Code Of The Lifemaker

by Hogan, James

  computers, nuclear plants, and spaceships. Hence we can explain every detail of

  our creations and its purpose, right down to the last nut and bolt of something

  like the Orion. But an understanding of biological processes didn't come so

  easily because, instead of being able to start with the simple, we found

  ourselves confronted by the most complex—the end-products of billions of years

  of evolution. With no comprehension of DNA, protein transcription, cell

  differentiation, and the like, it's not easy to explain the totality of a rabbit

  or account for how it came together in the first place." Spearman entered

  another command, waited to check its effect, and turned back to face the others

  once more. "The Taloids had the same problem. They were confronted by the

  end-products of a long history of alien technology, plus probably millions of

  years of evolution after that, without any of the benefit of attending the

  schools and technical colleges that the alien engineers went to. So the physical

  sciences remained a mystery. But dabbling with biological techniques was

  something they could figure out for themselves, using the resources they had."

  Thelma reflected for a few seconds. "You mean for a long time they never even

  experimented with simple tools as we know them? . . . They'd have had enough raw

  materials lying around down there. It seems ... oh, strange somehow."

  Spearman smiled faintly. "The reason's pretty obvious when you think about it,"

  he said.

  "What?" Thelma asked.

  "Tools as we know them are made out of refined materials like metals, glass,

  plastics, and so on," Spearman said. "In other words, the same kinds of

  substances that are produced naturally all over the place on Titan. They

  wouldn't last very long. Neither would anything you tried to make with them."

  Crookes gave a puzzled frown. "How come?"

  Webster spread his hands. "Anything like that would probably turn out to be

  'food' for something or other. And besides . . . who'd dream of making tools,

  ornaments, and houses out of candy bars and pizza?"

  The crew mess hall inside the larger of the two prefabricated domes that

  constituted Genoa Base One was warm, stuffy, and crowded. At the serving window,

  Massey picked up a mug of hot coffee and a donut and walked away from the short

  line of bulky figures in extravehicular suits waiting to snatch a last-minute

  snack before another expedition into the city. Since he had come down from the

  Orion thirty-six hours or so previously and just awakened from a rest period, it

  was really breakfast, he supposed. The Taloids remained continuously active for

  a period of a little over ten terrestrial days, centered around the time of

  maximum total illumination that resulted from direct solar radiation and

  reflection from Satum as Titan progressed through its sixteen-day orbit. Since

  Titan kept one hemisphere permanently toward Satum, one side of Titan

  experienced changes in both direct radiation and reflection while the other side

  experienced the direct component only, the areas in between receiving a mixture

  of both in varying proportions; thus the light-dark cycle was a complicated

  function of orbital motion, and on top of that, varied from place to place.

  "And how is the rationalist today?" a jovial voice inquired from behind him.

  "It's not a good time of year for the debunking business, I hear."

  Massey had recognized Zambendorf even before looking round. Although many of the

  mission's scientists had shown some signs of disdain and aloofness toward

  Zambendorf and his team three months previously at the time of leaving Earth,

  things had changed noticeably in the course of the voyage. Now Zambendorf,

  Abaquaan, Thelma, and the rest were simply accepted as a normal part of the

  day-to-day life of the Orion's community. Whether this was a psychological

  effect of everyone's sharing the same, tiny, man-made environment hundreds of

  millions of miles from Earth, Massey didn't know; but in his conversations he

  had detected a not-uncommon attitude among the scientists of amused respect

  toward Zambendorf and his crew for at least being indisputable masters of their

  chosen profession; the scientists' contempt was reserved more for those who

  chose to adulate Zambendorf's team.

  Massey turned to find Zambendorf grinning at him over the metal-ring

  helmet-seating of his EV suit. "It looks as if you might last a few more days

  yet," he conceded grumy.

  "I should hope so too," Zambendorf said. "Surely it must be obvious by now, even

  to you, Gerry, that there is more important work to be done than wasting time

  with trivia that belong where we should have left them—a billion miles away,

  back on Earth."

  Massey looked at him curiously. Zambendorf and his team had been showing a

  genuine interest in the mission's serious business—and surprising some of the

  scientists with how much they knew. Was it possible that Zambendorf could be

  undergoing a change of heart? "What's the matter Karl?" he asked. "Are you

  developing a guilt complex now that you're seeing some real science for once?"

  "Don't be ridiculous," Zambendorf scoffed. "And besides, even if it were true,

  do you think I'd tell you? You're the psychologist. You should be telling me."

  In other words Massey could take Zambendorf's attitude either way. He was still

  the same old Zambendorf—forever confusing, and always a jump ahead of the game.

  "You're doing something worthwhile for once," Massey said. "You've got a knack

  for getting through to the Taloids, and they trust you. That has to be a better

  feeling than ripping people off all the time, so why not admit it?"

