by Hogan, James
not in good conscience abandon him to the mercies of King's servants unlikely to
find the disappearance of their quarry a source of any great amusement."
"We have spare steeds," Dornvald said, looking at Groork. "Would you travel in
company as far as the village of Xerxeon, Hearer, though I should warn you I
have no ear for holy words?"
"Arghhh!" Groork shrank back into the doorway of the house and covered his
imagers protectively with an arm. "Wouldst thou defile me with the stain of thy
followers, Henchman-of-Unbehevers? I will travel my road in solitude, for thine
leads not upward to the Lifemaker, but downward to the precipice of doom."
Dornvald shrugged his shoulder cowlings. "As you will. But I doubt that your
voices will afford you the same safety on your journey." He looked back at
Thirg. "There is one pack-mount for the possessions you would bring with you.
Kleippur has given particular instructions for the charts and records belonging
to the mapmaker, Lofbayel, to be preserved. If you have a safe hiding place, I
suggest you use it for anything else of value. Who can foretell when the strange
workings of fate might bring you this way again?"
"Kleippur knows of the charts?" Thirg sounded amazed.
"Kleippur makes it his business to know many things," Dornvald replied.
Thirg spent a short while selecting personal belongings and some of his more
highly prized books and journals. While a couple of Dornvald's outlaws were
packing these items into bundles with Lofbayel's charts and securing them, Thirg
covered the remainder of his books, his study samples, and his finer measuring
instruments in oiled wrappings and locked them in chests which two more outlaws
carried to a concealed hole, sealed by a boulder, at the base of the cliff a
short distance from the house.
Then Thirg stood to take a last look around his garden while the outlaws who had
been helping him remounted. Another led forward a sleek, powerful-looking mount
with a dark, copper-tinted sheen and titanium-white flashes around its head and
neck. Thirg eyed it apprehensively as he stepped closer—riding was not one of
his greatest skills —and then cocked an imager-shade curiously as he noticed the
royal crest etched into its rear flank. Dornvald followed Thirg's gaze and
laughed. "Until recently the swift carrier of one of His Majesty's messengers,
who has departed for a place to which that steed could not take him. We must
make haste now, Collector-of-Books-and-Objects-That-Mystify-Me, or His Majesty's
servants will be here to take his property back for him."
Thirg mounted carefully while one of the outlaws held the animal's harness to
steady it. Then the riders formed up with Dornvald at the head, Thirg next with
Rex waiting suspiciously but faithfully alongside, and the remaining dozen or so
falling into a column behind. Groork crept out from the shadows at the back of
the house and watched. They had left behind one steed, which Dornvald had
ordered to be tethered to a pillar at the edge of the clearing.
"Which officer is it who leads the soldiers?" Dornvald inquired casually to
Geynor, his lieutenant, as the riders moved off. "Do we know of him from
encounters past, or by repute, perchance?"
"Oh indeed," Geynor replied, speaking just as loudly. "Captain Horazzorgio, no
less, whose rage causes even his own soldiers to tremble, or so I have heard
tell."
"Not the Horazzorgio whose inventions of tortures and torments are beyond the
ability of even the keepers of the King's dungeons to bring themselves to
speak?"
"The same. Tis said heretics have been slowly melted, starting at the toes."
"Really? How awful!"
The column filed out of the clearing into the gully of the stream, and began
following the narrow trail that led upward toward the High Country. They had
covered only a short distance when Fenyig, the rearguard, called to attract
Dornvald's attention. A lone mounted figure, holding well back to keep its
distance, had come into view lower down the trail. It halted when it saw that
the column had stopped to wait. Groork's voice came floating up hollowly from
below. "Thy demons have damned thee, Thirg. Even now doest thou go willingly
with the servants of Darkness to deliver thy soul into eternal bondage. Heed my
words, for surely wilt thou melt in the Great Furnace."
Thirg smiled to himself as he turned back, and Dornvald ordered the column to
resume moving. From there on he kept his eyes on the peaks of methane-capped ice
looming in the distance ahead. His future lay beyond the mountains now, and that
was where he should look.
