AIs

by Gardner Dozois

  Translating the Messages from a human male or female perspective profoundly distorted their meaning. In the early days, this had beclouded many translations. Much further effort had gone to cleansing these earlier texts. Nowadays, no work issued from the Library without a careful Nought vetting, to erase unconscious readings.

  Siloh said gravely, “The heliosphere incursion has baffled our finest minds. I wish to approach it along a different path. For once, the Library may be of immediate use.”

  Ruth found this puzzling. She had been schooled in the loftier aspects of the Library’s mission, its standing outside the tides of the times. Anyone who focused upon Messages that had been designed for eternity had to keep a mental distance from the events of the day. “I do not quite . . .”

  “Think of the Library as the uninitiated do. They seldom grasp the higher functions we must perform, and instead see mere passing opportunity. That is why we are bombarded with requests to view the Vaults as a source for inventions, tricks, novelties.”

  “And reject them, as we should.” She hoped she did not sound too pious.

  But Siloh nodded approvingly. “Indeed. My thinking is that an ancient society such as the Sagittarius Architecture might have encountered such problems before. It would know better than any of our astro-engineers how to deal with the vast forces at work.”

  “I see.” And why didn’t I think of it? Too steeped in this culture of hushed reverence for the sheer magnitude of the Library’s task? “Uh, it is difficult for me to envision how—”

  “Your task is not to imagine but to perceive,” Siloh said severely.

  She found Noughts disconcerting, and Siloh more so. Most chose to have no hair, but Siloh sported a rim of kinked coils, glinting like brass, as if a halo had descended onto his skull. Its pale eyelashes flicked seldom, gravely. Descending, its eyelids looked pink and rubbery. The nearly invisible blond eyebrows arched perpetually, so its every word seemed layered with artifice, tones sliding among syllables with resonant grace. Its face shifted from one nuanced expression to another, a pliable medium in ceaseless movement, like the surface of a restless pond rippled by unfelt winds. She felt as though she should be taking notes about its every utterance. Without blinking, she shifted to recording mode, letting her spine-based memory log everything that came in through eyes and ears. Just in case.

  “I have not kept up, I fear,” she said; it was always a good idea to appear humble. “The incursion—”

  “Has nearly reached Jupiter’s orbit,” Siloh said. The wall behind the Nought lit with a display showing the sun, gamely plowing through a gale of interstellar gas.

  Only recently had humanity learned that it had arisen in a benign time. An ancient supernova had once blown a bubble in the interstellar gas, and Earth had been cruising through that extreme vacuum while the mammals evolved from tree shrews to big-brained world-conquerors. Not that the sun was special in any other way. In its gyre about the galaxy’s hub, it moved only fifty light-years in the span of a million years, oscillating in and out of the galaxy’s plane every thirty-three million years—and that was enough to bring it now out of the Local Bubble’s protection. The full density of interstellar hydrogen now beat against the Sun’s own plasma wind, pushing inward, hammering into the realm of the fragile planets.

  “The hydrogen wall began to bombard the Ganymede Colony yesterday,” Siloh said with the odd impartiality Ruth still found unnerving, as though not being male or female gave it a detached view, above the human fray. “We at the Library are instructed to do all we can to find knowledge bearing upon our common catastrophe.”

  The wall screen picked up this hint and displayed Jupiter’s crescent against the hard stars. Ruth watched as a fresh flare coiled back from the ruby, roiling shock waves that embraced Jupiter. The bow curve rippled with colossal turbulence, vortices bigger than lesser worlds. “Surely we can’t change the interstellar weather.”

  “We must try. The older Galactics may know of a world that survived such an onslaught.”

  The sun’s realm, the heliosphere, had met the dense clump of gas and plasma eighty-eight years before. Normally the solar wind particles blown out from the sun kept the interstellar medium at bay. For many past millennia, these pressures had struggled against each other in a filmy barrier a hundred Astronomical Units beyond the cozy inner solar system. Now the barrier had been pressed back in, where the outer planets orbited.

  The wall’s view expanded to show what remained of the comfy realm dominated by the Sun’s pressure. It looked like an ocean-going vessel, seen from above: bow waves generated at the prow rolled back, forming the characteristic parabolic curve.

  Under the steadily rising pressure of the thickening interstellar gas and dust, that pressure front eroded. The sun’s course slammed it against the dense hydrogen wall at sixteen kilometers per second and its puny wind was pressed back into the realm of solar civilization. Pluto’s Cryo Base had been abandoned decades before, and Saturn only recently. The incoming hail of high-energy particles and fitful storms had killed many. The Europa Ocean’s strange life was safe beneath its ten kilometers of ice, but that was small consolation.

  “But what can we do on our scale?” she insisted.

  “What we can.”

  “The magnetic turbulence alone, at the bow shock, holds a larger energy store than all our civilization.”

  Siloh gave her a look that reminded her of how she had, as a girl, watched an insect mating dance. Distant distaste. “We do not question here. We listen.”

