"I was," Slitherfear answered immediately.
"You falsify!" the Erb flashed indignantly. "I was first."
The representative oriented on Heem. ¿You make a similar claim?¿
'Brother!' Jessica exclaimed. Heem only sprayed agreement.
¿We shall then await arrival of the Competition Authority Vehicle, and convey the three of you to an interrogation station, where the truth shall be ascertained. Analysis of your aural printouts will immediately—¿
The communication was cut off by Slitherfear's action. The Squam lunged into the Fa¿, knocking him down. One limb reached for the apex-spiral, and the pincer clamped on it and wrenched it out of the body.
Both Heem and the Erb moved forward, but Slitherfear was already slithering away. One pincer grasped the translator. "There will be no aural printouts," the Squam said. "I have nullified the Fa¿."
"You have not nullified us!" Heem jetted, his shock at this horrendous deed converting to cold anger. "We know the truth, not the Fa¿."
The Squam's body heaved. His stomach extruded— and it was no living membrane, but a fiber sac. That meant that Heem's action, there in the valley of Morning-mist, had been effective; the Squam had had to have his stomach amputated. He probably lived on artificial infusions of chemicals.
From the sac tumbled a cylindrical object. The fiber stomach was then sucked back in, and Slitherfear picked up the object. It fitted neatly in one set of pincers the three surfaces holding it without slippage. "So nice of you to allow me leisure to extract my tool. You, HydrO, will murder the Fa¿ by needling him through the torso; he is only comatose while his spiral perceptor is disconnected. I will then have to kill you and the Erb in defense of self."
'This is so dastardly it's crazy!' Jessica exclaimed. 'Heem, you're not about to murder the Competition Authority Representative!'
"I believe you are overly optimistic," the Erb flashed at the Squam. "I was not first to the apex of the tower, but if you kill the HydrO, he will be eliminated by death and you by disqualification, and I will become the legitimate winner. My aural printout will show the validity of my claim. I believe you have already disqualified yourself by your attack on the Fa¿."
Slitherfear aimed his cylinder at the prone creature. A needle of water shot out, piercing the Fa¿. The torso humped in agony, the limbs thrashing; then it subsided. The taste of mortality suffused the air. "As you can perceive the Representative has been needled to death," Slitherfear said. He put a second pincer to his weapon, clamping on it and breaking it apart. He threw it to the floor.
Abruptly the weapon burst into flame. The heat was fierce but brief; then nothing remained but the dissipating taste of combustion. It had been a self-destruct item.
"This remains unclear to me," the Erb flashed. "You may frame the HydrO and kill him—but you cannot also kill me. And if you could, you would still be subject to the aural printout yourself."
"This is part of my expertise for this mission," Slitherfear said. "I am the Star Squam representative; I have no transferee. Instead I have an aural scrambler. No clear printout is possible. The truth can not be had from me."
"An aural scrambler!" Heem jetted. "This would affect the scruples, even the sanity of any entity who employed it for any prolonged period."
'Like a pact with the devil,' Jessica agreed. 'The devil takes your soul in return for material gain.'
The implication had not been lost on the Erb. He flashed at the translator, but his message was for Heem. "HydrO, we compete with a mad creature. I think you and I had better form a—"
The translator crashed to the floor. Its message ceased. The Squam had destroyed it, too, before Erb and HydrO could come to an agreement.
The Erb formed his drill and moved purposefully toward the Squam. Slitherfear retreated quickly into the passage behind him. His sanity was evidently not so far eroded as to make him that foolish. He had to kill the Erb, but could hardly do so in a direct, fair encounter. He would avoid contact until he could obtain some illicit advantage. Perhaps he had another weapon hidden in his pseudostomach.
'Do you think we can trust the Erb?' Jessica asked worriedly. 'He can only win by seeing us both killed.'
