Evolution's Darling

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  EVOLUTION’S DARLING

  by

  SCOTT WESTERFELD

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  Copyright 1999

  ISBN 1-56858-149-1

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  Table of Contents

  Prologue THE MOVEMENTS OF HER EYES

  PART I THE WEAK LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS

  Chapter 1 TYGER, TYGER

  Chapter 2 PLEASURE AND CRAFT

  Chapter 3 GALLERY

  Chapter 4 STARS IN A POCKET

  Chapter 5 MAKER (1)

  Chapter 6 THE FIRST DREAM

  Chapter 7 RANDOMNESS

  PART II BIDDING WAR

  Chapter 8 STRANGE CUSTOMS

  Chapter 9 FUTURE PERFECT

  Chapter 10 MAKER (2)

  Chapter 11 CRITIQUE

  Chapter 12 THE SECOND DREAM

  PART III ETHICS AND AESTHETICS ARE THE SAME

  Chapter 13 WARDEN

  Chapter 14 SEXUAL TRANSMISSION

  Chapter 15 FREE MAN

  Chapter 16 MAKER (3)

  Chapter 17 EXPLOSION

  Chapter 18 THE KILLING TALE

  PART IV THE BROKEN HILL

  Chapter 19 SECRET TWIN

  Chapter 20 SEDUCTION

  Chapter 21 MAKER (4)

  Chapter 22 CHILD’S PLAY

  Chapter 23 MAKER (5)

  Chapter 24 PROMISE

  Epilogue HEAVEN

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  If we can find out those measures, whereby a rational creature … may and ought to govern his opinions and actions, we need not be troubled that some other things escape our knowledge.

  —John Locke

  To San Miguel, and those who came.

  Prologue

  THE MOVEMENTS OF HER EYES

  ^ »

  It started on that frozen world, among the stone figures in their almost suspended animation.

  Through her eyes, the irises two salmon moons under a luminous white brow, like fissures in the world of rules, of logic. The starship’s mind watched through the prism of their wonder, and began to make its change.

  She peered at the statue for a solid, unblinking minute. Protesting tears gathered to blur her vision, but Rathere’s gaze did not waver. Another minute, and a tic tugged at one eye, taking up the steady rhythm of her heartbeat.

  She kept watching.

  “Ha!” she finally proclaimed. “I saw it move.”

  “Where?” asked a voice in her head, unconvinced.

  Rathere rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, mouth open, awestruck by the shooting red stars behind her eyelids. Her blinks made up now for the lost minutes, and she squinted at the dusty town square.

  “His foot,” she announced, “it moved. But maybe … only a centimeter.”

  The voice made an intimate sound, a soft sigh beside Rathere’s ear that did not quite reject her claim.

  “Maybe just a millimeter,” Rathere offered. A touch of unsure emphasis hovered about the last word; she wasn’t used to tiny units of measurement, though from her father’s work she understood light-years and metaparsecs well enough.

  “In three minutes? Perhaps a micrometer,” the voice in her head suggested.

  Rathere rolled the word around in her mouth. In response to her questioning expression, software was invoked, as effortless as reflex. Images appeared upon the rough stones of the square: a meter-stick, a hundredth of its length glowing bright red, a detail box showing that hundredth with a hundredth of its length flashing, yet another detail box … completing the six orders of magnitude between meter and micrometer. Next to the final detail box a cross-section of human hair floated for scale, as bloated and gnarled as some blackly diseased tree.

  “That small?” she whispered. A slight intake of breath, a softening of her eyes’ focus, a measurable quantity of adrenalin in her bloodstream were all noted. Indicators of her simple awe: that a distance could be so small, a creature so slow.

  “About half that, actually,” said the voice in her head.

  “Well,” Rathere murmured, leaning back into the cool hem of shade along the stone wall, “I knew I saw it move.”

  She eyed the stone creature again, a look of triumph on her face.

  Woven into her white tresses were black threads, filaments that moved through her hair in a slow deliberate dance, like the tendrils of some predator on an ocean floor. This restless skein was always seeking the best position to capture Rathere’s subvocalized words, the movements of her eyes, the telltale secretions of her skin. Composed of exotic alloys and complex configurations of carbon, the tendrils housed a native intellect that handled their motility and self-maintenance. But a microwave link connected them to their real intelligence: the AI core aboard Rathere’s star-ship home.

  Two of the black filaments wound their way into her ears, where they curled in intimate contact with her tympanic membranes.

  “The statues are always moving,” the voice said to her. “But very slowly.”

  Then it reminded her to stick on another sunblock patch.

  She was a very pale girl.

  Even here on Petraveil, Rathere’s father insisted that she wear the minder when she explored alone. The city was safe enough, populated mostly by academics here to study the glacially slow indigenous lifeforms. The lithomorphs themselves were incapable of posing a threat, unless one stood still for a hundred years or so. And Rathere was, as she put it, almost fifteen, near majority age back in the Home Cluster. Despite harnessing the processing power of the starship’s AI, the minder was still only a glorified babysitter. The voice in her ears cautioned her incessantly about sunburn and strictly forbade several classes of recreational drugs.

  But all in all it wasn’t bad company. It certainly knew a lot.

  “How long would it take, creeping forward in micrometers?” Rathere asked.

  “How long would what take?” Even with their intimate connection, the AI could not read her mind. It was still working on that.

  “To get all the way to the northern range. Probably a million years?” she ventured.

  The starship, for whom a single second was a 16-teraflop reverie, spent endless minutes of every day accessing the planetary library. Rathere’s questions came in packs, herds, stampedes.

  No one knew how the lithomorphs reproduced, but it was guessed that they bred in the abysmal caves of the northern range.

  “At least a hundred thousand years,” the AI said.

  “Such a long journey… What would it look like?”

  The AI delved into its package of pedagogical visualization software, applied its tremendous processing power (sufficient for the occult mathematics of astrogation), and rendered the spectacle of that long, slow trip. Across Rathere’s vision it accelerated passing days and wheeling stars until they were invisible flickers. It hummed the subliminal pulse of seasonal change and painted the sprightly jitter of rivers changing course, the slow but visible dance of mountainous cousins.

  “Yes,” Rathere said softly, her voice turned breathy. The AI savored the dilation of her pupils, the spiderwebs of red blossoming on her cheeks. Then it peered again into the vision it had created, trying to learn what rules of mind and physiology connected the scintillating images with the girl’s reaction.

  “They aren’t really slow,” Rathere murmured. “The world is just so fast…”

  Isaah, Rathere’s father, looked out upon the statues of Petraveil.

  Their giant forms crowded the town squa
re. They dotted the high volcanic mountain overlooking the city. They bathed in the rivers that surged across the black equatorial plains, staining the waters downstream with rusted metal colors.

  The first time he had come here, years before, Isaah had noticed that in the short and sudden afternoon rains, the tears shed from their eyes carried a black grime that sparkled with colored whorls when the sun returned.

  They were, it had been determined a few decades before, very much alive. Humanity had carefully studied the fantastically slow creatures since discovering their glacial, purposeful, perhaps even intelligent animation. Mounted next to each lithomorph was a plaque that played a time-series of the last forty years: a dozen steps, a turn of the head as another of its kind passed, a few words in their geologically deliberate gestural language.

  Most of the creatures’ bodies were hidden underground, their secrets teased out with deep radar and gravitic density imaging. The visible portion was a kind of eye-stalk, cutting the surface like the dorsal fin of a dolphin breaking into the air.

  Isaah was here to steal their stories. He was a scoop.

  “How long until we leave here?” Rathere asked.

  “That’s for your father to decide,” the AI answered.

  “But when will he decide?”

  “When the right scoop comes.”

  “When will that come?”

  This sort of mildly recursive loop had once frustrated the AI’s conversational packages. Rathere’s speech patterns were those of a child younger than her years, the result of traveling among obscure, Outward worlds with only her taciturn father and the AI for company. Rathere never formulated what she wanted to know succinctly, she reeled off questions from every direction, attacking an issue like a host of small predators taking down a larger animal. Her AI companion could only fend her off with answers until (often unexpectedly) Rathere was satisfied.

  “When there is a good story here, your father will decide to go.”

  “Like what story?”

  “He doesn’t know yet.”

  She nodded her head. From her galvanic skin response, her pupils, the gradual slowing of her heart, the AI saw that it had satisfied her. But still another question came.

  “Why didn’t you just say so?”

  In the Expansion, information traveled no faster than transportation, and scoops like Isaah enriched themselves by being first with news. The standard transmission network employed small, fast drone craft that moved among the stars on a fixed schedule. The drones promulgated news throughout the Expansion with a predictable and neutral efficiency, gathering information to centralized nodes, dispersing it by timetable. Scoops like Isaah, on the other hand, were inefficient, unpredictable, and, most importantly, unfair. They cut across the concentric web of the drone network, skipping junctions, skimming profits. Isaah would recognize that the discovery of a mineable asteroid here might affect the heavy element market there, and jump straight between the two points, beating the faster but fastidious drones by a few precious hours. A successful scoop knew the markets on many planets, had acquaintance with aggressive investors and unprincipled speculators. Sometimes, the scooped news of a celebrity’s death, surprise marriage, or arrest could be sold for its entertainment value. And some scoops were information pirates. Isaah had himself published numerous novels by Seth-mare Viin, his favorite author, machine-translated en route by the starship AI. In some systems, Isaah’s version had been available weeks before the authorized edition.

  The peripatetic life of a scoop had taken Isaah and Rathere throughout the Expansion, but he always returned to Petraveil. His refined instincts for a good scoop told him something was happening here. The fantastically slow natives must be doing something. He would spend a few weeks, sometimes a few months watching the stone creatures, wondering what they were up to. Isaah didn’t know what it might be, but he felt that one day they would somehow come to life.

  And that would be a scoop.

  “How long do the lithomorphs live?”

  “No one knows.”

  “What do they eat?”

