"I have no idea. I wasn't being mysterious when I said that. Every time I've ridden a sounder it has flown me to a different place. It never takes long, though, so very soon you'll be able to see for yourselves."
"If it's that short, we can't be going anywhere very interesting." Billy was responding to Simon Macafee's confidence, and showed it by returning to his normal argumentative self.
"Wait and see, Billy Jexter. I don't know what you consider interesting, but I'm sure that I'll find it interesting. Anyway, we won't have to wait long before we know." Simon gestured to the port.
The awful, absolute darkness outside the Galileo was ending. The sounder's maw was opening again, slowly, stretching from a needle's eye to a gaping octagon. The light that entered looked fainter and whiter than the Cloud's glowing pink. It came from a striated circle in the sky that turned into a long ellipse as the sounder's mouth gaped wider.
"I can't see it properly," Billy complained. "Are we going outside?"
"We definitely are not." Simon Macafee was craning forward. "If that's what I think it is, I don't want to leave the sounder and maybe find ourselves stranded out here. We would never get home."
"Out where?" But Jeff in a dizzying moment of understanding realized what they were looking at. He had seen pictures like that glowing oval in the sky, with its star clouds and spiraled arms. "That's the Galaxy! But it can't be—the Sun and the Messina Dust Cloud and everything else are all inside the Galaxy."
"Quite right." Macafee spoke in a faint, introspective voice. "Deep inside. I have never come so far before. We are outside the Galaxy, maybe two hundred thousand light-years out. The light you see is the combined brilliance of a hundred billion stars. I've known for a long time that the sounders have their own ways of moving through space-time, one that doesn't depend on the network nodes. I just didn't realize how far and how fast they can travel."
"Is it even our galaxy?" Lilah asked. "If we came so far, so fast, mightn't it be a completely different galaxy?"
She received a startled glance from Macafee. "That's a possibility I'm not sure I'm ready to deal with." He scanned the great disk of light beyond the port, as though seeking an identification label, an arrow stating sol is here. "We will certainly record an image and take it back with us. But since no one has ever seen our own galaxy from outside, I don't know what we will do with the picture. Most people will insist that anything we show them is a hoax."
"You'll have to hurry if you want an image." Jeff had noticed that the mouth of the sounder had finished its slow dilation, and was beginning an equally leisurely contraction. "It's closing."
"Two hundred thousand light-years," said Lilah. "And the journey didn't take longer than ten minutes. That means we were traveling at a speed of . . . ."
She shook her head and did not continue. Billy said, "But what's the point of coming all this way, if no one will believe us when we get back home?"
No one answered him. Simon Macafee was busy at the controls, making observations with every sensor that the Galileo possessed. Lilah was sitting, staring at nothing. Jeff was overwhelmed by his own thoughts. Before he left Kopal Manor, even the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter had seemed far away. Then the Messina Dust Cloud, twenty-seven light-years from Sol, had been unimaginably remote. And now . . .
Now he was hovering high above the Galaxy, seeing it in light that had started its way toward them two thousand centuries ago. Sol and the Cloud were no more than pinpricks of light, not even visible from this distance. In a couple of months, his horizon had changed from the cozy boundaries of the family estate, to a place where no human had ever been before.
Except that he was probably no longer there, high above the galactic plane. The mouth of the sounder had closed all the way, and outside the Galileo he could again see only stygian darkness.
Where were they now, he and Lilah and Billy and Simon Macafee? Were they anywhere at all, in terms that humans could understand? Or did the sounder in its wanderings take them outside the universe itself, to some other plane of existence? Even Simon Macafee admitted that there were many things about the sounders that he did not understand—and he knew far more than anyone else.
"Well, here we are," Simon said cheerfully, interrupting Jeff's thoughts. "I said you could think of this as a mystery trip, but it turned out to be more of a mystery than I expected."
The mouth of the sounder was steadily dilating. Beyond it, no more than a kilometer away, Jeff saw the pinnace hovering in space.
"We ought to say thanks for the ride," Simon went on. "Unfortunately, I don't know how to talk to a sounder, though I've recorded their radio calls hundreds of times. They are all different, and I'm sure they are messages. But I'm nowhere near deciphering them. Some day." The Galileo had been creeping forward, and now it was clear of the wide mouth and approaching the waiting pinnace. "Here we are. Let me pop over there and return the starfire. Then we'll head for home. I hope it was worth it for you after all. Any questions, before I go?"
"Yes." Lilah spoke for the first time since they had started the return journey. "I told Muv that you couldn't take us very far in one day, and I said there was nothing dangerous within one day's ride of the Cloud. She is going to ask where we went. What do you think I should tell her?"
Chapter Sixteen
JEFF never did find out what Lilah told her mother about their adventure with Simon Macafee. Connie Cheever was waiting for the Galileo as it docked at Confluence Center, and her grim expression had her daughter flinching in advance. Lilah was expecting the worst, though she didn't know for what. As for Simon Macafee, he gave the situation one look and retreated without a word into the lock. Connie took just enough notice of her daughter and Billy Jexter to wave them away to the Confluence Center interior. As soon as they were gone she spoke to Jeff.
