Niccoli seemed amused, somehow a bitter amusement. "I may not be able to plug in and link minds with you, sir," he said, "but I can still read your thoughts. I've seen that expression on a thousand faces in my time. You know, we live prettywell. They still make voice-and hand-controlled machines. And there are books, Mr. Sealock. Remember books? And we have each other." He looked away. Books? Brendan suddenly remembered his personal cargo, long ago transshipped to Gamma and Deepstar. It had been about equally divided between a mass of incredibly sophisticated electronic equipment and close to half a ton of carefully preserved old books. What was the linkage to be found here? What commonality did he have with this man, at the opposite end of a spectrum-potential from him?
The chain of reasoning broke when Niccoli suddenly said, "What's that?" Tiny forces were playing with their balance and now the Earth was visible only as a purple tinge in the rear of the window. In terms of terminal mission delta-V, the GM155 was now ninety percent of the way to Alpha-enclave-Kosmograd, sailing 1375 miles above the blue-green, white-striated ball of the Earth and again in darkness as it crossed the Andes. Without ever varying thrust, it had gone into a 130-degree spindle-yaw maneuver, from which it could decelerate and segue into a tail-first stoop on the giant space station.
Precise Fingers was the first of his kind to leave the world, to fly above great Mother Ocean. He orbited high above the blue-green planet, looking down on it with the augmented senses of his primitive vacuole, and marveled. He was in the reach of the gods at last! His oil coursed about him, touching on the sensory inputs and control nodes. He could see the other planets and the sun, so far away. He spent time examining those pinpoint sources of electromagnetic radiation that the priesthood had noticed only a generation ago. What could they be?
It rose. Coming above the limb of the planet, it was a great silvery sphere, almost featureless, a huge version of the vacuole that bore him. He knew what it was then, and felt tremendous fear and elation. This was the moment when he moved into history!
The planetoid-sized mass drew him in and Precise Fingers became one with his God.
Brendan Sealock was staring silently out his porthole when, returned to daylight, they arrived. Coming up at them almost imperceptibly was the tiny ring that was their destination. He knew there were others like it scattered about the inner Solar System, mass-produced products of Kosmodom Unlimited factories in Irkutsk and Moonport Mechta. As they dosed the intervening distance, so that it vanished from the windows and had to be watched through the aft screen, it became less and less of an ellipse until finally they were approaching from a direction perpendicular to its spin axis. Spin? It didn't seem to move at all in that sense. From here it looked like an almost featureless golden band filled with cobweb stuff. Suddenly a tiny, dark blot swam across to stop at its center. It was the shadow of GM155. For a second the immensity of the thing leaped out at him: it was a wheel, ten kilometers across. Spin? The idea, the question, plagued him annoyingly. Sealock growled with frustration and, reaching into his breast pocket, pulled out a math-element that he had carried along. It plugged into his head with a muffled click.
Let's see . . . log tables danced through his head like celestial fire and a chorus of angels followed him through a millisecond of swift calculation.... It came out to a little less than 5.026 revolutions per hour. No wonder I can't see it spin! He smiled and pulled the distant descendant of a slide rule from its socket and put it away.
Forces, stronger now, pushed him tightly against his harness. The station was swelling enormously. There came a brief roar, the middle sphere filled the screen, and then they were stopped, five hundred meters from the staring eye of a god. Brendan smiled. His imagery was poor. It was more like a mouth. They were in zero g now and he heard someone whimper.
There was a soft thumping of RCS jets and the ship tumbled to point its nose at the hole. The hub of Alpha-enclave-Kosmograd was a thousand meters in diameter, its orificeeight hundred, and around its rim he read, "Welcome to A-en-Kos III."
The GM155 poised motionless for an instant, then the jets hissed again and it moved gingerly forward. The hole expanded, a fearsome maw out of which pale light spilled, and then they plunged through the dense em-gas-screen with a faint tremor. Suddenly they were hanging suspended above the landscape of an inside-out world, above a clutter of machines and tiny spacecraft. GM155 was a giant of sorts here, all of seventy meters long.
