The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [49]
He surrounded a stool, settled some of his mass on it, and spoke. My translator knew the Gray Mourner speech well. It said, “Hot liquid with much sugar and not much alcohol.”
“Fruit flavor?”
“ No. ”
I poured him hot tea with Benedictine in it I asked, “Which are you?”
“You cannot perceive? I am Shkatht.”
I said, “The Old Mind is gathering?”
“Yes, in the Orion Cluster.”
“Who is the Old Mind and what does it gather?”
He stared, I think. Shkatht has too many eyes to tell. “Information,” he said, “and intellect. Have you never heard reference to the Old Mind?”
“Never,” I said.
He asked, “Have you ever wondered if there are entities older than Chirpsithra?”
I knew of very old entities that were supposed to be extinct. Otherwise—I asked, “How old are the chirps?” He might know.
“A hundred million years, they tell us, or a half billion, or more, or less. It depends on where you set the breaks in speciation. They hold all the red dwarves in the galaxy now, they say. Their first world joined their first sun before they knew how to prevent that,” Shkatht said. “But the universe is older than that.”
“I wouldn’t think species last half a billion years.”
“No, certainly not species—”
“Shkatht, what is your mate doing?”
“Spreading the word, offering opportunity to all. The Old Mind is converging near the Orion Birthground. Chimes In Harmony prepares to depart. Perhaps the Mind will talk.”
Orion ... birthground of stars? The Hubble telescope gave us pictures of fresh young stars and planetars in the Trapezium Cluster of Orion Nebula. I said, “You’ll be centuries getting there. You make it sound like a grunion run.”
“We will need more than centuries. A convergence doesn’t happen all at once. Not many will choose to go. Some passengers will await the next ship. Some who planned to stay over will fight for a berth aboard Chimes In Harmony. They’re all on their communicators negotiating, changing their plans. What is a grunion run?”
I said, “Fish come up onto shore to mate in the sand. We catch the grunion for food, if we can guess the right night.”
Shkatht knotted himself in a laugh. “This is not a grunion run. We go in hope of speaking to the—oldest intelligence—no, not that. Most knowledgeable, it may be. Rick, permit me a question. What would you make of yourself if your options were infinite?”
I’d played such mind games in college. I said, “I’d make myself intelligent enough to decide what else I wanted.”
More aliens were leaving.
“Rick, there will come a point for my kind, or for yours, or for any tool-using community that lives long enough, when intelligence may be made arbitrarily large. Can you see the danger in that?”
I said, “If you make a computer too powerful, it absorbs all knowledge and then turns itself off.” I’d bought that knowledge the hard way, with my own money, when the Draco Tavern was new.
“Absorbs all available knowledge,” the spider man corrected me. “If a computer can reach further, build its own instruments, telescopes, probes, it lasts longer.”
“The poor fool who manufactured it still goes bankrupt!”
“Cease to think in terms of makers and owners, Rick. Let yourself be the computer, let you own yourself, let you seek greater intelligence. If you are confined to just one world, or just one solar system, there comes a point at which there is nothing left to think about. The information flow has fallen too far. You could never survive ten billion years.”
“It’s that old?”
“Guesswork.”
“Go on.”
“Give up speed of thought. Give up locality. Optimum might be a sluggish flow that sometimes clusters into blazes of brilliance.”
I waited.
“We only know the Old Mind in its present state. What we find is a scattering of elements,” Shkatht said, “everywhere in the starfield, spread across the universe. These elements signal each other when their distance is less than ... it varies greatly with intent ... but let us say five light-minutes apart Think of them as the cells of a brain.”
“Tiny?”
“Elements the size