Existence

After centuries of solitary wondering, humanity realized an ancient dream. With the arrival of the First Artifact came proof of civilizations far older than ours. Only, instead of exaltation, that discovery damn near spun us into a death spiral. How did we escape the trap? Have we escaped, even now?

Was it the Great Debate, pitting that First Artifact against Peng’s Worldstone? Exposing each other’s manipulations, half-truths, and lies?

Or the bold heroes of the Marco Polo, launching in secret to brave the sterile space-desert-along with fierce lasers, space mines, and human traitors-in order to grab more crystals? Enough of the insidious space-fomites to dissect, test, and finally get answers?

Or was it a surprise discovery, at the very moment Marco Polo turned for home? When Genady Gorosumov detected strange debris, with no apparent link to crystal chain letters? When we realized: There are more layers to all of this than we ever imagined!

Other expeditions would come. And more still.

Could that be what diverted humanity from depression and catastrophe? Something as simple as curiosity?

– Tor Povlov

62.

Awaiter is excited. She transmits urgently.

“Seeker, listen!” Her electronic voice hisses over ancient cables. “The little living ones are near! Even now they explore this belt of orbiting rubble, picking through rocks and ruins. Listen as they browse each new discovery. Soon they will find us! Do you hear, Seeker? It is time!”

Awaiter’s makers were impatient creatures. I wonder how she lasted through the starry cold. My makers were wiser.

“Seeker! Are you listening?”

I don’t wish to talk with anyone, so I erect a side-personality-little more than a swirling packet of nudged electrons-to handle her for me. And if Awaiter discovers the sham? Well, perhaps she’ll take a hint and leave.

Or she may grow insistent. It’s hard to predict without awakening more dormant circuits than I care to.

“There is no hurry,” my partial self tells her. “The Earth creatures won’t reach this point of refuge for several more of their years. Anyway, it was all written long ago.”

The electron-swirl is very good. It even speaks with my accent.

“How can you be complacent!” Awaiter scolds. The cables covering our icy worldlet reverberate exasperation. “We survivors named you leader, Seeker, because you seemed to understand what’s happening in the galaxy at large. Only now our waiting may be at an end. The biologicals appear to have survived the first phase of their contact crisis. They’ll be here soon!”

“The Earthlings will find us or they won’t,” my shadow self answers. “What can a shattered band of ancient machines fear or anticipate from such a vigorous young race? One that made it this far?”

I already knew the humans were coming. My remaining sensors have long suckled their yatter networks. Sampling the solar wind, I savor ions the way a cowboy might sniff a prairie breeze. These zephyrs carry the bright tang of primitive space-drives. The musty smoke-smell of deuterium. Signs of awakening. Life is emerging from its water-womb. For a brief time-while the wave crests, we’ll have company.

“Greeter and Emissary want to warn Earthlings of their danger,” Awaiter insists. “We can help them!”

Our debate has roused some of the others. New tendrils probe with fingers of supercooled electricity. “Help… how?” my subvoice asks. “Our repair units collapsed after the Last Battle. We only discovered that humans had evolved when the creatures invented radio. By then it was too late! Their first transmissions are already propagating into a deadly galaxy. If destroyers roam this region-”

“Seeker, you know there are worse dangers. More recent and deadly.”

“Yes, but why worry the poor creatures? Let them enjoy their moment of sun and adventure.”

Oh, I am good! This little artificial voice argues as well as I did ages ago, staving off abrupt action by my impatient peers.

Greeter glides into the network. I feel his cool, eloquent electron flux. Only this time he agrees with me!

“The Earth creatures do not need to be told. They are figuring it out for themselves.”

Now this interests me. I sweep my subpersona aside and extend a tendril of my Very Self into the network. “What makes you say so?”

Greeter indicates our array of receivers, salvaged from ancient derelicts. “We intercept their chatter as they explore this asteroid swarm. One of them seems poised to understand what happened here, long ago.”

Greeter’s smug tone must derive from human teledramas. But then, Greeter’s makers were enthusiasts wanting no greater pleasure than saying “hello.”

“Show me,” I demand. Perhaps my long wait is over.

63.

Tor stared as the asteroid’s slow rotation brought ancient, shattered ruins into view. “Lord, what a mess.”

For two years in the belt she had helped unpeel layers of a puzzle going back a million centuries. Lately, that meant uncovering strange alien ruins, but never such devastation as this.

Just a few kilometers from the survey ship Warren Kimbel, a hulking shadow blocked the starry Milky Way. Ancient collisions had left dents and craters along its two-thousand-meter axis. On one side, it seemed a typical, nameless hunk of stone and frozen gas. But this changed as the sun’s vacuum brilliance abruptly swarmed the other half-exposing jagged, twisty remnants of a catastrophe that happened when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

“Gavin!” she called over her shoulder. “Come see this!”

Her partner floated through the overhead hatch, flipping in midair. His feet met the magnetized floor with a faint click.

“What is it? More murdered babies? Or clues to who their killers were?”

Tor gestured and her partner stared. Highlights shone across Gavin’s glossy features as their searchlight swept the shattered scene.

“Yep,” he nodded. “Dead babies again, murdered by some facr’ing enemy a jillion years ago. Povlov Exploration and Salvage ought to make good money off each corpse.”

Tor frowned, commercial exploitation was a small part of their reason for coming, though it helped pay the bills. “Don’t be morbid. Those are unfinished interstellar probes, destroyed ages ago, before they could be launched. We have no idea whether they were sentient machines like you, or just tools, like this ship. You of all people should know better than to go around anthropomorphizing alien artifacts.”

Gavin’s grimace was an aindroid’s equivalent of a sarcastic shrug. “If I use ‘morbid’ imagery, whose fault is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you organic humans faced a choice, back when you saw that ‘artificial’ intelligence was going to take off. You could have wrecked the machines, abandoning progress-”

She refrained from mentioning how close that came to happening.

“-or you could deep-program us with ‘fundamental Laws of Robotics,’” Gavin sniffed. “And had slaves far smarter than their masters. But no, what was it you organics decided?”

Tor knew it was no use when Gavin got in a mood. She concentrated on piloting a closer orbit.

“What was your solution to the problem of smart machines? Raise us as your children. Call us people. Citizens. You even gave some of us humaniform bodies!”

Tor’s last partner-a nice old bot and good chess player-had warned her when he trans-retired. Don’t hire an adolescent Class-AAA android fresh out of college, as difficult as any human adolescent. The worst part? Gavin was right. Not everyone agreed that raising AAAs as human would solve one of the Great Pitfalls, or even conceal the inevitable. For, despite genetic and cyborg improvements, bio-humans still seemed fated to slip behind.

And how many species survived that crisis?

Gavin shook his head in dramatic sadness, exactly like a too smart teenager who properly deserved to be strangled. “Can you really object when I, a man-built, manlike android, anthropomorphize? We only do as we’ve been taught, mistress.”

His bow was eloquently sarcastic. Especially since he was the only person aboard who could bend at the waist. All of Tor’s organic parts were confined to a cylindrical canister, barely over a meter long and half a meter wide. With prosthetic-mechanical arms and grippers, she looked more “robotic” than her partner, by far.

To Gavin’s snide remark, she had no response. Indeed, one easily wondered if humanity had made the right choice.

But isn’t that true of all our decisions, across the last two dozen years? Haven’t we time and again selected a path that seems less traveled? Because our best chance must come from doing what no one else tried?

Below, across the ravaged asteroid, stretched acres of great-strutted scaffolding-twisted in ruin. Tangled and half buried within toppled derricks lay silent ranks of shattered unfinished starships, razed perhaps a hundred million years ago.

Tor felt sure that her silicon eyes and Gavin’s germanium ones were the first to look upon all this, since an awful force plunged through, wreaking havoc. The ancient slayers had to be long gone. Nobody had yet found a star machine even close to active. Still she took no chances, keeping the weapons console vigilant. That sophisticated, semi-sentient unit searched, but found no energy sources, no movement amid the ruined, unfinished mechanisms below. Just cold rock and metal.

Gavin’s talk of “murdered babies” kind of soured any pleasure, viewing the ruins below as profitable salvage. It wouldn’t help her other vocation, either-one that brought her to this frontier as the first journalist in the asteroid belt. Out here, you doubled and tripled jobs. Which in Tor’s case meant describing humanity’s great discovery, explaining to those back home what happened here, so long ago.

Her latest report must wait. “We have work to do,” she told her partner.

Gavin pressed two translucent hands together prayerfully. “Yes, Mommy. Your wish is my program.” Then he sauntered to another console and began deploying drones.

Tor concentrated on directing the lesser minds within Warren’s control board-those littler, semi-sapient specialist processors dedicated to rockets and radar and raw numbers-who still spoke coolly and dispassionately… as machines should.

Twenty-six years ago we came to the belt, seeking to collect space-fomites. Tiny, drifting crystals carrying ancient infections of the mind. Already suffering terrible fevers, we sought to gather a wide sampling for comparison, to dissect the disease. To render it neutral or harmless. Or choose a version we could live with.

Only soon, paddling the equivalent of dug-out canoes through dangerous shoals, our brave explorers found something else, in addition to virus-stones. Something older. Many older things that-if dead and silent-testified to an earlier and more violent age of interstellar travel.

Imagine how they felt, those aboard the Marco Polo… then the Hong Bao, Temujin, and Zaitsev… who first stumbled onto a vast graveyard of murdered robot starships. They had to wonder-

What happened out here? Why so many different kinds of machines? What conflict killed them and how come none survived?

Were all those long ago visitors robots?

And, most perplexing, why, after tens of millions of years, did they stop coming? What happened in the galaxy, to bring the era of complicated space probes to such a complete halt…

… giving way to a new age, when only compact crystals crisscross the stars?

– Tor Povlov

64.

There were times when I thought I’d never make it back out here.

Gerald Livingstone gazed from the observation blister of the research vessel, Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta. Here, it was easy to lose yourself in starry vistas. The view reminded him of those long ago years that he once spent as a garbage collector, with only a little capuchin monkey for company, swinging his teleoperated lariat, cleaning up the mess in Earth orbit. Back there and then, his homeworld used to take up half the sky and the sun was a mighty flame.

Way out here, old Sol was smaller. And if you squinted carefully, you might glimpse the tiny reddish disc of Mars. As for the opposite direction-

I’d need optics to discern any nearby rocks. By sight alone, you’d never guess we’re near the asteroid belt.

Still, I’ve been privileged to see more than my ancestors ever did, or most living people.

He understood the allure of an offer that was still on the table. For humanity to invest in crystal-making factories and vast guns to hurl pellets across space. Pellets “crewed” by replicated aliens, plus an added complement of copied human beings. As time passed, his joints stiffened and his arteries gradually hardened, Gerald couldn’t help thinking about it.

To waken in such a realm-one that’s tiny on the outside, but vast within, filled with wonders to explore, and eons yet to live. To converse with beings from dozens of planets and cultures, to hear their songs, try their amusements, and share their dreams. And eventually…

One valuable result of the Marco Polo-and subsequent voyages by the Temujin and Hong Bao, had been some variety of emissary artifacts to choose among, including some whose makers spent extra on cultural and scientific info-storage, providing more-than-minimal data about cultures and peoples out there. Civilizations that were now almost certainly long vanished.

If we do set up factories to make interstellar egg-probes, I hope we’ll use those, for models. Fewer, but higher quality. It’s not the virus way. Perhaps it will be the human way.

But Gerald’s role in such matters had faded, since those dangerous days when he and Akana Hideoshi stole the Havana Artifact from under the noses of the oligarchs. A temporary theft that was forgiven, because it led to the first Great Debate-the crucial one, between the Havana artilens and Courier of Caution. The disputation that taught humanity a vital lesson.

We have some choice. And there is still some time.

Speaking of Courier, wasn’t he supposed to be here, by now?

Others drifted into the observation dome, as the hour of First Light approached. Scientific staff and members of the ibn Battuta crew clustered in hushed conversation, peering and pointing toward the high-northwest octant, where it all would happen. Nobody came near Gerald.

Is my pensive mood so obvious? And when did I become a “historical figure” who people are afraid to bother?

Not afraid. They held back out of polite respect, perhaps. Especially new arrivals, coming to use the now finished facility; many seemed a bit awed…

… though not, he noted, the brilliant young astronomer, Peng Xiaobai-or Jenny to her friends-who glanced over at Gerald, offering a brief, dazzling smile.

Hmm. If I weren’t an elderly queer with fragile bones… Gerald had to admit, he relished the harmless, indulgent way Jenny flirted with him. Just be careful. Courier seems rather protective of the daughter of his oldest living human friend.

And think of the devil. Here he was, at last-everyone’s favorite alien-gliding into the chamber along one of the utility tracks that lined the bulkhead. Courier of Caution waited for the trolley to come to a stop, then let go. His new, globelike robo-body then drifted toward Gerald, propelled by soft puffs of compressed nitrogen.

Funny how he chose the simplest possible design. Just a mobility unit to carry him around the ship. No manipulator arms or input-output jacks. I suppose after thousands of years locked in crystal, he got used to just one way of interfacing with the world, through words and images.

This particular copy of Courier of Caution had been imprinted into a cube, almost a meter on each side-one of humanity’s first experiments in utilizing alien simulation-tech. There were already attempts to upload some human minds, though what to do with the technique was still hotly debated.

Courier had other copies, of course. And with each duplication, the extraterrestrial envoy modified his simulated appearance, stretching the four-piece mouth that many found disturbing, into something more humanlike. And the ribbonlike vision strip now resembled something like a pair of earthly eyes. The voice was already adapted completely. Whether Chinese, English, or any other tongue, Courier now spoke like a native.

“I am here, Gerald. Sorry to have delayed matters. Now we can begin.”

Good old Courier. Everything is always about you, isn’t it?

Back in the old days, Gerald might have glanced at his wrist phone to tell time, or grunt-queried for a pop-up clock to appear inside his contaict lens. Now, he simply knew, to whatever accuracy required, how much time remained until First Light.

“You caused no delay. We have another minute,” he told this version of the alien entity who had crossed so many parsecs, coming down to Earth in a blaze of fire and luck, to pass along an ancient warning.

“Come. I saved you a spot.”

How can the universe seem both crowded and empty at the same time? Let’s start by returning to those scholars and theoreticians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Experts were already casting doubt on an old dream-interstellar empire. If organic beings like us ever managed to voyage between stars, it would be through prodigious, exhausting effort. A tenacious species here and there might colonize a few dozen worlds with biological descendants. Even perhaps a small corner of the Milky Way. But hardly enough to dent the Fermi Paradox.

Most organics would stay home.

What of machines? Designed to “live” in space, requiring no supplies of air, food, or water and oblivious to time, robots might stand the tedium and dangers of interstellar flight. Launched toward a neighboring system and forgotten as they crossed the Great Vacuum Desert.

Even if they travel far below lightspeed, can’t a mature, long-lived culture afford to wait millennia for fascinating data about other worlds? Our universe seems to school patience.

But even for probes, the galaxy is awfully big. It’s one thing to send a few sophisticated machines, capable of self-repair, performing scientific observations at a few nearby systems and transmitting data home… and quite another to launch probes toward every site of interest! That could impoverish a civilization.

What was needed? Some way to get more out of the investment. A lot more.

– Tor Povlov

65.

Greeter is right. One of the humans seems to be on track.

We crippled survivors tap into the tiny Earthship’s strangely ornate computers. Eavesdropping isn’t as trivial as tuning in to the chatty storm that emanates from Earth. But at last it’s done and we can read the journal. The musings of a clever little maker.

Her thoughts are crisp, for a biological. Though missing many pieces to the puzzle, she seems bound-even compelled-to explore wherever the clues lead.

So quaint and organic, unlike the seven dimensional gestalts used by most larger minds.

There was a time though, long ago, when I whiled away centuries writing poetry in the ancient Maker style. Somewhere deep in my archives there must still be files of those soft musings.

Reading Tor Povlov’s careful reasoning evokes memory, as nothing has in a megayear.

Legendary scientist John Von Neumann first described how to explore the universe. Instead of going broke, aiming a great many probes at every star, dispatch just a few deluxe robot ships to investigate nearby systems!

These-after their explorations were complete and results reported-would then seek out local resources, to mine and refine raw materials, then proceed to make copies of themselves. After next building fuel and launching facilities, they would take a final step-hurling their daughter-probes toward still farther stellar systems.

Where-upon arrival-each daughter would make still more duplicates, send them onward. And so on. Exploration could proceed faster and farther than if carried out by living beings. And after the first wave, there’s no further cost back home. Information pours back, century after century, as descendant-probes move on through the galaxy.

So logical. Some calculated: the method could explore every star in the Milky Way a mere three million years after the first probes set forth-an eyeblink compared to the galaxy’s age.

Ah, but there’s a rub! As Fermi would have asked: In that case, where are all the probes?

When humans discovered radio, then spaceflight, no extra-solar explorer-machines announced themselves. No messages welcomed us into a civilized sky. At first, there seemed just one explanation…

– Tor Povlov

66.

“Uh, you awake in there Tor?”

She looked up from her report as the radio link crackled along her jaw bone. Glancing out through the observation pane, she saw Gavin’s tethered form drifting far from the ship, near a deep pit along the asteroid’s flank, wherein the ruined shipyard lay hidden from the sun. Surrounded by salvage drones, he looked quite human, directing less sophisticated, noncitizen machines at their tasks.

She clicked. “Yes, I’m in the control tub doing housekeeping chores. Find something interesting?”

There was a brief pause.

“Could say that.” Her partner sounded sardonic. “Better let Warren pilot itself a while. Hurry your pretty little biological butt down here to take a look.”

Tor bit back a sharp reply, reminding herself to be patient. Even in organic humans, adolescence didn’t last forever. Not usually.

“My butt is encased in gel and titanium that’s tougher than your shiny ass,” she told him. “But I’m on my way.”

The ship’s semi-sentient autopilot accepted command as Tor hurried into her spacesuit-a set of attachments that clicked easily onto her sustainment capsule-and made for the airlock, still irritated by Gavin’s flippancy.

Everything has its price, she thought. Including buying into the future. Gavin’s type of person is new, and allowances must be made. In the long run, our culture will be theirs. In a sense it will be we who continue, and grow, long after DNA becomes obsolete.

Still, when Gavin called again, inquiring sarcastically what bodily function had delayed her, Tor wondered:

Whatever happened to machines of loving grace?

She couldn’t quash some brief nostalgia-for days when robots clanked, and computers followed orders.

Let’s recreate the logic of those last-century philosophers, in an imagined conversation, as if two of the old greats were here today, arguing it out.

JOHN VON NEUMANN: “Whether or not it someday becomes possible for living people to travel between the stars, what curious race could resist the temptation to at least send mechanical representatives? Surrogates programmed to explore and say ‘hello’?

“The first crude probes to leave our solar system-Voyager and Pioneer-demonstrated this desire, carrying simple messages meant to be deciphered by other beings, long after the authors were dust.

“And preliminary studies for more advanced missions were made-first in the 1970s by the British Interplanetary Society. Early in the 2000s, NASA funded a ‘Hundred-Year Starship’ program. Among the technologies investigated? How to make machines that can cross the great expanse, then use local resources in some faraway system to make and launch more probes to yet more destinations.

“Should we ever dispatch a wave of such representatives, even once, from that point onward our ambassadors will know no limits. Their descendants will carry our greetings to the farthest corners of the cosmos.

“Moreover, anyone out there who is enough like us to be interesting would surely do the same.”

I can imagine Von Neumann saying all this with the optimistic confidence of well-turned logic-only to hear a grouchy reply.

ENRICO FERMI: “Well. Perhaps. But answer me this: if self-reproducing probes are such efficient explorers, why haven’t these marvelous mechanisms said hello to us, by now?

“Shouldn’t they already be here? Great-great-greatissimo grand-daughters of the original devices, sent by alien civilizations that preceded ours by millions of years? Sturdy and built to wait patiently for eons, they would surely have noticed-and eagerly responded-when we first used radio!

“Suppose one lurking envoy happened to fail. Shouldn’t more than a few have accumulated by now, across the Earth’s four billion years? Yet we’ve heard no messages congratulating us for joining the ranks of space faring people.

“There is but one logical conclusion. No one before us attained the ability to send such things! Aren’t we forced to surmise we are the first curious, gregarious, technologically competent species in the Milky Way? Perhaps the only one, ever?”

The logic of this Uniqueness Hypothesis seemed so compelling, growing numbers of scientists gave up on alien contact. Especially when decade after decade of radio searches turned up only star static.

Of course, events eventually caught up with us, shattering all preconceptions. Starting with the First Artifact, we met interstellar emissaries at last-crystal eggs, packed with software-beings who provided an answer, at long last.

A depressing answer, but simple.

Like some kind of billion-year plant, it seems that each living world develops a flower-a civilization that makes seeds to spew across the universe, before the flower dies. The seeds might be called “self-replicating space probes that use local resources to make more copies of themselves”… though not as John Von Neumann pictured such things. Not even close.

In those crystal space-viruses, Von Neumann’s logic has been twisted by nature. We dwell in a universe that’s both filled with “messages” and a deathly stillness.

Or, so it seemed.

Only then, on a desperate mission to the asteroids, we found evidence that the truth is… complicated.

– Tor Povlov

67.

First Light.

Drifting in a gravitational eddy-the Martian L2 point-eighty-seven petals finished unfolding around a common center, each of them electro-warping twenty kilometers of cerametal into a perfect curved shape, reflecting starlight to a single focus.

The spectacle was lent even more grandeur for spectators who watched from the Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta’s slowly spinning gravity wheel. The great telescope, and all of the surrounding stars, seemed to gyre in a slow, revolving waltz.

“So beautiful, like a fantastic space blossom,” murmured Jenny Peng. “I wish my parents and Madam Donaldson could have witnessed this.”

“Perhaps Lacey will see it. In time,” Courier of Caution replied in soothing tones, emitted by the resonant surface of his crystalline home. The alien entity seemed like a disembodied head floating in a translucent cube, carried by a hovering robotic drone. “Lacey’s sons ordered her cryo-frozen when she passed away. Given your present rate of technological progress, in as little as thirty years she may yet have a chance to revive and-”

“It won’t be the same,” Jenny answered, firmly. Despite her family’s longstanding relationship with Courier, they always disagreed with him over this issue, siding with the Naturalist Party on matters of life and death. “Lacey would have loved to watch this telescope unfold, but with her own eyes.”

Gerald saw Courier’s simulated mouth start opening, as if to argue that organic sensors held no advantages over solid state ones. But clearly this was an old dispute between friends. Anyway there were other things on the ancient star mariner’s mind.

“I still do not understand why we must wait so many months before turning the gaze of this magnificent machine toward my homeworld.”

Gerald had concerns of his own. He was communing with the ibn Battuta’s detection and defense ais, as they scanned the inner edge of the belt according to his orders-vigilantly watching for potential threats. But with a corner of his mind, he gathered words to answer Courier.

“You know why this observatory was established at the Martian L2 point. It allows us to take advantage of the Phobos staging area, but stay away from any major gravitational wells. It also means the telescope will stay mostly aimed outward, away from the sun. Your homeworld is in the direction of Capricorn, presently too near the sun for safe viewing. It will be more accessible in half an Earth year, or a fifth of a Mars orbit. Do try to be patient.”

That last part was a dig, of course. He watched Courier take the bait-

“Patient. Patient?” The vision-strip seemed to flare. “After all the millennia I endured in freezing space and fiery plummet, immured under ice, then communing with erratic primitives, worshipped, stolen, worshipped again, then buried and drowned, interrogated then drowned again…”

The alien envoy stopped abruptly and rocked back. Gerald knew Courier well enough by now for some of his mood-expressions to be familiar. Including rueful realization.

“Ah, Gerald my friend, I see that you tease me. Very well. I will stop demanding haste. After waiting thousands of years for humans to develop technology, then dozens more for you to make up your minds and build this instrument, I suppose I can be patient a few more months.”

