The Silkie

by A. E. van Vogt

  THE METHOD that was used was, the entire section of the planetoid surrounding Cemp simply lifted up and shot off into the sky. Cemp found himself floating in black, empty space, surrounded by meteorite debris.

  The Glis's thought came to him, 'I have done my part. Now tell me!'

  Even as Cemp complied he began to wonder if he really understood what was happening.

  Uneasiness came. In setting in motion a cycle-completion process, he had taken it for granted that Nature would strike a balance. An old life form had somehow been preserved here, and in its body, evolution was now proceeding at lightning speed. Millions of years of change had already been compressed into minutes of time. Since none other of its kind remained alive, he had assumed that the species had long since evolved to ... what?

  What was this creature? A chrysalis? An egg? Would it become a butterfly of space, a great worm, a gigantic bird?

  Such possibilities had not occurred to him before. He had thought only of the possibility of extinction. But — it struck him keenly — he hadn't considered seriously enough what extinction might consist of in its end product.

  Indeed, he hadn't thought about the existence of an end product.

  Unhappily, Cemp remembered what the computer had reported — that the atomic structure of this giant being reflected a younger state of matter.

  Could it be that, as the particles 'adjusted' and changed to current norm, energy would be released on a hitherto unknown scale?

  Below, a titanic thing happened.

  Part of the planetoid lifted, and a solid ball of red-hot matter at least a mile thick, lifted slowly out of it. As Cemp drew aside to let the improbable thing past him, he saw that an even more unlikely phenomenon was taking place. The 'up' speed of the chunk of now while-hot rock and dirt was increasing — and the mass was growing.

  It was well past him, and it was at least a hundred miles in diameter. A minute later, it was five hundred miles thick, and it was still expanding, still increasing in speed.

  It expanded to a burning, incredible mass.

  Suddenly, it was ten thousand miles in diameter and was still going away, still growing.

  Cemp sent out a general alarm: 'Get away — as fast as you can. Away!'

  As he himself fled, using a reversal of the gravity of the monstrous body behind him, he saw that in those few minutes it had grown more than 100,000 miles in diameter.

  It was quite pink at this point — strangely, beautifully pink. The color, altered even as he watched turning faintly yellow. And the body that emitted the beautiful ocher light was now more than 1,000,000 miles in diameter.

  As big as Earth's sun.

  In minutes more, it grew to the size of a giant blue sun, ten times the diameter of Sol.

  It began to turn pink again, and it grew one hundred times in ten minutes. Brighter than Mira the Wonderful, bigger than glorious Ras Algethi.

  But pink, not red. A deeper pink than before; not red, so definitely not a variable.

  All around was the starry universe, bright with unfamiliar objects that glowed near and far — hundreds of them, strung out like a long line of jack-o'-lanterns.

  Below was Earth.

  Cemp looked at that scene in the heavens and then at the near, familiar planet, and an awful excitement seized him.

  He thought, Is it possible that everything had to grow, that the Glis's change altered this entire area of space-time?

  Old forms could not keep their suppressed state once the supercolossal pink giant completed the growth that had some how been arrested from time's beginning.

  And so the Glis was now a sun in its prime, hut with eighteen hundred and twenty-three planets strung out like so many starry brilliants over the whole near sky.

  Everywhere he looked were planets so close to him that they looked like moons. He made a quick, anxious calculation and realised with great relief that all those planets were still within the warming area of the monstrous sun that hung out there, half a light-year away.

  As Cemp descended, at the top speed his Silkie body could withstand, into the huge atmosphere blanket that surrounded Earth, everything seemed the same — the land, the sea, the cities....

  He swooped low over one highway and observed cars going along it.

  He headed for the Silkie Authority in a haze of wonder and saw the shattered window from which he had leaped so dramatically — not yet repaired!

  When, moments later, he landed among the same group of men who had been there at his departure, he realised there had been some kind of a time stasis, related to size.

  For Earth and its people, that eighty days had been ... eighty seconds.

