Harvest the Fire - [Harvest of Stars 03]

by By Poul Anderson

  Dazzling developments occurred also in cybernetics. Robots of every kind became versatile and ubiquitous. Many could learn from experience, carry on conversations, make decisions, or otherwise behave like people. However, they remained sharply limited. No matter how elaborate its program, what a robot essentially did was carry out an algorithm. The goal of a truly conscious artificial intelligence stayed elusive.

  This was in spite of rather early success with downloads. By nanotechnic and quantum mechanical means, a nervous system could be scanned virtually molecule by molecule. The basic patterns of memory and personality could then be mapped into a program for a neural network of complexity comparable to the brain’s. In effect, a download was a copy of a person’s mind, equipped with sensors and a speaker, capable of hookup to a machine body. Fireball retained its integrity because Guthrie lived long enough to undergo the process before his death. His download continued in charge. Few persons ever opted for such a ghost-existence, and of those, hardly any chose to carry it on for long. Download Guthrie had sufficient of his original’s vigor and interest in life to do so.

  The United Nations and many countries collapsed in war and civil breakdown. A stronger World Federation rose out of the ruins, but during the hiatus a unique civilization had had a chance to develop among the Lunarians, and at length they won their independence. Theirs became a nation without a formal government, dominated rather than ruled by the families of the Selenarchs. It colonized widely through the Asteroid Belt, the moons of the giant planets, and Mars. Politicians and bureaucrats on Earth felt uneasy about those “anarchists” running loose, refusing membership in the Federation.

  New crises came to a head on the mother world. At last Fireball had no choice but to commit what amounted to an act of war, in alliance with the Selenarch Rinndalir and his associates. The reaction to this meant the doom of both. Guthrie negotiated and bought time while he made his preparations. Fireball had already sent exploratory probes to the nearest neighbor star, Alpha Centauri, which had one marginally habitable planet and numerous asteroids. By trading off the company’s assets, he got the means to make the tremendous journey there with a handful of Terran and Lunarian dissidents. Everybody knew that in a thousand years the planet, Demeter, would collide with another. But those thousand years could be lived in, and perhaps during them the descendants of the colonists would find a means of surviving.

  The Federation brought Luna forcibly back into itself, as a member republic complete with democratic institutions that ill suited Lunarians. At first, being in the large majority, they could often evade or ignore the new laws. But then the Federation government moved the abandoned L-5 colony, a big artificial satellite of Earth, into a low Lunar orbit, stabilized by solar sails—the Habitat. Given the artificial gravity engendered by its spin, Terrans could reproduce in easy reach of the Moon, moving there to stay when their children were old enough. Before long they outnumbered and outvoted the Lunarians.

  Another unhappy society was the Lahui Kuikawa, which had evolved among the Keiki Moana and their human partners. Cramped and restricted on a Hawaiian reservation, they at last—incidentally to a larger intrigue— got a mid-Pacific island and its surrounding waters for their own, where they could live with scant outside interference. Other cultures, some still more curious, were quietly developing around the planet.

  This happened well after the first true artificial intelligence, the first sophotect, had come into being. Once they had a nonalgorithmic model of consciousness, researchers became able to create it. Given the resources at its disposal, the sophotectic mind rapidly outpaced the organic. It was never divided among distinct personalities. Those could exist when and where desired, but could also unite or merge with others. Thus the cybercosm, the integrated system of machines, computers, robots, and sophotects, was a vast One with countless mutable avatars. Its apex became the Teramind, an intellect inconceivable to mortals and constantly growing.

  The cybercosm did not enslave humanity—why should it?—nor did humans regard themselves as parasites on it. It had a single vote in the parliament of the World Federation, together with an advisory role. People had their own lives to lead. The cybercosm was simply their invaluable partner. To be sure, it was nothing but good sense to follow the counsel of the machine mind. In this wise had the world, uncoerced, become stable, peaceful, prosperous, and happy. Don’t worry about scattered malcontents here and there. Don’t wonder what the ultimate purposes of the Teramind may be; they are utterly abstract, remote from any concerns of flesh and blood. . . .

  Not that the cybercosm was entirely separate from humanity. Besides all of its aspects that were in direct contact, it had its intermediaries, the synnoionts. Those were men and women of suitable innate capabilities, raised from childhood to be a part of it, repeatedly in electro-photonic rapport with it. They interpreted between the two kinds of intelligence. Often they became important officers of the Federation. But power in itself did not interest them. Their promised reward was that, if accident did not intervene, at the end of life they would be downloaded into the Oneness.

  Then the world learned of the existence of Proserpina, an asteroid, but a huge one and of high density. Long since cast by Jupiter into an orbit that took nearly two million years to complete, it was now in the far reaches of the Solar System, among the comets of the Kuiper Belt and outward bound for the Oort Cloud. Even so, it offered habitation, with the resources of those comets to draw upon, to Lunarians, at such a distance from Earth that they could again have an independent nation. Many of them emigrated there.

