Parents in the sense that shoreline slime is the parent of humanity, I suppose.
Rumors tell that the A.I.s have enlarged their intelligence endless times, and reproduced like maniacs, and perhaps spread to the stars and points beyond. Or perhaps they’ve remained here, not needing to go anywhere. The rumors are conflicting, in truth. There’s no sense in believing any of them, I remind myself.
“So what’s happening in the A.I. world?” asks a man at the adjacent table. He is talking to his waiter with a loud, self-important voice. “You guys got anything new up your sleeves?”
The questions are rude, not to mention stupid.
“Would you like to see a dessert menu? Sir?” The waiter possesses an unflappable poise. Coarse, ill-directed questions are so much bird noise, it seems. “Or we have some fine after-dinner drinks, if you’d rather.”
“Booze, yeah. Give me some,” growls the customer.
First of all, I’m thinking, A.I.s never explain their realm. For all the reasons I’ve heard, the undisputed best is that we cannot comprehend their answers. How could we? And secondly, the waiter is no more an A.I. than I am. Or my fork, for that matter. Or anything else we can see and touch and smell.
“Why don’t people understand?” I mutter to myself.
“I don’t know. Why?” says Jill.
I have to pee. My gut is full of fish and my wife’s excess steak, and I tell her, “I’ll be right back.”
She brightens. “More adjustments?”
“Maybe later.”
I find the rest room and untie my swimsuit, pee and shake and tuck. Then I’m washing my hands and thinking. At the office, now and again, I hear stories from single people and some of the married ones a little less stuffy than I. On Birth Day, it seems, they prefer different kinds of excitement. Dinner and sweet-sounding birds might be a start, but what are the A.I.s if not limitless? Bottomless and borderless, and what kinds of fun could they offer wilder sorts?
It puts me in a mood.
Leaving the rest room, I notice a beautiful woman standing at the end of the hallway. Was that a hallway a few moments ago? She seems to beckon for me. I take a tentative step, then another. “You look quite handsome tonight,” she informs me.
I smell perfume, or I smell her.
She isn’t human. The kind of beauty shining up out of her makes her seem eerily lovely, definitely not real, and that’s an enormous attraction, I discover. I’m surprised by how easily my breath comes up short, and I hear my clumsiest voice saying, “Excuse me . . . ?”
“Steven,” she says, “would you like some time with me? Alone?” She waits for an instant, then promises, “Your time with me costs nothing. Nobody will miss you. If you wish.”
“Thanks,” I mutter, “but no, I shouldn’t. No, thank you.”
She nods as if she expects my answer. “Then you have a very good evening, Steven.” She smiles. She could be a lighthouse with that smile. “And if you have the opportunity, at the right moment, you might wish to tell your wife that you love her deeply and passionately.”
“Excuse me?”
But she has gone. I’m shaking my head and saying, “Excuse me?” to a water fountain embossed in gold.
* * *
We actually discussed the possibility of refusing the A.I.s on the first Birth Day. Jill told me, if memory serves, “We can just say, No, thank you, when they come to the door. All right?”
For weeks, people had talked about little else. Birth Day was the A.I.s’ invention; they wished to thank us, the entire species, for having invested time and resources in their own beginnings. With their casual magic, they had produced the batches of charming people who went from door to door, asking who would like to join the festival, and what kinds of entertainment would be appreciated. (Although they likely sensed every answer before it was given. Politeness is one of their hallmarks, and they work hard to wear disarming faces.)
“Let’s stay home,” Jill suggested.
“Why?”
“Because,” she said. “Because I don’t want us leaving our babies with them. Inside our house.”
It was a concern of mine, too. The A.I.s had assured every parent that during Birth Day festivities, without exception, no child would fall down any stairs or poke out an eye or contract any diseases worse than a head cold. Their safety, and the safety of their parents, too, would be assured.
And how could anyone doubt their word?
How?
Yet on the other hand, we were talking about Mary Beth and David. Our daughter and son, and I had to agree. “We can tell them, No, thank you,” I said.
“Politely.”
“Absolutely.”
The sitter arrived at seven o’clock, to the instant, and I was waiting. She formed in front of our screen door, built from atoms pulled out of the surrounding landscape. Or from nothing. I suppose to an A.I., it’s a casual trick, probably on a par with me turning a doorknob. I’m like a bacterium to them—a single idiotic bug—and I must seem completely transparent under their strong gaze.
The babysitter was a large, middle-aged woman with vast breasts. She was the very image of the word “matron,” with a handsome face and an easy smile. “Good evening, sir,” she told me. “I’m sorry. Didn’t you expect me?”
I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and probably that old pair of Fruit of the Looms, newly bought.
“You and your wife were scheduled for this evening . . . yes?”
“Come in, please.” I had to let her inside, I felt. I could see the black limousines up and down the street, and the drivers, and I felt rather self-conscious. “My wife,” I began, “and I guess I, too . . .”
Jill came downstairs. She was carrying David, and he was crying with a jackhammer voice. He was refusing to eat or be still, and Jill’s expression told me the situation. Then she looked at the sitter, saying, “You’re here,” with a faltering voice.