  “Yes, Self.” This formal title, said to be preferred by Noughts to either Sir or Madam, seemed to please Siloh. It went through the rest of their interview with a small smile, and she could almost feel a personality beneath its chilly remove. Almost

  She left the Executat Dome with relief. The Library sprawled across the Locutus Plain, lit by Earth’s stunning crescent near a jagged white horizon. Beneath that preserved plain lay the cryofiles of all transmissions received from the Galactic Complex, the host of innumerable societies that had flourished long before humanity was born. A giant, largely impenetrable resource. The grandest possible intellectual scrap heap.

  Libraries were monuments not so much to the Past, but to Permanence itself. Ruth shivered with anticipation. She had passed through her first interviews!—and was now free to explore the myriad avenues of the galactic past. The Sagittarius was famous for its density of information, many-layered and intense. A wilderness, beckoning.

  Still, she had to deal with the intricacies of the Library, too. These now seemed as steeped in arcane byways and bureaucratic labyrinths as were the Library’s vast contents. Ruth cautioned herself to be careful, and most especially, to not let her impish side show. She bowed her head as she passed an aged Nought, for practice.

  The greatest ancient library had been at Alexandria, in Afrik. An historian had described the lot of librarians there with envy: They had a carefree life: free meals, high salaries, no taxes to pay, very pleasant surroundings, good lodgings, and servants. There was plenty of opportunity for quarreling with each other.

  So not much had changed . . .

  * * *

  Her apartment mate was a welcome antidote to the Nought. Small, bouncy, Catkejen was not the usual image of a Librarian candidate. She lounged around in a revealing sarong, sipping a stimulant that was scarcely allowed in the Trainee Manual.

  “Give ’em respect,” she said off-hand, “but don’t buy into all their solemn dignity-of-our-station stuff. You’ll choke on it after a while.”

  Ruth grinned. “And get slapped down.”

  “I kinda think the Librarians like some back talk. Keeps ’em in fighting trim.”

  “Where are you from?—Marside?”

  “They’re too mild for me. No, I’m a Ganny.”

  “Frontier stock, eh?” Ruth sprawled a little herself, a welcome relief from the ramrod-spine posture the Librarians kept. No one hunched over their work here in the classic scholar’s p
ose. They kept upright, using the surround enviros. “Buried in ice all your life?”

  “Don’t you buy that.” Catkejen waved a dismissive hand, extruding three tool-fingers to amplify the effect. “We get out to prospect the outer moons a lot.”

  “So you’re wealthy? Hiding behind magneto shields doesn’t seem worth it.”

  “More clichés. Not every Ganny strikes it rich.”

  The proton sleet at Ganymede was lethal, but the radiation-cured elements of the inner Jovian region had made many a fortune, too. “So you’re from the poor folks who had to send their brightest daughter off?”

  “Another cliché.” Catkejen made a face. “I hope you have better luck finding something original in—what was it?”

  “The Sagittarius Architecture.”

  “Brrrrr! I heard it was a hydra.”

  “Each time you approach it, you get a different mind?”

  “If you can call it a mind. I hear it’s more like a talking body.”

  Ruth had read and sensed a lot about the Sagittarius, but this was new. They all knew that the mind-body duality made no sense in dealing with alien consciousness, but how this played out was still mysterious. She frowned.

  Catkejen poked her in the ribs. “Come on, no more deep thought today! Let’s go for a fly in the high-pressure dome.”

  Reluctantly, Ruth went. But her attention still fidgeted over the issues. She thought about the challenge to come, even as she swooped in a long, serene glide over the fern-covered hills under the amusement dome, beneath the stunning ring of orbital colonies that made a glittering necklace in the persimmon sky.

  * * *

  Into her own pod, at last!

  She had gone through a week of final neural conditioning since seeing Siloh, and now the moment had arrived: direct line feed from the Sagittarius Architecture.

  Her pod acted as a neural web, using her entire body to convey connections. Sheets of sensation washed over her skin, a prickly itch began in her feet.

  She felt a heady kinesthetic rush of acceleration as a constellation of fusions drew her to a tight nexus. Alien architectures used most of the available human input landscape. Dizzying surges in the ears, biting smells, ringing cacophonies of elusive patterns, queasy perturbations of the inner organs—a Trainee had to know how these might convey meaning.

  They often did, but translating them was elusive. After such experiences, one never thought of human speech as anything more than a hobbled, claustrophobic mode. Its linear meanings and frail attempts at linked concepts were simple, utilitarian, and typical of younger minds.

  The greatest task was translating the dense smatterings of mingled sensations into discernible sentences. Only thus could a human fathom them at all, even in a way blunted and blurred. Or so much previous scholarly experience said.

  Ruth felt herself bathed in a shower of penetrating responses, all coming from her own body. These were her own in-board subsystems coupled with high-bit-rate spatterings of meaning—guesses, really. She had an ample repository of built-in processing units, lodged in her spine and shoulders. No one would attempt such a daunting task without artificial amplifications. To confront such slabs of raw data with a mere unaided human mind was pointless and quite dangerous. Early Librarians, centuries before, had perished in a microsecond’s exposure to such layered labyrinths as the Sagittarius.

