Forge of the Elders, page 49
"You heard that?" Eichra Oren turned back to Model 17, still addressing Sam. "And you let me go on worrying myself to—why didn't you say something?"
"Unaccustomed as I am to public reticence," the animal replied, "I wasn't all that sure myself that I was having a real experience. Or, to be honest, that I was real, myself. It's what comes of reading too many of Heinlein's later novels. Anyway, it was necessary to take a while and sort myself out, if you see what I mean. I used to wonder whether I was a dog with a computer-enhanced brain or a computer in a dog-enhanced cabinet. Now I'm just a former computer or a former dog who doesn't know whether he's a program or a database."
"You mean whether he's kibbles or bits." Danny ground a cigarette on the pavement at his feet—Eichra Oren hadn't even seen him light this one—and immediately lit another. "Sorry about that, an old commercial I saw once. Speaking of that promise, Eichra Oren, is there any reason you couldn't begin keeping it now?"
The Antarctican looked a question at the two physicians. "At this point, we've done all we can do," Rosalind answered. "The rest is up to automated equipment."
"And Sam's fragile will to survive," Dlee Raftan Saon added, provoking general laughter. "I could use some sleep, myself, but I'm far too . . . what's the expression?"
"Keyed up," supplied Rosalind, "and curious—speaking for myself."
"And curious," the insect doctor agreed, "speaking for both of us." He turned to Tai, doing a fair imitation of a human American southern accent. "You bein' the only cunnel heah, Cunnel, may Ah suggest that we-all repaih to mah office—where we kin all sit on the floah as comf'table as we can on the sidewalk out heah—for brandy an' cigahs?"
Eichra Oren stood up, stretching. "Good idea, Raftan, only make mine coffee, with a Turkish accent."
"In the name of the Grrreat and Merrrcifool," replied the insect, "kindly walk this way, Effendi."
"If I tried to walk that way—" Sam's disembodied voice began.
"I'd wind up in traction!" Danny, Jones, Tai, and Rosalind finished for him in unison. Together they entered the surgery and found places to sit in the doctor's office—only Model 17 sat on the floor—while their host ordered coffee and other refreshment, found a chair for himself, then filled and lit his pipe.
Jones pulled the glittery golf ball from his pocket.
"By this time, I'm curious, too," Eichra Oren told the robot. "Please feel free to satisfy our curiosity, Model 17. You have the audience you wanted."
"At last." Model 17 began, "How much do any of you know about slime molds?"
"Yech!" That was Danny, about to take a bite of ice cream covered with butterscotch syrup.
"About as much as I ever wanted to," Sam replied through the same speaker she'd used. "Practically nothing. I know they're like the Rio Grande, an inch deep and a mile wide."
"More on the order of a meter wide and a few dozen millimeters deep," corrected Dlee Raftan Saon. "To borrow Sam's unique manner of stating things, a slime mold is—well, more of an animal than a plant, that doesn't seem to know whether it's one big single-celled organism with thousands of nuclei, a single multicelled entity, or thousands of separate creatures which look rather like tiny worms. At one time or another, depending on temperature, available food or moisture, or maybe just its mood, it can be any of the three—or convert itself into a fine, dry powder and simply blow away on the wind to a better location."
"God," Danny gulped, "it sounds like something Spock and Captain Kirk would have to fight!"
Rosalind laughed. "Yes, but they're real, and just about as mundane as any living thing ever gets. People scrub them off their shower curtains every day without knowing it. They're a very ancient kind of organism—Precambrian—one of the first ever to evolve."
"And in at least one universe, the first to evolve intelligence," declared Model 17 with an electronic shudder. "They are the only Precambrian organisms ever to do so."
"And yet they left no traces of it," Dee Raftan Saon mused.
"The Eldest constructed no artifacts that we know of," Model 17 explained, "but created whatever they required out of their own substance, and perhaps even their thoughts. In all the myriad alternative worlds of infinite probability, neither they nor their soft-bodied nonsapient ancestors left any fossil record."
