Jindriss's expression weakened, and he seemed to age more by the minute as Sarvik related his findings. Even before he had finished speaking, Sarvik could tell he was not making any great revelations. Jindriss had known, but he had buried the knowledge deep inside his mind somewhere, out of sight of consciousness, persuading himself that Farworlds might come up with something. This was probably the first time he had faced the truth honestly and squarely.

"Yes, yes, you're right. Of course most of it is based on speculation," Jindriss admitted tiredly."Where could anyone possibly get the hard data? As you say, there have been no expeditions. There hasn't been time to even know what the right questions are, never mind be sure of the answers."

Sarvik was aghast. "And that's acknowledged generally? The other scientists here at ASH who are part of it-they know that at best the whole thing is a gamble against all the odds?"

"It's not a simple matter of being objective about facts, as you make it sound," Jindriss said.

"Self-defense reactions set in. The mind protects itself in situations like this. People immerse themselves totally in the only answer they've got. They shut everything else out."

"What about the engineers at Farworlds?" Sarvik objected. "The ones who are supposed to be implementing the solutions. They have to preserve a measure of realism, surely."

"Most of them believe the cover story for Breakout-that it's time to get out of the Kovar System.

They think the time pressure is for political reasons, to exploit Farworlds' edge over the compet.i.tion. In other words, to them the urgency isn't 'real,' and the problems will all get fixed eventually." Jindriss made a resigned gesture. "Of course, the senior executives who are tagged to go know the truth. But in their case we have protective psychology at work again. A collective unreason close to panic has taken hold.

Keeping busy and at least doing something provides a day-to-day a.n.a.lgesic that's better than the despair that would come with doing nothing. The rest just go along with the pressure without knowing the reason for it."

All of which was understandable, Sarvik could see. It was the only choice any of them had. But it was not the only choicehe had.

The next day he took the flymobile over to Pygal and kept an appointment he had made to see Alifrenz and Greel. It was time to renew their relationship.

Through them, he still had access to things that were going on in Replimaticon and certain other places Replimaticon was involved with, such as Universal Robocon. For Sarvik's previous work on his immortality project had suggested a different solution to the whole problem of escaping from Turle. It would need Replimaticon, and it would need access to the computers that planned and programmed the Searcher missions, which his privileged position at Farworlds already gave him. But apart from that, he no longer cared particularly whether the ASH-Farworlds plans for interstellar colonies were feasible, or if a single generation ship ever managed to lift itself out from its a.s.sembly orbit.

For the solution to it all that Sarvik had in mind didn't involve fragile, perishable biological Borijan bodies-and all the attendant complications of sustaining, nurturing, and reproducing them-at all.

20.

Sarvik sat back in the padded leather chair in the director's office overlooking the main lab and surveyed his domain high in the Farworlds Tower. Around him, arrays of panels flashed their lights self-importantly and beeped updates onto variously colored screens.

"Simulation run seven complete and checked through all phases," an irritatingly smooth synthetic female voice announced. "Results pending. Require preferred preview mode."

"Vertical section at x equal to pi, correlate with z-transform," Sarvik instructed absently.

Outside the variview window, which was switched to maximum transparency, programmers and a.n.a.lysts sat working at rows of consoles and terminals. In a darkened bay at one end of the room a holographic presentation of an atmospheric modeling exercise glowed silently as a sphere of swirling light patterns six feet in diameter. In a part.i.tioned conference area on the far side of the lab, a working party was arguing decision criteria for extracting metals from dissolved salts versus going to nuclear trans.m.u.tation. If the circ.u.mstances had been otherwise, Sarvik would have had good reason for feeling satisfied.

He had been with Farworlds three-quarters of a year now. It was a shame the rest of life couldn'thave been as untroubled and rea.s.suring as the daily pretense he saw acted out here in the tower. There had been a lot of suicides among scientists, which the health experts and sociologists had been unable to explain. Others had abandoned their lifetime's work, disappeared without trace, or taken to drink, drugs, debauchery, or all of them. It was now public knowledge that Farworlds Manufacturing was mounting an all-out program to build generation starships from modified Searcher designs, and fears that some kind of catastrophe was imminent abounded. The stories going the rounds and getting their share of attention in the media ranged from Turle's being about to collide with an asteroid or to be swallowed by a black hole, through a whole repertoire of climatic disruptions, to explosion of the planet's core or the subterranean fusion plants. Public accusations of official cover-ups were being made and denied, and investigations were being demanded almost daily, while the expert and not-so-expert in every science argued and proffered figures to support or refute, attack or defend just about every plausible scenario or crackpot theory imaginable. Even the truth had surfaced amid it all more than once, only to be swept away unrecognized in the general flood of confusion.

