by David Brin
Foreign infecting agents…
He looked at the estimate and whistled.
According to the bioassay, he should be dead.
Dead? Saul laughed. The damned machine seemed to think his blood was a froth of dangerous invaders. His bodily fluids were aswarm with horrible, nasty things, the smallest fraction of which should have killed him long ago!
And yet the other displays said: Nominal…
Nominal…
nominal…
nominal…
“Crazy damn machine,” he muttered.
But then Saul remembered… fighting the Uber in the hallway… the surprise on both of their faces when he—barely out of the slots—began twisting the other man’s arms back, back …
“Visual microscopic display,” he commanded. Time to get to the bottom of this. Something was wrong here, and the best way to find out what had broken down in his biocomputer would be to do an old-fashioned histological survey himself. “Screen One, subject blood sample magnification ninety.”
The holistank rippled and cleared, showing a straw-colored sea crowded with drifting globs of pink, white, yellow. A jostling of multishaded forms, whirling, jouncing, fluttering in the saline tide.
Saul shook his head, stared, shook his head again.
His mouth started working, without making a sound, in blank amazement and silent prayer.
CARL
Carl studied the main screen in disbelief. He had just finished another useless conversation with Major Clay, the marvelous wooden man who fielded all questions sent Earthside with a bland yet rock hard calm. Earth wasn’t sending advice, information, or even much sympathy—that was certain. Major Clay sidestepped every question. With each passing year, they papered over their fear by increasing the entertainment channels they sent in the weekly squirt. That left less time for real communication.
So Carl had thumbed off impatiently before the transmission time had elapsed. It was doubly irritating that he could never really hang up on Major Clay, because the delay from the speed of light was now five hours. Notconducive tosnappy comebacks, he had thought.
Time to prepare for the meeting. He idly thumbed over to RUNNING READOUT, expecting to see the usual situation report, but didn’t get the usual five-colored status chart. Instead, he caught a trickle of JonVon’s momentarily exposed inner flow. Incredibly, it was another poem. As he read, Carl began to smile.
Plateau Threes are simple, plain
can’t flutter free of Percell’s pain
Take us home! Or near sun’s warm!
Close to Earth and safe from harm.
Only ole JonVon’s got the charm
to hide a riddle
in the middle: gold!
Treat us as miners,
Major.
And Martian Way, ah
they see their day
to come—to smack a planet red
(Carefully, about the head.)
To make it run with fluids bled
From Halley’s pitted blue-iced dead.
Worms, like sticky pearls
Orbits, in liquid whorls
Ubers strut, pale hard jaws jut
Slice the Orthos!
If they could. All
for converging clammy good
Out by Neptune
on some ice-and-iron moon
(Or else to slip the knife
of bugs and lice to Earth. Drop
a rocket
in their pocket. Eh?)
Sad sure Arcists want to
Loop forever
Aren’t they clever?
High-pitched bray and rusty rattle
Brows furrowed, they sing like cattle:
Keep the blue-green pearl free
of us, our pus
Unclean, you see.
Suicide is as much a right
As going gladly into that Good Night.
Carl laughed. Incredible! This was not the first evidence he’d seen that JonVon was noodling away at poetry in slack moments. But of late the bio-organic idiot savant had been getting uncanny. Or maybe it only proved that poetry wasn’t really a higher-level activity after all. This was jagged, lurching, bitter stuff, reeling from rhyme to rhyme, with an occasional glancing collision with reason.
What was the gold JonVon was hiding? He wondered if JonVon had showed this to Virginia yet. She was still recuperating from the slots, but spent a few hours each day linked to her cyber-friend. What if the machine eventually turned out to be a better poet? Carl smiled.
And how did JonVon getsuch retailed information about the noxious factions Carl had to juggle? Maybe I should turn this job over to a subroutine.
Meetings, always meetings. Through the hatch came Andy. Carroll, slot-thin and glowering.
“Those Arcists have gone on strike again!”
“Wildcat?”
