Poul Anderson - Genesis

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GENESIS

POUL ANDERSON

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either

fictitious or are used fictitiously.

Part of this novel appeared in Far Futures, Gregory Benford, editor (Tor, 1995). Copyright (c)

1995 by The Trigonier Trust

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Design by Victoria Kuskowski

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor(r) is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 0-312-86707-7 First Edition: February 2000

Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

To Greq Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin, Killer Bees and COSMIC craftsmen

PART ONE

To follow knowledge like a sinking star.

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

-ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

The story is of a man, a woman, and a world. But ghosts pass through it, and gods. Time does,

which is more mysterious than any of these.

A boy stood on a hilltop and looked skyward. The breeze around him was a little cold, as if it

whispered of the spaces yonder. He kept his parka hood up. Gloves didn't make his fingers too

clumsy for the telescope he had carried here. Already now, before the autumnal equinox, summer was

dying out of the Tanana valley and the nights lengthening fast. Some warmth did linger in the

forest that enclosed this bare height: he caught a last faint fragrance of spruce.

The dark reached brilliant above him, the Milky Way cleaving it with frost, the Great Bear canted

and Capella outshining Polaris in the north, ruddy Arcturus and Altair flanking steely Vega in the

west, a bewilderment of stars. Though the moon was down, treetops lifted gray beneath their light.

A spark rose among them, a satellite in a high-inclination orbit. The boy's gaze followed it till

it vanished. Longing shook him. To be out there!

He would. Someday he would.

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Meanwhile he had this much heaven. Best get started. He must flit back home at a reasonable hour.

Tomorrow his school gyroball team was having practice, he wanted to work out a few more Fourier

series-if you just told the computer to do it, you'd never learn what went on-and in the evening

he'd take a certain girl to a dance. Maybe afterward he'd have nerve enough to recite her a poem

he'd written about her. He hastily postponed that thought.

His astronomical pursuits had gone well past the usual sights. This time he savored their glories

only briefly, for he was after a couple of Messier objects. There was no need to spoil the

adaptation of his eyes. He spoke a catalogue number to the telescope mount. It found the RA and

dec, pointed the instrument, and commenced tracking. He bent over the eyepiece and touched the

knobs. Somehow it always felt better to focus for himself.

The thing swam into view, dim and misty. He hadn't the power to resolve more than a hint of

structure. But it wasn't a nebula, it was a galaxy, the most remote he had yet tried for, suns in

their tens of billions, their births and deaths, whirling neutron globes, unfathomable black

holes, clouds of star-stuff, surely planets and moons and comets, surely-oh, please-living

creatures, maybe- who could say?-some that were gazing his way and wondering.

No. Stupid, the boy chided himself. It's too far. How many light-years? I can't quite remember.

He didn't immediately ask for the figure. Down south he had seen the Andromeda glimmer awesome

through six lunar diameters of arc, and it was a couple of million off. Here he spied on another

geological era.

No, not even that. Lately he had added geology to his interests, and one day realized that

magnolias were blooming on Earth when the Pleiades kindled. It strengthened his sense of the

cosmos as a unity, where he too belonged. Well, that star cluster was only about a hundred parsecs

away. (Only!) It was not altogether ridiculous to imagine what might be going on there as you

watched, three and a quarter centuries after the light now in your eyes had departed it. But

across gulfs far less deep than this that confronted him, simultaneity had no meaning whatsoever.

His wistfulness to know if any spirit so distant shared his lifetime would never be quenched. It

could not be.

The night chill seemed to flow through aperture and lens into him. He shivered, straightened,

glanced around in a sudden, irrational search for reassurance.

Air tingled through his nostrils. Blood pulsed. The forest stood tall from horizon to horizon.

Another satellite skittered low above it. An owl hooted.

The ground stayed firm beneath his feet. A nearby boulder, weathered, probably glacier-scarred,

bore the same witness to abidingness. If human science asked its age, the answer would be as real

as the stone.

We're not little bits of nothing, the boy thought half defiantly. We count too. Our sun is a third

as old as the universe. Earth isn't much younger. Life on Earth isn't much younger than that. And

we have learned this all by ourselves.

The silence of the stars replied: You have measured it. Do you understand it? Can you?

We can think it, he declared. We can speak it. Can you?

Why did the night seem to wait?

Oh, yes, he thought, we don't see or feel it the way we do what's right around us. If I try to

picture bricks or something side by side, my limit is about half a dozen. If I'd been counting

since I was born and kept on till I died, I wouldn't get as high as twenty billion. But I reason.

I imagine. That's enough.

