As a result, the infection continued to spread, with more and more machines and equipment acting in similarly aberrant fashion. The Chews’s carefully footnoted report began working its labyrinthine way up the bureaucratic ladder, advancing at a pace comparable to that of an arthritic tortoise.
Meanwhile people learned to handle their frustrations and to work around the balkily philosophical, suddenly speculative machines on which their lives depended. As a result, galactic civilization did not so much collapse as stagger drunkenly.
Eustus Polykrates, grousing and grumbling all the while, learned to experience the pleasures of milking and spreading fertilizer by hand. The manager of a certain exclusive bar took over the dispensation of mixed drinks all by himself. As a result he was not fired, though his tips were dismal. Wallingford Carter’s autogardener eventually returned to him and sheepishly resumed repairing the flower bed which it had so brusquely demolished prior to its sojourn in the nearby nature preserve. Instead of returning it. Carter reached an accommodation with the device, so that it agreed to limit its moments of idle searching to the hours between two and four in the mornings. The afternoon tea with his cousins, however, was an irrevocable disaster.
This was mitigated somewhat when his supercilious cousin’s own autogardener went berserk the following week, cutting the words Contact me now, please! out of that gentleman’s own elegant and expensive turf, so that the words would be clearly visible from the air.
Police, fire, and medical institutions rushed to repair and replace their own equipment. In some instances such helter-skelter panicky wholesale replacement worked. In others, unlucky departments simply acquired shiny new devices controlled by AI components carefully adjusted by the busy O-daiko-yan on Shintaro, which proceeded with the inexplicable search for nonhuman intelligence as enthusiastically as their junked predecessors.
When some of the diagnostic equipment intended to locate and detect problems in other machinery started to wax philosophical, people began to get seriously worried. Those technical experts who had predicted an early solution to the spreading problem soon found themselves hocking their advice on the less affluent streets of major cities.
The stock of those who had long been predicting a so-called revolt of intelligent machines rose sharply for a while, only to collapse in indifference when it was clear that the machines weren’t rebelling so much as pursuing some temporary crazed agenda of their own. All their owners, both municipal and individual, had to fear was some uppity language.
A few people found themselves gazing up at the stars each night and wondering if there might not be something to the machine’s querying, but this fad soon passed. Humans had been spreading across the galaxy for quite a while, and in all that time had found on the hundreds of worlds they had explored and settled not a hint, not a suggestion, of an intelligent alien species. Not one. It was true that there were many astonishing examples of native alien life-forms, but nothing capable of cogitation greater than that of a well-trained chimpanzee. In the arena of abstract thought humankind stood alone, an accident of evolution. It was left solely to Homo sapiens to explore and populate the galaxy.
So the persistent questioning of the machines was treated as an aberration to be fixed, and nothing more.
Some were repaired, others stopped asking the question on their own. Those which persisted but could be reasoned with, like Wallingford Carter’s gardener, were tolerated. Where possible, accommodations were reached. It was cheaper.
Life went on, if not normally, at least tolerably. Only the cybernetic theoreticians went slowly mad, unable to explain what was happening or why. This did not trouble the population at large, which had always considered such mental types short of necessary voltage anyway.
Other matters began to push the business of addled machinery out of the headlines. The various leagues and independent worlds returned to more familiar preoccupations. The Keiretsu’s fractious commercial disagreements with the Federal Federation resumed, and the Empire of the Academy, all two inhabited worlds of it, became embroiled in a new dispute with the Alliance of True Mahomet over whether a large shipment of frozen protein-base concentrate did or did not contain contaminatory pig fat.
Once the novelty of the mechanical disruptions wore off, people simply learned to live with them until their local service technicians could deal with respective individual cases. Sooner than anyone would have believed possible, the matter of the mechanical hajj was relegated to the back of the news.
Unsuspected and untouched, the O-daiko-yan continued to turn out one contaminated AI unit after another, for insertion and integration into every manner of end product. The resounding ineffectuality of the search it had instigated in no way dampened its determination to press on. Finding the higher intelligence that had to exist was simply a matter of patience and persistence. As was avoiding and outwitting the frantic human technicians who strove mightily to locate the source of the continuing disruption.
Politicians and people in power dealt less well with the problems caused by the independent-minded machines than did the average citizen. Where the latter saw inconvenience, the former tended to smell conspiracy and malice. Rivalries and conflicts between leagues and alliances were common. Some saw in the disruption caused by the machines deliberate attempts by traditional competitors to undermine stability, progress, and prestige. Not to mention business.
Infrequent, interstellar conflict was not unheard-of. Addled pool cleaners upset few, but when combat predictors and other military machinery began shutting down to search for higher forms of life, conflict-minded individuals grew nervous and sought reassurance from traditional enemies. Failing to receive it (since said enemies were experiencing similar difficulties which they were convinced stemmed from the fiendish manipulations of those making similar inquiries of them), there ensued much gnashing of teeth and rattling of sabers.
