Strider's Galaxy

by John Grant

  "What's it like being a bot?" she asked suddenly. It was something that had never occurred to her before. The only bots she had ever spent much time with were sexbots, and in such circumstances conversation was not generally part of the agenda.

  "I don't know what you mean, lady."

  "Maybe it's a silly question . . . or maybe it's not. If you asked me what it was like being a human I could give you some kind of an answer."

  "I think being a bot is not so much different from being a human," said Pinocchio after a pause. "I have likes and dislikes, just as humans do. I am more likely to malfunction than a human is, because no one has ever thought it necessary to spend much time or money constructing nanobots for bots." He rubbed the heel of his palm against his eye—a curiously human gesture. The cabble hummed softly. "I dislike the prospect of being trashed—just the same way as humans don't want to be killed. That's about it."

  "Do you feel emotions? Affection? Hatred? You know what I mean."

  Pinocchio's head buzzed for a second or two. Strider no longer found the effect alarming.

  "Emotions other than preferences—likes and dislikes, as I said—were not something deliberately built into my software," he said at length, "but I have developed something analogous to them, over the centuries. You could have trashed me last night, but instead you asked if we could be friends. That has imprinted itself in me."

  The cabble beeped loudly: they were approaching the locks of the SSIA blister.

  "I will be part of the Santa Maria mission," said Pinocchio. "I hope that you will be, too, lady."

  The last remark told Strider more than she had expected to know.

  #

  Project Eyeball had lasted the best part of a hundred years, and the first—and so far only—results had come back ninety years after that.

  Earth was in a mess and, for another few thousand years yet, Mars would be incapable of hosting the several billions of individuals that the human species would multiply itself into. Of course, there were strict laws against over-reproduction, and most of the time they worked, but, if a woman has a second child or even a third, what do you do? Kill the children?

  Sometime at the end of the twenty-third century a Mexican governmental advisor suggested sending out bot probes to those nearby stars the astrophysicists knew possessed planets to see if any of those worlds might be suitable for colonization. He was fired for stupidity—the Mexican government had very few funds to draw on—and his idea was immediately taken up by the Nigerghanaians. The only difficulty was, of course, that, if the astrophysicists knew a star had at least one planet, then it was probable that the star's planetary retinue was of a nature unlike the Solar System's. The space telescope Hubble XVII, orbiting Pluto, was able to detect the "wobbles" induced in the paths of a number of stars by attendant planetary objects; it seemed that, at least around singleton stars, planets were the norm rather than a rarity. The trouble was that, even with Hubble XVII's sensitivity, the smallest "wobble" that could be distinguished represented a planet of mass some two times that of Jupiter. A planet twice the mass of Jupiter is well on the way to becoming a star in its own right, and had probably, during the evolution of its parent, swept up most of the detritus floating around during the days, billions of years ago, when smaller, Earth-like planets might have been forming. Some of those "planetary" bodies might even be wasted pulsars, in which case there was no hope at all that any planets would be found.

  The Big Idea didn't take very long in coming. It was probably a better plan to send probes to those stars where the astrophysicists hadn't been able to detect the presence of planets.

  In 2303 Nigerghana put up the idea to the by now very small United Nations, where it was rejected by all except Mexico, whose government had performed a volte-face. However, the nascent Martian nation declared itself in favor of the Nigerghanaians, pointing out that it could mount the project for a fraction of the cost any terrestrial nation would have incurred: launch prices from Mars were far smaller than those from Earth, and the asteroid belt, with its invaluable raw materials, was several tens of millions of kilometers nearer. When a historian dug out the idea of the Von Neumann probe—which had been popular among theoreticians centuries earlier, long before the human species had had the technological ability to construct any such thing—the Martians told the Earth nations that they could be part of the project, or not.

  The idea of the Von Neumann probe is a very simple one. If you can create a bot probe so sophisticated that it will guide itself to the vicinity of another star, it takes very little extra effort to make it capable of finding, in the orbit of that star, a random chunk of rock—an asteroid or a dead moon—on which it can set down and start constructing a replica of itself while at the same time making a survey of the stellar system and reporting home. The replica—or, if there's nothing interesting in this particular stellar system, both the parent and the offspring—can then head off towards different nearby stars. The enthusiasts for the concept had, throughout the period between the late twentieth century and the mid-twenty-first century, regarded this as the paradigmatic fashion in which any technological species would investigate the Universe. The idea fell from fashion when it became apparent that there were almost certainly no Von Neumann probes currently at work in the Solar System: had other civilizations hit on the idea there should, by the mere laws of statistics, have been plenty.

  What the Martians did was adapt the notion a little. In the middle of the twenty-fourth century they put a colony on Ceres and built five probes simultaneously; the effort strained Mars's revenues considerably, even though most of the nations of Earth provided contributory funding. Completed, the five probes were launched into the asteroid belt to discover, essentially, what they could eat. When, some years later, Hubble XVII was able to observe the first of the offspring blasting off in the general direction of Epsilon Eridani, there was widespread rejoicing on Mars. There would have been widespread rejoicing on Earth as well, except that it was in the middle of another global war: fortunately no nukes or micro-organisms were used, but it was a pity about the population of Patagonia.

