The Fleet of Stars

by Poul Anderson

  Through gloves and heating filaments, he felt the clasp as if both hands were bare. He groped for words. "No, that'd be premature. My guess at the moment is that the thing can be done."

  "Then why are you—" Her plea faded out.

  He could find no choice but bluntness. “What I wonder is if it will be done."

  "Why shouldn't it? I... I think most Martians will be as willing ... as I am." Her grip tightened.

  Grimness: "The cybercosm isn't."

  She let go and sat back, away from him. "How do you know?" she demanded.

  "It's told us—"

  "When? In what way?" She drew breath. "Oh, yes, I've heard too. Some people were against this when it first started getting talked about. Some people are always against anything new. And they'll say the cybercosm advises them, but all they ever really have to quote is... the upshot of their computer models—conclusions no better than the models themselves are, that they made out of their own prejudices. It's like ancient preachers taking a line or two out of a holy book and spinning their personal ideas out of that and claiming it was the word of God."

  "You're saying the cybercosm is like God himself?" escaped from Fenn.

  "Are you a hostile?"

  He imagined he could hear: "I thought better of you."

  His anger congealed into a kind of steely sadness. All right, he decided, I've upsnarled what should have been a grand, free day and now there's nothing to do but try explaining.

  Then: Is that necessarily bad? She's very young, but she's bright, nova-bright, and raised amongst realities. Plain talk won't trample down her spirit. I'm supposed to learn something about the Martians as well as Mars, and maybe plant a few notions in them. Here's one whose career will probably go to their forefront.

  Hm, it might be smart to begin with making my attitude clear to her—first principles, if you want a fancy name—before telling what's happened.

  He shook his head within the helmet and spoke carefully. "No, I'm not any enemy, not any sort of revolutionary trashbrain. I know I wouldn't exist if it weren't for high tech. None of us would. Nor could we have experienced many marvels, like this today. And, sure, high tech means the cybercosm, and the cybercosm's made the Synesis possible. I've studied some history. I know about war, sickness, famine, government, all the horrors that none of us wants back. But—" He stopped to plan what he would say next.

  "But?" she prompted.

  "I'm not a scholar, or philosopher either. But more and more I've got a feeling that a time always comes when anything—a species, a system, anything—it reaches its limits, its dead end, and after that, it's deadweight."

  She sat quiet for a span. The wind-noise fluttered in his sonics.

  She said at length, steadily, looking straight into his eyes, "The Teramind has stopped growing? No, never. Not for longer than we can imagine, anyway."

  "Yeh," he replied, "maybe it'll go on indefinitely, with its intellection and—whatever else."

  The speculations about that future were countless, repeated lifetime after human lifetime. Intellect transcendent and ever evolving. Truths to be discovered, abstract beauty to be wrought, beyond the conceiving of mortals. Mind, consciousness, to outlive the stars, perhaps to remake the dying universe and give it rebirth.

  "But how much of it do we hear about?" he said. "Sure, we get our services, our calculations done for us, theorems worked out, art and engineering composed to order—and if we don't understand what the machines are doing for themselves along those lines, is that their fault? If we'd need to study for a thousand years before we could follow what the Teramind's currently thinking about—and then we still couldn't—is that its fault? This is what we're always told, Kinna, and I'm not calling it a lie. But we humans, we animals, what's left for us?"

  The argument was old, so old that it had long since virtually died out and only lately begun to be heard anew. He came close to foretelling her answer:

  "Everything that matters to us."

  "In theory, fine," he retorted. "Organic and electrophotonic, partners wherever we can help each other— especially where they can help us poor, weak organics— and otherwise free to take our separate trajectories, sharing as much as possible of what we find along the way—sure, sure." His fist smote his thigh. "Slag and slaughter!" he roared. "The 'cosm's started up antimatter production again, to power ships that push light-speed! What are their missions? Why don't we have any?"

  "That's ... been described. You've heard. They're too dangerous. They'd kill us. Maybe later—"

  "So we are told. And why are we not told what— well, what that solar lens has found? Nothing but rumors, mostly out of Proserpina, it seems. Are we unfit to know? I tell you, the questions go on and on."

