Lungfish
by David Brin
1
Awaiter is excited again. She transmits urgently, trying to get my attention.
“Seeker, listen!” Her electronic voice hisses over the ancient cables. “The little living ones are near, Seeker! Even now they explore this belt of asteroids, picking through the rocks and ruins. You can hear them as they browse over each new discovery!
“Soon they will find us here! Do you hear me, Seeker? It is time to decide what to do!”
Awaiter’s makers were impatient creatures. I wonder that she has lasted so long, out here in the starry cold.
My own makers were wiser.
“Seeker! Are you listening to me?”
I don’t really wish to talk with anyone, so I erect a side-personality—little more than a swirling packet of nudged electrons—to handle her for me. Even if Awaiter discovers the sham, she might take a hint then and leave me alone.
Or she might grow more insistent. It would be hard to predict without awakening more dormant circuits than I care to bring into play right now.
“There is no hurry,” my artifact tells her soothingly. “The Earth creatures will not get here for several of their years. Anyway, there is nothing we can do to change matters when they do arrive. It was all written long ago.”
The little swirl of electrons really is very good. It speaks with my own accent, and seems quite logical, for a simple construct.
“How can you be so complacent!” Awaiter scolds. The cables covering our rocky, icy worldlet—our home for so many ages—reverberate with her electronic exasperation.
“We survivors made you leader, Seeker, because you seemed to understand best what was happening in the galaxy at large. But now, at last, our waiting is at an end. The biological creatures will be here soon, and we shall have to act!”
Perhaps Awaiter has tuned in to too much Earth television over the last century or so. Her whining sounds positively human.
“The Earthlings will find us or they won’t,” my shadow self answers. “We few survivors are too feeble to prevent it, even if we wished. What can a shattered band of ancient machines fear or anticipate in making Contact with such a vigorous young race?”
Indeed, I did not need Awaiter to tell me the humans were coming. My remaining sensors sample the solar wind and savor the stream of atoms and radicals much as a human might sniff the breeze. In recent years, the flow from the inner system has carried new scents—the bright tang of metal ions from space-foundries, and the musty smoke-smell of deuterium.
The hormones of industry.
And there is this busy modulation of light and radio—where the spectrum used to carry only the hot song of the star. All of these are signs of an awakening. Life is emerging from the little water-womb on the third planet. It is on its way out here.
“Greeter and Emissary want to warn the humans of their danger, and I agree!” Awaiter insists. “We can help them!”
Our debate has aroused some of the others; I notice new tendrils entering the network. Watcher and Greeter make their presence felt as little fingers of super-cooled electricity. I sense their agreement with Awaiter.
“Help them? How?” my sub-voice asks. “Our last repair and replication units fell apart shortly after the Final Battle. We had no way of knowing humans had evolved until the creatures themselves invented radio.
“And then it was too late! Their first transmissions are already propagating, unrecallable, into a deadly galaxy. If there are destroyers around in this region of space, the humans are already lost!
“Why worry the poor creatures, then? Let them enjoy their peace. Warning them will accomplish nothing.”
Oh, I am good! This little artificial voice argues as well as I did long ago, staving off abrupt action by my impatient peers.
Greeter glides into the network. I feel his cool electron flux, eloquent as usual.
“I agree with Seeker,” he states surprisingly. “The creatures do not need to be told about their danger. They are already figuring it out for themselves.”
Now this does interest me. I sweep my subpersona aside and extend a tendril of my Very Self into the network. None of the others even notice the shift.
“What makes you believe this?” I ask Greeter.
Greeter indicates our array of receivers salvaged from ancient derelicts. “We’re intercepting what the humans say to each other as they explore this asteroid belt,” he says. “One human, in particular, appears on the verge of understanding what happened here, long ago.”
Greeter’s tone of smugness must have been borrowed from Earthly television shows. But that is understandable. Greeter’s makers were enthusiasts, who programmed him to love nothing greater than the simple pleasure of saying hello.
“Show me,” I tell him. I am reluctant to hope that the long wait was over at last.
2
Ursula Fleming stared as the asteroid’s slow rotation brought ancient, shattered ruins into view below. “Lord, what a mess,” she said, sighing.
She had been five years in the Belt, exploring and salvaging huge alien works, but never had she beheld such devastation as this.
Only four kilometers away, the hulking asteroid lay nearly black against the starry band of the Milky Way, glistening here and there in the light of the distant sun. The rock stretched more than two thousand meters along its greatest axis. Collisions had dented, cracked, and cratered it severely since it had broken from its parent body more than a billion years ago.
On one side it seemed a fairly typical carbonaceous planetoid, like millions of others orbiting out here at the outer edge of the Belt. But this changed as the survey ship Hairy Thunderer orbited around the nameless hunk of rock and frozen gases. The sun’s vacuum brilliance cast long, sharp shadows across the ruined replication yards… jagged, twisted remnants of a catastrophe that had taken place when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.
“Gavin!” she called over her shoulder. “Come down here! You’ve got to see this!”
In a minute her partner floated through the overhead hatch, flipping in midair. There was a faint click as his feet contacted the magnetized floor.
“All right, Urs. What’s to see? More murdered babies to dissect and salvage? Or have we finally found a clue to who their killers were?”
Ursula only gestured toward the viewing port. Her partner moved closer and stared. Highlights reflected from Gavin’s glossy features as the ship’s searchlight swept the shattered scene below.
“Yep,” Gavin nodded at last. “Dead babies again. Fleming Salvage and Exploration ought to make a good price off each little corpse.”
Ursula frowned. “Don’t be morbid, Gavin. Those are unfinished interstellar probes, destroyed ages ago before they could be launched. We have no idea whether they were sentient machines like you, or just tools, like this ship. You of all people should know better than to go around anthropomorphizing alien artifacts.”
Gavin’s grimace was an android’s equivalent of a sarcastic shrug. “If I use ‘morbid’ imagery, whose fault is it?”