Have you planned this a thousand years, ten thousand?

  Do you stand in this place and think in the mind of creatures dead longer even than you have lived? Do you hold their skulls and think their thoughts?

  Was it purpose eight million years ago?

  Was it, is it—horror upon horror—a mistake on both sides?

  “Lord Desan,” said Bothogi, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Lord Desan, we have a master key. We have weapons. We’re waiting, Lord Desan.”

  Above them the holocaust.

  It was only a service robot. It had never known its termination. Not like the base AI, in the director’s office, which had fought them with locked doors and release of atmosphere, to the misfortune of the director—

  “Tragedy, tragedy,” said Bothogi, standing by the small dented corpse, there on the ocher sand before the buildings. Smoke rolled up from a sabotaged lifesupport plant to the right of the domes; the world’s air had rolled outward and inward and mingled with the breaching of the central dome—the AI transport’s initial act of sabotage, ramming the plastic walls. “Microorganisms let loose on this world—the fools, the arrogant fools!”

  It was not the microorganisms Desan feared. It was the AI eight-wheeled transport, maneuvering itself for another attack on the cold-sleep facilities. Prudent to have set themselves inside a locked room with the rest of the scientists and hope for rescue from offworld; but the AI would batter itself against the plastic walls, and living targets kept it distracted from the sleeping, helpless clones—Gothon’s juniormost; Bothogi’s; those of a dozen senior staffers.

  And keeping it distracted became more and more difficult.

  Hour upon hour they had evaded its rushes, clumsy attacks and retreats in their encumbering suits. They had done it damage where they could while staff struggled to come up with something that might slow it…it limped along now with a great lot of metal wire wrapped around its rearmost right wheel.

  “Damn!” cried a young biologist as it maneuvered for her position. It was the agile young who played this game; and one aging lord-navigator who was the only fighter in the lot.

  Dodge, dodge and dodge. “It’s going to catch you against the oxy-plant, youngster! This way!” Desan’s heart thudded as the young woman thumped along in the cumbersome suit in a losing race with the transport. “Oh, damn, it’s got it figured! Bothogi!”

  Desan grasped his probe-spear and jogged on—“Divert it!” he yelled. Diverting it was all they could hope for.

  It turned their way, a whine of the motor, a serpentine flex of its metal body and a flurry of sand from its eight-wheeled drive. “Run, lord!” Bothogi gasped beside him; and it was still turning—it aimed for them now, and at another tangent a white-suited figure hurled a rock, to distract it yet again.

  It kept coming at them. AI. An eight-wheeled, flex-bodied intelligence that had suddenly decided its behavior was not working and altered the program, refusing distraction. A pressure-windowed juggernaut tracking every turn they made.

  Closer and closer. “Sensors!” Desan cried, turning on the slick dust—his footing failed him and he caught himself, gripped the probe and aimed it straight at the sensor array clustered beneath the front window.

  Thum-p! The dusty sky went blue and he was on his back, skidding in the sand with the great balloon tires churning sand on either side of him.

  The suit, he thought with a spaceman’s horror of the abrading, while it dawned on him at the same time he was being dragged beneath the AI, and that every joint and nerve center was throbbing with the high voltage shock of the probe.

  Things became very peaceful then, a cessation of commotion. He lay dazed, staring up at a rusty blue sky, and seeing it laced with a silver thread.

  They’re coming, he thought, and thought of his eldest clone, sleeping at a well-educated twenty years of age. Handsome lad. He talked to the boy from time to time. Poor lad, the lordship is yours. Your predecessor was a fool—

  A shadow passed above his face. It was another suited face peering down into his. A weight rested on his chest.

  “Get off,” he said.

  “He’s alive!” Bothogi’s voice cried. “Dr. Gothon, he’s still alive!”

  The world showed no more scars than it had at the beginning—red and ocher where clouds failed. The algae continued its struggle in sea and tidal pools and lakes and rivers—with whatever microscopic addenda the breached dome had let loose in the world. The insects and the worms continued their blind ascent to space, dominant life on this poor, cratered globe. The research station was in function again, repairs complete.

  Desan gazed on the world from his ship: it hung as a sphere in the holotank by his command station. A wave of his hand might show him the darkness of space; the floodlit shapes of ten hunting ships, lately returned from the deep and about to seek it again in continuation of the Mission, sleek fish rising and sinking again in a figurative black sea. A good many suns had shone on their hulls, but this one sun had seen them more often than any since their launching.

  Home.

  The space station was returning to function. Corpses were consigned to the sun the Mission had sought for so long. And power over the Mission rested solely at present in the hands of the lord-navigator, in the unprecedented circumstance of the demise of all five lords-magistrate simultaneously. Their clones were not yet activated to begin their years of majority—“Later will be time to wake the new lords-magistrate,” Desan decreed, “at some further world of the search. Let them hear this event as history.”

  When I can manage them personally, he thought. He looked aside at twenty-year-old Desan Six and the youth looked gravely back with the face Desan had seen in the mirror thirty-two waking years ago.

  “Lord-navigator?”

