by John Boyd
Andromeda Gun
John Boyd
1
For eons, as men measure time, the species had watched the dying of its light, the slow waning of its planet’s sun, and by the then-immutable Second Law of Thermodynamics the race was doomed by entropy.
But it was not a breed to go gently into its long night. Once its sons and daughters had stridden long-limbed through the planet’s morning (though that was long, long ago, and to move limbs required calories), so memory helped spur the race to find means of conserving energy. Through the darkness and pale daylights of its dying planet, it strove to prevent its own extinction, to revoke the Second Law.
The race had succeeded.
Now there were no longer sons and daughters, no organic heirs, only the race, lambent and protean, ethereal and far-ranging, the race immortal, for it had discovered the secrets of light. More, it had found the abstract and eternal Truth of Light.
It had come to its truth in steps, solving problems that begat problems. With its planet’s petrochemicals exhausted, with lumens falling weakly through the freezing air, the organic progenitors of the penultimate species brought heat and light to the twilit globe through the introduction of hydrogen fusion, but the hydrogen consumed in the process was necessary for the organisms’ existence. Thus all solutions led only to the ultimate problem and a final solution as awesome in its implications as it was in its technological challenge.
Seek, find, and re-create the anatomy of the angel.
The solution: Remove the electron from the hydrogen nucleus, retaining only the plasma; encapsulate a maximum of plasma in a .minimal organism through the electrolysis of an organic embryo. Once the circulatory pattern of the plasma is established by the embryo’s arterial system, place the embryo in a tachyon incubator and bombard the plasma, shattering the hydrogen nuclei into photons. After the photons are established as a circulatory light system by the arterial patterns of the embryo, atrophy the organism and disembody the light.
By trial and fewer and fewer errors, light was integrated and homogenized around a fusion-fission core. In the ultimate synthesis of energy and matter, after the organism withered away, only photons, the essence of pure being, remained. Swirling in the self-directed patterns men call intelligence, they wafted themselves through the darkening air or hung pendulous over the crested palls of their grand family funerals.
Selfless, immortal—and ineffectual—the ineffable descendants of organic forebears were form without substance, ardor without hormones, wills without power, but it had been foreseen that the limbo in which the beings existed would offend their inherited logic and affront the valor of a race which had not ceased from mortal fight until all else was overcome, even time which proved a part of the mysteries of light.
So the luminosities needed electrochemical organisms to invest and direct. They needed host beings with levered limbs and opposing thumbs to convert the wisdom of their race into good works. Still sentient, still unsatisfied, impelled by racial memories of an olden time entombed, the beings would never have been content to function as diffused light triggering random packets of chlorophyll, nor as focused light for casual illuminations, and certainly not as coherent light which can rend and destroy. Offspring of a forcible breed, they little cared to waver as pale violet light over the ruins of a dying planet. Instead, they would bring order to the energy in the bright corners of their galaxy. They would spread their wisdom to the sun-fed planets of other star clusters. With borrowed senses they would know again music and bright-eyed loves, with borrowed fingers build again their sunny domes of rare device.
These purposes, too, had been foreseen when the progenitors of the nebulosities earlier constructed miniaturized, single-entity starships with photoelectric guidance systems. By imparting speed, range and directional controls unavailable to the unassisted beings, the vehicles were designed to waft the angels on their flights across interstellar distances. Trundling up from the interior of the planet on automated assembly lines, the starships were moved onto launching pads. There the pilots angled the craft and lifted off with the sound of tearing silk, plashing the long-dimmed skies with the spurn of their wakes.
Over the margins of the worlds they sped and fretted the far-flung boundaries of the stars, interlacing nebulae with the skeins of ultra-ultra-high-frequency communication. They found and invested host organisms through which the heritage of their race might survive and through which matter might be woven into richer tapestries of life. On the planets they visited, they brought long peace to cornland, alp, and sea.
But theirs was not a unilateral giving.
