by Ian Stewart
This galaxy had suffered from what can best be described as a series of childhood infections. It was chronically infected with a plague of life. Reproducing entities, leaping from planet to planet and from star to star, had diffused along its spiral arms, taking the path of least resistance. Occasionally, the more virulent strains had crossed the relatively starless voids between. Now life forms had become endemic and moved through the galaxy’s substance at will.
And as they spread, they changed the nature of the habitats that they infected, until those accumulated changes affected the nature of the galaxy itself.
It was not clear whether these spreading patches of change were a disease or a natural progression toward maturity. Or both. There was no obvious place in the laws of quantum gravity for this fifth state of matter, sticking out at right angles to the conventional four of solid, liquid, gas, plasma: the spontaneous appearance of organized complexity. The physics of a galaxy seemed, at first sight, to imply a lifeless future. But the inner workings of those laws, propagated through the Middle Kingdom of the material mesoscale, led inexorably to persistent outbreaks of self-complication. When allied to the potent ability to replicate, this tendency gave rise to emergent structures that could only be described as living. And when replication made mistakes, becoming reproduction, those entities acquired the ability to evolve. Natural selection preserved some mistakes, destroyed the rest; this accelerated the process of change and offered a natural route to ever-greater complexity.
During the galaxy’s infancy this potential for complication had run riot. It had been realized in a billion different ways—as carbon chemistry, plasma topology, dislocations in high-gravity neutron crystals, diffraction peaks of electromagnetic radiation, herds of entangled electrons, communities of graviton orbitals. Each instance formed the nucleus of a separate infection with its own characteristic etiology, but the overall course of the galactic disease was much the same, whatever physical form the entities took. This was no disorder, however. On the contrary, it was an insidious, metastasizing outbreak of order. Order where none should exist, order that danced to its own tune. Impossible, wonderful, unavoidable life, clinging to existence with a robustness that defied all expectations.
Especially interesting complexities came into being at the boundaries where distinct infections collided and competed. Those boundaries could be temporal as well as spatial. The past could influence the future. Expectations of the future could influence the present.
In this galaxy, the dominant influences had been of just these kinds. While still in its early childhood, the galaxy had experienced a virulent infection by an unusually potent form of intelligence. The Precursors, as they were named by those with whom their legacy collided, had spread through almost all parts of the galaxy, avoiding only the Black Hole jungle at the galactic core. The agent and the consequence of this cosmic diaspora went far beyond mere intelligence, to become extelligence: the interactive, collective knowledge that is shared by a culture of intelligent, communicative beings. With breathtaking speed, Precursor extelligence became self-sustaining, self-propelled. It gave rise to a brand of technology so advanced that it bordered on magic.
All things end. When the Precursor contagion had run its course, and immunity had set in, the infectious intelligences vanished from the universe. But they left behind relics of their extelligence, scattered enigmatically across huge swaths of intragalactic space like the scars of long-healed wounds.
Later infections picked at those scars and metabolized them in their own ways. The relics of this childhood disease affected the symptoms, and the spread, of a thousand later, milder ones.
One of those relics was currently being employed to create several thousand copies of a mechanism so primitive that the Precursors would have been profoundly embarrassed by the use to which their technology was being put. The construction was being conducted by Servant-of-Unity XIV Samuel Godwin’sson Travers on board Disseminator 714, one small ship in a huge Cosmic Unity mission fleet that was soon to bring the memeplexes of universal joy and tolerance to yet another grateful world, a planet known locally as No-Moon. He hummed a tune of indeterminate provenance as he packed the resulting devices into plastic containers, sixty-four to a box.
For a normal human, Sam was tall—not with the exaggerated elongation often found in people who lived in microgravity, but a head higher than most. His bones were slender and lightly muscled; his face was a little too wide for its jaw, with the eyes set close together on either side of a narrow, straight nose. He wasn’t ugly; he wasn’t good-looking; he was just ordinary.
