Exodus to the Stars

by Andreas Brandhorst

  "Tortek and Mindahon are doing very poorly," Darhel continued in the same low voice. His head was a large globe looming over Jorgal. "The children have gone stiff, all seven of them. In the middle of their amorphous phase. I can't tell if they're alive or dead."

  "Are they still singing?" Jorgal asked and tried to put his thoughts in order—they were like worms all crawling in different directions.

  "The Youngest Ones do not sing," Darhel replied. "They are not machines."

  Only machines sing, Jorgal thought, and a part of him felt that thought was strange. Only machines are truly alive.

  "I don't know what the reason for it is," Darhel went on. "Maybe there is something in the air that we can't tolerate. Or maybe the reason is our genetic instability."

  "Do you mean ... the Uncertainties?" Jorgal asked. Why did Darhel often speak with him like this? So he would also bear the heavy burden of knowledge?

  "Yes. That's why our life-expectancy is less than that of the Normals."

  "There are no Normals here."

  "At least we haven't seen any yet. I wonder what kind of place this is. I don't think it's a ship."

  It was an uncanny place, Jorgal felt. There were machines that sang here, too, but their songs sounded strange, and he was not always able to discern their melodies. Moreover, he could hardly use the strength in them, and so he felt weak. He needed the songs of the machines to drive out the weakness within him and deal with the Uncertainties.

  Darhel moaned softly. "Excuse me, I ... " he groaned. He crawled quickly past Jorgal, leaned his head against the wall, and sighed. "The flexible support splints on my neck should have been replaced a long time ago," he explained, still speaking lowly out of consideration for Memerek. "Often my head is too heavy for me, and then I have to support it."

  "Why don't you just try to forget something or other?" Jorgal suggested. "Then your knowledge would weigh less and your head would be lighter."

  Darhel made a sound that the Machine Whisperer could not interpret. "If it were only that simple ... " He turned cautiously, leaning his back and head against the wall. "We must leave this place. If we stay here, we will all die."

  Jorgal looked across the semi-dark side room to the door, that led to the more brightly lit main room. He thought he heard Tanira's voice, speaking to the Youngest Ones, frozen between life and death, neither here nor there. What was the point of speaking words to them that they simply could not hear?

  What was the point of all this?

  Dangerous thoughts, Jorgal knew, not harmless worms like the others but poisonous snakes that devoured hope and confidence. Already so many children of the Group had fallen victim to them.

  "Did you hear, Jorgal? We must get out of here. And we can only do that with your help."

  "He's right, Jorgal." Memerek, who had been lying next to the Machine Whisperer, sat up.

  "I'm sorry that we woke you," Darhel said.

  "I've been awake for a while," Memerek replied, and sounded very tired.

  Jorgal looked into her large green eyes and saw that their shine had grown dull. And there were some bare patches in the down on her skin. "You're not feeling well," he realized in horror.

  "We're all doing badly," Memerek said. "And so are you."

  "And that's why we have to go on," Darhel said, emphasizing the point. "If we want to have a chance at all." He hesitated briefly. "Perhaps there are better songs somewhere else," he added.

  Jorgal's head did not hold as much knowledge as Darhel's but that did not mean the Machine Whisperer was stupid. "I'll help you anyway. You don't need to promise me anything."

  Darhel took a deep breath. "If the machine being that spoke to us returns ... You must try to bring it under your control."

  Jorgal's entire body suddenly trembled and his third leg twitched. "It sings terribly," he said. "Its song is hideous."

  "You have not succeeded in opening the door," Darhel reminded him.

  Jorgal sadly closed his eyes and remembered the faint song of the door. He had tried to join with it but had remained a discordant note in a melody that did not take him in. Whatever else might be said about the machines in this place, their songs were different.

  "The machine being's song hurts," he said.

  Memerek reached for his hand. "Only death is without pain," she replied.

