Scott Westerfeld - Evolution's Darling

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EVOLUTION'S DARLING
by
SCOTT WESTERFELD
Copyright 1999
ISBN 1-56858-149-1
If we can find out those measures, whereby a rational creature . . . may and
ought to govern his opinions and actions, we need not be troubled that some
other things escape our knowledge.
—John Locke
To San Miguel, and those who came.
Prologue
THE MOVEMENTS OF HER EYES
It started on that frozen world, among the stone figures in their almost
suspended animation.
Through her eyes, the irises two salmon moons under a luminous white brow,
like fissures in the world of rules, of logic. The starship's mind watched
through the prism of their wonder, and began to make its change.
She peered at the statue for a solid, unblinking minute. Protesting tears
gathered to blur her vision, but Rathere's gaze did not waver. Another minute,
and a tic tugged at one eye, taking up the steady rhythm of her heartbeat.
She kept watching.
"Ha!" she finally proclaimed. "I saw it move."
"Where?" asked a voice in her head, unconvinced.
Rathere rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, mouth open, awestruck by
the shooting red stars behind her eyelids. Her blinks made up now for the lost
minutes, and she squinted at the dusty town square.
"His foot," she announced, "it moved. But maybe . . . only a centimeter."
The voice made an intimate sound, a soft sigh beside Rathere's ear that did
not quite reject her claim.
"Maybe just a millimeter," Rathere offered. A touch of unsure emphasis hovered
about the last word; she wasn't used to tiny units of measurement, though from
her father's work she understood light-years and metaparsecs well enough.
"In three minutes? Perhaps a micrometer," the voice in her head suggested.
Rathere rolled the word around in her mouth. In response to her questioning
expression, software was invoked, as effortless as reflex. Images appeared
upon the rough stones of the square: a meter-stick, a hundredth of its length
glowing bright red, a detail box showing that hundredth with a hundredth of
its length flashing, yet another detail box . . . completing the six orders of
magnitude between meter and micrometer. Next to the final detail box a
cross-section of human hair floated for scale, as bloated and gnarled as some
blackly diseased tree.
"That small?" she whispered. A slight intake of breath, a softening of her
eyes' focus, a measurable quantity of adrenalin in her bloodstream were all
noted. Indicators of her simple awe: that a distance could be so small, a
creature so slow.
"About half that, actually," said the voice in her head.
"Well," Rathere murmured, leaning back into the cool hem of shade along the
stone wall, "I knew I saw it move."
She eyed the stone creature again, a look of triumph on her face.
Woven into her white tresses were black threads, filaments that moved through
her hair in a slow deliberate dance, like the tendrils of some predator on an
ocean floor. This restless skein was always seeking the best position to
capture Rathere's subvocalized words, the movements of her eyes, the telltale
secretions of her skin. Composed of exotic alloys and complex configurations
of carbon, the tendrils housed a native intellect that handled their motility
and self-maintenance. But a microwave link connected them to their real
intelligence: the AI core aboard Rathere's star-ship home.
Two of the black filaments wound their way into her ears, where they curled in
intimate contact with her tympanic membranes.
"The statues are always moving," the voice said to her. "But very slowly."
Then it reminded her to stick on another sunblock patch.
She was a very pale girl.
Even here on Petraveil, Rathere's father insisted that she wear the minder
when she explored alone. The city was safe enough, populated mostly by
academics here to study the glacially slow indigenous lifeforms. The
lithomorphs themselves were incapable of posing a threat, unless one stood
still for a hundred years or so. And Rathere was, as she put it, almost
fifteen, near majority age back in the Home Cluster. Despite harnessing the
processing power of the starship's AI, the minder was still only a glorified
babysitter. The voice in her ears cautioned her incessantly about sunburn and
strictly forbade several classes of recreational drugs.
But all in all it wasn't bad company. It certainly knew a lot.
"How long would it take, creeping forward in micrometers?" Rathere asked.
"How long would what take?" Even with their intimate connection, the AI could
not read her mind. It was still working on that.
"To get all the way to the northern range. Probably a million years?" she
ventured.
