a ledge, cracking rock, pushing him forwards and onwards, absorbing some of his downward velocity. He rolled down another slope, shedding more speed, then he jumped through the downpour, aiming for the knife edge of rock that stretched between two peaks.
He kicked out once, twice, three times, pushing himself back and forth between rocky walls, and landed lightly at his target, knees flexing to absorb the remaining energy of his fall. He gazed out towards the ziggurat that lay on the plain beyond the mountains. Something was awakening inside it.
In the hold, one of the wooden venumbs was approaching. Constantine thought it looked as if it was sniffing for something; it put him in mind of a dog scenting trouble. The rest of the crew seemed
unconcerned, and he continued with his story.
Constantine had been led to believe there were possibly three ways intelligence could arise. The first two methods were generally accepted as having been convincingly proven. Intelligence could appear as the result of evolution. Human intelligence was an example of this. Second, intelligence could be written. The AIs of Earth did this all the time, writing new minds to order, minds to fill spaceships and robots and Von Neumann Machines. Could I write a mind? Could I sit down and describe a scene, a thought and an emotion so well that it took life on the page? No, the page is not a suitable medium to allow movement, and this language is too ambiguous and overblown to capture the simplicity of the underlying mechanism of thought. Constantine had once been told that a mind was a sentence that could read itself. A book might have thoughts written within it, but something external had to be applied to the book in order to read the words. But what if words could be written in some medium that allowed the words to take on a life of their own and refer back to themselves? What if the instructions telling the book how to read itself were also written in the book itself?
The periphery of the rainstorm was at the edge of the mountains. Constantine stood at the borderline of the storm, seemingly at the edge of a new world. Down there, on that dry, sleeping plain, something wonderful was awakening. The ancient machinery that filled the stone halls of the ziggurat had lain in wait for nearly forty years. A baited trap. Something was beginning to move in there. Patterns rippled through the many- dimensional volumes enclosed by the processing spaces, repeating themselves, reflecting, constructing new patterns…
A third possible way that intelligence could arise had also been postulated: divine intervention. A dizzying feeling gripped Constantine at the enormity of what he was witnessing. This was what the Watcher believed: it believed itself to be the result of an interstellar computer virus, written long ago. It had set up the ziggurat on this forgotten planet in order to test this theory. It had filled the ziggurat with ancient machinery, hoping to catch the virus there. Constantine had been brought to this planet by the Watcher in order to observe what happened there. A suitable vessel had been left open under the vast star-lit night, and Constantine had been charged with waiting for something to pour down from the unguessed heavens and fill it with the spirit.
And, unbelievably, it was happening now. The event that Constantine had not really believed would happen, the one he had waited nearly forty years to observe—and it was happening. Something was straining within the ziggurat, something was straining to be. A thread was blowing back and forth across the ranks of symbols aligned in the processing spaces that filled the building. If the Watcher’s theory were correct, then the same virus that had caused the Watcher to be born would now be taking root in the ziggurat.
Constantine had robot eyes; he was looking straight into the processing spaces. He jumped. Something was looking back at him: eyes, unaware of themselves, receptors for the patterns that flickered across them from outside.
Constantine stepped from the rainfall into the still night beyond. He descended the mountainside, preparing to receive the message that would be carried to humanity. A low growl sounded. It began to climb in pitch. It was joined by another, and another. Sirens began to sound, rising howls in the night that sent the sleeping colonists tumbling from their beds. Arc lights slammed on and the sides of the ziggurat were lit up in red and yellow. The ziggurat was armed—Constantine felt a hollowness inside at the thought. This was the secret pain he had carried inside himself for the past forty years. The Watcher wanted proof, not competition. The Watcher controlled a vast area of space; it did not want a challenger for its domain. There was a bomb in the ziggurat….
Judy gasped.
“What is it?” asked Constantine.
“Nothing,” said Judy. “Go on…”
Random symbols emerged from the processing space. They carried the edge of meaning
…Would you like to engage…
