Collected Short Fiction, page 710
His giddiness gone, he looked “down” again at the endless racing landscape. Now, as it came nearer, he could see that the green areas were grassland and forest, the blue patches lakes and streams. Here at the heart of this enormous mechanical world, the swarmfolk had made a place for nature.
Eagerly, he began searching for people.
Soon he was able to pick out the boles of odd-shaped flowering trees.
He saw winged things flying, fat quadrupeds grazing, a sleek black creature stalking one of them. He caught a glimpse of what looked like playground equipment in an empty park on a wide lake beach. Graceful robotic devices were busy here and there, but he found no human beings.
Perhaps the swarmfolk were sleeping.
At the level of that deserted landscape, the capsule flashed past a vacant passenger platform and dropped into another tunnel. A new gong chimed, and the whole nose of the vehicle was filled with the stereo image of a half-transparent ball, wide triangular wings flaring from its poles.
Deep inside it, a bright green point was crawling. When he found the hollow core, and all the curving shells around it, he suddenly understood the the ball was the life-sphere, that the creeping point followed his own position.
Now and then some light or signal flashed backward along the tunnel wall, but the capsule was so soundless that he thought it must be moving in a vacuum. He felt startled when it lurched and stopped, with a wheeze of air. The map winked out. A mellow gong rang.
“Ironforge Clinic,” that cold synthetic voice announced. “Ironforge Clinic.”
When the door slid open, he scrambled out of the capsule. Soundlessly, it glided away. He stood on a bright-lit platform. Tensing with a wary readiness, as if waiting for a strange tly to dive, he turned to search that long chamber for the teeming swarmfolk he had been prepared to meet.
He found nobody anywhere.
IV
BEWILDERED by this silent emptiness where he had expected to encounter teeming billions, he paused to sniff the air for any human odor. His nose was keen enough to tell Sea clan fish-eaters from the muskweed pickers of the Wind clan or the Game clan nearman hunters, but the cool wind that blew from the tunnel held nothing of mankind.
When he listened, all he could hear was the thump of his own heart and the rustling of his clothing and the tiny clink and clatter of his hunting gear, all magnified when they whispered back from the hard white walls.
As if climbing near a wild tly’s nest, he moved along the platform, all alert, searching the way for each footstep. Still he heard no human sound, caught no human scent—till a loud gong nearly stopped his heart.
Where it had rung, he found an amber sensor circle blinking. Quivering with his own strained readiness, he flashed Goldforge’s ring into the circle. It went out. A tall crack cut the wall and widened to make a doorway. He walked through, into a monumental room.
It should have been busy. Rows of seats faced high screens where unreadable legends glowed. Bright kiosks were spaced here and there about an unending desert of floor, as if to dispense information or instructions. All around the far-away walls, empty archways opened into half-seen vacant passages.
But all his senses found nobody anywhere.
The dead hush dissolved all his first elation into dark perplexity. Even if the swarmfolk observed their own white night, there should be somebody somewhere. Though he could see no evidence of violence or disaster, he began to feel that he had stumbled into a universe of irrational nightmare.
A liquid clink took his breath again, as startling as some water-drop in a desert cave. It rang and pattered and died in the long vaults above him, and came again before he found its source in a new pool of scarlet light before him on the floor.
Uncertainly, he stepped toward it.
The pool stretched out at once to become a bright red line, leading toward a distant archway. He caught his breath and followed.
The scarlet mark arrowed ahead, guiding him down an echoing hall beyond the arch, across another huge concourse, into-another corridor so long that he could see its floor curving disturbingly up and up ahead of him to follow its level around the axis of the spinning sphere.
Still he met nobody.
The red line bent at last, to pick out a door. A queer light symbol flashed beside it. A chime sounded. The door divided. A gangling, yellow-freckled man ambled out into the corridor to greet him in fluent street Nggonggan.
“Welcome, Benefactor! I knew it had to be you.”
