Peter Watts - Ambassador # SS.pdf - Peter Watts - aachenac

Ambassador

I've never sold a story to Analog . (Truth be told, I've never sold a

story to any of the US magazines.) But this one, according to

Analog editor Stanley Schmidt, "almost made it". It had a

"powerful narrative drive" and "compelling theme". Sadly, ol'

Stan also found the ending "ugly" and "simplistic"; in other words,

just too damn futile (which, to those familiar with my work, is kind

of a familiar refrain). I toyed with the idea of bringing in some

clowns at the end, but I just couldn't get 'em to dance on cue.

“Ambassador” finally showed up in my " Ten Monkeys, Ten

Minutes " anthology, albeit in a somewhat updated and up-tarted

(but every bit as ugly and futile) form. It was my one true foray

into spaceships-and-rayguns science fiction until Blindsight (still

in progress). And in either a clever nod to continuity or a pathetic

recycling of unoriginal ideas, the thematic tagline of this story

shows up in Blindsight as well.

Ambassador

Peter Watts

First Contact was supposed to solve everything.

That was the rumour, anyway: gentle wizards from Epsilon

Eridani were going to save us from the fire and welcome us into a

vast Galactic Siblinghood spanning the Milky Way. Whatever

diseases we'd failed to conquer, they would cure. Whatever

political squabbles we hadn't outgrown, they would resolve. They

were going to fix it all.

They were not supposed to turn me into a hunted animal.

2 Watts

I didn't dwell much on the philosophical implications, at first; I

was too busy running for my life. Zombie streaked headlong into

the universe, slaved to a gibbering onboard infested with static.

Navigation was a joke. Every blind jump I made reduced the

chances of finding my way home by another order of magnitude. I

did it anyway, and repeatedly; any jump I didn't make would kill

me.

Once more out of the breach. Long-range put me somewhere

in the cometary halo of a modest binary. In better times the

computer would have shown me the system's planetary retinue in

an instant; now it would take days to make the necessary

measurements.

Not enough time. I could have fixed my position in a day or so

using raw starlight even without the onboard, but whatever was

after me had never given me the chance. Several times I'd made a

start. The longest reprieve had lasted six hours; in that time I'd

placed myself somewhere coreward of the Orion spur.

I'd stopped trying. Knowing my location at any moment would

put me no further ahead at t+1. I'd be lost again as soon as I

jumped.

And I always jumped. It always found me. I still don't know

how; theoretically it's impossible to track anything through a

singularity. But somehow space always opened its mouth and the

monster dropped down on me, hungry and mysterious. It might

have been easier to deal with if I'd known why.

What did I do, you ask. What did I do to get it so angry? Why,

I tried to say hello.

What kind of intelligence could take offence at that ?

Imagine a dead tree, three hundred fifty meters tall, with six

gnarled branches worming their way from its trunk. Throw it into

orbit around a guttering red dwarf that doesn't even rate a proper

name. This is what I'd come upon; there were no ports, no running

lights, no symbols on the hull. It hung there like some forgotten

chunk of cosmic driftwood. Embers of reflected sunlight glinted

occasionally from the surface; they only emphasised the shadows

drowning the rest of the structure. I thought it was derelict at first.

Ambassador

Of course I went through the motions anyway. I reached out on

all the best wavelengths, tried to make contact a hundred different

ways. For hours it ignored me. Then it sent the merest blip along

the hydrogen band. I fed it into the onboard.

What else do you do with an alien broadcast?

The onboard had managed one startled hiccough before it

crashed. All the stats on my panel had blinked once, in impossible

unison, and gone dark.

And then doppler had registered the first incoming missile.

So I'd jumped, blind. There really hadn ' t been a choice, then or

the four times since. Sometime during that panicked flight, I had

given my tormentor a name: Kali .

Unless Kali had gotten bored—hope springs eternal, even

within puppets such as myself—I'd have to run again in a few

hours. In the meantime I aimed Zombie at the binary and put her

under thrust. Open space is impossible to hide in; a system, even a

potential one, is marginally better.

