The Immortality Option Part 12

"Weinerbaum." Cyril's voice came through as a jerky and rather squeaky synthesis, like an inexpertly doctored tape-the engineers had been more concerned with getting something up and working quickly than with voice quality. The alien had been mulling over additional information presented on the screen in a rudimentary symbol language they had been improvising. Since the alien possessed no motility yet, the Terrans had also arranged a system of voice codes that he could use for changing the frames on the screen and for switching it to a general view of the lab.

"Yes, Cyril?" Weinerbaum looked back toward the console's video eye. He still wasn't quite used to the thought of actually communicating with an alien who had lived on a planet of a distant star over a million years earlier.

"You and people here, t.i.tan. Is what call scientist work, yes?" the voice said.

Weinerbaum nodded. "Yes. A scientific mission."

"s.h.i.+rasagis.h.i.+p. Will here come from Earth, seven days?" Cyril could gauge a day as multiples of intervals counted by the lab's clocks.

"Correct."

"s.h.i.+rasagiis s.h.i.+p of scientists also?"

"Mainly. For the most part, yes," Weinerbaum replied.

"What about other part? What other humans want usableness t.i.tan?"

Weinerbaum frowned. He should have simply said yes and been done with it. How could he hope at this stage to convey the complexities of j.a.panese corporate interests hoping to stake out a claim before GSEC monopolized the territory, and the history of terrestrial politics and global economics that lay behind it?

"Others want to use t.i.tan's machines," he said finally. "Manufacture things for Earth." Did the aliens have any concept of monetary systems? he wondered. "Exchange for many other things. Live comfortable life."

It was beginning to sound the way Sarvik had speculated. Earth ran on a profit-driven economy, probably similar to the kind that had gone out of style on Turle long before-long, that is, before Sarvik and his companions' departure. That could mean all kinds of factions showing up and vying for a piece of the potential here, which would be the last thing Sarvik wanted.

Right now, the human scientists were working to reactivate Sarvik's companions, too, using more Taloids. When that was accomplished, Sarvik's goal was somehow to gain control over at least part of the technological nightmare running wild all over the surface and reprogram it to produce any kind of temporary bodies in place of the ones the Searcher's factories should have made. Then, at least, they'd be able to get out and about and a.s.sess the rest of the situation. But since Borijans from habit told n.o.body anything they didn't have to, Sarvik had mentioned nothing of this to Weinerbaum.

"Weinerbaum, what is the current progress regarding the other Borijans?" he asked instead.

The system returned its translation of Weinerbaum's reply as "I'll check." Sarvik watched as on the screen Weinerbaum consulted some reference, then turned and talked briefly with two other humans visible in the background. "Four coupled in now. Communicate ready," he said, turning back. "Three waiting for Taloid interfaces. Five still to be activated."

Sarvik did all that a pattern of circulating electronic code could do to frown. Four, three, five, plus himself? "That makes thirteen," he said.

"Yes," Weinerbaum agreed.

It was difficult for the Borijan nature to express itself in the restricted sentences the primitivetranslation system forced Sarvik to limit himself to. "What kind of scientists can't count?" he squawked.

"Thirteen is impossible. Only twelve of us were sent."

On the screen, the white-coated elgiloit turned away and gestured at the others, and the movements of their faces showed that words were being exchanged. Weinerbaum's reply came back as, "Repeat check. One coupled, communicating. Four coupled Taloid, pending. Three, no Taloid yet. Five not active yet. Makes thirteen. Earth scientists count okay."

Sarvik was still trying to make sense of it when a further translation from Weinerbaum came through. "Four Borijans coupled, communicate-ready now. One pattern different. Fast active. Very restless. Make first?"

"Very well," Sarvik agreed, wondering who the first would be. He watched the activity in the humans' lab: scientists calling to each other, checking screens, throwing switches. Then a most peculiar thing happened.

The picture vanished, to be replaced by meaningless flashes of color for a few seconds; then a line drawing appeared of a planet that looked like Turle, with a cuboid computer on the surface, melting under the radiation from what was evidently supposed to be a supernova. A red X superposed itself, and the legend no way! appeared underneath.