  So matters stood when Nicol was born. Or so, at any rate, he rendered them. He thought with a flash of sardonicism that he wasn’t lying much when he called the whole account a fiction, as far short as it fell of the richness of reality.

  * * * *

  After another silence, Borges shook his head. “No,” he said, “I am sorry, but I can make nothing of this.”

  Nicol curbed the impulse to cry out that he had not spun a yarn nor tried to forecast. “Too fantastic?” he asked.

  “Actually, no. As I listened, I harked back to the past. How surreal would this city, this room appear to a hunter in the Ice Age, or even to a Martin Fierro? In my work I have never been closely concerned with modern science and engineering, but I can conceive the possibilities are as grandiose as you describe. What would baffle me is the people who live with them and in them. They would inevitably be more foreign than any dweller in Karnak or Cambaluc.”

  “You’ve dealt with foreigners in your writing, sir.”

  “I took them out of myself. They were facets of me. What else can a writer do? If your future world did exist— and you have indeed at some moment sounded like a veritable time traveler”—Borges smiled—”then I should have to know its inhabitants far better before I could abstract imaginary characters from them, or even compose a lyric about them, and I have not enough life span left to make such an acquaintance.”

  They are too alien, Nicol thought. I am too alien.

  “I can perhaps say that I would not envy a poet in their mainstream civilization,” Borges murmured. “I think my advice would be that he seek elsewhere.”

  And then: “Well, we have had quite an unusual talk, and I thank you for it, but—”

  Nicol glanced at his spring-powered armband watch. “Of course. I hope I haven’t overstayed my welcome.” His allotted real time was indeed getting short. And Borges would naturally have wanted to go home, have lunch and perhaps a siesta, and work with his translator.

  The program would stop running.

  “Not at all. A pleasure.” As gracious as always, Borges made small talk for some additional minutes. At the end, almost shyly, he asked, “Would you like a little souvenir of this occasion?” With hands grown skilled in darkness, he took from a drawer a copy of Ellibro de arena, signed it, and gave it to his caller.

  That was the most heartbreaking of everything. Nicol shook hands in a daze, mumbled farewell, and m
ade his way back to the mirage street.

  He had not walked far when it vanished, he fell through an instant of night, and again he lay in the tank.

  Mechanically, lost from his surroundings, he let the attendant help him out and detach the connections. The bath fluid rolled straight off his skin into an absorber. He dressed, left, and went down the corridors, barely noticing where he was. Sometimes he glanced down at his hand, as if it held a book.

  Why this feeling of nullity, of loss and grief? Surely not disappointment. He wasn’t that childish, was he? It had been clear from the first how slight his chances were of learning anything useful to him. He had had an encounter with a ghost of greatness. That ought to be enough, and a fountainhead of new strength. Instead, his loneliness had redoubled.

  Loneliness—no, isolation. Estrangement from his world and from his own spirit.

  The foyer was empty, oppressively still. He didn’t want the enclosure of his room, either. With a muttered curse, he went outside.

  Night had long since fallen. A full Moon rode high in a cloudless heaven. It made the land a witchery of sable and argent. Across distances the mist lifted hoar from the falls. Air lay cool, pervaded by their thunder.

  Once more an impulse swooped and seized. Nicol set forth, bound yonder.

  Moonlight illuminated the trails and catwalks. Where trees whose crowns it frosted overshadowed them, the informant on his wrist produced a flashbeam for him, thin but sufficient if he went carefully. His muscles rejoiced to be moving. He followed the whole way to the overlook at the Garganta del Diablo. There he stood for a time out of time, looking, listening, being.

  The wonder spread before him and around him, titanic reach of cliffs down which the cataracts rushed and roared, agleam below the Moon, lesser streams hastening to meet them in the gorge, wildness, power, majesty, and at his back the forest full of murk and fragrances and over his head the stars.

  Here was Earth, ancient Earth, mother of humankind and all other life, calling to the cosmos that begot her. The falls in their violence and splendor echoed the birth of suns and planets from shining nebulae, of the universe as it exploded from primordial nothingness and there was light.

  A diamond point crossed the sky, low above the northern horizon, some orbiting satellite, and that also was right, it belonged. At the present phase of the Moon he could not see any gleam from cities on it, nor could he find Mars or Alpha Centauri, but that didn’t matter, he knew that humans were there also. As for the machines, the omnipresent machines, robots, sophotects, Teramind, tonight he refused to fret. They were what they were, he was what he was.

  Whatever that might be, he thought with a return of ruefulness.

  Yet his heart was still high when he started back toward his bed. The grandeur had entered him, and he believed that the phantom had in truth counseled him well. Seek elsewhere. The variousness open to him was well-nigh unbounded. Someplace in it he might find what he needed.

  Or he might fail. He recognized that that was more likely, and that then anger might prove his undoing. But first he would have tried, he would have sought.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER

  1

  A dead man spoke with a machine.

