Maverick iarcraa-5

by Bruce Bethke

  Dr. Anastasi frowned. “Okay, I hear what you’re saying. Next?”

  Nose, the robot in charge of spectrography and chemical analysis, spoke up. It was equipped with the same voice synthesizer as Eyes and Ears, but Basalom noted that a microscopic crack in Nose’s voice diaphragm gave it an interesting third-harmonic distortion.

  “My specialties are of limited use in this situation. However, I was able to coordinate with the other units. I provided Eyes with spectrographic data regarding the Tau Puppis sunlight and a summary analysis of the planetary atmosphere. Beyond that, I am unable to contribute. ”

  Dr. Anastasi frowned. “Hmm. Something smells fishy about that. I’ll have to think it over. Next?”

  Throat, the robot in charge of outbound telecommunications, spoke last. “Due to our inability to locate the learning machine, laser and maser communications were not attempted. I have been broadcasting continuous messages on the learning machine’s internal commlink frequency. However, as Ears reported, there has been no response. ”

  Dr. Anastasi shot Throat a cold stare. “You don’t say?”

  That was a rhetorical question,Basalom added. Do not answer. The robot held its silence.

  Dr. Anastasi looked the scanning crew over one more time and screwed her face up into a look of complete disgust. “I can’t believe this,” she said finally. “You robots have been scanning that ball of dirt for eight hours and you haven’t found anything?”

  Throat did not wait for a cue from Basalom, but simply spoke right up. “On the contrary, Dr. Anastasi, we have found a great deal. However, none of it matches the profile of either the learning machine or its damaged remains. ”

  Dr. Anastasi forgot about Newton’s laws for a moment and waved a hand to cut Throat off. Unfortunately, since she was floating in zero-G, the action sent her spinning toward the neutrino detector. Basalom gently caught her and stabilized her.

  “You found something? What?”

  Eyes answered the question. “I have detected a significant number of large lifeforms in the area of the landing site. The largest appears to be a warm-blooded grazing animal. The next largest appears to be a cold-blooded predator which follows the grazing animals as they migrate. Since we do not know the final shape of the learning machine, I can tell you only that the average predator outweighs the learning machine by a factor of four to one. ”

  Dr. Anastasi frowned. “Oh, great. So our learning machine ran into a monster and got itself demolished. ”

  The scanning robots conferred briefly by commlink. “It is possible,” Throat said. “However, in that case we would still expect to find identifiable wreckage. At the very least, we should be able to locate the microfusion cell. We have not found either. ”

  “Moreover,” Eyes continued seamlessly, “I have detected a number of clustered infrared sources. The sources are almost always found in the vicinity of what appear to be limestone caves, and the next largest class of lifeforms are generally found clustered around the infrared sources. ”

  Dr. Anastasi looked from one robotic “face” to the next with a very puzzled look in her eyes.

  Basalom squirted out a hyperwave message to the scanning team. Clarify!

  “I studied the spectrographic signatures of the infrared sources,” Nose said. “I detected cellulose, chlorophyll, carbon, and pyroligneous acid. ”

  “So our intelligent lupoids are still down there. But they couldn’t have destroyed the learning machine, and they sure couldn’t have removed all traces of it.

  “If the robot were inside a cave, would you be able to detect it?”

  Eyes, Ears, Nose, and Throat conferred briefly. Ears spoke when they had finished. “The commlink would penetrate all but the deepest caves. Small amounts of positronic leakage from the brain should also be detectable. I detected neither. ”

  “So something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” Dr. Anastasi said.

  Basalom was still trying to parse out the metaphor when Janet kicked off the wall and dove into the access tube. “Let’s get out of here. I need time to think. ”

  As he followed, Basalom reopened his human viewpoint file and made another entry. When Dr. Anastasi wants to avoid having to make a decision, she moves to a different part of the ship and claims a need to think. Does physical location have a significant effect on human cogitative abilities? He logged and indexed the entry; as he was storing it, a dialogue box popped open in the upper left corner of his field of view.

