In the deepening silence that followed this announcement, Maurice looked at his console.
“Fair Exchange will be completed in five minutes,” he announced.
Miriam had finished her breakfast. She placed her fork on her plate and scratched her side awkwardly.
“Listen,” she said. “In about one and a half hours’ time you will be entering the quarantined zone. There are things in there waiting for you; they’ll have locked onto your ship already. They will have even locked onto your individual personalities.” She paused, letting this sink in.
“Our individual personalities?” Edward said.
“You don’t all have to go to Earth. Why don’t some of you come on board the Uninvited?” Miriam looked deliberately at Miss Rose.
“Why not, Miss Rose?” asked Saskia. “You’ll be safer there.”
Miss Rose shook her head. “I don’t think so, dear. Do you know why I’m here?”
There was a shuddering crash at the end of the table as one of the Uninvited dropped her fork. Miss Rose smiled at the redheaded woman suffering from cerebral palsy.
“I have my moments, too,” she sympathized. “Senile dementia. It’s odd, isn’t it? How we can build self-replicating machines and travel between the stars and yet we can’t cure conditions that are as old as human existence itself.”
Miriam nodded in agreement.
Miss Rose folded her hands around one of Saskia’s, holding it in the lap of her white shift.
“When the first symptoms appeared, when I first began to forget things and to repeat myself, it was suggested that I take a cruise. That was Social Care again.” She turned to Judy. “What is it about you lot?” she asked. “The halt and the lame, you want to shift us all off planet. Out of sight, out of mind, is it?”
Miss Rose’s voice had begun to crack. “Edward, be a good lad and get me some water.”
Edward returned with the glass. She took a sip.
“I never liked space,” Miss Rose continued. “I never wanted to travel. And yet there I was on a ship. Passing through the Earth Domain. Embarrassing people by asking them their names over and again, like each time I met them it was for the first time. Embarrassing myself. And then we met the Changes. An FE ship. I don’t think Social Care knew what FE was at that time, otherwise they would never have let their crew come aboard. We got chatting. They asked me what I wanted.”
Maddeningly, Miss Rose paused to slowly sip her water again.
“And what did you say, Miss Rose?” prompted Saskia.
“I said I didn’t want to continue like this,” Miss Rose said. She placed her glass on the table. “I said I wanted to do something important.”
“And what did they say?”
“They consulted their FE software,” Miss Rose said. “It said I could have what I wanted.”
“And what did you have to give in return?” Maurice asked.
“Me. I was sold as cargo to the Changes. And then I was sold to the Yellow River, and then I was sold to you.”
She turned around to Miriam. “And that’s why I think I will remain here on the Eva Rye,” she said.
Maurice’s console chimed. “The Exchange is completed,” he said. Then he gave a laugh. “And you’re not going to believe this, but this time we’re actually going to be paid! They’re going to pay us for taking Constantine on board!”
“What?” asked Saskia, brimming with hope.
Maurice made to speak and then he stopped himself.
Seated there at a glass table at the bottom of a huge blue ice bubble, sharing breakfast with the old, the handicapped, and a robot, Maurice raised a finger and tapped the side of his nose. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
“Where is Constantine?” Edward asked impatiently. He stood at the foot of the lowered entrance ramp of the Eva Rye, dancing with impatience.
“I don’t know,” Maurice said. “Kevin! Can you see him?”
Kevin, the voice of the Bailero, spoke from Maurice’s console.
“He is two hundred meters distant from my hull now. I will put a light over his entrance.”
A yellow spotlight shone down from somewhere, illuminating a patch of frost about thirty meters away from the foot of the ramp.
Maurice and Edward watched it expectantly. Constantine had literally jumped from the hatch of the Uninvited in the direction of the Bailero—they had all watched him do so. They had seen him sailing through space, a black pressurized bag slung over his shoulder.
“Here he comes,” said Kevin.
The spotlight strengthened in intensity, and then Constantine rose up into the interior of the Bailero, arms outstretched. The robot must have had some sort of independent motor source, Maurice realized, for it changed direction in flight and then quickly dropped back down to the frost-patterned floor. Briskly, it walked towards them. It paused just at the foot of the ramp.
Maurice gave Edward a nudge, and the young man extended his hand.
“Welcome aboard.”
“Glad to be on board,” said Constantine.
Edward led the way up the ramp of the Eva Rye, past the entrance to the little hold and along the corridor towards the conference room.
Judy and Saskia met them there.
“I’m Constantine Storey,” the robot said. “Thank you for taking me on board.”
“I’m Saskia. This is Judy.”
The robot was fiddling with the seal of the black pressure bag. “I have your payment here,” he said.
They all crowded a little closer as the robot struggled with the seal. His right hand was badly deformed, Maurice noticed; the three scars on his right-hand side were repeated on his lower arm. Maurice wondered what had happened to him.
Eventually, the robot worked the seal open. He reached into the bag, feeling about for something. Whatever it was seemed to be moving.
“What is it?” asked Edward. “What have you got in there?”
“Something that the FE software thought you needed,” said Constantine. “I can sort of see why. We’re almost at Earth now.”
