by Ian Stewart
"Moses?"
The boy stepped forward. Was this to be what he was ready for?
"Face Halfholder. Now remove the glove from your right hand—it will survive the cold, I assure you. Mine have."
Moses pulled off the glove and stuffed it in a pocket.
The lama turned to Halfholder, and Reliant Robin 2 translated his instructions and Halfholder's replies. "Bright Halfholder of the Violent Foam: you have prepared as I asked?"
«Respected Unity, the modification has been made.»
"You trust my assertion that the heat will cause no lasting damage?"
«No. There is no need for trust. I have made the necessary
calculations myself, and they concur with your own.» With that, Halfholder opened a sphincter valve in her life-support bag and extended an unprotected trunk through the alien atmosphere toward Moses' bare hand.
They touched.
Moses shivered, not at the feel of her, but at the enormity of it. First contact. A transcendental moment, beyond time and space, beyond imagination . . . Everything that had come before was a sham by comparison.
A jew seconds, and no more . . . Her hide was bitterly cold, so cold that it almost burned his fingertips. It was dry and slightly yielding, like chamois leather. It was ... He didn't have the words. Tears streamed down his face, freezing in the icy air; he didn't notice. But he did realize that if Halfholder's skin felt so cold to him, then his must feel like a furnace to her.
He took his hand off her trunk, the hardest thing he'd ever had to do in his life. But he would have died rather than risk causing her harm.
At that moment Charles would have given anything to be in Moses' place, but he understood why the Cuckoo had chosen only one of them. There was a practical reason: prolonged contact with human warmth would damage the alien's body. And there was a symbolic reason: the moment had to he unique. Since it had to be just one of them, Moses was the only possible choice.
Prudence felt the hairs on her neck rise. Her skin tingled all over. It was a feeling she would never forget.
Halfholder quickly slid her trunk back inside her life-support bag, which resealed itself. The human's hide was wonderful— astonishingly supple, soft as egg pulp, with a funny thin film of. . .fur, that's what they called it—but it did make your hide sting.
The Cuckoo broke the spell. "That was not the sole reason for bringing you here," he said quietly. "But we can discuss the
rest somewhere more comfortable. Allow me to lead the way." He descended into the cavity that had been hidden under the rock.
The others followed. The rock swung back into place behind them.
Crystal flakes of snow began to fall on to the summit of Chu-mulangma, erasing the footprints and wheeler tracks the group had made. Soon it was as if they had never been there.
Halfholder was led off down a side tunnel to recover in a Jovian environment; the Cuckoo remained with his human visitors, for he still had much to reveal to them. He led them to a small, well lit, and above all warm room. While the visitors were removing their outer layers of mountaineering gear, a tall, elderly monk entered, carrying a metal casket. This she handed respectfully to her master.
"The Wagtail has brought us a holy relic," said the Cuckoo, opening the lid. "Prudence, you will recall these inscriptions."
She leaned over and looked in: the casket held a resin cast of a clay tablet, marked with hieroglyphs. Not Egyptian—earlier. Proto-hieroglyphs. "It is the pre-Egyptian text that you had me translate for you, with excessive secrecy. The one that earned me Tiglath-Pileser." The Cuckoo said nothing. "The one that had much in common with another, which I found—which Charles and I found—inside the Sphinx."
"That is so."
"But you didn't show me these images—the ones inscribed alongside the text! You held out on me!"
"It was not then time. The Way of the Wholesome has many secrets, and the original of this tablet is one of our most precious. Do you see what the markings are?"
"An arc, a sphere . . . some scribbles."
"Look more closely, daughter. Unfocus your mind."
"That one looks like . . . Africa, I suppose. In which case, the others are—no, they can't be!"
"Give voice to your thoughts."
"At the bottom, Normerica; above, Soumerica. It's a globe of the Earth, upside down! But the Americas weren't discovered until. . . Your pardon. We know of several 'discoveries' of the Americas. What we do not know is which was the first."
The Cuckoo brought the palms of his hands together. "What do we deduce from this?"