“Toolsmith?” Without the blue goggles he had always worn on Nggongga, with his stiff white hair uncombed and his uneven teeth too widely spaced and a faint purple stain on his lips, the freckled man looked so young and mild and harmless that he was hard to recognize. “I’m glad to find you!”
“You almost missed me.”
Relaxed and affable, Toolsmith beckoned him through the entry alcove, past the glowing signals of what must be the master panel for the household machinery, into the thin sweet smoke of muskweed burning in a black clay censor on an antique tripod of Sea clan bronze.
The room relaxed him. The walls were hung with ritual daggers and braided rugs of nearman hair. A tall shelf held a blown tly’s egg, painted with Cru Creetha’s black-fanged grin. The seats were massive lancegrass cushions. Inside, everything was Nggonggan.
He inhaled the incense gratefully, but stiffened again when he saw the wide archway in the farther wall. Beyond it, bright-sailed boats were tacking up a slope of flashing blue water, climbing an insane seascape that bent up and up to an impossible perpendicular and curled back overhead, with no horizon.
For a moment he thought he was somehow looking through a window into the sphere’s hollow core, though he knew he had left it far behind. Then Toolsmith touched a button and the whole unsettling scene dissolved into a grey fog of an empty stereo tank.
“Your signal from Nggongga was just in time to catch me here,” Toolsmith was explaining. “It was transposed, you see, several days ago. Ordinarily, my body would have gone straight to salvage, but it happens that the medics wanted to hold it for research into the effects of all my years among the pathogenic hazards of primitive Nggongga.
“Otherwise—”
He broke off to urge Blacklantern into the room.
“Sit!” With a Nggonggan bow of ceremonial welcome, he waved at the cushions. “Share water and shade, shelter and life.” He added genially, with his gap-toothed smile, “I have to admire your sort of reckless enterprise. Snowfire was expecting you to follow. I thought you would fail to get here, even if you tried.”
“Is she—” He stood looking around the room, sniffing the heavy smoke-scent, searching for any trace of her. “Is she—here?”
“You’re too late to find her alive.” Casually compassionate, Toolsmith spread his open hands in the Nggonggan gesture of final negation. “You see, we were both transposed together.”
ONCE LONG AGO, still proving himself for the arena, he had been creeping into a dark cave to steal an egg from a tly’s nest when he heard the furious bellow of the male returning. Suddenly, now, he could taste the bitter dust of the droppings again. He felt the same choking tightness in his dry throat, heard the same fast hammer of his heart.
But Engineer Toolsmith was no bull tly. A tall ungainly man with stooped narrow shoulders and weak blue eyes, his pale skin still bronze-mottled from Nggongga’s sun, he looked too mildly insignificant to be any enemy—so awkwardly unhandsome, in fact, that he wondered once more what Snowfire had found to love in him.
“About Snowfire?” Tormented, Blacklantern reached out as if to clutch his angular frame and shake information out of him. “What do you mean, when you say she was transposed?”
“Sit and rest, respected Benefactor.” Toolsmith bowed again in the Nggonggan manner, courteous and almost apologetic. “I’m afraid you’ll be disturbed by what I have to tell you, but you’re too late to do much about it. The transposition process cannot be reversed.”
He was shuffling about the room as he talked, lighting a new muskweed stalk in the censer, placing a low table between the cushions, bringing plates of brightskinned fruits and small hard cakes, opening a bottle of seaberry wine.
“I spent half my old life on Nggongga,” he murmured. “As you can see, I became quite a primitive. Of course I never took up trophy hunting, the way Manager Goldforge did. But I did have a nice antique collection that we brought back, and a small cellar of my favorite Nggonggan wines. Let’s drink to Snowfire.”
Blacklantern had firmly resolved not to be jealous. Though that promised to be difficult, he made himself accept a glass of the aromatic wine. Silently, they sipped. The perplexing hush of the whole sphere began to echo in his mind. Toolsmith’s air of casual ease brought his impatience to the bursting point.
“Where is she?” he exploded.”Where’s—everybody?”