“Good,” Judy said with quiet resignation. “I feel like I’ve been traveling there for the past ten years.”
“Oh?” Constantine said. “I have been doing so for over a hundred. Ah, got it!”
At last he had what he was searching for. But now something was climbing out of the bag by itself: dark brown and tan, first a paw emerged and waved itself in the air. The robot withdrew his hand fully, holding a furry bundle of white, brown, and tan.
“It’s a kitten!” Saskia squealed excitedly.
“Two kittens,” Constantine said as a second bundle, tabby this time, dropped from his bag to the ground and then eeled its way across the floor, ears down flat.
“And what on earth are we going to do with them?” Maurice asked.
“Stroke them, of course,” said Saskia. “They’re sweet!”
constantine 6: 2252
Everybody loves kittens.
“I don’t,” said Maurice. “They smell, they make a mess, and what are they going to do on this spaceship anyway? It’s cruel to have them cooped up in here.”
“They can hardly be described as cooped up,” said Judy, waving her hand to indicate the enormous space of the hold. She was sitting cross-legged on the rubber floor, smiling as she dragged a length of silk ribbon back and forth for the patchwork kitten to chase. Its supple, darting movements contrasted with the plodding of the two colossal venumbs seen in the distance at the far end of the hold. The polished wood of their bodies looked like bone. Behind them lay the shuttle on which Judy had been sent from the Free Enterprise. A low, sleek arrow with six seats on board, and space for little else.
Constantine’s derm was half ripped away from the right side of his body. His head was a dented metal shell from which two eyes stared, his whole right side was badly scarred, his right arm still had only restricted movement. Even so, he felt a less damaged individual than the crew of the Eva Rye. Look at poor Edward, he t
hought, always on the defensive. Always trying to understand.
“Anyway, they can catch mice,” he was saying, his eyes drawn enviously back to the tabby kitten that Saskia was rubbing behind the ears.
“We don’t have any mice,” Maurice said. “We’re on a spaceship.”
“They might come on board with the cargo,” Saskia said contentedly. Her smile did not waver as the kitten wriggled free of her grasp and dropped to the floor. Edward reached for it, but naturally it headed straight for Maurice, the cat hater.
“Yes, mice might indeed try to come aboard,” Maurice said, kicking out at the kitten: it mewed and pattered away across the dark rubber of the floor. “And they would fail in the attempt as the ship’s manifest net would detect and eject them.”
The kitten took one look at Constantine, mewed again, and ran for the far end of the hold towards the great wooden venumbs.
“Do you always snipe at each other like this?” Constantine asked.
“Oh, no,” Saskia said seriously, “we used to be a lot worse.”
Maurice gave him a sharp look. “Are you laughing at us?”
“Honestly, no! I think it’s good that a crew about to cross into Earth’s solar system can be so relaxed about it.”
“That’s because there’s precious little else we can do about our present circumstances,” Saskia said. “You know, I think we should call that one Paws.” She pointed to the remaining kitten, and the group paused to watch it spread wide its little white paws before swiping in an attempt to catch the ribbon. “Look how she uses them like little hands.”
“We can still make a plan,” Edward said earnestly, turning to face Constantine. “That’s why we’re here.”
There was a creaking sound from the far side of the large hold as one of the huge wooden shapes slowly turned in a circle, apparently looking for something. Constantine wondered where they had originated. He had never seen venumbs that size before. Wooden skeletons: they would have to be carved from tree trunks to be so big. Beautiful white ash, planed into smooth curves that bent and flexed as the monsters pressed their splaying feet down on the floor. Incredibly shiny joints flashing in the antiseptic light. But what were they doing on board this ship?
“Plan to do what?” Maurice asked bitterly. “The ship lands on Earth. The Watcher has us under its gaze. We never get away. Period.” He sighed. “What do you suggest we do?”
“We should listen to Edward,” interrupted Saskia. “That’s what the Stranger recommended, and I for one think that’s right.”
Maurice pressed his mouth tightly shut. Constantine ignored him. The wooden monster was coming closer. It didn’t have a head, just a long neck made of white wooden vertebrae strung together by chrome.
“Okay,” Maurice said stubbornly. “Edward, tell us, what should we do?”
Edward looked puzzled at Maurice’s question. “I don’t know,” he said, frowning. “That’s why I think we should make a plan.”
Judy let go of the ribbon and climbed to her feet. The air was cold in the large hold, sharp like a winter’s morning. Constantine had possessed lungs once; he could imagine what it was like to breathe the air of the hold, to feel it light him up, bright and alive.
“I think Edward has got the right idea,” Judy said briskly. “Look at us. We’ve already spent too long just letting events buffet us around.”
“Look at us?” said Maurice. “Since when were you part of the crew?”
“That’s not very nice, Maurice.” Edward placed a big hand on Judy’s shoulder. “Judy is our friend. Go on, Judy.”
“Not just me. Aren’t we forgetting somebody?” Judy said. “You’ve agreed to take Constantine to Earth, too.”
All the faces swung towards Constantine. Why were they all so pale? Except for Edward, of course. Did they realize they were all so black-and-white? Just like this ship, of course. Someone was playing games here….
