by Larry Niven
Wieland devised manipulators that would ignore the content of the coating of the chambers. The entities took those apart, along with the linear motor they had built, and remade the material into a network of cables to hold the asteroid together.
Fear had been discovered.
It was Set who proposed resuming the mission to reach Earth. The analysts of the Library had learned why it had been included: to provide information for humans who came to collect the stuff of the asteroid. It was nothing like the entirety of human knowledge, merely what had been deemed useful enough to have nearby. If humans were going to use the asteroid for supplies, obviously they must be able to deal with such situations safely.
Target One was too fragile now for the original design to be used without tearing it apart.
But the Library had other designs in it.
* * *
Getting across the concept of fiction nearly started another war all by itself, but there were references to events such as, e.g., the expansion of the Sun into giant phase, which had obviously not happened yet. Still, some of the ideas looked feasible … though a few diehards never did quit looking for the Dean Drive.
The rest began looking for another rock.
And, what the hell: they found one.
There remained only the pushing and pulling. It would take longer, but they hadn’t been set a time limit.
XII
Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
When Toby logged on to send e-mail to proudrobot, he found one waiting for him.
Subject: Start reading for content, dammit!
The body of the message was blank. There was just the signature:
“Details of my evil plan are available in the brochures at the front desk.”
May looked at that, then said, “I picture an international conspiracy of avaricious psychiatrists, who turned him loose on the world to drum up business.”
Toby nodded, signed off, and went to the little antique writing desk in the entry hall. Behind the writing paper in the middle drawer was indeed a stack of brochures printed on pale blue paper. He handed May a copy and looked at another. There was a head-and-shoulders shot of Colin Clive in full emotive gush on the front. The title was:
TEN THINGS I CAN DO TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE!
1) CULTIVATE GOOD JOB HABITS—Always take work home with me.
2) PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT—Dispose of waste thoroughly.
3) CHECK MY WORK—Examine for flaws and correct them, using all available analysis resources.
4) PREVENT UNPLANNED SURPRISES—Remember that not everything that looks flawed is.
5) TAKE ACTION—Deal with the worst problem first.
6) PLAN PROJECTS IN ADVANCE—Find a place where I can think things over and make any necessary improvements for as long as it takes.
7) PRACTICE GOOD FENG SHUI—Remove destructive influences from the workplace.
8) BE CONSIDERATE OF OTHERS—Don’t force people to do things they don’t want or can’t enjoy, and don’t let others do so.
9) RETURN LOST PROPERTY—Even if the original holder is dead, someone is the rightful owner.
10) LEND ASSISTANCE WHERE NEEDED—Watch the skies.
“Translation,” Toby said. “Steal nanos, build his own with fail-safes and recycle materials … and it sounds like he can tap into the network for extra processing power … to analyze his own DNA. Four seems to be the Wyoming trick. Then killing the two Feds, going to prison deliberately—Jesus, he must have known in advance what he’d be going through with the execution!” Toby shuddered. “Then getting rid of the bad eggs in prison. Number eight I’m not getting.”
“I am,” May said. “When’s the last time you saw a pregnant woman?”
“I remember there was a lesbian couple at Bern-Belp. Why?”
“Pregnancy is way down. I don’t think women are getting pregnant unless they really want to. And not all of them.”
“I wonder how. Okay, that’s number eight …‘enjoy’?”
“Maybe they don’t become fertile unless they have an orgasm.”
Toby blinked. “He was obsessed with rapists. Believed there were genes for it. This way they wouldn’t get their victims pregnant.”
May ran back to the screen again and did a search. “The price of wool has gone through the roof. Number seven again. Sheep and goats create deserts, and they aren’t breeding. Nonhuman females don’t have orgasms. Goat Flu. It’s also being blamed for reduced human fertility. Toby, there aren’t any stories about it as such … raw data, yes, hmm … but there are a lot of sudden retirements in the media. And some disappearances.”
“Big Brother knows best. Anything else? Other animals?”
“Nope. Humans, sheep, goats.”
“Jesus. He must have analyzed their biochemistry and found what distinguishes them from every other— Wait, what about other primates?”
“Wait.… New orangutan pregnancy in the San Diego Zoo last month.”
“My God, how the hell could … oh. If there’s a nano attached to every cell, that’s a network with about four trillion nodes. How did he keep it from taking people over? —No, wait. With limited connections per node, no matter how big the network is it’ll never exceed a certain complexity. The Briareus nanos have ten, which is more than our neurons average. If he held it down to, say, four or five, he’d have enormous memory and processing, but his brain would still have the veto.”
May nodded and said, “JNAIT would be number nine, and number ten must be … hang on, he turned Goat Flu loose in November. He must have spotted Target One then and not told anyone.”
“So he made all his preparations for pickup starting then, but he only made contact with us last week,” Toby mused.
“With you. He wasn’t expecting me. The clothes here are new, and he didn’t get me new ID.”
