Trail Mix: Amoeba

by Piers Anthony

  Tod nodded. So it did make sense. Still, he had questions. “I think you said that the Amoeba is not intelligent. How can it reason out exactly what will be needed?”

  “I have wondered that myself. I have concluded that it can fathom, if not the future, at least the probability of success. It summons the creatures that maximize that probability. It may not know what their individual qualifications are, merely that the team as a whole has a reasonable chance.”

  “Still, it selects individuals,” Veee said.

  “Again, this is my conclusion, not my knowledge. I am unable to scry the Amoeba. But I think that it sends pseudopods out to intercept individuals who will contribute to the essential whole. It may be that when it finds one, it modifies its search for the next, so as neither to duplicate abilities or miss any. So when you entered the trail, Tod, that further defined the need for the next.” Wizard smiled. “It must have been quite a challenge, if it had to reach fifty thousand years into your past to find her.”

  “That’s another thing,” Tod said. “The Amoeba can reach across time, to bring Veee here, and space to bring Bem?”

  “And alternate universes, to bring Vanja and myself,” Wizard agreed. “Because magic is not effective in your realm, but seems to be necessary for this mission.”

  “And in the ambiance of the Amoeba, it seems that both science and magic work,” Tod said. “And whatever alien abilities Bem has.”

  “And we can talk to each other,” Veee said. “When we left the trail, we could not. In fact, I did not really exist in Tod’s world.”

  “The Amoeba is a marvelous entity,” Wizard said. “It not only brings in divergent creatures, wherever they may be, it enables them to survive comfortably in a common environment, and to interact compatibly. You would not survive long on Bem’s planet if you could go there; its air is not breathable, and its gravity is twice yours. But within the Amoeba neither of you are even aware of such things. In this manner it enables a truly remarkable mix of creatures.”

  Tod smiled. “I call it the trail mix.”

  “Apt description.”

  “Yet the Amoeba can’t simply solve its problems directly?” Tod asked. “Without going to the considerable trouble of bringing in, as you put it, divergent entities and making them comfortable?”

  “The Amoeba, as I understand it, can take no direct physical or mental action. For that it depends on us. Each time a crisis arises, it summons appropriate creatures to handle it, then lets them go or stay, as they prefer. The villagers are descendants of the members of prior missions, reverted to a comfortable state where the climate is equitable and food readily available. Elsewhere there are surely villages of vampires and of bems, too. But they lack the skills necessary to handle the current crisis, which is why we were summoned.”

  Tod nodded. “When you make life too easy, people relax into indolence. I’ve seen it on Earth. It’s a wonder the villagers aren’t fat.”

  “The Amoeba takes care of that too!” Veee said, catching on. “It keeps them healthy regardless!”

  “It is truly a paradise,” Wizard agreed. “That seems to be the reward for accomplishing its purposes: an ideal retirement.”

  “Don’t they get bored?” Tod asked.

  “While I waited for your arrival, I observed the activities of the villagers. They played many games and had much sex, seeming not concerned that I was observing.” He smiled. “Vanja will like them.”

  “I saw some children, but not many,” Veee said.

  “Population seems to be constant,” Wizard said. “When a villager ages and dies, a child is conceived and born. There seems to be no venereal disease. They accept that as the natural order.”

  “The women have nothing to lose except boredom,” Veee said. “That must make them amenable.”

  Tod glanced at her. “And you are not?”

  “I must pace Vanja, lest I lose you,” she said seriously. “Otherwise I would be more reticent. However, now that I know there will be no baby, I am free to enjoy it. If we were to retire here, I would not disappoint you.”

  “Free sex,” Tod said. “Much as I like the notion, I’m not sure I would settle for that.”

  “Which is perhaps why the option of going home exists,” Wizard said. “Those who are wary of Paradise are free to leave it.”

  “You will go home and leave me, Tod?” Veee’s tone and expression were dangerously neutral.

