Everything had worked out nicely. Better than Martin Oristano knew. Oh, not the frustration of the Syrax and their attempt to steal the secret of the GATE, though that achievement was gratifying enough. But much more than that had been at stake.
Mankind was so much the difficult child, the Colligatarch mused, though it perceived the analogy in purely mathematical terms. Sometimes you had to fool a child in order to make it swallow necessary medicine.
The human race continued to progress, but the last hundred years of that progress had been unsteady, shaky, and halting, compounded by problems ranging from overpopulation to a measurable decline in aspirations. The racial mind was stagnating, an inevitable consequence of worldwide peace. Mankind had traded his aggressiveness for security, as presided over by Colligatarch Authority.
That was a prime reason for the establishment of independent colonies. But once the secret of two-way GATE travel became known, as it had now, it spelled an end to the colonies’ independence from Earth, and from the stultifying peace and prosperity engulfing its inhabitants.
Fortunately, the secret had been kept until both colonies were well established. Otherwise, given the choice between the realities of Eden and Garden and the snug womb of Earth, not enough of the right people would have chosen to emigrate. The problem now was to establish anew a freshly independent colony, free of Earth’s influence. The Colligatarch had worked on that problem for over a hundred years without generating a solution. Any new colony would want communication with Earth. Unless, of course, it by some miracle wished complete estrangement from the mother world.
How kind of the Syrax to unwittingly provide a means by which that might be achieved. How good of them to supply the missing key to the solution in the person of Eric Abbott.
Oh, yes, much more than the secret of GATE physics had been at stake! Worlds and futures had hung on Abbott’s personality. When the time to decide arrived, would he choose Syrax, humanity, or himself and his friends? A great gamble. The Syrax had also gambled, and lost. Only they didn’t know it yet.
Truly his alien bioengineers had built him too well. Eric Abbott had been human enough to fool everyone he’d come in contact with. Now the galaxy enjoyed a good laugh because he’d fooled his creators as well.
Colligatarch had calculated that an independent colony established under Abbott’s leadership boasted a ninety-six percent chance of success. Far less predictable but much more exciting were the possibilities raised by further extrapolation of such a colony’s future. Because the tests run on Abbott during his brief stay in a London prison hospital indicated he was completely human in all the basics. He’d been fashioned to be that way.
What made the extrapolation so interesting was the fact that Lure Tambor series four was also human in all the basics. It was an important part of her makeup. So were contraceptives. But no longer.
What might happen now that Eric Abbott and Lisa Tambor were free to be as human as they wished?
No, it was the Colligatarch which had done the thieving this time, not the Syrax. Let them steal the secrets of the GATE someday. They were too inventive not to succeed eventually. Until that day, mankind had to fight a holding action. Let them subsequently extend their benign dominance over Earth and its inhabitants. Yes, let them even make use of the Colligatarch to serve their own purposes. The thought did not trouble the machine. It was concerned not for its own future but for that of the people it had been built to serve.
The offspring of Eric Abbott and Lisa Tambor would not be machines. They would be human, and artison, and a little bit Syrax, able to meet and compete with the Syrax on their own lofty terms where normal humans and machine would not. They might achieve that level in the near future or the far. It didn’t matter. Because they were safe to develop on distant Paradise together with their 25,000 highly intelligent fellow humans. They were the pick of humanity, those adventurous 25,000, and they had such a leader as history could not have predicted.
A machine is not supposed to have emotions, but the Colligatarch had been programmed to deal with human beings, and as such it had been fully equipped to empathize with them. But only a machine could have risked the gamble. Certainly Martin Oristano would not have chanced it, nor would Dhurapati Ponnani or Froelich or Novotski or any of the others. They were heirs to the fears and hesitations of their forefathers.
The Colligatarch had no forefathers. It had measured the probabilities and gambled on Eric Abbott, and he’d borne out all the hopes embodied in the predictions even as he’d railed against the evils of the machine to his fellow colonials. And that too was part of the plan. Now the descendants of Paradise’s first settlers would mature and develop their abilities free of the ennervating cocoon a comforting computer network could build for them. They would be their own machines, their own Colligatarch.
By forcing them to reject me, I make them independent, the machine thought with satisfaction. It was immensely gratifying to think that out there, someday, its makers would at last stand as its equals instead of its servants.
The Colligatarch turned its vast self to other, more mundane matters. It could be patient. It intended to be patient. Just as it intended to be around several thousand years hence to greet the first of Lisa Tambor and Eric Abbott’s many-times-over great-grandchildren when they teleported all the way from Paradise into its presence without the aid of a GATE.
About the Author
The New York Times–bestselling author of more than one hundred ten books, Alan Dean Foster is one of the most prominent writers of modern science fiction. Born in New York City in 1946, he studied filmmaking at UCLA, but first found success in 1968 when a horror magazine published one of his short stories. In 1972 he wrote his first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, the first in his Pip and Flinx series featuring the Humanx Commonwealth, a universe he has explored in more than twenty-five books. He also created the Spellsinger series, numerous film novelizations, and the story for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An avid world traveler, he lives with his family in Prescott, Arizona.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1984 by Alan Dean Foster
Cover design by Ian Koviak
ISBN: 978-1-5040-9346-0
This edition published in 2024 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10038
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