He had always had a good head for figures. He could scale them down till they lay in his mind like

pebbles in his hand. Even those astrophysical ages-No, maybe it didn't make sense either, harking

clear back to the quantum creation. Too much that was too strange had happened too fast. But

afterward time must have run for the first of the stars as it did for him. The chronology of life

was perfectly straightforward.

Not that it had an exact zero point. The traces were too faint. Besides, most likely there wasn't

any such moment. Chemistry evolved, with no stage at which you could say this had come alive.

Still, animate matter certainly existed sometime between three and a half and four billion years

ago.

The boy's mind jumped, as if a meteor had startled him. Let's split the difference and call the

date three-point-six-five billion B.C.E., he thought. Then one day stands for ten million years.

Life began when January the first did, and this is midnight December the thirty-first, the stroke

of the next new year.

So ... along about April, single cells developed, nuclei, ribosomes, and the rest. The cells got

together, algae broke oxygen free into the atmosphere, and by November the first trilobites were

crawling over the sea floor. Life invaded the land around Thanksgiving. The dinosaurs appeared

early in December. They perished on Christmas Day. The hominids parted company with the apes at

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noon today. Primitive Homo sapiens showed up maybe fifteen minutes ago. Recorded history had

lasted less than one minute. And here they were, measuring the universe, ranging the Solar System,

planning missions to the stars.

Where will we be by sunrise? he wondered for a dizzying moment.

It passed. The upward steepness was an illusion, he knew. To go from worm to fish took immensely

longer than to go from fish to mammal because the changes were immensely greater. By comparison,

an ancient insectivore was very like an ape, and an ape nearly identical with a human.

Just the same, the boy thought, we've become a force of nature, and not only on this world. It's

never seen anything like us before. Our little piece of extra brain tissue has got to have taken

us across a threshold.

But what threshold, and what's beyond it?

He shivered again, pushed the question away from him, and turned back to his stargazing.

Strictly speaking, he was mistaken. In no particular was humankind unique. Nearly all animals had

language, in the sense of communication between each other; among some, parts of it were learned,

not innate, and actual dialects could develop. Many were technologists, in the sense of

constructing things. A few used tools, in the sense of employing foreign objects for special

tasks. A very few made tools, in the sense of slightly reshaping the objects; three or four

species did this with the help of something besides their own mouths or digits.

Yet none came near to humans in any of these ways. In no other lineage did language grow so rich

and powerful, for in them it sprang from an unprecedented capability of abstraction and reason.

They had been toolmasters par excellence since before they were fully human; fire, chipped stone,

and cut wood became conditions of their further evolution. At last the scope of their technology

was such that natural selection no longer had significant effect on them. Like social insects and

various sea dwellers, they were so well fitted to their surroundings that they bade fair to

continue unaltered for millions of years. In their case, however, they themselves created- or were-

their own environment. We can, if we like, say they had crossed a threshold.

Then we must say that another, more fateful one lay ahead.

For technology was never static. It continued to develop, at an ever more furious pace.

Technological evolution was radically different from biological. It was not Darwinian, driven by

contingency, competition, and a blind urge to reproduce. It was Lamarckian, driven by purpose. Its

units of inheritance were not genes but memes-ideas, concepts, deliberately mutated or kept intact

according to needs foreseen.

Knowledge also grew, in a fashion more nearly organic and haphazard until technology made science,

the systematic search for verifiable information, possible. Thereafter the two nourished one

another and the pace accelerated further.

More and more it was as though technology took on a life of its own, acting independently and

ruthlessly. Gunpowder brought whole societies down. The steam engine forced basic change upon

whole civilizations. Its internal-combustion successor turned the planet into a single quarrelsome

neighborhood, while powering an agriculture that fed billions but starved what was left of the

natural world. Computers remade industry, economics, and the everyday well-nigh beyond

recognition, undermined liberty, and opened a road to space. The Internet, founded as a link

between military centers, spread across the globe in a matter of years, revolutionized

communication and access to knowledge like nothing since movable type, curbed tyrannies, and vexed

governments everywhere. Automation made traditional skills useless, raising resentment and despair

side by side with new wealth and new hopes.

"Artificial intelligence" was the name given the qualities of the most advanced systems. Certain

of these went into the business of enhancing artificial intelligence. Soon the business was

entirely theirs.

The boy became a man. For a while he adventured on Earth, then he went into space as he had

dreamed.

The machines evolved onward.

III

Long after-ward-almost unimaginably long afterward-Christian Brannock recalled that day. For it

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had been somehow both an ending and a beginning.

He did not see this until he looked back on his life and his afterlife in fullness. At the time,

he was wholly caught up in the there and then. It was not even day, except by a clock set to North

American hours; and at the moment Earth was some hundred million kilometers to starward, while

night still lay over Clement Base.

