Collected Short Fiction, page 683
“The other time you went we weren’t about to be married.”
“All right, that’s true. I owe you something. But I owe our planet something, too. We’re just beginning to contribute our share of leadership in the galaxy, Zara. I mean, look at that waiter. Half the Purchased People around are now human beings. When the nonviables edit a copy for Sun One—what shape do they copy?
Human! The human shape is as familiar in the galaxy now as the Sheliaks—and all less than in twenty years.”
Zara sucked at the last of her drink and put it down in its cage. She stared at the waiter, who was smoking a cigarette and thinking whatever thoughts a blanked-out personality was allowed to think.
She shook her head. “I’ll lay it out nice and orderly like an engineer for you, Ben. First, if they copy human shape—is it because they respect us or because they have some crazy methane sense of humor? Second, if they buy our convicts for Purchased People, likely enough it’s because we have more criminals to sell. Third, I don’t like the whole idea of Earth’s trying to dominate the galaxy. Fourth—”
“Dominate? I said ‘leadership,’ not domination.”
“One is a prerequisite to the other. Fourth, I hate your going on personal grounds—and I’m not talking about idealism. I’m talking about sex. It’s going to take some of the joy out of going to bed with you, Ben, thinking that at the same time somewhere else you’re getting eaten by a Sheliak or dying of radiation burn. I’m sorry it’s so, but it’s so.”
Ben said doubtfully after a moment, “Would it be better if we postponed the wedding a little bit?”
“I don’t know. Let me think.”
He waited, finished his drink, looked cautiously at Zara. He saw no anger or misery on her pretty face—she was simply staring thoughtfully out at the other beings in the concourse.
Pertin beckoned to the waiter and paid the check.
“They thank you,” said the waiter in the idiom of the Purchased People, staring appraisingly at Pertin and the girl. As with all Earth’s exported criminals, his body and will belonged to the race that had bought him, but the thoughts of the brain inside were still his own. Far off at the core of some gas-giant planet or floating in space, a creature with a wholly different physical structure was using this man’s eyes and limbs as his own, linked by tachyon transmission to the monitor units implanted in each Purchased Person’s skull. But inside that skull the original mind was spending a lifetime in solitary confinement. “They ask,” droned the waiter, “if there will be anything else?”
“No, we’re going—”
Zara sighed and smiled at Pertin. “Well—you want to go pretty badly. Feeling the way you do, I suppose you ought to go. I won’t stop you, Ben, and it’s silly to put off getting married. But there is one thing I want you to do.” He waited warily. “Give me your ring. No, just to hold. When you’ve finished going to the probe I’ll give it back to you. But I don’t want you wearing my ring when you die.”
II
LAST-MINUTE briefing was in the tachyon transport chamber, out at the far shell of Sun One and heavily shielded. Dr. Gerald York Bielowitz himself checked out Pertin. He was a methodical man, one of the reasons he was head of the mission to Sun One. He read from a soundscripted list.
“We’ve got about ten minutes, Ben Charles. Let’s see. Object Lambda. You know as much about it as I do. It’s anomalous and it’s exciting. The only way to find out about it is this probe and it’s in Earth’s interest to make the probe succeed.” He dropped his eyes to the page and went on: “There’s no possibility of survival on the probe, of course, and this has undoubtedly had some effect on the psyches of all the beings there. To the extent that they have what we can map as psyches, I mean. But in my opinion it’s the physical problems that have caused the trouble. Some of them are now dying—your predecessor among them, of course. Others are functioning poorly, probably because of ionization interference with their nervous systems. Or whatever corresponds to nervous systems. At any rate—” he checked off a point—“the beings aboard no longer constitute an orderly system. There’s violence. Some of the deaths are from fights or murders. This is seriously interfering with the operation of the probe and threatening its very success. You know how important that is. If we blow this it’ll be more than a hundred years before we get another chance. And finally—” Bielowitz folded the list and put it in his sporran—“your account here will be credited with double-rate pay for your services on the probe. Your equipment will follow, along with Doc Chimp here.” He nodded civilly to the hairy little handyman who crouched next to Pertin. “And good luck to you both.”
