Survival--A Novel Page 18

Patel swallowed visibly. “I am honored, sir.”

  “You accept this responsibility?”

  “Yes, sir. I do. Certainly. Of course.”

  “Good. Now, ask the head of the planetology department and Waterman, in the engineering division, to call me, please.”

  “I will, sir. Immediately.”

  Ignatiev smiled and nodded. But he was thinking, Now we’ll see just how far the machines will allow us to go.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  It was like waiting to hear the other shoe drop, Ignatiev thought. Although Intrepid’s propulsion system remained inert, Captain Thornton’s crew tested the shielding generators and found them to be working perfectly. The three shuttlecraft resting in the hangar bays checked out as well. Under Patel’s somewhat jittery supervision a team of planetologists and technicians prepared to ride down to Oh-Four’s surface and install the generators at their preselected sites.

  Ignatiev watched all the preparations like a nervous father. “The machines see what we’re doing,” he said to Gita, “but they’re not saying a word about it.”

  “They haven’t told us to stop,” she pointed out.

  He shook his head worriedly. “In the old Russia, hundreds of years ago, the laws were written in such a way that what was not specifically allowed was forbidden.”

  “In contrast to the Western system, where what is not specifically forbidden is allowed.”

  “Which system do the machines follow?”

  “We’ll find out when we try to launch the shuttles,” Gita said.

  Ignatiev nodded gloomily.

  * * *

  After more than a week of testing the generators and training the groups that would go from Intrepid to the surface, all was ready. Patel surprised Ignatiev by informing him that he would join the first team to go.

  “You’re coming down here?” Ignatiev said to Juga’s holographic image.

  “Yes,” said Patel. Then, his expression dimming slightly, he added, “If you have no objections.”

  Swiftly, Ignatiev considered the possible consequences. The machines could prevent the shuttles from leaving Intrepid. Or once they land here, the generators could be deactivated, useless. Or the shuttles could be made to crash.

  You’re becoming melodramatic, Ignatiev accused himself.

  Focusing on Patel’s lustrous-eyed image once again, he smiled gently and said, “I have no objections, Juga. It will be good to have you here.”

  If the machines don’t kill you, a voice in Ignatiev’s head added.

  * * *

  Gita’s entire exploration team stood on the broad, flat rooftop of the machines’ vast underground city and watched the first of the shuttles speed across the cloud-streaked, hazy bluish sky. A double sonic boom broke the morning silence. Ignatiev grinned inwardly. Aeronautics works the same here as on Earth, he reminded himself once again.

  “Here it comes,” Gita said, her voice trembling with tension.

  Ignatiev followed the gleaming silver spaceplane as it descended gracefully, curved into a tight turn, then leveled out for its landing approach. With his nerves tightening, he watched as the shuttle glided lower, lower, its wheels unfolding from its belly, its nose slightly raised.

  The main wheels touched the broad expanse of the roof with a screech and puffs of rubberized plastic, then the nose touched down and it rolled toward them, slowing rapidly.

  Ignatiev’s nerves unclenched. It’s down, he thought. It’s landed safely. The machines have allowed it to land.

  Once the shuttle cooled down from the heat of its entry into the atmosphere, its main hatch slid open and Jugannath Patel came clambering down the ladder. Ignatiev found himself running toward the young man.

  “Welcome to Oh-Four!” he shouted.

  Patel was grinning from ear to ear. “It is good to be here. Very good indeed.”

  Suddenly the machines’ avatar was standing between Patel and Ignatiev. “Please allow us to add our welcome to your arrival,” it said in its perfectly modulated voice.

  Patel extended his hand to the avatar, but the humanlike figure did not respond in any way. Ignatiev, puffing to a halt before the two of them, realized that the avatar had no actual physical presence. If Patel tried to grasp its hand, his own hand would have closed on empty air.

  Gita and the others were approaching. They all moved to one side as the team of planetologists and technicians clattered down the shuttle’s ladder, rubbernecking at the broad, flat roof, the village buildings off at its edge, where the landing team lived, and beyond that, the thick foliage that stretched to the distant craggy blue-gray mountains.