Morning approached, but slowly. Between sunrise and sunrise, 176 terrestrial rotations passed. Not

that the men here had ever gazed directly at a sunlit landscape on Mercury. Though a darkened pane

might bring the brightness down to something endurable, other radiation would strike through.

Their machines above ground ranged for them. Most of these were robots, with different degrees of

autonomy. One was more.

Gimmick never knew darkness. Across five hundred kilometers, Christian saw by laserlight,

radarlight, amplified starlight. He felt with fingers and tendrils of metal, with sensors in the

treads as the body rolled across the regolith, with subtle seismics. He tasted and smelled with

flickery beams of electrons and nuclear particles. He listened electronically to whispers of

radioactivity from the rock around and to the hiss and spatter of cosmic rain. Interior sensors

kept him subliminally aware of balances, flows, needs, as nerves and glands did in his own body.

Together, he and Gimmick made observations and decisions, like his brain alone in its skull; they

moved the machine as his muscles moved himself.

Rapport was not total. It could only be so in line-of-sight. Relay, whether by satellite or by

spires planted along the way, inevitably reduced the bandwidth and degraded the signal. Christian

remained dimly conscious of his surroundings, the recliner in which he lay connected, meters and

instruments, air odorless and a little chilly, tensions and casings-instinctive responses, which

sometimes made him strain against his bonds. From the corner of an eye he glimpsed Willem Schuyten

seated at a control console, monitoring what went on. That had seldom been necessary elsewhere,

Christian thought vaguely. Or, at least, he'd avoided it. But this was a team effort, and on

Mercury the unknowns were many and the stakes high.

It was just half a minute's distraction, while Gimmick did some data analysis that he couldn't

follow. A certain direction of search seemed promising, and the explorer set off again.

Christian's whole attention returned to the scene.

Heaven glimmered and shimmered, its manifold brilliances arcing down to a horizon that on the left

was near and sharp. Craters pocked the murky terrain, boulders lay strewn. When he glanced at any,

he could tell its age within a few million years, as he could tell the age of a person or a tree

on Earth; the clues were countless, the deductions subconscious. Close on the right a scarp four

kilometers high, hundreds of kilometers long, loomed like a wall across the world. The enhancement

that was Christian-Gimmick perceived it as more than rock. He noted traces as he went along; brain

and computer joined to read the history, the tale of a gigantic upthrust along a fault line long

ago when the planet was still cooling and shrinking after its birth.

He spied possibilities in something ahead.

Gimmick was following the cliff southwesterly, back toward the polar region where Clement waited.

Rubble scrunched beneath the treads, soundlessly to human ears; dust smoked up and fell quickly

down, under low gravity but unhindered by air. It did not cling to the robot, whose material

repelled it.

There, Christian thought, that crag yonder. Maybe a good anchor point. We'll have a look. The

partnership veered slightly and trundled nearer the heights. Debris lay deep here. Shards slipped

aside. Motors labored. He considered deploying the six legs but decided that wasn't needful.

The peak sheered out of a lower slope above the rubble, a rough-edged hundred-meter obelisk. He

had seen others as he traveled, though none so large. Probably shock-wave resonances in the age of

uplift had split them from the massif.

He visualized this one as an almost ready-made core for a transmission tower, part of the global

network that was to collect the solar energy cataracting down onto Mercury's dayside and hurl it

out to orbiting antimatter factories-ultimately, to the laser beams that would send the first

starships on their way! Passion thrummed in him.

A quick structural exam. The self-robots can map the details later. A disc at the end of an arm

snugged tightly. Vibrations through stone returned their echoes, bearing tales.

The stone gave way. Thunder and blindness crashed down.

"Wat drommel?" Willem Schuyten cried. He went back to the expedition's English. "What the hell?"

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After a glance at the other man's face: "Hell indeed."

"N-no." Secured in the system, Christian Brannock could neither lift a braceleted arm nor shake

his helmeted head. His voice shuddered. "Hold on. Keep going. Let me try to find out-what's

happened-"

Willem nodded and concentrated on his instruments. Grown gray in the artificial intelligence

field, he could make inferences from these readings and computations that might well escape an on-

site observer.

Shards and tatters of input went through Christian like a nightmare, blackness, deafness, crushing

heaviness, powers lost, strength in ebb. Instinct panicked; his flesh struggled against the

restraints. But somehow his mind clung to the steadiness that was Gimmick's. Together they tried

to interpret what little the sensors gave them.

Those fitful moments of reality turned more and more chaotic. They weakened, too, until he could

not make out whatever form they still had.