  Basalom?It was Eyes. This reaction puzzles us. Have we harmed Mistress Janet by giving her this information?

  Basalom responded via commlink. 1 am still trying to determine the First Law implications of emotional distress.

  Oh.Eyes was not a particularly bright robot, but it was selfaware enough to realize that it lacked experience in the subtleties of dealing with humans. In that case, perhaps you are best qualified to judge whether or not we should report our one additional finding.

  I will try. What is it?

  There was a pause; nothing a human would have noticed, but Basalom could plainly see that the scanning robot was having difficulty integrating the information . While we were unable to locate the specific communications and energy signatures of Learning Machine# J,we did record a significant amount of other robotic activity.

  Basalom’s curiosity bits skyrocketed. Other robotic activity? Explain.

  The little robot made one more try at generating a conclusion from its data and then gave up. Icannot. Stand by for download of raw data.

  Basalom cleared several of his unused memory banks, redirected his I/0 to fast storage, and opened his multiplex comm channel. Ready. A nanosecond later, a torrent of raw data flooded into Basalom’s mind. As fast as he could, he sorted, collated, and organized the data. Pushing it through his pattern-recognition algorithm, he tried to isolate and identify the most important points.

  One by one, the points swam into clear focus. They quickly formed a structure, a simple pattern that teased comparative memories out of his long-term data storage.

  Oh no.His stress register started clicking like a geiger counter, and the pattern took on an ever-more-familiar shape. It can ’ t be. His First Law sense began to itch like mad as the Second Law potential tried to find a route to ground. One word got out through the First Law filter: “Madam?”

  Dr. Anastasi paused in the tube and looked over her shoulder at Basalom. “Yes?”

  Power flowed through Basalom’ s cognitive circuits like strong wine. Thoughts spun and danced; potentials crashed and exploded like thunderclouds on a hot summer night.

  “Madam, there-” The First Law choked him off again.

  A concerned look crossed Dr. Anastasi’s face. “Well?”

  In Basalom’s mind, the First and Second Law collided head on, drew apart, and collided again. Neither was the clear winner; he sought desperately to reroute data to his speech centers.

  “Ma-”

  Dr. Anastasi grew impatient. “Come on, Basalom. Spit it out. ”

  His limbs froze; his major joints locked up. He blinked sixty-four times in rapid succession, and then through sheer force of will dumped his speech buffer through his voice synthesizer.

  “ There is a Robot City on this planet. ”

  Chapter 7. Maverick

  The spur of rock jutted straight out from the side of the mountain forming a natural balcony. Maverick sat on the edge of the spur, drinking in the clean pine smell of the forested valley below and watching the moons’ light glitter and dance on the river in the distance. Smallface was now near its zenith, and it cast a cool, white light with almost no shadow. Largeface, just barely above the horizon, was a dull orange globe the color and shape of a vingfruit with a bite taken out of it.

  Somehow, the sight of the two moons together in the sky stirred something deep and primal in Maverick’s soul. As if the two were directly linked, his excitement grew as Largeface rose. He paced nervously around the rock spur. A half-dozen times he yelped sharply whe
n he thought he heard something. His excitement only grew stronger when the sounds turned out to be false alarms.

  Then the sound he’d been waiting for came wafting gently on the wind, and it was raw, beautiful, and absolutely unmistakable.

  At first, it was very soft and distant. Arooo. Just one voice at first, lonely, plaintive, and far away. The sound sent chills up and down Maverick’s spine and set his hackles standing on end.

  Then another voice joined in, a little closer. Arooooo! The first voice responded, and the forests and mountains threw back the echo of the ancient, wordless cry.

  No, those weren’t echoes, those were yet more voices, joining in the chorus of a song that was as old as his race. Voices joined, and picked up, and repeated. AROOO! The call carried for miles across the hills and valleys. Not just miles; hundreds of miles, as the voices followed the rising moon west across the land. As it had on certain nights for thousands of years, the song chased the twin moons clear across the world, from the eastern shores to the western sea.