"I see."
"Nor," she continued, "does it appear that they could be killed in any way we know the term."
"What do you mean they couldn't be killed?" Sam demanded, "They're slime mold. Enough household disinfectant and—"
"So what happened to them, then?" Rosalind asked.
"In their own universe—the one we presently occupy—after a bitter conflict lasting millions of years, of which I feel fortunate to have been given little useful memory, my builders believed they had imprisoned the Eldest in eternal frozen sleep in the absolute cold of the Cometary Halo. Even thus contained, the Predecessors greatly feared that the Eldest might somehow be awakened accidentally."
"So greatly," asked Eichra Oren, "that they invented the Virtual Drive just so they could flee the Solar System?"
"Yes," Model 17 answered. "I am afraid that correctly states the facts of the matter."
"And now," the Antarctican persisted, "the Eldest are awakening?"
"Yes, Eichra Oren." She gave him one of her almost-sighs. "I have just seen indications of it by means of what the Soviet Americans call my tachyon telescope."
Dlee Raftan Saon blew multiple smoke rings from the spiracles along the sides of his abdomen, forcing the humans to revise some of their theories about his respiratory process. "I'd like to see that myself, Model 17, very much."
"You are most welcome to at any time, Doctor."
"Thank you. Some of my colleagues here believe that your fears regarding the Eldest are an expression of mass paranoia among your builders induced by fundamental contradictions between their natural collectivism and the sapience they evolved into."
Model 17 was less capable of facial expression than the mantislike doctor or she would have nodded. "This is why they were reluctant to take my warning seriously?"
Laying a gentle hand on Model 17's carapace, Rosalind hunkered down beside the robot trilobite. "I'm one of those colleagues Raftan mentioned, Model 17, and I won't deny that I still believe that the contradictory beliefs he refers to can have dangerous consequences both to those who hold them and everyone around them. Except by way of contrast, intelligence and socialism don't even belong in the same sentence, let alone the same belief system."
"I am most sincerely grateful for your honesty, Doctor Nguyen," the robot answered her.
"That's about the most polite way I've ever heard of telling somebody to go to hell, but you're welcome anyway, Model 17, and I am willing to listen seriously about the Eldest. If they're stirring out there, what will you do about them?"
"What I shall do? Some of it I am already doing, preparing for the conflict inevitably to come. The rest depends on how easily I convince you and your companions to travel aboard this vessel with me to the Cometary Halo, where I hope to reimprison—or even destroy—the Eldest while they are not yet fully awakened."
FIFTY-NINE A Bird in the Hand
"Drat!"
The aerostat looped at half the speed of sound, hurling its occupants to the floor of the passenger compartment—temporarily the ceiling—before righting itself to resume course. A flock of large, pink, long-legged birds it had swerved to avoid flew on, unaware of how closely death had brushed their wingtips.
Preening his own feathers indignantly, Aelbraugh Pritsch levered himself back to a sitting position beside Horatio Gutierrez, who was cursing quietly in Spanish. No one knew better than the bird-being himself that the nautiloid Elders he'd served all his life—particularly including his employer of the last couple of centuries, Mister Thoggosh—were imperfect creatures. The vehicle he and the American general presently occupied provided ample illustration of their fallibility.
One of the engineers, the arachnid Nannel Rab, had described it as a "floored torus," which seemed to put any humans who heard it in stitches, reciting arcane phrases like "found on road dead" and "fix or repair daily." They called the aerocraft which served the nautiloid community "flying bagels." For his own part, Aelbraugh Pritsch thought they bore a greater resemblance to red blood cells.
Only a few meters across, their operating principle was foolproof and simple, befitting the sort of rough camping which the colony on 5023 Eris represented. They had no moving parts. A layer of air molecules next to the surface was continuously ionized and drawn to zones of opposing polarity which "flowed" over the surface themselves, creating currents which lifted and propelled the craft in any direction at speeds of several hundred kilometers an hour.