Of course I'd have to jump long before I got there. It didn't

matter. My reflexes were engineered to perform under all

circumstances. Zombie's autopilot may have been disabled, but

mine engaged smoothly.

It takes time to recharge between jumps. So far, it had taken

longer for Kali to find me. At some point that was likely to

change; the onboard had to be running again before it did.

I knew there wasn't a hope in hell.

***

A little forensic hindsight, here: how exactly did Kali pull it

off?

I'm not exactly sure. But some of Zombie 's diagnostic systems

run at the scale of the merely electronic, with no reliance on

quantum computation. The crash didn't affect them; they were able

to paint a few broad strokes in the aftermath.

The Trojan signal contained at least one set of spatial co-

ordinates. The onboard would have read that as a pointer of some

kind: it would have opened the navigation files to see what resided

4 Watts

at x-y-z. A conspicuous astronomical feature, perhaps? Some

common ground to compare respective visions of time and space?

Zap. Nav files gone.

Once nav was down—or maybe before, I can't tell—the

invading program told Zombie to update all her backups with

copies of itself. Only then, with all avenues of recovery

contaminated, had it crashed the onboard. Now the whole system

was frozen, every probability wave collapsed, every qubit locked

into P=1.00.

It was an astonishingly beautiful assault. In the time it had

taken me to say hello, Kali had grown so intimate with my ship

that she'd been able to seduce it into suicide. Such a feat was

beyond my capabilities, far beyond those of the haphazard beasts

that built me. I'd have given anything to meet the mind behind the

act, if it hadn't been trying so hard to kill me.

***

Early in the hunt I'd tried jumping several times in rapid

succession, without giving Kali the chance to catch up. I'd nearly

bled out the reserves. All for nothing; the alien found me just as

quickly, and I'd had barely enough power to escape.

I was still paying for that gamble. It would take two days at

sublight for Zombie to recharge fully, and ninety minutes before I

could even jump again. Now I didn't dare jump until the destroyer

came for me; I lay in real space and hoarded whatever moments of

peace the universe saw fit to grant.

This time the universe granted three and a half hours. Then

short-range beeped at me; object ahead. I plugged into Zombie's

cameras and looked forward.

A patch of stars disappeared before my eyes.

The manual controls were still unfamiliar. It took precious

seconds to call up the right numbers. Whatever eclipsed the stars

was preceding Zombie on a sunwards course, decelerating fast.

One figure refused to settle; the mass of the object was increasing

as I watched. Which meant that it was coming through from

somewhere else.

Ambassador

Kali was cutting her search time with each iteration.

Two thousand kilometres ahead, twisted branches turned to

face me across the ether. One of them sprouted an incandescent

bud.

Zombie's sensors reported the incoming missile to the onboard;

the brainchips behind my dash asked for an impact projection. The

onboard chittered mindlessly.

I stared at the approaching thunderbolt. What do want with

me? Why can't you just leave me alone?

Of course I didn't wait for an answer. I jumped.

***

My creators left me a tool for this sort of situation: fear , they

called it.

They didn't leave much else. None of the parasitic nucleotides

that gather like dust whenever blind stupid evolution has its way,

for example. None of the genes that build genitals; what would

have been the point? They left me a sex drive, but they tweaked it;

the things that get me off are more tightly linked to mission

profiles than to anything so vulgar as procreation. I retain a

smattering of chemical sexuality, mostly androgens so I won't

easily take no for an answer.

There are genetic sequences, long and intricately folded,

which code for loneliness. Thigmotactic hardwiring, tactile

pleasure, pheromonal receptors that draw the individual into social

groups. All gone from me. They even tried to cut religion out of

the mix, but God, it turns out, is borne of fear. The loci are easy

enough to pinpoint but the linkages are absolute: you can't

exorcise faith without eliminating pure mammalian terror as well.

And out here, they decided, fear was too vital a survival

mechanism to leave behind.

So fear is what they left me with. Fear, and superstition. And

try as I might to keep my midbrain under control, the circuitry

down there kept urging me to grovel and abase itself before the

omnipotence of the Great Killer God.

Peter Watts - Ambassador # SS.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: