Cluster c-1

by Piers Anthony

  “Because none want to. A hundred or so stars jammed into a cubic parsec of space. Hard to get a night’s sleep with all that starlight.”

  “It’s not that bad. It’s an open cluster, not a closed one. The question is, which Sphere has jurisdiction now? This Ancient site may be the most important find in the galaxy. Who excavates it?”

  “What makes you so sure there’s any more there than there’s been anywhere else? Three million years make a big difference.”

  “This one’s on an airless planet—and it hasn’t been touched.”

  “Airless!” Flint said. “No deterioration?”

  “Almost none. It’s the best-preserved Ancient site ever discovered, we believe. A peppering of meteorite pocks, but apparently its location in the cluster protected it pretty well even from space debris. Otherwise, it’s intact.”

  “Which means there may be a functioning machine, an Ancient machine—”

  “Or an Ancient library that would enable us to crack the language barrier and learn all their secrets,” the Minister said, his pale face becoming animated. Flint had regarded the Ministers as basically devoid of individuality, but now a bit of character was beginning to show. This one really cared about his alien Spheres. “The Ancients had no Spherical regression; they were able to maintain a galactic empire with uniform culture and technology, as far as we can ascertain. They solved the energy problem. If we had that secret—”

  “Then I could retire,” Flint said. But the notion no longer filled him with enthusiasm. He had had himself put in the records as officially dead, so that Honeybloom would have his pension. There was no longer any life to retire to. And this business of traveling to strange civilizations had slowly grown on him; this was his type of adventure.

  “You could retire, having saved our galaxy,” the Minister agreed, not aware of the irony. “We have elected to compromise. We have sent message capsules to all our neighbors with the news. The potential significance of this discovery transcends local Sphere boundaries. The other Spheres of this cluster have agreed to a cooperative mission, with all discoveries to be shared equally, for the good of the galaxy. They are notifying their neighbors, and we hope several of these will participate also. We have of course also advised Sphere Knyfh of the inner galaxy, but naturally they cannot afford to mattermit a representative five thousand light-years on speculation.”

  Flint nodded. “If all the Spheres mattermit their own physical representatives to the Hyades that will be some menagerie!”

  “That’s why we’re sending you. You have had direct experience with some of these creatures. You will be able to recognize them and deal with them despite their strange or even repulsive aspects. Other humans would be at a severe disadvantage.”

  “That’s true,” Flint agreed, remembering the way human beings had seemed to him when he occupied a Polarian host. He had been shocked and nauseated, and so had blundered badly. Of course, he still suffered some from an aversion to illness or deformity—his recent excursion in the body of a one-armed boy had been a real exercise in control!—but alienophobia was a nearly universal phenomenon. This Hyades group would not be the most compatible assemblage!

  Yet the prospect remained intriguing, and not merely because of the monstrous potential of the Ancient site. To deal physically, in his own body, with all the alien sapients he had known only in transfer…

  He arrived at Gondolph IV at night. Four bright stars were visible in the sky, overwhelming the more distant field. They were Gondolph’s neighbors, II, III, V and VI, all within half a light-year, but they had the aspect of stars, not suns. No perpetual day here after all; the cluster was not that tight. Maybe someday he would visit a closed or globular cluster; then he’d see something!

  The cluster of civilizations was not that tight, either, he thought. Each Sphere functioned independently of its neighbors, with only minor interactions. Together the massed Spheres made up the disk-shaped cluster of the Milky Way galaxy, like so many cells forming a creature. The Milky Way had also operated largely independently of its neighbors in the cluster of galaxies. Until recently…

  Flint was in a spacesuit, and it was no more awkward than adapting to an alien host-body. This was not like the old Luna spacesuits, clumsy and suspect; the material of this suit fit him like a sheath of exterior muscles. It yielded wherever his motions required, but maintained comfortably normal atmospheric pressure. A porous layer next to his skin permitted the transfer of fluids and gases necessary to his health. His body would not suffocate from lack of oxygen or drown in its own sweat. It had discreet airlocks for intake and outgo, so that all natural functions could be accommodated readily and safely. The suit was tough—but it had limitations. If it were perforated and not immediately patched, he would quickly die of exposure and decompression. Therefore he carried no power weapon; it was too possible for it to be used against him. He was, however, armed—unobtrusively.