“A darling baby!” she squealed. “May I hold him? A moment?”
And of course David became silent an instant later. Maybe the A.I.s performed magic on his mood, though I think it was more in the way the sitter held him and how she smiled; and ten minutes later, late but not too late, we were dressed for dancing, and leaving our children in capable hands. I can’t quite recall the steps involved, and we weren’t entirely at ease. In fact, we came home early, finding bliss despite our fears. It was true, we realized. Nothing bad could happen to anyone on Birth Day, and for that short span, our babies were in the care they deserved. In perfect hands, it seemed. And parents everywhere could take a few hours to relax, every worry and weight lifted from them. It seemed.
* * *
On our way home, in darkness, I tell Jill how much I love her.
Her response is heartfelt and surprising. Her passion is a little unnerving. Did she have an interlude with a husky-voiced waiter, perhaps? Did he say things and do things to leave her ready for my hands and tender words? Maybe so. Or maybe there was something that I hadn’t caught for myself. I just needed someone to make me pay attention, maybe?
We embrace on the limousine’s expansive seat, then it’s more than an embrace. I notice the windows have gone black, and there’s a divider between the driver and us. Music plays somewhere. I don’t recognize the piece. Then we’re finished, but there’s no reason to dress—they will make time for us—and after a second coupling, we have enough, and dress and arrive home moments later. We thank our driver, then the sitter. “Oh, we had a lovely time!” Mrs. Simpson gushes. “Such lovely children!”
Whose? I’m wondering. Ours?
We check on David in his room, Mary Beth in hers, and everything seems intact. Mrs. Simpson probably spun perfect children’s stories for them, or invented games, then baked them cookies without any help from the oven, and sent them to bed without complaints.
Once a year seems miraculous.
Jill and I try once more in our own bed, but I’m tired. Old. Spent. I sleep hard, and wake to find that it’s S
aturday morning, the kids watching TV and my wife brewing coffee. The house looks shabby, I’m thinking. After every Birth Day, it looks worn and old. Like old times, Jill holds my hand under the kitchen table, and we sip, and suddenly it seems too quiet in the family room.
Our instincts are pricked at the same instant.
Mary Beth arrives with a delighted expression. What now?
“He’s stuck,” she announces.
“David—?” Jill begins.
“On the stairs . . . He got caught somehow . . .”
We have iron bars as part of the railing, painted white and very slick. Somehow David has thrust his head between two bars and become stuck. He’s crying without sound. In his mind, I suppose, he’s making ready to spend the rest of his life in this position. That’s the kind of kid he is . . . Oh God, he worries me.
“How did this happen?” I ask.
“She told me to—”
“Liar!” shouts his sister.
Jill says, “Everyone, be quiet!”
Then I’m working to bend the rails ever so slightly, to gain enough room to pull him free. Only, my strength ebbs when I start to laugh. I can’t help myself. Everything has built up, and Jill laughs, too. We’re both crazy for a few moments, giggling like little kids. And later, after our son is safe and Mary Beth is exiled to her room for the morning, Jill pours both of us cups of strong, cool coffee; and I comment, “You know, we wouldn’t make very good bacteria.”
“Excuse me?” she says. “What was that gem?”
“If we had to be bacteria . . . you know . . . swimming in the slime? We’d do a piss-poor job of it. I bet so.”
Maybe she understands me, and maybe not.
I watch her nod and sip, then she says, “And they wouldn’t make very good people. Would they?”
I doubt it.
“Amen,” I say. “Amen!”
The Hydrogen Wall
Gregory Benford
Here’s a compelling portrait of a young woman who must bargain with an immense and ancient alien Artificial Intelligence for the information needed to avert the End of the World, all the while struggling to accept the price she must pay to succeed . . .
Gregory Benford is one of the modern giants of the field. His 1980 novel, Timescape, won the Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award, and is widely considered to be one of the classic novels of the last two decades. His other novels include Beyond Jupiter, The Stars in Shroud, In the Ocean of Night, Against Infinity, Artifact, Across the Sea of Suns, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, Sailing Bright Eternity, Cosm, and Foundation’s Fear. His short work has been collected in Matter’s End and Worlds Vast and Various. His most recent books are a major new solo novel, The Martian Race; a nonfiction collection, Deep Time; and a new collection, Immersion and Other Short Novels. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine.
* * *
Hidden wisdom and hidden treasure—of what use is either?
—Ecclesiasticus 20:30
“Your ambition?” The Prefect raised an eyebrow.
She had not expected such a question. “To, uh, translate. To learn.” It sounded lame to her ears, and his disdainful scowl showed that he had expected some such rattled response. Very well then, be more assertive. “Particularly, if I may, from the Sagittarius Architecture.”
This took the Prefect’s angular face by surprise, though he quickly covered by pursing his leathery mouth. “That is an ancient problem. Surely you do not expect that a Trainee could make headway in such a classically difficult challenge.”
“I might,” she shot back crisply. “Precisely because it’s so well documented.”
