Part 16 (1/2)

He was surrounded by a dozen cheerfully babbling children-sweet, obedient, charming . . .

Stupid.

No matter how much a parent loves his little ones, there comes a time when he wishes they would grow up . . . and Wan-To realized ruefully that he had made that impossible for his new flock. He was almost tempted to make a few more, with just a trifle trifle more of independence and aggressiveness . . . more of independence and aggressiveness . . .

But self-preservation always intervened.

Then he got his first real surprise.

One of his widespread Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs reported peculiar behavior on the part of a star in its neighborhood. The thing had flared. flared.

Well, that in itself wasn't very interesting. Stars were flaring somewhere in his galaxy all the time; it was a thing that some stars did. But this one was different. Frighteningly Frighteningly different. It wasn't behaving in the normal fas.h.i.+on of any proper flare star, but very much the way Wan-To and his earlier family had caused in their jolly little war of brothers. It was what Earthly astronomers had briefly called a ”Sorricaine-Mtiga object”- different. It wasn't behaving in the normal fas.h.i.+on of any proper flare star, but very much the way Wan-To and his earlier family had caused in their jolly little war of brothers. It was what Earthly astronomers had briefly called a ”Sorricaine-Mtiga object”- And it was not natural.

For a moment Wan-To felt stark terror. Had some of the others survived and sought him out here? Had some of his new brood somehow, impossibly, managed to break through their programming? Was there a threat? threat?

If it was, it was not from any of his children. He queried each one of them, sternly, carefully, and their innocently wondering replies were convincing. ”Oh, no, Wan-To, I I haven't destroyed any stars. How could I? I don't know haven't destroyed any stars. How could I? I don't know how.” how.” And, ”We And, ”We wouldn't wouldn't do anything like that, Wan-To, you wouldn't do anything like that, Wan-To, you wouldn't let let us.” us.”

Nevertheless another star flared.

The alternative possibility was even more frightening. Could one of that old crew of ingrates have followed him here? But there were no signs of it-none of any intelligence in any of the four hundred billion stars of his new galaxy. Not even a whisper of tachyon transmission, not anywhere.

As a last, baffled resort, it occurred to Wan-To to check some of the planets in systems near the flared stars . . . and what he then found was the most incredible thing of all.

There were artifacts artifacts there! On there! On planets! planets! There were planets where energy was being released, sometimes quite a lot of it, in forms and with modulations that were never natural! There were planets where energy was being released, sometimes quite a lot of it, in forms and with modulations that were never natural!

There was alien life in his galaxy, and it was made of solid matter. matter.

For the first time in many millions of years Wan-To thought of his lost doppel on the little planet he had sent speeding off into infinity. That had told him of solid-matter life, too, and he had dismissed it. But what was going on here was something else. These-creatures-were using quite high-order forces. If they could flare stars, then they knew how to manipulate the vector bosons that controlled gravity. And that meant that they might someday threaten Wan-To.

There was only one thing to do about that. Horrified, Wan-To did what any householder would do when he discovered loathsome pests in his backyard. It was a job for an exterminator.

It was only when Wan-To had made quite sure that none of those pesky little things survived that he thought of his lost doppel again. His good humor recovered, he thought with amus.e.m.e.nt of the way the doppel had tolerated them.

Well, if it had, Wan-To thought, it probably by now had learned the error of its ways.

But in fact the doppel hadn't.

It had been a long time for the doppel to be out of contact with Wan-To-not nearly as long, in its time-dilated frame of reference, as it had been for Wan-To himself, of course, but still long enough. It had been quite long enough for the doppel to realize, with a real sense of loss, that there weren't ever going to be any fresh orders from its master.

The doppel had no way of communicating with Wan-To's murderous rivals, either. Even if they hadn't been cut off by the relativistic effects of the system's all-but-light velocity just as Wan-To himself had, Five had no Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky mechanisms for reaching them anyway. Wan-To had made sure of that. In fact, there was not any intelligent being, anywhere within the range of the doppel's senses, at all-except for those few strange solid-matter creatures it had permitted to live (for a while) on the surface of its planet.

The doppel certainly had very little in common with such rude ent.i.ties. But they were there, there, and even a doppel can get lonesome. and even a doppel can get lonesome.

It was for that reason that Five had permitted the survivors among the creatures that fell out of the destroyed Ark Ark to reach the surface of Nebo without being annihilated. One of them, unfortunately, had gotten seriously broken when Five bashed its container, but there were three others. to reach the surface of Nebo without being annihilated. One of them, unfortunately, had gotten seriously broken when Five bashed its container, but there were three others.

In its first casual ”glance” Five saw that there was nothing about the three surviving little monsters that const.i.tuted any kind of a threat. If they had been a little more technologically advanced-if they had carried with them any of that worrisome antimatter that the s.h.i.+p held, or any kind of weaponry more advanced than mere chemistry-then they would have died before they touched ground.

Five was not very intelligent, but it was smart enough to be a.s.sured that these things represented no danger at all.

Well, then, what did they represent?

When Five reported them to its master, Wan-To's response was not very helpful. Wan-To didn't tell it what to do about them. Wan-To left the matter discretionary.

So Five did what it was best equipped to do. It studied the things.