  When the door opened, Jorgal knew at once that something had changed. The many-legged machine being that had spoken to them shortly after their arrival did not appear. In its place though, was a humming globe from which dozens of spike-like extensions of various lengths stuck out. Borne by invisible vibrations, the new metal creature floated as it approached and a voice boomed from its loudspeaker. It sounded almost like that of a Normal, but the language was strange. Jorgal did not understand a single word.

  The Machine Whisperer crouched close by the door and wondered what he should do now. Darhel, Memerek, and the others were in the side room and waited for him to make a path to freedom. The seven Youngest Ones of the Group lay in front of the back wall, rooted to the floor in their amorphous paralysis.

  Jorgal reached out his third leg to the machine being and trembled violently because the sphere's song was even more hideous than the song of the other metal creature. He perceived shrill, screeching notes, disharmonies one after another without any coherence, without a hint of a melody. There was just noise that hurt Jorgal's esthetic sensitivity and caused pain to his inner ear.

  As the globe hummed more loudly, a finger of pale light stabbed out from it and felt for the first of the Youngest Ones. The amorphous Group child dissolved.

  Jorgal stared uncomprehending at the place where it had just been lying.

  "The metal being has come to kill us!" Memerek exclaimed in the side room. "Jorgal!"

  The Machine Whisperer's third leg touched the globe and his mind found itself in a storm of shrill tones once more. His instinct urged him to break off the contact immediately and pull back, but something within him knew that it would be a death sentence for Memerek, Darhel, and the others, as well as for him. While his very self, which yearned for pure harmony, drifted in chaos, he sensed movement, and realized that the globe was floating through the main room and approaching the open door to the side room. Its screeching songs told of destruction.

  The Machine Whisperer tried to push everything else aside, absorbed the discordant notes within himself, and searched for a pattern, for an indication of structure. He knew that something like that had to exist. No machine song was completely random; there was always some controlling, guiding element, some factor giving order even in the most chaotic cacophony.

  As he had earlier at the door, he tried to become part of the song, to add himself to the shrill music like an additional note, and then to reshape the song. But the screeching all but numbed him, and in the background, in a silent realm on the other side of the noise, he sensed a strange presence, immeasurably alien and at the same time very alluring. Amazed, he concentrated on it and sensed still more: the delicate echoes of a distant melody, incredibly complex, with thousands of interwoven harmonies, a magnificent symphony, full of power, but ... incomplete. Odd, Jorgal felt. How could something so colossally complex be incomplete? How could he perceive even the impression of incompleteness when he heard no more than a small part of the whole?

  Suddenly he realized that it had grown quieter around him. The noise had not diminished, but Jorgal had learned to hear the silence between the screeching and howling, and he crept into one of those quiet intermediate spaces, reached for nearby notes, and united them into the first melodic sequences.

  The song of chaos changed and Jorgal could move better within it. Something inside of him wanted to approach the distant melody that sounded so wondrously enticing, but he remembered the mission he had to carry out here. A fine webwork ensued as he connected other notes with each other, but then a moment of inattention—he let himself be captivated listening to the distant singing—was enough to tear the net of t
he new song apart.

  As Jorgal once again stumbled through the alien screeching and howling, his eyes saw another finger of light shooting out of the floating sphere with the spikes and sweeping over the Youngest Ones. Their bodies dissolved.

  "Jorgal!" Memerek cried in the side room, and the Machine Whisperer realized that the machine being was nearing the open door between the two rooms. The Youngest Ones no longer existed, and if the deadly finger of light had an opportunity to touch Memerek and the others as well ...

  Again he concentrated on the silent areas between the individual discordant notes and once more began to create connections and change the screeching into a true melody. He now thought only of that, of nothing else, and after a while he sensed the notes reacting to his wishes despite their strangeness. The screeching and howling grew softer, more harmonious, and the quiet areas expanded a little, adapting to the sequence of notes. Again the web of a machine song appeared and gave Jorgal a feeling for where something had to be changed in order to achieve his goal.

  The spiked globe sank to the floor next to the doorway, and Jorgal surrounded the deadly energy within it with a neutralizing melody. There was a change in the pitch of the distant song, and Jorgal thought he heard the equivalent of surprise and a question.

