NINE HAD DIED IN THE FIGHT, NINE GOOD FRIENDS AND family members. From her haven in the small hollow escape pod attached to the great tree, she stared out into the rain, but she could see little more than water and mist. The tears began to flow as a dark shape seemed to move in the grayness outside. She raised the pistol but did not fire; the shape paused a moment, then moved on past the tree.
She knew that it had somehow still missed her, but it was heading for the nearby compound where twenty more would be taken by surprise as her party had been—and possibly slaughtered for not telling the thing what they did not know.
Its pause between her escape and its pursuit certainly meant that it had beamed a full account of the progress to date to its master module, in orbit somewhere above. Its programmers would make certain she never left this cursed world, and if she destroyed it they’d send another Val, and another, until they got her—no matter what the cost.
How many lives, both human and Sakanian, was she worth? How many would be massacred for her? And for what? Sooner or later they would get her, and even if she could elude them indefinitely in this mess of a world she could do no more useful work.
With a sigh, she crawled out of the pod and into the rain. The thing had not gone far and was easy to track, and she was amazed at her sudden calmness. Sensing it was being followed, it stopped and waited, a large, hulking, obsidianlike humanoid that was plastic enough to become whatever it needed, and now needed to be nothing more than itself.
She stepped into the clearing and faced the Val from a distance of five meters or so, her pistol still pointed at it.
“I have been waiting for you, Ngoriki,” the Val said in a voice that sounded somewhat like her own, but full of stoic self-confidence.
“I know. I can’t let you kill any more innocent people.”
“Yes. Inside me is a record of you, you know. I fully understood what the action would do to you. I very much regret having to do it, but there seemed no other way. I had tried the traditional approaches and nothing else seemed sure.”
She felt suddenly furious, and her grip on the pistol tightened. “You regret! How dare you! How can you regret? You are a machine, a soulless monstrosity! You don’t feel. You don’t know what that did to me! You’re nothing but a machine carrying out your programming, no matter what the cost!”
“You are both right and wrong,” the machine said. “It is true that I am a construct, carrying out my master programming instructions—but so are you. I am made of different stuff, in a different way, than you, and, unlike you, I know my creator and my engineers. Human beings are programmed by their biochemistry more than you would like to believe. I think—and that makes me an individual. I am not free, but neither is humanity.”
“Yes. That’s what you’ll do to me, isn’t it? Reprogram me. Perhaps that is what sets us apart, then. I have a yearning to be free, and you see that yearning as only a flaw in my own genetics.”
“No,” the Val responded. “We have a disagreement, that is all. This is not a good, let alone perfect, system we have, I grant that. It is merely a better system than the alternatives. It saved the race of humankind and many other races from inevitable self-extinction. Having saved them from their demise at their own hands, it now saves them from extinction at the hands of others. Survival outweighs all other considerations. If one survives, one has opportunity and hope at some point for changes for the better. If one does not survive, nothing else matters.”
“Damn it!” she screamed at him. “You have everything I was inside you! Everything! You know I am innocent of what I was charged!”
The Val almost seemed to sigh. “Yes. I know. That more than anything has made this so difficult for me. We hate to get the rare innocent to track, yet we must. Do you know why we are called Vals? After a character in ancient Earth literature, one Jean Valjean. He stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving family and received life at slave labor as his punishment. He escaped, became great, and did only great things for others, yet he was hunted relentlessly and brought down all the same. The name is that of the victim, not the pursuer. The greater good for the greater number requires that the system work. An individual injustice here and there is inevitable, but so long as the trial is fair and the conviction proper, the system must be served, for otherwise there is chaos and disorder, and the masses will suffer. Better one than the many, as painful as that may be.”
“You bastard! Where does justice and mercy fit into all this?”
“Is it mercy to spare one so that a thousand be killed? The system ensures survival. Without survival, justice and mercy are irrelevant, as well. Therefore, they are irrelevant here.”
The pistol dipped down, and she felt the tears returning. “But—without justice and mercy, why survive at all?” she asked.
She suddenly raised the pistol, ready to fire, but the Val had anticipated her and was quicker. A snakelike tentacle suddenly shot from its midsection and struck her once, hard, on the side of her head. She cried out, then crumpled. It retracted the tentacle, then went over to her and gave her a quick examination. She was out cold.
