Heechee - The Gateway Trip Part 12

The first definite signs of an alien intelligence (not counting the Heechee themselves, of course) were detected by a three-person crew from Pasadena, California, Earth. They came out of faster-than-light drive in orbit around a promising-looking sun (it was identified as a G-4, pretty close to Earth's own primary in type and suitability), and discovered quickly that there was a good-sized planet right in the middle of the habitability zone.

The trouble was, the planet was a mess. Most of one hemisphere was a patchwork of bare rock plains, punctuated with volcanoes, and the thing was hot. It didn't have much in the way of oceans. It didn't even have anything like as much of an atmosphere as its ma.s.s and const.i.tution would have predicted.

However, what it did have was a dam. A big one.

The dam was on the less ruined side of the planet. Even so, it was not at all in good shape. It wasn't a very high-tech dam, for that matter-half a kilometer of rock piled across a valley. It had once been a river valley, no doubt, but there was nothing left of the river at all. There wasn't much left of the dam, for that matter. But what there was could not have been natural. Someone had piled those rocks in that place for a definite purpose.

Martin Scranton and his two sisters tried to land on the planet. They made a landing, all right, but the heat sensors in their lander began to squawk warnings as soon as they touched down; the surface even around the dam was hotter than the boiling point of water. They did, they thought, see traces of what might have been other stone structures on a few mountaintops, but nothing in recognizable shape.

Back on the Gateway asteroid, the scientists decided that that planet had had some bad luck-bad enough to be struck by some wandering body, probably something the size of Callisto; the impact had boiled off the seas, buried much of the planet under molten rock, driven the atmosphere into s.p.a.ce-and, oh, yes, certainly, killed every organic thing that had ever inhabited it.

So Scranton hadn't found intelligent life. He did claim that he had at least found a place where intelligent life had once been. The Gateway Corporation couldn't call it a success, in terms of the discovery bonus offered. But still They took a long time to think it over, then paid half the bonus for a good try.

The first living nonhuman intelligent race the human explorers found didn't count. They weren't all that nonhuman, and they weren't all that intelligent, either. (For that matter, they weren't even discovered by a Gateway ship; the people who found them were moping around the extremes of Earth's own solar system in a primitive Earth-designed rocket ship.) What these particular "aliens" were were the remote descendants of a tribe of Earthly australopithecines, and the place they were found was on the big Heechee ship (or artifact), orbiting out in Sol's Oort cloud of comets, called "Heechee Heaven."

Of course, as we have seen, those old australopithecines hadn't gotten there by themselves. The Heechee had taken them away for breeding stock, in that long-ago visit to prehuman Earth. Then they had left them to the care of machine nursemaids-for half a million years and more.

The second race of aliens was better. It took a long time before they were found, but they were clearly the real thing at last. They were definitely intelligent-they proved it by traveling through interstellar s.p.a.ce on their own! But they were a bit of a disappointment, all the same. They certainly weren't much fun to talk to.

They weren't exactly found by a Gateway prospector, either- the whole Gateway Corporation was pretty nearly history by the time these folks got discovered. It still existed, of course. But Gateway no longer was where the action was, for by then human beings had learned to copy a lot of Heechee technology and were venturing into new areas of the galaxy on their own.

At that point, one interstellar ship, on what had become a fairly routine cruise, detected an unfamiliar vessel. It turned out to be a photon-sail ship, slowly chugging along between stars on a voyage of centuries.

That certainly was not Heechee technology! Nor was it human, not even australopithecine: the long-awaited truly alien race had at last been located!

But actually they had been discovered quite a while earlier, it turned out-by the Heechee themselves, in fact. The sailboat people were the descendants of what the Heechee had called the "Slow Swimmers" and human beings came to know as the "Sluggards." They were definitely alien, and definitely not Heechee, and definitely intelligent.

That was all they had to recommend them, though. The Sluggards were sludge dwellers. They lived in wandering arcologies in a semifrozen mush of methane and other gases, and, although they had really and truly managed to launch those photon-sail s.p.a.ceships, they didn't have many other attractive qualities. The worst thing was that they were terribly slow. Their metabolisms ran at the pace of free-radical reactions in the icy slush they lived in, and so did their thoughts, and their speech.

It took a long time before any human beings were able to establish any sort of useful communication with the snail's-pace Sluggards .. . and by then, as it turned out, it didn't really matter.

MISSION STINKPOT.