  Afterward, he would hear how people had experienced what seemed like an earthquake tension in their bodies, momentary sensory blackout, a brief feeling that it was dark.

  Now, as he entered, Cemp transformed to human form and said in a piercing voice, 'Gentlemen, prepare for the most remarkable piece of information in the history of the universe. That pink sun out there is not the result of an atmospheric distortion.

  'And, gentlemen, Earth now has eighteen hundred inhabited sister planets. Let's begin to organise for a fantastic future!'

  Later, comfortably back in his Florida home, Cemp said to Joanne, 'Now we can see why the Silkie problem didn't have a solution as things stood. For Earth, two thousand of us was saturation. But in this new sun system...

  It was no longer a question of what to do with the 6,000 members of the Silkie nation but of how they could get a hundred such groups to cope with the work to be done.

  Quickly!

  * * *

  XXIII

  WHEN THE Silkie call for help came, Nat Cemp was exploring the planet that had been given the astronomical designation Minus 1109-93.

  The 1109th planet farther away than Earth from the new, mighty sun, revolving at an angle of ninety-three degrees in relation to Earth.

  It was a temporary nomenclature. No one took the attitude that Earth was the most important planet of the new system.

  Not, apparently, that it was going to matter. On the three planets 1107, 1108, and now 1109 that had been assigned to Cemp, there were no detectable inhabitants. He had been skimming for nearly half a day among the strange, slender buildings that reared like stretched lacework toward the sky. And already it was sadly obvious that here, also, the transition period had been too long for life to survive, that perhaps only Earth and a few others already discovered had been able to make the changeover.

  The call for help came as Cemp was floating through a vast generator-building complex. Clear and sharp and urgent, he picked it up from the mechanical relay system between 1109 and 1110.

  It said, 'All Silkies and government agencies: I have just received a [Silkie word] message from Lan Jedd.'

  The special Silkie word was a thought form used to describe an after-death Silkie communication phenomenon. As a Silkie descended into death, there was a threshold point at which an isolated neural bundle was activated. The bundle was a telepathic sender, and it quite simply transmitted the final living thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of a Silkie who, at the time the message was sent, was already dead.

  The name of the dead Silkie, thus relayed, shocked Cemp. For Lan Jedd and he had been as much friends as any two Silkies ever were, or rather ever were allowed to be. Human beings, and particularly the Special People, had always discouraged Silkie-with-Silkie associations.

  Lan and he had chosen to explore adjoining sets of planets at this remote end of the system in order to have relatively unmonitored discussions about the increasing severity of the Silkie-human problem.

  So, for Cemp, as the message reached him, the shocking thrill-thought came that except for the sender, he was the nearest 'help.'

  He responded at once with, 'Nat Cemp coming immediately, Who are you?'

  'Ou-Dan! Calling from 1113-86.'

  The identification of the sender was disturbing. It was a name of the type and style common to mete
oric Silkies, whose existence had until less than a year ago been unknown. The presence of such 'original' Silkies in this vastly larger sun system was an unknown, unresolved factor, that which Cemp and Lan Jedd had also talked about in great detail.

  It was startling to consider that perhaps Ou-Dan had 'listened in' to their discussion. But what especially disturbed Cemp was that he had no confidence in the fighting abilities of these newly arrived Silkies. Therefore, for many hours he would be virtually alone against a mysterious, powerful enemy who had already proved himself strong enough to kill a Silkie.

  As he had these awarenesses, Cemp was projecting himself out of the building he was in. Moments later he was rising out of the atmosphere by means of his Silkie method of gravitational reversal.

  Literally, the planet expelled his body, which, in his C-Silkie form, was almost bullet-shaped and ten feet long. In this form his was fully able to operate and live in the vacuum of space.

  Once away from the planet, Cemp maintained his expulsion momentum and moved through space by cutting off gravity from all objects in space except in the direction he wanted to go. Thus the outer planets drew him, and he 'fell' with ever-increasing speed toward his destination, a special 'ship.'