  He looked about. The Hyades, mythologically, were the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the nymph Aethra, and they were half-sisters to the Pleiades. There were two ways to relate that to the present situation; the Titan was the Milky Way galaxy, and his daughters the Spheres, perhaps seven of which would be represented here. Or the Titan was the empire of the Ancients, and his daughters were the scientific and cultural artifacts left behind—each one of immense potential significance to the contemporary scene.

  At a time like this, he longed for the ability to journey back into the time-frame of the Ancients. Not merely to penetrate their technological and cultural secrets, but just to get to know them as individuals. Surely they had been something very, very special!

  But now to meet his companions—and commence the archaeological research. A Nathian lifeship had discovered the site and set down the first mattermitter. For reasons comprehensible only to the Nath mind, that device had sat on the planet unused for twenty Earth years. News of galactic peril brought by micromessage from Sphere Polaris, and the quick transmission of transfer information had brought this site back into awareness. The Nath government had recognized the possible relevance and finally revealed the existence of its device. After that, things had moved rapidly. More mattermission units had been sent through the first and attuned to their Spheres of origination. Thus all representatives could be shipped at a common time.

  They were to meet at a designated staging area within the site. Flint wondered why the units hadn’t been grouped together to begin with, but assumed it was to provide a certain initial privacy. The shock of coming face to face with alien monsters—yes, it was better to allow some spacing and nominal adjustment room. But the Nathian organizers might have had some quite different notion.

  Flint’s eye was attracted by a surprising but familiar form: the disk of a Canopian flying saucer. He had thought these craft were airborne, but evidently they used another mechanism. At least this one did, for it traversed the vacuum effortlessly. It spotted him, and coasted down to hover close above. “Conveyance, Sphere Sol?” its speaker inquired in the standard language of Imperial Earth.

  “Sphere Canopus comes in style,” Flint observed, grasping the flexible ladder that descended for his convenience. “You mattermitted the whole craft?” That would have cost tens of trillions of dollars worth of energy, unless they had worked out a really economical system.

  His benefactor turned out to be a Master: facet-eyed, mandible-mouthed, with wings forming a cloak, and half a dozen spindly legs. It looked like a monstrous insect, and perhaps it was—but it was also highly intelligent and of inflexible nerve. In Sphere Canopus these were the Master species, while humanoids were Slaves—and Flint had learned the hard way not to interfere with that social scheme. In fact, he had developed a lot of respect for the Masters. “What we do, we do properly,” it said in its melodious voice. “This does not imply any pleasure in the task.”

  Of course. The Canopian Masters wanted to be left alone to run their Sphere in their efficient fashion. Slavers generally did no
t appreciate the cynosure of dissimilar cultures. But the one in charge of Flint’s case when he had visited there in transfer, B:::1, had yielded to the inevitable, and Canopus had joined the galactic coalition. “I am Flint of Outworld. I visited your Sphere a few months ago.”

  The Masters seldom showed emotion, but something very like surprise made this one’s mandibles twitch. “I regret I did not recognize your specific identity, in your natural host. I am H:::4, of Kirlian intensity forty-five.”

  “Your government risks a high-Kirlian entity on a mattermission mission?”

  The Master extended one thin leg to touch Flint’s shoulder. Even through the suit, Flint felt the power of the aura. It seemed higher than forty-five—unless his own reduced aura made the differential seem less. “The secret of the Ancients necessarily involves some aspect of Kirlian force. I suspect all representatives here will be Kirlian, even as you and I.”

  A good answer. Obviously the Council of Ministers had had more than Flint’s experience in mind when they selected him.