The depth of his devotion was not. He carried out his allotted tasks with the keenness of a true zealot. Performing the duties of Cosmic Unity gave him a deep spiritual satisfaction. His lifesoul felt cleansed and sparkling, vibrant with transcendent love. Ever since early childhood his life had been dedicated to Service, for his parents knew that their son had been born to serve. They knew that through Service all species would eventually become One, and the sacred prophecies would be fulfilled, as had been ordained by the Founders. And soon, under their kind but firm tutelage, XIV Samuel came to know it, too.
The prospect sent a shiver along his spine. If only Unity would be attained soon! So that I am alive to witness it!
Absently he buffed the Precursor duplicator with the sleeve of his robe, removing a faint trace of sweat left by a previous, less careful servant. The machine functioned without noise, vibration, or indeed any external signs save for the appearance, in a steady stream, of the copies that it made. It had no evident energy source, but some kind of conservation law seemed to govern its functions, for it had to be fed an occasional meal of matter. It did not seem important what kind of matter—save for a few essential elements like praseodymium, which presumably could not be synthesized—but there had to be enough matter.
An original of the object being duplicated lay in a shallow depression on the machine’s surface, where Sam had placed it. The duplicator created such a depression automatically, to fit whatever was deposited there. Sam’s job, in which he had undergone extensive training, was to operate the duplicator and persuade it to disgorge endless replicas of that one original.
He did not have to know how the duplicator worked, which was good. No one knew how any Precursor technology worked—not the giant orbital fortifications encircling Rigel, not even the handheld devices that had been dug from the frozen nitrogen plains of the fifth moon of Zeta Camelopardi 14, the ones that could both crack nuts and graft new limbs on silicon-based creatures in low gravity. But that technology had been designed by master engineers, who did not expect the user to understand what was being used. Every Precursor machine was controlled through a user interface based on metaphor. It must have been entirely intuitive to any Precursor. But even with extensive and arduous training, it took their successors many years to become accustomed to the rudiments of the system—and half a lifetime to become proficient. Even experienced operators often made mistakes.
Mistakes were unimportant. The material could be recycled, the task repeated until it achieved the desired result. When it did, the duplicator could churn out perfect replicas, apparently identical down to the molecular level, indefinitely.
In a replicative economy, anything that works is free.
Duplicators were a gift to younger species from the long-dead Precursors. The Precursors built to last. Perhaps they had intended to leave a legacy for those that followed them. Perhaps it was the merest accident that anything useful survived. No one knew how Precursor minds worked; they had left their artifacts but no record of themselves.
This particular gift was not easily acquired, even so. A quarter-million years before Sam’s lifetime, a Thunchchan expedition along a section of the Galaxy’s Trailing Spiral Arm had investigated a world whose atmosphere was rich in the sulfur oxides so necessary for metabolism. Hoping to found a new colony, they had stumbled instead on something of far greater value: the separate components of an unu
sed duplicator, still in their original wrappings.
It took more than 230,000 years for the combined intellect of the Thunchchan Empire to figure out how to provoke those components into self-assembly. It took only a few months more to get the device running, producing poor but recognizable copies of small items like skin clips and crest jewelry.
It took more than a century to refine their control of the device to make perfect copies of any inert object no larger than their own heads.
Life forms? Those were different. The duplicator could copy them, but the copies came out dead. Many religions took this as proof that life was infused with something special, some nonmaterial essence. But Cosmic Unity held to a simpler, more prosaic explanation: The Precursor machine could duplicate form but not dynamics.
One duplicator, however, is little more than a curio. The Thunchchans searched their entire region of the cosmos for a second—or, better still, for another set of components, waiting to be assembled. The components would be small enough to be copied faithfully with their current skills.
The search proved fruitless. The Thunchchans were the sole owners of one solitary item of Precursor magic, and all they could use it for were party tricks.
It was frustrating.
Thunchchan technocrats studied the duplicator until there were no ideas left to test, learned nothing useful, and consigned the artifact to an archaeological museum. There it was prominently displayed but seldom operated. It remained there for three thousand years . . . until one morning an inquisitive youngling, climbing over the exhibit, triggered a second mode of operation, in which the duplicator accessed a presumably preinstalled database of constructs. It began turning out copies of a limited range of devices without the presence of an original.
