The blights had a need, as did OX. He grasped the concept without identifying the specific. Ultimately, the mutual imperative to be SURVIVE. OX needed more volume; the spots needed something else.
When the spots were amenable, they made perfect geometric figures. When they were distressed, they made imperfect figures. OX did the same. Thus, they played a wide-ranging game of figures: I do this -- does it please/displease you? Is it nearer or farther from your mode of survival? You do that -- I am pleased/displeased as it reflects on some aspect of my survival.
Given enough time, they could have worked out an efficient means of communication. But there was no time; OX's elements were fading, and he had to have answers now. He had to know what the spots needed, and whether they had what he needed.
So he ran a frame-search. Instead of laboriously exchanging symbols, he surveyed the entire range of prospects available to him.
In a few, the spots were more active. They made excellent figures. In others, the elements were stronger, better for him. Guided by this knowledge, OX arranged his responses to direct developments toward the most favorable prospects.
But somehow these prospects faded as he approached them. The spots ceased cooperating.
OX surveyed the framework again, analyzing it in the context of this alteration. Somehow the act of orienting on his needs had made those needs unapproachable.
He tried orienting on the prospects most favorable to the spots -- and then his own improved.
Confusion. His survival and that of the spots were linked -- but the mechanism was unclear.
By experimentation and circuit modification, he clarified it. The spots needed a specific locale, both physical and frame -- that part of the framework where there were certain stationary spots. As they approached that region, they did something that enhanced the strength of his elements.
This was an alternate solution to his problem! He did not need greater volume if his existing elements recharged faster. The proximity of the spots, in some cases, enhanced that recharging. OX directed the responses to further enhance recharging while keeping the needs of the spots in mind.
Suddenly the spots responded. Amazingly, the elements flourished, recharging at such a rate that OX's entire survival problem abated.
In retrospect, comprehension came. The elements were not individual entities; they were the energy termini of larger subpatterns. These systems were physical, like the ground. The spots were physical. The spots catered to the needs of the energy plants and thereby improved OX's situation.
Dialogue improved also. OX learned that one of the most important needs of spots and element-plants was fluid -- a certain kind of liquid matter. In the presence of this fluid, spots of many varieties flourished. Some were mobile spots of semi-sentient or nonsentient nature, distinct from the three he knew. Others were stationary and nonsentient -- and these also were of a number of subtypes. Some provided nourishment for the sentient spots, and so these were facilitated by the transfer of liquid and increased access to certain forms of ambient energy. Others, of no direct interest to the sentients, produced nodules of processed energy that projected into adjacent alternate-frames. These were the elements!
The physical sustenance that the spots provided for their own plants also aided the element plants. They became more vigorous, and so the elements were stronger. So, by this seemingly devious chain, when OX helped the spots, he helped himself. Not just any spots, for the semi-sentients had no care at all for the plants and would not cater to OX's preferences. But the sentient spots, grasping the interaction between them, now cared for the element plants as they cared for their own. It was largely through Ornet, the most sentient spot, that this understanding came about.
Survival seemed assured. Then the machine came.
OX recognized it instantly, though he had never experienced this type of interaction before. Alarm circuits were integral to his makeup, and the presence of the machine activated them. Here was Pattern's deadliest enemy!
In certain respects the machine was like a spot, for aspects of it were physical. But in other respects it was a kind of pattern, or antipattern. It possessed, in limited form, the ability to travel between frames, as OX did. Ordinarily, he would have noted only its pattern-aspect, but his necessary study of the spots had provided him with a wider perspective, and now he grasped much more of its nature. Suddenly the spots had enhanced his survival in quite another way, for when he viewed the machine as a double-level entity, he found it both more comprehensible and more formidable.
It could not touch OX directly, but it was deadly. It destroyed his elements by shorting out their stores of energy and physically severing the element-plants from their moorings, leaving gaps in the network. Such gaps, encountered unawares, could destroy a pattern entity.
The machine was also a direct physical threat to the spots and hence, in another respect, to OX's own survival. He could avoid it, moving his pattern to undamaged elements -- but the spots had no such retreat. They could not jump across the frames of probability.
The spots were aware of this. They were furiously mobile, interacting with the machine. Ornet was distracting it by moving erratically, while Dec swooped at it, striking with a sharp extremity. But the machine was invulnerable to such attack. In a moment it discovered less elusive prey. It turned on Cub.
Cub did not take evasive action. He merely lay where he was while the attack-instrument of the machine bore down.
The blades connected. Thinly sliced sections of the physical body flew out as the action continued. The solids and fluids were taken into the machine, and Cub was no more.
After that, the machine departed. It was a small one, and its immediate survival need -- its hunger -- had been sated by the matter in Cub. The crisis was over.
But Dec and Ornet had a different notion. They suffered negative reaction. They were distressed by the loss of their companion, as though he were related in some way to their own survival. It was a thing they were unable to convey directly to OX, but he understood their need, if not their rationale. They had expended much attention assisting Cub from the outset, and they required him to be undefunct.
Accordingly, OX surveyed the alternates. A number existed in which one of the other spots had been consumed by the machine, but OX concluded these were not appropriate. He located those in which all three spots survived intact.
Knowing an alternate frame and entering it were different things. OX had directed events toward favorable alternates before -- but now he had to travel through the fourth dimension of probability, isolate one from many, and take the spots with him -- when the options had been greatly reduced by the force of events. He could readily remove the spots to a frame in which they would not suffer immediate attack by the machine; it was much more difficult to do this after that event had actually occurred.
He tried. The consumption of energy was colossal, diminishing his elements at a ruinous rate. Once started, he had to succeed, for only in the proper alternate would the elements remain sufficiently charged for the maintenance of his pattern. Failure meant nonsurvival.
The spots could be moved so long as they remained within the boundaries of his animated form. He could not move them physically from place to place, but he could transfer them from one version of reality to another. It was in his fundamental circuits, just as knowledge of machines was in them; he knew what to do -- if he could handle himself properly. Moving blight spots was more difficult than merely moving himself.
The framework wrenched. OX fibrillated. The frame changed. OX let go, disoriented by the complex effort. For a time he could not discern whether he had succeeded or failed.
...rstanding came about.
Survival seemed assured.
Then the machine came.
OX recognized it instantly, though he had never experienced this type of interaction before. The intrusion of the machine activated his alarm circuits. Here was Pattern's deadliest threat!
OX acted. He formed a
decoy shoot designed to preempt the attention of the machine. It resembled ideal prey because it exhibited tokens keyed to the machine's perceptions: the glint of refined, polished metal; the motion of seeming blight; the sparkle of the periphery of a true pattern-entity. The machine was not intelligent enough or experienced enough to penetrate the ruse. It followed the shoot.
The shoot moved out on a simulated evasion course, the machine slicing vigorously at it. The shoot would fizzle out at a suitable distance from the locale of the spots -- by which time the machine would have forgotten them. The threat had been abated, and all the spots were safe.
Chapter 7 - FOREST
Agents were disciplined; they had firm control over their emotions. Even consciousness-changing drugs could not subvert this, unless their actions overrode the total function of the brain. The subconscious mind of an agent was integrated with the conscious so that there were no suppressed passions, no buried monsters.
But the brutal slaying of a human infant had shaken her. The agent training and surgery could not eliminate the most fundamental drives that made her a woman. To watch, even in replica, a baby being sliced alive like so much bologna and funneled into the maw of a machine...
Then Veg had disrupted the image, and it had not returned. Perhaps that was just as well.
Another thing bothered her: the feeling that the image was not a mockup but a transmission. As with a televised picture: a replica of events actually occurring elsewhere. If so, this was no threat to cow the captives; it was the presentation of vital information.
Perhaps the controlling entity expected them to absorb the news like so many sponges. Probably there was more to come. But she was not inclined to wait on alien convenience. It was time to act.
Before she could act, she had to reconnoiter and get back in touch with Taler. That meant giving Cal and the mantas the slip.
But she could not afford to leave the human trio to its own devices. That was why she had come along on this projection! If she left them alone now, they could come up with some inconvenient mischief, just as they had on Paleo.
Answer, straight from the manual: take a hostage. There was no problem which one. Cal was too smart to control directly -- if, indeed, he could be controlled at all. He had given the agents a lesson back at Paleo! Aquilon would be difficult to manage because she was female, and complicated. The mantas were out of the question. So it had to be Veg: male, manageable, and not too smart. And she had primed him already.
Meanwhile, the others were recovering from their shock. No subtlety here; they reacted exactly as human beings should be expected to. Perhaps that was part of the point: The aliens intended to test the party in various ways, cataloguing their responses, much as psychiatrists tested white rats.
"What does it mean?" Aquilon asked, shading her eyes with one hand as though to shut off the glare of the vision.
"It means they can reach us -- emotionally as well as physically," Cal said slowly. "Whenever they want to. We could be in for a very ugly series of visions. But what they are trying to tell us -- that is unclear."
Tamme turned to the nearest manta. "Did you see it?" she inquired.
