Clifford Simak - The Observer

It existed. Whether it has slept and wakened, or been turned on, or if this might be the first instant of its creation, it had no way of knowing. There was no memory of other time, or place.

Words came to fit where it found itself. Words emerging out of nowhere, symbols quite unbidden-awakened or turned on or first appearing, as it had itself.

It was in a place of red and yellow. The land was red. The sky was yellow. A brightness stood straight above the red land in the yellow sky. Liquid ran gurgling down a channel in the land.

In a little time it knew more, had a better understanding. It knew the brightness was a sun. It knew the running liquid was a brook. It thought of the liquid as a compound, but it wasn't water. Life forms sprang from the redness of the soil. Their stems were green. They had purple fruits at the top of them.

It had the names now, identifying symbols it could use — life, liquid, land, sky, red, yellow, purple, green, sun, bright, water. Each instant it had more words, more names, more terms. And it could see, although seeing might not be the proper term, for it had no eyes. Nor legs. Nor arms. Not body.

It had no eyes and seemed to have no body, either. It had no idea of position — standing up or lying down or sitting. It could look anywhere it wished without turning its head, since it hadn't any head. Although, strangely, it did seem to occupy a specific position in relation to the landscape.

It looked straight up into the sky at the brightness of the suit and could look directly at the brightness since it was seeing without eyes, without frail organic structures that might be harmed by brilliance.

The sun was a B8 star, five times more massive than the Sun, and it lay 3.76 A.U. distant from this planet.

Sun, capitalized? A.U.? Five? 3.76? Planet?

Sometime in the past — when past, where past, what past — it had known the terms, a sun that was capitalized, water that ran in brooks, the idea of a body and of eyes. Or had it known them? Had it ever had a past in which it could have known them? Or were they simply terms that were being fed into it from another source, to be utilized as the need arose, tools — and there was yet another term — to be used in interpreting this place where it found itself? Interpreting this place for what? For itself? That was ridiculous, for it did not need to know, did not even care to know.

Knowing, how did it know? How did it know the sun was a B8 star, and what was a B8 star? How know its distance, its diameter, its mass just by looking at it? How know a star, for it had never seen a star before?

Then, even thinking this, it knew it had. It had known many suns, a long string of suns across the galaxy and it had looked at each of them and known its spectral type, its distance and diameter, its mass, its very composition, its age and probable length of remaining life, stable or variable, its spectral lines, any small peculiarities that might set it apart from other stars. Red giants, supergiants, white dwarfs, even one black dwarf. But mostly main sequence stars and the planets that went with them, for it made few stops at stars that had no planets.

Perhaps nothing had even seen more suns than it. Or knew more of suns than it.

And the purpose of all this? It tried to think of purpose, but there seemed no purpose. The purpose utterly escaped it. If there were, in fact, a purpose.

It stopped looking at the sun and looked at the rest of it, at all of it at once, at all the planetary surface in its sight — as if, it thought, it had eyes all around its nonexistent head. Why did it, it wondered, keep dwelling on this idea of a head and eyes? Had it, at one time perhaps, have had a head and eyes? Was the ideal of head and eyes an old residual, perhaps a primitive, memory that persistently refused to go away, but that for some reason must linger and thrust itself forward at the slightest opportunity?

It tried to think it out, to reach back and grasp the idea or the memory and drag it squalling from its hole. And failed.

It concentrated on the surface. It was located — if located was the word — on a steep hillside with massive rock outcroppings. The hill shut off the view of one portion of the surface, but the rest lay bare before it to the horizon line.

The rest of the surface was level, except for one place, far distant, where what appeared to be a circular prominence arose. The top of the prominence was jagged and the sides were furrowed and it looked very like an ancient crater.

But the rest was level and through it ran several little streams of something that was liquid but was not water. The sparse vegetation stood up on its dark green stems, surmounted by its purple fruit and now it was apparent that there were several kinds of vegetation. The purple fruit vegetation at first had seemed to be the only vegetation because it was more abundant, and certainly more spectacular.

The soil seemed to be little more than sand. It put out a hand — no, not a hand, for it had no hand — but it thought of its action as putting out a hand. It put out a hand and thrust the fingers deep into the soil and the data on the soil came flowing into it. Sand. Almost pure sand. Silicon, some iron, some aluminum, traces of oxygen, hydrogen, potassium, magnesium. Almost no acidity. There were figures, percentages, but it hardly noticed. They simply passed along.

The atmosphere was deadly.

Deadly to what? The radiation lancing in from the B-type star was deadly and again, deadly to what?

What do I have to know, it wondered. And there was another word it had not used before. I. Me. Myself. An entity. A self. A single thing, standing all alone, no part of another. A personality.

What am I? it asked. Where am I? And why? Why must I go on collecting all this data? What care I for soil, or radiation, or the atmosphere? Why should I have to know what kind of star is standing overhead? I have no body that can be affected by any of it. I seem to have no form, I only have a being. A disembodied entity. A nebulous I.

It desisted for a time, unmoving, doing nothing, collecting no more data, only looking at the red and yellow of the planet, the purple of the flowers.

Then, after a time, it took up its work again. It touched the rocky outcrops on the hillside, found the planes that lay between the layers, seeped into the rock, following the cleavages.

Limestone. Massive, hard limestone. Put down millennia ago at the bottom of the sea.

It paused for a moment, vaguely disturbed, then recognized the cause of its disturbance. Fossils!

Why should fossils disturb it, it asked itself and then suddenly it knew with something that amounted to excitement, or as close as it could come to what might be excitement.

These were not the fossils of plants, primordial ancestors to those purple plants growing on the present surface. These were animals — well-organized forms of life, sophisticated in their structure, well up the evolutionary ladder.

So few of the other planets had any life at all, the few that did more often than not had only the simplest of vegetable life or, perhaps, tiny organisms on the borderline, things that might be slightly more than vegetable, but not yet animal. I should have known, it thought. The purple plants should have alerted me. For they are highly organized; they are not simple plants. On this planet, despite its deadly atmosphere and its deadly radiation and its liquid that is not water, evolutionary forces still had been at work.

It traced one particular fossil. Not large. A chitin covering, apparently, but still it had a skeleton of sorts. It had a head, a body, legs. It had a flattened tail for swimming in whatever evil chemical brew the ocean might have been. It had jaws for seizing and for holding. It had eyes, a great many more eyes, perhaps, than it had any need of. There were faint tracings of an alimentary canal, fragments of nerves here and there that were still preserved, or at least the canals in which they ran had been preserved.