The four people on this mission spent a lot of time, and a lot of money, in court. What they were doing there was trying to win a suit against the Gateway Corporation for that ten-million-dollar bonus. They thought they had a pretty good case.

They didn't have a very good planet, though. Certainly it wasn't an attractive one. It was small and it was hot; its sun was a red dwarf, only a quarter of an AU away. And the planet really stank. That was what gave it its name.

The planet was also largely covered with water-not sparkling tropical seas but a sluggish ocean that bubbled methane into an atmosphere that was already mostly methane. You couldn't breathe the stuff. You wouldn't have wanted to if you could, because .of the stink, and there was absolutely nothing of interest anywhere on the planet's few dry-land surfaces.

That wasn't good news for the people in the ship, but it wasn't absolutely crushing, either. As it happened, they had made some unusual preparations before they left Gateway, and thus they were equipped for more than the casual touchdown-and-lookaround of your average Gateway crew.

They were a family, and they came from Singapore. They were Jimmy Oh Kip Fwa, his wife Daisy Mek Tan Dah, and their two young daughters, Jenny Oh Sing Dut and Rosemary Oh Ting Lu. The Oh family was very old in Singapore. They had once been very rich, with a family fortune that had been made out of underwater mining. When Malaysia took the island over and expropriated all its industries the Ohs stopped being rich, but they had wisely socked away enough in Switzerland and Jakarta to finance their fares to Gateway, with enough left over to bring along some extra equipment. It was gear for underwater exploration. As Jimmy Oh told his family, "The Ohs made a lot of money out of sea-bottoms once. Maybe we can do it again."

Taking all that stuff with them meant that they could only fit four people in their Five, but then they didn't much want anyone else along anyway. And when they saw what sort of planet they had reached through the luck of the draw, Madame Mek was blessedly silent-at last-and their daughter Jenny said, "Jesus, Pop, you're not so dumb after all."

Even the Ohs hadn't brought along the kind of deep-sea diving gear and instrumentation that would let them make a systematic survey of Stinkpot's sea bottom. There was just too much sea bottom to explore, and too little time. What they had was half a dozen instrumented neutral-buoyancy b.a.l.l.s. They dropped them into the global ocean at half a dozen randomly chosen points.

Then they went back to their orbiting ship and waited for transmissions.

As the buoys returned to the surface, the Ohs interrogated each one in turn about what it had found. That was disappointing. Of Heechee metal, the instruments had detected none at all. Of the kind of transuranic or other radioactive elements that might, just possibly, be worth mining and shipping back to Earth, also nothing.

But the instruments had picked up some electrical potentials that didn't seem to have any identifiable source. They were regular, in a pleasingly irregular kind of way. They made nice, rounded waves on a CRT, and when Jenny Oh, who had majored in cetacean ethology in school, slowed the signals down and played them through a sound synthesizer, they sounded ... alive.

Were the signals language? If so, of what sort of living thing?

That was when the lawsuits started.

The Oh family said that language definitely proved the existence of intelligent life. The Corporation's lawyers said chirps and squeals weren't language, even if they did happen to be electromagnetic instead of acoustical. (Actually the signals did sound more like cricket chirps or bird calls than any articulate tongue.) The Ohs said how could crickets communicate by electrical impulses unless they were smart enough to build something like radio sets? The Corporation's lawyers said there wasn't any radio involved, just electric fields, and maybe the creatures had current-producing organs like an electric eel. The Ohs said, aha, then you admit you owe us at least the alien-life-discovery bonus, so pay it up right away. The Corporation's lawyers said, first show us your specimens. Or photographs. Or anything to prove these alien life forms are real.

Of course, all of this was in slow time. Each interchange in this dialogue took six or eight months of continuances and motion hearings and the taking of depositions. After three litigious years the Corporation grudgingly allowed a quarter-million-dollar settlement, which just about paid the Ohs' lawyer bills.

Then, years after that, someone else repeated their trip with better equipment. The new underwater probes had lights and cameras, and they found what was making the signals. It wasn't intelligence. It was worms-ten meters long, eyeless, living on the sulfurous exudation of undersea thermal vents. The things turned out on dissection to have electrical systems, just as the Ohs had claimed. That was all they did have that was of any interest at all.

Nevertheless, at least the Ohs were clearly ent.i.tled to another couple of hundred thousand, now that their discovery of life was confirmed. They didn't get it, though. They were no longer in any position to collect any further bonuses, having failed to return from their latest mission.