Controlled by cerebro-cortical implant, each aerocraft automatically obeyed the will of its operator. Concealed behind an emergency panel were manual controls, but suitably forewarned, no one in his right mind would consider going into the air in one of these machines if the cybernetics had failed for some reason.
Within the padded passenger compartment, no seats had been provided. Too many different species used these machines, of too many different shapes and sizes. A constant airflow like that on the outer surface created a dynamic windshield and, in a sense, served as seatbelts (he'd never tested this himself), blowing any potential accident victim back inside before he could tumble out—for example on a tight, looping high-speed turn such as they'd just experienced.
With considerable trepidation, Aelbraugh Pritsch sat up straighter and, as an exercise of character, forced himself to peer over the machine's softly rounded edge at the ground.
"It isn't the fall that kills you," Gutierrez joked in English, "it's the sudden stop at the bottom!"
Aelbraugh Pritsch gulped bile, glaring resentfully at Gutierrez, although he doubted that the man would recognize a resentful avian glare when it was aimed at him. He agreed with the general's sentiment, although he didn't understand why it was supposed to be funny. There were many items like that which no one had ever been able to explain to him. Often he sat up all night with references, trying to figure them out. If his texts on sapient behavior had been printed on physical pages, the sections on humor would be the best thumbed by now. He was aware that even his symbiote, a nonsapient reptile, had a better sense of humor than he did.
Nonetheless, he could appreciate how the general's feeble jest might apply as a metaphor to their current circumstances. It wasn't so much this flight from the human encampment he deplored as what would inevitably happen at its end.
From the corner of an eye, he saw Gutierrez looking him over and wondered how he must appear to someone who had never lived among other sapients. About the height of the average human being, he was a typical member of a race descended from the "missing link" between birds and dinosaurs—except that the link wasn't missing; the ancestral form was well known to paleobiologists not only of his own world but to those of many others—who had survived whatever catastrophe had wiped them out in a majority of other universes.
Why this should be, nobody knew. Iridium traces hinting at an asteroid collision with Earth sixty-five million years ago lingered in his world's soil, as they did in almost everybody else's. Perhaps his forebears had taken to living in caves, as was often suggested—scavenging the remains of species that had perished, displacing mammalian scavengers whose offspring came to dominate other worlds—long enough for the atmosphere to clear and the sun to return. Birds had survived elsewhere. Only in his world, as far as he knew (and in this area his knowledge was considerable) had they arisen to sapience.
For whatever reason, the straightest path to sapience, unlike the preposterously circuitous route followed by humans, had in his people retained a birdlike form. Some exigency of natural selection had halted the full development of feathers, fusing individual fibers to form light, flexible armor. As his species' diet became omnivorous—and dependent on manipulative ability—the beak had flattened and softened until it formed a convex inverted shield below his eyes, concealing elementary teeth which were still a subject of controversy among avialogists. Were they descended from the primitive teeth most birds had given up or were they another convergent development?
His legs and feet were birdlike, resembling those of an ostrich. The wing-claws his ancestors shared with other primitive pre-birds—and at least one contemporary species on many versions of Earth—had come to dominate the upper limb structure until they formed hands similar to those of humans, although he could still set the air in an entire room in motion with his broad, pseudofeathered arms.
The representative of a more fanciful people might have tried flight here, where the air pressure was kept at Earth-normal and the gravity was a tenth of that exerted by his homeworld. Such an idea had never occurred to Aelbraugh Pritsch.
His symbiote was a tiny, blue-green jewel-scaled lizard of a type his ancestors had originally brought from their home time line. They'd been kept as decorative pets which made sweet trilling noises and helped their owners control parasites in their plumage. As part of the Great Restitution to all Appropriated Persons, they'd been enhanced the same way Eichra Oren's Sam had been, through selective breeding, genetic engineering, and the addition of sophisticated electronics to their nervous systems. The result was a companion species just below the borderline of sapience, useful for many tasks.
But they no longer sang.
