Hogan, James P - Mind, Machines and Evolution

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Preface to the Baen Books Edition

The original edition of Minds, Machines, & Evolution, published by Bantam

Books in June, 1988, produced some enthusiastic responses, and readers were

still tracking me down to ask how they could obtain a copy long after it had

gone out of print. So, when, early in 1996, Jim Baen decided to put together a

second, similar collection, Rockets, Redheads, & Revolution, we thought it

would be a good idea to reissue the first also as a companion volume.

Views and opinions that remained totally unchanged after eight years would be

a sure sign of little or nothing much new having been learned in the meantime.

All material, however, has been left as it appeared in the original. Where

appropriate, I have added an afterword to reflect any updates that would seem

in order today.

SILVER SHOES FOR A PRINCESS

The girl had always been called Taya. She propped her elbows on the sill below

the window and rested her chin in her hands while she stared out at the stars.

Her eyes, wide with a nine-year-old's wonder, mirrored a million jewels

spilling endlessly across carpets of glowing nebulas painted over black

infinity by brushes softer than the yellow hair framing her face.

It was a pretty face, with clear skin and an upturned nose, and a mouth that

could push itself out into a pout when she frowned, or pull itself back into

dimples when she smiled. She was wearing just a simple dress of pale blue,

which tightened as she leaned forward across the sill, outlining the curves

just beginning to form on her body. And as she gazed out at the stars, she

wriggled her toes in the soft pile covering the floor, and she wondered . . .

She wondered why everything she could see beyond the window that looked out of

Merkon was so different from the things inside. That was one of the things she

often wondered about. She liked wondering things . . . such as why the stars

never changed, as they should have if Merkon was really moving the way Kort

said it was. Kort said it was moving toward a particular star that he called

Vaxis. He had pointed it out to her in the sky, and shown it to her on the

star pictures that they could make on the screens—as if there were something

special about it. But it always looked the same as all the other stars to her.

Kort said that Merkon had always been moving toward Vaxis. But if that was

true, why didn't Vaxis ever get any bigger? Outside the rooms in which Taya

lived was a long corridor that led to the place where capsules left for other

parts of Merkon. When Taya walked along the corridor, the far end of it would

at first be smaller than her thumb; but as she carried on walking it would

grow, until by the time she got there it was bigger even than Kort. Kort said

that Vaxis didn't seem to get any bigger because it was much farther away than

the end of the corridor. But he also said that Merkon had been moving for

years and years—longer than she could remember—and that it was moving even

faster than the capsules did through the tubes. How could anything be so far

away that it never got any bigger?

Kort didn't know why Merkon was moving toward Vaxis, which was strange because

Kort knew everything. He just said that was the way things had always been,

just as there had always been stars outside. When she asked him why there were

stars outside, he always talked about gas clouds, gravitation, temperatures,

densities, and other "machine things" that had nothing to do with what she

meant. She didn't want to know how the stars came to be out there, but why

anything should be out there at all—or for that matter, why there should be an

"out there" in the first place for anything to be in. He just didn't seem to

share her kind of curiosity about things.

"We know what we mean, don't we, Rassie," Taya said aloud, turning her head

toward the doll sitting on the sill, staring outward to share her

contemplation of the universe. "Kort knows so many things. . . . But there are

some things you just can't make him understand."

Rassie was a miniature version of herself, with long golden hair, light green

eyes, and soft arms and legs that were the same color as hers. Rassie, too,

wore a pale blue dress—Taya always dressed Rassie in the same things as she

herself felt like wearing on any particular day. She didn't know why; it was

just something she had always done.

Kort had made Rassie for her—he often made things that he said it wasn't worth

setting up the machines to make. He had made Rassie a long time ago now, when

Taya was much smaller. He had been teaching her how to draw shapes and colors

on one of the screens, and soon she had learned to make pictures of the things

in the rooms where she lived, and pictures of Kort. Her favorite pictures had

been ones of herself, whom she could see reflected in the window when the

lights inside were turned up high. That was when Kort had made her a mirror.

But the mirror had made her sad because she could never pick up the little

girl that she saw in it, or touch her the way she could all her other things.

So Kort had gone away, and later he'd come back with Rassie.

