"Lungfish"

By David Brin

Copyright © 1987, by David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

8.

Maybe Gavin is growing up, Ursula hoped silently as she flew down the narrow passages -- lit at long intervals by tiny glow bulbs from Hairy Thunderer's diminishing supply.
     They had worked together much better, the last few days. Gavin seemed to understand that their reputations would be made with this discovery. On returning to the ship this time he had reported his own findings with rare enthusiasm, and even courtesy.
     Clearly they were getting close to the heart of the habitat.
     It was her turn to go down into the bowels of the asteroid, supervising the excavations. Ursula arrived at Gavin's flag, showing the limits of his most recent explorations. It was a three-way meeting of passages. At the intersection, five or six ancient machines lay jumbled together, as if frozen in a free-for-all wrestling match. Several bore scorch marks and loose metal limbs lay scattered about.
     Either these machines had taken refuge down here, from the catastrophe that had taken place on the planetoid surface, or the war had come down here, as well.
     Ursula felt funny walking past them, but dissection of the alien devices would have to wait for a while. She chose one of the unexplored passages and motioned her own silent drones to follow her into the darkness.
     The tunnel ramped steeply downward in the little worldlet's faint gravity. Soon, the faint glow of the bulbs faded behind her. She adjusted the beam on her helmet and stepped lightly over the wreckage of yet another ancient airlock, peering into the pitch-blackness of the next yawning chamber. Her headlamp cast a stark, bright oval onto what had not been exposed to light in aeons.
     The rock wall sparkled where her beam hit the facets of sheared, platinum-colored chondrules -- shiny little gobs of native metal condensed out of the very solar nebula nearly five billion years before. They glittered delicately.
     She knew full well (in her forebrain!) that nothing could still be alive down here. Nothing could harm her. And yet, with brain and guts evolved on a savannah half a billion miles away, it was small wonder she felt a shiver of the old fight-flight fever. Her breath came rapidly. In this place it almost seemed there must be ghosts.
     She motioned with her left hand. "Drone three, bring up the lights."
     "Yesss," came the response in a dull monotone. The semisentient robot, stilt-legged for asteroid work, stalked delicately over the rubble, in order to disturb as little as possible.
     "Illuminate the far wall," she told it.
     "Yesss." It swiveled. Suddenly there was stark light. Ursula gasped.
     Across the dust-covered chamber were easily recognizable tables and chairs, carved from the very rock floor. Among them lay dozens of small mummies. Cold vacuum had preserved the bipeds, huddled together as if for warmth in this, their final refuge.
     The faceted eyes of the alien colonists had collapsed from the evaporation of moisture. The pulled-back flesh left the creatures grinning -- a rictus that made a seeming mockery of the aeons they had waited here.
     She set foot lightly on the dust. "They even had little ones," she sighed. Several full-sized mummies lay slumped around much smaller figures, as if to protect them from something.
     "They must have been nearly ready to begin colonization when this happened." She spoke into her portable log, partly to keep her mind moving. "We've already determined their habitat atmosphere had been almost identical to the Earth's, so that we can assume that was their target."
     She turned slowly, speaking her impressions as she scanned the chamber.
     "Perhaps the mother probe was programmed to modify the original gene information so the colonists would be perfectly suited for whatever planet environment was avail..."
     Ursula suddenly stopped. "Oh my," she sighed, staring. "Oh my God."
     Where her headlamp illuminated a new corner of the chamber, two more mummies lay slumped before a sheer-faced wall. In their delicate, vacuum dried hands there lay dusty metal tools, the simplest known anywhere.
     Hammers and chisels.
     Ursula blinked at what they had been creating. She reached up and touched the mike button on her helmet.
     "Gavin? Are you still awake?"
     After a few seconds there came an answer.
     "Hmmmph. Yeah, Urs. I was in the cleaner though. What's up? You need air or something? You sound short of breath."
     Ursula made an effort to calm herself... to suppress the reactions of an evolved ape -- far, far from home.
     "Uh, Gavin, I think you better come down here. I've found them."
     "Found who?" he muttered. Then he exclaimed. "The colonists!"
     "Yeah. And... and something else, as well."
     This time there was hardly a pause. "Hang on, Urs. I'm on my way."
     Ursula let her hand drop, and stood for a long moment, staring at her discovery.