Naturally, Farworlds dismissed all of it as ma.s.s hysteria and insisted that the generation-ship program meant no more than what it had always said: that the time had come for the Borijan civilization to expand beyond the Kovar System. Why all the hurry, then? the skeptics asked. To exploit their compet.i.tive edge over their rivals, Farworlds' public relations flacks replied. They were the biggest in the business and intended to stay that way. To show that everything was business as usual, Farworlds was continuing its regular Searcher launches as scheduled.

But Sarvik didn't think it could hold together for very much longer. From his inside vantage point he was more certain than ever that Breakout could never be made to work in the remaining time available.

Every day he saw evidence that others were ceasing to delude themselves, too. Eventually the disillusionment would reach critical ma.s.s and set off a chain reaction of dashed hopes, at which point the effort would collapse. After that, there would be no more Searchers going out. All the pieces of his own escape plan were in place. The time to move with it was now.

A blank screen in front of him came to life to show a pair of Borijan ears and a question mark.

Sarvik shook aside his reflections. "It's all right. You can speak," he said.

"I just heard an interesting conversation between Lequasha and Othenitan," GENIUS informed him. It had turned out that Lequasha was among the inner group who knew the real reason for Breakout.

Othenitan was another. The most sensitive records were still being held off-line from the net, where GENIUS couldn't get to them. However, it had found that by modifying the diagnostics the maintenance programs used for remote-checking hardware, it could surrept.i.tiously activate the regular voice pickups on terminals in the executive suites.

"Go on," Sarvik directed.

"The story that's being given out to the public is cracking," GENIUS said. "So a whole new group of PR people are being brought into the secret to help hold things together. In return, they get slots in the lifeboats."

"Which will mean deallocating someone else's," Sarvik concluded. There was no surprise in his voice. He had been waiting for something like this for a while.

"Do you want the conversation verbatim, or shall I summarize?" GENIUS asked.

"No. Just give me the gist."

"Essentially, you're out, along with the other slots they a.s.signed you. They figure that your usefulness was concentrated up front, with the conceptual stages. The specs will be frozen on final encoding, which means that when the ships fly, your job's over."

Sarvik stared through the screens, beyond the walls of the building. Although he had been prepared for this, it still took him a moment to come to terms with hearing it said in cold words.Now, he told himself again. His preparations would never be more complete. Further delay could only increase the risk of exposure or disaster through a sudden cancellation of the Searcher program. The time was now.

After a while a cartoon depiction of fingers tapping impatiently appeared on GENIUS's screen.response? it prompted.

Sarvik drew in a long, unsteady breath. Uploading a personality was a one-way process-once he was transformed into machine-resident code, there could be no coming back. "We get our own show rolling," he finally p.r.o.nounced. "Are the archive allocation groupings still good?"

"No change."

"Reactivation sequence?"

"Implanted successfully and tested. Untraceable from system level."

Sarvik had identified Indrigon early on as having little real confidence in the Breakout program, and had revealed to him his own scheme. He had needed somebody in Indrigon's position to arrange unrestricted access to the Searcher mission-control software. This had enabled Sarvik to engineer a whole region of "invisible" storage s.p.a.ce, undetectable by the regular test procedures, inside the archives section of the Searcher database. There, he and the companions he had selected to take with him would stow away indefinitely as patterns of electronic molecular-bond encryptions able to survive virtually indefinitely, even with a loss of power. They would reactivate in response to a trigger code issued by the supervising processor when the right conditions were met. Indrigon would be one of those going with Sarvik, of course, along with two of his closer a.s.sociates from Farworlds: a female director named Dorn, and Gulaw, one of the engineering chiefs. They had nothing to gain from giving Sarvik's plan away and everything to lose if it was blocked.

