AIs

by Gardner Dozois

  But there were two people there. And the sobbing carried both grief and passion, agony and ecstasy. An ancient tide ran in the room’s shadowed musk.

  The other person was Geoffrey. Moving with a slow rhythm, he was administering a kind of sympathy Ruth certainly could not. And she had not had the slightest clue of this relationship between them. A pang forked through her. The pain surprised her. She made her way out quietly.

  * * *

  Catkejen’s family had not made it out from Ganymede. She had to go through the rituals and words that soften the hard edges of life. She went for a long hike in the domes, by herself. When she returned she was quieter, worked long hours and took up sewing.

  The somber prospects of the Ganymede loss cast a pall over all humanity, and affected the Library’s work. This disaster was unparalleled in human history, greater even than the Nation Wars.

  Still, solid work helped for a while. But after weeks, Ruth needed a break, and there weren’t many at the Library. Anything physical beckoned. She had gone for a swim in the spherical pool, of course, enjoying the challenge. And flown in broad swoops across the Greater Dome on plumes of hot air. But a simmering frustration remained. Life had changed.

  With Catkejen she had developed a new, friendly, work-buddy relationship with Geoffrey. Much of this was done without words, a negotiation of nuances. They never spoke of that moment in the apartment, and Ruth did not know if they had sensed her presence.

  Perhaps more than ever, Geoffrey amused them with his quick talk and artful stunts. Ruth admired his physicality, the yeasty smell of him as he laughed and cavorted. HiGeers were known for their focus, which athletics repaid in careers of remarkable performance. The typical HiGee career began in sports and moved later to work in arduous climes, sites in the solar system where human strength and endurance still counted, because machines were not dexterous and supple enough.

  Some said the HiGeer concentration might have come from a side effect of their high-spin, centrifugal doughnut habitats. Somehow Geoffrey’s concentration came out as a life-of-the-party energy, even after his long hours in intense rapport with his own research.

  Appropriately, he was working on the Andromeda Manifold, a knotty tangle of intelligences that stressed the embodied nature of their parent species. Geoffrey’s superb nervous system, and especially his exact hand-eye coordination, gave him unusual access to the Manifold. While he joked about this, most of what he found could not be conveyed in words at all. That was one of the lessons of the Library—that other intelligences sensed the world, and the body’s relation to it, quite differently. The ghost of Cartesian duality still haunted human thinking.

  Together the three of them hiked the larger craters. All good for the body, but Ruth’s spirit was troubled. Her own work was not going well.

  She could scarcely follow some of the Architecture’s conversations. Still less comprehensible were the eerie sensoria it projected to her—sometimes, the only way it would take part in their discourse, for weeks on end.

  Finally, frustrated, she broke off connection and did not return for a month. She devoted herself instead to historical records of earlier Sagittarius discourse. From those had come some useful technical inventions, a classic linear text, even a new digital art form. But that had been centuries ago. Reluctantly she went back into her pod and returned to linear speech mode.

  “I don’t know what you intend by these tonal conduits,” she said to the Sagittarius—after all, It probably had an original point of view, even upon its own motivations.

  I was dispatched into the Realm to both carry my Creators’ essentials, to propagate their supreme Cause, and to gather knowing-wisdom for them.

  So it spoke of itself as “I” today—meaning that she was dealing with a shrunken fraction of the Architecture. Was it losing interest? Or withholding itself, after she had stayed away?

  I have other functions, as well. Any immortal intelligence must police its own mentation.

  Now what did that mean? Suddenly, all over her body washed sheets of some strange signal she could not grasp. The scatter-shot impulses aroused a pulse-quickening unease in her. Concentrate. “But . . . but your home world is toward the galactic center, at least twenty thousand light-years away. So much time has passed—”

  Quite so—my Creators may be long extinct. Probabilities suggest so. I gather from your information, and mine, that the mean lifetime for civilizations in the Realm is comparable to their/our span.

  “So there may be no reason for you to gather information from us at all. You can’t send it to them anymore.” She could not keep the tensions from her voice. In earlier weeks of incessant pod time, she had relied upon her pod’s programming to disguise her transmission. And of course, It knew this. Was anything lost on It?

  Our motivations do not change. We are eternally a dutiful servant, as are you.

  Ah, an advance to “We.” She remembered to bore in on the crucial, not be deflected. “Good. If the interstellar plasma gets near Earth—”

  We follow your inference. The effects I know well. My Creators inhabit(ed) a world similar to yours, though frankly, more beautiful. (You have wasted so much area upon water!) We managed the electrical environs of our world to send our beacon signal, harnessing the rotational energy of our two moons to the task.

  This was further than anyone had gotten with Sagittarius in a lifetime of Librarians. She felt a spike of elation. “Okay, what will happen?”

  If the bow shock’s plasma density increases further, while your ordinary star ploughs into it, then there shall be electrical consequences.

