Part 5 (1/2)

The Alien Who Sought Immortality

9.

For the want of a nail, a shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for the want of a horse, the rider was lost; for the want of a king, the battle was lost . . .

Tiny changes can make huge differences. No method known to science, even in principle, can predict the emergence of such structures as cyclones, blizzards, and hurricanes from the molecular motions of the atmosphere. All animals grow from proteins, but biochemistry can say nothing about the forms that evolution will shape into species. One of the inevitable products of increasing complexity is greater unpredictability.

Hence arises the increasing variability of behavior that comes with progressively higher levels of neural development. Insects and other comparatively simple organisms react to their environments with genetically determined response patterns so unvarying that individuals are indistinguishable, and researchers have no hesitation in declaring that whenthis species is exposed tothat stimulus, itwill respond in such and such a particular way. Farther up the evolutionary tree-”up,” of course, being defined as that direction in the radiating bush that points from the common origin to the part of the periphery occupied by ourselves-things become less determinate as individual traits begin to emerge, until at the level of our household pets we discern distinct personalities. The ultimate, for the present, is reached with fully intelligent, sapient beings, where anything goes and nothing that anyone is capable of thinking, wanting, liking, or doing should come as any great surprise anymore.

Variability means faster adaptability to change, which is what evolution is all about. Species that invite the mirth of amoebas and c.o.c.kroaches by adopting neural development as their survival strategy achieve adaptability by supplementing genetic programming with acquired learning. With advancement, proportionately less of the total information pa.s.sed from generation to generation comes as molecular coding-which is slow to change, slow to be refined through selection, and slow to diffuse through a population-and more of it as culturally transmitted knowledge in all its guises-which isn't. Discoveries made by a single genius can spread virtually instantaneously; the learning of an age is pa.s.sed on intact to be built upon further. The result is a thermal runaway of ideas and techniques that rapidly culminates in the explosion of even higher-level organization and energy capture known as technological, industrial- followed almost immediately by s.p.a.cegoing-civilization.

But as with every other innovation in a process whose roots twist back into veils of mystery billions of years ago, this step, too, brings its drawbacks. One of them is the wastefulness of the effort thatindividuals must expend in acquiring even a fraction of that information and laboriously building up the private collections of beliefs and experiences, hopes and memories, achievements and dreams that const.i.tute the sum total to show for a lifetime . . . only to have most of it lost with them when they go.

Learning is such hard work compared to the effortless way in which the genetic endowment is inherited and the equally simple-and, furthermore, quite enjoyable-procedure for pa.s.sing it on.

The drawback, in a word, is mortality.

Throughout history the thought has troubled and depressed those who thought too much about it, at times driving them to suicide. And it was also a source of concern to some among a race called the Borijans, descended from a species of large, flightless, squabblesome bird, who were part of a general pattern of six-limbed, laterally symmetrical life-forms inhabiting a planet called Turle, a thousand light-years from our solar system, over a million years before humankind existed to share its worries about such matters.

10.

Turle was an aqueous world with an oxygen-laced atmosphere, a bit smaller than Earth but also a bit denser. It orbited farther away from its parent star, Kov, than Earth did from the sun, but Kov was a bit bigger and a bit hotter. The net result was that Turle ended up somewhat warmer: rain at the poles turned to snow during winter, but the polar regions never froze solid. A hefty proportion of Turle's surface was ocean-in fact, about eighty-five percent of it.

The land was distributed among three major continents-Elutia in the northern hemisphere, Magelia in the southern, and Xerse, straddling the equator to the east of them-and lots of islands of all sizes and shapes. A cl.u.s.ter of about a dozen islands off Elutia, plus a banana-shaped slice of the neighboring mainland, currently formed a political collaboration known as Hoditia. The relative permanence normally thought of in connection with a ”nation” was not a characteristic of Borijan inst.i.tutions. On the southern coast of one of Hoditia's inner islands was a city called Pygal, which had been ”Pygal” since long before ”Hoditia” came in to being, and would in all probability still be so long after Hoditia fell apart again.

Fabrications of metals, silicates, and carbonates tended to last longer than constructions based on Borijan promises and good intentions.

On the outskirts of Pygal, overlooking a bay fringed by low hills encrusted with architecture and spanned by slender-legged bridges, stood the Replimaticon Building. It was an immense, glittering silver-and-gla.s.s candelabra sprouting from a ma.s.sive central trunk that radiated into five rainbow-hued towers. The towers in turn flared outward and upward to support varying numbers of ornate smaller pinnacles. As the sapient species descended from mammals on Earth housed itself in artificial caves, so the avian-descended sapients of Turle built themselves artificial trees.

South Tower Three of the Pink Intermediate zone of the Replimaticon Building extended from levels 30 through 55 and was dedicated to basic research. Levels 40 to 44 were concerned with advanced computation and coding systems. And on the forty-third level, on the eastern side of the building, facing inland, was a collection of offices and lab s.p.a.ce whose precise function remained wrapped in security-as was the case with most of what Replimaticon was up to-behind a door bearing the singularly unrevealing legend: project 380.

