“Not strictly true. Probably they could have stayed. But they wouldn’t have been happy, the way everything was changing and Fireball itself soon to be no more.”
“Because of the machines?”
“No, that isn’t right either. Drfn’t forget, people have had machines of one kind or another for ages. They made the machines better and better, till at last they began to build robots, which can be programmed to do things without a person in control. And then finally they built sophotects, machines that can think and know that they think, like you and me.”
Now the boy’s voice took on the least tinge of fear.
“But the so-pho-tects, they made themselves better yet, didn’t they?”
His father put an arm around his shoulders. “Don’t be afraid. They have no wish to harm us. Besides, they’re far away at Sol. Yes, Earth has come to depend on the cybercosm, all those wonderful machines working and … thinking … together. That’s made Earth very different from what we have here—”
The philosopher stopped, knowing how readily dim fears arise in children and grow until they leap forth as nightmares. Already he had softened his utterances. He did not know what the cybercosm portended for humankind. Nobody did, maybe not even itself. Let him set the little heart beside him at rest, as well as he could.
“But it’s still Earth, the Earth you’ve been told about,” he said. “The countries are still all in the World Federation, and the Peace Authority keeps them peaceful, and no one has to be hungry or fall sick or go in fear.” He wondered how much softening was in that sentence, for indeed he spoke of a world so distant that np ship had borne any of his kind across the space between since Guthrie spent the whole wealth of Fireball to bring a handful of colonists here. Communication with it had virtually ceased. “And we are just as different, in our own ways, from what Earth once was,” he finished.
The boy’s mother came into the room. “Bedtime,” she told him. “Kiss Daddy goodnight.”
The philosopher stayed behind, meditating. A violet dusk filled the old-style windows, for the companion sun was aloft, remote in its orbit. Presently he rose and went to his desk. He wished to record whatever ideas occurred to him while the news was fresh. As yet they were unclear, but he hoped that eventually he could write something useful, a letter to the man his son would be. Piece by slow piece, he entered:
“Few of us will ever fully understand what has come to pass—perhaps none, “as strange as it was and is.
Surely we cannot foresee how far or how mightily the aftermath will reach, whether out among the comets or onward to trouble the stars. A man and a woman searched back through time, bewildered, hunted, alone. Two lives met across death and centuries. To ask what it meant is meaningless. There is no destiny. But sometimes there is bravery.”
Lilisaire, Wardress of Mare Orientate and the Cordillera, at Zamok Vysoki, summons the captain lan Kenmuir, wheresoever he be. Come, I have need of you.
From Luna her message rode carrier beams through relays circling millions of kilometers apart, until it reached the communications center on Ceres. Then the hunt began.
Out here in the deeps, vessels seldom kept unbroken contact with any traffic control station. The computer on the big asteroid knew only that Kenmuir’s ship had been active among the moons of Jupiter these past seventeen months. It flashed a question to its twin on Himalia, tenth from the planet. Shunted through another relay, the answer spent almost an hour in passage. The ship had left the Jovian realm eleven daycycles earlier, inbound for a certain minor body.
Given the flight plan Kenmuir had registered, calculating the direction of a laser beam that would intercept him was the work of a microsecond or less. It required no awareness, merely power over numbers. Within that vast net which was the cybercosm, robotic functions like this were more automatic than were the human brainstem’s regulation of breath and heartbeat. The minds of the machines were elsewhere.
Yet the cybercosm was always One.