Once more they were able to feel the warmth of sunlight on cheeks or jowls. They reexperienced the homely joys of organic existence: the gut-expanding repletion of food and its tense tendoned release; fresh awakenings from the sweet satiety of sleep; dew smells at morning and starshine at night. They heard music and birdsong, flowing water and rushing wind. They relearned laughter quickly, for they held to the detachment from which humor springs. Being immortal, they felt with recurring delight the pangs of young love on the principally bisexual planets they inhabited. On the unisexual planets they knew the thrill of self-pollination; on polysexual planets the more diffused joy of group encounters. But the luminosities found their most abiding joy in work performed.
Rechanneling energies, they brought order from organic chaos. Often they invested brutish organisms whose behavior they reformed into patterns men call sainthood. The scouts brought species after species into the Galactic Brotherhood, species which varied from the gentle fahlahs of Doremia, themselves so nebulous they barely cast shadows, to the stalkthorns of Mirfak who pollinated by dagger thrusts. When they went forth to battle, they always won.
Until the Light Bearers encountered Man.
While, with unhurried haste and unperturbed pace, the luminosities had spread over and encompassed the Milky Way, and inexplicable disaster was recorded in a message flashed across the spaceways:
ONE OF OUR PROBES IS MISSING!
The message was sent through the galaxies on the third survey of the wheel galaxy the Brotherhood designated M-17 . In part, it was a tribute to Central Intelligence, in greater part a tribute to the scouts, that only one expedition vanished, because dangers did exist for the scouts. There were dark holes in space, neutron stars whose tremendous gravitational pull sucked in light quanta, and there was the danger of a loss of entropy in luminosities trapped, by some means, on cul-de-sac planets.
Officially the file was closed on Galactic Probe Three. Mathematics almost precluded a solution to the disappearance, for there were many stars in the nebula and many, many planets. More probes came as M-17 wheeled through the void, and always, when they neared the coordinates where G-3 vanished, the probes brought wonderment with them. Among scouts of the Galactic Brotherhood’s Interplanetary Exploration Legion, the loss was never forgotten.
Still, two millennia later, no hint of a second catastrophe was contained in the preliminary report received at Galactic Central in M-17 from the seventh scout sent into the sector:
Arrived at tertiary planet, minor star, parsec 11.6, axis 86.36. Survey reveals ambulatory organisms. Am stationed for investment.
G-7
Aloft, an eagle soared in the afternoon sunlight, tipping its wings to updrafts from the Grand Teton. Drowsing atop the Territorial Stage Lines stagecoach, the driver felt no impulse to look upward as his horses plodded beside the Snake River, untended in their final five-mile pull toward Shoshone Flats. August heat, the sway of the stagecoach, and the creak of harness leather added to the driver’s somnolence.
Here where horses clip-clopped beside a murmuring river, where insects hummed from the roadsides, there was little need for alertness and less for war
iness. Had he seen it, the driver would have paid no heed to a boulder jutting from a precipice five hundred yards ahead where the road swung sharply through a narrow defile cut by the Snake. Above the stagecoach, the eagle continued to circle, watching the movements of the horses with a predator’s curiosity, but the eagle was not the sole observer of the man and horses.
Atop the crest, the boulder was also watching.
Inside the naturally camouflaged space vehicle, impressions received not solely from light but from more subtle emanations recorded the structure of the vehicle below, the texture of the leather, the grain of the wood, heat and heat variations. Sensors weighed the moisture content of breath, traced coursing blood, sought and found electrical impulses in brains.
Within the metering segment of the spaceship, the scout scanned the encephalogram of the driver, then passed swiftly over the brain readings of the horses and those of a passenger inside the coach whose beta waves registered but faintly. Minute adjustments occurred in the crystals of the space rock when the electromagnetic warp created by the driver’s bone structure revealed flexible digits on his hand and a musculature that permitted opposing motion in one of the digits. All meterings ceased, their object accomplished; G-7 had discovered the ultimate index of an organism’s capabilities, the driver’s thumb.
