Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Charles Sheffield

  For the same reason that they were not constantly swallowing each other. Maybe the test hadn’t failed after all. Maybe Carp had taken it — and passed, by changing his smell to one acceptable to the Snarks.

  And what was he doing now? He was still squatting by the heap of leaves, apparently lost in thought.

  Drake noticed that the Snarks had begun a common activity. They were removing plants from the piles and dragging them across to make a master heap. In the first sign of peaceful cooperation that he had seen, four of them were using their many pseudopods to shape the heap. The sickle-shaped tails patted and smoothed the edges to round them off and provide a compact, flat-topped structure.

  It only became obvious what they were doing when they were finished, and Carp moved across to lie down on the heap.

  “Milton! They’ve made him a damned bed. ”

  “So it would appear.”

  “But how did he tell them what to do? You said that the Snarks have no language.”

  “Apparently I was wrong. Do you wish me to — abandon the experiment?”

  The Servitor, like other composites, could not handle certain notions. What Milton meant was, Do you wish me to destroy Carp?

  “Of course not. He found an answer that’s a lot more effective than aggression: he has the Snarks working for him. I want you to go ahead with the next test. Pick him up — as soon as he’s had some sleep.”

  If Carp was indeed proposing to sleep. He was stretched out comfortably on his back on the bed of plants, arms raised to cushion his head on his open hands. The dark, expressionless eyes were open, gazing up into a gentle downward drift of CO2 snow.

  He was awake, Drake realized. And thinking… what?

  The Snarks were Graybill’s most feral and dangerous species, but they were not the planet’s only predator. The soundbugs were big gray invertebrates with formidable exoskeletons. They ruled the “tropics,” where

  Graybill’s sun could, at zenith, sometimes melt mercury.

  The soundbugs were solitary hunters. “They do not resemble the Snarks in appearance, form, or habits,” Milton assured Drake. “Also, they hunt at night, and they use primarily sound and echo-location, like the bats of your own home world. It seems unlikely that smell will play any part in Carp’s survival.”

  “If he survives.” Drake had seen a close-up of a soundbug, and he shriveled inside at the idea of fighting one. The animal was like a hard-shelled scorpion, about two meters long and supported by a dozen strong and leathery legs. It weighed three or four hundred pounds, most of that the thick shield of dense armor on its back and belly. Like the Snarks, it swallowed its food whole; unlike them, it could not expand its body and mouth because the massive exoskeleton was of fixed width. Instead, two constriction rings at the front of the maw crushed the prey, living or dead, to a size where it could be engulfed.

  “It is my opinion that our Carp will do more than survive. He will triumph.” Milton had initially been dubious about the prospects of any combination of Snark and human. The idea that such a creature might be of value in the battle with the Shiva had seemed preposterous. Now the Servitor’s position was changing. Milton had become a supporter, rooting for their creation and ready to believe that it could do anything.

  The Servitor was ready to order Carp’s release. At Drake’s insistence, all activities would still be carried out using remote handling equipment. As an extra precaution, the pilotless flier that had taken Carp from the Snark colony to the equator contained no sentient components. Milton and Drake were directing operations from a station several hundreds of kilometers away and monitoring everything with ground-based, airborne, and spaceborne observing systems.

  Graybill’s long twilight was beginning when the door of the aircar automatically opened, and Carp was free to step out onto the crumbling, orange-gray surface.

  The planet’s atmosphere was too thick for most stars to shine brightly through. Night observations had to rely on thermal and microwave signatures, and those pictures tended to be grainy and monochrome. Milton was already complaining of their poor quality and augmenting the results with sonic imaging. Drake worried that those high-frequency sound beams might interfere with the soundbug’s own sonic pulses.

  Milton reassured him. “It is a different frequency regime. The worst that can happen is occasional signal aliasing, and the soundbug’s interpretation system has enough redundancy to compensate for that. Do not worry. The soundbug will be able to see Carp.”