"AMS status?" Sarvik checked.

"Final link structure fixed. Simulator returns all positive," GENIUS reported.

When the Searcher found a planet meeting all the environmental and other conditions and the first general-purpose factory had been built, the Supervisor would switch to an alternative manufacturing schedule of products for it to make-very different from the standard remote-manufacturing list. Key among these would be the new bodies that Greel and Alifrenz's contacts at Universal Robocon had designed for the machine-transported personalities to be copied into. Two prototypes had been built at UR and delivered to Replimaticon for trials. In return, a UR director called Kalazin, along with two of his senior designers, a male named Creesh and Meyad, a female, would be included in the deal. Greel and Alifrenz had also organized the completion of the upgraded molecular-circuit brain for the UR body, and its two designers at Replimaticon would also be coming. Leradil and Palomec Jindriss had already earned their places, bringing the total thus far to eleven.

"And the two prototypes have remained stable?" Sarvik said. "No indications of regression or breakdown?"

In reply, GENIUS activated another screen to show a recorded image of one of the strangest robotic constructions that had ever crossed a laboratory floor. "This came in this morning on the progress of the second subject," it announced. "Integration appears to be going smoothly, without adverse effects. Just like the first one."

Finally, there was Dr. Queezt, who had persuaded two of the terminal patients under his care to volunteer as experimental subjects to be written into artificial hosts. Later, when Sarvik had divulged to him why cerebral prosthetics didn't matter anymore, Queezt had moved to Replimaticon, where the brain developed by Greel and Alifrenz's group, the prototype bodies from UR, and the two sets of extracted code from Queezt's patients were integrated into a complete package. It would have been unfortunate indeed if the first full test wasn't tried until it all came together in a Searcher-built factory out at some distant star and it failed to work. But so far the results looked promising.

Animals that were formed roughly like a stick, such as worms or snails, were unable to manipulate objects or even to move around very well. Animals with legs-a stick with smaller, movable sticks attached-moved themselves better but were still awkward at manipulation. Animals with fingers-sticks on the ends of sticks on a stick-became amazingly dexterous.

The body that GENIUS was showing in the recording from the Replimaticon lab was a total departure from the menagerie of legged, wheeled, or tracked, multisensored, variously appendaged,surveying, constructing, transporting, and a.s.sembling robots that Universal Robocon's design teams had been dreaming up for over a century. It was formed in the general pattern of sticks on the ends of sticks on the ends of sticks down to the eighth level, with major limbs reconfigurable into lesser segments that could act in combination or subdivide further to achieve finer levels of tactile sensitivity and coordination.

In short, it could create or modify limbs and digits to suit the purpose of the moment.

"Come over here and tell me what you make of this," Queezt's voice said. The camera angle shifted, and Queezt appeared, gesturing toward something on top of a bench next to where he was standing. The machine he was talking to re-formed the tripodal arrangement that it had been resting on into two multijointed limbs, on which it made its way warily and visibly unsteadily across the room.

"This still feels odd." The voice was pleasantly melodious, not at all like what most people would have thought of as "mechanical." "I'm having trouble coordinating. My legs have got too many pieces in them."

"That's because the neural model that you created during life doesn't map onto the physical geography," Queezt said. "That will get better as you adapt. Give it a chance." He gestured again toward the bench. "Now, have a try at this and tell me how it feels." The figure of Leradil Jindriss appeared in the background and moved closer. Her experience in animal behavior was proving a valuable a.s.set to the project.

Lying on the bench was a popular puzzle in the form of a plastic board with a pattern of holes containing colored pegs. The object was to jump the pegs according to stated rules in such a way as to leave a single peg in the middle. Most children encountered it at one time or another, and addicts had been known to spend hours trying to make it come out right.

But instead of using two fingers to select and move one peg at a time, as was the usual way of tackling the problem, the creation extended a limb over the board, at the same time disa.s.sembling its "hand" into a forest of digits and subdigits that encompa.s.sed every part of the array simultaneously.