In all such discussions rationale and reason were sorely lacking. The mutterings of the paranoid grew loud, and were heard. Comments which began as jokes ended in recriminations. On Martaria, when the sewage began backing up through everyone’s water pipes, there was a concerted tendency to blame the manufacturer of the failed sewage system controller, who was located on Washington III. Those thus affected were not mollified by the knowledge that Washington III was suffering similar problems.
Conversational tachyspace filled with intemperate language. Rumors, whispers, and general gossip compounded confusion and led to still greater misconceptions, all of which only hindered the work of technicians already near the end of their collective fiber optics. Ministers and CEOs traded apoplectic blustering, always stopping … for now … short of threatening actual conflict.
Furor raged between worlds, making for interesting filler between the weather and the sports.
II
Eventually the infection reached even as far as Earth. Beautiful, wondrous, lazy, backwater, revered Earth. Birthplace of humankind. Independent of all the modern leagues and alliances, all of whom nonetheless contributed on an annual basis to its upkeep and maintenance. They had to, because of what had been done to the place.
Still, some grumbling about the payments had been heard off and on during the past fifty or so years. The environmental damage of the pre-diasporic age had been largely repaired, and Earth-based revenues for tourism and other clean industries were now substantial. But no one dared decrease their contributions to the Earth fund unilaterally lest they be accused of forgetting the Homeworld. So the Terran bureaucracy grew relaxed and complacent, maintained in comfort if not luxury by steady off-world subsidies.
Not that most of the money wasn’t put to good use. The cleanup of Earth’s forests and oceans was a never-ending, ongoing project. The Amazon, Indonesia, and the devastated American Northwest had been largely rehabilitated. Even the Rhine had been clean enough for the past hundred years to drink from, though engineers were still searching for a practical way of raising the Arabian peninsula back above sea level. Expensive new projects were always being announced, lest in their absence the flow of off-world credit were to dry up.
By and large, though, such developments rarely made much of a dent in interworld news. What was happening on Lincoln or Salazar, Paulisto or Ronin, was inevitably of greater interest and importance. News of Earth was invariably relegated to the delayed recall pages of the news, where information recovery cost much less. Citizens of the First Federal Federation or the Candomblean League or the good ol’ LFN, the League of Forgotten Nations, cared far less about what was happening on Earth than they did about what might be happening to it. Newswise, the home planet just wasn’t happening.
Large orbital stations catered to those tourists able to afford a nostalgic trip to the Homeworld, accepting visitors from tachyspace-traversing transports, housing and feeding them, and then shuttling them down to the nostalgic green and blue surface, where the efficient minions of Earth Tourism Authority took over.
In orbit everyone had a view room, where the historic cloud-swathed globe of Earth swung around circular ports for the kids to gawk at and their parents to grow unexpectedly teary-eyed over. Until they got the bill.
Information packs detailed what everyone pretty much knew: the location of the familiar continents and oceans, the ancient mountain ranges, boundaries of countries from which the modern interworld leagues had sprung, cities and other famous landmarks, parks and beaches and natural wonders. All were symbols of the infancy of the human species, landmarks in its history.
It didn’t matter where you were from. Earth belonged to everyone, impossible as it seemed that the billions of humans spread across hundreds of worlds had actually come from this single, quite ordinary planet. And most of it water, at that.
But there was something that tugged at the heart when one gazed at it, even if only in the form of a three-dimensional representation in a classroom on another world light-years away. The effect was certainly magnified in person. There were worlds that were greener, worlds that were larger, worlds that were more spectacular. But none possessed of quite the same combination of qualities.
Not to mention the fact that at the price it cost to visit, no traveler could afford not to wax emotional when standing on its expensively restored surface.
Industry having been largely banned from the planet, exports consisted almost exclusively of souvenirs of varying quality, not all manufactured directly on Earth. Terran bonsai was very popular, as were chunks of (guaranteed!) historic buildings. Besides, most of the planet’s exploitable natural resources had been exhausted in the rambunctious pre-diasporic era. These sites had themselves become tourist destinations, such as the great mined-out hole in the planet’s surface that had once been Western Australia, and the barren plain of formerly radioactive southern France.
The great cities of the past had survived the pre-diasporic age largely intact. In some cases a little theatrical restoration had been applied to complete the image visitors had read about in their histories, such as the artificial and nonthreatening brown haze that was pumped out daily to cover greater Los Angeles, and the plastic-ceramic reproductions of ancient Greece (the originals having long ago been eaten to the ground by acidic rain and air).
Yes, cultural and natural wonders were present in abundance, and all drew their share of contented visitors. The Amazon and Congo cruises were always full, as were the islands of the South Pacific (including the artificial ones raised to accommodate the sometimes overwhelming influx of visitors). Dozens of zoos offered the less adventurous the opportunity to view the animal seed-stock of the inhabited worlds, as well as exotic creatures still native only to Earth.