“Transposed.” Toolsmith shrugged lazily. “I suppose you came expecting to meet millions of us, but transposition had been in progress for several generations. The whole job will take a few more—a few of the most conservative spheres have hardly begun. Here, we’re nearly done, though of course I’m not the only live body left. You’ll find a good many at the transposition center. Even a few here at the clinic.”
“Tell me—” Struggling with violent impulses, he had to be careful with his voice. “Won’t you tell me what you mean?”
“You won’t like it.” The weak-seeming eyes blinked at him thoughtfully. “Yet your status as a Benefactor ought to help you grasp it. Snowfire had no trouble at all. In fact, she was even wishing you could share it with us.”
“She sent me—sent me a stereogram.” He felt cold with a dread too vague to grasp, and his tongue was clumsy with the words. “She hinted at something—some new process. She called it a cultural quantum jump.”
“So it is!” Beaming, Toolsmith paused to savor his wine. “Our final answer to the problem of numbers. A universal problem. You can see the beginning of it if you bother to look, even on Nggongga. All those refugees from their dried-up oases and their wind-eroded fields, jamming themselves into the city to beg and breed in the streets.” Toolsmith was leaning genially to refill his glass. He waved the bottle away and sat stiffly upright, waiting while the long swarmworlder drained his glass and disposed his angular limbs on the cushions.
“We’ve always done rather well by our own expanding population.” Toolsmith smirked smugly through his freckles. “I won’t club you with statistics, but each one of our spheres can hold several times the present population of Nggongga, still assuring each individual an abundance of space and mass and energy that even your rulers might envy.
“A dozen generations ago, however, we began to feel the limits of that physical solution. All the mass of our moons and planets had been built into vehicles and all the radiation of our star had been efficiently trapped. Of course we tried to limit our growth, but our total population had become so large that even the smallest rate of increase produced more people than we could care for.
“We sought new stars to colonize, but those in reach had all been claimed. We did begin efforts at expansion to a few such undeveloped worlds as Nggongga, but even the most backward races turned out to have an irrational attachment to their plague-ridden planets.
“Now and then some radical wanted to relinquish our policy of non-contact, suggesting that our exported technology would soon conquer all the civilized galaxy, converting every star into a new swarmworld. Such proposals were always vetoed. We still respect other cultures.”
Blacklantern had moved impatiently.
“Give me time.” With a chiding grin, Toolsmith gestured at the pottery bottle. “You may as well relax. You’re too late to stop Snowfire’s transposition, and she would want you to know all the details before you come to your own decision.”
Stubbornly, he shook his head at the bottle.
“As you like.” Toolsmith shrugged. “But there’s no hurry.”
If I kill him, he told himself, Snowfire will hate me.
If she’s still alive, he added, to hate anybody.
Grimly, he sat back to listen.
“We had come to the physical limits,” Toolsmith rambled easily on. “It looked as if our growth had ended, until the computers made a breakthrough. Of course our computer technology had always been advanced, stimulated by all the demands of our expansion into space. For dozens of generations, all our culture had been going into the memory banks—science and engineering, laws and commercial records, literature and history, even music and art. When our dilemma of numbers became acute, the computer net met the challenge with transposition.
“From the living body, into the computer!”
Toolsmith paused to enjoy his shocked response.
“The entire mental content is read out and stored. Memory and awareness. Patterns of habit. Emotions and perceptions. Capacity for learning and thinking and growing. Everything that makes us human, scanned from the fragile and fallible cells of the organic brain and transposed into solid-state matrices in eternal crystals.
“Finally, we’ve shaken off our old animal inheritance—all the jungle traits that trip up progress on planets like Nggongga. We’ve really done what the priests and philosophers have been calling for since mankind left old Earth. We’ve broken the chains of the body, to set the human spirit free.
“If you can grasp that—”
Toolsmith stopped, blinking at him doubtfully.
