Of Man and Manta Omnibus

by Piers Anthony

  Then something strange happened.

  Chapter 4 - SENTIENCE

  First problem: survival in a nonsurvival situation.

  Second problem: existence of mobile blight, detectable only by its transitory damping effect on elements.

  Each problem seemed insoluble by itself. But together, there was a possibility. The existence of mobile nonpattern entities implied that a nonpattern mode of survival was feasible. Comprehend the mode of the blight, and perhaps survival would develop.

  OX's original circuitry had difficulty accepting this supposition, so he modified it. The nagging distress occasioned by these modifications served as warning that he could be pursuing a nonsurvival course. But when all apparent courses were nonsurvival, did it matter?

  He put his full attention to the blight problem. First he mapped the complete outline of each blight spot, getting an exact idea of its shape. One was virtually stationary, a central blob with extensions that moved about. Another moved slowly from location to location in two dimensions, retaining its form. The third was most promising because it moved rapidly in three dimensions and changed its shape as it moved.

  This was the way a sentient entity functioned.

  Yet it was blight. A mere pattern of element damping.

  Pattern. A pattern of blight was still a pattern, and pattern was the fundamental indication of sentience. Thus, nonsentients were sentient. Another paradox, indicating a flaw in perception or rationale.

  Possibility: The blight was not blight but the facsimile of blight. As though a pattern were present but whose presence suppressed the activation of the elements instead of facilitating it. An inverse entity.

  Error. Such an entity should leave blanks where those elements were being suppressed: as of the absence of elements. OX perceived no such blanks. When he activated given elements, the presence of an inverse pattern should at least nullify it so that the elements would seem untouched. Instead, they did activate -- but not as sharply as was proper. The effect was more like a shield, dimming but not obliterating the flow of energy. A blight, not a pattern.

  OX suffered another period of disorientation. It required energy to wrestle with paradox, and he was already short of the reserve required for survival.

  In due course he returned to the problem; he had to. It seemed that the ultimate nature of the spots was incomprehensible. But their perceivable attributes could be ascertained and catalogued, perhaps leading to some clarification. It was still his best approach to survival. Where a pseudopattern could survive, so might a genuine pattern.

  OX developed a modified spotter circuit that enabled him to perceive the spots as simple patterns rather than as pattern-gaps. The effect was marvelous: Suddenly, seeming randomness became sensible. Instead of ghosts, these now manifested as viable, if peculiar, entities.

  The most comprehensible was the outline-changing spot. At times it was stationary, like a pattern at rest. When it moved, it altered its shape -- as a pattern entity normally did. But even here there was a mystery: The spot did not change according to the fundamental rules of pattern. It could therefore not be stable. Yet it was; it always returned to a similar configuration.

  OX's disorientation was developing again. With another effort he modified his rationale-feedback to permit him to consider confusion and paradox without suffering in this fashion. The distress signals accompanying this modification were so strong that he would never have done it had he not faced the inevitable alternative of nonsurvival.

  Now he concentrated on the observable phenomena. Possible or not, the spot moved in the manner it moved and was stable.

  Another spot moved but did not alter its outline appreciably. It seemed to be circulating so as not to exhaust its elements, which made sense. But it traveled only in those two dimensions.

  The third spot did not move. It only shifted its projections randomly. It had occupied the same bank of elements too long -- yet had not exhausted them. Another improbability: Elements had to be given slack time to recharge, or they became inoperative.

  Of course, a pattern that damped down elements might not exhaust them in the same fashion.

  Could OX himself achieve that state? If he were able to alternate pattern-activity with pattern damping, he might survive indefinitely.

  Survival!

  Such a prospect was worth the expenditure of his last reserves of energy.

  OX did not know how such an inversion might be achieved. The spot patterns did know, for they had achieved it. He would have to learn from them.

  It now became a problem of communication. With an entity of his own type OX would have sent an exploratory vortex to meet the vortex of the other. But these spot-entities were within his demesnes, not perceivable beyond them.

  He tried an internal vortex, creating a subpattern within his own being, in the vicinity of the most mobile spot. There was no response.

  He tried a self-damping offshoot -- another construction developed as the need manifested. The mobile spot ignored it. Was the spot nonsentient after all -- or merely unable to perceive the activation of the elements?

  He tried other variants. The mobile spot took no notice.

  OX was pragmatic. If one thing did not work, he would try another, and another, until he either found something that did work or exhausted the alternatives. His elements were slowly fading; if he did not discover a solution -- nonsurvival.

  In the midst of the fifteenth variation of offshoot, OX noted a response. Not by the shape-changing spot at which the display was directed -- by the stable-shape mobile spot. It had been moving about, and abruptly it stopped.

