and manufacturing right down to the atomic level. He imagined a fleet of these limited, imperfect robots being unleashed on the Galaxy, ordered to travel from star to star, to build others of their kind … and, with each generation, getting it subtly wrong.
But for there to be such a wide variety of ‘mutations’ as he saw here, there surely had to have been an awful lot of generations.
Or, he thought, what if these are the Gaijin?
He had been assuming that behind these ‘mere’ machines there had to be something bigger, something smarter, something more complex. Lack of imagination, Malenfant. Anthropomorphic. Deal with what you see, not what you imagine might be waiting for you.
He tired of watching the incomprehensible swarming of the robots, and he turned his enhancement softscreen on Alpha Centauri.
Each of the near-twins looked hauntingly like the sun – but if the brighter star, Alpha A, were set in place of the sun, its companion, Alpha B, would be within the solar system: closer than planet Neptune, in fact.
And there were planets here. The interpretative software built into his softscreen began to trace out orbits – one, two, three of them, tight around bright Alpha A – of small rocky worlds, perhaps twins of Earth or Venus or Mars. A couple of minutes later, similar orbits had been sketched out around the companion, B.
Alpha Centauri wasn’t just a twin star; it was a twin solar system. If Earth had been transplanted here the second sun would be a brilliant star. There would be double sunrises, double sunsets, strange eclipses of one star by the other; the sky would be a bright and complex place. And there would have been a whole other planetary system a few light-hours away: so close humans would have been able to complete interstellar journeys maybe as early as the 1970s. He felt an odd ache of possibilities lost, nostalgia for a reality that had never come to be.
The double system contained only one gas giant – and that was small compared to mighty Jupiter, or even Saturn. It was looping, it seemed, on a strange metastable orbit that caused it to fly, on decades-long trajectories, back and forth between the two stars. And as the stars followed their own elliptical orbits around each other, it seemed highly likely that within a few million years the rogue planet would be flung out into the dark, from whence, perhaps, it had come.
If there were few giants, the Alpha sky was full of minor planets, asteroids, comet nuclei. Unlike the orderly lanes of Earth, these asteroid clouds extended right across the space between the stars, and into the surrounding volume. As the ’screen’s software began to plot density contours within the glittering asteroid clouds, Malenfant made out knots and bands and figure-of-eight loops, even what looked like spokes radiating from each star’s central system: clouds of density marked out by the sweeping paths of flocks of asteroids, shepherded by the competing pulls of the stars and their retinues of planets. From an Earth orbiting Alpha A or B, there would be a line across the sky, marking out the plane of the ecliptic: dazzling, alluring, the sparkle of trillions of asteroids, the promise of unimaginable wealth.
The pattern seemed clear. The mutual influence of A and B had prevented the formation of giant planets. All the volatile material that had been absorbed into Sol’s great gas giants had here been left unconsolidated. Malenfant, who had spent half his life arguing for the mining of space resources, felt his fingers itch as he looked at those immense clouds of floating treasures. Here it would have been easy, he thought with some bitterness.
But this was not a place for humanity, and perhaps it never would be. For now the software posted tiny blue flags, all around the rim of the system. These were points of gravitational-lensing focus, Saddle Points, far more of them than in Sol’s simple unipolar gravity field. And there was movement within those dusty lanes of light: bright yellow sparks, Gaijin flower-ships, everywhere.
The solar system is impoverished by comparison, he thought. This is where the action is in this part of space: Alpha Centauri, riddled with so many Saddle Points it’s like Grand Central Station, and with a sky full of flying mines to boot. He felt humbled, embarrassed, like a country cousin come to the big city.
There was a blur of motion, washing across his magnified vision.
He rocked back, peering out of his bubble with naked eyes.
It was a robot, skittering this way and that on its attitude thrusters, crystals of reaction gas sparkling in Alpha light. It came to rest and hovered, limbs splayed, no more than ten metres from the bubble.
Malenfant pushed himself to the wall nearest the robot, pressed his face against the membrane, and stared back.
Its attitude suggested watchfulness. But he was probably anthropomorphizing again.
That dodecahedral core, fat and compact, must have been a couple of metres across. It glistened with panels of complex texture, and there were apertures in the silvery skin within which more machinery gleamed, unrecognizable. The robot had various appendages. A whole forest of them no more than centimetres long bristled from every surface of the core, wiry, almost like a layer of fur. But two of the limbs were longer – ten metres each, perhaps – and articulated like the robot arms carried by the old Space Shuttle, each ending in a knot of machinery. He noticed small attitude thruster nozzles spread along the arms. The whole thing reminded him of one of the old space probes – Voyager, perhaps, or Pioneer – that dense solid core, the flimsy booms, a spacecraft built like a dragonfly.
The robot showed signs of wear and age: crumpled panels on the dodecahedral core; an antenna-like protrusion that was pitted and scarred, as if by micrometeorite rain; one arm that appeared to have been broken and patched by a sheath of newer material. This is an old machine, he thought, and it might have been travelling a long, long time; he wondered how many suns had baked its fragile skin, how many dusty comet trails clouds had worn away at those filmy structures.
Right now the two arms were held upwards, as if in an air of supplication, giving the robot an overall W-shape – like the first robot he’d seen.
Could this be the same machine I met when I came through the hoop? Or, he wondered, am I anthropomorphizing again, longing for individuality where none exists? After all, this thing could never be mistaken for something alive – could it? If nothing else its lack of symmetry – one arm was a good two metres longer than the others – was, on some profound level, deeply disturbing.
He gave in to his sentimentality.
‘Cassiopeia,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ll call you.’
Female, Malenfant? But the thing did have a certain delicacy and grace. Cassiopeia, then. He raised a hand and waved.
He half-expected a wave back from those complex robot arms, but they did not move.
… But now there was a change. An object that looked for all the world like a telephoto lens came pushing out of an aperture in the front of Cassiopeia’s dodecahedral torso, and trained on him.
He wondered if Cassiopeia had just manufactured the system, in response to its – her – perceived need, in some nano factory in her interior. More likely the technology was simpler, and this ‘camera’ had been assembled from a stock of parts carried within. Maybe Cassiopeia was like a Swiss Army knife, he thought: not infinitely flexible, but with a stock of tools that could be deployed and adapted to a variety of purposes.
And then, once again, he was startled – this time by a noise from within his bubble.
It was a radio screech. It had come