"Some deductions are obvious," said Charles, butting in. "The pre-Egyptian civilization was more powerful than the one that followed it. Its people knew that the Earth was round, and they knew of the Americas. They must have set up regular trade routes between the continents . . . which, of course, would explain a number of archaeological puzz—"
"I agree, those deductions are obvious. Now, Charles Dunsmoore: tell me something that is not obvious. Such as how they knew the shapes of the continents." Charles fell silent. "Let me offer a hint. We have identified the circle and the marks upon it. But there is another line in the pictograph."
"The wide, curved line ... It curves down at the ends, like a frown, while the Earth rests upon it, like a nose."
"Mkha'-gro: where did you find that tahletV
The Cuckoo ignored her. "Charles?"
"It reminds me of something . . . something very old, very famous . . . Oh! The Moon? Has to be. It's a picture of the Earth, seen from the Moon."
"Exactly. And to answer your question. Prudence: the image depicts a view from somewhere near the south pole of the Moon, and that is where the tablet was discovered. Nearly eighty years ago, when I was a young monk engaged in surveying the Belt, one of our people found this tablet lying in the shadow of a crater during construction work at our South Polar Moonbase."
"It must be a fake, then," said Charles.
"No, it is perfectly genuine. It has been examined by experts."
"You're saying that the pre-Egyptians had spacejlightl Nuts. They'd have needed a major industrial civilization—there'd be remains on Earth and on the Moon."
"Time quickly obliterates the works of humanity," said the Cuckoo. "Relics from those times may still exist. Some will be buried beneath the desert, some will have been reused by later civilizations, and some will have been misinterpreted. In central Africa there are ancient earthworks so gigantic that they were long thought to be natural formations—history misinterpreted as geography, so to speak." He chuckled at his own joke. "There are more pyramids in Nubia than in the whole of Egypt, and many ancient sites there are still unexplored ... I have often wondered if the tablet might be pre-Nubian rather than pre-Egyptian.
"As for the Moon—Charles, my friend, the exploration of the Moon is in its infancy The Way of the Wholesome has made no more than a cursory examination of a few regions near the poles. For all we know, there could be a dozen perfectly preserved pre-Egyptian lunar bases, but we would never see them from orbit if they had been tunneled into crater walls."
"What about launch pads?" Charles objected. He wasn't ready to concede yet.
"We do not know what technology the pre-Egyptian astronauts employed."
Charles gave a skeptical grunt. "You're basing an awful lot on appeals to ignorance."
"Ignorance is the human condition, my friend. The universe does not maintain records for our edification. We cannot know history," he said. "We can know only what is preserved for us by the whim of chance. How this tablet came to be on the Moon will probably be forever hidden. But the pre-Egyptians must have possessed some form of space travel, or else it could not have been found there. Whether it was rockets or anti-
gravity, they were indeed more powerful than those who followed."
Charles was still trying to take it in. Prudence saw the other implications. "Then—this explains so many things about Egyptian civilization! Their obsession with the sta
rs! The alignments of shafts in the pyramids! And the py—"
The Cuckoo laid a fatherly hand on her arm. "Not so fast, my daughter. These are simplistic speculations, unworthy of your sharp mind. Many other cultures were obsessed with the stars. Why, unless I had stopped you, you might have gone on to suggest that the pyramids were some kind of cargo-cult representation of spaceships."
Prudence gave him a sheepish grin. "That would be very foolish."
"Indeed. A pyramid is not a good shape for a spacecraft. In any case, the evidence that we do have points in other, far more remarkable directions." He gestured to an unseen attendant, and the room darkened . . .
Shallow-wave limhilic died today, caught in a sudden carbon shower. I have slowed my vorticity in his memory.