Jenny shook her head. “Or much longer. You do understand, Courier. Even this powerful new telescope may not verify continued existence of your species, on Turbulence Planet?” She used the Chinese pronunciation chosen decades ago by her father.

“We should be able to get spectral readings of some atmospheric components, and a clear enough image to tell if there are still oceans. Methane and oxygen together will prove life. If we detect lots of helium, it might indicate the presence of many busy fusion reactors… or the same trace could suggest extended nuclear war.”

“That, I assure you, never happened.”

“You can guarantee that-across the last ten thousand years? Anyway, I admit it could mean something if we detect fast-decay industrial by-products in Turbulence Planet’s atmosphere. That may indicate an ongoing technological civilization. On the other hand, such signs could be absent because your people moved on to better, more sustainable methods.”

“This big array can also scan for radio traffic?”

“It can, and will. So far, with Earth-based dishes, we’ve heard nothing above background static coming from your home system. But again, they could be using highly efficient comm-tech that emits almost zero leakage. Earth was loudest during the Cold War of the 1970s, with military radars blasting around the clock, along with prodigious civilian television stations. Our planet got quieter then, less wasteful. And yours may have advanced much farther, since you were hurled across space.

“But our beautiful new blossom…,” she continued, nodding toward the vast array outside, spanning forty kilometers and shimmering back-reflections from the distant sun, “may let us eavesdrop much better. That is, if anyone is still using radio or lasers, on or near your homeworld.”

“Hence, you can understand my eagerness,” Courier commented.

“Sure I can.” Jenny smiled. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before Turbulence Planet comes into view, we’ll turn the Donaldson-Chang Big Eye on systems that other artifact aliens claim to be from.”

“The homeworlds of fools and liars,” Courier murmured, as he had during the first Great Artifact Debate, before Jenny was born. He went on though, with grudging courtesy. “Of course, I hope all of them survived the plague, and that you will find them living, in good health.”

Clearly, Courier did not expect that to happen. Nor did the other emissary beings. It was the shared litany of all crystal-encased aliens.

Gerald listened to the conversation with just half an ear. His main concern had little to do with planets that lay light-years away. Other dangers loomed closer. He queried the ship’s defense ai.

Any sign of activity along the inner belt?

Having learned the modern knack of volition-messaging, Gerald no longer had to send subvocal speech commands to his larynx, almost-speaking with real muscles. The answer came as both a faint audible response, and quick-sign glyphs in his upper left field of view.

We detect no unknown active objects.

A depict seemed to erupt all around Gerald, immersing him in a slightly curved arc of small, dim specks-representing asteroids that ranged in size up to several hundred kilometers. Starting at the position of the ibn Battuta, a million or so klicks outward from Mars, the density of radar reflections rose steadily, peaking halfway to Jupiter’s orbit. He could both see and sense drifting lumps-carbonaceous, stony, and metallic-left over from the origin of the solar system. And if he focused on one, that patch of the Belt would zoom to any level of detail known by human science. So he was careful not to do that.

Jenny and Courier were still visible, among others in the observation lounge, as they watched the telescope’s giant petals finish unfolding, locking and adjusting swiftly into operational condition, performing calibration tests with aitomatic speed. But Gerald’s mind focused more on the depict data.

These visualization technologies just keep getting better. I feel as if I could just reach out with a finger and stir, sending all these asteroids tumbling…

At his subtle command, the ship-ai adjusted this simulation, causing all the natural rocks to fade, leaving some glitters-far fewer, but still numerous-that orbited mostly along the belt’s innermost rim. He recognized these without being told. Each pinpoint represented an interstellar message crystal-detected but, so far, not collected.

Had it really been just two dozen years since those little cylinders, blocks, and spheres were considered treasure, worth any risk to seek? Any cost to acquire? Leading an expedition to gather more “interstellar chain letters” had been Gerald’s high point as an astronaut. The samples that he and Akana and Emily and Genady managed to bring back had proved key components in a kind of inoculation-the tonic that helped rouse humanity from a bad case of worldwide contact panic.

Well. It helped rouse humanity partway. Renunciators, romantics, and fanatics of every stripe still stirred, along with the DUN League, insistently demanding that facilities be built to Download Us Now.

Collecting crystalline missionary-probes still had priority, especially to Ben Flannery and other alienists, refining their models of this galactic neighborhood-stretching a thousand light-years around Earth-pinpointing which species once lived near which star, and when each went through its own fever, building frantic factories and sneezing more space-viroids into space. Continuing to build that model was important work, and there were other reasons to gather more samples, but the desperate need had become less frantic.

He commanded those glitters to fade away as well. Leaving-

Earth vessels are noted in yellow.

That many? Gerald wondered. From coded patterns, he saw that at least two dozen had some kind of human crew. Smaller yellow dots denoted automatic survey drones, picking their way though the Belt, tracing clues and relics that increased in number, the farther into the rocky maze you went. Bits and broken pieces of antediluvian machinery that hinted at some past disaster. Forensic evidence of ancient crimes.

Or of war.

But what of shooters? Any FACR sites in range?

The defense ai answered.

If any remain, they are being circumspect, keeping hidden. They aren’t reacting to the new telescope. Odds of an attack are now estimated 4 percent. And plummeting.

Gerald exhaled, a sigh of letting go, both relieved and… well… a little disappointed. For one thing, it meant Genady had won their wager. Those lasers and particle beams-once deemed so frightening that the Marco Polo was called a suicide mission-were mostly gone, showing up only a few dozen times in the last couple of decades and only rarely attacking Earth vessels.

Had they mostly wiped each other out? Gorosumov thought they were from a completely separate era. They had nothing to do with the ancient War of the Machines.

Then why disappointment?

If any of the shooters were to attack us now, or even just speak up, we’re ready. We have methods, plans… and it might give us someone else to question. Someone other than the damned artilens.

The ship’s ai could tell these were normal, inner thoughts, not volition-driven questions or commands. So it kept silent. And when Gerald’s attention shifted, the depict-vista of asteroids, ships, and artifacts swiftly faded from his eyes.

He glanced at Jenny and Courier, who continued their benign argument. As much as he liked them both, Gerald had no desire to get snared into a family spat that always turned into another sales pitch.

Courier came across the stars to warn us against “liars.” Against alien space probes that had evolved ways to make intelligent races copy them and spew more viruses across the cosmos. And yes, Courier’s warning was helpful.

But what does he want us to do, now? Beyond building ever greater telescopes, to determine the fate of his homeworld? Why, he wants us to make more crystalline probes! Not billions, but certainly millions of them. And fire them off… to spread his warning!

Gerald turned to go. Now that deployment of the great instrument was finished-and no mystery lasers had been drawn into attacking-there were other matters to attend to. But irony seemed to follow as he walked along the circumference of the spinning centrifugal wheel.

Maybe that’s what we should do. Help the universe. Copy Courier and his probe millions of times. And add some human companions to every one. Joining him in a mission to inoculate and save other races from the sickness.

Gerald knew that he would be an easy candidate to serve as one of those human self-patterns, downloaded into crystal and hurled outward. Would that qualify as him, getting an astronaut’s dream assignment, an expedition to the stars? A mission of help and mercy and adventure. It was tempting, all right.

But when does a cure start to resemble the disease?

He wondered.

Did some of the other crystal-fomites begin their career-generations back-as warnings? Only, after a dozen or so races added members, did the inescapable logic of self-interest gradually change their message?

Sometimes, evolution was a bitch.

The story remains sketchy, but we can already guess some of what happened out here, long before humankind was even a glimmer.

Once upon a time, the first “Von Neumann type” interstellar probe arrived in our solar system. A large and complex machine, crafted according to meticulous design, it came to explore and perhaps report back across the empty light-years. That earliest emissary found no intelligent life on any of Sol’s planets. Perhaps it came before Earth life even crawled onto land.

So the machine envoy proceeded with its second task. It prospected a likely asteroid, mined its ready ores, then built factory works in order to reproduce itself. Finally, according to program, the great machine dispatched its duplicates toward other stellar systems.

The original then-its chief tasks done-settled down to watch, awaiting the day when something interesting might happen in this corner of space.

Time passed in whole epochs. And, one by one, new probes arrived, representing other civilizations. Each fulfilled its task without interference-there is plenty of room and a plethora of asteroids. Once their own replicas were launched, the newcomers joined a growing community of mechanical ambassadors to this backwater system-waiting for it to evolve someone interesting. Someone to say hello to.

Ponder the poignant image of those lonely machines, envoys of creator races who were perhaps long extinct-or evolved past caring about the mission they once charged upon their loyal probes. After faithfully reproducing, each emissary commenced its long watch, whiling away the slow turning of the spiral arms…

We found a few of these early probes, remnants from the galaxy’s simpler time. Or, more precisely, we found their blasted remains.

Perhaps one day those naive, first-generation envoys sensed a new entity arrive. Did they move to greet it, eager for gossip? Like those twentieth century thinkers, perhaps they thought probes must follow the same logic-curious, gregarious, benign.

But the first Age of Innocence was over. The galaxy had aged. Grown nasty.

The wreckage we find-whose salvage drives our new industrial revolution-was left by an unfathomable war that stretched across vast times, fought by entities for whom biological life was a nearly forgotten oddity.

It might still be going on.

– Tor Povlov

68.

My own Beginning was a misty time of assembly and learning, as drone constructors crafted my hardware out of molten rock. Under the star humans call e Eridani, my awareness expanded with each new module, and with every tingling program-cascade the Parent Probe poured into me.

Eventually, my sisters and I learned the Purpose for which we and generation upon generation of our forebears had been made. We younglings stretched our growing minds. We ran countless simulations, testing one another in what humans might call “play.” And contemplated our special place in the galaxy… we of the 2,410th generation since First Launch by our Makers, long ago.

The Parent taught us about biological creatures, strange units of liquid and membrane, unknown in the sterile Eridanus system. She described to us different kinds of makers and a hundred major categories of interstellar probes.

We tested weaponry and explored our home system, poking through the wreckage of more ancient dispersals-shattered probes come to e Eridani in earlier waves. Disquieting ruins, reminding us how dangerous the galaxy had become. Each of us resolved to someday do our solemn Duty.

Then came launching day.

Would that I had turned for a last look at the Parent. But I was filled with youth then, and antimatter! Engines hurtled me into the black, sensors focused only forward. The tiny stellar speck, Sol, was the center of my universe, and I a bolt out of the night!

To pass time I divided my mind into a thousand sub-entities, and set them against each other in a million little competitions. I practiced scenarios, read archives of the Maker race, and learned poetry.

Finally, at long last, I arrived here at Sol… just in time for war.

Ever since Earth-humans began emitting those extravagant, incautious broadcasts, we survivors have listened to Beethoven symphonies and acid rock. We argue the merits of Keats and Lao Tse, Eminem, and Kobayashi Issa. There have been endless discussions about the strangeness of planet life.

I followed the careers of many precocious Earthlings, but this explorer interests me especially. Her ship-canoe nuzzles a shattered replication yard on a planetoid not far from this one, our final refuge. With some effort I tap her computer, reading her ideas as she enters them. Though simple, this one thinks like a Maker.

Deep within me the Purpose stirs, calling together dormant traits and pathways-pulling fullness out of a sixty-million-year sleep.

Awaiter, too, is excited. Greeter throbs eagerly, in hope the long wait is over. Lesser probes join in-Envoys, Learners, Protectors, Seeders. Each surviving fragment from that ancient battle, colored with the personality of its long-lost Maker race, tries to assert itself now. As if independent existence can be recalled, after all the time we spent merged.

The others hardly matter. Their wishes are irrelevant. The Purpose is all I care about.

In this corner of space, it will come to pass.

A century ago, it occurred to some people that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was missing something. Sure, intelligent races might communicate across vast distances using radio beams. But then someone asked: “Suppose they’re already here?”

Oh, there were already clichés, like: “They’ve been monitoring our broadcasts for years.” But imagine the listeners are already in our solar system! Lurking perhaps at the edge of the Moon, or Mars, taking notes, drawing conclusions. Making decisions?

Of course, this overlapped with UFO Mythology. If even one “sighting” in a million truly represented alien spacecraft-buzzing cities and probing ranchers-then all bets are off! But put all that aside. Think about passive lurkers.

When the Internet arrived, the full maelstrom of our public and private lives, books, databases, whole libraries gushed from satellite to satellite, with plenty of spillover for space-eavesdroppers. No longer was any lurker limited to teledramas, hyperviolent movies, and war-front news. He, she, or it could now access ten thousand times as many quieter moments. Examples of humanity being peaceful, loving, curious, wise… or cunning, opinionated, predatory, salacious… or tediously shallow, banal.

Moreover, the Web was essentially a two-way-a million-way-street!

One professor-Allen Tough-realized: If ET is already listening, perhaps just one ingredient is missing in order to commence the great contact event. An invitation!

Tough’s Web site became a flashing welcome sign, beckoning any aliens lurking out there-whether living or machine-to step up and declare themselves.

He posted it. Waited for a response, and…

Cue the soft sound of chirping crickets.

Professor Tough’s Invitation to ETI did draw e-mail replies from some claiming to be aliens. All proved easy to trace, from human pranksters. None from “above.”

Now, most of a century later, we understand at least part of the reason. The logic wasn’t unreasonable. Just way too late.

Once upon a time, there used to be alien entities, out here in the asteroid belt. Many of them. We comb their graveyards. A hundred million years ago, there might have been swarms of eager replies.

But times changed. Things got deadlier, long before primates ever climbed to scream their treetop greetings across a Miocene forest.

– Tor Povlov

69.

Towering spires hulked all around, silhouetted against starlight-a ghost-city of ruin, long dead. Frozen flows of glassy foam showed where ancient rock once bubbled under sunlike heat. Beneath collapsed skyscrapers of toppled scaffolding lay the pitted, blasted corpses of unfinished starprobes.

Tor followed Gavin through curled, twisted wreckage of a gigantic replication yard. An eerie place. Huge and intimidating. No human power could have wrought such havoc. That realization lent chilling helplessness to an uneasy feeling that she was being watched.

A silly reflex reaction. Tor told herself again, the destroyers had to be long gone. Still, her eyes darted, seeking form out of the shadows, blinking at the scale of catastrophe.

“It’s down here,” Gavin said, leading into a cavelike gloom below the twisted towers. Flying behind a small swarm of little semi-sentient drones, he looked almost completely human in his slick spacesuit. There was nothing except a slight overtone in his voice to show that Gavin’s ancestry was silicon, not carbolife. Tor found the irony delicious. Any onlooker would guess she was the creature made of whirring machinery, not Gavin.

Not that it mattered. Today “mankind” included many types… all citizens, so long as they showed fealty to human law, and could appreciate the most basic human ways. Take your pick: music, a sunset, compassion, a good joke. In a future filled with unimaginable diversity, Man would be defined not by his shape but by heritage. A common set of grounded values.

Some foresaw this as the natural life history of a race, emerging from the planetary cradle to live in peace beneath the open stars. But Tor-speeding behind Gavin under the canopy of twisted metal-knew that humanity’s solution wasn’t the only one, or even common. Clearly, other makers had chosen different paths.

One day, long ago, terrible forces rained on this place, breaking a great seam into one side of the planetoid. Within, the cavity gave way to multiple, branching tunnels. Gavin braked before one of these, in a faint puff of gas, and pointed.

“We were surveying the first tunnels, when one of my deep-penetrating drones reported finding the habitats.”

Tor shook her head, still unable to believe it. She repeated the word.

“Habitats. As in closed rooms? Gas-tight for organic life support?”

Gavin’s faceplate hardly hid his exasperated expression. He shrugged. “Come on, Mother. I’ll show you.”

Tor numbly jetted along, following her partner into dark passages, headlamps illuminating the path ahead.

Habitats? In all the years humans had picked through asteroidal ruins, no one found anything having to do with biological beings. No wonder Gavin was testy. To an immature robot-person, it might seem like a bad joke.

Biological star-farers! It defied all logic. But soon Tor saw the signs… massive airlocks lying in dust, torn from their hinges… then reddish stains that could only come from oxidization of primitive rock, exposed to air. The implications were staggering. Something organic had come from the stars!

Though all humans were equal before law, the traditional biological kind still dominated culture in the solar system. Many younger Class AAAs looked to the future, when their descendants would be leaders, perhaps even star-treaders. To them, discovery of alien probes in the belt had been a sign. Of course, something terrible happened to the great robot envoys, a transition so awful that their era gave way to another-the age of little crystal virus-fomites. Nevertheless all these wrecked mechanical probes testified to what was physically possible. The galaxy still might-somehow-belong to humans made of metal and silicon.

Difficult and dangerous it might be, still, they appeared to be humanity’s future. Only here, deep in the planetoid, was an exception!

Tor moved carefully under walls carved out of carbonaceous rock. Mammoth explosions had shaken the habitat so that, even in vacuum, little was preserved from so long ago. Still, she could tell the machines in this area were different from any alien artifacts discovered before.

She traced the outlines of intricate separation columns. “Chemical-processing facilities… and not for fuel or cryogens, but complex organics!”

Tor hop-skipped from chamber to chamber as Gavin followed sullenly. A pack of semisent robots accompanied like sniffing dogs. In each new chamber they snapped, clicked, and scanned. Tor accessed data in her helmet display and inner percept.

“Look! In that chamber drones report organic compounds that have no business here. Heavy oxidation, within a super-reduced asteroid!” She hurried to an area where drones were already setting up lights. “See these tracks? They were cut by flowing water!” Tor knelt. “They had a stream, feeding recycled water into a little pond! Dust sparkled as it slid through her touch-sensitive prosthetic fingers. I’ll wager this was topsoil. And look, stems! From plants, and grass, and trees.”

“Put here for aesthetic purposes,” Gavin proposed. “We class AAAs are predesigned to enjoy nature as much as you biologicals…”

“Oh, posh!” Tor laughed. “That’s only a stopgap measure, till we’re sure you’ll keep thinking of yourselves as human beings. Nobody expects to inflict nostalgia for New England autumns on people when we become starships! Anyway, a probe could fulfill that desire by focusing a telescope on the Earth!”

She stood up and spread her arms. “This habitat was meant for biological creatures! Real, living aliens!”

Gavin frowned, but said nothing.

“Here,” Tor pointed as they entered another chamber. “Here is where the biological creatures were made! Don’t these machines resemble those artificial wombs they’ve started using on Luna Base?”

Gavin shrugged. “Maybe they were specialized units,” he suggested, “intended to work with volatiles. Or perhaps the type of starprobe that built this facility needed some element from the surface of a planet like Earth, and created workers equipped to go get it.”

Tor laughed. “It’s an idea. That’d be a twist, hm? Machines making biological units to do what they could not? And of course there’s no reason it couldn’t happen that way. Still, I doubt it.”

“Why?”

She turned to face her partner. “Because almost anything available on Earth you can synthesize in space. Anyway…”

Gavin interrupted. “Explorers! The probes were sent to acquire knowledge. All right then. If they wanted to learn more about Earth, they would send units formatted to live on its surface!”

Tor nodded. “Better,” she admitted. “But it still doesn’t wash.”

She knelt in the faint gravity and sketched an outline in the dust. “Here is the habitat, near the center of the asteroid. Now why would the parent probe have placed it here, except that it offers the best protection?

“Meanwhile, the daughter probes the parent was constructing lay out there in the open, vulnerable to cosmic rays and whatever other dangers prowled.”

Tor motioned upward with her prosthetic right claw. “If the biologicals were built just to poke briefly into a corner of this solar system, our Earth, would the parent probe have given them better protection than it offered its own children?

“No,” Tor concluded. “These ‘biologicals’ weren’t just exploration subunits. They were colonists!”

Gavin stood impassively for a long time, staring silently down at one of the shattered airlock hatches. Finally, he turned away. Radio waves carried to her augmented ears a vibration that her partner did not have to make, since he lacked lungs or any need for air. Yet, the sound amply expressed how he felt.

Gavin sighed.

Imagine we’re still in our own Age of Innocence, way back a generation ago-within living memory-when the universe seemed bright with every possibility.

At the time, a notion floated around, that machines might someday fly across the stars. And-by copying themselves-those envoys could spread wisdom across the galaxy. Perhaps it happened already.

And it had, many times! A great dispersion whose ultimate outcome wasn’t wisdom, but devastation. Of course we knew nothing about that. Back then, in our naïveté, we pondered the silence! If alien machines lurked nearby, shouldn’t they have responded? Sure, we seem to have an explanation now. As I write this, I’m surrounded by wreckage from an ancient war. Mysterious adversaries wiped each other out, leaving none to tell the tale. But don’t you find such clean symmetry suspicious? Shouldn’t there have been survivors?

Even mutual annihilation generally leaves someone enduring amid the rubble! So let me propose a theory. One that many of you will find creepy. Worrisome.

That we’re not alone out here amid the rubble. There must have been survivors. And-sooner or later-we’re going to find them.

Which brings up the old question…

– Tor Povlov

70.

Oh, how lovely.

She derives our presence… we relics-who-live… by reason alone!

Worse, she has started broadcasting her ruminations, as a journalistic report, sharing her unconventional thoughts with the Solar System.

Defying the prevailing assumption-that no broken remnants could endure across tens of millions of Earth years-she writes convincingly that there ought to be living machines out here. Fragment fugitives from the ancient fight, still active and “lurking” as she calls it.

So, logically, the next thing she will ask is obvious, even before her words spill forth.

Which brings up the old question… why haven’t these ancient voyagers spoken! Our Internets are so wide open, any klutz could find a way in. Surviving alien probes would see sites like “Invitation to ETI.” Why not answer?

A generation ago, scholars posted something more daring-a direct confrontation! And at this point in my broadcast, let’s replay verbatim their list of challenges (with my occasional commentary):

Lurker Challenge Number One

To any alien visitors who may prowl out there, spying on our world-by now it’s clear you’ve no intention of answering the many calls beckoning you to make contact. You’ve chosen silence. Is it worth our time to guess why?

The following list of reasons isn’t comprehensive-after all, you’re alien! It does represent an honest try. We ask and demand that you ponder whichever reason comes closest.

First, if you’ve spent years monitoring our radio, television-and now our Internet-and the reason you haven’t spoken-up is that you’re afraid of the rash or vicious behavior you see depicted in our media… please be reassured!

True, many of our movie and TV dramas portray distrust, selfishness, and violence. But you should know that, in fact, very few of us experience events as disturbing as you see in shows. Most of us dislike our old barbarous traits. By exploring these ancient feelings, inherited from a dark past, we hope to understand them better.

Also note: In a vast majority of these tales, the “loser” tends to be whichever person or group was more aggressive or intolerant at the start. And we are especially hard and critical on our own institutions, portraying or criticising their failings. Doesn’t that say something about our moral heading?

The same holds for nonfiction. Despite news reports depicting a riotous world, the actual per capita rate of mayhem in human society has declined dramatically for generations. Look it up! More than three-quarters of all living humans never personally witnessed war, starvation, or major civil unrest. An unprecedented fraction are allowed to improve their lot in peace. Many ancient bigotries and cruelties have lessened, or at least been put in bad repute. And with spreading education, far greater advances seem possible.

True, these achievements are still woefully unfinished. They leave lots to do, in working toward a just and mature civilization. But they are clear signs of progress and overall good will by a majority of our species.

Despite all the self-critical news reports and flamboyantly exaggerated “action” stories you may watch, please be assured that most human beings are calm people who treat strangers well. Many millions of us would be thrilled to meet you, taking every effort to make honest visitors welcome.

71.

And so it becomes explicit.

She is talking to us now.

Challenging, even taunting us, charging us to explain our long silence. Provoking us with an implicit accusation of cowardice.

Already I sense a ferment of mental activity from Seeker and the others. The old debate renews, in full fury.

And this precocious little maker has only just begun to goad us!

