Eta Cassiopeiae’s twin suns hung close to the horizon. They lit the scene with orange, dust-filtered light. This dour landscape, according to Chan’s briefings, was the most attractive part of the planet.
He wondered where the Artefact might be hiding. According to those same briefings, it would have no trouble living anywhere on Barchan—even in the scorching equatorial regions where only micro-organisms survived.
The three service buildings stood a kilometer away from the parked aircar. As Chan watched, a swirling veil of dark purple emerged from one of the buildings and blew like a rolling cloud of dust towards the car. When it was fifty yards away Chan opened the door. The individual components of the cloud could now be resolved. They were purple-black winged creatures, all identical and each about as big as his finger. They approached with a whirring of wings. In less than thirty seconds every one of them had entered the aircar door and settled all over the rear of the main cabin.
Chan closed the door and turned to watch. He had seen the next phase in briefing displays, but this was his first exposure to the real thing.
It began with one component—an apparently arbitrary one—hovering in mid air with its purple-and-black body vertical. A ring of pale green eyes on the head stared all around, as though assessing the situation, while the wings fluttered too fast to see. After a moment another component flew in to attach at the head end, and a third one settled into position beneath. Thin, whiplike antennae reached out and connected heads to tails. The triplet hovered, wings vibrating. A fourth and fifth element flew over to join the nucleus of the group.
After that the aggregation grew too fast for Chan to watch individual connections. As new components were added the Composite extended outward and downwards, to make contact with and derive support from the cabin floor. Within a minute the main body was complete. To Chan’s surprise—something not pointed out in the briefings—most of the individual components still remained unattached. Of the total who had entered the cabin, maybe a fifth were now connected to form a compact mass; the remainder stood tail-first on the cabin floor or hung singly from the walls using the small claws on the front of their shiny leather-like wings.
The mass of the Tinker Composite began to form a funnel-like opening in its topmost extremity. From that aperture came an experimental hollow wheeze. “Ohhh-ahhh-gggghh. Hharr-ehh-looo,” it said. Then, in an oddly acrentedvariety of solar speech, “Har-e-loo. Hal-loo.”
Kubo Flammarion had warned that this was inevitable. “Imagine,” he said, “that somebody took you apart every night and put you back together every morning. Don’t you think it would take a little while to get your act together? So make allowances for the Tinkers.”
Chan couldn’t imagine it. But he suspected that the little captain, a long-time alcoholic and a recent Paradox addict, knew that morning-after where’s-the-rest-of-me feeling rather too well.
“Hello,” he said, in response to the Tinker’s greeting. “Hello.”
As he had been advised to do, he waited.
“We-ee arre-eh,” said a whistling voice. There was a substantial pause, then, “We are . . . Shikari.”
“Hello. You should call me Chan.”
This time it was the Tinker who waited expectantly. “Shikari is an old Earth word,” it said at last when Chan did not respond. “It means hunter. We think that it is appropriate. And perhaps also amusing? But you did not laugh.”
“I’m sorry. I never heard the word before.”
“Yes.” The funnel buzzed briefly. “You see, we were making a joke. We do not think that you are amused. You do not look it.”
Look it. Chan wondered if the Tinker could actually see him. The individual components had in total many thousands of eyes, but how were they used for vision by the Composite? He gestured to the myriad of components still scattered around the cabin.
“Are all of you Shikari? Or only the ones who are connected?”
There was a buzzing pause. An indication of confusion? “We thiink that we understand your question, but we are not sure. We all in past time have been Shikari. We all in future time will be Shikari; and we all in now-time can be Shikari. But in now-time we are not all Shikari.”
“I understand. But why are you not all Shikari now? Don’t you think better when you are all connected?”
The Tinker had taken on a roughly human outline, with arms, legs, and head. When it moved forward in the cabin it was propelled by two different actions, the turning of body connections and the movement of thousands of component wings.
“Chan, you ask a many-questions-in-one question,” said the whistling voice. “Listen carefully. First, if we wish we can join all together at any time.”
“And you have more brainpower when you do it?”
“Yes, and no. When we join we certainly have more thinking material available—which you may call brainpower. But we are also less efficient. We are slower. We have a much longer integration time—the time it takes for us to complete a thought and reach a decision. That time grows fast-as-growth-itself—as you say, exponentially—with the number of components. When there is much, much time available, and the problem is large, we combine more units in us. More join, to make one body. But then the integration time can become so long that individual components begin to starve. We cannot, when connected, search for food. So components must leave, or die.
“What you see now is the most effective form, our preferred compromise between speed of thought and depth of thought. The free components that you see now will eat, rest, and mate. When the right time comes there will be exchange. Rested-and-fed-of-us will take the place of tired-and-hungry-of-us.”
Chan had a score more questions, although they were already late for take-off. How did a Composite decide when and how to form? Was it adopting a human shape only for his convenience? How intelligent were the components, if at all? (He had the feeling that question had been answered during his early briefings on Horus, but anything told to him before the Tolkov Stimulator worked its miracle felt vague and unreliable.) How did the components know whether to join the Composite or stay away? Most important of all, if a Tinker was varying its composition all the time, how could there possibly be a single self-awareness and a specific personality? Shikari had all that, and claimed a sense of humor, too.
