by Hogan, James
computers, nuclear plants, and spaceships. Hence we can explain every detail of
our creations and its purpose, right down to the last nut and bolt of something
like the Orion. But an understanding of biological processes didn't come so
easily because, instead of being able to start with the simple, we found
ourselves confronted by the most complex—the end-products of billions of years
of evolution. With no comprehension of DNA, protein transcription, cell
differentiation, and the like, it's not easy to explain the totality of a rabbit
or account for how it came together in the first place." Spearman entered
another command, waited to check its effect, and turned back to face the others
once more. "The Taloids had the same problem. They were confronted by the
end-products of a long history of alien technology, plus probably millions of
years of evolution after that, without any of the benefit of attending the
schools and technical colleges that the alien engineers went to. So the physical
sciences remained a mystery. But dabbling with biological techniques was
something they could figure out for themselves, using the resources they had."
Thelma reflected for a few seconds. "You mean for a long time they never even
experimented with simple tools as we know them? . . . They'd have had enough raw
materials lying around down there. It seems ... oh, strange somehow."
Spearman smiled faintly. "The reason's pretty obvious when you think about it,"
he said.
"What?" Thelma asked.
"Tools as we know them are made out of refined materials like metals, glass,
plastics, and so on," Spearman said. "In other words, the same kinds of
substances that are produced naturally all over the place on Titan. They
wouldn't last very long. Neither would anything you tried to make with them."
Crookes gave a puzzled frown. "How come?"
Webster spread his hands. "Anything like that would probably turn out to be
'food' for something or other. And besides . . . who'd dream of making tools,
ornaments, and houses out of candy bars and pizza?"
The crew mess hall inside the larger of the two prefabricated domes that
constituted Genoa Base One was warm, stuffy, and crowded. At the serving window,
Massey picked up a mug of hot coffee and a donut and walked away from the short
line of bulky figures in extravehicular suits waiting to snatch a last-minute
snack before another expedition into the city. Since he had come down from the
Orion thirty-six hours or so previously and just awakened from a rest period, it
was really breakfast, he supposed. The Taloids remained continuously active for
a period of a little over ten terrestrial days, centered around the time of
maximum total illumination that resulted from direct solar radiation and
reflection from Satum as Titan progressed through its sixteen-day orbit. Since
Titan kept one hemisphere permanently toward Satum, one side of Titan
experienced changes in both direct radiation and reflection while the other side
experienced the direct component only, the areas in between receiving a mixture
of both in varying proportions; thus the light-dark cycle was a complicated
function of orbital motion, and on top of that, varied from place to place.
"And how is the rationalist today?" a jovial voice inquired from behind him.
"It's not a good time of year for the debunking business, I hear."
Massey had recognized Zambendorf even before looking round. Although many of the
mission's scientists had shown some signs of disdain and aloofness toward
Zambendorf and his team three months previously at the time of leaving Earth,
things had changed noticeably in the course of the voyage. Now Zambendorf,
Abaquaan, Thelma, and the rest were simply accepted as a normal part of the
day-to-day life of the Orion's community. Whether this was a psychological
effect of everyone's sharing the same, tiny, man-made environment hundreds of
millions of miles from Earth, Massey didn't know; but in his conversations he
had detected a not-uncommon attitude among the scientists of amused respect
toward Zambendorf and his crew for at least being indisputable masters of their
chosen profession; the scientists' contempt was reserved more for those who
chose to adulate Zambendorf's team.
Massey turned to find Zambendorf grinning at him over the metal-ring
helmet-seating of his EV suit. "It looks as if you might last a few more days
yet," he conceded grumy.
"I should hope so too," Zambendorf said. "Surely it must be obvious by now, even
to you, Gerry, that there is more important work to be done than wasting time
with trivia that belong where we should have left them—a billion miles away,
back on Earth."
Massey looked at him curiously. Zambendorf and his team had been showing a
genuine interest in the mission's serious business—and surprising some of the
scientists with how much they knew. Was it possible that Zambendorf could be
undergoing a change of heart? "What's the matter Karl?" he asked. "Are you
developing a guilt complex now that you're seeing some real science for once?"
"Don't be ridiculous," Zambendorf scoffed. "And besides, even if it were true,
do you think I'd tell you? You're the psychologist. You should be telling me."
In other words Massey could take Zambendorf's attitude either way. He was still
the same old Zambendorf—forever confusing, and always a jump ahead of the game.
"You're doing something worthwhile for once," Massey said. "You've got a knack
for getting through to the Taloids, and they trust you. That has to be a better
feeling than ripping people off all the time, so why not admit it?"
