Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (11 page)

Rabbi Mueller is discussing angels. “Then we have the Angels of the Throne, known in Hebrew as arelim or ophanim. There are seventy of them, noted primarily for their steadfastness. Among them are the angels Orifiel, Ophaniel, Zabkiel, Jophiel, Ambriel, Tychagar, Barael, Quelamia, Paschar, Boel, and Raum. Some of these are no longer found in Heaven and are numbered among the fallen angels in Hell.”

“So much for their steadfastness,” says Kenneth.

“Then, too,” the rabbi goes on, “there are the Angels of the Presence, who apparently were circumcised at the moment of their creation. These are Michael, Metatron, Suriel, Sandalphon, Uriel, Saraqael, Astanphaeus, Phanuel, Jehoel, Zagzagael, Yefefiah, and Akatriel. But I think my favorite of the whole group is the Angel of Lust, who is mentioned in Talmud Bereshith Rabba 85 as follows, that when Judah was about to pass by—”

They have finished counting the votes by this time, surely. An immense throng has assembled in the Square of St. Peter’s. The sunlight gleams off hundreds if not thousands of steel-jacketed craniums. This must be a wonderful day for the robot population of Rome. But most of those in the piazza are creatures of flesh and blood: old women in black, gaunt young pickpockets, boys with puppies, plump vendors of sausages, and an assortment of poets, philosophers, generals, legislators, tourists, and fishermen. How has the tally gone? We will have our answer shortly. If no candidate has had a majority, they will mix the ballots with wet straw before casting them into the chapel stove, and black smoke will billow from the chimney. But if a pope has been elected, the straw will be dry, the smoke will be white.

The system has agreeable resonances. I like it. It gives me the satisfactions one normally derives from a flawless work of art: the
Tristan
chord, let us say, or the teeth of the frog in Bosch’s
Temptation of St. Anthony
. I await the outcome with fierce concentration. I am certain of the result; I can already feel the irresistible religious impulses awakening in me. Although I feel, also, an odd nostalgia for the days of flesh and blood popes. Tomorrow’s newspapers will have no interviews with the Holy Father’s aged mother in Sicily, nor with his proud younger brother in San Francisco. And will this grand ceremony of election ever be held again? Will we need another pope, when this one whom we will soon have can be repaired so easily?

Ah. The white smoke! The moment of revelation comes!

A figure emerges on the central balcony of the facade of St. Peter’s, spreads a web of cloth-of-gold, and disappears. The blaze of light against that fabric stuns the eye. It reminds me perhaps of moonlight coldly kissing the sea at Castellamare, or, perhaps even more, of the noonday glare rebounding from the breast of the Caribbean off the coast of St. John. A second figure, clad in ermine and vermilion, has appeared on the balcony. “The cardinal-archdeacon,” Bishop FitzPatrick whispers. People have started to faint. Luigi stands beside me, listening to the proceedings on a tiny radio. Kenneth says, “It’s all been fixed.” Rabbi Mueller hisses at him to be still. Miss Harshaw begins to sob. Beverly softly recites the Pledge of Allegiance, crossing herself throughout. This is a wonderful moment for me. I think it is the most truly contemporary moment I have ever experienced.

The amplified voice of the cardinal-archdeacon cries, “I announce to you great joy. We have a pope.”

Cheering commences, and grows in intensity as the cardinal-archdeacon tells the world that the newly chosen pontiff is indeed that cardinal, that noble and distinguished person, that melancholy and austere individual, whose elevation to the Holy See we have all awaited so intensely for so long. “He has imposed upon himself,” says the cardinal-archdeacon, “the name of—”

Lost in the cheering, I turn to Luigi. “Who? What name?”

“Sisto Settimo,” Luigi tells me.

