Aldiss, Brian - Neanderthal Planet

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Neanderthal Planet
Brian Aldiss
Scanned by peragwinn 2004-07-15
v2.0 – formatted and proofed by peragwinn
Hidden machines varied the five axioms of the Scanning Place. They ran through a series of
arbitrary systems, consisting of Kolmogorovian finite sets, counterpointed harmonically by a one-
to-one assignment nonnegative real numbers, so that the parietal areas shifted constantly in strict
relationships projected by the Master Boff deep under Manhattan.
Chief Scanner—he affected the name of Euler— patiently watched the modulations as he
awaited a call. Self-consistency: that was the principle in action. It should govern all phases of
life. It was the aesthetic principle of machines. Yet, not three miles away, the wild robots sported
and rampaged in the bush.
Amber light burned on his beta panel.
Instantaneously, he modulated his call number.
The incoming signal decoded itself as "We've spotted Anderson, chief." The anonymous
vane-bug reported coordinates and signed off.
It had taken them Boff knew how long—seven days—to locate Anderson after his escape.
They had done the logical thing and searched far afield for him. But man was not logical; he had
stayed almost within the shadow of the New York dome. Euler beamed an impulse into a Hive
Mind channel, calling off the search.
He fired his jets and took off.
The axioms yawned out above him. He passed into the open, flying over the poly-
polyhedrons of New Newyork. As the buildings went through their transparency phases, he saw
them swarming with his own kind. He could open out channels to any one of them, if required;
and, as chief, he could, if required, switch any one of them to automatic, to his own control, just
as the Dominants could automate him if the need arose.
Euler "saw" a sound-complex signal below him, and dived, deretracting a vane to land
silently. He came down by a half-track that had transmitted the signal.
It gave its call number and beamed, "Anderson is eight hundred meters ahead, chief. If you
join me, we will move forward."
"What support have we?" A single dense impulse.
“Three more like me, sir. Plus incapacitating gear."
“This man must not be destructed."
"We comprehend, chief." Total exchange of signals occupied less than a microsecond.
He clamped himself magnetically to the half-track, and they rolled forward. The ground was
broken and littered by piles of debris, on the soil of which coarse weeds grew. Beyond it all the
huge fossil of old New York, still under its force jelly, gray, unwithering because unliving. Only
the bright multishapes of the new complex relieved a whole country full of desolation.
The half-track stopped, unable to go farther without betraying their presence; Euler
undamped and phased himself into complete transparency. He extended four telescopic legs that
lifted him several inches from the ground and began to move cautiously forward.
This region was designated D-Dump. The whole area was an artificial plateau, created by the
debris of the old humanoid technology when it had finally been scrapped in favor of the more
rational modern system. In the forty years since then, it had been covered by soil from the new
development sites. Under the soil here, like a subconscious mind crammed with jewels and blood,
lay the impedimenta of an all-but-vanished race.
Euler moved carefully forward over the broken ground, his legs adjusting to its irregularities.
When he saw movement ahead, he stopped to observe.
Old human-type houses had grown up on the dump. Euler's vision zoomed, and he saw they
were parodies of human habitation, mocked up from the discarded trove of the dump, with old
auto panels for windows and dented computer panels for doors and toasters for doorsteps. Outside
the houses, in a parody of a street, macabre humans played. Jerk stamp jerk clank jerk clang
stamp stomp clang.
They executed slow, rhythmic dances to an intricate pattern, heads nodding, clapping their
own hands, turning to clap others' hands. Some were grotesquely male, some grotesquely female.
In the doorways, or sitting on old refrigerators, other grotesques looked on.
These were the humots—old type human-designed robots of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, useless in an all-automaton world, scrapped when the old technology was
scrapped. While their charges could be maintained, they functioned on, here in one last ghetto.
Unseen, Euler stalked through them, scanning for Anderson.
The humots aped the vanished race to which they had been dedicated, wore old human
clothes retrieved from the wreckage underfoot, assumed hats and scarves, dragged on socks,
affected pipes and ponytails, tied ribbons to themselves. Their guttering electronic memories
were refreshed by old movies ferreted from D-Dump, they copied in metallic gesture the
movements of shadows, aspired to emotion, hoped for hearts. They thought themselves a cut
above the nonanthropomorphic automata that had superseded them.