It then took Thunchchan science less than a year to discover how to access the default templates that generated all the components of a duplicator. Complete with wrappings.
Duplicates of these components could also self-assemble. The result was a fully functional duplicator. There seemed to be no loss of fidelity: The product of a chain of copies thousands of generations long seemed to do everything that the original could.
Within ten years, the machines were in use on a hundred worlds. All attempts to control their spread failed, even—especially—when they fell into the hands of Thunchch’s enemies. Within a century, there was not a solid-matter civilization in the Galaxy that could manage without them.
Like life, the duplicators were a disease, and they spread like wildfire. They needed only three things to function: nutrients in the form of matter; a small but essential supply of rare elements, notably praseodymium; and a host mind to configure them. The duplicators were not self-reproducing life forms, but they reproduced nonetheless. They were viruslike parasites, or more probably symbionts—the verdict was not yet in.
Sam turned to the duplicator and knelt before it, his head bowed. He made a series of graceful gestures with his hands.
It was not some religious rite, although there were plenty of those on board Disseminator 714 as it spread the Good News of Cosmic Unity, namely, the Oneness of All Life. It was how the machine’s user interface—its metaphace—worked. Presumably, the Precursors had used a language of gesture, or possibly that was merely how they communicated with their machines. All Sam knew was that this particular series of movements would (he hoped) increase the size of the output by approximately 12 percent. It did seem to help if the duplicator was approached in a reverential frame of mind, but he suspected that was because such a mood slowed his gestures down and made them clearer. Or smoother. Or more confident.
Sam didn’t really care; all he cared about was serving Unity, as he had been trained to do by his revered parents, XIII Samuel and his partners XVI Eloise and II Josephina.
Sam drew a short breath of pleasure. The new devices were larger, just as he had intended, but otherwise they were identical to the original. He had no idea of the purpose for which Cosmic Unity needed them, and it never occurred to him to ask. They were just the next item on a very long list: 65,536 copies of original AZ-F-4933, the second half of them to be made one standard increment larger. He uttered a short but heartfelt prayer to the Lifesoul-Cherisher, and experienced a flood of satisfaction as he fulfilled his assigned role of servant.
While its operator prayed, the duplicator continued to disgorge identical devices, one every few seconds.
Sam rose to his feet and picked up an empty container. The boxes themselves were made by a colleague in an adjoining chamber. Methodically he packed the box with the devices he had made. By the time he had finished, another boxful was ready. Occasionally, he conversed with the box-maker, another human male. Disseminator 714 had the fifteen types of species that the Church had determined were ideal to maintain social harmony, but repeated attempts to mix species on technical tasks never seemed to work very well and had been abandoned.
In this manner Sam’s morning passed. It was fulfilling work.
In the belly of Disseminator 714 was a large open space, once a cargo tank. The vessel had originally been built to carry freight, mostly liquids that were common in some parts of the Galaxy and rare, but essential, elsewhere. When the market in liquid neon collapsed, Cosmic Unity had purchased the ship at a bargain price and converted it for creatures warmer-blooded than its previous Gra’aan owners. The cargo tank became a sanctum for the rites of the Community of the United Cosmos, and the vessel became yet another agent for the dissemination of the Memeplex of Universal Tolerance to a receptive Galaxy.
His duties temporarily suspended by command of the high acolyte, Sam hurried through the bowels of the ship as he always did on such occasions, trotting securely in the ubiquitous artificial gravity. He was hastening to take his place in the Assembly of Joy so that he could renew his faith in the essential oneness of Life—be it a magnetic plasmoid in the surface of a star or a fragile bag of molecules like himself.
It was the high point of his existence, a daily reaffirmation of his reason for being.