“No, Malcolm called them in. I just got a hail from him.”
“How come?”
“He says their Hydro share was low this week. His pickup team just returned with no fruit, not many vegetables.”
Carl frowned. “That shouldn’t have happened. I checked the output—”
“Sergeov got some of theirs, I’m pretty sure.” Andy balled a fist and smacked it into his palm.
“Stole it gain?”
A nod. “He’s got some way of slipping the stuff out after it’s been counted and allotted. I can’t figure it.”
Mildly Carl said, “That’s your department.”
Andy was young, only recently awakened, but he had caught on to the nuances of the situation quickly. His black eyebrows shot up. “I cover every entrance. No way a man or woman could get in there.”
Carl nodded sympathetically. “Uh-huh. What about half a man?”
“Wh… oh. You figure Sergeov can get through other ways?”
“With no legs… check it out.”
Andy brooded, his pale features compressed into a mask of fretful concern. “I don’t see how, but okay.”
Carl sighed and stretched in the webbing. “Now you know what this job’s like.”
“Yeah. They’re a bunch of goddamned children!”
“You’ve been out—what? Two months?”
“Right. Still.”
“It’ll take a while to see where the hate comes from. Just try to ignore the worst, work around it.”
“I’m convinced that Malcolm is stalling.”
“He often is. What else’s he got to negotiate with? But you mean seriously, this time?”
“I think so. I checked the Nudge pods they supposedly finished three months ago—down at the south pole. They look as though they’re set up right, but I pulled off a few cowlings. Inside there’re connections missing, tanks not racked—it’s a mess.”
“Sure it’s Malcolm’s fault?”
“I think they’re sabotaging the pods.”
“They smash anything?”
“No, just took stuff apart.”
“Smart. Any obvious damage, we’d howl. This way, you might very well have accused Malcolm to his face of shirking the work.”
Andy blushed. “Well, actually, that’s what I did.”
A pause. “Oh?”
“I… I know I should’ve got hold of you first, but—I was so damn hopping mad! I called Malcolm and started in on him.” Andy stopped, embarrassed.
“And?”
“He hung up on me before I even got three sentences out.”
“Then he probably thinks he’s got some complaint with us, too.” Don’t sound too casual, Carl reminded himself. Don’t let Andy onto what you know…that there’s simply no way the Nudge accelerators would be done in time anyway.
Carl said, “Who has the most to gain if you and Malcolm tear at each other’s throats?”
“Hell, hardly anybody, seems to me.”
“Doesn’t have to be more than a few.”
“Well… oh yeah. Quiverian. He’s the one keeps spouting that Arcist crap. You think he’s trying to slow dow
n work on the Nudge?”
“It fits. The radical Arcists don’t want any possibility of cometary material getting near Earth. No orbits near enough to make a good rendezvous, nothing. Preserving Earth’s biosphere is it for them. They don’t care what happens to us.”
“But there are still possibilities that offer no conceivable threat to Earth. Give ourselves a shorter-period orbit with the Nudge, pack everybody into slots.”
“And hope a decade or two sobers up everybody Earthside?”
Andy’s face was so open it was almost painful to read. “It’s… We’ve got to have hope, don’t we?”
“Sure,” Carl said, trying to get some hearty optimism into his voice. “Sure.”
Andy pursed his lips, absorbed with his dreams. Maybe it’s not dumb optimism, Carl thought. Maybe we’ll get a break. I’m just getting tired of wishing.
Hethought of showing Andy the poem and then decided to forget it. Andy might very well find the mixture of bile and gallows humor unsettling Let him marinate for a year or so first.
And who knows? Perhaps some archaeologist will find that poem and pronounce it the great work of our sad, luckless expedition. They might put it on a plaque beside the main outer lock, to label the mountainous ice museum that swung through their sky, marking a great failed idea. With us, swimming permanently in our slimy slot fluids, as the prime exhibits.
It wasn’t an absurd notion.
