Might the cybercosm order actual killing?
Maybe. If necessary.
Necessary to preserve sanity in the near future, and preserve the far future itself.
He reached the main communication chamber and settled down before the console. It curved around the swivel seat, a flatscreen on his left, a holoscreen on his right, and a viewtank in front. When Fong called back, the eidophone would relay to that. Venator dismissed the urge to talk with him as he flew. Pointless. Distracting. Hunters should wait before they spring.
However—With voice and fingers, he made connection to the Proserpina file. The program was still unrolling. Well, if it held the pair in place, that should suffice. It would have to. And why not? The spies would go over it more than once, excitedly discuss it, take notes. For Lilisaire.
A machine entered, carrying a tray. It was hu-manoform, suggestive of a man wrapped in foil, except for the turret, the two extra arms, and the inhumanly graceful movements. “Would you care for refreshment?” it asked musically.
A teapot steamed on the tray beside a plate of protein cakes. “Thank you very much,” Venator said, for this was no robot, it was a sophotect using the body. “A long night ahead of me. Of us.”
“Yes. What else can assist you?”
“Nothing at the moment. I’ll let you know.”-Venator glanced up at the shining facelessness. “How fully are you involved?” It was the cybercosm to which he spoke, through this avatar.
“A minor part, but a standby signal has gone out to the whole system.”
Venator nodded. He had instructed the half-mind guarding the fije to notify him and alert the constabulary if it was activated. That went automatically; but it was extraordinary enough that a higher-level intelligence in the net was bound to have noticed and sent appropriate messages of its own.
The machine departed. Venator sipped the tea and munched a cake. Coarse, homely fare. A symbol. That which controlled the world and comprehended the universe had also thought of this ordinariness.
Universe—On a sudden impulse, he retrieved the Alpha Centauri file. In a blind way, he felt it could strengthen his resolve.
It was prodigious. He could only skip about, semirandomly asking for this scene and that, while he waited to hear from Fong.
Far and far. The newest sight transmitted from Sol’s closest neighbor was more than four years old. Guthrie’s handful of colonists spent half a century making the passage, and readying for that one voyage had consumed every resource at his command. What was left, the World Federation took over, and Fireball Enterprises became a memory. There would be no more such argosies.
Venator chose a view from an earlier time, when the first unmanned probe arrived. That in itself had been no mean achievement. The double sun blazed brilliant against blackness. Fast-forwarded, the scan swept inward until Alpha A was a disc of light and the probe orbited the single life-bearing planet in the system.
Demeter was no Earth. Or else it was a primordial Earth, or an Earth that might have come to be had not population control, molecular technology, and clean energy saved it. The seas of Demeter swarmed with organisms, true, enough to create and sustain air that humans could breathe; but just a few primitive plants and creatures clung precariously to existence along the shores. Inland were rock, sand, dust blown on scouring winds, as stark as Mars. Why? Many factors, strong among them the absence of a huge moon to stabilize the rotation axis; and Luna was the child of a cosmic accident, a monster collision, back near the beginning.
No wonder that search had never found spoor of other thinking races. Life was a rarity. Sentience must be infrequent to almost the vanishing point. Maybe, in the whole of the universe, it had evolved on Earth alone.
It would make itself be the meaning and destiny of that universe.
Venator advanced the scene through time until he found an image of Demeter as it was now—four and a third years ago. Cloud-swirls marbled sapphire and turquoise ocean. Snows whitened a wintering north country and the crowns of mountains. Southward and lower, continents and islands lay soft green and brown, hues of forest, meadow, marsh, pastureland for mighty herds and breeding grounds for mighty flocks.