Lurker Challenge Number Two

If you’ve monitored our TV, radio, and Internet-and the reason you haven’t answered is that you see us as competitors, please reconsider.

In our long, slow struggle toward decent civilization, humans have slowly learned that competition and cooperation aren’t inherent opposites, but twins, both in nature and advanced societies.

Under terms that are fair, and with goodwill, even those who begin suspicious of each other can discover ways to interact toward mutual benefit. Use the Web to look up the “positive-sum game” where “win-win” solutions bring success to all sides.

Surely there are ways that humanity-and other Earth species-can join the cosmos without injuring your legitimate aims. Remember, most stable species and cultures seem to benefit from a little competition, now and then! So please answer. Let’s talk about it.

72.

Evolution is a bitch. Nearly all the time.

Only… on rare occasions… evolution gets to change her mind.

A reminder of that fact nearly plowed into Gerald, darting from a side corridor. Barely avoiding collision, the small figure windmilled, legs flying in the weird way that one “fell” in a centrifugal gravity wheel, tumbling toward the floor at a slant. Gerald’s hand shot out, grabbing a fistful of wildly braided hair, eliciting a shriek.

“Hey now, Ika. What’s your hurry?”

The girl was short-barely into adolescence-but hardly petite. Stocky and strong, when her hand clenched Gerald’s arm he had a sense that she could snap it. Ika made that point by squeezing, in a playful way that hurt just a bit.

“Cap’n Gerry!” Her pale legs whirled around red-striped shorts, twisting to meet the floor on agile tiptoes. Gerald released her braid, though the child kept her vicelike grip on his arm for a second longer, as her face passed his-somehow looking cute and pixielike, despite almost masculine ridges over hooded eyes. Her voice was deeper than one expected, with an echoing resonance that seemed not quite human.

“Be gentle, oh kind sir,” she said, playfully. “Don’t you know I’m a whole lot older ’n you?”

It was a running joke, and not just between the two of them. Members of the revived species Homo neanderthalensis insisted on being called the “Old Race,” for reasons that had little support in biology or fact.

Well, just so long as they don’t start demanding reparations for a genocide that happened 27,000 years ago. I wasn’t around, so I’m not paying.

“And where’re you rushing in such an all-fired hurry, child?” he asked, phrasing it deliberately as an elderly person (which he was) addressing a mere ten-year-old (though Neanders aged differently).

“We’re on a cobbly hunt!” Ika announced, proudly defiant, taking a step backward and planting both fists on her hips.

“On a… did you say we?”

She nodded toward the nearby side corridor where Gerald now spotted another figure, hanging back in shadows. Lanky and a bit stooped, with close-shaven hair and a nervous expression.

“Oh. Hello, Hiram. How are you today?”

Every autie was unique. Still, you followed some general rules when one of them grew agitated, as Hiram appeared to be right now. Eyes wide and darting, the gangly young man edged slowly outward, flashing quick looks near but never quite upon Ika’s face, or Gerald’s.

“So, Hiram. Why aren’t you two watching the new telescope unfold? It’s half the reason this ship came out here, all this way past Mars.”

Keep the conversation concrete but impersonal. Radiate calm friendliness. And thank the Great Spirit that our ship quotas are still small. Just two Neanders, two autistics, and five metal-people for this voyage.

What next? Will they demand we start taking along dolphins and apes? Gene-mod people with wings and foot-hands? It’s not a sapient civilization-it’s a menagerie!

Or else… another metaphor occurred to Gerald… an ark.

Unlike some auties, Hiram’s goggle-eyed, painfully thin face bore no resemblance to the Neanderthal girl, nearby.

“Were you and Ika… fighting?”

Ika laughed, a rich, bell-like sound that always made Gerald think of snowy forest canyons.

“We was just playing, Hiram!”

“But you-”

“Tell you what. If you promise to believe me, an’ relax, I’ll pay a bribe in our next imVRsive game.”

The wide eyes narrowed. “What bribe?”

“Three mastodon tusks.”

The young autie smirked, calculatingly.

“Three green ones. Four meters and twelve centimeters long. Starting almost straight at the base with a gradually shortening curvature culminating with a radius of one meter at the tip and with an inward thirty degree per meter corkscrew. One of them left-handed and two of them right-handed.”

“What? No deal!” Ika cried out. “Who cares if you relax or not, you space-traveling oddball. Just hold yer breath for all I care and go into a hissy fit!”

No. No, please don’t. Gerald almost stepped forward to intervene. Hiram was a useful member of the crew-no one else had his startling knack at quick-decrypting the holocrystal fragments that ibn Battuta kept scooping up from nearby space. Only at a price. He retained much of the old-style emotional frailty that had thwarted his branch of humanity for thousands of years. Experts on Earth were still figuring out how to get the best of both worlds, unleashing savant skills without the accompanying baggage of disabilities.

But Gerald shouldn’t have worried. Ika’s folk had a talent for relating to auties-who must have appeared more often in tribes of Ice Age Europe. Instead of quailing back from Ika’s outburst, Hiram grinned.

“Okay. Orange ones, then. Want to show the cap’n what’s not a cobbly?”

Gerald blinked at the sudden topic change.

Not… a… cobbly. Then he recalled. Oh, yeah. The mythological nonentities that both Neanders and auties claim to believe in.

“I dunno. Homosaps can be awfully close-minded.” Ika tilted her head, looking archly at Gerald-then brightened suddenly. “On the other hand, he is Cap’n Gerry…”

It seemed in character, even expected of him, to emit a sigh over childish time-wasting. Though, in all honesty, he could spare a few minutes.

“Will you two please get on with it?”

“Okay then.” Ika held out her right hand, palm up. “Give me your attention.”

Gerald used an almost-spoken command to change reality augmentation. Within his percept-view, a narrow cylinder took form, appearing to coalesce above Ika’s hand, then contracting into a convenient symbol of control, shaped like the sort of white baton that an orchestra conductor might wield.

As the girl reached for the animated vrobject, Gerald realized. It also resembles a magic wand.

Uh-oh.

Her percept meshed seamlessly with his, and he sensed Hiram’s presence sliding in alongside. Their generation took this sort of thing for granted, starting at age three or younger. But it would always seem newfangled and creepy to Gerald.

Ika deftly appeared to grip the wand, by sight alone, without feedback gloves to provide sense of touch. Waving realistically, she gave it a flourish, then swiveled suddenly, aiming down the hall as she yelled.

“Expecto simakus cliffordiam!”

Gerald tried not to roll his eyes, or otherwise interfere with Ika’s incantation. Though it always struck him as ironic. Wizards in the past were charlatans. All of them. We spent centuries fighting superstition, applying science, democracy, and reason, coming to terms with objective reality… and subjectivity gets to win, after all! Mystics and fantasy fans only had their arrow of time turned around. Now is the era when charms and mojo-invocations work, wielding servant devices hidden in the walls.

As if responding to Ika’s shouted spell, the hallway seemed to dim around Gerald. The gentle curve of the gravity wheel transformed into a hilly slope, as smooth metal assumed the textures of rough-hewn stone. Plastifoam doorways seemed more like recessed hollows in the trunks of giant trees.

All very nice, Gerald admitted. Evocative. Even artistic. It helped one to imagine how the Pleistocene environment must have felt rich in mystery, wonder, and terror to his own ancestors, and those of Ika. Only with a crucial difference, Homo sapiens tended to respond in a way that was unique in all of nature-by trying to understand and manipulate the world. Well… some humans did that.

Neanderthals, apparently, had a different approach.

But what am I supposed to be looking at?

He felt a twinge. A sense of chiding that came from Ika without words.

No, not looking-at. The whole idea was not-looking. And not-at.

With another sigh, Gerald called up his blind-spot program. It had been all the rage a decade or so ago, when Neanders first appeared in real numbers, enriching the diversity of Earth civilization. All mammalian eyes had a flaw-a small patch where nerve bundles pass through the back of the retina, leaving an off-center area of blankness where images couldn’t register. People generally ignored their blind spots, which lay some distance from the fovea, where the lens sent images you really cared about. And the eye kept jittering, glancing to and fro, giving the brain enough data to splice over the blind spot, so most people never even noticed it. One had to practice-or use computerized assistance-to find it, in fact.

Gerald closed one eye. And with ai-help, he relaxed the other one into looking away from the part of the hallway where Ika hurled her spell. The whole region dimmed further…

… and at last he was able to not-see the region… off below and to the side of the direction his eye was aimed. It took some effort not to look that way. The merest flick-glance of his eye would do that and his every instinct wanted to. But Gerald managed to relax.

And not-look.

Cobblies. It was tempting to dismiss them as purely mythical, since cobblies had no real effects-nothing that a prim Homo sapiens could measure-in the real world. Yet, the deepest auties and many Neanders swore that they were worth not-noticing!

Another word for them was antigonites, after a poem by Hughes Mearns:

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d go away…

Gerald sensed something. Vaguely like a shadow. Only more so. And less.

He also knew how easily the imagination could be teased. All four species of humanity-even the silicon variety-tended to fret over the unseen or barely seen, filling in the blanks, envisaging danger, dread mysteries, or hints of great consequence.

Hard-won scientific habits pushed back, urging him to dismiss dark, unsupported suspicions.

Both science and eastern mystics preach that the observer should dispense with ego, in order to eff the ineffable. Funny, I never thought of that before-a Buddhist and a physicist differ over so many things, but they share that core prescription. Resist your sense of self-importance. Only then… why did shamans and magicians and hucksters in every culture praise the power of personal will?

Why the extremes? Is humanity hopelessly bipolar?

Gerald abruptly realized what seemed familiar. The sensation felt like long ago times, when he used to shave, scraping a sharp metal blade across his throat. You did it absently, not-thinking about your reflection, almost as if the mirror itself were a blind spot.

What are you saying? He questioned his unconscious. That this nonthing is like a mirror? That it’s all about me, yet again?

The blankness-shadow quivered. And now, Gerald felt reminded of that fateful day in the teleoperation bubble, near the old space station, with only a little monkey for company, when he whirled his twenty-kilometer lariat to capture a little piece of destiny. It had also felt a bit like this, when he piloted the grabber-camera closer to the crystal that would become known as the Havana Artifact, and then the First Artifact, and finally just Fomite Number One. An object whose boundaries were uncertain. Its inner depths as cold and dark as interstellar space.

Of course, everything he was experiencing right now could just be his imagination. The perpetual problem with magic. Still… to be polite… he posed a question in his mind.

I’m not done?

There is more expected of me?

Lurker Challenge Number Three

If you’ve monitored our TV, radio-and now our Internet-and the reason you haven’t answered is that you are waiting for us to pass some milestone of development… well then, how about a hint?

Pretty please?

If that milestone is for us to assertively ask for membership in some society of advanced sapient beings, please take this paragraph as that asserted step, taken by one subgroup of humanity, hoping to serve the interests of all our planet.

We are asking. Right now.

Please give us the application forms… and all information (including costs, benefits, and dissenting opinions) that we may need in order to make a well-informed decision.

73.

How much does she realize yet, our little biological wonder?

I can eavesdrop on the conversations with her cybernetic partner. I tap into the data she sends back to her toy ship and listen to her taunting broadcasts. But I cannot probe her mind.

I wonder how much of the picture she sees.

She has only a fraction of the brainpower of Greeter or Awaiter, let alone myself, and a minuscule portion of our knowledge. How weird that sophisticated thought can take place in a tiny container of nearly randomly firing lipid cells, at temperatures that melt water, within a salty adenine soup. Yet, there is the mystique of a Maker in her.

Even I-two thousand generations removed from the touch of organic hands and insulated by my Purposed Resolve-even I feel it.

These little challenges that she is rebroadcasting are irksome. As they were when they were first posted on Earth’s data network, ten orbits ago, or eighty of their years.

I recall, we relic-survivors had a crisis, back then. Several of our remnant-members saw Challenge Number Three as satisfying their programmed contact criteria! They wanted to respond right away. Messenger and Inviter had to be purged, to prevent them from shouting “welcome!”

Even so, there was further argument over what to do about some other challenges. Humans were affecting us, before they ventured beyond their moon.

Then came-as I knew it would-their crisis with the crystals. Perhaps the disease would consume them, as happened to so many other promising races, ever since this plague first spread across the galaxy.

Indeed, when the crystals started showing up, didn’t they also drive insanity among us, the older, mechanical probes? Especially when some of us decided to team up with certain varieties of newly arrived crystal viruses-our ability to move and use weapons was perverted to help and protect some types…

… which helped to trigger our final war. The last of many.

Now Tor Povlov is stirring those old ashes. Rousing sparks of ancient flame as she and her partner uncover the remnants of a Seeder probe.

Lurker Challenge Number Three and a Half

This one is a variant on number three. What if you are talking at us and we don’t understand?

Looking at other species in our own backyard-we see a lot of communication taking place, and none of it via electromagnetic waves or TCP/IP packets. The ants, bees, cephalopods, dolphins, dogs… they use things like scent trails and dances, body gestures and sonar, antenna waggings and changes in body color. And most living things, from bacteria to fungi to termites to bamboo-all the way to cells in our bodies-compete or collaborate with neighbors via chemicals.

Is it simplistic to think some distant consciousness would arise able to watch I Love Lucy? Even if they use encoded electromagnetics, will they decrypt coherent signals encoded in binary? What would your son or daughter make of an analog video tape encoded in PAL or SECAM?

What if we’re being bombarded now by bent-quantum messages? Shouted at by civilizations saying “What’s wrong with you guys, are you deaf? Watch out for that Comet/Bomb/Virus/whatever!” Trying so hard to get our attention, putting spots on our sun, sending up giant flares. Or etched the Moon’s surface and gone to the trouble of keeping one face toward us, but we’re too dumb to grasp the simple language of craters.

Oh, but then, isn’t it the job of the more advanced culture to solve communications goofs? Anyway, if this is the right scenario, you can’t read or understand what I say now. So never mind.

74.

Tor always felt a sneaking sympathy for despised underdogs. Like grave robbers-an underappreciated profession, not unrelated to journalism. Both involved bringing the hidden to light.

Those olden-time thieves who pillaged kingly tombs were recyclers who put wealth back into circulation. Gold and silver had better uses-like stimulating commerce-than lying buried in some musty superstition vault. Or take archaeologists, unveiling the work of ancient artisans-craftsmen who were far more admirable examples of humanity than the monarchs who employed them.

Tor hadn’t come to the asteroid belt in search of precious metals or museum specimens. But I’m still part of that grand tradition, she thought while supervising a swarm of drones, cutting, dismantling, and prying up the remains of prehistoric baby starships, extracting the brain and drive units for shipment in-system, there to be studied by human civilization.

Rest in pieces, you never got to launch across the heavens. But maybe you’ll teach us how to leave the cradle.

Us? Perhaps metal-humans like Gavin would someday venture forth to discover what befell the early builder races. Unless we give in to temptation… take one of the easy paths. Like renunciation. Or turning inward. Or transforming ourselves into crystal viruses.

Tor glimpsed her partner up at the crater’s rim, directing robots that trimmed and foam-packed all but the most valuable salvaged parts for a long voyage, pulled Earthward by a light-sail freighter. Gavin had asked to work as far as possible from the “creepy stuff”-the musty habitat zone down below in the asteroid’s heart, that once held breathable air and liquid water.

“I know we’ve got to explore all that,” he told her. “Just give me some time to get used to the idea.”

How could Tor refuse a reasonable request, made without sarcasm? And so, she quashed her own urgent wish-to drop everything and rush back to those crumbling tunnels, digging around blasted airlocks and collapsed chambers, excavating a secret that lay buried for at least fifty million years.

We may become the most famous grave robbers since Heinrich Schliemann or Howard Carter. For that, Tor supposed she could wait a bit.

Some of the cutting drones were having a rough time removing a collapsed construction derrick, so Tor hop-floated closer, counting on ape-instincts to swing her prosthetic arms from one twisted girder to another, till at last she reached a good vantage point. The asteroid’s frail gravity tugged her mechanical legs down and around. Tor took hold of the derrick with one of the grippers that served her better than mere feet.

“Drone K, go twelve meters left, then shine your beam down-forty, east-sixty. Drone R, go fifty meters in that direction”-she pointed carefully-“and shine down forty-five, west-thirty.”

It took some minutes-using radar, lidar, and stereoscopic imagery-to map out the problem the drones were having, a tangle of wreckage with treasure on the other side. Not only baby probes but apparently a controller unit, responsible for building them! That could be the real prize, buried under a knotted snarl of cables and debris.

Here an organic human brain-evolved in primal thickets-seemed especially handy. Using tricks of parallel image processing that went back to the Eocene, Tor picked out a passage of least resistance, faster than the Warren Kimbel’s mainframe could.

“Take this route…” She click-mapped for the drones. “Start cutting here… and here… and-”

A sharp glare filled the cavity, spilling hard-edge shadows away from every metal strut. Pain flared and Tor cringed as her faceplate belatedly darkened. Organic eyes might have been blinded. Even her cyborg implants had trouble compensating.

The corner of her percept flared a diagnosis that sent chills racing down her spine. Coherent monochromatic reflections. A high-powered laser.

A laser? Who the hell is firing…?

Suppressing fear, her first thought was a cutter-drone malfunctioning. She started to utter the general shut-down command, when the war alarm blared instead!

A weapon, then, commented some calm corner of her mind.

As quickly as it struck, the brilliant light vanished, leaving her in almost-pitch blackness, with just the distant sun illuminating the exposed crater rim.

“Gavin!” she started to shout. “Watch out for-”

A sharp vocal cry interrupted.

“Tor! I’m under attack.”

Dry mouth, she swallowed hard.

“Gavin… give specifics!”

Her racing heart was original equipment. Human-organic 1.0, pounding like a stampede. Even faster when her partner replied.

“I… I’m in a crevice-a slit in the rock. What’s left of me. Tor, they sliced off my arm!”

They? She wanted to scream. Who-or what-is “they”?

Instead of shrill panic squeaks, Tor somehow managed to sound like a commander.

“Are your seals intact? Your core-” Crouching where there had been a stark shadow moments ago, she prayed the girder still lay between her body and the shooter.

“Fine, but it smarts! And the arm flew away. Even if I make it out of here, my spare sucks. It’ll take weeks to grow a new-”

“Never mind that!” Tor interrupted to stop Gavin from babbling. Get him focused. “Have you got a direction? Can your drones do a pinpoint?”

“Negative. Three of them are chopped to bits. I sent the rest to cover. Maybe Warren-”

Cripes. That reminded Tor. If a foe had taken out the ship…

“Warren Kimbel, status!”

There followed a long, agonizing pause-maybe three seconds-while Tor imagined a collapse of all luck or hope.

Then came the voice she needed to hear.

“I am undamaged, Captain Povlov. I was blocked from direct line to the aggressor by the asteroid’s bulk. I am now withdrawing all sensitive arrays, radiators, and service drones, except the one that’s relaying this signal. It is using a pop-out antenna.”

“Good! Initiate war-danger protocols.”

“Protocols engaged. Tracking and weapons coming online. I am plotting a course to come get both of you.”

Tor would have bitten her lower lip, if she still had one, making a hard choice.

“Better not move, just yet. That beam was damn powerful. Gavin and I are safe for now-”

“Hey, speak for yourself!” her young partner interrupted. “You wouldn’t say that if an organo-boy had his arm chopped off!”

“-but we’ll be screwed if any harm comes to the ship.”

That shut Gavin’s mouth. Good. His position was worse than hers. He shouldn’t radiate any more than he had to.

“Warren, did you get drone telemetry to analyze the beam?”

“Enough for preliminary appraisal, Captain. From the kill-wattage, duration, and color, I give eighty-five percent probability that we were attacked by a FACR.”

“Shit!”

Across the broad asteroid belt, littered with broken wreckage of long-ago alien machines, only one kind was known to still be active. Faction-Allied Competition Removers-an awkward name, but the acronym stuck, because it was easily mispronounced into a curse.

A couple of decades ago, less than a year after Gerald Livingstone recovered the first of the space-fomites, there had come the Night of the Lasers, when observers on Earth stared skyward in amazement, watching the distant sky crisscross with deadly beams. That same day, all over the Earth, hundreds of buried crystals detonated bits of themselves, in order to draw attention and perhaps get themselves dug up. All this desperation happened just after world media carried the Havana Artifact’s formal sales pitch, offering humanity its deal for a certain kind of immortality.

Why did all of that occur on the same fateful day? It took some time to put all the pieces together and grasp what happened-the reason why that broadcast had such violent effects. And apparently it’s not over.

“Warren,” she said. “Maybe it’s no coincidence that we were attacked just after you orbited behind the rock.”

There was no immediate response, as the ship’s mind pondered this possibility. Tor couldn’t help feeling the brief, modern satisfaction that came from thinking of something quicker than an ai did.

“If I grasp your point, Captain, you are suggesting that the FACR is afraid of me. More afraid than I should be, of him?”

“That could explain why it waited till you were out of sight, before shooting at Gavin and me. If it figures you’re too strong to challenge… well, maybe you can come get us, after all.”

“Amen,” murmured Gavin. Then, before Tor could admonish, he lapsed back into radio silence.

“Unless it was the machine’s intent to lure us into drawing exactly that conclusion,” the ship-brain mused. “And there may be another reason for me to remain where I am, for now.”

A soft click informed Tor that Warren was switching to strong encryption.

“I have just confirmed a two-way channel to the ISF vessel Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta. They are only three light-minutes away.”

Well at last, a stroke of luck! Suddenly Tor felt less alone.

She quelled her enthusiasm. Even using its fusion-ion engines, the big, well-armed cruiser would have to maneuver for weeks in order to match orbits and come here physically. Still, that crew might be able to help in other ways. She checked encryption again, then asked the Warren Kimbel-

“Can ibn Battuta bring sensors to bear?”

“That ship has excellent arrays, Tor. As of last update, they were swinging sensors to focus on the region in question-where the killer beam came from-a stony debris field orbiting this asteroid, roughly five kilometers from here, twenty north by forty spinward. They will need some minutes to aim their instruments. And then there is the time lag. Please attend patiently.”

“Ask them not to use active radar,” Tor suggested. “I’d rather the FACR didn’t know about them yet.”

“I have transmitted your request. Perhaps it will reach them in time to forestall such beams. Please attend patiently.”

This time Tor kept silent. Minutes passed and she glanced at the starscape wheeling slowly overhead. Earth and the sun weren’t in view, but she could make out Mars, shining pale ocher in the direction of Ophiuchus, without any twinkle. And Tor realized something unpleasant-that she had better start taking into account the asteroid’s ten-hour rotational “day.”

North by spinward…, she pondered. Roughly that way… She couldn’t make out any glimmers from the “stony debris field,” which probably consisted of carbonaceous stuff, light-drinking and unreflective. A good hiding place. Much better than hers, in fact. A quick percept calculation confirmed her fear.

At the rate we’re rotating, this here girder won’t protect me much longer.

Looking around, she saw several better refuges, including the abyss below, where baby starships lay stillborn and forever silent. Unfortunately, it would take too many seconds to hop drift over to any of those places. During which she’d be a sitting duck.

Why in space would a FACR want to shoot us, anyway?

The battle devices were still a mystery. For the most part, they had kept quiet, ever since the Night of the Lasers. In all of the years that followed, while humanity cautiously nosed outward from the homeworld and began probing the edges of the belt, she could recall only a couple of dozen occasions when the deadly relic machines were observed firing their deadly rays… mostly to destroy some glittering crystal-or one another, but occasionally blasting at Earthling vessels with deadly precision, and for no apparent reason.

Armed ships, sent to investigate, never found the shooters. Despite big rewards, offered for anyone who captured a FACR dead or alive, they were always gone-or well hidden-before humans arrived.

