Echoes of Earth

THE VIKING WIDOWS

The Frank Tipler, like all the other survey vessels, allowed a number of ways in which the engrams could interact with their environment that flesh-and-blood humans could not share. The most frequently utilized was the ability to speed up or slow down the internal clock, so that one could compress a thirty-year period into an hour, if necessary, or speed up one external day and make it feel like three. Engrams could also shut themselves down when necessary for a brief time, although the process was discouraged; it was too much like death, to suspend one's thoughts completely, and few were prepared to take a chance on never returning. After all, who knew? The theory of the soul had taken a beating in the twenty-first century, but no one was immune to the superstitious leftovers of the past.

One facility that hadn't been included, although it had been raised several times, was the ability to clone individual crew members. This had been deemed too problematic for missions such as these. If someone was copied, that created an immediate imbalance in resources; why should one person have more than their fair share of processing time than the others? The situation would be unsustainable. And supposing that the copy was ultimately "retired," who was to say that it had any less right to continue existing than the original? What if there were more than one copy? The moral and ethical arguments were many and had the potential of leading to disastrous circumstances.

Caryl Hatzis was one of those who had always been opposed to the idea of replication. After two days of talking with the Gifts, however, she was beginning to wish she hadn't. For a start, she could have cloned Alander and put as many copies as she wanted in new bodies and set them to work, and each could have communicated with the Gifts. She would not have been forced to wait until he was ready. She never thought it would be something she would hear herself say, but one Alander simply wasn't enough!

Two days . . . In that time, she had watched as the droids completed a map of the Gallery, which turned out not to be as infinite as it had first seemed, although it still contained more works of art than the Tipler had memory to record. This was without taking into account the Library and the Science Hall, where another droid had scanned the numerous equations covering the thousands of square meters of walls. Some of the math seemed to pertain to a theory underlying the Kempe-Larner super-string GUT, a possibility that had her mathematicians completely stumped. The Gifts wouldn't explain what any of the equations were; that, they had said, was humanity's task.