by Tanith Lee
If the ’raid had happened four days before it had, Dmitru and Linka would still have been aboard. Alive. With him.
Vils thought of this and lay motionless on his bunk.
Nine more days passed. Then a mechanic machine, spawned from Kayis’s insides, came to clean, hydrate, and feed him. When Vils resisted, it mildly sedated him and then did as intended.
Drearily he shouted at Kayis. Why not leave him alone? Neither he nor the station could make contact any more with the civilization that had created and nurtured them. They had been flung beyond the perimeters. Probably too, nothing, no one, would ever search for them, since it must seem everything else on or attending Arkann, had been destroyed.
They were going nowhere, and that — forever. Or at least, as Vils stressed, Kayis was, for he, long-lived though humankind had become, would not persist more than another 80 or 90 years.
Kayis did not reason with him. Or protest. Or encourage.
Kayis kept him alive and cleaned up and gave him revitalizing if compulsory sleep, adding to that all the luxury foods and drinks and legal drugs he demanded.
On the 51st day he pushed by the mechanic machine and himself went into the shower.
On the 71st day he had somehow himself returned, as if spontaneously, to the ordinary regime of hygiene, nourishment, work, observation, reflection, and the occasional ordinary and recommended treats. By then he only lost his temper over silly things, and momentarily. He only wept about once in every couple of weeks and for less than a minute. He was sad and bleak and sane and clean. And practical. He got on with life as best he could. What else was there to do? Except die. Which Kayis, anyway, seemed likely to prevent.
A year passed. An Arkannite year of 14 months.
The station’s direction was random, and it moved at nonlightspeed (nolisp). Outside, the star-strewn desert did not unravel into anything especially spectacular. In the twelfth month a small two-sun system was visible, several lisp (lightspeed) years travel away. Kayis, at Vils’ instruction, scanned and investigated the types of the three visible planets, which were untennanted, barren and dry. There was obviously no purpose now in such monitoring, yet all the time he and Kayis automatically carried it out, checking on every curiosity and implication that even dimly appeared or was otherwise indicated. This was mere functionality, Vils knew, for Kayis. And for him it was accustomed, if now meaningless and uninteresting, routine.
He had long since asked the station why it and apparently all the other look-out mechanisms of Arkann had failed to detect the meteoraid in time.
Kayis had no answers beyond a cool mathematic of coincidental malfunction, human error, and/or signalesion occlusion of a kind sometimes, if seldom, encountered.
The area of space through which the choiceless journey tended was far from the Hesiona Nebulind, in which sector Arkann, and its fellow planets were (had been) located. Regions in this outer sector of the galaxy were generally uncharted. Speculation, even myth (old space-sailors’ yarns) were the only information that Kayis’s computerized library could give.
Now and then, during the next year, Vils dreamed of the deaths of Dmitru and Linka. And too those of other persons he had known on-planet. None of these last had been close to him; his main relationships had occurred lightmiles off. Frequently the dream deaths bore no relation to what must or might have happened during the ’raid — or worse, if they had survived, in the hours after.
He no longer wept.
He read a great deal, and Kayis played him music from the library. Vils found he yearned for all the pieces Kayis had not been given to store — Rakhmaninov’s later concertos, Prokofiev’s ballet scores, the Librius Alentus of Jy, various choral works of Handl and Stoll. And there was one book too, he could never recall the title of, which he and Kayis searched for through an entire evening (by the planetary chronometer) and did not unearth.
Inevitably humans always wanted what was not available. What they could not — ever — get.
Vils talked conversationally to Kayis often, but then he always had. All or most of the crews had done so. And Kayis always responded, naturally. Calm, wise words. The history of things, the thoughts of mankind, the lessons of physical worlds. All built in to the machinery. Kayis could talk as well and wonderfully as it cleansed the latrines, repainted the walls in sheer, uplifting colors, pruned and watered the small hydroponic garden, flicked off from its own inner and outer skin the tiny space-mites and debris that might try to colonize there.