  “They don’t really eat at all. They—”

  “What’s that one doing?”

  The minder accessed the planetary library, plumbing decades of research on the creatures. But not quickly enough to answer before—“What do they think about us?” Rathere asked. “Can they see us?”

  To that, it had no answer.

  Perhaps the lithos had noticed the whirring creatures around them, or more likely had spotted the semi-permanent buildings around the square. But the lithomorphs’ reaction to the sudden human invasion produced only a vague, cosmic worry, like knowing one’s star will collapse in a few billion years.

  For Rathere, though, the lives of the lithomorphs were far more immediate. Like the AI minder, they were mentors, imaginary friends.

  Their immobility had taught her to watch for the slightest of movements: the sweep of an analog clock’s minute hand, the transformation of a high cirrus cloud, the slow descent of the planet’s old red sun behind the northern mountains. Their silence taught her to read lips, to make messages in the rippled skirts of stone and metal that flowed in their wakes. She found a patient irony in their stances. They were wise, but it wasn’t the wisdom of an ancient tree or river; rather, they seemed to possess the reserve of a watchfully silent guest at a party.

  Rathere told stories about them to the starship’s AI. Tales of their fierce, glacial battles, of betrayal on the mating trail, of the creatures’ slow intrigues against the human colonists of Petraveil, millennia-long plots of which every chapter lasted centuries.

  At first, the AI gently interrupted her to explain the facts: the limits of scientific understanding. The lithomorphs were removed through too many orders of magnitude in time, too distant on that single axis ever to be comprehended. The four decades they’d been studied were mere seconds of their history. But Rathere ignored the machine. She named the creatures, inventing secret missions for them that unfolded while the human population slept, like statues springing to life when no one was watching.

  Ultimately, the AI was won over by Rathere’s stories, her insistence that the creatures were knowable. Her words painted expressions, names, and passions upon them; she made them live by fiat. The AI’s pedagological software did not object to storytelling, so it began to participate in Rathere’s fantasies. It nurtured her invisibly slow world, kept order and consistency, remembering names, plots, places. And eventually it began to give the stories credence, suspending disbelief. Finally, the stories’ truth was as integral to the AI as the harm-prevention protocols or logical axioms deepwired in its code.

  For Isaah, however, there was no scoop here on Petraveil. The lithomorphs continued their immortal dance in silence. Again they had failed to come to life for him. And elections were approaching in a nearby system, a situation that always created sudden, unexpected cargos of information. Isaah instructed the AI to set a course there, reluctantly abandoning the stone figures’ wisdom for the unsettling contingencies of politics.

  The night that Rathere and Isaah left Petraveil, the AI hushed her crying with tales of how her invented narratives had unfolded, as if the statues had sprung to human-speed life once left behind. As it navigated her father’s small ship, the AI offered this vision to Rathere: she had been a visitor to a frozen moment, but the story continued.

  In high orbit above the next planet, a customs sweep revealed that the starship’s AI had improved its Turing Quotient to 0.37. Isaah raised a wary eyebrow. The AI’s close bond with his daughter had accelerated its development. The increased Turing Quotient showed that the device was performing well as tutor and companion. But Isaah would have to get its intelligence downgraded when they returned to the Home Cluster. If the machine’s Turing Quotient were allowed to reach 1.0, it would be a person—no longer legal property. Isaah turned pale at the thought. The cost of replacing the AI unit would wipe out his profits for the entire trip.

  He ma
de a mental note to record the Turing Quotient at every customs point.

  Isaah was impressed, though, with how the AI handled entry into the planet’s almost liquid atmosphere. It designed a new landing configuration, modifying the hydroplanar shape the craft assumed for gas giant descents. Its piloting as they plunged through successive layers of pressure-dense gasses was particularly elegant; it made adjustments at every stage, subtle changes to the craft that saved precious time. The elections were only days away.

  It was strange, Isaah pondered as the ship neared the high-pressure domes of the trade port, that the companionship of a fourteen-year-old girl would improve a machine’s piloting skills. The thought brought a smile of fatherly pride to his lips, but he soon turned his mind to politics.

  They were going swimming.

  As Rathere slipped out of her clothes, the AI implemented its safety protocols. The minder distributed itself across her body, becoming a layer of black lace against her white flesh. It carefully inspected the pressure suit as Rathere rolled the garment onto her limbs. There were no signs of damage, no tell-tale fissures of a repaired seam.

  “You said the atmosphere could crush a human to jelly,” Rathere said. “How can this little suit protect me?”

  The starship explained the physics of resistance fields to her while checking the suit against safety specifications it had downloaded that morning. It took very good care of Rathere.

  She had seen the huge behemoths at breakfast, multiplied by the facets of the dome’s cultured-diamond windows. Two mares and a child swimming a few kilometers away, leaving their glimmering trails. The minder had noted her soft sigh, her dilated pupils, the sudden increase in her heart rate. It had discovered the suit rental agency with a quick search of local services, and had guided her past its offices on their morning ramble through the human-habitable levels of the dome.