by Ben Bova
“When you used the sensor scan that set them off in the cavern, did you get any indication they ‘heard’ it?”
“No more than when we tried it when we remoted the worksuit an hour ago. They heard or sensed it somehow—you saw their reaction. But if you’re trying to suggest some way to transmit and receive from them using it, I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“Oh, well,” Anmoore said. “Maybe when we get back up to the ship. Thanks anyway.”
Adela approached the alien once more, her hand in front of her. “Let me try again to—”
She barely saw the silver tendril as it rushed at her head, flowing coolly, heavily over her face. Blackness and a numb silence gripped her as the living metal spread around and behind her cheeks, covering her ears. She gasped for breath and clawed at the tendril, but her fingers merely passed through the syrupy thickness of the alien and she began to see a series of sparks and fireflies as the lack of air started to overcome her. She fell backward, felt hands on her shoulders and arms.
I understand. The thought formed in her mind, and her mouth was suddenly uncovered, letting her inhale a desperate swallow of air, then another and another until the suffocating feeling left her. And with it went the surprised terror that had gripped her the moment the tendril had hit her forehead. She could breathe normally again, but the liquid silver still covered the rest of her face.
“I’m all right!” She had no idea if they heard her or not, but the desperate grip on her shoulders lessened, and she felt herself being lowered to a sitting position on the floor … .
The room was bright again. But Adela hadn’t noticed when her face had been suddenly uncovered. She blinked at the strange light, dull and orange as it streamed through the opened window. There was a gorgeous sunset there, just visible through the draperies, and she saw a bloated K-type star hanging low on the horizon.
There was an odd, unfamiliar sensation at her chest and she looked down, stunned to find that she was suckling an infant. The shock passed instantly, and then she knew instinctively that everything was all right, that all was as it should be. She held the boy to her breast, stroking the tawny fur of his head and back, and kissed his tiny ears. He looked up at her with large, blinking eyes set above the tiny, bridgeless nose. His face was still furless and wrinkled, but he would have the coloring of his father in a few weeks. He pulled away, her nipple slipping from his mouth, and he yawned sleepily, tiny sharp teeth already beginning to appear in his gums. The mewling sound he made was warm and comforting as he yawned again and rubbed tiny, stubby-fingered paws on his face. His eyelids drooped a few times, then closed, and he fell into a deep sleep.
She pulled down her linen blouse, covering herself, and held him closer. As she rocked him in her arms, she felt his delicate breath on the light fur of her neck.
“Sleep, little Tanyo,” she whispered. She hummed softly, a lullaby she had learned when she was still a child herself. There was the thump of a door being closed down the hallway, and the sound of footsteps made in such a way that showed that whoever was coming did not want to wake the little nestling.
“Shhhhhhh …” she admonished when he came in.
He made an apologetic face and tiptoed over to her, sitting beside her on the divan and encircling them both in his strong arms. He nuzzled her, gently licking the fur of her neck and cheek, sending a feeling of love and warmth through her.
“I love you, Ettalira,” he said, the scent of his breath sweet in her nostrils. “It’s hard to believe that we leave tomorrow.”
“And I love you.” She rubbed her face against his, nipping lightly at his lips and ears, then said softly, so as not to wake the nestling Tanyo, “I wonder what kind of world we shall find?”
“As long as you and Tanyo are there with me, it will be a fine and happy world.”
She smiled, and buried her face against his neck … .
“Grandmother?”
“Dr. Montgarde, can you hear me?”
She blinked and looked around her at surroundings that seemed cold, strange. The peaceful living room was gone, the glowing warmth that was the setting sun evaporated; her husband and baby were but memories. Seated on the floor of the suit room, she blinked up into four concerned faces, and behind them an improbable line of plastic snowmen. Looking down at her arms, she noticed that they were folded to her chest as if gently holding something protectively. Adela felt as though she had lost something precious.
A gleaming movement caught her eye.
“I understand you now, Ettalira,” she said to the silver sphere. Adela rose, and smiled warmly at the alien. “Thank you for sharing your life, and your people, with me.”
The sphere came forward. A round portion of the silvery surface perhaps three centimeters across flattened, vibrating.
“And thank you for sharing yours with me,” she said in Adela’s voice.
The holoconference chamber on the lander Surtsey was small, utilitarian, with only four couches. Still on Big One, Brendan, Anmoore and Adela listened intently, as did the image of Lewis from the Scartaris.
“First let me say that I am deeply sorry about what happened to your people,” Ettalira was saying from where she floated between Brendan and Anmoore.
Although several hours had passed since the two of them had shared minds, Adela could still not get used to hearing her own voice coming from the silver sphere. As she watched, the sphere seemed somehow smaller, less threatening than it had when they’d first encountered it in the fissure cavern.
“We have hundreds of mechanical devices at the Home, powered in many ways,” Ettalira went on. “But none have ever reacted with such destructive force. There was no way to anticipate, when the waking curtain was erected, that it would interact in such a way with the servo motors of your hard suits. For that matter, we had no reason to suspect that any life other than our own would enter the cavern.”