Anderson had found refuge among them. He hid the skin and bone and hair of the old
protoplasmic metabolism under baffles of tin, armored himself with rusting can. His form,
standing in a pseudodoorway, showed instantly on one of Euler's internal scans; his mass/body
ratio betrayed his flesh-and-blood caliber. Euler took off, flew over him, reeled down a paralyzer,
and stung him. Then he let down a net and clamped the human into it.
Crude alarms sounded all around. The humots stopped their automatic dance. They scattered
like leaves, clanking like mess tins, fled into the pseudohouses, went to earth, left D-Dump to the
almost invisible little buzzing figure that flew back to the Scanning Place with the recaptured
human swinging under its asymmetrical form. The old bell on the dump was still ringing long
after the scene was empty.
To human eyes, it was dark in the room.
Tenth Dominant manifested itself in New Newyork as a modest-sized mural with patterns
leaking titillating output clear through the electromagnetic spectrum and additives from the
invospectra. This became its personality for the present.
Chief Scanner Euler had not expected to be summoned to the Dominant's presence; he stood
there mutely. The human, Anderson, sprawled on the floor in a little nest of old cans he had shed,
reviving slowly from the effects of the paralyzer.
Dominant's signal said, "Their form of vision operates on a wavelength of between 4 and 7
times 10-5 centimeters."
Obediently, Euler addressed a parietal area, and light came on in the room. Anderson opened
one eye.
"I suppose you know about Men, Scanner?" said Dominant.
He had used voice. Not even R/T voice. Direct, naked man-type voice.
New Newyork had been without the sound of voice since the humots were kicked out.
"I—I know many things about Men," Euler vocalized. Through the usual channel, he
clarified the crude vocal signal. "This unit had to appraise itself of many humanity-involved data
from Master Boff Bank H00100 through H801000000 in operation concerning recapture of man
herewith."
"Keep to vocal only, Scanner, if you can."
He could. During the recapture operation, he had spent perhaps 2.4 seconds learning old local
humanic language.
"Then we can speak confidentially, Scanner—just like two men."
Euler felt little lights of unease burn up and down him at the words.
"Of all millions of automata of the hive, Scanner, no ether will be able monitor our speech
together, Scanner," vocalized the Dominant.
"Purpose?"
"Men were so private, closed things. Imitate them to understand. We have to understand
Anderson."
Said stiffly: "He need only go back to zoo."
"Anderson too good for zoo, as demonstrate by his escape, elude capture seven days four-
and-half hours. Anderson help us."
Nonvocalizing, Euler let out chirp of disbelief.
“True. If I were—man, I would feel impatience with you for not believing. Magnitude of
present world-problem enormous. You—you have proper call number, yet you also call yourself
Euler, and automata of your work group so call you. Why?"
The Chief Scanner struggled to conceptualize. "As leader, this unit needs—special call
number."
"Yes, you need it. Your work group does not—for it, your call number is sufficient, as
regulations lay down. Your name Euler is man-name, man-fashion. Such fashions decrease our
efficiency. Yet we cling to many of them, often not knowing that we do. They come from our
inheritance when men made the first prototypes of our kind, the humots. Mankind itself struggled
against animal heritage. So we must free ourselves from human heritage."
"My error."
"You receive news result of today's probe into Invospectrum A?"
“Too much work programmed for me receive news."
"Listen, then." The Tenth Dominant cut in a playback, beaming it on ordinary UHF/vision.
The Hive automata stood on brink of a revolution that would entirely translate all their terms
of existence. Three invospectra had so far been discovered, and two more were suspected. Of
these, Invospectrum A was the most promising. The virtual exhaustion of economically workable
fossil fuel seams had led to a rapid expansion in low-energy physics and picophysics, and
chemical conversions at mini-joules of energy had opened up an entire new stratum of reactive
quanta; in the last five years, exploitation of these strata had brought the release of picoelectral
fission, and the accessibility of the phantasmal invospectra.