  She braced herself and responded stiffly: "I've probably heard them oftener than you have."

  Startled, he asked, "You have?"

  "What else did you want to say?" Her tone commanded. No, he thought, she's not a child adoring the glamorous stranger.

  He spent a minute or two assembling his response. There was plenty of time in this canyon, billions of years' worth.

  "All right," he said. "Repeat, I'm not for overthrowing the whole system. Nearly everybody would die, and anyway, it's probably impossible. But... why have we been snugged so long into our comfortable selfsame-ness, like bugs in amber? Just because machines can better do everything in space that needs doing? In death's name, the thing they can't do for us is being there!"

  He curbed himself. "Never mind that. Let's stay with the Deimos project. I've had a conference with Chuan, your synnoiont. He told me the work will never be done. Not if the cybercosm can prevent."

  "Chuan?" she cried. "No! He wouldn't!"

  He saw she was appalled. She couldn't be that conventional, that humbly accepting, he thought. Not her. She must have her reasons, and he'd do well to find out what they were.

  "He was polite, you could say friendly," Fenn conceded. "He didn't outright forbid anything—not that he has the authority to, of course. He talked about costs out of proportion to gains, unintended and unforeseeable consequences, the hazard to social stability a couple of centuries down the line—he screened a sociodynamic analysis for me—I admit most of it was over my head. But he does speak for the cybercosm, that's what his life is all about, and I know opposition when I meet it."

  She looked across the canyon, as if to draw peace from agelessness, before she turned to him and said quietly: "I have to tell you, Chuan is a dear old friend. He's been my, my safe harbor at the university. It isn't always easy there, and I've had my occasional troubles." Blameless, surely, he thought. She's headlong and trusting. "I've come to him and he—no, he never used his influence, but he listened and—" She gulped. "Yes, I'm prejudiced. But shouldn't we try to be, oh, objective? Chuan has his duty. You, you ... Lahui... have this magnificent dream ... I'd love to believe it can come real. But do we understand, can we, what it might lead to?''

  "The Teramind knows best," he gibed.

  "You're talking like a Lunarian." It was not a rebuff but a remark, slightly bemused, and he realized that she too was searching for common ground.

  He clamped calm down on himself. "Kinna, let's not fight. I'm on Mars to learn. Maybe the proposal I've brought with me is wrong." He didn't accept that, but why not make the gesture? "Or maybe I misunderstood Chuan. He did get into technicalities that are beyond me, and it's true he didn't claim to have any certainties, only probability functions."

  She rallied. "Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if he simply failed to make himself clear to you. He lives so much with his machines, his abstractions. I think that at heart he must be very lonely. I'll talk to him, next chance I get.

  "And he can't yet have been linked with the main cybercosm, can he? Not across those millions of klicks. Maybe he'll find the limited system here drew the wrong conclusions. Or at worst—Mars is a free republic within the Synesis. It can't dictate to us. We'll decide for ourselves what we want to do."

&n
bsp; "Everything's still in the air, isn't it?" Once more she seized his hand. "Why don't we keep on as we were, we two? I've so much I'd like to share with you."

  Her optimism was like a breath of oxygen to him. "By all means." However, he could not but grab at the opportunity he had glimpsed. "Uh, you mentioned Lunarians. Could I meet some of yours?"

  Her cheerfulness was returning rapidly. Maybe she was working at it a little, but he judged that most of it sprang straight from what she was. "Easy. I've plenty of friends among them."

  "You do?" he blurted. "You're quite a girl, you are."

  —Night fell as they climbed back over the rimrock. The abrupt stars made a dusk of it, through which, down-slope, the viewports of Sananton glowed honey-yellow. Kinna raised her eyes aloft. "Deimos," she lilted low. "Turned into a real moon, big, clear to see, shining up there bright and full of life." She threw an arm about his waist. "Oh, Fenn, how I hope. Thank you for the hope."

