Across A Billion Years

THIRTEEN

January 2, 2376

The Asteroid

Yesterday morning Pilazinool called for volunteers to go out and attempt to communicate with the robot. Jan’s hand was the first to rise; mine followed, and then most of the others, with the notable exceptions of Steen Steen and Leroy Chang. The group that finally went included Pilazinool, Dr. Horkkk, Mirrik, and me. Jan didn’t like having to stay behind, but I was relieved that she wasn’t picked.

We crossed the bare rocky plain in single file, Pilazinool leading, Mirrik in the rear. All of us except Dr. Horkkk were armed; I carried a positron gun that was probably capable of blowing the robot up, but I wasn’t sharp on using it.

When we were within twenty meters of the robot we halted and fanned out widely. Dr. Horkkk stepped forward. In his left hands he carried a little blackboard; in one of his right hands he held an inscription node. The robot took no notice of him. It still stood as though a statue, holding the globe aloft, though images no longer came from it.

Dr. Horkkk slowly waved the inscription node from side to side, trying to catch the robot’s attention. That took courage. The robot might be easily annoyed. After a few minutes Dr. Horkkk began to copy the hieroglyphics from the inscription node onto his blackboard, keeping the blackboard turned so that the robot could see what was happening. The idea was to demonstrate to the robot that we are intelligent creatures, capable at least of copying High Ones writing even if unable to understand it.

“Suppose what he’s copying is obscene?” Mirrik murmured. “Or unfriendly? What if it makes the robot angry?”

Dr. Horkkk went on sketching hieroglyphics. Gradually the robot started to show interest in him. It lowered the globe to chest-height. It stared down at the small Thhhian, and the colors of its vision panel darkened; pale greens and yellows gave way to rich maroon, shot through with crimson threads. The equivalent of a frown, maybe? The colors of deep concentration? Dr. Horkkk’s inscription node suddenly went blank, and a new inscription appeared. Calmly Dr. Horkkk erased his blackboard and began to copy the current message. The robot seemed impressed. From somewhere within its cavernous chest there boomed sounds that our suit radios were able to pick up.

“Dihn ahm ruuu dihn korp!”

Who knows what it means? But we assume that it’s in the language of the High Ones.

Dr. Horkkk took another calculated risk. He put down his blackboard, stepped forward three paces, and said in clear tones, “Dihn ahm ruuu dihn korp!”

It was an excellent imitation. But for all Dr. Horkkk knew, he was accepting a challenge to a duel, casting aspersions on the robot’s ancestry, or agreeing that he deserved to be obliterated on the spot. However, the robot’s reaction was mild. It flashed a stream of violet light along its vision panel, extended its leftmost arm in a kind of beckoning gesture, and said, “Mirt ahm dihn ruuu korp.”

“Mirt ahm dihn ruuu korp,” Dr. Horkkk repeated.

“Korp mirt hohm ahm dihn.”

“Korp mirt hohm ahm dihn.”

“Mirt ruuu chlook.”

“Mirt ruuu chlook.”

And so on for several minutes. After a while Dr. Horkkk ventured to mix up the now-familiar words, rearranging them into new patterns to give a pretense at conversation: “Ruuu mirt dihn ahm” and “Korp ruuu chlook korp mirt” and so forth. This had the virtue of showing the robot that Dr. Horkkk was something other than some kind of recording machine, but it must have been puzzling to it to be getting these gibberish responses to its statements.

Then the robot turned on the globe. The scene that took form about us was the sequence of the construction of the vault, beginning as usual with the wide-angle view of the galaxy, then the close-up of the immediate stellar neighborhood. The robot pointed to the pattern of projected stars. Then it switched the globe off and pointed first to the very different pattern of stars in the present-day sky of the asteroid, then to the burned-out dwarf star.

That seemed intelligible enough. The robot was telling us that it realized, from the astronomical changes it observed, that a vast span of time must have elapsed since it had been sealed into the vault.

The robot now made some adjustment on the globe, and the scene of the High Ones’ city appeared. For several minutes we watched once more the High Ones moving solemnly and gracefully through their wonderland of cables and dangling structures. The robot cut it off, pointed again to the stars, pointed to Dr. Horkkk, pointed to itself, pointed to Dr. Horkkk.

