Poul Anderson - Renascence

Illustration by George M. Krauter

I think he told me this because I am his daughter. Not that he begot me in his flesh. When I was born, he was still homebound on a voyage that had begun almost three hundred years before. When we spoke, he was machine. But my father and my mother bear the genomes of him and his mate. They were created with the same basic memories, harking back to Earth itself, and even with some shared recollections of lives lived afterward. Also, it happens I resemble her as she was when young. Machine or no, of course he loved me once we had met.

What he said was that if I cared to hear the full tale of why he had returned so much earlier than planned, he would be glad to tell me. Oh, but I cared!

I think, too, he needed this. He had downloaded his knowledge into the appropriate databases, but that is impersonal. He had communed with the Life Mother of our planet, but that is sacred. I wonder if she counseled him to seek ordinary human connection. She may well have. In his awareness, the terror and solitude were only days behind him. Unbroken, he was nonetheless shaken, wounded. Maybe those hours with me helped speed his healing. Maybe he went back the stronger for it, to face the thing again. I would like to believe so.

We walked out of Rydberg and upstream along the Argen. On our right the poplars whispered with breeze; their pale leaves snared sunlight and spattered it across their shadows. On our left the river gleamed and murmured. Beyond it a farmscape, green, green, and golden, rolled away toward hills left wild. Here and there, brightness flashed off an attendant robot. Both moons were aloft, wan crescents in a blue crossed by cloud scraps and wings. The air drifted warm, full of herbal smells.

We soon got past sight of the town. When we came to a mossy bank, I knelt to drink—the water here has a slight iron tang—and sat down on the softness. A butterfly went past like a bit of rainbow. I could well-nigh feel the presence of the Life Mother, watching over and warding everything with which our ancestors seeded this world. The black hole seemed more than remote, it seemed to lie in another reality.

But my companion had gone there. The body that he wore today stood upright, two-legged, two-armed, two-handed, until it settled at my side. In its turret he produced the moving image of his mortal head, which could have been my father’s, blocky, red-dish-haired, rugged-featured. Somehow these homelinesses made that of which he spoke all the more freezingly alien.

And he himself had not been human then, not really, in the way I am. Nor was he now, in spite of the many everyday touches that endeared him to me. I cannot tell his story or that of his Demeter as it was to them. My brain is not electrophotonic. I do not have machine sensors or capabilities. Nor was I ever grown as an adult in a tank; I was born from a womb. No memories of past existences were ever downloaded into me; mine are just what came directly to this one organism during the thirty years I have been alive. Pseudo-experiences in a dream box give little feeling for organometallic regenesis. Those are too unanimal. I will not understand them until I have been through my own. Do you?

I must tell what I heard as I heard it, in ordinary language, therefore fragmentary and often false—what they found yonder. They awaited strangeness. Theirs was the first expedition to the first black hole identified within practicable range of any dwelling place that any of our races have found thus far. Yet their ship, at not greatly less than the speed of light, was a century and a half in passage. “Maybe we should’ve expected not only surprises, but thunderbolts,” his voice rumbled to me like my father’s. “How could we have known, though? For sure, nobody could’ve warned us.”

At the moment it computed as best, the ship closed circuits to awaken them. Reactivation brought an instant’s bewilderment. In their minds, they had begun accelerating outward and had finished lasering their farewells back to our world. Now immediately they confronted foreign space, and our Sun was among the stars, by no means the brightest.

Orientation crystallized. Micro-gravity and the silence of airlessness were familiar enough. Most of the sky around them had changed little: the stellar horde, red, yellow, blue-white; the galactic band toppling through it, an iciness broken by black gulfs of cosmic dust; nebulae lacily aglow; sister galaxies afar and afar; radio seethings, hard particle sleets. Despite it, this was foreign space. Before them burned the fire that ringed their destination.

Anson Guthrie gusted a sigh. “Well, old girl,” he said, “we made it.”

Of course those were not sounds. They were signals that he willed into his transmitter. But her brain interpreted them as he intended, for she too had many fleshly as well as machine lives behind her. They possessed communicators more subtle or more powerful, to use at need. What they wanted at this minute was to be together.

They could not clasp hands. Their braincases lay deep within a heavily shielded control complex. However, they had means to generate their images for one another. She “saw” him in his young manhood, on a beach where surf brawled beneath a sharp wind. For him, she appeared as she had first been synthesized, long ago on a planet long since destroyed—dark-haired, amber-skinned, hazeleyed, she whom in her manifold recreations on our various worlds and in their various histories we have always named Demeter. A forest surrounded her.

They stared, laughed, ignored the contradictory settings, and feigned an embrace. Their lips met. “Darling,” she said, immortally his beloved. Then she stepped back. Her smile trembled. “That was sweet, in its ghostly fashion. Just the same—”

“Wait’ll we go mortal again,” he answered. “I’ll give you some sweetness that isn’t ghostly. You’ll be walking bowlegged.” It came out more harsh than humorous. He had never quite liked being a download, an encoding of memories and synapses. For him it was thin stuff compared to being organically alive. Whenever his program was put into a newly made human Guthrie, he most often had it simultaneously removed from the neural network, declaring that for the time being he was tired of the machine condition and it didn’t care to continue by itself.

Demeter completed her sentence: “—We’d better pay attention to where we are.”

“Right,” he agreed, a lilt entering his tone. After all, adventures and achievements are possible to machines where humans can never go, let alone survive. When organic, he regretted that he could not perfectly remember everything he had encountered.

A versatile problem-solver, the ship would have determined this was a safe region. But it was robotic, without conscious personality. The minds aboard it were what would perceive and seek to understand.

Demeter consulted its database and instruments. One of the downloads that went to make the very first Life Mother, at Alpha Centauri—and thus, eventually, passed into the first Demeter Daughter—had been a space pilot’s. While she examined the parameters of vessel and orbit, Guthrie linked himself to an astrophysics program. Thereby made expert, he studied the black hole around which they swung.

Their distance was a cautious twenty astronomical units. Magnification and enhancement were required to get sight of the body. With a mass of some ten sol, its event horizon was a few tens of kilometers across. In the screen it showed as a blue-rimmed dot of utter darkness. Had the ship’s path not been at a high inclination, not even that much would have been visible, for around it whirled an accretion disc. Matter spiraling inward gave off a torrent of quanta. Millions of kilometers out, the fire was dim, radio hues, but closer in it blazed ever more savagely, microwave, optical, ultraviolet, X-ray, a maelstrom through which lightnings leaped and shadowlike transients flickered. At first he could not really see it; his mind must learn how. He never became able to make visual sense of the inner edge, where atoms were plunging to oblivion through a time that his clocks measured as infinite.