.”

  “I think it was because of the weapons,” Rice said. “Aiming, directing, quantum weapons required a unique mechanism. The controlling intelligence had to genuinely understand the universe in realtime. This ship—”

  She switched to the image with which she’d begun, the prism orbiting the swirling yellow clouds of the planet below.

  “—has true machine intelligence. It doesn’t mimic consciousness, it acts consciously.”

  “That’s the same thing,” Graz said in puzzlement. “For all practical purposes.”

  “I’d have said that those dead bodies were pretty practical!” Balthus said. Kearney didn’t remember hearing him sound snappish before.

  “To put it in other words . . . ,” Rice said. Her tone made clear the sort of words she was tempted to put it in, but thank goodness she didn’t do that. “The ship doesn’t mimic the cognition of some large sample of its creators. The ship behaves like an intelligent ship.”

  “Does your ship, your Shield,” said Balthus, “have a directive to protect itself?”

  Graz opened her mouth to reply. Before she could, Shawm broke in with, “Anything to do with such a ship as you postulate would be classified!”

  “Well, no matter,” said Rice. “I can’t imagine that you’ve created true machine intelligence.”

  “No warship would have self preservation as its prime directive,” said Admiral Blumenthal. “That’s crazy. No matter what race built it.”

  “But a truly conscious machine wouldn’t be concerned with the priorities of the people who built it,” Balthus said. “It would have its own priorities. It’s unlikely that attacking a powerful enemy because its builders want it to would be high on the ship’s own list.”

  “Whereas hiding in sponge space as soon as it was activated would prolong the ship’s life for, well, thirty thousand years,” Rice said. “And its existence for half a million, apparently.”

  “The ship disposed of the crew as quickly and efficiently as possible,” Kearney said. “The crew members would probably have opinions of their own and might damage the ship if they were allowed to run free.”

  “Good God,” said Tadeko. “Good God.”

  He got up and ran for a door. He moved very quickly for a man of his age.

  He called something over his shoulder which Kearney heard as, “I have to send a courier!”

  Rice looked at the remaining members of the Defense Board. She said, “You don’t mean that your undoubtedly clever software engineers have managed to create real machine intelligence, do you?”

  IN FROM THE COMMONS

  by Tony Daniel

  Pioneers in the past have undergone hardships, lethal weather conditions, starvation, and (no surprise) death. But the advance of science and technology might lead to going to the stars in comfort and style . . . in more ways than one.

  In that summer when the call went out, we were in the mountains fishing up a trout stream that flowed from the cirque lake on Paradise Peak. The sky was carbon blue and the water was very cold on our ankles and calves. There were no clouds. There was no sun that day. Everything was bright and precisely rendered. The call was a sound at first, a metallic tintinnabulation, as from a carillon. Eva looked up, but Gene was playing out his fishing line and Haller was intent on finding a lure that matched the gnats he’d seen swirling in the shadow of the stream’s bank. I was sipping tea from an enamel cup.

  After the sound came a green flash across the sky. Light travels more slowly than sound in the Time River mountains, of course. Then there was the smell—dandelions, crushed—and then there was the way it felt inside us. It is a strange thing to have sudden knowledge where there was none before—knowledge you neither intuited nor deduced, knowledge that is only and entirely there, in an instant. It is not like deja vu or a presaging because it is not knowledge of the past or the future. It is like a sensation that comes from nowhere; it is a finger behind your eyeballs rubbing away a cataract from the backside of your vision.

  Gene ceased his casting. Haller put down his hat, which was pricked with lures. I finished sipping my tea, wiped my mouth, and considered what I now knew. We were very far into the continent, into the commons. Traveling back would be an extremely long trip over changing terrain. I always knew that the call would eventually come, but I had not expected it so soon. It was something that was in the back of my mind, but something of which I never spoke. What would have been the point? It either would or would not come.

  It had come.

  “What do you think it means?” Eva said. She climbed from the stream, water beading and dripping from the wool of her trousers. “Are we there?”

  “It’ll be a long, hard trek back to find out if we are,” Haller said. “We passed through the January Hills over two months ago.”

  After a moment, Gene began casting his line once again, settling back into his sedate, precise rhythm. His face also settled—back into its usual serenity. It was as if a small stone had been dropped into a pond, and, since it was a pond, there could be no record of the stone’s perturbation of the water. That was Gene.

  “We’re a long way into the commons,” I said. “In the cities, we’d have an address and we’d be sought out and asked whether we wanted to leave or not, but we’re hidden in the ecology here. It’s totally up to us to answer the call.”

  “It always has been,” Gene said, casting, still casting.

  “But we aren’t trying to hide,” said Eva.

  “They always expected to lose part of us to the commons,” Haller said, “Splitting us up was supposed to help with the problem a bit, but I heard talk of as many as three in ten not coming back.”

  “We have been here a long, long time,” said Eva. “Maybe we’ve forgotten something important. Do we even know how to get back?”