“We will mourn our friends, Ettalira,” Lewis said, his voice firm and strong. Adela enjoyed this moment to watch him “at work.” It was the first opportunity she had had to see him in the role he loved so much, and she was pleased to see that he was a competent commander and authority figure. “However, we accept the unfortunate nature of what has happened as an accident that could neither have been anticipated, nor prevented. Even if the ‘waking curtain,’ as you call it, had been detected, its threatening nature could never have been foreseen. Eventually, something—or someone—containing a power chip of the type in the hard suits would have come into contact with your curtain. Perhaps our friends’ sacrifice has, in some way, prevented an even greater tragedy. Let’s speak no more of it.”
“All right, then.” The sphere bobbed in the air, the motion almost suggesting a nod. “However, I will join you in your mourning.”
Lewis nodded back, a look of gratitude on his features. “Thank you.” He straightened in his couch. “Dr. Montgarde tells me that you are an old race.”
“That’s true,” she said. “I would need to touch someone in the Home records to give you an accurate figure, since I’ve not needed to know how much time has passed since we left our world. To be frank, time is something that is hard for me to grasp anymore. To be sure, I can measure elapsed time—we have been in this chamber talking for three minutes, nineteen seconds, as you measure it. But the passage of time doesn’t matter to me, since I was not alive until the waking curtain created me.”
There was a silence, during which Lewis, as well as Brendan and Anmoore, sat upright.
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“Commander Wood, I have learned much from your grandmother about how you travel in space. Your ships are fast, much faster than ours—and the wormholes!” She paused, in awe of the very concept. “Our technology was not so advanced. My people, riding the seed ship, went out across this galaxy, colonizing hundreds of planets as we found them along our journey. But the voyage was too long, and too slow. It would have been foolish for us to go.”
“Ettal
ira Tewligh never physically left Gatan, her world at the galaxy core,” Adela explained. “Everything she, her husband and son were, was recorded and imprinted in their ship’s core memory. The ship left—with no living soul on board—on a trajectory that would take it along one of the spiral arms, programmed to scan for appropriate systems with habitable worlds and alter its course to intercept them. Once in orbit around a candidate, the memory core determined the suitability of the planet and, if it was of a type that would support the Gatanni, then a waking call was sent throughout the ship. At that moment, hundreds of memory patterns were activated and encoded into these living metal spheres.”
“And,” Ettalira picked up, “we used recorded DNA and genetic patterns to construct living, breathing Gatanni, altered to adapt them to the specific conditions of each world. Then we imprint them with the recorded memories of those of us on the ship who would people the new world, and bring rise to a new civilization. Then I, and my husband, return to the ship and are absorbed into the core until we are created again.”
“What you’re saying, then,” Brendan interjected, “is that you sent out a single colony ship, that colonized each world in the same way, with the same individuals? That you, or someone with your imprinted life and memories, has existed—still exists—on every world you’ve colonized?”
Ettalira moved into the center of the couches, regarding each of the men. “I perceive a sense of revulsion in your faces,” she said in Adela’s voice. “Understand that each world we colonize evolves on its own. We do not have interstellar communication, like you. Nor is the imprinting complete in the knowledge of how each society is created, or that a seeding ship has created them. Each new world, each new Ettalira Tewligh, her family and people, were free to develop on their own.” She was silent a moment, then said, “Please; it is not so shameful a life. The person who I was has been dead for millennia; gone and forgotten on a world that I no longer would recognize. But with each new world we find, I live again. And so does my husband, and my nestling Tanyo, all over again.”
“The natives on Tsing are not a separate intelligent species,” Adela said. “They are the Gatanni. Their bone structure is slightly different to accommodate the difference in surface gravity from Gatan normal. Their eyes are smaller, better adapted to the G-type star. Their digestive and respiratory organs have been finely tuned to the ecosystem. But they are still Gatanni.”
Lewis stood, pacing the small area around his chair. He would occasionally approach the limit of the holographic pickup and fade slightly as he trod back and forth. “So what happened here, Ettalira? The natives on the world below do not have a high level of technology. They are warlike, and unless some essence of cooperation develops among them, they are not likely to advance for a much longer time than your own world did.”
“I don’t know.” The sphere moved to Adela, and floated at her side. “The work of reproducing our culture takes many years, and was underway while I slept. When all is ready, when the living beings are constructed and functioning, the landing ship returns for us to complete our role. The waking curtain responsible for killing your friends was to have created me and the others at that time to travel below to imprint our memories on the colonists. I have learned from Dr. Montgarde’s memory that there is a crash site on the world below, many years old. I can only assume that this is the landing ship.”
“I think I understand now,” Brendan said, turning to the sphere. “You never were roused here on this moon, and your memories and customs were never given to the natives on the planet. The colonists that were designed and created for this world developed entirely on their own, then. They may have Gatanni origins, but their culture, their civilization, is unique to themselves.”
“That’s right.”
There was an awkward silence, broken finally when Lewis retook his seat and addressed the room at large. “So what happens now?” he asked bluntly. “You have been awakened to find that your work was incomplete, and that the long journey of your seed ship came to an end here.”