  "Jorgal?"

  He wearily lifted his head and saw Memerek, the beautiful Memerek, in whose large green eyes concern shone. "I'm so tired ... "

  "Can't you absorb a little machine energy?"

  Jorgal saw Darhel doing something with the globe, his large round head on its thin neck swaying back and forth. Was he searching for machine knowledge? But then his head would be even heavier!

  "There isn't enough here," Jorgal replied lowly. "And I don't have direct access to it."

  Darhel came towards them. "Jorgal, are you strong enough to walk?"

  The Machine Whisperer had already withdrawn his third leg and stood up. Exhaustion made him totter. As before, Uncertainty prickled within him, and he knew that he owed at least a part of his weakness to that. The Uncertainty seemed unable to decide what to do with his body, and merely drained him of strength.

  "I hear a song in the distance," he said numbly. "If I can reach it ... "

  "We have to get away from here," Darhel pressed.

  And so they continued on their way, six out of the nineteen that had set out after the collision. All the others were dead, among them the seven Youngest Ones who had never had a chance to truly live.

  15

  Deshan Apian

  Lemuria (51,891 B.C.)

  "Interesting," Deshan Apian said as he skimmed through the text and graphics on the little Zephalon's display. "Very interesting. My compliments, Mira. You went to a lot of effort."

  Mira Lemroth sat at the controls of the electricar and steered it through traffic that even here at the city limits of Marroar was amazingly dense. "You've only read a small portion of it."

  "And it was enough to impress me. This will guarantee you new Merit awards."

  Deshan looked at his wife and noted the obvious bulge of her stomach. After Tamaha and Milissa, Mira would bring their third child into the world in a few months. They already knew it would be a boy and his name would be Erron, after Mira's grandfather.

  "It's a draft," Mira replied, glancing briefly away from the traffic. "The final dissertation will be more comprehensive. I plan to add a chapter about the 'Star Seekers.'"

  "You won't just rise a Merit level, you'll also be awarded a new title," Deshan said. "Mira Lemroth, Zephalon Master and Specialist for Sociology and Social Psychology." He smiled. "The larger our family gets, the more your interest grows in the social sciences."

  "We're all part of this society, and our children are born into it." Mira operated the electricar's controls and the motor hummed a little louder as she changed lanes and accelerated. She drove towards the west, in the direction of Pataah, but their trip would end well before that, at the Konos Monument of Hedros.

  "Perhaps I find sociology and its psychological aspects so interesting because I believe we live in a unique time," Mira said. Warm wind blew through the slightly open side window and played with her long black hair. "Did you know that the average age of our population has gone down by fifteen years in the last half century?"

  Deshan shook his head.

  "That's an enormous change for an entire population, becoming so young. And the reason for it ... " Mira took one hand off the controls and stroked her stomach. "An ever-increasing birthrate. Think of all the people out there, Deshan. Thousands, millions, each one of them with their own hopes and dreams. But, and this is the key point, most of those hopes and dreams also exist in the collective consciousness. In other words, the wishes of the individual correspond with those of the community."

  "We're all pulling on the same rope," Deshan said.

  "Not all, but more than ninety-five percent, and that's an extremely high conformity ratio."

  "It's the principle of solidarity."

  "There's more behind it than just the concept of solidarity, or mutual assistance. Imagine society as an organism that grows and evolves so slowly that we are aware of the changes only when they reach a certain scale, when quantity changes to quality. During the last century, a society stagnating at a low level has become a thoroughly dynamic one. We have spread ourselves out across Lemuria, and our industrial capacity has grown enormously. And it's continuing to increase at a high rate. We live today in a perfect society, Deshan. There are practically no internal conflicts, and for almost all of us, the common good means the same as our individual good. There is security for each one of us. Each of us has the chance to achieve Merit and to rise. The satisfaction of basic needs is guaranteed even for those who can't achieve any Merit. Everyone has a place in our great common house."

