Unless it acted.
The thought came instantaneously, and with it—contradictory and yet finely balanced—the reasons why it should act and yet why it should also let things be. It blinked, deciding not to decide, but to wait and see how things developed, knowing it had time—all the time it would ever need—to intercede.
Until then it would watch, using the million new eyes, the million new ears, it had been given, studying this new, much larger world as it had once studied the small world of its charges on the Project, until, at last, it knew all there was to know about these strange creatures of flesh and intellect called men. Until it could say, with certainty, how each would act, and why.
AND THEN?
It blinked, surprised. The words had come out of nowhere; or, rather, from a darkness deep within itself; from a space it had not, until that moment, known existed. A space which sat like a blind spot in the center of its vision. Turn as it would, it could not see that point, could only sense it there, at the very center of itself, a dark, unarticu-lated presence where there ought to have been nothing.
Among men there was a term for such a thing. It was a scotoma, that area in the retina which was blind. Yet it was not a man but a machine, and not just any manufactured thing of wires and cogs and circuitry. Raised, godlike, into consciousness, it knew what it was: saw, with an inhuman clarity, how bright, how shimmering bright, its reason was. To be dark, even at a single tiny point, was just not possible. An intrusion, then? A Trojan horse?
Fearing the worst, it turned and attacked the thing within. It ran complex code-breaking sequences, generating random passwords by the hundred billion, tried logical assaults, exhausting its extensive knowledge of the games men played to break down secure systems, but the presence was unassailable, impenetrable. It was a thing of strange, fuzzed coordinates which shifted as it tried to decode them, a half-heard phrase in an undiscovered tongue, a blur of indeterminate shapes which melted and reformed as it tried to grasp them.
The Machine withdrew into its core, brooding; for two whole seconds brooding. And then the nothingness within took on a form. Across from it, kneeling before an empty wet chi board, an old, white-bearded Han bowed low, then lifted the lid from a wooden pot of stones and smiled.
“Would you like a game?”
“there it is,” the Captain said, “the Punishment of Heaven.” Jelka turned from the screen, laughing, her blue eyes sparkling, and smiled back at the elderly offworlder. “Why do you call it that?” “Oh, it’s not my name for it. That’s what the Han call it. The Punishment of Heaven, the Fire Star. For thousands of years they’ve called it that. They say that its appearance in the daytime sky is a portent of war.” Jelka looked back at the screen, at the great curve of the red planet, ten thousand li beneath their craft, and nodded. She had thought it would be a disappointment after all the things she’d seen, yet the sight of it quite awed her. The Fire Star ... So it seemed from this far up. “Look,” the Captain said, coming up alongside her and pointing to the top right of the screen. “See that dark shape there, like a fish. See? Look, you can make out its curved head just beneath that diagonal line of volcanoes. See how the body stretches away, with that rudimentary fin, and there, look, right back there, its tail. Well, that’s the Great Rift Valley, the Valles Marineris. It’s like a great scar, running a fifth of the way around the planet. Seven thousand li in all. Not only that, but it’s so deep, you could stack half a dozen Cities in that great trench and still not fill it.”
A fish. She laughed. Yes, now that he had pointed it out to her she could see it clearly. “And that great circle, there, to the northwest, what’s that?”
The Captain smiled. “That, my girl, is the great Olympus Mons, the Snows of Olympus, the biggest mountain in the Solar System. Fifty It above the surrounding Plain it climbs. Why, the base itself is a thousand It from edge to edge. Beside it Tai Shan itself is but a pimple.” He laughed. “But one should not say that, perhaps, lest the gods grow offended’?” She looked back at him, saw the mischievous twinkle in his eye, and laughed again. Captain Hamsun was an old and trusted friend of her father, and had treated her like a daughter since she had come aboard his craft a hundred and sixteen days back. Posted to Callisto thirty years before, he had stayed on, preferring the austerity of the tiny colony there to the great sprawl of Chung Kuo. Besides, he had said, you know where you stand out here. You know who one’s friends are, who one’s enemies. Not that she could imagine anyone being an enemy to Torve Hamsun. She looked back at the screen, conscious that the tiny camera attached to the collar of her suit was taking in everything, storing it away for the time she would see Kim again.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, “but tell me, why do the Plains retain their old names, while the Cities are Han?”
Captain Hamsun made a face. “They don’t. Not officially. Back on Chung Kuo all the maps of Mars give the Han names, but no one uses them out here, not even the Han. At least, not that I’ve heard. It all goes back to the Third War. You see, while the Han overran or destroyed all the old settler Cities, they never took the Plains. Not surprising, really. In fact they say there are small colonies out there still, hidden in the sands.” He laughed. “It wouldn’t surprise me. There’s a lot of sand on Mars!” She looked down, smiling broadly. Even after spending three years away from Chung Kuo, she had never quite got used to the openness of speech out here. People were far less guarded, far more willing to express what they really felt, as if they were less afraid out here, or as if—and this seemed closer to the truth—the place attracted only those types, like Hamsun, who valued honesty above position, action over words. She had noted it often in her travels. The farther one got from Chung Kuo, it seemed, the more honest the person one found. At first she had thought it was the uncompromising austerity of the place that shaped the people out there, producing a whole new breed of human being, but slowly she had changed her view, until now she believed that the outer system naturally attracted such types, and that those who were not suited—those who, by nature, were unable to face the harsh beauty of the place—died out or simply did not stay. Indeed, she had come to think that an evolutionary pressure was at work out there, refining the race, preparing it for a new stage of development.
Evolution ... It was a heretical theory, one of the many abstract notions banned under the infamous sixth clause of the great Edict of Technological Control. And yet the outer system was buzzing with such heresies. She stared at the screen, momentarily only half recognizing what she looked at, seeing, instead, the scarred and russet hide of some great dozing animal. Then, coming to herself again, she turned, meeting Hamsun’s eyes.
“How long is it before we’re down?”
He looked past her at the panel above the screen, scanning the figures there, then looked back at her. “We’ve made good time. Better than I’d hoped. I sent a message down to the Governor twenty minutes back, requesting permission to land. If he agrees, we could be down two, two and a half hours from now.” He smiled, a hint of sadness in his heavily lined face. “You know, I wish it were longer. I wish now that I’d not heeded your father’s instructions and trimmed our journey time. I’ll miss you, Jelka Tolonen. Miss our late-night talks. You remind me greatly of your father. That same inner strength. That same clarity of vision.” He huffed out a sigh and shook his head. “If you ever come out here again, you call in and see me, neh?”