  “What . . . consequences?”

  Dire. You must see your system as a portrait in electrodynamics, one that is common throughout the Realm. Perceive: currents seethe forth—

  A three-dimensional figure sprang into being before her, with the golden sun at its center. Blue feelers of currents sprouted from the sun’s angry red spots, flowing out with the gale of particles, sweeping by the apron-strings of Earth’s magnetic fields. This much she knew—that Earth’s fields deflected huge energies, letting them pass into the great vault where they would press against the interstellar pressures.

  But the currents told a different tale. They arced and soared around each world, cocooning each in some proportion. Then they torqued off into the vastness, smothering in darkness, then eventually returning in high, long arcs to the sun. They were like colossal rubber bands that could never break, but that forces could stretch into fibrous structures.

  And here came the bulge of interstellar plasma. Lightning forked all along its intrusion. It engulfed Jupiter, and spikes of coronal fury arced far out from the giant planet. These bright blue streamers curled inward, following long tangents toward the sun.

  Some struck the Earth.

  “I don’t need a detailed description of what that means,” she said.

  Your world is like many others, a spherical capacitor. Disruption of the electrodynamic equilibrium will endanger the fragile skin of life.

  From the Sagittarius came a sudden humid reek. She flinched. Sheeting sounds churned so low that she felt them as deep bass notes resounding in her. Wavelengths longer than her body rang through her bones. Her heart abruptly pounded. A growling storm rose in her ears. “I . . . I will take this . . . and withdraw.”

  Have this as well, fair primate—

  A squirt of compressed meaning erupted in her sensorium.

  It will self-unlock at the appropriate moment.

  * * *

  Opened, the first fraction of the squashed nugget was astonishing. Even Siloh let itself appear impressed. She could tell this by the millimeter rise of a left lip.

  “This text is for the Prefect’s attention.” When Siloh rose and walked around its work-plane, she realized that she had never seen its extent—nearly three meters of lean muscle, utterly without any hint of male or female shaping. The basic human machine, engineered for no natural world. It stopped to gaze at her. “This
confirms what some physikers believe. Jupiter is the key.”

  Within an hour the Prefect agreed. He eyed them both and flicked on a display. “The Sagittarius confirms our worst suspicions. Trainee, you said that you had captured from it yet more?”

  She displayed the full data-nugget It had given her. A pyrotechnic display arced around a simulated Jupiter—

  “There, at the poles,” the Prefect said. “That cylinder.”

  The fringing fields carried by interstellar plasma swarmed into the cylinder. This time, instead of ejecting fierce currents, Jupiter absorbed them.

  “That tube is electrically shorting out the disturbance,” Siloh said. “The cylinders at both poles—somehow they shunt the energies into the atmosphere.”

  “And not into ours,” Ruth said. “It’s given us a solution.”

  The Prefect said, “What an odd way to do it. No description, just pictures.”

  Siloh said slowly, “Ummmmm . . . And just how do we build those cylinders?”

  They looked at her silently, but she got the message: Find out.

  * * *

  The sensations washing over her were quite clear now. She had asked for engineering details, and it had countered with a demand. A quite graphic one.

  This is my price. To know the full extent of the human sensorium.

  “Sex?! You want to—”

  It seems a small measure in return for the life of your world.

  Before she could stop herself she blurted, “But you’re not—”

  Human? Very well, we wish to fathom the meaning of that word, all the more. This is one step toward comprehending what that symbol-complex means.

  “You’re a machine. A bunch of electronic bips and stutters.”

  Then we ask merely for a particular constellation of such information.

  She gasped, trying not to lose it entirely. “You . . . would barter that for a civilization?”

  We are a civilization unto Ourself. Greater than any of you singletons can know.

  “I . . . I can’t. I won’t.”

  * * *

  “You will,” Siloh said with stony serenity.

  Ruth blinked. “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “This is more, much more, than required by all the Guild standards of neural integration.”

  “But—yes.”

  In his sickening swirl of emotions, she automatically reached for rules. Emotion would carry no weight with this Nought.

  She felt on firm ground here, despite not recalling well the welter of policy and opinions surrounding the entire phenomenon. A millennium of experience and profound philosophical analysis, much of it by artificial minds, had created a vast, weighty body of thought: Library Metatheory. A lot of it, she thought, was more like the barnacles on the belly of a great ship, parasitic and along for the ride. But the issue could cut her now. Given a neurologically integrated system with two parties enmeshed, what was the proper separation?

  “This issue is far larger than individual concerns.” Siloh’s face remained calm though flinty.

  “Even though a Trainee, I am in charge of this particular translation—”

  “Only nominally. I can have you removed in an instant. Indeed, I can do so myself.”

  “That would take a while, for anyone to achieve my levels of attunement and focus—”

  “I have been monitoring your work. I can easily step in—”

  “The Sagittarius Composite doesn’t want to sleep with you.”