  "It's not the same thing," Zambendorf replied. "I'll help anyone who makes the

  effort to help himself. The Taloids might have some way to go yet, but they

  value knowledge and skill. They want to learn. They're willing to work at it.

  But people? Pah! They grow up surrounded by libraries, universities, teachers

  who could show them the accumulated discoveries and wisdom of millennia and

  they're not interested. They'd rather live junk-lives. How can you steal

  anything from someone who has already thrown everything away?"

  "Perhaps people simply need to be shown how to think," Massey suggested.

  Zambendorf shook his head. "It's like leading horses to water. When people are

  ready to think, they will think. Trying to rush them is futile. All you can do

  is show them where the water is and wait for them to get thirsty." He gestured

  over Massey's shoulder at Osmond Periera and Malcom Wade, who were standing by

  the doorway, debating in loud voices a speculation of Periera's that the

  antimatter spaceship responsible for creating the North Polar Sea might have

  come from Titan. "Listen to those two idiots," Zambendorf murmured in a lower

  voice. "You could spend a year of your life preparing a detailed refutation that

  might succeed in convincing them that what they're talking about is nonsense. Do

  you think they'd learn anything from the experience? Not a bit of it. Within a

  week they'd be off into something else equally preposterous. So you could have

  saved your time for something profitable. I'll save mine for the Taloids."

  "Careful
, Karl," Massey cautioned. "You're beginning to sound as if you're

  admitting you're a fraud again."

  "Don't be ridiculous," Zambendorf said. "But even if it were true, do you think

  people would learn anything from the experience if you proved it?" He shook his

  head. "Not a bit of that either. Within a week they would have found something

  else too ... just like friend Osmond and that other character behind you."

  At that moment a loudspeaker announced that the personnel carrier that would be

  taking the party into the city was waiting at the vehicle-access transfer lock.

  "The problem with you is that you really are a scientist at heart," Massey said

  as they began moving in the direction of the doorway. "But you think it would be

  beneath your dignity to admit it."

  Half an hour later they were among the passengers watching parts of the

  outskirts of Genoa slide through the headlamp beams of the carrier and its

  escort of two military scout cars fifty yards ahead and behind. All along the

  way, Taloids came to stand by the roadside to watch the procession of strange

  creatures that bore within them beings from another world. Some ran forward to

  bathe themselves in the light, which they apparently believed to possess

  miraculous and curative properties; a few shrank back as the vehicles passed, or

  fled into the alleys and sidestreets.

  One—a mounted figure wrapped in a heavy riding cloak, its face concealed in a

  deep hood—watched inconspicuously from the shadows of a gateway near the city

  wall, absorbing every detail. When the Terran vehicles had passed, the rider

  reemerged and moved away along the side of the road in the opposite direction to

  resume the journey that would take it out of the city, beyond the borders of

  Carthogia, and across the Wilderness of Meracasine. Skerilliane,

  Spy-with-a-Thousand-Eyes, would have much to report when he returned to his

  royal master Eskenderom, the King of Kroaxia.

  21

  "CAN YOU IMAGINE A DISTANCE TWELVE TIMES GREATER THAN the greatest breadth of

  Carthogia?" Thirg asked Lofbayel's son, Morayak, who was sitting with his back

  to the large table strewn with charts and sheets of calculations, in the room

  that Lofbayel had given Thirg to use as a study while Thirg was residing with

  the family.

  "I think so, though I have never journeyed but a fraction of such a distance,"

  Morayak said. "Why, it must be greater even than the size of the strange,

  spherical world of which you and my father speak!"

  "Not so, Young-Questioner-Who-Will-Become-Wise-by-Questioning," Thirg said. He

  picked up the Skybeings' globe that the Wearer-of-the-Arm-Vegetable had

  presented to him as a gift, and looked at it briefly. "In fact such a distance

  would be a little less than half the diameter of our world, of which I am

  assured this is a faithful representation." He put the globe down and looked

  back at Morayak. "And what of a distance yet twelve times that again—enough to

  span six worlds side by side? Can your mind grasp that?"

  Morayak frowned and stared at the globe while he concentrated. "I'm not sure. To

  visualize the breadth of Carthogia requires but a simple extension of faculties

  that are familiar to me, but where is the experience to guide my intuition in

  attempting to judge a distance through a world rather than across it? But even

  taxing my mind to that degree does not satisfy you enough, it seems, for now you

  would have me grapple with conceiving six of them."

  "Then instead of worlds whose surfaces curve in space, let us take as our model,

  time, which involves no complications from multiplicity of direction," Thirg

  suggested. "If the breadth of Carthogia be represented by a single bright, then

  the distance to which I refer, being twelve times twelve, equates to one

  Carthogia for every bright contained in the duration of twelve twelve-brights.

  Now—can you visualize that?"

  It took Morayak a few seconds to grasp, but in the end he nodded, at the same

  time frowning intently. "That is vastness indeed, but it is not completely

  unimaginable now you have described it thus. My mind is stretched, but I think

  it can conceive of such a distance."