"True. He did try to falsify his order of arrival to the Competition Authority Representative. He may balk at murder, but we can not safely assume so. He may even be a decent sort, like Windflower, but he's not here to be decent. We had best stay clear of him. We don't need to attack him, even assuming we can penetrate his protective shield. All we need do now is survive until Competition Authority reinforcements come; then we shall be adjudged the victors."
'Maybe it would be smartest simply to retreat for the time being,' she said. 'Let the other two fight it out, while we wait for the Authority. You don't have to kill Slitherfear directly, even if the Erb doesn't catch him; just by surviving, you will finish him, because he is guilty of murdering a neutral sapient entity. You can be sure he won't get off this rap; it would make an inter-Segment incident. His scrambler will do him no good, if you are present to testify.'
"True." Was he being sensible, or merely yielding to his fear of the Squam?
'You're not afraid, Heem! You never were a coward, and now with your needles sharp you're as formidable as any HydrO can be. There's just no profit in charging blindly into battle. Besides, we'll have a better chance if we familiarize ourselves with the locale. We might even set an ambush for the Squam, since he has to come to us if he wants to win.'
Good tactics! Slitherfear would indeed come for them, for to fail to do so would be to lose. They could prepare a fitting reception.
Heem rolled down the passage most nearly opposite the one the Squam had used. It opened shortly on another chamber, also with five branching exits, including the passage they had come on. 'Uh, you know we could get lost in here, if the rooms are all the same,' Jessica said nervously.
"If we are lost, the Squam cannot locate us," he reminded her. "But we shall not be lost; I will know the taste of my own trail when I cross it, and can follow it back."
'Nothing here,' she said, reassured, forming the image of the bare chamber. 'The Ancients really cleaned it out when they left. But if they knew they were leaving, why didn't they turn off the tower mechanism?'
"It is hard to fathom the rationale of the Ancients! Perhaps they expected to return—and were caught unawares by their abrupt demise."
'But this is so clean! It's not just mothballed for later use, it's empty. The way you leave a house when you're moving for good.'
"A what?"
'Oh, never mind! Just keep rolling along.'
Heem rolled along, down the opposite passage. They came to another chamber, and another. 'It's a labyrinth!' Jessica exclaimed. 'But what's its purpose? It just doesn't seem to make much sense.'
"If we were able to make sense of the Ancients, we might achieve their level."
'I don't know that there's much here to exploit. The mechanisms of the tower, that's all. Some sites have had important transfer technology, but if this was just a survey marker station...' She let her thought fade into tasteless-ness.
Then, abruptly, a passage opened into a much larger chamber. All about the perimeter were point flavors, in the same multi-sense technique as the tower globes. 'The stars!' Jessica said. 'This is a planetarium! An astrotarium! The Ancients liked the stars; they had representations—' Her image replaced the taste-pattern, as it had when they threaded the needle between Star and Hole. The stars became bright constellations, scintillating on a black background.
They rolled to the center of the chamber, and it was as if the galaxy spread out about them. The stars were not mere dabs of taste or light, but tangibilities in full dimension. Depth, intensity, color—all were present, wonderfully.
'Why are some stars keyed wrong?'
Heem realized she was correct. He had considerable mental awareness of the configuration of local space. This multi-dimensional map was far more detailed than what his mind could hold, and hi
ghly accurate. It was, of course, Ancient-old; but most stars did not change very much in such a period. There was a wrongness about their representation that the passage of time could not account for.
'Heem—you're familiar with this galactic locale. Is there—are the stars all there, in the picture?'
"There are more stars than any mind can track," he jetted. "But all the habitable systems are keyed in, in a shade of color-taste, and all—" He paused, as the significance of the elementary keying opened to him. "All inhabited systems are keyed in. Star HydrO, Star Erb, Star Squam, the other Stars of this Segment—all my mind can verify are present. But not Holestar."
'Of course not. This is System Holestar, and it had no sapient life-forms three million years ago. Except for the visiting Ancients, of course, and the barracks-builders, who were probably also of non-System origin. The only native life would have been plants and maybe low-grade animals. Even the rats of the tunnels are probably imports, vermin who sneaked in on spaceships and took over after the premises were vacated. They could not have evolved on Eccentric, since there were no non-lava passages before the sapients colonized it.'