  “It isn’t a question of that,” Gene said, placidly. “We know where we are; Tan has kept a map.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have kept a good map.” The map was always in my back pocket. I could feel it bunched between my rump and the rock on which I sat. It was made on beautybark paper and I worked on it each night with a wild turkey feather stylus filled with ink of liquid moonlight, which I collected from my portable condenser. When we returned to civilization, I had thought to sell my map to finance another trip into the commons. In the cities, such artifacts were highly sought after as interpretative paradigms for sortilege and other means of divination. As any prognosticator knows, the commons are the shadow cast by all of our minds, and vice versa. In the commons, we know what we know, and that is all that there is. So, of course, the interpretation of omens is a precise and useful craft.

  “I’m not going, by the way,” Gene said. He did not interrupt the rhythm of his casting. “I’ve been thinking for a long time that I might stay.”

  “Oh, Gene,” Eva said. “Don’t decide yet, please.” Eva sat down with her legs crossed on a patch of tundra grass near the stream bank. She looked at the back of Gene’s head. Each of his hairs was unique and defined in the general brightness. Gene was luminous. He had achieved this long before the rest of us, even though this was the reason we had all traveled into the commons in the first place. Beatification. It was what you did while you waited. When we set out, I had not figured that he would be the first. Haller was quick and clever and Eva had a broad and synthesizing intellect. I had no ex
pectations concerning myself, but I had thought it would happen to one of them first. In retrospect, however, it was clear that Gene was bound for beatification. He was the empiricist who took everything as it came. Over time, he had become a cavern through which all of his surroundings flowed.

  “I know what I know,” Gene said. “I know where I am, and here is where I am.”

  We were at altitude and so the moon was nearly full every night, since we were so near to it. I had plans to climb Paradise Peak, touch its face, and actually to collect a jar of moonlight ink to take down with me. Now there was no time—not if I were to answer the call and come in from the commons.

  That night, Eva unzipped the door flap and crawled into my tent after midnight. She snuggled up beside me in my sleeping bag and I felt her cool cheek against the scruff of my beard, her chilly arms warming against my chest. She had come in with only a long cotton shirt on and wool socks; a few snow crystals tickled my bare legs where she rubbed her feet against my thighs. “I’ve been with Haller,” she said. “But Gene won’t let me touch him.”

  “What does he say?”

  “Nothing much. You know Gene. But I think he is worried about me trying to change his mind.”

  “I think he’s letting you go,” I said. “He doesn’t want to make up your mind for you.”

  “Yes,” Eva said, “that would be a kinder way to look at it.”

  “It’s the best way,” I said. “I don’t think Gene is being selfish.”

  “You’re not going to stay, are you?” She poked my ribs. “Are you, Tan?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “How could you even think of that. If you don’t come, then none of us can. You’re the pilot!”

  “I’m just the surface shine,” I said. “Our spokesman to the world. If I don’t come, Haller could do the job just as well.”

  “Haller needs to do the calculating, Tan. He wouldn’t have time to do his work.”

  She unzipped my sleeping bag so she could sit up, then climbed onto my stomach.

  “And what about me?” she said. “I’m meant for intimacy, to ease the solitude. Do you want our deepest feelings to go about in the world exposed?”

  She undid her cotton blouse and let it fall from her shoulders. Her breasts hung before me like two moons. I touched them and imagined I was touching the moon, as I had wanted to for so long. I wanted to touch the moon, but the call had come and now I would never be able to do that if I answer it.

  “You act like you didn’t hear the call,” she said. “Didn’t you hear it, Tan?”

  “Oh, I heard it. I have it in me still, just as you do.”

  “But why is there any question whatsoever about going back?”

  She moved back on me and pushed me inside her, where I grew like a melon vine after rain.

  “You want to go back with me, don’t you?” She moved back and forth on me, pushing me deeper.

  “Don’t ask me that now,” I said. “I’ll do anything you want now.”

  She laughed and we made love in that way. I came as I suckled Eva’s breasts. I was thinking of moonlight and the glamour of the night. For that moment only, I forgot about the call. Then we were lying together, side by side, and I remembered.

  In the morning, Gene grilled us a trout he had caught while fishing at sun up. Today there was a blue-green sun, and it was a traveling one, west to east. It cast long morning shadows across the rocky tundra basin where we were camped. We ate the trout on metal plates and it fell apart, scalding and delicious, in our mouths. We drank hot tea and chased it with clear water from the stream.

  “I thought of an argument,” Haller said. His words were directed at no one in particular, but we all knew he was talking to Gene. “Do you agree that better people have better dogs?”

  A ripple of interest passed over Gene’s face. He took another bite of his trout.

  “Think about it,” said Haller. “Good people, on average, choose nicer, smarter dogs. But there is a dog overpopulation problem in the cities. So all the people of good will have their dogs spayed or neutered.”

  “Yes,” said Gene. “I suppose.”