Abruptly the robot turned and strode into the vault. It did something at one of the instrument panels in the rear; then it beckoned unmistakably to us. We hesitated. The robot beckoned again.

“Possibly it turned off the lightning field,” Pilazinool said.

“And possibly it didn’t,” said Dr. Horkkk. “This may be a trick designed to make us go to our deaths.”

“If the robot wanted to kill us,” I pointed out, “it wouldn’t need to trick us. It’s got weapon attachments in its arms.”

“Certainly,” said Pilazinool. “Tom’s right!”

Still, none of us went into the vault. The robot made its beckoning gesture a third time.

Dr. Horkkk found another pebble and pitched it across the threshold of the vault. No blast of lightning. That was reassuring.

“Shall we risk it?” Pilazinool asked.

He started forward.

“Wait,” I heard myself saying, as another fit of heroism rushed through my brain. “I’m less important than the rest of you. Let me go, and if I make it—”

Telling myself that at the worst it would be a quick, clean finish, I leaped up on the fallen door, stepped into the vault, and lived to tell the tale. Pilazinool followed me; then, somewhat more cautiously, Dr. Horkkk. Mirrik remained outside at Pilazinool’s suggestion; in case this did turn out to be a trap, we needed a survivor to explain what had happened to the others.

Instinctively we stayed close to the entrance of the vault and made no sudden moves that might alarm our huge host. We still didn’t know if the robot’s intentions were friendly. Much as we wanted a close look at those complex, cluttered instrument panels on the rear walls of the vault, we didn’t dare approach them, for that would have required us to get between the robot and its instruments. The robot might not have liked that.

It turned to the instruments itself and touched one of the controls. Instantly images burst forth: the same sort of screenless projection that came from our globe.

We watched a kind of travelog of the High Ones’ supercivilization. The scenes were different from those out of the globe, but similar in feeling, showing us all the magnificence and splendor of these people. We saw shots of High Ones cities that completely eclipsed the earlier one — cities that seemed to occupy whole planets, with patterns of aerial cables shifting and crossing and interlocking and apparently slipping in and out of dimensions. We saw grandees of the High Ones moving in stately procession through lofty, glittering halls, each being surrounded by dozens of robot servants of all sizes, shapes, and functions, catering to the smallest whim. We looked through tunnels in which vast machines of unfathomable purpose throbbed and revolved. We watched starships in flight, saw High Ones explorers landing on scores of worlds, stepping forth confidently equipped for every sort of environmental condition from dismal airlessness to lush tropical greenery. We received a dazzling view of this most incredible of civilizations, this true master race of the universe’s dawn. The globe had shown us only a fraction of it. Brilliant, vivid scenes poured from the vault wall for more than half an hour.

Temples and libraries, museums, computer halls, auditoriums — who knew the purposes to which those colossal structures had been put? When the High Ones gathered to watch a gyrating point of light, as we saw them do, what kind of beauty did they comprehend? How much information was stored in those glistening data banks, and information of what kind? The star-ships that moved so effortlessly, seemingly without expenditure of fuel — the elegance of the house furnishings — the incomprehensible rituals — the dignity of the people as they went serenely through their day’s activities — all of this conveyed to us a sense of a race so far beyond the attainments of our era that our pride in our own petty accomplishments seemed to be the silly posturing of monkeys.

And yet… they are gone from the universe, these great beings, and we remain. And, little creatures that we are, we still have managed to find our way through the stars to this place and to set free the guardian of this ancient vault. Surely that is no small achievement for a species only a million years or so away from apehood. Surely the High Ones, whose time of greatness had lasted a century to each of our minutes, would agree that we have done well for ourselves thus far.

And there was irony in watching this humbling display of glittering greatness, and in knowing that the makers of that greatness had vanished into extinction hundreds of millions of years ago.

“Ozymandias,” said Mirrik gently, looking at the images from outside the cave.

