Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Charles Sheffield

  were carried inside that long-haired skull.

  “First thing in the morning,” he repeated. “Then it’s good-bye to Carp. Some means can never be justified, no matter what the ends.”

  It seemed natural that Drake would feel a form of bond with Carp, given the latter’s genetic roots. What was more surprising was that Milton had similar feelings.

  And yet, why not? Milton had done the genetic design work, plus the tricky splicing of human and Snark nucleotide coding. Milton had also grown Carp’s body and downloaded into his brain a body of data that went beyond basic survival instincts. If Drake was the father and one of the Snarks was Carp’s mother, then the Servitor could certainly claim to be the midwife.

  Milton discussed none of this with Drake. The Servitor merely, and uncharacteristically, volunteered to go back to the clearing and collect the flier. Milton had confirmed that the car would no longer work by remote control, and suggested that it might be informative to learn what had been done to it.

  “You can go, with two conditions.” Drake was busy with his own work. He had vowed that Carp would have a group of his own kind as companions, as soon as possible. With Carp’s template to work from, the task would be short and routine. The seed of the necessary lab had been dropped from orbit, the lab itself had been grown, and the lab’s manufacturing line was already up and running.

  “First,” Drake continued, “you must handle everything with a heavy lift vehicle that stays continuously airborne. You hoist the flier with that, and you don’t land anything at all on the surface — including you. Second, you make sure that Carp is nowhere around when you do it. Scan the flier, inside and out. If you see a sign of Carp, abandon the pickup operation at once and return to base.”

  “Which is precisely what I would have done, without instructions.” The Servitor was touchy on only a few subjects, but reliability and sound judgment were two of them. Milton rolled away, leaving Drake to continue the development of the Carp duplicates. The original cells were in a continuous-flow nutrient bath and had a constant doubling time of 820 seconds. Growth from primal cell to full-sized organism, ready to step out onto the surface of Graybill, was a twelve-hour operation. There were fewer than four hours to go.

  Drake divided his attention three ways while the growth process proceeded. His main focus was on the development of the Carp clones, but at the same time he was making plans to wrap up operations on Graybill. The orbiting mother craft had already received instructions. It was prepared to send Drake and Milton back to headquarters by S-wave link, as soon as they were uploaded to it.

  Every few minutes Drake made a spot check of Milton’s progress. Like the downed flier, the heavy-lift air vehicle had been grown on Graybill. Both craft would be left behind on the planet after Drake and Milton were uploaded to orbit. The vehicles would not last long. With a planned decay time of less than a month, they would crumble to dust as intermolecular forces weakened.

  The vehicles had also been built with an eye to rugged simplicity, rather than the ultimate in performance. That became clear during operations. The heavy-lift cargo car could hover, but it had a slight tendency to drift forward. Drake watched until, on the second sweep, the lifter’s magnetic grapples secured the flier and hoisted it clear of the surface; then Drake returned to his other tasks. He had seen no signs of Carp on the ground, and he confirmed that Milton’s observations had discovered no trace of him. The body of the soundbug had been opened and partly eaten. Without landing for a close inspection, it was hard to say how much of a hand Carp had had in that operation. Plenty of other native life-forms had probably been willing to enjoy breakfast at the soundbug’s expense.

  Drake checked the status of each biotank. By design, each copy of Carp had been given a slightly different development plan, and the results would all be a little different from each other. Drake spent the next hour monitoring and approving the progress of each variation.

  Finally, he looked up and wondered what was delaying the heavy lifter. The vehicle had not been designed for speed, but the three-hundred-kilometer return trip should take no more than an hour. It must be slowed by the presence of the flier beneath it, and by the resistance of Graybill’s dense atmosphere. There could be no major problem, otherwise the lifter’s emergency beacon would have gone into operation.

  Drake turned back to the biotank displays. Almost immediately he was interrupted. The heavy lift vehicle had finally arrived. It lowered the crippled aircar and released it onto the station pad, then made its own landing. Drake, watching at the window, saw the door of the heavy lifter open. Milton rolled out and headed for the aircar. The whisk-broom head turned toward the station. Drake waved and was answered by a nod of tangled wires.

  Drake confirmed that the orbiting ship had registered the arrival of the lifter and was ready to upload him and Milton. He made a final check of the biotanks. Everything was proceeding on schedule. In another couple of hours, the biological growth operations within the tanks would be complete. Before the tanks opened, Drake and Milton would leave the planet. Each- copy of Carp would awaken in a biotank that was already dissolving around it. Each copy contained genetic information that would guide it to Carp’s location, together with general data about Graybill. After Drake and Merlin had been transferred to headquarters, the mother vessel would remain high above the surface to monitor activity on the planet below for the indefinite future.

  Drake heard a sound at the open door of the station. If Milton were finished already, there was no reason they should not leave at once. He knew that his own wish, to stay long enough to make sure that the copies were delivered safely from the tanks, was unnecessary and even dangerous. As soon as they could go, they must leave.

  He stood up. As he did so, Carp entered. Drake had no sense of rapid movement, but suddenly he was back in his chair and Carp was leaning over him. A bristly forearm across his throat held him in position, barely allowing him to breathe.