The linkage is failing fast. Better break it altogether and start work. Christian never knew

whether the decision was his alone or rooted also in his partner's calm logic. Nor did he know or

care why it ended with: So long. Good luck.

"Terminate," he rasped aloud.

"Terminate," Willem repeated. He swept a glance and a judgment across the gauges, deemed that an

immediate breakoff was neurologically safe, and pressed the command button. Voice-activated, the

communication center could have done everything by itself, but a human in the loop was an added

precaution. He could better tell what another human required.

All channels shut down. The neuroconnectors released Christian. He lay for a minute breathing

hard, then sat up. Willem stood above him with a tumbler of water. Christian drained it in two

gulps. "Thanks," he mumbled. "Dry as yon landscape, my mouth was."

"Terror will do that," his companion replied. "I saw your involuntary reactions. Want a levozine?"

Christian half grinned, without merriment. "What I really want is a stiff drink. But we're in a

hurry. Yes, I'll take a pill."

Willem gave him one. Some was always on hand, in case a mission got unexpectedly long or difficult

and the operator could not stop to rest. "In a hurry, you said? Do you mean there is something we

can do at once?"

Christian nodded. "We'd bloody well better." He climbed to his feet. The medication began to

tranquilize and stimulate. His trembling died away, his voice gained force. "Whew! Hope I can

snatch a shower during preparations. I smell six weeks dead, don't I?" Sweat sheened on his skin

and darkened his shirt.

Willem regarded him narrowly. "My monitors say the machine is a ruin. The transceiver's badly

damaged. It can carry some information, erratically, but the power unit's out of commission.

Anything that could perhaps function, like an arm, can't anymore. And the energy reserve is

dwindling fast."

"Gimmick's intact."

Willem sighed. "Yes, evidently. That hurts, doesn't it?" He had often heard such highly developed

computers and neural nets, with their programs and databases, called "brains." People who worked

with one, like Christian-although seldom as intimately as he did-were apt to give it a name and

speak of its personal quirks, as other people might speak of a ship or a tool that had served them

a long time. "I imagine you'd prefer the wreck to have been quick and total. Merciful, so to

speak. That would have been a shock to you, however, worse than you got."

"I know. Like suddenly dying myself. I'd have recovered. But this way-My God, man, Gimmick's out

there, not a heap of smashed parts but Gimmick! And sunrise is coming."

Willem sighed. "Exactly. Have you any idea what happened?"

The question, its style carefully parched, demanded an answer in kind. Christian's fists

unclenched. "We were examining an unusual sort of crag. All at once it broke into huge chunks. It

buried Gimmick." His tone sharpened. "The body Gimmick was using." Again impersonal: "The top of

the transceiver mast, with the dish, is sticking out, and what came to me shows that the interior

armor protected the brain."

"Are you sure? It could be in poor shape too."

Christian shook his head. "No. Do you believe I wouldn't know that, feel it, same as I would if my

own brain took a concussion?"

"All right. But the accident-how could a collapse happen? An earthquake?"

"No." Christian spoke with certainty. He had, in a way, been there. "Nor a meteorite strike.

Somehow our seismic probe must have touched things off. I don't see how. You know it didn't have

any great force. And, and Mercury's geologically used up. That jut of rock stood unchanged for-

what?-three billion years?"

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"A freak occurrence, then."

"Maybe. Or maybe such formations and weaknesses are common. How much do we know? Why the devil are

we on Mercury, except to get the lay of the land? Before something like this happens elsewhere-"

Christian drew breath and forced coolness upon himself. "I was only in linkage with Gimmick. The

full information isn't in me, it's in his database. If we don't retrieve him before sunrise,

everything will be baked and blasted to nothing."

"I suppose so. Thermostatic system destroyed and the rocks probably not a good replacement for

smashed radiation shielding." Willem laid a hand on his friend's shoulder. "I'm sorry. Dreadful

luck. Worse for you than the expedition, perhaps. This association you've grown used to, this

particular rapport you've developed, gone. You'll have to start all over, won't you?" He regarded

the creases in the face, the fallowness in the blond hair. "Unless you choose to make a career

change, or just retire. I'm sorry, Christian."

The response lashed at him: "No! There's time to go dig, detach Gimmick from the wreckage, get

back here. But we've got to move, I tell you!"

"I ... am afraid not. Let me check and make sure." Willem turned to his keyboards and readouts.

Christian stood where he was. His fists doubled again.

After a while the cyberneticist looked at him and said slowly:

"No. I've gathered the present whereabouts of everything we have with proper capability," self-

programming robots surveying and studying the planet in advance of the grand enterprise.

