NAINS
1560 4D
Jeff drifted nearer to Dree. “So you’re here to get me down to… Tarnus, you called it? What’s it like there? Is anybody left alive?” Her skin was a pale tan in the dim light. Sentines could work in hard vacuum without suits, communicating through bioradios.
“I think so. There are transmissions exchanged between the archive banks here and the surface of Tarnus every now and then. They have an intelligent pattern, but I’m not sure whether they’re from AIs or humans. There is only one way to find out.”
“Why can’t you make transmissions of your own? Ask them questions?”
“You mean, as in the Turing Test? Could you tell whether I was human or an AI before you saw me? How do you know I’m not human inside, and droid outside?”
Jeff paused. “I don’t.”
“Exactly. In fact, I’m not even certain of that myself. I know one thing: you need oxygen, and water, and food, and air pressure around you. Your suit won’t keep you alive for very long out here, so we’re going to have to get you to a place where you can live. We have to do it soon.”
“What woke me up?”
“I did.”
“Have you been awake for all these… thousands of years?”
“No. It took the nanobots that long to repair me and bring me up again. I’m the only one of my type that survived the trip. The others are all dead or too badly degraded. Come on. We have to get you down to Tarnus.” She floated back from Jeff, and her legs came into view. One was smooth and well-proportioned, muscles articulating under its surface, but the other one was badly damaged and twisted.
“Didn’t they take the lander? Is there anything left to make reentry?”
“Yes, there is.” She kicked off with her good leg, caromed from a wall to a narrow doorway, and vanished in gloom.
Jeff followed her, his light flickering across her moving form as they navigated a maze of corridors and open chambers. A giant humanoid form, its skin textured in green and gray, shuddered as Dree swung past it, then it croaked a strange word and shivered to paralysis again. Jeff froze, then kicked ahead to find Dree again.
“Come on!” she called. Her voice rang urgent in his headset.
“What’s the hurry?”
“Your air and power are low. Aren’t you checking?”
Coasting a long passage, Dree just a flicker far ahead, Jeff remembered the hand codes, pressed the contacts on the suit, read the indicators. She was right: only a few hours left. They were too far from the planet to get down before his air gave out. “It’s too late,” he called.
“No, it’s not,” she answered. “Just get up here with me, will you? I’ll take care of you.”
He kicked once more, and vast dark space opened up around him. An assembly chamber, he guessed. “Where are you?” he called, shining his suit lamp around. In one sector, a jagged opening revealed stars.
“Behind you. Here. No, here. Yes. Come on.” She was waving, half a kilometer away. Beside her, a compact ellipsoid hung shining back at him.
As he approached her, he asked, “What about your energy supply?” Sentines, he knew, used everything from electron storage to nuclear energy. At launch time, they’d been considered the most advanced form of artificial intelligence, and he’d heard rumors that they had human brains built in as foundations for their own.
“I’m all right for now. Here. This is what we’ll use to get to Tarnus. It’s got some independent air and power.”
He drifted nearer. The ellipsoid was a small vessel, designed for outer-hull repair on the Tompuso. It had no reentry surfaces at all; its entire surface shone silvery in the darkness, sending Jeff‘s lamplight off to be swallowed in shadows.
“This thing is no good. It’ll burn up as soon as it hits the upper air.”
She floated nearer to him; sentines didn’t need suit jets for zero-G maneuvering. As one cyberengineer at Earth had told Jeff, “Without digestive wastes, the anus became obsolete. But we finally found a good use for it: suit-jet propulsion. So they just fart around.”
Dree said to Jeff, “Watch this.” She made a high-pitched series of keening sounds that stabbed his eardrums in his headset. “I found some Nains.” She patted a large brownish-black spheroid floating next to her.
“What are Nains?”
“Look.”
As Jeff watched, the spheroid surface articulated into a tangle of small arms, legs, bodies and heads. Abruptly, the sphere exploded. Little people flew apart, then blew skin jets to assemble before Dree in a bulky knot, all their bright metallic eyes staring directly at her mouth. Their skins shone in many colors, striped with dull gray.
