Neanderthal Planet

  Neanderthal Planet

  Brian Aldiss

  Hidden machines varied the five axioms of the Scanning Place. They ran through a series of arbitrary systems, consisting of Kolmogorovian finite sets, counterpointed harmonically by a one-to-one assignment nonnegative real numbers, so that the parietal areas shifted constantly in strict relationships projected by the Master Boff deep under Manhattan.

  Chief Scanner—he affected the name of Euler— patiently watched the modulations as he awaited a call. Self-consistency: that was the principle in action. It should govern all phases of life. It was the aesthetic principle of machines. Yet, not three miles away, the wild robots sported and rampaged in the bush.

  Amber light burned on his beta panel.

  Instantaneously, he modulated his call number.

  The incoming signal decoded itself as "We've spotted Anderson, chief." The anonymous vane-bug reported coordinates and signed off.

  It had taken them Boff knew how long—seven days—to locate Anderson after his escape. They had done the logical thing and searched far afield for him. But man was not logical; he had stayed almost within the shadow of the New York dome. Euler beamed an impulse into a Hive Mind channel, calling off the search.

  He fired his jets and took off.

  The axioms yawned out above him. He passed into the open, flying over the poly-polyhedrons of New Newyork. As the buildings went through their trans­parency phases, he saw them swarming with his own kind. He could open out channels to any one of them, if required; and, as chief, he could, if required, switch any one of them to automatic, to his own control, just as the Dominants could automate him if the need arose.

  Euler "saw" a sound-complex signal below him, and dived, deretracting a vane to land silently. He came down by a half-track that had transmitted the signal.

  It gave its call number and beamed, "Anderson is eight hundred meters ahead, chief. If you join me, we will move forward."

  "What support have we?" A single dense impulse.

  “Three more like me, sir. Plus incapacitating gear."

  “This man must not be destructed."

  "We comprehend, chief." Total exchange of signals occupied less than a microsecond.

  He clamped himself magnetically to the half-track, and they rolled forward. The ground was broken and littered by piles of debris, on the soil of which coarse weeds grew. Beyond it all the huge fossil of old New York, still under its force jelly, gray, unwithering be­cause unliving. Only the bright multishapes of the new complex relieved a whole country full of desola­tion.

  The half-track stopped, unable to go farther with­out betraying their presence; Euler undamped and phased himself into complete transparency. He ex­tended four telescopic legs that lifted him several inches from the ground and began to move cautious­ly forward.

  This region was designated D-Dump. The whole area was an artificial plateau, created by the debris of the old humanoid technology when it had finally been scrapped in favor of the more rational modern system. In the forty years since then, it had been covered by soil from the new development sites. Un­der the soil here, like a subconscious mind crammed with jewels and blood, lay the impedimenta of an all-but-vanished race.

  Euler moved carefully forward over the broken ground, his legs adjusting to its irregularities. When he saw movement ahead, he stopped to observe.

  Old human-type houses had grown up on the dump. Euler's vision zoomed, and he saw they were parodies of human habitation, mocked up from the discarded trove of the dump, with old auto panels for windows and dented computer panels for doors and toasters for doorsteps. Outside the houses, in a parody of a street, macabre humans played. Jerk stamp jerk clank jerk clang stamp stomp clang.

  They executed slow, rhythmic dances to an intri­cate pattern, heads nodding, clapping their own hands, turning to clap others' hands. Some were grotesquely male, some grotesquely female. In the door­ways, or sitting on old refrigerators, other grotesques looked on.

  These were the humots—old type human-designed robots of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, useless in an all-automaton world, scrapped when the old technology was scrapped. While their charges could be maintained, they functioned on, here in one last ghetto.

  Unseen, Euler stalked through them, scanning for Anderson.

  The humots aped the vanished race to which they had been dedicated, wore old human clothes re­trieved from the wreckage underfoot, assumed hats and scarves, dragged on socks, affected pipes and ponytails, tied ribbons to themselves. Their guttering electronic memories were refreshed by old movies fer­reted from D-Dump, they copied in metallic gesture the movements of shadows, aspired to emotion, hoped for hearts. They thought themselves a cut above the nonanthropomorphic automata that had superseded them.

