Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  With a leap, the Worthy One came out of the water and, since the magic was almost gone from him, he thought to himself to find a way to use the last of it to defeat the woman. One way only presented itself to his mind. So he transformed himself not into a fox, or into a dog, but instead into a heap of grain. And the woman, as a hen, pecked at the grain and swallowed it down inside her. At this the magic of the Worthy One and the magic of the woman met, and cancelled each other, the woman became again only a woman, and her fort vanished, and her power of destroying the entirety of forest vanished, and she could no longer metallise the clouds or burn the air with fire.

  And ever after, because the battle made a noise like thunder, that lake was known as Turve Liant. [That is, ‘Thunder of waters’.]

  ‘You have been a clever adversary,’ said the woman, standing again on two legs, and with arms flapping in place of wings; ‘and now you are hidden in a place where I cannot harm you without harming myself, or kill you without killing myself. But since you have named me, and taken upon yourself some of my power, then I will do the only thing that I can do, and that is to pass the name onto another, and out of me, out of my very body.’ And so the grain inside her kindled, and she became pregnant with a child. And she took her brother, who, though made simple in his thoughts by the blow, was not dead; and she took another Fantoum to be her servant, and she left the forest. When the time came she gave birth to a girl, and gave her the name Death, and so that true name passed from the woman and she became as any other woman.

  That is the end of the story of the woman who bore death.

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  ~ * ~

  Anticopernicus

  1. The Mighty Adam

  The visible matter we see around us (including the mountains, planets, stars and galaxies) make up a paltry 4 per cent of the total matter and energy content of the universe — and of that 4 per cent, most of it is in the form of hydrogen and helium, with probably only 0. 03 per cent taking the form of the heavy elements. Most of the universe is made of a mysterious, invisible material of totally unknown origin . . . 23 per cent of the universe is made of a strange, undetermined substance called dark matter, which has weight, surrounds galaxies in a gigantic halo, but is totally invisible. Dark matter is so pervasive and abundant that, in our own Milky Way galaxy, it outweighs all the stars by a factor of 10 . . . But perhaps the greatest surprise is that 73 per cent of the universe, by far the largest amount, is made of a totally unknown form of energy called dark energy, or the invisible energy hidden in the vacuum of space. Introduced by Einstein himself in 1917 and then later discarded (he called it his ‘greatest blunder’), dark energy, or the energy of nothing or empty space, is now re-emerging as the driving force in the entire universe. This dark energy is now believed to create a new antigravity field which is driving the galaxies apart.

  [Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds (2005), 12]

  Let’s call this single, originary atom Adam.

  It is all that exists. It exists and that’s all. It lasts from the beginning to the end, and that’s all there is - just it, alone in its spacetime Eden. It existed from the beginning to the end and then it exists again, backwards (as it were) through time, from end to beginning, setting up a complicated interference pattern with itself. You see, as yet there is no ‘time’ or ‘space’, not as we currently understand it, and so this is a more natural progression than you might think. So it arrives back when it starts and exists once again following the arrow of time forwards. This means (there’s no time - it doesn’t happen sequentially like this, but permit me the approximation) that ‘now’ there are two atoms, coexisting in the same ‘location’. It’s alright, though. The topography of the pre-universe can bear this. The atom exists, moving forwards and backwards through time (40 billion years, perhaps) 1080 times. This number happens to be the density threshold, according to the pre-universe topography, beyond which the copresence of so much ‘matter’ becomes unstable. The reduplicated unity breaks down and the big bang occurs, spreading this matter into - or more accurately, creating the spacetime of - the observable universe in which we live.

  Running ‘backwards’, as it would later appear, and however awkwardly inexpressive that kind of talk is, entailed a swimming-against-the-stream friction - a tenfold force, generating ten times the tourbillions of friction in the spacetime medium, such that the matter running back from the end to the big-beginning brought with it not the same amount but ten times as much mass. But that’s a trivial thing, a nothing, compared to the profounder mystery; and that profounder mystery is the incomparably vaster shroud which we call dark energy, the halo that surrounds Adam and all his 1080 iterations of himself.

  What is the dark energy? Good, right, yes. Although what is not always a question that gets answered. Nor is why.

  ~ * ~

  2. First Contact

  I saw that the shanty town had grown over the graves and that the crowd lived among the memorials.

  [James Fenton, 1983]

  It was the strangest summer of Ange Mlinko’s life. It was for everybody on the planet, of course. But it was rather more strange for Ange than most.

