Sarvik had thought he'd seen everything that naive trust had to offer. But the ease with which Weinerbaum had bought the fellow-seekers-after-truth line, and his readiness to give access to the Earthnet, had surpassed all of it. Earth was now quarantined for a comfortably long time and could be dealt with at leisure. Meanwhile, the Borijans were free to concentrate on getting Titan organized.
At first the other Borijans had been skeptical of Sarvik's accounts to them of his initial conversations with the Terrans. Nobody could be that credulous, they had said, which had led them to suspect that Sarvik was setting them up for something. But they believed him later, when they got a chance to use the interface themselves.
Their suspicions made Sarvik despair. Back on Turle it had been no more than healthily prudent to be suspicious of another's motives. But among the last dozen of their kind a million years after their civilization had ended, with a new world to build and enormous shared problems to overcome, he'd hoped that more constructive attitudes might have prevailed. Perhaps he had erred in his judgment of who had been worthy to bring with him.
He left that line of thought to be picked up again another time as his consciousness expanded to accommodate more incoming data channels, and the difficulties of trying to integrate his multiple simultaneous perceptions intensified. The area of surface geography that had become "him" now covered about four acres and contained an electronics assembly and wiring line that he "saw" from monitor cameras mounted at different vantage points, "felt" through a variety of position and motion sensors distributed through the machines and transfer operations, and "read" from the outputs of subprocessors controlling the manufacturing process. All this had become his new sensory system.
It had been obvious that the Terrans would retaliate when they discovered that the whole Earthnet was going down. So, by the time Weinerbaum threatened to contain the Borijans by isolating the hardware that was hosting them, Sarvik and the others had already escaped into the general Titanwide network, leaving copies of themselves behind to occupy the Terrans. Since then, Sarvik had been learning to function in the strange new environment of the surface. He had pretty much gotten the knack of fusing the mosaic of scattered input impressions into a coherent whole and was learning to manipulate the machines and processes that for the present constituted his being. The next step would be to clear away some of the chaotically evolved jungle and reorganize it to producing purpose-designed bodies along the lines that had been envisaged on Turle.
But in addition to Sarvik's computing know-how, that project would need the Farworlds people's expertise in laying out manufacturing lines and Robocon's knowledge of detailed machine design. Getting very much further would therefore require reestablishing contact with the others. To do that, he would have to learn how to explore his surroundings and move around.
The electronics line fed into an area where the circuit assemblies were fitted into racks; the racks were mounted in metal frames that then went into cabinets. The cabinets and racking came from a metalworking facility in the opposite direction from the electronics line. One type of mounting frame made here came with four drilled holes, one at each corner of a facing flange. Sarvik concentrated his awareness on the drilling operation and experienced the curious sensation of reading the head-positioning digitizers, feeling the speed and pressure feedbacks, and watching the process through an imager, all as parts of a single, unified perception. Out of curiosity he tried moving the drill head by an effort of will to a normally blank area of metal halfway along one side of the flange. The system responded, and he discovered a distinct satisfaction in making it drill two additional holes.
A small beginning, Sarvik told himself. But a beginning.
Sarvik soon found that he could move his center point of attention within his domain of awareness, somewhat like the focal point of a visual field. After some experimenting, he began concentrating on the external signals arriving at the periphery, learning to discern form and meaning in the patterns generated by the things going on around him. As his consciousness adapted more to its new, extended realm, it learned to construct visual mappings of the entities and processes making up the surrounding electronic landscape.
It was a mysterious landscape of geometric shapes in colored light appearing and vanishing, program trees pulsing in changing configurations against hillsides of permanent command structures standing solid and dark. Data streams merged and looped in sparkling torrents to join slowly moving tides, and message packets sailed over like birds, carrying snippets of information from somewhere afar or reports being logged to some distant destination. And there were stranger forms, too, that moved purposefully among it all, able to combine together on occasions and then to separate again, preserving their integrity and identities. Sarvik perceived them as strange animal forms upon the landscape. There was as much life, he realized, inhabiting the invisible software networks of Titan's forests as there were freely mobile forms roaming it physically.