"It's not the same thing," Zambendorf replied. "I'll help anyone who makes the
effort to help himself. The Taloids might have some way to go yet, but they
value knowledge and skill. They want to learn. They're willing to work at it.
But people? Pah! They grow up surrounded by libraries, universities, teachers
who could show them the accumulated discoveries and wisdom of millennia and
they're not interested. They'd rather live junk-lives. How can you steal
anything from someone who has already thrown everything away?"
"Perhaps people simply need to be shown how to think," Massey suggested.
Zambendorf shook his head. "It's like leading horses to water. When people are
ready to think, they will think. Trying to rush them is futile. All you can do
is show them where the water is and wait for them to get thirsty." He gestured
over Massey's shoulder at Osmond Periera and Malcom Wade, who were standing by
the doorway, debating in loud voices a speculation of Periera's that the
antimatter spaceship responsible for creating the North Polar Sea might have
come from Titan. "Listen to those two idiots," Zambendorf murmured in a lower
voice. "You could spend a year of your life preparing a detailed refutation that
might succeed in convincing them that what they're talking about is nonsense. Do
you think they'd learn anything from the experience? Not a bit of it. Within a
week they'd be off into something else equally preposterous. So you could have
saved your time for something profitable. I'll save mine for the Taloids."
"Careful
, Karl," Massey cautioned. "You're beginning to sound as if you're
admitting you're a fraud again."
"Don't be ridiculous," Zambendorf said. "But even if it were true, do you think
people would learn anything from the experience if you proved it?" He shook his
head. "Not a bit of that either. Within a week they would have found something
else too ... just like friend Osmond and that other character behind you."
At that moment a loudspeaker announced that the personnel carrier that would be
taking the party into the city was waiting at the vehicle-access transfer lock.
"The problem with you is that you really are a scientist at heart," Massey said
as they began moving in the direction of the doorway. "But you think it would be
beneath your dignity to admit it."
Half an hour later they were among the passengers watching parts of the
outskirts of Genoa slide through the headlamp beams of the carrier and its
escort of two military scout cars fifty yards ahead and behind. All along the
way, Taloids came to stand by the roadside to watch the procession of strange
creatures that bore within them beings from another world. Some ran forward to
bathe themselves in the light, which they apparently believed to possess
miraculous and curative properties; a few shrank back as the vehicles passed, or
fled into the alleys and sidestreets.
One—a mounted figure wrapped in a heavy riding cloak, its face concealed in a
deep hood—watched inconspicuously from the shadows of a gateway near the city
wall, absorbing every detail. When the Terran vehicles had passed, the rider
reemerged and moved away along the side of the road in the opposite direction to
resume the journey that would take it out of the city, beyond the borders of
Carthogia, and across the Wilderness of Meracasine. Skerilliane,
Spy-with-a-Thousand-Eyes, would have much to report when he returned to his
royal master Eskenderom, the King of Kroaxia.
21
"CAN YOU IMAGINE A DISTANCE TWELVE TIMES GREATER THAN the greatest breadth of
Carthogia?" Thirg asked Lofbayel's son, Morayak, who was sitting with his back
to the large table strewn with charts and sheets of calculations, in the room
that Lofbayel had given Thirg to use as a study while Thirg was residing with
the family.
"I think so, though I have never journeyed but a fraction of such a distance,"
Morayak said. "Why, it must be greater even than the size of the strange,
spherical world of which you and my father speak!"
"Not so, Young-Questioner-Who-Will-Become-Wise-by-Questioning," Thirg said. He
picked up the Skybeings' globe that the Wearer-of-the-Arm-Vegetable had
presented to him as a gift, and looked at it briefly. "In fact such a distance
would be a little less than half the diameter of our world, of which I am
assured this is a faithful representation." He put the globe down and looked
back at Morayak. "And what of a distance yet twelve times that again—enough to
span six worlds side by side? Can your mind grasp that?"
Morayak frowned and stared at the globe while he concentrated. "I'm not sure. To
visualize the breadth of Carthogia requires but a simple extension of faculties
that are familiar to me, but where is the experience to guide my intuition in
attempting to judge a distance through a world rather than across it? But even
taxing my mind to that degree does not satisfy you enough, it seems, for now you
would have me grapple with conceiving six of them."
"Then instead of worlds whose surfaces curve in space, let us take as our model,
time, which involves no complications from multiplicity of direction," Thirg
suggested. "If the breadth of Carthogia be represented by a single bright, then
the distance to which I refer, being twelve times twelve, equates to one
Carthogia for every bright contained in the duration of twelve twelve-brights.
Now—can you visualize that?"
It took Morayak a few seconds to grasp, but in the end he nodded, at the same
time frowning intently. "That is vastness indeed, but it is not completely
unimaginable now you have described it thus. My mind is stretched, but I think
it can conceive of such a distance."
