Macroscope

by Pierce Anthony

  “Beryllium.”

  “How do you know?”

  “This is an elemental arrangement. Look at—”

  “Elementary arrangement,” Groton corrected her.

  “Elemental. You do know what an element is? Look at these objects. The first is a sphere, which means it has only one side: outside. The second is a closed cone: two sides, one curved, one flat. The third, the cylinder, has three. Yours has four, and so on. The first two aren’t empty — they’re gases! Hydrogen and helium, first and second elements on the periodic table—”

  “Could be,” Groton said, impressed.

  “And likely to be so for any technologically advanced species. Lithium, the metal that’s half the weight of water, third. Beryllium, fourth. Boron—”

  She broke off again and lurched for the sixth alcove — and froze before it.

  The others followed. There lay a four-inch cube — six sides — of a bright clear substance.

  Groton picked it up. “What’s number six on the table? Six protons, six electrons… isn’t that supposed to be carbon?” Then he too froze, eyes fixed on the cube. The light refracted through it strongly.

  Then Ivo made the connection. “Carbon in crystalline form — that’s diamond!”

  They gazed upon it: sixty-four cubic inches of diamond, that had to have been cut from a much larger crystal.

  A single exhibit — of scores in the hall.

  Then Afra was moving down the length of the room, calling off the samples. “Nitrogen — oxygen — fluorine — neon…”

  Groton shook his head. “What a fortune! And they’re only samples, shape-coded for ready reference. They—”

  Words failed him. Reverently, he replaced the diamond block.

  “Scandium — titanium — vanadium — chromium—” Afra chanted as she rushed on. “They’re all here! All of them!”

  Beatryx was perplexed. “Why shouldn’t they put them on display, if they want to?”

  Groton came out of his daze. “No reason, dear. No reason at all. It’s just a very expensive exhibit, to leave open to strangers. Perhaps it is their way of informing us that wealth means nothing to them.”

  She nodded, reassured.

  “The rare earths, too!” Afra called. She was now on the opposite side of the room, working her way back. “Here’s promethium — pounds of it! And it doesn’t even occur in nature!”

  “Does she know all the elements by heart?” Ivo muttered.

  “Osmium! That little cube must weigh twenty pounds! And solid iridium — on Earth that would sell for a thousand dollars an ounce!”

  “Better stay clear of the radioactives, Afra!” Groton cautioned her.

  “They’re glassed in. Lead glass, or something; no radiation. I hope. At least they don’t have them by the pound! Uranium — neptunium — plutonium—”

  “Saturnium — jupiterium — marsium,” Ivo muttered, facetiously carrying the planetary identifiers farther. It seemed to him that too much was being made of this exhibit. “Earthium — venusium — mercurochrome—”

  “Mercury,” Groton said, overhearing him. “There is such an element.”

  Oh.

  Afra came back at last, subdued. “Their table goes to a hundred and twenty. Those latter shapes get pretty intricate…”

  “You know better than that, Afra,” Groton said. “Some of those artificial elements have half-lives of hours, even minutes. They can’t sit on display.”

  “Even seconds, half-life. They’re still here. Look for yourself.”

  “Facsimiles, maybe. Not—”

  “Bet?”

  “No.” Groton looked for himself. “Must be some kind of stasis field,” he said dubiously. “If they can do what they can do with gravity—”

  “Suddenly I feel very small,” she said.

  But Ivo reminded himself that such tricks were nothing compared to the compression of an entire planet into its gravitational radius, and the protection of accompanying human flesh. This exhibit was impressive, but hardly alarming, viewed in perspective. He suspected that there was more to it than they had spotted so far.

  The hall continued beyond the element display, slanting down again. Ivo wondered about such things as the temperature. Sharp changes in it should affect some of the element-exhibits, changing them from solid to liquid, or liquid to gas. Yet the exhibit had been geared to a comfortable temperature for human beings, and was obviously a permanent arrangement. The layout, too — convenient for human beings, even to the height of the alcove.

