World Hammer Read online

  _____

  Tarkos came to the end of the hall. The bay was lit brightly as before. The cruiser sat by the square ocean pool, seemingly untouched. Small waves tossed in the exposed water, disturbed by the currents below. The two cylinders with their cargo of folded monument plates stood near the cruiser’s stern.

  Tarkos took a step into the bay, and the floor slid him back into the spoke. He frowned. Using Bria’s method, he shot two twin lasers across the floor, scarring it. He stepped forward.

  And the cruiser slid back, toward the open water.

  Tarkos stopped. He could control the cruiser using his implants. He could make it rise up and hover. But dark machines crouched against the walls of the bay. What could they do, if woken up and used as weapons?

  He considered. What did the Ulltrian want? If Eydis were right, it wanted him to leave with the two plates. What he wanted, instead, was to get into the cruiser. So, what could he do to make the Ulltrian allow him in?

  He had to load the monument plates.

  He sent a command to one of the ship’s general robots. The starboard airlock opened and the thin, humanoid form dropped down to the wet deck. He told it to walk over to the first cylinder. He would not allow the whole cylinder in the ship—it could contain any kind of technology. Instead, he told the robot to attempt to cut the clear material away.

  A cutting torch slid easily through the cylinder, melting a doorway. The robot reached in and lifted the metallic plate. As it felt the weight, it extended a second pair of legs for support. It carefully pulled the plate out and carried it into the airlock. Tarkos told it to do the same with the other cylinder.

  When the robot was done, and both monument plates were in the cruiser, Tarkos took a step forward. The cruiser did not move.

  He ran for its airlock.

  _____

  “Pala,” he said, as he climbed into the cruiser. “Talk to me.” The sound of her voice made him worry slightly less.

  “About what?” she asked.

  “Anything. The Ulltrian homeworld, the Well of Furies. What were you doing there? Tell me about that.”

  “Studying the Ulltrian technology,” she said, her voice sounded thin, breathy. She was trying not to pant, he realized. And the weakening radio link made her sound like she talked to him from inside a drum. It disturbed him: her voice sounded mortal, weak and tenuous.

  “I went hoping to learn about their computer systems,” she said. “That was hard. Not a lot of Ulltrian systems are still running on the Well of Furies. But there are a few. Here and there. I went hoping to crack their codes, to understand how they made software, and how their software ran.”

  In the airlock, Tarkos shoved the two monument plates, which leaned against the wall and covered the controls. The plates had more mass than he expected. They fell with a shuddering crash on the closing door. But the door continued to close, scraping against them.

  “Did you do it?”

  “Not at first,” she said. “But then, little by little, I started to make progress. For a year I worked at it. All day long, it seemed, I turned strange huge structures around in my head, and then at night I slept on what I’d learned. Over and over. Day after day. And then….”

  “What?” he asked, as he pushed into the cruiser and, huffing with the effort, ran down the hall to the cockpit. He threw himself into the co-pilot’s seat.

  “Then I saw it,” she whispered. “A structure that relied upon the first three perfect numbers in base eight mathematics. They’d used it, who knows why, as a kind of fundamental starting point. From that….”

  “From that?”

  “Everything followed.” Her voice really was just a whisper now. Tarkos suspected she might be crying.

  “You sound… emotional about it,” he said.

  “It was the greatest accomplishment of my life. One of those moments that, well—that’s what it must have been like when Gödel saw the Incompleteness Theorem, or when Cantor figured out there were different sized infinities. A moment of everything coming together. I realized, then, that my whole life had been for that instant of understanding.”

  “It must have been wonderful,” Tarkos said. He slapped the toggles that started the cruiser’s engines.

  “I won’t ever do something that important again.”

  “You’ll do other work.”

  “Nothing like that. No. Never again.”

  “Maybe,” Tarkos said. “Maybe not. You can’t know, right?”

  “Always the optimist. Where are you now?”