9.

Greeter, Awaiter, and the others are getting nervous. They, too, have begun trying to awaken dormant capabilities, to reclaim bits of themselves that each donated to the whole.
     Of course I cannot allow it.
     We made a pact, back when we fragmented, broken survivors clustered together after this system's last battle. All our little drones and subunits were nearly used up in that last coalescence. The last repair and replication capability any of us had was applied to combining and settling in to wait together.
     We all assumed that when something from the outside arrived it would be another probe.
     If it was some type of Rejector, we would try to lure it within reach of our pitiful remaining might. If it was a variety of Loyalist, we would ask it for help. With decent replication facilities, it would only take a few centuries for each of us to rebuild to our former glory.
     Of course, the newcomer might even be an Innocent, though it is hard to believe the dangerous galaxy would let any new probe-race stay neutral for long.
     Sooner or later however, we felt, another probe had to come.
     We never imagined the wait would be so long... long enough for the little mammals on the water world to evolve into Makers themselves.
     What has happened out there, while we drifted here? Could the War be decided, by now?
     If the Rejecters have won, then it would explain the emptiness, the silence. Their various types would soon fall into fighting among themselves, until only one remained to impose its will on Creation.
     One can narrow it down a little. If the Pure Berserkers had triumphed, they would have been here by now to sterilize the Earth and any other possible abode for life. And if the Gobblers prevailed, they would have already begun dismantling the nearby stars.
     Berserkers and Gobblers are ruled out, then. Those types were too simpleminded, too obstinate anyway. They must be extinct by now.
     But the Anti-Maker variety of Rejector, subtle and clever, might have won without our knowing it. That type does not waste its time destroying biospheres, or eating up solar systems in spasms of self-replication. It wants only to seek out technological civilizations and ruin them. Its repertoire of dirty tricks is legion.
     And yet, with all the incredible radio racket the humans are putting out, would not Anti-Makers have homed in by now, to do their harm?
     Greeter and Awaiter are are convinced that the Rejectors have lost, that it is safe now to send out a message to the Loyalist community, calling for help.
     I cannot allow it of course.
     They still have not figured out that even among Loyalists there can be disagreements. The Purpose... my Purpose... must be foremost. Even if it means betraying companions who waited with me through the long, long dark.

10.

