This was new, utterly. Maudit, the place Kroger was saying the Guild had wanted to go, was the next system-site out from the earth of the atevi, a not-quite-planet in a thick asteroid belt.
“The Guild hopedwe’d go on to our target star once we’d just gathered resources here. This spot, in orbit around an inner planet, was safer—or so they believed—for interim measures, but the Guild hopedwe’d simply establish a small base until we had population enough to go out to Maudit’s orbit and operate there, where off-planet metal is hazardously more common. The well-known fact is, we damned near lost the colony, as was. This is a dirty system, Mr. Cameron, in every sense. This planet meets meteor swarms. We didn’t have that tracked; we were strangers to the system; we had no wealth of advance data on that fine a scale. Where we came from, we knew these hazards, but not to this degree, and this degree was lethal to the equipment.”
Lethal. The possibilities he’d begun to imagine took a severe blow.
“Do those mining robots still exist?”
“Hard to say. The big robots, the extrusion molders, survived—the station itself is evidence of that. They seem still to exist—somewhere on this station, according to the records. But the smaller ones, the machines that could safely mine the asteroids…” She shrugged. “The Guild has only opened a fraction of the station up so far. From those records, I believe one or two might still be in storage in Section Five. Most were cannibalized for their metaclass="underline" in those first days it was the onlynearby metal we could lay hands on.”
“Can we make them work?”
“Mr. Cameron… Bren… ifthey still exist, ifyour atevi can make them run, they may well function, but they won’t work. Hardening. That’s another word I give to you. The lack of it on our initial equipment is why we suffered so much damage: we weren’t prepared for the environment we went into; we damn sure weren’t prepared for this one. The problem with making the miner-bots work, then, launched in a dirty system with minimal information, was getting the resources for spare parts. The problem with making them work nowand with any degree of economic viability is making them less vulnerable. In that archive, we have specifications, however none of them are going to enable a robot ora manned craft to operate safely in this system, let alone efficiently. What I am alsosure of is that we can do better. You want atevi to do it all, Mr. Cameron… Bren. But let me suggest that atevi manufacturing and design linkedto Mospheiran resources for electronics, optics, and robotics, can save a good many lives. We can do better.”
He was a translator, a maker of dictionaries, who had had to learn far more about physics and engineering than he had ever planned to know in the process of performing his job. There were certain topics on which he was naive, and the specifics of items locked up within specialized departments of the Mospheiran establishment contained many such topics.
“I find this very interesting,” he said. He utterly forgave the tone. “Go on.”
“Joint effort, joint development.”
“An atevi-Mospheiran company,” Tom Lund said. “Manufacturing these things.”
“Still interesting” Bren said. He’d envisioned shielding, to protect atevi operators. But shielding meant mass, and it became another worm-swallowing-its-tail situation: fuel to run the miners that gathered the fuel. Removing all that mass from the equation—atevi, shielding and the lifesupport—meant fuel savings, but the same problem held true, as Kroger had pointed out, if robotic equipment ate up all its profits in repairs. If their proposed space industry ever entered diminishing returns, the situation could become again what drove colonists off the station and onto the planet, when Phoenixhad drunk up all the fuel, all the resources, all that the colonists could do, because the captains of that long ago day had believed they could go off and find the earth of humans.
A lot of history had happened since then. The captains that had come back were dealing with a planetary population and an industry base that was capable. Capable not only of the manufacturing the Guild knew it wanted, but of analyzing what went wrong the first time and doing it right the second.
The solar system had proved capable of delivering nasty surprises, he’d known that from the incomplete records. He’d known, when he came to propose the atevi as miners, that those nasty surprises were a problem needing a solution. Howextensive a problem, he’d had to wait for those archived records to determine.
Astronomical observation, the tracking of celestial objects, had been lacking for several centuries among the atevi: astronomy having become a science in disgrace since the astronomers had failed to predict the Foreign Star in their skies. Even with the new revolution in the field, with the Astronomer Emeritus and his work, atevi were stillunaware of cosmic debris that didn’t make annual appearances as falling stars.
The Mospheirans had been even less curious about the lethal environment from which they’d escaped. The region of the solar system where they had to work to supply Phoenixand the station, let alone this new ship the captains wanted, was unmapped except in historical records he hoped were in that download.
He had expected bad news from those records and the initial surveys; but this… this robotics development… was an interesting piece of information from outside his domain.
He began to see much more accurately what they were up against.
He began to see all his proposals as achievable.
Still, she had raised questions… questions that definitely touched on his realm of expertise.
“You’re saying it was a political consideration that killed the robots.”
“Political and practical,” Kroger said. “Political, because manned mining was part of the mystique; because the colonist faction was doing the mining and possibly the leaders feared if the robots replaced the miners they’d lose their political clout.”
“Is there proof of that?”
“It’s my own suspicion,” Kroger said, “and there’s no proof. But I don’t think there were saints on either side. There was some reasonthe colonists didn’t push for robotic development when they were dying left and right; there was some reasonleadership didn’t press for a delay of the ship fueling and a rearrangement of priorities, to get robots that worked. Possibly it was simple ignorance. Possibly it was ideological blindness. We’ve seen a bit of that in our generation. The fact was, the radicals among the colonists suspected everythingthe Guild proposed, by that point in time. If the Guild proposed it, there must be an ulterior motive. And the radicals were in charge. As long as their people kept dying at a sustainable rate, the anger of the colonists kept them going.”
“I don’t like to think so,” Bren said, “but I’ve no way to deny your thesis.”
“It could have been done,” Kroger said. “And they didn’t do it. The political pressure for a landing built and built.”
“The question is” Bren said, “whether the robots weren’t built because they couldn’twork, or whether you’re right. I’d hope there’s a third answer. I really hope there’s a third answer, that we can’t have been that venal.”