Exactly so. Ozymandias. Shelley’s poem. The “traveler from an antique land” who finds “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” in the desert, and beside them, half sunk in sand, the shattered head of a statue, still wearing its “sneer of cold command” —

And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Precisely so. Ozymandias. How could we tell this robot that its fantastic creators no longer existed? That a billion years of rock covered the ruins of their outposts on dozens of planets? That we had come seeking a mystery locked in a past so distant we could barely comprehend its remoteness? While this robot waited here, the patient, timeless servant, ready to show its movies and impress the casual wayfarer with the might of its masters… never dreaming that it alone was left to tell the tale and that all its pride in that great civilization was a waste.

The projections ended. We blinked as our eyes adjusted to the sudden dimming of that brightness in the vault. The robot began to speak again, slowly, enunciating clearly, using the same sort of tone we would use in speaking to a foreigner or someone who is slightly deaf or a little dull in the skull. “Dihn ruuu… mirt korp ahm… mirt chlook… ruuu ahm… hohm mirt korp zort…” As before, Dr. Horkkk patched together some sentences in reply, with random combinations of dihns and ruuus and ahms. The robot listened to this in what struck me as an interested and approving way. Then it pointed several times to the inscription node Dr. Horkkk was carrying and spoke in an apparently urgent manner. Of course there was no hope of real communication. But at least the robot seems to think we’re worth trying to reach. Coming from a machine of the High Ones, that’s a compliment.

January 4

Dr. Horkkk has spent most of the last two days running tapes of his “conversation” with the robot through his linguistic computer, trying to wring some meaning out. Zero results. The robot spoke only about two dozen different words, arranging them in various ways, and that’s not enough to allow the finding of a meaningful pattern.

The rest of us have constantly been going back and forth between the ship and the vault, taking full advantage of the robot’s hospitality. By now it’s quite clear that the robot isn’t hostile. The death of 408b was a tragic mistake; the vault evidently was designed not to admit anything without the robot’s permission, and if 408b hadn’t impulsively rushed in the moment the door came loose, it wouldn’t have been killed. Once we established that we were friendly organisms, the robot turned the lightning field off, and we now are welcome to enter the vault as often as we please.

We are getting bolder. The first day we stood around edgily as if expecting the robot to change its mind and zap us any minute, but now we’ve made ourselves at home to the extent of making a full tridim record of the machinery and taking plenty of shots of the robot itself. What we don’t dare do is touch any of the machinery, since the robot is plainly the custodian of the vault and might very well destroy anyone who even seemed to threaten its contents. Besides, with 408b gone we have only the flimsiest notions of what that machinery is all about.

The robot has run its travelog several more times for us, and we’ve filmed it in its entirety. This is catching your archaeology on the hoof, all right: instead of digging up broken bits and rusty scraps of the High Ones’ civilization, we have glossy tridims of the actual cities and people. Looking at them gives us an uncanny sensation. It’s something like having a time machine. We’ve learned more than we ever dreamed was possible about the High Ones, thanks to the globe and what the robot has showed us. We know more about these people of a billion years ago, suddenly, than archaeologists have ever managed to find out about the Egyptians or Sumerians or Etruscans of the very recent past.

The robot goes through the same curious pantomime routine whenever we visit it. It points to us, points to itself, points to the stars. Over and over. Pilazinool argues that the robot is telling us that it would like to lead us somewhere — to some other vault, maybe, or even to a planet once inhabited by the High Ones. Dr. Horkkk, as usual, disagrees. “The robot is merely discussing origins,” Dr. Horkkk says. “It is indicating that both itself and ourselves come from worlds outside the solar system of GGC 1145591. Nothing more than that.”

I like to think Pilazinool is right. But I don’t know, and I doubt that we’ll ever know.

Communicating by pantomime isn’t terribly satisfying.

Three hours have gone by since the foregoing, and everything has turned upside down again. Now the robot is talking to us. In Anglic.

Steen Steen and I were sent across to the vault to get some stereo shots of one instrument panel, because we had botched the calibration on the first try. We found the robot busy in one corner with its back to us. Since it was taking no notice of us, we quietly went about our business.

Five minutes later the robot turned and came clanking over. It extended one arm and aimed an intricate little gadget at us. I thought it was a gun and I was too scared to move.

The robot said, slowly, with great effort:

“Speak… words … to … this.”

I did a quick spectrum trip of astonishment. So did Steen, whose mantle fluttered within his/her breathing-suit.

“It was speaking Anglic?” I said to Steen.