VIRGINIA
Stolen gifts,
Hidden away in time.
Waiting gifts,
Deep within my rhyme.
—Huh? Did you say something, Virginia?—
Jeffers’s voice crackled over her comm as she concentrated on bringing her two balky mechs over an ice mound at the same time. It was always a delicate exercise, for the big machines had enough strength to bound completely away from the rubble-strewn surface. These repair-drone models had no onboard propellants to bring them back, in case of a miscalculation.
“Um, don’t pay any attention, Jeff. It’s just JonVon acting up again. As soon as we’ve finished with this project I’m going to give him a good memory purging.”
—Sounds like he’s picked up a bit of your hand for scribbling. If he’s been writin’ poems for thirty years, you may be in for some competition, child.—
Jeffers sounded amused, and Virginia laughed. But within she was beginning to get worried. Something was wrong with her bio-organic computer counterpart. In some skills JonVon seemed more subtle, more capable than when she had been slotted, decades ago—a natural result of programming him for slow, steady self-improvement. But in other ways the machine/program now behaved erratically, uncertainly, spontaneously giving forth these bursts that seemed irrelevant, untraceable.
Trash-strewn snowfields stretched away toward the row of agro domes around the entrance to Shaft 1. Huge mirrors hung from spidery ice towers nearby, concentrating the sun’s distant spark to turn the domes into bright blazes against the grainy ice.
Beneath the glassy domes, green masses waved gently under artificial breezes. A few workers drifted languidly among the plants, tending the colony’s staff of life. Since awakening from slot sleep, she had had little time to learn about the hydroponics procedures that had been developed, by trial and error over the long decades. But she could tell already that the process could use a lot of automating.
Her mechs arrived where Jeffers’s spacesuited figure awaited her, standing beside a toppled crystal structure. Broken shards of glassy ice were everywhere.
Virginia gasped. “This is terrible! Who wrecked Jim Vidor’s sculpture?”
The statue had been dedicated to Captain Cruz and the dream so many members of the expedition had shared. It had depicted a spacesuited figure, ragged and weary but perseverant, holding out sparkling gifts on his return to a blue globe, the Earth.
Virginia remembered how proud Jim Vidor had been of it, just before his slotting so long ago. It had been a beautiful work, crafted in six shades of ice, traced in native crystal. But now the carved spacer lay crumpled on its side, and the blue planet was crushed.
Deep under the surface, in her lab, Virginia tensed on her webbing as she looked at the vandalism through the mech’s eyes. “Who…?”
Jeffers’s voice was tense. —Dunno. I’d guess some of Sergeov’s Ubers did it.—
“But why?”
The spacer shrugged. —Cruz was an Ortho.—
That seemed explanation enough to him. Virginia felt her skin flush, just then ashamed to be a Percell.
“Has Jim ever seen this?”
—Naw. Matsudo brought him out in 2073 or so, and Lintz’s cyanutes fixed his first disease. But then they had to slot him again a year or so later with a real bad blood infection. I guess in a way it’s a blessing, at that. He’ll never see how bad it’s all gotten since then. Jim was an Ortho. But I liked him a lot.—
“Yeah,” she said, unable to think of anything else to say. She stepped her mechs around the shattered moment to join Jeffers. Come on Let’s see if we can work a miracle or two.”
—Right, pretty Hawaiian lady.—Jeffers reached up and pulled several narrow envelopes off a rack carried by one of the mechs. —This way to the Elephants’ Graveyard.—
They rounded a rocky hummock and Virginia sighed. No mere statistics could have prepared her for the scene before her now. Machines, laid out row upon row, in orderly ranks that stretched nearly to the curved horizon, all frozen, unmoving, locked in a rigor of uselessness and disrepair.
“Where do we start?” she asked in dismay.
Jeffers clapped his gloved hands together and lifted off the ice a couple of meters in his nervous excitement.
