functions which those modules controlled. This was usually fatal, and no
descendants came into being to repeat such mistakes. The successful alternative
was to create space by trimming nonessential code from many modules, which
tended to leave the acceptor robot with some degradation in performance—usually
manifesting itself as a reduction in agility, dexterity, and defensive
abilities— but at least still functioning. The sacrifice was only temporary
since the acceptor robot would be reprogramed with replacement modules when it
delivered its genetic package at the factory.
But in return for these complications and superficial penalties came the immense
benefit that the subfiles presented at the factories were complete ones—suitable
for dispatch to the Schedulers without delay and the attendant risk of being
deleted by overworked Supervisors. The new method thus solved the reliability
problem that had plagued the formerly universal “asexual” mode of reproduction.
The information crisis that it also solved had developed through the
“inbreeding” caused by the various Supervisors having only the gene pools of
their respective “tribes” available to work with, which made recombination
difficult because of the restrictive rules imposed by the alien programers. But
the robots swapping genes out on the surface were not always averse to
adventuring beyond the tribal limits, knew nothing and cared less about
programers’ rules, since nothing approaching intelligence or awareness was
operative yet in what was unfolding, and proceeded to bring half-subfiles
together haphazardly in ways that the aliens’ rules didn’t permit and which the
Supervisors would never have imagined. Most of the offspring resulting from
these experiments didn’t work and were scrapped before leaving the factories;
but the ones that did radiated functionally outward in all directions to launch
a whole new, qualitatively distinct phase of the evolutionary process.
The demands of the two sexual roles reinforced minor initial physical
differences and brought about a gradual polarization of behavioral traits. Since
a female in a “pregnant” condition suffered the loss of some measure of
self-sufficiency for the duration, her chances of delivering (literally!) were
improved considerably if her mate happened to be of a disposition to stay around
for a while and provide for the two of them generally, thus helping to protect
their joint genetic investment. Selection tended, therefore, to favor the genes
of this kind of male, and by the same token those of the females who mated
preferentially with them. As a consequence a female trait emerged of being
“choosy” in this respect, and in response the males evolved various repertoires
of rituals, displays, and demonstrations to improve their eligibility.
The population had thus come to exhibit genetic variability and recombination,
competition, selection, and adaptation—all the essentials for continuing
evolution. The form of life—for it was, wasn’t it?—was admittedly somewhat
strange by terrestrial standards, with the individuals that it comprised sharing
common, external reproductive, digestive, and immune systems instead of
separate, internal ones . . . and of course there were no chains of complicated
carbon chemistry figuring anywhere in the scheme of things. … But then, after
all, what is there apart from chauvinism to say it shouldn’t have been so?
1
KARL ZAMBENDORF STOOD GAZING DOWN OVER SEVENTH AVENUE from the window of his
penthouse suite in the New York Hilton. He was a tall man in his early fifties,
a little on the portly side but with an erect and imposing bearing, graying hair
worn collar-length and flowing, bright, piercing eyes, and hawklike features
rendered biblically patriarchal by a pointed beard that he bleached white for
effect. Although the time was late in the morning, Zambendorf’s breakfast tray
on the side table beside the window had only recently been discarded, and he was
still in his shirt-sleeves from sleeping in after his team’s late-night return
from its just completed Argentina tour.
A prominent Argentine news magazine had featured him as THE AUSTRIAN
MIRACLE-WORKER on its cover for the previous week’s issue, and the hostess of
one of the major talk shows on Buenos Aires TV had introduced him as “Perhaps
one of the most baffling men of the twenty-first century, the scientifically
authenticated superpsychic …” Thus had Latin America greeted the man who was
already a media sensation across the northern continent and Western Europe, and