“It was. Yes.”

The robot said again, more smoothly, “Speak words to this.”

I took a close look at the gadget in its hand. It wasn’t a gun. It consisted of an inscription node with a tesseract-shaped puzzle-box mounted at one end. Within the struts of the puzzle-box glowed a deep crimson radiance.

“Words of you,” the robot said. “More. To this.”

The situation began to acquire some spin for me. The robot had been listening to us speak — recording our words, prying into them for meanings — and had taught itself Anglic. And now it wanted to increase its vocabulary. Perhaps, I thought, an inscription node with a puzzle-box attached is a kind of recorder. (I was wrong about that.)

Steen figured this out a fraction of a second ahead of me. He/she nudged me aside, put the voice-output of his/her breathing-suit close to the glowing end of the puzzle-box, and began rapidly to speak — in Calamorian! He/she spewed forth at least a dozen sentences in his/her native tongue before I woke up, grabbed him/her, and pulled him/her away from the robot.

“Get your sposhing hands off me!” Steen shouted.

“You idiot, what was the idea of speaking Calamorian?”

“To program the robot’s translating machine!” Indignantly. “Why can’t it be given words of a civilized language?”

I was so furious over Steen’s stupid militancy that I overlooked the important thing he/she had said, for a moment. I said, “You know damn well that Anglic is the official language of this expedition, and you’ve agreed to use it throughout. If we’re going to give this robot words, they ought to be in only one language, and that language should be—”

“The robot should have a chance to know that Anglic is not the only language in the cosmos! This suppression of the Calamorian language is an act of racial genocide! It—”

“Shut up,” I said, not very tolerant of Steen’s outraged racial pride. Then I reacted to the right thing at last, ” — translating machine?”

Of course.

Inscription nodes and puzzle-boxes weren’t separate artifacts. They were meant to work together, as this robot had assembled them. And they weren’t recording devices, either.

They were machines for converting the babble of primitive barbarian races into the language of the High Ones.

Steen had seen this quickly, and wanted to get his/her own wonderful Calamorian language into the record, in defiance of expedition agreements. Maybe doing it enhanced his sense of racial pride, but it also quonked up our chances of quick communication with the robot, since it had placed a dozen incompatible sentences on the record. No translating machine ever invented would get anywhere operating under the assumption that what Steen had just blurted and what the rest of us had been saying were both the same language.

I warned Steen not to try it again. Steen gave me a surly look; but he/she had scored the intended point and now subsided, leaving me a clear shot at the translating machine.

I bent close to it.

Then I wondered what I ought to say.

Words wouldn’t come. Steen Steen had probably bellowed some glib testimonial to the everlasting merits of the Calamorian people, but I wasn’t about to do that, and I developed a paralyzing case of mike fright as I tried to imagine the most useful and appropriate possible statements.

The robot said encouragingly, “Speak words of you to this.”

I said, “What kind of words? Any words?”

Then silence. Steen laughed at me.

I said, “My name is Tom Rice. I was born on the planet Earth of the sun Sol. I am twenty-two years old.”

I stopped again, as if the machine needed time to digest one set of statements before receiving another. It didn’t, I now know.

“Speak more words,” prompted the robot.

I said, “The language I am speaking is Anglic, which is the most important language of Earth. The language spoken by the last voice was Calamorian. This is a language of another world in a different solar system.”

As I spoke, I saw streams of High Ones hieroglyphics rippling along the surface of the inscription node. The gadget was converting my sounds into the written characters of the ancient language. What good that did was hard to say, in terms of communication. When I write Dihn ruuu mirt korp, I’m converting the robot’s sounds into our kind of alphabetic writing, but I’m not getting one step closer to understanding what those sounds mean.

It must have helped, though. Because the speaking vocabulary of the robot expanded from minute to minute.

“Say name of other one,” it said.

“He/she is Steen Steen of Calamor. We have come here to seek information about the builders of this vault.”

“Say more names of things.”

I indicated and named the vault, the door, the ship, the heavens, and as much else as was within pointing range. Carefully choosing my words, I spelled out the fact that we knew that a great deal of time had passed since the construction of the vault. I tried to explain that we were archaeologists who had excavated many remains of the High Ones, but that no member of any existing species had ever encountered a living High One. And so on.