  When he judged the time to be right, Maverick threw his head back, flattened his ears, and joined in. AROOOO! I am Maverick! I am here, my brothers! I join you! AROOOOOO!

  Other intelligible words began rising out of the joyous, incoherent howl of BeastTongue. I am ChippedFang.

  I am DoesNotFollow.

  I am RaggedEar.

  I am SmellsBad. I join you!

  The Howl Network had just come on line.

  The Howl Network reached from sea to sea, and from the land of AlwaysSnow to the Uncrossable Desert. It covered the land, but it was not terribly efficient. Maverick had plenty of time to think while listening to the threads of news that twisted through the air.

  This time, though, he thought silently. How strange, lad. The pack-kin insult and despise the outcasts. If they catch you in their territory - and outnumber you by at least three to one - they ’ ll attack you, and even try to kill you.

  Yet if it weren ’ t for the outcasts, not a one of them would ever know what was happening just fifty trots outside his pack ’ s territory.

  Oops. A message that he found interesting echoed through the night. Maverick picked it up, repeated it, and added a few comments of his own. Then he went back to thinking.

  Hmm. I add comments, and ChippedFang adds comments, and DoesNotFollow adds comments… Might be interesting sometime to get the originator and the final receiver of the message together, to see how much the message changes along the line.

  More messages wafted through the damp spring air. Weather reports from out west; looked like heavy rain this year. Further accounts of renewed fighting between two feuding packs in the southeast; oh, those two had been fighting for years without resolution. A hunting report on the grazer migration in the north; it seemed the calves were fat and slow this year, and the sharpfangs few in number. Maverick dutifully picked up and repeated each message without comment, then went back to his first line of thought.

  Yes, the pack-kin hate loners. They attack you; they warn their pups that they ’ II turn out like you if they aren ’ t good. They call you pups o/the FirstBeast, and blame you/or everything that ’ s wrong with their cozy little world.

  Maverick thought of the last pack he’d encountered, less than a week before. The freshly healed scar on his leg gave him another sharp twinge, but he smiled anyway, and for a moment lost himself in a memory of soft young fur and a certain long pink tongue.

  Yes, the pack-kin hate you. But on warm spring evenings when the mood is in the air, their virgin daughters seekyou out.

  And when their huntleaders are all dead or driven off by internal fighting, who do they ask to be their new leaders?

  Maverick stood up on all fours a moment, yawned as wide as his jaw would allow, and indulged in a long stretch that ran from his haunches clear out to the toes of his forepaws. Then he treated himself to one more smile.

  “Face it, kid. They’re just plain jealous. ”

  Oops! A new message was coming through the night, and he’d almost missed it. Maverick quickly sat down, cocked his ears, and listened attentively to the voice-he thought it was RaggedEar-that relayed the story.

  “-report from the eastern lakes country. The kin of PackHome are seeing GodBeings again.

  “PackHome was the scene of last year’s so-called ‘Hill of Stars’ incident, in which an enormous, shining sanddigger’s nest reportedly appeared in the midst of isolated hunting territory.

  “The sudden appearance of the Hill of Stars was accompanied by an invasion of ‘WalkingStones. ’ These creatures, which walked on their hind legs at all times and had no smell, killed several kin by throwing lightning from their fingertips.

  “ At about the same time, a mysterious kin known as SilverSides joined the pack. She destroyed several of the WalkingStones, and forced the GodBeing that lived in the Hill of Stars to come out for single combat. Local kin say that SilverSides became a GodBeing herself and went into the Hill of Stars.

  “Since then, SilverSides has been seen only once, in the company of a strange, half-kin, half-GodBeing creature named Wolruf. ”

  Wolruf?Maverick wondered. What ’ s a wolruf?

  “LifeCrier, who speaks the history for the kin of PackHome, says that SilverSides was a gift of the OldMother and has returned to her. LifeCrier insists that SilverSides will return to lead the hunt and protect all the kin.