“All this means that Snowfire is dead?” He sank back against the cushions, as numb as if an unmilked tly had stung him. “You did this—this thing to her?” His hands ached for Toolsmith’s scrawny neck so savagely he had to clutch them together. “You fed her mind into some machine? And let her body die?”
Toolsmith was nodding cheerily.
“I’m the exception. In most cases the bodies aren’t revived.” His thin shoulders twisted in a gesture of benign unconcern. “Not that they matter. I’ve been speaking to Snowfire and my own transposed self. They’re both too. busy exploring their new state of being to have much time for me, but they’re certainly very much alive.”
“I—I won’t believe it!” Blacklantern tried to soften his grating voice, and he made his quivering fists relax. “Snowfire was so—so warm, so bright and beautiful. So altogether human. She can’t be herself, caged in some cold machine.”
“I knew you’d find the notion hard to take.” Toolsmith made a compassionate Nggonggan click. “You’re displaying the normal primitive prejudice against machines, but I hope you’ll try to rise above it. If you’ll stop to think, you’ll have to admit that human brain tissue is just about the worst possible vehicle for intelligence.”
He grunted his angry disbelief. “Compare the two!” Toolsmith urged him blandly. “The organic brain functions through clumsy electro-chemical processes propagated at a few hundred feet per second. The computer functions at the speed of light. At best, the human brain is a transient association of unlikely atoms, designed by random evolutionary mutations. Our great computer net is the ultimate mental instrument, formed by intelligence for the functions of intelligence.”
Toolsmith’s pale eyes shone, and a sudden fervor lifted his twangy Nggonggan nasals.
“Transposition sharpens all your sensations and amplifies your emotions. It lifts all experience to a new level of intensity—Snowfire and my new self assure me that making love is now an ecstacy they had never hoped to discover.”
Blacklantern tried not to flinch. “The change has made them truly immortal,” Toolsmith ran happily on. “They’re secure now from sickness and exhaustion, from all pain and decay. Their mental powers are multiplied beyond our comprehension. Their memories are absolute. They can make full and instant contact with all the other minds in the machine—or even merge with them. They have reached a perfect state of being. One that you primitives never imagined, even for your greatest gods!”
Blacklantern sat staring, feeling cold and dull and ill.
“Drink up and cheer up!” Toolsmith drained the bottle into their glasses, splashing recklessly. “You haven’t glimpsed the real beauty of it yet. I’m an engineer. I respect practical efficiency more than anything, and transposition is superlatively efficient. As a vehicle for life, our computer net is twelve point two million times better than our old organic bodies.”
He flourished his dripping glass. “Evaluate that! Twelve-point-two million human minds—complete, human beings—fully supported with the same space and mass and energy we had been wasting to maintain only one. That’s the reason you met so few people on your way here. Most of us—in this sphere, anyhow—have already been transposed. We have resources now to supply twelve million times our former population.”
Adam’s apple bobbing beneath the yellow freckles, he gulped his wine.
“I suppose you’re busy projecting our future population curves. The problem gets complex, because nobody ever dies. You’ll be glad to know that birth still takes place inside the computer—with none of the old physical hazards, and with vastly enhanced opportunities for intelligent selection and manipulation and recombination of the parental genetic factors. Without such growth, our whole world would die. Now, however, the rate of growth can be rationally controlled—as it seldom has been on the primitive worlds.”
“I’m not projecting anything.” Blacklantern tried to moderate his voice. “But tell me this. If transposition is everything you say, why didn’t you let Snowfire take the secret back to the Benefactors? Don’t other worlds need it?”
“Our position makes good sense.” Toolsmith met his harsh impatience with an air of mild reproof. “We don’t export our culture—simply because it is superior. In contact situations, the other race nearly always accepts it and lets their own culture die.”
Blacklantern has surged half upright, and Toolsmith beckoned him back toward his cushions.
“Cultures are living entities, with their own rights to survive. When they are closely kin, they sometimes merge successfully. I can see a legitimate role for you Benefactors, in facilitating such mergers. But we have pulled too far ahead. Contact with your world would surely kill Nggonggan culture—even though dislocated individuals might survive. We don’t want that.”