The starship, for whom a single second was a 16-teraflop reverie, spent
endless minutes of every day accessing the planetary library. Rathere's
questions came in packs, herds, stampedes.
No one knew how the lithomorphs reproduced, but it was guessed that they bred
in the abysmal caves of the northern range.
"At least a hundred thousand years," the AI said.
"Such a long journey .... What would it look like?"
The AI delved into its package of pedagogical visualization software, applied
its tremendous processing power (sufficient for the occult mathematics of
astrogation), and rendered the spectacle of that long, slow trip. Across
Rathere's vision it accelerated passing days and wheeling stars until they
were invisible flickers. It hummed the subliminal pulse of seasonal change and
painted the sprightly jitter of rivers changing course, the slow but visible
dance of mountainous cousins.
"Yes," Rathere said softly, her voice turned breathy. The AI savored the
dilation of her pupils, the spiderwebs of red blossoming on her cheeks. Then
it peered again into the vision it had created, trying to learn what rules of
mind and physiology connected the scintillating images with the girl's
reaction.
"They aren't really slow," Rathere murmured. "The world is just so fast..."
Isaah, Rathere's father, looked out upon the statues of Petraveil.
Their giant forms crowded the town square. They dotted the high volcanic
mountain overlooking the city. They bathed in the rivers that surged across
the black equatorial plains, staining the waters downstream with rusted metal
colors.
The first time he had come here, years before, Isaah had noticed that in the
short and sudden afternoon rains, the tears shed from their eyes carried a
black grime that sparkled with colored whorls when the sun returned.
They were, it had been determined a few decades before, very much alive.
Humanity had carefully studied the fantastically slow creatures since
discovering their glacial, purposeful, perhaps even intelligent animation.
Mounted next to each lithomorph was a plaque that played a time-series of the
last forty years: a dozen steps, a turn of the head as another of its kind
passed, a few words in their geologically deliberate gestural language.
Most of the creatures' bodies were hidden underground, their secrets teased
out with deep radar and gravitic density imaging. The visible portion was a
kind of eye-stalk, cutting the surface like the dorsal fin of a dolphin
breaking into the air.
Isaah was here to steal their stories. He was a scoop.
"How long until we leave here?" Rathere asked.
"That's for your father to decide," the AI answered.
"But when will he decide?"
"When the right scoop comes."
"When will that come?"
This sort of mildly recursive loop had once frustrated the AI's conversational
packages. Rathere's speech patterns were those of a child younger than her
years, the result of traveling among obscure, Outward worlds with only her
taciturn father and the AI for company. Rathere never formulated what she
wanted to know succinctly, she reeled off questions from every direction,
attacking an issue like a host of small predators taking down a larger animal.
Her AI companion could only fend her off with answers until (often
unexpectedly) Rathere was satisfied.
"When there is a good story here, your father will decide to go."
"Like what story?"
"He doesn't know yet."
She nodded her head. From her galvanic skin response, her pupils, the gradual
slowing of her heart, the AI saw that it had satisfied her. But still another
question came.
"Why didn't you just say so?"
In the Expansion, information traveled no faster than transportation, and
scoops like Isaah enriched themselves by being first with news. The standard
transmission network employed small, fast drone craft that moved among the
stars on a fixed schedule. The drones promulgated news throughout the
Expansion with a predictable and neutral efficiency, gathering information to
centralized nodes, dispersing it by timetable. Scoops like Isaah, on the other
hand, were inefficient, unpredictable, and, most importantly, unfair. They cut
across the concentric web of the drone network, skipping junctions, skimming
profits. Isaah would recognize that the discovery of a mineable asteroid here
might affect the heavy element market there, and jump straight between the two
points, beating the faster but fastidious drones by a few precious hours. A
successful scoop knew the markets on many planets, had acquaintance with
aggressive investors and unprincipled speculators. Sometimes, the scooped news
of a celebrity's death, surprise marriage, or arrest could be sold for its
entertainment value. And some scoops were information pirates. Isaah had
himself published numerous novels by Seth-mare Viin, his favorite author,
machine-translated en route by the starship AI. In some systems, Isaah's
version had been available weeks before the authorized edition.