The intelligent-alien bonus didn't go entirely unclaimed, though. Two other parties of Gateway explorers did, in fact, collect their ten million apiece. They found what the Corporation, with some charity, agreed to call "intelligent" aliens.

Everyone admitted that the Corporation was stretching a point here. Even the lucky explorers did, though that didn't keep them from taking the money. The "Voodoo Pigs" looked like blue-skinned anteaters and wallowed in filth, like domesticated Earthly pigs. What made them "intelligent" was that they had developed an art form: they made little statuettes, nibbling them into shape with their teeth (well, the things they used for teeth), and that was more than any Earthly animal had ever done. So the Corporation philosophically paid off.

Then there were the "Quancies." They lived in the sea of a remote planet. They had tiny flippers, but no real hands; they weren't any good at manufacturing things for that reason, and so no one considered them technological. What they did have was a definite, and even a more or less translatable, language. They were definitely smarter than, say, dolphins or whales or anything else on Earth but man himself-and there, too, the Corporation paid its bonus. (By then it was getting so rich that it was actually becoming generous, anyway.) Those were all the live ones.

There were, to be sure, traces of other "civilizations" that were gone. A planet here and there had refined metal structures, not yet completely rusted away; others showed that somebody, sometime, had gone so far as to pollute its environment with certainly artificial radionuclides.

That was it.

And the more they found, the more the wonder grew. Where were the old civilizations? The ones who had reached Earth's stage of culture a million or a billion years before? Why hadn't they survived?

It was as though the first explorers into, say, the Amazon jungle had found huts, farms, villages, but instead of living denizens only corpses. The explorers would certainly wonder what had killed all the people off.

So wondered the Gateway prospectors. They could have accepted it if they had found no traces of any other intelligence (always, of course, not counting the Heechee themselves). Those members of the human race who cared about such things had been braced for that all along: the SETI searches and the cosmological estimates had prepared them for a lonely universe. But there had been other creatures that appeared to have been capable of as much technology and as much wisdom as the human race. They had existed, and now they were gone.

What had happened?

It was a long time before the human race found out the answer to that, and then they didn't like it at all.

While human beings were beginning to thread their way across the immensity of the galaxy, the world they had left behind was beginning to change. It took a long time, but at last the Heechee wonders the Gateway prospectors had brought home were beginning to make a real change for the better in the condition of the peoples of the Earth-even the poorest ones.

One key discovery unlocked all the rest. That was learning how to read the Heechee language. The hardest part of that was finding any Heechee language to read, because the Heechee did not seem to have been familiar with things like pencils, paper, or printing. It was a sure-thing bet in the opinion of everybody who ever gave it a thought that the Heechee must have had some way of recording things, but where was it?

When the answer turned up it was obvious enough: the longmysterious "prayer fans" were actually Heechee "books." That is, it was obvious after the fact-though the tricky bit was that the things couldn't be read without some high-tech aid.

Once the records were identified as records, the rest was up to linguists. It wasn't all that hard. It certainly was no harder, say, than the long-ago decipherment of "Linear B," and it was made easier by the fact that places were discovered, on "Heechee Heaven" and elsewhere, where parallel texts could be found in both languages.

When the prayer fans were interpreted, some of the most intractable Heechee mysteries became crystal clear. Not the least of them was how to reproduce the Heechee faster-than-light drive. Then colonization could really begin. The great ship that had been called "Heechee Heaven" was the first to be used for that purpose, because it was already there. It ferried thousands of poverty-stricken emigrants at a time to new homes on places like Peggy's Planet, and that was only the beginning. Within five years that ship was joined by others, now human made-just as fast; even bigger.

And on the home planet itself...

On the home planet itself, it was the CHON-food factories that made the first big difference.

Simply put, what they did was end human starvation forever. The Heechee's own CHON-food factories...o...b..ted in cometary s.p.a.ce-that was the reason for the long-baffling Heechee fascination with Oort clouds, now answered at last. The human-made copies of these factories could be sited anywhere-that is, anywhere there was a supply of the basic four elements. The only other raw material they needed was enough of a salting of impurities to fill out the dietary needs.

So before long the CHON-food factories sat on the sh.o.r.es of the Great Lakes in North America and Lake Victoria in Africa and everywhere else where water and the four elements were present and people wanted to eat. They were along the beaches of every sea. No one starved anymore.