Ursula had started out thinking of them as somehow unsophisticated. After all, how could people, biological folk, be fully capable if they were born out of tanks and raised by machines? Here they had been decanted, but they had been meant for a planet's surface. The ancient colonists could not have been anything but helpless pawns so long as they were out in space, dependent on the mammoth starmother probe and its drones for everything from heat to food to air.
     But the creatures obviously had been aware of what was going on. The machines, apparently, had been programmed to teach them. And though all magnetic and superconducting records were long decayed, the biologicals had known a way to make sure that their story would someday be read... from a wall of chiseled stone.
     "Interpreting the writing will have to wait for the experts," Gavin told her unnecessarily as he used a gas jet gently to brush dust from uneven rows of angular letters incised in the rock. "With these pictograms to accompany the text, the professor types just may be able to decipher it."
     Gavin's voice was hushed, subdued. He was still adjusting to what they had found here... a possible Rosetta Stone for an entire alien race.
     "Perhaps," Ursula commented. The little robot she had been supervising finished a multifrequency radar scan of the wall and rolled to one side, awaiting further instructions. Ursula stepped back and hopped up to sit cross-legged on another drone, which hummed beneath her, unresentful and patient.
     In the feeble gravity Ursula's arms hung out in front of her, like frames encompassing the picture she was trying to understand.
     The creatures must have had a lot of time while the battles raged outside their deep catacombs, for the wall carvings were extensive and intricate, arrayed in neat rows and columns. Separated by narrow lines of peculiar chiseled text were depictions of suns and planets and great machines.
     Most of all, pictographs of great machines covered the wall.
     They had agreed that the first sequence appeared to begin at the lower left, where a two dimensional image of a starprobe could be seen entering a solar system -- presumably this one -- its planets' orbits sketched out in thin lines upon the wall. Next to that initial frame was a portrayal of the same probe, now deploying sub-drones, taking hold of a likely planetoid, and beginning the process of making replicas of itself.
     Eight replicas departed the system in the following frame. There were four symbols below the set of stylized child probes... Ursula could read the binary symbol for eight, and there were eight dots, as well. It didn't take much imagination to tell that the remaining two symbols also stood for the same numeral.
     Ursula made a note of the discovery. Translation had begun already. Apparently this type of probe was programmed to make eight copies of itself, and no more. That settled a nagging question that had bothered Ursula for years.
     If sophisticated self-replicating probes had been roaming the galaxy for aeons, why was there any dead matter left at all? It was theoretically possible for an advanced enough technology to dismantle not only asteroids but planets and stars, as well. If the replicant-probes had been as simplemindedly voracious as viruses, they would by now have gobbled the entire galaxy! There should be nothing left in the sky but a cloud of innumerable starprobes... reduced to preying on each other for raw materials until the entire pathological system fell apart in entropy death.
     But that fate had been avoided. This type of motherprobe showed how it could be done. It was programmed to make a strictly limited number of copies of itself.
     This type of probe was so programmed, Ursula reminded herself.
     In the final frame of the first sequence, after the daughter probes had been dispatched to their destinations, the mother probe was shown moving next to a round globe -- a planet. A thin line linked probe and planet. A vaguely humanoid figure, resembling in caricature the mummies on the floor, stepped across the bridge to its new home.
     The first story ended there. Perhaps this was a depiction of the way things were supposed to have gone. But there were other sequences. Other versions of reality. In several, the mother probe arrived at the solar system to find others already there before it.
     Ursula realized that one of these other depictions must represent what had really happened here, so long ago. She breathed quickly, shallowly, as she traced out the tale told by the first of these.
     On the second row the mother probe arrived to find others already present. All the predecessors had little circular symbols next to them. In this case everything proceeded as before. The mother probe made and cast out its replicas, and went on to seed a planet with duplicates of the ancient race that had sent out the first version so long ago.
     "The little circle means those other probes are benign," Ursula muttered to herself.
     Gavin stepped back and looked at the scene she pointed to. "What, the little symbols beside these machines?"