  “Young kin from many packs have come to the eastern lakes country to hear LifeCrier speak and hoping to glimpse the GodBeings. But there are stories of widespread confusion.

  “In the meantime, the faithful wait, and the Hill of Stars itself remains silent. This report was first cried by StormBringer on the eastern lakes echo. ”

  Maverick sat quietly a few moments longer, listening to the last reverberations of the message die out against the mountainside. Then the yips and howls started up again as other kin picked up the story and repeated it. Maverick cleared his throat, laid his ears back, took a deep breath

  And thought better of it. “PackHome, eh? In the eastern lakes country?” He squeezed out a tight-lipped smile, got to his feet, and trotted over to where the spur of rock joined the side of the mountain. “Sounds like a chaotic, leaderless mess to me. ” At the top of the trail he paused to look at the stars and get a good fix on the direction he was heading. Then he started carefully picking his way down the talus-covered slope.

  “Just the place for a strong kin with a little ambition, eh, lad?”

  He looked up at the stars one more time and noted that LargeFace was now well up in the sky. In this phase the shadowy outline of SplitEar, the kin in the moon, stood out very clearly.

  Maverick couldn’t help but feel that old SplitEar, first pup of the OldMother, was smiling down on him.

  Chapter 8. Derec

  Dr. Avery was hunched over a data terminal in the ship’s robotics lab, deeply engrossed in a dense mass of hex code, when Derec called out, “Hi, Dad!” and came bouncing into the room.

  Avery pulled his face away from the terminal just long enough to glare at Derec. “Will you please stop calling me that?” he asked, his white mustache bristling with anger. “You know how much it annoys me. ”

  “Sure, Dad. ”

  Avery shot his son one more if-looks-could-kill glance, ran his fingers through his long white hair, and turned back to the terminal. He would never have said it out loud, of course, but in his heart, Avery admitted that Derec certainly had every right to try to annoy him. After all, it was Avery’s megalomaniacal experiment that had erased Derec’s memory and infected Ariel with amnemonic plague. Now he could not reconstruct how, in his madness, he had caused the amnesia, much less how to reverse it. And while his little chemfet nanomachines had ultimately worked to perfection, they’d nearly killed Derec twice, and they had killed Derec and Ariel’s unborn child.

  Given all that, Avery resolved once more to put up with whatever juvenile revenge Derec was in the mood to exact today. He waited patiently while Derec
found a noisy tin stool, dragged it over, and sat down. Then, when it appeared that Derec wasn’t going to say anything, he called up another bloc of code.

  “Whatcha doing, Dad?” Derec asked brightly.

  Avery sighed and turned to his son. ‘. I’m going through the ship’ s systems software, in hopes of finding the shape-changing algorithm. ”

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to stop the polymorphism, or at least slow it down a great deal. ”

  “Why?”

  Avery sighed again and ran his fingers through his hair. That ’ s one of the problems with having children raised by robots, he thought. When they ’ re about three years old, they go through a “Why, daddy?” stage. The Second Law forces the robots to answer. So the kids never outgrow it.

  Avery straightened his lab coat, pasted on his best imitation paternal smile, and answered the question with another question.

  “Have you ever walked off the edge of a gravity field?”

  . Derec sifted through his attenuated memories. “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “I did, last night. You‘ve seen how minimal the environment on the second deck is? I was looking for Lucius last night and I walked into a pitch-dark cabin that had no gravity field. ”

  “What happened?”

  “When you reach the edge of a gravity field, you don’t float up into the air. Rather, down suddenly becomes the floor of the room you just left. There’s no sensation of falling; you simply pivot on the doorsill and follow the field through a 90-degree curve. ”

  “So?”

  “Have you ever heard the expression,. the floor jumped up and hit me in the face’?”

  . Derec snickered.

  “Blast it, Derec, it’s not funny! If the floor hadn’t realized what was going on and softened itself an instant before impact, I would have broken my nose!”