  “No! I don’t think I could leave you, Veee. I think I love you, and have a passion for Vanja. But settling into sloth, with no physical or mental or social challenge—that’s not for me either.”

  She smiled. “Vanja is adventurous too. I would rather share you with her than lose you.”

  “Maybe we can travel. Who knows where the trails of the Amoeba will take us?”

  “Anywhere in space, time, or alternate reality,” Wizard said. “Paradise is not limited to sloth.”

  Still, Tod was not quite satisfied. “The benefits the Amoeba provides seem marvelous. Yet I can’t be sure it really exists. It could be simply a magical path.”

  “Yes,” Veee agreed. “It is like a god.”

  “I can’t say I believe in any god,” Tod said. “I mean, some invisible, intangible entity that watches over us all without interfering? What is the point?”

  “There could be nothing,” Veee agreed.

  “Skepticism is healthy,” Wizard said. “I was a skeptic too. But I came to believe.”

  “What convinced you?” Tod asked.

  “A subtle thing. While the Amoeba is not intelligent or even conscious, as far as I can tell, it does know what’s in a person’s mind. It has to, to choose the right people for the job at hand. I learned to sense its tuning in. When there is anything odd or incomplete, it orients on it, as if to verify that the person is correct for the team. It’s just a momentary focus, not an action.”

  “How does that prove the existence of the Amoeba?” Tod asked.

  “Perhaps we can demonstrate. I can’t read minds, I can only feel the Amoeba when it orients. That should be enough.”

  “I am in doubt also,” Veee said.

  “Try to think of something that bothers you, both of you,” Wizard said. “When I feel the Amoeba respond, I will speak, and then you can tell me what you were thinking of.”

  “That does not seem like much of a test,” Tod said.

  “Try it and see.”

  Tod and Veee pondered. What came to his mind seemed totally irrelevant. He was about to pass over it, when Wizard spoke. “Now. What is in your mind?”

  “It’s just a schoolyard ditty I don’t get,” Tod said. “Nothing important.”

  “Describe it.”

  “A poem, actually. But everyone else laughed as though it was dirty. It seemed innocent to me. I shut up because I didn’t want to be ridiculed for being stupid. I never mentioned it to anyone.”

  “Recite it now.”

  Tod was embarrassed, but plowed ahead. “Oh Nellie Priss went out to pick some flowers,” he recited. “She stood in grass up to her ankle tops. She went to the coop to let out a poor little chicken, and now she sits and shivers in the moonlight.” He spread his hands. “It doesn’t even rhyme.”

  Veee was evidently trying to keep a straight face. “I almost heard something else,” she said. “Something that did rhyme. Maybe the rendering into my language erred.”

  “Say what you almost heard,” Wizard said.

  “It is not nice. I am ashamed of my wicked imagination.”

  “Say it,” Tod growled impatiently.

  “Oh Nellie Priss went out to piss,” she said. “She stood in grass up to her ass. She went to the coop to let out a poop, and now she sits and shits.”

  Suddenly Tod got it. “Oh my god! Now I remember how they stressed some of the words. She went to the coop to let out a po-oo—or little chicken. How could I have missed it!”

  “You had a conservative upbringing,” Wizard said. “You tuned out the dirtiness. That r
endered it pointless.”

  “And the Amoeba sensed my distress over it,” Tod said.

  “Exactly. You may not consider that proof of the Amoeba’s existence.”

  “No, I think now I do, crazy as it seems.”

  “Let me continue,” Veee said.

  They waited while she pondered.

  “Now,” Wizard said suddenly.

  “Oh, I don’t think—”

  “The Amoeba knows. Tell us.”

  “But it might annoy Tod.”

  Tod smiled. “Which is why you prefer to avoid it. I appreciate your courtesy, and promise not to be annoyed.”

  She considered momentarily, then took a breath. “It’s that we have lore about pretend people who look and talk and act like real ones, but are really zombies or spooks who will kill you if you trust them. They—they can even have sex, and you can’t know the difference. But if you then sleep in their arms, they will throttle you. It bothers me. If I encountered such a creature, how could I know? I don’t want to run away from a real man I like.” She paused. “I—I think that when I first met Tod, I feared he could be such a thing. He seemed real, but he was different. It took me time to trust him.”

