The object seemed to be a ball of ice. It might have been an asteroid, but he was a long way from those double Suns. This was more likely the Alpha equivalent of a Kuiper object, an ice moon — or maybe he was even in this system’s Oort cloud, and this was the head of some long-period comet.
And now he made out movement on that icy surface: continual, complex, almost rippling. He tapped at the softscreen, instructing it to magnify and enhance some more.
He saw drone robots swarming everywhere, their complex limbs working like cockroach legs. The drones moved back and forth in files and streams, endless traffic. Here and there in the flow there were islands of stillness, nodes where the swirl gathered in knots and eddies. And in a few places he saw the gleam of silvery blankets, perhaps like the nano-blankets Frank Paulis’s probe had found on that belt asteroid back home. Maybe they were making more flower-ships. Or perhaps these were von Neumann machines, he thought, replicators engaged primarily in making more copies of themselves, and they would continue until every gram of this remote ball of ice and rock had been converted into purposeful machinery.
But everywhere he looked, as he scanned his screen, he could see endless, purposeful movement — perhaps millions of drones, the toiling community making up a glinting, robotic sea. His overwhelming impression was of cooperation — of blind, unquestioning, smoothly efficient obedience to a higher communal goal. These robots had more in common with hive insects, he thought — ants or termites — than with humans.
But perhaps I should have expected this, he thought. Humans were competitive. But there was no reason to suppose that everybody else had to be that way. Maybe a competitive technological community could only reach a certain point before it became unstable and destroyed itself. Arms races could only take you so far. Perhaps only the cooperative could survive. In which case, he thought, what we are going to find as we move farther out is, inevitably, more of this. Termite colonies. And, perhaps, nobody like us.
Damn, he thought. I might be the only true individual in this whole star system. What a bleak and terrifying notion.
But if the robots were replicators they weren’t very good ones.
They all seemed to be based on the design of the type he had first met, with that chunky dodecahedral body, limbs sprouting in a variety of configurations, apparently specialized. But otherwise these toiling drones appeared somewhat diverse. The differences weren’t great: a few extra limbs here, a touch of asymmetry there, each dodecahedron slightly diverging from the geometric ideal — but they were there.
Perhaps the authentic von Neumann vision — of identical replicators spawning each other — was impossible without true nanotech, a command of materials 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 stellar 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, bands, figure-eight loops, and 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 eliptic: 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 meters 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 meters 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 centimeters long bristled from every surface of the core, wiry, almost like a layer of fur. But two of the limbs were longer — ten meters each, perhaps — and were 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.