It did have a head in which visual and other senses were concentrated, close to the brain. But Sarvik's eventual goal was a fully distributed architecture in which the concept of "brain" would no longer be meaningful: an architecture able to sense, move, and think with all of its anatomy. When, with further experiment and improvement, the branching level reached a degree where the terminal endings became cilia numbered in trillions, an individual would command an information input and processing ability comparable to that of the entire present-day Borijan population. Instead of having to be content with the infinitesimal bandwidths accessible to a few fixed senses, it would be able to create sensory capacities to suit its needs: an eye by forming a holographic diffraction lens with one set of fingers and a retina from a few million others held in the focal plane behind, or ears able to register from spine-juddering subba.s.s to megacycle ultrasonic, or a UHF antenna, or an X-ray diffraction grating. Its descendants would become a new form of life, as far removed in their perceptions and aspirations from Borijans as Borijans were from the first replicating cells that had come together out of the chemistry of Turle's oceans three billion years before. They would never have to die. Parts could be replaced, outmoded functions exchanged for better ones.

It would be . . . immortality.

But in the meantime the crude precursor that Sarvik was looking at on the screen would have to do.

The test body performed something like a one-armed sleight of hand in which all the pegs moved together, all but one of them being lifted and leaving a lone remainder in the target hole in the center.

Even Sarvik was impressed.

"I can't explain what I did," its voice said, sounding hesitant. "It wasn't a sequential process. It was as if . . . as if the whole logic of the problem was just 'there,' instantly, all at the same time . . . like when you look down on a maze and can see the way through all of it. I felt as if I was looking down on time, somehow, in the same kind of way . . . I don't know how else to describe it."

"That's fine, just fine." Queezt was obviously having trouble containing his excitement. "It's unlike anything you've ever experienced before. You'll get used to it."As the rest of them would have to, too. At least this would give them an idea of what they should expect.

"That'll do," Sarvik told GENIUS. The screen went blank.

All the pieces were in place and ready, he told himself again. The time was now. The next Searcher would be departing from orbit around Veresoi, another of the planets in the system of Kov, in three days' time. Its computers and database were currently being loaded from Turle via laser link. Sarvik made his decision.

"We go with the next launch," he said. "Set up the storage zones and transmit the manufacturing files. Send the code word to Greel and Alifrenz to have the extraction facility at Replimaticon ready to receive us tomorrow night. Make sure everyone has a good official reason for not being seen around during the following two days."

That was it. There was nothing more to say. Sarvik checked for anything he might have overlooked. There was nothing. The arrangements had all been worked out in detail and agreed to in advance. He got up and left the room.

On the screen a caricature of a cuboid computer with a face appeared, followed by a large question mark.

The flight back to Hoditia the following afternoon was a strange and unsettling experience. Sarvik traveled with Indrigon and the two others from Farworlds, Dorn and Gulaw, but communicated little with any of them. All the way he stared out over the familiar cloud-mottled sphere of Turle turning slowly by below the dartliner, at the oceans and the islands, trying to make himself believe that it was really true that after this day he would never set eyes on any of those sights again. But somehow it refused to feel real, perhaps because some mental defense mechanism of the kind that Palomec Jindriss had talked about had taken hold and was dulling the sensation. When he next experienced conscious awareness after tonight, all of this would long ago have ceased to exist. How far into the distant future, he wondered, would that be? What kind of world would he awaken to? There was no way of even guessing. His companions were equally reticent, doubtless weighed down by similar thoughts.

They met Greel and Alifrenz at Replimaticon, together with Kalazin, Creesh, and Meyad, the three from Universal Robocon. Queezt, with Palomec and Leradil Jindriss, were already there, too. Again, there was little talk. The party went down to the processing lab where Queezt had set up the equipment for extracting the neural configuration coding, and one by one they lay back to sink into oblivion as the preliminary anesthetic took effect. The technicians in attendance were the ones who had processed the two test subjects that Queezt had brought previously, and asked no questions.

From Pygal in Hoditia the codes were beamed via satellite to Xerse, where the Farworlds processors responsible for managing the Searcher launch retransmitted them out to the ship, which was hanging in orbit above the planet Veresoi. There, the streams of code found their a.s.signed destinations, hidden deep inside the system's archives. Back in Pygal, the physical remains of what had been Sarvik and his eleven companions were incinerated and the residue was flushed away down the Replimaticon Building's drains.