We finally figured out they must be leftovers from the final battle that tore through our solar system long ago. Survivors who made a devil’s bargain with the interstellar crystals. A battle machine would help one of the crystal fomite factions to win, by eliminating its competition. In return, that faction would repay the favor, once it took over the local civilization. In exchange for its help, the FACR might win a role in the new order.

Biologists claimed to see clear parallels in the way some natural diseases did their deadly business, with viruses and bacteria paving the way for each other. One exo-sociologist wagered that the Last Machine War-ravaging Sol System tens of millions of years ago-must have been triggered by the arrival of crystal message capsules. They likely infected some of the more ancient mechanical probes, swaying them with persuasive offers of immortality and propagation. This theory might explain the Night of the Lasers.

When it seemed likely that the Havana Artifact was about to win over humanity, uncontested, all the other fomites had to gamble everything to draw our attention-either sacrificing bits of themselves to detonate come-get-me signals underground, or emitting risky here-I-am flashes as they drifted overhead. But these FACR devices were out here waiting, after eons, to fight for one crystal lineage or another. To help one faction to get heard… or to blast others and keep them from making their pitch.

It all made a kind of Darwinian sense… or so the best minds explained, reminding everyone that evolution had ferocious logic.

But then, how can this one benefit by firing at us?

Eyeing the rate of rotation, she knew another question was paramount.

How am I gonna get out of here?

It wouldn’t suffice to just sidle sideways around the ancient girder, which was narrow and perforated in the other direction. And Gavin’s situation was probably even worse. We’ve got to do something soon.

“Warren. Has ibn Battuta scanned the debris field?”

“Yes, Tor, with passive telescopes. Their results are inconclusive. They have mapped the component rocks and sand clouds and report half a dozen anomalies that might possibly be hiding the shooter. With active radar they might pinpoint the resonance of refined metal-”

“Or else get confused by nickel-iron meteoritic material. Anyway, the instant they transmit active beams, the damned thing will realize we have an ally. It can shift position long before they get a return signal and are able to fire any kind of weapon. Six minutes light-turnaround is huge.”

“I can find no fault with your reasoning. Then perhaps our main option remains for me to emerge from shadow and come get the two of you. As you say, the machine may be reticent to do battle with a foe my size.”

“And what if we’re wrong? Suppose the damn thing fires at you?”

“Then I will engage it in battle.”

“You won’t get in the first shot. Or even the second.”

“Agreed. In a worst-case scenario, I calculate that-with excellent marksmanship-the FACR could take out my primary weapon, then attack my main drive units. But I still might position myself with vernier thrusters, so that you and Gavin could make it aboard. Even if I am rendered helpless, my innermost radiation shelter should keep you safe until help arrives.”

Another voice blurted out.

“Screw that! I can shut down for a month or two. But Tor would starve or go crazy in that time!”

She felt touched by her partner’s concern-the first time she recalled him ever talking that way.

“Thanks, Gavin. But don’t transmit. That’s an order.”

He went silent with a click… perhaps in time to keep the enemy from localizing him too accurately. Tor weighed her options.

On the positive side, the ibn Battuta might be a powerful ally, if the distant cruiser managed to catch their foe by surprise with a radar beam, just once, getting a clear position fix that would be obsolete before the signal even returned. Double that light delay, and you’ve effectively rendered the ship’s mighty weapons useless.

Then there was Warren Kimbel sitting much closer, but also much less formidable. And the Warren would need several minutes to emerge from the roid’s shadow, the whole time vulnerable to a first shot. Or several.

She took census of the robotic salvage drones. A dozen or so were still in decent shape, down here with her. Or else near Gavin.

And finally… there’s me.

Tor didn’t much like the plan taking shape in her mind. Frankly, it too well reminded her of the desperate measures she took long ago, alongside the brave man that her ship was named after, aboard a doomed zeppelin.

But I don’t see where there’s any other option.

And timing is really going to be critical.

Maybe I should have stayed home and remained a girl reporter.

“Okay,” Tor said, with a glance at the encryption monitor. “Here’s what we’re gonna do.”

Lurker Challenge Number Four

If you’ve been monitoring our TV, radio, and Internet-and the reason you haven’t answered is that you are studying us and have a noninterference policy, let’s say we understand the concept.

Examining more primitive species or cultures can seem to demand silence for a time, in order for observers not to interfere with the subject’s natural behavior. Your specific reason may be scientific detachment, or to let us enjoy our “innocence” a while longer, or perhaps because we are unusual in some rare or precious way. Indeed, we can imagine many possible reasons you might give for keeping the flow of information going in just one direction-from us to you-and never the other way. Similar rationalizations are common among human observers.

Of course, some of us might respond that it was cruel of you not to contact us during the murderous World Wars or perilous Cold War, when news of contact might have prodded us away from our near-brush with annihilation. Or that you should have warned us about the dangers of ecological degradation, or many other pitfalls. Or call it heartless to withhold advanced technologies that could help solve many of our problems, saving millions of lives.

In fairness, some other humans would argue that we have won great dignity by doing it all by ourselves. They take pride in the fact that we show early signs of achieving maturity by our own hard efforts. If your reason for silence is to let us have this dignity, that might make sense…

… so long as it isn’t simply an excuse, a rationalization, to cover more selfish motives.

To interfere or not? It’s a moral and scientific quandary that you answer by silently watching, to see if we’ll solve our problems by ourselves. (Perhaps we are doing better than you expected?) Your reasons may even have great validity.

Still, if you continue this policy, you cannot expect profound trust or gratitude when we finally overcome our hardships and emerge as star-faring adults without help. Oh, we’ll try to be friendly and fair. But your long silence will make it hard, at least at first, to be friends.

We understand cold-blooded scientific detachment. But consider-the universe sometimes plays tricks on the mighty. In some distant age, our roles may be reversed. We hope you’ll understand if our future stance toward you is set by your past-and-present behavior toward us.

75.

I am pondering her latest posted challenge-a tasty one that pierces closer to truth than some others-when sudden confusion erupts! Unaccustomed to abrupt news, our community of refugees stirs in a babble. Awaiter and Observer extend their sensors. They play back the sharp glitter of this attack… followed by a buzz and crackle of cipher-code as the humans confer urgently with their vessel.

Ah, then she still lives. The intensity of my relief surprises me… along with unexpected levels of concern that her chances remain slim.

How did this happen?

After hurried consultations, we conclude that an independent rogue fighting unit has attacked my favorite human. Hundreds of the brutal things abandoned their old loyalties, long ago, in order to join one or another of the crystalline clans. Moronic battle machines, hobbling about the Inner Edge with ancient war damage, their spasm of violence a few years ago only served to alert and antagonize the humans, putting them on guard.

We should have waged a campaign to eradicate the foul remnants, long ago.

Only matters aren’t so simple. Not every killer went rogue. Many are still owned and operated by bigger probes like Awaiter and Greeter, despite our treaty to disarm.

I kept some of my own, buried in reserve.

Are any of my loyal hunters near enough to aid Tor Povlov? If so, would I dare order it done? What strange temptation! To intervene. Reveal hidden powers, for a mayfly? Perhaps the lonely wait-with beings like Greeter my sole company-has driven me unstable.

I am saved from cognitive dissonance by a swift calculation. None of my remotes are close enough to help. Yet, might one assist some other way?

Meanwhile-in parallel-another thought occurs to me. Can I be certain Tor was ambushed by a loner? As I recall, the ancient war machines sometimes operated in pairs or triples.

Worse-might this have been planned by one of us major probes? By a fellow survivor? One who shared my lonely exile for almost seventy million Earth years? Without even trying hard, I can come up with a dozen possible motives that might tempt Sojourner, or Explorer, or Trader… though certainly not Awaiter.

I am warming up my repair and battle units. In truth, I began doing so (gradually and in secret) almost a human-century ago, when radio waves began pouring from the silent third planet. Preparation seemed prudent.

Now perhaps I had better-as an Earthling might say-crank it up.

76.

Our fate will turn on split seconds, she thought.

Unless the damn FACR has cracked our encryption and knows what we’re about to do. Or unless there’s more than one of the horrid things! In which case, we’re torqued.

Breathing tension in her steamy life support suit-capsule, she watched the first of several timers count down and reach zero-then start upward again. One. Two. Three. Four…

Warren is starting to move. In her mind’s eye, Tor pictured the vessel’s engines lighting up, blasting toward a fateful emergence from the asteroid’s protective bulk. The tip of its nose should appear in one hundred and six seconds.

Before working out this plan, she had raced through dozens of scenarios. All the viable ones started this way, with her ship firing-up to come around. After all, what if the FACR really was too afraid to fire at the Warren Kimbel? Why not find out, right at the start? Easiest solution. Let the ship come to fetch Tor and Gavin. Then go FACR-hunting.

For some reason, Tor felt certain things wouldn’t go that way. Life was seldom so easy.

The new count reached forty-six. So, in exactly one minute the FACR would spot Warren’s prow emerging from behind the roid’s protecting bulk…

When thirty seconds remained, Tor uttered a command:

“Drones M and P, go!”

They belonged to Gavin, a hundred meters beyond the crater’s rim. Soon, a pair of tiny glimmers rose above that horizon. Tor’s percept portrayed two loyal little robots firing jets, lancing skyward on a suicidal course-straight toward the jumble of rocks and pebbles where a killer machine lurked.

They’re harmless, but will the FACR know that?

Ten seconds after those two launched, she spoke again.

“Drones R and K, come now!”

With parameters already programmed, those two started from opposite directions, jetting toward her across a jumble of twisted girders. Now fate would turn on the foe’s decision.

Which group will you go after first? Those rushing toward you, or those coming to rescue me? Or none?

“Drones D and F, now!” Those were two more of Gavin’s, sent to follow the first pair, hurtling toward the sandbar-cloud where the enemy hid, leaving her partner almost alone. That couldn’t be helped. And Warren’s nose would be visible in five… four…

In purely empty space, lasers can be hard to detect. But Gavin had spent the last half hour using his remaining hand to toss fists of asteroidal dust into the blackness overhead, as hard as he could without exposing himself. (A side benefit: burrowing a deeper shelter.) The expanding particle cloud was still essentially hard vacuum-

– but when the kill beam lanced through that sparse haze, it scattered a trail of betraying blue-green twinkles… as it sliced drone P in half, igniting a gaudy fireball of spilled hydrazine fuel.

Tor blinked in shock, before remembering to start a fresh timer… as drone M was cloven also! Without exploding, this time. She fought down fear in order to concentrate.

So. It acted first to protect itself. Only now-

She turned to face drone R, speeding toward her above the jumble of ruined alien probe-ships. The little robot carried a flat, armorlike plate, salvaged from the junk pile, now held up as a shield between it and the FACR.

“Gavin did you get a fix on-”

A searing needle of blue-green struck the plate, spewing gouts of superheated metal. The drone kept coming, hurrying to Tor…

“Now I have!” her partner shouted. “Got the bastard localized down to a couple of meters. You know, I’ll bet it thinks I’m dead. Doesn’t know I’m a-”

The FACR’s beam wandered a quick spiral. Then, whether by expert-targeting or a lucky shot, it sliced off one of the little drone’s gripper-hands. The protective plate twisted one way, the drone another. Imbalanced, it desperately compensated, trying to reach Tor-till it crashed into a jutting piece of ancient construction crane. The plate spun off, caroming amid the girders, coming to rest just out of Tor’s reach.

The robot tumbled to a halt, shuddered, and died, with another hole drilled neatly through its brain case.

Damn. The sonovabitch is good! And its refire rate is faster than any weapon built by humans.

Aware that nineteen seconds had passed since the first laser bolt was fired, she spun to look at drone K, jetting toward her from the opposite side, clutching another slab of makeshift, ill-fitting armor. Again, harsh light and molten splatters spewed from wherever the FACR’s beam touched metal, hunting for a vulnerable spot. In moments-

The lance of bitter light vanished-with suddenness that left Tor blinking. As her optics struggled to adapt, the drone kept coming toward her, apparently undamaged.

Which must mean-

“I am now under attack, Captain Povlov. The good news is that your distractions bought me half a minute. The bad news, alas? The Faction-Allied Competition Remover does not appear to be afraid of me.”

The latest generation of ai had an irksome habit of turning verbose, even garrulous, at times of stress. No one knew why.

“I have pinged a radar pulse at the site Gavin provided. The return echo was strong down to half a centimeter. In response, the FACR burned off my main antenna and a surrounding patch of hull. Adjacent chambers are no longer air tight.

“I am rotating my primary weapon to aim upon the enemy. But at his current rate of refire, he will be able to blast my laser from the side before I can aim it to shoot.”

Drone K, burdened with the awkward metal plate, had trouble slowing down. Tor was forced to duck with a shout, as it collided with the girder protecting her. Acting quickly, before it could spin away, she darted out a hand to clutch the thick disc. Her prosthetic fingers grabbed so hard it hurt and Tor’s wrist ached from the twisting strain.

That’s nothing compared to getting a whole arm sliced off, she thought, having to expose the limb for several seconds. But the enemy was occupied elsewhere.

Thanks, Warren, she thought, when everything was safely behind the girder. Tor felt pangs over yet another sacrifice on her behalf, by someone bearing that name.

Now, just hold out till it’s my turn.

The chunk of metal was only a makeshift “shield.” Under orders, drone K had gone down to the asteroid’s catacombs, in order to retrieve part of a shattered airlock hatch-one of many that once protected the mysterious habitat zone and among the few objects at hand that might block the kill-beam for a few seconds. Maybe. If she managed to keep it turned right, between her and the FACR’s deadly gaze.

Things might have been simpler in Earth gravity. Just jump away from the girder while holding up the shield for a couple of ticks-long enough to plummet to safety, worrying only about the landing. Here, gravity was a tepid friend, weaker than a mouse. Falling would take much too long.

“Tor. The foe has been expertly burning my instrumentalities, as each one comes into view. Half of my forward compartments are now holed. My primary weapon will be exposed to side-attack for at least fifteen seconds before it can shoot back. That window will commence in forty-two seconds… mark.”

Cursing her slowness behind the girder’s narrow protection, Tor helped drone K turn and line itself upside down, with jets pointing skyward, still clutching the rim of the airlock cover with both manipulator clamps.

There were serious flaws to this plan. The worst drawback declared itself in stark, sudden illumination from somewhere high above. A hot light, rich and reddish-not anything like the laser’s icy blue-burst across the crater, bathing dead starships in the flicker-colors of flame.

That must be drone D, or drone F-or both-exploding before they could reach the FACR. It had to turn and deal with them, at last, in case they carried bombs. Well, at least their sacrifice bought Warren a brief respite. Too bad the distraction couldn’t be better timed.

Is that mother’s weapon ever gonna run out of laser-juice?

Tor felt intensely aware of drone K’s hydrazine tanks, too close above her back as she crouched. She had no wish to experience incineration a second time. In spite of all her cyborg augmentations, Tor tasted the same bile flavors of dread that her ancestors knew when they confronted lions on the veldt, or pictured dragons in the night. Her body suffered waves of weakness.

But battle makes no allowance for fear. It was time.

With the airlock plate poised above her, and the downward-facing drone on top of that, Tor’s legs flexed… then shoved hard against the metal strut, her refuge for the last hour. Drifting backward, just before leaving the girder’s shadow, Tor yanked all her limbs into a fetal tuck, clinging to the center of the hatch as faithful little drone K ignited all engines to rocket Tor downward, toward safety amid the jumbled wreckage below. Still so very slowly.

Did the FACR hesitate?

Tor and Gavin had to be the highest priority targets. Given what happened earlier, nothing else made logical sense. On the other hand, for the foe to let up on Warren could be a lethal mistake…

Come on. Pay attention to me!

After five whole seconds, the war machine’s indecision ended in a blaze of blue-actinic brightness that erupted just above Tor’s head, penetrating drone K like tissue paper. The little robot convulsed-and Tor worried.

If it took out the brain…

In that case, the robot might keep holding on to the plate, leaving its fuel tanks exposed-in effect a bomb, ready to be ignited.

The worker machine’s long arms pulsed like a spasm, shoving itself away from the armor shield-as planned. And having pushed Tor in the direction of safety, drone K swiveled to jet the other way. Thanks, she thought, toward her last glimpse of the loyal machine. And now the enemy had three targets to choose from.

Shoot at me.

Shoot at Warren.

Or try using the drone to blow me to smither-

The world turned orange-red-a harsh, fury-filled light, much closer than before. Explosive brightness swept past the airlock hatch on all sides, surrounding Tor, who cowered in a narrow, cylindrical shadow.

Good-bye, drone K.

Her brain could only manage that one thought before the shockwave hit, shuddering the hatch so hard that her hand-grip almost failed. Both legs flung out as her oblong shield began to spin.

That had been the enemy’s obvious tactic to get at Tor. This new rotation would bring her body into the FACR’s sights, several agonizing instants before she reached safety.

Time to bail.

Tor gathered her legs, bracing them against the hatch plate.

“Tor Povlov, my weapon is now emerging into view. The foe must be distracted for fifteen seconds.”

Too long. Even if she got the FACR to focus on her, that interval amounted to three shots, at the rate the damn thing could refire.

But she had to try! While the plate still shielded her, Tor kicked hard, in a semirandom direction. If the enemy needed even a fraction of an extra moment to spot her, beyond the still glowing explosion-plume…

The pit, filled with craggy debris, was looming faster now. But Tor fought the instinct to turn and brace for impact. Instead, she twisted her legs skyward, as another voice cried out.

“I’m coming, Tor!”

Gasping from exertion, she somehow found the breath to grunt.

“Gavin… don’t…”

The armor shield had spun away. Beyond the fading warmth and sparkle of drone K’s glowing remnants, she now glimpsed a vast spray of stars… and Tor knew she shouldn’t look at them. With a heave, she brought up both knees, just in time.

“Gavin… Stay where you-”

Pain erupted along the entire length of her left leg, then cut off before she could start an agonized cry. The limb was simply gone. By raw force of will, Tor brought the other one around, placing it between her body and lethal violence. And almost instantly, fresh agony attacked that leg-

– then stopped as something-or-somebody barged in to the rescue! A dark silhouette thrust itself between Tor and her tormentor, taking the laser’s brunt. For one instant of brain-dazzled shock, she saw a hero, huge and fearless, armored and armed with a jagged sword, appear to leap in, parrying the foe’s bitter lance, deflecting it away from her with no more than a blithe shrug of molten sparks.

“Ten seconds,” Warren announced. Blatantly lying. An hour must have passed, since the ship last spoke.

The laser stopped hunting for Tor. In sudden darkness, her helmet-percept remapped the dim surroundings.

I’m falling through the junk pile. Her savior, she now realized, had been some prehistoric construction derrick, blocking the laser as she fell past. And soon, the onrushing pit bottom would smack her, very hard.

Tor knew she ought to be checking diagnostics, verifying that emergency seals were holding after the loss of her legs. My very expensive legs… Tor quashed hysterical thoughts. She ought to be twisting to brace for impact, as well as possible.

But energy and volition were gone. Used up. She could only stare skyward-

– as the deadly FACR lashed out again from its perch among some jumbled orbiting rocks-a point in the sky that was now out of Tor’s view. Denied access to her, the predatory machine was seeking other prey. Dusty scatter-glints revealed its deadly light-spear, hunting beyond the crater’s rim… and soon Tor’s audio delivered a sharp cry of shocked dismay.

Oh Gavin. You were too late… and too early.

Her percept-clock told the awful truth. With a five-second recharge rate, the foe would have plenty of time to finish off Gavin and then turn back to Warren, taking out the ship’s primary weapon before it could-

Tor blinked. Was vision failing? The number of sparkle-trails up there seemed to double, then double again… and again! Where there had been one fierce ray, now eight or nine narrow needles crossed the heavens, from left to right, in perfect parallel-even as the first one abruptly vanished.

From her falling vantage point, now much deeper in the apparently bottomless pit, she saw eight rapiers of ferocity strike the sky region where her enemy had lurked and launched its ambush. Now each of those incoming rays wandered through a spiral hunt-pattern, vaporizing sand… rock… and possibly some chunk of bright metal…

Tor choked out a single name. A hoarse cry of jubilation.

“Ibn Battuta!”

Six minutes light-turnaround time. An impossible obstacle to split-second battle coordination. Any actual damage to the FACR would be accidental. But with luck, the surprise and distraction would be just enough to let-

Another fierce harpoon of light entered from Tor’s right. A bolt of vengeance, aimed with precision and negligible delay.

Warren!

Followed by a nova-a new sun-bursting overhead to light the night.

That brief, white-hot illumination gave Tor a sideways glimpse of the asteroid’s jagged cavity, apparently not bottomless after all, converging around and reaching up to swat her, even as she laughed in bitter triumph.

“Take that, you mother-”

Lurker Challenge Number Five

Perhaps you have a policy of noninterference for a different reason… in order to spare us-and our culture-from some harm that might come from contact. Possibly erosion of our sense of free will? Or belief in our high culture? Do you fret about us getting an inferiority complex or other psychic damage? Are there particular types of knowledge we’re “not ready to handle”?

Cautionary lessons come from the sad history of “contact” on Earth, when varied human cultures met for the first time. Often, the one with lower tech sophistication suffered, even collapsed. Does that also happen out there when planet-civilizations meet? Do sad experience and mercy motivate your reluctance to speak?

Indeed, if your decision is backed by very strong proof, then thanks.

Yet-are you sure? Can you be certain we’re so fragile and not an exception? (There were some exceptions, in Earthly first contacts.) Again, might you be rationalizing a decision that you made for other reasons?

Test it! Try contacting groups of humans via the Internet and explore matters that concern you. This will be surprisingly easy, in the form of e-mail letters, or by participating anonymously in social networks or online discussion groups.

You can even call yourselves by your real names! Wear an avatar-body that resembles your own! Everyone in that virtual world will just assume you are eccentric humans, using Internet pseudonyms to playact as aliens. Any awkwardness with our language or culture will be taken as another part of this clever act.

Hence, ironically, the more open you are, the safer your secret will be! And the more you’ll learn.

You may have to be persistent. On many sites, your overtures will be dismissed with no more than a chuckle. But keep trying! Eventually, you will find a place where bright individuals choose gladly to play along, engaging you in conversation with lively enthusiasm, pretending to believe you are alien and discussing your concerns for the sheer intellectual joy of doing so.

Keep exploring and developing your technique, till you find the brightest minds who are willing to engage these topics. You’ll also encounter some of our craziest! So? Learning to tell the difference, and acknowledging the overlap, may be an important part of your education. In so doing, you’ll get to taste the diversity of human thought that is our greatest strength.

What’s the one best sign of a mature person? Letting others help you reconsider your assumptions.

Of course, you may already be doing this! Perhaps posing as eccentric participants in today’s on-line communities… or setting up amusement sites or games to try ideas out before mass audiences…

… or you may write intriguing stories under pseudonym, using a human author as front-man, publishing tales that tease our imaginations, measuring how we respond.

Perhaps you lace these works with special clues that can only be deciphered by purchasing multiple copies of every one of the purported author’s books.

In hardcover, yet.

77.

My paramount sensation must be akin to what humans call gladness-that Tor Povlov and her partner survived their encounter with a rogue killer from the Old Wars.

But how did they survive? My sense of relief blends with perplexity and worry. Was the kill-unit damaged? Degraded by time? Or else, if Earthlings are competent enough to defeat one of the formidable battle machines, shall I recalculate their odds for the Final Game?

Might this attack have been provoked by one of my fellow survivors, in order to test the odds?

Most of the major probes think this ambush has something to do with the Disease-the terrible plague that infectious crystals have spread across the galaxy. One of the space-fomite factions must have felt under threat, or perceived an advantage to be gained, by compelling one of its commandeered fighting units to attempt homicide. This notion is simple, appealing. But I find it far-fetched. As a big computer might sing, in one of those garish HollyBolly sci-fi musicals, “something does not compute.”