  Cessation of motion did not constitute awareness necessarily; it could signify demise. But OX repeated the configuration, this time directing it at the second spot.

  The spot moved toward the offshoot. Awareness -- or coincidence?

  OX repeated the figure, somewhat to the side of the first one. The spot moved toward the new offshoot.

  OX tried a similar configuration, this time one that moved in an arc before it damped out. The spot followed it and stopped when the figure was gone.

  OX began to suffer the disorientation of something very like excitement despite a prior modification to alleviate this disruptive effect in himself. He tried another variant: one that moved in three dimensions. The spot did not follow it.

  But a repeat of the two-dimensional one brought another response. This spot always had moved in two dimensions; it seemed to be unable to perceive in three. Yet it acted sentient within that limited framework.

  OX tried a two-dimensional shoot that looped in a circle indefinitely. The spot followed it through one full circle, then stopped. Why?

  Then the spot moved in a circle of its own beside the shoot. It was no longer following; it was duplicating!

  OX damped out the shoot. The spot halted. There was no doubt now: The spot was aware of the shoot.

  The spot moved in an oval. OX sent a new shoot to duplicate the figure.

  The spot moved in a triangle. OX made a similar triangle subpattern.

  The spot halted. OX tried a square. The spot duplicated it. So did the shape-changing spot.

  OX controlled his threatening disorientation. Communication had been established -- not with one spot but with two!

  Survival!

  Chapter 5 - CITY

  It was like a city, and like a jungle, and like a factory, all run together for surrealistic effect. Veg shook his head, unable to make any coherent whole of it at first glance.

  He stood on a metal ramp beside a vastly spreading mock-oak tree overlooking a channel of water that disappeared into a sieve over a mazelike mass of crisscrossing bars lighted from beneath.

  "Another alternate, I presume," Tamme said beside him. "I suspect we'll find the others here. Why not have your mantas look?"

  Now Veg saw her standing beside Hex and Circe. "Sure -- look," he said vaguely. He still had not quite adjusted to finding himself alive and well.

  The
mantas moved. Hex sailed up and over the purple dome of a mosquelike building whose interior consisted of revolving mirrors, while Circe angled under some wooden stalactites depending from an inverted giant toadstool whose roots were colored threads.

  Veg squatted to investigate a gently flexing flower. It was about three inches across, on a metallic stem, and it swiveled to face him as he moved. He poked a finger at its center.

  Sharp yellow petals closed instantly on his finger, cutting the skin. "Hey!" he yelled, yanking free. The skin was scraped where the sharp edges had touched and smarted as though acid had been squirted into the wounds.

  He raised his foot high and stamped down hard with his heel. The flower dodged, but he caught the stem and crushed it against the hard ramp. Then he was sorry. "Damn!" he said as he surveyed the wreckage. "I shouldn't have done that; it was only trying to defend itself."

  "Better not fool with what we don't understand," Tamme warned a bit late.

  "I don't understand any of this, but I'm in it!" Veg retorted, sucking on his finger.

  "I believe that was a radar device -- with a self-protective circuit," she said. "This place is functioning."

  "Not a flower," he said, relieved. "I don't mind bashing a machine."

  There was a humming sound behind him. Veg whirled. "Now that's a machine!" he cried.

  "Climb!" Tamme directed. She showed the way by scrambling up a trellis of organ pipes to reach a suspended walkway. Veg followed her example with alacrity.

  The machine moved swiftly along the original ramp. Its design was different from the one he had battled in the desert. It had wheels instead of treads and an assortment of spider-leg appendages in place of the spinning blade.

  It stopped by the damaged flower. There was a writhing flurry of its legs. So quickly that Veg was unable to follow the detail, it had the plant uprooted, adjusted, and replaced -- repaired.

  Then the machine hummed on down the ramp.

  "What do you know!" Veg exclaimed. "A tame machine!"

  "I wouldn't count on it. If we do any more damage, we may see a destroyer-machine. And if this is their world, we'll be in trouble."

  "Yeah, no sand here." Veg nodded thoughtfully. "If that desert was the hinterland, this is the capital. Same world, maybe."

  "No. What we went through felt like a projection -- and the atmospherics differ here. That's no certain indication, but I believe it is safer to assume this is another alternate."

  "Anyway, we're jungle specimens, picked up and put down, remote control. In case we should bite." He bared his teeth. "And we just might."

  "Yet it is strange they didn't cage us," Tamme said. "And it was no machine that brought us."

  "Well, let's look about -- carefully." He walked along the higher path. It extended in a bridgelike arc over a forest of winking lights. These were bulbs, not the scintillating motes that had brought the party here. Which reminded him again: "What did bring us?"