A day later, the Searcher ship fired its drive and lifted itself out from orbit above Veresoi. Its navigation system took control and brought it around onto an accelerating course toward the outer fringes of the Kovar System.

Actually, Sarvik could never have done it with just the eleven others preserved with him in the Searcher's data bank. He had conned more than a hundred more individuals at Replimaticon, ASH, and Farworlds into rendering essential help, all of whom believed that they were among the privileged. But such a number would have been impossible to process. In any case, he didn't need them. An entire population of new individuals could be generated from electronically shuffled sets of genes once the new bodies were in production. So, in the final and ultimate game to end all games, he had beaten them all.

Heh-heh-heh.

21.

Several decades later, the searcher arrived at the fourth planet of a not-too-distant star. Turlewas a dead world by that time, the Borijan civilization gone-but the programs const.i.tuting the Searcher's Supervisor knew nothing about that.

It wasn't much of a world to brag about: an airless, lifeless ball of eroded rock formations, debris from ancient meteorite impacts, and wastes of volcanic ash and dust. Certainly it fell far short of meeting the criteria that Sarvik had specified for the kind of place he and his friends would want to inhabit, and so the command to reactivate them and switch to the alternative manufacturing procedure was not issued. But the orbital probes and surface landers found a crust rich in the kind of minerals the Searcher's regular routine called for, and the Supervisor initiated the descent routine.

A standard robot workforce was deployed to feed ores and materials back to where others had begun building a pilot extraction plant. A parts-making facility was added next, followed by a parts-a.s.sembly facility, and step by step the pilot plant grew itself into a general-purpose factory, complete with its own control computers. The master programs from the ship were copied into the factory's computers, which thereupon took charge of surface operations. The factory then began making more robots.

Time pa.s.sed, the factory hummed, and the robot population grew in number and variety.

Maintenance robots took care of stoppages and routine wear in the factory; troubleshooting programs tracked down the causes of production rejects; breakdown teams brought in malfunctioning machines for repair; and specialized scavenging robots roamed in search of wrecks, write-offs, and any other sources of parts suitable for recycling.

When the operation reached a critical size, a mixed workforce detached itself and migrated a few miles away to build a second factory, a replica of the first, using materials supplied initially from Factory One. As this self-replicating pattern spread, production commenced of products and robot freighters to carry them back to the extinct civilization that would never need them. After verifying that all was well and subjecting itself to a thorough overhaul, the Searcher launched itself back into s.p.a.ce to seek more worlds on which to repeat the cycle.

Fifty years later, the Searcher was approaching a hot bluish-white star with a ma.s.s of more than a dozen times Kov's. It so happened that this was one of the last ma.s.sive stars to go supernova in the chain that had rippled through the cl.u.s.ter surrounding Kov and put an end to the Borijans and their worries about mortality.

The Searcher's hull survived the heat and radiation blast more or less intact, but secondary X rays and high-energy particles flooded the interior, wreaking havoc with its electronics. With its navigation system disrupted and many of its programs obliterated or corrupted, the Searcher veered away and disappeared back into interstellar s.p.a.ce. One of the faint specks now lying ahead of it was a yellow-white dwarf star a thousand light-years away. It, too, possessed a family of planets, and on the third of them, the descendants of a line of semi-intelligent apes had tamed fire and were beginning to experiment with tools chipped laboriously from stone.

A hundred thousand years after its encounter with the supernova, the Searcher drifted into the outer regions of the solar system. The few of its long-range sensors that were still functional fixed upon the planet-moon system of Saturn, finally singling out t.i.tan. Unable to deploy surveillance satellites or high-alt.i.tude probes, the ship went straight into its descent routine and landed on an ice beach by an inlet of a shallow methane sea. It was a bleak, barren, ice-encrusted world, unsuitable either for remote manufacturing or for hosting re-created Borijans, but that was of no consequence since the programs for evaluating the prospects for both kinds of endeavor weren't working. Accordingly, Factory One, withmost of its essential functions up and running to at least some degree, took shape on a rocky shelf above the ice beach.