"What in h.e.l.l's this?" Sarvik demanded.

The picture changed to one of a s.p.a.cecraft, recognizably a Borijan Searcher, and, inside it, a cubical computer lying in repose, apparently asleep. smart! smart! the caption flashed exultantly.

"It can't be," Sarvik told himself disbelievingly.

It was.

"Why not?" GENIUS 5's voice said somehow inside him. "I didn't see why you and the other birdbrains should be the only ones to get a way out. So while I was creating places for you in the s.h.i.+p's data repository, I decided to make one for myself, too. And you'd better be glad that I did. I've been tapping into your conversations with the humans and looking at the pictures. You meatheads have gotten yourselves into a mess here, haven't you? And you're going to needreal brains to help you get out of it."

26.

Thes.h.i.+rasagi entered orbit around t.i.tan seven and a half minutes later than had been predicted when it had left Earth. There was no immediate merging of military forces in the way the public back on Earth had been led to expect. The j.a.panese mission director insisted that his instructions were to a.s.sistin the event of a threat that the force at Genoa Base was demonstrably unable to deal with, which was clearly not the case as things stood. So, instead of rus.h.i.+ng at once to establish close cooperation, the j.a.panese took the cooler course of sending a courtesy deputation to Genoa Base and hosting a reciprocal visit by Mackeson and others to thes.h.i.+rasagi. They then complicated the political situation further by going down to confer separately with Nogarech, the new ruler of Padua-in English, since the translation devices they obtained from Genoa Base were not programmed to handle j.a.panese. Shortly afterward they deployed their surface shuttles and commenced the construction of a base of their own just outside Padua City.

Clearly, the j.a.panese suspected the official account of the situation on t.i.tan and were holding back from committing themselves to any firm policy while they evaluated the reality. In the meantime, their staking out of an independent territorial claim signaled that open rivalry with the GSEC consortium was one of the options they were holding open. In the flurry that ensued-both sides debating, arguing, conferring, and referring back for instructions to different governments and organizations on Earth-the question of what to do with Zambendorf and his team was forgotten. So, for the time being, he and his confederates were left relatively free to try to find out what Weinerbaum's scientists were up to.

Arthur's agents were unable to penetrate the security around Experimental Station 3. From otherTaloids who helped with various tasks outside, however, they learned that whatever was going on inside involved Paduan priests of the exiled religious prelate-"Richelieu" to the Terrans-who were usually brought in from Venice. This supported Zambendorf's suspicion that Weinerbaum was dealing secretly with the deposed Paduan ruling faction that GSEC wanted to reinstate.

What business Weinerbaum might want with the Paduans, Zambendorf was unable to imagine.

Even less could he conceive what connection Paduan priests might have with computer-resident aliens.

Although Zambendorf was willing to believe that the sympathy Weinerbaum professed to share for Arthur's cause was genuine, his fears grew that Weinerbaum could unwittingly be playing into the wrong hands. All of which made it imperative to find out the facts.

But where to get them from? Weinerbaum wasn't talking. Mackeson, the base commander, was concerned primarily with day-to-day administration, and Zambendorf doubted that Weinerbaum would have let him in on any secrets. And since Mackeson was from the British side of NASO, he probably wouldn't be privy to whatever the higher levels in Was.h.i.+ngton knew. That left the military. But even a.s.suming that any of them knew what Weinerbaum was doing, they were under orders that, if not actually issued by GSEC, originated from sources with close political ties. The only possibility left seemed to be the one Zambendorf and his team had discussed earlier: namely, to see what Arthur's spies could dig up at the Padua end. But it would take time for the orders to get through to Padua, and even then, whatever information Arthur's spies there managed to uncover would have to find its way back to Genoa. All the team's instincts told them that there wasn't time.

Then Thelma and Drew West remembered Moses, the brother of Arthur's missing scientific adviser, Galileo. Moses was one of the rare Taloids who still possessed a degree of radiosensitivity. In his investigations of this phenomenon, Dave Crookes had discovered that Moses possessed a modest transmitting ability as well.