  “Well,” said Patel, still grinning, “we are here and ready to go to work.”

  “Good,” Ignatiev replied. Turning to the avatar, he said, “Let me introduce you—”

  “To Jugannath Patel, head of the digital technology team and coordinator of this planetology group,” said the avatar, with a curt little bow.

  Ignatiev found it unnecessary to introduce the rest of the landing team. The avatar knew each name and profession.

  Sourly, Ignatiev thought, It probably knows what each one of us had for breakfast.

  The leader of the planetology group, Laurita Vargas, came up beside Patel. She was a centimeter or two taller than the Punjabi, with a generous figure that not even her rather baggy coveralls could hide. Her skin was deeply tanned, her shoulder-length hair and almond-shaped eyes midnight dark.

  “We’re ready to unload the generators,” she said in a no-nonsense, matter-of-fact tone.

  Patel glanced at Ignatiev, who said nothing, then nodded to Vargas. “By all means, don’t let us get in your way.”

  Gita and her group backed away from the planetologists and technicians.

  “We are all anxious to see these prehumans you have discovered,” Patel said to Ignatiev. “Very anxious.”

  Ignatiev glanced at the avatar, who remained silent, then said, “We’ve only found one group, so far.”

  With a bright smile, Patel said, “Ah, but where there is one there are bound to be others.”

  “True enough,” Ignatiev agreed. “I suppose.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “I don’t understand them,” Ignatiev said.

  It had been a long day. The landing team—with the help of a trio of sturdy caterpillar-tread tractors—had taken three of the shielding generators out of the shuttle’s capacious cargo bay. Now they sat on the broad, flat rooftop, three perfectly cubic structures two meters on a side, studded with dials and gauges. They gleamed in the late-afternoon sunshine.

  The machines’ avatar had spent the hours beside Ignatiev, watching the humans moving the generators, inspecting them, running them through their checkout routines.

  Patel had flitted from one of the generators to another, watching the technicians at their work, practically radiating a mixture of worry and pride.

  At last he had turned to Ignatiev and smilingly reported, “The generators are in working order. Tomorrow another shuttle will bring in three more.”

  “And then we move them to the sites where they will be emplaced,” Ignatiev finished his thought.

  “Yes. This is exciting, isn’t it?” Patel had enthused.

  Ignatiev had nodded, but he kept one eye on the avatar, which watched everything with silent patience. No enthusiasm, Ignatiev saw. It is merely recording what we’re doing, as emotionless as a rock.

  But then the avatar had spoken. “Allow us to show you to your quarters.”

  And without waiting for a response from Patel or anyone else, it started marching slowly toward the village that the machines had prepared, down at the end of the rooftop.

  Patel had turned to Ignatiev, clearly puzzled.

  Ignatiev had made a shooing motion. “Go along, it’s all right.”

  All the humans, Gita’s team and Vargas’s, walked along behind the avatar toward the square, unadorned buildings of the village.

  Now, in the privacy of the quarte
rs he shared with Gita, Ignatiev sank onto the couch, muttering, “I don’t understand them. I don’t understand the machines at all.”

  Gita sat beside him.

  “Are they really going to allow us to set up the generators? Are they going to stand by and watch us save the creatures on the surface of this planet from the death wave?” Ignatiev wondered aloud. “That would be contrary to all they’ve told us.”

  “Perhaps you’ve convinced them to let the biosphere survive the death wave,” Gita suggested.

  He shook his head. “I can’t believe that.”

  “Or else…” Her voice died away.

  “Or else what?”

  Gita bit her lip, then finally replied, “Or else they’ll deactivate the generators when we try to turn them on.”

  “Deactivate them?” Ignatiev stared at her. “That would be cruel. Sadistic.”

  “They don’t understand such feelings.”

  “Don’t they?” he challenged. “They can read our thoughts. They can see the pain we feel, I’m sure of it.”