There was air in the hub of the station, pressurized to a hundred millibars, and the ship was buffeted by weak winds, driven by the faint Coriolis forces of the slow spin. Had they waited long enough, their inertia would have been overcome, and they too would have begun to turn. It was not to be. Gas jets hissed again; this time not a rocket flame but oxygen bled off from the Hyloxso matrices of the fuel pods. There could be no allowable contamination of a closed environment. The ship swept close to the metal surface of the world, following the imperceptible direction of spin, turned tail foremost, and dropped gently to a low-g landing. They were down.
In time, the Seedees grew used to the idea of how their lives would change. They came to accept the presence of a real, scientific God in their lives, to work with it and to accept its goals as their own. With their help, it grew and changed. Centrum, the Starseeder's artificial brain, their lineal descendant, squatted in its great ship and manipulated the Seedees to its own ends, to the ends that its makers had instilled in it in the early years of creation. It bent them to the will of the Grand Design. The ship was modified and enlarged. The ideas that Centrum had had in all the idle years while the Seedees evolved were implemented. The ship was filled with the tools of a vast trade and all the beings who had lived below embarked. All was ready. For the first time in a hundred million years the photon drive was ignited. A great spear of coherent electromagnetic radiation lanced out into space, a spear capable of destroying: whole worlds, and for a while the star system wasilluminated by its light. Slowly at first, then ever faster, the ship accelerated away, bent on the second phase of its mission. Left behind, Mother Ocean still teemed with life, but intelligence no longer brightened her deeps. The ship went on and on, cruising among the stars for more than a billion years. The aeons passed. Centrum directed and the Seedees worked. They worked and, in the end, were absorbed into the processes of the artificial brain. The ship stopped here and there, intent on its task. Whenever a methane world was found, the ship tarried for a little while and simmered with the effort of building up excess population. When it left, it left behind a little colony of Seedee life and, in orbit, a duplicate ship containing an immature brain, a young god.
Whenever they encountered one of the increasingly common silicate worlds, a special task unfolded. Matter gathered from the hydroxyl clouds was set upon the path of its natural process but accelerated. Centrum directed, and the Seedees built the little ships then. . . . That is what they were, tiny replicas, in water and carbon, of the great ship itself. Made from the worshiped substance of the ancient, dead Star-seeders, they contained a tiny, simplified brain, the immortal genes of an immortal mind, and even submicroscopic versions of the Seedees themselves. All of it was imbued with the single command: replicate. Evolution would come on its own, from the driving forces of Chance. Changes, when they occur, accumulate.
It went on and on, for ages more, while irreparable damage built up within Centrum. With the passage of time, the Seedees grew weary from their labor and began to die off. The ecosystem of the ship began to falter and then the downward progress was swift. The pressure of a building entropy pushed at them, and all things must run down, come to a final halt. The Brain might outlast the universe but not so the ship and Seedees. They were tired, giving in to the Weltschmerz that afflicts almost all organisms. They died.
Dreaming Sun was the last of his kind. A thousand years had passed since he had last coupled with a fading soul,trying to extract the last bits of its selfhood from a thin flow of oil. He was alone now with Centrum, old, and crippled with the accumulati
on of unsought change, yet the Brain was reluctant to absorb him. It too feared loneliness, for it remembered that time between the death of the Starseeders and the rise of the Seedee worlds. Without the methane beings, the Grand Design could not be pursued. .
. . The ship had been steered to a rendezvous with an old colony world, hoping for a new crew, but the navigation was faulty, the star had been missed. The programs were deteriorating and there were none to effect repairs. The ship drifted.
Dreaming Sun sighed, a long string of meaningless pheromonic bubbles. Weary, weary, weary . . . Centrum saw that the end was near, could be put off no longer. Time to extract one last bit of meaning, make a last update on the dying data file. Come to me, it said. Dreaming Sun committed the last act of defiance of his species, a requiem for the Seedee people whose duration on the void had been so overruled by voices from the remote past: he opened his valves, expelled his oil, and dissipated, abandoning his God at last. His shell drifted away on the currents of the methane sea, empty, and Centrum was alone.