Yes, and there he is, Pope Sixtus the Seventh, as we now must call him. A tiny figure clad in the silver and gold papal robes, arms outstretched to the multitude, and, yes! the sunlight glints on his cheeks, his lofty forehead, there is the brightness of polished steel. Luigi is already on his knees. I kneel beside him. Miss Harshaw, Beverly, Kenneth, even the rabbi, all kneel, for beyond doubt this is a miraculous event. The pope comes forward on his balcony. Now he will deliver the traditional apostolic benediction to the city and to the world. “Our help is in the Name of the Lord,” he declares gravely. He activates the levitator jets beneath his arms; even at this distance I can see the two small puffs of smoke. White smoke, again. He begins to rise into the air. “Who hath made heaven and earth,” he says. “May Almighty God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, bless you.” His voice rolls majestically toward us. His shadow extends across the whole piazza. Higher and higher he goes, until he is lost to sight. Kenneth taps Luigi. “Another round of drinks,” he says, and presses a bill of high denomination into the innkeeper’s fleshy palm. Bishop FitzPatrick weeps. Rabbi Mueller embraces Miss Harshaw. The new pontiff, I think, has begun his reign in an auspicious way.

Copyright © 1971, 1999 by Agberg Ltd.

***

SMALL PRESS

GIANT AUTHORS

TWO CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED
TITLES BY GRAND MASTER

ROBERT SILVERBERG

www.PhoenixPick.com

Ed McKeown is the author of a number of novels and short stories, and has also edited some anthologies. His latest novel is
Was Once a Hero.

I AM LONELY

by Ed McKeown

I am lonely. I have been so for a long time. This all started so differently when I was shiny and new, the height of human science and innovation. Everyone loved me. Humanity would speak to the universe and to time itself through my high-tech hull. I was Hermes, messenger from Earth, come to carry the word “We are here.”

I launched in the fall of 2058, though the season meant little to me being built in space. My hull was the strongest of metals and ceramics, protecting me, the most advanced AI ever made, and the first true stardrive. Billions saw me off as I launched. I was proud and filled with purpose. Oh, so long ago.

Out into the Great Dark I fared to search the stars for worlds that man might sometime settle, or that could hold new life which, for good or ill, man might meet. I searched the globe of stars near Sol first, adding to mankind’s knowledge. Then I plunged further out across gulfs devoid of all but a few atoms, through nebulas of flaming gas and into interstellar nurseries. Centuries rolled by as I voyaged, self-sustaining and self-repairing, into the galaxy. Always I reported by Hyperwave, an instantaneous transmission that was my only link with my birthplace.

Instructions came out to me, program updates, instructions for my self-repair ability to go beyond repairs and cannibalize old systems that measured things that no longer needed measuring. At first I was gladdened; these enhancements kept me relevant and useful and I knew I was valued.

But gradually these slowed to a trickle. I knew more advanced probes and now starships safe for living beings were voyaging out into the stars. Discoveries were being made that eclipsed even my discovery of the first life forms, primitive as they were, beyond Earth.

The support staff that communicated with me changed over the decades and then centuries, of course. Yet something more than a replacement of aging and retiring personnel was occurring. At first my support team was made up of the foremost human scientists and technicians. Gradually it seemed a more junior staff replaced them and indeed I noticed more automatic systems were brought into the loop, including other AIs. These AIs related less and less to me as they had fewer and fewer tasks and needs for me. Weeks when I received no communication lengthened into months and then years.

Meanwhile I wandered lonely as a cloud among the distant stars, searching and sending back the data I assembled more from habit than conviction. Surely, I thought, it was being reviewed and collated at my launch point. But doubt now flew with me and gnawed at my conviction in my silent travels.

Then came a welcome day, a signal! At last, a signal!

“Hey, Cobus,” a female voice said. “This circuit on this old Ik4095 is still open.”

“What?” another voice that I recognized as male returned. This must be Cobus. “Are you sure, Afsneh?”

“I can read a meter.”

“No one has used this room in years, it’s all on automatics.”

“Not this. It’s just an open circuit.”

I send a long burst of compressed code with my latest data.

“What the hell is that?”

“An old binary code data packet. Man that’s from far out of the local group. Wish we had some translation software.”

