Insistence of Vision (35 page)

This from a fellow so atavistic, I had no doubt he would chain me to a bed in his seraglio, were it in his power. I kept my amusement to myself. “I’m sure, Your Majesty, that you wouldn’t want it to get out among your Erthumoi and Nexian neighbors that you have something to hide...”

“
All
kingdoms and sovereign worlds have secrets, foolish woman. I have a right to keep vital security information from the prying eyes of outsiders.”

I nodded. “But not when those secrets violate the Essential Protocols of the Erthuma. Or is it your intention to join the Outlaw Worlds, foregoing the services of my Guild?”

For a moment it looked as if he might declare just such intentions. But he stopped. Commercial repercussions would be catastrophic. That step might push his people too far.

“The Essential Protocols don’t cover much,” he said, slowly. “My subjects have access to Erthumoi ombudsmen. I vet my treaties past Guild lawyers, and my ship captains report to the Guild on activities observed among the Other Five races. That is all that’s required of me.”

“You are forgetting Article Six of the Protocols,” I said.

Blinking, Zardee spoke slowly. “Exactly what do you accuse me of, Ambassador?”

I shrugged. “Such a strong word. There are rumors, Majesty... that
someone
is violating the rule against creating fully autonomous replicants.”

His face reddened three shades. I did not need a Nexian’s insight or Cephallon’s empathy to tell I’d struck home. At the same time though, it was not
guilt
I read in the monarch’s eyes, but rather something akin to
shame
. I found the reaction most interesting.

“I’ll rendezvous with your ship above the ninth planet,” he said tersely, and cut the channel. No doubt Captain Smeet and the king’s captain were already exchanging coordinates by the time I departed the lounge and headed for the Guest Suite, to see how things were progressing there.

ᚖ

I shouldn’t have expected miracles from Phss’aah. After all, Jirata the Crotonite was my responsibility, not his. But, at least, I might have hoped for
tact
from a Cephallon diplomat. Instead, I returned to find Phss’aah carrying on a long monologue directed at the crippled Croton, who huddled in his corner glaring back at the creature in the tank. And if looks could maim there wouldn’t have been much of anything left but bloody water.

“... so unlike the other Starfaring Races, we Cephallons find this human innovation of articulate, intelligent machines useful and fascinating, even if it is also puzzling and bizarre. Take your own case, Jirata. Would not a loyal mechanical surrogate be of use to one such as you, especially in your present condition? Helping you fend for...”

Phss’aah noticed my return and interrupted his monologue. “Ah, Patty. You have returned. I was just explaining to our comrade here how useful it is to have machines able to anticipate your requirements, and of repairing and maintaining themselves. Even the Crotonites’ marvelous, intricate devices, hand-made and unique, lack that capability.”

“We do not need it!” Jirata spat. “A machine should be elegant, light, compact, efficient. It should be a thing of beauty and craftsmanship! Pah! What pride can a human have in such a monster as a robot? Why, I hear they even allow the things to design and build
more
robots, which build still others! What can come about when an engineer lets his creations pass beyond personal control?”

I felt an eerie chill. Glad as I was that Jirata seemed, in his own style, to be emerging from his funk, I didn’t like the direction this conversation was headed.

“What about that, Patty?” Phss’aah asked, turning to face me. “I have consulted much Erthumoi literature having to do with man-created machine intelligence, and there runs through much of it a thread of warning. Philosophers speak of the very fear Jirata expressed... calling it the “Frankenstein Syndrome.” I do not know the origins of that term, but it has an apt sound for dread of destruction at the hands of one’s own creations.”

I nodded. “Fortunately, we Erthuma have a tradition of
liking
to frighten ourselves with scary stories, then finding ways to avoid the very scenario described. It’s called Warning Fiction, and historians now credit that art form with our species’ survival across the bomb-to-starship crisis time.”

“Most interesting. But tell me please, how did you come to choose a way to keep control over your creations? The Locrians certainly have trouble, whenever a clutch of male eggs is neglectfully laid outside the careful management of professional brooders, and the Samians have their own problems with gene-bred animals. How do you manage your robots then?”

How indeed? I wondered at the way this discussion had, apparently naturally, just happened upon a topic so deadly and coincidentally apropos to my other concerns.

“Well, one approach is to have the machines programmed with deeply coded fundamental operating rules, or robotic laws, which they cannot disobey without causing paralysis. This method serves well as a first line of defense, especially for simple machines.

Unfortunately, those
laws of robotics
proved tragically inadequate when the machines’ growing intelligence enabled them to
interpret
those laws in new, rather distressing ways. Lawyer programs can be terribly tricky, we found. Today, unleashing a new one without proper checks is punishable by death.”

“I understand. We Cephallons reserve that punishment for the lawyers themselves. I’ll remember to advise my Council about this, if we decide to buy more of your high-end robots. Do continue.”

“Well, one experimental approach, with the very brightest machines, has been to actually raise them as if they were Erthumoi children. In one of our confederations there are several thousand robots that have been granted provisional status as junior citizens –”

“Obscenity!” Jirata interrupted with a shout.

I merely shrugged. “It’s an experiment. The idea is that we’ll have little to fear from super-smart robots if they think of themselves as fellow Erthuma, who just happen to be built differently. Thus the hope is that they’ll be as loyal as our grand-children, and like our grand-children, pose no threat even if they grow smarter than us.”

“Fascinating!” the Cephallon cried. “But then, what happens when...”

Point after point, he spun out the logical chain. I was drawn into Phss’aah’s intellectual enthusiasm. This was one of the reasons I entered the Diplomacy Guild, after all... in order to see old things in entirely new light, through alien eyes, as if for the first time.