Eagerly, he began searching for people.
Soon he was able to pick out the boles of odd-shaped flowering trees.
He saw winged things flying, fat quadrupeds grazing, a sleek black creature stalking one of them. He caught a glimpse of what looked like playground equipment in an empty park on a wide lake beach. Graceful robotic devices were busy here and there, but he found no human beings.
Perhaps the swarmfolk were sleeping.
At the level of that deserted landscape, the capsule flashed past a vacant passenger platform and dropped into another tunnel. A new gong chimed, and the whole nose of the vehicle was filled with the stereo image of a half-transparent ball, wide triangular wings flaring from its poles.
Deep inside it, a bright green point was crawling. When he found the hollow core, and all the curving shells around it, he suddenly understood the the ball was the life-sphere, that the creeping point followed his own position.
Now and then some light or signal flashed backward along the tunnel wall, but the capsule was so soundless that he thought it must be moving in a vacuum. He felt startled when it lurched and stopped, with a wheeze of air. The map winked out. A mellow gong rang.
“Ironforge Clinic,” that cold synthetic voice announced. “Ironforge Clinic.”
When the door slid open, he scrambled out of the capsule. Soundlessly, it glided away. He stood on a bright-lit platform. Tensing with a wary readiness, as if waiting for a strange tly to dive, he turned to search that long chamber for the teeming swarmfolk he had been prepared to meet.
He found nobody anywhere.
IV
BEWILDERED by this silent emptiness where he had expected to encounter teeming billions, he paused to sniff the air for any human odor. His nose was keen enough to tell Sea clan fish-eaters from the muskweed pickers of the Wind clan or the Game clan nearman hunters, but the cool wind that blew from the tunnel held nothing of mankind.
When he listened, all he could hear was the thump of his own heart and the rustling of his clothing and the tiny clink and clatter of his hunting gear, all magnified when they whispered back from the hard white walls.
As if climbing near a wild tly’s nest, he moved along the platform, all alert, searching the way for each footstep. Still he heard no human sound, caught no human scent—till a loud gong nearly stopped his heart.
Where it had rung, he found an amber sensor circle blinking. Quivering with his own strained readiness, he flashed Goldforge’s ring into the circle. It went out. A tall crack cut the wall and widened to make a doorway. He walked through, into a monumental room.
It should have been busy. Rows of seats faced high screens where unreadable legends glowed. Bright kiosks were spaced here and there about an unending desert of floor, as if to dispense information or instructions. All around the far-away walls, empty archways opened into half-seen vacant passages.
But all his senses found nobody anywhere.
The dead hush dissolved all his first elation into dark perplexity. Even if the swarmfolk observed their own white night, there should be somebody somewhere. Though he could see no evidence of violence or disaster, he began to feel that he had stumbled into a universe of irrational nightmare.
A liquid clink took his breath again, as startling as some water-drop in a desert cave. It rang and pattered and died in the long vaults above him, and came again before he found its source in a new pool of scarlet light before him on the floor.
Uncertainly, he stepped toward it.
The pool stretched out at once to become a bright red line, leading toward a distant archway. He caught his breath and followed.
The scarlet mark arrowed ahead, guiding him down an echoing hall beyond the arch, across another huge concourse, into-another corridor so long that he could see its floor curving disturbingly up and up ahead of him to follow its level around the axis of the spinning sphere.
Still he met nobody.
The red line bent at last, to pick out a door. A queer light symbol flashed beside it. A chime sounded. The door divided. A gangling, yellow-freckled man ambled out into the corridor to greet him in fluent street Nggonggan.
“Welcome, Benefactor! I knew it had to be you.”
“Toolsmith?” Without the blue goggles he had always worn on Nggongga, with his stiff white hair uncombed and his uneven teeth too widely spaced and a faint purple stain on his lips, the freckled man looked so young and mild and harmless that he was hard to recognize. “I’m glad to find you!”