“Hello, Mama,” said the nearest one, on radio. “I’m Chucky.”
“Want a kiss, Chucky? It’s time to work.”
“Yes, Mama.” He moved out toward her. She grabbed his arms and planted a long kiss on his mouth. His arms wiggled, then she released him, and he shot over to the ship and waited.
One by one Dree kissed the Nains, and they swarmed over to the ship. When the last one arrived, they began to work on the surface of the metal, rubbing and caressing it.
“What are they doing?”
“They’re preparing it for the ablation layers. These will slough off during reentry, and carry away the heat.”
“Where did you find them? We didn’t start out with anything like them.”
Dree nodded. “I know. At some time during the starship‘s journey here, we were boarded by another vessel, perhaps more than once. One of those vessels is in orbit near the Tompuso now, but it’s long dead. I think these Nains are from a vessel like that one.”
“What are they?”
“They’re repair creatures. They may or may not be biologically alive. They activate with a kind of kiss. That’s how I tell them what to do. It’s chemical transmission.”
“Oh. It looked like fun.”
“Just business.”
The Nains had finished with the surface preparation; it was now dull and dark. One by one, they laid themselves across the surface of the ship in an interlocked pattern, appearing to spread out across the surface until most of the vessel’s surface was covered with a pale tan coating and the Nains themselves had disappeared. Dree moved closer and knocked on the surface.
“See? It’s a heat-shedding coat, fused tight.”
“They’re dead?”
“Of course. That’s what they’re supposed to do.”
“And you think this is going to get us to Tarnus?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know that?”
“I broke into the archives of that other ship orbiting here. There’s a tremendous amount of information in it about the Nains and everything else. That ship is from Earth, thousands of years after the Tompuso left.”
“Can we take some of it with us?”
“I already have.” Dree pointed to her head. “I loaded up all my spare capacity, and there is a way to access those archives remotely via radio, even from Tarnus. Let’s go.” She moved aft along the ellisoidal ship, past the end of the surface area covered by the Nains. Her finger touched a small scribed circle on the gleaming metal, and a hatch opened inward. She reached to him, took his gloved hand, and pulled him in after her.
The small ship had just two seats. Jeff groped in the darkness, and a male droid voice said, “Yes?”
“We’re going to do reentry and landing,” Jeff said. “Dree?”
“Take us out of the bay, Jeff,” she said.
Using the ship’s few remaining thrusters, Jeff maneuvered it clumsily out of the Tompuso‘s bay. Dree sat beside him, punching buttons, crooning commands to the ship’s droids.
“There’s air now. You could take off your helmet, except that we’re about to do the burn to get us down closer.”
“How much air?”
“The ship droids say there’s plenty on board. Relieved?” Dree smiled.
Tarnus, the day side, crept into view over the kilometer-wide cylinder of the Tompuso. The planet shone blue and white and tan and dark green, with much desert, and a long gash of jungle just south of a gigantic scarp that ran east and west in the tropics. Cloud cover ran in long thin curving streaks, almost like contrails, across the lands and seas. Thin concentrations of darkness hinted at some clotting of rock or water or trees or maybe a city or two… Jeff stared, his mind racing.
“Time to get on down to an insertion orbit,” Dree said. She rattled through a long list of commands, and added, “Straps tight?”
Jeff checked. “All set. Wait a minute. Even if we survive reentry, how do we land? This thing doesn’t have wings or power for air flight.”
“The Nains took care of that, too,” Dree said.
“How?”
Dree smiled. “You’ll see. Oh, we’re getting a fuel system warning. One of the ignition systems is reporting an intermittent open circuit. I estimate that the warning system itself is most likely the source of the error report.”
“Is there any backup system?”
“Not any more. Both the alarm system and the fuel system are without backup.”
“So we go anyway.”
“Yes. Any other ideas?” Dree grinned.
“Back to sleep? I don’t think so.”