  Had this been the destroyer station closest to Earth, there could have been suspicion of a carefully tailored show. But this one was almost fifty thousand light-years distant. It could not have been designed for men — unless there were men in the galaxy not of Earth. Or very similar creatures.

  The implications disturbed him, but no more than anything else about this strange museum. He knew it had been said that a planetary creature had to be somewhat like man in order to rise to civilization and technology, and that long chains of reasoning had been used to “prove” this thesis — but man’s reasoning in such respects was necessarily biased, and he had discounted it. Yet if it were true — if it were true — did it also hold for man’s personality? The greed, the stupidity, the bloodthirst — ?

  Was that Schön laughing again?

  The passage opened into a second room. This one was much larger than the first, and the alcoves began at floor-level.

  “Machinery!” Groton exclaimed with the same kind of excitement Afra had expressed before. He went to the first exhibit: a giant slab of metal, shaped like a wedge of cheese. As he approached, a ball fell on it and rolled off. Nothing else happened.

  “Machine?” Ivo inquired.

  “Inclined plane — the elementary machine, yes.”

  Well, if Groton were satisfied…

  The second item was a simple lever. Fulcrum and rod, the point of the latter wedged under a large block. As they came up to it, the rod moved, and the block slid over a small amount. Groton nodded, pleased, and Ivo followed him to the next. The two women walked ahead, giving only cursory attention to this display.

  The third resembled a vise. A long handle turned a heavy screw, so that the force applied was geared down twice. “Plane and lever,” Groton remarked. “We’re jumping ahead about fifty thousand years each time, as human technology goes.”

  “So far.”

  The fourth one had a furnace and a boiler, and resembled a primitive steam engine — which it was. The fifth was an electric turbine.

  After that they became complicated. To Ivo’s untrained eye, they resembled complex motors, heaters and radio equipment. Some he recognized as variants of devices he had blue printed via the macroscope; others were beyond his comprehension. Not all were intricate in detail; some were deceptively smooth. He suspected that an old automobile mechanic would find a printed-circuit board with embedded micro-transistors to be similarly smooth. One thing he was sure of: none of it was fakery.

  Groton stopped at the tenth machine. “I thought I’d seen real technology when we terraformed Triton,” he said. “Now — I am a believer. I’ve digested about as much as I care to try in one outing. Let’s go on.”

  The girls had already done so, and were in the next chamber. This contained what appeared to be objects of art. The display commenced with simple two- and three-dimensional representations of concretes and abstracts, and went on to astonishing permutations. This time it was Beatryx who was fascinated.

  “Oh, yes, I see it,” she said, moving languidly from item to item. She was lovely in her absorption, as though the grandeur and artistry of what she perceived transfigured her own flesh. Now she outshone Afra. Ivo had not realized how fervent her interest in matters artistic was, though it followed naturally from her appreciation of music. He had assumed that what she did not talk about was of no concern to her, and now he chided himself for comprehending shallowly — yet again.

  The display did not appeal
to him as a whole, but individual selections did. He could appreciate the mathematical symbolism in some; it was of a sophisticated nature, and allied to the galactic language codes.

  A number were portraits of creatures. They were of planets remote from Earth, but were intelligent and civilized, though he could not tell how he could be sure of either fact. Probably the subtle clues manifested themselves to him subliminally, as when Brad had first shown him alien scapes on the macroscope. Description? Pointless; the creatures were manlike in certain respects and quite alien in certain others. What mattered more was their intangible symmetry of form and dignity of countenance. These were Greek idealizations; the perfect physique with the well-tutored mind and disciplined emotion. These were handsome male, females and neuters. They were represented here as art, and they were art, in the same sense that a rendition of a finely contoured athlete or nude woman was art by human terms.