  The first contact with alien life, and everybody was intensely aware of the strangeness of this. Ange felt a more acute relationship to the experience, though. She was to crew the Leibniz, to meet the aliens in person. And then she wasn’t. Then she was, again. She was flown to Florida, where it was very hot. Then she wasn’t; Norodom Chantaraingsey was to take her place. She was flown to New York, and had four days down-time, which she spent as a flaneur, wandering the streets and squares. New York was as crowded as ever - could not, in truth, grow any more crowded, the space having long reached saturation point. But the composition of the crowds seemed different. She overheard English conversations no more than one in three. The manmade canyons echoed and reverberated. At a café she drank latté, and eavesdropped on a woman trying to impress a man with her traveller’s tales. Mars est renommée par ses falaises. Et ses rouges, bien sûr. Silence is the name of the sea. The frontage of St Mark’s was swarmed upon by roosting pigeons, to the point where you could no longer see the stone, like an underwater escarpment covered with silver-grey-blue mussels. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you ten thousand times.

  A message came through on her phone: she was on again. So she packed up at the hotel, and went to the airport. But as she waited for the flight back to Florida she got another message: apologies for earlier confusion, but she was off again, it was definitely not going to be her. She might as well go home.

  She went home.

  Months followed, summer months. But anticipation made her a stranger in her own house. She looked past the table, on which sat a bowl of unstoned olives, black as sloes, to the window. The garden was pristine. Sunlight possessed it. A cutlass-shaped fir-tree, green as emerald. Like everybody else she watched the Leibniz, crewed by twenty people including Chantaraingsey but not including her. The alien intelligence, or intelligences, or - who knew what they were, or what they wanted - had approached as close as the Oort cloud, and there they waited, patiently, as far as anybody could see, for the Leibniz to trawl slowly, slowly, slowly out to the rendezvous. Communication had been intermittent, although the aliens’ command of English was fluent and idiomatic. But most of the questions beamed out at them had been returned with non sequiturs. ‘What do you look like? Where are you from? By what political system do you organise your society? Are you an ancient race of beings? How do you travel faster than light? Do you come in peace? How did you find out about us? Where are you from? What do you look like?’

  ‘Fingers are a mode of madness — and toes! Toes? Toes!’

  ‘What do you mean? Do you mean you don’t possess fingers and toes, and that the sight of them distresses you? Do you have flippers, or tentacles, or do you manipulate your environment with force-fields directly manoeuvred by your minds? We can wear mittens - if it distresses you. We can wear shoes on our feet a
nd boxing-gloves on our hands! Not that we wish to box with you ... we have no belligerent feelings towards you at all.’

  ‘We love your fingers and toes! They are adorable! Adorable! But mad.’

  ‘We don’t understand. We don’t understand! Are we missing some nuance? Can you explain?’

  ‘We count these ice pieces by the billion, and all of it inert! Every shard. ‘

  ‘How far have you come? Have you come very far? Our observations indicate you’ve come at least from Beta Cygni. That’s an awfully long way! Your craft is clearly very large . . . are there many of you?’

  ‘Many of us? All of us. The totality of us.’

  This was a worry: had they come to colonise? Or was this an obscure alien-joke? Who knew what passed for a sense of humour, amongst the Cygnics? And how many was ‘all’?

  ‘We are happy to welcome you, but naturally we are apprehensive to.’

  ‘Multicellular life. Particellular life. It’ll do the crack! crack! like a heart attack! Come to us—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come to us - Come come to us—’

  ‘Really? You’re inviting us to you?’

  ‘Come come come to us—’

  There was no missing the craft: a huge device with a friable boundary, or perhaps a fractal boundary, and the approximate shape of four connected oblate spheres: it had decelerated spectacularly into the Oort cloud, such that every sensing device and observational algorithm in Earth had been drawn to it.

  ‘—come to us and we’ll be waiting. We’ve seen all your television and your cloud-images, and the data that rushes and rushes and rushes, so be assured we will not hurt you. Us? Hurt you? Pull the other one. ‘

  English, the experts agreed, only because that language had had such a historic prominence in televisual and early internet culture. They must have picked up a transmission, and come to investigate. A surprising thing - ‘As if, to quote Eva Tsvetaeva, ‘Europeans had somehow heard about some sand-fleas living on Bondi Beach and had travelled all the way around the world to meet with them. Why would they? They had the whole cosmos to explore! Why should they have the remotest interest in a tiny blue-white planet orbiting an insignificant star in a lesser prong of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy?’

  But here they were, so there had to be a reason. Maybe they are entomologists. Maybe they just happened across us. Maybe they have a thing for insignificant life forms.

  ‘Why have you come to visit us? Why us? We’re an insignificant, primitive civilisation by Galactic standards - surely we are! We don’t even have faster-than-light technologies!’

  ‘We debated a long time about whether to come and visit you.’’ But despite further questions there was nothing more forthcoming about the nature or extent of that we, or the precise manner by which the debating took place.

  ‘Are they communists, or fascists?’ asked Lidija Cho. ‘Are they democrats or anarchists? By what logic, if any, do they orchestrate their societies? We just don’t know.’

