In due course it solidified into walls of stone: They were passing through a cavern, a huge hollow in the ground. Cub recognized this also, for last season he had fashioned digging and chipping tools and dug deep, deep into the ground, trying to ascertain whether there was any escape from the enclave in that direction. He had, in fact, made a small cavern. But it was useless, and he had given up and closed it over. Now they used it for winter storage and occasionally for shelter from storms.
A tremendous room opened out on one side, far larger than the cave Cub had made. Then the stone closed in again as though the very walls were moving.
Wait! Cub signaled. I saw something. Go back.
The shoot gave a controlled fadeout equivalent to the drooping of Ornet's tail feathers or Cub's own shrug of the shoulders. The moving walls reversed, opening into the cavern.
There! Cub indicated. Geographically -- move over.
Now the others spotted it. In the center of the cavern a creature was doing something. It was working on some sort of machine... no, the thing was too simple to be a machine, merely a mechanical device, perhaps the ancestor of a machine. Sound emerged, pleasant, harmonious. The thing was playing music, similar to that Cub himself could make with voice and the beat of his hands on a log, but smoother, prettier. The creature's tentacles touched the device here and there, and the melodious sound issued.
Follow that frame, Cub directed, as though the other members of his party had no preferences. But they were content to follow his lead in this. In physical motion, Dec was supreme; in memory, it was Ornet. In imagination, it was Cub, and they all knew it.
OX oriented -- and the single alien musician became two, then eight, and then a myriad of players. The music swelled resoundingly. Then the creatures changed, becoming humanoid, and finally human.
Your kind! Ornet squawked.
Startled, Cub examined them more carefully. My kind!
They changed to tall green plants, playing the instruments with leaves and roots. Wait! Cub signaled, too late.
But OX was already backing up. The Cub-type players re-formed, went alien, returned, went naked, elaborately clothed, and finally focused on a compromise.
My kind! Cub repeated, half dazed. But what are those others? He gestured toward some individuals that differed slightly. They resembled him, but their torsos varied, and their faces were bare as though they were not yet grown.
Female of your species, Ornet squawked. Show the natural version, OX.
OX obliged, shifting to the unclothed players.
Mam females lack the urinary appendage, Ornet explained, gesturing with his beak. But they possess structures for the nursing of infants. My ancestors have not observed your particular species, but these are merely modifications of the type.
Cub stared at the nursing structures, appalled yet fascinated. I would like to put my hands on those, he signaled.
This can not be done, the shoot replied. We can not interact.
I know it! Cub gestured irritably, though for a moment he was tempted to challenge OX to make a circuit for the attempt. Let's go on.
They went on -- but after that Cub's attention was on his memory of his kind, on the bare-fleshed females. If only there were some way to get across the barrier physically!
Suddenly Mach appeared, rising up out of the storage cave. All of them were caught off guard. Once more the machine had been too cunning for them and had arranged to come on their special frame-trip, after all!
The thing came whirling its blade and spinning its treads, forcing the physical beings out of its way, and its pattern-disruptive emanations were so strong that OX had to move explosively to avoid nonsurvival effects. Cub could see the sparkles flying out like a stellar display on a chill night.
Then the group mobilized, as it had so many times before. Ornet served as decoy, flapping his wings and squawking just outside the range of the blade. Dec swooped by, flicking his tail at the perceptor bulbs. Cub stood back and threw stones into the blade. And OX formed shoots that spun across the elements in the machine's vicinity, distracting its alternate-frame perspective.
They could hardly damage Mach, let alone destroy it; it was invulnerable to their attack. But their combined harassment made it uncomfortable and always drove it back.
This time it persisted for an extraordinary time. It was undeniably strong. But finally the stones and sand that Cub shoveled at its blade and into its hopper discouraged it. Sand did not hurt it, but it was unable to disgorge it while under attack. And so it retreated -- just far enough to abate their defensive action.
Through the years they had come to a kind of understanding with Mach. Once the machine retreated, they would let it alone -- and it would not attack again that day. Truce, while both sides recuperated. Neither side had ever broken that tacit agreement; that temporary security was too important. Mach actually seemed to be honest; perhaps the mechanical circuits prevented dishonesty in any form. This was one of the things about the machine that Cub respected. Sometimes he and Dec and Ornet sought out Mach and attacked it merely to invoke the truce so that they could be assured it would not attack them while something important was going on.
Cub threw himself down, panting, as the machine became quiescent. It remained within the area of OX's influence -- but Cub had no desire to drive it outside. They had brought it along on this trip, and they would have to return it to the normal enclave. It would not be right to leave it stranded.
Once he had wished for some way to rid the enclave of this constant menace. Now he had the chance -- and would not take it. Not merely because of his interpretation of their truce; because he was even more certain that Mach was a sentient entity, too, and deserved a certain measure of respect.
But then he remembered what he had seen beyond the enclave, in the cave of the musicians, and forgot the machine.
Chapter 13 - DREAMS
Aquilon wiped her eyes with her fists. "This R Pentomino is a menace!" she complained. "I'm getting a headache! It just goes on and on."
Cal pulled his head out of the innards of the machine. "I told you it was an impressive dead end after eleven hundred and three moves."
"I know. I wanted to see for myself."
"Try the glider," he suggested.
"The what?"
"You have been dealing with stationary forms. There are others. Here." He extricated himself and came over. "This is the glider." He made the pattern of dots on her canvas-sheet:
"That's another pentomino!" she said indignantly.
He shrugged and returned to his work. "I hope to convert this machine to a specialized oscilloscope, or facsimile thereof, so that we can translate our signals into pattern-language. I have the feeling that the pattern-entities are as eager to talk with us as we are to talk with them. Think how confusing we must be to them!"
"But we are solid and visible!" she said, working on the new figure. It had gone from [1] to [2] to [3] In fact, it was now a mirror image of its original form, turned endwise. Funny.
"Precisely. An entity whose system is based on patterns of points would find our mode of operation virtually incomprehensible."
She made the next figure, jumping straight from one to the next without such laborious additions and erasures. [4] "Do you think Veg is all right?"
"I doubt I ever get used to the caprices of female thought," he remarked. "Veg is with Tamme."
"That's what I meant."
"Jealousy -- at your age?"
She looked at the next figure: [5] "Hey -- this thing repeats itself on new squares! It's like a blinker -- only it moves!"
"Precisely. Patterns can travel. The glider moves diagonally at a quarter the speed of light."
"Speed of light?"
"An advance of one square per move is the maximum possible velocity in this game, so we call it the speed of light. The glider takes four moves to repeat itself, one square across and one down, so that is one quarter light-speed."
She looked at it, nodding. "Beauti
ful!"
Veg would have said, "So are you." Not Cal. He said: "A variant of that formation is called the Spaceship. Spaceships of various sizes can move at half the speed of light. As they go, they fire off sparks that vanish, like propulsion."
"The sparkle cloud did that!" she cried.
"Yes. We also know of a 'glider gun' that fires off gliders regularly. And another figure that consumes gliders. In fact, it is possible to fire several gliders to form new figures at the point of convergence -- even another glider gun that shoots back at its parent guns, destroying them."
"If I were a pattern, I'd be very careful where I fired my gliders!" Aquilon said. "That game plays a rough game!"
"It does. As does all nature. I should think assorted defensive mechanisms would appear by natural selection, or the game would be unstable -- assuming it were self-willed. The possibilities are obvious."
"Especially when you get into three dimensions!"
"Yes. It is a three-dimensional computerized grid I am working on now. I wish I were a more experienced technician!"
"I think you're a genius," she said sincerely. And she felt a flare of emotion.
"You can help me now if you will. I'll need some figures for my three-dimensional grid."
"What's wrong with the ones we have? The R Pentomino, the glider -- "
"They won't be the same. A line of three points would manufacture four new ones, not two -- because of the added dimension. That would form a short cross, which would in turn form a kind of hollow cube. I believe that's an infinitely expanding figure -- and that is not suitable for our purpose. We need figures that are approximately in balance -- that neither fade out too rapidly nor expand to fill the whole framework."
"Hm, I see," she murmured, trying to trace the three-dimensional permutations of the figure on her two-dimensional canvas. She compromised by using color to represent the third dimension. "Your line becomes an indefinitely expanding three-dimensional figure, as you said. Looks like two parallel caterpillar treads with eight cleats in each, if I haven't fouled it up. But almost any figure expands; there are just too many interactions."
"Agreed. So we must modify the rules to do for three dimensions what 'Life' does for two. Perhaps we must require four points to generate a fifth and let a point be stable with three or four neighbors. Perhaps some other combination. If you can suggest viable rules and figures, it will save me time, once I have this equipment modified."
"I'll try!" she said, and bent to it. They both had difficult, intricate jobs, and from time to time they had to break off. They also chatted intermittently during the work.
"Say -- did you ever find the missing earthquake?" Aquilon asked suddenly.
Cal paused momentarily at his labor. She knew he was finding his mental place, as she had just made another momentous leap of topic. To her surprise, he placed her reference accurately. "We were separated three days on Paleo, during which time there were two tremors, a minor and a strong one. I remember them clearly."