  “If we discover what we hope,” Flint said, “the mutual threat will be considerably abated. With the science of the Ancients, whether Kirlian or otherwise, our galaxy should be invulnerable.”

  “Perhaps. Yet the Ancients perished.”

  “After maintaining their empire for a million years or so.”

  “Strange that they should fade so suddenly and completely, after such longevity,” the Master observed.

  “Yes. That is one of their fascinating mysteries.”

  “We regard it as ominous rather than intriguing.”

  The saucer dropped down, and Flint climbed out from the visitor’s well. “Thank you for the lift,” he said.

  “It has been an honor to serve.” The craft set off to locate a new entity.

  Flint stood where he was for a moment, pondering. The exchange had been perfectly amicable, but the Master had shown him that it had come thoroughly prepared. An excellent ally—or an extremely dangerous enemy. The Canopians evidently were convinced of the importance of this site!

  Thanks to the ride, Flint was first at the rendezvous. He looked about, concentrating on the ground rather than the sky. Here, more than anywhere, he ran the danger of stepping over a material cliff while gazing at the ethereal heavens, like the Fool of the Tarot deck.

  All around were the preserved ruins of an advanced civilization. Not the pottery shards and stone arrowheads of Earthly archaeological sites, but actual buildings of a former city, no more strange in design than similar constructions of modern Sol, Polaris, or Canopus. It seemed almost as if an Ancient sapient were about to walk out.

  Flint had not expected much, knowing that most Ancient sites were evident only to the trained eye: an unnatural mound here, a pattern of depressions there, sometimes a vague depression overgrown by jungle. Or even a mountain slope, the site a victim of orogeny, mountain building, now tilted and perhaps buried or even inverted. Some-times construction crews discovered deeply covered strata with the Ancient stigmata. But three million years was a long time; it was evident that the Ancients had been phenomenal ground-movers, but that offered little insight into their culture. Until this moment…

  There was motion, down near the ground beyond a collapsed building. Flint, suddenly nervous, unlimbered one of his special weapons, a telescoping spear. This required human hands and skill for proper application, and as a Stone Age man and flintsmith, he was expert in its use. It was unlikely that any other creature could turn this against him. He could attack or defend, and if he lost it, he was also adept at defense against it. He doubted that the other creatures would be mechanically equipped to balk it. Of course they would have their own weapons. He wanted no quarrel, for both personal and Spherical reasons, still, something strange was coming toward him, and he wanted to be ready.

  The motion manifested as a traveling patch of brambles. Flint studied its approach, and realized that it had to be sentient and sapient; there was no native life on Godawful Four, as he called this planet. The only thing that could move were the mattermitted, spacesuited representatives of the Spheres. He was being unreasonably jumpy. He put away his spear, though his primitive inclination was to step on the thing, squishing it like a centipede.

  It was legless and had thousands of projectile-spines, like the barbed quills of an Earth porcupine or the spurs of sandspur grass. These shot out on tiny threads to hook into anything, even the dust of the airless desert. These were then reeled in, winching the main mass forward. At any given moment, a number of tethers were in every stage of the process—retracted, shooting out, catching, drawing in. The overall effect was, once he adjusted to the notion, rather graceful; the creature traveled across the rock smoothly.

  It had to be in a spacesuit, for no lifeform Flint knew of existed in a vacuum. But what a suit! Each tiny hook and tether must be enclosed and pressurized. This bespoke a fine technology. Probably those myriad little members had exquisite detail control.

  “Hello, comrade,” Flint said. There was no air to carry his voice, but he knew the sound would be transmitted through the ground. He also had a translator keyed into a radio transceiver in his suit.

  He was answered by a staccato of faint taps, as of tiny anchors dropping. He turned on his unit, letting it orient on whichever language this was. In a moment it spoke. “Sphere Nath.”

  “Sphere Sol,” Flint said. His unit did not translate his own words. For simplicity, each creature’s unit would handle all incoming messages, rendering them into the native language. There had been no direct human-Nathian contact before, though the two Spheres were adjacent. The expense, risk, and delay of inter-Sphere contact had been too great, until this galactic crisis.