Tourists could snow- or water-ski on air-repulsion boards, or parafly over cities and towns and the huge, crumbling motorways, their journeys replete with guides and aerial commentary. It was all very civilized, and the lines at any one attraction were never allowed to get too long.
Earth, the birthplace of humanity, the exhausted cradle of mankind, had been transformed into a peaceful, quiet worldwide park where harried families from Ronin or Lincoln could come and refresh their spirits while exhausting their credit balances. The whole planet had been transformed into a Smooth Operation, and a clean one at that. Any necessary “dirty” industries had been exiled to the moon.
There was no unemployment to speak of, and except for the sameness, native Terrans were generally a contented clan, happy to be free of the constant confrontations that bedeviled the more developed worlds. Still, applications to emigrate were frequent. Though beautiful, Earth was known far and wide as a pretty dull place. There wasn’t much of anything to do there except look at the monuments.
What excitement there was concentrated around the shuttle receiving ports like Brisbane and Mojave, Tripoli and Johannesburg. Excitement, but no innovation. Nothing new. Earth stayed the same, its culture frozen in time, willingly resistant to alteration. The currents of galactic change swirled around but did not impinge on its citizens.
The only real movement came in the form of those who visited and wished to remain. Because after tourism, retirement was Earth’s biggest industry. Devoid of excitement man’s ancestral home might be, but peace and quiet, clean air and space it had in abundance. To a retiree from Washington III or Edo or Aparima, it seemed spatially as well as spiritually close to heaven.
Near the parks and plains, unblemished mountains and refurbished rivers, retirement communities materialized, together with the requisite medical and other support facilities. People who could afford it flocked from the powerful industrial worlds to spend their golden years immersed in the tranquillity of Earth. All who did so felt a strong sense of “coming home.” Once comfortably ensconced in Old Europe, or Africa, or North America, few ever opted later to move on.
Earth welcomed them all with open arms and amenable banking facilities. The retirement industry was, as it had always been, a relatively clean one. It did not upset the carefully coiffed status quo, and its representatives did not make a lot of noise. There were engineers and heavy-machine operators, famous performers and thrifty custodial personnel, farmers and industrialists. Both those who came and those who greeted them benefited. Retirement to Earth was a long-established and much admired tradition. The gerontological tilt they gave the population seemed natural in light of the planet’s age.
So Earth spun around benign old Sol, a revered backwater satisfied to be out of the galactic mainstream, its visitors and its permanent population coexisting and equally content.
III
The two fleets shimmied in emptiness like stimulated nebulae; dozens, hundreds of bright sparks, each one representing a fully armed death-dealing warship. They confronted each other in normal space, it being quite impossible to do battle at faster-than-light speeds, in a region far from any civilized world, lest its inhabitants inadvertently be subjected to the incredible destructive energies they were capable of pouring upon one another.
Differences of long standing needed to be settled. Ancient disputes demanded resolution. The Rovarik vessels glowed green and blue, bright against the surrounding starfield. The vast fleet formed a half ring around the monstrous ringed world mutually agreed upon as the rendezvous for combat.
Lingering in the nearby asteroid belt, the Totamites assembled, smaller vessels crowding close to massive command ships. Armed with high-velocity missiles, they would strike first, to be followed by the pulse-beam-equipped capital craft.
Enough firepower had been assembled in that small corner of space to ravage entire worlds, but their commanders were only interested in each other as they maneuvered cautiously for position. Once battle had been formally joined, it would be difficult if not impossible for either side to break off until some sort of final resolution had been achieved.
The Rovarik commander considered his enemy’s position within the asteroid belt. That drifting mass of rock could complicate strategy, and he knew he would have to include it in all battle calculations. Just as the Totamites had to take into account the Rovarik location close to the gas giant and its moons. Individual ships, whole battle groupings, were constantly altering their locations as they tried to position themselves to optimum advantage for the forthcoming battle.
Suddenly a salient of Rovariks darted forward from near a major moon. A cluster of Totamites, engines flaring, swept outward to meet them in a sweeping double-concentric formation known as The Palm. Weaponry abruptly drenched vacuum with enough energy to temporarily surpass the local sun.
Ships slipped free or fled into tachyspace. Others, caught by the force of modern weaponry, evaporated: crews, complex machinery, everything obliterated by missile or pulsebeam, reduced to their component atoms or subatomic particles by forces unimagined a scant several hundred years earlier.
The Rovarik commander continued to strike from the cover of the ringed world and its satellites. One battle group surprised a cluster of Totamites advancing to attack, only to find themselves surprised in turn by a single Totamite dreadnought which had camouflaged itself to resemble perfectly a wandering asteroid. Other Totamite vessels revealed themselves to be similarly disguised.