"The Dreadnought is here. It took a faster and riskier path than I expected through the Cloud's spaceways, and we picked up its approach just half an hour ago. The ship is docking now. In a few minutes I have to go for a first meeting with their commander, but I had to talk to you first. Do you know a Space Navy ensign called Myron Lazenby?"
"He's my cousin!"
"I thought so. I've never heard you say the name, but Hooglich recognized it. He told me a number of things about you and Myron. What about Mohammad Duval, have you heard of him?"
"Never."
"Hooglich and Russo say he's bad news. A stooge for Giles Lazenby, according to them."
"Giles Lazenby is my uncle." Just saying the name gave Jeff's insides a lurch. "He's Myron's father."
"I know."
"Why are you asking about them?"
"Because Myron Lazenby and Mohammad Duval are listed on the manifest as crew of the Dreadnought. Mohammad Duval is the captain, Myron Lazenby is a new recruit on his first assignment. In a few minutes they will be inside Confluence Center. Confluence starts tonight—I moved up the schedule, but I never dreamed the Dreadnought might get here before we started. Here's my question. Do you want to be the person responsible for showing Myron around Confluence Center and taking him to Confluence? I realize that you hardly know your way around, but he is your cousin. It would be natural for you to be in charge of him, especially when the Confluence games begin. On the other hand, I can see reasons why you might not want to do it."
"I'd rather not." Jeff spoke instinctively and at once, without analyzing his feelings.
Connie Cheever stared at him. "Right. I can understand that. I'll make other arrangements. Now I have to get to my meeting with Captain Duval."
She turned and left, before Jeff had a chance to explain.
But would he have explained, even if she had given him a chance? The truth was not very flattering. He couldn't see himself reciting to Connie Cheever the whole multiyear history of interactions with his cousin, Myron outperforming Jeff in every way and at every step. And Confluence, according to Billy, involved large numbers of games, just the sort of environment where Myron would shine and Jeff would sink. If he
were in charge of Myron, the dreary pattern of losses would be repeated over and over.
All that, and more, had been wrapped up in his terse "I'd rather not" to Connie Cheever. She said she understood, but she didn't. Jeff was still standing, filled with feelings of his own inadequacy, when Simon Macafee emerged from the dock.
"Not pleased?" said Simon.
It took a moment to realize that Simon was referring not to Jeff's own mood, but to Connie Cheever's reaction to where they had been and what they had done.
"She's not pleased, but it had nothing to do with us and the trip inside the sounder. We didn't have a chance to say a word about that. The Space Navy ship is here. It arrived early."
"Ah." Macafee's eyes, usually remote and abstracted, came into sharp focus on Jeff. "Are they making threats?"
"No. They only just got here."
"Give them time."
"You think they came to cause trouble?" Jeff followed Macafee, who was moving away past the bare exterior docks of Confluence Center.
"Why else?" Macafee paused, and the strange eyes turned again on Jeff. "The other question is, Why? I don't mean I can't think of a reason why the Space Navy might cause trouble, I just don't know which reason to choose. Sol-side misunderstands the Cloud in so many ways."
"I know." Jeff thought back to his own fears, before he left Earth. "Did you know that on Earth they call the Cloud Cyborg Territory? Before I got here, I imagined that you were all cyborgs."
"Why would we be?"
"No one told me that. I thought the Cloud was producing some sort of superwarrior. I saw you as a kind of horrible mixture, human and machine."
"You weren't alone. I've heard that idea before. It's the way the Sol-side government likes to paint us. Come on." They had reached an unlit shaft. Macafee took two paces forward and dropped out of sight.
Jeff stood for a few seconds on the edge, peering down into darkness. It could be a fatal drop. Finally he repeated to himself, "Jefferson Kopal is a coward. He knows it, and if he doesn't do something about it soon, so will everyone else," and stepped out into space. There was a terrifying and stomach-turning interval of free fall, in which he sensed the sides of the shaft flying past him at increasing speed. Then at last he was slowing, for no reason. A few more seconds, and he was deposited in a feather-soft landing on a floor of white tiles.
"Slanting opinion a certain way by choice of words has a special name," Macafee went on, as though nothing had happened since his last remark to Jeff. "It's called propaganda. The word started out with a religious meaning, but now it's used differently. Propaganda means speeches and handouts and publicity designed to give one group a distorted idea of another. If you are going to fight somebody, or invade them, or even exterminate them, it helps a lot if your soldiers believe the other group is made up of monsters, or creatures less than human. Back Sol-side you had propaganda about the Cloud, and a big part of it was talk of cyborgs."
They had reached a chamber with a dozen exits, some of them leading to corridors, others to stairways. Macafee walked to a bench at the side of the room and sat down. He gestured to Jeff to join him.
"If Lilah and Billy are heading straight for Level One, they'll come through here. You and I took a shortcut with a little help from an Anadem field. While we're waiting, I want to walk you through a mental exercise and set your mind at rest. Let's agree that a cyborg is some mixture of a human and a machine. And let's ask how much machine, and how much human, you would want in a perfect soldier. We'll start first with pure human and pure machine, then look at mixtures. Can you list the properties or abilities that you think would be important for a soldier operating in space?"