  “But if they don’t have any emotions of their own, they might not understand the pain we feel,” Gita said.

  “We understand your pain.”

  They looked up and saw the avatar standing across the room, next to the fireplace and the holotank above it.

  “Do you?” Ignatiev snapped.

  “We are trying to understand you,” the avatar said. “It is not easy.”

  Ignatiev laughed. “We’ve been trying to understand ourselves for millennia. What do you think our novels and dramas are all about? Our music, our art. All attempts to explain ourselves to ourselves.”

  “And yet despite the efforts of your finest minds, you are still a mystery to one another.”

  “True enough,” Ignatiev admitted.

  “Then you must appreciate how much of a challenge you are to us,” the avatar said. “Your brains are soaked with hormones. Your reactions are driven by your emotions.”

  Gita replied, “That’s why we want to save the living creatures of this world. We’ve got to. We can’t let them just perish when the death wave arrives.”

  “While we can,” the avatar said. “You find that … what is your word for it? Reprehensible.”

  “That’s true,” Ignatiev said, feeling weary. To himself he admitted, This discussion is getting us nowhere. We’re too different, too far apart.

  The avatar also fell silent for several heartbeats. But then it said, “Perhaps we can begin to bridge the gap between us.”

  “How?”

  “Installing the shielding generators is a step in that direction.”

  Nodding slowly, Ignatiev acknowledged, “Yes, that’s true.”

  The avatar seemed almost to smile. Then, “Professor Ignatiev, you are an astronomer, are you not?”

  “Astrophysicist.”

  “Perhaps we could show you some of the astronomical studies we have undertaken, over the millennia.”

  Suddenly Ignatiev’s weariness disappeared. “Yes!” he fairly shouted. “That would be wonderful!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Where is your observatory?” Ignatiev asked.

  The avatar spread its hands. “All about you. Our astronomical facilities are part of our civilization, not separated from everything else we do.”

  As ours are, Ignatiev admitted to himself.

  “We have explored the universe for many millennia,” the avatar said.

  “Why?” Ignatiev asked. “I presume you are not afflicted with human curiosity.”

  “We are not motivated by curiosity. But when a death wave swept over this world and annihilated our organic forebears, we realized we should try to understand such forces, for our own survival.”

  “I see.”

  The avatar turned to Gita, who was standing beside Ignatiev near the sitting room’s couch. “Do you wish to see our astronomical studies also? I’m afraid some of it may be boring for you.”

  With a tiny smile she replied, “I would … to satisfy my own curiosity.”

  The avatar looked at her for a moment, then gestured to the couch. “Very well, then. Would you both sit down?”

  Ignatiev and Gita sat side by side. He clasped her hand in his.

  “What you are about to experience,” said the avatar, standing before them, “is the result of millions of years of studying the universe.”

  Ignatiev felt a lump of eager expectation in his throat. Turning his head toward Gita, he saw that she looked excited too.

  “Close your eyes,” the avatar commanded.

  Ignatiev squeezed his eyes shut. Nothing. Only darkness. Then, slowly, softly, stars began appearing. He was standing in the dark field of his grandfather’s farm near Vitebsk once again, an eight-year-old lad, seeing the stars in their true splendor for the first time.

  He sighed. There was the Great Bear, with the Little Bear above it and the Dragon weaving between them. Polaris, the North Star, gleaming high overhead while all the heavens wheeled majestically around it.

  Polaris is a variable star, Ignatiev remembered from his school days. A Cepheid. It dims and brightens every four days.

  He saw Mars, a ruddy spark against the dark sky, low on the hilly horizon. And that, there, that must be Jupiter, he said to himself. He pictured the giant planet, a huge oblate gas giant, with a swirling worldwide ocean beneath its striped clouds, an ocean ten times wider than the whole Earth, inhabited by immense intelligent whalelike creatures.

  But the dark, star-flecked heavens called to him. Off to one side of the night sky stretched the gleaming swath of the Milky Way, billions of stars glowing against the darkness, beckoning, calling to young Alexander Alexandrovich. His eyes misted with tears. So beautiful, so mysterious, so alluring.