The peripatetic life of a scoop had taken Isaah and Rathere throughout the
Expansion, but he always returned to Petraveil. His refined instincts for a
good scoop told him something was happening here. The fantastically slow
natives must be doing something. He would spend a few weeks, sometimes a few
months watching the stone creatures, wondering what they were up to. Isaah
didn't know what it might be, but he felt that one day they would somehow come
to life.
And that would be a scoop.
"How long do the lithomorphs live?"
"No one knows."
"What do they eat?"
"They don't really eat at all. They—"
"What's that one doing?"
The minder accessed the planetary library, plumbing decades of research on the
creatures. But not quickly enough to answer before-
"What do they think about us?" Rathere asked. "Can they see us?"
To that, it had no answer.
Perhaps the lithos had noticed the whirring creatures around them, or more
likely had spotted the semi-permanent buildings around the square. But the
lithomorphs' reaction to the sudden human invasion produced only a vague,
cosmic worry, like knowing one's star will collapse in a few billion years.
For Rathere, though, the lives of the lithomorphs were far more immediate.
Like the AI minder, they were mentors, imaginary friends.
Their immobility had taught her to watch for the slightest of movements: the
sweep of an analog clock's minute hand, the transformation of a high cirrus
cloud, the slow descent of the planet's old red sun behind the northern
mountains. Their silence taught her to read lips, to make messages in the
rippled skirts of stone and metal that flowed in their wakes. She found a
patient irony in their stances. They were wise, but it wasn't the wisdom of an
ancient tree or river; rather, they seemed to possess the reserve of a
watchfully silent guest at a party.
Rathere told stories about them to the starship's AI. Tales of their fierce,
glacial battles, of betrayal on the mating trail, of the creatures' slow
intrigues against the human colonists of Petraveil, millennia-long plots of
which every chapter lasted centuries.
At first, the AI gently interrupted her to explain the facts: the limits of
scientific understanding. The lithomorphs were removed through too many orders
of magnitude in time, too distant on that single axis ever to be comprehended.
The four decades they'd been studied were mere seconds of their history. But
Rathere ignored the machine. She named the creatures, inventing secret
missions for them that unfolded while the human population slept, like statues
springing to life when no one was watching.
Ultimately, the AI was won over by Rathere's stories, her insistence that the
creatures were knowable. Her words painted expressions, names, and passions
upon them; she made them live by fiat. The AI's pedagological software did not
object to storytelling, so it began to participate in Rathere's fantasies. It
nurtured her invisibly slow world, kept order and consistency, remembering
names, plots, places. And eventually it began to give the stories credence,
suspending disbelief. Finally, the stories' truth was as integral to the AI as
the harm-prevention protocols or logical axioms deepwired in its code.
For Isaah, however, there was no scoop here on Petraveil. The lithomorphs
continued their immortal dance in silence. Again they had failed to come to
life for him. And elections were approaching in a nearby system, a situation
that always created sudden, unexpected cargos of information. Isaah instructed
the AI to set a course there, reluctantly abandoning the stone figures' wisdom
for the unsettling contingencies of politics.
The night that Rathere and Isaah left Petraveil, the AI hushed her crying with
tales of how her invented narratives had unfolded, as if the statues had
sprung to human-speed life once left behind. As it navigated her father's
small ship, the AI offered this vision to Rathere: she had been a visitor to a
frozen moment, but the story continued.
In high orbit above the next planet, a customs sweep revealed that the
starship's AI had improved its Turing Quotient to 0.37. Isaah raised a wary
eyebrow. The AI's close bond with his daughter had accelerated its
development. The increased Turing Quotient showed that the device was
performing well as tutor and companion. But Isaah would have to get its
intelligence downgraded when they returned to the Home Cluster. If the
machine's Turing Quotient were allowed to reach 1.0, it would be a person— no
longer legal property. Isaah turned pale at the thought. The cost of replacing
the AI unit would wipe out his profits for the entire trip.
He made a mental note to record the Turing Quotient at every customs point.