Ten minutes ago, Jeff had been telling himself how much he hated games. He meant it, but there was one kind of game that he didn't hate at all: He loved any challenge that depended not on strength or physical coordination, but on thought alone. Apparently Simon Macafee was the same.
So. Properties and abilities useful for space warriors. The first candidate that came to mind was one that Jeff had experienced for himself, recently and painfully.
"You need an ability to withstand high accelerations."
"That's a fine start. What would you say humans can tolerate?"
"I'm not sure. Maybe ten or twelve Gs, but that's only for a short burst. Five Gs?"
"Fair enough. But you couldn't take that for long, either, a few days of it would kill you. A machine can easily be built to operate for as long as you want at a hundred Gs—a thousand Gs, too, if you ever needed it. Score one for machines. What else?"
"Perception. The ability to observe your surroundings."
"That's good. Do you know the human limits?"
"We see from violet light to red light."
"That's roughly from 0.4 to 0.7 micrometers' wavelength. Not very much, less than a factor of two in range. I can build a machine that 'sees' everything from hard X rays to long radio waves, a billion times as big a range as we have, and in at least as much detail as we see. Machines win again. What else?"
"Life support." Jeff could see where Simon Macafee was heading, but he didn't mind. This was the sort of talk he loved and almost never got—a discussion like this with Myron or anyone else at Kopal Manor was unthinkable.
Macafee nodded. "Another good one. Let's consider it in pieces. A human can survive long-term in a pressure range from about one-third of an Earth atmosphere to a couple of atmospheres—provided we have the right gases, which in practice means oxygen plus something inert. A machine can operate in anything from hard vacuum to a thousand atmospheres or more, and it can tolerate any gas mix that doesn't dissolve it. We need food and water, too. A machine needs a power source, that's all. We have a fixed operating rate. Even when we are asleep, we use almost as much energy as when we are awake. We can't power down, or switch ourselves off for a few months. A machine can do both of those. We feel pain, and sometimes that hinders our ability to function. Try thinking clearly with a broken arm. A machine has self-preservation sensors, but damage does not interfere with its logic functions.
"We also come in standard sizes. There are adult humans who mass as little as fifteen kilos, or as much as five hundred, but I don't think either limit would be my choice for a warrior. A machine can be as small or as large as you choose, depending on needs. Think of the nannies, too small to see but still regular machines. A human is also made of fixed materials—not very strong ones. A machine can be made of anything, steel or carbon filaments or condensed matter."
Lilah and Billy had entered the room and stood listening. Simon Macafee went on talking as though he did not see them. Jeff suspected that he didn't. Macafee was enjoying himself—and so was Jeff.
"You might think you can do better by combining human and machine into a cyborg," Simon went on. "You can't. You introduce other problems. I could give you an artificial arm, able to lift tons. But the rest of your body is still flesh and bone. Try to exert all the force your arm can produce, and you'll tear yourself apart. The same problem arises if I speed up your reaction times. You'll rip your muscles if you try to move too fast. However you look at it, a cyborg makes no sense—except for the special form of cyborg where the nannies enter a human to repair it."
"You're leaving something out." Simon Macafee might be a legend in the Cloud, but Jeff was not self-conscious when he had something to say. "What about self-repair? We can do that. The Logans can't."
"True. But only because it's not the economical way to do things. Why carry a whole repair factory around with you, when you can leave it in one central place and go there only when you happen to need it? Humans are more like snails than we like to think. They carry their house around on their backs. We carry around every useless thing that four billion years of evolution has dumped onto us, hair and nails and teeth. How long since you had to use your claws and fangs to defend yourself? I know of only one area where we are superior to machines: We are still more flexible in what we can do, and more adaptable—but the Loga
ns come closer to us every year."
"I don't think that's the only thing humans do more effectively than machines," said Jeff, and then at once wished he had kept his mouth shut.
"You don't?" Simon Macafee sniffed skeptically. "Can you name another?"
"Well, we are better"—Jeff wasn't sure how to phrase this—"we are more efficient at replication. Machines are not self-replicating."
"What's replication?" Billy asked. "Does that mean breathing?"
"You're thinking of respiration," Macafee said. "Replication means making copies."
"Huh? You mean like making copies of things with a copying machine?"
"No, Billy. I mean like breeding"
"Which means having children," Lilah added. She gave Jeff an unreadable sideways glance of bright blue eyes. "Rely on an Earthling to come up with that as his prize example."
"And it's not true," Macafee said. "First of all, many animals reproduce far more easily than humans. Second, the nannies replicate themselves until their job is done. And if you're thinking of speed of replication, a nanny or a bacterium can produce a working copy of itself in twenty minutes. Last time I studied the subject, a human took at least nine months to make. And when you're all done, a baby can't look after itself for many years." He stood up. "I'll be interested in another example if you can think of one. But I'll be amazed if you can find any case where a cyborg human/machine combination is better than a machine, in a combat situation. It's just Sol propaganda."
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