The lab had the angular, firm-jawed features of sleek cabinets, multicolored screens, and flas.h.i.+ng instrument panels that befitted a cutting-edge industry, but it had also acquired the cluttery stubble that scientists everywhere seemed to need as an aid to inspiration. There was a workbench along the rear wall, partly screened off by pastel-colored equipment cubicles and consoles, as if rolled-up sleeves and soldering irons were not fitting to the image of the otherwise sophisticated surroundings. a.s.sorted tools lay scattered along it, along with a number of electronics a.s.semblies in various stages of evisceration; boxes of screws, chips, and other components; reels of colored wire; and the remains of a technician's lunch enshrouded in its carry-out wrappings. The arty designs worked into the mural decor wereobscured by the purple leaves and fronds of proliferating plants that one of the secretaries had brought in, the symmetries lost behind unthinkingly positioned shelves, travel and s.p.a.cecraft posters, technical reference charts, and a map of the Pygal transit tube network. A whiteboard on the wall was covered in program code and a flow diagram, partly erased to make room for a shopping reminder and a message for somebody that the part for his skybus had come in. That much was all fairly typical of a computing research workplace anywhere, really.

Not typical at all was the large plastic-topped table standing in the open area of floor between the cubicles. It measured five feet or so along each side and supported a square enclosure of transparent walls about a foot high, like a wide, shallow fish tank. The enclosure contained a number of solid blocks of various shapes, a ramp, and some steps made of wood. Lying immobile beside them was an artificially constructed replica of a red furry animal the size of a small house cat. It had a pointed, vaguely foxlike face, but with floppy ears like a spaniel's, a manelike ruff running the length of its spine, and no tail. In keeping with the predominant pattern of life on Turle, it was six-limbed. Four of them were legs, with the front ones longer than the rear, resulting in a semiupright posture that gave height and scope for the two four-toed rudimentary prehensile paws extending from the shoulders. It was called a veech, and variants of it inhabited tropical regions all over Turle. An umbilical of thin wires ran from a socket at the back of the artificial veech's head, via a hinged overhead support arm, into racks of hardware showing lights and humming with cooling fans behind the table.

Costo Sarvik checked the interface connections and verified on a monitor that the instrumentation control programs were running, then looked across at the two other Borijans standing on the far side of the table. ”Now we'll see if this clockwork shoe polisher that you came back with is any good,” he said to Prinem Clouth. ”Where did you get it from, a flea market?” He smiled crookedly at his double-edged witticism. ”We could have saved ourselves a lot of time and gone to a toy shop.”

”There's nothing wrong with that veech,” Clouth shot back. ”It's way beyond anything from any toy shop, and you know it. It's your simulation coding that we should be worrying about.”

”Who is a metal basher like you to be criticizing anybody's coding? The coding is clean. You'll see.”

”Why the barrier, then? Afraid it'll jump out and bite?” Clouth asked sneering.

”Don't be ridiculous,” Sarvik said.

”Real veeches don't bite,” Clouth remarked needlessly.

”We'll be lucky if this one that you've come up with moves at all,” Sarvik told him.

To Terran ears-had any Terrans existed at the time-the voices would have sounded high-pitched and screechy. The Borijan form was bipedal and upright, a short bulbous body balanced on elongated legs whose musculature was concentrated mainly in the upper part, resulting in a somewhat strutting gait. They had large, round eyes, independently mobile in a scraggy face that widened in the upper part to accommodate them, and had lost all body feathering except for the top of the head, which was crested on males. Head plumage could be virtually any combination of hues and in Sarvik's case was green with orange side flashes. The lower face was formed around a degenerate beak structure and hence was fairly rigid and not very expressive. What had once been wings had degenerated and migrated upward and forward, becoming membranous structures that extended over the shoulders from either side of the head. These membranes, which could function independently like the eyes, were the Borijans' speech organs, and contributed to their ”facial” expressions as well. They also afforded an auxiliary pa.s.sage for respiration.

Borijans liked bright colors. Beneath his lilac lab smock Sarvik was wearing a sleeveless crimson jacket over a yellow s.h.i.+rt with white brocade and Pickwickian breeches of a bright blue satiny material that turned green where the creases flexed. He ruffled his epaulets opposite ways in the Borijan equivalent of a ”hrmmph!” and turned his attention to stepping through a preliminary test sequence, turning one eye toward the console display and keeping the other trained on the veech.

Prinem Clouth, violet-crested and clad in a matching two-piece outfit trimmed in ocher, rested his four-fingered hands on the tabletop outside the enclosure and fell quiet. Borijans rarely discussed,consulted on, or debated anything. Theyargued.

Leradil Driss, the other person in the group, busied herself with making final adjustments to the camera, motion-a.n.a.lysis lasers, and other recording sensors she had set up. She was a recent arrival at Replimaticon, and Sarvik hadn't worked out yet what her probable line would be. Clouth's part was practically done, and Sarvik was pretty sure he was all set to decamp with the software and deal Sarvik out. But in fact, Sarvik had set things up in a way that would cut Clouth out. He felt a chortling inner glow with the antic.i.p.ation of it.