Each Appropriated species had been given symbiotes. This had worked more or less well, depending on the species. One never saw symbiotes with sea-scorpionoids, for example, who had been barbarians when the Elders discovered them. Aelbraugh Pritsch suspected that their erstwhile masters had eaten them.
In the case of Eichra Oren and his fellow humans, it had worked altogether too well. The necessary enhancements, performed on a breed of large white dog found aboard the original sailing vessel escaping the Antarctican catastrophe, had been carried too far, creating symbiotes who were sapient themselves.
The craft dipped abruptly, plummeting toward the nautiloid settlement and skidding to a landing on the platform which served as a foundation for dozens of buildings set a few meters above ground level. Climbing out with the feeling of unfocused gratitude he always experienced, Aelbraugh Pritsch turned to the general.
"Mister Thoggosh will be waiting for you in his office. Will you need my help finding it?"
Gutierrez shook his head. "Once I've been to a place, Aelbraugh Pritsch, I can usually find my way back." He grinned. "Thanks for the ride—I think."
It was one of those rare occasions when the avian understood and shared the feelings of another sapient. He would have grinned back if he'd been physically capable of it.
"You're quite welcome, General. I must be getting along to my own office, then. I'll be available, when you're ready, to transport you back to your encampment."
"Try not to be too disappointed, Aelbraugh Pritsch, if I decide it's a nice day for a walk."
They shook hands, a purely human custom almost everyone on the asteroid had adopted, and parted, the man to his appointment, Aelbraugh Pritsch to his office to observe remotely, as requested, the conversation between human and nautiloid.
By the time the bird-being reached his desk, Gutierrez had descended a dozen steps from the main platform level to Mister Thoggosh's sunken quarters, inhaled the oxygenated fluorocarbon with which they were filled, entered the air lock, and been greeted by his giant host. Relayed by the nautiloid's cerebro-cortical implant, images of the Proprietor's office filled Aelbraugh Pritsch's mind.
As usual, the first thing the human seemed to notice—besides the imposing sight of Mister Thoggosh himself—was the Proprietor's colorful and highly prized songfish, warbling in a cage hanging beside the area of the floor, swept clear of sand by a carefully calculated current, which served the great mollusc as a desk.
"Ah, General, it's good to see you again." The nautiloid lifted a long tentacle, offering Gutierrez a chair. "Would you care for something? Perhaps a hot flask of coffee? I'm having beer."
"Thanks, coffee will be just fine. And it's not really `General' any more, Mister Thoggosh. I've resigned from the American Soviet Aerospace Force. Horatio will do nicely—which reminds me of something I've been meaning to ask about since we arrived here."
In its hanging cage, Mister Thoggosh's songfish trilled sweetly in the momentary silence. From his office a few dozen meters away, Aelbraugh Pritsch watched Mister Thoggosh send his separable limb away to fetch refreshments, gratified that the sight no longer seemed to startle the humans. "And what might that be, Horatio?"
Gutierrez shrugged. "Well, I understand that your civilization has been free of government—"
"Of coercive authority, Horatio. We practice individual self-government. As nearly as I can tell, the only purpose served by the State—yours or any other—is to deny to the average individual the benefits of the Industrial Revolution."
"Somehow," Gutierrez grinned, "they neglected to point that out to us that in high-school civics."
Mister Thoggosh grunted. "Look closely enough at the structure of the State and what it resembles is a network of plumbing designed to drain the lifeblood from the productive class, those willing to work for a living, and deliver it to those who won't—nor do I speak of the `widows and orphans' whom the real beneficiaries inevitably prop up to justify their parasitism. Or have I said all this before?"
"If you have, it wasn't to me. It probably bears saying again." The man nodded. Aelbraugh Pritsch found himself wondering what he was working up to. "Self-government. And that's the way it's been with you for something like half a billion years?"
"More like 350 million. Here's your coffee." The nautiloid took a long, satisfying draft from the fluorocarbontight sipping tube of his own container. Gutierrez followed suit. "Even we did not create Utopia in a day, Horatio."