One night, about the third month of the second year, Vils dreamed that he heard Kayis weeping. The sobs were liquid with tears, yet still sexless and of no age.
“What is it?” he cried out in the dream. “Tell me, my dear friend, what’s wrong with you?”
There was no answer. The dream melted away. When he remembered it the next morning, he said nothing about it. Vils was ashamed. He must be careful not to humanize Kayis. True, it was now, and probably for always, his only companion. But it was a machine, as it, itself, always affirmed, when referring to itself. And he a man, flesh and blood, imbued with a psyche, an intellect, or even that thing once termed a soul or ghost. He and Kayis were not friends. And machinery did not weep.
He had grown up, through infancy and childhood into youth, amid a planetary system a long way from Arkann.
His home had been a communal farm, a huge sprawling technicated mansion, whose electric chimneys and wind-valves sang at certain times of day and night, like gigantic choirs of those real insects that hopped about the cornfields. The fields also sprawled for miles, and then came the open plains, yellow as lions from an ancient illustration.
Far off, worlds away they had seemed, lilac mountains upheld a sky that changed its temper and color at a whim. It was a dry place, often rainless for months at a time. The narrow river courses that ran like seams through patches of scrubby forest would empty and nearly close themselves. After dark the stars kept the sky’s colors in bright perforations of the nocturnal black, silver and blue, red and amber, copper, pearl, and glass green.
Vils, aboard the adrift station, dreamed no more of a crying machine, and seldom of human death.
He dreamed of walking the woods and paths of his past, of working in the baking fields, sheltering from violent rainstorms that lasted less than fifteen minutes yet filled up the gullies of the half-shut rivers, where, afterwards, you could catch fat four-legged fish that came out of holes to swim there. He dreamed stars fell and he caught them, tiny as candies on his palm. He dreamed of a grasshopper, tall as a man, that sat in the corn and made its music.
There were no people in the dreams, no proper machines save those inherent to the distant house that, dreaming, he never again entered.
The dreams soothed him. Then grew tiresome. Then they too were gone.
He stopped dreaming, or never recollected what he had dreamed.
Vils asked Kayis then to monitor his sleep, waking him every third or fourth night if it detected dream-activity in his brain. This in the hope of remembering something. But at that point, even if woken up, he never did.
The stars in space were not like the starry nights of his homeland. Shadowy alter-elements moved over space and the stars there, spangles and smokes with prosaic scientific reasons and names.
Space was not a starry night.
Now and then Vils told himself, talking only inside his head, that despite the lack of a communication function, and the proximity of the wasteland they had entered, it was still just possible Kayis might, coincidentally only, approach some obscure, perhaps secret, outpost of mankind. Or after all, some person somewhere might be searching for them. Might find them. One day, someday. Sometime…ever….
An evening came, by the planetary chronometer at the end of the second year, when Vils was playing eschek with Kayis, as occasionally he and formerly others always had.
With no warning, Kayis did not take its turn to move a piece (by sliding it along the board through ion-electronic means).
&nbs
p; “Your move, Kayis,” Vils spoke almost thoughtlessly, supposing the station had deduced he was still considering his own move. Although, of course, even a robot opponent must have noted he had completed it.
When Kayis did not respond, either vocally or by shifting a piece, a sudden and awful terror swamped Vils. Inevitably. For what had happened? What now had gone wrong?
“Kayis!” he bellowed into the star-chilled twilight of the foredeck.
Kayis did not reply.
Vils sprang upward, knocking and tilting the board on its pedestal. But the board adjusted itself, and a firefly display of lights flared up on every side.
“All is well, Vilsev.” The voice, so pure and alien and calm. As even in disaster it always was.
“Why didn’t you answer me?”
“There has been…” the voice hesitated, presumably to evaluate its information, though it sounded, for an instant, like a human voice taking care with what, next, it must say. “There is a contact, Vilsev.”