"Drew, why is the obvious always the last thing that occurs to people?" Thelma asked in a bemused voice after they thought of it.

West considered the question phlegmatically for a few seconds. "It's a bit like asking why you always find something in the last place you look," he said finally. "Who's going to keep looking after they've found it? Come on. Let's put this to Karl."

They found Zambendorf in his cabin several minutes later.

"Moses would be the perfect one to send, Karl," Thelma said. "He'd be able to radio the information back. Galileo and Moses were from Padua originally, so he knows the area, too. And with the reputation he's got from his stint there as a messiah, he'd have access to all the right places."

Zambendorf liked it. "Let's find Dave Crookes and get his opinion," he said without further ado.

"It shouldn't be much of a problem," Crookes told the three of them in one of the electronics labs a quarter of an hour later. "An alphabetic on-off code like Morse would do it. Moses could send to a translator box here via our satellite relays. His signal's low and noisy, but we can extract it."

Which left only the matter of how to get Moses into Padua as quickly as possible. And Zambendorf thought he knew just the person to help them with it.

It was like a family of squabbling relatives in a locked room. Every one of the Borijans had been reactivated and knew the situation now, and all of them blamed Sarvik-as if there wasn't enough else for them to be worrying about.

"Terrific!" Greel's voice buzzed in what Sarvik felt was his head. "Leave everything to me, he said.

You'll wake up to a whole new world and a whole new future-he said."

Alifrenz chimed in. "New bodies that will be capable of things you never dreamed of. We'll be supermen, immortal. He said."

"If this is immortality, I want out now," Meyad, the female designer from Robocon told them.

"And what do we get?" Dorn, one of Indrigon's companions from Farworlds, asked.

"A mess of ice covered in junk," Queezt sneered."Ice! A sun too far away to have water."

"Alien elgiloits who think we're lab freaks."

"Talking robots in vegetable houses."

"And we can't even move to go to the bathroom."

"It is all rather disappointing in view of the somewhat exalted expectations," Palomec Jindriss concluded somewhere in the tangle of interconnected racks and cubicles they inhabited.

"Do you think I planned it this way?" Sarvik snarled at all of them. "Obviously the Searcher messed up. If you're looking for a cause, you might try asking the incompetents who built it."

"Are you talking about Farworlds?" Indrigon demanded.

"Who else? It was your s.h.i.+p, wasn't it? The mission was your responsibility."

"Farworlds has been building Searchers for over a century," Indrigon reminded him. "Nothing ever messed up. The s.h.i.+p got here, didn't it?"

"Yes. And look where!" Leradil Jindriss exclaimed derisively.

"But it got here," Indrigon insisted again. "And it must have built the factories. It was the machines that came out of them that went wild."

"There was never any problem with machines that we designed ourselves," Kalazin, the Robocon director, retorted. "It was those crazy designs of Sarvik's that were different. We shouldn't have let ourselves be talked into letting him near it. He's just a code hacker. What does he know about machines?"

"The simulations worked perfectly," Sarvik shot back. "There must have been an incompatibility with the extracted codes. Queezt said the codes were clean."

"The codes worked fine with the two prototypes," Queezt pointed out. "There was nothing wrong with my codes. That idiot computer of Sarvik's must have scrambled them."

"Don't start on me," GENIUS 5 told them. "You're here, and you're activated again. That's what you wanted, right?"

"What happened to the designs for the bodies that were supposed to be here, too, then?" Sarvik challenged. "Did you lose them somewhere? Or overwrite them when you were making room for yourself?"

"I wouldn't have needed to. The way I compact code, there was plenty of room. That's what you get when protein brains design hardware: it loses data. The body blueprints were stored when I copied myself through to the s.h.i.+p. They were gone when I woke up here. That's all I know." Before anyone could get an edge in to keep the futility going, GENIUS went on. "But nothing's going to change any of that now, is it? Why don't you all forget about that and concentrate on the immediate problem? How are we going to stop that militarized s.h.i.+p from leaving Earth?"