  Which further explained her initial reticence. “You feared I could be a robot. A machine that seemed like a man, but was not alive.”

  “Yes,” she said faintly. “Can you forgive me?”

  “There’s nothing to forgive! You had a sensible concern, considering your culture. And I am curious too: if you were a robot, capable of emulating a live human being even to the extent of having sex, how could I know? How could I risk sleeping in your embrace?”

  “You trusted me.”

  “Maybe I was more foolish than you were, because I never doubted you, and I should have.”

  “When you slept in my arms, I knew you were real.” She smiled. “You even snored.”

  “It remains a good question: how could either of us be sure before risking sleeping that the other was real and not a robot, zombie, changeling, or simply an assassin?”

  “Yes. I knew I could not ask, because a false person would lie, saying he was real.”

  “I wonder,” Tod said, getting an idea. “A fake would never admit to being fake, would he? Because that would ruin his mission. So you can be sure of his answer.”

  “Yes. So I didn’t ask.”

  “But you see, that may be the key. Suppose you require him to play the game of reversal: to say the exact opposite of what he means. Then you ask him point blank: are you real?”

  Her brow furrowed. “But he would say no, meaning yes.”

  “Would he? A genuine human being is sophisticated enough to lie by indirection, but a simple fake who exists only to kill a person is unlikely to have that capacity. Chances are he can’t say no, because that seems like a confession that will damn him. So all he can say is yes, or nothing. Either dooms him.”

  Veee looked at Wizard. “Does this make sense?”

  “Yes,” Wizard said. “No facsimile is as complicated mentally as a live person. Otherwise he would become a person in his own right, and seek to join, not kill you.”

  She smiled. “Let’s play that game a moment, Tod. To say the opposite.”

  She had something in mind. “Okay.”

  “I hate you.”

  “I hate you too.”

  She moved into him and kissed him ardently. “You are real!”

  He squeezed her bottom. “So are you.” It seemed there had been a lingering doubt in her mind that this negated.

  “Is your doubt about the Amoeba similarly resolved?” Wizard asked.

  Veee paused as she disengaged. “Yes. I don’t know why.”

  “I don’t know why either,” Tod said. “Now that I consider it, this may clarify our identities as real people, but the Amoeba could still not exist. Logically I know that, yet I accept the Amoeba.”

  “And there is the proof,” Wizard said. “The Amoeba identified your concerns, allowed you to work them out, and then caused you to accept the Amoeba itself as you accept each other. It is similar to the way the Amoeba causes the disparate members of the team to get along together, to like each other, despite being so different or even natural enemies. It is that touch in your mind, that you know is not your own logic, that authenticates it.”

  Both Tod and Veee pondered that. Did it really make sense? “Let’s kiss again,” he said.

  She smiled and kissed him again. That would have to do.

  But they had other business to handle. Tod focused on the present. “Now all we have to do is get rid of the androids before they get rid of us, and then the Amoeba itself.”

  “Exactly,” Wizard agreed. “I will cooperate to the best of my abilities, which are considerable, but I am no thinker or leader. You must formulate the plan and put it into action.”

  “No thinker? You just explained how the Amoeba persuaded us to believe in it.”

  “My insight is based on prior experience. I have had an intervening lifetime to reflect on such nuances. You must take charge.”

  “I will do my best,” Tod said wryly.

  “That may not be enough,” Veee said.

  The two men looked at her. “My best will not suffice?” Tod asked.

  “As I now understand the Amoeba, the best of one person is never enough. It requires the best of every member of the team, and of the team itself.”

  “Yes, of course,” Tod agreed, vaguely nettled. “I meant merely that I will do my part.”