I am fortunate to live in the lower layers — not too near the core, where the pressures play strange tricks with one's mental stability; not too close to the Void, where freedom becomes so easy that one is embarrassed by choice, and the maintenance of a consistent attitude is virtually impossible. No, the lower layers are where any truly civilized person would choose to be. Memories persist in the lower layers. There is continuity, a sense of self an opportunity to dream of grandiose schemes, to relish the swirling nobility of self-organization. Here topologies can complicate, or not, at will. Unlike the core, where the complexity required for survival is self-defeating, or the sky tops, where structures self-simplify no matter how cunningly they are constructed.
In the skytops, they say, bodies disintegrate more rapidly than they can he assembled. It must be a strange and desolate place.
I swirl, and spin, and dream of life in the core. I like being complex, I complicate myself voluntarily at every opportunity. I sense the patterns — the currents and streams and reaction paths of the world. I keep track of the transmutation trees, trying to outness the trails of the lijeless ones. Oj course, I seldom succeed — and when I do, I am sure it is only by chance. Nevertheless, I dream of the dark complexities of the core, the pulsating jerment of the higher reactions, and sometimes (blasphemy!) I wonder about the crystal realm of the Ultimate Levels. But that, absolutely, is not my place.
Illicit dreams . . .
Sometimes I have dreams that jrighten me. Dreams of cold things that jloat in the Far Void. Dreams that those distant realms are not as dead as the teachers declare. Ijreely acknowledge that my dreams are joolish, jor the conditions jor lije are well understood. The scholars have dejined the precise parameters of nuclear turbulence that permit recursively selj-complicating algorithmic vortex activity, which all agree dejines the essence of a living being. How else could a plas-moid system occupy a selj-rejerential phase space? It stands to reason.
Despite which, I wonder . . .
. . . and I awaken jrom my daydream in haste and panic as a knot of tangled jield lines sweeps past, collapsing several subspaces of my quantum eigenjunctions. Fortunately the damaged junctions can be recompiled by successive approximation jrom wild wavejunctions in my immediate environment. But today I have learned a valuable lesson, one I hope never to jorget, topological losses permitting.
Ij I were a believer, I would pray jor persistence of memory. But I am a rationalist, and to me the worship of the Bright Spirals seems pointless and, indeed, primitive.
Ah, what exquisite pain to be an intelligent plasmoidJ Once more I incline toward the crushed existence of the core, where such thoughts are jorbidden by long-timescale conservation laws . . .
* * *
The glowing letters ceased their flow and the ambient lighting ramped slowly back to normal.
"Mkha'-gro: what the devil was that about?"
The Cuckoo shifted slightly in his seat: his back was having problems again. He must remember to move more. "It is an extract from the Jovian archives, Prudence. Its identifier translates as Diary of a Heretic. It is not Jovian: it is from their dealings with creatures they call plasmoids."
"It's weird. What's a plasmoid?"
"Some of the other Jovian records mentioned plasmoids," said Charles. "Nobody ever worked out what they were . . ." He gave the Cuckoo a quizzical look. "I don't recall this particular item being released to the public."
"Charles, you can't possibly remember every single record in the Jovian database!"
"Very true. Prudence, but I recall this one vividly because it was so weird. And we classified it and encrypted it because we didn't understand it. Cuckoo? How did you come by this? Is there an explanation?"
The elderly lama sighed. "Subterfuge is sometimes unavoidable. The Way of the Wholesome must protect its interests. Several members of the Skylarks team were monks of this order, as you know. I need say no more."
"What categories of information did your snoops steal?"
"A choice of terminology that pains me, but I concede the point. As I said: sometimes subterfuge is unavoidable. We wished to ensure that we received all records related to the existence of an early spacefaring civilization on Earth. The Way of the Wholesome has a special interest in such matters."
Now Charles was completely baffled. Had the old man gone mad? "What do these plasmoid things have to do with pre-Egyptian spaceflight?"
" 'But now the gods-that-dwell-heneath-the-Sun arose,' " Prudence
declaimed, " 'and their wrath was as the wrath of a raging torrent, and they spread great wings of burning flame. And their breath became a breath of fire, and they spat at Anshethrat. And the Moon was aflame, and the sky was aflame, and the Earth was aflame, and every tree in the city of Gyzer turned to blackened ashes, and every house in the city became as a pillar of flame.' " His face was a picture. "The Y-ra'i, Charles. The 'gods that dwell beneath the Sun.' Only you were right all along, my translation was poor. It's not 'beneath.'"