“Thank you, Gerald York,” said Pertin gravely. He stepped up to the transport portal, waited for the signal and entered, giving a half wave to Bielowitz as the door closed behind him.
This was the fourth time he had found himself in a tachyon transporter box, or at least the fourth time that he remembered. They all looked about the same. On the inside they were featureless except for what seemed to be studs or nailheads almost completely covering each of the six interior surfaces. He stood there for a moment and felt nothing.
But something was going on. The sensors were counting, locating and identifying every atom in his body, measuring their bonds to adjacent atoms, charting them in a precise three-dimensional matrix. The information obtained they encoded into a string of binary numbers, whereupon the great tachyon generators glowed into life, transmitting the numbers at a billibit per second in the direction of a point outside the farthest spiral arm of the galaxy, where the ship Ben Pertin had just volunteered to serve on—and to die on—lay waiting.
IT WAS here—in the tachyon transmission chamber—that the great identity problem that plagued all the space-exploring humans had its genesis. Freud would have found its implications thrilling. It was another womb—with a completely different set of birth traumas.
All tachyon transmission was enormously expensive both in psychic cost and in cash. Its only justification was that it was indispensable. If you wanted to get a man or an instrument or a shipload of chess sets from one point in the universe to some other point across interstellar distances you had only two choices. One was to build a rocket preferably fusion-powered like the one Pertin was going to. You then had to launch it and set it on its way—and then wait. Wait indefinitely, for it could take anywhere from a decade or two to geologic eras before it reached another star, even one relatively nearby. If you wanted to go farther than that you would wait forever. A voyage from a spiral arm to the core or from any point in. the galaxy to the deeps of intergalactic space was simply out of the time consciousness of any race but the T’Worlie.
The other method was faster. It dispensed with attempting to transport matter at all. Instead of sending an object you sent a blueprint of the object and had it built from plan at the destination.
The procedure was not simple. It required enormous expenditures of energy to generate the tachyon stream that carried the blueprint. It required complex scanning devices to measure every atom and molecule in the object to be transmitted and to encode positions and relationships for transmission. Above all, it required a tachyon receiver at the point to which you wanted to send—or go.
But granted all those things, you could “travel” at the speed of the tachyons, those particles whose lower speed limit was the velocity of light, and whose upper limit had never been measured.
The original object, of course, remained behind. It was scanned and its blueprints were encoded and then it was released unharmed. He who volunteered for a tachyon trip also stayed at home. What flashed across space was a description of himself and what emerged from the receiving chamber at destination was a newly built identical copy. There was no detectable difference between original and copy. It would have been a foolproof method of counterfeiting or of duplicating rare art objects—if it had not been so expensive in terms of power consumption that there was little worth the cost of duplicating.
As a method of duplicating human beings, the process was more successful—it was perfect and unique. The man who entered a tachyon transmission chamber to be sent to Sun One was the same man who walked out of it and returned to his home on Earth—and was also the same man who emerged on Sun One to take up a wholly new life. The continuity was absolute. Neither was a “copy” in any physical sense.
In a psychic sense the question of “reality” was troublesome. Every human who ventured into the star swarms was heavily briefed and indoctrinated with endless philosophical arguments and logical proofs. If you draw two triangles, which is the “real” triangle? (They both are, chorused the classes doubtfully.) If you build 10,000 Mercedes-Ford hovercars on an assembly line, which is the “real” Mercedes-Ford? (They all are.) Oh, the lecturers went on, there would eventually be differences among them. One car gets a scratch on the windshield when the wipers are installed. Another has a ripped gasket in its hydraulic system that, three years later, means its braking system has to be overhauled. But one is not an “imitation” or a “copy” of the other. Both are “real.” All of the Ben Pertins were Ben Pertin. The custom that gave them differing middle names was only a convenience, but they were all real—and, ladies and gentlemen, when you go out into space you will still be you. Not a copy. You.
