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inhabitants. Yes, let them even make use of the Colligatarch to serve their
own purposes. The thought did not trouble the machine. It was concerned not
for its own future but for that of the people it had been built to serve.
The offspring of Eric Abbott and Lisa Tambor would not be machines. They would
be human, and artison, and a little bit Syrax, able to meet and compete with
the Syrax on their own lofty terms where normal humans and machine would not.
They might achieve that level in the near future or the far. It didn't matter.
Because they were safe to develop on distant Paradise together with their
25,000 highly intelligent fellow humans. They were the pick of humanity, those
adventurous 25,000, and they had such a leader as history could not have
predicted.
A machine is not supposed to have emotions, but the Colligatarch had been
programmed to deal with human beings, and as such it had been fully equipped
to empathize with them. But only a machine could have risked the gamble.
Certainly Martin Oristano would not have chanced it, nor would Dhurapati
Ponnani or Froelich or Novotski or any of the others. They were heirs to the
fears and hesitations of their forefathers.
The Colligatarch had no forefathers. It had measured the probabilities and
gambled on Eric Abbott, and he'd borne out all the hopes embodied in the
predictions even as he'd railed against the evils of the
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colonials. And that too was part of the plan. Now the descendants of
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Paradise's first settlers would mature and develop their abilities free of the
ennervating cocoon a comforting computer network could build for them. They
would be their own machines, their own Colligatarch.
By forcing them to reject me, I make them independent, the machine thought
with satisfaction. It was immensely gratifying to think that out there,
someday, its makers would at last stand as its equals instead of its servants.
The Colligatarch turned its vast self to other, more mundane matters. It could
be patient. It intended to be patient. Just as it intended to be around
several thousand years hence to greet the first of Lisa Tambor and Eric
Abbott's many-times-over great-grandchildren when they teleported all the way
from Paradise into its presence without the aid of a GATE.
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