  “You’ll wake your brother after we’re away, Six. Directly after. I’ll be staying awake much of this trip.”

  “Awake, sir?”

  “Quite. There are things I want you to think about. I’ll be talking to you and Seven both.”

  “About the lords-magistrate, sir?”

  Desan lifted brows at this presumption. “You and I are already quite well attuned, Six. You’ll succeed young. Are you sorry you missed this time?”

  “No, lord-navigator! I assure you not!”

  “Good brain. I ought to know. Go to your post, Six. Be grateful you don’t have to cope with a new lordship and five new lords-magistrate and a recent schism.”

  Desan leaned back in his chair as the youth crossed the bridge and settled at a crew-post, beside the captain. The lord-navigator was more than a figurehead to rule the seventy ships of the Mission, with their captains and their crews. Let the boy try his skill on this plotting. Desan intended to check it. He leaned aside with a wince—the electric shock that had blown him flat between the AI’s tires had saved him from worse than a broken arm and leg; and the medical staff had seen to that: the arm and the leg were all but healed, with only a light wrap to protect them. The ribs were tightly wrapped too; and they cost him more pain than all the rest.

  A scan had indeed located three errant asteroids, three courses the station’s computers had not accurately recorded as inbound for the planet—until personnel from the ships began to run their own observation. Those were redirected.

  Casualties. Destruction. Fighting within the Mission. The guilt of the lords-magistrate was profound and beyond dispute.

  “Lord-navigator,” the communications officer said. “Dr. Gothon returning your call.”

  Goodbye, he had told Gothon. I don’t accept your judgment, but I shall devote my energy to pursuit of mine, and let any who want to join you—reside on the station. There are some volunteers; I don’t profess to understand them. But you may trust them. You may trust the lords-magistrate to have learned a lesson. I will teach it. No member of this mission will be restrained in any opinion while my influence lasts. And I shall see to that. Sleep again and we may see each other once more in our lives.

  “I’ll receive it,” Desan said, pleased and anxious at once that Gothon deigned reply; he activated the com-control. Ship-electronics touched his ear, implanted for comfort. He heard the usual blip and chatter of com’s mechanical protocols, then Gothon’s quiet voice. “Lord-navigator.”

  “I’m hearing you, doctor.”

  “Thank you for your sentiment. I wish you well, too. I wish you very well.”

  The tablet was mounted before him, above the console. Millions of years ago a tiny probe had set out from this world, bearing the original. Two aliens standing naked, one with hand uplifted. A series of diagrams which, partially obliterated, had still served to guide the Mission across the centuries. A probe bearing a greeting. Ages-dead cameras and simple instruments.

  Greetings, stranger. We come from this place, this star system.

  See, the hand, the appendage of a builder—This we will have in common.

  The diagrams: we speak knowledge; we have no fear of you, strangers who read this, whoever you be.

  Wise fools.

  There had been a time, long ago, when fools had set out to seek them…In a vast desert of stars. Fools who had desperately needed proof, once upon a quarter million years ago, that they were not alone. One dust-covered alien artifact they found, so long ago, on a lonely drifting course.

  Hello, it said.

  The makers, the peaceful Ancients, became a legend. They became purpose, inspiration.

  The overriding, obsessive Why that saved a species, pulled it back from war, gave it the stars.

  “I’m very serious—I do hope you rest, doctor—save a few years for the unborn.”

  “My eldest’s awake. I’ve lost my illusions of immortality, lord-navigator. She hopes to meet you.”

  “You might still abandon this world and come with us, doctor.”

  “To search for a myth?”

  “Not a myth. We’re bound to disagree. Doctor, doctor, what good can your presence there do? What if you’re right? It’s a dead end. What if I’m wrong? I’ll never stop looking. I’ll never know.”

  “But we know their descendants, lord-navigator. We. We are. We’ve spread their legend from star to star—they’ve become a fable. The Ancients. The Pathfinders. A hundred civilizations have taken up that myth. A hundred civilizations have lived out their years in that belief and begotten others to tell their story. What if you should find them? Would you know them—or where evolution had taken them? Perhaps we’ve already met them, somewhere along the worlds we’ve visited, and we failed to know them.”

  It was irony. Gentle humor. “Perhaps, then,” Desan said in turn, “we’ll find the track leads home again. Perhaps we are their children—eight and a quarter million years removed.”

  “O ye makers of myths. Do your work, space-farer. Tangle the skein with legends. Teach fables to the races you meet. Brighten the universe with them. I put my faith in you. Don’t you know—this world is all I came to find, but you—child of the voyage, you have to have more. For you the voyage is the Mission. Goodbye to you. Fare well. Nothing is complete calamity. The equation here is different, by a multitude of microorganisms let free—Bothogi has stopped grieving and begun to have quite different thoughts on the matter. His algaepools may turn out a different breed this time—the shift of a protein here and there in the genetic chain—who knows what it will breed? Different software this time, perhaps. Good voyage to you, lord-navigator. Look for your Ancients under other suns. We’re waiting for their offspring here, under this one.”

