by Hogan, James
might have been wrong about this whole thing? Could there really be something to
Zambendorf after all?"
In the Mission Director's executive offices in Globe I of the Orion, Caspar Lang
was shaking his head at a grim-faced Daniel Leaherney. "Of course it's not
genuine," Lang insisted. "We underestimated Zambendorf and his people. We took
them for simple tricksters, but they're obviously far more sophisticated. It was
a clever piece of espionage— nothing more, and nothing less."
"We'll have to tell the mission," Leaherney said. "It doesn't matter how
Zambendorf did it—the result's still the same. We'll have to tell everyone on
the ship the real story now."
"But we would have had to tell them before much longer anyway," Lang reminded
him. "At least we're on our way, which is the main thing. It's a pity that the
Soviets will find out now, instead of later when the Orion fails to show up at
Mars, I know; but you have to agree, Dan, that with the number of people who've
been involved, security has been a hell of a lot better than we dared hope."
Leaherney frowned for a while, but eventually nodded with a heavy sigh. "I guess
you're right. Okay, put a clamp on all unofficial communications to Earth,
effective immediately, and announce that I'll be addressing all personnel within
a few hours. And get that psychic over here right away, would you. I reckon it's
about time he and I had a little talk."
In Moscow an official from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, who was aware that the
Americans had been conducting top-secret research into paranormal phenomena for
many years, protested to the U. S. and European ambassadors that if the Orion
was being sent to make first contact with an alien intelligence, none of Earth's
major powers could be excluded. He demanded that the ship be recalled. The
allegation was denied, and in their reply the representatives of the Western
states suggested that perhaps the Soviet government was allowing itself to be
unduly influenced by rumor and overreacting to sensationalism and unscientific
speculation.
That same day aboard the Orion, Daniel Leaherney broadcast to the ship's
occupants to inform them that, as had been generally concluded already, the
ship's destination was indeed Saturn's moon, Titan. Pictures were replayed of
the last views transmitted from the European probes that had landed on Titan two
years previously, which showed strange machines approaching, and then
nothing—the landers having presumably been destroyed. Nothing had been seen of
whoever or whatever had built the machines. The orbiter that had launched the
landers was still over Titan, but little more had been learned of the surface
because of the moon's thick, brownish red clouds of nitrogen compounds and
hydrocarbons.
The departments of the U.S. and European governments responsible for initiating
the mission had never intended forcing anyone to face such unknowns against
their will. Since the first reaction of many people to such a prospect would
naturally be fear and nervousness, the original plan had been to announce the
true story when the Orion was a few weeks out from Earth, which would have given
everyone more than a month to discuss the situation and reflect upon its
implications. Arrangements had been made for a NASO transporter from Mars to
rendezvous with the Orion to take off anyone choosing not to stay on after that
time. Expectations had been that after due consideration the majority of
personnel would elect to continue the voyage and place their services at the
disposal of the mission, and Leaherney expressed the hope that this would still
be the case. The secrecy had been regrettable but necessary to ". . . safeguard
the interests and security of the North American democracies and their European
allies," he said.
Seven weeks later only a few faint souls dropped out when the NASO transporter
rendezvoused with the mission ship. The Orion then accelerated away once more,
its course now set for the outer regions of the Solar System.
11
THIRG, ASKER-OF-FORBIDDEN-QUESTIONS, LIVED IN THE HIGHER reaches of the forests
south of the city of Pergassos in the land of the Kroaxians, where the foothills
rose toward the mountains bounding the Great Meracasine Wilderness.
He lived in something that was more than a hut but less than a house, in keeping
with the not quite hermitic but certainly less than sociable life that he
preferred to lead. His home was situated in a small clearing amid pleasant
forest groves of copper and aluminum wire-drawing machines, injection molders,
transfer presses, and stately pylons bearing their canopy of power lines and
data cables, among which scurrying sheet riveters, gracefully moving spot
welders, and occasional slow-plodding pipe benders supplied a soothing
background of chattering, hissing, whirring, and clunking to insulate him from
the world of mortals and their mundane affairs and leave him alone and in peace
with his thoughts. A low ice cliff stood at the back of the clearing to prop up
the hillside rising away toward the mountains beyond, its line broken on one
side by the valley of a liquid methane stream which tumbled cheerfully down over
cataracts and ice boulders between clear pools where zinc-separating
electrolyzers and potassium-precipitating evaporators came to wallow and wade
and dip their slender intake nozzles and funnel-shaped scoops at the height of
the bright period.