  In spite of his initial acceleration, it was the usual slow journey of a Silkie traveling by himself through space. So it was several anxious hours before he at last saw the ship in the dark space ahead.

  The ship was a defensive vessel that had been built as part of a crash program after Earth became part of the new sun system. Built without walls, utilising weapons built on principles Cemp had learned from the Glis, it and others like it were part of the safety measures set up in conjunction with exploring so many new and unknown planets.

  As soon as he was securely in control of the ship, Cemp started it toward Ou-Dan, a distance of only four planets, which was no problem at all to the fast ship.

  Once underway, Cemp allowed its relay sender to activate again. Thus, he tuned in to communications that were already in progress from more remote points — Silkies speculating telepathically about what had happened.

  What a powerful life form that planet which Lan Jedd had been exploring must have ... if one or even several of them could kill a fully grown Silkie like Lan! That was the general thought. From all over the system converging Silkies readied for a mass battle with a dangerous opponent.

  Unfortunately, it would be quite a while before these more distant helpers arrived on the scene. For at least an Earth day, Ou-Dan and Cemp would be the only living beings on or near the scene.

  Arriving at ship speed, Cemp learned that the dead Silkie body had been taken by Ou-Dan over to a meteorite that circled 1113-86.

  The strange bright-dark of space with its black 'sky' and the huge, faraway sun glaring with a thousand reflected brilliances from every rock and metal facet of the meteorite that was the backdrop.

  In such a vast frame, the shattered Silkie body seemed like an atom in infinity. It lay sprawled on a flat spread of rock. In death it bore an even vaguer resemblance to a human being than in life.

  There was no indication of how the destruction had been done. Ou-Dan commented telepathically that the body looked collapsed, but it was not much smaller than normal — eight inches at most.

  As Cemp gazed silently down at his dead friend, he realised that the worst possible thing had happened. A highly trained adult Silkie, with all that implied in alertness and ability to utilize powerful defensive and offensive energies, had been confronted by another being, and the Silkie had been defeated and killed.

  Ou-Dan, looking a little like an elongated meteorite himself, telepathed, 'Lan had just reported to me that there were no inhabitants surviving on 1110, 1111, and 1112, and I, working backward, had found the same situation on 1115, 1114, and 1113, when his after-death message came.'

  A dead Silkie, Cemp thought, and only one clue — that single flash of communication from the mature and powerful Lan Jedd, instants after he died. A mental picture of a pyramidal shape and the thought, It came from nowhere, from nothingness.

  Cemp felt a chill as he contemplated the fantastic implications of the message. The immense speed of the attack ... out of nowhere.

  Presently, Cemp telepathed to Ou-Dan, 'Why don't you come with me, and we'll wait in the ship? Its weapons will help us if we're attacked.'

  Ou-Dan followed Cemp into an alcove barrier at the heart of the machinery that made up the ship. 'But I'm not staying,' he said.

  Cemp sensed behind the decision, not antagonism, but disinterest.

  Ou-Dan's thought came again, 'I remained with Lan's dead body out of courtesy till someone arrived. Now that you're here, I plan to return to Earth.'

  'It's safer in the ship,' Cemp urged.

  He pointed out that it was an Earth Silkie maxim never to take unnecessary chances. Ou-Dan's plan to go out by himself into space seemed a risk of this kind.

  'It would be purely accidental,' was the reply, 'if I met the killer in these vast reaches. My guess is that he spotted Lan when he used the relay system to communicate with me. So as I see it, the closer you are to a ship, the greater your danger.'

  The analysis had its own reasonableness. But why, since Ou Dan had joined the exploration group in the first place, leave now? Cemp asked the question.

  Ou-Dan said that because of Cemp's action in saving the meteorite Silkies from the Glis eight months before, On-Dan felt obligated to tell him that he considered this to be a crisis. But it was probably typical of the many crises that would occur in the future in a new system comprising eighteen hundred arid twenty-three habitable planets. So the time to resolve Silkie rights in relation to human beings was now.