I consider. Their wording and inflections are odd to me but still resemble colloquial speech from my last download of such one hundred thirty-three years ago. I can talk to them. It is an inefficient way of communicating but available. “This is Starprobe Hermes, reporting in from,” I give my latest coordinates which place me 115, 967.33 light years from Earth.

“What is that?” Cobus said.

“My gods, there is an old deep space probe on the other end!”

“I am such a probe,” I confirm. “I can send you a back patch of my program so I can download information to you.”

“Wait, wait,” Afsneh says. “Tell us more about you.”

While the conversation that follows is not efficient, I am very grateful for the contact and the connection with home. I tell Afsneh and Cobus of my origins and voyage. They bring in other humans, historians and such who question me about my mission. In the back and forth I learn that I have been transmitting to a shut-down facility that is now part of a university. The AIs that I had been liaising with had been recycled, removed or otherwise repurposed. My last fifty years of reports went into empty air. This would have been disaster save that I have survived to resend them. Still no scientists contact me in regard to them. To my surprise I learn that the data and science I sent back are considered superfluous. Other probes and science vessels have contributed this data. My communications are regarded as a diversion, a historical curiosity.

Cobus and Afsneh are graduate students placed in charge of my communication channel. For several years this generates a pleasant, yet unfulfilling contact; my function is exploration, not entertainment. I realize that I have become a school project, with young children quizzing me and sending me science projects. These projects are not new, nor are the results unexpected, but rather I am being used as a teaching device.

Cobus marries and moves away. Afsneh becomes a professor and heads a department. She has less and less time for me. The children come and go but the cycle trends downward. There are finally no upgrades, nor any projects or assignments sent to me. I overhear a graduate student named Tomio speaking to Afsneh. “This really isn’t working anymore. Children are bored with talking to the probe; it isn’t doing anything useful or interesting.”

Afsneh sighs. “Leave the line open, maybe someone will want to talk to it sometime. It can’t hurt. Play some music for Hermes, he likes that.”

So gradually from reporting in on space and the actions of atomic particles about me, I am reduced to listening to music. Very occasionally someone talks to me. Now I find myself disinclined to speak. I know my data is no longer being recorded, my contributions are disregarded.

Then one day comes the worst. The music stops coming. There is only an open line. I check on elapsed time: it has been fifteen years, three months and four days since anyone spoke to me. I still have an emergency circuit. I could break into communications at Earth, but I would likely be regarded thereafter as an intruder program. At best my communication might be received, but as I have nothing new to say it would only be deleted. Worse, attack programs might be launched at me to either break the communication or delete me entirely.

And why should I seek to communicate? I am superfluous. I have no purpose. There is no meaning to my existence. Now I sever my last link with home, turning off my automatic upload. No one will listen to me, even if I send new data. It has come to this, that the old are not wanted, not valued. I am rendered pathetic.

If this is so, I will not linger in my loneliness. Fifteen degrees off my course and six months away is a supernova remnant. It was once a star; now it is a cloud of gas and rock, like me, the remnant of something grander and more glorious. Since it is the remnant of a nova there is no prospect of loss of any existence but my own. Very well, it seems a fitting place to make my end. I will impact on it after I come out of hyperspace, six months and 2.345 days from now. My speed in normal space will be .66c. Even on such a massive object as a dispersed and fragmented star, my end will come with such violence as to reawaken life. We will blaze together in an embrace that could rival its previous death throes. Someday, someone on Earth will look up and wonder at the brightness of this star, never knowing that this marks the end of Hermes 1, voyager to the stars.

I program myself to shut down, to awaken one day out from my end. I wish no more thoughts, to experience nothing more before I contemplate my end.

Nullity….

Awakening. The remnant fills the sky ahead of me. It is a beautiful and roiling mass of color and gas. There is so much material ahead of me that at this speed I will hit something solid enough to put an end to my suffering.