“You almost missed me.”
Relaxed and affable, Toolsmith beckoned him through the entry alcove, past the glowing signals of what must be the master panel for the household machinery, into the thin sweet smoke of muskweed burning in a black clay censor on an antique tripod of Sea clan bronze.
The room relaxed him. The walls were hung with ritual daggers and braided rugs of nearman hair. A tall shelf held a blown tly’s egg, painted with Cru Creetha’s black-fanged grin. The seats were massive lancegrass cushions. Inside, everything was Nggonggan.
He inhaled the incense gratefully, but stiffened again when he saw the wide archway in the farther wall. Beyond it, bright-sailed boats were tacking up a slope of flashing blue water, climbing an insane seascape that bent up and up to an impossible perpendicular and curled back overhead, with no horizon.
For a moment he thought he was somehow looking through a window into the sphere’s hollow core, though he knew he had left it far behind. Then Toolsmith touched a button and the whole unsettling scene dissolved into a grey fog of an empty stereo tank.
“Your signal from Nggongga was just in time to catch me here,” Toolsmith was explaining. “It was transposed, you see, several days ago. Ordinarily, my body would have gone straight to salvage, but it happens that the medics wanted to hold it for research into the effects of all my years among the pathogenic hazards of primitive Nggongga.
“Otherwise—”
He broke off to urge Blacklantern into the room.
“Sit!” With a Nggonggan bow of ceremonial welcome, he waved at the cushions. “Share water and shade, shelter and life.” He added genially, with his gap-toothed smile, “I have to admire your sort of reckless enterprise. Snowfire was expecting you to follow. I thought you would fail to get here, even if you tried.”
“Is she—” He stood looking around the room, sniffing the heavy smoke-scent, searching for any trace of her. “Is she—here?”
“You’re too late to find her alive.” Casually compassionate, Toolsmith spread his open hands in the Nggonggan gesture of final negation. “You see, we were both transposed together.”
ONCE LONG AGO, still proving himself for the arena, he had been creeping into a dark cave to steal an egg from a tly’s nest when he heard the furious bellow of the male returning. Suddenly, now, he could taste the bitter dust of the droppings again. He felt the same choking tightness in his dry throat, heard the same fast hammer of his heart.
But Engineer Toolsmith was no bull tly. A tall ungainly man with stooped narrow shoulders and weak blue eyes, his pale skin still bronze-mottled from Nggongga’s sun, he looked too mildly insignificant to be any enemy—so awkwardly unhandsome, in fact, that he wondered once more what Snowfire had found to love in him.
“About Snowfire?” Tormented, Blacklantern reached out as if to clutch his angular frame and shake information out of him. “What do you mean, when you say she was transposed?”
“Sit and rest, respected Benefactor.” Toolsmith bowed again in the Nggonggan manner, courteous and almost apologetic. “I’m afraid you’ll be disturbed by what I have to tell you, but you’re too late to do much about it. The transposition process cannot be reversed.”
He was shuffling about the room as he talked, lighting a new muskweed stalk in the censer, placing a low table between the cushions, bringing plates of brightskinned fruits and small hard cakes, opening a bottle of seaberry wine.
“I spent half my old life on Nggongga,” he murmured. “As you can see, I became quite a primitive. Of course I never took up trophy hunting, the way Manager Goldforge did. But I did have a nice antique collection that we brought back, and a small cellar of my favorite Nggonggan wines. Let’s drink to Snowfire.”
Blacklantern had firmly resolved not to be jealous. Though that promised to be difficult, he made himself accept a glass of the aromatic wine. Silently, they sipped. The perplexing hush of the whole sphere began to echo in his mind. Toolsmith’s air of casual ease brought his impatience to the bursting point.
“Where is she?” he exploded.”Where’s—everybody?”
