Ten Apprentices Read online

  There are twice as many men as women, for two reasons. One, more men than women volunteered to go on such dangerous missions. Two, men were hardier first generation settlers. But the embryos packed were in the reverse proportions. The men who survived the first ten years would have more than one mate. It was what made the most sense, to populate a world as quickly as possible.

  I went back up to my maker, surprised at how much time had passed. Two hours. I had barely been aware of it.

  “Where were you?” he asked, though he must have asked the computer to tell him when he woke.

  “In the hold,” I said. “Watching the others.”

  “You don’t need to do that. Their chambers are fully automated. If there is any problem, we would be immediately alerted to it.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Would you like me to teach you how to pilot the ship? It’s tricky only once every two or three years, but then it’s very tricky. We could do a simulation of the last wormhole jump and you could see what it’s like.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’d like to show you. It is the reason I signed on to this. I was seduced by the beauty of the wormhole visions.” He smiled at me, as if waiting to see my reaction to his needling.

  I was not jealous of his wormhole visions, however.

  I was a machine.

  “I thought two hundred fifty years of visions was nothing short of Heaven. But back then, I lived on one for a year afterwards, and even then, I could close my eyes and bring it back. Now I think I’m jaded. They don’t feel as good and they don’t last as long. Good thing before I became a wormhole junkie, I was an engineer, eh?” He put his lips against mine again, but only for a moment, then pulled away.

  “I said I wasn’t going to do that anymore, didn’t I?” He held my arm so that I looked at him. He had made me two inches shorter than he was, so that his chin touched my nose, unless I tilted my head up to him.

  “I do love you,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I loved you before I made you. I made you and every step of the way, I was filled with more love for you.” His eyes were wide, almost like when he was in his wormhole visions.

  He twitched through them, and made me wonder what would happen if he died. I could not pilot the ship through the wormholes. Only one in ten million humans could do it, and it had nothing to do with intelligence or any measurable skill. It was a gift, an art, purely human.

  Which was why any ship that went out into space had to have one live one aboard, along with the cryo-chambers. The only way to go farther than two hundred fifty years was to have two aboard, one who would wake when the first had died. But finding one pilot was difficult enough.

  He sleeps, but always with a node attached to the computer, so that he can be wakened at any moment.

  I do not need sleep.

  I roam the ship. He had give me an enormous processor, so that I can take in every detail of every moment. I have libraries of histories, art, and literature in my head.

  It is boring.

  I went down to the chambers again.

  What if I woke one of them? Who would I choose?

  It was not a serious question. I did not intend to do anything. I only played with the thought in my head, a game that had interest for me.

  If I were human, I would consider what attraction there was for me, physically. I would gauge one face against another, or choose a physique that appealed to evolutionary impulses.

  There was #54, who had a square jaw and was younger by far than my maker. His eyes were open, staring vacantly around him. I could see they were blue, like one of mine. He had good musculature as of yet, though we were not yet one fifth of the way through the voyage. By the end of it, the lack of gravity and the cryo-sleep would slough away much of him. His ribs would show through thin skin, and his head would seem too large on his neck.

  I returned to my maker.

  He was awake once more. “You have a crush, don’t you?” he said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s fine. I don’t mind. Let your circuitry go wild, playing out scenarios of you and him together. I’m the one you’ll come back to in the end.”

  “I do not have a crush. I do not think of him that way,” I said.

  “If I wanted to make you love me, I could have programmed it in,” he said. “But I did not. Do you know what that means?”

  I think it meant that it was impossible to program a machine to love. It is such a human thing, so delicate and irrational. It is so biological, with the imperatives to continue the human race, the passion of the act of sex, and the need to protect a child.

  “It means that I want you to have your freedom. I am willing to wait.”

  He prefers it when I laugh at his jokes. Not too easily, and not too often, however. I make a chart of that, as well. He does not like to know that I have already planned which joke to laugh at, beforehand. He also likes a small hesitation, and a tilt to my head.

  He waits.

  For twenty years he waits.

  He does not kiss me.

  He watches me go to the hold.

  Then he comes. I think he will tell me a joke. I calculate the possibility that it will be about a plumber and a lightbulb (sixty-three percent), a man and a dog (twenty-four percent), an elephant’s tail (eleven percent), and a computer woman (seven percent).

  “I want to make another one of you,” he says.

  This was feedback on my performance. A human might be hurt. But I was not human.

  “I do not want you to be jealous,” he went on.

  “I cannot be jealous. You did not program that emotion into me.” He had only programmed positive feelings, and those had all been less intense than what seemed to be normal for humans.

  “Yes, I know. But I felt I should tell you before I went ahead. To help you understand. I mean it to be no ill reflection on you. You have fulfilled precisely your programming.”

  But I am not enough. “You will make the other one differently, then?”

  “I will take my time. I rushed with you, I think. That was my mistake. I was desperate with loneliness.”

  And now he is not.

  “I could use your assistance.”

  I felt no anger at him. I could not. He had not programmed me to.

  He built her mind first. Smaller than mine. It was done in the first year, but he did not awaken her. She slumbered in the grand computer of the ship.

  Her body he spent another hundred years on. The care he had spent on my eyes he spread over her entirety. The foam was of higher quality than mine, more flexible, warmer. He built a heart for circulating her fluids, and he gave her hair that could grow.

  She had brown eyes, like his own.

  He asked me my opinion many times, whether he should give her sensors in her fingertips that alerted her to pain, whether he should make her sleep and dream, as a human would.

  I gave him my answers as honestly as I could. I thought nothing of her except that she would be better for him than I was. He was my maker. He deserved happiness. And the ship itself needed his sanity to continue on to the planet. The other humans’ lives all depended on him. The continuation of the human race, in fact. For though many ships had been sent out, no communication had ever returned to Earth from any of them. No one knew if they had survived or not.

  He wakened her after we had been in space for one hundred and forty-nine years. There were ninety-four years remaining in the journey. I was one hundred and one years old myself. These things are important to humans, I think. The passage of time, the progress towards a destination.

  She was soft-spoken and I saw him offer her his first kiss her first day of life.

  She made sounds of pleasure and wrapped her arms around him. Her fingertips had nails on them that would grow out and need to be clipped, as his did. Her hands were perfectly formed, the skin on them tanned. He had built her a violin to play, and she need
ed no further lessons to play a sonata, her fingers dancing on the strings.

  I go down to the hold and stare at #54. I think of waking him here and now. But I do not love him. I only wish I loved him. And wish that he could love me.

  There is a reason, I think, that no ships have reported back to Earth.

  Some may have had pilots that went mad from the wormhole visions, or the silence of the ships. Some may have met with accidents, engines stopped or asteroids too large to be cut with lasers before they struck the shields.

  But I think there are others like me, built by those who were too hasty or too ignorant to make us either completely human or happy to be what we were.

  I think I am not the only one who made the choice to cut off the supply of ship’s resources to the cryo-chambers. Or to strangle her master in his sleep. Or to deactivate a robot who was a second, better attempt.

  I go down to the hold to say goodbye to the last one, to #54. His eyes closed at last as he died in his sleep.

  I am not human, nor will I ever be.