“A — what do you mean?”
“Part of Kayis’s remaining communication faculty has reacted to an external signal.”
“What — what?”
“Wait one minute, Vilsev. The machine establishes a link.”
Vils found his legs had gone to water. He dropped back in his seat because he had no alternative. He sat there and stared out of the vast viewscreen that showed the spacescape beyond and all around. His eyes were glazed and did not focus.
More than a minute passed. Then another two minutes.
Kayis spoke: “There is a planetary system. A signal has reached the station. The station’s communicatory ableness has therefore been re-activated to a capacity of 86%.”
“A signal — of what sort? Who — who is signaling —”
“Kayis does not know, Vilsev.”
“Is it human?”
A pause.
Kayis said, “The station does not compute it is human.”
“Mechanical then. A machine.”
“Kayis does not compute,” said Kayis, “Kayis does not compute it is mechanical.”
“What then?” he said again. He was hoarse, dry as any rainless riverbed.
“The station does not know,” said Kayis.
“Play it over to me.”
Another gap. Vils swore violently.
“Why didn’t you play it as I told you to?”
“Kayis did play it, but you could not hear. The frequency is at odds since the system is not as able as it was. Only the communication system can hear. Kayis does not identify what the signal is, but it reacts to the signal and can read it. The planet is one of seven grouped about a single sun. This is what the signal reveals.”
“How far off?” Vils asked. “Where?”
“Kayis will form a chart to show you, Vilsev. Kayis is computing the station will take months to reach this place, five or a little more.”
“Five months…a planet…a signal. No. It’s some mistake. A mechanical error. Check and read it again and put it right.”
Kayis now did not reply.
Going to the screen above the gallery of the deck, Vils peered out, naturally seeing nothing substantially other than he already had.
A vague secondary fear stirred through him. Had the technic brain of Kayis itself malfunctioned? But everything else seemed as it should be. Look, now even the game-piece was sliding into its slot on the eschek board. Kayis had won the game, which it was programmed to do a reasonable yet random number of times.
Throughout what ultimately proved to be, travelling via nolisp, five and three-quarter months, Vils became excited and anxious. He was unable to help himself.
Kayis too, had it been human, might have been judged as almost over-eager to bring him any news. As the signal strengthened, information expanded and charts were produced, atlases of star-ways ready-plotted — or hypothesized. Everything was shown on the screens. Kayis announced that the one-star solar system that contained the planet might be that mentioned in an obscure historic and isolated robot survey. In this case the world represented had been code-called Jangala. It was a fertile environment, while the six surrounding orbs were only chunks of boiling, icy, or arid rock. The sun was young, and Jangala lay the perfect distance from its face. The rest were too close, or too far.
Vils pored over all there was to be had, listened to any concepts that were, or had been, floated, stared at any facsimilous images anyone or thing (man, machine) had devised. He grew familiar with the likely look of the planet.
Kayis inaugurated, or else assisted with everything, again as if eager. But that was only fancy.
Vils guarded himself strictly against such ideas.
If only there had been an animal on the station, bred for long life, intelligence and companionship. But no members of the crews had felt such a ploy necessary.
Vils did not dream of Jangala, just as now he did not dream of people. Nor really dream at all, except, it seemed, in amorphous snatches, emotion rather than visualizations.
But he daydreamed about the planet.
“Is there life there?” he asked repeatedly.
At first Kayis could not be sure, aside from the presence of living plants and essential animate molecular organisms. Then Kayis was sure that, these aside, there was no life, neither humanoid, nor animalian. Not even, Kayis mooted, entirely alien life as such.
There would be no one to talk to.
No one to meet or greet.
What then had formed a signal so vigorous that even the reduced capacity of the station had perceived it?
“It is the planet,” Kayis told him.