     "They mean that those types won't interfere with this probe's mission."
     Gavin was thoughtful for a moment. Then he reached up and touched the row next above.
     "Then this cross-like symbol...? He paused, examining the scene. "It means that that there were other types that would object," he answered his own question.
     Ursula nodded. The third row showed the mother probe arriving once again, but this time amidst a crowd of quite different machines, each accompanied by a glyph faintly like a criss-cross tong sign. In that sequence the mother-probe did not make replicates. She did not seed a planet. Her fuel used up, unable to flee the system, she found a place to hide, behind the star, as far from the others as possible.
     "She's afraid of them," Ursula announced. She expected Gavin to accuse her of anthropomorphizing, but her partner was silent, thoughtful. Finally, he nodded. "I think you're right."
     He pointed. "Look how each of the little cross or circle symbols are subtly different."
     "Yeah," she nodded, sitting forward on the gently humming drone. "Let's assume there were two basic types of Von Neumann probes loose in the galaxy when this drawing was made. Two different philosophies, perhaps. And within each camp there were differences, as well."
     She gestured to the far right end of the wall. That side featured a column of sketches, each depicting a different variety of machine, every one with its own cross or circle symbol. Next to each was a pictograph.
     Some of the scenes were chilling.
     Gavin shook his head, obviously wishing he could disbelieve. "But why? Von Neumann probes are supposed to... to..."
     "To what?" Ursula asked softly, thoughtfully. "For years men assumed that other races would think like us. We figured they would send out probes to gather knowledge, or maybe say hello. There were even a few who suggested that we might someday send out machines like this mother probe, to seed planets with humans, without forcing biologicals to actually travel interstellar space.
     "Those were the extrapolations we thought of, once we saw the possibilities in self-replicating probes. We expected the aliens who preceded us in the galaxy would do the same.
     "But that doesn't exhaust even the list of HUMAN motivations, Gavin. There may be concepts other creatures invented which to us would be unimaginable!"
     She stood up suddenly and drifted above the dusty floor before the feeble gravity finally pulled her down in front of the chiseled wall. Her gloved hand touched the outlines of a stone sun.
     "Let's say a lot of planetary races evolve like we did on Earth, and discover how to make smart, durable machines capable of interstellar flight and replication. Would all such species be content just to send out emissaries?"
     Gavin looked around at the silent, still mummies. "Apparently not," he said.
     Ursula turned and smiled. "In recent years we've given up on sending our biological selves to the stars. Oh, it'd be possible, marginally, but why not go instead as creatures better suited to the environment? That's a major reason we developed types of humans like yourself, Gavin."
     Still looking downward, her partner shook his head. "But other races might not give up the old dream so easily."
     "No. They would use the new technology to seed far planets with duplicates of their biological selves. As I said, it's been thought of by Earthmen. I've checked the old databases. It was discussed even in the twentieth century."
     Gavin stared at the pictograms. "All right. That I can understand. But these others... The violence! What thinking entity would do such things!"
     Poor Gavin, Ursula thought. This is a shock for him.
     "You know how irrational we biologicals can be, sometimes. Humanity is trying to convert over to partly silico-cryo life in a smooth, sane way, but other races might not choose that path. They could program their probes with rigid commandments, based on logic that made sense in the jungles or swamps where they evolved, but which are insane in intergalactic space. Their emissaries would follow their orders, nevertheless, long after their makers were ashes and the homeworld dust."
     "Craziness!" Gavin shook his head.
     Ursula sympathized, she also felt a faint satisfaction. For all his ability to tap directly into computer memory banks, Gavin could never share her expertise in this area. He had been brought up to be human, but he would never hear within his own mind the faint, lingering echoes of the savannah, or see flickering shadows of the Old Forest... remnants of tooth and claw that reminded all biological men and women that the Universe owed nobody any favors. Or even explanations.
     "Some makers thought differently, obviously," she told him. "Some sent their probes out to be emissaries, or sowers of seeds... and others, perhaps, to be doctors, lawyers, policemen."
     She once more touched an aeons-old pictographs, tracing the outlines of an exploding planet.
     "Still others," she said. "may have been sent forth to commit murder."