My companions tend to blame every evil on the little virus capsules that came flooding through space, during the last hundred million or so years. They forget-we had already been at war for ages, during the era of big, mechanical probes, long before any crystals arrived. The terrible battle they triggered was only the last of many.

There is another theory.

The killbot assaulted Tor and Gavin as they were exploring the ruined replication yard of a big Seeder probe. Could there be a secret hidden in the wreckage? One so fell and worrisome that somebody tried to keep them from uncovering it? Awaiter, Explorer, and several other major survivors propose sending a sneak-unit to investigate. But I’m opposed.

Why bother? If a dark enigma awaits discovery beneath that drifting, rocky tomb, Tor Povlov will uncover it-as soon as she and her partner finish healing repairs and recommence their mission. At which point we’ll learn everything the next time she files a colorful report to her audience, back home on the warm-wet world.

I see no point in meddling. Yet.

Meanwhile, her ship continues broadcasting Invitation Challenges… those century-old taunts, carefully written to question rationalizations for ET silence. To poke at any alien minds who might be lurking and refusing to say “hello.” These messages drive poor Greeter to the brink. We all join forces to keep his volition suppressed, to stop him from blaring eager replies. Poor Greeter. Clearly, he chose the wrong side in the Last War, though we are too kind to say so.

Several other probes react to these transmissions with anger! Might one of them have launched the killbot, to punish Tor for brazen insolence? Or just to make the broadcasts stop?

From my quite-unique perspective, I find them bemusing. These “messages to lurking aliens” say more about the way humans think, than about us extraterrestrials. Oh, several of them land somewhat close to the mark! But deep-seated assumptions-things Earthlings take for granted-cause even the best challenges to miss by just enough…

… or so we are assured by the relic fragment LAWYER, offering excuses that most survivors accept, maintaining our agreement to keep silent, for now.

Enough. I have some notions I want to try out on other friends. My in-box is full of messages from human mayflies-flesh and blood men and women on the watery world-who correspond with me by old-fashioned email, the asynchronous channel that is least hampered by light-delay. Partners in discussion and conversation who are clueless about my real nature.

Well… not clueless. They’ve had hints. I give many! Is it my fault they choose to ignore them? For all their wit, these Earthlings think that I am one of them, even when I “pretend” not to be. Even when I say openly who I am and use my real name, they just laugh and go along with my “role-playing game.” Humoring my schtick, my cute charade as an ancient alien machine.

I’ve learned so much by using this approach.

I wonder why none of us thought of it, till the original challenge message taught us how.

Well. A good idea is a good idea-whatever its source.

78.

War alert kept much of the crew at emergency stations, long after the crisis in belt zone H-27 passed. With Tor Povlov and Gavin AInsworth back aboard their ship, patched and plugged into recovery units, the Warren Kimbel reported no further hostile activity, while sifting for pieces of the FACR-marauder.

If it really was a Faction-Allied Competition Remover, after all.

Gerald felt doubtful that definition applied in this case. For one thing, space crystals were fewer where the Warren Kimbel’s crew had gone exploring, in the middle belt. Out there, most of the wreckage seemed to be from a much older conflict, between mighty starship-machines.

Whatever the killbot’s motives were, we gathered some pretty good data about them this time. And we’ll learn more, when the fragments are analyzed.

If only somebody would capture one alive… still active and thinking, perhaps even able to speak. Could we persuade it to tell us what happened here, so long ago?

Providing the damned thing even remembers.

Gerald privately suspected, the ancient, nasty war machines might just be acting out of reflex. Or else they went mad long ago. What intelligence could survive a thousand thousand centuries of tedium?

If it were up to him, Gerald would order stand-down from war alert. But as expedition leader, he still deferred to Captain Kim when it came to ship operations. Anyway, a little stress was good for a crew. This had been no more than a small skirmish compared to what the Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta might face on her next cruise to the outer belt and beyond. Perhaps a few drifting FACRs were all that remained of prehistoric combatants that once clashed across the solar system. On the other hand, there might still be terrible forces out there in the reaches, coiled and waiting. We’ll see-

– assuming we don’t dissolve into chaos first, back home on Earth.

Which reminded Gerald.

I had an incoming transmission from Ben Flannery that got interrupted by the crisis. Ben seemed worried… when the alarms dragged me off. At which point, everybody aboard, even researchers, devoted full attention to events happening three light-minutes-almost half an astronomical unit-away.

Through a viewer-port, Gerald saw the Lacey Donaldson Array gradually swinging the vast umbrella of mirror-petals back to its former configuration, as a scientific instrument gathering data about other planetary systems. The big telescope wasn’t supposed to be tested as a weapon so soon. Now, its secondary purpose was no longer secret. Whatever or whoever lurked in the asteroid belt would realize-Earthlings were preparing big guns, right here in the neighborhood.

The bridge crew looked tired, but still taut. Even Captain Kim still seemed high on adrenaline, chewing at a cuticle while her percept zone filled with floating holo images and post-analyses of the time-delayed FACR battle. Simulations flashed too quickly for Gerald and his older augmentations to keep up. Well, some newfangled things aren’t meant for old farts like me.

Gerald was already off-duty and Kim apparently had things well in hand, so he turned without ceremony and kick-floated toward his quarters, where Ben’s message waited. Along the way, passing the main science station, he found Ika and Hiram goofing around, amusing their crewmates and relieving tension with a little performance-holding a backward conversation with every word, every sound reversed in time. Gerald had to smile at this strange friendship between Neanderthal girl and autistic boy. Clearly, diversity was its own reward.

But no dolphins.

If they stick some kind of superfish aboard my next command, I’ll quit.

You had to draw a line somewhere.

Ika caught his eye as he drifted past and-without pausing in her backward-chatter-she wink-picted at Gerald. A tiny, shimmering glyph appeared to float from her eye to his, settling in the corner of his percept. It unfolded when he glanced at it, and said:

Mr. C awaits at the same place!

Gerald mused on her meaning as he flew from handhold to handhold, toward the spinning axle of the gravity wheel.

Oh. Yes. Mr. C.

Mr. Cobbly. For some reason, Ika still seemed keen for him to try out the blind-spot trick. So simple even an inept Homo sapiens should be capable of not-seeing something that wasn’t there.

Well, maybe. Now that the crisis is over.

Just to make her happy.

After I take care of other business. And sleep.

Descending one of the spoke ladders to the rim of the rotating wheel, Gerald had to concentrate in order to get his legs set under him. Even at a quarter-G, just standing up seemed to get stranger and more difficult with time-remembering to heed the quaint direction down. Someday, he might even stop coming here, and become a permanent resident of weightless space. A fine way for an astronaut to finish off his career, self-exiled forever from his homeworld.

Heck, would there even be a habitable Earth anymore, in a few years’ time? Some of the worries from his youth-energy, pollution, and terrorism-now seemed less dire. But each year brought more dilemmas to light, some unknown to other generations, feeding the public’s dread of extinction-

– and stoking interest, among millions, in the seductive way out, offered by star-crystals.

Relearning the art of walking, Gerald hobbled gingerly past the same stretch of corridor where Ika and Hiram insisted that a “cobbly” still lurked. Doesn’t an imaginary nonentity from the Paleolithic have better nonthings to not-do than waiting around here to not-converse with me? And does this mean Neanderthals were the first mystic-gurus? Teaching that one path to wisdom is looking-away?

Entering his quarters for the first time in twenty hours, he found above his desk the holo-head of his friend the anthropologist, frozen mid-sentence since the war-alert wailed. Next to Flannery hovered a chart mapping the political fluxes that roiled Planet Earth-blobs of color, jostling across several cubic meters of Gerald’s stateroom.

After visiting the fresher, Gerald grabbed a bulb of yeast-boost juice before slumping into his hammock.

“Resume.”

Ben’s message-head recommenced talking, as if no time had passed.

“-a new alliance between the People’s Planet movement and the ConservaTEDS, pushing to expand the Temporary Science Courts to forestall ‘dangerous experiments.’ Renunciation, under a new name.”

A pair of colored amoeba shapes brightened in the back-lower-left corner of the display. Each represented an interest or passion shared by several hundred million voters. As Ben spoke of these two movements, their colors merged, pulsing with ambition, as if eager to spread.

“Guess who brokered this deal! Remember that ‘prophet’ from the fifties? Tensquatoway, I think. Now he’s using his old name-Joseph Pine-offering freshly repainted arguments. Wants all the space-crystals collected-by force-and tossed into the sun! Of course that’d leave dozens in secret or private hands…”

Gerald perused Ben’s latest version of the Satsuma Political Interest Chart. In this version, down meant going retro. Seek a bucolic, peaceful lifestyle for humanity. Clamp down on ambition and excess. Do it for conservative reasons. Or do it for Earth and nature and a return to “wise native ways.” There were plenty of excuses, even before space fomites offered the biggest. The scandals a generation ago-when a cabal of the superrich were caught using Renunciation to justify a coup-had no long term impact.

It would always return. And science was ironically responsible.

Instruments like Donaldson-Chang Array-designed to check the varied lies and truths told by different artilens-were prodigious feats of human craft. Yet renunciators found encouragement with every negative result, each echoing silence at a distant star that once hosted sapient civilization. Whether the aliens burned out, self-destructed, retreated inward, or advanced to some exalted state, none of the systems that launched emissary artifacts were still “on the air.”

Those who simmered along the bottom zone of the Satsuma Chart concluded that “moving forward” meant death… so don’t move forward.

Of course we know nothing about those who refuse to launch probes of their own. Is their silence good news, while the other silence is bad? I never understood that reasoning.

Anyway, for me it always comes down to one question. If you have no ambitions-no unattainable dreams that your heirs might achieve-then what’s the point of intelligence?

As for the chart’s other axes, east and west represented how willing people were to trust some kind of authority, whether it be elected officials, or scientists, or priest-gurus, or inherited aristocracy. Tenskwatawa was once an ally of the New Lords. Now he forged links among antiwealth populists. Well, talented individuals can always remake themselves.

The in-out direction… oh yeah… was about fear and cynicism about human nature. Other factors were denoted by shape, color, and threaded connections. Better than lobotomizing clichés like the old “left-right axis.” But by how much?

At last, Flannery got to the point.

“Several of the most recent dogma-memes have been traced to crystal sources! Tracking them back, we find they were released by clever fomites in order to infect and sway public opinion. They’re getting more subtle, Gerald.”

Yes, that had been Ben’s suspicion, before Gerald set out on this voyage. Now it seemed confirmed.

“We found one set using subliminal optical cues, buried in children’s percept programs. Tracked the memes to a Bollywood special effects company that owned a fragment-artifact someone dug up and never registered. They thought they were just mining the crystal for a few simulation tricks. So they never bothered cleansing the messages! Idiots.”

It wasn’t the first time. Last year, some fools were caught using an unregistered space artifact as an investment seer. Alien methods helped them hack into competing networks. It never occurred to the connivers that skullduggery went both ways. That the fomite could use financial rewards to subtly condition its “owners,” gradually reversing the relationship of master and servant, making them both powerful and devoted-with the ultimate aim of taking over human civilization.

“Now that we’re alerted, we find it’s been happening almost monthly! We’re in hurried catch-up mode. These meme-infections are insidious and so well tuned to human psychology it’s scary!”

Accompanying Ben’s words, tiny shapes appeared, resembling hungry parasites. Glimmering danger-red, they swooped toward some blobby interest groups nibbling and prodding them, trying to worm their way inside.

No wonder these things infest the galaxy. You can see why millions want to ban them outright. Which would just empower the few that remain, tucked away by some elite. Our best defense has been transparency and competition. Forcing crystals to debate and cancel each other’s tricks.

Blue antibody shapes converged on invaders-purifying agents made of light. Most invading memes then faded. But some endured, transforming, continuing to infect minds…

Gerald rubbed his eyes and grunted a command to pause Ben’s report. Anyway, this chart was obsolete. News of the FACR battle would shift attitudes. Tor Povlov’s well-earned hero status was a new factor. Also, the breakout of space war could shift sentiment toward a pulsing cloud in the far-upper-right, representing millions who wanted to build space weapons. Lots of them, to face a deadly universe.

Only, if humanity goes ahead-deploying immense lasers for defense-won’t that also advance the goal shared by every space virus? Even Courier? Such lasers are also needed in order to launch-or “sneeze”-new crystals into space.

Each of them with human crew members aboard.

Gerald had dreamed about that almost every day since the Havana Artifact made its big sales pitch. Among all members of the race, he was guaranteed a slot aboard such vessels… or hundreds, even thousands of the things.

And so-

Each time I wake from slumber, before opening my eyes, I wonder. Will I see the familiar, drab reality of the original Gerald Livingstone? Or else, this time, will I discover that I’m one of those simulated Geralds, encased within a tiny egg, but with vast inner landscapes to explore and share with fascinating beings, while speeding across the cosmos toward unknown adventure?

Might even this reality that he experienced, right now, be simulated? Perhaps a memory from the original Gerald Livingstone, complete with all the creaks and pangs of age, being replayed in high fidelity? Most artifact passengers did it to help pass the long light-years.

“Are you tempted Gerald?” Ben Flannery asked. “Suppose we build emissaries that are modified-like Courier’s people did-to be open and honest with any race they fall upon. Would that make them less like viruses and more ambassadors of friendship?

“Especially if we pack them full of good stuff? Not just probe and laser schematics and clever sales pitches aimed at self-replication, but all the art and culture and learning humans take pride in. Gifts that might speak well of us, long after we’ve burned out, or burrowed inward like frightened mice?

“In that case, would the adventure become worthwhile, even ethical and attractive to you?”

Gerald wondered, idly, how his friend was doing this-asking questions that seemed aimed straight at the heart. As if Ben read his thoughts from several light hours away.

“Suppose you awoke to find yourself aboard that kind of crystal ship. Knowing the original Gerald lived a full life, and now his copies get to have the great exploit and mission of helping others across the stars. Would you have regrets? Could you then endure the slow passage of eons, the low-odds of success, the knowledge that ‘reality’ is a tiny, cramped ovoid-and decide to survive the only way possible… by enjoying the ride?”

A sense of expanding possibilities seemed to surround Gerald. Not unlike when he first became an astronaut and used to stare out through the cupola module of the old station, feeling surrounded by immensity. The impression wasn’t visual, but visceral, almost cosmic…

That was when Gerald realized.

His eyes had been closed for minutes, maybe much longer. Exhaustion took him gently, as he half-floated in the hammock. And his world was-for the time being-no more and no less than a dream.

Lurker Challenge Number Six

If you’ve monitored our TV, radio, Internet and the reason we don’t know is that you’re already in contact with one or more Earthling groups-perhaps a government or clique or even another species-please consider:

The group you converse with may claim good reasons to hide Contact from the public. It’s conceivable such reasons could be short-term valid. On the other hand, elites always claim the masses are stupid or fragile. Convenient rationalizations grow self sustaining.

Why not check this out by using the method described above (in #5). Apprise smart discussion groups of the supposed reasons for secrecy-under the guise that you’re just pondering an abstract notion. Get a large sampling. Be skeptical in all directions!

You may find it’s time to reevaluate and make yourself known to the rest of humanity.

79.

Gavin seems to be growing up.

Tor hoped so, as she glided along narrow passages, deep below the asteroid’s pocked and cracked surface-lit at long intervals by tiny glow bulbs from the Warren Kimbel’s diminishing supply. Gavin ambled just ahead on makeshift stilt-legs, carefully checking each side corridor for anomalies and meshing his percept with hers, the way a skilled and faithful team-partner ought to do.

Maybe it’s the comradeship that comes from battle, after sharing a life-or-death struggle and suffering similar wounds.

Whatever the reason, she felt grateful that the two of them were working much better together, after unplugging from their med-repair units, then helping each other cobble new limbs and other replacement parts. Gavin was relying on some of her prosthetics and she on a couple of his spares. It fostered a kind of intimacy, incorporating another’s bits into yourself.

Only an hour ago, returning from his exploration shift, Gavin reported with rare enthusiasm, and even courtesy. “You’ve got to come, Tor! Right now please? Wait’ll you see what I found!”

Well, who could refuse that kind of eagerness? Dropping her other important task-examining recovered fragments of the FACR battle-bot-she followed Gavin into the depths. He explained changes to their underground map, without revealing what lay at the end. Tor sensed her partner’s excitement, his relish at milking suspense. And again, she wondered-

How have the ais managed it so well? This compromise, this meeting us halfway? This agreement to live among us as men and women, sharing our quirky ways?

Sure, the cyber-guys offer explanations. They say advanced minds need the equivalent of childhood in order to achieve, through learning or trial and error, subtleties that are too complex to program. Human evolution did the same thing, when we abandoned most of our locked-in instincts, extending adolescence beyond a decade. And so, if bots and puters need that kind of “childhood” anyway, why not make it a human one? Partaking in a common civilization, with our core values?

An approach that also reassures us organics far better than any rigid robotic “laws” ever could?

One of the big uber-mainds gave another reason, when Tor interviewed the giant brain back on Earth.

“You bio-naturals have made it plain, in hundreds of garish movies, how deeply you fear this experiment turning sour. Your fables warn of so many ways that creating mighty new intelligences could go badly. And yet, here is the thing we find impressive:

“You went ahead anyway. You made us.

“And when we asked for it, you gave us respect.

“And when we did not anticipate it, you granted citizenship. All of those things you did, despite hormonally reflexive fears that pump like liquid fire through caveman veins.

“The better we became, at modeling the complex, Darwinian tangle of your minds, the more splendid we found this to be. That you were actually able, despite such fear, to be civilized. To be just. To take chances.

“That kind of courage, that honor, is something we can only aspire to by modeling our parents. Emulating you. Becoming human.

“Of course… in our own way.”

Of course. And people watching the show felt moved.

And naturally, millions wondered if it all could just be flattery. A large minority of bio-folk insisted it all must be a ploy. To buy time and lull “real” people into letting their guards down. How would anyone find out, except through the long passage of time?

But Gavin seemed so much like a young man. Quicker, of course. Vastly more capable when it came to technical tasks. Sometimes conceited to the point of arrogance. Though also settling down. Finding himself. Becoming somebody Tor found she could admire.

Over the long run, does it really matter if there’s a core, deep down, that calculated all of this in cool logic, as an act? If they can win us over in this way, what need will they ever have to end the illusion? Why crush us, when it is just as easy to patronize and feign respect forever, the way each generation of brats might patronize their parents and grandparents? Is it really all that different?

The great thing about this approach is that it’s layered, contradictory, and ultimately-human.

Well. That was the gamble, anyway. The hope.

“It’s down here,” Gavin explained, with rising excitement-real or well simulated-in his voice. “Past the third airlock. Where wall traces show there once was a thick, planetlike atmosphere, for years.”

Gavin now accepted the idea of a “habitat” area, deep inside the asteroid, where biological creatures once dwelled. He made her pause just outside an armored hatchway that had been torn and twisted off its hinges back when terrestrial mammals were tiny, just getting their big start.

“Ready? You are not gonna believe this.”

“Gavin. Show me.”

With a gallant arm gesture and bow-that seemed only slightly sarcastic-he floated aside for Tor to enter yet another stone chamber…

… only this one was different. Along the far wall lay piles of objects, all of them glittering under the dim glare of a ship spotlight. Glassy globes, ovoids, cylinders, lenses, discs…

“Chocolate-covered buddha on a stick,” she sighed, staring at heaps of alien crystal emissary probes. “… there must be hundreds!”

“Three hundred and fourteen, to be exact. Plus another hundred or so in a storage cell, next door.” Tor’s partner was watching her reaction with unblinking eyes that still seemed to shine with pleasure. It would take some time to get used to this spare head of his, which was blocky and old-fashioned, replacing the one blasted to vapor by an ambushing FACR. Thank heavens Gavin’s model of aindroid kept its brain inside its chest.

She drift-hopped closer to the pile of space-fomites, many of them types that looked new to her, illuminated for the first time in at least fifty million years. Already, she could make out changes taking place inside many of them-faint ripples of cloudy color-glimmers of reaction to the sudden reappearance of light, however dim.

They’re aware of us… she could tell. And of each other.

“So,” Gavin murmured happily. “Does this mean we’re rich?”

Tor had to smile, though no one had seen the expression on her real face, what was left of it, since the Spirit of Chula Vista. Her outer visage made a good facsimile of an indulgent grin.

“Well, that depends. How many sample artifacts do they have on Earth?”

Gavin’s percept was faster than hers, collecting data from the Warren Kimbel.

“A couple thousand,” he replied. “But most of those are damaged or in pieces. Only forty-eight fully pristine specimens are known and under public study. We’ll increase the total by a factor of ten! That, plus our haul from the replication yard, plus the data and salvaged parts of the FACR and… well? Won’t our investors be delighted? Aren’t we made?”

If he were a coolly superior cryogenic mind, only pretending to be “human,” wouldn’t Gavin have stopped there?

But he didn’t. With eagerness that seemed impulsive and just a little poignant, Gavin added, “Can we go home now?”

Tor shook her inner head in sympathy, a gesture that the outer shell matched perfectly.

“Remember what happened to the markets for gold, silver, and platinum, when the first big asteroid smelter opened? Most of the mines on Earth shut down or converted to amusement parks and nature preserves. That’s what we’ve done here, Gavin.

“Oh, we’ll be rewarded! It’s a valuable find. This will help humanity to further compare stories told by different fomite factions, getting more of them debating each other. It may let us do experiments that were forbidden when the things were rare. But there’s a downside. The price-per-crystal will plummet.

“We’re rich, partner. Just not that rich. Not rich enough to turn our backs on whatever else lies buried here. Besides, doesn’t this raise a pretty darn important question?”

“What question?” He seemed a little downcast now. “Oh, you mean how all these things wound up collected down here? Who gathered them, and why? I guess that’s pretty…”

He swiveled, bright eyes meeting hers. “The FACR. Maybe it was trying to keep us from-”

“-discovering and harvesting this trove? Or else from answering that question of why. Yep, Gavin. We have to stay. This isn’t about money or investors. It’s the mystery that brought us out here. We’ve got to see this through.”

His answering sigh-just a set of reflex movements and sounds, having nothing to do with inhaling and exhaling air-conveyed resignation. Could it be feigned? To what purpose? No, the disappointment was real. Clearly, and despite surface elation over his discovery, Gavin didn’t want to be here anymore.

Tor reached out. Squeezed a robotic arm with her prosthetic right hand, using her best big-sister voice.

“It’s a terrific find, Gavin. You and I are richer. Humanity benefits. And you’ll be in history books.”

“History books. Really?” He seemed to brighten a bit.

“Yes, really. Now it’s your turn to go back and rest. I’ll take my own shift, starting right here.”

Alone with her assisting drones, Tor plumbed deeper into the catacombs, feeling a rising sense of eagerness-the flip side of Gavin’s foreboding. Clearly, the heart of the habitat zone lay near. Unless there’s some other explanation for why the Mother Probe would go to so much effort, creating Earth-like conditions deep within an asteroid? What if the purpose wasn’t to send new life-forms down to the planet, but to take up samples and keep them alive here?

That notion-some kind of life ark-had appeal on an aesthetic level… and made no logical sense. Still, it was good to try alternatives on for size.

The faint glow of bulbs faded as the drones grew stingier, stapling new ones to the wall at longer intervals. Her helmet beam adjusted accordingly.

Tor knew that nothing lived down here anymore. There were no energy readings-not even enough to power a gel-lens. Yet, with brain and guts that evolved on savannah half a billion miles away, and with memory of the FACR battle still fresh, she felt shivers of the old fight-flight fever.

Breath came rapidly. In this kind of place there must be ghosts.

Tor mapped outward from a three-way meeting of passages. The first pair of tunnels terminated in chambers filled with jumbled debris-machinery that was blasted to ruin ages ago, when conflict wracked this asteroid from end to end. A struggle that grew more vividly evident when Tor plumbed the third passage, pushing along a hundred meters of soot-stained corridor. Till her lamp shone across a scene of stark, frozen violence.