  She smiled at him. “What I really meant is that getting rid of the android pool won’t be enough. Probably the villagers could do that themselves, now that they have been alerted. Our team must have been assembled for a larger purpose. One that requires more of us than merely dealing with the present menace.”

  Tod exchanged a glance with Wizard. “There is a larger menace?”

  “I think of it as like an infection, a disease that troubles the Amoeba itself. If the androids consume all the villagers and go on to other villages, in time there will not be any people or animals or perhaps plants left. The Amoeba will become a desert, unable to support any new recruits.”

  “Maybe a better analogy is cancer,” Tod said. “A tumor forms and grows, leeching off the body of the host, even requiring it grow blood vessels to supply the cancer itself. Then it metastasizes, or colonizes other parts of the body. That spread is what will likely kill the host.”

  “Cancer,” Veee agreed, though the term was evidently new to her. “The android pool will seed other pools. These must be stopped. But I am thinking of the pool that seeded this one. Where is it? That is the one we must locate and abolish. Otherwise we will simply be fighting the daughter pools endlessly.”

  Wizard nodded. “You have a point. We are dealing with an effect rather than a cause. We must handle the effect, then go after the cause, wherever it may be.”

  “That could be a daughter pool itself,” Tod said. “There could be a chain of them. But I think not a long chain, because if the problem had appeared long ago, we or some other team would have been summoned to deal with it then. So probably this is the first one. Still, it had to come from somewhere.”

  “A single orange crab,” Wizard said. “Scuttling through the reaches of the Amoeba, until it finds a suitable place to pool. It did not invent itself; it has to have come from somewhere else. Somewhere outside the Amoeba.”

  “Where we can’t go,” Veee said.

  “It came down a trail, down a pseudopod, as we did,” Tod said. “We must find that trail and close it off.”

  Wizard shook his head. “Trails can’t be closed by others. Each trail remains open as long as its person remains in the Amoeba. That’s so any participant can always go home. Few do, but that option remains until they die.”

  “I don’t want to kill anyone,” Tod said quickly.

  “This merely acquaints you with the parameters of the challenge.”

  Tod sighed. “I am coming to appreciate them. N
ow we should help the others get organized.”

  They returned to the village. The men were building a rampart by digging a trench and piling the dirt into a low wall. The women were gathering firewood and forming it into a kind of wall outside the rampart. The children were collecting berries and storing them in baskets, food for a likely siege. Bem was clearly organizing them well. But would it suffice? It depended on how many androids came how soon.

  Bem spied them and glided toward them. “The villagers appreciate the danger,” it said. “But I am uncertain they have the resources to abate a larger attack of this nature. The supply of wood is limited, and it will not be easy to battle the androids when they come in an organized mass.”

  “We’ll have to help them,” Tod said. “If we can figure out how best to do it.”

  The bat flew in, transforming as she landed. “I located the pool,” Vanja said. “It’s in a mountain crevice, barely accessible to two legged creatures. We will have a problem reaching it, especially if we need to be unobserved.”

  “How far advanced is the pool?” Bem asked.

  “Hard to tell. Depends how much volume is hidden in that crevice. There are maybe a dozen androids bringing in small animals and dumping them in. They scream as they dissolve.”

  “What about plants?”

  “No plants being dumped. Is that significant?”

  “Yes,” Bem said. “The androids that attacked our realm were omnivorous. They consumed plants as well as animals. This may be a more limited variant.”

  “Too bad they are not limited to plant life,” Veee said.

  “Probably plant fiber is harder to digest,” Tod said. “They are going for the easy stuff first.”

  “So what’s the plan?” Vanja asked.

  “Is an attack on the village likely today or tonight?”

  “I think not. They are still foraging for animals.”

  “Could we attack the pool today?”

  “I can show you where it is, but I think we’ll need to wipe out the loose androids before we get near the pool.”

  Tod considered. “I think the best way to wipe them out is to wait for their attack on the village. If they are largely mindless, we can chop them up, then attack the pool immediately while its defenses are depleted. Meanwhile we can help the villagers prepare.”