  "And what of twelve times that, yet again?"

  Morayak stared at Thirg with a strained look on his face, then grinned

  hopelessly and shook his head. "Impossible!"

  Thirg paced across the room, swung around, and threw his hands wide. "Then what

  of twelve times even that, and twelve times that yet again still, and then even

  twelve times—"

  "Stop, Thirg!" Morayak protested. "What purpose is served by uttering

  repetitions of words that have ceased to carry any meaning?"

  "But they do carry meaning," Thirg said. He moved forward and raised his arm to

  point. Morayak turned in his seat to look at the large chart on the wall above

  the table, which Lofbayel had drawn from Thirg's records of conversations with

  the Skybeings. In the center it showed the huge furnace in the sky—large enough

  to consume the whole world in an instant, the Skybeings said—and around it the

  paths of the nine worlds that circled it endlessly, some of them accompanied by

  their own attendant worlds, which in turn circled them. It had come as something

  of a shock to learn that Robia, as Kleippur had named the robeing world, was not

  even a member of the nine, but just one— although, true, the largest—of a

  retinue of seventeen servants following at the heels of a giant. Dornvald had

  remarked that the giant was surely the king of worlds, because of his ringlike

  crown. But Thirg was pointing not at the giant, but at the third world out from

  the furnace—a humble little world, seemingly, with just a single page in

  attendance— which Lofbayel had labeled Lumia, since its sky shone with the heat

  light that accompanied the Skybeings, or Lumians, as they were now more properly

  called, wherever they went. Thirg swept a finger slowly across the chart. "That

  is the distance which separates our world from the world of Lumians, Morayak—the

  distance they have traveled to come to Robia."

  Morayak stared at him incredulously. "It cannot be!" Thirg nodded. Morayak

  looked at the chart again, then back at Thirg. "But such a journey would surely

  require many twelves of twelves of lifetimes."

  "One twelve-bright was sufficient, we are assured. The large dragon that circles

  beyond the sky is swifter, seemingly, than even the smaller ones which cross

  above the city in moments." Thirg studied Morayak's face for a few seconds and

  gave a satisfied nod. "Now, methinks, you understand better the wondrousness of

  the beings you are soon to meet," he said.

  Morayak stared back at Thirg for a moment longer as if unsure of whether or not

  to take his words seriously, and then looked slowly back at the chart, this time

  with a new respect. Thirg and Lofbayel were due to leave shortly for Kleippur's

  residence to join the Carthogian leaders in more discussions with the Lumians,

  and Morayak had eventually succeeded in pestering his father into allowing him

  to go along too. He had been to see the strange growths that the Lumians lived

  in just outside the city, of course—his father said that the Lumians had created
>
  them—and he had caught glimpses from a distance of the cumbersome, domeheaded

  figures, which apparently weren't the Lumians at all but an outer casing that

  they had to wear on Robia because they needed to be bathed in hot, highly

  corrosive gas all the time; but that wasn't the same—he wouldn't be able to

  boast to his friends about that. "I wonder what kind of a world it is," he

  murmured distantly, still staring at the chart.

  "Amazing beyond your wildest dreams," Thirg replied. "Its sky is filled with

  worlds too numerous to count, extending away as far as it is possible to see,

  for there is no permanent cover of cloud above Lumia to limit vision. It is so

  hot that the surface is covered by oceans of liquid ice. Methane can exist only

  as a vapor. Your body would be much heavier than it is on Robia."

  "What of the countryside?" Morayak asked. "Does it have mountains and forests?

  Do the Lumians keep herds of bearing-bush formers, and hunt platemelters out on

  the flatlands? Do they have children who go gasket-collecting among the

  head-assembly transfer lines, or baiting traps with copper wire to catch

  coil-winders?"

  Thirg frowned, not knowing quite how to explain the differences. "The children

  there are assembled in miniature form," he said. "They grow larger by taking in

  substances which are distributed internally as liquid solutions."

  Morayak stared at him in astonishment. "But how could the substances know where

  to be deposited?" he objected. "All form would surely be lost."

  "The process is beyond my understanding," Thirg admitted. "Perhaps that is why

  the Lumians exist as jelly and must remain inside outer casings to preserve

  their shape. But natural assembly is impossible on Lumia because there aren't

  any machines . . . save for a few which aren't alive, but were created by the

  Lumians."

  "It's true then—the Lumians really can make artificial machines?"

  "Oh yes—those are the only machines they know. They do have animals and forests,

  but they're not machines. They're made of, well . . . the best way I can find to

  describe it is 'naturally occurring organics'—very like the Lumians themselves."

  Morayak looked perplexed. "But artisans must exist to create organics. How can

  there be 'natural organics'?"

  "I too am learning," Thirg reminded him. "We both have many questions that will