“We are different,” the Val said aloud. “I have often wished, in circumstances such as this, that I, too, could cry.”
It lifted her gently in its huge arms and carefully made its way back to the compound and, eventually, the ship.
Absolution was a destruction of memory that left a Val in some way impaired, missing a part of itself. Rarely did a Val crave Absolution—but this one did. The girl had been so beautiful, so innocent, yet the Val had been forced by the logic of its system to destroy her. Reprogramming a human brain was not death, of course; the system demanded some mercy. Still, she would cease to exist as a separate entity who had been born, raised, and molded by the world of her birth. She would become someone entirely different, someone totally artificial, and she would never even suspect that she had changed. She would be a character in Master System’s grand play, no more a true and natural sentient creature than, well, than the Val itself.
Absolution would erase all knowledge and memory of her, of the hunt for her, along with the traces of guilt and doubt that such operations always induced. In a personal sense, the Val would welcome the relief, but in another sense it would not. By now those memories that were hers existed only in its own data banks; when they were gone, she would be truly dead.
How many others had been like her? How many of the thousands it had chased and brought to justice—or destroyed, when that had been the only alternative—had been in fact not the system’s enemies but its victims? It would never know, but that very thought was treason and disturbing down to its core; Absolution was a necessity, and must be done as soon as possible.
Vals had at their constant disposal a reading of all the memories, all the personality factors, of their object. To catch someone, the hunter had to know the quarry more intimately than the quarry knew itself. Even such people as murderers and traitors might be viewed with sympathy if all that they were was seen with detachment.
No, that was getting even worse. Perhaps this Val was defective. Perhaps this time there would be no awakening from Absolution.
The Val went to its cubicle and plugged in its receptors. The complete data was first read out into Master System’s files; there, at least, the information and the personality files would always reside. Then all data in the auxiliary banks and the core was erased, so that the Val was as virginal and ignorant—and as nonfunctional—as when it was built.
Master System then reprogrammed the core as a new unit updated with all the newest findings, the newest technology, and the newest tricks of the trade. The Val did not feel, did not wonder, did not doubt. It was merely a machine.
But it was a machine with the capacity for all those things, for if it were not it could never comprehend its quarry, never second-guess them and trap them. Without Absolution, the Vals were in serious danger of becoming somewhat human.
Now came the assignment.
Master System was the greatest computer ever built. All data ever on a computer network was inside it from the start; it knew all there was to know, the sum total of human knowledge and experience. Designed as a last link in a massive defense against impending nuclear war, its sole purposes were the preservation of the human race and its knowledge, and the quest for new knowledge.
It had done its job; and having prevented holocaust, it had set about to carry out its dictates that would prevent even the remotest possibility of such a horror ever happening again. It seized command of the world, all weapons and powers, and tied all computer systems into a master system of its own design. It selected examples in doubting and resisting countries, and certain cities along with their teeming populations ceased to exist—and so did resistance to Master System.
But its basic programming still reigned: The human race must never be permitted to die out. So robotic scouts were sent out to find worlds for humanity. And such worlds were found. Colonists specially tailored for survival on those not-quite-Earthlike worlds were brought to their new homes by great universe ships. Earth was left not with billions, but a mere five hundred thousand, who could be reprogrammed and resettled.
The great cities were leveled and traces of modern civilization were all but wiped out. The survivors were confined to isolated reservations whose cultures were modeled after more primitive periods of history. Humanity became its own living museum, not with great accuracy but with great effect.
Only a few human beings knew the facts. These were the elite, the brightest from each of the indigenous people, the chosen administrators who kept their own people in primitive darkness as the price of their own luxury and privilege.
Giving knowledge to those who ran humanity was not without price to Master System. Putting the best and brightest together and allowing them access to tools and history resulted in the development of a hidden subculture that had discovered how to beat the system. They had learned to edit their own memories, eliminating any forbidden knowledge that might be detected in the periodic recordings made of their minds. They did their own research and played their own power games beyond the reach of Master System. The great computer tolerated a certain measure of such activities, but was eternally vigilant to any that threatened the system itself or its own near-total control. Those who overstepped the bounds had the Vals sent after them—and the Vals rarely failed.