  Siloh froze, composure gone. “You are inserting personal rebuke here!”

  Her lips twitched as she struggled not to smile. “Merely an observation. Sagittarius desires something it cannot get among the Nought class.”

  “I can arrange matters differently, then.” Its face worked with several unreadable signals—as though, she thought, something unresolved was trying to express itself.

  “I want to remain at work—”

  Suddenly he smiled and said lightly, “Oh, you may. You definitely may.”

  An abrupt hand waved her away. Plainly it had reached some insight it would not share. But what? Siloh’s bland gaze gave away nothing. And she was not good enough at translating him, yet.

  * * *

  Some of the Messages lodged in the Library had not been intended for mortal ears or eyes at all. Like some ancient rulers of Mesopotamia, these alien authors directly addressed their deities, and only them. One opened plaintively:

  Tell the God we know and say

  For your tomorrow we give our today.

  It was not obvious whether this couplet (for in the original it was clearly rhymed) came from a living civilization, or from an artifact left to remind the entire galaxy of what had come before. Perhaps, in alien terms, the distinction did not matter.

  Such signals also carried Artificials, as the digital minds immersed in the Messages were termed. The advanced Artificials, such as Sagittarius, often supervised vast databanks containing apparent secrets, outright brags, and certified history—which was, often, merely gossip about the great. These last, rather transparently, were couched to elicit punishment for the author’s enemies, from alien gods. This differed only in complexity and guile from the ancient motivations of Babylonian kings.

  Most Messages of this beseeching tone assumed some universal moral laws and boasted of their authors’ compliance with them. At first the Sagittarius Architecture had appeared to be of this class, and so went largely uninterpreted for over a century. Only gradually did its sophistication and rich response become apparent. Most importantly, it was a new class entirely—the first Architecture Artificial.

  It had something roughly comparable to a human unconscious—and yet it could see into its own inner minds at will. It was as if a human could know all of his/her impulses came from a locus of past trauma, or just a momentary anger—and could see this instantly, by tracing back its own workings. The strange power of human art sprang in part from its invisible wellsprings. To be able to unmask that sanctum was an unnerving prospect.

  Yet human-made Artificials always worked with total transparency. The Sagittarius could work that way, or it could mask portions of its own mind from itself, and so attain something like that notorious cliché, the Human Condition.

  Since in that era current opinion held that the supreme advantage of any artificial mind lay in its constant transparency, this was a shock. What advantage could come to an Artificial that did not immediately know its own levels? Which acted out of thinking patterns it could not consciously review?

  Since this was a property the Sagittarius Architecture shared (in a way) with humans, the discussion became heated for over two centuries. And unresolved.

  Now when Ruth engaged with it, she was acutely conscious of how the Artificial could change nature with quixotic speed. Swerves into irritation came fast upon long bouts of analytic serenity. She could make no sense of these, or fathom the information she gained in these long episodes of engagement. The neurological impact upon her accumulated. Her immersion in the pod carried a jittery static. Her nerves frayed.

  Some fraction of the information the Sagittarius Architecture gave her bore upon the problem of heliospheric physics, but she could not follow this. She conveyed the passages, many quite long, to Siloh.

  The crisis over the Artificial’s demand seemed to have passed. She worked more deeply with it now, and so one afternoon in the pod, concentrating upon the exact nuances of the link, she did not at first react when she felt a sudden surge of unmistakable desire in herself. It shook her, yeasty and feverish, pressing her calves together and urging her thighs to ache with a sweet longing.

  Somehow this merged with the passage currently under translation/discussion. She entered more fully into the difficult problem of extracting just the right subtlety from the

  when all at once she was not reasoning in one part of her mind but, it seemed, in all of them.

  From there until only a few heartbeats later she ran the gamut of all prev
ious passions. An ecstasy and union she had experienced only a few times—and only partially, she now saw—poured through her. Her body shook with gusts of raw pleasure. Her Self sang its song, rapt. A constriction of herself seized this flood and rode it. Only blinding speed could grasp what this was, and in full passionate flow she felt herself hammered on a microsecond anvil—into the internal time frames of the Composite.

  Dizzy, blinding speed. It registered vast sheets of thought while a single human neuron was charging up to fire. Its cascades of inference and experience were like rapids in a river she could not see but only feel, a kinesthetic acceleration, swerves that swept finally into a delightful blur.

  Thought, sensation—all one.

  She woke in the pod. Only a few minutes had passed since she had last registered any sort of time at all.

  Yet she knew what had happened.

  And regretted that it was over.

  And hated herself for feeling that way.

  * * *

  “It had me.”

  Siloh began, “In a manner of speaking—”

  “Against my will!”

  Siloh looked judicial. “So you say. The recordings are necessarily only a pale shadow, so I cannot tell from experiencing them myself—”

  Scornfully: “How could you anyway?”