To Sam, the atmosphere in the sanctum was pure poison. So, as he entered, protective Precursor machinery sprang into action. A puff of mist condensed and enveloped him in a molecule-thick membrane that would filter out toxic compounds from the air. If his skin had been unprotected, these would have had the same effect on him as nerve gas: He would have died within seconds of entering the room, his skin becoming a mass of giant pus-filled blisters. He knew this, but he seldom even thought about it anymore. It did not disturb him. Precursor gadgetry never failed.
The environment in the Assembly was deliberately selected so that it suited none of those present. That was fair and just, reflecting the essential nature of the Community of the Cosmos. Each sentient entity present, in its own way, was protected by technology, be it endogenous or Precursor. Unity came at a price, the price of constant discomfort and reliance on machines, coatings, membranes, and magnetogravitic fields. All this served as a valuable reminder that Unity was not the natural state of the universe, but one that could be attained only through sacrifice, humility, faith, and tolerance.
Tolerance was more than just a state of mind. It was an ever-present act of reaffirmation. You had to work at being tolerant.
Sam looked around, trying to find a place to pray. Worship rings painted on the bare metal floor tacitly told ground-seeking species where to station themselves. Smaller rings, on the walls, were occupied by metallomorphs, which clung like lichen to flat surfaces and moved by hitching a ride on other, more mobile creatures. In appearance no more than shiny quasicrystalline patches, metallomorphs actually housed a quick electronic intelligence.
Other areas of the walls were hung with strips of fabric from many worlds, forming an abstract representation of the striped clouds of a gas giant, in memory of the Founders. There were no other artworks, nothing ostentatious in any way. The only smells were those of a working starship, mostly the characteristic odors of its varied inhabitants.
Sam slipped alo
ng the rows of worship rings until he found an unoccupied one. He folded his legs beneath him in a yogic pose and emptied his mind of all save a proper humility and respect for the unfathomable diversity of the Lifesoul-Giver’s creation. As he waited for the high acolyte to commence the rites, he mouthed a silent prayer to Moish the Firstborn, a simple prayer that every Child of Unity learned almost before it could transduce energy.
The high acolyte’s entrance was low-key, almost demure, and all the more effective for the absence of pomp and panoply. The priestess was a blimp from a gas giant’s cloud layer, possibly even a Jovian descendant, though no one seemed to know for sure. She was enveloped in a Precursor wrap to protect her lumpy skin from the radiant warmth of the inner-world life forms whose veins flowed with liquid ice, and a breathing bulb hovered beside her as she floated to her place at the rostrum, buoyed up by the mixture of hydrogen and helium that was almost universal in gas-giant balloonists. Her many tentacles—also a universal on such worlds—hung down her sides, and she spun lazily as she advanced, spying out her surroundings in an unconscious reversion to evolutionary habit.
She was followed by a dozen lesser acolytes, each from a different species. Every day they were chosen by lot. Today the first was a tall, spindly creature, all black twiglike legs, supported in what for it was high gravity, by a Precursor exoskeleton. Sam recognized it as a linecrawler from one of the rare rock webs—clusters of small asteroids linked by thick cables, extruded over the eons by a variety of arachnoid organisms that obtained their energy directly from infrared light. It was followed by a Wymokh, a representative of a species that he had never seen before, which resembled a tangled ball of wool. Surprisingly, it moved not by rolling but by squashing itself flat and suddenly expanding, so that it hopped along in a series of rapid bounds. He found it difficult to imagine what habitat might cause such a form of locomotion to evolve. Third in line was a steel blue Hytth insectoid. Next was something rather like a stubby centipede, then a metallic construct with what looked like wheels, then a procession of three apparently identical creatures like giant butterflies with teardrop bodies—but in fact these had originated in totally different spiral arms of the Galaxy and used totally different genetic material. It was a strange case of convergent evolution and vivid affirmation of the Unity of Life. Sam was pleased to see an Earth-norm humanoid, possibly even a true human—until he realized that the creature just looked like a human. It was a metamorph, and it could mimic anything from a neutronium tetrahedron to a beautiful human female—which was today’s choice. The informal procession was completed by a chlorine-breathing Illensan, which dragged a spherical powerball behind it on a trolley to run its life-support systems.