So many questions, and every one of them surely vital to the Pursuit Team’s success—not to mention Chan’s personal curiosity. But they would have to wait until the rendezvous with the other team members.
Chan prepared to take off, then decided he ought to consult Shikari. After all, if they were to be called a team, they ought to act as one.
“Shikari, are you ready to go?”
“We are very ready.”
“Then would you like to move up front? If you want to study the landscape, you’d be better off sitting”—(Could a Tinker sit?)—“next to me.”
“That will be very good.” The Tinker changed shape. It came slithering forward like a giant purple-black pancake, over and around the back of the passenger seat and around Chan’s legs. The speaking funnel emerged briefly from the center.
“And perhaps when we are on our way,” Shikari said, “we can talk some more. When opportunity arises, we have innumerable questions concerning the strange form and functions of humans.”
Chapter 19
To a visitor, all the inhabitants of a foreign country are apt to look the same.
The Sargasso Dump was as foreign a place as Phoebe Willard had ever been. For her first week or two, the brain-shattered guards at Sargasso were distinguished by little more than their sex.
Two things changed her attitude. The first was Luther Brachis’s insistence that the two of them attend the guard review and follow it by a formal reception and dinner. It was possible to regard men and women as identical and anonymous when you merely passed them in corridors or took trays of food from them, but it was far more difficult when you stood or sat face to face and made (or attempted) conversation.
>
Many of the guards found speech beyond them. Luther Brachis ignored that fact. He knew every one of the hundred residents, he talked to them easily, and he told Phoebe of the deeds that had brought them to the Dump. It was a shock for her to realize that many of the blank-eyed dreamers at the long table were true heroes, the derelict remnants of daredevil men and women who had saved ships from disaster and whole colonies from collapse. They wore their medals at the dinner, but most of them seemed oblivious to former glories. Only a couple brightened and smiled when Brachis called them by their old titles.
The reception and dinner was a one-time event, but after it was over Phoebe began to notice individual guards, and address them by name.
That led to a bigger change in her attitude, although the next event had nothing to do with social behavior. It was a matter of simple necessity. Phoebe had a task that could not be accomplished with just one pair of hands. She left the nitrogen bubble, checked the guard roster, and headed for a remote region of the Dump.
He was there, sitting in a habitation bubble and staring at the stars (or at nothing). He knew Phoebe was present, she was sure of it, but ne did not turn his head at her approach.
“Captain Ridley. Are you busy?” (An idiot question; he didn’t know what busy was any more.) “I need help. Will you come and help me?”
He had been the guard who above all others had seemed to respond at the dinner. He had even said a few words to her. But now he did not move and he did not reply.
Phoebe, angry at her own stupidity in even asking, went back into the habitation lock; and found that Ridley was following her.
It was a beginning. He scarcely said a word, but he could and did follow directions. Within a few days he had taken over the routine of temperature checking within the bubble as his own, and he shook his head vehemently when she tried to help. It was Ridley who, near the end of one of Phoebe’s long work sessions, left the bubble and then thirty minutes later was back.
“No more for today,” said Phoebe. He shook his head, took her arm, and tugged it. He had never done that before.
“What’s wrong, Ridley?”
His mismatched eyes rolled. She knew that one of them was a replacement. The original, like his lower jaw, had been the casualty of a violent space explosion and decompression. “Brargas.”
“Brachis?”
Ridley nodded. He watched impassively as Phoebe turned off all inputs to the sealed nitrogen balloon that held the brain of the Morgan Construct, closed her suit, and followed him back to the main Dump control area. She was oddly gratified when she entered and saw the image of Luther Brachis on the communication display.
“Thank you, Captain Ridley.” And to Brachis, smugly, as he stared at the other man, “My assistant, Blaine Ridley. Are you all right?” She noticed that Brachis was not wearing his uniform, and one arm was bare and bandaged.
“Sure, I’m fine. Little incident in a restaurant.”
“In a restaurant! I’ve heard of bad service, Commander, but this is ridiculous.”
Apparently it was again not a day for joking, for Brachis went on as though he had not heard her, “I’ve been downed for a few days, and I finally had time to do some thinking. I know what’s been going on with M-26A.”
“You’re ahead of me. I’ve been getting nothing sensible. Either the Construct’s brain wasn’t working right before its body was destroyed on Cobweb Station, or the blow-up there was too much for it. It’s certainly crazy now.”
“It may seem crazy, but it’s quite logical. Do you have the complete record of your interactions with M-26A?”
“Not right here in front of me. But I have them all.”
