Macroscope

by Pierce Anthony

  “But with no defense—”

  “Wait and see.” Inwardly, Groton prayed that his audacious gamble paid off. He was not, ordinarily a gambling man. He was exchanging almost certain defeat for a fifty-fifty chance at victory — but had he been a real tactician, he might have known how to play for two- or three-to-one odds in his favor. “Now you and I will board the fleet flagship,” he finished.

  That made another stir. It seemed that commanders of naval operations generally ensconced themselves safely within the base moon and jumped to another location in space when the battle went against them. No wonder losses could be heavy!

  He had no time to concern himself with the details of the ship he boarded. It was a standard cruiser, heavy on armament, slow on maneuver, but capable of high velocity under sustained acceleration.

  Three hours later they were closer to the enemy moon than to their own. The Felk fleet was still emerging, though about half of it was now positioned around its base.

  “Form our ships into three wedges,” Groton said. “Send them in simultaneously from three directions.” And it was done.

  The enemy fleet deployed to counter this move. “Why don’t they mass and attack our station?” the officer asked, baffled.

  “Would you attack the enemy home-base — if your ships were needed to save your own hide?”

  “Hide?”

  “Carapace. Chitin integument. Personal dignity.”

  “Oh. Yes. Self-preservation.”

  An underling-worker reported: “Felk commander has a message for Queen commander.”

  “Is that safe to accept?”

  “Yes,” the officer replied. “The Felks are reputed to be honorable in battle.”

  “Let’s see it then. Maybe he wants to negotiate.”

  “Negotiate?”

  “Don’t you ever bargain for some settlement short of total victory?”

  “Bargain?”

  Groton shrugged and watched the communications screen. A picture of a two-eyed creature with a caved-in face formed, manlike in its way. Do we look that ugly? he asked himself, already acclimatized to the shell-gloss outlines of the hive personnel.

  The Felk commander spoke in whistles, pursing its flaccid lips, but there was a running translation. “Commander, I am impressed by your technique.” There was no opportunity for normal dialogue, since there was almost a minute’s delay owing to lightspeed limitation of communications. By the time a rapid conversation was feasible, they would be virtually on top of the enemy moon. “I did not anticipate such initiative on the part of the Queen’s forces. From the facility with which you are adjusting formation, I suspect that you, commander, are aboard one of the ships in the area. This demonstrates courage, and gives a tactical advantage over me, since my communications delay is much greater than yours. I am authorized to offer you a generous commission in our navy, if you will defect to our side.”

  Groton stood before the silent screen, amazed at the audacity of it, “He’s losing — so he offers his enemy a commission!”

  “Felks are adroit,” the officer agreed indifferently. “That’s how we lost my predecessor.”

  “He defected?”

  “He tried to. But the Queen overheard and cut off his head. The mission was successful.”

  Groton gained respect for the Queen. She, at least, had unquestioned loyalty to her side. Of course, she was her side, largely…

  Still, the notion of blatantly buying off the opposition… “Well, beam back a picture of me,” he said hotly. “Nothing else. We’ll see if the Felks figure to bribe away the Queen’s Drone.”

  He had his answer in two minutes. “As it happens,” the Felk commander whistled, “we hold captive a Queen of your species, obtained as the result of a singularly fortunate maneuver. Unfortunately her Drone died. She has been very lonely for a year, though we permit her a reasonable retinue of her neuters, hatched from the few remaining eggs she has in storage. I suspect she would not tire of a serviceable mate for a very long time, knowing she could not obtain another. As you know, the favor extended to individual Drones is normally of short duration — two or three years. I can arrange to send you to her.”

  Again Groton was astonished. Would this creature stop at nothing? The Drone’s memory verified that the Felks had overrun an outpost some time ago — one staffed by a Queen — and that a Queen could not raise her own Drone from an egg. Incest did not exist, in this culture.

  The Drone-mind clamored for attention. The offer, it developed was attractive, particularly to one who faced the prospect of early retirement by his present Queen. A Drone could live as long as a Queen could — if permitted. That amounted to decades. Felks did not lie; the offer was valid.

  Sorry, Groton said to the Drone. Then, to the officer: “Tell the Felk to look to his defenses. This commander is not about to be bought off by the boudoir.”

  In the interval between messages, the officer fidgeted, then spoke. “Request permission to voice an opinion.” The third eye was now lidded.

  “Granted, provided it is brief.”

  “I had thought it was an insult to serve under Drone command. I was mistaken.”

  “We all make mistakes,” Groton said, touched but not forgetting that it would be a mistake to betray any personal softness. The mission was not yet over. More and more he appreciated the lessons of that hectic school-teaching session of his earlier life. Then it had been merely his pride and self-confidence that took beatings; now the lives of thousands were at stake.

  The third message showed that the Felk had not given up. “You evince a handsome loyalty to your Queen. But have you properly considered the nature of your loyalty to your species, and to other technological species? Surely you are intelligent enough to perceive that this station and the others in your program will hurt all of us. All we ask is the right to travel — yet only one species in a thousand is to be permitted this, if the stations function. Neither your species nor mine is among the select. Why cooperate as the tool of the destroyer?”

