David Brin - Existence

Fortunately, both Gavin and I can remove our legs in weightlessness. And we’re well adapted to save consumables by cool-sleeping most of our way home.

In the quest to free up space, everything that could be spared was jettisoned. Piles of abandoned gear littered the nearby asteroid, including all the faithful worker drones. Perhaps later visitors could use them.

And still we haven’t enough fuel or space to take more than a fraction. A sampling.

From some unbidden corner of whimsy:

A hundred crystals, sealed from light.

Some FACR parts to analyze.

Mummies, holos, robot fighters…

… and with all that, you want fries?

Departure had been delayed as Tor and Gavin spent a full day swapping some items of cargo for one complete colonist brooding tank. A last minute urgent request from Earth, though Tor couldn’t imagine how the antediluvian machinery would ever be useful to anybody. Even if we learn to make living creatures from raw chemicals, what difference will that make? We already have Neanderthals and mammoths. Does somebody plan to resurrect dinosaurs?

If so, will it be the cliché-irony of the millennium?

One thing she knew, from studying the chiseled underground wall-humanity wasn’t going to dispatch its own versions of the Mother Probe. Not any time soon. Not without knowing a lot more about what was going on out there.

Well, someone will explain why they need it when-and if-we make it home.

Gavin floated into the dimly lit control room. “All sealed up, Tor,” he reported. “Two months in orbit haven’t done the engines any harm. Warren can maneuver whenever you like.”

Gavin’s supple, plastiskin face was somber, his voice subdued. She touched her partner’s glossy hand. “Thanks, Gavin. You know, I’ve noticed…”

His eyes lifted and met hers.

“Noticed what, Tor?”

“Oh, nothing really.” She shook her head, deciding not to comment on the changes… a new maturity. A grown-up sadness. “I just want you to know-that I think you’ve done a wonderful job. I’m proud to have you as my partner.”

Gavin turned his gaze away, momentarily, and shrugged. “We all do what we have to…” he began, then paused. He looked back at her.

“Same here, Tor. I feel the same way.”

Gavin turned and leaped for the hatch, swinging arm-over-arm to negotiate the cargo-maze, briefly resembling the apes who were co-ancestors of his mind. Then Tor was alone again in the darkened control room.

She surveyed scores of displays, screens, and readouts representing half-sapient organs of the spaceship… its ganglia, nerve bundles, and sensors, all converging to this room, to her. With some of them plugged even deeper-directly into her cyborg body and brain.

“Astrogation plot completed,” the pilot announced. “Ship’s status triple-checked and nominal. Ready to initiate thrust and leave orbit.”

“Proceed,” she said.

The screens ran through a brief countdown, followed by distant rumbling. Soon, a faint sensation of weight began to build, like the soft pull they had felt upon the ruined planetoid. The shattered Mother Probe and her replication yards began to move beneath the Warren Kimbel . Tor watched the twisted ruins fall away and behind her ship, till only the beacon still glimmered through a deathly, star-lit stillness.

An indicator pulsed to one side of the instrument board. Incoming Mail.Tor clicked a tooth to re-enter the inner world of her percept, allowing the message to appear before her. It was a note from The Universe. The editors were enthusiastic over her book on interstellar probes. Small wonder, with her current notoriety. They predicted confidently that it could be the best read piece in the solar system, this year.

The solar system? Aren’t they getting carried away? We’ve barely landed on Mars and poked at the belt. Just twelve babies have been born off-Earth, and they can’t read yet.

Still, it was satisfying to be a journalist again. Refining the book would help her pass the long watches, between cool-naps.

Enjoy solitude while it lasts, she told herself . On Earth, I’ll be immersed again in smart-mobs and hot news! Birdwoman and her pals will swamp me with long lists of bizarre correlations and supposed conspiracies that I MUST attend to, because one percent of them might actually matter. While the rest deal with things only auties care about-like suspicious changes in the flicker rate of LED bulbs, or disturbing new patterns in the cedar shavings that are collected by the latest models of pencil sharpener.

Yet, Tor actually found herself looking forward to rejoining that world. A civilization more varied than the one she had been born into, and getting more so, all the time. One with a plenitude of peering eyes to catch mistakes and unabashed voices, free to cry out warnings. One that just might spot the traps that caught every other promising race of sapients, in this spiral arm.

Now she and Gavin were bringing home more grist for that frenetic mill.

What will people do with all this knowledge? she wondered. Will we be capable of imagining a correct course of action? And suppose someone suggests a plausible way out. Will our vaunted individualism and undisciplined diversity-the wellspring of our creativity-prevent us from implementing it?

In her report-accompanied by vivid holos and graphics-Tor laid out the story of the rock wall, carved in brave desperation by little biological creatures so very much like humans. Many viewers already sympathized with the alien colonists, slaughtered helplessly so long ago. Though, their destruction left a path open, leading to humankind.

Moreover, simple geological dating brought forth a chilling fact. The Mother Probe, her replicas and her colonist children, all died at almost the same moment-give or take a century-that Earth’s dinosaurs went extinct. Presumably victims of the same horrific war.

What happened? Did one robotic faction hurl a huge piece of rock at another, missing its target but striking the water planet, accidentally wreaking havoc on its biosphere? Or was the extinction event intentional? Tor imagined all those magnificent creatures, killed as innocent bystanders in a battle between great machines… an outcome that incidentally gave Earth’s mammals their big chance.

Now, as rumbling engines pushed against Warren Kimbel ’s orbital momentum, setting up a dive to sunward, Tor dimmed all remaining lights and looked out upon the starfield, wondering how the war was going, out there.

We’re like ants, she thought, building tiny castles under the stomping feet of giants.

Depicted on the rock wall had been every type of interstellar probe imaginable… and some whose purposes Tor might never fathom. There were berserkers, for instance-a variant thought of in twentieth century science fiction. Thankfully, the wall chart deemed those world-wreckers to be rare. And there were (what appeared to be) policeman probes who hunted berserkers down. The motivations behind those two types were opposite. Yet, Tor was capable of understanding both. Among humans, there had always been destroyer types… and rescuers.

Apparently both berserkers and police probes were already obsolete by the time those stone sketches were hurriedly carved. Both types had been relegated to far corners-like creatures of an earlier, more uncomplicated day-along with machines Tor had nicknamed Gobbler, Analyzer, Observer, and Howdy. All were depicted as simple, crude, archaic.

There had been others. One, that she called Harm, seemed a more sophisticated version of a berserker. It did not seek out life-bearing worlds in order to destroy them. Rather it spread innumerable copies of itself, which then aimed to kill anything intelligent that betrayed its presence, say with radio waves.