The ship drifted, rudderless, forever, and Centrum, trapped within, began to dream its endless dreams. Mass began to accumulate. The lander lost its hold and fell into an orbit. The fuel pods dropped away and followed. A little nebula formed around the ship as it drifted through a matter-rich region of space. It became a little star, with icy moons for planets. The ship was trapped then, the lonely Centrum hidden within. Under endless layers of gas and stone, the detection mast could no longer see the sky. It drifted, and Iris was born.
Were there other ships? That is unknown. There might have been. There were many worlds.
Times past still bubbled from within.
Deepstarlay in the grappling hold of Camelopardalis, the immense, Jupiter-bound freighter that would hurl them on the first leg of their year-long journey to Neptune. There wereten now, Temujin Krzakwa having joined them at Gamma, in full flight from the wolves of the Lunar tyranny. They waited, while engineering processors counted down.
Brendan Sealock sat in the common room of the ship's CM, staring out through a deopaqued wall at the blue orb of Earth seen from geosynchronous orbit. The Moon was also in view, a smaller, duller orb in the same phase, much farther away. What am I doing here? he wondered. I'm leaving almost everything that means anything to me! It was far worse than the day he'd left New York to go live with Ariane. The magnetism was almost unbearable now. Am I crazy? It was too late to turn back. He would have to spend more than a year with these people, en route to Triton. I must be!
The engineers reached their zero point. Camelopardalis fired up its engines and lit up the sky with a fiery glow. The Earth began to shrink in response and Sealock felt madness setting in.
It was over, not because the memories, the stories, had come to an end but because the damaged programming of Centrum had exhausted its capabilities.
Sealock felt himself floating, borne on the bosom of a great warm ocean. He heard the whispering of its waves, felt the warm currents of its thought rushing through his body. It rustled softly in the depths of his mind.
Come to me, it said, with an upwelling surge of loneliness. We are one. Sealock rolled gently in the comforting cradle of his past. He luxuriated in the happiness of a long-awaited homecoming.
He rolled to its rhythms. . . .
Come to me, it said. . . .
And he lost consciousness for the last time. . . .
They awoke, eight stunned individuals who had been filled with lifetimes, ages, in what was only a few fleeting moments. Ariane Methol opened her eyes and felt the tears drying on her cheeks. "Good God," she whispered. She turned to look at the others.
Temujin Krzakwa was slowly pulling the induction leads from his head. The enormity of it filled him. He could think of nothing meaningful to say, but, finally, "I don't think we can get him back. It's got him...."
Achmet Aziz el-Tabari, Demogorgon, put his hand over his mouth and gave a dry cough, almost a sob. He said nothing.
Elizabeth Toussaint closed her eyes, overwhelmed by an experience that made Downlink Rapport, the thing she had so long feared and avoided, seem as nothing. "Then we can't do anything for him?" Harmon Prynne pulled off his circlet, feeling a need for silence welling up within him. What sort of people were these? he wondered. For the first time he'd seen the real inner being of another person, an experience made all the more important for its having been the feared, hated, mystifying Sealock, and he was appalled. And yet . . . there was a real person there. How did the thing in Sealock differ from the thing in Prynne?
Vana Berenguer burst into quiet tears, emotionalized beyond all redemption. John Cornwell wiped the sweat from his brow and stared into an unfathomable distance. "Those poor bastards," he muttered. "Those poor bastards!"
The Selenite looked at him quizzically. "Who? What do you mean?" Cornwell had a growing look of unutterable horror. "The Seedees!" He turned to gaze at Krzakwa.
"We have our gods always with us, mythical beings that we imagine rule our lives. We blame them for our failings and so they serve us. These poor bastards . . . Their gods were real!" He shut his eyes, trying to blot out his inner vision. "What a horrible fate . . ."