  Dark eyes stared into his. They were all pupil, round and black and infinitely deep. Drake saw in them his own folly and stupidity, level after level of it. He had been crazy to think he could play God, devising a superior warrior that would help to battle the Shiva. If he failed, he failed, and the attempt was simply futile. But success was far worse. Why would such a being wait to fight the Shiva, when humans were so close to hand? What madness had led Drake to believe that such a creature, once brought into existence, could be controlled and confined?

  A hundred stories, as old as history, told what happened when a man summoned forces he could not master.

  And, the final folly. Why had he allowed Milton to go alone to retrieve the flier? If anyone went alone, it should have been Drake himself. He did not know what Carp had done to persuade or trick Milton, or even if Milton still existed. It did not matter.

  “I’m sorry.” The pressure on his throat was great, and he could barely utter the words. Carp’s hands changed their position on his neck and began to twist.

  Drake knew that he was going to die, and it would not be of strangulation.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered again, as the turning force increased. Sorry that I did this to you, bringing you into such a life, with such a purpose.

  There was a different look in Carp’s eyes. Surprise, that a being who was about to be killed did not resist? Surprise at Drake’s words, which surely Carp did not understand? Or a puzzled wonderment, as Carp, like Drake, stared into another’s eyes and recognized part of himself?

  But another presence lay within Carp; a cold, remorseless agent that could admit neither reason nor mercy. Like the Snarks, Carp killed because he had no choice. He killed because he had to kill.

  Sorry. No words could come from Drake’s throat. His neck was wrenched around to a point where the cervical vertebrae were ready to splinter and snap. Sorry for what I did to you. And for what I must now do to you.

  Drake had been foolish, but he had not been finally and terminally foolish. The orbiting spacecraft w
as monitoring everything that happened to him. Certain safeguards were still in position.

  Drake felt the bones of his neck breaking. His last moment of darkened vision showed Carp’s face, puzzled and alert. Carp was aware that something new was happening, something beyond his control. Drake’s final sensation was the onset of dissolution. The hands that gripped his throat, like Drake himself, seemed to weaken and crumble.

  Drake’s death provided the signal. Within him, within Carp’s body, within the station, within all the biotanks, within the fliers, within every human presence or artifact on Graybill, the changes began. Molecular bonds lost their hold.

  In the final moments, Carp released Drake’s broken body and dropped it to the ground. He stood upright and motionless, feeling within himself the chaos of death. His final howl, the first sound that he had ever uttered, was a cry of anger. As he fell, he raged at the injustice of a universe that created a perfect fighting machine, then destroyed it before it had a chance to fulfill its destiny.

  Chapter 21

  “Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death.”

  Drake hung in open space, six light-hours from the nearest star. Mel Bradley was at his side. While Drake would have been quite willing to receive a report and a display in the War Room, Mel insisted that he see this at firsthand.

  Drake knew exactly where he was: out on the far side of the Galaxy, a safe distance from the spreading Silent Zone controlled (or destroyed) by the Shiva. The nearest star of the Zone was about sixty light-years away.

  He was less sure of what he was. He had been transmitted here at superluminal speed, but not to any recognizable form of embodiment. He could maneuver in space and look in any direction, but he was unaware of the nature of his body.

  “You’d have to ask Cass Leemu about that,” Mel said. He seemed unconcerned, his attention elsewhere. “It’s something she dreamed up.”

  “Are we made of plasma?” Drake turned his own attention inward and saw nothing.

  “Not the usual sort. We’re an assembly of Bose-Einstein Condensates. Cass says a BEC assembly has two great advantages. When we’re done we’ll be transmitted back without modification.”

  “What’s the second advantage?”

  Mel had no way to grin, but he radiated a wolfish sense of glee. “If something goes wrong, Cass assured me that dissolution from a BEC form is painless. Of course, she’s never tried it. Makes you think of the old preachers, talking about the delights of heaven or the torments of hell after you die. I always wanted to ask them, Did you die? How do you know what happens if you haven’t tried it for yourself?”

  Drake was listening, but with only half an ear. He was looking outward again. Mel had said that something was ready to begin. Drake had very little idea as to what would happen next.

  Partly that was Mel’s doing. He was perfect as the person to develop new offensive weapons, but he was also as awkward and cross-minded and independent as ever, wanting to do things in his own way. And partly it was Drake’s doing. He had been learning over the millennia that either you learned to delegate or you drowned in details. Worse than that, if you were involved in the process, you lost the power to be objective about the outcome. It was Drake’s job to review what Mel had done, then either approve or veto the next step.

  But it was hard. The urge to meddle was deep-rooted in humans.

  The nearby star was a white FO type, like the blazing giant Canopus that had troubled Drake so many aeons ago. From this distance it showed a definite disk, slightly smaller and whiter than the Sun as seen from Earth. Drake could see a slight asymmetry. A straight line had been ruled across the left-hand limb. Beyond that line, but within the star’s imagined circle, he could detect faint and scattered points of light. They were other stars.

  “The caesura?”