It was when Factory One's Supervisor identified commencement of work on Factory Two as its next a.s.signment that everything went completely wrong. The "How to Make a Factory" file that it signaled for from the ship's data bank included a set of subfiles on "How to Make the Machines Needed to Make a Factory," i.e., robots. Because of corruption in the software, the subfiles containing the robot-manufacturing information, instead of being transmitted to Factory One, were merely relayed through the factory's system and beamed out to the local memories of the robot types to which they pertained. No copies at all were retained in the factory files, and worse still, the originals inside the ship managed to get erased in the process. Eventually the system diagnostics managed to piece together what had happened. The scheduler couldn't schedule anything without manufacturing information, and the only information that now existed for making robots was that contained inside the robots out on the surface.

So the Supervisor put out messages telling them to send their manufacturing information back again.

But none of the robots were able to comply. Their local memories were simply not big enough to hold a complete manufacturing subfile. However, different individuals seemed to have collected different pieces of their respective files, and a quick check indicated that most of the information had been preserved among all of them. So the Supervisor retrieved different parts from different sources and tried to fit them back together in a way that made sense, and that was how it arrived at the versions it eventually pa.s.sed to the scheduler for manufacture.

Unfortunately, the instruction to store this information for future reference got lost somewhere, and the Supervisor had to go through the whole rigmarole again whenever a new batch of a particular robot type was needed. The Supervisor had been written as a self-modifying learning program that would grow unhappy about such an inefficiency and experiment with ways of doing something about it. It found that some of the robots contained about half their respective subfiles, and in some cases the halves were complementary. This meant that a complete copy could be obtained by interrogating just two individuals instead of many. Accordingly, the Supervisor made a note of such "matching pairs" as its sources for servicing future scheduling requests and ignored the others. Thus, the robots started coming off the line with one-half of their "genetic" information included in the programs that were written into them to start them up, and they in turn became the source when more models came to be built later.

The resulting "genomes" were seldom identical, and as a consequence the robots began taking on ever stranger shapes and behaving in strange ways. The majority simply failed to function at all and were broken down again for recycling. Many were genetically incomplete-"sterile"-and lasted until they wore out, then became extinct. Of those which did reproduce, most did so pa.s.sively, transmitting their half subfiles to the Supervisor when the Supervisor asked for them.

A few, however, had inherited routines from the ship's software that caused them to lodge requests with the scheduler to schedule more models of their own kind-routines, moreover, that raised the urgency of their requests until they were serviced. These robots reproduced actively: they behaved as if they experienced a compulsion to ensure that their half subfiles were always included in the scheduler's list of things to make next. The robots competing in this way for slots in the production schedules soon overrode the demands for everything else. And this pattern spread through the new factories appearing inland from the rocky coastal shelf.

Resources were scarce everywhere, adding to the compet.i.tive pressure. The factory-robot communities that had "appet.i.tes" appropriate to their needs and also enjoyed favorable sites usually managed to survive, if not flourish. Factory Ten, for example, was built in the center of a meteorite crater where the impact had exposed metal-bearing bedrock from below the ice. Factory Thirteen occupied a deep fissure and was able to melt a shaft down to access core materials, while Factory Fifteen resorted to building up nuclei by trans.m.u.tation. But there were many like Factory Nineteen, which ground to a halt half-complete when its drilling robots and trans.m.u.tation reactors failed to function, and its supply of materials ran out.

The parts-salvaging scavengers, able to locate a.s.semblies suitable for breaking down-"digesting"-and rebuilding into something useful, a.s.sumed a crucial role in shaping the strange metabolism that was coming into being. The piles of a.s.sorted junk and broken-down robots were eaten up; the carca.s.ses of defunct factories were eaten up; the Searcher ship, still lying on the ice beach by the methane sea, was eaten up. And when those sources of parts and materials ran low, some of the machines started eating each other.

The scavengers were supposed to discriminate between properly functioning machines and rejects in need of disa.s.sembling and recycling. But as with everything else in the mess the project had turned into, this worked with varying success in most cases and sometimes not at all, which meant that some types were likely to attempt the dismantling of a live, walking-around something or other instead of a dead, flat-on-its-back one. The victims who were indifferent to this kind of treatment soon died out, but others evolved fight-or-flight responses to preserve themselves, marking the emergence of specialized prey and predators.