  12

  AT THEIR PRESENT configuration, a message could go on a direct beam between Mars and Earth, without needing to be relayed around the sun. The satellite that received it passed it on to a groundside station, whence the network flashed it to Nauru. It demanded either to be forwarded to the addressee or held abeyant till he called for it. In the course of the next fractional second, the network queried several possible locations Fenn had entered in the database. It found that he had most recently registered himself in London, and ran through a file of public accommodations. Thus, when he and Wanika came back to their hotel room, the eidophone informed him that it had a communication to deliver.

  They were celebrating his homecoming with a little travel. In a dreambox, either of them could have experienced the city through its ages, Britons, Romans, kings, merchants, great brigand discoverers, builders of empire and industry, on through the return of grassland, woodland, blossoming hawthorn, across tracts abandoned and demolished. In reconstructions equally careful, they could have met, interacted with, William the Conqueror, Elizabeth the First, Winston Churchill, Diana Leigh; with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pepys, Kipling, Wells; with Newton, Faraday, Medawar; with Moll Flanders, Wilkins Mi-cawber, Sherlock Holmes. But it would have been reconstruction, conjecture, illusion. In this preserved and restored ancient core, they walked on solid stones, breathed random whiffs of smoke, bought flowers from a chance-met vendor in Hyde Park, went into a pub for beer and a dart game and a chat with flesh-and-blood people. Yes, it was a museum set, maintained for tourists and a few pious antiquarians, but these were things that had known the actual hands and eyes of the ancestors, and the dwellers were not merely being quaint for the sake of extra money. They had come to like archaism, had made it a subculture as genuine as most.

  Whatever that might mean, Fenn thought.

  The phone detected the opening of the room to the door and blinked. "Hea?" Wanika wondered. "Speak."

  "A communication from Mars for Fenn," it said, adding his number.

  "Huh?" He stopped in midstride. After a second, he remembered his companion. "Uh, must be somebody I met there."

  "Obviously," she murmured. "Shall I go out while you play it?"

  With exasperation, he felt his face grow warm. "No, no reason to. Can't be anything very personal. Could well concern ... all of us."

  He sat down, touched his palm to the identification plate, and flicked for display. The screen before him was suddenly bright. Kinna Ronay's image looked forth, rumpled brown hair, shirt half open above the small, firm bosom. She smiled and waved. "Hola, Fenn," he heard. Through his head went echoes of that high, eager voice, from Sananton, Eos Chasma, Belgarre, the far end of the Valles, aflight and then atramp across Argyre Planitia and polar icefields, finally at the spaceport bidding him goodbye. There it had broken just a little, and she had dabbed at her eyes before taking his hand for a moment longer than was quite necessary.

  "You asked me to call and tell you what's happened and what I've found out and everything," she went on. "Well, here I am. Not a heap of news, I'm afraid, but I'll be happy to keep trying if you want. I, I hope you had a good voyage and everything's all right for you on Earth. It is for us here. I'm back in school and—oh, the usual things. Was out in the Tweel Tavern with some friends the other night and I sang that old 'MacCannon' song you taught me and they loved it and wanted to learn it too, but maybe you recall how I think the translation into modern Anglo could be bettered and—" Laughter trilled. "I'm sorry. I ought to go back and edit this silliness out. But it is good to talk at you, and I suppose you know my style by now. You'll bring back the sobriety average if you feel like replying. I hope you will."

  Fenn stopped the play. Kinna's gaiety froze in place. "The young woman who guided me through the regions she knows," he said to Wanika. "I've told you about her, and the fact that her parents are fairly prominent."

  "How interesting to encounter her," she answered slowly.

  Fenn resumed play. Kinna turned serious—as grave as a child can often, be, he thought. “Well, I did talk with Chuan, the way I promised to," she said. "More than once. There's so much to think about and for him to try to explain. And then, he is my honorary uncle. A lot of every time we're together, we just enjoy each other's company."

  "A touch of humanness for him," Wanika said in an undertone.

  Fenn stopped the message again. "We're lucky to have this contact," he reminded her.