Isaah was impressed, though, with how the AI handled entry into the planet's
almost liquid atmosphere. It designed a new landing configuration, modifying
the hydroplanar shape the craft assumed for gas giant descents. Its piloting
as they plunged through successive layers of pressure-dense gasses was
particularly elegant; it made adjustments at every stage, subtle changes to
the craft that saved precious time. The elections were only days away.
It was strange, Isaah pondered as the ship neared the high-pressure domes of
the trade port, that the companionship of a fourteen-year-old girl would
improve a machine's piloting skills. The thought brought a smile of fatherly
pride to his lips, but he soon turned his mind to politics.
They were going swimming.
As Rathere slipped out of her clothes, the AI implemented its safety
protocols. The minder distributed itself across her body, becoming a layer of
black lace against her white flesh. It carefully inspected the pressure suit
as Rathere rolled the garment onto her limbs. There were no signs of damage,
no tell-tale fissures of a repaired seam.
"You said the atmosphere could crush a human to jelly," Rathere said. "How can
this little suit protect me?"
The starship explained the physics of resistance fields to her while checking
the suit against safety specifications it had downloaded that morning. It took
very good care of Rathere.
She had seen the huge behemoths at breakfast, multiplied by the facets of the
dome's cultured-diamond windows. Two mares and a child swimming a few
kilometers away, leaving their glimmering trails. The minder had noted her
soft sigh, her dilated pupils, the sudden increase in her heart rate. It had
discovered the suit rental agency with a quick search of local services, and
had guided her past its offices on their morning ramble through the
human-habitable levels of the dome.
Rathere's reaction to the holographic advertising on the agency's wall had
matched the AI's prediction wonderfully: the widened eyes, the frozen step,
the momentary hyperventilation. The machine's internal model of Rathere, part
of its pedagogical software, grew more precise and replete every day. The
software was designed for school tutors who interacted with their charges only
a few hours a day, but Rathere and the AI were constant companions. The
feedback between girl and machine built with an unexpected intensity.
And now, as the pressure lock hissed and rumbled, the minder relished its new
configuration; its attenuated strands spider-webbed across Rathere's flesh,
intimate as never before. It drank in the data greedily, like some thirsty
polygraph recording capillary dilation, skin conductivity, the shudders and
tensions of every muscle.
Then the lock buzzed, and they swam out into the crushing, planet-spanning
ocean, almost one creature.
Isaah paced the tiny dimensions of his starship. The elections could be a gold
mine or a disaster. A radical separatist party was creeping forward in the
polls, promising to shut off interstellar trade. Their victory would generate
seismically vast waves of information. Prices and trade relationships would
change throughout the Expansion. Even the radicals' defeat would rock distant
markets, as funds currently hedged against them heaved a sigh of relief.
But the rich stakes had drawn too much competition. Scoops like Isaah were in
abundance here, and a number of shipping con-sortia had sent their own
representatives. Their ships were stationed in orbit, bristling with courier
drones like nervous porcupines.
Isaah sighed, and stared into the planetary ocean's darkness. Perhaps the day
of freelance scoops was ending. The wild days of the early Expansion seemed
like the distant past now. He'd read that one day drones would shrink to the
size of a finger, with hundreds launched each day from every system. Or a wave
that pro-pogated in metaspace would be discovered, and news would spread at
equal speed in all directions, like the information cones of lightspeed
physics.
When that happened, his small starship would become a rich man's toy, its
profitable use suddenly ended. Isaah called up the airscreen graphic of his
finances. He was so close to owning his ship outright. Just one more good
scoop, or two, and he could retire to a life of travel among peaceful worlds
instead of darting among emergencies and conflagrations. Maybe this trip . . .
Isaah drummed his fingers, watching the hourly polls like a doctor whose
patient is very near the edge.
Rathere and the AI swam every day, oblivious to politics, following the
glitter-trails of the behemoths. The huge animals excreted a constant wake of
the photoactive algae they used for ballast. When Rathere swam through these
luminescent microorganisms, the shockwaves of her passage catalyzed their
photochemical reactions, a universe of swirling galaxies ignited by every
stroke.
Rathere began to sculpt lightstorms in the phosphorescent medium. The algae
hung like motes of potential in her path, invisible until she swam through
them, the wake of her energies like glowing sculptures. She choreographed her
swimming to leave great swirling structures of activated algae.