"No," said the Cuckoo. "It is 'within.'"
From hints and allusions in the fovian records, and their own slab of pre-Egyptian legend, the Way of the Wholesome had put together a coherent story . . .
Compared to the plasmoids, Jovians and humans were pretty much identical. Both were molecular, both lived on planets, and both used coded genetic information in the course of their reproduction. Plasmoids were very different. A plasmoid was a complex weave of interlocking vortices of superheated plasma, a "flying carpet" of irregular shape up to three hundred miles across, and it lived inside a star. It derived its organizational complexity, and its long-term stability, from the topological complexity of knots and links. A plasmoid was a suit of chain mail whose links were elaborately knotted whirlpools of mag-netohydrodynamic plasma. Plasmoid genotype was identical to phenotype: the "information" required to create a new plasmoid was held in the topology of the parent's body plan. Plasmoids reproduced by a process of link-doubling that was akin to three-dimensional photocopying, though it would probably take human science half a millennium to figure out the details of how the two sets of vortices were successfully separated.
Topological errors in this photocopying process had made it possible for early proto-plasmoids to evolve. One of the first
successful plasmoid life-forms was the magnetotorus, a huge ring of glowing plasma. Magnetotori learned to surf the solar winds, sucking in hydrogen fuel from their surroundings. They were living Bussard ramjets, dolphins of the interstellar winds, tasting the heady currents of space . . . Vast herds of wild magnetotori roamed the interstellar wastes, grazing on Stardust.
The blimps had learned to tame magnetotori, breaking their animal spirits and bending them to their masters' wills. They used their tame magnetotori as celestial beasts of burden. Blimp starships were magnetotori with payloads. What the blimps had not known, until too late, was that far earlier the plasmoids in some stars had evolved intelligence. These sentient plasmoids had undergone a cosmic diaspora—first by hitching rides on magnetotori, later by metamorphosing into structured electromagnetic radiation and broadcasting themselves across the galaxy at the speed of light. Subsequently the sentient plasmoids had evolved culturally, becoming placid intellectuals and mystics
who preferred to remain deep inside their own comfortable stars instead of risking death and dissociation in the interstellar void.
Then the blimps invented gravitic repulsion and started flinging undesirable comets and asteroids into Firsthome's Sun. This disturbed their star's normally introspective plasmoids by disrupting the peaceful nuclear processes of their breeding grounds. To the plasmoids it was inconceivable that nonplasma life-forms could possibly exist, so it took them an unconscionably long time to realize that the incoming projectiles were not some Act of God, but an Act of Blimp. Having done so, however, they were quick to deal with the threat. Out of a mystic respect for all life-forms, whatever their materials, the plasmoids could not resort to the obvious remedy of scorching Firsthome back to molten rock with a barrage of controlled solar flares. Instead, they made life impossible for the blimps by generating erratic changes in the star's output of heat and light. And their mysticism was robust enough to countenance an occasional limited
torching of selected regions of the planet, as a warning. The blimps assumed that their sun's wild behavior was the result of some chaotic physical process and quickly came to the horrible conclusion that they had brought the disaster upon themselves through their obsessive tidiness regarding errant comets and asteroids. This was true, although they were seriously mistaken about details.
Whatever the cause, their only path to survival was to harness up the magnetotori, evacuate their home world, and find somewhere else to live. And so they had embarked upon their lengthy Exodus. Arriving at Secondhome after numerous terrible experiences, they vowed never again to risk disturbing their own sun. Only later did they learn the real reason for the Exodus, when they made contact with the Sun's plasmoids.
"And the pre-Egyptian tablets?" Prudence asked.
"We believe they record a burst of plasmoid activity in our own Sun. The plasmoid diaspora, we are convinced, included the colonization of Earth's own star."