Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

“I don’t believe you! Where is she? Come out with it!”

“She’s far away, I tell you. One million, six-hundred-thousand, five-hundred-and-nineteen planetary diameters away from here! Just go look, if you don’t trust me!”

“Oh, I’ll look all right!” And Trurl deployed his X-ray vision on the immediate vicinity.

What he saw caused him to gasp! “You—you’ve let her dock inside you!”

From deep inside Klapaucius emerged a muted feminine giggle.

“This is beyond belief, Klapaucius! You know we pledged never to do such a thing. Oh, a little cyber-canoodling, sure. ‘Mild petting’ were your exact words, as I recall. But this—!”

“Don’t pretend you never thought of it, Trurl! Neu Trina told me how you dangled your USB plugs in front of her!”

“That was simply so she could inspect my pins to see if their gold-plating had begun to flake…”

“Oh, really…”

“Make her come out! Now!”

An enormous door in the front of Klapaucius gaped, a ramp extended, and the petite Neu Trina rolled out, just as she had that long-ago day from the birthing factory. Except today all her antennae were disheveled and hot liquid solder dripped from several ports.

Trurl’s emotional units went angrily asymptotic at this sluttish sight.

“Damn you, Klapaucius!”

Trurl unfurled a bevy of whip-like manipulators and began to flail away at his partner.

Klapaucius responded in kind.

“Now, boys, don’t fight over little old— squee !”

Caught in the middle of the battle, Neu Trina had her main interface pod lopped off by a metal tendril. If the combatants noticed this collateral damage, it served only to further inflame them. They escalated their fight, employing deadlier and deadlier devices—against which, of course, they were both immune.

But not so their surroundings. The pilothouse was soon destroyed, and Neu Trina rendered into scattered shavings and solenoids, tubes and transistors, lenses and levers.

After long struggle, the master constructors ground down to an exhausted halt. They looked about themselves, assessing the destruction they had caused with an air of sheepish bemusement. Trurl kicked half-heartedly at Neu Trina’s dented responsometer, sending that heart-shaped box sailing several miles away. Klapaucius pretended to be very interested in a gyno-gasket.

Neither spoke, until Klapaucius said, “Well, I suppose I did let my lusts get the better of my judgement. I apologize profusely, dear Trurl. What was this servo anyhow, to come between us? Nothing! No hard feelings, I hope? Still friends?”

Klapaucius tentatively extended a manipulator. After a moment’s hesitation, Trurl matched the gesture.

“Always friends, dear Klapaucius! Always! Now, listen to what brought me here.” Trurl narrated his revelation about the orrery.

“You klystron klutz! Have you forgotten so easily the Law of Retrograde Reflexivity!”

“But the Ninth Corollary clearly states—”

And off they went to their labours, arguing all the way.

One trillion AUs out from the planet that had first given birth to the race of palefaces, and millions of years deep into the past, relative to their own era, the pair of master constructors focused their bevy of remote-sensing devices on the blue-green globe. Instantly a large monitor filled with a living scene, complete with haptics and sound: a primitive urban conglomeration swarming with fleshy bipedal creatures, moving about “on foot” and inside enslaved dumb vehicles that emitted wasteful puffs of gas as they zoomed down narrow channels.

Trurl shuddered all along his beryllium spinal nodules. “How disagreeable these ‘humans’ are! So squishy! Like bags of water full of contaminants and debris.”

“Don’t forget—these are our ancestors, after a fashion. The legends hold that they invented the first machine intelligences.”

“It seems impossible. Our clean, infallible, utilitarian kind emerging from organic slop—”

“Well, stranger things have happened. Recall how those colonies of metal-fixing bacteria on Benthic VII began to exhibit emergent behavioural complexity.”

“Still, I can’t quite credit the legend. Say, these pests can’t reach us here, can they?”

“Although all records are lost, I believe we’ve travelled to an era before the humans had managed to venture further than their own satellite—bodily, that is. I’ve already registered the existence of various crude intrasolar data-gathering probes. Here, taste this captured one.”

Klapaucius offered Trurl a small bonbon of a probe, and Trurl ate it with zest. “Hmmm, yes, the most rudimentary processing power imaginable. Perhaps the legends are true. Well, be that as it may, what’s our next move?”

“We’ll have to reach the planet under our own power. The GHC—which the human astronomers seem not to have noticed yet, by the way—must remain here, due to its immense gravitic influences. Now, once within tractor-beam range, we could simply abduct some palefaces at random. They’re powerless in comparison to our capabilities. Yet I argue otherwise.”

“Why?” Trurl asked.

“How would we determine their fitness for our purposes? What standards apply? What if we got weak or intractable specimens?”

“Awful. They might die off or suicide, and we’d have to do this all over again. I hate repeating myself.”

“Yes, indeed. So instead, I propose that we let our sample be self-determining.”

“How would you arrange that?”

“Simple. We show ourselves and state our needs. Any human who volunteers to come with us will be ipso facto one of the type who would flourish in a novel environment.”

“Brilliant, Klapaucius! But wait. Are we taking a chance by such blatant interference of diverting futurity from the course we know?”

“Not according to the Sixth Postulate of the Varker-Baley Theorems.”

“Perfect! Then let’s be off!”

Leaving the GHC in self-maintenance mode, the master constructors zipped across the intervening one trillion AUs and into low Earth orbit.

“Pick a concentration of humans,” Klapaucius graciously transmitted to his partner.

“How about that one?” Trurl sent forth a low-wattage laser beam to highlight a large city on the edge of one continent. Even at low-wattage, however, the beam raised some flames visible from miles high.

“As good as anyplace else. Wait, one moment—there, I’ve deciphered every paleface language in their radio output. Now we can descend.”

The master constructors were soon hovering above their chosen destination, casting enormous shadows over wildly racing, noisy, accident-prone crowds.

“Let us land in that plot of greenery, to avoid smashing any of these fragile structures.”

Trurl and Klapaucius stood soon amidst crushed trees and shattered boulders and bridges and gazebos, rearing higher than the majority of the buildings around them.

“I will now broadcast our invitation in a range of languages,” said Klapaucius.

From various speakers embedded across his form, words thundered out. Glass shattered throughout the city.

“My mistake.”

The volume moderated, Klapaucius’s call for volunteers went out. “—come with us. The future beckons! Leave this parochial planet behind. Trade your limited lifetimes and perspectives for infinite knowledge. Only enthusiastic and broad-minded individuals need apply….”

Soon the giant cybervisitors were surrounded by a crowd of humans. Trurl and Klapaucius extruded interactive sensors at ground level to question the humans. One stepped boldly forward.

“Do you understand what we are looking for, human?”