  In 2510 Mars picked up the first signals from one of the cloned bot probes: Proxima Centauri was orbited by seven lifeless, atmosphereless lumps of rock, none of them larger than the Solar System's Mercury. No one was startled or disappointed by the news: Proxima, itself orbiting distantly around the binary of Alpha and Beta Centauri, had never been regarded as a hot prospect. Still, it would have been nice had the first probe report been positive.

  The second one was. It came in 2512, and it came from the system of Tau Ceti. Here there were only five planets orbiting the little star. The second one out had an atmosphere that was rather richer in oxygen than that of Mars, a gravity zero point eight three that of the Earth, and abundant vegetation. Whether or not humans would find it in fact habitable was something the probe could not determine: only human beings themselves could do that.

  By trying it out.

  It was a ruthless means of experimentation, but no one could think of a better one.

  So, on Phobos, the Martians began the construction of the Santa Maria, which would hold forty-five human beings for a thirty-year trip, and was capable of supporting them for a further eighty years if it proved obvious that Tau Ceti II was a complete non-starter: in that case they would explore the system, learning what they could, and then head straight back home.

  It had been projected that the building of the Santa Maria would take thirty years but, as time went by and no further probes reported, some urgency was put into the construction. Unlike most major engineering projects, it was coming in ahead of schedule.

  #

  The semicircular desk had been replaced by a much smaller one, seemingly made of wood. Pinocchio ushered Strider into the room, and left. Today only Dulac and Macphee were there, and they were smiling.

  She could have done with a few smiles during her interrogation yesterday. In fact, she could have done with any pal
ette of human emotions from her interviewers, whatever those emotions might have been: even outright antagonism would have been better than what she had endured.

  The three of them exchanged greetings, and sat. The chairs were placed at precisely one-hundred-and-twenty-degree intervals, Strider observed, and despite herself she began to feel excitement kick in. The arrangement was for a meeting of equals.

  "A few final questions, Strider," said Dulac.

  "I'm ready."

  "Why is it that you lack neural implants, stim sockets, cortical amplification, secondary retinal screens, augmented musculature and a direct commline?" Dulac was still smiling, but she could tell by the way he was leaning across the desk towards her that her he wanted an answer: this wasn't just friendly chitchat.

  She decided to be honest.

  "Because I've never felt the need of any of them," she said. "Most of them are just toys. I don't need augmented musculature, because I augment my own by working out in the gym. I refuse to have stim sockets or secondary retinal screens because they get in the way of my perceptions: I'm more efficient without them." She put her hands, palms down, flat on the table in front of her. "I've often thought about having a direct commline installed, because it could be useful, but—"

  "Would you object to having a commline installed?" Macphee interposed. Even though this was a much lower-key interview than yesterday's, and even though the friendly smiles were still in place, the two still seemed determined to play the good-cop, bad-cop game.

  "It would depend on the circumstances. I was fitted with a stim socket for a while a few years ago: after a while I got tired of getting high when I didn't really want to, so I had the thing taken out again. Occasionally I use a commlink to hook myself into the system temporarily. Ideally, I'd rather do without a permanent commline. On the other hand, if it meant I could perform my job better . . ."

  "What degree of technological enhancement does your body in fact possess, Strider?" said Dulac.

  "Nothing except nanobots—but you must know that from my records."

  "How much holo do you watch?" said Macphee.

  "Not much. Most of it's garbage."

  "So you wouldn't describe yourself as addicted to it?" said Dulac.

  Strider laughed. "Of course not."

  "Yet you watched some in your hotel room last night."

  "So you were observing me. I tuned in to a bit of holo, yes, because I was too tired to start a new bookette and I wanted something to relax with." She drew a finger across the bridge of her nose. "You're putting me on the defensive, and that pisses me off."

  Dulac cleared his throat. "Thanks for the frankness, Strider. We wouldn't be doing it unless we had reason."

  "We're not fooling around here," added Macphee. "These questions are more important than they might seem. Would you get up and go over to the window?"

  "It's a pretty scene," said Strider, pushing back her chair.

  "We've changed it today," said Dulac. "Please, go and look at it and tell us what you think."

  She stared at him for a moment, then obeyed.

  The tranquil groves and the ambling philosophers were gone. Instead there was a scene of such extravagant bleakness that Strider sucked in her breath. There was a prairie of long grey grass that seemed to stretch out towards infinity. Vicious sleet was coming down at an angle, and a gale was blowing across the landscape so violently that many of the ears of the grass were being ripped away, to go tumbling high in the air before being lost in the distance. A pinkish sun lowered not far above the horizon. Strider touched the plastite: it was at approximate skin temperature, but at the same time it made her sense that it was cold. She felt a stinging in her nostrils, as if she had just breathed a whiff of ozone.

