“Not your fault. My medical was good, after all.”
“Marginal. Just marginal.”
“Oh.”
“Thing was, I rejected you right off. Ted came and leaned on me—really leaned. Called in some obligations, had Sanchez over in Medical sweet-talk me. The works. I finally caved in.”
“Ah.”
“Wish I haddna.”
It was, of course, the sort of thing you could never be sure of. Still, from Ted’s point of view; the calculation was simple enough: How could Ted lose? If Nigel did well in the job, things would have gone on as before. When he failed, instead, his long recovery reduced his political effectiveness.
Or was this paranoia? Hard to tell. He decided to keep his thoughts to himself. After all, there was always the possibility that this was merely an opening move.
Carlotta said, “I still don’t buy it,” and sipped at her drink. It was another fizzing orange thing, filling the air with a tingling sweetness.
Nigel persisted. “Machines can evolve, just as animals do.”
“Look—those things we’ve found, orbiting god-awful messed-up worlds. Sure, they’re automated artifacts. But intelligent? Self-reproducing, okay. The time needed to make a really smart entity is—”
“Enormous. Granted. We haven’t dated most of those worlds—can’t, with just one flyby. They could be billions of years older than Earth.”
There was the rub. It was difficult to think of what the galaxy might be like if organically derived intelligence was a mere passing glimmer, if machine evolution dominated in the long run. The ruins Lancer and the probes were finding seemed to say that even societies which had colonized other worlds could still be vulnerable to species suicide. Complex systems in orbit would have the best chance to live. A war would be a powerful selection pressure for survival among machines which had, in whatever weak form, a desire for survival. Given time …
That was the point. Events on a galactic scale were slow, majestic. That fact had been written into the structure of the universe, from the beginning. In order for galaxies to form at all, the expansion energy of the Big Bang had to be just the right amount. To make stars coalesce from dust clouds, certain physical constants had to be the correct size. Otherwise, ordinary hydrogen would not be so widespread, and stellar evolution would be quite different. If nuclear forces were slightly weaker than they are, no complex chemical elements would be possible. Planets would be dull places, without a variety of elements to cook into life.
The size of stars, and their distances from each other, were not arbitrary. If they were not thinly spread, collisions between them would have soon disrupted the planetary systems orbiting them. The size of the galaxy was set, among other things, by the strength of gravity. The fact that gravity was relatively weak, compared to electromagnetism and other forces, allowed the galaxy to have a hundred billion stars in it. This same weakness let living entities evolve which were bigger than microbes, without being crushed by their planet’s gravity. That meant they could be big enough, and complex enough, to dream of voyaging to the distant dots of light in a black sky.
Those organic dreamers were doomed to a poignant end. Evolution worked remorselessly in a cycle of birth, begetting, and death. Each life-form had to make room for its children, or else the weight of the past would bear down on any mutation, smothering change. So death was written into the genetic code. Evolution’s judicial indifference selected for death as well as life.
The coming of intelligent entities meant the birth of tragedy, the dawning realization of personal finiteness. Given the distance of habitable planets from a star, deducing the surface temperature, factoring in the physical constants that predicated chemistry—it was not hard to work out the approximate lifetime that evolution would ordain for human-sized intelligent life: a century or so. Which meant there was barely time to look around, understand, and work for a few frantic decades, before the darkness closed in. At best, an intelligent organism could make its mark in one or two areas of thought. It came and vanished in a flicker. Through its lifetime the night sky would not appear to move at all. The galaxy seemed frozen, unchanging.
Unmoving stars, distant targets. The organic beings, knowing of their own coming deaths, could still dream of going there. Yet on their voyages they were subject to the speed limit set by light. If light’s velocity had been higher, allowing rapid flight between stars, there would have been a huge price to pay. Nuclear forces would be different; the stars’ slow percolating of the heavy elements would not work. The long march upward that led to human-sized creatures would never have gotten started.