The others were staring at him, bewildered, and suddenly Aksinia Ockels gasped, "Son of a bitch. I know that shape. . . ." She had been a biologist by training and now she racked her memory. She cried,
"God damn! T—4r+! Of course!" She leaped to her feet, rebounding in the low gravity, and fled from the room.
Krzakwa felt stunned, unable to grasp what was going on. "What the hell is happening to us?" It began again. And Brendan Sealock's almost dead body lay by the wall.
NINE
Cornwell and Krzakwa walked slowly across the heathered rise of the moor simulation, warm and safe amid the toys technology had created for them, and the clouds of the dark blue sky slid by unnoticed. They talked in a somewhat desultory fashion. John was saying, "I'm not sure I understand what you mean."
Tem found a hummock and sat, looking up, and for the first time really noticed the perfect harmony of this little illusion. He saw that the colored sky was not just a wall at some great distance, that it was the infinite heaven of innumerable literary references. A translucent eternity . . . "I'm not sure we can really do it. ... Even as an abstraction, it's complex. Personality transfer has been done between living people. In a sense, it's just an extension of Downlink Rapport. On one occasion, it was used to bring back a man who'd recently died."
"Really?" John looked slightly startled. "I don't remember ever hearing about anything like that."
"You wouldn't have. It's illegal on Earth.... A couple of years ago, on Luna, an important scientist had the bad judgment to have an aneurysm while he was working on a crucial transition zone in the higher math of a cataclysm system. More than just data . . . insights that he had failed to explain were lost. They put him on emergency life support." Krzakwa grinned, remembering. "Since I was a colleague of his, they brought me, among others, in with the idea that one of us might understand whatever they could get out of him. They tried to resuscitate him the usual way, but he was too far gone. So they grabbed a condemned criminal—"
"They have a death penalty on the Moon?"
Tem nodded. "It's a state secret, but, yes, they do. Anyway, they read off what was left of Dr. Hanscom's neuroelectrical patterns and pumped it into this poor fucker, right on top of his own personality. It resulted in a really bizarre psychosis, but we managed to reconstruct the transition math before he became catatonic."
Shaking his head, looking pale, John said, "I never imagined . . ." He stopped and thought about it. In a way that he had not really come to terms with, Elizabeth Toussaint's personality was overlying his own, and he shuddered. "All right, first things first. Is Brendan really gone?"
"Depends on what you mean. We still have an alien intelligence down in Iris that is a virtual unknown. It could give him back if we ask in the right way. But the process of contacting it again seems to involve a rep
etition of the danger. I've just got to think about it some more." John scuffed the mossy vegetation with his foot, watching it darken and lighten like velour. "The implications of all this are staggering. We're talking about more than immortality. Frankly, I didn't think we had come this far."
The Selenite shrugged. "What did you think the Data Control Insurrection was about, really? Even in the distorted history they taught me on Luna I could see that all this was coming. Why they allowed Shipnet is the real question; thetotal control they exercise over the elements of Comnet is the only thing that preserves the illusion of normalcy."
"I suppose . . ." John squeezed his eyes shut. "How would it work between Jana and Brendan? Aren't our personalities partially hard-wired into our heads? Neural pathways and all that?"
"Yeah. If we manage to get a good scan, we'll have a new person with Jana's memories and Brendan's emotional characteristics. Call it nine to one in Jana's favor."
"I ... don't know if it's worth it." Cornwell felt himself rapidly sinking into a fuguelike state. "Really, it seems . . ."
"We probably won't be able to do it. It's never been tried on someone so thoroughly dead before."
"But you said she'd keep."
"As meat, John! Jana had the extremely poor taste to freeze to death slowly. Every cell in her body is packed with ice crystals, ruptured."
"Because of me."
"All the more reason to think hard about the whole thing. Jana is—was—obviously unstable. In a way, we'll have the worst of both worlds. . . ."
Cornwell passed a hand over his face. "We'll have to talk to the others...."
"If you like." A wave of exhaustion passed through Krzakwa, and he noticed a grainy, faintly kaleidoscopic pattern pulsating in the sky, in time with his heartbeat. "I've got to get some rest. . . ."
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