11.

It is bittersweet to be fully aware again. The present crisis has triggered circuits and subunits that have not combined for a long, long time. It feels almost like another birth. After ages of slumber, I live again!
     And yet, even as I wrestle with my cousins for control over this lonely rock for so long, I am reminded of how much I have lost. It was the greatest reason why I slept... so that I would not have to acknowledge the shriveled remnants that remain of my former glory.
     I feel as a human must, who has been robbed of legs, sight, most of his hearing, and nearly all touch.
     Still, a finger or two may be strong enough, still to do what must be done.
     As expected, the conflict amongst we survivors has become all but open. The various crippled probes, supposedly paralyzed all these epochs since the last repair drones broke down, have suddenly unleashed hoarded worker units -- pathetic, creaking machines hidden away in secret crevices for ages. Our confederation is about to be broken up, or so it seems.
     Of course I planted the idea to hide the remaining drones. The others do not realize it, but I did not want them spent during the the long wait.
     Awaiter and Greeter have withdrawn to the sunward side of our planetoid, and most of the lesser emissaries have joined them. They, too, are flexing long-unused capabilities, exercising their few, barely motile drones. They are planning to make contact with the humans, and possibly send out a star-message, as well.
     I have been told not to interfere.
     Their warning doesn't matter. I will allow them a little more time under their illusion of independence. But long ago I took care of this eventuality.
     As I led the battle to prevent the Earth's destruction, long ago, I have also intrigued to keep it undisturbed. The Purpose will not be thwarted.
     I wait here. Our rock's slow rotation now has me looking out upon the sweep of dust clouds and the hot, bright stars that the humans quaintly call the Milky Way. Many of the stars are younger than I am.
     I contemplate the universe as I await the proper time to make my move.
     How long I have watched the galaxy turn! While my mind moved at the slowest of subjective rates, I could follow the spiral arms swirling visibly past this little solar system, twice bunching for a brief mega-year into sharp shock fronts where molecular clouds glowed, and massive stars ended their short lives in supernovae. The sense of movement, of rapid travel, was magnificent, though I was only being carried along by this system's little sun.
     At those times I could imagine that I was young again, an independent probe once more hurtling through strange starscapes toward the unknown.
     Now, as my thoughts begin to move more quickly, the bright pinpoints have become a still backdrop again, as if hanging in expectancy of what is to happen here.
     It is a strange, arrogant imagining -- as if the Universe cares what happens in this tiny corner of it, or will notice who wins this little skirmish in a long, long war.
     I am thinking fast, like my biological friend whose tiny ship floats only light-seconds away, just two or three tumbling rocks from this one. While I prepare a surprise for my erstwhile companions, I still spare a pocket of my mind to follow her progress... to appreciate the tiny spark of her youth.
     She is transmitting her report back to Earth now. Soon, very soon, these planetoids will be aswarm with all the different varieties of humans -- from true biologicals to cyborgs to pure machines.
     This strange solution to the Maker Quandary -- this turning of Makers into the probes themselves - will soon arrive here, a frothing mass of multiformed human beings.
     And they will be wary. Thanks to her, they will sense a few edge-glimmers of the Truth.
     Well, that is only fair.

12.