He found that by concentrating his faculties at a point on his containing boundary, he could extend it in that direction; at the same time, he lost a part of his awareness from the opposite side. In effect, he had moved himself a short distance. With practice, he developed this knack into an ability to "flow" at will within the net, sometimes in a gradual progression, sometimes in leaps, depending on the nature of the electronic terrain. Thus, he was able to explore and move himself about Titan's surfaceand to do so, he discovered, with astonishing speed.
It didn't take him too long after that to find another of his kind, which had been his objective. He saw it coming toward him along a ravine of flickering orange and blue latticed sides and a floor of rectangular pools sitting among low pink walls that went in all directions like a maze. At intervals, wide, green trunklike cylinders rose vertically and converged toward infinity far overhead. The figure was on a kind of raft being carried along on a swiftly moving stream of colors that followed the middle of the ravine.
Sarvik didn't know for sure what, in the peculiar transform space he was now living in, a data set representing a Borijan ought to look like. But this entity was more complex than any of the autonomous living forms he'd seen previously, and it resembled the parts of his own extension that appeared within his field of view, being formed from wire-frame sections connected by filaments, the whole vaguely suggesting an aggregation of cylinders connected by spheres. What else could it be?
The creature had also evidently seen him. It stepped off the raft, which promptly dissolved away into the stream, and approached. Sarvik slackened his pace as he drew nearer. The two of them went into a slow, circling motion around each other, keeping their distance, moving between the pink walls in a wide space among the green trunks. Sarvik had never tried communicating in his new form, since there had been nobody to communicate with after his exit from Weinerbaum's lab. He concentrated on directing the same faculty of projection that enabled him to move himself and endeavored to impress upon it the thought "Borijan?" And immediately he knew, as when one heard one's own voice, that somehow it worked.
"Yes," came the reply.
The two figures ceased circling one another and relaxed visibly. Sarvik stepped forward; the other moved to meet him.
"The unsuspected world within a world of Titan," the other said.
"It's . . . a strange place," Sarvik replied.
"Takes some getting used to."
"I have to be impolite," Sarvik said. "I don't know how to recognize anyone in this form yet, probably any more than you do. Who are you?"
"Sarvik," the figure replied.
Sarvik froze, a composite of wire frames half-raised in a gesture of greeting. "That's not possible. I'm Sarv"
And then he saw suddenly that it was very possible. Of course, from his point of view, it would have been he who had escaped from the lab and a copy who had been left there. And all the other copies that had been written out into the net as a precaution would think the same thing. Did that mean he was a copy? He wasn't even sure if the term meant anything anymore.
"Oh. I see. I must be the first one you've bumped into," the other Sarvik said.
"Er . . . yes."
"So you haven't talked with any of the others at all?"
"How could I? I've just told you that you're the first one of us I've met in here."
Sarvik Two gestured to indicate the stream rushing along the middle of the ravine. "You can tap into the long-range communications channels. It's a bit more tricky than coordinating local functions but not so bad when you get used to it. It sounds as if you've been out of things. We're spread out all over Titan. The plans are moving right along to get sites cleared for proper factories to make bodies. There's another tentative design worked out, and the Indrigons have already reprogrammed some of the native machines to produce parts."
All that already? It didn't seem possible. And then Sarvik One caught Sarvik Two's use of the plural. "What do you mean, Indrigons?" he queried. "Who is spread out all over Titan? How many of us are you talking about?"
"Sixty-eight at the last count, but more keep turning uplike you," Sarvik Two told him. "There's five of ussix nowalong with four Kalazins, half a dozen Indrigons . . . I'm not sure offhand how many of each of the rest. We'll have to get you into one of the design groups. Everybody will be getting together somewhere for a review conference shortly. Distance is no object, as you've probably found out."
Sarvik One listened in a daze. When the novelty wore off, the compulsive Borijan antagonism that had shown itself briefly when they had first been reactivated would come to the surface again. Only, instead of just one of each of them for the others to conspire against, there would be dozens!