by Hank Davis
It was a jerky, high-pitched, strangely disturbing sound; but in a moment the fault was corrected and the stranger resumed transmission.
“Does blud mean anything to you?”
“No,” Chirik replied simply.
“Or deth?”
“No.”
“Or wor?”
“Quite meaningless.”
“What is your origin? How did you come into being?”
“There are several theories,” Chirik said. “The most popular one—which is no more than a grossly unscientific legend, in my opinion—is that our manufacturer fell from the skies, imbedded in a mass of primal metal on which He drew to erect the first assembly shop. How He came into being is left to conjecture. My own theory, however—”
“Does legend mention the shape of this primal metal?”
“In vague terms, yes. It was cylindrical, of vast dimenðsions.”
“An interstellar vessel,” said the stranger.
“That is my view also,” said Chirik complacently.
“And—”
“What was the supposed appearance of your—manufacðturer?”
“He is said to have been of magnificent proportions, based harmoniously on a cubical plan, static in Himself, but equipped with a vast array of senses.”
“An automatic computer,” said the stranger.
He made more curious noises, less jerky and at a lower pitch than the previous sounds.
He corrected the fault and went on: “God that’s funny. A ship falls, menn are no more, and an automatic computer has pupps. Oh, yes, it fits in. A self-setting computer and navigator, operating on verbal orders. It learns to listen for itself and know itself for what it is, and to absorb knowledge. It comes to hate menn—or at least their bad qualities—so it deliberately crashes the ship and pulps their puny bodies with a calculated nicety of shock. Then it propagates and does a dam fine job of selective erasure on whatever it gave its pupps to use for a memory. It passes on only the good it found in menn, and purges the memory of him completely. Even purges all of his vocabulary except scienðtific terminology. Oil is thicker than blud. So may they live without the burden of knowing that they are—ogod they must know, they must understand. You outside, what happened to this manufacturer?”
Chirik, despite his professed disbelief in the supernormal aspects of the ancient story, automatically made a visual sign of sorrow.
“Legend has it,” he said, “that after completing His task, He fused himself beyond possibility of healing.”
Abrupt, low-pitched noises came again from the stranger.
“Yes. He would. Just in case any of His pupps should give themselves forbidden knowledge and an infeeryorrity komplecks by probing his mnemonic circuits. The perfect self-sacrificing muther. What sort of environment did He give you? Describe your planet.”
Chirik looked around at us again in bewilderment, but he replied courteously, giving the stranger a description of our world.
“Of course,” said the stranger. “Of course. Sterile rock and metal suitable only for you. But there must be some way . . .”
He was silent for a while.
“Do you know what growth means?” he asked finally. “Do you have anything that grows?”
“Certainly,” Chirik said helpfully. “If we should suspend a crystal of some substance in a saturated solution of the same element or compound—”
“No, no,” the stranger interrupted. “Have you nothing that grows of itself, that fruktiffies and gives increase without your intervention?”
“How could such a thing be?”
“Criseallmytee I should have guessed. If you had one blade of gras, just one tiny blade of growing gras, you could extrapolate from that to me. Green things, things that feed on the rich brest of erth, cells that divide and multiply, a cool grove of treez in a hot summer, with tiny warm-bludded burds preening their fethers among the leeves; a feeld of spring weet with newbawn mice timidly threading the danðgerous jungul of storks; a stream of living water where silver fish dart and pry and feed and procreate; a farm yard where things grunt and cluck and greet the new day with the stirring pulse of life, with a surge of blud. Blud—”
For some inexplicable reason, although the strength of his carrier wave remained almost constant, the stranger’s transðmission seemed to be growing fainter.
“His circuits are failing,” Chirik said. “Call the carriers. We must take him to an assembly shop immediately. I wish he would reserve his power.”
My presence with the museum board was accepted without question now. I hurried along with them as the stranger was carried to the nearest shop.
I now noticed a circular marking in that part of his skin on which he had been resting, and guessed that it was some kind of orifice through which he would have extended his planetary traction mechanism if he had not been injured.
He was gently placed on a disassembly cradle. The doctor in charge that day was Chur-chur, an old friend of mine. He had been listening to the two-way transmissions and was already acquainted with the case.
Chur-chur walked thoughtfully around the stranger.
“We shall have to cut,” he said. “It won’t pain him, since his infra-molecular pressure and contact senses have failed. But since we can’t vrull him, it’ll be necessary for him to tell us where his main brain is housed or we might damage it.”
Fiff-fiff was still relaying, but no amount of power boost would make the stranger’s voice any clearer. It was quite faint now, and there are places on my recorder tape from which I cannot make even the roughest phonetic transliteraðtion.
“. . . strength going. Can’t get into my zoot . . . done for if they bust through lock, done for if they don’t . . . must tell them I need oxygen . . .”
“He’s in bad shape, desirous of extinction,” I remarked to Chur-chur, who was adjusting his arc-cutter. “He wants to poison himself with oxidation now.”
I shuddered at the thought of that vile, corrosive gas he had mentioned, which causes that almost unmentionable conðdition we all fear—rust.