13
TITAN, SECOND IN SIZE AMONG THE MOONS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM only to Jupiter's
Ganymede and then by just the barest of margins, had been a constant source of
enigmas for astronomers and planetary physicists virtually since its discovery
by Christiaan Huyghens in 1655. One of the first questions to be asked was
whether it possessed an atmosphere, thus making it unique among the planetary
satellites. When that was at last resolved affirmatively in the early 1940s,
other questions arose: What did the atmosphere consist of, and what were its
physical conditions at various depths? For more than thirty years attempts at
measuring the body's optical, infrared, and radio spectra yielded inconsistent
and sometimes contradictory results. Then the close flyby of the American
Voyager I probe in 1980 resolved some of the basic issues:
Titan's atmosphere was mostly nitrogen, with significant proportions of argon,
methane, and hydrogen, plus trace amounts of numerous hydrocarbons and
nitrogenous compounds. Surface pressure was around 1.5 times that of Earth's
atmosphere, which at the estimated temperature of minus 179 degrees Celsius and
with Titan's surface gravity of 0.14 suggested about ten times as much gas per
unit area as on Earth. As had been suspected by many theorists, the dense,
reddish clouds blanketing the surface turned out to be an aerosol suspension at
an altitude of two hundred kilometers, consisting of molecular fragments formed
by ultraviolet dissociation of the gases in the upper atmosphere. According to
most models, the aerosol particles would gradually recombine into heavier
polymers and precipitate out of the atmosphere to form surface deposits of
considerable depth, but this hadn't been verified since the clouds were
everywhere opaque. Because of the cloud blanket and Titan's remoteness from the
Sun, daylight on the surface would be about as bright, it was estimated, as a
moonlit night on Earth.
The returned data were consistent with surface conditions close to the
triple-point of the solid, liquid, and gaseous phases of methane, which raised
the intriguing possibility that methane could well exist as a gas in the lower
atmosphere and a liquid on the surface, thus playing a role similar to that of
water on Earth. Conceivably, therefore, the surface of Titan could consist of
methane oceans and water-ice continents covered by nitrogenous-hydrocarbon soil,
above which methane rain precipitated from methane clouds formed below the
aerosol blanket. It was even possible tha
t the release of radioactive heat in
the interior might maintain reservoirs of water that could escape to the surface
as "ice lava," and perhaps provide a fluid substrate for mountain-building and
other tectonic processes. But with the diversion of funding from planetary
exploration programs to feed the ongoing insanity of the arms race, little more
was learned until the arrival of the European probe at Saturn, less than three
years before the Orion.
Radar mapping by the Dauphin orbiter had indeed revealed the existence of vast
oceans, islands, continents, and mountains below Titan's all-obscuring clouds,
and details of the natural geography had been published widely. However, as the
Orion's occupants had learned only after leaving Earth, the orbiter had also
sent back radar images of highly reflective objects suggestive of artificial
metallic constructions, which in many places covered huge areas too densely to
be resolved individually. All mention of that had been censored from the
published information, along with any reference to the machines glimpsed by the
Dauphin's short-lived surface landers and the advanced culture that had
originated them. At least, the inferred sizes of the constructions and the areas
which they covered on some parts of the surface had seemed indicative of an
advanced culture. But in almost three years the orbiter's instruments had failed
to observe any activity in space around Titan, or even to detect any sign of
aircraft in the lower atmosphere; and except for intermittent transmissions
emanating from a few sources pinpointed on the surface, the radio spectrum had
been strangely silent.
No more was learned until the Orion went into orbit above Titan and began
sending reconnaissance drones down through the aerosol layer and the
lower-altitude methane clouds to scan the surface. The views sent back had been
at first perplexing, then bewildering, and finally staggering as the mission's
scientists gradually unraveled what they implied. The views had shown what
appeared to be alien towns consisting of unusual buildings that resembled
enormous, intricately shaped hollow plants more than anything fabricated
according to recognizable methods, which was difficult to explain since there
were also plenty of examples of immense and elaborate engineering constructions.
If the aliens had the technology to build factories, why didn't they build
cities to live in? Perhaps because of their notions of values and aesthetics,
somebody had suggested.
Then had come the first indications that maybe the aliens weren't so
professional at managing their technology after all. View after view showed
chaotic situations where entire industrial complexes seemed to have overflowed
their boundaries, spilling plant and machinery out across the surrounding
country with outgrowths from different centers invading each other's territories
and mixing themselves up in hopeless confusion. In some areas the mess of
working and broken-down machinery, all buried amid piles of scrap and assorted
parts, stretched for miles, yet much of it managed, somehow, to continue
functioning. If the alien engineers were capable of efficient and purposeful
design at all— and some of the designs seemed astonishingly advanced—how could
they have let things get into such a state? It made no sense.