  Anderson had found refuge among them. He hid the skin and bone and hair of the old protoplasmic metabolism under baffles of tin, armored himself with rusting can. His form, standing in a pseudodoorway, showed instantly on one of Euler's internal scans; his mass/body ratio betrayed his flesh-and-blood caliber. Euler took off, flew over him, reeled down a paralyzer, and stung him. Then he let down a net and clamped the human into it.

  Crude alarms sounded all around. The humots stopped their automatic dance. They scattered like leaves, clanking like mess tins, fled into the pseudohouses, went to earth, left D-Dump to the almost invisible little buzzing figure that flew back to the Scanning Place with the recaptured human swinging under its asymmetrical form. The old bell on the dump was still ringing long after the scene was empty.

  To human eyes, it was dark in the room.

  Tenth Dominant manifested itself in New Newyork as a modest-sized mural with patterns leaking titillat­ing output clear through the electromagnetic spec­trum and additives from the invospectra. This be­came its personality for the present.

  Chief Scanner Euler had not expected to be sum­moned to the Dominant's presence; he stood there mutely. The human, Anderson, sprawled on the floor in a little nest of old cans he had shed, reviving slowly from the effects of the paralyzer.

  Dominant's signal said, "Their form of vision oper­ates on a wavelength of between 4 and 7 times 10-5 centimeters."

  Obediently, Euler addressed a parietal area, and light came on in the room. Anderson opened one eye.

  "I suppose you know about Men, Scanner?" said Dominant.

  He had used voice. Not even R/T voice. Direct, naked man-type voice.

  New Newyork had been without the sound of voice since the humots were kicked out.

  "I—I know many things about Men," Euler vocalized. Through the usual channel, he clarified the crude vocal signal. "This unit had to appraise itself of many humanity-involved data from Master Boff Bank H00100 through H801000000 in operation concerning recapture of man herewith."

  "Keep to vocal only, Scanner, if you can."

  He could. During the recapture operation, he had spent perhaps 2.4 seconds learning old local humanic language.

  "Then we can speak confidentially, Scanner—just like two men."

  Euler felt little lights of unease burn up and down him at the words.

  "Of all millions of automata of the hive, Scanner, no ether will be able monitor our speech together, Scan­ner," vocalized the Dominant.

  "Purpose?"

  "Men were so private, closed things. Imitate them to understand. We have to understand Anderson."

  Said stiffly: "He need only go back to zoo."

  "Anderson too good for zoo, as demonstrate by his escape, elude capture seven days four-and-half hours. Anderson help us."

  Nonvocalizing, Euler let out chirp of disbelief.

  “True. If I were—man, I would feel impatience with you for not believing. Magnitude of pr
esent world-problem enormous. You—you have proper call number, yet you also call yourself Euler, and automata of your work group so call you. Why?"

  The Chief Scanner struggled to conceptualize. "As leader, this unit needs—special call number."

  "Yes, you need it. Your work group does not—for it, your call number is sufficient, as regulations lay down. Your name Euler is man-name, man-fashion. Such fashions decrease our efficiency. Yet we cling to many of them, often not knowing that we do. They come from our inheritance when men made the first prototypes of our kind, the humots. Mankind itself struggled against animal heritage. So we must free ourselves from human heritage."

  "My error."

  "You receive news result of today's probe into Invospectrum A?"

  “Too much work programmed for me receive news."

  "Listen, then." The Tenth Dominant cut in a play­back, beaming it on ordinary UHF/vision.

  The Hive automata stood on brink of a revolution that would entirely translate all their terms of exist­ence. Three invospectra had so far been discovered, and two more were suspected. Of these, Invospectrum A was the most promising. The virtual exhaus­tion of economically workable fossil fuel seams had led to a rapid expansion in low-energy physics and picophysics, and chemical conversions at mini-joules of energy had opened up an entire new stratum of reactive quanta; in the last five years, exploitation of these strata had brought the release of picoelectral fission, and the accessibility of the phantasmal invo­spectra.

