Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

It’s this:

There’s a simple biological fact, true of every life-form ever discovered: although a single-celled organism, like an amoeba or one of the other Protista, can live forever, any complex multicelled organism will die of old age if nothing else gets it.

Any species, humans or Cecropians or Varnians or Polyphemes (or Builders!), is just a large number of individuals, and you can think of that assembly as a single multicelled organism. In some cases, like the Hymenopts and the Decantil Myrmecons, the single nature is a lot more obvious than it is for humans or Cecropians — though humans seem like a swarm when you’ve seen as many worlds as I have from space, with cities and road nets and superstructures spreading over the surface like mold on a ripe fruit.

Anyway, species are organisms , and here’s my simple syllogism:

Any species is a single, multicelled organism. Every multicelled organism will over the course of time grow old and die. Therefore , any species will at last grow old and die.

That’s what happened to the superorganism known as the Builders. It lived a long time. Then it got old. And it died.

Convincing? If so, you shouldn’t expect anything better for humans. I certainly don’t.

Hans Rebka’s job as a Phemus Circle troubleshooter had taken him to a hundred planets. He had made thousands of planetary landings; and because by the nature of things his job took him only to places where there were already problems, scores of those landings had been made in desperate circumstances.

The first thought after a hard impact was always the same: Alive! I’m Alive. The questions came crowding in after that: Am I in good enough shape to function? Are my companions alive and well? Is the ship in one piece? Is it airtight? Is it intact enough to allow us to take off again?

And finally, the questions that made the condition of the ship and the crew so important: Where are we? What is it like outside ?

By Rebka’s standards, the seedship had made a soft landing — which is to say, it had been brought down at a speed that did not burn it up as it entered the atmosphere and the impact had not killed outright every being on board. But it had not made a comfortable landing. The ship had driven obliquely into the surface with force enough to make the tough hull shiver and scream in protest. Hans Rebka had felt his teeth rattle in his head while a sudden force of many gravities rammed him down into the padded seat.

He had blacked out for a few seconds. When he swam back to consciousness his eyes were not working properly. There was a shifting flicker of bright lights, interspersed with moments of total darkness.

He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. If sight failed, he would have to make do with other senses. The key questions still had to be asked and answered.

Concentrate. Make your brain work, even though it doesn’t want to.

Hearing. He listened to the noises around him. First answer: some of the others on board had survived the crash. He could hear cursing and groaning, and the clicks and whistles of conversation between Kallik and J’merlia. The groans had to be Louis Nenda. And anything that had left humans alive was unlikely to have harmed a Lo’tfian, still less a Hymenopt. Atvar H’sial, most massive of the ship’s occupants, might be in the worst shape. But that fear was eased when Rebka felt a soft proboscis touching his face, and heard Nenda’s voice: “Is he alive? Lift him up, At, let me get a look at him.”

Smell. The ship had fared less well. Rebka could smell an unfamiliar and unpleasant odor, like cloying damp mold. The integrity of the hull had been breached, and they were breathing the planet’s air. That disposed of any idea of testing the atmosphere before exposing themselves to it. Either it would kill them, or it wouldn’t.

Touch. Someone was poking his chest and belly, hard enough to hurt. Rebka grunted and opened his eyes again, experimentally. The flicker was fading, reduced to a background shimmer. His head ached horribly. Louis Nenda had finished his abdominal poking and was moving Rebka’s arms and legs, feeling the bones and working the joints.

“Don’t need to do that.” Rebka took a deep, shuddering breath and sat up. “I’m good as new. The ship…”

“Should probably fly atmospheric with no problem. But we can’t leave for space till that’s fixed.” Nenda was pointing forward. Hans Rebka saw a spray of black mud right in front of his seat, squirted in through a caved section of the seedship’s hull. “Atvar H’sial and J’merlia are checking it out, seein’ how big a job we got before we’d be ready for a space run.”

“If we’re allowed to leave.” Rebka was trying to stand and finding that his legs did not want to cooperate. It did not help that the floor of the seedship remained at ten degrees to the horizontal. Rebka came upright in the cramped space and leaned on the wall. He noticed a deep bleeding gash on Nenda’s muscular left arm. The Karelian was calmly suturing it with a needle and thick thread — and, of course, without anesthetic.

Rebka registered that without comment. Whatever Nenda’s defects, he was tough and he was not a whiner. A good man to have at your back in a fight — but watch your own back, afterward.

“We didn’t have any control coming in,” Rebka said. “If we leave, that same beam could drop us right back — less gently next time.”

“Yeah. We were lucky,” Nenda mumbled through clenched teeth. He had finished his stitching and was biting through the coarse thread. He finally spat out the loose end, went to the open hatch, and peered out. “Soft mud. If you have to hit, best possible stuff to land on. Kallik!” he called outside, adding a click and a loud whistle. “Damn that Hymenopt. I said to take a peek outside, but I don’t see her nowhere. Where’s she got to now?”

With the ship tilted as it was, the bottom of the open hatch was five feet above the ground. Rebka followed Louis Nenda as the Karelian sat on the sloping floor and swung himself out of the hatch to drop onto the surface of the planet. The two men found themselves standing on a flat, gray-green moss that gave an inch or two beneath their weight. The skidding arrival of the seedship had gouged a straight black furrow, a few hundred yards long, in that level surface.

“Lucky,” Nenda said. “We could have landed in that .” He pointed to the ship’s rear. Half a mile away the flat ground gave way to a patchwork of tall ferns and cycads, from which twisted fingers of dark rock were projecting. Their serried tops were sharp as dragon’s teeth. “Or in that .”

Nenda turned and pointed the other way, ahead of the ship. The gray-green moss on which they were standing formed a shoreline, a flat between the jutting rocks and a silent, blue-gray sea. “If we’d flown one mile farther, right now we’d be trying to breathe water. Lucky again. Except I don’t believe it was luck.”

“We were brought here,” Rebka agreed. The two men moved farther from the crippled ship, searching the surface from horizon to horizon. There was an unspoken thought in both their heads. Every planet carried its own life-forms and its own potential dangers. But if this world was in fact Genizee, there was a formidable known danger to worry about: the Zardalu.

Rebka was cursing the decision — his decision, he made himself admit — to penetrate the singularities using the nimble but unarmed seedship. They could not have brought the Erebus , bristling with weapons, without risking the loss of the whole party if the ship was unable to negotiate the encircling singularities; but they could have brought Dulcimer’s ship, the Indulgence , well-armed enough to allow adequate self-defense. With only the seedship, they were reduced to fighting with their bare hands — and they knew how hopeless that was against the Zardalu. True enough, they had never intended to land; but Rebka would not excuse his error.