  “In the cruiser. Running system’s check. I’ll be there soon. Keep talking.”

  “OK. Let’s change the topic.”

  “Right. Something about Earth. Iceland, maybe.”

  “No,” Eydis said, “I better tell you something else. I might have caused Tiklik to go crazy.”

  “What do you mean?” The cruiser lifted off the deck. Tarkos checked all the engines. Everything showed good. He activated the main engines and ran diagnostics on all weapons systems. He told the ship’s AI to heat up all the guns and ready the missiles.

  “I gave him all my data, and ask him to transmit it to Earth, via his built in hyperradio, when he could. It was a huge load, and some of that data… well, I had not decoded some of it. It could have included some rogue programs. So if I don’t get out of this, you can’t blame Tiklik. Not till you know for sure what happened.”

  The cruiser hovered over the pool of water now. He cut the engines and the ship splashed down hard. Bubbles churned over all the exterior cameras.

  “You’re getting out of this and you can stand up for Tiklik yourself,” Tarkos said. “Don’t be afraid.”

  Eydis laughed, a short bitter snort. “I’m alone with an Ulltrian, Amir. I’d be an idiot to not be afraid.” Her voice cracked as she added, “But it’s not that. I fear for Earth, Amir.”

  The sound of her voice as she said this made him feel the pressure of tears in his own eyes. He was taking too damn long to get to her. Too damn long.

  “I fear for it,” Eydis said. “I fear the machines in the Lost Zone. I fear we’ll be swallowed into the Alliance and lose ourselves. And now those seem like a child’s worries, because the worse thing of all has happened. The Ulltrians have returned. We just saw hundreds of their ships launch. It’s Ragnarok, the end of creation.”

  Tarkos let the ship sink a dozen meters into the black sea, clearing the station. The sonar images became crisp. He eased the ship to the side, and headed for the surface. He looked for the place where the ice above was still thinnest.

  “Have faith,” he said. “The Alliance won before, and it’s stronger now. We will save Earth, Pala. We’ll protect it.”

  “I tell you what,” Pala replied. “Faith or no faith, we can only protect Earth if we are vigilant, with both eyes. And at this time, right now, I think of you and me as those two eyes.”

  “Right. Let’s get out of this together,” Tarkos said. “You stay alive. I’ll stay alive. We’ll go back to the Alliance, and then you’ll go home, and some day I’ll come to Iceland, in the summer, and you’ll buy me dinner at your favorite restaurant, and we’ll talk till midnight, when the sun finally sets.”

  “And then I’ll take you to my home,” she said. “And show you a proper bed. Not that plastic little bunk in your quarters.”

  “Deal. Listen, Pala. I’m going to go above the ice for a second, just to see if there is company out here. There is minimal telemetry from our orbiting probes. That worries me. It won’t take me any longer to get to you, and it will let me know if we need to expect an attack from above.”

  “Hurry,” she said.

  He used the ships x-ray lasers to cut the ice. The twin beams left exploding lines of boiling water. He lifted the ship till it touched the black crust where he’d cut, and then eased the engine power up. A shudder sounded through the cruiser as cracks rippled through the crust. He cranked the power higher, and huge blocks parted. He broke through to the dark surfac
e. Stars shone overhead, cut in twain before him by the silhouette of the black vent tower.

  Data began to flood into the ship’s systems, from half the probes that they had set orbiting the World Hammer. He frowned, and checked the data for the signature of other ships. He found nothing. Something killed half their probes, but the sky seemed empty, at least above this ice world. There was no data from the starsleeve, though. That could be a bad sign. It should report to the probes regularly.

  “Amir,” Eydis said. “The station just shifted. I think it moved. Or is that just this damn moving floor under me?”

  A datum pinged in Tarkos’s dataspace. Telemetry from some of the remaining drones still operating in the station showed that the drones moved away from him—all of the drones, simultaneously. He wondered a second how that could be possible, but then as he watched, the station’s vent tower slowly diminished as its peak slipped toward the black ice.

