Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

“Ummm.” If you were to run tourist ships out to this part of the Anfract, and keep them here for a few hours — assuming that anyone could stand such a wonderful feeling for so long — you could make your fortune. And maybe you could be on the ship yourself , for every trip.

“Hey.” He was staring at her. “What are you looking so pleased about? I thought you’d feel down today, but you’re wall-to-wall grin.”

“Yeah.” Darya gazed into his eyes and amended her last thought. He wasn’t feeling it. You would run ships of female tourists out here.

But the tingle inside her was fading, and at last she could speak. “Why shouldn’t I grin? We found the Zardalu, we all escaped from Genizee, we’ve got the live infant as evidence for the Council, and we’re on the way home. Don’t we have a right to smile?”

“ We do. Graves and Tally and me do. You don’t.”

“Hans, if you’re going to start that nonsense again about me and Louis Nenda… he was only trying to explain what they were going to do with the Indulgence , I’m sure he was. And then when I wouldn’t listen to him, he put his hand on—”

“That’s not a problem anymore. We know what happened to the Indulgence . While you were snoring your head off, Kallik located a flight plan in a locked file in the Erebus ’s backup computer. Nenda and Atvar H’sial are heading for Glister and Nenda’s old ship.”

That stopped Darya for a moment. She had been hoping to return to Glister herself in the near future, but it was not the right time to mention it. “Well, if you think that I’m smiling because Nenda and I had been—”

“Haven’t thought about that all day.”

He had, though, Darya was sure of it — he had answered much too fast. She was getting to know Hans Rebka better than she had ever known anyone.

“I’m not worrying about you and Nenda, or you and anyone.” His face was no longer lazy or lacking emotion. “I’m worrying about you , and only you. You didn’t come here to find the Zardalu, I know that.”

“I came to be with you.”

“Nuts. Maybe a little bit of that, and I’d like to think so. But mainly you came to find the Builders.”

So she had! It was hard to remember it that way now, but he had pinpointed her original motives for leaving Sentinel Gate. Whether she liked it or not, he was getting to know her, too, better than anyone had ever known her. The flow through the empathy pipe ran both ways. It had been open for only a year. How well would they know each other in a century ?

“And now,” he was continuing, “you’re going home with-out a thing.”

“Nonsense! I have a new artifact to think about. An amazing one. The Torvil Anfract is a Builder creation, the strangest we’ve ever seen.”

“Maybe. But can I quote what a certain professor told me, back on Sentinel Gate? ‘There was nothing more interesting in my life than Builder artifacts — so long as the Builders remained hidden. But once you meet the Builders’ sentient constructs, and think you have a chance to find the Builders themselves, why, the past is irrelevant. artifacts can’t compete.’ Remember who said that?”

He was not expecting an answer. Darya had one, but she did not offer it. Instead she looked again out of the observation bubble. In the sky outside, the blackness was breaking to a scatter of faint light. A view of the spiral arm was coming into view; the real spiral arm, as it ought to look, undistorted by singularity sheets or quantum speckle or Torvil chimeras. They must be almost out of the Anfract.

“But you’re no closer to the Builders now than you were a year ago,” Hans went on. “Farther away, in some ways. When we were dealing with the Builder constructs on Glister and Serenity, you thought that The-One-Who-Waits and Speaker-Between held the key to the exact plans and intentions of the Builders. Now we find that Guardian and World-Keeper agree completely with each other — but they don’t agree with the other constructs at all. It’s a mess and it’s a muddle, and you have to be disappointed and miserable.”

Darya didn’t feel the least bit miserable or disappointed. She had questions, scores of them, but that was what the world was all about.

She smiled fondly at Hans Rebka — or was she just smiling at the warm feeling inside her? Surely a bit of both. “Of course Guardian and World-Keeper agree with each other. You’d expect them to — because they are the same entity . They are one construct existing in a mixed quantum state, just the way J’merlia existed. But in their case, it’s permanent.” And then, while Hans jerked his head back and stared along his nose at her in astonishment, she went on. “Hans, I’ve learned more about Builders and constructs in the past year than anyone has ever known. And you know what? Every new piece of information has made things more puzzling. So here’s the central question: If all the constructs are earnest and industrious and incapable of lying, and if they are all busy carrying out the agenda of their creators, then why is everything so confusing?”

She did not expect an answer. She would have been upset if Hans Rebka had tried to offer one. He was going to be the tryout audience for the paper she would write when she returned to Sentinel Gate. Their departure from the research institute had hardly been a triumph. She laughed to herself. Triumph? Their exit had been a disaster ; Professor Merada, wringing his hands and moaning about the artifact catalog; Glenna Omar, her neck covered in burn ointment and bandages; Carmina Gold firing off outraged messages to the Alliance Council… The next paper that Darya produced had better be really good.

“I’ll tell you why we’ve been confused, Hans. The Builder constructs have terrific physical powers, we know that by direct experience. And it’s tempting to think that anything with that much power has to know what it’s doing. But I don’t believe it anymore. For one thing, they all have different ideas as to their purpose. How come? There’s only one plausible answer: They contradict each other, because each construct had to develop its ideas for itself .

“Our assumption that the machines have been following a well-defined Builder program is nonsense. There’s no such program — or if there is, the constructs don’t know it.

“I’ll tell you what I think happened. Five million years ago, the Builders upped and vanished. The machines were left behind. Like the other artifacts, they’re relics left by the Builders. But there’s one big difference: the constructs are intelligent . They sat and waited for the promised return — real or imaginary — of their creators; and while they waited, they invented agendas to justify their own existence. And each construct made up a Builder Grand Design in which it played the central role. Sound familiar? — just like humans?

“It wasn’t the Builders who decided Genizee was a special place that one day they’d settle down in. They evolved on a gas-giant planet, for God’s sake — what would they want with a funny little world like Genizee? It was Guardian who decided that its planet was special and set up a weird quarantine system to keep space around it free of anyone who failed the test of ethical behavior. Apparently we passed, and the Zardalu failed. Pretty weird, you might say, but the other constructs are just as bad. The-One-Who-Waits thought that Quake was uniquely special, and Speaker-Between knew that Serenity was the only important place.”

Rebka was shaking his head. “I think you’re wrong. I think the Builders are still around, but they don’t want us looking for them. I think they tried to confine the Zardalu to Genizee, but the Zardalu escaped, and got out of control. The Great Rising took care of the Zardalu, they were no problem anymore. But now the Builders are worried about us. Maybe we’ll get out of control, too. I think the Builders are scared of us.”