Ettalira didn’t answer immediately, considering what he had said. “That’s not entirely true,” she confessed. “The seed ship would already have left, even before the living beings on the world below were constructed. You see, the ship itself is small. When it finds a suitable world, automated procedures gather the necessary ores and material from the candidate solar system, either on the selected world or from the other planets and asteroids in the system. They then construct, first, the Home, followed by all equipment needed to erect the colony, including a small landing craft. The main ship then departs, continuing along the galaxy arm, while those here in the Home are left to finish the work of peopling our new world. According to the updating I received when the waking curtain created me, more than two thousand years, as you measure them, have passed since that would have occurred.”
“I see.” Lewis rubbed thoughtfully at his chin. “So your seeding ship had already come and gone, long before we even ventured out into space. I wonder how far it has traveled.”
“And how many colony worlds it has settled,” Anmoore put in.
“I have no way of knowing. None of us do who are left behind.” She floated to the center of the ring of couches again. “Once the ship is gone, and everything in the Home is constructed, organic material is collected from the chosen planet and used to replicate living beings, who are transported to the surface and imprinted.”
“That’s incredible,” Brendan said. “You construct living beings?”
“It isn’t that difficult, Academician. I am a living being, made of metal and inorganics, mechanical in nature. Biological beings are but organic machines, not that different from the form I have now.” She floated close to Lewis’ image, her voice—Adela’s voice—low. “For that matter, there is little difference among any living beings. Humanity is not that different from Gatanni, and the Sarpan share much with us both. The building blocks of life are the same.”
“But what happens when you are done, when the new world is finished?”
“When our work is done, we are reabsorbed into the Home, which then shuts down and remains hidden for all time.”
“The commander’s earlier question still stands, Ettalira,” Adela said. “You never completed your colonization. What do you plan to do now?”
“I don’t know what happened on the planet so long ago that interrupted everything. An accident, a malfunction, a miscalculation; it no longer matters.” There was a tiny sound, almost like a sigh. “But Adela, our work is completed. It’s too late to interfere in the lives of those below.”
“So you’ll just … turn yourself off?”
“Yes.”
“But that is such a waste,” Brendan sputtered. “Why would you even consider such a thing?”
“Why should I not?” she replied, orienting on his couch. “Please understand, Academician, that I have lived a hundred times before coming to this world. I’m certain that I have lived a hundred times since.”
“But why not stay … alive? There is much that we would like to learn from you, and a great deal you could learn from us.”
“This form isn’t permanent; it’s designed to allow us to do what we need to realize our goals, but it is too energy-inefficient to last much longer than a few days. What you see here …” She rippled the surface of the sphere, the liquid silver undulating in waves around its circumference. “ … is only temporary.”
Adela regarded the alien carefully, studying her. “Looking at you a few moments ago, I thought you were smaller. I was right, wasn’t I?”
“Yes. I have almost existed longer than I am designed to. This form is self-fueling, and is using itself up.”
“Then construct a biological one,” Adela said. “Consider this: If you had been successful here, if the landing ship had not been destroyed, there would be an advanced Gatanni culture here at this world. We would have discovered you then, and would have interacted and learned from each other. We can’t do that
with the inhabitants below; they know nothing of you or your past. Construct new living beings and imprint them.”
Ettalira considered this for several moments, then addressed Lewis. “When Adela and I touched, I learned that there is a great fear of those not like yourself. Do you think it is wise, Commander, to further contribute to that fear?”
“I consider it unwise to turn away knowledge when it is available,” he said without hesitation. “It is the absence of knowledge that feeds fear.”
“Your offer is a generous one,” she said. “But please remember that my time is limited in this form. Let me return to Home and discuss it with the others, although I’m fairly certain that they will agree. With your permission, however, I would like to suggest that only a few of us be imprinted at first. I think we should progress slowly in this.”
“Very good.” He turned to Anmoore. “Captain, would you please escort Ettalira to the lower level?”
Anmoore stood, nodding, and headed for the door with the sphere at his side.
“I have to admit,” Adela said when the three of them were alone, “that you surprise me. I didn’t expect your consent so quickly.”
“Me, too,” Brendan agreed. “You almost sounded like me a moment ago.”
“Maybe I’ve learned from you; maybe I’ve learned from both of you. Besides, it’s true.” He stood and unbuttoned the high collar of his uniform jacket, then sat on the arm of the couch. “Jephthah isn’t gone yet, only contained for the moment. If we ever hope to deal with the fear he’s spread through the Hundred Worlds, we have to move before he does. Enlisting the Gatanni now, before he has a chance to twist this latest news—before he even knows!—gives us an edge.”
Adela leaned forward, looking first at one, then the other of her grandsons. “Good. For once, then, the three of us are in accord.”
“There’s another reason I’m making this decision.” He finished unbuttoning his jacket and removed it, draping it in front of him over folded arms. “I’ve received word from Father, relayed from one of my commanders at the wormhole gate. He’s coming here—he’s already on his way, in fact—and will arrive in less than two weeks. I want as much in place when he gets here as possible.”