  The destroyer! Suddenly the meaning of all this settled into focus. He was participating in the origin of the destroyer station — perhaps the very one that had blanked out Earth’s finest minds. Would blank, for what he experienced now had to be history at least fifteen thousand years past. His mystic journey had finished on target; there could be no more significant event.

  And he was on the wrong side.

  Or was he? He had learned, in his human existence, to consider things carefully. Surely the Queen had not gone to the immense trouble and danger of setting up an interference that would prevent her own kind from using the spaceways, without very good reason. He should understand that reason, before making his own decision.

  Meanwhile there was the practical problem of the enemy fleet. If he did not destroy it, it would destroy him, making his personal decision less relevant than his indecision. Unless he defected… but that would doom the station, and might be a mistake.

  “Send this reply,” he said. “MESSAGE RECEIVED. SUGGEST YOU WITHDRAW.”

  The officer obeyed, then came back to question the directive. “Do you expect the Felk to retreat merely because you ask him to?”

  “We’ll see.”

  In due course they saw. The Felk ships decelerated, looped about, and drew in toward their base. As time passed they docked within their moon in orderly fashion.

  “A ruse!” the officer said.

  “Yet you told me the Felk were honorable.”

  The officer looked confused.

  More time passed. The last enemy ship docked while Groton held his own fleet back, suspending fire. For three hours they globed the moon at a safe distance. Then it vanished.

  The release of its gravitational influence jolted the Queen’s fleet, sending ships tumbling outward. Space had been drawn into a knot and rent, and had healed itself. There was no doubt the Felk force had withdrawn.

  “He will pop back on the opposite side, close to the destroyer station,” t
he officer predicted. “He didn’t say he wouldn’t, anyway.”

  But the Felk did not return. In the course of the following twelve hours the workships finished laying their mines and activating the mines’ perceptors and trackers. The area was impregnable. A mine could not travel, but it was supreme in its area of space. Anything that approached, even an entire fleet, would be blasted, unless it carried the nullifying code-signal. The Queen’s fleet possessed this, of course — but its nature was a secure secret known only to the Queen.

  The Queen’s moon detached the destroyer station and let the ships adjust its position. As it warmed up, its tremendous field of gravity took hold, hauling the moon into orbit around it, though it was two miles in diameter compared to the moon’s two thousand. Child’s-play, for this technology; gravity could be turned on and off as though it were a magnetic field. Probably the station had reclined in null-G aboard the moon, so as not to be crushed in storage. To think that the entire fabulous layout that was the destroyer-complex was no more than an installation problem to the Queen…!

  Then the destroyer signal was cut in, and Groton knew that it was spreading out in a sphere whose radius expanded at lightspeed. Any battlemoon that transferred in would not transfer out again — and the six mines would finish whatever stayed.

  “Request permission to ask a question.”

  Groton understood the hive signals now. This was something important to the officer. “Granted.”

  “By what reasoning did you determine that the Felk would leave upon request? I saw nothing in your conversation to indicate such a response.” It paused. “I wish to learn, for I note that you accomplished the mission without loss of ships, when I surely would have failed.”

  This was not a question Groton particularly wanted to answer, but he felt an obligation to give a serious response to a serious query. “Put yourself in the place of the Felk commander, he said, seeing a discreet way to handle the matter.

  “Defect to the Felk?”

  Oops! “No — I mean to imagine that your situation was his. You emerge from spacefold to set up your attack, and instead you find the enemy, whose force is inferior to yours, attacking you. What would you do?”

  The officer concentrated, adjusting to this unfamiliar mode of thinking. “I would wait for further developments,” it said at last. “I would want to ascertain what advantage the enemy had that made him so bold.”

  “Precisely. And if he maneuvers with such facility and confidence that you find yourself at a disadvantage in spite of your superior resources?”

  It thought some more. “I would attempt to subvert its commander.” Then its center arm lifted in the gesture of sudden illumination, and its center eye blinked. “That is what the Felk did!”

  “Right. And if you could not buy off the enemy strategist?”

  “I would attempt to negotiate honorably.” It paused again, now translating from actuality. “I would — appeal to that officer’s loyalty to its species, and attempt to convince it that our causes were one. But — not too obviously, for its honor should not be impugned.”

  “And if he agreed to consider the matter?”

  “If my position were already too bad to recover, I would have to leave the decision up to it. Perhaps that commander would — change its mind — once left to its own devices.” It looked at him. “May I—”

  “You may not inquire. Perhaps you can decide for yourself what my decision will be.”

  The officer remained silent, accepting it. Groton hoped the mental effort would do it good and that it would be a better tactician in the future. It certainly had come a long way in the past hours.

  And what was his decision to be? Here was his chance to change history, perhaps even to give his species — mankind — freedom of space travel. In one sense this adventure might be a dream, a vision; but in another he was certain it was real. Now he understood why Ivo had been unwilling to dismiss his Tyre episode out of hand. It was likely that the body that remained at the starting point was the mockup; the better portion of reality was here.