  Why did the question of coming to visit such an insignificant, technologically backward species as Homo sapiens require long debate? Come, or don’t come - what did it matter?

  Naturally, many suspected a trap. Many thought the Leibniz would never return. But from the tone of the alien communication . . .

  Why not come closer in? Why do they loiter out in the Oort-distances, when their technology is so far advanced over ours, and would make the trip so much easier? We tried inviting them. ‘We have scientific bases on Mars, and on our own moon, and various inhabited craft in space, mostly in Earth orbit. But if you are worried about scaring us, or overawing us, or even damaging us, you could still come to the orbit - let’s say - of Jupiter, and still have many billions of kilometres of naked space by way of quarantine between you and us. That way the Leibniz, launched and fuelled and on its way, would rendezvous with you in weeks, rather than in a year.’

  No reply.

  ‘You can understand how eager we are to meet! Perhaps the passage of time means nothing to you; but it passes very quickly for us. Perhaps your lifespans are millennial, but ours are measured out in paltry decades.’

  ‘Our lifespans are not at issue. The emmet and binaries, binaries in everything. A mad profusion of boundaries. Oh, the scintillations!’

  ‘Then why will you come no closer?’

  ‘No closer? This is close!’

  The consensus was that, for a species of interstellar travellers like the Cygnics, the distance from the Oort cloud to Earth was almost too small to count; and that was why they were so cavalier about it. There was also the feeling that the Cygnics were averse to being too proximate to the sun.

  ‘Maybe our solar radiation is toxic to them! Maybe they are a deep-space species, only truly at home in the dark between the stars? Why can’t we just ask them!’

  ‘We can, but they are not very forthcoming. Or they answer with chatter and chaff. Or they hum and hoom like ents. Or—’

  The Leibniz was hastily refitted with extra fuel (tanks and blocks), and beefed-up acceleration couches. Then it ignited a long burn and began its curving passage out to meet the aliens. The whole world watched. Ange Mlinko watched too, of course. That should have been me, on board there, she thought to herself.

  ~ * ~

  Alicia came to visit. ‘I don’t like you being all alone in this big house,’ she said.

  ‘But I like to be alone.’

  ‘I know,’ said Alicia, ‘you like to be alone. I don’t like you liking being alone. What if you had an accident? All alone here. You might hurt yourself.’

  ‘If I were with somebody else, they might hurt me.’

  ‘Don’t they test you people for paranoia?’ (You people meant, ‘pilots’.)

  ‘How little I crave . . .’ Ange started to say. But, with a short sigh, she gave up on the sentiment.

  ‘People like to be around people,’ said Alicia, speaking seriously. ‘That’s just how people are.’

  ‘I’m people too,’ said Ange Mlinko. ‘And I don’t like that. I’ll tell you something else - people are seldom as missed as they like to think.’

  Alicia made her mouth into a ~. ‘You’re not the first divorcee to go through a misanthropic phase, you know. Once you start dating again, your cold-shouldering of humankind will thaw. Then you can waste-bin your inner Scrooge, and reboot your smile.’

  Ange didn’t say so, but her preference for solitude had nothing to do with her divorce, now three years behind her. The problem with the marriage had not been anything sparky or oppressive or unbearable; it had been, precisely, its blandness. She had chosen a husband who did not interfere with her aversion to human intimacy, which was both his appeal and, of course, the grounds of her eventual disaffection. Not the sex. She had never minded the sex, perhaps because she had never seen it as especially intimate; or to put it more precisely, its intimacy was of the banal, somatic kind that did not disturb her. Alicia’s theory was that she had never had the right kind of sex, the sort that ruffles the mind as much as it gratifies the body. It was true she had never had that kind of sex. But, if she were honest, she disbelieved such things ever happened, except in the self-deluding, talk-themselves-into-it hysteria of people convincing themselves the earth moved. The earth didn’t move for her. She moved from the earth. Eppur si muove. Silence is a more intense experience than moans and gasps and grunts.

  ‘And I don’t want to hear about you growing up with four noisy siblings,’ said Alicia. ‘Five kids is not even that large a family! Time was, when families of twelve were normal.’

  ‘Since you don’t want to hear about it,’ said Ange, with asperity, ‘I shall not talk about it.’

  The two friends were silent for a while, and Alicia drank her spritzer, and ate an olive from the plate, and stared through the window at the sunlit garden. ‘It’s very lovely and what’s the word?’

  ‘I don’t know what the word is.’


  ‘Pristine. Neat. Is it a person, or a robot?’

  ‘You mean, gardening? The latter.’

  ‘It’s very nice.’ And then, after a pause: ‘I’m sorry you’re not on the Leibniz. I know you’re disappointed. But look on the bright side! If these Cygnic aliens are as horrible as all the rumours say, none of that crew will ever see home again.’