The first thing Five had to do, starting with its control of magnetic and electrostatic forces, and its limited (but adequate) supply of gravitational particles, was simple excavation. It had to wrench out large quantities of matter—ill assorted, full of things Five didn’t want at all—from the surface of the planet (and from some sources pretty far below the surface) for separation into the basic building blocks it needed; call them ores. To separate the various kinds of useful things out of the ores, it invented what humans might have called a sort of mass spectrometer: vaporized matter passed through a sieve of forces that pulled out each separate atom, according to its weight and characteristics, and deposited them one at a time (but very rapidly!) in “storage bins” until such time as Five was ready to put them together in the combinations and shapes it needed. And it needed so many different shapes of matter! It needed antennae to locate and lock onto the various nearby stars it was meant to carry along. It needed chambers to contain the forces that would move them; it needed sensors to make sure they were moving properly; it needed a separate kind of antenna, just to keep in communication with its master, Wan-To.
And it needed them all in a hurry, because Wan-To was not patient. Wan-To took for granted that the doppel, Five, was moving as rapidly as possible. Five slaved to do so. It wasn’t that it was afraid of punishment. The heart of an animal doesn’t pump because it is afraid its master will be angry if it stops; it pumps because that is what it does.
When, rarely, Wan-To bothered to call up to check on progress Five was not fearful. It was only happy to report that it was doing its job.
When you came right down to it, all Five had to do, on a planet that had nothing, was to create an entire industrial complex. It took Five several weeks, but before the castings had quite cooled on the last of its guidance antennae it had already begun reaching out to all of its chosen eleven stars. It wasn’t hard for Five—not for a near (if severely abridged) copy of Wan-To himself.
Five didn’t like to question Wan-To. (Wan-To hadn’t instructed it to ask questions, only to get the work done.) So Five had to make a number of decisions on its own. Wan-To’s orders had been to accelerate this little group of stars. Well, that certainly meant to accelerate at least one planet with them—namely, the one he was on. But what about the other planets, satellites, and lesser things?
Five pondered that for a long time, then decided to play it safe and take everything. Of course, that made its job a little harder. Now there weren’t just a dozen bodies to move. There were roughly half a million, it counted, including all the asteroids and comets big enough to bother with.
It was a daunting job, but Five was not daunted. Five was quite capable of doing all sorts of intricate and difficult things, only not very smart about what things to do.
From time to time Wan-To did communicate with his one surviving matter analogue. Five wasn’t much company, but there were some good things about carrying on a conversation with it. The most important of them was that that kind of conversation was perfectly safe, because the thing was a dolt. It could never threaten Wan-To.
The bad side of that coin was that talking to the matter analogue was terribly boring. To begin with, it was boringly slow. The matter thing took forever to get a simple sentence out. Anyway, what could such a sluggish, rudimentary thing possibly have to say?
The answer to that was, “Not much.”
At first, Wan-To had been mildly interested by the matter-copy’s reports, especially the ones that were transmitted as “pictures.” Wan-To wasn’t much good at pictures. His perceptions operated in nine spatial dimensions (though, true, six of them were only vestiges), and a flat representation wasn’t much good to him. Also, things with definite boundaries of any kind were scarce in Wan-To’s experience, especially when they didn’t flow or fluctuate. (How stagnant matter was!) It had been an interesting bit of puzzle solving for Wan-To to attach any meaning at all to the pictorial data the matter-copy turned in. Then, when he had gotten used to the ideas of “shapes” and “edges,” the next question was, “What are all these ‘solid’ things good for?” Why were those great shiny arrays Five was building that swayed from horizon to horizon as the planet turned always pointing toward its little star? (“Energy accumulators,” the matter-analogue informed its master—but how odd to be tapping energy from outside the star!) Why those spiraling shapes whose aims converged at a point far beyond the star’s farthest planets? (They were the guides for the graviscalar flow that was pulling the whole group along.) Why the long square structure? or the domed ones? or the ones deep underground? (But you had to have them, Five humbly protested. They sheltered the matter machines that contained the forces that did the job. It was the way it was able to fulfill its mission.)
Of course, Wan-To had left the details of how to do the mission up to the matter-doppel’s own judgment. Wan-To couldn’t be bothered with such details. The matter-copy had been instructed to create a pit of gravitation for that star and its attendant bodies to fall into—endlessly—and it hadn’t been told specifically how. The commissioned officer’s instructions were just to do it, and do it the sergeant had.
That sort of entertainment palled quickly. After a few questions Wan-To began to tire of the answers. Just before Wan-To decided on cutting off communication with the doppel and looking for something more interesting, he asked the important question. “And the stars in your group? Have any survived?”
“Almost all,” Five reported. “Two were damaged some time ago, but there have been no attacks since.”
Wan-To didn’t respond. That was as he had expected. He was just about to cut off, without of course bothering with any such politenesses as a good-bye, when the matter-copy gave its equivalent of a deferential cough. Humbly it told him that it had come across one little phenomenon it hadn’t expected. Nothing in the datastores Wan-To had transferred to him had suggested that small bits of matter might organize themselves into aggregates that seemed to be—well, what else could you call it?—more or less alive.
For a long time after he had finished wringing out of the doppel every scrap of information it possessed about this new kind of “life,” Wan-To lay in his plasma core, restlessly writhing, marveling at this interesting new thing. How very odd! From all the matter-copy had observed, these “living” things were quite small, quite rudimentary (human taxonomists would have called them mosses, bacteria, invertebrates, and a few flowering plants), and certainly quite trivial in any large sense.
So, of course, the relevant word was only “interesting.” It certainly was not in any way important. There was surely no way that these things could possibly affect the lives of Wan-To or his like, ever.
Yet it was strange that in all his billions of years of life Wan-To had never come across such a thing before.
True, he rarely bothered with anything concerned with matter—what was the point? And true, he told himself justly, even Wan-To himself was fairly young, as far as his probable life expectancy went. It wasn’t his fault. The universe itself was only about twice as old as Wan-To, though he had already determined that it would survive for a highly exponential number of times that long (and, if he was lucky, he would survive with it). Matter-life was naturally quite transitory. It was also rather new on the scene, he decided, for some quick “ball-park” (not that Wan-To knew anything of ball parks) calculations had suggested to him that it would take quite a while for this matter-life to arise by chance.
He saw how such a thing could happen, though. All it would take was some random combinations of particles that, purely by chance, turned out to have organizing and reproductive capacities.
It was probably not unlike the same random events that, he knew, had brought his own life into being.
Actually it had not been Wan-To himself that had been brought into being by those events, but his predecessors. That was an unimportant distinction, though. Wan-To’s predecessor (being so solitary he hadn’t bothered giving himself a name) had made a nearly exact copy of himself when he made Wan-To, and Wan-To had as many memories as his “father” did.
Which, in this case, was not very many. Apart from any other consideration, the proto-Wan-To hadn’t been very smart then—well, he had been an infant, after all! His entire network had hardly amounted to more than two or three hundred billion particles altogether, and none of them fully integrated with the others as yet. But as he had grown over the eons to be very smart indeed, and, quite curious, he had spent a lot of thought in deducing how that event had had to be.