And the classes would nod and grin at each other and go on to their next training class. But that night each of them in his or her solitary bed would lie staring through closed eyes at a future that held two separate identities. And all through the courses the couches of the analysts were kept warm with the bodies of trainees trying to come to terms with the question of “reality.”
But the process itself was easy, quick and painless. It was only moments until Ben Charles Pertin walked out of the box and shook hands with his head of mission.
“You’re the best man I’ve got left,” said Bielowitz. “Thanks.”
Pertin then went back to his office and worked through the rest of the afternoon. He left a little early to meet his fiancée and take her to dinner and over the coffee she returned his troth ring.
AT ABOUT the same time as Ben Charles Pertin was putting his ring back on his finger, inasmuch as time at two points separated by relativistic distances and velocities can be called the “same,” Ben James Pertin pushed his way out of another, almost identical box on the probe ship.
He stopped just outside the portal, moving slightly to allow it to close behind him. His expression was grim. “Lucked out,” he said aloud, looking around the unfamiliar chamber.
There was no one to hear—or to see the bitter and despondent look on his face. The chamber was deserted. The probe was in free fall and Pertin floated slowly away from the transport. Nothing else was floating in the room. There was . . . no litter, no sign that any other being of any sort was within thousands of light-years and, as he listened, he heard not even any sound.
He swore softly to himself and twisted his body around to face the crated personal effects that were nudging their way out of the box. There wasn’t a great deal to come—some tapes, some changes of clothing, personal items. At the end of the string of transmissions came his companion in the mission. Doc Chimp.
Doc Chimp thrust out a long arm and caught the handle of the door as he went by. He Hung there for a moment, staring at his environment with an expression that was a parody of Pertin’s own.
“Oh, wow, Ben Charles,” he said sadly. “What a place.”
“It’ll be ‘Ben James,’ I think,” said Pertin.
“Sure,” said Doc Chimp dismally. “Me, I’m not going to bother. If you want to call me something different—call me stupid.”
Doc Chimp was Earthborn, but he was not human. He was five feet three inches tall, weighed more than two hundred pounds and, in high-G environments, habitually walked on feet and knuckles. His parents had been chimpanzees, but Doc Chimp was something different.
For one thing, he had a sense of humor. He reflected it in the clothes he wore. Across his hairy barrel chest stretched a little red vest—open, with the coarse black fur sprouting through. He didn’t need it for comfort or for modesty—it was to please his own sense of the comic and for pockets to hold his automatic translator, the key to his private suitcase and a supply of macadamia nuts, of which he was very fond. For modesty he wore shiny brown lederhosen. On his head he sported a kepi with a sand veil around sides and back and over its visor a bright green plume.
Even the plume was sagging dejectedly as he said, “I think I’m going to hate this place.”
“We didn’t come here to have fun. Where the hell is everybody?”
“Don’t know, Ben James.”
“Stow our stuff then. This thing won’t stay in free fall long; we’d better find somebody before it starts firing again.”
“Certainly, Ben James. But somebody’s coming now.”
Pertin said, startled, “I don’t hear anything.”
“Neither do I. But I smell it. It’s a T’Worlie, coming fast.”
THE probe ship was T’Worlie property, but fortunately for the other races of the galaxy the T’Worlie didn’t have a very strong territorial imperative.
They had been civilized for a long, long time. They were an inquisitive race in their unhurried way and no doubt that was why they had been sending their probes out for hundreds of generations. Little T’Worlie rockets had radiated in all directions from their mother star, some of them aimed at other stars, some at nothing closer than the Great Nebula in Andromeda, ten million years’ travel time away.