The robot studied the changing hieroglyphics on the inscription node with intense interest, but confined its statements to brief, brusque commands to go on talking. By now the translating machine had absorbed a healthy chunk of data. By now it had struck me that we ought to be letting the others in on what was going on, too, and I said to Steen, “Switch to ship frequency and call Dr. Horkkk here.”

“While you feed the robot with poisonous lies?” Steen said. “You call!”

Resisting the impulse to kick Steen in the ribs, if Steen has ribs, I switched channels briefly, summoned everyone from the ship, and cut back to vocal output. The robot wanted more words… and more… and lots more. It soaked them up.

Dr. Horkkk and Pilazinool arrived, with the others not far behind. I explained the situation. Dr. Horkkk began to glow with excitement. “Keep talking,” he said.

I kept talking.

I talked myself hoarse, and then Jan took over, and after her, Saul Shahmoon. It didn’t matter much what we said; we were stocking a high-powered computer with data, in essence, and the computer would take care of sorting things out and making sense of them. Dr. Horkkk seemed to tingle in amazement and perhaps a sort of dismay, for such a sense-from-noise machine was exactly what he had been trying without success to develop in his whole career.

After more than an hour the robot was satisfied.

“No more words,” it said. “The rest will fit in by themselves.”

Translation: the machine now was sufficiently stocked with Anglic words. It would arrange them, make them accessible to the robot, and deal with additions to its vocabulary by interpreting them in context as they came along.

The robot was silent for perhaps five minutes, studying the ebb and flow of hieroglyphics on the inscription node. We didn’t dare speak.

Then it said, in fluent Anglic that reproduced my own accent and pronunciation and even tone of voice, “I will name myself for you. I can be called Dihn Ruuu. I am a machine produced to serve the Mirt Korp Ahm, whom you call the High Ones. The meaning of my name is Machine To Serve. My purpose is to remain in readiness so that I may serve the Mirt Korp Ahm if they come back to this solar system.”

Another long silence. Dihn Ruuu seemed to be waiting for questions.

Pilazinool said, “How long has it been since the Mirt Korp Ahm were on this place?”

“How shall I say the time?” the robot asked.

“That’s a tough one,” Pilazinool muttered. “We haven’t defined our units.”

Dr. Horkkk took over, and I must say he performed brilliantly. “Our basic unit is the second,” he said. “The sound I will make is one second in length.” He flashed an order back to the ship’s computer, which obligingly generated a tone lasting one second. Then he explained how the Earth-standard time units are built up, sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, and so on up to a year. The robot, obedient machine that it was, refrained from making sarcastic comments about this inexact and arbitrary system that we have compelled all other races to adopt, at least in their dealings with us. (Why sixty seconds to a minute? Why twenty-four hours to a day? Why not a sensible system built on tens, or logarithms, or something orderly? Ask the Babylonians. I think they invented it.)

When the robot had grasped our time system, Dr. Horkkk moved on to our distance system, blocking out a line one centimeter in length on the vault floor, and then a one-meter line, and finally instructing the robot to visualize a kilometer as a thousand meters. Finally Dr. Horkkk proceeded to define the orbital velocity of this asteroid in terms of kilometers per hour. The robot stepped out of the vault and scanned the heavens for about half a minute, probably measuring parallax effects so it could see for itself how fast the asteroid was traveling through this solar system. Whatever fantastic computing machine is under its skull was quickly able to calculate the orbital velocity of the asteroid in terms of High Ones units of time and distance, and to work out a correlation from that to Earth-standard figures.

The robot said, “I will confirm. The orbital period of this asteroid is one year, six months, five days, three hours, two minutes, and forty-one seconds.”

“That’s right,” said Captain Ludwig.

“Very well,” Dr. Horkkk said briskly, as though it were not at all a miracle that this alien machine could learn so fast and that it could calculate orbital periods by a mere glance at the sky. “Now we may proceed. Can you give us an estimate in our terms of the time elapsed since the most recent visit of the Mirt Korp Ahm to this asteroid?”

Again the robot studied the sky — this time, apparently, scanning the stars and measuring the shifts in constellations that had taken place since its last look at the outside world.