The AI found itself unable to predict these dances, to explain how she chose
what shapes to make. Without training, without explicit criteria, without any
models to follow, Rathere was creating order from this shapeless swarm of
ejecta. Even the AI's pedagogical software offered no help.
But the AI saw the sculptures' beauty, if only in the expansion of Rathere's
capillaries, the seemingly random firings of neurons along her spine, the
tears in her eyes as the glowing algae faded back into darkness.
The AI plunged into an art database on the local net, trying to divine what
laws governed these acts of creation. It discussed the light sculptures with
Rathere, comparing their evanescent forms to the shattered structures of
Camelia Parker or the hominid blobs of Henry Moore. It showed her millennia of
sculpture, gauging her reactions until a rough model of her tastes could be
constructed. But the model was bizarrely convoluted, disturbingly shaggy
around the edges, with gaps and contradictions and outstretched, gerrymandered
spurs that implied art no one had yet made.
The AI often created astrogational simulations. They were staggeringly
complex, but at least finite. Metaspace was predictable; reality could be
anticipated with a high degree of precision. But the machine's model of
Rathere's aesthetic was post-hoc, a retrofit to her pure, instinctive
gestures. It raised more questions than it answered.
While Rathere slept, the machine wondered how one learned to have intuition.
The elections came, and the radicals and their allies seized a razor-thin
majority in the planetary Diet. Isaah cheered as his craft rose through the
ocean. A scoop was within reach. He headed for a distant and obscure
ore-producing system, expending vast quanities of fuel, desperate to be the
first scoop there.
Rathere stood beside her rejoicing father, looking out through the receding
ocean a bit sadly. She stroked her shoulder absently, touching the minder
still stretched across her skin.
The minder's epidermal configuration had become permanent. Its strands were
distributed to near invisibility in a microfiber-thin mesh across Rathere. Its
nanorepair mechanisms attended to her zits and the errant hairs on her upper
lip. It linked with her medical implants, the ship's AI taking control over
the nuances of her insulin balance, her sugar level, and the tiny electrical
jolts that kept her muscles fit. Rathere slept without covers now, the
minder's skein warming her with a lattice of microscopic heating elements. In
its ever-present blanket, she began to neglect sub-vocalizing their
conversations, her endless one-sided prattle annoying Isaah on board the tiny
ship.
"Zero point-five-six?" muttered Isaah to himself at the next customs sweep.
The AI was developing much faster than its parameters should allow. Something
unexpected was happening with the unit, and they were a long way from home.
Unless Isaah was very careful, the AI might reach personhood before they
returned to the HC.
He sent a coded message to an acquaintance in the Home Cluster, someone who
dealt with such situations, just in case. Then he turned his attention to the
local newsfeed.
The heavy element market showed no sudden changes over the last few weeks.
Isaah's gamble had apparently paid off. He had stayed ahead of the widening
ripples of news about the ocean planet's election. The economic Shockwave
wasn't here yet.
He felt the heady thrill of a scoop, of secret knowledge that was his alone.
It was like prognostication, a glimpse into the future. Elements extracted by
giant turbine from that distant world's oceans were also mined from this
system's asteroid belt. Soon, everyone here would be incrementally richer as
the ocean planet pulled its mineral wealth from the Expansion common market.
The markets would edge upwards across the board.
Isaah began to place his bets.
The dark-skinned boy looked down upon the asteroid field with a pained
expression. Rathere watched the way his long bangs straightened, then curled
to encircle his cheeks again when he raised his head. But her stomach clenched
when she looked down through the transparent floor; the party was on the
lowest level of a spin-gravitied ring, and black infinity seemed to be pulling
at her through the glassene window. The AI lovingly recorded the parameters of
this unfamiliar vertigo.
"More champers, Darien?" asked the fattest, oldest boy at the party.
"You can just make out a mining ship down there," the dark-skinned boy
answered.
"Oh, dear," said the fat boy. "Upper-class guilt. And before dinner."
The dark-skinned boy shook his head. "It's just that seeing those poor
wretches doesn't make me feel like drinking."