"For a genius, you have a poor memory," she said, smiling over her complex dot-pattern. "We were separated four days, and there were quakes on the first three. You must really have been absorbed with that dinosaur not to notice."
"Odd that we should differ on something so easy to verify," he said. "Shall we compare notes in detail?" It was as though he were inviting her to a duel, certain that she would lose.
Aquilon was intrigued. "Let's."
"You and Veg went to the island -- "
"Not that much detail," she said, embarrassed. Then she reconsidered. "No -- let's put it out in the open. You wanted to make a report on Paleo that would surely lay it open to exploitation and destruction -- "
"I changed my mind."
"Let me finish. I wanted to help Orn and Ornette survive because they were unique, intelligent birds and I liked them. Veg went with me." She took a breath and forced herself to continue. "Veg and I made love that night. Next morning he went to see you at the raft -- and the first tremor came."
"Yes. After he left the raft, I set sail. I was aware of the tremor; it made the water dance. About fifteen seconds, mild."
"Even a mild earthquake is horrible," she said, giving her head a little reminiscent shake. "That was the first day, the first quake. So we agree."
"So far." She could tell from his tone that he was still sure she was wrong about the tremors. She was also a bit uneasy about the seemingly bland response to her confession concerning Veg. "The second day Circe came and told us a predator dinosaur was after you, but you wouldn't let the mantas help you. I thought we should leave well enough alone. Veg hit me and headed off."
"He should not have done that." Again, too mild a response.
"Cal, I didn't want you to die -- but I thought it was more important that you be allowed to do what you felt you had to do, your own way."
"Precisely. Veg blundered."
So it was all right. Cal understood. She should have known he would. "Later that day the second quake came. It shattered the eggs -- all but one. It was violent, awful."
"I was on the mountainside. The tremor knocked Tyrannosaurus off his feet and rolled him down the mountain. I was afraid he was too badly hurt to continue the chase. Fortunately, he suffered minimal damage."
Aquilon grimaced, knowing he was not being facetious. Cal had wanted to conquer the dinosaur himself, without the help of an act of God. "So we agree on the second day, the second quake."
"We agree. I continued on up the mountain and slept in a volcanic cave. Next day the agents came -- Taler, Taner, and Tamme."
"No," she said firmly. "Next day there was a third quake. It tore the island apart. A plesiosaurus got Ornette, so Orn and I had to ferry the egg to the mainland the day following -- the morning of the fourth day, the day the agents came. I'll never forget that awful journey through the water, protecting the egg! I had to use Orn for support -- "
Cal nodded thoughtfully. "So you really did experience an extra day and tremor!"
"You lost a day, Cal. What happened to it?"
He sighed. "This suggests something too fantastic to believe. In fact, I don't believe it."
So there was something! "This sounds fascinating! You have a secret?"
"In a manner of speaking. I didn't think it was anything significant. You would have been the first to know had there been anything to it. All men have fantasies -- and all women, too, I'm sure. But now -- I wonder. Alternates do exist, and in some of them are virtual duplicates of ourselves. The woman you met, the naked Aquilon -- "
"Don't tell me you dream of naked Aquilons!" she said, pleased. But at the same time, the memory of the lost egg upset, her. She had so wanted to save the Orn species...
"More than that, I'm afraid. After all, I have seen you naked in life."
She remembered the time she had run nude on Paleo before they found the dinosaurs. She had not realized that he had paid attention. "You always loved me. You said so back on Planet Nacre. And I love you. But there's never been much of a -- a physical component, has there?"
"The major component," he said seriously.
"Oh? I thought all things were intellectual to you."
He peered at her over the machine. "You are leading me on."
"That's what I mean. You are too smart for me, and we both know it. I couldn't deceive you with feminine wiles if I tried. You intellectualize everything to the point where you feel no physical passion." She felt a little shiver as she said it, wanting him to deny it. She had taken the initiative with Veg, and that had been wrong; he had resented it and repaid her with a blow. Not a conscious motivation, perhaps -- but she was sure that it had been one of his unconscious ones.
"Intelligence is irrelevant. You have shown me my error in the counting of tremors, for example."
"That's right. What did you do with that day and that quake? Chase naked Aquilons?"
"Yes."
She looked at him sharply, for he sounded serious. "You did?"
"Bea
r with me if I affront your sensitivities. I think this is something you should know."
"I'm not affronted," she said, keeping her eyes on her diagrams. "Intrigued, though..." She certainly was; the three-dimensional life-game analysis was now no more than a pretense.
He buried his head in the machine so that only his voice reached her. She returned to her work with an effort and listened, visualizing what he described.
Of Man and Manta Omnibus Page 61