  Should he act now, sabotage the destroyer station before it could blank out the thousand traveling species for every one it promoted? He could fire a volley from his flagship that would wreck the station mechanism. What right did the Queen have to repress a major section of the galaxy in such fashion?

  He refused to act without information. That was the way of prejudice, and could only stir up catastrophe. If he wanted to know the motivation of the Queen, he would have to ask her.

  She was waiting for him as the operation closed down. “Drone, that was a creditable byplay. I had expected to have to retreat to one of our alternate locales during the enemy’s commitment, perhaps even to leave you behind, but you surprised me by prevailing. What came over you?”

  He tried to say “Sometimes the worm does turn,” but it came out, in this situation, as “Upon occasion the annelid completes a circuit.”

  “You seem to have demonstrated your point. It would not be expedient to adopt a new Drone at this stage,” she said. “Here to me, my cherished.”

  Realizing her intent, Groton tried to resist. He was human whatever his present body, and infidelity was not in his nature. How would he face Beatryx, if — ?

  But the Drone-body was already advancing to its destiny. The Queen was mistress, the dual concept a single one in this society. She was wife and monarch, never to be denied in either capacity. The Drone motor response, in this instance, was involuntary. Groton could observe but not control.

  From the hump before his middle leg a member of specific purpose telescoped out. His legs and arms reached to embrace her in the fashion peculiar to this association, and the act of intimacy precipitated itself.

  It lasted a long time, this fertilizing of several score eggs, and afterward, exhausted, he slept. His body had been drained in a fashion far more literal than that of human intercourse.

  When he woke, Groton was tired but in control again — and gifted with a unique appreciation of the meaning of rape.

  “Drone!” the Queen’s voice came — and once more he was on his feet at her behest. His control extended only to the extent she permitted it; he could not disobey a direct order.

  “Groom me,” she said as he arrived. Nothing had changed.

  “What is the reason for the destroyer?” he inquired as he worked, relieved that he could communicate to this extent.

  “The Horven knows,” she said. “Shall I send you to it in my stead?” Then, as was her wont, she made her decision immediately. “Yes. Groom yourself, feed yourself, and go. I have eggs to lay.”

  Obediently he turned the brush on his own fur, less handsome than hers, and set about procuring a meal of the royal nectar.

  Who or what was the Horven? The Drone had never been curious, and consequently knew very little on this subject. The Horven was a member of a civilized species of long standing — a species that did not deign to trade with others, or even to communicate with them. Yet one was resident within this moon.

  He searched the Drone’s memory. Three times before, the Queen had descended into the depths of the Horven apartments, after setting up destroyer stations. On her return, the moon had begun the transmission cycle leading to the emplacement of the next unit. Did she have to make a report? Receive orders? This was an unacceptable concept to the Drone. The Queen bowed to no creature.

  Why, then, these regular journeys? What passed between them, the Queen and the strange alien? He was about to find out.

  The Queen put him aboard the hanging descent-car with something almost like affection. “Do not linger, male-thing.”

  The capsule was translucent; distorted images entered to tantalize him. The polished metal walls of the upper landing gave way to bleak stone as the unit swung along at a rapid pace. Sometimes it seemed he was traveling through natural caverns; at other times the walls were so close as to resemble a tunnel. Once light blazed, as though he were navigating a fiery hell.

 
He gathered that the Horven liked its privacy.

  What was he supposed to say to it? He had no idea.

  At least he knew that one could make such a visit and return intact. Whatever business the one species had with the other, it was not physically dangerous. Still, the Drone-mind within him gibbered with fear.

  Was it right to use this body so callously? He had control, and he had exercised it ruthlessly. How would he feel, if an alien intellect had taken over his own body and suppressed the higher centers of his brain?

  “I believe this is a temporary phenomenon,” he said to the Drone. “When I have finished my business here, you will have your body back.”

  And was surprised to pick up a fiercer burst of terror than any before.

  The capsule halted before he had a chance to ascertain the reason for this reaction. Its side panel opened and the vehicle tilted to disgorge him.

  He looked about. He was in a spacious hall, and standing on a circular platform. A manlike figure was before him, dressed in an enveloping robe. Its head was inhuman in a manner he could not quite define. It was as though his three eyes were unable to focus on it. Had they been able, he was sure he would have discovered truly alien features — alien in ways his imagination had never hitherto touched on. Somehow his eyes ceased to track whenever he looked at it, whether he used one or two or three at once. The effect was frustrating in much the way an Earth-blackout was: the direct glance at a given object was less productive than a peripheral view.

  “Welcome, Harold,” the creature addressed him. Its voice, like its face, was undefined; perhaps it had spoken telepathically.

  “I’m not sure I—”

  It gestured benignly with a blurred extremity. “Certainly we know you, Harold. We most appreciate your difficult excursion from hence. You are the only Earthman to participate in our venture, and we comprehend the peculiar courage required.”