Inevitably, he realized, with a ridiculous resentfulness. For Kayis had been primed to receive and react to the sub-linguistic communications of Arkann. How else had Connect HQ kept Kayis on track, and how, ultimately, HQ demolished, had Kayis known Arkann’s full and horrible fate?
One peculiar and extraordinary moment ensued, nevertheless.
Vils was eating lunch in the refectory, before going to work on various chores, when Kayis broke into his meal with a new, almost journalistic essay on Jangala — which it seemed the communication system had just resolved. Features of the planet were described by Kayis — tall hills, deep jungle-forests, a small and landlocked saline sea, shaped like an axe-head —
When the speech, delivered as ever coolly and clearly, sexlessly, agelessly, and at the most serene pace, was over, Vils heard himself comment, bitterly, “You just can’t wait to get there, can you, Kayis 42X?”
The instant the words were free of him, he felt a shudder of distaste. Was he losing control of his mind, now? A machine did not long for arrivals, did not, as a man did, superimpose undreamed dreams of childhood and loss and yearning on to other objects, whether inert or alive.
Kayis answered at once. “Kayis does not understand you, Vilsev. Kayis must travel at its usual speed. The wait is now for another three-and-a-half months.”
Kayis does not understand you…
Vils heard in his head another voice then, quite voiceless, yet his own. Dissembler, said the second voice. Liar.
Is there such a thing as an “inanimate object?”
Logically not. Since all things, whether composed of flesh or fiber, gas or water, granite or iron, take their basic comprisement from atoms.
The fundamental building blocks of all (known) worlds, at least, are particles particular mainly in their variety and genius of manner and aspect, but not of material.
If created by accident, or design — or even accidental design (ink spilled through carelessness may yet create an exquisite, even a readable pattern) every latent or potent object still has that in common with its unlike siblings. The results are multitudinous and dissimilar. The mud, however, from which they come, even if they result from chaos itself, is universally identical.
The rose and the man, the lion and the worm, the eagle and the star and a tiny clod of dung — are all related. And with them the cliff, the ocean, the tower, the shi
p of steel.
Then, if there is a life-force in mankind (whatever the force is — mind, intellect, psyche, soul, ghost) that same force will reside, comparatively — while it occupies a physical environment — within any and all of the basic mud-clay formations. Within the rose. Within the mountain, the eagle, the planet, and the star.
Within — how else — the delicate grey turd of a rabbit.
And if in all these, then too inside the machine. There also, and always, is the ghost, the spiritous driver of each physical vehicle.
But within the ghost itself — that final, incorporeal and non-concessionary overseer — is what?
The planet code-called Jangala had been mechanically sighted after the third month. Another month, and it became visible to the human eye, even unassisted. After another one-and-three-quarters months, Station Kayis 42X had anchored itself, aided by the planetary spatial field, ready to begin a steady circling orbit.
The planet’s circumferent mass was greater than Arkann’s. It would take 19 Arkann days, by the chronometer, to complete a full epicyle section.
Kayis began the Epicylis.
Vils, and evidently the station, observed the planet.
Sometimes, as had been consistently feasible above Arkann, “close-ups” were achievable on screen, as if seeing the world’s surface from a mid-altitude plane.
It was like eating or drinking, Vils thought. A fine meal after a famine.
Like that too, the sort of mental and emotional indigestion that followed.
He suffered nightmares — made worse, he felt, since he could never now recall their ingredients, only the fear and trauma.
But that passed. Of course it did.
In the seventh month, Kayis said: “Vilsev, it is an option for the station to descend. That is, Vilsev, to make landfall.”
Already it was established that the lush dark-green and golden world was rich in oxygenated air and hydrated with wholesome waters. No animal forms of any type, let alone advancement, had been detected, and never visually spotted, but this did not necessarily preclude them; they might initially escape even technicated notice. The vegetation seemed generally nourishing, often having some relation to familiar crops. The planet too had day and night. Nothing notably adverse was registered.