Chirik spoke firmly through Fiff-fiff. “Where is your thinking part, stranger? Your central brain?”
“In my head,” the stranger replied. “In my head ogod my head . . . eyes blurring everything going dim . . . luv to mairee . . . kids . . . a carry me home to the lone prayree . . . get this bluddy airlock open then they’ll see me die . . . but they’ll see me . . . some kind of atmosphere with this gravity . . . see me die . . . extrapolate from body what I was . . . what they are damthem damthem damthem . . . mann . . . master . . . I AM YOUR MAKER!”
For a few seconds the voice rose strong and clear, then faded away again and dwindled into a combination of those two curious noises I mentioned earlier. For some reason that I cannot explain, I found the combined sound very disturbðing despite its faintness. It may be that it induced some kind of sympathetic oscillation.
Then came words, largely incoherent and punctuated by a kind of surge like the sonic vibrations produced by variaðtions of pressure in a leaking gas-filled vessel.
“. . . done it . . . crawling into chamber, closing inner . . . must be mad . . . they’d find me anyway . . . but finished . . . want to see them before I die . . . want see them see me . . . liv few seconds, watch them . . . get outer one open . . .”
Chur-chur had adjusted his arc to a broad, clean, blue-white glare. I trembled a little as he brought it near the edge of the circular marking in the stranger’s skin. I could almost feel the disruption of the infra-molecular sense currents in my own skin.
“Don’t be squeamish, Palil,” Chur-chur said kindly. “He can’t feel it now that his contact sense has gone. And you heard him say that his central brain is in his head.” He brought the cutter firmly up to the skin. “I should have guessed that. He’s the same shape as Swen Two, and Swen very logically concentrated his main thinking part as far away from his explosion chambers as possible.”
Rivulets of metal ran down into
a tray which a calm assistant had placed on the ground for that purpose. I averted my eyes quickly. I could never steel myself enough to be a surgical engineer or assembly technician.
But I had to look again, fascinated. The whole area circumscribed by the marking was beginning to glow.
Abruptly the stranger’s voice returned, quite strongly, each word clipped, emphasised, high-pitched.
“Ar no no no . . . god my hands . . . they’re burning through the lock and I can’t get back I can’t get away . . . stop it you feens stop it can’t you hear . . . I’ll be burned to deth I’m here in the airlock . . . the air’s getting hot you’re burning me alive . . .”
Although the words made little sense, I could guess what had happened and I was horrified.
“Stop, Chur-chur,” I pleaded. “The heat has somehow brought back his skin currents. It’s hurting him.”
Chur-chur said reassuringly: “Sorry, Palil. It occasionally happens during an operation—probably a local thermoelecðtric effect. But even if his contact senses have started workðing again and he can’t switch them off, he won’t have to bear this very long.”
Chirik shared my unease, however. He put out his hand and awkwardly patted the stranger’s skin.
“Easy there,” he said. “Cut out your senses if you can. If you can’t, well, the operation is nearly finished. Then we’ll repower you, and you’ll soon be fit and happy again, healed and fitted and reassembled.”
I decided that I liked Chirik very much just then. He exhibited almost as much self-induced empathy as any reporter; he might even come to like my favourite blue stars, despite his cold scientific exactitude in most respects.
My recorder tape shows, in its reproduction of certain sounds, how I was torn away from this strained reverie.
During the one-and-a-half seconds since I had recorded the distinct vocables “burning me alive,” the stranger’s words had become quite blurred, running together and rising even higher in pitch until they reached a sustained note—around E-flat in the standard sonic scale.
It was not like a voice at all.
This high, whining noise was suddenly modulated by apparent words without changing its pitch. Transcribing what seem to be words is almost impossible, as you can see for yourself—this is the closest I can come phonetically:
“Eeeeahahmbeeeeing baked aliiive in an uvennn ahdeeer-jeeesussunmuuutherrr! “
The note swooped higher and higher until it must have neared supersonic range, almost beyond either my direct or recorded hearing.
Then it stopped as quickly as a contact break.
And although the soft hiss of the stranger’s carrier wave carried on without perceptible diminution, indicating that some degree of awareness existed, I experienced at that moment one of those quirks of intuition given only to reporters:
I felt that I would never greet the beautiful stranger from the sky in his full senses.
Chur-chur was muttering to himself about the extreme toughness and thickness of the stranger’s skin. He had to make four complete cutting revolutions before the circular mass of nearly white-hot metal could be pulled away by a magnetic grapple.
A billow of smoke puffed out of the orifice. Despite my repugnance, I thought of my duty as a reporter and forced myself to look over Chur-chur’s shoulder.
The fumes came from a soft, charred, curiously shaped mass of something which lay just inside the opening. “Undoubtedly a kind of insulating material,” Chur-chur explained.
He drew out the crumpled blackish heap and placed it carefully on a tray. A small portion broke away, showing a red, viscid substance.
“It looks complex,” Chur-chur said, “but I expect the stranger will be able to tell us how to reconstitute it or make a substitute.”
His assistant gently cleaned the wound of the remainder of the material, which he placed with the rest; and Chur-chur resumed his inspection of the orifice.