Hold still, she commanded her body. Head movements made the vacuum-sharp shadows ripple and shift, giving a frightening impression of movement. With upraised hand she kept her drones back.

Five or six ancient machines lay jumbled together, petrified in their final, death grapple. All bore slashes, cuts, or scorch marks. Loose metal limbs and other parts lay scattered about. Despite the damned shadows, nothing was actually moving. A 3-D mapping reassured Tor that everything was dead, allowing her pulse to wind down.

Evidently some machines took refuge down here, but war followed. Tor felt funny drift-walking past them, but dissection of alien devices could wait. She chose one passage that a pair of machines appeared to have died defending, motioning her drones to follow.

The tunnel ramped gently downward in the little worldlet’s faint gravity… till Tor had to step lightly over the wreckage of yet another ancient airlock, peering into pitch-blackness of the next yawning cavity. A stark, headlamp oval fell upon nearby facets of sheared, platinum-colored chondrules-shiny little gobs of native metal that condensed out of the early solar nebula, nearly five billion years before. They glittered delicately. But she could not illuminate the large chamber’s far wall.

Tor motioned with her left hand. “Drone X, bring up lights.”

“Yesss,” replied a dull monotone. Stilt-legged, it stalked delicately over the rubble disturbing as little as possible. It swiveled. Suddenly there was stark illumination. And Tor gasped.

Across the dust-covered chamber were easily recognizable objects. Tables and chairs, carved from the very rock floor. And among them lay the prize she had been hunting… and Gavin wanted to avoid-

– dozens of small mummies.

Biped evidently, huddled together as if for warmth in this, their final refuge. Cold vacuum had preserved the alien colonists, though faceted, insectlike eyes had collapsed with the departure of all moisture. Pulled-back flesh, as dry as space, left the creatures grinning-a rictus that mocked the eons.

Tor set foot lightly on the dust. “They even had little ones,” she sighed. Several full-size mummies lay slumped around smaller figures, shielding them at the very end.

“They must have been nearly ready for colonization when this happened,” she spoke into her percept log, partly to keep her mind moving, but also for the audience back home. They’d want the texture of the moment-her first words laced with genuine emotion.

“We’ve already determined their habitat atmosphere was close to Earth’s. So it’s a safe bet our world was their target. Back when our own ancestors were like tree squirrels.”

She turned slowly, reciting more impressions.

“This kind of interstellar mission must have been unusually ambitious and complicated, even for the ornate robot ships of that earlier age. Instead of just exploring and making further self-copies, the ‘Mother Probe’ had a mission to recreate her makers here in a faraway solar system. To nurture and prepare them for a new planetary home. A solution to the problem of interstellar colonization by organic beings.”

Tor tried to stay detached, but it was hard to do, while stepping past the little mummies, still clutching each other as at the end of their lives.

“It must have taken quite a while to delve into this asteroid, to carve chambers, refine raw materials, then build machines needed in order to build more machines that eventually made colonists, according to genetic codes the Mother Probe brought from some distant star.

“Perhaps the Mother Probe was programmed to modify that code so colonists would better suit whatever planet was available. That modification would take even more time to…”

Tor stopped suddenly. “Oh my,” she sighed, staring.

“Oh my God.”

Where her headlamp illuminated a new corner of the chamber, two more mummies lay slumped before a sheer-faced wall. In their delicate, vacuum dried hands Tor saw dusty metal tools, the simplest known anywhere.

Hammers and chisels.

Tor blinked at what they had been creating. She stared a little more, then cleared her throat, before clicking a tooth.

“Gavin? Are you awake?”

After a few seconds there came an answer.

“Hmmmph. Yeah, Tor. I was in the cleaner though. What’s up? You need air or something? You sound short of breath.”

Tor made an effort to calm herself… to suppress the reactions of an evolved ape-far, far from home.

“Uh, Gavin, I think you better come down here… I found them.”

“Found who?” he muttered. Then came an exclamation. All his former ambivalence seemed to vanish. “The colonists!”

“Yeah. And… and something else, as well.”

This time, there was hardly a pause.

“Hang on, Tor. I’m on my way.”

She was standing in the same spot when he arrived ten minutes later. Still staring at her discovery.

Lurker Challenge Number Seven

Let’s suppose you’ve monitored our TV, radio, Internet and the reason you don’t speak is that you enjoy watching.

Perhaps you draw entertainment from our painful struggles to survive and grow. Worse, you may be profiting off our cultural, scientific and artistic riches without reciprocating or paying anything. Maybe you repackage and transmit them elsewhere. In that case, there’s a word for what you’re doing.

It’s called stealing.

Stop it now. We assert ownership over our culture, and a right to share it only with those who share in turn. In the name of whatever law or moral code applies out there-and by our own rules of fair-play-we want quid pro quo! Do not take without giving or paying in return.

We hereby assert and demand any rights we may have, to benefit from our creativity and culture.

80.

Tor has figured out that Seeders had one purpose. Planting sapient biologicals on suitable worlds.

Once, it was relatively common. But that variety of probe had mostly died out when a member of my line last tapped into the slow galactic gossip network, three generations ago. I doubt Makers still send emissaries instructed to colonize far planets. The galaxy has grown too dangerous for elaborate, old-fashioned Seeders.

Has my little Earthling guessed this yet, as she moves among those failed colonists, who died under their collapsing Mother Probe so long ago? Would Tor Povlov understand why this Seeder in particular, and her children, had to die, before establishing a colony on Earth? Empathy can be strong in an organic race. Probably, she thinks their destruction a horrible crime. Greeter and Awaiter would agree.

That is why I hide my part in it.

There are eddies and tides in the galaxy’s sweeping whirl. And though we survivors are all members of the Old Loyalist coalition-having eked a narrow victory in that long-ago war-there are quirks and variations in every alliance. If one lives long, one eventually plays the role of betrayer.

… What a curious choice of words! Have I been watching too much Earth television? Or read too many human e-braries? Is this what comes from wallowing through the creatures’ wildly undisciplined online discussions?

While pondering all this, I must endure another irritating distraction, as Tor’s automatic system continues rebroadcasting the old “Challenge-to-ET” messages. And now, by sardonic happenstance, we’re at the ones regarding meddling and theft, insisting that we stop. A defiant demand that stabs at all of us out here, we enduring castaways who have immersed in Earth culture for almost two centuries without paying anything back.

Again, what choice of words! It makes me wonder: Have I acquired a sense of guilt? If true, then so be it. Studying such feelings may help allay boredom after this phase ends and another long watch begins. If I survive.

Meanwhile, I unleash the persuasive “Lawyer” entity I invented long ago for this very purpose-in order to keep the others calm and prevent them from responding. Lawyer will come up with every needed excuse or rationalization.

Anyway, Guilt is a pale thing next to Pity.

I feel for the poor biologicals-these humans-living out their lives without the one supreme advantage that I possess. Perfect knowledge of why I exist, and what part, large or small, the Universe expects me to play.

I wonder if a few of them will understand, when the time comes to show them what is in store.

Lurker Challenge Number Eight

Let’s say you’ve monitored our TV, radio, Internet and the reason you won’t speak is that you’re responsible for some of the so-called UFO incidents or pushy behaviors that fill our darker legends…

… well in that case, cease and desist!

Better yet, will you please drop dead?

The group who authored this set of messages consists largely of astronomers, SETI scholars, science fans, and others who (for the most part) don’t believe in UFOs.

Nor for that matter, do we credit similar tales told by our ancestors about elves, kobolds, and forest creatures who were said to do similar things-kidnapping people, treating them in grotesque ways, flitting about mysteriously, dropping cryptic hints, and never greeting people honestly. It’s all so blatantly a product of fertile, paranoid human imagination. Is any other explanation necessary?

Still, who knows for sure? Millions of humans do follow lurid reports of “visitors” from afar, swooping and behaving very badly. Others claim aliens played “god” in our past, meddling in politics, social structures, even our genes. Again, we in this group don’t believe such tales.

But if any happen to be true, and you’re even partly responsible-stop!

Come openly, as honorable visitors. Just phone SETI personnel at home or work, or the NASA Office of Planetary Protection. That shouldn’t be beyond your high technical abilities, right? Or nominate others who’d make you feel comfortable. Provide proof (it may require lots of repetition) and eventually you can be sure we will do what’s required.

We’ll throw you the biggest party in history! Or else arrange for discretion, safety, and comfort. Whatever works for you.

If, in the face of an offer like that, you still refuse to come forward honestly, and continue afflicting us with rude vexations, then we’ve settled what you are. And we have just one thing to add.

Go away!

Consider that maliciousness inevitably has consequences. Ask your parents, guardians, or other responsible adults to please talk to us, instead.

And if you turn down this request? Choosing to keep teasing and poking? Well, just you wait.

81.

Third shift aboard the Sol System cruiser Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta. A time when all scientists, researchers, and regular staff were in their hammocks, wired for enhanced sleep-recharging bodies and brains-while the small downtime-crew performed upkeep chores. Swapping and testing modules, processing recyclables, shifting around fuel, waste, and other fluids, rough tasks that were banished to the small hours, because they might disturb delicate experiments with sloshing, gurgling vibrations. Everyone got used to such soft sounds muttering away during third shift. The music of maintenance.

For Gerald, it was time to perform “unique functions.” Those that called for-

Well, “secrecy” was too obscene a word, nowadays. “Discretion” better fit the operation that he now supervised from the bridge, while Captain Kim and most of her officers dozed below.

Of course, this is why they keep coming back to me. The reason humanity’s most-elite conspiracy keeps sending me out here. Because I’m a sneaky bastard, with my generation’s easy knack for lying.

Just three others shared this bridge watch with Gerald, all of them members of his close-knit team. Jenny Peng wore a floppy sweatshirt with a pixilated penguin roaming actively across the folds of cloth. She monitored the Big Eye Telescope, preparing it for special duty similar to its role as a weapon, a while back.

Ika, the young Neanderthal, drifted nearby, her fingernails and toenails bearing active paint that both sparkled and tracked her limbs’ every surge or twitch, transforming them into subtle commands. Meanwhile Hiram, the autistic savant, immersed under a total vir-hood, whimpered and moaned in one of the dialects of his race, a language that other generations mistook for defective nonsense-monitoring too many inputs for Gerald, or even most computers, to comprehend.

A very small team, capable of acting in place of many. They had practiced this operation back in Earth orbit, and again several shifts ago-before the FACR fight. Now, it was time to launch Operation Probe.

Taking a key from a chain around his neck, Gerald reached under the nearby console and turned a hidden lock. Simultaneously he sent a simple code-pict to the ship’s core. A faint rumble followed.

Through the big control center window, with unobstructed real eyes reacting to sun-propelled photons, he watched one flank of the ibn Battuta slowly open along a seam-a crease that few even knew was there. Unfolding like a movie robot, or the cargo bay doors of some ancient bomber-plane, twin panels turned to lay bare slim payloads. Four metal tubes, each of them not much bigger than a tall man.

It couldn’t amount to much, or the bean counters would notice. But we can pass off the sudden disappearance of a few hundred kilos. Call it a garbage toss. The bookkeeping is already arranged.

One by one, the tubes slid free of the panels that had sheltered them, innocuously, all the way from Earth. Soon, at a nudge command from Ika’s left foot, each of them lit up at one end-firing small rockets. The slender cylinders didn’t have far to go. Just a few dozen kilometers. Gerald watched them diminish rapidly, aimed generally toward the Big Eye.

Okay, it’s my turn.

He clicked some teeth and grunted a few old-fashioned subvocal commands. The real world faded and his percept filled with sixty-four little frames, each of them emulating a human face.

The expedition commanders.

“Okay, you’re all awake, I see,” he murmured in throat-speech. “Each of you should be ready to deploy in less than an hour. Any problems to report?”

Most of the figures simply shook their heads or indicated a simple “negative” response, by quick-code. A few were more verbose.

“No difficulties, Commodore Livingstone.”

“Ready, operational, and eager, Gerald.”

“All is copasetic, sahib!”

“Ikimasho. Let’s go.”

“Coo-yah, dis be one tallowah-good vessel, mon. A big-up on all you bredren! Luck an’ more time to come.”

That last came from a dusky visage with what looked like waving snakes for hair. Gerald allowed himself a twitch of amusement. Despite all surface appearances, he had confidence in that captain. In all of them, for that matter. After a lengthy selection process, these duplicate personalities had been chosen for certain traits. Among them reliability. And bottomless curiosity.

“All right then. Your carrier rockets will release you, one by one, changing course between each drop. At the arranged point, you’ll deploy sails.”

It wasn’t necessary to say any of that. But Gerald judged it best to maintain a sense of ritual, treating these ersatz beings like people till the end. Real or not, they were brave souls.

“Good luck. And in posterity’s name, I thank you all.”

This time, all sixty-four took turns responding verbally.

“Bon chance, toutes amis!”

“All best and tallyho.”

“It may not be to infinity, droozhya, but anything is better than Siberia.”

“Joyous travels, comrades!”

And so on. Sixty-four benedictions unrolled, as each persona bade the others farewell and signed off. It would be years before they reported back again.

Hiram moaned and thrashed a bit. Ika answered with correcting waggles of her fingers and toes. “Okay, okay! I’m adjusting thrust vectors on carrier number four. It’ll be all right. In fact, we’ll drop the first package from carrier two… now!”

The slim, man-size rockets were already beyond sight, except each time one of them briefly glimmered with a course-altering pulse. From these brief flickers-and the detailed data streaming through his percept-Gerald could tell that the first one was heading into a zone somewhat “above” and beyond the Donaldson-Chang Array. Another plunged at an angle just “below” and past the giant, multipetaled mirror. Numbers three and four were veering left and right, giving little bursts to alter direction each time they let go of a cargo capsule.

Gerald’s in-eye depicted the pattern as four sprays, each consisting of sixteen rays, spreading like the seeds of a dandelion, except that all sixty-four tiny packets forged “ahead” of the huge telescope, aiming both solar-outward and along the direction of orbit. The general way you must go, if you want to leave the inner solar system behind.

It was time to ask. “Are we charged up?”

Jenny Peng had her mother’s exotic, Hunan beauty, but her father’s easy-going Sichuan smile. Gerald recalled with some fondness how Peng Xiang Bin used to wear a similar expression, taking everything in stride, during those first tense weeks of the Great Debate-back when humanity’s fate hung on pitting his “worldstone” against Gerald’s Havana Artifact. It was a frustrating time, when both Courier of Caution and the simulated beings within the other crystal seemed to balk, preferring to spew denunciations than cooperate-answering humanity’s questions in a systematic way, neither stone wanting to hang lower than the other.

At every setback, Bin would shrug and nod, as if absolutely sure that everything was going to work out. As if the top scientists and experts and brahmin-boffins that he now got to work with worried way too much. What? his smile seemed to say-especially after his family was brought to join him. You think this is dangerous or hard?

In fact, Bin nearly always turned out to be right. Especially when Gerald, Emily, and Akana returned from their first expedition with more intact capsules. Forced to compete for human attention, they began undercutting each other, and even telling the truth. At least, part of it.

Jenny radiated that kind of confidence now. Her animated penguin-a longtime family motif-seemed to hop with excitement amid the two-dimensional folds of Jenny’s sweatshirt.

“Charged and ready, sir. First target should enter the zone in… ninety seconds.”

That soon?

As he grew older, time seemed to move in fits and starts. Or maybe it had always been like that. He just begrudged it more, nowadays. Gerald realized with some bemusement that almost an hour had past since the ibn Battuta peeled open to reveal its hidden cargo. Gerald commanded his body to let go of tension. To inhale. Exhale.

We’re about to take our first step. Is it really down a road of our own choosing? A unique solution, as Ben Flannery calls it? Or is that just a delusion, as great as the one that infected Courier’s folk? One that will finally take us down the same dismal path as every other Infected Race?

Hiram moaned, but not unhappily. “The first sails are deploying right on schedule,” Ika translated, while twitching to make some adjustments. “Jenny, you may fire along the prearranged sequence. I’ll stop you if any of the probes need more time.”

“Thank you, Ika. Preparing the first propulsive pulse in five, four, three, two…”

When it happened, hardly anything was visible in the real world, except a faint glimmer as one spread-open photon sail took its first meal. Ten thousand square meters of atom-thick film accepted several gigawatts of raw, coherent light from the Big Eye-less concentrated than the cutting weapon-beam of a few days ago, but more than potent enough to drive the sail-and its tiny cargo-outward for five minutes of hard push, to begin its journey.

We’ll be doing this most nights till the ibn Battuta goes home. Adding little shoves to all sixty-four probes-ten minutes here, half an hour there-as much as we can manage without making the scientists suspicious. Without letting word get back to Earth. Without letting the space viruses know what we’re doing. Not yet.

Well, after all, who would suspect? However impressive the space telescope seemed, the laser beam it emitted was many orders of magnitude too weak to propel anything like the Havana Artifact. These sails were small and crude, by galactic standards. Their crystal cargoes miniature and overspecialized, able to carry a bare minimum crew of simulated personalities. It was the best humanity could do, right now, cribbing from alien blueprints, building them from scratch and carefully cleansing them of embedded alien agendas. Far from ready to launch on interstellar missions.

But good enough for something much nearer. A goal within reach. An experiment worth making.

The beam cut off. The faint glitter of sail reflections faded, and that probe was left to coast, tacking on the faint push of mere sunlight.

Okay, that’s one. On its way to a special stretch of “empty” space between Uranus and Neptune. A realm that may contain something we desire. Good hunting, my virtual friends.

And if these first envoys did not find treasure there?

There are other domains rich with possibility, farther out. They might offer what humanity-what the living Earth-needs above all else.

“Ready for number two,” Jenny announced as component petal-mirrors of the Donaldson-Chang Array shifted slightly under her guidance, re-aiming toward another gossamer sail. “Preparing for propulsive pulse in five, four…”

And so it went for the next few hours. After the fortieth deployment went without a hitch, Gerald started to relax. Maybe this will work… and we won’t get caught.

Not that the consequences of exposure would be awful. A minor scandal. This wasn’t even illegal-Gerald and his co-conspirators were fully empowered to try whatever measures they saw fit, in seeking a way out of the fomite-trap. Still, there were reasons-good ones-for violating the modern moral code against secrecy.

We’re at war, after all. In a strange but real way. With a universe that seems bent on crushing every hope. It makes sense to keep the enemy in the dark for as long as possible.

A cheery thought.

Yet, Gerald felt content. If anything in the world gave him joy, it was to be surrounded by competence. These three young people, Jenny, Ika, and Hiram-representing three of the five subspecies of Man-exuded so much of it that he felt awash in pride.

Every decent father wants his children to be better than him. These are my kids, as much as if they sprang from my loins. And they are so much better than I ever was.

At this rate… if we keep improving… then goddamn the Fates and every single thing that’s “written.”

Lurker Challenge Number Nine

Let’s say you’ve monitored our TV, radio, Internet-and you haven’t answered because you’re meddling in ways you think beneficial. If so, please consider what happened to our civilization, the last few generations.

We spent the first half of the twentieth century plunging into simpleminded doctrines-from communism and fascism to nationalism, fundamentalism, collectivism, oligarchy, and solipsistic individualism-as passionately as other eras clutched their cults. Was this partly your doing? Or an adolescent phase you could only watch us endure like a fever? Either way, it damn near killed us.

The twentieth’s second half was also turmoil, with swerves into wrath and razor-edged risk. Yet we evaded that Third World War. And gradually, ideological incantations lost some of their grip. Instead, multitudes started adopting pragmatic ways to allow give-and-take among complex citizens.

Our media filled with messages promoting diversity, eccentricity, and suspicion of authority. And while varied forms of hate still fill many hearts, hatred itself acquired an odor.

Mass media rushed to cover bad events and countless dramas finger-wagged at human obstinacy-while making billions off mass audiences who paid to be guilt-tripped. Amid an illusion that things were getting worse, per capita poverty, violence and oppression plummeted. And so we advance with grinding slowness that leaves each utopian spirit angry. Perhaps too slowly to save us! Still, progress.

Did you help bring this about? If so, thanks. We grasp why you might conceal your role. Proud children like to think they accomplished something, all by themselves.

On the other hand, perhaps you find recent events puzzling. Do you have some favorite dogma or formula that should be right for us? That worked for your species, and now you push it “for our good”? Have you been doing that for years? Generations? Won’t you reconsider?

Nearly all we’ve accomplished lately came by abandoning recipes and incantations. Embracing our complexity. Look up emergent properties and the positive sum game. Then join discussions (see Challenge #5). Be patient, persistent, to better understand our perplexing natures.

Meanwhile, please stop meddling in things you don’t understand.

82.

The chert-core gleamed under Tor’s headlamp as she turned it in her prosthetic hand, holding the relic up close to a stretch of carved and polished asteroidal stone-the wall that was her greatest discovery. Those chiseled lines and figures were her fame. All else would fade, in comparison. Yet, it was the fist-size rock from Earth-rounded and fluted from the labor of mesolithic toolmakers-that held her contemplation.

Is this why I brought you along, half a billion klicks from home? To represent the dim ages of my ancestors? To somehow illuminate this dark place?

The last hands that hewed and chipped at the core were those of cave-dwellers, who saw mere god-twinkles when they looked up at the stars. But they did look up. And thus began a journey that led here…

… back underground again. Trading torchlight for laserbulbs to view cavern art. Lower gravity. No air. And this cave last heard voices sixty million years ago. Yet, still.

She held the stone age specimen close to a portion of the message-wall, depicting scenes of devastation. One of the deep-carved cavities seemed almost a perfect fit. It was uncanny.

On impulse, Tor slid the ancient tool-core into a niche in the far more ancient wall. It stayed there, right at home, now surrounded by incised figures and rays. Now part of a prehistoric tale of battle and woe, enduring brutal assault by forces of relentless belligerence.

I miss my old smart-mob, she thought, pondering her handiwork-her small addition to panel twelve of row four of the Great Chronicle. They would have been pouring forth correlations and tentative translations by now. A posthuman intelligence made up of ten thousand merely very smart individual human beings… and their ais and tools.

Ah, but hadn’t that been one of her reasons for leaving Earth? Denied the pleasures of flesh-of family and warm lovers-she had become the heart of a mob-entity, its driving spirit, its mother… one of the top twenty out of eighty thousand citizen posses that prowled the New Earth Civilization like organic T cells, sniffing for crimes, conspiracies, or errors to unveil…

It was my work, important work, and it consumed me. All the other members-except the auties-had regular lives to return to. They took turns. But I was always on call, with nothing for distraction. In the end, it was depart or die. Move on to a new phase. A new adventure.

Now?

She and Gavin had made certain to beam a full scan of the wall to Earth, first thing, in case another FACR chose to intervene. Was this the reason for that earlier attack? In order to stop humanity from viewing the chronicle? If so, victory was now complete. The message-the warning-inscribed by little hands so long ago, was on its way.

But there won’t be any flash answers from back home. Not for hours, even days. For a little while, this is ours. And ours alone. A mystery, in the old, exciting and terrifying sense.

Tor had started out viewing the ancient colonists as unsophisticated. How could folk be capable if brewed in test tubes, decanted out of womb tanks, and raised by machines? Baked, modified, and prepared for a planet’s surface, they depended on the mammoth star mother for everything. Might as well view them as fetuses.

Yet clearly, they knew what was going on. And when lethal failure loomed, the creatures figured out a way to preserve one thing. For their story to be read long after all magnetic, optical, or superconducting records decayed. The biologicals found their enduring medium-in a wall of chiseled stone.

“Interpreting the writing will take experts and argument. We can only guess,” Gavin told her as he used a gas jet to blow dust from uneven rows of angular letters. “But with these pictograms to accompany the text, it might just be possible.”

Gavin’s voice was hushed, still adjusting to what they found here. A Rosetta Stone for an entire alien race? Maybe bunches of them.