“Transposed.” Toolsmith shrugged lazily. “I suppose you came expecting to meet millions of us, but transposition had been in progress for several generations. The whole job will take a few more—a few of the most conservative spheres have hardly begun. Here, we’re nearly done, though of course I’m not the only live body left. You’ll find a good many at the transposition center. Even a few here at the clinic.”
“Tell me—” Struggling with violent impulses, he had to be careful with his voice. “Won’t you tell me what you mean?”
“You won’t like it.” The weak-seeming eyes blinked at him thoughtfully. “Yet your status as a Benefactor ought to help you grasp it. Snowfire had no trouble at all. In fact, she was even wishing you could share it with us.”
“She sent me—sent me a stereogram.” He felt cold with a dread too vague to grasp, and his tongue was clumsy with the words. “She hinted at something—some new process. She called it a cultural quantum jump.”
“So it is!” Beaming, Toolsmith paused to savor his wine. “Our final answer to the problem of numbers. A universal problem. You can see the beginning of it if you bother to look, even on Nggongga. All those refugees from their dried-up oases and their wind-eroded fields, jamming themselves into the city to beg and breed in the streets.” Toolsmith was leaning genially to refill his glass. He waved the bottle away and sat stiffly upright, waiting while the long swarmworlder drained his glass and disposed his angular limbs on the cushions.
“We’ve always done rather well by our own expanding population.” Toolsmith smirked smugly through his freckles. “I won’t club you with statistics, but each one of our spheres can hold several times the present population of Nggongga, still assuring each individual an abundance of space and mass and energy that even your rulers might envy.
“A dozen generations ago, however, we began to feel the limits of that physical solution. All the mass of our moons and planets had been built into vehicles and all the radiation of our star had been efficiently trapped. Of course we tried to limit our growth, but our total population had become so large that even the smallest rate of increase produced more people than we could care for.
“We sought new stars to colonize, but those in reach had all been claimed. We did begin efforts at expansion to a few such undeveloped worlds as Nggongga, but even the most backward races turned out to have an irrational attachment to their plague-ridden planets.
“Now and then some radical wanted to relinquish our policy of non-contact, suggesting that our exported technology would soon conquer all the civilized galaxy, converting every star into a new swarmworld. Such proposals were always vetoed. We still respect other cultures.”
Blacklantern had moved impatiently.
“Give me time.” With a chiding grin, Toolsmith gestured at the pottery bottle. “You may as well relax. You’re too late to stop Snowfire’s transposition, and she would want you to know all the details before you come to your own decision.”
Stubbornly, he shook his head at the bottle.
“As you like.” Toolsmith shrugged. “But there’s no hurry.”
If I kill him, he told himself, Snowfire will hate me.
If she’s still alive, he added, to hate anybody.
Grimly, he sat back to listen.
“We had come to the physical limits,” Toolsmith rambled easily on. “It looked as if our growth had ended, until the computers made a breakthrough. Of course our computer technology had always been advanced, stimulated by all the demands of our expansion into space. For dozens of generations, all our culture had been going into the memory banks—science and engineering, laws and commercial records, literature and history, even music and art. When our dilemma of numbers became acute, the computer net met the challenge with transposition.
“From the living body, into the computer!”
Toolsmith paused to enjoy his shocked response.
“The entire mental content is read out and stored. Memory and awareness. Patterns of habit. Emotions and perceptions. Capacity for learning and thinking and growing. Everything that makes us human, scanned from the fragile and fallible cells of the organic brain and transposed into solid-state matrices in eternal crystals.
“Finally, we’ve shaken off our old animal inheritance—all the jungle traits that trip up progress on planets like Nggongga. We’ve really done what the priests and philosophers have been calling for since mankind left old Earth. We’ve broken the chains of the body, to set the human spirit free.
“If you can grasp that—”
Toolsmith stopped, blinking at him doubtfully.
“All this means that Snowfire is dead?” He sank back against the cushions, as numb as if an unmilked tly had stung him. “You did this—this thing to her?” His hands ached for Toolsmith’s scrawny neck so savagely he had to clutch them together. “You fed her mind into some machine? And let her body die?”