  Years of scholarly training had conditioned her against the jagged ferocity of the link, but still she felt a cold shiver of dread. That, too, she had to wait to let pass. The effect amplified whatever neural state you brought to it. Legend had it that a Librarian had once come to contact while angry, and been driven into a fit from which he’d never recovered. They had found the body peppered everywhere with micro-contusions.

  The raw link was as she had expected:

  A daunting, many-layered language. Then she slid into an easier notation that went through her spinal interface, and heard/felt/read:

  Much more intelligible, but still . . . She concentrated—

  We wish you greetings, new sapience.

  “Hello. I come with reverence and new supple offerings.” This was the standard opening, one refined over five centuries ago and never changed by so much as a syllable.

  And you offer?

  “Further cultural nuances.” Also a ritual promise, however unlikely it was to be fulfilled. Few advances into the Sagittarius had been made in the last century. Even the most ambitious Librarians seldom tried any longer.

  Something like mirth came wafting to her, then:

  We are of a mind to venture otherwise with you.

  Damn! There was no record of such a response before, her downlink confirmed. It sounded like a preliminary to a dismissal. That overture had worked fine for the last six Trainees. But then, they hadn’t gotten much farther, either, before the Sagittarius lost interest and went silent again. Being ignored was the greatest insult a Trainee faced, and the most common. Humans were more than a little boring to advanced intelligences. The worst of it was that one seldom had an idea why.

  So what in hell did this last remark from it mean? Ruth fretted, speculated, and then realized that her indecision was affecting her own neural states. She decided to just wing it. “I am open to suggestion and enlightenment.”

  A pause, getting longer as she kept her breathing steady. Her meditative cues helped, but could not entirely submerge her anxieties. Maybe she had bitten off entirely too much—

  From Sagittarius she received a jittering cascade, resolving to:

  As a species you are technologically gifted yet philosophically callow, a common condition among emergent intelligences. But of late it is your animal property of physical expression that intrigues. Frequently you are unaware of your actions which makes them all the more revealing.

  “Oh?” She sat back in her pod and crossed her legs. The physical pose might help her mental profile, in the global view of the Sagittarius. Until now its responses had been within conventional bounds; this last was new.

  You concentrate so hard upon your linear word groups that you forget how your movements, postures and facial cues give you away.

  “What am I saying now, then?”

  That you must humor Us until you can ask your questions about the heliosphere catastrophe.

  Ruth laughed. It felt good. “I’m that obvious?”

  Many societies We know only through their bit-strings and abstractions. That is the nature of binary signals. You, on the other hand (to use a primate phrase), We can know through your unconscious self.

  “You want to know about me?”

  We have heard enough symphonies, believe Us.

  At least it was direct. Many times in the past, her research showed, it—“They”—had not been. The Architecture was paying attention!—a coup in itself. “I’m sorry our art forms bore you.”

  Many beings who use acoustic means believe their art forms are the most important, valuable aspects of their minds. This is seldom so, in Our experience.

  “So involvement is more important to you?”

  For this moment, truly. Remember that we are an evolving composite of mental states, no less than you. You cannot meet the same Us again.

  “Then you should be called . . . ?”

  We know your term ‘Architecture’ and find it—your phrasing?—amusing. Better perhaps to consider us to be a composite entity. As you are yourselves, though you cannot sense this aspect. You imagine that you are a unitary consciousness, guiding your bodies.

  “And we aren’t?”

  Of course not. Few intelligences in Our experience know as little of their underlying mental architecture as do you.

  “Could that be an advantage for us?” With the next words came a shooting sensation, something like a dry chuckle.

  Perhaps so. You apparently do all your best work offstage. Ideas appear to you without your knowing where they come from.

  She tried to imagine watching her own thoughts, but was at a loss where to go w
ith this. “Then let’s . . . well.”

  Gossip?

  What an odd word choice. There was something like a tremor of pleasure in its neural tone, resounding with long, slow wavelengths within her.

  * * *

  “It sounds creepy,” Catkejen said. She was shoveling in food at the Grand Cafeteria, a habit Ruth had noticed many Gannies had.

  “Nothing in my training really prepared me for its . . . well, coldness, and . . .”

  Catkejen stopped eating to nod knowingly. “And intimacy?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Look, I’ve been doing pod work only a few weeks, just like you. Already it’s pretty clear that we’re mostly negotiating, not translating.”

  Ruth frowned. “They warned us, but still . . .”

  “Look, these are big minds. Strange as anything we’ll ever know. But they’re trapped in a small space, living cyber-lives. We’re their entertainment.”

  “And I am yours, ladies,” said a young man as he sat down at their table. He ceremoniously shook hands. “Geoffrey Chandis.”

  “So how’re you going to amuse us?” Catkejen smiled skeptically.

  “How’s this?” Geoffrey stood and put one hand on their table. In one deft leap he was upside down, balanced upon the one hand, the other saluting them.

  “You’re from HiGee.” Catkejen applauded.