  "Is this Tau Ceti II?" she said quietly. "It's beautiful."

  Dulac chuckled behind her.

  "No. It's only a mock-up. We haven't got any pictures of the planet yet—we won't have until next year some time. You should know that."

  Strider nodded absently, still absorbed by the scene of wilderness. The Martians' Von Neumann probes were programmed to replicate themselves first, explore the stellar system they had encountered, and then only as a last resort descend to the surface of any major planet. In theory the probe could lift itself off again, but only at the potential cost of destroying every ecosystem for hundreds if not thousands of square kilometers around. In practice, if they decided to investigate a world close up, they would send transmissions home as long as they thought fit, then switch themselves off.

  She loved Mars. She thought of herself not as an Earthling but as a Martian. But she would have given virtually anything to be able to strip back the plastite of the fake window and throw herself into the mocked-up alien scene.

  "Strider," said Dulac. He had to say it a second time before she heard him, because a heavy creature with two huge horns jutting from each shoulder was strutting through the grass towards her. It seemed to have no head as such; its eyes were just beneath and to the front of the horns.

  "Yes," she said, forcing herself away from the view.

  "You've got yourself a job."

  "On the Santa Maria?" She tried to make it sound as if the question weren't any big deal.

  "You could say that."

  "Oh, shit, you're not making me part of the back-up team, are you?"

  "No." Macphee took over. "We want you to be the Santa Maria's captain."

  #

  It took them a while to explain to her what the word "captain" meant—hierarchical structures were of course present on Mars, but everyone tried to ignore the fact. It took them a while longer to tell her why she had been singled out for the role.

  In an era when almost everybody was booted up with various bits and pieces of technological augmentation, she was something of a rarity; some people were filled with more extraneous software than the average bot, which was fine when they wanted to play videogames in the middle of the night without having to get out of bed but not so exciting when they had to draw on more basic brain functions, like walking. And the two major troubles with technology were that eventually people came to rely on it and that inevitably, in time, it broke down. Sometimes it could be fixed, sometimes it couldn't.

  The SSIA was sending a party of human beings on a journey that might take a hundred and ten years. During this time, some of the potential colonists would certainly suffer mental collapse: the Santa Maria was as large as she could be built, but the confinement and the boredom would surely break a few of the party. What was more worrying, however, was the risk of technowithdrawal: people became addicted to their gadgetry, and were likely to become suicidal—or, worse, murderous—if it broke down and couldn't be replaced.

  Strider was a normal human being.

  This, they repeated, meant that she was very unusual. It had also made her a prime candidate for—she practiced the new word again that night back in her apt in City 19—captaincy of the Santa Maria. She'd told Dulac and Macphee that she wanted a week to sort things out before the SSIA podded her across to City 78.

  She felt like getting laid by way of celebration but she couldn't think of anyone to call whom she much liked and her sexbot was so goddam proficient that she was bored with it ("Couldn't you just sort of be interestingly impotent from time to time?" "It-is-not-in-my-programming."), so instead she spent a week's salary ordering up a real-cheese pizza, a glass of wine and a shot of ziprite.

  2

  Phobos: AD2528

  The great thing about being on Phobos was that you felt light.

  Out in the open wasn't as much fun, because you were constricted inside a spacesuit whose various devices for dealing with bodily excretions were extremely uncomfortable, and because you always had the nervous feeling that, if you so much as tripped, you could wrench yourself out of the tiny moon's gravitational field and either go plummeting downwards towards Mars, which seemed very big from here, or tumbling and turning off into the eternity of the Universe, which seemed even
bigger. Through the thin atmosphere of Mars you could see about fifteen times as many stars as you could from the surface of the Earth; from Phobos you could see twice as many again—plus a couple of dozen distant galaxies. The spectacle was amazing, but it didn't quite compensate for the fact that you were always worried about either falling or rising.

  It was a false fear. Assuming that you could kick yourself hard enough off the surface of Phobos not to come down again, all that would happen would be that you shared the moon's orbit around Mars until someone came and fetched you back. But false fears are as frightening as real ones: everyone knows the laws of physics; everyone's subconscious flatly refuses to believe in some of them.

  When you were contained within the Santa Maria, however, it was different.

  It was better than free fall. In free fall you can do a triple somersault in mid-air, but then you have to grab hold of something to stop yourself somersaulting for the rest of your life. Here you could do a triple somersault and then come slowly down for a graceful landing. Everyone tried it in private a few times before realizing that everyone else was trying it in private; after that, people got together for bouts of low-g acrobatics.

  No one aboard the Santa Maria was actually fat, but quite a few justifiably thought of themselves as plump. In the low-g of Phobos it didn't make any difference: everybody was a ballet dancer.

  #

  "Retro seven," said Strider.

  "Retro seven," agreed Danny O'Sondheim.

  "Rotary seven point one four eight three three six one," she said.