Toby wasn’t listening. “Goat Flu was released to create a diversion. The Feds must have noticed Briareus much later and started the wheels turning to come after me, then got their act together Thursday.”
May got where he was headed. “Connors didn’t expect them to move for another month, when the birth rate drops near zero.”
He nodded. “You’re right. They’ll want me to work on the ‘problem.’” Suddenly he stood at attention. “No. He noticed the rock before November. He released the nano so the drop in births would happen around the time of its arrival.”
“He wants double the panic? Why?”
“He used to say that sometimes the only way to call attention to bad construction was to set fire to the building. May, this is going to topple governments. Lots of governments. Bad governments.”
May said slowly, “In places where wool herds affect everyone’s welfare, women usually get a bad deal.”
“Not Westralia.”
“They’re an industrial nation with some wool production. Like Scotland. There’ll still be a few—” Her eyes widened, and she said, “I bet every lesbian couple that tries to conceive is successful.”
She was visibly trying not to laugh. Toby thought about it, and grinned. “I want odds.” He thought more, and frowned. “How did he spot Target One? It’s not producing the exhaust we expected, it’s way late, and it’s barely visible.”
“Could the network have let him deduce what was changed, from it being late?”
“I … hope not. I don’t think so. He still seems human, and if he developed that kind of mentality he wouldn’t be.”
“Connors could fake being normal.”
“He wouldn’t need to. He’d be able to do any damn thing he pleased without attracting attention. He could get into the computers that monitor stuff and have them ignore whatever he pleased. Hell, in principle he could plug himself into the Internet and…”
He was silent for so long that May said, “Could he shut down someone’s
speech center?”
Toby started, looked her in the eye, and said, “Yes.”
“I was kidding.”
“I’m not. These things can send and receive. I realized today I don’t get horny until you do.”
May astounded him by saying, “That son of a bitch!”
“Huh?”
“Now you’ll know when I’m just flirting!”
A hitherto unsuspected survival reflex kept Toby from expressing the slightest approval. “Women won’t need the extra edge, though.”
“You think it’s everybody?”
“I think it will be.”
May still looked irritated, but said only, “So what did you just think of?”
“Huh?”
“Internet?” she reminded.
“Oh. He might be able to plug himself directly into the Internet and convince computers that he was just an added processor. He could tell anything—he could tell everything what to do.”
May was grave. “Do you think that’s what happened to other civilizations? Interstellar civilizations. Why nobody’s come to see us?”
He hadn’t considered it. “Alien,” he corrected absently, thinking. “They’d never become interstellar civilizations. That’s the point.”
“Is my word choice important to this conversation?”
“Don’t ever ask Connors that, okay? Not unless you have a week to spare. —May, that could be exactly what happened to them,” he said, with growing dread. “There could be planets full of immortal intelligences that use nanos to get all the resources they need at home. And I may have started it here.”
“I doubt it.”
He clutched at hope. “Why?”
“Because you told me Connors hates rape. If he can reconstruct us by remote control—and your performance this morning suggests he can,” she said, beaming, “—and control processing networks, I dare say he can also keep us from thinking of that. Obviously he didn’t. Instead he helped with Briareus and gave you credit for curing AIDS. He wants mankind going out there, not sitting around playing videogames to pass the time between meals of freshly synthesized lotus. And keeping rapists from reproducing is planning for future generations. He wants good people going into space and living there, and he’s made something that’ll take care of at least one of those things. Maybe both. Remember what you told me about planning? Years, build a house. Decades, plant an orchard. Lifetimes, found a university. What are you planning for if you remake a world?”
“Eternity,” he realized. “And we thought we had ambitions!”
“We still do,” she said. “I want to look at the data on Briareus. What it’s doing now.”
He nodded vigorously. “Me too.” As he linked up, he said, “That oxygen exhaust makes sense, you know. To nanos it’s poison. Thing is, I don’t know how they’re accelerating it. It doesn’t lend itself readily to linear accelerator thrust. Too many electrons in the outer shell for anions. And cations come apart too easily.”
“I’ll look up the plume while you look up funny drives.”
“Deal.”
Toby found a proposal that was so relevant it was annoying. Make an anode rod and a cathode pipe out of iridium, put the anode in the center, throw in everything you find in a stony asteroid, run high current through until it melts—and the crippling drawback of photovoltaics, that they make only DC, made them perfect for that—and oxygen comes out along the rod while a molten mix of metals, carbon, and silicon flows out the other end of the pipe. Feed the oxygen into a tube, with a laser beam running down the middle to heat it to plasma, then give the plasma a hearty shove with magnetic constriction and you have fast exhaust. As it cools and recombines and interacts with solar wind, it glows. Some amiably deranged science-fiction writer had come up with it forty years back and, like so many of his kind, given it away for free—or anyway at fifty cents a word.
“I’ve found something,” May said.
“Me too. They’re making plasma with a laser and thrust with magnets.”