  "Is it Paradise?" Deshan asked, looking out the window. They were heading towards the setting sun, and behind them the first lights were shining in Marroar. It was not far now to the Hedros Monument.

  "Almost, at least from a sociological standpoint. It's a perfect society because it's traumatized."

  "The Konos," Deshan said.

  "Yes," Mira agreed, keeping her gaze fixed on the road. There was still a surprising amount of traffic, even here outside of Marroar. "Humanity was nearly wiped out. We stood at the edge of the abyss, and what we saw there utterly horrified us and left its mark on us for millennia. Each of us has an individual drive for self-preservation, but there is also a collective urge for self-preservation that applies to the entire species."

  "You mean that in our society today there aren't any internal conflicts because we're all working together in order to survive."

  "That's what it amounts to. The trauma we suffered has become the motor that drives our society. You Chroniclers see to it that the wounds in our soul don't heal and the trauma continues."

  "Because we report about the past?" Deshan felt almost as though he had been challenged. "Because we preserve what used to be? What we are today is the result of all the things that happened in our past. We must not allow the truth to be forgotten."

  "You don't need to justify yourself. I know how important your task is. The past must remain alive, I quite agree with you. But for the sake of argument, imagine that the trauma fades away. What would happen to us then?"

  "If you take that line of thought to its conclusion ... Without the trauma, our society would lose its inner cohesion."

  "It all depends. It could also go on growing." Mira was silent for a moment, and Deshan had the impression that she was putting her thoughts in order and searching for words. On the horizon appeared a brightly lit complex of buildings, like a beacon in the gathering night. "I think we're at a turning point now. The trauma that made us what we are today still exists and it's developing new strength now. Remember what I said about quantity changing into quality? Some years ago, something began to develop that is now becoming more and more apparent, and I think it will cause changes in our society."
r />   That sounded almost like a prophecy, Deshan thought. "Positive or negative?"

  "Hard to say." The electricar slowed—further on, at the entrances to the monument, traffic had come to a standstill. "It depends entirely on how you look at it. That's an indication there." Mira pointed ahead.

  "It looks like quite a few people are interested in the rally."

  "They're increasing all the time. The Star Seekers are quickly gaining new supporters."

  Deshan looked thoughtfully at the small Zephalon's display, and remembered a passage he had read. "You've emphasized that changes in society come out of external stimuli or the new requirements of a growing and more mature sociological entity. What is the case here?"

  They turned into an entranceway and Mira guided the car down a ramp into the large underground garage. Moments later she had found an empty parking space, then turned the electric motor off and leaned back. They remained where they were while other cars parked around them. Men, women, and even children got out and headed in the direction of the steps and the elevators.

  "Perhaps one as much as the other," Mira said, absently stroking her stomach. "It's said that the Twelfth Hero Vehraáto has returned."

  They sat in one of the amphitheater's upper rows of seats, so far from the speakers' platform that the faces of the people there were vague spots without individual details. But the speakers appeared on large vidscreens as their voices echoed from loudspeakers.

  Deshan remembered his role as a Chronicler—he played with the thought of writing a report on this rally and offering it to Marroar's media—and began by absorbing overall impressions. Next to the amphitheater, which was part of the Hedros Memorial, rose the Konos Monument: a collection of intertwined monstrous beings—those nightmarish creatures had almost succeeded in wiping out the Lemurians several millennia before. It was here that the Lemurians of Fortress Hedros had made a last stand, fighting bitterly until the last of them were dead. Some ruins remained of the fortress on the other side of the spotlighted monument. The mood of this place suggested antiquity, a long-ago tragedy, and a warning reminder for the present. And of that the men and women on the podium spoke as well. One of the speakers was a tall man clad entirely in black who seemed to disappear when he stepped out of the light into the shadows. He showed a remarkable skill for oratory, and was able to draw his many listeners under his spell. Deshan felt how the words had their effect on even him although he was attempting to keep a certain distance and listen to everything with the critical ears of a Chronicler.