From the point of view of little Luo Fah, the first in the landing party whom Five chose to examine, that process was terrifying, agonizing, and fatal. Luo had hardly stepped out of the lander, mask pumping oxygen into her faceplate, pistol at the ready, when she was s.n.a.t.c.hed brutally into the air and-well-disa.s.sembled. The clothes, the gun, and the air mask were the first to go, as Five methodically dismantled its curious little specimen to see what it was all about. There was stark fear and a lot of pain as things were wrenched off her with little concern for what they did to her clutching fingers and resisting limbs. The next part was far worse, but fortunately for Luo she didn't feel it. She was dead by the time the interior of her body was opened up for study.

The other two in the team were luckier-for a while.

One specimen had been enough for Five to deduce, roughly, how these things worked. They had a chemical basis, it perceived. They required an influx of gases (it didn't call the process ”breathing,” but it understood the necessity from the distress Luo had exhibited when it took her mask away). So it determined simply to observe the others for a while.

Five was cautious, of course. When it detected electromagnetic radiation, definitely patterned in nonnatural ways, coming from something inside the lander it could not permit that-who knew what the purpose of it was? So it destroyed the lander's radio transmitter with one quick, controlled bolt. That was bad luck for the man who happened to be the one transmitting, because the blast burned his face quite horribly. But it wasn't quite as bad for Jake Lundy, because Five then perceived that it had to be more careful with these things.

Five did not exactly have emotions. What Five had was orders. They were the commandments written in stone. They could not be violated . . . but what a pity that they hadn't included instructions for dealing with these solid-matter creatures and their artifacts.

Five also had a good deal of resourcefulness. What it didn't know it was quite capable of trying to learn. It was always possible, it reasoned, that at some time Wan-To would call again and would want to be fully informed about these unexpected visitors.

So it permitted those two to live. They were fascinating to watch. Five was fascinated to observe, as the burn victim's wounds slowly began to heal, that they seemed to have some sort of built-in repair systems, like Five itself. (But then why hadn't the two earlier ones managed to put themselves back together?) As Five learned more and more about their needs it even provided them with the kinds of air they seemed to want-the kinds, at least, that they kept inside their vehicle. When it deduced they also needed water-by observing how carefully they measured it out to each other in captivity-it made them some water. When it discovered they needed ”food”-which took quite a while longer, and the two survivors were cadaverous by the time Five got to that point-that was harder, but Five had of course long since investigated the chemistry of the things the specimens had eaten, and of the excrement they insisted on carrying outside and burying. It was no impossible task for Five to create a range of organic materials to offer them; and some, in fact, they did seem to be willing to ”eat.”

Unfortunately for Jake and his one surviving companion, that was pretty late in the game.

Five saw that things were going badly for its specimens. They were moving slower and more feebly. Sometimes they hardly moved at all for long periods. They spent a lot of time making sound vibrations to each other, but those slowed and became less frequent with time, too, as did their peculiar habit of, one at a time, making those same sound vibrations to a kind of metallic instrument. (Naturally Five investigated the instrument, but it seemed to do nothing more than make magnetic a.n.a.logues of those vibrations on a spool of metal ribbon, so it returned the thing to them only slightly damaged.) Five wondered why they didn't copy themselves, so as to have new, young beings of their sort to carry on for them. It thought that would be nice. That would provide a permanent stock of such playthings; Five could investigate them in detail, over a long period of time, offering them all kinds of challenges and rewards to see what they would do.

Disappointingly, the time came when the second of them stopped moving entirely, and as the body began to bloat Five reluctantly conceded that its specimens had died. And they hadn't ever copied themselves!

Five could not understand at all. It had never occurred to the doppel that they were both male.

A little while later-oh, a few hundred years-when the specimens were long dissolved into uninteresting dust, Five got another surprise.

When the doppel had not heard from Wan-To for all that time, because the relativistic s.h.i.+ft had decoupled its Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pair, it began to wonder if it should not try some other kind of communication. Or, more important, whether Wan-To was trying to call it, say, by means of tachyons.

So it began listening more intently on the tachyon frequencies, then even on the unlikely electromagnetic ones. It heard nothing-nothing, at least, from any stellar source anywhere, except for the endless hiss of hydrogen and the chatter of carbon monoxide and the mutterings from all the other excited molecules in the stellar photospheres and gas clouds-nothing that was artificial. artificial.

Until it realized that there was, in fact, a quite definitely artifactual signal beginning to come in now and then on the radio frequencies. It closely resembled the one that had caused it to destroy the lander's radio-and it came from Five's own solar system.

In fact, it came from a planet. planet. That was astonis.h.i.+ng to Five. A human being would not have been more surprised if a tree had spoken to him. That was astonis.h.i.+ng to Five. A human being would not have been more surprised if a tree had spoken to him.

Of course, the doppel had no idea what messages were being conveyed by these bizarre signals, but once it had located their source it took a closer look in the optical frequencies, and what it saw gave it a start.

The hulk of the s.h.i.+p it had blasted was beginning to move under its own power again. It was being hijacked!

In that moment of discovery, Five came very close to again unleas.h.i.+ng the forces that had destroyed Ark in the first place. If it had been a human, its fingers would have been on the b.u.t.ton. Since Five was only a matter doppel it had no fingers; but the generators which produced the X-ray laser began to glow and build up to full power.

But they didn't fire.

Five withheld the command. It couldn't make up its mind what to do. If only Wan-To could be asked for instructions!