“Great. Toby, the mass and speed of the exhaust, and the motion of the plume, indicate that the mass it’s decelerating is around two hundred billion tons. And—well, the math isn’t certain this far ahead, but the deceleration it’s using doesn’t leave it slow enough to stay in orbit when it intercepts Earth, and it looks like it’s aimed dead on. Collision course.”
“Are you sure?”
The person who had designed and launched the vehicle that had put Briareus flawlessly into its original orbit just looked at him.
“I have no idea why I said that. Yes I do. We knew Target One had a lot of metal—one reason we wanted it—but its mass was fifteen to twenty billion tons. This isn’t Target One, it’s ten times as big.”
“I know.”
“What is that thing?”
“I don’t know.”
Toby looked at the data on her screen. “So tiny to do so much. —I wonder if that was Goliath’s last thought.”
May smiled weakly. “We’ve spent our lives fighting Philistines. If this hits, it’ll kill an awful lot of them.”
“And probably us.”
“There is that.”
XIII
Tennis anyone?
—HUMPHREY BOGART
Most of the mass of the asteroid belt was pebbles, with a little dust—not much of the latter, as the primordial stuff had either stuck to things or blown out past the Kuyper Belt long since, and collisions were too rare to replenish the supply faster than it found things to stick to. Had there been a practical way of locating pebbles for collection, Briareus could have gathered enough mass to solidify the core and stop the instability in a matter of days. Unfortunately they were too small.
Big rocks were usually too far away or moving too fast to contact safely. Briareus was in a fairly eccentric orbit, so out near aphelion, other objects at the same distance from the Sun were usually moving significantly faster. Thorough observation and identification of the innumerable undistinguished specks in all directions (the entities were hindered in discussion of the work by the lack of any sort of vulgar terms in their language) allowed them to find a rock that was also in an eccentric orbit, so that its relative speed at closest approach would be a few score meters per second. They had most of a year to prepare for that.
The bag for dust collection was remade into a net. The original material wasn’t very good, so it was redesigned as strands of linked loops of buckytubes, with operators around the edge of the net.
The entities had never heard of chain mail.
The material they didn’t use for the net was made into braided cables of the same design, which were used to wrap the rolled net. An army of operators was gathered and instructed in a single function: linking together and pushing on other linked operators. Thousands of layers of these around the parcel would impart the speed necessary to fling it at the passing rock at the proper moment. The net would open, wrap around the target rock, and join together on the far side, and hundreds of miles of cable would thereafter connect the two rocks, which could then be drawn together.
They had never heard of a harpoon gun.
Which was a pity, as they had never heard of a Nantucket Sleigh Ride either.
Fortunately the new rock was passing to sunward, and they needed light, so no operators were jerked loose when the bindings suddenly dug in, spalled away some surface material, and yanked Target One along.
There was no record of it in the Library, but the late Warren Littlemeade had selected Target One in preference to scores of more dangerous Earthgrazers because its rotation was negligible.
Target Two was ten times as large, and it was spinning. It completed a rotation in just under thirty-one hours, which wasn’t terribly fast, but it made the ride very much more interesting for the entities as the cables wrapped around it and wound them in. Not very evenly.
As cable wound around the net holding Target Two, the increased speed of Target One in its orbit pulled it farther from the Sun. Target
Two was slowed in its own orbit, pulling it closer to the Sun. When rotation finally stopped, the two rocks were linked by a rigid tether.
The appalled entities had not been idle, and before the tether could get Target Two rotating in the opposite direction—they had never heard of bungee cords either, but they had worked out the principles—a torus, filled with operators and Wieland, was fired along the cable to where it met the capture net, which was at once bound firmly to the cable. The two asteroids maintained their orientation.
Unfortunately, this put Target Two between Target One and the Sun. Occultation was neither complete nor constant, but it presented a great hardship.
This lasted only until Wieland sent the torus back bearing conductive cables. The operators that had survived impact and linkage had resumed their default program and had been copying themselves, and Target Two was now rich with power production.
In principle, everyone could have moved everything to Target Two, detached Target One, and taken the larger rock to Earth. They never thought of it. They had been created to bring Target One to Earth, and that was hardwired into the processor of every individual operator. Sufficiently large clusters could have other ideas, but all such concepts worked against a terrific resistance. Even Set had given up the idea of ignoring Earth once the processors that had been damaged by (comparatively) high voltage were replaced.
They began winching the rocks together.
It took years. They had to build the oxygen drive earlier than planned, to compensate for the rotational changes from shortening the cable. And since it had to be on Two, because One was going to be crushed by the collision, that meant they were getting farther from the Sun. Not much, but some.
Wieland was killed when the rocks came close enough for gravity to make the winching easier. Until then, gravity had simply been accepted as the thing that made everything go around the Sun, and applying the concept to smaller objects had been unimportant. The collision happened earlier than expected, and the entity hadn’t gotten clear. It had been busy supervising the assembly of a thick iron plate.