Only a race like that, deploying probes as lavishly and patiently as that, could have discovered the curious astronomical object called Lambda. No other race would have been in a position to do it. Sirians, with their limited time-binding capacities that reached no more than a week into the future, wouldn’t have bothered. Nothing that promised some remote payoff interested them at all—which made them unattractive partners but inoffensive foes. Humans of course had no chance. Their technology wasn’t up to the job. The farthest terrestrial probe was still climbing toward the turnover point on its now senseless journey toward 40 Eridani A.
But the T’Worlie thought long, slow thoughts and they were gently but persistently curious about everything. If their race lived long enough it would learn everything there was to know. None of them seemed to mind that no T’Worlie now alive would be present to learn it.
If the T’Worlie hadn’t been what they wore, probably no one would have found Object Lambda for another several thousand years. It had been discovered first by an unmanned T’Worlie scoutship and reported in a routine synoptic survey. It attracted no attention at all. When first observed its great distance and low luminosity put it at the very threshhold of discovery and the traits that made it unique had not been detected.
Subsequent observations attracted more attention. The Object’s weak spectral lines seemed to shift toward the violet rather than the red, which is to say that it was moving toward the galaxy instead of away from it. Curious. But the lines were so very weak, the point so very distant and the orderly T’Worlie had many other things on their agenda to investigate.
Then, by accident, another scout turned up the same object in a survey.
It might not have been recognized if the computers of the T’Worlie had not been so patient and painstaking. The second scout had been launched five thousand years earlier, its vector several degrees away. From its point of view Object Lambda was in a wholly different part of the sky and its rate of approach, indicated by the spectral shift, quite different.
But the computers had sensed a possible match and clucked over the figures until they confirmed it. There existed a specific, if hypothetical, orbit and velocity which, seen from those two scouts at those recorded times, would have given exactly those readings.
From the estimated elements the computers made a prediction. They requested a special observation from still a third unmanned scout. Lo! it turned out as they had predicted.
Object Lambda was not more than 20,000 light-years from the edge of the galaxy and was approaching it at about one-sixth of light speed.
At this point the T’Worlie announced their discovery to the galactic civilization at large and began a study of their existing drones in that general part of space.
The T’Worlie drones were as small as an interstellar probe can be made—a scoop, a hydrogen ram, some instruments and a tachyon installation. The T’Worlie had been launching them, thousands at a time, for tens of thousands of years. Since they had never invented war they were able to accumulate large quantities of surplus capital, so the probes were not a particularly expensive project for them. Like most early-industrial races, they had energy to burn. They burned it. Their planet was largely water covered—though they looked like bats, they were somewhat more analogous to flying fish. Their water was rich in D20 and they spent its fusion energies profligately.
The T’Worlie drone model was standardized early. A program was set up under which each drone, upon reaching a point suitably distant from all others, flashed a tachyonic signal to the T’Worlie planet, whereupon the tachyon transmitters scanned, encoded and transmitted whole new drones to the mother drone’s unit. As each new drone flashed into being, it signaled in to the T’Worlie planet, was given a course and program of its own and moved on. The effect was of an enormous globe of drones—at the end thousands of millions of them—expanding outward like the shell of a dead supernova.
The program was fully automatic and economical of everything but the energy eaten up by the tachyon transmitters—and for ten thousand years there seemed to be an endless supply of that.
AT THE end even the T’Worlie began to realize that their energy resources, though huge, were not infinite. The drone program was cut to a trickle. But it was never stopped and the great swelling bubble of drone ships expanded into globular clusters, out toward the neighboring galaxies, along the spiral arms, in toward the core of the Milky Way itself. It was a T’Worlie drone that had buried itself on Pluto and been found by the exploration from Earth. Besides humans, T’Worlie drones had brought into the galactic society at least a hundred races at one time or another, almost half of the total so far located. Another race might have thought of using that fact to establish dominance for itself, but the T’Worlie didn’t think that way. They had never invented empires, either.
