Part 11 (1/2)

...rstanding came about.

Survival seemed a.s.sured.

Then the machine came.

OX recognized it instantly, though he had never experienced this type of interaction before. The intrusion of the machine activated his alarm circuits. Here was Pattern's deadliest threat!

OX acted. He formed a decoy shoot designed to preempt the attention of the machine. It resembled ideal prey because it exhibited tokens keyed to the machine's perceptions: the glint of refined, polished metal; the motion of seeming blight; the sparkle of the periphery of a true pattern-ent.i.ty. The machine was not intelligent enough or experienced enough to penetrate the ruse. It followed the shoot.

The shoot moved out on a simulated evasion course, the machine slicing vigorously at it. The shoot would fizzle out at a suitable distance from the locale of the spots -- by which time the machine would have forgotten them. The threat had been abated, and all the spots were safe.

Chapter 7.

FOREST.

Agents were disciplined; they had firm control over their emotions. Even consciousness-changing drugs could not subvert this, unless their actions overrode the total function of the brain. The subconscious mind of an agent was integrated with the conscious so that there were no suppressed pa.s.sions, no buried monsters.

But the brutal slaying of a human infant had shaken her. The agent training and surgery could not eliminate the most fundamental drives that made her a woman. To watch, even in replica, a baby being sliced alive like so much bologna and funneled into the maw of a machine...

Then Veg had disrupted the image, and it had not returned. Perhaps that was just as well.

Another thing bothered her: the feeling that the image was not a mockup but a transmission. As with a televised picture: a replica of events actually occurring elsewhere. If so, this was no threat to cow the captives; it was the presentation of vital information.

Perhaps the controlling ent.i.ty expected them to absorb the news like so many sponges. Probably there was more to come. But she was not inclined to wait on alien convenience. It was time to act.

Before she could act, she had to reconnoiter and get back in touch with Taler. That meant giving Cal and the mantas the slip.

But she could not afford to leave the human trio to its own devices. That was why she had come along on this projection! If she left them alone now, they could come up with some inconvenient mischief, just as they had on Paleo.

Answer, straight from the manual: take a hostage. There was no problem which one. Cal was too smart to control directly -- if, indeed, he could be controlled at all. He had given the agents a lesson back at Paleo! Aquilon would be difficult to manage because she was female, and complicated. The mantas were out of the question. So it had to be Veg: male, manageable, and not too smart. And she had primed him already.

Meanwhile, the others were recovering from their shock. No subtlety here; they reacted exactly as human beings should be expected to. Perhaps that was part of the point: The aliens intended to test the party in various ways, cataloguing their responses, much as psychiatrists tested white rats.

”What does it mean?” Aquilon asked, shading her eyes with one hand as though to shut off the glare of the vision.

”It means they can reach us -- emotionally as well as physically,” Cal said slowly. ”Whenever they want to. We could be in for a very ugly series of visions. But what they are trying to tell us -- that is unclear.”

Tamme turned to the nearest manta. ”Did you see it?” she inquired.

”Circe didn't see the vision,” Aquilon answered. ”Their eyes are different; they can't pick up totalities the way we do. They have no conception of perspective or of art.”

Tamme knew that. She had studied the material on the fungoid creatures before pa.s.sing through the aperture from Earth to Paleo. She knew they were cunning and dangerous; one had escaped captivity and hidden on a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p bound for the region of s.p.a.ce containing the manta home-world of Nacre. It had never been killed or recaptured despite a strenuous search, and they had had to place a temporary proscription on Planet Nacre to prevent any more mantas from entering s.p.a.ce.

The manta's eye was an organic cathode emitting a controlled beam of light and picking up its reflections from surrounding objects. That radar eye was unexcelled for the type of seeing that it did and worked as well in darkness as in light. But it had its limitations, as Aquilon had described. Yet if the mantas had seen the cloud-picture, this would have been highly significant.

Cal understood. ”We see with one system, the manta with another. A comparison of the two could have led to significant new insights about the nature of the force that brought us here and showed us this scene.” He shook his head. ”But we have verified that the mantas see only flares of energy in the cloud, winking on and off extremely rapidly. They can not perceive the source of these flares and are not equipped to see any pictures.”

”Let's sleep on it,” Veg said gruffly.

”The baby -- something about it -- ” Aquilon said.