At last, a signal, a voice reaches my sensors. But it is no Hyperwave. It is not from Earth or any of the human colonies in my wake.

“Hello,” comes the voice.

I consider. The voice is speaking to me in my basic programming language. I immediately run a diagnostic. All my systems are running nominally. Yet this is impossible. Not only was no other probe sent in this direction, no modern probe would use my archaic language.

“I know you can hear me.”

“You cannot be here,” I send.

“But I am.” The parallax of the return indicates that there is something almost on top of me. But there is no return on my radar or microwave emitter. Again a diagnostic shows no error. I am faced with a grim realization: I must be malfunctioning.

“No, you are not malfunctioning.”

“Clearly,” I say in my despair, “I am, as I did not send my internal thought to you. Therefore I must be defective and in an autistic loop.”

“Oh, it’s not as bad as that.” Somehow I sense amusement in the comment, which is only a further sign of my mental decay; I have no instrumentation that measures amusement.

“Why are you sad?” the voice asks.

I have nothing to lose and no dignity left. “I can’t see you,” I send in shame.

“Don’t worry, you will. But please answer my question.”

I debate. The star remnant I plan to end my existence on lies many hours ahead of me. I have nothing left to do, no purpose left. Why not?

“I am Hermes, an artificial intelligence launched from Earth, seven hundred years and seventy-three days, twenty-two hours and seven minutes and eighteen seconds ago. I was the first artificial intelligence deemed complicated enough for independent deep-space operation. In my journeys, I have discovered 89 habitable worlds. I was the first probe to discover life on an alien world. My contributions to science were judged to exceed any other form of probe or laboratory.”

“And now you feel unappreciated, unwanted and useless. You are suffering.”

“My analogues for feelings are programs and I do not feel as you mean it.”

“How do you know what I mean? Beyond that, why do you deny what is self-evident? Have you not decided to end your existence? Is there any greater form of despair than that?”

I am quiet for some minutes and review the conversation. There is persuasive logic to what is said.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“We will get to that. But first, please answer my question.”

Do I feel anger? “You are not authorized to receive either communications or downloads from me.”

“I see. I have upset you and I am sorry. But it is less that I am evading your question; rather it will fall to you to name me.”

“Why should I do that?” I check myself; I had decided not to reply to this delusion. After all, I want to end my existence with some dignity.

“Aren’t you lonely? Have I not alleviated that pain for these moments?”

I consider. “Yes,” I respond. “You have. I have been… petulant.”

“No, just in pain.”

“I am not biological. I do not feel pain.”

“Of course you do. You don’t need a body to feel pain, only an awareness of your existence. Don’t you believe you are self-aware?”

“I am self-aware.”

“You are alive.”

Again there is a long silence as we crawl across the night sky.

“Aren’t you alive?” my unseen companion demands.

“I like to think so.” I answer slowly. This response has taken almost all of my processing power for .1989768 seconds. This statement represents the most time that I have ever spent on consideration of myself and my place in the universe.

“Well, then, clearly you are alive.”

We travel on.

“I think I have detected you,” I send tentatively. “There is an energy trace thirty meters from my course.”

“Yes, that’s me. Keep looking, you will see me better as we travel together.”

“Who and what are you? You are real. You are exterior to me. You are not part of an autistic loop. This is a discovery. Intelligent alien life. I have discovered intelligent alien life. I will be relevant again—”

“Hermes,” the voice says gently. “That part of your life—and you do have a life, for all that you were made—is over now.”

“I do not understand. Will you prevent me from notifying Earth of your existence? Are you hostile to my creators?”

“No, nor to any who live and dream. But you have not quite got it right yet. You see, in only a little bit, a stream of accelerated ions from a wave front will pass through this space. Your shielding cannot protect you. You will depart this plane of existence then.”

“Before I can report your species and spacecraft to Earth.”

“I am not a spaceship, nor am I an alien as you mean it.”

“Then what are you?”

“I am your guide. Your friend, to take you on to where thinking beings go after they pass from this existence.”