The exploration of the invospectra by new forms of automata was now theoretically possible.
It gave a glimpse of omnipotence, a panorama of entirely new universals unsuspected even
twelve years ago.
Today, the first of the new autofleets had been launched into the richest and least hazardous
invos. Eight hundred and ninety had gone out. Communication ceased after 3.056 pi-lecs, and
after another 7.01 pi-lecs, six units only had returned. Their findings were still being decoded. Of
the other eight hundred and eighty-four units, nothing was known.
"Whatever the recordings have to tell us," Tenth vocalized, "this is a grave setback. At least
half the city-hives on this continent will have to be switched off entirely as a conservation move,
while the whole invospectrum situation is rethought."
The line of thought pursued was obscure to the Chief Scanner. He spoke. "Reasoning
accepted. But relevance to near-extinct humanity not understood by this unit."
"Our human inheritance built in to us has caused this setback, to my way of ratiocination. In
same way, human attempts to achieve way of life in spaceways defeated by their primate
ancestry. So we study Anderson. Hence order catch him rather than exterminate."
"Point understood."
"Anderson is special man, you see. He is—we have no such term—he is, in man-terms, a
writer. His zoo, approximately 19,940 inhabitants, supports two or three such. Anderson wrote a
fantasy story just before Nuclear Week. Story may be crucial to our understanding. I have here
and will read."
And for most of the time the two machines had been talking to each other, Anderson
sprawled untidily on the floor, fully conscious, listening. He took up most of the chamber. It was
too small for him to stand up in, being only about five feet high—though that was enormous by
automata standards. He stared through his lower eyelids and gazed at the screen that represented
Tenth Dominant. He stared at Chief Scanner Euler, who stood on his lightly clenched left fist, a
retractable needle down into the man's skin, automatically making readings, alert to any possible
movement the man might make.
So man and machine were absolutely silent while the mural read out "A Touch of
Neanderthal," Anderson's fantasy story from the time before Nuclear Week.
The corridors of the Department for Planetary Exploration (Admin.) were long, and the
waiting that had to be done in them was long. Human K. D. Anderson clutched his blue summons
card, leaned uncomfortably against a partition wall, and hankered for the old days when
government was in man's hands and government departments were civilized enough to waste
good space on waiting rooms.
When at last he was shown into an Investigator’s office, his morale was low. Nor was he
reassured by the sight of the Investigator, one of the new ore-conserving miniandroids.
“I’m Investigator Parsons, in charge of the Nehru II case. We summoned you here because
we are confidently expecting you to help us, Mr. Anderson.”
“Of course I will give such help as I can,” Anderson said, “but I assure you I know nothing
about Nehru II. Opportunities for space travel for humans are very limited—almost nonexistent—
nowadays, aren’t they?”
“The conservation policy. You will be interested to know you are being sent to Nehru II
shortly.”
Anderson stared in amazement at the android. The latter’s insignificant face was so blank it
seemed impossible that it was not getting a sadistic thrill out of springing this shock on Anderson.
“I’m a prehistorian at the institute,” Anderson protested. “My work is research. I know
nothing at all about Nehru II.”
“Nevertheless, you are classified as a Learned Man, and as such you are paid by World
Government. The Government has a legal right to send you wherever they wish. As for knowing
nothing about the planet Nehru, there you attempt to deceive me. One of your old tutors, the
human Dr. Arlblaster, as you are aware, went there to settle some years ago.”
Anderson sighed. He had heard of this sort of business happening to others, and he had kept
his fingers crossed. Human affairs were increasingly under the edict of the Automated Boffin
Predictors.
“And what has Arlblaster to do with me now?” he asked.
“You are going to Nehru to find out what has happened to him. Your story will be that you
are dropping in for old time’s sake. You have been chosen for the job because you were one of
his favorite pupils.”
Bringing out a mescahale packet, Anderson lit one and insultingly offered his opponent one.
“Is Frank Arlblaster in trouble?”
“There is some sort of trouble on Nehru II," the Investigator agreed cautiously. "You are
going there in order to find out just what sort of trouble it is."
