Pohl, Frederik - Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

The Oldest One recognized that he had no real hope there would ever be another from his children. If it could happen, it would have. There had been time. Ten thousand generations of his children had been born and died since then, over a span of a quarter of a million years.

When the Oldest One moved again, all his children jumped too. They knew he would act. They did not know what the actions would be.

“The repair mechanisms in the 4700 A corridors are to be replaced,” he said. “Three artificers see to it” There was a stilled murmur of relief from the seventy-odd adults-punishment always came first, and if his first orders were not punishment then there would be none. This time. The three artificers the leader pointed to were less relieved, because that meant some days of very hard work in manhandling new machines to the green corridors and bringing back the old for repair; but it was their excuse to get away from the awful presence of the Oldest One. They seized it immediately.

“The male intruder and the older female are to be penned together,” he said. If they were to breed they had best get on with it, and better to start with the older female. “Do any of you survive who have had experience with the rapporter?” Three of the children were pushed reluctantly forward. “One of you will educate the younger female,” he instructed. “Do any survive who have had experience in preparing intruders for storage?”

“I prepared the last two,” the leader said. “Also there are persons who assisted me still alive.”

“See that the skills are maintained,” the Oldest One ordered. “If one of you should die, he is to be prepared by the others, and new persons must be taught” That was a convenience. If the skills had been lost-and the lives of these creatures were so brief that many skills did get lost while he was powered down-it would have been necessary to set some of them to practicing brain surgery on others, to be ready in case he decided that these intruders, too, should go into storage. Continuing down his priority list, he gave additional instructions. Dead or spindly plantings should be replaced. All permitted areas of Here should be visited at least once a month. And, as the number of infants and young was only eleven, at least five babies should be born each year for the next ten years.

The Oldest One then powered down his external receptors, resumed his place at the central communications terminals and plugged himself in to his long-term memories. All about the central spindle his children were hastening to do his bidding as the leader parceled out assignments. Half a dozen left to dig up berryfruit bushes and airvines to replace the defective plants, others went to deal with the captives and attend to housekeeping chores, several young couples were sent to their quarters to breed. If they had had other plans, they were now deferred. At this particular awakening the Oldest One was not dissatisfied with his children, and whether they were dissatisfied with him did not occur to him to wonder.

His concerns were elsewhere.

With his externals reduced to the standby trickle of his resting mode, the Oldest One was not resting. He was assimilating these new factors into his reference store. There was change. Change was danger. Change was also opportunity, if approached right. Change might be used to advance his purposes, and could not be allowed to interfere with them. He had dealt with the immediate and the tactical. Now his attention went to the strategic and the ultimate.

He reached into his long-term memory. Some memories represented events very far away in space and in time, and were frightening even to the Oldest One. (How had he dared such temerity!) Some were quite near, and not frightening at all, for example those stored intruder intelligences the boy called “the Dead Men”. There was nothing in them to be frightening. But, oh, how irritating they could be.

When the intruders first blundered Here, shattered castaways in their tiny ships, the Oldest One had had a moment of terror. They were unexplained. Who were they? Were they the lords he was trying to serve, come to reproach his presumption?

He quickly learned they were not. Were they, then, some other breed of servants to the lords, from whom he could learn new modes of service? They were not that either. They were wanderers. They had come Here by chance, in ancient, abandoned ships they did not truly know how to use. When their ships’ course directors neutralized themselves, as they were meant to do on arriving Here, they were terrified.

They were not, as it turned out, even very interesting. He had used up many days of life with them as they appeared, first one, then another lone adventurer, then a group of three. In all there had been nearly twenty of them, in nine ships, not counting the child who had been born here, and none of them worth the concern they had caused him. The first few he had had his children sacrifice at once, in order to put their stored intelligence into the machine form that he could best deal with. The others he had given orders to preserve, even to allow to roam free, when it appeared they might be more interesting in an independent life in the unused areas of Here. He had given them everything he perceived they might need. He had even given some of them immortality, as he himself had been made immortal-as fewer than one in a hundred thousand of his children ever were. It was a waste. Alive and capricious, or stored for eternity, they were more trouble than they were worth. They brought diseases to his children, and some of them had died. They caught diseases from the children, and some of the intruders died, too. And they did not store well. Properly programmed into his long-term memories, by the machine-directed techniques that had been used on him thousands of centuries ago and taught to his children ever since, they performed badly. Their time sense was deficient. Their response to interrogatories was erratic. Large sections of their memories were gone. Some of them could not be read at all. The fault was not in the techniques; they were defective to begin with.

When the Oldest One himself had been made immortal after the death of his flesh, he awoke as his exact self. All the knowledge and skills he had ever had were duplicated in the machine store. So with his children, when at random intervals he chose one to store. So even with his flesh ancestors, so far back that even his own immense age dwindled in comparison. So with those other stored memories that he did not like even to consult.

Not so with the intruders. There was something wrong with their chemistry. They recorded imperfectly and retrieved haphazardly, and there were times when he thought to erase them all. He had banished the little storage spheres and their readout systems to the remote periphery of Here, and his children never went near them. He had decided to preserve them at the last only out of thrift. A time might come when he would need them.

Perhaps that time was now.

With a sense of reluctant distaste, as a man might reach into a sewer to retrieve a dropped gem, the Oldest One opened the pathways that linked him to the stored intruder minds.

And recoiled.

Three of the children, hurrying Janine around the curvature of the spindle from her. pen to the rapporter, saw the Oldest One’s effectors quiver and external lenses flash open. They stumbled and stopped, waiting fearfully for what would come next

Nothing came next. The effectors relaxed again. The lenses powered down to standby. After a moment, the children collected themselves and dragged Janine to the waiting metallic couch.

But inside the Oldest One’s metal shell he had received his greatest shock in many awakenings. Someone had been interfering with his stored memories! It was not merely that they were mad. They had always been mad; worse, they were in some ways more sane now, or at least more lucid, as though something had been trying to reprogram them. There were inputs he had never given them. They contained memories he had never shared. These were not storage that had come to the surface from their past lives. They were new. They spoke of organized knowledge on a scale that dwarfed even his own. Spaceships and machines. Living intelligences by the tens of billions. Machine intelligences that were slow and even almost stupid, by his standards, but possessed incredible stores to draw on. It was no wonder that he had reacted physically, as a man shocked out of a reverie might start and twitch.