"A variant keying indicates other inhabited systems, as many as the ones we know, but this is wrong. I recognize a number of these. System Extirpate, where a nova seems to have wiped clear all life—"
'Seems to have?'
"HydrO technicians explored it long ago. There were a few artifacts suggestive of technological sapience on the two planets there, but both planets had been so badly burned by an ancient nova—"
Three million years ancient?' she asked, catching on.
"Yes. Only Star Extirpate is not a nova star, so could not have been the source of obliteration. It does not seem likely that another star could have been near enough to do this, and then vanish entirely. It is one of the mysteries of space. And other lifeless systems—"
'Are listed on this Ancient map as supporting potentially sapient life?'
"Unless I misinterpret the key."
'Heem, this is horrible! Could there have been twice as many life-forms three million years ago as now, and half of them were obliterated?'
"This is my understanding. This must have been a survey station too, accurately mapping all sapience in this sector of our Galaxy. The other markers we conjectured may have mapped other sectors."
'And then half of that sapience was brutally destroyed. Could it have been war—war on a galactic scale? And the present-day life-forms are the survivors?'
"But we lacked technology then! We HydrOs were pre-sapients, not yet evolved to our full powers, lacking all knowledge of the extra-planetary universe. The same was true of our neighbors in Thousandstar—and I believe it was true also of the rest of this galaxy generally. None of the contemporary life-forms had entered space then. We could not have defended ourselves from technological species such as the Ancients."
'Nor could we Solarians,' she agreed. 'We were barbarians, hardly mastering the use of fire, then. Some among our kind might conjecture that we rose to heights long ago, then reverted to barbarism after some colossal catastrophe, but archaeology does not support this. We were primitives. Yet we survived, and you HydrOs survived, and all the others, while the civilized Ancients perished.'
"And this station knew precisely which survived and which perished—for the keying differs, and not coincidentally."
'But this station is part of the culture that perished! It could not have recorded its own demise so neatly!'
"Only if it saw it coming. The Ancients might have vacated, leaving only the tower and planetarium operative, still surveying data for those who might follow."
'And no one followed, for all civilization in the galaxy had collapsed, leaving only vermin-species like ourselves.'
They contemplated the grim galactic map, mystified and appalled. The mystery of the Ancients became greater with each discovery relating to it!
There was a vibration, followed by the spreading taste of metal. "Something is happening!" Heem sprayed, alarmed. "Perhaps the Competition Authority has arrived!"
'Must be! The Fa¿ should have signaled them before he died, though why he didn't have them come to get him out of the depths—let's get over there to stake our claim before Slitherfear does something worse yet!'
Heem rolled rapidly toward the source of the commotion. He could guess why the Fa¿ hadn't summoned help; he would have thus exposed his own incompetence. It was also possible that the Ancient site shielded transmissions, making external communication impossible.
They passed through several of the pentagonal chambers and came at last into another larger one. The Erb entered from another passage ahead of him, and a third presence manifested: a HydrO. Swoon of Sweetswamp had managed to follow them down into this complex.
Slitherfear was in the center of the room, his pincers gripping some kind of machine mounted there. It was from this device the vibration and taste emanated. It seemed to be an Ancient artifact, operative but somewhat irregular after its long hiatus. The Ancients had been the Cluster's finest builders, but the inordinate period since their passing had made even their machines unreliable.
The Erb charged at the Squam, his drill formed and turning. Slitherfear rotated the machine until a lens pointed at the Erb, and struck a globe-control with one pincer.
The taste of alien power jetted out from the machine. The Erb collapsed.
'It's a death-ray generator!' Jessica exclaimed. 'An Ancient weapon! Must have been too awkward to move, so they had to leave it."
"And Slitherfear found it, discovered its operation, and made a commotion to lure the rest of us here to be killed! We should have stayed hidden, instead of succumbing to his trap!"