No one died of hunger before his time-and before long it was almost true that no one died at all. This was for two reasons. The first of them had to do with surgery, and, peculiarly, with the CHON-food factories, as well.

For a long time human beings had known how to subst.i.tute transplants for any worn-out organ. Now the replacement parts no longer had to be butchered out of cadavers. The same system that made CHON-food, considerably refined, could be induced to man- ufacture tailor-made human organs to implant into people in need. (A whole wicked industry of a.s.sa.s.sinations for the marketplace collapsed overnight.) n.o.body had to die because a heart, lung, kidney, bowel, or bladder wore out. You just turned over your specifications to the people at the spare-parts division of the CHON-food factory, and when they pulled your new organs out of their amniotic soup the surgeons popped them in place.

In fact, all the life sciences flowered. The Heechee food factories made it possible to identify, and then to reproduce or even creat'e, a thousand new biological agents-anti-antigens; antivirals; selective enzymes; cell replacements. Disease simply pa.s.sed out of fashion. Even such long-endured traumas as tooth decay, childbirth, and the common cold became history. (Why should any woman suffer through parturition when some other breeding machine-say, a cow-could be persuaded to accept the fertilized ovum, nurture it to ripeness, and deliver it healthy and squalling?) And then there was the second reason. If, in spite of everything, a person did finally die of simple overall decay, he didn't have to die completely.

At least, there was another Heechee invention-it had been first found on the ship called "Heechee Heaven"-that robbed death of some of its sting. The Heechee's techniques for capturing a dead person's mind in machine storage produced the "dead men" on Heechee Heaven. Later, on Earth, it produced the enterprise called "HereAfter, Inc.," the worldwide chain of operators that would take your deceased mother or spouse or friend, put his or her memory into computer s.p.a.ce, and permit you to converse with him or her whenever you liked-forever. Or as long as someone paid the storage charges for his or her datafile.

At first that certainly wasn't quite the same as being really alive. But it was a whole lot better than being irrecoverably dead.

Of course, as the technology matured (and it matured very fast), machine storage of human intelligence got easier and a great deal better.

When it got really good it began to raise some unexpected problems. Surprisingly, the problems were theological. The promises of Earthly religions were being fulfilled in a way the religious leaders had never planned, for indeed it seemed now to be true that "life" was only a sort of overture, and that "death" was in fact nothing more than the stepping stone to "eternal bliss in Heaven."

The dying man who then woke up to find himself no more than a collection of bits in the datafile of the immense computer networks might well wonder why he had clung to life in his organic body so long, for the machine afterlife had everything going for it. He had lost nothing through death. He still could "feel." The machine-stored ate as much as they liked-neither cost nor season were factors in planning a menu-and if they chose they excreted, too. (It did not matter that the "food" the "dead man" ate was only symbolically represented by bits of data, because so was he. He could not tell the difference.) All the biological functions were possible. He was deprived of none of the pleasures of the flesh. He could even make love with his dearest-provided only that she had stored herself in the same net-or with any number of dearests, real and imaginary, if that was how his tastes went. If he wanted the society of the still-living friends he had left behind, there was nothing to stop him representing himself to them (as a machine-generated hologram) in order to have a conversation, or a friendly game of cards.

There was also travel; and, perhaps most popular of all, there was work.

After all, the basic human work is only a kind of date processing. Humans don't dig the foundations for skysc.r.a.pers. Machines do that; all the humans do is run the machines, and that could be done as readily from machine storage as in the flesh.

All those books that the deceased had been meaning to read- the plays, the operas, the ballets, the orchestral performances-now there was time to enjoy them. As much time as he chose. Whenever he chose.

That svas heaven indeed. The dead person's style of life was exactly what he wanted it to be. He didn't have to worry about what he could "afford" or what was "bad for him." The only limit was his own desire. If he wished to be cruising in the Aegean or sipping cold rum drinks on a tropical beach, he only had to order it. Then the datastores would summon up any surround he liked, as detailed as any reality could be and just as rewarding. It was almost like living in a perfect video game. The operative word is "perfect," for the simulations were just as good as the reality; in fact they were better: Tahiti without mosquitoes, French cuisine without gaining weight, the pleasure in the risks of mountainclimbing without the penalty of being killed in an accident. The deceased could ski, swim, feast, indulge in any pleasure . . . and he never had a hangover.

Some people are never happy. There were a few of the formerly dead who weren't satisfied. Sipping aperitifs at the Cafe de la Paix or rafting down the Colorado River, they would take note of the taste of the Campari and the spray of the water and ask, "But is it real?"