In his corner, I sensed even Jirata paying attention, almost in spite of himself. I had never before seen a Crotonite willing to sit and listen for so long. Perhaps this cruel and desperate experiment of theirs might actually bear fruit?

Then Jirata exploded with another set of disdainful curses, deriding one of Phss’aah’s extrapolations. And I knew that, even if the experiment worked, it was going to be a long struggle.

Meanwhile, I felt the minutes flicker by, counting down to my encounter with Zardee.

ᚖ

Even with hyperdrive it’s next to impossible to run anything like an “Empire,” in the ancient sense of the word. Not across starlanes as vast as the Galaxy. Left to their own devices, the scattered colony worlds – daughters of faraway Earth – would probably have diverged long ago... each choosing a separate path, conservative or outlandish, into a unique destiny. Without opposition, we humans do tend to fraction our loyalties.

But there
was
opposition of sorts, when we emerged into space. The Other Five were already there. Strange, barely knowable creatures with technologies at first quite a bit ahead of ours. In playing a furious game of catch-up, the Erthumoi worlds nearly all agreed to a pact... a loose confederation bound together by a civil service. Foremost of these is the Diplomacy Guild.

And foremost among the rules agreed to by all signatories to the Essential Protocol is this – not to undertake any unilateral actions which might unite other starfaring cultures against the Erthuma. In my lifetime, four crises have loomed which caused strife over this provision – in which some community of Earth-descent was found to be engaged in dangerous or inciteful activities. Once, a small trade alliance of Erthumoi worlds almost provoked a Locrian Queendom to the point of violence. Each time, the episode was soothed over by the Guild, but on two of those occasions it took severe threats... arraying all of the offending community’s Erthumoi neighbors in a united show of intimidation... before the reckless ones backed down.

Now I feared it was about to happen again. And this time, the conditions for a quick and simple solution weren’t encouraging. Zardee’s system lay nearby a cluster of stars very rich in material resources, heavy elements given off by a spate of supernovas a few million years ago. Asteroids abundant in every desirable mineral were plentiful there.

Now normally, this wouldn’t matter much. The galaxy is not resource poor. We are not living in Earth’s desperate Twenty-first Century, after all.

But what if one of the Six embarked on a population binge? Still fresh among we Erthuma is memory of such a calamity. Earth’s frail ecosystem is still recovering from the stress laid on her before we grew up and moved away to give our ancient mother a rest.

Of course the galaxy is vast beyond all planetary measure. Still, it doesn’t take much computer time to extrapolate what could happen if any of the Six Starfarers decided to have fun making babies fast. Take our own species as an example. At human breeding rates typical of pre-spacefaring Earth, and given the efficiency of hyperdrive to speed colonization, we could fill every Earthlike world in the galaxy within a million years. Among the catastrophic consequences of such a hasty, uncontrolled expansion would be destruction of various lifeforms already in existence on those worlds.

Whereupon, of course, our descendants would run out of Earthlike planets. What then? Might they not chafe at the limitations on terraforming... the agreement among the Six only to convert dead worlds, never worlds already bearing life?

Consider the fundamental reason why there has never been a major war among the Six. It’s their
incompatibility
– the fact that each others’ worlds are respectively unpleasant or deadly to the other five – that maintains the peace. But what if overpopulation started us imagining we could get away with turning a high CO
2
world into an Oxy-rich planet, say. How would the Locrians react to that?

The same logic applied to the Other Five, each capable of its own population burst. Only their irascible temperaments and short life-spans keep the Crotonites from over-breeding, for instance. And the Locrians, first of the Six upon the spacelanes, admitted once in rare candor that the urge to spew forth a myriad of eggs is still powerful within them, constrained only by social and religious pressures.

The problem is this – what seems at first to be a stable situation is anything but stable. If the Locrians seem ancient from our Erthumoi perspective, by the clock of the stars they are nearly as recent as we. Three hundred thousand years is a mere eyeblink. The coincidence of all Six appearing virtually at the same time is one that has Erthumoi and Cephallon and Naxian scholars completely puzzled.

Yes, we’re all at peace now. But computer simulations show utter calamity if any race looks about to take off on a population binge. And despite the Erthumoi monopoly on self-aware machines, all of the Six do have computers.

As my ship docked with the resplendent yacht of the King of Prongee, I looked off in the direction of the Gorch Cluster, with its rainbow of bright, metal rich stars, and its promise of riches beyond what anyone alive might need.

Beyond present needs, yes. But perhaps not beyond what any one man might
want
.

Captain Smeet signaled the locks would open in a few minutes. I took advantage of that interval to use a viewer and check in on my guests.

Within his tank, Phss’aah was getting another rub-down from his personal robot valet. Meanwhile, the Cephallon continued an apparent monologue.

“... how mystics of several races explain the sudden and simultaneous appearance of starfarers in the galaxy. After all, is it not puzzling that awkward creatures such as we water dwellers, or the Samians, took to the stars, when so many skilled, mechanically minded races, such as the Lenglils and Forttts, never even thought of it, and rejected spaceflight when it was offered them?”

From his corner of the room, Jirata flapped his wing nubs as if dismissing an unpleasant thought. “It is obscene that any but those who personally fly should ever have achieved the heights.”

I felt pleased. By Crotonite standards, Jirata was being positively outgoing and friendly. Like a good Cephallon diplomat, Phss’aah seemed not to notice the insults.

Captain Smeet signaled and I shut off the viewer reluctantly. There were times when, irritating as he was, Phss’aah could be fascinating to listen to. Now though, I had business to discuss, and no lesser matter, possibly, than the long-term survival of the Erthuma.

ᚖ

“My industrial robots are mining devices, pure and simple. They threaten no one!”