So it all knitted together: To arise naturally out of this universe meant a sure knowledge of impending death. That foreshortened all perspectives, forcing a creature to think on short time scales—times so truncated that a journey between stars was a life-devouring odyssey.
“—doesn’t explain the Swarmers, doesn’t account for the EMs adequately,” Carlotta was saving. “Your explanation has too many holes. Too many unjustified assumptions.”
“He hasn’t had help with a detailed analysis, remember that,” Nikka put in.
“No,” Nigel said, “Carlotta’s right. It needs work. Conceptual work.”
He sat back while the women discussed the latest gravlens images, his mind still wandering. He watched Carlotta’s quick, deft movements. She spent a lot of time on her dress, making artful concoctions from the skimpy supplies available. He was losing touch with her. She saw more of Nikka than of him, and knew a lot of the crewmen who were multisocketed now. Those people spent not only their working hours but their recreation as well, plugged in, taking part in—what was the phrase?—“computer-assisted socialization.” Meanwhile, Theory Section was producing no new hypotheses, nothing beyond a bland compiling of data. As the light-years piled up, the crew was turning inward, away from the awful emptiness that lay beyond Lancer’s stone buffers. Few went outside anymore, to gaze upon the relativistically Dopplered rainbow unaided. Weeks went by without his hearing even a mention of Earthside in casual conversation. In the face of immensity, something ingrained in humans made them reduce matters to the local, the present, the specific.
Admittedly, Lancer was packed with ambitious, intelligent folk. Given the years in flight, social diversions had undoubtedly been on from the start. But this … No, something rang wrong. Something beyond his curmudgeon’s distrust. Ted Landon and the rest could tune down this sort of thing if they desired. But a crew distracted was a crew easily misled, easily manipulated. And from such a muddle, a strong leader often eventually emerged when a crisis finally came.
He watched Carlotta stirring the orange ice shards in her noisy drink. He thought of Magellan, voyaging with thin hopes and not enough oranges to stave off scurvy. And of the Titantic, which sailed with absolute certainty and oranges galore.
“—wouldn’t they?” Carlotta was asking him a question.
“I don’t catch the drift,” he said to cover his day-dreaming.
“I mean, what’s going to force them to evolve higher intelligence?”
“Self-replicating machines can forage for raw materials anywhere. Lord knows they work better in space than we do—we’re hopeless, messy sods. But resources always run out. That will ensure competition.”
“It takes so long to exhaust a whole solar system,” Nikka said.
“Um. Yes. Hard for us to think on that time scale, isn’t it? Perhaps a reasonably bright machine needn’t wait around for evolution to do its work, though. It can augment its intelligence by adding on units, remember. Manufacturing, then delegating tasks to its new subsystems. Boosts the thinking speed, which is at least a step in the right direction. Simpler than willing yourself to have more brain cells, which is what we’d have to do.”
“Look, I’m the computer hack here,” Carlotta said. “I say artificial intelligence isn’t that easy. Earthside’s huge machines are sharp, sure, but it’s not just a question of adding more capacity.”
“Granted. But we’re talking about millions of years of evolution here—perhaps billions.”
“That’s a big, glossy generalization you’re making,” Carlotta said.
“So it is. I suppose I ought to think matters through better.”
“Listen,” Carlotta pressed him, “this is science. You’ve got to make a prediction if you want people to listen.”
“Right. Here it is. A Watcher will appear around every world where technology is possible. Or where it once was and might come again. They’re cops, you see. But they only police spots where technology might come from a naturally arising species. An organic one.”
Carlotta frowned. “Let’s see … That fits—”
Nigel broke in eagerly, “The robots which were shuttling ice at Wolf 359, for example. No Watcher there, because those patient little fellows are an early form of a machine society. Give ’em a few million years of exposure to cosmic rays, a shortage of materials—they’ll evolve. Become a member of the club.”
“Club?” Nikka asked.