Christian's had been the only direct human-machine alliance, expensive in terms of life support

and equipment, rewarding in terms of special situations calling for an organic mind on the scene.

"They're scattered across the globe, remember. Even the nearest has rough terrain to cross. None

can get there soon enough."

Christian had become quite composed. "I guessed so. Well, it isn't too far from here. I'll go

myself."

Everyone else at Clement called the idea insane. The central artificial intelligence made a

lightning-quick calculation and agreed. No possible gain was worth the risk of losing the outfit

necessary, let alone a human life. Commander Gupta forbade it.

Christian Brannock stood his ground. He and Gimmick had been doing work impossible for any single

man or machine. The delay while a replacement was found and brought to the planet, then the time

spent regaining the lost information, could possibly cripple the whole undertaking, if only by the

added cost. More to the point, as .in independent contractor he had broad discretion. Within

limits that he insisted he was not exceeding, he could commandeer whatever he needed to cope with

an emergency.

His haste and resolution overbore them. Two hours later he was on his way.

After that, he waited. The rover that carried him operated itself. Its program included a

topographic map, and survey satellites provided exact detail. Following its progress through

communication relays, from time to time the intelligence at base ordered a change of course that

would make for better speed. None of this impinged directly on Christian. Nor could he talk with

the robot that accompanied him. It was built for power and dexterity, not thought. When they

reached the site, the intelligence would direct its operations. Meanwhile its bulk crowded a cabin

intended for, at most, three men.

Otherwise he was fairly comfortable. Air blew recycled, always pure. (He remembered odors of

blossoms, pines, a woman's sunlit hair.) Temperature varied subtly because that was best for

health and alertness, without regard to the hundred-Kelvin cold of midnight or the searing three

hundred Celsius degrees of noonday. (He remembered a beach where surf burst and roared, a wind

chill in his face and salt on his lips but warmth radiant from a leeward bluff.) The metal around

him hummed and quivered, the deck underfoot pitched and swayed, as the vehicle drove full tilt

across a rugged land. However, the seat in which he sat harnessed compensated for most, and what

it could not entirely counteract didn't amount to much in Mercurian gravity. If anything, the

motion soothed, almost cradle like. (He remembered a boat heeled over, climbing the crests of

waves and diving into their troughs, the tiller athrum beneath his hand, the mainsail a snowpeak

against heaven.)

Exhaustion claimed him. He ate and drank something, reclined the seat, and slept. His dreams were

uneasy. Once during them he asked Gimmick, "Do you ever dream? When we're not linked, I mean," and

the robot replied, "You taught me how." Or was that a confused memory? They'd been together quite

a few years, in quite a few strange places.

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He woke refreshed, though, unharnessed, balanced himself against the lurching while he stretched

his muscles and used the sanitor, ate more of the cold rations, and settled back down. When he

called for a revised estimate of arrival time, the vehicle said "About another three hours" in its

flat voice.

He frowned. That wouldn't be long before sunrise. Well, he'd known when he started that this was

the best he could hope for. And . . . the swollen solar disc would take fifteen hours to clear the

horizon.

He looked outward. Direct vision was impossible when he sat in the middle of thick armor, but the

electronics that he activated gave him a simulacrum as good. Suddenly it was as if everything

above 1 he deck were gone and he directly beneath the sky, naked, alone, invulnerable. So might an

angel have seen.

No, only a man. He did not now share the more than human senses of his partner. But for a while he

lost himself in unaided vision.

A kind of dawn was breaking in the northeast, zodiacal light strengthened by the nearness of the

sun. It lifted above rocks and craters like a huge wing, softly pearl-hued, a quarter of the way

to the zenith before it faded among stars. The galactic belt outshone it, an ice-bright river from

worldedge to worldedge. Everywhere else I he stars themselves gleamed and glittered, their

thousands overwhelming the crystalline blackness behind. Though Christian had beheld them oftener

than he could recall, for a moment he felt his spirit fall free, upward and upward forever into

the majesty of their silence.

A glimpse drew him back. Low over a northwesterly ridge stood ii blue diamond. He could just espy

a mote beside it, ashen-gold. Earth, he knew, and Earth's moon. Home.

Did that moon tonight throw a glint off a bit of Ellen's windborne dust?

Sometimes, without warning, the memory of her overtook him. He had long since healed himself of

grief. There had been women before her; there had been women afterward. But she was the one for

whom he left space and settled down to groundside engineering, because nothing was worth leaving

her for months or years on end. When she died-robotic controls could not yet prevent every

senseless accident-and he had scattered the contents of the urn across the countryside she loved,

he returned to space. Their son was grown and didn't need him any longer. He took up the new

technology of human-machine linkage, and seldom came back for a visit. But from time to time he

remembered, and it hurt.