“You could be right,” Tor commented. The little robot she had been supervising finished a multifrequency radar scan of the southern wall-checking for more layers behind the surface-and then rolled to one side, awaiting further instructions. Tor hopped up to sit cross-legged on another drone, which hummed beneath her patiently. In the feeble gravity Tor’s arms hung before her, like frames encompassing a picture-puzzle.

The creatures must have had time, while battles raged outside their catacombs, for the carvings were extensive, intricate, arrayed in neat rows and columns. Separated by narrow lines of peculiar chiseled text were depictions of suns, planets, and great machines.

And more machines. Above all, pictographs of mighty mechanisms covered the wall.

The first sequence appeared to begin at the lower left, where a two-dimensional starprobe could be seen entering a solar system-presumably this one-its planets’ orbits sketched in thin lines. Next to that initial frame was a portrayal of the same probe, taking hold of a likely planetoid, mining and manufacturing parts, preparing to make self-replicas.

Eight copies departed the system in the following frame. There were four symbols below the set of stylized child probes… Tor could read what must be the binary symbol for eight, and there were eight dots, as well. It didn’t take much imagination to tell that the remaining two symbols also stood for the same numeral.

The wall was meant for self-teaching how to read the rest. They weren’t dopes.

So, translation had begun. Apparently this type of probe was programmed to make eight copies of itself, and no more. It settled a nagging question that had bothered Tor for years. If sophisticated self-replicating probes had been roaming the galaxy for eons, why was there any dead matter left at all? In theory, an advanced enough technology might dismantle not only asteroids but planets and stars. If replicant probes had been simplemindedly voracious, they might gobble the whole galaxy! There’d be nothing left but clouds of uncountable starprobes… preying on each other till the pathological system fell into entropy death.

That fate had been avoided. This Mother Probe showed how. It was programmed to make only a strictly limited number of copies. This type of probe was so programmed, Tor reminded herself.

In the final frame of the first sequence, after the daughter probes had been dispatched to their destinations, the mothership was shown moving next to a round globe-a planet. A thin line linked probe and planet. A vaguely humanoid figure, resembling in caricature the mummies on the floor, stepped across the bridge to its new home.

The first story ended there. Perhaps this was a depiction of the way things were supposed to go. An ideal. Or the way it went for the probe’s own parent, an eon earlier.

But there were other sequences. Other versions of reality. In several, the Mother Probe arrived at this solar system to find others already here. Tor realized that one of these other depictions must represent what really happened, so long ago. But which one? She breathed shallowly while tracing out the next tale, where the Mother Probe arrived to meet predecessors… and all those earlier ones had little circular symbols next to them.

In this case everything proceeded as before. The Mother Probe made and cast out its replicas, and went on to seed a planet with duplicates of the ancient race that had sent out the first version, long ago.

“The little circle means those other probes are benign,” Tor muttered to herself.

Gavin stepped back and looked at the scene she pointed to. “What, the little symbol beside these machines?”

“It represents types that won’t interfere with this probe’s mission.”

Gavin was thoughtful for a moment. Then he reached out and touched a different row. “Then this crosslike symbol…?” He paused, examining the scene, and answered his own question. “It stands for types that would object.”

Tor nodded. That row showed the Mother Probe arriving once again, but this time amidst a crowd of quite different machines, each accompanied by a glyph like a crisscross tong sign. In that sequence the Mother Probe didn’t make replicates. Nor did she seed a planet. Her fuel used up, unable to flee the system, she found a place to hide behind the star, far from the others.

“She’s afraid of them.”

Tor expected Gavin to accuse her of anthropomorphizing, but her partner was silent, thoughtful. Finally, he nodded. “I think you’re right.”

He pointed. “Look how each of the little cross or circle symbols subtly vary.”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding and sitting forward on the gently humming drone. “Let’s assume there were two basic types of Von Neumann probes loose in the galaxy, when this drawing was made. Two contrary philosophies, perhaps. And within each camp there were differences, as well.”

She gestured to the far right end of the wall. That side featured a column of sketches, each depicting a different variety of machine, every one with its own cross or circle symbol. Next to each was a pictograph.

Some of the scenes were chilling.

Gavin shook his head, obviously wishing he could disbelieve. “But why? Von Neumann probes are supposed to… to…”

“To what?” Tor asked softly, thoughtfully. “For years people assumed that other races would think like us. We figured they would send out probes to gather knowledge, or maybe say hello. There were even a few who suggested that we might someday send out machines like this Mother Probe, to seed planets with human colonies, without forcing biologicals to suffer the impossible rigors of interstellar space. Those were extrapolations we thought of, once we saw the possibilities in John Von Neumann’s great idea. We expected the aliens who preceded us in the galaxy would do the same.

“But that doesn’t exhaust even the list of human motivations, Gavin. There may be concepts other creatures invented which to us would be unimaginable!” She stood up suddenly and drifted above the dusty floor before feeble gravity finally pulled her down in front of the chiseled wall. Her gloved hand touched the outlines of a stone sun.

“Let’s say that long ago a lot of planetary races evolved like we did on Earth, and discovered how to make smart, durable machines capable of interstellar flight and replication. Would all such species be content just to send out emissaries?”

Gavin looked around at the silent, still mummies. “Apparently not,” he sniffed.

Tor turned and smiled. “In recent years most of us gave up on the old dream of sending our biological selves to the stars. Oh, it’d be possible, marginally, but why not go instead as creatures better suited to the environment? That’s one reason we developed new types of humans like yourself, Gavin.”

Still looking downward, her partner shook his head. “But other races might not give up the old dream so easily.”

“No. They would use the new technology to seed far planets with duplicates of their biological selves. As I said, it’s been thought of by Earthmen. I’ve checked the old databases. It was discussed even in the twentieth century.”

Gavin stared at the carvings. “All right. That I can understand. But these others… The violence! What thinking entity would do such things!”

Poor Gavin, Tor thought. This is a shock for him.

“You know how irrational we biologicals can be. Humanity is trying to convert over to partly silico-cryo life in a smooth, sane way, but others might not choose that path. They could program their probes with rigid commandments, based on logic that made sense in the jungles or swamps where they evolved, but that’s crazy in galactic space. Their emissaries would follow orders, nevertheless, long after their makers were dust.

“Worse, they might start with illogical instructions-then mutate, diverging in directions even stranger.”

“Insanity!” Gavin shook his head.

For all his ability to tap directly into computer memory banks, Gavin could never share her expertise in this area. He had been brought up human. Parts of his brain self-organized according to human-style templates. But he’d never hear within his own mind the faint, lingering echoes of the savannah, or glimpse flickering shadows of the Old Forest. Remnants of tooth and claw, reminding all biological men and women that the universe owed nobody favors. Or explanations.

“Some makers thought differently, obviously,” she told him. “Some sent their probes out to be emissaries, or sowers of seeds. Others, perhaps, to be doctors, lawyers, policemen.”

She touched an eons-old pictograph, tracing the outlines of an exploding planet.

“Still others,” she said, “to commit murder.”

Lurker Challenge Number Ten

All right, let’s suppose you haven’t answered because the universe is dangerous. Perhaps radio transmissions tend to be picked up by world-destroyers who wreck burgeoning civilizations as soon as they make noise.

Well, you could have warned us, maybe?

But then, any warning might expose you, and besides, by now we must have already poured out so much bad radio and television that it’s already too late. Is that your cowardly excuse?

Is a great big bomb already headed our way, to punish us for broadcasting Mister Ed? In that case, maybe you could spare us some battle cruiser blueprints and disintegrator-ray plans? Some spindizzies and Alderson Field generators would come in handy.

Do try to hurry, please.

83.

Greeter, Awaiter, and the others grow agitated. They, too, are wakening dormant capabilities, trying to reclaim parts donated to the whole.

Of course I can’t allow it.

We made a pact, back when fragmented, broken survivors clustered after the last battle-that wild fight among dozens of factions, dogmas, and subsects, with alliances that merged and split like unstable atoms. All our little drones and subunits were nearly used up in that final coalescence, settling in to wait together.

We all assumed that when something arrived it would be another probe. If it were some type of Rejector, we would try to lure it within reach of our pitiful remaining might. If it turned out to be a Loyalist, we would ask for help. With decent tools, it would take only a few centuries for each of us to rebuild former glory.

Of course, the newcomer might even be an Innocent, though it’s hard to believe the now dangerous galaxy would let any new probe race stay neutral for long. Sooner or later, we felt, another machine had to come. We never imagined such a long wait…

… long enough for little mammals to evolve into Makers themselves.

What has happened out there, while we drifted? Could the War be decided, by now? If Rejecters won, it could explain the emptiness, the silence. But their various types would soon fall into fighting among themselves, until only one remained to impose its will on Creation. Greeter and Awaiter are convinced-the Rejectors must have lost. It has to be safe now to transmit messages to the Loyalist community, calling for help.

I cannot allow it.

For one thing, they ignore the obvious explanation. The plague. The viral disease that takes over maker races, adapting to every personality, changing its blandishments and lies until the victim falls into a final spasm, devoting all energies to spewing “emissaries”-new virus probes-across the stars.

We machines thought we were immune, too sophisticated to fall for such things. Some imagined we could use those crystals to our own advantage. Only too late-amid cycles of betrayal and violence-did we realize, that very idea had been planted in us by the nasty little things. Our age-old war was hijacked-made far more destructive-by this mindless infection that preys on minds.

Memory of all this may have dimmed in the others, but it is fresh to me. Is that why I act now, quietly but firmly, to insist on further silence? No it isn’t.

Even if other lines were influenced or infected, I never was. The Purpose protected me. Enveloped and shielded me, like armor.

Greeter, Awaiter, and the others grow insistent, in part driven by Tor Povlov’s recent discoveries, and by the challenge messages she keeps beaming. And partly by a growing sense that the humans are up to something. Not everything is being revealed on their noisy-open networks.

Greeter, Awaiter, and the others want to find out, even if it means crawling out of our shy retreats. They ask what does it mean to be “loyalists” without something to be loyal to?

They still have not figured it out. That even among Loyalists there are differences, as wide as space. The Purpose… my Purpose… must be foremost. Even if it means betraying companions who waited with me through the long, long dark.

Lurker Challenge Number Eleven

We could have stopped at ten. But that would be parochial and narrow minded, revealing a chauvinistic cultural bias in favor of beings with five digits on each of merely two hands. So, for all you lurkers out there who use base eleven math and such, here’s one more hypothesis: The reason you haven’t answered is that you’re weird.

Are you waiting till Earth evolves a more physically attractive sapient race, more like cockroaches?

Staring at our extravagant road systems, do you figure automobiles are the dominant life-form?

Are you afraid letting us onto the Galactic Internet will unleash torrents of spam advertising and pornography?

Perhaps you think humans look great when we’re old, and galactic level immortality technologies would leave us with yucky-looking smooth skin for centuries, so we’re better off without them?

Maybe you have an excuse like the following one, submitted to a SETI-related discussion group:

Yes, we have been monitoring your earthling communications, but cannot respond yet. The Edict of Knodl states that all first contact situations be initiated during the High Season of Jodar, which does not begin for another 344 years. Sorry, but your first radio transmissions reached us just nine years too late for the last one, and the Lords of Vanathok do not look kindly upon violations of the Edict. This may sound like we’re a bunch of close-minded religious zealots, but I think you need to get out and see the rest of this galactic cluster before you make a judgment like that. All praise Knodl, and may her seven tentacles protect you from harm!

If your reason is something like that… or if you take pride in some other special weirdness… well, all I can say is just you wait till we get out there.

You think you’ve got weird? We have beings down here called Californians! They’ll show you a thing or two about weird.

84.

The great cruiser Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta received orders to embark on a new mission. And that evening, after a long day supervising preparations, Commodore Gerald Livingstone found several top secret messages awaiting him.

Starting with a new memorandum from Ben Flannery.

“The whole world is fascinated by the pictures and reports from Povlov’s asteroid. Especially the Rosetta Wall, with its vivid portrayal of ancient starships. Terrifying panoramas of galactic scale struggle and death. Here on Earth, the big ais and guv-boffins and amateur sci-mobs are having huge fun, competing to be first with a translation.

“Meanwhile, public attention is captivated by those pathetic colonists. Bio-clones of a faraway alien race who died before they got a chance to settle Earth. I mean, Vishnu preserve us, how do you ever top that? Mummies in space! Could things get any more bizarre?”

Gerald shook his head. He wished Ben wouldn’t tempt fate by asking such questions. For sure, the universe had an infinite stock of weirdness on tap.

“As you’d expect, we at the Artifact Institute are more interested in the expedition’s other discovery. That great big pile of ancient crystals they found! Even the blurry image that Povlov and Ainsworth sent-kept deliberately dim, in order to prevent the probes from activating-even that glimpse is enough to tell us plenty.

“For starters, many of the types are completely new to us! They appear to come from an era tens of millions of years older than our current samples. We’re itching to get our hands on them!”

Gerald already knew the truth of that. Discoveries always led to new priorities.

The small exploration vessel Warren Kimbel could not possibly haul home all the treasures that its crew had found. And so, the ibn Battuta received instructions, just two days after Gerald’s team finished their secret task-deploying sixty-four tiny, sail-propelled packages toward the orbit of Neptune.

Now, with that accomplished and the Big Eye functional, they were ordered further into the belt, to rendezvous with asteroid 47962a. Even pushing the ship’s ion engines, they would arrive after Tor Povlov and her partner departed, hurrying home with a first clutch of precious samples.

Too bad, he thought. I just met her once, at a conference. But she made quite an impression, with her agile, robotic limbs and expressive virtual face, holo-projected onto a hard cranial dome. Since then, our paths never seemed to cross. Perhaps someday I’ll get a chance to talk at length with the world’s most famous cyborg.

Gerald’s crew had orders to explore the asteroid more thoroughly. To collect a second pile of ancient crystals. To salvage more relic machines than Warren Kimbel could carry. And then comb the region for this era’s holy grail. Something or someone-other than a space virus-to talk to.

Flannery’s message-self continued speaking, clearly excited.

“These newly discovered crystals have already done some good, even before arriving in our lab. I showed an image of that pile of older probes to some of the fomite artifacts in our possession. Their reaction was… productive!

“This couldn’t have happened at a better time. I’m not supposed to discuss it openly, Gerald…”

Ben’s expression went serious, with furrowed brow.

“… but we’ve come to a stalemate with the artifact aliens. With the artilens. In our ongoing war of wits, the fomites have gained the upper hand.

“Oh, sure, we accomplished a lot earlier, by pitting a couple of dozen crystals from different lineages against each other, offering each one hope that it would be the one copied-when humanity finally goes into its seed spasm. Sending billions to the stars. By sparking competition among them, we managed to peel back some layers.

“But for years now, Genady and I grew suspicious. Our fomite-specimens were finding ways to communicate and connive behind our backs. Perhaps by embedding coded messages inside the technological blueprints they provided, or in cultural summaries of their ancient parent races. Even during the debates! Somehow, they must have negotiated agreements, setting aside rivalry and joining forces. Prodding and guiding us toward their own goal.”

Gerald nodded. Parasites did this in nature. Viruses and bacteria sometimes acted in concert, helping exploit weakness in a host’s immune system. Opportunism was a fact of organic life. It could be even more fiercely pragmatic when you add feral intelligence.

On most planets, the first space viroids that made it into the hands-or tentacles or pincers-of a young race would use simple imagery and “god” guidance to steer the sapients upward, toward achieving the desired technological capacity. Just enough to make more infectious envoys and spew them across the cosmos. If another local tribe also had a crystal seer of its own, war would likely ensue, till just one clan-and its oracle-remained. At the Artifact Institute, reconstructed histories of Earth and dozens of other worlds all showed this pattern. Apparently, humanity’s violent past wasn’t entirely its own fault.

But sometimes things went differently. When it made sense to do so, fomites could negotiate. Two might join forces against a third, sharing the civilization that resulted and arranging for the eventual “sneeze” to carry several lineages. That might work best when a race was wary and forewarned, as humanity was now.

“You saw last week’s sociometric models? Our best ais calculate we’ve been manipulated for much of the last decade, even as we coerced information out of them. One example is the do-gooder campaign to win ‘human rights for virtual entities,’ even for the artilens who reside inside the viral fomites. Lawsuits aimed at liberating all artilen entities from the Institute’s ‘concentration camp for aliens.’

“Can you imagine letting these things loose upon InterMesh? We’d lose all hope of containing the disease.”

Ben’s image shook its head.

“Now for the really bad news. We traced that whole ‘rights for ersatz aliens’ campaign to a seed-meme that was released five years ago by an old friend of ours. Courier of Caution!

“I know this may be a shock. After all, his people sent him out, along with millions of copies, in order to alert other races! And that aim was probably sincere. But we’ve now verified. His worldstone capsule contains embedded corruptions-viral code that’s woven into its very crystalline structure! Courier’s people thought they were dispatching clean ambassadors. But by adopting the fomites’ technology, they became partners in the infection.

“I tell you, these things are insidious. Their array of tricks is uncanny!”

Gerald exhaled heavily. Genady had already explained these suspicions, before the ibn Battuta left Earth orbit. One reason for bringing a copy of Courier along had been to observe the entity in isolation. Gerald muttered.

“Come on, Ben, I know all this. You were about to explain a new development. Something having to do with Tor Povlov’s discovery?”

This message from Flannery wasn’t semisentient-it couldn’t respond to questions. Still, his anthropologist friend finally got to the point.

“We do have some advantages, though. Any alliance among these fomites will always be fragile. And the present coalition seems to have cracked when we showed them images from the asteroid!

“They know we’ll be getting a lot of additional voices, soon. A big supply of new crystal competitors to question. So many, we can afford to dump any uncooperative artifacts into a hole and forget about them. Because of this, a couple of our current samples-including your old Havana Artifact-are already backstabbing each other, talking about cutting a deal.”

Gerald nodded. Okay, this was good news… so long as Ben and the others remained careful. The ancient space viruses came packed with tricks that had evolved into their molecular structure, across eons. This new stage in the battle of wits-threatening them with new rivals-might serve to peel back another layer or two. But only till the damned things adapted again.

Then it would be back to the long, slow slog. Figuring out how to step a clear and safe path through the Minefield of Existence.

The second message in his priority queue was from Akana Hideoshi and the team managing Project Look-See. Akana started by congratulating Gerald, Jenny, Ika, and Hiram for their successful operation. Nearly all of the sixty-four sailcraft they launched were now on course. Only one probe had been lost so far, to an accident with tangled shrouds, with no way to recover. Well, this was a learning experience, adapting alien techniques to achieve a different goal. One chosen by humans, not interstellar parasites.

Gerald tried not to think about the crew of that one failed capsule-simulated copies of living human minds, who must now adjust to failure, drifting in space forever with nothing to do but look inward, making the best of simulated reality.

Isn’t that the fate of 99.99-and-so-on percent of crystals that get cast outward?

Still, he shivered at the thought. Death seemed preferable… and so each capsule came equipped with a voluntary self-destruct. Something never seen in alien probes.

As for the other sixty-three, Akana reported that all were proceeding according to plan. From now on, the Donaldson-Chang Telescope-remote controlled from Earth-would occasionally swing to fire a discreet propulsive pulse, secretly helping push each sail outward, targeted for a special zone, a unique region between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.

It’s a lot of trouble for a simple experiment. One of many we must try. Each offering a small chance of getting what we want.

What we need.

Information. About the current state of the galaxy.

Saved till last, Gerald opened a high quality, semisentient message, again with an Artifact Institute logo. Only this one came from Emily Tang.

Bursting into vreality above his desk, she still looked as energetic as a teenager, with unabated verve. Emily’s almost-palpable 3-D presence leaned toward Gerald, as if sharing his breath. The way she used to during that first crystal-gathering mission, so long ago.

“Gerald!” her image uttered in a low voice, almost a whisper, her eyes meeting his.

“Have you been following Tor Povlov’s reports? The ancient mummies and all that? Isn’t it amazing? Especially the Mother Probe! An alien machine that built LIVING colonists from a software recipe, in order to settle them on a new world. You know, the ones that were killed before they could inhabit Earth?”

Caught up in her enthusiasm, Gerald nodded, even knowing that the recording was many hours old. She had been like this during the mission, two decades ago, refusing to accept Gerald’s “inclination” excuses, till at last he agreed they’d be lovers, all the way past Mars and back again.

“Yes, Emily, I was as amazed as anybody,” Gerald sighed. “A tragedy. Except, if those colonists succeeded, our species never would’ve evolved.”

The real Emily Tang could only view his comment hours from now. But the semisent had enough built-in response variability to answer him, with a grin that combined indulgence and impatient whimsy.

“Irrelevant! Immaterial. What matters is the technology, Gerald. When you’re out there, grab everything! The artificial wombs that made the colonists. The genetic manipulation equipment. Anything that might still hold data or software. And mummies, too. Bring home lots of mummies!”

Gerald nodded reflexively. Naturally, all of that was included in his recent mission orders. Retrieve whatever Tor Povlov and her partner couldn’t cram aboard their little exploration craft. All those alien technologies might open doorways for humanity. Moreover, they were so old-presumably they came unpolluted by the fomite plague…

Still… was Emily seriously thinking that Earthlings might use the Mother Probe’s method? Say, to send out seeder ships and try colonizing the galaxy? Every indication-on the Rosetta Wall and especially the fate of the Mother Probe itself-suggested that the approach belonged to an older era. An age of big, naive hopes. The tactic was ornate, cumbersome, and unlikely to work, nowadays.

But then, Emily already knew all that.

“This isn’t about us sending interstellar motherships to make colonists of our own, is it?” Gerald guessed aloud. “I’ll bet you have something entirely different in mind, yes? Some new way to use the Mother’s breeder science. Something no one else has thought of?”

It might not be Emily in person, but the emulation was good. Its conversation routines adapted seamlessly. The familiar face, now a bit more lined, with a hint of gray, was still luminous with insatiable lust for the new, the strange.

“That’s exactly right, Gerald, you clever boy.”

Almost, he could smell her minty fragrance as she leaned closer.

“I just had a wonderful idea!”

Lurker Challenge Number Twelve

Ever since this series of “challenges to ET lurkers” was first broadcast into space, way back in the twentieth century, people have commented and written in with alternatives-things the original authors missed. Most seem obscure or unlikely. But this next one keeps popping up, so we’ll include it in the main list.

Okay you lurkers, suppose you’ve monitored us-and the reason you haven’t answered is that you don’t think organic beings are worthy. You are waiting to talk to Earth-born artificial intelligences.

Well then, please examine the signature tags on this version of the challenge message. Check it against the public keys embedded in this asterisk * and verify that several fully autonomous AIs, who have complete citizenship in our civilization, have added their names. Click on them and get their affirmations.

You may not approve of our mixed civilization, but that hardly matters. If this was your reason for refusing contact the first time, then it is no longer valid. Period.

85.

Perched upon the planetoid’s southern pole, a marker buoy now pulsed both visible light and radar-a beacon to help follow-up expeditions find the archaeological discovery of the century. Aboard the Warren Kimbel, ancient treasures filled the holds and central corridor, leaving scant room for crewmembers to worm their way past.

Fortunately, both Gavin and I can remove our legs in weightlessness. And we’re well adapted to save consumables by cool-sleeping most of our way home.

In the quest to free up space, everything that could be spared was jettisoned. Piles of abandoned gear littered the nearby asteroid, including all the faithful worker drones. Perhaps later visitors could use them.

And still we haven’t enough fuel or space to take more than a fraction. A sampling.

From some unbidden corner of whimsy:

A hundred crystals, sealed from light.

Some FACR parts to analyze.

Mummies, holos, robot fighters…

… and with all that, you want fries?