—Who cares! For three years I’ve been pokin’ way at the hardware, fussin’ in the autofactory, scragging prototype spares. But I keep hittin’ software glitches, ROM blocs, clapes I just couldn’t grok! Frustrated everythin’ I tried.—
He landed facing her mech.
—But now, in just two weeks, you’ve sorted out things that had me dead stopped!—
Her mech lifted a metal hand, exactly mimicking Virginia’s gesture down within her darkened lab. “Now hold on, Jeff. I said this was just a first cut. No promises…”
But the man had already jetted over to a spindly repair-bot… a sophisticated androidlike machine designed for the maintenance of other devices, but now frozen itself in a locked rigor of uselessness.
—Let’s start with this puppy. I already did a physical workover on it.—
Virginia watched nervously as the spacer sorted through the envelopes, selected one, tore it open, and drew forth a gleaming sliver. He pried open an access panel and slipped the reprogramming crystal into the back of the machine.
—Arise!—he commanded, stepping back with a theatrical wave of his arms.
Virginia held her breath. For an instant, it seemed that the frost coating the rigid mech would bind it into immobility. A part of her wondered, Can a statue come to life?
But then the frost cracked, puffing away in tiny, silent explosions as amorphous ice changed state directly into gas. With a wavering delicacy, the machine unfolded. In an unlimbering of stiltlike, mantis legs, it stood up and turned to face Jeffers. Eye cells gleaming, it extended a long arm strong enough to snap the man in two. A many-fingered hand opened, like a blooming flower.
Jeffers laid the stack of envelopes into the sure, deft grasp.
—The Armies of the Dead arise this mornin’!—He laughed. —Come on, angel face. We got some heavy-duty resurrectin’ to do!—
Virginia forgave the man his marginal blasphemy. His excitement was infectious. Almost as much as the deadly illnesses and the manpower shortage, this gradual decline in the colony’s mech force had contributed to the pervasive mood of hopelessness, the impossibility of achieving anything real.
Oh, it won’t make enough of a difference, whatever we accomplish out here. Nothing can replace missing human beings.
But we just may be able to make
life a bit easier around here.
Jeffers was a dervish on the ice, hurrying from drone to roboid to waldo mech. Virginia thought she had no illusions; still, she grew amazed and more hopeful as they moved along the silent rows of the graveyard, swapping program slivers, lubricating, energizing.
It was thrilling to watch. Long-dead machines, frozen rigid for years, shuddered and stood up. Others rolled by on grapple wheels, or floated free of their moorings. Data channels clicked, beeped, twittered with well-ordered computer code.
Their efforts began to multiply as reprogrammed repair-bots moved out on their own, taking over whole rows of disabled mechs. What had been a small cluster of activity spread outward like ripples from a spring-thawed pool.
As dust drifted away from long-quiescent machines, their headphones carried sounds of wonder and growing excitement from the agro domes. Crowds began to gather, staring out at what had heretofore been a silent, frozen army. Airlocks opened, and spacesuited figures spilled onto the snow to stare at the milling mechanical crowd.
Jeffers cried out as a huge lifter mech puffed away on a burst of ionized hydrogen to hover nearby, its green and blue lights glittering. Shadows spread past them as it moved over to moor beside the long-unused supply depot.
The headphone-channel monitors cut in to dampen an overload of cheering from the onlookers.
More and more people appeared on the ice, in spacesuits not used in years, wearing once-white tabards now ratty from age. Some threw away caution and leaped in excitement, to arc high overhead for tong minutes while others jeered happily.
Virginia laughed. Halley’s north pole had become a festival —bumping into mechs, which uncomplainingly swerved to avoid more-violent collisions. Percells pirouetted with Orthos. Spacers talked excitedly with Arcists. Someone piped music over D-channel, and the weird, twisting dance of near-zero gravity filled the sky.
It doesn’t take much… just a little good news.
From one agro dome, a dozen spindly children stared… some slack-jawed and barely seeing, but a few clapping their hands and tugging at the sleeves of nearby adults, pointing excitedly at the boisterous celebration.