  Introduction to “Press Enter ”

  by John Varley

  Okay, I’ll tell you right now, my favorite John Varley story wasn’t even published under his name, it came out as a story by “Herb Boehm.” But that story didn’t belong in this anthology for several reasons. First, it’s already too familiar—it has been turned into a novel and then into an HBO movie. Second, it was published in the 1970s, just like another of Varley’s best stories, “The Persistence of Vision,” and so is ineligible for this book.

  But that’s all right. No loss. Because any decade in which John Varley publishes at all, there will be a John Varley story worthy of inclusion in any anthology that pretends to be definitive. This is Varley’s monument to the 1980s, when personal computers first became a pervasive part of the American experience.

  When this story came out, most home computers were crumby little VICs and Commodore 64s doomed to gather dust on the closet shelves, or graphically and computationally crippled IBM PCs that software designers were desperately trying to turn into useful tools of business and industry. The people who understood computers weren’t writing stories, and the people writing stories didn’t understand computers. Thus you got end-of-the-world nonsense like War Games, in which a computer somehow got a mind of its own and decided to blow up the world, or romanticized computer networks as in Neuromancer, where “virtual” people lived as electronic cowboys on the open range, now and then roping a cow or holding up a train. These works might well have been entertaining, and even, in some cases, good art; but what they definitely were not was an exploration of what computers can actually do. (To their credit, however, War Games and Neuromancer were infinitely smarter than Tron, which, despite its humiliating dumbness, continues to be remade again and again, in films and stories in which people somehow get trapped inside computers, or computers somehow leap out and run amok in our world.)

  Even if “Press Enter ” did nothing else, it would be remarkable for having found a believable way that a computer might actually wreak havoc in the real world. And, because it’s Varley’s story, “Press Enter ” does do something else. It draws you through the twists and turns of real lives, so that even though it is structured as a mystery story, it can be reread many times as a story of character.

  PRESS ENTER

  John Varley

  “This is a recording. Please do not hang up until—”

  I slammed the phone down so hard it fell onto the floor. Then I stood there, dripping wet and shaking with anger. Eventually, the phone started to make that buzzing noise they make when a receiver is off the hook. It’s twenty times as loud as any sound a phone can normally make, and I always wondered why. As though it was such a terrible disaster: “Emergency! Your telephone is off the hook!!!”

  Phone answering machines are one of the small annoyances of life. Confess, do you really like to talk to a machine? But what had just happened to me was more than a petty irritation. I had just been called by an automatic dialing machine.

  They’re fairly new. I’d been getting about two or three such calls a month. Most of them come from insurance companies. They give you a two-minute spiel and then a number to call if you are interested. (I called back, once, to give them a piece of my mind, and was put on hold, complete with Muzak.) They use lists. I don’t know where they get them.

  I went back to the bathroom, wiped water droplets from the plastic cover of the library book, and carefully lowered myself back into the water. It was too cool. I ran more hot water and was just getting my blood pressure back to normal when the phone rang again.

  So I sat through fifteen rings, trying to ignore it.

  Did you ever try to read with the phone ringing?

  On the sixteenth ring I got up. I dried off, put on a robe, walked slowly and deliberately into the living room. I stared at the phone for a while.

  On the fiftieth ring I picked it up.

  “This is a recording. Please do not hang up until the message has been completed. This call originates from the house of your next-door neighbor, Charles Kluge. It will repeat every ten minutes. Mister Kluge knows he has not been the best of neighbors, and apologizes in advance for the inconvenience. He requests that you go immediately to his house. The key is under the mat. Go inside and do what needs to be done. There will be a reward for your services. Thank you.”

  Click. Dial tone.

  I’m not a hasty man. Ten minutes later, when the phone rang again, I was still sitting there thinking it over. I picked up the receiver and listened carefully.

  It was the same message. As before, it was not Kluge’s voice. It was something synthesized, with all the human warmth of a Speak’n’Spell.

  I heard it out again, and cradled the receiver when it was done.

  I thought about calling the police. Charles Kluge had lived next door to me for ten years. In that time I may have had a dozen conversations with him, none lasting longer than a minute. I owed him nothing.

  I thought about ignoring it. I was still thinking about that when the phone rang again. I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes. I lifted the receiver and put it right back down.

  I could disconnect the phone. It wouldn’t change my life radically.

  But in the end I got dressed and went out the front door, turned left, and walked toward Kluge’s property.

  My neighbor across the street, Hal Lanier, was out mowing the lawn. He waved to me, and I waved back. It was about seven in the evening of a wonderful August day. The shadows were long. There was the smell of cut grass in the air. I’ve always liked that smell. About time to cut my own lawn, I thought.

  It was a thought Kluge had never entertained. His lawn was brown and knee-high and choked with weeds.

  I rang the bell. When nobody came I knocked. Then I sighed, looked under the mat, and used the key I found there to open the door.

  “Kluge?” I called out as I stuck my head in.

  I went along the short hallway, tentatively, as people do when unsure of their welcome. The drapes were drawn, as always, so it was dark in there, but in what had once been the living room ten television screens gave more than enough light for me to see Kluge. He sat in a chair in front of a table, with his face pressed into a computer keyboard and the side of his head blown away.