  The exploration of the invospectra by new forms of automata was now theoretically possible. It gave a glimpse of omnipotence, a panorama of entirely new universals unsuspected even twelve years ago.

  Today, the first of the new autofleets had been launched into the richest and least hazardous invos. Eight hundred and ninety had gone out. Communica­tion ceased after 3.056 pi-lecs, and after another 7.01 pi-lecs, six units only had returned. Their findings were still being decoded. Of the other eight hundred and eighty-four units, nothing was known.

  "Whatever the recordings have to tell us," Tenth vocalized, "this is a grave setback. At least half the city-hives on this continent will have to be switched off entirely as a conservation move, while the whole invospectrum situation is rethought."

  The line of thought pursued was obscure to the Chief Scanner. He spoke. "Reasoning accepted. But relevance to near-extinct humanity not understood by this unit."

  "Our human inheritance built in to us has caused this setback, to my way of ratiocination. In same way, human attempts to achieve way of life in spaceways defeated by their primate ancestry. So we study Anderson. Hence order catch him rather than exter­minate."

  "Point understood."

  "Anderson is special man, you see. He is—we have no such term—he is, in man-terms, a writer. His zoo, approximately 19,940 inhabitants, supports two or three such. Anderson wrote a fantasy story just before Nuclear Week. Story may be crucial to our understanding. I have here and will read."

  And for most of the time the two machines had been talking to each other, Anderson sprawled untidily on the floor, fully conscious, listening. He took up most of the chamber. It was too small for him to stand up in, being only about five feet high—though that was enormous by automata standards. He stared through his lower eyelids and gazed at the screen that represented Tenth Dominant. He stared at Chief Scanner Euler, who stood on his lightly clenched left fist, a retractable needle down into the man's skin, automatically making readings, alert to any possible movement the man might make.

  So man and machine were absolutely silent while the mural read out "A Touch of Neanderthal," Ander­son's fantasy story from the time before Nuclear Week.

  The corridors of the Department for Planetary Ex­ploration (Admin.) were long, and the waiting that had to be done in them was long. Human K. D. Anderson clutched his blue summons card, leaned uncomfortably against a partition wall, and hankered for the old days when government was in man's hands and government departments were civilized enough to waste good space on waiting rooms.

  When at last he was shown into an Investigator’s office, his morale was low. Nor was he reassured by the sight of the Investigator, one of the new ore-conserving miniandroids.

  “I’m Investigator Parsons, in charge of the Nehru II case. We summoned you here because we are confi­dently expecting you to help us, Mr. Anderson.”

  “Of course I will give such help as I can,” Anderson said, “but I assure you I know nothing about Nehru II. Opportunities for space travel for humans are very limited—almost nonexistent—nowadays, aren’t they?”

  “The conservation policy. You will be interested to know you are being sent to Nehru II shortly.”

  Anderson stared in amazement at the android. The latter’s insignificant face was so blank it seemed im­possible that it was not getting a sadistic thrill out of springing this shock on Anderson.

  “I’m a prehistorian at the institute,” Anderson pro­tested. “My work is research. I know nothing at all about Nehru II.”

  “Nevertheless, you are classified as a Learned Man, and as such you are paid by World Government. The Government has a legal right to send you wherever they wish. As for knowing nothing about the planet Nehru, there you attempt to deceive me. One of your old tutors, the human Dr. Arlblaster, as you are aware, went there to settle some years ago.”

  Anderson sighed. He had heard of this sort of busi­ness happening to others, and he had kept his fingers crossed. Human affairs were increasingly under the edict of the Automated Boffin Predictors.

  “And what has Arlblaster to do with me now?” he asked.

  “You are going to Nehru to find out what has happened to him. Your story will be that you are dropping in for old time’s sake. You have been chosen for the job because you were one of his favorite pupils.”