Maybe, selfishly speaking, he was otherwise better off. Of course, he'd been happy to pay the

price. Nevertheless, on Earth he had always felt trapped. The stars-

Again he looked aloft. A deeper longing shook him. He had fared and wrought across the Solar

System. Beyond waited a universe.

Half angrily, he dismissed the emotion. Self-pity. They were going to the stars, yes, but it

wouldn't happen in his lifetime, and they wouldn't be flesh and blood, they would be machines. Oh,

sentient, sensitive, bearing with them all the heritages of history, but not really human.

Her ghost lingered. It made the cabin too quiet.

He was not mawkish. In his job, he couldn't be and survive. Yet you couldn't survive either if you

were a dullard. That meant you found ways to occupy long, empty stretches of time-not merely games

and recorded shows, but anything from acquiring a language or mastering calligraphy to creating an

artwork or maturing a philosophy. Christian Brannock was, among other things, a ballad singer who

had composed several of his own.

He had taken his guitar along. The optics of total outervision obscured his immediate

surroundings, but he knew where it was racked. He reached and pulled it free. Soundboard and

strings glimmered into sight as he laid it over his lap. He struck a chord and began to sing.

"Once upon a hearth

We lit a little fire

To warm our winter hands

And kindle our desire,

Which never needed this;

But still, we found it good

To see the flames seduce

The dry and virgin wood.-"

No. The music clanged to a halt. He had made the song in his Earthside youth, later Ellen enjoyed

it, a while ago he revived it on Mars, where no true flame had ever danced. Doing it here felt

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somehow wrong.

Why was he so churned up inside? Because he was in danger of losing Gimmick? But Gimmick was only

a machine, wasn't he- wasn't it? Well, maybe not "only." . . .

Christian had work to make ready for. Defiantly, he launched into something older and bawdier.

"Oh, a tinker came a-strolling,

A-strolling down the Strand-"

Already the solar corona was well over a ridge in the northeast. Its opalescent glory drowned the

zodiacal light and cast a wan, shadowful glow across pocks and scars beneath. A crimson tongue of

prominence heralded the oncoming disc. Elsewhere the stars still ruled. Earth no longer beckoned.

The scarp blocked sight of it.

That cliff sheered from horizon to horizon, filling nearly half the sky. Christian remembered

ledges, pinnacles, steeps, mineral streaks, the mark of meteorite strikes through billions of

years. But he had seen those together with Gimmick. To his unaided eyes the heights were one vast

darkness.

He might have imagined they were a storm front-on its own timescale the cosmos is neither enduring

nor peaceful, it is appallingly violent-except that the wreckage on the rubble slope at the foot

gripped his attention. His partner lay below that heap of broken stone. The communication disc

poked above. He couldn't make out exactly what damage it had suffered. Besides, lacking the

necessary connectors, he was cut off from it. However, the intelligence back at Clement Base had

no such limitations.

"Are you in touch?" he cried to it through the rover's radio. "What can you tell us?"

The voice that replied was baritone. It could be in any register, always as vibrant and expressive

as any human's. "No more than formerly. The robot does not respond to calls. Evidently its own

signals would be too feeble and distorted, and it doesn't waste energy trying. Internal power is

barely sufficient to maintain computational functions."

In other words, Gimmick remains conscious, Christian said to himself. No, I'm being

anthropomorphic. Which isn't scientific, is it? "Does he know we're here?"

"Possibly, through seismic or electronic traces." The intelligence put a note of urgency into its

calm. "Don't delay if you want to save anything that matters."

Christian thought of Gimmick lying prisoned, waiting either for rescue or death. Sensing? Hoping?

So had many humans done, when an earthquake buried them alive or a disabled spacecraft went

helpless off on trajectory. Was it altogether fantastic to suppose that Gimmick wanted to live?

"Right," he said. "Take over the robot." He hesitated. "Please."

The big, half manlike thing stirred. It turned about and rumbled from the cabin. Christian heard

its mass reach the crew-access air lock, then after a minute the hiss of pumps evacuating the

chamber. He saw it go forth onto the surface, into the coronal luminance, stand for another minute

while the intelligence at Clement studied the scene through its sensors, and start climbing the

talus. Shards slipped from beneath its feet and slid downward. On Earth they would have rattled.

He couldn't endure to sit and watch. His assigned part came toward the end, when he applied tools

for which the robot was not designed. But the corona was creeping higher, the flame-tongue

standing taller. Maybe his slight strength would make the slight difference that counted.

The intelligence perceived. "Don't," it warned. "You will hazard yourself more than enough

according to plan."

"I'm the captain here," Christian flung back.