“Yes,” Maurice said. “Why exactly do you want to go to Earth?”
Constantine had been waiting for this question.
“Because I have a message for the Watcher,” he replied.
Constantine Storey didn’t mind the rain. Up here in the mountains the spaces defined between the sheer peaks and rough-hewn walls seemed to be completed by the lashing downpour.
Or at least that’s what Constantine thought.
But what does it mean to think? he wondered. No one else came up here amongst the newly born peaks, raw and cracked and splintered and perpetually washed with cold rain. No other mind, so far as he knew, had ever looked upon the hidden valleys, had climbed the columns that rose up here, pressed against the sky.
Coldness, wetness, the feeling of vertigo from clinging to harsh rock and looking down into the pitiless depths below, all of these things were just random patterns that fluttered through the currents of his mind.
…and if those thoughts were to cease?
He stepped from the ledge and began the long fall into the shadows. The feel of the downpour lessened on his back as the speed of his descent approached that of the raindrops around him. He waved his arms and fancied he could touch the individual drops that hung in the darkness around him. There is a pattern to these drops, he thought, defined by their size and purity and their distance between each other. The pattern is affected by wind resistance and minute changes in air pressure, even the increasing effect of gravity as they grow closer to the planet. Weyl and Ricci distortion. There is a pattern here that is probably unique throughout the universe…and when they hit the rocks below, that unique pattern will be lost and no one will mourn its passing.
Buffeted by wind and rain, his body reached terminal velocity. Shadows raced upwards around him, the pale moon lost high above.
And yet, when I hit the ground, what would people mourn? Not the loss of my body but rather the unique pattern that represented my thoughts; the potential which that unique pattern had to go on unfolding, to become me. What is the difference between the pattern of my mind and the pattern of the rain? At what point does a pattern assume significance? At what point can it be labeled thought? Maybe tonight I will have the answer.
But not by dying.
Constantine Storey was a human mind alive in a robot’s body. At one point in his life, the unique pattern that had been his self at that moment in time—burning brightly amongst the neurons of his brain—had been carefully lifted from his head and dropped into a processing space within a robot’s body. Virtual neurons had gone on firing, following in the unfolding symbolic series that his human brain had defined, and a new Constantine had come into being. Only this Constantine was alive in an enhanced body.
He allowed the reflexes of his new body to take over, and he reveled in the sensation of becoming a superman.
A sheer cliff face approached in the darkness, steeply angled. Robot legs kicked out and changed his angle of descent, increasing the horizontal component of his motion. Constantine held his arms wide as he dived across a narrow valley. Hands slammed onto a ledge, cracking rock, pushing him forwards and onwards, absorbing some of his downward velocity. He rolled down another slope, shedding more speed, then he jumped through the downpour, aiming for the knife edge of rock that stretched between two peaks.
He kicked out once, twice, three times, pushing himself back and forth between rocky walls, and landed lightly at his target, knees flexing to absorb the remaining energy of his fall. He gazed out towards the ziggurat that lay on the plain beyond the mountains.
Something was awakening inside it.
In the hold, one of the wooden venumbs was approaching. Constantine thought it looked as if it was sniffing for something; it put him in mind of a dog scenting trouble. The rest of the crew seemed unconcerned, and he continued with his story.
Constantine had been led to believe there were possibly three ways intelligence could arise. The first two methods were generally accepted as having been convincingly proven. Intelligence could appear as the result of evolution. Human intell
igence was an example of this.
Second, intelligence could be written. The AIs of Earth did this all the time, writing new minds to order, minds to fill spaceships and robots and Von Neumann Machines.
Could I write a mind? Could I sit down and describe a scene, a thought and an emotion so well that it took life on the page? No, the page is not a suitable medium to allow movement, and this language is too ambiguous and overblown to capture the simplicity of the underlying mechanism of thought.
Constantine had once been told that a mind was a sentence that could read itself. A book might have thoughts written within it, but something external had to be applied to the book in order to read the words. But what if words could be written in some medium that allowed the words to take on a life of their own and refer back to themselves? What if the instructions telling the book how to read itself were also written in the book itself?
The periphery of the rainstorm was at the edge of the mountains. Constantine stood at the borderline of the storm, seemingly at the edge of a new world. Down there, on that dry, sleeping plain, something wonderful was awakening. The ancient machinery that filled the stone halls of the ziggurat had lain in wait for nearly forty years. A baited trap.
Something was beginning to move in there. Patterns rippled through the many-dimensional volumes enclosed by the processing spaces, repeating themselves, reflecting, constructing new patterns…
A third possible way that intelligence could arise had also been postulated: divine intervention. A dizzying feeling gripped Constantine at the enormity of what he was witnessing. This was what the Watcher believed: it believed itself to be the result of an interstellar computer virus, written long ago. It had set up the ziggurat on this forgotten planet in order to test this theory. It had filled the ziggurat with ancient machinery, hoping to catch the virus there.
Constantine had been brought to this planet by the Watcher in order to observe what happened there. A suitable vessel had been left open under the vast star-lit night, and Constantine had been charged with waiting for something to pour down from the unguessed heavens and fill it with the spirit.
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