“What if there should happen to be more than one?”

“Give me the form of the one that seems closest to human.” Drake regarded his body, so soon assumed and so soon to be abandoned. Was there a reason to remain in it any longer? Not that he could think of. It would be another six thousand years — at an absolute minimum — before he had any reason to be conscious. He must not dwell on that. Think of it as a natural sleep/wake cycle, not as a time comprising the whole of written history before his own birth. “I’m ready to be uploaded. If you can’t make up your mind which form to use when you get there, because they’re not anything like human, don’t worry about it. Just pick one.”

“With what criteria?”

“I don’t mind. Use a virtual coin if you have to — but don’t wake me up to call the toss.”

Chapter 27

Postindustrial

Drake awoke slowly and easily. As soon as he was able to think, he knew that something had gone badly awry.

His body did not feel wrong — it felt too right. His blood ran like ichor through his veins, and his mood was giddily euphoric. He knew of only one way that such a thing could happen.

He opened his eyes, lifted his head, and looked down at his naked body. As he had suspected; he was in his own human form, a new and blemish-free version of himself. He was also aboard the ship.

“What happened?” The vocal cords had never been used before, but they were in perfect working order. He tried an experimental laugh. Whatever else might be wrong, the embodiment lab was in fine shape. And so was he. “Are you telling me that you found a planet full of humans who look just like me in another galaxy?”

“No. I believe that we have encountered an intelligent form, but it is certainly not human.”

“So why did you put me in this body?”

“It was a default option.”

The ship sounded as frustrated as Drake felt exhilarated. He needed to be careful. The brain transients produced by new-body residence had not yet damped themselves out. He could feel the wild mood swings. How long had he been dormant?

“What do you mean, a ‘default option’? Tell me what’s going on.”

“Your instructions were followed to the letter. We flew to our first target star. One of its planets bore life, but it had not progressed beyond single-celled prokaryotes. There is no possibility that intelligence will develop there for several billion years. I therefore proceeded to the second target, twelve thousand light-years away. I could determine, from a distance of half a light-year, that the nature of the atmosphere of all the planets in the system was such that no life in any form that we know it could survive. Nonetheless, I continued and found on closer approach that life had actually come and gone on one world. It had never achieved intelligence, and it had died out as temperatures rose during the normal brightening and expansion of its main sequence primary.

“On the third world, fifteen thousand light-years away, there were large artifacts and all the signs of sometime intelligence. But the creators had been destroyed, apparently by their own actions. No other life-form had the potential for near-term self-awareness.

“On the fourth world—”

“Wait a minute. How many targets have we visited?”

“This is the one hundred and twenty-fourth. I saw no point in resurrecting you on any earlier occasion. You are not interested in extinct intelligence, nor in possible future intelligence, but in present intelligence. We have never before found evidence of that.”

“And now you have?”

“I believe so.”

“And how long since the search began?”

“We have been traveling for slightly more than two million years.”

“Fine.” Drake decided that he had become blasй. Two million years no longer impressed him. To get his attention now, you had to talk billions. “So what’s the problem?”

“When we were approaching the current target star, I examined it from far orbit and concluded that one of the planets was remarkably Earth-like. Its atmosphere told of the presence of oxygen-breathing life, and as we came closer I observed several characteristic markers of intelligence: long linear and rectangular surface features, modified river courses, patterns of nighttime lights, and cluster patterns supporting little or no plant life.”

“That sounds right. Roads and dams and power and cities. Did you make detail scans?”

“I did so as we approached closer, images to the meter level of detail and beyond. ”

“So you know the shape of whoever was doing all the work. Why didn’t you put me into that form?”

“Had I been able to find such a form, I would have done so. As it is, I found it necessary to invoke the default option of your original shape for the embodiment.” The wall in front of Drake became a display screen. “Observe. We are first looking from far away, on our approach orbit.”

The scene was the whole planet, seen from space. The ball glowed a mottled red and pink, from its banded midsection up to the small circles of white around the poles.

“Are those water-ice polar caps?” Drake had the irrelevant thought that he was looking at a gigantic Christmas tree ornament. He was bubbling over with excess energy, and his mind was ready to accept strange images.

“Correct. The mean temperature is that of Earth during one of your planet’s warmer periods.”

“I can’t see much from this distance.”

“Have patience. The images that you will soon see derive from lower orbit.”

The pink sphere on the display was growing. It was possible to imagine dark lines on its surface, scattered close to the equator. Drake waited. He knew the tendency of the human eye to play “connect the dots” and discern linear patterns where there were none. His thoughts spun away to the far-off past. Who was it, long before his own time, who had been fooled by that built-in physiological quirk of the human brain and had drawn maps of nonexistent Martian “canals”?

Except that this was no optical illusion. The linear features were real, growing in clarity every minute. As the ship drew closer to the planet, the display could no longer hold the full image of the world. The focus moved to a line, dark and straight, at center screen. It was bordered by colored rectangles and triangles. To Drake’s eye and imagination the line was a road across a Kansas flatland. The broad fields were different shades of red, a child’s quilt with bright patches that ranged from light pink to deepest crimson. The yellow brick road had turned dark brown, but it ran through farmlands of fairy-tale color.

The scale that accompanied the display gave the lie to the illusion. The “road” was a kilometer wide. The quilt was monstrous, each of its patches the size of a county of old Earth. Scattered darker dots within the patches were big enough to be towns.

The field of view zoomed in toward a narrower black thread at the center of the broad swath of road. Drake could see that the edges of the patchwork quilt were not regular. They were broken and random, the boundaries intruding on each other. The pink had spread in places onto the darker swath, like crabgrass invading an untended lawn.

The black thread must surely be water. Unlike on Mars, these canals were real. The line of banks ran ruler straight across the surface. Close to the water’s edge, every few kilometers, a five-sided open tower of girders stretched toward the sky. The display closed in on one.

“This is too tall to be built on this planet with natural materials. Carbon composites are essential for its building and continued stability, which implies a reasonably advanced technology. Technology implies intelligence. But where is that intelligence?”