Starfarers (52 page)

Ivan met the human gaze. The scent from en was like autumn winds over rain-wet dead leaves. “(None. The cost of resistance is too high. We will do as we are told.)”

“Can we trust them?” Zeyd wondered.

Leo heard. Either en had that much English, or en guessed the meaning. Screen and attitude spelled: “(You can trust us. We do not fear for ourselves. We never did. Achieve your desire, mad ones, terrible ones, then bring us home and go away and leave Tahir in peace. Is that a correct price for our help?)”

“(I mourn for what might have been,)” Emil said.

Nansen blinked and squinted. Crow’s-feet spread from the corners of his eyes. Fingers on touchboard wavered slightly. “(It may be yet. In spite of everything, someday it may be.)”

“Unto Almighty
God we commend the souls of our brothers departed. …”

Nansen read the service through to the end. His crew responded according to their faiths, or kept silence.

At a signal, robots obeyed their programming. From the common room, the humans saw, on the screen, a probe leave the ship. Starlight touched two sheeted forms lashed to its sides.

It took on velocity and swiftly vanished, bound for the black hole. There was no other grave.

Nansen led the way to the wardroom, through the gap where the door had been. The room itself was cleaned and restored, bright and comforting. The servitors had prepared a buffet. A feast, however modest, is also part of a funeral.

He found himself raising a goblet of white wine to ring on Dayan’s. His reserve cracked. “
Adiós, hermanos
,” broke from his throat.

She gave him the strength he groped for: “Yes. And tomorrow we’ll get on with our work.”

Daycycle by
daycycle, leap by leap, language grew into being.

Early on, the visual code became four-dimensional, figures depicted from various angles in space and shown changing with time. These representations would quickly have gone from solid geometry through non-Euclidean geometry to bewilderment, had not a computer simultaneously developed the appropriate equations. “Phase spaces, Riemannian spaces—I think they perceive them, live in them, with direct experience,” Dayan said. “When we send a set of tensors, does that come across to them as a … an object?”

“Yes, the conditions we live under must be as strange to them as theirs are to us,” Sundaram mused. “Stranger still, then, is that our transmissions do not leave them utterly baffled.”

Hypertext evolved, symbols in multiply connected arrays. Ever oftener, context revealed meanings, which led to the adoption of new symbols and more sophisticated grammar. For this, Simon was invaluable. Adapted to chaotically changeable environments, sensorium extending to single photons and electron transitions, ens instincts bred intuitions of what a message might refer to. On the other hand, it was usually humans who worked out the form of a reply or of a question; they were better at abstract thought, and their species had developed mathematics further.

When Simon proposed expanding the code, Yu designed and built circuits to employ sonics. Though the beings at the other end of the communications scarcely employed sound themselves, they promptly got the idea and returned equivalent signals. It never led to direct speech, but it did give expression to a wider range of concepts. “Like music, rhythm, tone—saying things that words can’t,” Mokoena suggested. “M-m, no, I don’t suppose that’s a real comparison.’’ However, she and Zeyd found it useful in describing their own kind of life, its chemistry, variousness, histories, folkways, perhaps a hint at its feelings and dreams.

Dazzlingly fast, the language expanded. The aliens seemed to make no mistakes, go up no blind alleys. When those aboard the ship did, the exchange quickly revealed where they were wrong. The code that resulted was a sort of human-Tahirian hybrid, heavily mathematical and graphical, individuality and emotion only implied—both parties burningly wanted to know! It did not translate well into English, still less into Tahirian. Yet there was discourse.

Einstein said once that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

To Nansen
came Emil and asked, “(Would it be possible to take the remaining boat on excursions? We could make many worthwhile observations, for example, of the black hole and its beams from a more canted orbit.)”

“(No.)” A parleur could not utter the man’s sympathy for this spacefarer, idled and isolated. “(We cannot risk our only landable craft. Have you three nothing at all to do?)”

“(Leo and Peter will mate—without begetting, of course. The joining of life is a high art.)”