Shortly the robot said, “941,285,008 years, two months, twelve days—”

It was like a high-voltage jolt to hear those calm words. The robot confirmed, to superhuman exactness, the calculations of Luna City Observatory. I don’t know how many computers Luna City put on that job, or how long they spent at it, but they certainly didn’t hand out an instant real-time reply the way Dihn Ruuu had just done. Something like that tends to puncture your pride in human attainments. How much superior to us the High Ones must have been, if they could build a robot that would wait patiently in a cave for 941 million years, still be in prime working order when visitors come, and be capable of tossing off computations of that sort! Zit!

“When was the last time you had contact with the Mirt Korp Ahm?” Pilazinool asked.

“941,285,008 years, two months, twelve—”

“That is, not since the sealing of the vault?”

“Correct. It is my task to await their return.”

“They won’t return,” said Pilazinool. “They haven’t been seen in this galaxy for millions of years.”

“This is contrary to possibility,” Dihn Ruuu replied smoothly. “Their existence could not have ceased. Therefore they must continue to occupy substantial portions of this galaxy. And thus they will return to this place. I must await them.”

Dr. Schein cut in, “Do you understand what I mean when I refer to the home world of the Mirt Korp Ahm?”

“The world on which their first evolution occurred,” said the robot. “The world which is basic to their history.”

“That’s it, yes.” Dr. Schein leaned forward eagerly. “We’ve tried to discover this world, but we’ve had no success. Can you give us information about it? For example: is it located in this galactic cluster?”

“Yes,” the robot said.

Dr. Schein looked distressed. He belonged to the school of thought that says the High Ones came from another galaxy. Dr. Horkkk hopped about in triumph. He was one of the first to argue that the High Ones originated right here.

Though shaken, Dr. Schein went on, “Is the star that is the sun of the Mirt Korp Ahm’s home world visible from this place?”

“Yes,” the robot said.

“I mean, is it still visible, after all the time that’s passed since you came here?”

“Yes,” the robot said.

“Will you point it out for us?” Dr. Schein asked.

I found myself trembling. The others were equally tense. This weird and dreamlike interview with an age-old machine had suddenly erupted into something of incredible importance. Passionate scientific controversies were being settled. The machine would tell us everything. All we had to do was ask! And now it was going to give us the fundamental solution to our quest — the location of the home world of the High Ones.

It stepped out of the vault again for a clear view of the heavens. It looked up.

A minute passed. Two minutes. Three.

No doubt the robot was comparing its recorded memory of the constellations of 941 million years ago against what it saw now, and making the necessary adjustments that would enable it to trace the wanderings of the High Ones’ sun during the elapsed time.

Something was wrong, though. The robot seemed frozen. It scanned the sky, halted, thought, scanned the sky again.

“Perhaps an internal command against revealing the location of the home world has taken control,” Dr. Horkkk suggested.

The robot stumbled back into the vault. Stumbled, I say. This flawless machine moved with the shambling, staggering gait of someone who’s just learned that he’s been wiped out by a quick twitch of the stock market, or who’s just heard that seven generations of his family were caught in a sunglider accident.

“The star is not there,” said the robot in a terrible voice.

“You can’t find it?” Dr. Schein asked. “It’s not visible from this part of space?”

“It should be visible,” the robot said. “I have computed its location precisely, and there is no possibility of error. But the star is gone from the sky. I look at the place where I know it must be, and I see only darkness. I detect no energy radiation at all. The star is gone. The star is gone.”

“How can a star vanish?” Jan whispered.

“Maybe it went supernova,” Saul suggested. “Blew up half a billion years ago — the robot wouldn’t have any way of knowing that—”

“The star is gone,” said the robot again. The colors of its vision panel dulled in obvious shock and bewilderment. This perfect mechanical brain, with its total grasp on all data, had hit a horrible, numbing inconsistency in its universe — in the most vital part of its universe, too.

We hardly knew what to say. How can you console a robot on the disappearance of its builders’ home star?

After a long pause Dihn Ruuu said, “There is no need for me to wait here longer. The star is gone. Where have the Mirt Korp Ahm gone? The Mirt Korp Ahm will never return to this place. The star is gone. The star is gone. It is beyond all understanding, but the star is gone.”