We’re like ants, she thought, building our tiny castles under the tread of rampaging giants. And, like ants, we’ve spent our lives unaware of the battles going on overhead.
Depicted on the rock wall had been almost every type of interstellar probe imaginable… and some whose purposes Ursula might never fathom.
There were Berserkers, for instance—a variant thought of before in Twentieth Century science fiction. Thankfully, those wreckers of worlds were rare, according to the wall chart. And there were what appeared to be Policeman probes, as well, who hunted the berserkers down wherever they could be found.
The motivations behind the two types were opposite. And yet Ursula was capable of understanding both. After all, there had always been those humans who were destroyer types… and those who were rescuers.
Apparently both berserkers and police probes were already obsolete by the time the stone sketches had been hurriedly carved. Both types were relegated to the corners—as if they were creatures of an earlier, more uncomplicated day. And they were not the only ones. Probes Ursula had nicknamed Gobbler, Emissary, and Howdy also were depicted as simple, crude, archaic.
But there had been others.
One she had called Harm, seemed like a more sophisticated version of Berserker. It did not seek out life-bearing worlds in order to destroy them. Rather it spread innumerable copies of itself and looked for other types of probes to kill. Anything intelligent. Whenever it detected modulated radio waves, it would hunt down the source and destroy it.
Ursula could understand even the warped logic of the makers of the Harm probes. Paranoid creatures who apparently wanted the stars for themselves, and sent out their robot killers ahead to make sure there would be no competition awaiting them among the stars.
Probes like that could explain the emptiness of the airwaves, which naïve twentieth-century scientists had expected to be filled with interstellar conversation. They could explain why the Earth was never colonized by some starfaring race.
At first Ursula had thought that Harm was responsible for the devastation here, too, in the solar system’s asteroid belt. But even Harm, she had come to realize, seemed relegated to one side of the rock carving, as if history had passed it by, as well.
The main part of the frieze depicted machines whose purposes were not so simple to interpret. Perhaps professional decipherers—archaeologists and cryptologists—would do better.
Somehow, though, Ursula doubted they would have much luck.
Man was late upon the scene, and a billion years was a long, long head start.
13
Perhaps I really should have acted to prevent her report. It would have been easier to do my work had the humans come unto me innocent, unsuspecting.
Still, it would have been unsporting to stop Ursula’s transmission. After all, she has earned her species this small advantage. They would have needed it to have a chance to survive any first meeting with Rejectors, or even Loyalists.
They will need it when they encounter me.
A stray thought bubbles to the surface, invading my mind like a crawling glob of Helium Three.
I wonder if, perhaps in some other part of the galaxy, my line of probes and others like it have made some discovery, or some leap of thought. Or perhaps some new generation of replicants has come upon the scene. Either way, might they have decided on some new course, some new strategy? Is it possible that my Purpose has become obsolete, as Rejectionism and Loyalism long ago became redundant?
The human concept of Progress is polluting my thoughts, and yet I am intrigued. To me the Purpose is so clear, for all its necessary, manipulative cruelty—too subtle and long-viewed for the other, more primitive probes to have understood.
And yet…
And yet I can imagine that a new generation might have thought up something as strangely advanced and incomprehensible to me as the Replicant War must seem to the humans.
It is a discomforting thought, still I toy with it, turning it around to look at it from all sides.
Yes, the humans have affected me, changed me. I enjoy this queer sensation of uncertainty! I savor the anticipation.
The noisy, multiformed tribe of humans will be here soon.
It will be an interesting time.
14
She sat very still in the darkness of the control room, her breathing light in the faint pseudogravity of the throbbing rockets. Her own gentle pulse rocked her body to a regular rhythm, seeming to roll her slightly, perceptibly, with every beat of her heart.
The ship surrounded her and yet, in a sense, it did not. She felt awash, as if the stars were flickering dots of plankton in a great sea… the sea that was the birthplace of all life.
What happened here? she wondered. What really went by so many, many years ago?
What is going on out there, in the galaxy, right now?
The central part of the rock mural had eluded understanding. Ursula suspected that there were pieces of the puzzle which none of the archaeologists and psychologists, biological or cybernetic, would ever be able to decipher.
We are like lungfish, trying to climb out of the sea long after the land has already been claimed by others, she realized. We’ve arrived late in the game.
The time when the rules were simple had passed long ago. Out there, the probes had changed. They had evolved.
In changing, would they remain true to the fundamental programming they had begun with? The missions originally given them? As we biologicals still obey instincts imprinted in the jungle and the sea?
Soon, very soon, humans would begin sending out probes of their own. And if the radio noise of the last few centuries had not brought the attention of the galaxy down upon Sol, that would surely do it.
We’ll learn a lot from studying the wrecks we find here, but we had better remember that these were the losers! And a lot may have changed since the little skirmish ended here, millions of years ago.
An image came to her, of Gavin’s descendants—and hers—heading out bravely into a dangerous galaxy whose very rules were a mystery. It was inevitable, whatever was deciphered from the ruins here in the asteroid belt. Mankind would not stay crouched next to the fire, whatever shadows lurked in the darkness beyond. The explorers would go forth, machines who had been programmed to be human, or humans who had turned themselves into starprobes.
It was a pattern she had not seen in the sad depictions on the rock wall. Was that because it was doomed from the start?
Should we try something else, instead?
Try what? What options had a fish who chose to leave the sea a billion years too late?
Ursula blinked, and as her eyes opened again the stars diffracted through a thin film of tears. The million pinpoint lights broke up into rays, spreading in all directions.
There were too many directions. Too many paths. More than she had ever imagined. More than her mind could hold.
The rays from the sea of stars lengthened, crossing the sky quicker than light. Innumerable, they streaked across the dark lens of the galaxy and beyond, faster than the blink of an eye.
More directions than a human ought to know…
At last, Ursula closed her eyes, cutting off the image.