  “But what that does is take more and more of the good dogs out of the breeding pool, while the bad dogs belonging to bad owners keep multiplying.”

  “Yep.”

  “So you end up with a dog population that gets meaner and meaner and dumber and dumber.”

  “On average,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Haller, “on average.”

  Gene took a long sip of tea, considered. “The good dogs are dead, but I’m not,” he said. “And I’m not a dog. It’s you who are going somewhere else, you know. I’m just going fishing.”

  That day, I heard thunder rising from the plains below. People were coming in from the commons down there and the tramp of their feet and the rustle of their clothes was what made the rumble I heard rising from the gray void below us. As soon as the day warmed, the light from the plains would rise and the images coalesce. The sight of the people on the move would bubble up to us.

  I took out my map and spent the day studying it. Haller and Eva took down the tents, all but Gene’s, and loaded their packs. Eva was humming a tune, and after a while I recognized it from yesterday as the carillon melody of the call’s leading edge.

  That night I walked to the stream. I heard a clinking noise and looked downstream. By the light of the moon, I saw Gene. He was standing knee deep in the water. He had a pan from the camp cookset in his hands, and he was panning in the silt of the stream bottom. He raised the pan up, swirled it about, then bent to bring up another plate of sand.

  I watched him for a while, and then I spilled all the condensed moonlight I had gathered into the stream. It flowed uphill against the current of the water—back toward its source, which hung over Paradise Peak immense and globose. And, for me, unreachable. I would answer the call.

  We said goodbye to Gene on a rocky outcropping about a mile from our last camp. At some point last night he had stopped off the panning of the stream and had gone to Eva’s tent. They emerged together from it in the morning. Eva was now carrying away a little of Gene inside her, both physically and emotionally and seemed less distraught to be leaving him behind.

  We all shook hands.

  “Well,” I said. I took out my map. “For the moment, it’s mostly a matter of climbing down.”

  “I have something for you,” Gene said. “For all of you.”

  He pulled a bandana from his pocket and unwrapped it. Inside the fabric were three fly fishing lures. He gave one to each of us. I lay my lure in the palm of my hand.

  “One day you may come back to the commons,” Gene said. “And you may want to find me.”

  “Of course we will find you,” Haller said.

  Eva was clutching her lure and was crying.

  “They’ll disappear when we leave,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Gene said, and gave her a freshly washed bandana to wipe her tears. “Nothing will be lost.”

  I looked down at my lure. It was an exquisite thing of feather and bone. And in the center was a moonstone. Well, a moon-pebble, actually, hardly bigger than a grain of sand. So that was what he’d been panning for. They were extremely rare, and only found in these high lands.

  “All day yesterday I was thinking about what each of you would look like to me,” Gene said, “from the other side. The way a fish sees a mayfly above the water.”

  “So this is me,” I said, folding my palm over the lure.

  “Yes, Tan.”

  “And this is me,” said Eva.

  “And me,” Hellar said.

  “No matter what I become while you’re gone,” Gene said. “These will always draw me back to you.”

  We trekked down from the mountains into snow that later became a steady rain. Our hot breath formed a foggy haze about us so that we seemed to be continually walking out of a cloud. The stream veered away and then rejoined us at various times an
d at the bottom of the last alluvial hill, it emptied out into the river. Our canoes were where we’d left them, hidden in some willows. We secured the gear and took the boats out into the current.

  We were a fortnight on the Time river. We had been nearly a month and a half paddling up it. After the river turned against the January Hills, we grounded the canoes. The January Hills had not been here when everyone first arrived. They had risen over time as people had walked through them. Most of the trails cut straight through the hills in straight lines along gorges that were nearly a mile deep in places.

  We came out of the January Hills into the vineyards on the outskirts of the Interport City. The last of those who were answering the call emerged with us, and we walked together, eating grapes and drinking from the caches of young red wine that the grape growers had left for those who would come behind them. After we had passed, the wilderness would reclaim these lands and the commons would flow back into civilization once again.

  We arrived at the port fifty days after we’d left Gene in the mountains. The sea was the mottled green of a spread of lichen. There were wheelbarrows and hospital gurneys, which people had used to cart the infirm down to the waters, all along the boardwalk margin. I lashed my map to a rusted anchor I’d dragged from a ruined wharf nearby to keep the map from floating up and away, back to the moon. I buried it beneath a stand of six palm trees several hundred feet from the beach and marked the spot with a stack of gurneys with a wheelbarrow on top. This was mild Resolution Gulf, and no storms would disturb my monument.

  At sunset of the fifty-first day—it was a day of a traveling east-west sun—Hellar, Eva and I went down to the beach.

  “I have something to tell you both,” Eva said. “Before we go in.”

  “What is it?” Hellar asked, but I had already guessed. I was Eva’s confidante, the one to whom she brought her doubts and frustrations, and she always told me she had her period. She hadn’t told me.