On the way out he stopped by a locker. From the geological gear stored there he took a pick and

spade. At the lock he donned his spacesuit and went through his checklist with the almost mindless

ruse of long practice. Almost mindless; one tiny malfunction or mistake could kill you. Machines

were hardier. No wonder that it would be they who went to the stars. By now there weren't too many

uses for humans even on the planets.

Gear and all, he weighed less than he did unclad on Earth. Inertia was the same, of course, a

combination that could get tricky.

He bounded across the ground to the detritus slope, but therefore picked his way with care. From

the top he caught a chiaroscuro view of the rover, its metal partly shadowed, partly agleam under

the waxing radiance. If you ignored details, it looked rather like a giant version of Gimmick's

body, minus the specialized limbs, detectors, and collection bins-an ovoid with a turret, legs

currently folded while it rested on caterpillar treads, radiator fins deployed against the sun's

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assault.

To hell with bodies. Gimmick had worn a lot of different bodies. What needed saving was the

unitized hardware, software, and database. The brain. The mind? The soul? Anyway, Gimmick himself.

The robot toiled stolidly. Attachments on its four arms loosened rocks and flung them off, to

bounce across the lower terrain. Often it paused while the intelligence considered, then moved to

another spot. Christian knew this was to excavate efficiently and avoid causing a slide. His

judgment was poor by comparison, his muscles weak. Nevertheless, if he was cautious he could help

rather than hinder-help just a bit.

The body began to appear, cruelly battered and rent. The corona climbed.

Christian dug. After a while he gasped. The spacesuit's equilibrators couldn't quite keep up; his

faceplate fogged, his air thickened and stank. Hands trembled on handles. "Conserve yourself,"

advised the serene voice. "You'll be wanted for a precision task."

He yielded. To stop his labor was about as hard a thing as he could recall ever doing.

A sliver of sun blazed over the ridge. Suddenly shadows were long and sharp. Small craters stood

out of them like atolls. Stars fled from eyesight.

Fifteen hours . . . But well before then, the solar wind would sweep across the land, bearing its

radiation rain. Furnace heat would follow. Only in the rover was there refuge.

"If you are prudent, you will retreat," said the voice.

"I know," Christian answered. "I ain't."

The robot worked on.

The midsection emerged. If Christian's faceplate had not been self-darkening, the light off it

would have blinded him. But he could at last get to his real job.

Nearly level, the sunbeams were little diffused. Night still hung around whatever they did not

strike directly. The tool kit secured to his suit included provisions such as flashbeams and

miniradars, but often he had to go by touch, through sensory-amplifying power gloves. The

objective was to open several layered shells and detach the independent unit, as delicately as a

brain surgeon.

"The background count is rising fast," said the intelligence.

"Shut up," said Christian. "I'm busy."

And somehow he freed Gimmick before either of them took too large a dose. He cradled the spheroid

and its trailing cables in his arms, he crept down the rubble slope and leaped across the

regolith. Dust puffed from his boots. The airlock opened for him. He stumbled through and up to

the cabin, where he collapsed into a seat. His heart thuttered. As yet, the turmoil in him drowned

any feeling of triumph. Mostly he lusted for a cold beer. Or two or three or four.

The robot spent a while examining the discarded machine and selecting rock specimens before it

joined him. It had no reason to hurry.

Like Christian, Gimmick need not be in rapport in order to process data and execute a program-to

remember, think, be aware. Unlike him, it did not need a body for this. A power supply and a few

input-output connections sufficed. Upon returning, it had been linked to the central intelligence

for purposes of downloading and analyzing the knowledge it brought. Those circuits were now

inoperative.

The voice from the intercom should therefore have been flat, the words an unemotional report. To

mimic humanness as well as the central intelligence did required capabilities beyond any called

for in an explorer-especially an explorer that would often be under the guidance of a human mind.

Yet tone and language this day carried more than bare information. Something else, a hint as of

life, flowed along.

"You've found the cause of the collapse?" Christian asked eagerly.

"Uh-huh," replied Gimmick. "The nanotech studied crystal structures atom by atom, and then the big

brain set up a model and ran it. It turns out this particular mineral combination is unusually

vulnerable to thermal stress. Oh, not much, or the crag wouldn't have stood so long. But gigayears

of heat and cold, heat and cold chewed on it. Solar wind and cosmic rays didn't help. Flaws

developed and grew till any substantial shock would bring everything tumbling down. Sooner or

later, a good-sized meteorite would have hit nearby."

Christian frowned. "We gave it no such push."

"Sure, our seismic probe was gentle. But the resonant frequencies were enough. Construction or a

spacecraft landing in the neighborhood would have done the same."

