Lungfish

2

Ursula Fleming stared as the asteroid’s slow rotation brought ancient, shattered ruins into view below. “Lord, what a mess,” she said, sighing.

She had been five years in the Belt, exploring and salvaging huge alien works, but never had she beheld such devastation as this.

Only four kilometers away, the hulking asteroid lay nearly black against the starry band of the Milky Way, glistening here and there in the light of the distant sun. The rock stretched more than two thousand meters along its greatest axis. Collisions had dented, cracked, and cratered it severely since it had broken from its parent body more than a billion years ago.

On one side it seemed a fairly typical carbonaceous planetoid, like millions of others orbiting out here at the outer edge of the Belt. But this changed as the survey ship Hairy Thunderer orbited around the nameless hunk of rock and frozen gases. The sun’s vacuum brilliance cast long, sharp shadows across the ruined replication yards… jagged, twisted remnants of a catastrophe that had taken place when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

“Gavin!” she called over her shoulder. “Come down here! You’ve got to see this!”

In a minute her partner floated through the overhead hatch, flipping in midair. There was a faint click as his feet contacted the magnetized floor.

“All right, Urs. What’s to see? More murdered babies to dissect and salvage? Or have we finally found a clue to who their killers were?”

Ursula only gestured toward the viewing port. Her partner moved closer and stared. Highlights reflected from Gavin’s glossy features as the ship’s searchlight swept the shattered scene below.

“Yep,” Gavin nodded at last. “Dead babies again. Fleming Salvage and Exploration ought to make a good price off each little corpse.”

Ursula frowned. “Don’t be morbid, Gavin. 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 android’s equivalent of a sarcastic shrug. “If I use ‘morbid’ imagery, whose fault is it?”

“What do you mean?” Ursula turned to face him.

“I mean you organic humans faced a choice, a hundred years ago, when you saw that ‘artificial’ intelligence was going to take off and someday leave the biological kind behind.

“You could have wrecked the machines, but that would have halted progress.

“You could have deep-programmed us with ‘Fundamental Laws of Robotics’,” Gavin sniffed. “And had slaves far smarter than their masters.

“But what was it you organics finally did decide to do?”

Ursula knew it was no use answering, not when Gavin was in one of his moods. She concentrated on piloting Hairy Thunderer closer to the asteroid.

“What was your solution to the problem of smart machines?” Gavin persisted. “You chose to raise us as your children, that’s what you did. You taught us to be just like you, and even gave most of us humaniform bodies!”

Ursula’s last partner—a nice old ’bot and good chess player—had warned, her when he retired, not to hire an adolescent Class-AAA android fresh out of college. They could be as difficult as any human teenager, he cautioned.

The worst part of it was that Gavin was right once again.

Despite genetic and cyborg improvements to the human animal, machines still seemed fated to surpass biological men. For better or worse the decision had been made to raise Class-AAA androids as human children, with all the same awkward irritations that implied.

Gavin shook his head in dramatic, superior sadness, exactly like a too-smart adolescent 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.

Ursula said nothing. It was hard, at times, to be entirely sure humanity had made the right decision after all.

Below, across the face of the ravaged asteroid, stretched acres of great-strutted scaffolding—twisted and curled in ruin. Within the toppled derricks lay silent ranks of shattered, unfinished starships, wrecked perhaps a hundred million years ago.

Ursula felt sure that theirs were the first eyes to look on this scene since some awful force had wrought this havoc.

The ancient destroyers had to be long gone. Nobody had yet found a star machine even close to active. Still, she took no chances, making certain the weapons console was vigilant.

The sophisticated, semi-sentient unit searched, but found no energy sources, no movement among the ruined, unfinished star probes below. Instruments showed nothing but cold rock and metal, long dead.

Ursula shook her head. She did not like such metaphors. Gavin’s talk of “murdered babies” didn’t help one look at the ruins below as potentially profitable salvage.

It would not help her other vocation, either… the paper she had been working on for months now… her carefully crafted theory about what had happened out here, so long ago.

“We have work to do,” she told her partner. “Let’s get on with it.”

Gavin pressed two translucent hands together prayerfully. “Yes, Mommy. Your wish is my program.” He sauntered away to his own console and began deploying their remote exploration drones.

Ursula concentrated on directing the lesser minds within Thunderer’s control board—those smaller semisentient minds dedicated to rockets and radar and raw numbers—who still spoke and acted coolly and dispassionately… as machines ought to do.