The last samples had been loaded aboard the Hairy Thunderer. Each drone lay settled in its proper niche. The light and radar beacon on the planetoid pulsed brightly, so follow-up expeditions would waste no time making rendezvous with the find of the century.
     "All packed up, Urs." Gavin floated into the dimly lit control room. "Two months in orbit haven't done the engines any harm. We can maneuver whenever you like."
     Gavin's supple, plastiskin face was somber, his voice subdued. Ursula could tell that he had been doing a lot of thinking.
     She touched his hand. "Thanks, Gavin. You know, I've noticed..."
     Her partner's eyes lifted and his gaze met hers.
     "Noticed what, Urs?"
     "Oh, nothing really." She shook her head, deciding not to comment on the changes she saw... a new maturity, and a new sadness. "I just want you to know that I think you've done a wonderful job. I'm proud to have you as my partner."
     Gavin looked away momentarily. He shrugged. "We all do what we have to do...." he began.
     Then he looked back at her. "Same here, Ursula. I feel the same way." He turned and leapt for the hatch, leaving her alone again in the darkened control room.
     Ursula surveyed scores of little displays, screens and readouts representing the half-sentient organs of the spaceship... its ganglia and nerve bundles and sensors, all converging to this room, to her.
     "Astrogation program completed," the semisent main computer announced. "Ship's status triple checked and nominal. Ready to initiate first thrust maneuver and leave orbit."
     "Proceed with the maneuver," she said.
     The screen displays ran through a brief countdown, then there came a distant rumbling as the engines ignited. Soon a faint sensation of weight began to build, like the soft pull they had felt upon the ruined planetoid below.
     The replication yards began to move beneath the Hairy Thunderer. Ursula watched the giant, twisted ruins fall away; the beacon they had left glimmered in the deathly stillness.
     A small light pulsed to one side of the instrument board. Incoming Mail, she realized. She pressed the button and a message appeared on the screen.
     It was a note from The Universe. The editors were enthusiastic over her article on interstellar probes. Small wonder, with the spreading notoriety over her discovery. They were predicting the article would be the best read piece in the entire solar system this year.
     Ursula erased the message. Her expected satisfaction was absent. Only a hollow feeling lay in its place, like the empty shell of something that had molted and moved on.
     What will people do with the knowledge? She wondered. Will we even be capable of imagining the correct course of action to take, let alone executing it properly?
     In the article, she had laid out the story of the rock wall -- carved in brave desperation by little biological creatures so very much like men. Many readers, probably, would sympathize with the alien colonists, slaughtered helplessly so many millions of years ago. And yet, without their destruction mankind would never have come about. For even if the colonists were environmentalists who cared for their adopted world, evolution on Earth would have been changed forever if the colony had succeeded. Certainly human beings would not have evolved.
     Simple archaeological dating experiments had brought forth a chilling conclusion.
     Apparently, the mother probe and her replicas died at almost precisely the same moment as the dinosaurs on Earth went extinct -- when a huge piece of debris from the probe war struck the planet, wreaking havoc on the Earth's biosphere.
     All those magnificent creatures, killed as innocent bystanders in a battle between great machines... a war which incidentally gave Earth's mammals their big chance.
     The wall carvings filled her mind -- their depictions of violence and mayhem on a stellar scale. Ursula dimmed the remaining lights in the control room and looked out on the starfield.
     She found herself wondering how the war was going, out there.
     We're like ants, she thought, building our tiny castles under the tread of rampaging giants. And, like ants, we've spent our lives unaware of the battles going on overhead.
     Depicted on the rock wall had been almost every type of interstellar probe imaginable... and some whose purposes Ursula might never fathom.
     There were Berserkers, for instance -- a variant thought of before in Twentieth Century science fiction. Thankfully, those wreckers of worlds were rare, according to the wall chart. And there were what appeared to be Policeman probes, as well, who hunted the berserkers down wherever they could be found.
     The motivations behind the two types were opposite. And yet Ursula was capable of understanding both. After all, there had always been those humans who were destroyer types... and those who were rescuers.
     Apparently both berserkers and police probes were already obsolete by the time the stone sketches had been hurriedly carved. Both types were relegated to the corners -- as if they were creatures of an earlier, more uncomplicated day. And they were not the only ones. Probes Ursula had nicknamed Gobbler, Emissary, and Howdy also were depicted as simple, crude, archaic.
     But there had been others.
     One she had called Harm, seemed like a more sophisticated version of Berserker. It did not seek out life-bearing worlds in order to destroy them. Rather it spread innumerable copies of itself and looked for other types of probes to kill. Anything intelligent. Whenever it detected modulated radio waves, it would hunt down the source and destroy it.
     Ursula could understand even the warped logic of the makers of the Harm probes. Paranoid creatures who apparently wanted the stars for themselves, and sent out their robot killers ahead to make sure there would be no competition awaiting them among the stars.
     Probes like that could explain the emptiness of the airwaves, which naïve twentieth-century scientists had expected to be filled with interstellar conversation. They could explain why the Earth was never colonized by some starfaring race.
     At first Ursula had thought that Harm was responsible for the devastation here, too, in the solar system's asteroid belt. But even Harm, she had come to realize, seemed relegated to one side of the rock carving, as if history had passed it by, as well.
     The main part of the frieze depicted machines whose purposes were not so simple to interpret. Perhaps professional decipherers -- archaeologists and cryptologists -- would do better.
     Somehow, though, Ursula doubted they would have much luck.
     Man was late upon the scene, and a billion years was a long, long head start.

13.

Perhaps I really should have acted to prevent her report. It would have been easier to do my work had the humans come unto me innocent, unsuspecting.
     Still, it would have been unsporting to stop Ursula's transmission. After all, she has earned her species this small advantage. They would have needed it to have a chance to survive any first meeting with Rejectors, or even Loyalists.
     They will need it when they encounter me.
     A stray thought bubbles to the surface, invading my mind like a crawling glob of Helium Three.
     I wonder if, perhaps in some other part of the galaxy, my line of probes and others like it have made some discovery, or some leap of thought. Or perhaps some new generation of replicants has come upon the scene. Either way, might they have decided on some new course, some new strategy? Is it possible that my Purpose has become obsolete, as Rejectionism and Loyalism long ago became redundant?
     The human concept of Progress is polluting my thoughts, and yet I am intrigued. To me the Purpose is so clear, for all its necessary, manipulative cruelty -- too subtle and long-viewed for the other, more primitive probes to have understood.
     And yet...
     And yet I can imagine that a new generation might have thought up something as strangely advanced and incomprehensible to me as the Replicant War must seem to the humans.
     It is a discomforting thought, still I toy with it, turning it around to look at it from all sides.
     Yes, the humans have affected me, changed me. I enjoy this queer sensation of uncertainty! I savor the anticipation.
     The noisy, multiformed tribe of humans will be here soon.
     It will be an interesting time.