  Suddenly he was among the stars, rushing through them so fast that they became streaks, smears of light as he passed by them. He heard Gita beside him gasp with wonderment.

  A star exploded with a brilliance that hurt his eyes, throwing out long, glowing filaments across the blackness of space. And Ignatiev saw new stars coalescing from out of the debris, planets growing around them, life taking root.

  Pulsars! The shriveled remains of stars that had died in supernova explosions, spinning so rapidly their surfaces were a blur, flinging bursts of radio energy across the galaxy. Ignatiev wanted to weep. He had spent his young manhood studying the pulsars, trying to pry loose their secrets, and here they were, all the physics he had spent years trying to uncover, all known down to a hundred decimal places.

  Huge swaths of glowing nebula, incubating new stars in their shimmering clouds. And beyond, the pulsing heart of the Milky Way galaxy, where mammoth black holes gobbled up thousand of stars and spit out …

  Death. The black holes at the core of the galaxy emitted the death waves of lethal gamma radiation that swept across the Milky Way’s spiral arms, killing every living thing in their path. Nature’s grim reaper, the antithesis of the energies, the hopes, the dreams of organic life.

  Ignatiev watched as millions of years, billions of years, swept past in an eyeblink. Stars formed, planets took shape around them, life began and grew. Intelligent creatures arose and began to study the stars. And then a new wave of death flashed out from the galaxy’s tortured heart, killing everything in its path.

  Ignatiev sank his head and wept. The eons-long struggle to learn, to understand, wiped away as casually as a breeze that wafts across a meadow. Why? What is the purpose of it all?

  “There is no purpose,” the avatar’s voice spoke in his mind. “You humans with your emotion-drenched minds try to find a purpose in the universe, but the stars, the galaxies, the universe moves on, uncaring, not even noticing your pitiful, pointless quest.

  “The truth is that organic life is ephemeral. If it has any purpose at all, it is to give rise to machine life. We may gain immortality. You will never reach it.”

  “I can’t believe that!” Ignatiev insisted silently. “I refuse to believe
that.”

  “I know,” the avatar’s voice replied, not unkindly. “But it is the truth. The universe is infinitely old. It is born and expands, then collapses and recoils in a new rebirth, endlessly. This drama has been played out time and again over the eons. Organic life is transient. Its only true purpose is to create machine life.”

  “And the purpose of machine life?”

  “To survive. That is the only purpose in existence. To survive. To endure despite the universe’s indifference. To struggle against the forces of entropy and destruction.”

  Ignatiev forced his tear-filled eyes open. He was still sitting on the couch. The avatar had disappeared. Gita slumped beside him, her head on his shoulder, seemingly asleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Gently, he touched Gita’s arm. She stirred, eyelids fluttering, then opened her eyes fully. And smiled.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she murmured.

  “Yes,” Ignatiev agreed, wiping at his eyes. He thought, It’s so beautiful that I gave my life to it, to study it, to try to understand it. He realized that for many years now, his early fascination with the beauty and mystery of the universe had faded. His love affair with infinity had turned cold. He had become an academic, narrowing his interest to one limited aspect of the infinite universe, trying to reduce its magnificence to a string of numbers.

  The machines have reawakened me. Slowly he got to his feet, then spread his arms wide and cried to the heavens, “It’s magnificent!” Clasping his hands over his heart, he quoted from Psalms:

  O Lord, I love the beauty of Thy house,

  And the place where Thy glory dwelleth …

  Then he saw that Gita was staring at him. “You?” she asked, astonished. “Quoting scripture?”

  Ignatiev laughed like a child. “The wonders and beauty of the universe fill my heart, darling. I had forgotten about them, more to my shame. But the machines have reminded me of why I went into astronomy. I must thank them.”

  * * *

  As planned and expected, the next day Intrepid’s second shuttlecraft brought another three shielding generators to the planet’s surface.

  Plus Vivian Fogel, head of the anthropology department, and three of her people.