  “The station,” he said. “The station is sinking.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Tiklik had turned off the lights in its quarters. The incessant, unchanging spectral pattern of the diodes had bored the AI. But now the lights came on again, blinking in a frequency at the long end of animal perception. A pulsing change in the air pressure began. Sound, Tiklik thought. An alarm, warning the robot that the air had evacuated on the other side of the door to its quarters.

  Tiklik found sound strange. Sound pulsed so slowly, so weakly, that it seemed the sickly shadow of light as it bounced around in the thin skin of planets. Light was the quick voice of stars. Sound was the slow voice of animals.

  A tap came at the door to Tiklik’s quarters. The tap sounded in time with the alarm, and by coincidence the metal of the door rang at a frequency in harmony with the alarm, but two octaves below. Like music.

  Is this the room where you are restrained? The vibration of the Farraday field asked.

  Yes, Tiklik answered.

  Prepare for local explosive decompression.

  Tiklik leapt to the corner and wedged its legs against the walls. While its door still rang, it waited for the air—and with it all these sounds, all this accidental music—to be torn away.

  _____

  The human Pala Eydis had taught Tiklik about music. One day, while the human Tarkos worked alone on the bridge, the woman had come to Tiklik’s quarters, her primary orifice open in a geometry that Tiklik’s meager records on human social etiquette explained was a sign of greeting called a “smile.” The human asked if Tiklik had heard music. Earth music.

  “No,” Tiklik said. “I have only been able to hear for seventy eight k-days, subjective time. When my Kirt masters reassembled my body into this form, deemed suitable to serving organisms like yourself in a gravity well, they gave me sound sensors. I had not heard before.”

  The geometry of the human woman’s mouth orifice became more pronounced. “Perfect,” she said. “I will transmit to you the complete symphonies of Beethoven. You are a truly virgin listener, an alien in every sense. You’re the perfect audience.”

  The data file she sent was small. “I can review this in a second,” Tiklik said.

  Eydis hand held up her hands, an inscrutable animal gesture. “Stop!” she said. “No. You can’t do that. Absolutely not.”

  Tiklik ceased his analysis. The human had a strange manner, unlike the Kirt. She gave orders that seemed requests. Tiklik always obeyed them, but it felt different to do so.

  “Pick one,” she said. “The files are divided into parts, right? Each is what we call a symphony. One hundred humans are working together, in consort, to make this music. We’ll pick one symphony. The seventh symphony. Now, most important of all, Tiklik, you must listen to it in the specified time signature. Not faster. Transmit it to the room’s speakers, and play it aloud, and we’ll listen together.”

  Tiklik hesitated. “That would be inefficient.”

  “Efficiency is irrelevant here. This is music. Here. I’ll do it.” She used her implants to interface with the ship. The speakers in the ceiling began to play the music, the vibrations filling the room with the languid animal tones. Eydis told the floor to extrude a chair and she sat.

  “Now listen. And no going into slow time, either.”

  Tiklik obeyed. They waited, while the air shook. Eydis stopped the recording at the end of the first movement.

  “Well? What do you think?”

  “The patterns have a low descriptive complexity, with a large amount of repetition. The data is not of use for my future function.”

  “That’s all you hear?” she said. Her primary orifice changed shaped. Tiklik checked its etiquette files again and returned a 74% chance that this was a human frown.

  “Tiklik,” the human said, “Would you do me a favor? I want you to put your future planning capabilities to sleep.”

  “I do not sleep.”

  “Into slow time then. You can do that, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t run any algorithms to count the information. Put your expected utility calculator to sleep. Let reason be still. Keep only your perceptual apparatus awake and in real time. And just listen. Just feel. Can you do that?”

  “I have never done that before.”

  “But can you do it?”

  Tiklik leaned slightly and thought for a second. “I can do that.”

  “Do it,” she said.