Well, what is "real"? If a man whispers loving words to his sweetheart on the long-distance phone, what is it that she "really" hears? It isn't his own dear voice. That was a mere shaking of the atmosphere. It has been a.n.a.lyzed and graphed and converted into a string of digits; what is reconst.i.tuted in the phone at her ear is an entirely different shaking of the air. It is a simulation.

For that matter, what did she hear even when her darling's lips were only inches away? It was not her ear that "heard" the words. All the ear does is register changes in pressure by their action on the little stirrup and anvil bones. Just as all the eye does is respond to changes in light-sensitive chemicals. It is up to the nerves to report these things to the brain, but they only report coded symbols of the things, not the things themselves, for the nerves cannot carry the sound of a voice or the sight of Mont Blanc; all they transmit is impulses. They are no more real than the digitized voice of a person on a phone.

It is up to the mind that inhabits the brain to a.s.semble the~e coded impulses into information, or pleasure, or beauty. And a mind that happens to be inhabiting machine storage can do that just as well.

So the pleasure, all the pleasures, were as "real" as pleasure ever is. And if the mere pursuit of pleasure began to pall, after a (subjective) millennium or two, he could work. Some of the greatest music of the period was composed by "ghosts," and from them came some of the greatest advances in scientific theory.

It was really surprising that, nevertheless, so many people still preferred to cling to their organic lives.

All of this led to a rather surprising situation, though it took awhile for anyone to realize it.

When the Gateway explorers started bringing back useful Heechee technology, the world population on Earth wasn't much more than ten billion. That was only a tiny fraction of all the human beings who had ever lived, of course. The best guess anybody would make about the total census was-oh, well, maybe-let's say, somewhere around a hundred billion people.

That included everybody. It included you and your neighbor and your cousin's barber. It included the president of the United States and the pope and the woman who drove your school bus when you were nine; it included all the casualties in the Civil War, the American Revolution, and the Peloponnesian Wars, and their survivors, too; all the Romanovs and Hohenzollerns and Ptolemys, and all the Jukes and Kallikaks, as well; Jesus Christ, Caesar Augustus, and the innkeepers in Bethlehem; the first tribes to cross the land bridge from Siberia to the New World, and also the tribes who stayed behind; "Q" (an arbitrary name a.s.signed to the unknown first man to make use of fire), "X" (the arbitrary name of his father), and the original African Eve. What it included was everybody, living or dead, who was taxonomically human and born before that first year of Gateway.

That came, as we said, to a grand total of 100,000,000,000 people (give or take quite a lot), of whom the great majority were deceased.

Then along came Heechee, or Heechee-inspired, medicine, and things got started.

The numbers of the living meat people doubled, and doubled again, and kept on doubling. And they lived longer, too. With modern medicine, they didn't die before they wanted to. With medical encouragement and no painful penalties, they generallyand generally lots of them. And when they did Well, when they did "die" they also still "lived" in mechanical storage, and among that growing electronic population there were no fatalities at all.

So the number of the living continued to increase, while the number of the truly dead remained essentially static, and the result was inevitable. But when the point was reached it still took everyone by surprise; for at last in human history the living outnumbered the dead.

All of that had some interesting consequences. The eighty-year-old woman writing her X-rated memoirs of youthful indiscretions couldn't drop the names of video stars, gangsters, and bishops anymore-not unless the indiscretions had really happened, anyway- because the video stars, gangsters, and bishops were still around to correct the record.

It was a great plus for the oldest persons in machine storage, though. The names that they dropped from their meat days were well and truly dead, and in no condition to dispute the stories.

It wasn't bad to be a meat person anymore. Hardly any of them were poor.

Well, they weren't money poor. Not even on Earth. Nor were they poor in possessions. All their factories with all their clever robots were turning out smart kitchen appliances and fun game machines and talk-anywhere video-telephones, and they were doing it all the time. The cities got really big. Detroit led the way in the old United States, with its three-hundred-story New Renaissance megastructures that covered everything from Wayne State University dormitories to the river; a hundred and seventy million people lived in that crystal ziggurat, and every one of them had personal TVs with three hundred channels and holographic VCRs to fill any gaps left by the networks. Out in the Navajo reservation the tribe (now eighty million strong) erected a more-than-Paolo-Soleri arcology; the lowest forty stories produced frozen diet meals, clothing, and woven rugs for the tourist trade, and all above was filled with extended Navajo families. On the sands of the Kalahari Desert, the !Kungs entered a life of plenty and ease. China reached twenty billion that year, each family with its fridge and electric wok. Even in Moscow the shelves of the GUM department store were loaded with clock radios, playing cards, and leisure suits.