  "True. A tiny insight into the opposition viewpoint— 'Auwe, I realize it isn't anything near that simple. Synnoionts aren't inhuman or dehumanized, they're a different kind—a different aspect of human. And the cybercosm isn't an enemy."

  "It could get to be," Fenn muttered.

  "What?"

  "Never mind." He restarted the phone.

  Troubled, Kinna said, "I can't spell things out, not really. I've been thinking and thinking, and finally I wrote down what I believe is what Chuan meant. Let me scroll that for you."

  Her image vanished. Text appeared. Fenn ran it at low speed, now and then halting it or backing it up for him and Wanika to consider a passage. Yet it was plain and brief.

  "We went through the arguments over and over. He has been in touch with Earth, as close into the cybercosm there as he could be over those distances. Probably he doesn't have all the complexities and subtleties in his head or at his fingertips, but he's got enough for the likes of me. You can get as much else as you want, and a landslide more, right where you are. So I won't go into any details, unless you tell me I should.

  "Mainly, you know, the cybercosm thinks the Deimos project would be terribly destabilizing. The danger's not to it but to us, not the sophotects and machines but the humans. You told me how he spoke to you about the economics and the cultural effects. I can imagine those, sort of, but the equations and analytic matrices went astronomical units over my head. I did say what you'd said, that the Lahui Kuikawa might be very willing to see their society change, even back on Earth, if what it gets them is the freedom of space. He said a Martian would naturally think like that, but he wishes a people of the seas, Earth's seas, would stop to ask themselves what it really means.

  "He went on to worry about the Proserpinans. How they will react, and what effect that will have on the inner planets (on those who live there, I mean). It isn't foreseeable. He called up a lot of history to show me how the unforeseeable again and again proved to be the terrible. A madman "killed a nobleman, and Earth plunged into a hundred years of war and the cruelest tyrannies. The internal combustion engine prevailed over the steam engine, and Earth came close to strangling and did suffer a hundred years of dreadful weather. Oh, yes, he agreed nothing was actually so simple. But precisely because so many factors were tangled together, as they always are, a small change could have enormous consequences. He gave me some other examples, but I'd rather not write about them.

  "I finally got up my courage and asked him the questions you asked me. What about those new kinds of spaceships? What about the solar lenses? Why all the mystery? Is it right?


  "Fenn, he grew so sad. I felt as if I had stabbed him. First he said the cybercosm, if we think of it as a reasoning being, the cybercosm has the same freedom any human does/That includes the right to exercise private judgment and hold back private data. If we want to develop field-drive craft for ourselves, no law prevents us.

  But the cybercosm (the Teramind, or a lower echelon better suited to deal with us?) believes that to tell us how, at this stage, would be irresponsible. Chuan said we don't need them—we need hardly any spacecraft any longer— and besides, we couldn't fly in the superspeed ones and live, unless maybe as downloads. I couldn't get him to say it outright, but I think here too he's afraid of the Proserpinans and what they might do.

  "Well, I'm sure you and your Lahui Kuikawa have heard all this more directly.

  "There is something strange about the solar lens, though. Chuan would say even less when I asked, but I have just written how sorrowful he became. Not that he said he was, but I could read it on him, how he looked away from me and his shoulders slumped and his voice drooped. What he actually told me was the same old thing, that the data are uncertain and further research is in order and we'll get a report in due course. Fenn, I couldn't bring myself to hound him.

  "Imagine me now making a long pause. I've done that while I thought over what I've just told and what's to tell next.

  "It's more cheerful. You remember meeting my friend Elverir, and what I told you about other Lunarians I've met through him. (Maybe I'd better not write more. You know what I mean.) Well, to put it very shortly, everybody knows that most of our Lunarians are for Project Deimos. They would welcome new people, new wealth, new possibilities—maybe still more than we Terrans would—and if in the long run it leads to making Mars come truly alive, why, they are human too. The prospect of getting into space again in earnest excites them tremendously. Here at home, they mainly want to make sure their race won't ever be subjects of a Life Mother—as they think of it—and they realize that if they cooperate from the very beginning, when their help will be invaluable, they can arrange the terms they want.