“Then I want you to check them, every one, and see if the pattern that I noticed always holds. It’s quite simple. If you ask a question, you always get the same useless response: More information must be provided before that question can be answered. But if you give a piece of information, and then ask a question, you get a real answer—it can be what you just fed in, or something different. But it’s just one answer. If you want information—even if it’s no more than a repeat of an answer that you just received—you have to provide a piece of information. One question, one answer. No exceptions.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Neither did I. But it works for every case. You can go back and try it, feed in anything you like, then ask any question you like. I don’t know if you’ll get the answers you want, but I’ll bet you get something. Hold on now!”
Phoebe was moving away from the camera, obviously itching to get back to test the idea that Brachis had been proposing.
“What else?”
“Assume that I’m right, and we have a way of genuine communication with M-26A. I want to know if it will let us build up a credit account. If we give it a hundred pieces of information one after another, will it then answer a hundred of our questions? If so, I want to feed it general background data about all the other members of the Stellar Group. Home worlds, history, physiology, psychology.”
“That will be a huge job.”
“I know. But M-26A is our only access point to Morgan Construct thinking processes and possible actions, and all the other Stellar Group species are going to be involved in the search. If the answers to my questions are to be useful, M-26A needs an adequate data base.”
“I’ll do my best. But I’m busy as hell. If you’re looking for quick results—”
Phoebe Willard paused. Ridley had moved forward, to stand by her side. He was clutching at her arm. He stared at Luther Brachis, and the lop-sided jaw began moving.
“Brargas. Comder Brargas. Data. Data in to M-M—. I will—I want to—” His eye rolled, and he made a supreme effort. “I want to help.”
Chapter 20
Mondrian awoke in a fetid, red-lit gloom to the sound of a low and ominous humming. He tensed as a tall figure loomed high overhead. As he recognized it, he slowly relaxed.
He knew where he was. He had been dreaming again; ghastly, terrifying dreams, but just what he had come to expect. The figure hovering over him was Skrynol, and the nightmare visions had been carefully designed and planted under Fropper supervision. Even the noise had a simple explanation. Skrynol was singing.
The Pipe-Rilla bent over Mondrian’s sweat-soaked body, peered at him with huge compound eyes, and hummed a three-toned phrase. The lights in the chamber promptly increased.
“For your benefit,” said Skrynol. She chittered strangely in Pipe-Rilla speech. “I did it so that you can admire my rare beauty.”
Mondrian took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped sweat from his forehead and bare chest. He had stripped to the waist at the beginning of the session, not for Skrynol’s benefit but his own. She was not fully comfortable at a temperature below human blood heat, and in the last few meetings the chamber had been made hotter and hotter.
“You seem in exuberant mood,” he said. “Can I assume that we have made progress?”
“Oh, yes, indeed.” The Pipe-Rilla bobbed her head back and forward in the gesture of assent she had learned from Mondrian. “Excellent progress. Excellent-excellent progress.”
“Enough to sing about?”
“Ahhh.” Skrynol raised her forelimbs and placed them on top of her head. “You embarrass me. A word is in order on my singing. Because we were doing so well, I extended the length of our session somewhat to pinpoint one result. As a result I took more of your blood than usual.”
“How much more?”
“Some more. Rather a lot, actually. But do not worry, I gave you replacement fluids. Mm-mm . . .” She bent over him, an enormous and deformed praying mantis inspecting its victim. There was a flutter of olfactory cilia, and a whisding sigh. “Mm-mm. Esro Mondrian, it is well that we Pipe-Rillas can so control our emotions and our actions. I had been warned before I came to Earth that human blood was a powerful stimulant and intoxicant to our metabolism—but no one could ever describe this feeling of exhilaration!”
/> She reached down with one soft flipper and drew it lovingly along Mondrian’s neck and naked chest. As she did so, long flexible needles peeped involuntarily out of their sheaths on each side of her third tarsal segment. They glistened orange in the bright white light. Fully extended, they would reach their hollow length more than nine feet in any direction. The official propaganda on the Pipe-Rillas described the aliens as “peaceable sap-sucking beings despite their formidable mandibles.”
Esro Mondrian stared uneasily at the needles. Sap-sucking? Perhaps—but only if the word could apply to the body juices of plants and animals.
The urge to flinch away from her touch was strong. He resisted it and sat upright on the velvet couch. “I know how you must feel. Some humans also experience exhilaration from blood. Myself, I draw excitement from other sources. Can we talk about the session now? Are you controlled enough to tell me what you have found?”
“Of course.” Skrynol, swaying like a sailing rig in a high sea, somehow reared her jointed body up another six feet. “We do not yet have a solution for your difficulties, but I think I can fairly say that at last we have defined the problem. I will begin with a question. You are Chief of Boundary Survey Security. Tell me, if you will, how you came to that position.”
“Through the usual route.” Mondrian was puzzled. “After I first left Earth I studied the other civilizations in the Stellar Group, and then took a job in commercial liaison with them. After that it was just a matter of hard work and steady promotion.”
“That is the way it may appear to you. But your physical response when certain subjects are mentioned makes one fact obvious: the rise to your present position was less circumstantial than you believe. You were driven to seek it. As I told you in our first meeting, your nightmares are no more than analogies. But we are past that level. Now we must ask, analogies for what?”
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