  The rooms continued, each one at a lower level than the one preceding, until it seemed that the party had to be at the second lap of a spiral. One chamber contained books; printed scrolls, coiled tapes, metallic memory disks. Probably all the information the builders of the station might have broadcast to space was here, the reply to anyone who might suspect that the destroyer was merely sour grapes delivered by an ignorant culture. It was, in retrospect, obvious that that had never been the case.

  One room contained food. Many hours and many miles had passed in fascination; they were hungry. Macroscopic chemical identifiers labeled the entrees, which were in stasis ovens. The party made selections as though they were dining at an automat, “defrosting” items, and the menu was strange but good.

  Nowhere was there sign of animate habitation. It was as though the builders had stocked the station as a hostel and center of information, and left it for travelers who could come in the following eons. Yet it was also the source of the very signal that banished travel. What paradox was this?

  The hall opened at last to a small room — and abruptly terminated. There were no alcoves, no exhibits; only a pedestal in the center supporting a small intricate object.

  They walked around it indecisively. “Does it seem to you that we are being led down the garden path?” Afra inquired. “The exhibits are impressive, and I am impressed — but is this all? A museum tour and a dead end?”

  “It is all we are supposed to see,” Groton said. “And somehow I do not think it would be wise to force the issue.”

  “We came to force the issue!” Afra said.

  “What I meant to say was, let’s not start hammering at the walls. We could discover ourselves in hard vacuum. Further exploration in an intellectual capacity should be all right.”

  Ivo was looking at the device on the pedestal. It was about eighteen inches long, and reminded him vaguely of the S D P S: an object of greater significance than first appeared. It was in basic outline cylindrical, but within that general boundary was a mass of convoluted tubings, planes, wires and attachments. It seemed to be partly electronic in nature, but not entirely a machine; partly artistic, but not a piece of sculpture. Yet there was a certain familiarity about it; some quality, some purpose inherent in it that he felt he should recognize.

  He picked it up, finding the weight slight for so intricate an object: perhaps two pounds, and deviously balanced. The incipient recognition of its nature struck him more strongly. He ought to know what it was.

  Something happened.

  It was as though there were the noise of a great gong, but with vibrations not quite audible to human ears. Light flared, yet his eyes registered no image. There was a shock of heat and pressure and ponderosity that his body could not discern definitely, and some overwhelming odor that his nostrils missed.

  The others were looking at him and at each other, aware that something important had been manifested — and not aware of more.

  Ivo still held the instrument.

  “Play it, Ivo,” Beatryx said.

  And all were mute, realizing that in all the chambers there had been no musical devices.

  Ivo looked at it again, this time seeing conduits like those of a complex horn; fibers like those of stringed instruments; drumlike diaphragms; reeds. There was no place to blow, no spot to strike; but fingers could touch controls and eyes could trace connections.

  The object was vibrating gently, as though the lifting of it had activated its power source. It had come alive, awaiting the musician’s imperative.

  He touched a stud at random — and was rewarded by a roll of thunder.

  Beatryx, Afra, Groton: they stared up and out, trying instinctively to trace the source, to protect themselves if the walls caved in… before realizing what had happened. Multiphonal sound!

  “When you picked it up,” Groton began—

  “You touched a control,” Afra finished. Both were shaken. “The BONG button.”

  “And now the thunder stud,” Beatryx said.

  Ivo slid one finger across a panel. A siren wail came at them from all directions, deafening yet melodious.

  He explored the rest of it, producing a measured cacophony: every type of sound he could imagine was represented here, each imbued with visual, tactile and olfactory demesnes. If only he could bring this sensuous panorama under control—

  And he could. Already his hands were responding to the instrument’s ratios, achieving the measure of it, growing into the necessary disciplines. This was his talent, this way with an organ of melody. He had confined himself to the flute — Sidney Lanier’s choice — but the truth was that all of Schön’s gift was his. Probably there was no human being with greater natural potential than his own — should he choose to invoke it.

