And did it really spell evil? Reaching for the stars, Faustian man had well-nigh ruined his planet and obliterated his species. Yet the knowledge he wrested from an uncaring cosmos, the instrumentalities he forged, were they not that from which the age of sanity had flowered?
Venator shivered in an evening going bleak. Westward the thinnest sickle of a new Moon sank below the mountains. Eastward, night was on the way.
He had lived the horrors of the past, wars, tyrannies, fanaticisms, rampant crime, millstone poverty, wasted land, poisoned waters, deadly air, the breaking of the human spirit, alienation, throngs of the desperately lonely, the triumph first of the mediocre and then of the idiotic, in civilization after suicidal civilization. He had lived them though books, multiceivers, quiviras, imagination, guided by the great sophotectic minds. Not that they had told him what to think. They had led him to the facts and told him he must think. Against the past, he had seen the gentle present and the infinitely unfolding future. Therefore—yes, he was a hunter born, but nevertheless—therefore he became an officer of the Peace Authority.
But did an arrogant and unbounded ambition necessarily bring damnation? Fireball Enterprises had created a fellowship of shared loyalty and achievement whose remnant endured on Earth to this day.
At Alpha Centauri too, a remembrance and a lure.
Venator hastened his footsteps. Another beacon shone before him, the lighted station.
As if inspired by the sight, an idea came. He snapped his fingers, annoyed at himself. Why hadn’t he thought of it earlier? Probably because the contingency against which it would guard was so remote. Still, it was an easy precaution to take, and if somehow it justified itself, why, the reward would be past all measure.
Evidently it hadn’t occurred to the cybercosm either. The higher machine intelligences could well have come up with it, if only by running through permutations of concepts at the near-light speed of their data processing. But they had loftier occupations than this. The lower-level sophotects were as capable as he was, but in different ways. The electrophotonic brain did not work like the chemical neuroglandular system. That was the reason there were synnoionts.
Venator entered the main building and descended. Underneath it he went along a corridor where strange abstract shapes glimmered in the walls and strange abstract notes sounded out of them. Linked into the net, he could grasp and savor a little of what such art evoked. Isolated in his flesh, he could not. He was the sole human here, monastically lodged and nourished. That was by his choice. Mortal indulgences belonged among mortals.
A detached sophotect passed by. The body it was wearing rolled on wheels and sprouted implements. “Greeting, Pragmatic,” it called courteously. He answered and they parted.
Elsewhere he had worked side by side with beings like this, and afterward sat in actual conversation. Not often, though. It had been agreeable and fascinating to him, but both knew how superficial it was. Direct data exchange was the natural way of the machines. Venator longed to begin upon it.
When he reached his communion room, he was trembling with eagerness. But that was the animal, which knew that soon the brain would be in rapture. Endorphins … Somatically trained, he willed calm, donned the interlink, lay down on the couch, and requested clearance.
Although his purpose was simple and straightforward, he sensed the cybercosm as a single vast organism with a hundred billion avatars. The point-nexusthat was his awareness could flash through strand after strand of the web, the ever-changing connectivity, to join any existence within it.
A bank of instruments at the bottom of the sea tasted the chemistries of a black smoker and the life it fed. A robot repaired the drainage line of a village in Yunnan. A monitor kept watch over the growth, atom by atom, of fullerene cables in a nanotank. A service sophotect chose the proper pseudo-virus to destroy precancerous cells in an aging human. Traffic Control kept aircraft in their millions safely flying, as intricately as a body circulates blood. An intelligence developed the logical structure needed for the proof or disproof of a theorem—but from that work the flitting point must retreat, half dazzled, half bewildered.