“Centuries of well-marshaled inquiry have told us very little of the Sagittarius Architecture. It is a specimen from the highest order of Sentient Information, and will not reward mere poking around.”
“Still, I’d like a crack at it.”
“A neophyte—”
“May bring a fresh perspective.”
They both knew that by tradition at the Library, incoming candidate Librarians could pick their first topic. Most deferred to the reigning conventional wisdom and took up a small Message, something from a Type I Civilization just coming onto the galactic stage. Something resembling what Earth had sent out in its first efforts. To tackle a really big problem was foolhardy.
But some smug note in the Prefect’s arrogant gaze had kindled an old desire in her.
He sniffed. “To merely review previous thinking would take a great deal of time.”
She leaned forward in her chair. “I have studied the Sagittarius for years. It became something of a preoccupation of mine.”
“Ummm.” She had little experience with people like this. The Prefect was strangely austere in his unreadable face, the even tones of his neutral sentences. Deciphering him seemed to require the same sort of skills she had fashioned through years of training. But at the moment she felt only a yawning sense of her inexperience, amplified by the stretching silence in this office. The Prefect could be right, after all. She started to phrase a gracious way to back down.
The Prefect made a small sound, something like a sigh. “Very well. Report weekly.”
She blinked. “Um, many thanks.”
* * *
Ruth Angle smoothed, her ornate, severely traditional Trainee shift as she left the Prefect’s office, an old calming gesture she could not train away. Now her big mouth had gotten her into a fix, and she could see no way out. Not short of going back in there and asking for his guidance, to find a simpler Message, something she could manage.
To hell with that. The soaring, fluted alabaster columns of the Library Centrex reminded her of the majesty of this entire enterprise, stiffening her resolve.
There were few other traditional sites, here at the edge of the Fourth Millennium, that could approach the grandeur of the Library. Since the first detection of signals from other galactic civilizations nearly a thousand years before, no greater task had confronted humanity than the learning of such vast lore.
The Library itself had come to resemble its holdings: huge, aged, mysterious in its shadowy depths. In the formal grand pantheon devoted to full-color, moving statues of legendary Interlocutors, giving onto the Seminar Plaza, stood the revered block of black basalt: the Rosetta Stone, symbol of all they worked toward. Its chiseled face was nearly three millennia old, and, she thought as she passed it, endearingly easy to understand. It was a simple linear, one-to-one mapping of three human languages, found by accident Having the same text in Greek II, which the discoverers could read, meant that the hieroglyphic pictures and cursive Demotic forms could be deduced. This battered black slab, found by troops clearing ground to build a fort, had linked civilizations separated by millennia.
She reached out a trembling palm to caress its chilly hard sleekness. The touch brought a thrill. They who served here were part of a grand, age-old tradition, one that went to the heart of the very meaning of being human.
Only the lightness of her ringing steps buoyed her against the grave atmosphere of the tall, shadowy vaults. Scribes passed silently among the palisades, their violet robes swishing after them. She was noisy and new, and she knew it
She had come down from low lunar orbit the day before, riding on the rotating funicular, happy to rediscover Luna’s ample domes and obliging gravity. Her earliest training had been here, and then the mandatory two years on Earth. The Councilors liked to keep a firm hold on who ran the Library, so the final scholastic work had to be in bustling, focal point Australia, beside foaming waves and tawny beaches. Luna was a more solemn place, unchanging.
She savored the stark ivory slopes of craters in the distance as she walked in the springy gait of one still adjusting to the gravity.
Sagittarius, here I come.
* * *
Her next and most important appointment was with the Head Nought. She
went through the usual protocols, calling upon lesser lights, before being ushered into the presence of Siloh, a smooth-skinned Nought who apparently had not learned to smile. Or maybe that went with the cellular territory; Noughts had intricate adjustments to offset their deeply sexless natures.
“I do hope you can find a congruence with the Sagittarius Architecture,” Siloh said in a flat tone that ended each sentence with a purr. “Though I regret your lost effort.”
“Lost?’
“You will fail, of course.”
“Perhaps a fresh approach—”
“So have said many hundreds of candidate scholars. I remind you of our latest injunction from the Councilors—the heliosphere threat.”
“I thought there was little anyone could do.”
“So it seems.” Siloh scowled. “But we cannot stop from striving.”
“Of course not,” she said in what she hoped was a demure manner. She was aware of how little she could make of this person, who gave off nothing but sentences.
Noughts had proven their many uses centuries before. Their lack of sexual appetites and apparatus, both physical and mental, gave them a rigorous objectivity. As diplomats, Contractual Savants, and neutral judges, they excelled. They had replaced much of the massive legal apparatus that had come to burden society in earlier centuries.
The Library could scarcely function without their insights. Alien texts did not carry unthinking auras of sexuality, as did human works. Or more precisely, the Messages might carry alien sexualities aplenty, however much their original creators had struggled to make them objective and transparent. Cutting through that was a difficult task for ordinary people, such as herself. The early decades of the Library had struggled with the issue, and the Noughts had solved it.
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