At one time, before she'd learned that Rassie wasn't really the same as her,

she had taken Rassie everywhere and talked to her all the time. She didn't

talk to her so much now . . . but when Kort was away, there was nobody else to

talk to. "Kort said he couldn't think of a reason why anyone would ask

questions like that. How can anyone be as clever as Kort, yet never think of

asking a question like that?" Taya studied the doll's immobile features for a

while, then sighed. "You can't tell me, can you? You can only tell me the

things I pretend you say, and this time I don't know what to pretend." She

moved the doll to stare in a different direction. "There. You stay here and

watch Vaxis. Tell me if it starts to get any bigger."

Taya straightened up from the sill and walked into the room behind the window

room. This was where, when she was smaller, she had spent most of her time

playing with the things that Kort made for her. These days she didn't play

with things so much—she preferred making things instead. Making things was

easy for Kort because he could do anything, but it had taken her a long time

to learn—and she still wasn't very good at some of the things he had shown

her. She liked forming shapes from the colored plastic that set hard and shiny

like glass. Often, she made things she could use, such as vases to put things

in, or plates to eat from, but at other times she enjoyed making shapes that

just looked nice. Kort couldn't understand what it meant for something to

"just look nice" . . . but that was because he only thought "machine things."

Then there were pictures that she drew—not on the screens, but with her hands,

using the colored pens that Kort had made for her when she'd explained what

she wanted. He had never understood why she thought the pictures that she drew

were anything like the things she said they were like. He had told her that

the machines could make much better pictures in an instant. But Kort hadn't

been able to see that her pictures were supposed to look the way they did.

They were supposed to look like what she felt about things—not like the things

really were, exactly. Kort had tried drawing with pens, too. He could draw

much faster than she could, and his pictures always looked exactly like the

things they were supposed to be . . . but she still didn't like them as much

as her pictures. They were always "machine pictures."

And she made clothes. Kort had made her clothes for her when she was smaller,

but later, when he found that she liked to think up her own, he had made her

some needles and other tools and shown her how to use them. She liked her

clothes better than the ones that Kort made, which were never pretty, but just

hung like the covers on some of the machines in other parts of Merkon. Once—

not very long ago, because she could still remember it—she had tried not

wearing any clothes at all; but she'd found that she got dusty and itchy and

kept touching cold things, and sometimes she scratched herself. Kort had told

her that was why he'd started making clothes for her in the first place, when

she was very small, and she had soon started using them again.

There were lots of half-finished things lying around the workroom, but she

didn't feel like doing anything with them. She toyed for a while with one of

the glass mosaics that she sometimes made to hang on the walls, but grew

restless and went on through to the screen room and sat down at the console

with its rows of buttons. But she didn't feel like playing any games, or

learning about anything, or asking any questions, or practicing words and

math, or any of the other things that the machines could let her do. She had

to practice things like words and math, because if she didn't she forgot how

to do them. Kort never forgot anything and never had to practice. He could

multiply the biggest numbers she could think of before she could even begin,

and he had never gotten a single one wrong . . . but he couldn't tell a pretty

dress from one that wasn't, or a nice shape from one that was just silly. Taya

giggled to herself as she thought of the funny shapes that Kort had made

sometimes when he'd tried to find out what a "nice" one was, and how she had

laughed at them. Then, when he discovered that she enjoyed laughing, he had

started doing silly things just to make her laugh.

She decided that she wanted to talk to Kort, and touched the buttons to spell

out the sign that would connect a speaking channel to him. His voice answered

immediately from a grille above the blank screen. "Hello, little gazer-at-

stars."

"How did you know I'd been looking at the stars?"

"I know everything."

Kort's voice was much deeper than hers. Sometimes she tried to speak the way

he did, but she had to make the sounds way down at the back of her throat, and

it always made her cough. "Where are you?" she asked.

"I went to fix something in one of the machinery compartments while you were

asleep."

"Will you be long?"

"I'm almost finished. Why?"

"I just wanted to talk to you."

"We can still talk."

"It's not the same as talking to you when you're here."

"Why don't you talk to Rassie?"

"Oh, that's an old game now. I don't really think Rassie listens—not any

more."

"You change faster every day," Kort's voice said. "We'll have to find more

interesting things for you to do."

"What kind of things?"