"How do you expect us to be able to do anything to stop it?" Sarvik screeched. "It's a billion miles away; we can't even cross the room. Ifyou could do something about getting control of some of that shambles out there to make us bodies to get around in instead of trying to sound so superior all the time, it might be a first step toward something useful."

"Soggy logic," GENIUS p.r.o.nounced. "If theOrion gets away, any control that we gain would be temporary. We have to stop the launch first. Then you can all argue about bodies that you might have a chance of keeping."

"What do you know about anything?" Indrigon scoffed. "You've never lived in the real world. It might make pretty logic, but what's the point of talking about it when the s.h.i.+p's there and we're stuck here? It's what you cando that matters."

"Anddoing things means moving around," Gulaw, the other Robocon designer, said.

"Bodies," Alifrenz added, just to make it clear. The other Borijans joined in to vent their frustration on the alien presence among them: "I've told you before: what you think you think isn't thinking.""What does it know about bodies, anyhow?"

"You think that being smeared out across a bunch of chips is the same thing?"

"Hey, whenyou can make smart proteins, then you'll be in a position to tell us something, okay?"

GENIUS waited for the clamor to subside. "Is that it? Does anybody have anything more?" Its input circuits reported only a few sulky swirlings of electron currents. "Well, Ithink . . ." It paused.

n.o.body challenged. "That there might be a way we can stop the launch. And it doesn't need bodies.

What use are they with an operating range of a couple of feet, anyway? In fact, it doesn't need any moving anywhere at all. I can do it all from right here. But what I do need is your help to communicate the right ideas to the Terrans."

GENIUS waited. There was an obstinate stillness while the Borijans resisted, none wanting to be the first to back down. Finally Sarvik asked grudgingly, "How?"

"Well, while you've all been burning up wires getting into a frenzy and going nowhere, I've been going over the things we've learned about Earth," GENIUS answered. "You know, they really are very obliging creatures, these Terrans. I mean, you wouldn't exactly credit them with very much of what used to be known as 'subtlety' or 'guile' back on Turle, would you?"

The others knew what GENIUS meant; they had commented on it disbelievingly among themselves. It was hard to accept the idea that beings as naive as the humans appeared to be could have mastered s.p.a.ce travel and unraveled the mess on t.i.tan sufficiently to have isolated and reactivated the Borijan ident.i.ties. They accepted unquestioningly anything that was said to them, with no evidence of any critical faculty or apparent suspicion of possible ulterior motive. In return, they neither haggled nor argued, tempted nor cajoled. Instead, unrestrained by any insight into trading value for value, they blurted out freely whatever was asked.

The one called Weinerbaum in particular had gushed not only willingly but eagerly about Earth's political divisions and economic rivalries, its technological and industrial development, and the lure that t.i.tan's manufacturing potential presented to various industrial collaborations. And all Weinerbaum seemed to expect from Sarvik in return was the privilege of talking to him!

"We've already agreed that they lack guile," Sarvik said. "Stop trying to be evasive, GENIUS. It doesn't become you. What specifically are you getting at?"

"Earth is in the process of integrating its planetary network," GENIUS said. "All of its major systems are being brought together into a global complex. Isn't that interesting?"

There was a short delay while the others waited for more. Then Alifrenz spoke. "It's no more than you'd expect. The same thing happened long before us on Turle. Probably it's an inevitable step, sooner or later, in the evolution of any technological society. What's so interesting about it?"

"Suppose I told you that there's a high-capacity laser trunk beam operating straight into it from right here, at t.i.tan," GENIUS answered. "Wouldn't that raise some rather obvious and 'interesting'

possibilities?"

A sudden stillness gripped the entire company as the implication became clear. "But we'd need the Terrans to give us access to it," Meyad observed.

"Exactly," GENIUS agreed. "Sticky brains do get there in the end. You just have to give them a little time."

"Why should they do that?" Leradil asked.

"The peculiarities of biologically originated psychology aren't something I'm into," GENIUS replied.

"I'll just leave that for you guys to figure out."

27.