Thirg had grown the actual dwelling himself, having learned the craft from an
old friend who was a builder in Pergassos. After laboring to clear the area of
dead steel latticeworks and structural frames, the carcass of a transformer that
had clung obstinately to its concrete base, and assorted scrap-metal
undergrowth, he had prepared an area of the hydrocarbon soil below the cliff
with nitrogenous loams collected from the stream bed, and planted the seed
culture for the outside wall in a line ten paces out from the cliff base,
curving inward at its ends to close off the frontage of a dry cave. Then he had
laid out the baselines of the interior walls to provide a living and dining
area, a workroom, and a library, and while carefully nurturing with methane
solutions gathered from the forest, and pruning and shaping of the windows and
doorways while the walls grew upward and merged into a half-dome overhead, he
had enlarged the cave at the rear into a second workroom and a storeroom. The
doors and window fittings had grown from secondary cultures grafted inio the
structure when the frames had stabilized at their correct shapes and sizes, and
the larger furnishings from premolded miniatures purchased in the city, A
conduit of forest piping diverted running methane from the stream, and a power
line strung from a nearby distribution mast provided all the comforts of home
recharging. To provide the rustic finish that suited his taste, Thirg had lined
the walls with polished alloy sheets obtained from the rolling mill a mile
farther downstream, and laid the floors with ceramic bricks and lengths of
girder from a partly decomposed foundry that he had come across while walking
near
the stacking meadows just below the cabinet assembly line on the slopes
overlooking the north side of the river.
One morning Thirg was sitting outside his house on a stump of steel forging,
pondering the mysteries of life while he watched a phosphor-bronze bearing
collector buzzing and chattering to itself as it poked and rummaged among a pile
of undergrowth on the far side of the clearing. It was a species of a general
family of collector animals that a naturalist friend had spent a lifetime
cataloguing and classifying—discreetly since such inquisitiveness could lead to
trouble with the authorities if it was brought to the attention of the priests.
Like all its related species, it selected just one type of metal composition by
sniffing the emissions from a tiny spot that it vaporized with a needle laser,
and then only from samples of a particular size and shape, and delivered its
trophies to the nearest conveyor to be carried off to other parts of the forest.
Thirg's friend had spent many hours following components through miles of
forming, processing, and finishing stations to the assembly places where animals
came to life, and observing the furnaces that devoured reject components and
excreted pure materials from which new components were manufactured; he had
drawn elaborate charts depicting the merging and branching patterns by which
components and sub-assemblies flowed through the forest; and he had dismantled
hundreds of dead animals and other machines in an attempt to trace where their
organs and constituent parts had come from, via what routes, and where the raw
materials had originated. But even with the findings of generations of earlier
naturalists to build on, the work was barely begun. The intricate, interlocking,
mutually interdependent pathways by which Nature recycled its materials as it
constantly renewed the living world were so bewildering that Thirg sometimes
suspected that, despite all the effort, hardly a fraction of the whole had been
glimpsed yet, let alone comprehended. It was fascinating to think that one of
the scraps of metal being sorted by the collector that he was watching now might
be found twelve-brights later inside the rotor mounting of a centrifuge located
miles away, or perhaps in the wheel bearings of a dead plastics-browser on the
other side of Kroaxia.
Although Tbirg had never elected to start a family of his own, his natural
curiosity had led him at times to the places where subassemblies of robeings—the
unique, self-aware species to which he belonged— came together for final
assembly. He had watched in awed fascination as the embryos grew to their final
forms and shapes while anxious parents scurried back and forth to make sure all
the parts were available and all the requirements of the assembly machines
satisfied, and he had shared their elation when the new robeing was at last
activated and departed trustingly with the proud couple to its new home to begin
the process of learning language, behavior, customs, and all the other things
that characterized an adult member of society.
The assembly process was essentially identical to the ways in which animals and
other life forms grew. Thirg's naturalist friend had assured him that all forms,
including robeings, were supplied from the same sources of components, and it
seemed remarkable that one species should exhibit thinking abilities sufficient
to distinguish it so sharply from all the others. On the face of it, the
difference seemed to support the orthodox teaching that robeings were unique in
possessing souls which would eventually either return to the Lifemaker after
undergoing worldly quality-assurance testing, or else be consigned to the Great
Reduction Furnace below, from which the liquid ice volcanoes originated. But the
physicians who had carefully dismantled and studied bodies of dead robeings had
been able to find nothing more than was found in any other machine: the same
kinds of perplexing arrangements of tubes, fibers, brackets, and bearings, and
baffling arrays of intricate patterns etched into countless slivers of crystal
that descended to levels of detail way beyond the power of the most powerful
protein lenses to resolve. So where was the soul? If it existed, why was there
no sign of anything different to say that it existed? True, nobody could explain
how robeings were able to think, but on the other hand nobody could explain how
animals came to act the way they did or to know what they seemed to know either.