"How great a problem will this be?"

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"We'll have to find out. Probably not very. The rock doesn't appear to be a common sort. In any

case, the planners will be forewarned."

"I daresay the business was worth what it cost, then. But we're earning our pay!"

Did the voice quiver, ever so faintly? "When can we start surveying again?"

"Don't know. I've looked into the matter, and it isn't practical to modify any robot on the planet

for you. If making a new body and shipping it from Earth will take too long, I'll negotiate early

termination of our contract and let another team succeed us. I don't want to sit idled for months,

above all on Mercury." Christian glanced at Willem Schuyten. "Sorry," he murmured. "Nothing wrong

with the company here."

The older man smiled wryly. "Aside from a lack of live women. I don't especially care for

virtuals."

"And the rest of the universe waiting," Christian said, more softly still.

The cyberneticist gave him a look that went deep. For a moment the room lay silent. It was

Christian's quarters. At present, one wall screen held a view of Saturn in space, jewel-exquisite.

In another, dry snow drifted across a flank of Everest, white beneath lordly blue. A third,

smaller, displayed a portrait of his Ellen, which he seldom animated anymore, and a fourth had the

likeness of their son, which he often did. His guitar leaned against a desk cluttered with

figurines and the equipment for creating them. A bottle and two tumblers stood companionably on

the table between the men.

Christian stirred. "Well," he said toward the intercom, "I'll let you know as soon as I do myself.

Meanwhile, if you've nothing to keep you amused, I expect you'll turn yourself off. Adios."

"Until then," responded the voice, and ceased.

"Escape from boredom," Christian muttered. "I envy you that."

"Do you really?" asked Willem almost as low.

Christian paused before he replied. "I suppose not. Envy wouldn't make sense, would it?"

"Not envy of a machine. But you spoke with Gimmick the way one speaks with a friend."

Christian shrugged. "Habit. Haven't you ever talked or sworn at a machine?"

"I said 'spoke with,' not 'spoke at.' It never struck me before-I never was exposed to it so

directly-how you two converse. How eerily lifelike Gimmick sounded. How much like you."

"I shouldn't think you'd be surprised. You're the expert on AI."

"It's an enormous field, and enlarging exponentially. I had no experience with your sort of team

until I came to Mercury. And of course my work here has been with the main system," helping it

direct the manifold activities on a world full of unknowns.

"But I mean, it's so obvious. Gimmick's not a thing I steer like a boat or put on and take off

like a glove. He can operate by himself. He makes judgments and acts on them. He learns. Naturally

he'd learn-pick up traits-from me."

"And you from him," Willem said slowly.

Christian's hand, reaching for his drink, dropped to the table and doubled into a fist. "I never

thought I'd hear that out of your mouth," he snapped. " 'Dehumanization,' 'emotional deprivation,'

all the Organicist quack-quackery infesting Earth."

Willem raised his own palm. "Peace, I pray. I certainly do know better. No offense intended. My

apologies."

Christian relaxed somewhat. "I'm sorry. Overreaction, stupid of me." He gave the other a rueful

smile. "After that go-around at the scarp, I guess my nerves haven't yet stopped jangling."

"Very understandable. But I do want to make a point, and then . . . lead up to something that's

been more and more on my mind."

Christian lifted the tumbler, sipped, and leaned back in his chair. "Go ahead, do."

"You've given Gimmick a name, jocular, but doesn't that in itself show a feeling? And you

persistently refer to Gimmick not as 'it' but 'he.' "

"Sure. Why not? I've owned a couple of boats on Earth, named them, and called them 'she.' "

"But you said it yourself, Gimmick is not a passive piece of machinery. Within . . . his . . .

limits, to all intents and purposes, he thinks. In linkage with you, he becomes ... an aspect, a

facet of a human being."

"No," Christian said quietly. "In linkage, together, we're more than human."

"In sensory range, in capabilities, yes. Which is bound to affect you. But you are the man. Yours

are the instincts, drives, fears and hopes, joys and sorrows, everything that four billion years

of evolution on Earth has made. Do you imagine contact with that would not affect him?"

Again Christian gathered his thoughts before he answered. "Of course it has. During the time we've

worked as a team, and that's been a spell now, I've noticed. And not been surprised." He tossed

off a dram. "That's part of why I get so angry at those snotheads. Robotization of humans? How

about humanization of robots?"

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file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/Paul%20Anderson%20-%20Genesis.txtGENESISPOULANDERSONThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisnovelareeitherfictitiousorareusedfictitiously.GENESISCopyright(c)2000byTheTrigonierTrustAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproduc...

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Poul Anderson - Genesis

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