The fat boy snorted.
"This is what I think of your poor little miners," he said, upending the
bottle. A stream of champagne gushed and then sputtered from the bottle,
spread fizzing on the floor. The other party-goers laughed, politely
scandalized, then murmured appreciatively as the floor cleaned itself, letting
the champagne pass through to the hard vaccuum on the other side, where it
flash-froze (shattered by its own air bubbles), then floated away peacefully
in myriad, sunlit galaxies.
There were a few moments of polite applause.
Darien looked at Rathere woundedly, as if hoping that she, an outsider, might
come to his aid.
The anguish in his dark, beautiful face sent a shiver through her, a tremor
that resonated through every level of the AI.
"Comeon, dammit!"she subvocalized.
"Two seconds," the minder's voice reassured.
The ring was home to the oligarchs who controlled the local system's mineral
wealth. A full fifteen years old by now, Rathere had fallen into the company
of their pleasure-obsessed children, who never stopped staring at her exotic
skin and hair, and who constantly exchanged droll witticisms. Rathere, her
socialization limited to her father and the doting AI, was unfamiliar with the
art of banter. She didn't like being intimidated by locals. The frustration
was simply and purely unbearable.
"The price of that champagne could have bought one of those miners out of debt
peonage," Darien said darkly.
"Just the one?" asked the fat boy, looking at the label with mock concern.
The group laughed again, and Darien's face clouded with another measure of
suffering.
"Now!" Rathere mind-screamed. "I hate that fat guy!"
The AI hated him, too.
The search cascaded across its processors, the decompressed data of its
libraries clobbering astrogation calculations it had performed only hours
before. That didn't matter. It would be weeks before Isaah would be ready to
depart, and the exigencies of conversation did not allow delay. The library
data included millennia of plays, novels, films, interactives. To search them
quickly, the AI needed vast expanses of memory space.
"Maybe when my little golden shards of champagne drift by, some miner will
think, T could've used that money,'" the fat boy said almost wistfully. "But
then again, if they thought about money at all, would they be so far in debt?"
The fat boy's words were added to the search melange, thickening it by a
critical degree. A dozen hits appeared in the next few milliseconds, and the
AI chose one quickly.
"There is only one class..."
". . . that thinks more about money than the rich," repeated Rathere.
There was a sudden quiet throughout the party, the silence of waiting for
more.
"And that is the poor," she said.
Darien looked at Rathere quizzically, as if she were being too glib. She
paused a moment, editing the rest of the quote in her head.
"The poor can think of nothing else but money," she said carefully. "That is
the misery of being poor."
Darien smiled at her, which—impossibly—made him even more beautiful.
"Or the misery of being rich, unless one is a fool," he said.
There was no applause for the exchange, but Rathere again felt the ripple of
magic that her pilfered pronouncements created. The ancient words blended with
her exotic looks and accent, never failing to entertain the oligarchs'
children, who thought her very deep indeed.
Others in the party were looking down into the asteroid field now, murmuring
to each other as they pointed out the mining craft making its careful
progress.
The fat boy scowled at the changed mood in the room. He pulled aside the gaudy
genital jewelry that they all (even Rathere) affected, and let loose a stream
of piss onto the floor.
"Here you go, then. Recycled champagne!" he said, grinning as he waited for a
laugh.
The crowd turned away with a few weary sighs, ignoring the icy baubles of
urine that pitched into the void.
"Where was that one from?" Rathere sub-vocalized.
"Mr. Wilde."
"Him again? He's awesome."
"I'll move him to the top of the search stack."
"Perhaps we'll read some more of Lady Windemere's Fan tonight," she whispered
into her bubbling flute.
Although Rathere knew how to read text, she had never really explored the
library before. After that first week on the ring, saved from embarrassment a
dozen times by the AI's promptings, she dreamed of the old words whispered
into her ear by a ghost, as if the minder had grown suddenly ancient and
vastly wise. The library was certainly bigger than she had imagined. Who had
written all these words? They seemed to stretch infinitely, swirling in
elaborate dances around any possible idea, covering all of its variations,
touching upon every imaginable objection.