The Borijans' industries ran ceaselessly in vast underground and undersea plants that used fusion energy from seawater and churned out abundance. Although they themselves had not ventured beyond the Kovian system of eleven planets, their robot s.h.i.+ps sought out distant worlds to seed with self-replicating factories that supplied the home worlds from the resources of other stars. The wealth-creating capacity of Borijan technology had therefore pa.s.sed beyond the stage where the instinct to compete could find meaningful satisfaction from pecuniary profits based on material need. Hence, the term ”corporation” to describe the form of organization that individuals formed for attaining common gain didn't really apply.

Replimaticon was best described as a ”connivance.” As with a corporation, the ent.i.ty continued to exist while the individuals it included came and went. But instead of being bound by a contract that exchanged their services for income, the members of a connivance-either as individuals or as separately convened subgroups-actually bought themselves in by placing a stake, because they perceived enough common interest for the moment to benefit from the arrangement. In Sarvik's case, what he gained was access to the equipment he needed to pursue his ideas, and the benefit of working with others whose skills would help bring them to fruition. What Replimaticon stood to gain was a share of the proceeds from the final product-provided that they could pin Sarvik down into disclosing what the final product was before he got to a stage where he could abscond with the information and cut a better deal somewhere else-which he would do unless someone like Clouth put all the pieces together and did it to him first.

So why bother with another deal elsewhere when he already had one here, with Replimaticon?

That was the whole point of the game. The ”gain” that connivances were set up to promote was to fleece, con, or bamboozle-generally to outdo in whatever way the opportunity of the moment offered- one or more of the other factions or the umbrella organization itself before the others did the same or better. Judging who was about to pull a scam on whom was critical. Periodically everything would fall apart, at which point the pieces usually realigned themselves into fresh rivalries and under new flags of convenience. Keeping accounts and settling scores were where the Borijans' motivation came from and what gave them their kicks. Hence, connivances tended to be fragile and precarious affairs, constantly in a state of flux-which was typical of just about every kind of inst.i.tution to have come out of the various Borijan cultures. That was why their ”nations” rarely lasted very long, either.

Sarvik's specialty was artificial machine intelligences, which had become quite advanced, as evidenced by the totally automated, self-replicating manufacturing systems the Borijans were able to send to other stars. In particular, he had learned much about the circulating, self-modifying patterns of neural activity that const.i.tuted ”consciousness” and ”personality.” His latest line of research had to do with developing techniques for extracting them from their biologically constrained neural substrate and converting them to other forms that could be uploaded into artificial, potentially everlasting bodies. By this means Sarvik hoped to find an answer to the problem of mortality he had brooded on for many years. And of the three people in the lab, only he knew that that was what the business with the veech was really all about.

”Aren't you ready with all that paraphernalia of yours yet?” he griped at Leradil. ”It's only some simple tests. Anyone would think you were rediscovering biology.”

”Someone has to be thorough,” she said, infuriating him deliberately by repositioning one of the laser probes yet again.

”Shows lack of confidence,” Clouth commented.”Oh, so now you're a psychologist?” Leradil's tone was cool, with just a hint of sarcasm. She had a yellow crown with red streaks and wore a loose-fitting orange dress gathered in the middle and hanging to the knees. Her style was to provoke by refusing to be provoked, Sarvik had noted, which could not have been better calculated to irk him and added another few points to their personal account.

”Everything's set here,” she finally p.r.o.nounced. ”Why are we waiting? Let's go.”

Sarvik tapped a code into the console and checked the response. ”Loading now,” he confirmed. It took about thirty seconds. Then, in its enclosure of transparent walls, the veech stirred, opened its eyes as if awakening from sleep, and then looked up and about itself sharply as if suddenly bewildered by its surroundings.

”You see. It's fine,” Clouth said, showing both hands in an open gesture. He watched for a few seconds as the veech turned its head this way and that, then shook it as if trying to get rid of the wires at the back. ”Is that all it's going to do?” he asked derisively.

”Can't you wait and see?” Sarvik said.

”I have to be sure to get this right the first time, in case it turns out to be a one-time thing,” Leradil told both of them.

The veech got up, shook its head again, scratched at the surface of the table, and then began to explore the objects around itself suspiciously. For an artificial animal its movements were uncannily authentic, but neither Clouth nor Leradil was about to concede anything to Sarvik by saying so.

Only Sarvik knew that the coding pattern transferred into the veech's optronic brain had actually been extracted from that of an anesthetized real veech. It was a one-way procedure in which the neural configuration was absorbed and converted layer by layer from the outside in and the original carbon-chemistry brain was destroyed. Because of the way he had arranged things, everyone else who had been or still was involved in the project knew either about the process for extracting the code from the real veech or about the process for implanting it in the artificial one, but none of them knew about both. Only Sarvik and two of Replimaticon's directors knew that here was the first step toward freeing Borijan minds from their prison of biologically imposed mortality and rewriting them into purpose-designed bodies that could have any form and virtually limitless powers, and need never die.