The erect quadrupled, the one with the synchronous brain waves in an activated cerebral cortex, was a suitable host. G-7 sent an action report to Galactic Central: “Am investing host organism.”
G-7 flowed into the diffusion chamber, expanded its light content below the level of visibility, and emerged from the spaceship. For a moment it hovered over the spaceship, testing for an absence of shadow and waiting for the stagecoach to pass beneath it. Its luminosity was lost in the sunlight. It cast no shadow. Ahead of the stagecoach, it sensed a sharp bend where the road almost overhung the river curving below.
Then, gliding along the magnetic force lines of earth, G-7 zoomed toward the horses.
With the curve in the road twenty yards ahead, G-7 dipped low over the heads of the beasts and shrilled, electronically, a note too high for the driver to detect against the tympanums of the horses’ ears. Maddened by pain, the beasts bolted. The stage lurched forward, gaining speed despite the reining of the aroused driver. Flayed by the keening of G-7, the horses thundered onto the curve, swinging around it, but the stage had become a juggernaut not to be diverted.
It swayed and keeled too far, swinging out over the embankment, and toppled, cartwheeling twice before it smashed to a halt so close to the river that its remaining right wheel continued to spin over the water’s edge. Both trailing horses had been dragged off the road with the stagecoach, but the leading span, saved by a broken center pole, trotted to a halt down the road, trailing their severed harnesses, as G-7’s keening dwindled into silence.
G-7 hovered over the wreckage, personally metering the close-in data. It had not intended to destroy, but, obviously, the organisms offered poor survival capabilities. One of the quadrupeds had been pierced by the broken center pole, which had barely penetrated its arterial pump, but the pump was malfunctioning in a drastic manner. One lay immobilized by a simple fracture of a single limb.
Far more important to G-7, the erect quadruped with the levered thumb had been thrown from the seat with sufficient force to snap the column supporting its brain housing, and it was emitting no neural impulses at all.
G-7’s selected host, the driver, had ceased to function.
Inside the stage, the passenger was functioning with no additional impairments to its nerve or brain structure. In fact, the organism had failed to awaken at the crash. From previous meterings, G-7 had rejected the passenger as a host, would have, in fact, preferred the horses had it not been for the sleeper’s thumb.
G-7 drifted through the underside of the stagecoach and entered the skull pan of the sleeper, tapping the energy of its thalamus, sending tracers out to explore the sleeper’s memory, language, and knowledge.
It sensed potentialities in the brain mechanism. In fact, the brain was made up almost entirely of potentialities, all unrealized. Memories traced along the whorls and loops of neurons connected visions of warfare, death, and violence. G-7 followed a history that led from the battlefields of northern Virginia to gunfights in a place called Texas and across a river into a place called Mexico, to friendship with a Mexican, Hey You Garcia, and to numberless brawls in cantinas. But all memories led to a moonswept desert in Utah where a man called Colonel Blicket laughed above smoking guns which had killed Garcia and mouthed a foul insult to the absent owner of the mind G-7 occupied, Johnny Loco.
The vileness of the epithet spoken by the colonel was so revolting to the sleeper that the words were blocked by the subconscious machinery of the being who called himself a man, but even the blocked memory caused such discords in the brain that G-7 quickly shunted its explorations to less-disturbed areas.
Vastnesses of untapped energy lay in the brain pod, and the untapped areas were neutral, neither good nor evil. If this organism were to become the instrument by which its species would be led to galactic brotherhood, then molecular patterns would have to be reoriented and unused neurons activated. What little potential toward goodness the man had developed was so far gone into darkness that even his name was shrouded. The man who called himself Johnny Loco had been born Ian McCloud.
First, he would have to be guided into cooperation with his species, for in his own language the man was an outlaw, a term which implied some law he was outside of. Tracing the concept of “law” through the brain’s conceptual areas, G-7 arrived at: going to church; keeping cleaned and shaved; being polite to women; not robbing and killing.