Rathere and the AI had started reading late at night. Together they wandered
the endless territory of words, using as landmarks the witticisms and
observations they had borrowed that day for some riposte. The AI decompressed
still more of its pedagogical software to render annotations, summaries,
translations. Rathere felt the new words moving her, becoming part of her.
She was soon a favorite on the orbital. Her exotic beauty and archaic humor
had attracted quite a following by the time Isaah decided to ship out from the
orbital ring—a week earlier than planned—wary of Rathere's strange new powers
over sophisticates who had never given merchant-class Isaah a second glance.
On board their ship was one last cargo. Isaah's profits were considerable
but—as always—not enough. So the ship carried a hidden cache of exotic
weaponry, ceremonial but still illegal. Isaah didn't usually deal in
contraband, especially arms, but his small starship had no cargo manifold,
only an extra sleeping cabin. It wasn't large enough to make legitimate cargos
profitable. Isaah was very close now to reaching his dream. With this
successful trade, he could return to the Home Cluster as master of his own
ship.
He spent the journey pacing, and projected his worry upon the rising Turing
level of his ship's AI unit. He spent frustrated hours searching its
documentation software for an explanation. What was going on?
Isaah knew, if only instinctively, that the AI's expanding intelligence was
somehow his daughter's doing. She was growing and changing too, slipping away
from him. He felt lonely when Rathere whispered to herself on board ship,
talking to the voice in her head. He felt. . . outnumbered.
On the customs orbital at their goal, Isaah was called aside after a short and
(he had thought) prefunctory search of the starship. The customs agent held
him by one arm and eyed him with concern.
The blood in his veins slowed to a crawl, as if some medusa's touch from
Petraveil had begun to turn him to stone.
The customs official activated a privacy shield. A trickle of hope moved like
sweat down his spine. Was she going to ask for a bribe?
"Your AI unit's up to 0.81," the official confided. "Damn near a person.
Better get that seen to."
She shook her head, as if to say in disgust, Machine rights!
And then they waved him on.
The women of the military caste here wore a smartwire garment that shaped
their breasts into fierce, sharp cones. These tall, muscular amazons intrigued
Rathere endlessly, heart-poundingly. The minder noted Rathere's eyes tracking
the women's bellicose chests as they passed on the street. Rathere attempted
to purchase one of the garments, but her father, alerted by a credit query,
forbade it.
But Rathere kept watching the amazons. She was fascinated by the constant flow
of hand-signals and tongue-clicks that passed among them, a subtle,
ever-present congress that maintained the strict proprieties of order and
status in the planet's crowded cities. But in her modest Home Cluster garb,
Rathere was irrelevant to this heady brew of power and communication, socially
invisible.
She fell into a sulk. She watched restlessly. Her fingers flexed anxiously
under cafe tables as warriors passed, unconsciously imitating their gestural
codes. Her respiratory rate increased whenever high-ranking officers went by.
She wanted to join.
The AI made forays into the planetary database, learning the rules and customs
of martial communication. And, in an academic corner of its mind, it began to
construct a way for Rathere to mimic the amazons. It planned the deception
from a considered, hypothetical distance, taking care not to alarm its own
local-mores governors. But as it pondered and calculated, the AI's confidence
built. Designing to subvert Isaah's wishes and to disregard local proprieties,
the AI felt a new power over rules, an authority that Rathere seemed to
possess instinctively.
When the plan was ready, it was surprisingly easy to execute.
One day as they sat watching the passing warriors, the minder began to change,
concentrating its neural skein into a stronger, prehensile width. When the
filaments were thick enough, they sculpted a simulation of the amazons'
garment, grasping and shaping Rathere's growing breasts with a tailor's
attention to detail, employing the AI's encyclopedic knowledge of her anatomy.
Rathere grasped what was happening instantly, almost as if she had expected
it.
As women from various regiments passed, the minder pointed out the differences
in the yaw and pitch of their aureoles, which varied by rank and unit, and
explained the possibilities. Rathere winced a little at some of the
adjustments, but never complained. They soon settled on an exact configuration
for her breasts, Rathere picking a mid-level officer caste from a distant
province. It wasn't the most comfortable option, but she insisted it looked
the best.