"And what of twelve times that, yet again?"
Morayak stared at Thirg with a strained look on his face, then grinned
hopelessly and shook his head. "Impossible!"
Thirg paced across the room, swung around, and threw his hands wide. "Then what
of twelve times even that, and twelve times that yet again still, and then even
twelve times—"
"Stop, Thirg!" Morayak protested. "What purpose is served by uttering
repetitions of words that have ceased to carry any meaning?"
"But they do carry meaning," Thirg said. He moved forward and raised his arm to
point. Morayak turned in his seat to look at the large chart on the wall above
the table, which Lofbayel had drawn from Thirg's records of conversations with
the Skybeings. In the center it showed the huge furnace in the sky—large enough
to consume the whole world in an instant, the Skybeings said—and around it the
paths of the nine worlds that circled it endlessly, some of them accompanied by
their own attendant worlds, which in turn circled them. It had come as something
of a shock to learn that Robia, as Kleippur had named the robeing world, was not
even a member of the nine, but just one— although, true, the largest—of a
retinue of seventeen servants following at the heels of a giant. Dornvald had
remarked that the giant was surely the king of worlds, because of his ringlike
crown. But Thirg was pointing not at the giant, but at the third world out from
the furnace—a humble little world, seemingly, with just a single page in
attendance— which Lofbayel had labeled Lumia, since its sky shone with the heat
light that accompanied the Skybeings, or Lumians, as they were now more properly
called, wherever they went. Thirg swept a finger slowly across the chart. "That
is the distance which separates our world from the world of Lumians, Morayak—the
distance they have traveled to come to Robia."
Morayak stared at him incredulously. "It cannot be!" Thirg nodded. Morayak
looked at the chart again, then back at Thirg. "But such a journey would surely
require many twelves of twelves of lifetimes."
"One twelve-bright was sufficient, we are assured. The large dragon that circles
beyond the sky is swifter, seemingly, than even the smaller ones which cross
above the city in moments." Thirg studied Morayak's face for a few seconds and
gave a satisfied nod. "Now, methinks, you understand better the wondrousness of
the beings you are soon to meet," he said.
Morayak stared back at Thirg for a moment longer as if unsure of whether or not
to take his words seriously, and then looked slowly back at the chart, this time
with a new respect. Thirg and Lofbayel were due to leave shortly for Kleippur's
residence to join the Carthogian leaders in more discussions with the Lumians,
and Morayak had eventually succeeded in pestering his father into allowing him
to go along too. He had been to see the strange growths that the Lumians lived
in just outside the city, of course—his father said that the Lumians had created
>
them—and he had caught glimpses from a distance of the cumbersome, domeheaded
figures, which apparently weren't the Lumians at all but an outer casing that
they had to wear on Robia because they needed to be bathed in hot, highly
corrosive gas all the time; but that wasn't the same—he wouldn't be able to
boast to his friends about that. "I wonder what kind of a world it is," he
murmured distantly, still staring at the chart.
"Amazing beyond your wildest dreams," Thirg replied. "Its sky is filled with
worlds too numerous to count, extending away as far as it is possible to see,
for there is no permanent cover of cloud above Lumia to limit vision. It is so
hot that the surface is covered by oceans of liquid ice. Methane can exist only
as a vapor. Your body would be much heavier than it is on Robia."
"What of the countryside?" Morayak asked. "Does it have mountains and forests?
Do the Lumians keep herds of bearing-bush formers, and hunt platemelters out on
the flatlands? Do they have children who go gasket-collecting among the
head-assembly transfer lines, or baiting traps with copper wire to catch
coil-winders?"
Thirg frowned, not knowing quite how to explain the differences. "The children
there are assembled in miniature form," he said. "They grow larger by taking in
substances which are distributed internally as liquid solutions."
Morayak stared at him in astonishment. "But how could the substances know where
to be deposited?" he objected. "All form would surely be lost."
"The process is beyond my understanding," Thirg admitted. "Perhaps that is why
the Lumians exist as jelly and must remain inside outer casings to preserve
their shape. But natural assembly is impossible on Lumia because there aren't
any machines . . . save for a few which aren't alive, but were created by the
Lumians."
"It's true then—the Lumians really can make artificial machines?"
"Oh yes—those are the only machines they know. They do have animals and forests,
but they're not machines. They're made of, well . . . the best way I can find to
describe it is 'naturally occurring organics'—very like the Lumians themselves."
Morayak looked perplexed. "But artisans must exist to create organics. How can
there be 'natural organics'?"
"I too am learning," Thirg reminded him. "We both have many questions that will