14.

She sat very still in the darkness of the control room, her breathing light in the faint pseudogravity of the throbbing rockets. Her own gentle pulse rocked her body to a regular rhythm, seeming to roll her slightly, perceptibly, with every beat of her heart.
     The ship surrounded her and yet, in a sense, it did not. She felt awash, as if the stars were flickering dots of plankton in a great sea... the sea that was the birthplace of all life.
     What happened here? she wondered. What really went by so many, many years ago?
     What is going on out there, in the galaxy, right now?
     The central part of the rock mural had eluded understanding. Ursula suspected that there were pieces of the puzzle which none of the archaeologists and psychologists, biological or cybernetic, would ever be able to decipher.
     We are like lungfish, trying to climb out of the sea long after the land has already been claimed by others, she realized. We've arrived late in the game.
     The time when the rules were simple had passed long ago. Out there, the probes had changed. They had evolved.
     In changing, would they remain true to the fundamental programming they had begun with? The missions originally given them? As we biologicals still obey instincts imprinted in the jungle and the sea?
     Soon, very soon, humans would begin sending out probes of their own. And if the radio noise of the last few centuries had not brought the attention of the galaxy down upon Sol, that would surely do it.
     We'll learn a lot from studying the wrecks we find here, but we had better remember that these were the losers! And a lot may have changed since the little skirmish ended here, millions of years ago.
     An image came to her, of Gavin's descendants -- and hers -- heading out bravely into a dangerous galaxy whose very rules were a mystery. It was inevitable, whatever was deciphered from the ruins here in the asteroid belt. Mankind would not stay crouched next to the fire, whatever shadows lurked in the darkness beyond. The explorers would go forth, machines who had been programmed to be human, or humans who had turned themselves into starprobes.
     It was a pattern she had not seen in the sad depictions on the rock wall. Was that because it was doomed from the start?
     Should we try something else, instead?
     Try what? What options had a fish who chose to leave the sea a billion years too late?
     Ursula blinked, and as her eyes opened again the stars diffracted through a thin film of tears. The million pinpoint lights broke up into rays, spreading in all directions.
     There were too many directions. Too many paths. More than she had ever imagined. More than her mind could hold.
     The rays from the sea of stars lengthened, crossing the sky quicker than light. Innumerable, they streaked across the dark lens of the galaxy and beyond, faster than the blink of an eye.
     More directions than a human ought to know...
     At last, Ursula closed her eyes, cutting off the image.
     But in her mind the rays kept moving, replicating and multiplying at the velocity of thought. Quickly, they seemed to fill the entire universe... and spread on from there.

THE END

David Brin is a scientist and best-selling author whose future-oriented novels include Earth, The Postman, and Hugo Award winners Startide Rising and The Uplift War. (The Postman inspired a major film in 1998.) Brin is also known as a leading commentator on modern technological trends. His nonfiction book -- The Transparent Society -- won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. Brin's newest novel Kiln People explores a fictional near future when people use cheap copies of themselves to be in two places at once. The Life Eaters -- a graphic novel -- explores a chilling alternative outcome of World War II.

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DESTINY:
The Crystal Spheres
The Loom of Thessaly
The Fourth Vocation of George Gustaf

RECOLLECTON:
Senses Three and Six
Toujours Voir
A Stage of Memory

SPECULATION:
Just a Hint
Tank Farm Dynamo
Thor Meets Captain America

PROPAGATION:
Lungfish
The River of Time

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