As the drones were sent lower to obtain telescopic close-ups both in infrared
and at normal wavelengths using flares and searchlights, the scientists
monitoring the views back in the Orion had waited breathlessly for their first
glimpse of an alien. But they never found any. There were thousands of
ingeniously conceived, freely mobile machines, to be sure, some of them
displaying extraordinary degrees of versatility and behavioral adaptability,
with all manner of types apparently specialized for just about every task
imaginable . . . but never once was there a trace of the aliens whose needs all
the activity was presumably intended to serve. Some of the scientists had
speculated that the aliens were too tiny to show up on the pictures. But if so,
why would they make machines that were so much larger? It didn't add up. Maybe
the aliens lived below the surface and never came out, leaving the machines to
manage everything on the surface. Maybe they just stayed in their vegetable
houses all the time. Maybe . . . but nobody found such suggestions very
satisfying.
And then, as the scientists continued to study replays from all over Titan, they
began noticing something remarkable about a particular "species" of erect,
bipedal, vaguely humanoid robot that seemed to be represented everywhere to a
greater or lesser extent: Everything they seemed to do was unremarkably
familiar. Their patterns of coming and going in and out of the houses and about
the towns, sometimes alone and sometimes in groups, stopping occasionally upon
meeting others, were the same as could be seen in communities anywhere; they
tended plantations of odd-looking growths that in some ways resembled their
peculiar organic houses; they wore what looked like clothes; they herded flocks
of mechanical "animals," and—more amazing still—were frequently seen to ride
them; they gathered in crowds, and there was an instance of two groups of them
fighting each other; and once or twice when the drones went too low, their
reactions showed every characteristic of fear, and occasionally, panic. In
short, as far as could be ascertained from pictures, they acted exactly as
people did.
Which explained, of course, why nobody was having any luck in finding aliens—at
least, not the flesh-and-blood or whatever-and-what-ever kinds of "conventional"
aliens that planetary biologists had speculated about for years.
Titan was inhabited by machines. It possessed an electromechanical biosphere
which included, apparently, a dominant species of culturally developed,
intelligent, and presumably self-aware robot. The scientists christened them the
Taloids, after Talos, the bronze man created by Hephaestus, the blacksmith son
of Hera and Zeus. But clearly Titan could never have evolved such a system from
nothing. So how had the machines come to be there? They had to be products of an
alien civilization that had either brought them to Titan or sent them there.
When? What for? Why Titan? Where were the aliens? Nobody had any answers. As
always, Titan had thrown up a new batch of mysteries as soon as the earlier ones
were resolved. Evidently it would be far from running low on its supply of them
for a while to come.
"Not only aliens; not only intelligent aliens; but intelligent, alien
machines—plus undreamed-of technology in virtually unlimited abundance, and a
whole new, geologically active world!" Gerold Massey turned back from facing a
wall of cable-runs and switchboxes in the generator bay inside the Orion's
Service Module and spread his hands emphatically. "Probably the most staggering
discoveries within a century, and quite possibly within the entire history of
science. Now, that's worth some time and effort . . . But Mars never happened.
There isn't any place now for psychic paranonsense, surely."
Z
ambendorf, leaning with arms folded against a stator housing, sent back a
scornful look. "You're being presumptuous, Massey. And besides, you're talking
about how I make my living, which I happen to find stimulating, entertaining,
and amply rewarding. I would say that's worth a considerable amount of time and
effort."
"And how about all the people who waste their minds and their lives thinking
they're going to become supermen—have you asked them if they think so too?"
"I don't have to," Zambendorf said. "They've already shown what they think—by
how they choose to spend their own time and their own money. They're free-acting
individuals in a free society. Why do you insist on making their well-being your
business?"
"When I have to live surrounded by mass-produced morons, it is my business,"
Massey retorted. "We've got scientists emigrating in droves. Japanese power
plants are driving half of what's left of our industries. This ship wouldn't be
here if it weren't for the Europeans ... I mean, Christ!—don't you care what
you're doing?"
"Why single me out?" Zambendorf demanded, straightening up and sounding angry
suddenly. "Do you think I made people the way they are? I merely accept them as
I find them, and if they have failed to develop the sense that would serve them
better, or if society has failed to educate them in the use of it, why am I
supposed to be the one to blame? Why don't you complain at our so-called
educators, or the media mind-puppeteers, or the political dummies who read
opinion polls like horoscopes instead of doing something to influence them?
Protecting fools from their own stupidity will not make them wiser, Massey. It
merely spares them any need even to be aware of the fact that they're fools,
which is hardly the best way to begin curing anything. When I find I am unable
to make a living, that is when people will have learned something. In the
meantime, don't expect apologies from me."
"Ah . . . you're admitting you're a fake at last, are you?" Massey inquired,
looking mildly amused.
Zambendorf calmed down at once and sniffed disdainfully. "Don't be absurd. I
admit no such thing."
"So why did GSEC send you here? I wonder," Massey said, ignoring the denial.
"Because I know, and I know you know, that Ramelson and the other GSEC people