Heem rolled at the Squam from the side. Slitherfear, aware of him, swung the machine about on its mounting, but Heem had the advantage of velocity, thanks to the time it had taken to kill the Erb, and crashed into the Squam before the machine could orient. Slitherfear was shoved away, half rolling on the floor. He was up immediately, pincers extended—but now Swoon of Sweetswamp was there, almost colliding with him herself. She needled him, rolling back.
'His tough luck that we all arrived at once,' Jessica remarked without sympathy. 'Had we been spaced out more, he would have finished us all, just as he planned.'
Slitherfear, enraged, slithered after Swoon. 'Heem, he'll kill her!' Jessica cried.
"He can't catch her," Heem jetted. He also remembered the way Swoon had needled Windflower. That had pretty much abated any sympathy he might have felt for the HydrO. "We must inspect this machine he found, because it represents the greatest immediate threat to us."
'You're right,' she said reluctantly. 'At least let's check the Erb. Maybe he's not actually dead. Stunned—'
Her and her concern for living creatures! They checked the Erb, while the Squam chased the HydrO into another passage. The Erb was not dead, but he was not living either. "His aura," Heem sprayed, dismayed. "I believe his aura is gone."
'Aura! Of course! The Ancients were the consummate experts in aura! This must be a transfer device, moving his aura to some other host, perhaps across the Galaxy!'
Heem rolled back to the machine. Its control-globe had the balled-line inside, similar to the globes outside, but in addition there were three symbols on the ball's surface. Jessica pieced them out, translating Heem's taste into vivid pictures. One was an empty circle, Ο; another was a two-knobbed line, •—•; and the third was a circle with a dot inside, Θ. That was all.
The only other controls seemed to be the activator-globes: one opaque, which the Squam must have used to turn the machine on, the other empty, but apparently trigger for the transfer, since it was the one Slitherfear had banged to destroy the Erb. 'We'd better not fool with either of these,' Jessica said nervously. 'We know so little about this thing, and it seems just about ready to blow itself apart. We don't even dare try to turn it off, because we can't be sure how the off switch works.'
"But so long as it remains
functional, we are threatened by it," Heem pointed out. "If we leave it unattended, and Slitherfear returns—" He focused his taste on the fallen Erb, meaningfully.
'Um, you're right again, Heem.' They studied the marked globe again. 'Maybe if we changed the setting— what do you think these symbols mean?'
"It is set now on Ο," Heem sprayed. "That could mean vacancy of host. A body without an aura. Like the Erb."
'Horrible—and probably correct. An aura-destruction setting. I don't think contemporary science has anything like that, and I'm not sure it should. What does that make the Θ symbol?'
"An aura-creating setting? No, even the Ancients could not have created an aura from nothing! But if they had an aura available—"
'I think I've got it, Heem! This is no weapon—it's a research tool! This was a laboratory attached to the observatory or the beacon or whatever, with many cubicles for researchers to occupy, like a big office building. They were analyzing auras, classifying them, separating the sheep from the goats—'
"The—?"
'Never mind! And the sheep they keyed in one fashion, and the goats in another, for their big map of the Milky Way, or at least this segment of it. Now maybe it was a very subtle thing they were studying, so they had to transfer a given subject aura into a blank host, to maintain it while studying it in a controlled environment. And sometimes they had to superimpose it on an occupied host, as my aura is superimposed on yours. So they would have needed some blank hosts, and some occupied ones. So they used this machine to blank a given host, and the Ο is the setting for that. And—'
"This is awful!" Heem protested. "To blank creatures, probably sapients—"
'No worse than vivisection! If you want to know about something, you have to work with it, take it apart, analyze it. The Ancients did not advance their science of auras to the pinnacle they did without doing a hell of a lot of lab work, believe me! So the Θ setting must be to superimpose an aura on a given host, maybe one that's already occupied, maybe not. The same thing we do today, for travel and inter-Sphere communication. And the •—• setting—'
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