  There was a problem with Milton’s assessment. Unless Carp came out, no one would see him at all; and at the moment, nothing moved in the clearing where the flier stood.

  “What’s he doing in there?” Drake asked at last.

  “I am sorry, but I am unable to answer your question. The flier’s imaging systems are directed toward observation outside the car. Maybe we should change that in the future. But it is all right. Here he comes.”

  A shadowy figure was emerging from the flier’s open door. Carp paused just a few feet from the flier, turning his head slowly from side to side.

  “He won’t see clearly for much longer. And when it is fully dark, he will lack our night sensors.” Milton increased the image intensity. The scene became brighter, but no less grainy. “What can he be doing?”

  The figure on the screen was bending low, touching the ground.

  “He’s digging,” Drake said. “I have no idea why, but I’m sure that he does. Don’t forget that his memories are derived from experiences on the surface of Graybill. He also has instincts, things going for him that we know nothing about. He recognizes a dangerous environment without being told. He knows about soundbugs and maybe he has a way to deal with them.”

  But a big part of Carp also derived from Drake Merlin. What would Drake do, himself, if he were outside and alone in the darkness?

  Drake had information that Carp lacked. He knew that a soundbug, as big as any on Graybill, had its den a couple of kilometers to the west, across a narrow but deep hydrocarbon stream that ran to within thirty meters of the clearing. Worse than that, the soundbug’s nightly hunting path took it across the stream and through the clearing. They had picked this particular site to make sure that there would be an encounter.

  Drake decided he could answer his own question: If he were outside as dark approached, he would climb back into the flier, lock the door, and wait through the long fourteen hours until dawn. Strangely, that seemed to be what Carp was doing. He had raised from his stooped position and moved back inside the aircar. But the door of the car remained open.

  Now Drake could see the result of Carp’s digging with his hands. The soil of the clearing was soft and crumbling for only the first few inches, then it turned to a hard tangle of roots and rocks.

  “He’s coming out again,” Milton said softly.

  Drake could see that for himself. Carp had emerged from the car. He ignored his digging and headed west, toward the stream. He seemed to be following faint marks on the ground. When he reached the stream he stood on its bank for a few seconds, looking first up and then downstream. Graybill’s plant life had never developed woody trunks, and it was limited in height to a couple of feet. Carp had a clear view of both directions. Upstream, to the north, the ground sloped rapidly higher, and at its narrowest point the stream became a series of fast-moving rapids. Downstream the flood slowed and widened to a series of pools and shallows.

  Carp stepped into midstream and waded north. The turbulent flow pushed against him, rising past his knees. At one point the stream became narrower and deeper, and he was in almost to his waist. After standing at that deepest point for a few moments, he turned and allowed the liquid flow to push him back downstream. He waded past his point of entry, on to where the flow was slower. There were calm, deep pools here, and the whole stream was much wider.

  “But what is he doing?” Milton said.

  Drake did not reply. Although the actions were mysterious, the Snark-human synthesis carried a sense of def
inite purpose in every movement.

  Carp emerged from the stream and headed back to the flier. Once more he entered, and once more there was a long and frustrating wait. When he came out he carried a big bundle of soft material.

  “He has been stripping the front cabin,” Drake said quietly. “Those are seat materials and seat covers from the control chair. Are you sure there is no way that he can control the flier itself?”

  “Quite sure.” Milton displayed a confidence that Drake did not share. “He would need to change microchip settings from remote to manual, and that requires microtools and a knowledge of circuit designs. He has neither. But he has made sure that we cannot do anything with the flier, either. The cables he is carrying are the ones that control attitude and power levels. Do you think he merely seeks to hold the car as a place where he can hide?”

  “No. He could do that without stripping the seats.”