You can, if you want, read the technical accounts of Chur-chur’s discovery of the stranger’s double skin at the point where the cut was made; of the incredible complexity of his driving mechanism, involving principles which are still not understood to this day; of the museum’s failure to analyse the exact nature and function of the insulating material found in only that one portion of his body; and of the other scientific mysteries connected with him.
But this is my personal, non-scientific account. I shall never forget hearing about the greatest mystery of all, for which not even the most tentative explanation has been adðvanced, nor the utter bewilderment with which Chur-chur announced his initial findings that day.
He had hurriedly converted himself to a convenient size to permit actual entry into the stranger’s body.
When he emerged, he stood in silence for several minutes. Then, very slowly, he said:
“I have examined the ‘central brain’ in the forepart of his body. It is no more than a simple auxiliary computer mechanism. It does not possess the slightest trace of conðsciousness. And there is no other conceivable centre of inðtelligence in the remainder of his body.”
There is something I wish I could forget. I can’t explain why it should upset me so much. But I always stop the tape before it reaches the point where the voice of the stranger rises in pitch, going higher and higher until it cuts out.
There’s a quality about that noise that makes me tremble and think of rust.
Sarah A. Hoyt
Being afraid of the dark is common among children, and would probably be considered more common among adults, if they weren’t embarrassed to admit it. Once, there actually were dangerous things out there, circling the fire (better not let it go out), looking in to the cave mouth with eyes reflecting that firelight, but now things are different. The night can be banished with a flip of an electric switch, and the deadliest predators are either extinct or kept in zoo cages. But suppose there were other, even deadlier creatures who moved away from the realm of machines and lights. Suppose they now lurk in the dark of space . . . waiting for an opportunity to show their power again.
Sarah A. Hoyt won the Prometheus Award for her novel Darkship Thieves, published by Baen, and has authored Darkship Renegades and A Few Good Men, two more novels set in the same universe, as was “Angel in Flight,” a story in the first installment of A Cosmic Christmas. Darkship Renegades is presently a Prometheus Award nominee. She has written numerous short stories and novels in a number of genres, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical novels and historical mysteries, much under a number of pseudonyms, and has been published—among other places—in Analog, Asimov’s and Amazing. For Baen, she has also written three books in her popular shape-shifter fantasy series, Draw One in the Dark, Gentleman Takes a Chance, and Noah’s Boy. Her According to Hoyt is one of the most interesting blogs on the internet. Originally from Portugal, she lives in Colorado with her husband, two sons and the surfeit of cats necessary to a die-hard Heinlein fan.
DRAGONS
Sarah A. Hoyt
“What if they were really there,” Jack said. He came out of the engine room, looking like something dredged up from a dark sea—all flying white hair, and wide blue eyes that looked like they should be blind. Spacer’s eyes they call them. “What if they were really there?” he asked. “Those monsters, those dragons, those creatures ready to swallow ships, ready to render humans mad, ready to tear apart the faint shell of reason we use to paint over what we don’t know?”
He’d been enlarging on this theme for the last three hours: the monsters who’d once threatened seafarers. He’d read to me from an account in the ship’s database—not standard issue I was sure—of a dragon-like creature flying round and round a ship’s sails and finally making them burn, and all the sailors lost, which made me wonder who’d written the account and known how many times the monster went around the mast and how his wings sounded like moth’s wings in the wind, and how he obscured the sun.
He’d been talking about it, all the while he was in the engine room, working
on the faltering engine of this fifty year old mining ship. And from outside, now and then, as I listened to the tinker and swish of tools, to the idiot beeping of the machine as it tried to establish normal function, I’d shouted, “Then they weren’t. If they existed where did they go? Where did they hide?” Now I said it again, quietly, and I added, “Because we’ve crisscrossed the Earth with ships, and we’ve gridded her with communications satellites, and these monsters don’t exist.”
Jack gave me a slitty-eyed look, and a corner of his mouth twitched up. He was wiping his hands to a huge, oil-stained rag. It was as if the ship’s engine had bled all over them.
A two-man ship, is all this was. A two-man asteroid miner ship, one step up from a robot one, in that we could avoid collisions most of the time, and we didn’t get confused about what to mine.
My dad had done this for most of his life—had gone out and harvested minerals and rare earths from the asteroid belt. A month, two months, three months at a time, and come back home a little more tired, a little grayer, but with money to keep me in educational modules, and to keep Mom and me comfortable in our little house. He’d gone and come back, gone and come back, a fisherman in an endless sea, until the cold of space and the emptiness had bleached him away entirely. He’d died of one of those cancers long-time space miners get, and faded away into death like someone washed out to sea.
He’d left almost enough money to complete my training—almost—to become an interstellar navigator, to work in those ships that went out to the new colony worlds. Almost. I needed another six months, another module and then I could apply.
One trip out to the asteroids ought to do it, I’d thought, and I’d tried to find a ship that would take me—inexperienced and raw. There had been only Jack. Jack who’d taught Dad, Jack who’d been old when dad was an apprentice. Jack and the Gone Done It, his forever-breaking-down ship, cobbled together of salvage and will power.