There wasn't any problem producing anything anyone wanted anymore. The energy was there; the raw materials cascaded down from s.p.a.ce. Agriculture had become as rationalized as industry at last: robots planted the fields, and robots harvested the crops-genetically tailored crops, enriched with artificial nonpolluting fertilizers and trickle-irrigated, drop by drop, by smart, automatic valves. And the whole, of course, supplemented by the CHON-food factories.

And if anyone still felt that Earth was not giving him all he chose to desire-there was always the rest of the galaxy.

That was what the meat people had. What the machine-stored had, of course, was much more. It was everything. Everything they had ever wanted, and everything they could imagine.

Really, there was only one real problem with machine storage after death, and that was relative time.

That couldn't be helped. Machines move faster than meat. In the interactions between the machine-stored and the meat persons they had left behind, it was a considerable handicap to conversation. The machine-stored found the meat people desperately boring.

It was easy enough for the still-living to talk with their dear departed (because the dear departed hadn't really departed any farther than the nearest computer terminal), but it was not a lot of fun. It was as bad as trying to make small talk with the Sluggards all over again. While the flesh-and-blood person was struggling to complete a single question, his machine-stored "departed" had time to eat a (machine-stored) meal, play a few rounds of (simulated) golf, and "read" War and Peace.

The fact that the machine-stored moved so much faster brought about some emotional problems for their meat relicts, too. It was particularly disconcerting right after a death. By the time the funeral was over, and the bereft put in a call for the one who had gone before, the one who had gone on had likely gone to take a relaxing, if simulated, cruise through the (also simulated) Norwegian fjords, learned to play the (unreal) violin, and made a hundred new machine-stored friends. The survivors might still have tear stains on their cheeks, but the deceased had almost forgotten his dying.

In fact, when he thought about his life in the flesh his feelings were probably nostalgic, but also quite glad all that was over-like any elderly adult remembering his own blundering, confused, worried childhood.

As one small consequence, machine-storage put the undertakers out of business. The machine-stored did not need a mausoleum to be remembered. Deaths were still marked by ceremonies, but they were more like a wedding reception than a wake; the business went to caterers rather than funeral directors.

Psychologists worried about this for a while. With the dead still (sort of) alive, and even reachable, how would the bereaved manage their grief?

When push came to shove, the answer was obvious. Grief wasn't a problem. There wasn't much to grieve.

Unfortunately, full stomachs and comfortable lives do not necessarily make human beings good.

Such things probably do help, a little. Nevertheless, the worms of ambition and envy that live in the human mind are not easily sated. As far back as the twentieth century it was observed that the manual laborer who managed to promote himself from cold-water flat to a ranch house with a VCR and a sports car could still feel pangs of envy toward his neighbor with the jacuzzi and the thirty-two-foot cabin cruiser.

The human race didn't change just because they had acquired Heechee technology. There were still people who wanted what other people had badly enough to try to take it away from them.

So theft did not disappear. Nor did thwarted lovers, or brooding victims, or simple psychopaths who tried to heal their grievances by means of rape, a.s.sault, or murder.

An earlier age took care of such people either by caging them in penitentiaries (but the prisons turned out to be mere finishing schools for crime) or turning them over to the executioner (but was murder any less premeditated murder simply because it was the state that was doing it?).

The Age of Gold had better ways. They were less revengeful, and maybe less satisfying to some of the punishment-minded. But they worked. Society was at last fully protected from its renegades. If there were still prisons (and there were), they were manned by computer-driven robot guards who neither slept nor took bribes. Better than prisons, there were planets of exile, where severe offenders could be deported. A criminal dropped on a low-tech planet could probably feed himself and continue to live, but there was no way he could ever build himself an interstellar s.p.a.ceship to get back to civilization.

And for the worst cases, there was HereAfter.

Their minds faithfully reproduced in machine storage, their bodies no longer mattered. They could be disposed of without a qualm. It was capital punishment without its depressingly final aspects. After the sentence was carried out, the criminals weren't dead. They were still alive-after a fashion, anyway-but they were rendered permanently harmless. From that sort of prison no one ever was paroled, and no one could ever manage to escape.