  But Drake did not have a better suggestion. He watched as Carp, in near darkness now, retraced his steps toward the stream. The synthesis chose his site carefully, and on the stream bank formed a rough cylinder from the material that he was carrying. A long loop of cable went around it and back to his hands. Carp ran another noose on the soft

  ground, a full meter away from the cylinder in each direction, and held on to the free end of that line also. In the last glimmer of light he paid out both wire cables and stepped down into the water. Heading upstream, he came to the deepest point of the fast-running rapids. There he crouched down until only his head was visible.

  “I think I get it,” Drake said. “He saw the soundbug tracks, and he must have an idea what made them. He tried digging as a way to become invisible, but only the first few inches of ground are soft. So instead he’s trying to use water to hide him.”

  “Water?”

  “Sorry. I mean liquid hydrocarbons.” Yet to Drake, in his present body, they seemed like water. What else should you call a clear, cold liquid that ran in pure streams, that evaporated from surface pools, that you could drink whenever you felt thirsty? He and Carp had a lot in common, even if Drake could not follow the other’s thought processes. But it was the difference in thought patterns that provided the whole reason for Carp’s existence.

  That existence was now threatened. Milton grunted, and drew Drake’s attention to another display. It was dark enough for the soundbug to waken from its daytime torpor, and it was on the move. It had emerged from its den and was making its way downhill. No sound signal accompanied the display, but the easy liquid movement across the uneven surface gave an impression of silent, ghostly progress.

  That was confirmed when the soundbug came on its first prey of the night. The animal was a short, fat version of a polar Snark. It was scrabbling busily in the dirt, tail high in the air. The soundbug seized it before it realized it was in danger. The soundbug’s leathery legs moved the victim to the front constricting rings and compression began. Blood spurted from the blind head end into the waiting maw of the soundbug, but the fat Snark did not die at once. It went on struggling, until the last wriggling tip of the tail was swallowed.

  Drake did not look at Milton. He had no trouble imagining the Servitor’s reaction, because he shared it. The original idea had sounded clean and simple: combine Snark ferocity with human cunning, to produce an organism more effective than either in combatting the Shiva. What had been left unmentioned was the question of testing the result.

  In retrospect it was obvious: he and Milton would have to expose Carp to more and more dangerous situations, until one of them proved fatal. It was a particularly vicious form of torture, with no escape but death.

  Drake made his decision. He might be willing to sacrifice himself to save the Galaxy from the Shiva, but he could not bear to create thinking beings merely in order to kill them. If Carp somehow survived through the night, that would be the end of the experiment. The Snark-human synthesis would live out his days in peace on Graybill. That sounded like a cruel enough punishment, forcing a sentient being to exist without others of its kind, but Drake could change that. It would be easy to develop a dozen copies of Carp in the off-world lab and transport them down for release on the surface of the planet.

  More than likely, however, that would not be necessary. Every action of the soundbug seemed to emphasize its invulnerability. Nothing in the flier could penetrate that massive armor. Nothing could sever those tough limbs. Unless Drake flew to the distant site at once and rescued Carp, the chance of the synthesis being alive at dawn seemed close to zero.

  Drake glanced from one screen to the other. The fat Snark had apparently been no more than an appetizer for the soundbug’s main meal. It was on the move again, quartering the ground. Long antennas had unfurled above the armored back, to receive returning sound signals and interpret them as images.

  The soundbug was closing on the stream. Very soon the pictures on the two display screens would merge and show the same scene. To Drake, who knew exactly where to look, Carp’s head was easy to pick out. It was a lighter gray against the darker turbulent flow. The question was, would the soundbug recognize that feature of the stream as new and different, when natural rocks both upstream and downstream rose above the surface to interrupt the flow?

  Very soon, they would know. Thirty meters more, and the soundbug was at the far bank. It had come to the narrowest point of the stream, and it hesitated there. The flier was over in the middle of the clearing. That would be new to the soundbug; but also new, and much closer, a fat cylinder lay on the other bank. As the soundbug paused, the cylinder twitched and jerked a couple of feet along the ground.