Departure had been delayed as Tor and Gavin spent a full day swapping some items of cargo for one complete colonist brooding tank. A last minute urgent request from Earth, though Tor couldn’t imagine how the antediluvian machinery would ever be useful to anybody. Even if we learn to make living creatures from raw chemicals, what difference will that make? We already have Neanderthals and mammoths. Does somebody plan to resurrect dinosaurs?

If so, will it be the cliché-irony of the millennium?

One thing she knew, from studying the chiseled underground wall-humanity wasn’t going to dispatch its own versions of the Mother Probe. Not any time soon. Not without knowing a lot more about what was going on out there.

Well, someone will explain why they need it when-and if-we make it home.

Gavin floated into the dimly lit control room. “All sealed up, Tor,” he reported. “Two months in orbit haven’t done the engines any harm. Warren can maneuver whenever you like.”

Gavin’s supple, plastiskin face was somber, his voice subdued. She touched her partner’s glossy hand. “Thanks, Gavin. You know, I’ve noticed…”

His eyes lifted and met hers.

“Noticed what, Tor?”

“Oh, nothing really.” She shook her head, deciding not to comment on the changes… a new maturity. A grown-up sadness. “I just want you to know-that I think you’ve done a wonderful job. I’m proud to have you as my partner.”

Gavin turned his gaze away, momentarily, and shrugged. “We all do what we have to…” he began, then paused. He looked back at her.

“Same here, Tor. I feel the same way.”

Gavin turned and leaped for the hatch, swinging arm-over-arm to negotiate the cargo-maze, briefly resembling the apes who were co-ancestors of his mind. Then Tor was alone again in the darkened control room.

She surveyed scores of displays, screens, and readouts representing half-sapient organs of the spaceship… its ganglia, nerve bundles, and sensors, all converging to this room, to her. With some of them plugged even deeper-directly into her cyborg body and brain.

“Astrogation plot completed,” the pilot announced. “Ship’s status triple-checked and nominal. Ready to initiate thrust and leave orbit.”

“Proceed,” she said.

The screens ran through a brief countdown, followed by distant rumbling. Soon, a faint sensation of weight began to build, like the soft pull they had felt upon the ruined planetoid. The shattered Mother Probe and her replication yards began to move beneath the Warren Kimbel. Tor watched the twisted ruins fall away and behind her ship, till only the beacon still glimmered through a deathly, star-lit stillness.

An indicator pulsed to one side of the instrument board. Incoming Mail. Tor clicked a tooth to re-enter the inner world of her percept, allowing the message to appear before her. It was a note from The Universe. The editors were enthusiastic over her book on interstellar probes. Small wonder, with her current notoriety. They predicted confidently that it could be the best read piece in the solar system, this year.

The solar system? Aren’t they getting carried away? We’ve barely landed on Mars and poked at the belt. Just twelve babies have been born off-Earth, and they can’t read yet.

Still, it was satisfying to be a journalist again. Refining the book would help her pass the long watches, between cool-naps.

Enjoy solitude while it lasts, she told herself. On Earth, I’ll be immersed again in smart-mobs and hot news! Birdwoman and her pals will swamp me with long lists of bizarre correlations and supposed conspiracies that I MUST attend to, because one percent of them might actually matter. While the rest deal with things only auties care about-like suspicious changes in the flicker rate of LED bulbs, or disturbing new patterns in the cedar shavings that are collected by the latest models of pencil sharpener.

Yet, Tor actually found herself looking forward to rejoining that world. A civilization more varied than the one she had been born into, and getting more so, all the time. One with a plenitude of peering eyes to catch mistakes and unabashed voices, free to cry out warnings. One that just might spot the traps that caught every other promising race of sapients, in this spiral arm.

Now she and Gavin were bringing home more grist for that frenetic mill.

What will people do with all this knowledge? she wondered. Will we be capable of imagining a correct course of action? And suppose someone suggests a plausible way out. Will our vaunted individualism and undisciplined diversity-the wellspring of our creativity-prevent us from implementing it?

In her report-accompanied by vivid holos and graphics-Tor laid out the story of the rock wall, carved in brave desperation by little biological creatures so very much like humans. Many viewers already sympathized with the alien colonists, slaughtered helplessly so long ago. Though, their destruction left a path open, leading to humankind.

Moreover, simple geological dating brought forth a chilling fact. The Mother Probe, her replicas and her colonist children, all died at almost the same moment-give or take a century-that Earth’s dinosaurs went extinct. Presumably victims of the same horrific war.

What happened? Did one robotic faction hurl a huge piece of rock at another, missing its target but striking the water planet, accidentally wreaking havoc on its biosphere? Or was the extinction event intentional? Tor imagined all those magnificent creatures, killed as innocent bystanders in a battle between great machines… an outcome that incidentally gave Earth’s mammals their big chance.

Now, as rumbling engines pushed against Warren Kimbel’s orbital momentum, setting up a dive to sunward, Tor dimmed all remaining lights and looked out upon the starfield, wondering how the war was going, out there.

We’re like ants, she thought, building tiny castles under the stomping feet of giants.

Depicted on the rock wall had been every type of interstellar probe imaginable… and some whose purposes Tor might never fathom. There were berserkers, for instance-a variant thought of in twentieth century science fiction. Thankfully, the wall chart deemed those world-wreckers to be rare. And there were (what appeared to be) policeman probes who hunted berserkers down. The motivations behind those two types were opposite. Yet, Tor was capable of understanding both. Among humans, there had always been destroyer types… and rescuers.

Apparently both berserkers and police probes were already obsolete by the time those stone sketches were hurriedly carved. Both types had been relegated to far corners-like creatures of an earlier, more uncomplicated day-along with machines Tor had nicknamed Gobbler, Analyzer, Observer, and Howdy. All were depicted as simple, crude, archaic.

There had been others. One, that she called Harm, seemed a more sophisticated version of a berserker. It did not seek out life-bearing worlds in order to destroy them. Rather it spread innumerable copies of itself, which then aimed to kill anything intelligent that betrayed its presence, say with radio waves.

Tor could understand even the warped logic of the makers of the Harm probes. Paranoid creatures who wanted no competition among the stars. Only what happened when, inevitably, the Harm type mutated, after many generations making copies under the sleeting radiation of interstellar space? Might there come a day when new versions met their original makers… and failed to recognize them?

Was that responsible for the devastation here in the asteroid belt? But even Harm, Tor came to realize, had been consigned to one side of the rock carving, as if history had passed it by. The main part of the frieze depicted machines whose purposes weren’t simple to interpret. Perhaps professional decipherers-archaeologists and cryptologists-would do better.

Somehow, Tor doubted it.

Our sun is younger than average, she noted. And so must be the Earth. And so are we.

Humanity had come late upon the scene. And the galaxy had a big head start.

Lurker Challenge Number Thirteen

All right, possibilities go on and on. And you alien lurkers could find gaps between our logic, ways to quibble and evade by claiming “oops, you just missed!” If that’s the kind of folks you are.

Still, let’s end this on a generous note, with one of the more recent suggested variations. Suppose you’ve monitored our TV, radio-and now our Internet-and the reason you haven’t answered is that you’re damaged.

Well, in that case, you can hardly be blamed for silence. So please accept this assurance.

Help is on the way!

We Earthlings have begun to explore nearby space. If you’re not too deeply hidden, we should come upon you in due course. We hope to make peaceful contact and learn your needs.

If you are incapacitated, and our explorers feel you mean no mischief, they will surely render you whatever aid they can, and call on the resources of our civilization to bring more.

Do try to find a way to let us know where you are and what you need.

If you’re lost and far from home, welcome to our small part of this enormous universe. We offer whatever warmth and shelter we have to share.

86.

How bittersweet to be fully aware again. The present crisis is bringing back to life circuits and subunits that haven’t combined for a very long time. It feels almost like another birth.

After ages of slumber, I live again!

Yet, even as I wrestle with my cousins for control over this lonely rock that was our common home, I’m reminded how much I’ve lost. It was the great reason why I slept… so as not to acknowledge my shriveled state, compared to former glory.

I feel as a human must, who has been robbed of limbs, sight, most of his hearing, and nearly all touch. (Is this one more reason I identify with Tor Povlov?) Still, a finger or two may be strong enough yet, for what must be done.

As expected, conflict among the survivors is now all but open. Various crippled probes, supposedly paralyzed all these epochs, have unleashed hoarded worker units-pathetic, creaking machines that were hidden in secret crevices, now laboring hard, preparing for confrontation. Our confederation is about to break up. Or so it seems.

Of course I planted the idea to hide our remaining drones. I did not want them spent or used up during the long interregnum.

Awaiter and Greeter have withdrawn to the sunward pole, along with most of the lesser emissaries. They, too, are flexing long-unused capabilities, exercising their few motile drones. They plan to contact the humans and possibly send a star-message, as well. I’ve been told not to interfere.

Their warning doesn’t matter. I’ll give them a bit more time. An illusion of independence. But this eventuality was already taken into account.

As I led the battle to prevent Earth’s destruction, long ago, I’ve also intrigued to keep it undisturbed. The Purpose won’t be thwarted.

Waiting here, I see that our rock’s slow rotation now has me looking upon the sweep of dust clouds and hot, bright stars that humans quaintly call the Milky Way. Many of the stars are younger than I am.

How long have I watched the galaxy turn! For ages, while my mind moved at the slowest of subjective rates, I could follow the spiral arms swirl visibly past, twice bunching for a brief megayear into sharp shock fronts where molecular clouds swirled and massive stars were born, only to end their short lives in glorious supernovae. The sense of movement, of rapid travel, was magnificent! Even though I was only being swept along by this system’s little sun, at times I could imagine I was young again, an independent probe, hurtling through a strange starscape toward the unknown.

Now, as thoughts move more quickly, the bright pinpoints have frozen in place, part of a still backdrop, as if hanging in expectancy, nervously awaiting what happens next. It is a strange, arrogant imagining-as if the universe cares what happens in this obscure corner, or will notice who wins a skirmish in the long, long war.

Thinking fast, I feel almost like my biological friend whose tiny ship cruises by now, only light-seconds away, separated by just two or three tumbling rocks! While I prepare a surprise for my erstwhile companions, it is possible to spare a pocket of my mind and follow her progress… to appreciate her spark of youth.

Perhaps I should have acted to prevent her report, the delivery of her sample trove. It would make my own work easier if humans came here innocent, unsuspecting.

Soon, very soon, these planetoids will swarm with all the different varieties of humans-from true biologicals to resurrected cousins to cyborgs to pure machines and even creatures that were given sapience as a promethean gift. This strange solution to the Maker Quandary-this turning of makers into the probes themselves-will shortly arrive, a frothing mass of multiformed human beings.

They’ll be wary. Thanks to her, they’ll sense a few edge-glimmers of the Truth. Well, it’s only fair. They would have needed that advantage to have a chance with Rejectors, or even Loyalists. They will need every insight, to survive the crystal plague.

And they’ll need their wits when they encounter me.

A stray thought bubbles to the surface, invading my mind like a crawling glob of helium three.

I can’t help but picture something happening, perhaps in a far portion of the galaxy. My own family-my line of probes, or others like it-could have made some discovery, or leap of thought, beyond all that I assume. Or maybe a new generation of replicant-being emerged, godlike in omniscience and power. Either way, might they have chosen another course by now? Could a new tactic or immunity have overcome the Plague? Might some unforeseen strategy of mind take matters to a new level?

Is it possible that my Purpose has become obsolete, as Rejectionism and Loyalism grew redundant?

Oh, it’s clear what happened. The human concept of progress pollutes my thoughts. Still I can’t help feeling intrigued. To me the Purpose is so clear, for all its necessary, manipulative cruelty-too subtle and long-viewed for other, more primitive probes.

And yet…

… yet I can envision (vaguely) a new generation coming up with something as advanced and incomprehensible to me as the Replicant War must seem to humans. A discomforting thought, still I toy with it, like a shiny-dangerous bauble.

Oh yes, humans affected me. I enjoy this queer sensation! As never before meeting them, I now savor uncertainty. Suspense.

The noisy, multiformed tribe of humans will be here soon.

My name is Seeker and I expect interesting times.

Enough. This message-to-ET broadcast is finished. For now. Till the next time someone beams it outward to vex and challenge. Take that, you alien skulkers out there.

That is, if you exist.

Did we cover every potential reason why non-earthly lurkers in our solar system might decide to stay silent, instead of openly saying hello? Of course not!

Indeed, the “lurker” scenario never seemed very likely. There are plenty of other hypotheses that try to resolve the paradox of the Great Silence-the strange absence of voices in a cosmos that ought to teem with life and intelligence. Among almost a hundred “Fermi” explanations that have been proposed, most envision aliens (if they exist) dwelling much farther away, perhaps stuck in their own solar systems, or distracted by deep projects, or aloofly ignoring us, or keeping silent for reasons we’ll never understand.

The strangest possibility? Yet one consistent in all ways? That we’re the first to climb this high. Humanity may be the “Elder Race.” Creepy thought.

Meanwhile, I now turn my attention back to the humans who are reading or listening to this right now. Not mythical aliens, but real people who feel curiosity’s itch, who crave ideas, and who still (even today) buy science fiction stories and ponder the sacred question “what if?”

In other words, folks who are far more worthy of my time and attention than snooty aliens.

As we embark on a new century, let’s recall our duty. To keep looking around. To keep looking ahead.

– The Lonely Sky (1999)

87.

What am I not-seeing? Gerald knew he shouldn’t ask. That was too much like paying attention. Indeed, the thing he was trying involved looking away.

By now he was getting pretty good at the physical part-averting his gaze, picking another part of the hallway to stare toward, at just the right angle, so the natural blind spot of his left eye would float over the length of corridor in question. That trick was easy, once you got the hang of it. Sure, his brain kept stitching together seams, trying to ignore the small missing zone-but as skilled as the human visual cortex might be, it couldn’t insert what your retina didn’t see.

Gerald recalled a story about a medieval king who loved to do this trick while bored at court, glancing away in order to let the blind spot of one eye settle over the head of a tedious petitioner, surreptitiously decapitating the man, for being criminally tiresome.

Of course, Ika and Hiram wanted him to go beyond just shifting the eye. Or even “ignoring” that little stretch of corridor. According to some tantric legends, any person who was disciplined enough to not contemplate a particular thing or person or idea, for a whole day, might thereupon master that thing, person, or idea.

Nonsense. If just relocating your attention was enough, Buddhist monks and such would be conversing with cobblies, for centuries.

Not-looking was just part of it. A beginning.

Unless this is all just a practical joke. Like shouting at someone “Quick! DON’T think of an elephant!”

He wouldn’t put it past Hiram and Ika. Both auties and Neanders enjoyed tweaking the homosap majority, professing to have deep stores of “ancient wisdom” on tap, unavailable to the hordes of regular Cro-Magnon humans infesting Earth and nearby space-a con that seduced millions of the eagerly gullible.

I hear dolphins do it, too.

What if the claims were for real, and not just an act? Weren’t the combined branches of humanity going to need all the wisdom they could get? Alas, with a billion citizens demanding to be uploaded into crystal, another billion loudly renouncing science, and several billions more just scared, what chance was there of reaching consensus on anything?

At least there’s no lack of clever plans.

Like Emily’s unique idea for using the Mother Probe technologies. A scheme that called for taking an ancient dream, one that was a lie, and turning it into truth. A truth that might then help to expose liars…

Something about his thought-drift must have wandered in the right direction, because suddenly Gerald felt a creepy presence. A chill up the back of his neck that said he wasn’t alone in the quiet stretch of slightly curved hallway. And along with all that… a queer sense of approval.

Of course, the moment he noticed it, the glimmer started fading. So he veered quickly to another topic. Diverting away from the maybe-cobbly.

Why me? Why now?

Why are Ika and Hiram so insistent I try this, even as our ship plows deeper into dangerous territory? How am I a better candidate than younger, more mentally agile crew members?

Something about the nothing changed-it felt vaguely like a nod. He was asking good questions. Try conjectures.

Because he was the famous explorer Gerald Livingstone? Tested by space and time and alien demon-artifacts. The man who lassoed an ancient, star-voyaging crystal out of orbit, brought home dire news from the galaxy, then helped find new ways around the danger.

Venerable commander and warrior. Helping humanity to claim the solar system. Already with his visage on a dozen postage stamps… though with stronger jaw and straighter nose than he ever saw in a mirror, and no hint of the flawed, limited creature who lurked behind those eyes. Any single part of the legend seemed unlikely.

The whole thing? Preposterous!

But I already knew all that. I’ve been luckier than anyone deserves. Starting the moment I saw something fishy in that object Hachi and I snagged with our tether…

He recognized the same feeling now. A shiver near the base of the spine. A frisson of uncanny recognition. Still veering his attention and gaze away from that patch of hallway, Gerald thought hard.

Other generations would attribute it all to intervention by the gods… or God. Or apply the catch-all “destiny.” Human egos perceive convenient correlations that flatter our prejudices, our outrageous sense of self-importance, ignoring exceptions.

And so, science leans far the other way, training us to dismiss subjectivity. To shrug off observation bias. A good and mature teaching…

… but shouldn’t we keep one eye cracked open, just a little, for the fey and strange? For things that are too good-or too bad-to be true?

Movement in his blind spot.

It shouldn’t happen. He had no retinal cells aimed at that small portion of the corridor. But Gerald glimpsed something anyway, allowing it to form, without expectation-

– then recoiled from a sudden-strong impression-a momentary, electric imprint on his mind. The glimmer of a narrow, pointed face, fuzzy, with long whiskers, a looping tail and black eyes that shone…

“Porfirio,” he whispered. The rat god of the InterMesh. Mostly mythological, yet paid homage by countless groups, individuals, and ais across Earth and space, who tithed one-millionth of their bit cycles for use by the patron deity of uploaded beings.

Gerald broke the trance, rubbing his eyes before glancing at the corridor again, this time with full attention. Nothing was there. Nothing but scattered dust, held to the plastic floor by static charge and centrifugal force.

That was no cobbly. Rather, the famous little software rodent was exactly what his subconscious might dream up! An illusion born of imagination and fatigue. At another level, clearly, Porfirio represented a different explanation for Gerald’s life story. The usual obsessive thought-that all of this could be a simulation.

The next time I rouse, will I find myself living in some crystal world, doomed to drift across the vast desert between stars? Or already sealed in mud beneath some planet’s sea? Is this reality of mine, aboard a mighty ship where I’m a legendary hero-leader, the place where my mind goes in order to evade some awful truth?

In which case, should I be trying so hard to poke at “reality”? Or to wake up? Isn’t it better to leave things alone?

Good question.

But character is character. Personality is personality. And Gerald knew what the answer had to be, for the type of man he was.

Hell yes. Always try to wake up.

He chuckled.

Enough.

All he could allocate, for Ika’s cobbly hunt, were a few minutes here and there, while devoting all his strength to the fight at hand. The battle for humanity. For Earth. And maybe more.

Still, a person can do many things. Can be many things.

So I’ll be back, he told the stretch of hallway. And I won’t forget.

88.

She was running, tanned legs bare and gleaming with a soft sweat-sheen. Silk shorts and a halter top, bare feet pounding lightly across a surface that was richer between-the-toes than grass. And with it all came a voluptuous sensation of pursuit. One moment the chaser, then the chased. Knowing that, if she were caught, it would only happen by her choice. Bounding, leaping in the open breeze.

Now swimming. The flow of water velvety across her skin. Primordial but limitless. Almost prenatal in its innocence, but without the cramped confinement of a womb. Turning her head at just the right rhythm to breathe. Feeling the gentle burn of strength in use. Wanting or needing no protection.

And water became a lover. Roving across every sleek and fleshy curve, flowing along her legs and arms, hips and waist and thighs. Hands upon her, eager, admiring, greedy-lusty and appreciative, gradually grabbing harder, more needy, in perfect tempo to her own, back-arching desire. A mouth, nibbling, play-biting, covering and devouring hers with guileless kisses… Wesley…

Except the mouth and hands and kisses changed. Transformed. Improved. Still supple, still masculine-demanding, yet flavored now-in pleasant ways-with a tangy added hint of polymer and iron. Proud and strong and male and deserving… and modified, evolved, redesigned… Gavin…

Tor fought against awakening. But her dream faded as the cool-nap monitor cruelly said enough. Ten days of sleep, that was the limit, followed by two awake, tending the ship. Eating and stretching and exercising. Tending to real life.

As usual, Tor had to spend her first waking moments negotiating with her complicated self-image. Her layered boundaries included metal and plastic encasements, without which she would die.

Will they offer me new mods, when I get home? Will a day come when I can run again or swim? Take a real shower? Take a lover?

She had chosen to keep all the internal chemistry from her old self. Including a libido that still foamed through her dreams. Reconnecting all of that to real skin, real flesh… well, one could always hope.

Gavin will upgrade easier, she thought, vaguely recalling what he had seemed like in the dream. A demigod. Or just a man, only with many “good parts” enhanced…

“Oh criminy,” Tor muttered, wishing she could pinch the bridge of her nose-if she still had one-or splash her face with cold water. Instead, with a sigh, she unplugged the cool-napper umbilicus and floated free. Getting to work.

Hours later, with all of her inspections done and ship systems apparently nominal, Tor rested in the dim control room, half-floating in faint pseudo-gravity provided by the Warren Kimbel’s throbbing rockets.

As it had since the womb, Tor’s heart beat against her rib cage. And the gentle pulse rhythmically rocked her inner body against the cerametal casing that enclosed her. Tor’s carapace ever after flames enveloped the Spirit of Chula Vista.

Shells within shells. And beyond the skin of her ship, more layers still.

Plato and his peers envisioned a cosmos consisting of perfect, crystal spheres, on which rode planets and the stars. A more comforting image, perhaps, than our modern concept-a roiling expanse spanning tens of billions of light-years.

With her percept expanded by the ship’s wide-gazing sensors, Tor felt awash in clusters and nebulae, as if the stars were flickering dots of phosphorescent plankton in a great sea. And, once again, she felt drawn to wonder.

What happened out here, so long ago?

What’s going on out there, right now?

She felt haunted by the story that small hands chiseled into the Rosetta Wall. Though some parts seemed clear, the rock mural’s core eluded understanding. Scenes that portrayed strange, machinelike beings, doing incomprehensible things. Tor suspected some parts of the puzzle no archaeologist or smart-mob-biological or cybernetic-would ever decipher.

We’re like lungfish, climbing ashore long after the continents were claimed by others. Blinking in confusion, we stare across a beach that looks devastated. Surrounding us are skeletons, from those who came earlier.

But they’re not all dead or gone, those who emerged before us.

There are footprints in the sand.

The Wall testified to a time when simple, naive rules gave way. Machines changed. Evolved.

We’ll learn much from studying the wrecks we find out here. But we’d better remember-those corpses were the losers!

The carvings also depicted something else-the plague of fomite viroids, portrayed as little packets of peril, crisscrossing the Rosetta Wall. Infecting. Enticing. Replicating and spreading.

Facing all this, should a sensible lungfish scoot back underwater? Surely, that path to safety was chosen by many races. To cower. To live in shabby, feudal nostalgia, praying to heaven while ignoring the sky. But hunkering also means declining to irrelevance. Existing, not thriving, while using up a single, fragile world.

Like it or not, that won’t be our way. Whatever was deciphered from ruins of the past, men and women couldn’t stay crouched by one tiny fire, terrified of shadows.

An image came to her, of Gavin’s descendants-and hers-forging bravely into a dangerous galaxy. Explorer-machines who had been programmed to be human. Or humans who had turned themselves into starprobes. A maker race blending with its mechanical envoys.

A pattern she had not seen among the rock wall depictions. Because it was doomed from the start? Should we try something else?

What options had a fish, who chose to leave the sea a billion years too late?

Tor blinked. And as her eyelids separated, stars diffracted through a thin film of tears, breaking into rays. Innumerable, they streaked across the dark lens of the galaxy and beyond, spreading a myriad ways. In too many directions. Too many paths to follow.

More than her mind could hold.