"Circe didn't see the vision," Aquilon answered. "Their eyes are different; they can't pick up totalities the way we do. They have no conception of perspective or of art."
Tamme knew that. She had studied the material on the fungoid creatures before passing through the aperture from Earth to Paleo. She knew they were cunning and dangerous; one had escaped captivity and hidden on a spaceship bound for the region of space containing the manta home-world of Nacre. It had never been killed or recaptured despite a strenuous search, and they had had to place a temporary proscription on Planet Nacre to prevent any more mantas from entering space.
The manta's eye was an organic cathode emitting a controlled beam of light and picking up its reflections from surrounding objects. That radar eye was unexcelled for the type of seeing that it did and worked as well in darkness as in light. But it had its limitations, as Aquilon had described. Yet if the mantas had seen the cloud-picture, this would have been highly significant.
Cal understood. "We see with one system, the manta with another. A comparison of the two could have led to significant new insights about the nature of the force that brought us here and showed us this scene." He shook his head. "But we have verified that the mantas see only flares of energy in the cloud, winking on and off extremely rapidly. They can not perceive the source of these flares and are not equipped to see any pictures."
"Let's sleep on it," Veg said gruffly.
"The baby -- something about it -- " Aquilon said.
"What's a baby doing by itself in an alternate world?" Veg demanded. "Whatever you folks thought you saw, it wasn't real."
Tamme differed. "A little manta, a little flightless bird, and a little human being -- there's a pattern there, and they looked real. I was able to read the bodily signs on that baby. It was thirsty. I'd say it was real, or at least a projection made from a real model."
"Odd that it should be in a nest," Cal remarked.
"I recognized it somehow," Aquilon said. "I don't know who it was, but it was somebody. Maybe one of us, back when..."
Cal was surprised beyond what he should have been. Tamme would have liked to question him about that, but this was not the occasion. Why should a conjecture about his infancy make him react? But Aquilon was right: There was a certain resemblance to Cal -- and to Aquilon herself. Had the alien intelligence drawn somehow from human memories to formulate a composite infant?
They settled down. The trio shared the interior of their tent, unselfconsciously; Tamme, by her own choice and theirs, slept apart. She had not been invited along, and they did not want her, but they accepted her presence as one of the facts of this mission.
Tamme's sleep was never deep, and she did not dream in the manner of normals because of the changed nature of the computer-organized mind. Much of human sleep was a sifting, digesting, and identification tagging of the day's events; without that sorting and filing, the mind would soon degenerate into chaos. But agents were reprogrammed regularly and so required no long-term memory cataloguing. Rather, she sank into a trancelike state while her body relaxed and her mind reviewed and organized developments with a view to their relevancy for her mission. It took about an hour; agents were efficient in this, too.
Now the others were asleep, Cal deeply, Aquilon lightly, Veg rising through a rapid-eye-movement sequence. The two mantas were off exploring; if she were lucky, they would not check on the supposedly quiescent human party for several hours.
She stood and removed her blouse, skirt, and slippers. Her fingers worked nimbly, tearing out friction seams and pressing the material together again in a new configuration. This was one trick male agents didn't have!
When the clothing was ready, she removed her bra, slip, and panties and redesigned them, too. Then she reassembled herself in an artful new format, let down her hair, and relaxed.
Sure enough, Veg's REM proceeded into wakefulness. It was not that he had complex continuing adjustments to make in connection with his rebound from Aquilon -- though he did. He had merely forgotten to visit the privy before turning in. Tamme had known he would rouse himself in due course.
Veg emerged from the tent. Tamme sat up as he passed her. He paused, as she had known he would. He could barely see her in the dark, but he was acutely conscious of her locale. "Just goin' to the..." he muttered.
"It happens," she said, standing, facing him, close.
Hope, negation, and suspicion ran through him. She picked up the mixed, involuntary signals of his body: quickened respiration and pulse, tightening of muscles, odors of transitory tension. She could see him, of course, for she had artificially acute night vision -- but her ears and nostrils would have sufficed. Normals were so easy to read.
Veg walked on, and Tamme walked with him, touching, matching her step to his. There was a faint, suggestive rustle to her clothing now tha
t set off new awareness in him. He did not consciously pick up the cause of this heightening intrigue, but the effect was strong. And in his present emotional state, severed from Aquilon, he was much more vulnerable to Tamme's calculated attack than he would normally have been.
Outside the auditorium there was a light-flower, its neon petals radiating illumination of many wavelengths. Now Veg could see her -- and it was a new impact.
"You've changed!"
"You merely behold me in a different light," she murmured, turning slightly within that differing glow.
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