  Yes, I understand why the Oneness has raised me back into being. Trouble is loose, and again there is need for me to go to and fro in the world. But tell me what and how, that I may do my work as soon as may be and return to the Oneness.

  Yet he was not truly dead, nor truly a man. Before he who sometimes called himself Venator perished, the cybercosm had downloaded the configurations of his mind into the program of a neural network that mapped his brain; and meanwhile it gave the aged flesh a sleeping away into cessation. For a span thereafter, the consciousness was an electrophotonic intelligence in an organometallic body. That was only a span, to accustom it to its new condition. Then, as had been promised the living man, he got his reward for faithful service. The cybercosm merged the mind with itself.

  Identity regained was, at first, bitter and bewildering.

  The reply ran: Our great peace lies once more under threat. Someone or something has breached the walls of our inmost secrets. Those were not material walls, Venator knew. They were encryptions and lines of communication that ought to have been secure against all that the laws of nature allowed to exist. A strange genius had found ways to corrupt the very system. We know this from the fact that there has been more activity, not our own, than can be accounted for by quantum fluctuations; and that was determined only lately. Thus we do not know what files have been ransacked, or for what purpose, save that it cannot be benign.

  And the speaker was not truly a machine, a sophotect with individuality. It was a part or aspect of the central intelligence—not the actual Teramind, of course, but distantly joined to that apex through nodes of ascending power. So is the forefinger of a human a distinct thing while also a component of her hand, which is a component of her arm, which is a component of her entire organism. But this mind could, when desired, become one with as many others as necessary to deal with any question or any danger. What it was now was merely what it deemed to be sufficient.

  And neither of these two was truly speaking. Directly linked, they exchanged information and thoughts at well-nigh the speed of light. In less than a second, Venator knew what had gone on in the thirty years since his death, saw what it might portend, and realized what he must do.

  But let words stand in for that lightninglike discourse. It is not altogether a false analogy. As he settled into his re-created state, Venator began to remember how it had felt being human, how it had felt to talk.

  —Almost surely this business is centered on the Moon, and most likely the virusmaster is there. Little active hostility to the order of things remains on Earth, and it is ideational or emotional—ill informed, ill organized where it is organized at all, devoid of any significant resources. But ever more Lunarians grow ever more restless. No longer simply expressing dissent, refusing cooperation with Terrans, or evading what laws of their republic they can, increasingly often they openly violate those laws that do not please them; and acts of sabotage are occurring. Although agents of the Peace Authority have not succeeded in discovering what the membership of the Scaine Croi is, they estimate it in the thousands, and certainly its sympathizers include most of the race.

  —But the Lunarians are a dwindling minority, a dying breed. Or so they were toward the end of my life. What menace can they offer?

  —Their birth rate is rising anew. They are getting back a belief in their future. It is the influence of Proserpina, direct and indirect, that inspires them. What else? This was foreseen and feared already in your day.

  —Proserpina is so remote, though, so small and poor. The colony was a desperate gamble. We thought it might well fail. At worst, it should not have posed a serious problem for centuries to come. What has changed yonder?

  —The colony has struck firm roots. Its population prospers and slowly enlarges. Left to itself, it can reach equilibrium and survive indefinitely.

  —We meant to see to it that that would be the probable outcome: an equilibrium, a tiny and static nation isolated in the far fringes of the Solar System, insignificant and virtually forgotten by the rest of humankind.

  —Exactly. Thus far our policies have worked well. Proserpina is contained. Resentment among its people was expected and allowed for. What was not properly expected was the degree to which that resentment would infect the Lunarians on Luna.

  —Hm. I could have guessed it. Proserpina may be invisible to them, but in spirit it blazes forth that their old wild ways are still alive, still free. Humans who rebel are not those without hope, but those who suppose that at last they see the end of the tunnel.

  —You can well judge, who have been human yourself.

  —Terran human. Lunarians are not like me. (Memory stirred, a Lunarian woman walked again with her red hair and wicked laughter, the download must set aside a download’s equivalent o
f pain.) Nevertheless, I think that they and I are akin in this.

  —They are not insane. There is no reason to anticipate insurrection on the Moon. However, the violation of our databases clearly indicates an organization both strong and cunning, with tendrils into the cybercosm. It also indicates enmity, not so? Both these point toward the Scaine Croi.

  —-What action has the Peace Authority taken?

  —Intensive investigation. (Details followed, not a welter of them but a coherent, mathematically precise representation.) As you see, progress has been slight. The special capabilities of a download, halfway between the organic and the cybernetic, could prove of critical importance. Your record, your gifts and skills and experiences while alive, singled you out. Therefore you have been resurrected.

  —Agents with Terran genes would certainly have . . . difficulty . . . penetrating a Lunarian underground. Also, that outfit will maintain its private lines of communication. Meanwhile, any Lunarian willing to dissemble a bit, or just key in to the public database, can learn about most of the things Terrans are doing. Yes-s-s.