  Mel said, “You’re looking at it. It’s started.” Even he seemed subdued. The star they were watching might seem small from this distance, but it was thirty million miles across.

  And it was being eaten. The dividing line was moving steadily to the right. Drake stared hard at the remaining portion of the star. It seemed unaffected, untouched.

  “Are you sure it’s really happening, Mel? If the caesura is sending part of the star to another universe, why isn’t the rest of it in turmoil? Unless somehow the gravitational effect is left behind…”

  “According to Cass, it’s not. The whole thing goes — mass, matter, gravitational and magnetic fields, everything. We verified that on the small tests of asteroids and planets. I see no reason to think she’s wrong this time.”

  “So why isn’t there total chaos around the star?”

  “Cheshire Cat effect. Cass doesn’t call it that — she uses a string of Science gibberish. But there’s a time lag before the field stresses disappear from our universe. It’s long enough to keep the star intact as it moves into the caesura. If there were colonies on the planets around the star — there aren’t, of course, they were moved long ago — and if the caesura hadn’t swallowed them, the colonies would see the star vanish but measure its residual gravitational field. That fades smoothly away over an eight-hour period.”

  “Suppose the caesura moves slowly, and takes more than eight hours?”

  “Then the part of the star that hasn’t been absorbed will collapse. If half of it is left behind, you’ll get an explosion with as much energy as a supernova. The nice thing is that this can be done with any type of star, and you can do it when you choose. And by picking the right caesura geometry you can beam the emitted energy in a particular direction. You can keep the beam collimated, so it doesn’t spread much over interstellar distances. Intergalactic, either, if you take extra care. And there’s your weapon.”

  A weapon, indeed. The ultimate weapon. Drake stared at the doomed star, reduced now to a mere sliver of brilliance. Only a thin sector of the right-hand side remained. Then he turned to look outward, toward the galactic edge. The stars blazed there, undiminished, but they were silent. Uncommunicating, controlled by the Shiva.

  He knew now the power that lay within his hands. His own idea had been to use the caesuras to create a no-man’s-land, an empty zone on the edge of Shiva territory. Even if the Shiva could cross that firebreak, the time it took would tell humans something more about the manner and speed of Shiva movement.

  Now Mel was pointing out that they could do much more.

  Pick a target star in the Silent Zone. Choose any planetless and expendable star in this region, or any other convenient place in the Galaxy. Create a caesura of the right dimensions and geometry.

  Now if you moved the caesura to engulf your chosen star at the right speed, a tongue of energy from the stellar collapse would be thrown out into space. It would travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. When it reached the target star, any planets orbiting that star would become burned and lifeless cinders. The star’s outer layers on one side would be stripped off. There was a chance that the star itself would explode.

  There were more than enough available stars in the human sector of the Galaxy for a one-on-one matching with stars in the Silent Zone. The Shiva, whatever they were, could be destroyed.

  Whatever they were. That was the trouble. It was easy to examine the pattern by which the Shiva had entered and spread through the Galaxy from outside, and conclude from the long silence of the old human colonies that the Shiva were ruthless destroyers, inimical to anything other than their own kind.

  And hence to propose the old human solution, stated by Rome but surely far older: Shiva delenda est; “the Shiva must be destroyed.”

  Conclusion was not the same as proof. Suppose that the colonies throughout the Silent Zone still survived? Suppose there was some other reason for their failure to speak? The existence of the Shiva and the silence of the colonies were not the elements of a syllogism. They did not add up to a proof that the colonies no longer existed.

  Drake wondered just what it would take to persuade him of that. Was he pr
oving that the composites were wrong, when they called him back to consciousness? Maybe he was like them, lacking the resolve to do what had to be done.

  He looked again at the sky, which now showed nothing at all where star and caesura had been. He turned to Mel Bradley.

  “What happens to the caesura when it has done its work?”

  “It just sits there, a permanent feature of space-time with zero associated mass-energy. It will never decay or go away. Don’t worry, though. I asked Cass Leemu the same question. Unless it’s activated in the right way it won’t absorb anything else. There’s no danger that the caesuras will keep going and swallow up the universe.”

  “That wasn’t what I was thinking. I was wondering if a caesura could go on and eat up another star.”

  “Any number. So far as we can tell there’s no limit to how much matter or energy you can put into a caesura and kick right out of the universe. But rather than move one caesura all over the place, it’s easier to make another one. Cass and I have the technique down cold.

  We can make one for each star in the Galaxy — if you want us to.”

  There was an implied suggestion behind Mel’s words. Which means we could make one for each star in the Silent Zone, if you wanted us to, and have plenty of the Galaxy left afterward.

  It was a solution, but one that Drake could not use. Not yet. Someday, maybe, when he had exhausted every other hope, or when absolute proof was produced to show that the Shiva were the destroyers that they seemed to be. But for the moment…

  “Stay here. Make as many of the caesuras as you need for the firebreak. As soon as all the colonies are relocated to a safe region, remove the stars and get the break in position.”

  “Very good.” Mel sounded disappointed. “And how should I use the caesuras, fast or slow?”

  “Fast enough to avoid the problem of stellar collapse.”