Pohl, Frederik - Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

The Oldest One could not enter the chamber because of his size, but with long, soft-metal feelers he reached inside and touched the captives. It did not interest him that they screamed and struggled. His interest at that moment was only in their physical state. That was very satisfactory: two of them, including the male, were quite young, and therefore good for many years of use. In whatever fashion he might decide to use them. All seemed in good health.

As far as communicating with them went, there was the nuisance that their yells and imprecations were in one of those unpleasant languages their predecessors had used. The Oldest One did not understand one word. That was not a real problem, because he could always talk to them through the intervention of the stored intelligences of their predecessors. Even his own children, over the centuries, tended to evolve their language so that he could not have talked to them, either, if he had not stored one or two of them every dozen generations as translators-as nothing but translators, because the Oldest One’s children regrettably did not seem to be much use for anything else. So such problems could be solved. Meanwhile the facts were favorable. Fact: The specimens were in good condition. Fact: They were clearly intelligent, tool-using, even technological. Fact: They were his to employ as he saw fit.

“Feed them. Keep them secure. Wait for further instructions,” he commanded the children clustered behind him. He then turned down his external receptors so that he could consider just how to employ these intruders in the furtherance of the imperatives that were the central core of his very long life.

As a personality stored in a machine, the Oldest One’s normal life expectancy was very great-perhaps as much as several thousand years-but not great enough to carry out his plans. He had extended it by diluting it. In standby mode he hardly aged at all. So he spent most of his time powered-down, motionless. He was not resting at such times, not even dreaming. He was merely abiding, while his children lived their lives and carried out his will and the astrophysical events outside crept sluggishly forward.

From time to time he woke at the urging of his internal clocks, to check and correct and revise. At other times his children woke him. They were instructed to do so at need, and very often (though not really very by any standard other than his own) the need arose.

Time was when the Oldest One was a flesh-and-blood creature, as much an animal as his present children or the captives they had brought him. That time had been very short indeed, less than a nap, from the moment when he was expelled from his mother’s sweated and straining loins to the terrible time at its end, lying helpless as strange needles poured sleep into his veins and the whirling knives waited to trepan his skull. He could remember that time quite clearly when he chose. He could remember anything, in that short life or in the long, long pseudolife that followed, provided only that he could remember where to look for it in his stored memories. And that he could not always remember. There was too much stored.

The Oldest One had no clear conception of how many memories he had available to him, or of how much time had passed, one way or another. Or even of where things were. This place where he and his children dwelt was “Here”. That certain other place that figured so largely in his thoughts was “There”. Everything else in the universe was merely “Everywhere else”, and he did not trouble to locate points as they related to one another. Where did the intruders come from? From somewhere or other. It did not matter exactly where. Where was the food source that the boy visited? Some other somewhere. Where had his people come from, in the long ages before he himself had been born? It didn’t matter. The central Here had existed for a long, long time-longer than one could comprehend, even for the Oldest One himself. Here had sailed through space since it was built and outfitted and launched; Here had seen many births and deaths-nearly five million of them-though at no one time did it hold more than a few hundred living things, and seldom more than a few score. Here had seen constant slow changes through all that time. The newborns were larger, softer, fatter, and more helpless as time went on. The adults were taller, slower, less hairy. Here had often seen rapid changes, as well. At such times the children were well advised to wake the Oldest One.

Sometimes the changes were political, for Here had held a thousand different social systems, one at a time. There were spans of a generation or two, or even of centuries, when the existing culture was sensate and hedonistic, or puritanically stark; when one individual became a despot or a divinity, or when none rose above any other at all. There was never a democratic republic like those Earth had tried-Here was not big enough for representative government-and only once a racially stratified society. (It ended when the dun-furred lowers rose against the chocolate-furred uppers and wiped them out for good.) There had been many ideologies Here, and a various collection of moralities, but only one religion-at least, in the last many millennia. There was only room for one, when its living god rested among the children all the days of their lives, and awoke to smite or favor when it chose.

For many eons Here held no true people at all, only a collection of puzzled semisentients confronted with challenges that had been engineered to make them wise. The process worked. Only slowly. It took a hundred thousand years before the first of them comprehended even the concept of writing, nearly half a million more before one was found to be wise enough to be trusted with real work to do. That honor had gone to the Oldest One himself. It had not been welcome. No other had earned it since.

And that, too, was a failing, the Oldest One knew. Somehow he had failed, what had he done wrong?

Surely he had done his best! He had always, particularly in the first few centuries of his machine-bodied afterlife, been diligent and careful in supervising every act of the children. When they did wrong he punished. When they did well he praised. Always he cared for their needs.

But perhaps that was where he had gone wrong. There had been a time, long and long ago, when he had awakened with a terrible “pain” in the metal carapace he dwelt within. It was not the pain of flesh, but the sensors’ report of unacceptable physical damage; but it was quite as alarming. His children were gathered around in terror, all shouting at once as they displayed to him the hacked-dead corpse of a young female. “She was insane!” they cried, quaking. “She tried to destroy you!”

The Oldest One’s quick check of systems revealed that the damage was trivial. It had been an explosive of some sort, and all it had cost him was a few effectors and some destruction of control nets, nothing that could not be repaired. He asked to know why she had done this. Their answers came only slowly, for they were terrified, but they came: “She wanted us to destroy you. She said you were damaging us, and that we could not grow without you. We beg forgiveness! We know we did wrong by not killing her sooner!”

“You did wrong,” the Oldest One said justly, “but that was not the reason. If any such person appears among you again you are to awaken me at once. He may be restrained if it is necessary. But he may not be killed.”

And then-was it a few centuries later? It seemed only the wink of an eye. And then there had been the time when they had not awakened him soon enough. For a dozen generations they had failed to observe the laws, and the reproductive budgets had not been met, and the total census of his living children was down to four individuals before they dared risk his displeasure by waking him. Well, they felt it. That had nearly been the end of all plans, because only one of the four was a female, and she near the end of childbearing. He had used a dozen years of his life then, waking fretfully every few months, disciplining, teaching-worrying. With the help of biological lore stored deep in his oldest memories he had insured that the two babies the female managed to bear were also female. With stored sperm from the terrified males he kept the gene pool as diverse as he could. But it was a near thing. And some things had been forever lost. No other would-be assassin had ever risen against him. If only one would! No other like himself had ever appeared.