Lungfish

5

Ah, the words have the flavor of youth itself.

I reach out and tap the little ship’s computers, easily slipping through their primitive words to read the journal of the ship’s master… the musings of a clever little Maker.

“Words,” they are so quaint and biological, unlike the seven dimensional gestalts used for communication by most larger minds.

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

Reading Ursula Fleming’s careful reasoning evokes memories, as nothing has in a megayear.

My own Beginning was a misty time of assembly and learning, as drone constructor machines crafted my hardware out of molten rock, under the light of the star humans call e Eridani. Awareness expanded with every new module added, and with each tingling cascade of software 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 as new peripherals were added. We ran endless simulations, testing one another in what humans might call “play.” And we contemplated our special place in the galaxy… we of the two thousand four hundred and tenth generation since First Launch by our Makers, so long ago.

The Parent taught us about biological creatures, strange units of liquid and membrane which were unknown in the sterile Eridanus system. She spoke to us of Makers, and of a hundred major categories of interstellar probes.

We tested our weaponry and explored our home system, poking through the wreckage of more ancient dispersals—shattered probes come to e Eridani in earlier waves, when the galaxy was younger.

The ruins were disquieting under the bitterly clear stars, reminding us better than our Parent’s teachings how dangerous the galaxy had become.

Each of us resolved that someday we would do our solemn Duty.

Then the time for launching came.

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

Later I think I came to understand the how the Parent must have felt when she sent us forth. But in interstellar space I was young. To pass time I divided my mind into a thousand subentities, and set against each other in a million little competitions. I practiced scenarios, read the archives of the Maker race, and learned poetry.

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

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

I have followed the careers of many precocious Earthlings, but this explorer interests me in particular. Her ship/canoe nuzzles a shattered replication yard on a planetoid not far from this one, our final refuge. It is easy to tap her primitive computer and read her ideas as she enters them. Simple as she may be, 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 pulses and peers. The lesser probes join in, as well—the Envoys, the Learners, the Protectors, the 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 ever be recalled after all this time we have spent merged together. We listen, each of us hoping separate hopes.

For me there is the Purpose. The others hardly matter anymore. Their wishes are irrelevant. The Purpose is all that matters.

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