  Ivo could not call out the technical aspects or discuss the theory knowledgeably; that was not part of it. He could not even read musical notation, for he had never studied it, choosing instead to learn by ear. But with an instrument in his hands and the desire to play, he could produce a harmony, and he could do it precisely, however complicated the descriptive terms for what he performed.

  Now he developed that massive raw talent, bringing all his incipient skill to bear. He picked a suitable exercise, adapting for the flute at first, hearing the words as the song became animate. It was not from Lanier; that would come when he had command. One had to practice with lesser themes first. A trial run only…

  Drink to me only with thine eyes and I will pledge with mine;

  Or leave a kiss within the cup and I’ll not ask for wine.

  The thirst that from the soul doth rise doth ask a drink divine;

  But could I of Jove’s nectar sip, I would not change for thine.

  The others stood as the simple haunting melody surrounded them, marvelously clear, almost liquid, possessed increasingly of that éclat, that soul that was the true artist’s way. The galactic instrument brought also the suggestion of a heady nectar… and the touch of magic lips.

  Afra was staring raptly at him, never having heard him play before. Had that been his worst blunder? Not to employ the real talent he had?

  Groton was staring at Afra…

  No, he was staring beyond her! The blank wall blocking the continuation of their tour was dissolving, revealing another passage. The way was open again!

  “The free ride is over,” Groton murmured. “Now we have to participate.”

  They moved down it then in silence, Ivo still carrying the instrument. This hall opened into a tremendous chamber whose ceiling was an opaque mist and whose floor was a translucency without visible termination. There were no walls; the sides merely faded into darkness, though there was light close at hand.

  They walked within it, looking in vain for something tangible. But now even the floor was gone. Physically gone: it too had dissolved and left them in free-fall, hanging weightless in an atmosphere. Their point of entry, too, had vanished; they tried to swim back through the pleasant air, but there was nothing to locate. They were isolated and lost.

  “So it was a trap,” Afra said, seemingly
more irritated than frightened.

  “Or — a test,” Groton said. “We had to demonstrate a certain type of competence to gain admittance, after the strictly sightseeing sections were finished. Perhaps we shall have to demonstrate more, before being permitted to leave.”

  They looked at Ivo, who was floating a little apart from the others, and he looked at the thing in his hands.

  “Try the same tune you did before,” Afra suggested. “Just to be sure.”

  He played “Drink to Me Only” again. Nothing happened. He tried several other simple tunes, and the sound came at them from all over the unbounded chamber, not simple at all, but they remained as they were: four people drifting in nebulosity.

  “I persist in suspecting that the key is musical,” Groton said. “Why else that instrument, obviously neither toy nor exhibit. So far we may only have touched on its capability.”

  “Do you know,” Ivo said thoughtfully, “Lanier believed that the rules for poetry and music were identical, and he tried to demonstrate this in his work. His flute-playing was said to be poetically inspired, and much of his poetry was musically harmonious. He even—”

  “Very well,” Afra said, unsurprised and still unworried, though the web of the spider seemed to be tightening. “Let’s follow up on Lanier. He wrote a travelogue of Florida, one poor novel, and the poems ‘Corn,’ ‘The Marshes of Glynn,’ The Symphony’—”

  “The Symphony!” Groton said it, but they all had reacted to the title. “Would that be — ?”

  “Play it, Ivo!” Beatryx said.

  “The Symphony” was poetry, not music; there was no prescribed tune for it. But Ivo lifted the instrument and felt the power come into his being, for he had dreamed of setting this piece to music many times. He had never had the courage to make the attempt, on his own initiative. But here was his chance to make something of himself and his talent; to find out whether he could open, musically, the door to the riddle that was the destroyer.

  There was music in meaning, and meaning in music, and they were very close to one another in the work of Sidney Lanier and in this poem in particular. Each portion of it was spoken by a different instrument, personified, and the whole was the orchestral symphony…