Is it enough, by itself, to fill months or years for them?
Nansen thought.
Not among humans. Even Jean and I
—He dodged away from the memories suddenly crowding in on him, as they so often did. “(We have a few probes left Let us by all means lay out a research program for them.)”

“(I anticipated you would hold the boat in reserve),” Emil said. “(It has occurred to me that we can get more information from the probes—they will survive more missions before the unforeseeable overtakes them—if they are directed by us, not entirely by robots, from closer than the ship. Could we not put together a protective capsule with such controls and a motor? Low acceleration would suffice, and the excursions need not be hazardously lengthy.)”

“¡Por Dios!”
Nansen cried. “(That is an interesting concept indeed.)” His mind leapfrogged. Shift cargo around to clear a large volume in the hull. Bring what tools and other equipment were necessary across to that workspace; spare materials were already abundantly stored over there. Keep busy, keep engaged—“(Let us talk further.)”
Thank you for this, you who have not surrendered to apathy or to sorrow.

Hard labor would be a blessing. He had been following the revelations from Sundaram’s group, fascinated; but he was a layman, with nothing to contribute. Robots kept house. Envoy had no present need for a commander. He seldom even presided over dinner. His fellows generally snatched what food and sleep they must, at whatever hours were least inconvenient, and went back to their science. After that which they had undergone together, tacit consent
had put them on first-name terms with him. He had recognized other overtures, tentative moves to lessen his aloneness, and had not responded. He appreciated their kindness, but appreciated more that it did not press itself upon him. The notion stayed with him that it was unwise, undutiful, for the captain to bare any wounds.

Once only, Mokoena got him aside and suggested a euthymic. He declined. “Well, grief must run its full course one way or another,” she said. “If this is your way, you’ll either break or you’ll recover faster than otherwise, and I don’t think you’ll break. If ever you want to, see me again.” He thanked her and left.

He had exercised. He had read, watched a number of dramas, listened to much music, attempted to brush up his rudimentary Chinese and learn Hebrew. His sketches and his clay sculptures went better, but he was no genius in this field, either.

He slept poorly. Often when awake he abruptly realized that he had been staring for half an hour into vacancy. Or he paced the corridors, up and down, back and forth, like a caged animal.

He could order an ending, a return. At this stage, it would feel like a betrayal of Jean. Emil’s wish, born out of Emil’s need, beckoned him onward.

Discovery unfolding—

Think of the black hole, monstrous mass monstrously awhirl, a throat down into an annulment that is also a transfiguration to the unmeasurable and unimaginable. Think of the matter vortex, captured, indrawn, torn asunder, gyrating in a magnetic field so intense as to be well-nigh material itself, shaken by resonance, racked by chaos, flung back out in great bursts of flame and seething back down again, naked nuclei colliding and fusing and erupting in wild new particles, photons turned into pairs and pairs annihilating to photons, a lightning storm of energies, and pervasive beneath it
the subtle, all-powerful tides of the vacuum, of ultimate reality. Think of this as it comes to the event horizon, where space and time themselves are an onrushing, intertwining undertow around that strangest of shores.

What can happen there is impossible in mere abysses of light-years or at stars that merely burn.

It does not occur at every black hole, just as organic life does not occur on every planet. Conditions must be right. Maybe these are even more rare. Here, though, about this body, it lived.

Life is not a thing or a substance. It is information, a flux of patterns; it is the business of being alive. Organic biota are organic only because no other element has the versatility of carbon, to make the molecules that encode the data and carry out the processes. In a newly dead man the molecules are mostly the same as before, but that particular flow of events has ceased. There is no reason in principle why corresponding events cannot occur in a different matrix. In fact, many computer programs and robots are so complex and changeable that it is a largely semantic question whether or not to call them alive.

