David Brin: Lungfish

Ursula made an effort to calm herself… to suppress the reactions of an evolved ape—far, far from home.

“Uh, Gavin, I think you better come down here. I’ve found them.”

“Found who?” he muttered. Then he exclaimed. “The colonists!”

“Yeah. And… and something else, as well.”

This time there was hardly a pause. “Hang on, Urs. I’m on my way.”

Ursula let her hand drop, and stood for a long moment, staring at her discovery.

Greeter, Awaiter, and the others are getting nervous. They, too, have begun trying to awaken dormant capabilities, to reclaim bits of themselves that each donated to the whole .

Of course I cannot allow it .

We made a pact, back when we fragmented, broken survivors clustered together after this system’s last battle. All our little drones and subunits were nearly used up in that last coalescence. The last repair and replication capability any of us had was applied to combining and settling in to wait together .

We all assumed that when something from the outside arrived it would be another probe .

If it was some type of Rejector, we would try to lure it within reach of our pitiful remaining might. If it was a variety of Loyalist, we would ask it for help. With decent replication facilities, it would only take a few centuries for each of us to rebuild to our former glory .

Of course, the newcomer might even be an Innocent, though it is hard to believe the dangerous galaxy would let any new probe-race stay neutral for long .

Sooner or later however, we felt, another probe had to come .

We never imagined the wait would be so long… long enough for the little mammals on the water world to evolve into Makers themselves .

What has happened out there, while we drifted here? Could the War be decided, by now ?

If the Rejecters have won, then it would explain the emptiness, the silence. Their various types would soon fall into fighting among themselves, until only one remained to impose its will on Creation .

One can narrow it down a little. If the Pure Berserkers had triumphed, they would have been here by now to sterilize the Earth and any other possible abode for life. And if the Gobblers prevailed, they would have already begun dismantling the nearby stars .

Berserkers and Gobblers are ruled out, then. Those types were too simpleminded, too obstinate anyway. They must be extinct by now .

But the Anti-Maker variety of Rejector, subtle and clever, might have won without our knowing it. That type does not waste its time destroying biospheres, or eating up solar systems in spasms of self-replication. It wants only to seek out technological civilizations and ruin them. Its repertoire of dirty tricks is legion .

And yet, with all the incredible radio racket the humans are putting out, would not Anti-Makers have homed in by now, to do their harm ?

Greeter and Awaiter are are convinced that the Rejectors have lost, that it is safe now to send out a message to the Loyalist community, calling for help .

I cannot allow it of course .

They still have not figured out that even among Loyalists there can be disagreements. The Purpose… my Purpose… must be foremost. Even if it means betraying companions who waited with me through the long, long dark .

Ursula had started out thinking of them as somehow unsophisticated. After all, how could people, biological folk, be fully capable if they were born out of tanks and raised by machines? Here they had been decanted, but they had been meant for a planet’s surface. The ancient colonists could not have been anything but helpless pawns so long as they were out in space, dependent on the mammoth starmother probe and its drones for everything from heat to food to air.

But the creatures obviously had been aware of what was going on. The machines, apparently, had been programmed to teach them. And though all magnetic and superconducting records were long decayed, the biologicals had known a way to make sure that their story would someday be read… from a wall of chiseled stone.

“Interpreting the writing will have to wait for the experts,” Gavin told her unnecessarily as he used a gas jet gently to brush dust from uneven rows of angular letters incised in the rock. “With these pictograms to accompany the text, the professor types just may be able to decipher it.”

Gavin’s voice was hushed, subdued. He was still adjusting to what they had found here… a possible Rosetta Stone for an entire alien race.

“Perhaps,” Ursula commented. The little robot she had been supervising finished a multifrequency radar scan of the wall and rolled to one side, awaiting further instructions. Ursula stepped back and hopped up to sit cross-legged on another drone, which hummed beneath her, unresentful and patient.

In the feeble gravity Ursula’s arms hung out in front of her, like frames encompassing the picture she was trying to understand.

The creatures must have had a lot of time while the battles raged outside their deep catacombs, for the wall carvings were extensive and intricate, arrayed in neat rows and columns. Separated by narrow lines of peculiar chiseled text were depictions of suns and planets and great machines.

Most of all, pictographs of great machines covered the wall.

They had agreed that the first sequence appeared to begin at the lower left, where a two dimensional image of a starprobe could be seen entering a solar system—presumably this one—its planets’ orbits sketched out in thin lines upon the wall. Next to that initial frame was a portrayal of the same probe, now deploying sub-drones, taking hold of a likely planetoid, and beginning the process of making replicas of itself.

Eight replicas departed the system in the following frame. There were four symbols below the set of stylized child probes… Ursula could read the binary symbol for eight, and there were eight dots, as well. It didn’t take much imagination to tell that the remaining two symbols also stood for the same numeral.

Ursula made a note of the discovery. Translation had begun already. Apparently this type of probe was programmed to make eight copies of itself, and no more. That settled a nagging question that had bothered Ursula for years.

If sophisticated self-replicating probes had been roaming the galaxy for aeons, why was there any dead matter left at all? It was theoretically possible for an advanced enough technology to dismantle not only asteroids but planets and stars, as well. If the replicant-probes had been as simplemindedly voracious as viruses, they would by now have gobbled the entire galaxy! There should be nothing left in the sky but a cloud of innumerable starprobes… reduced to preying on each other for raw materials until the entire pathological system fell apart in entropy death.

But that fate had been avoided. This type of motherprobe showed how it could be done. It was programmed to make a strictly limited number of copies of itself.

This type of probe was so programmed, Ursula reminded herself.

In the final frame of the first sequence, after the daughter probes had been dispatched to their destinations, the mother probe was shown moving next to a round globe—a planet. A thin line linked probe and planet. A vaguely humanoid figure, resembling in caricature the mummies on the floor, stepped across the bridge to its new home.

The first story ended there. Perhaps this was a depiction of the way things were supposed to have gone. But there were other sequences. Other versions of reality. In several, the mother probe arrived at the solar system to find others already there before it.