  “Arrivals?” his unit inquired as the Nathian tapped again.

  “Sphere Canopus,” Flint said. “With a flying craft. No others I know of, yet.”

  “Message from Sphere Bellatrix. Cannot attend, but information relayed to Sphere Mirzam, who attends.”

  Flint visualized the map of the Vicinity Cluster of Spheres. Bellatrix was a small Sphere, about Sphere Sol’s size, adjacent to Nath. It was about five hundred light-years from Sol. Mirzam was two hundred and fifty light-years out. Bellatrix had been invited to attend; Mirzam had not, as contact had not yet been made. Evidently the chain of contacts was still extending, and that was good. Soon this entire section of the galaxy would be alert to the Andromedan threat.

  “We of Sphere Nath have held long discourse with Sphere Bellatrix,” the creature continued. Flint knew the translation was approximate, as there had to be fundamental distinctions of concept. “Discourse” could mean war or slavery or cohabitation. But there were limits to what a hastily jury-rigged multiple translation system could do. “They are very shy of strangers, so could not attend. But they are affinitive to Mirzam, with whom their contact parallels ours, so they relayed transfer, and Mirzam attends.”

  Could be. On the map, Sphere Bellatrix overlapped both Nath and Mirzam, so that as with Sol and Polaris, they could have had centuries of interaction, cooperative Fringe colonies, trade, and so on. Their refusal to interact immediately with a group of unfamiliar entities was understandable. Flint had seen Solarians as others saw them, there in Sphere Polaris, and it was a lesson he hoped never to forget. He still had trouble adjusting to new forms—in fact was having trouble right now—and he was Sol’s most experienced agent.

  “We of Sphere Sol understand,” he said. “We appreciate the message.”

  “Pull-hook,” the Nathian said.

  Oops, a mistranslation. Obviously, to hook and pull was an expression of affinity, of motion or success; acquiescence. But since there were literal meanings to the terms, the machine had oriented on them, taking the simplest route. Which was one reason inter-Sphere relations could not be trusted entirely to machines.

  “Perhaps we should wait on the others,” Flint said. “We want to coordinate the search.”

  “Meaning clarification: occupy what position
in relation to others?”

  Flint reviewed his phrasing. “Remain inactive until the representatives of other Spheres arrive,” he said. Yes, he would have to watch his own language. These literalisms could be troublesome, even deadly. To wait on an alien creature might be to squash it, and his word might have been taken as a direct threat. His mass could do a lot of harm to a low-spread-out, thread-limbed creature like this. “We have translation problems; please verify all questionable remarks without taking offense.”

  “Pull-hook.”

  “Are you familiar with Sphere Mirzam?”

  “I would recognize a Mirzam entity by sonar—they are jumpers somewhat like yourself—but we have had very little direct contact. The expense of mattermission…”

  “Yes.” That was a universal problem. By the map it was some five hundred light-years from Nath to Mirzam. “Irritation to be avoided,” the Nathian said. Meaning “No offense?” Probably a personal question. “Comprehended, no irritation.”

  “How would you like to bash your head in?” Hm. “Clarification,” Flint said.

  “Apparent danger of collapsing with damage, perched endwise.”

  Oh. “Solarian sapients have a sophisticated balancing mechanism. By being alert, we avoid falling and bashing in our heads. And we gain the advantage of perception from an elevation.”

  “Credit deserved, overcoming obvious handicap,” it said.

  “Pull-hook,” Flint agreed.

  The Nathian rippled its threads in seeming acknowledgment, shooting out burrs and snapping them back unanchored. A nice gesture—or maybe it was merely laughing. Flint saw no sign of eyes, and realized that elevation would have little bearing on hearing, so maybe his explanation had been gibberish to it.

  “I understand—” Flint caught himself, realizing what a literal translation would sound like. “I have been informed that Sphere Nath discovered this Ancient site. Why didn’t you explore it earlier?”