  Ou-Dan predicted that the Silkie originals would undoubtedly take no further action until their legal situation with Earth was settled.

  'The others and I came out to get the feel of being involved,' said Ou-Dan.. 'So I can tell you right now that we're not going to settle for being police officers like you. And of course, we're not going to give up our ability to change to any form or shape of body.

  'After all,' On-Dan continued tolerantly, 'just because you're limited to the Silkie-human cycle doesn't mean we have to be.'

  They had been talking mentally at the superspeed of thoughts synchronised with magnetic carrier waves. It would have actually required a small book for a transcript of the details of their messages to each other; the overtones were that numerous.

  Now, for the period required for a private thought, Cemp put up a barrier. The fantastic subject of change of form was not one he was prepared to discuss with anyone. In fact, he had instructions from the Silkie Authority to keep secret his special knowledge.

  The original Silkies — like Ou-Dan — had a basic ability to change into any living shape or form that could contain, expand, or compress the total number of molecules involved; not merely a human form. Theirs was, however, an elementary-level transformation, beginning with a general internal and external resemblance — not very refined but adequate for any reasonable purpose. In addition, in the presence of a life form, they could, by a continuous rapid scanning-and-feedback method, duplicate that life form at virtually any level of refinement — as long as the being who was duplicated was close by.

  Earth Silkies, on the other hand, had been biologically limited to the human — Silkie B — Silkie C change, which was automatic once it was set in motion.

  Only Nat Cemp, of the Earth Silkies, could go beyond the Silkie-human cycle.

  In confronting the remarkable Kibmadine, he had learned its perfect method of metamorphic ability. He needed only the memory of someone once met, and he could become that person or being with total duplication.

  Having had these thoughts and hidden them, Cemp telepathed in a temporising way, 'Don't underestimate human beings.'

  'I won't,' retorted Ou-Dan, 'so long as they have you fooled into being on their side.'

  Cemp said, 'Even with the 6,000 original Silkies added to our
own numbers, the total Silkie population of the entire universe is less than 8,000. Such a minority has to adjust to the vast planetary populations of other life forms.'

  Ou-Dan said, 'I don't have to adjust to anything. I'm free to do as I please.'

  Cemp said, 'All through human history, wherever people got the right to make their own choices, they presently refused to cooperate even for the common good. Soon, each person set himself up as having an opinion as good as that of anyone else. Naturally, they soon fell under the influence of individuals with skillful systems, and in the end were maneuvered into a new slavery. Now, here you are making the same error of refusing to cooperate.'

  'Let others cooperate with us,' was the reply. 'We're the superior beings.'

  'If we were so great,' Cemp flashed back, 'how come there are so few of us left?'

  'Well ... ' Ou-Dan was impatient. 'We were unlucky that we ran into a race with even more capability than we had. At least, that's the legend. And of course, after that we were in that meteorite under the control of the Glis, and our numbers were kept limited.'

  Cemp pointed out gently that control of Silkies by the Glis was the slave condition. 'Therefore,' he said, 'we may deduce that long ago, Silkies reached the state of refusing to cooperate for the common good. We can picture enormous, vaulting egos, opinionated and ridiculous, never once having a true survival thought.

  'We can,' Cemp continued, 'picture Silkies refusing to abide by any system of law, going out into space if anyone threatened them, feeling absolutely impregnable. And then, one day out there in the dark reaches, they met their match and were hunted down individually by a remorseless enemy.'

  'I don't see how we free Silkies can even talk to someone as conformist as you are,' said Ou-Dan.

  'Reliable is the word,' answered Cemp 'I can be trusted to do what I say. Evidently, you and your originals cannot even decide what rôle you want to play.'

  'Why should we have a rôle? why should we work at all, at anything? Why shouldn't human beings work for us instead of we for them? That's a perfectly fair question.'