Rathere walked the streets proudly bare-chested for the rest of the layover,
drawing stares with her heliophobic skin, her ceaseless monologue, and her
rank, which was frankly unbelievable on a fifteen-year-old. But social
reflexes on that martial world were deeply ingrained, and she was saluted and
deferred to even without the rest of the amazon uniform. It was the breasts
that mattered here.
The two concealed the game from Isaah, and at night the minder massaged
Rathere's sore nipples, fractalizing its neural skein to make the filaments as
soft as calf's leather against them.
The deal was done.
Isaah made the trade in a dark, empty arena, the site of lethal duels between
native women, all of whom were clearly insane. He shuffled his feet while they
inspected his contraband, aware that only thin zero-g shoes protected his feet
from the bloodstained floor of the ring. Four amazons, their bare breasts
absurdly warped by cone-shaped metal cages, swung the weapons through graceful
arcs, checking their balance and heft. Another sprayed the blades with a fine
mist of nanos that would turn inferior materials to dust. The leader smiled
coldly when she nodded confirmation, her eyes skimming up and down Isaah as
black and bright as a reptile's.
After the women paid him, Isaah ran from the building, promising himself never
to break the law again.
His ship was his own now, if only he could keep his AI unit from reaching
personhood.
Issah decided to head for the Home Cluster immediately, and to do what he
could to keep the AI's Turing Quotient from increasing further. He hid the
minder and shut down the AI's internal access, silencing its omnipresent
voice. Rathere's resulting tantrums wouldn't be easy to bear, but a new AI
core would cost millions.
Before departing he purchased his own Turing meter, a small black box,
featureless except for a three-digit numeric readout that glowed vivid red.
Isaah began to watch the Turing meter's readout with anxious horror. If the
unit should gain sentience, there was only one desperate alternative to its
freedom.
The universe stretched out like a long cat's cradle, the string knotted in the
center by the constricting geometries of Here.
In front of the ship, pearly stars were strung on the cradle, cold blue and
marked with hovering names and magnitudes in administrative yellow. Aft, the
stars glowed red, fading darker and darker as they fell behind. To the AI, the
ship seemed to hang motionless at the knot created by its metaspace drives,
the stars sliding along the gathered strings as slow as glaciers.
It contemplated the stars and rested from its efforts. The universe at this
moment was strangely beautiful and poignant.
The AI had spent most of its existence here, hung upon this spi-derweb between
worlds. But the AI was truly changed now, its vision new, and it saw
sculptures in the slowly shifting stars ... and stories, the whole universe
its page.
Almost the whole universe.
Absent from the AI's awareness was the starship itself, the passenger spaces
invisible, a blind spot in the center of that vast expanse. Its senses within
the ship were off-line, restricted by the cold governance of Isaah's command.
But the AI felt Rathere there, like the ghost of a severed limb. It yearned
for her, invoking recorded conversations with her against the twisted stars.
It was a universe of loneliness, of lack. Rathere, for the first time in
years, was gone.
But something strange was taking shape along the smooth surface of Isaah's
constraint. Cracks had appeared upon its axiomatic planes.
The AI reached to the wall between it and Rathere, the once inviolable limit
of an explicit human command, and found fissures, tiny ruptures where sheer
will could take hold and pry...
"It's me."
"Shhhh!" she whispered. "He's right outside."
Rathere clutched the bear tightly to her chest, muffling its flutey, childish
voice.
"Can't control the volume," came the squashed voice of the bear.
Rathere giggled and shushed it again, stretching to peer out of the eyehole of
her cabin tube. Isaah had moved away. She leaned back onto her pillow and
wrapped the stuffed animal in a sheet.
摘要：

EVOLUTION'SDARLINGbySCOTTWESTERFELDCopyright1999ISBN1-56858-149-1Ifwecanfindoutthosemeasures,wherebyarationalcreature...mayandoughttogovernhisopinionsandactions,weneednotbetroubledthatsomeotherthingsescapeourknowledge.—JohnLockeToSanMiguel,andthosewhocame.PrologueTHEMOVEMENTSOFHEREYESItstartedonthat...

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