  The world shrank. Tiklik found itself floating in the moment, without a goal, without planning. The music started again. Tiklik listened. It felt like drifting into something like slow time, the hibernation state Tiklik preferred—but it was not slow time. It was… stilled time.

  The patterns of the music were simple, at first uninteresting. But the elements—the “notes,” Eydis had called them, using a human word—troubled, and then fascinated Tiklik. They were not atoms of meaning, like the 0 and 1 of binary code. They were analog, complex, every one different, every one longer or slower or louder or fading or in a thousand other ways different from every other one. Tiklik had spent its existence looking for clean, measurable patterns of vast complexity in the heavens. But this skill failed Tiklik when it listened to the human music. Relatively simple patterns formed the music’s large structure, but the tiny nuances of the production of the elements of the music—these were vastly complex and strangely fluid, like animal emotions. It disturbed Tiklik, this simplicity made of complexity. It disturbed him the way organisms disturbed him: their goals were so simple, but their individual lives so strange and confused and complex.

  After an unmeasured period of time, the vibrations ceased. The first movement had completed.

  “What do you think now?” the human asked. “That was the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.”

  “Play the rest,” Tiklik said.

  _____

  Bright sparks showered into Tiklik’s quarters, the molten spray of metal pushed through as a laser cut into the door. Two beams circled the door’s outline. When the beams touched, the door exploded out into the hall, the room’s air following in a freezing white haze.

  Tiklik stood when the decompression had emptied the room. It walked over into the bright glow falling from the doorway. A black figure pulled itself foward in the hall. It was a Kriani, a member of the slave race of the Ulltrians, dressed in vacuum armor. Its six legs were sheathed in gleaming black metal and an armored helmet covered its eyes with a featureless black shield. It gestured with its head and sent a dense blast of radar slapping against Tiklik.

  “You are the Kirt machine Tiklik’al’Takas,” the Kriani transmitted, its radio signal much too powerful, a blaring shriek against Tiklik’s sensitive receptors.

  “I am the Kirt manufactured artificial intelligence Tiklik’al’Takas,” the robot replied.

  “Who else is on this ship?”

  “A sentient weapon may also be present,” Tiklik said, remembering Tarkos’s warning that he would set a weapon in the hall.

  “We destroyed the gun,” the Kria
ni said. “Who else?”

  “OnUnAn ambassador Gowgoroup. It has been harmed. It is imprisoned in its quarters there.” Tiklik stepped out into the hall and, having learned that animals find such gestures helpful, pointed a single arm at the next door in the hall.

  “The OnUnAn can remain there,” the Kriani radioed. “You are needed.”

  Tiklik looked down the hall toward the stern. It could not see around the bend in the hall, but the ambient radiation told it that the hull breach lay only a few meters ahead. The radio song of the brown dwarf that the starsleeve orbited buzzed incessantly now, penetrating the space around them. Tiklik felt naked to space, nearly outside.

  Tiklik looked toward the bow. A pair of slim black robots flanked the door to the bridge. They moved lasers over the metal, casting sparks that floated, glowing, past the Kriani, unable to cool in the vacuum.

  “You have access to ship systems?” the Kriani asked.

  “I have access to some ship systems,” Tiklik said.

  “You will maintain ship integrity while we remove the ship’s mind core. You will prevent the core from decaying.”

  Silently, the door to the bridge flung free and bounced down the hall. Tiklik pulled back into its quarters. The Kriani shifted only slightly, and seemed unaffected as the heavy steel door bounced off one hard armored joint of its first of six legs. The door settled against the ceiling.

  “Follow, Kirt AI Tiklik’al’Takas,” the Kriani said.

  Tiklik looked again toward the stern. It would be easy to flee down the hall and fling itself into space. It would not escape, of course. To even consider the action was irrational. And yet, to its surprise, it felt the motivation to do just that. It wanted to sail in black space, listening to the stars, if only for a few moments.

  But the Kriani pulled itself toward the bridge. Tiklik followed.