  Tamme shook her head in the pretty way she had. It bothered him to think that probably all female agents had the same mannerisms, carefully programmed for their effect on gullible males like him. "Some kind of force field, maybe. And I suspect there is no way out of this except the way we came. We're in the power of the machines."

  He stopped at a fountain that seemed to start as a rising beam of light but phased into falling water and finally hardened into a moving belt of woven fabric. Very carefully because of his experience with the flower, he touched the belt. It was solid yet resilient, like a rug. "The thing is a loom!"

  Tamme looked, startled. "No Earthly technology, that," she said. "Very neat. The light passes through that prism, separates into its component colors, which then become liquid and fall -- to be channeled into a pattern of the fabric before they solidify. Some loom!"

  "I didn't know light could be liquefied or solidified," Veg remarked. His eyes traced the belt farther down to where it was slowly taken up by a huge roll.

  "Neither did I," she admitted. "It appears that we are dealing with a more sophisticated science than our own."

  "I sort of like it," he said. "It reminds me of something 'Quilon might paint. In fact, this whole city isn't bad."

  But it was evident that Tamme was not so pleased. No doubt she would have a bombshell of a report when she returned to Earth. Would the agents come and burn all this down, as they had the dinosaur valley of Paleo?

  Hex returned. "Hey, friend," Veg said. "Did you find them?"

  One snap: YES. "All in one piece?"

  Three snaps: confusion. To a manta, fragmentation was the death of prey. The creatures were not sharp on human humor or hyperbole.

  But Cal and Aquilon were already on their way. "Veg!" Aquilon called just as though nothing had changed between them. She was absolutely beautiful.

  In a moment they all were grouped about the light-fountain-loom. "We've been here an hour," Cal said. "This place is phenomenal!" Then he looked at Tamme, and Veg remembered that Cal had not known about her crossover. "Where are your friends?"

  "Two alternates away, I suspect," Tamme said.

  "You drew straws, and you lost."

  "Exactly."

  "She's not bad when you get to know her," Veg said, aware of the tension between the two.

  "When you get to know them..." Aquilon murmured, and he knew she was thinking of Subble.

  "I realize that not all of you are thrilled at my presence," Tamme said. "But I think we have become involved in something that overrides our private differences. We may never see Earth again."

  "Do you want to?" Cal inquired. He was not being facetious.

  "Is there anything to eat around here?" Veg asked. "We're short on supplies now."

  "There are fruiting plants," Aquilon said. "We don't know whether they're safe, though."

  "I can probably tell," Tamme said.

  "See -- lucky she's along!" Veg said. It fell flat. Neither Cal nor Aquilon responded, and he knew they were still against Tamme. They were not going to give her a chance. And perhaps they were right; the agents had destroyed the dinosaur enclave without a trace of conscience. He felt a certain guilt defending any agent... though Subble had indeed seemed different.

  It didn't help any that he knew Tamme could read his emotions as they occurred.

  "Any hint of the machines' purpose in bringing us here?" Tamme asked.

  Cal shrugged. "I question whether any machine was responsible. We seem to be dealing with some more sophisticated entities. Whoever built this city..."

  "There's some kind of amphitheater," Aquilon said. "With a stage. That might be the place to make contact -- if they want to."

  "Doesn't make much sense to snatch us up and then forget us!" Veg muttered.

  "These entities may not see things quite the way we do," Cal said, smiling.

  They examined the fruit plants, and Tamme pronounced them probably safe. Apparently she had finely developed senses and was able to detect poison before it could harm her system.

  The amphitheater was beautiful. Translucent colonnades framed the elevated stage, which was suspended above a green fog. The fog seemed to have no substance yet evidently supported the weight of the platform, cushioning it. Veg rolled a fruit into the mist, and the fruit emerged from the other side without hindrance: no substance there!

  "Magnetic, perhaps," Cal said. "I admit to being impressed."

  "But where are the people who made all this?" Veg demanded.

  "Why do you assume people made it?"

  "It's set up for people. The walks are just right, the seats fit us, the stage is easy to see, and the fruit's good. It wouldn't be like this if it were meant for non-humans."

  Cal nodded. "An excellent reply."

  "What about the machines?" Aquilon asked. "They move all around, tending it."

  "That's just it," Veg said. "They're tending it, not using it. They're servants, not masters."

  "I can't improve on that reasoning," Cal said. That struck Veg as vaguely false; why should Cal t
ry to butter him up? To stop him from siding with Tamme?

  "But if human beings built it -- " Aquilon started.

  "Then where are they?" Veg finished. "That's what I wanted to know the first time 'round."

  "Several possibilities," Cal said thoughtfully. "This could have been constructed centuries or millennia ago, then deserted. The machines might have been designed to maintain it, and no one ever turned them off."

  "Who ever deserted a healthy city?" Veg asked. "I mean, the whole population?"