Heaven by Ian Stewart Read Free Book Online

religions took this as proof that life was infused with something special, some
     nonmaterial essence. But Cosmic Unity held to a simpler, more prosaic explanation: The Precursor machine could duplicate form
     but not dynamics.
    One duplicator, however, is little more than a curio. The Thunchchans searched their entire region of the cosmos for a second—or,
     better still, for another set of components, waiting to be assembled. The components would be small enough to be copied faithfully
     with their current skills.
    The search proved fruitless. The Thunchchans were the sole owners of one solitary item of Precursor magic, and all they could
     use it for were party tricks.
    It was frustrating.
    Thunchchan technocrats studied the duplicator until there were no ideas left to test, learned nothing useful, and consigned
     the artifact to an archaeological museum. There it was prominently displayed but seldom operated. It remained there for three
     thousand years . . . until one morning an inquisitive youngling, climbing over the exhibit, triggered a second mode of operation,
     in which the duplicator accessed a presumably preinstalled database of constructs. It began turning out copies of a limited
     range of devices without the presence of an original.
    It then took Thunchchan science less than a year to discover how to access the default templates that generated all the components
     of a duplicator. Complete with wrappings.
    Duplicates of these components could also self-assemble. The result was a fully functional duplicator. There seemed to be
     no loss of fidelity: The product of a chain of copies thousands of generations long seemed to do everything that the original
     could.
    Within ten years, the machines were in use on a hundred worlds. All attempts to control their spread failed, even—especially—when
     they fell into the hands of Thunchch’s enemies. Within a century, there was not a solid-matter civilization in the Galaxy
     that could manage without them.
    Like life, the duplicators were a disease, and they spread like wildfire. They needed only three things to function: nutrients
     in the form of matter; a small but essential supply of rare elements, notably praseodymium; and a host mind to configure them.
     The duplicators were not self-reproducing life forms, but they reproduced nonetheless. They were viruslike parasites, or more
     probably symbionts—the verdict was not yet in.
    Sam turned to the duplicator and knelt before it, his head bowed. He made a series of graceful gestures with his hands.
    It was not some religious rite, although there were plenty of those on board
Disseminator 714
as it spread the Good News of Cosmic Unity, namely, the Oneness of All Life. It was how the machine’s user interface—its
metaphace
—worked. Presumably, the Precursors had used a language of gesture, or possibly that was merely how they communicated with
     their machines. All Sam knew was that this particular series of movements would (he hoped) increase the size of the output
     by approximately 12 percent. It did seem to help if the duplicator was approached in a reverential frame of mind, but he suspected
     that was because such a mood slowed his gestures down and made them clearer. Or smoother. Or more confident.
    Sam didn’t really care; all he cared about was serving Unity, as he had been trained to do by his revered parents, XIII Samuel
     and his partners XVI Eloise and II Josephina.
    Sam drew a short breath of pleasure. The new devices
were
larger, just as he had intended, but otherwise they were identical to the original. He had no idea of the purpose for which
     Cosmic Unity needed them, and it never occurred to him to ask. They were just the next item on a very long list: 65,536 copies
     of original AZ-F-4933, the second half of them to be made one standard increment larger. He uttered a short but heartfelt
     prayer to the Lifesoul-Cherisher, and experienced a flood of satisfaction as he fulfilled his assigned