Poul Anderson - Renascence

It was not perfectly symmetrical, and ends curved from the periphery, as if it were growing outward. Nor was the interior quite empty; a three-dimensional spiderweb of thin strands crisscrossed and interwove. The light-flashes came off small pennons—metallic?—fluttering to every breeze. Where they struck together, they belled. Radio waves pulsed from the entirety, a hiss and throb echoed by underground electromagnetic surges. Deep below lay a node of matter close to absolute zero.

She stopped. It was Guthrie who spoke, “Judas priest,” in marvel.

A member uncoiled from the lattice, swung around, and seized her.

At first she was merely astounded. The clutch encircled her turret and tightened. A second cable-thick limb whipped out, groped down her side, and closed on a leg.

Guthrie roared an obscenity. Demeter dug in her heels and strained backward. Her motors snarled. She felt the strain go through her captor, she saw the whole huge structure tremble. But it held her fast.

Her tool arms attacked with diamond saw and geologist’s hammer. They barely bit. The cables were incredibly tough. Strands of perfect molecules, she thought wildly—fullerenes?—She pitched her weight to and fro. The cables drew her forward.

“Hang on!” Guthrie shouted. “I’m coming!”

He was above the opposite hemisphere. The computer in his body made its grim calculations. While the ship boosted, he gathered weapons.

The globe hugged Demeter against its lattice. Tendrils from within coiled about her, threadlike but soon enmeshingly many.

“Anse,” she begged, “don’t take reckless chances. Whatever happens, Anse, thank you, mil gracias for all our time—Oh—”

Inside the globe, something pushed out of the ground. A steel trumpet flower, she thought amidst the craziness. No, not really. As it stretched upward on its stalk, she saw that the petals moved and that their edges were serrated. By now she could do no more than kick a little.

The corolla swung back and forth. Its blind seeking found the target. Very slowly, it swayed toward her.

“I’m about to launch,” Guthrie’s voice tolled. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Don’t risk yourself,” she pleaded, knowing he would. “I’m only one download.”

“You’re my woman,” he said. “If that thing hurts you, there’s going to be a valley full of nothing but slag.”

“No, Anse, por favor, you mustn’t—”

A deep whistling went through her receiver. His vehicle had left the ship.

The corolla fumbled across her. When it found the turret, the petals drew shut, a hangman’s cap. Her optics went black.

She felt the vibration as the petals cut through her shielding. It was like a scream.

I have heard that a download does not, cannot fear its extinction. But surely it can fear for those it loves, and sorrow at leaving them, and regret losing this miraculous Universe. I think a part of Demeter withdrew to her past lives and sought peace in the recounting of how very much she had had. Another part of her still thought desperately, less about any way by which she might escape than about the whole of her plight, what had brought it about, what it meant.

And enlightenment came. We know this because of what she cried at the end.

A sensation pierced her, akin to agony. The corolla had ripped her shield open, pulled it apart, and started exuding a substance—an acid?—that attacked the casing beneath. Radiation from the disc struck the petals. Secondary showers rained out of them into her brain.

The ground shook. The noise of it toned in her. Guthrie had landed, meters away.

The corolla withdrew as if startled. Radiation flooded directly upon her. Particles and photons tore through picocircuits. Memory banks and logical functions degraded. Thunder blasted her awareness. It whirled down a vortex of night.

She saw Guthrie come striding. His body was meant for speed, not strength. The cables that held her could pluck him in pieces. He gave that no heed. In two of his hands an atomic hydrogen torch spouted flame. In two of his hands a laser projector made an energy sword. In two of his hands a sledge hammer swung, breaking a way to left and to right. So he came for her.

Lunacy ran wild. The past shattered and dissolved. With the last of herself Demeter wept, “Anse, darling, have mercy. This is alive—” Her mind fell from her as if into a black hole.

He said nothing to me of the battle he had waged except, “I got her free and took her back to the ship. I was her shield while we flew, of course.”

Of course.

“Was she terribly hurt?” I breathed.

“Bad enough. I deactivated her and steered for home.”

I mustered courage to ask, “She could have waited safely, couldn’t she? While you did more science there?”

“I couldn’t have,” he answered. The bleakness thawed on his generated countenance. “Besides, alone, I’d’ve been less than half as effective as the two of us. I could easily have blundered into a situation where not even the ship survived. Better to cut our losses.”

“How… how is she?”

“She’s being restored. Many of her memories were undamaged. Most of what’s gone can be replaced, along with the essential personality. I’ll get her back.”

Such is the primitive will to life on behalf of a beloved. In a download too. I think that otherwise we would not be peopling the stars.

“I’m glad,” I said, in full honesty, and laid my hand over his. The sun had warmed it. Light danced on water, wind talked in leaves, a smell of wild thyme blew above the riverbank.

“What then?” I asked.

“We’ll return,” he said. “Better prepared, and not by ourselves. This calls for a major expedition.”

“It’s certainly strange.”

“More than strange.”

My head snapped up at his tone. I stared at him.

“She knew,” he said. “On the edge of death, she knew. Because she’s been the Life Mother, again and again, clear back to Centauri. Through all the differences, she suddenly recognized the sameness.”

I waited.

“That’s a living planet,” he said.

“But how can it be?”

“What is life? Don’t we have to define it by what it does? It stores, copies, and transmits information; converts energy; recycles matter; maintains homeostasis; repairs and reproduces itself, grows, evolves. Don’t I count as alive in this phase of mine? I do those things, one way or another.”

“But you—you began as organic. Life has to.”

“Probably. Only carbon has the properties to bootstrap up from the smallest molecules. However, once we’d developed technology, we built inorganic systems that’re alive by any reasonable standard.”

He was silent for a span before he went on—how quietly—“A vegetative life yonder, I suppose. Mainly, the electric currents are incidental, like the changing potentials in your cells. Although… it seems to have some kind of unity, integration. Local activity focused on the thing that grabbed my Demeter. Why did it? To save the valley from a trampling invader? Or was the action just a sort of tropism? How did it get the ability? I’ve wondered if maybe it processes ores. But then how are they passed on to it? An ecology—

“Sure, things must have been much simpler at first. Metals and silicates aren’t very labile. I imagine, though, the radiation drives chemistry and crystallography hard. And an equivalent of catalysis—” He paused. “Does anything correspond to animals? And what might the evolution go on toward?

“We need to know.”

“How could it have started?” I heard my voice thin and shivery.

“That’s what we really need to know,” Guthrie said. Each word struck after the next, like blows on a nail head. “Wreckage from a ship—or what?—how many ages ago? Or deliberate seeding? Were the crew organic… or were they not? We’ve never found spoor of any intelligent beings besides us and our creations. Until now—maybe. Remember, on Earth, it’s the cybercosm that rules, minds more powerful than we believe anything in a biocosm can ever become. What are they doing? What may other cybercosms have been doing? We dream our dreams of the future. What may theirs be?”