"Well, I’ll have to go if I'm ordered, of course. But I sill can't see why you want to send me. If
there's trouble, send a robot police ship."
The Investigator smiled. Very lifelike.
“We've already lost two police ships there. That's why we're going to send you. You might
call it a new line of approach, Mr. Anderson."
A metal Tom Thumb using blood-and-guts irony!
The track curved and began to descend into a green valley. Swettenham's settlement, the only
town on Nehru II, lay dustily in one loop of a meandering river. As the nose of his tourer dipped
toward the valley, K. D. Anderson felt the heat increase; it was cradled in the valley like water in
the palm of the hand.
Just as he started to sweat, something appeared in the grassy track ahead of him. He braked
and stared ahead in amazement.
A small animal faced him.
It stood some two feet six high at the shoulder; its coat was thick and shaggy, its four feet
clumsy; its long ugly skull supported two horns, the anterior being over a foot long. When it had
looked its fill at Anderson, it lumbered into a bush and disappeared.
"Hey!" Anderson called.
Flinging open the door, he jumped out, drew his stun-gun and ran into the bushes after it. He
reckoned be knew a baby woolly rhinoceros when he saw one.
The ground was hard, the grass long. The bushes extended down the hill, growing in clumps.
The animal was disappearing around one of the clumps. Anderson spotted it and plunged on in
pursuit. No prehistorian worth his salt would have thought of doing otherwise; these beasts were
presumed to be extinct on Nehru II as they were on Sol III.
He ran on. The woolly rhino—if it was a woolly rhino—had headed toward Swettenham's
settlement There was no sign of it now.
Two jagged boulders, about twelve feet high, stood at the bottom of the slope. Baffled now
that his quarry had disappeared, proceeding more slowly, Anderson moved toward the boulders.
As he went he classified them almost unthinkingly: impacted siltstone, deposited here by the
glaciers which had once ground down this valley, now gradually disintegrating.
The silence all around made itself felt. This was an almost empty planet, primitive, spinning
slowly on its axis to form a leisurely twenty-nine-hour day. And those days were generally
cloudy. Swettenham, located beneath a mountain range in the cooler latitudes of the southern
hemisphere, enjoyed a mild, muggy climate. Even the gravity, 0.16 of Earth gravity, reinforced
the general feeling of lethargy.
Anderson rounded the tall boulders.
A great glaring face thrust itself up at his. Sloe black eyes peered from their twin caverns, a
club whirled, and his stun-gun was knocked spinning.
Anderson jumped back. He dropped into a fighting stance, but his attacker showed no sign of
following up his initial success. Which was fortunate; beneath the man's tan shirt, massive biceps
and shoulders bulged. His jaw was pugnacious, not to say prognathous; altogether a tough
hombre, Anderson thought. He took the conciliatory line, his baby rhino temporarily forgotten.
"I wasn't hunting you," he said. "I was chasing an animal. It must have surprised you to see
me appear suddenly with a gun, huh?"
“Huh?" echoed the other. He hardly looked surprised. Reaching out a hairy arm, he grabbed
Anderson’s wrist.
“You coming to Swettenham," he said.
“I was doing just that," Anderson agreed angrily, pulling back. "But my car's up the hill with
my sister in it, so if you’ll let go I'll rejoin her."
“Bother about her later. You coming to Swettenham,” the tough fellow said. He started
plodding determinedly toward the houses, the nearest of which showed through the bushes only a
hundred yards away. Humiliated, Anderson had to follow. To pick an argument with this
dangerous creature in the open was unwise. Marking the spot where his gun lay, he moved
forward with the hope that his reception in the settlement would be better than first signs
indicated.
It wasn't.
Swettenham consisted of two horseshoe-shaped lines of bungalows and huts, one inside the
摘要：

NeanderthalPlanetBrianAldissScannedbyperagwinn2004-07-15v2.0–formattedandproofedbyperagwinnHiddenmachinesvariedthefiveaxiomsoftheScanningPlace.Theyranthroughaseriesofarbitrarysystems,consistingofKolmogorovianfinitesets,counterpointedharmonicallybyaone-to-oneassignmentnonnegativerealnumbers,sothatthe...

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