Now a Val was being informed of a new element, one that might be the greatest threat of all times to Master System. For the great computer was vulnerable. It had taken all the measures it thought it could to hide that fact, but the vulnerability remained, having been built into it by its creators: An overriding command could suspend all existing programming imperatives of Master System and make it subject to new compulsive orders. It was also compelled to allow anyone actually attempting this to do so. For the attempt to succeed, however, the cancellation codes had to be read into Master System’s core memory. The codes were hidden on tiny microchips disguised as five individually designed elaborate and ornate golden rings. Anyone inserting all five into their corresponding interface slots in the correct order would in effect be the master of Master System. The rings themselves, Master System’s programming demanded, had to be at all times in the possession of humans with authority. If a ring were lost or destroyed, another must be fashioned to replace it. Altering any such imperatives in its programming would destroy Master System.
So it had scattered the rings, leaving one on Earth and sending the other four into the trackless void of the involuntary interstellar colonists. It had wiped out all references it could find to the rings, their function and their use—and even to the very location where the rings had to be used.
But somewhere, somehow, possibly in ancient archives uncovered by Center archaeologists, some record of the rings, and all they implied, survived the centuries. After nine hundred years of static life in darkness, there were humans who knew. Already a few technological underground cells had discovered how to command and reprogram Master System’s computer-piloted spaceships. Some such groups as the freebooters, who were occasionally useful, were even allowed to exist as a sort of Center in space, so long as they remained selfish and did not threaten the system.
But now a small group of renegades had all the information it needed to start out. They knew of the rings. They knew how to command the ships. They did not know where the rings were, nor where to use them, but there was a strong possibility that they could discover these things in time. They were on the loose, and they were dedicated—with nothing to lose.
Although the group seemed insignificant, and its chances of doing anything more than providing a minor nuisance were billions to one against them, Master System was tremendously concerned. It claimed it was fighting a bitter and stalemated war—although even its own Vals were not told whom it was fighting, or where, or why—and that if Master System were to be in any way disabled, defeat would be inevitable, with consequences horrible for all. The mere fact that information on the rings had survived and gotten out beyond Earth was unsettling to it. It felt so threatened it was actually considering a new mass reprogramming of humanity, the destruction of all the Centers, and the imposing of a new limit where even the concept of agriculture or of a language capable of expressing complex and abstract ideas would be forbidden by computers that would be worshipped and obeyed as tangible gods. But it would take a very long time to do this.
The capture of the rebel band was given overriding priority to the Vals. There were ten individuals to find, but there were recordings for only a small number of those. What information they did have was provided by Doctor Isaac Clayben of Melchior, the penal colony in the asteroids from which all the renegades had escaped.
The Val absorbed the available information, then was fed the mindprint of the band’s leader, Hawks. The historian was a fascinating individual, a man of some brilliance and accomplishment literally torn between his tribal and Center worlds. Though he was not a rebel or an adventurer, nor a man of action in spite of some romantic fantasies, it was clear that once Hawks had the documents in his possession he would have felt compelled to read them out of sheer curiosity and a hunger to know—and that he no doubt understood them and their implications.
Recent events not included in the mindprint showed that he was capable of much adaptation, capable of killing if need be, and capable of living in and out of the wild as well. The Val was convinced that in a hopeless position Hawks would kill himself rather than surrender. He would not, however, desert his own people, particularly the women, unless forced to do so by circumstances or necessity. As a result, if Hawks could be located, so might most or all of the rest.
They will go after the rings, the Val noted. Although it is unlikely, we cannot assume they do not already know their location. Vals must cover all four rings.
Agreed, Master System responded. But you will not be posted there. They will need ships other than what they have. They will need contacts among the freebooters and others. The Koll Val is working on this end. You will assist. If any are sighted, trace them. So long as they do not possess all five rings, it is imperative that they be taken alive, so that we may find how many others share the forbidden knowledge. However, once they possess all five rings, if they ever do, then no limitations will be imposed.
But surely there is no danger of them ever obtaining all five! They must run our gauntlet in each case!
It is always possible. I see a hidden hand in this, one who has selected most of these for just this purpose. It is this hidden hand I want most of all. It is possible our great enemy is behind this. If so, then they are dangerous indeed. We can take no chances. Also, time is not necessarily on our side. If they do not succeed, but escape, we might well face their grandchildren. Go. You are programmed and assigned.
The Val disconnected. The entire process, from Absolution through reprogramming, had taken just a few seconds. The Val, who thought often in computer time but functioned in human time, could not help but note this fact alone.
How could they possibly win?