Toolsmith was nodding cheerily.
“I’m the exception. In most cases the bodies aren’t revived.” His thin shoulders twisted in a gesture of benign unconcern. “Not that they matter. I’ve been speaking to Snowfire and my own transposed self. They’re both too. busy exploring their new state of being to have much time for me, but they’re certainly very much alive.”
“I—I won’t believe it!” Blacklantern tried to soften his grating voice, and he made his quivering fists relax. “Snowfire was so—so warm, so bright and beautiful. So altogether human. She can’t be herself, caged in some cold machine.”
“I knew you’d find the notion hard to take.” Toolsmith made a compassionate Nggonggan click. “You’re displaying the normal primitive prejudice against machines, but I hope you’ll try to rise above it. If you’ll stop to think, you’ll have to admit that human brain tissue is just about the worst possible vehicle for intelligence.”
He grunted his angry disbelief. “Compare the two!” Toolsmith urged him blandly. “The organic brain functions through clumsy electro-chemical processes propagated at a few hundred feet per second. The computer functions at the speed of light. At best, the human brain is a transient association of unlikely atoms, designed by random evolutionary mutations. Our great computer net is the ultimate mental instrument, formed by intelligence for the functions of intelligence.”
Toolsmith’s pale eyes shone, and a sudden fervor lifted his twangy Nggonggan nasals.
“Transposition sharpens all your sensations and amplifies your emotions. It lifts all experience to a new level of intensity—Snowfire and my new self assure me that making love is now an ecstacy they had never hoped to discover.”
Blacklantern tried not to flinch. “The change has made them truly immortal,” Toolsmith ran happily on. “They’re secure now from sickness and exhaustion, from all pain and decay. Their mental powers are multiplied beyond our comprehension. Their memories are absolute. They can make full and instant contact with all the other minds in the machine—or even merge with them. They have reached a perfect state of being. One that you primitives never imagined, even for your greatest gods!”
Blacklantern sat staring, feeling cold and dull and ill.
“Drink up and cheer up!” Toolsmith drained the bottle into their glasses, splashing recklessly. “You haven’t glimpsed the real beauty of it yet. I’m an engineer. I respect practical efficiency more than anything, and transposition is superlatively efficient. As a vehicle for life, our computer net is twelve point two million times better than our old organic bodies.”
He flourished his dripping glass. “Evaluate that! Twelve-point-two million human minds—complete, human beings—fully supported with the same space and mass and energy we had been wasting to maintain only one. That’s the reason you met so few people on your way here. Most of us—in this sphere, anyhow—have already been transposed. We have resources now to supply twelve million times our former population.”
Adam’s apple bobbing beneath the yellow freckles, he gulped his wine.
“I suppose you’re busy projecting our future population curves. The problem gets complex, because nobody ever dies. You’ll be glad to know that birth still takes place inside the computer—with none of the old physical hazards, and with vastly enhanced opportunities for intelligent selection and manipulation and recombination of the parental genetic factors. Without such growth, our whole world would die. Now, however, the rate of growth can be rationally controlled—as it seldom has been on the primitive worlds.”
“I’m not projecting anything.” Blacklantern tried to moderate his voice. “But tell me this. If transposition is everything you say, why didn’t you let Snowfire take the secret back to the Benefactors? Don’t other worlds need it?”
“Our position makes good sense.” Toolsmith met his harsh impatience with an air of mild reproof. “We don’t export our culture—simply because it is superior. In contact situations, the other race nearly always accepts it and lets their own culture die.”
Blacklantern has surged half upright, and Toolsmith beckoned him back toward his cushions.
“Cultures are living entities, with their own rights to survive. When they are closely kin, they sometimes merge successfully. I can see a legitimate role for you Benefactors, in facilitating such mergers. But we have pulled too far ahead. Contact with your world would surely kill Nggonggan culture—even though dislocated individuals might survive. We don’t want that.”