If the mightiest artificial intelligences, far surpassing our capabilities of logic, lack true consciousness, this is because it is not a separate thing, either. It is something that an entire organism
does
. We would have to supply the deep old animal parts of the brain, a nervous system integral with the whole, muscles, viscera, glands, drives, instincts: and thus the end product would be a creature much like ourselves. In the nature of the case, we cannot design a body for a superior mind. Evolution might conceivably carry on where we left off; but then, it might conceivably work further on us.

It might work on nonchemical life. It did.

Already people aboard
Envoy
had speculated. Now surmises took definite shape.

What they learned was partial, perhaps roughly equivalent to nineteenth-century knowledge of biochemistry, genetics, and phylogeny. It could no more be put in words than can
the essence of theoretical physics. The researchers must needs try, for each other’s benefit if nobody else’s, but they realized how crude their approximations were.

In the intricate and mutable space-time geometry at the black hole, infalling matter and energy interacted with the virtualities of the vacuum in ways unknown to the flatter cosmos beyond it. Quasi-stable quantum states appeared, linked according to Schrödinger’s wave functions and their own entanglement, more and more of them, intricacy compounding until it amounted to a set of codes. The uncertainty principle wrought mutations; variants perished or flourished; forms competed, cooperated, merged, divided, interacted; the patterns multiplied and diversified; at last, along one fork on a branch of the life tree, thought budded.

That life was not organic, animal and vegetable and lesser kingdoms, growing, breathing, drinking, eating, breeding, hunting, hiding; it kindled no fires and wielded no tools; from the beginning, it was a kind of oneness. An original unity differentiated itself into countless avatars, like waves on a sea. They arose and lived individually, coalesced when they chose by twos or threes or multitudes, re-emerged as other than they had been, gave themselves and their experiences back to the underlying whole. Evolution, history, lives eerily resembled memes in organic minds.

Yet quantum life was not a series of shifting abstractions. Like the organic, it was in and of its environment. It acted to alter its quantum states and those around it: action that manifested itself as electronic, photonic, and nuclear events. Its domain was no more shadowy to it than ours is to us. It strove, it failed, it achieved. They were never sure aboard
Envoy
whether they could suppose it loved, hated, yearned, mourned, rejoiced. The gap between was too wide for any language to bridge. Nevertheless they were convinced that it knew something they might as well call emotion, and that that included wondering.

Certain it was that the former, abortive efforts of the Tahirians to make contact had awakened some kind of passion,
and the beings were doing whatever they could to establish communication with these better-qualified newcomers. That was astoundingly much.

Hitherto Nansen
had not used the virtual-reality terminal in his cabin as anything but a tool, an aid to understanding. He would evoke something—a change in procedures, a modification of a piece of equipment, an unfamiliar astronomical configuration—and study it, try it out, in different aspects under various conditions, until he learned what he wanted to learn. Like most people, he had played with pseudoexperiences, fantasies, but that was long ago, in adolescence on Earth, and seldom. He did not fear addiction, he simply preferred truth.

Now he sought back. His project with Emil offered him hard labor and the deep sleep that follows it, but first the work required careful planning, and too often he drifted from a conference or a computer to raw memory. Since he refused drugs—before prescribing, Mokoena would want to explore his inmost needs—he thought a little spell in child-land might help.

It did not take him long to set up the program, complex though it was. Elements of landscape, artifacts, personal features and traits, historical or fictional situations, everything anyone had cared to have entered, were in the ship’s database. The computer would combine them according to basic instructions, partly randomly, partly fractally, governed by principles of logic and aesthetics unless he specified otherwise, sketching a world. Likewise would neurostimulation suggest sensory input. Imagination would do the rest, the vividness of dream within the coherence of structure, the unexpectedness of life within the boundaries of desire.

Nansen shaped a small, crooked smile. “Surprise me,” he said, a phrase he had acquired from Dayan. But of course any surprises would spring from himself.

Loosely clad, he attached the bracelets and anklets, donned the cap, snugged every contact against his skin, and
stretched out on his bed. For a moment he hung back, half reluctant. Then he grimaced, pressed the switch, and lowered head to pillow.