  The soundbug crossed the stream and pounced in a single movement. As it grabbed the stuffed roll of seat covers, Carp stood upright in the middle of the stream. He pulled hard on the second wire, drawing a noose around the soundbug’s legs and carapace.

  The predator felt the pressure at once and reached its head down to grip the cable. The maw snapped shut on the

  closed loop.

  The wire had an outer insulating layer, but its core had been designed to resist both shear and stretching. It would not break, nor could it be cut through. While the soundbug had all its attention on the confining cable, Carp hauled backward and dragged the struggling creature over the edge of the bank into the fast-flowing stream. Weighed down by its dense carapace, the soundbug plunged to the streambed, where it stood with the current swirling about its broad back.

  Drake expected that Carp would now try to pull the soundbug upstream, and would fail. The drag of the current in the other direction was too great. But instead, the Snark-human synthesis began to wade forward and allowed the cable to slacken. With the noose still tight around its legs and hindering its movements, the soundbug scrabbled and splashed and was swept farther downstream.

  Carp followed. Still holding the wire, he came dangerously close to the predator. Except that it was no longer quite so dangerous. The antennas, thoroughly soaked, lay flat along the back. When Carp pushed at the edge of the carapace, adding his weight for a moment to the force of the current, and then rapidly jumped away, Drake realized that the soundbug was blind. Its sound-emitting equipment was below the surface, and its wet receiving equipment had no signal to receive.

  But the animal could still kill anything within reach. The multiple legs were grasping madly in all directions, while the constricting rings in a reflex of violence were dilating and snapping tight every couple of seconds.

  Then the upper part of the leathery legs was no longer visible. The dome of the carapace showed less high above the surface. The current had carried the soundbug downstream to one of the deep pools.

  Once the thick shield of the exoskeleton had vanished completely beneath the surface, Carp tightened the cable to prevent the sunken body from moving to shallower parts. Then he stood and waited.

  Waves on the surface revealed the desperate activity beneath. Four times the soundbug reared up, and the edge of the carapace became visible. Before the head could
appear, Carp pulled the body off-balance. The fourth time, the soundbug flipped over onto its back before it disappeared again. There was one last burst of furious splashing, which gradually subsided. Finally not a ripple showed on the surface of the pool.

  Carp waited for another minute or two, before finally wading to the bank and hauling himself out. He sat for a while, hunched over and with his legs in the stream. He was still holding the cable that had trapped the soundbug in its noose.

  He looked exhausted. It was not surprising. He had fought a creature that Drake had judged invulnerable; he had fought in a place that was not of his own choosing; and he had fought without weapons.

  That was when Drake realized the most astonishing thing of all. He and Milton had watched the fight with the aid of microwave and high-frequency imaging sensors. They could see everything. The soundbug, until the stream drowned its sense organs, had also seen perfectly; but Carp could have seen nothing. It was too dark.

  He had fought the soundbug totally blind. And still he had won. It was tempting to ask, what were the limits of Carp’s abilities as a fighter? How far could he be pushed, before he lost?

  That was an immoral question. Drake had made his decision earlier, before the fight began. He would not change it now.

  “It’s over.” He spoke to Milton, who was staring at the display where Carp had at last roused himself and was hauling the dead body of the soundbug onto the bank of the stream. “We wait for dawn. Then first thing in the morning, we go and get the flier.”

  “And Carp?”

  “He goes free. Don’t you think he’s earned it?”

  “More than earned it. But what about the Shiva?”

  “We’ll have to find another way.” Drake took a last look at Carp, who now had the soundbug on its back and was prying open the lower shell casing. There was every sign that the soundbug’s final meal would be as a course and not as a diner. What senses was Carp using to guide him? It could only be touch and smell. If it was anything else, some sense undreamed of by humans, Drake would never find out what it was. Just as he would never know what thoughts