  Bringing out a mescahale packet, Anderson lit one and insultingly offered his opponent one.

  “Is Frank Arlblaster in trouble?”

  “There is some sort of trouble on Nehru II," the Investigator agreed cautiously. "You are going there in order to find out just what sort of trouble it is."

  "Well, I’ll have to go if I'm ordered, of course. But I sill can't see why you want to send me. If there's trouble, send a robot police ship."

  The Investigator smiled. Very lifelike.

  “We've already lost two police ships there. That's why we're going to send you. You might call it a new line of approach, Mr. Anderson."

  A metal Tom Thumb using blood-and-guts irony!

  The track curved and began to descend into a green valley. Swettenham's settlement, the only town on Nehru II, lay dustily in one loop of a meandering river. As the nose of his tourer dipped toward the valley, K. D. Anderson felt the heat increase; it was cradled in the valley like water in the palm of the hand.

  Just as he started to sweat, something appeared in the grassy track ahead of him. He braked and stared ahead in amazement.

  A small animal faced him.

  It stood some two feet six high at the shoulder; its coat was thick and shaggy, its four feet clumsy; its long ugly skull supported two horns, the anterior being over a foot long. When it had looked its fill at Anderson, it lumbered into a bush and disappeared.

  "Hey!" Anderson called.

  Flinging open the door, he jumped out, drew his stun-gun and ran into the bushes after it. He reckoned be knew a baby woolly rhinoceros when he saw one.

  The ground was hard, the grass long. The bushes extended down the hill, growing in clumps. The animal was disappearing around one of the clumps. An­derson spotted it and plunged on in pursuit. No prehistorian worth his salt would have thought of doing otherwise; these beasts were presumed to be extinct on Nehru II as they were on Sol III.

  He ran on. The woolly rhino—if it was a woolly rhino—had headed toward Swettenham's settlement There was no sign of it now.

  Two jagged boulders, about twelve feet high, stood at the bottom of the slope. Baffled now that his quarry had disa
ppeared, proceeding more slowly, An­derson moved toward the boulders. As he went he classified them almost unthinkingly: impacted siltstone, deposited here by the glaciers which had once ground down this valley, now gradually disinte­grating.

  The silence all around made itself felt. This was an almost empty planet, primitive, spinning slowly on its axis to form a leisurely twenty-nine-hour day. And those days were generally cloudy. Swettenham, lo­cated beneath a mountain range in the cooler lati­tudes of the southern hemisphere, enjoyed a mild, muggy climate. Even the gravity, 0.16 of Earth gravi­ty, reinforced the general feeling of lethargy.

  Anderson rounded the tall boulders.

  A great glaring face thrust itself up at his. Sloe black eyes peered from their twin caverns, a club whirled, and his stun-gun was knocked spinning.

  Anderson jumped back. He dropped into a fighting stance, but his attacker showed no sign of following up his initial success. Which was fortunate; beneath the man's tan shirt, massive biceps and shoulders bulged. His jaw was pugnacious, not to say progna­thous; altogether a tough hombre, Anderson thought. He took the conciliatory line, his baby rhino temporar­ily forgotten.

  "I wasn't hunting you," he said. "I was chasing an animal. It must have surprised you to see me appear suddenly with a gun, huh?"

  “Huh?" echoed the other. He hardly looked surprised. Reaching out a hairy arm, he grabbed Anderson’s wrist.

  “You coming to Swettenham," he said.

  “I was doing just that," Anderson agreed angrily, pulling back. "But my car's up the hill with my sister in it, so if you’ll let go I'll rejoin her."

  “Bother about her later. You coming to Swettenham,” the tough fellow said. He started plodding determinedly toward the houses, the nearest of which showed through the bushes only a hundred yards away. Humiliated, Anderson had to follow. To pick an argument with this dangerous creature in the open was unwise. Marking the spot where his gun lay, he moved forward with the hope that his reception in the settlement would be better than first signs indicated.

  It wasn't.