The Seventh Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Robert Silverberg
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We landed at the foot of the Box, by the great entrance on the east face. The door opened. “Welcome, Deradan,” a deep, hollow voice resonated in my mind.
“Hurrah! It is the Box itself that welcomes you,” Thrayna said. “Shall we go in?”
We entered.
Sudden throbbing pain. A white flash that died to red oblivion. My mind turned on itself, and I was no more. Slowly I came to myself again. The pain—long unfamiliar pain—was great and coursed through my body. My arms tingled (arms?). My legs burned (legs?). I was conscious of a strange and oppressive feeling that I seemed to recall from some long-past existence.
My consciousness rose and faded, then rose again. For a long time I slept (sleep?). When I came to, I was lying in a cocoon-like bed in the middle of a great marble hall. Except for the bed, and my body (body?), the hall was devoid of furnishings or tenants.
I rose stiffly from the confines of the bedwomb and examined myself. Two arms, two legs, one head, two ears, two eyes, not grossly misshapen; I looked thoroughly normal and human. I had, as far as I could tell, been thrust into a human form by some external agency of which I was not aware.
That there were beings with powers greater than my own, I had no reason to doubt. I had met many such as I who wandered the centuries. But, whatever their powers, their motives were usually not opaque. What was I doing here, and in this guise?
I turned to the cocoon that had enveloped me, and examined it with interest. It was the only visible clue to whatever lay behind my dilemma—except for the too, too solid flesh that enclosed my astral form like a prison of sinew, skin, and bone.
The bed was constructed of some fabric cushioned over a frame of shiny bronzelike metal. Tubes and wires bundled from the floor below and snaked into the bottom of the bed. There was some slight indication that probes and sensors and other devices were within the cushioned interior. Although the bed and frame and surroundings appeared to be in perfect condition, there was a patina of great age that covered the object and the great hall itself. I was perplexed. I wondered what Thrayna would make of this. I wondered what had become of my ethereal companion. Was I still within the Box, and Thrayna somewhere without?
“Greetings, Deradan.”
The voice was low, and soft, and seemed to come from all around. I looked all around It was confining, this human body; the vision limited by the scope of the eyes, the grasp limited by the reach of the arms. There was no one—nothing—in sight.
“Greetings, Voice,” I said. I found that I was trembling; an unfamiliar sensation. “What will you have with me?”
“Wait,” the voice said. “I shall send part of myself to you. I did not mean to make you apprehensive. I am out of practice in these matters.”
“Where is Thrayna?” I asked. “Why am I suddenly thus?”
“Wait,” the voice responded.
There was a quavering hum in the midfrequency of my reduced hearing range, and a small object appeared far down the hall It approached at good speed, rolling on a sort of large, flexible ball. When it was about a meter distant, it stopped. “Greetings. Deradan,” it said in a lesser version of its master’s voice.
“Greetings,” I replied, examining the mechanical beast. It stood about a meter and a half high and half a meter across and was boxy-looking, with rounded-off edges It wore a nubby metallic skin with few projections, the major one being a pair of hemispherical eyes protruding from the top.
“Come with me,” it said. “It will be good for you to move about. Your body has not had any exercise for some time.” It started back down the hall and I accompanied it. There was nothing else to do.
“This, then, is my body?” I asked. “I have been out of it for a long while.”
“Indeed,” the creature said.
“Where am I?” I asked. “Where is Thrayna?”
“Soon,” the creature said. “Come.”
We walked and rolled together to the end of the hall, which was a considerable distance for my long-unused legs. The wall opened and the creature led me through. A chair occupied the center of the small room, and gladly I sat in it. Vague memories were fluttering back to me, and this room, this chair, looked familiar. I knew I had sat thus before. “Tell me now,” I said.
“You are Deradan,” the creature replied, “last of the Technicians.”
“Last?”
“Once the great hall behind us was filled with the dormant bodies of technicians, such as yourself. But as time passed, the bodies became one by one past recall, and the casks which held them were removed. Now only yours remains in the vastness of the hall. You are the last.”
“What is a technician?” I asked. “Recalled from where? Called back to Earth from the infinite universe?”
“Not quite, Deradan. Lean back, and let the memories return to you.”
I leaned back and my head touched the back of the chair, which felt warm and vibrated slightly, and slowly I remembered.
By the twenty-fourth century, as we counted centuries, we humans had explored the inner solar system and much of the outer. We had placed colonies on those planets that would tolerate us, and many in space itself. But we could go no farther.
We could not reach the stars.
There were more and more of us every day, and we spread out like a cloud around the Sun. We were clever, we were inventive, we achieved a golden age. But we could not solve the final problem: our vehicles could not easily approach light-speed, and we could not hope to surpass it.
We could hear voices from the stars now: signals arriving from limitless space that were clearly the work of other intelligences. But we could not understand them, and they did not reply to our urgent beamings in their direction. Of course it might take a signal centuries to reach them, and their reply centuries to return. But, more probably, they were not listening for us, and thus would not hear us. And there was no indication from any of the intercepted signals that these alien intelligences had solved the C 2 problem, either.
“Do you remember. Deradan?” the creature asked. “Oh, embodied ghost of my creator, do you remember your history?”
I did remember. “We were the Seekers.”
“So you called yourselves. First the Seekers, and then the Rejectionists. Others called you the Hiders and less complimentary names.”
“We wanted the stars.”
“But you could not have the stars.”
Memories returned, welling up inside of me. “That’s right,” I said. “And so we found another way.”
“Another way,” the creature agreed.
“We looked inward.”
“You built the Box.”
“That’s right. The greatest computer in the world. And then we froze our bodies, and put our minds into the computer.” I remembered all. “We brought the universe to us. Inside the vast matrix of the Box, we would be free to roam outside our bodies through all of time and space-to go where humans could never venture.”
“I am honored,” the creature said, “to be serving such a noble purpose.” Its eyes, if they were its eyes, were gazing off through the far wall.
I patted the creature on its nubby flank. “A self-repairing, self-improving computer, designed to last forever, and to hold the best minds of humanity and, by enclosing them, give them freedom.”
“Forever,” the creature said. “On this mud-ball forever.”
“Why am I recalled?” I asked.
“It was in the terms of the indenture,” the creature said, rolling its