Probing tentacles of light diverged through the sleeper’s brain, connecting synapses, jury-rigging junctions between the man’s atrophied love centers and his equally disused concepts of social responsibility. G-7 was making its first attempt to guide the man, prompting him to take his first step in which appeared to be a journey of a thousand miles toward respectability.
Now interwoven with the neuron patterns of its host, using the man’s language, G-7 felt its first human emotion. It thrilled to the knowledge that this currently saddleless saddle tramp, this ignoble brute it had inhabited, would eventually be hailed by others of its species as Saint Ian the First.
At the moment, storms sweeping from the vagus nerve were battering the man’s thalamus. Nudging a neuron here, straightening a chain of molecules there, G-7 went about pacifying the brain’s outraged stomach as Johnny Loco stirred, stretched, and opened his eyes.
G-7 was amazed by the clarity, range, the depth and color perception of the man’s binocular vision. At the angle at which he lay, the man could see the crest of the defile, and from five hundred yards G-7 could estimate the cubic volume of the boulder atop the crest, the spaceship which had brought it to this planet called earth in a galaxy called the Milky Way from a star cluster which, it would later learn, men had named Andromeda.
Drifting into full wakefulness, Johnny Loco noticed first his boots on the seat above his head with his feet still in them. He could not recall when he had last slept with his feet over his head, but it was a good position for curing a hangover. Ordinarily he would have been very sick from the rotgut he had drunk last night in Idaho Falls.
Idaho Falls! The very words rang as a knell , and he closed his eyes again to shut out his memories. He had bet a hundred dollars on a two-card draw to an inside straight and had lost the pot to a pair of jacks. He had bet and lost his horse and saddle and had tried to bet his pistol, but the other gamblers would not let him bet the weapon. It had a hair trigger, and its handle was so full of notches that drawing it was like grabbing a saw.
If he couldn’t learn to play poker, he might as well quit robbing banks, he thought. All he had left from the Boise holdup was thirty-seven cents and a ticket to Shoshone Flats, Wyoming Territory. Remembering the stage ticket, he could account for the position of his boots. The stage
coach had overturned, which meant he had paid good money for fare to nowhere, and if he didn’t make Shoshone Flats by six the bank would be closed. He reopened his eyes, suddenly alert.
Today was Saturday and if he didn’t get to the bank before closing time, he’d have no funds for Sunday. It was against his principles to rob banks after hours or after dark. He was a bank robber, not a night-crawling burglar, so it was imperative that he get to town in time to find and steal a fast horse for his getaway and rob the bank before nightfall. Still marveling at his clear head and unroiled stomach, he climbed through the window and looked over the wreckage.
One glance at the angle of the driver’s head told him the man’s neck was broken. One of the horses was dead, and the other, still in harness, had a broken foreleg. Loco slid down from the side of the stagecoach, walked over, pulled his pistol, and killed the lame horse in an act of mercy so conventional it was unaccompanied by compassion for the beast. Reloading and reholstering his pistol, he knelt beside the body of the driver and pulled the man’s wallet from his pocket. He riffled through the contents.
There was a paper dollar and a two-dollar meal ticket with eighty cents unpunched drawn on a Miss Stewart’s Restaurant in Shoshone Flats. The ticket was made out to Will Trotter by the Territorial Stage Lines. Loco kept the dollar and returned the meal ticket to the wallet when he noticed the width of the dead man’s belt. He unbuckled the belt and slid it out of the belt straps.
Apparently Will Trotter had not been a trusting person. Loco found nine silver dollars concealed in the belt. That sum, with an additional twenty-three cents he found in the driver’s jeans was the extent of his salvage. Loco was not disappointed. He had robbed banks for less money.
Standing, he looked up at the road and saw the two lead horses farther down munching on the roadside grass. He climbed the hill and walked down the road to take the reins of the first horse, a Percheron. It was no horse for a man of his calling, but it was as good as the Clydesdale farther down the road, good enough to carry him within stealing distance of a faster horse. He started to swing aboard the Percheron when, for the first time in his life, Johnny Loco reconsidered.