So did the existence of robeings require anything fundamentally "different" to
be explained? Thirg wasn't at all sure that it did. To him the "fact" of the
soul sounded suspiciously as if it had been invented to suit the answer; the
answer hadn't been deduced from the facts in the way that was required by the
system of rules he had constructed for answering questions reliably. And in all
of the tests that he had subjected them to, the rules had never failed him.
A sudden grinding sound from the edge of the clearing interrupted his thoughts.
Moments later the grinding changed to sharp clacking as Rex began gnashing his
cutters and running backward and forward excitedly in front of the trail leading
from the forest. Thirg stood up just as a tall figure clad in a woven-wire tunic
and a dark cloak of carbon fiber came into view. He was wearing a hat of
ice-dozer wheelskin and carrying a stout staff of duralumin tubing. "Down, Rex,"
Thirg said. "It's only Groork coming to pay us a rare visit. You should know him
by now." And then, louder, "Well, hello, brother, Hearer-of-Voices. Have your
voices led you up into these parts, or do you bring us tidings from the world?"
Groork came into the clearing and approached between the metallic-salt
deposition baths on one side of Thirg's garden and a decorative row of
sub-miniature laser drilling and milling heads busily carving delicate aesthetic
patterns in an arrangement of used gas cylinders and old pump housings. His
radiator vanes were glowing visibly after his exertions, and he was puffing
coolant vapors. "There are many strange voices in the sky of late, the like of
which I have never heard before," he replied. He didn't smile in response to
Thirg's greeting; but then he was a mystic, and so never smiled at anything.
"Surely it is an omen of great things that will soon come to pass. I am called
to go out into the Wilderness of Meracasine, and there I will find the
Revelation that many have sought. For it is written that—"
"Yes, yes, I know all about that," Thirg said, holding up an arm of silver
alloy, jointed by intricately overlapping, sliding scales. "Come in and rest.
You look thirsty. A drink of invigorating mountain methane is what you need. I
don't know how you stand that polluted muck that they run into the city at all."
Thirg led the way inside, and Groork sat down gratefully on the couch by the
wall in the dining area. While Thirg was pouring a cup of coolant, Groork
selected one of the array of power sockets sprouting from the transformer unit,
each of which designated a particular strength and flavor, drew it out on the
end of its extension cord, and connected it to a plug inside a flap below his
chin.
"Ah, that does feel a lot better," he agreed after a few seconds.
Thirg passed Groork the cup, then glanced at his hands and down at his feet in
their wheelskin sandals. He gestured toward the electroplating attachment. "If
you're wearing hungry anywhere, help yourself."
"You've eaten already?"
"Yes, I've had a plate. I can recommend a new composition of chromium and
vanadium that you ought to try. Delicious—home-regulated, fresh from the garden.
Or a top-up of lube, perhaps?"
Groork shook his head, and the fervent glint returned to his imaging matrixes.
"My purpose is not to trifle over pleasantries, Thirg. I have a higher calling
to answer, and I do indeed bear thee news—grave news, 0 brother who forsakes his
soul for Black Arts. Thy heresy hath betrayed thee! A writ has been issued by
the King's Chancellor for you to be brought before the High Council of Priests
by the time of the next west-bright, to recant the public utterances in which
you have denied the Holy Scribings. Soldiers of the Royal Guard have already
departed the city and will arrive hither this bright. Flee now and save thy
wretched body while it lives, for its spirit is surely lost already to the Dark
Master thou wilt never renounce!"
"Oh . . . And what am I supposed to have said now?" Thirg asked. Despite the
tone of Groork's words, the thermal patterns playing on the surfaces of his face
painted expressions of a concern that was genuine.
"Does thy memory ail?" Groork said. "Is that not the first symptom of the
madness that afflicts all blasphemers and drives them into the deserts to perish
seeking covenant with the accursed in the lands of the Unbelievers?"
"I'd have said they did it more to get away from the priests and avoid being
dipped in acid baths," Thirg replied, and asked again, "What am I supposed to
have said?"
"Didst thou not, in the hearing of many who were in the marketplace, deny the
Sacred Doctrine of the Divine and Unknowable Essence of the Maker of All
Life?''' Groork whispered, as if fearful of uttering the words too loudly.
"Hardly. What I said was that some of the sacred logic strikes me as precarious.
For is not the existence of Life cited as proof that the Lifemaker must have
made it ... at least when one troubles to penetrate the confusing tangles of