"I'll have to think about it."

"Do you think I could learn to do the things you do?" Taya asked.

"Maybe. We'll have to wait and see what happens as you grow bigger."

"How big will I get?"

"I don't know."

"Oh, Kort, you know everything. Will I grow as big as you?"

"Maybe."

A few seconds of silence followed while Taya thought to herself. "What are you

doing now?" she asked at last.

"There's a fault in the optical circuits of one of the machines. The service

machines could fix it, but they'd need to have new parts made by other

machines in another place. I can fix it more quickly, so I've told them not to

bother. I'm almost done now."

"Can I see?" Taya asked.

The screen above the buttons came to life to show what Kort could see through

his eyes. He was looking at a dense pattern of lines and shapes on a metal-

framed plate of crystal that he had removed from a slot in one of many tiers

of such plates. It could have been the inside of any machine. They all looked

the much the same to Taya, and not especially interesting. The ones she liked

best were the maintenance machines that fixed other machines, because they at

least moved around and did something.

She had never seen how anyone could really understand how the machines worked.

Kort had told her about electrons and currents and fields, and shown her how

to find out more for herself from the screens . . . but she had never quite

followed what all that had to do with building new parts of Merkon, changing

old parts, finding out what the stars were made of, or all the other things

that the machines did. Every time she learned something, she discovered two

more things she didn't know, which she hadn't thought of before. Learning

things was like trying to count the stars: there were always two more for

every one she counted.

Then Kort's hands moved into the view on the screen. They were huge, silver-

gray hands with fingers almost as thick as Taya's wrists, and joints that

flexed by sliding metal surfaces over each other—not like her little "bendy"

hands at all. One of the hands was holding a piece of machine while the other

hand tightened a fastening, using one of the tools that Kort took with him

when he went away to fix something. Taya watched, fascinated, as the hands

restored other, larger connections, and then replaced a metal cover over the

top. Then the view moved away and showed Kort's hands collecting other tools

from a ledge and putting them into the box that he used to carry them.

"Do you think I'd ever be able to do things like that?" Taya asked in an awed

voice.

"Well, there isn't any air here where I am, and the temperature would be too

low for your jelly body," Kort told her. "But apart from that, yes, maybe you

could . . . in time."

"But how do you know what to do?"

"By learning things."

"But I'm not sure I could ever learn those things. I'm just not very good at

learning `machine things.' "

"Perhaps it's only because I've been learning things longer than you have,"

Kort suggested. "You have to learn easy things before you can expect to

understand harder things, and that takes time." On the screen, a doorway

enlarged as Kort moved toward it. Beyond it was a larger space, crammed with

machines, cabinets, cables, and ducting. It could have been anywhere in

Merkon. Only the machines could live in most parts of it. Just the part that

Taya lived in was different from the rest.

"But I've already been learning things for years and years," she protested.

"And I still don't really know how pressing buttons makes shapes appear on the

screens, or how I can still talk to you when you're not here. Have you been

learning things for longer than years and years?"

"Much longer," Kort replied. "And besides that, I talk to the machines

faster."

The mass of machinery moving by on the screen gave way to a dark tunnel, lined

with banks of pipes and cables. The colors changed as Kort entered, which

meant he had switched his vision to its infra-red range. Taya knew that Kort

could see things by their heat. She had tried practicing it herself in the

dark, but she'd never been able to make it work.

"How fast can you talk to the machines, Kort?" Taya asked.

"Very fast. Much faster than you can."

"What, evenifItakeabigbreathandtalkasfastasthis?"

Kort laughed—that was something he had learned from Taya. "Much faster, little

asker-of-endless-questions. I'll show you. Tell me, what is the three hundred

twenty-fifth word in the dictionary that starts with a B?"

"Is this a game?"

"If you like."

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摘要：

PrefacetotheBaenBooksEditionTheoriginaleditionofMinds,Machines,&Evolution,publishedbyBantamBooksinJune,1988,producedsomeenthusiasticresponses,andreaderswerestilltrackingmedowntoaskhowtheycouldobtainacopylongafterithadgoneoutofprint.So,when,earlyin1996,JimBaendecidedtoputtogetherasecond,similarcollec...

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Hogan, James P - Mind, Machines and Evolution

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