Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

  Synapo entered the discussion at that point.

  “The rift is created and enlarged by the intense application of electrons, which themselves are convolutions in spacetime. The stream of electrons — highly focused on a microscopic volume at the initial point of separation — enlarges the void progressively around the extent of the rift, much as I separate the gores of my reflector when I untether each morning.

  “But as my colleague, Sarco, suggests, perhaps we should move directly to a discussion of your schedule for implementing harmonious cohabitation.”

  “Strictly from visual observations, the dome seems to partake of the nature of a black hole,” Derec persisted. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Black hole?” Synapo said, as though now having difficulty himself with the trend of the conversation. “Black hole! Yes, that is a good analogy. The derivation of the word was not self-evident.

  “Yes, the compensator is a black hole, but an unnatural one internal to the universe, not on the edge; a black hole as a concavity, not as a convexity at the edge where space and time separate in the course of the natural decay of the universe.

  “Now may we move on?”

  “Just two more questions,” Derec said. “When we look at the dome from the outside, we can’t see the city. We see objects on the other side as though the dome and the city weren’t there. Why can’t we see the city inside?”

  “The compensator’s intense curvature of spacetime bends the light around the dome much as light from a distant star is bent slightly as it goes around our sun. In the case of the compensator, the bending is not slight. It is calculated to produce the effect of invisibility and nonexistence: one of its attributes as a compensator.

  “You had one more question?”

  “Yes. Why should a hyperspace flier fall toward the surface of the black concavity and escape only by the full thrust of its impulse engines, as Ariel described to me last night — an effect of the curvature of spacetime — when the atmosphere, the air inside the dome, does not fall toward the blackness likewise?”

  “You answered your own question,” Synapo said.

  A small green flame hissed from the blackness a decimeter below his eyes, and his voice took on a note of irritation, as though his patience were about to be exhausted.

  “The curvature of spacetime, as you suggested. The flier was beyond the neutral shell, in the gravitational field of the black concavity. The planet’s atmosphere is within the neutral shell, in the gravitational field of the planet.”

  With a note of finality, Synapo concluded with a question.

  “Did not your jumper have to achieve normal escape velocity to drive into the blackness before it could reverse and try to escape back to the planet?”

  Quickly, before Derec had time to fully digest those last remarks, Ariel regained control of the meeting. With firmness, she said, “Now, honorable Ceremyons, our schedule calls for the first phase of our effort to be completed in two months. That effort will provide sufficient farm area and production — 1000 square kilometers — for proof of environmental passivity.

  “Concurrently, we will modify the city to provide terminal facilities for local and interstellar transport vehicles. Those facilities will project through the opening in the dome, but will be insulated and force-ventilated to ensure that all harmful radiation and emissions will be retained within the dome.

  “Wolruf, our farm engineering specialist, and Derec, our city engineering specialist, will now describe the detailed schedules for those two activities.”

  SilverSide recorded all that, but her attention, her whole being, was concentrated on the alien, Synapo. His domination of the dialogue told her that he was the superior of the two aliens and potentially more powerful, more intelligent, than any of the mammals she had become familiar with. In short, she had found the ultimate target for her final imprint, or so she believed.

  She left off recording the meeting with the aliens. She had found a new role model to fit the beings the Laws of Robotics compelled her to serve. She was no longer obligated to observe the orders of lesser beings. Still, she gave Wolruf a last thought filled with fondness, that new emotion she had found in her consideration of LifeCrier, now far, far away. She would continue to protect Wolruf with just a little less weight than she gave herself under the Third Law, the law of self-preservation.

  She turned her attention back to the alien on the right, Synapo, and concentrated now on the technical details of the imprint, particularly the aerodynamic characteristics that would be the hardest to duplicate. The calculations quickly showed that her wingspread and airfoil area would have to be several-fold greater than that of the aliens in order to support her body weight. Their body mass must be light indeed, with mostly hollow structural reinforcements.

  And she would have to increase the dimensions of her body to provide the geometry needed for the wing connections and the leverage required for the wing manipulators. Not surprisingly, that was going to decrease her body density to match that of the aliens.

  She worked on the eyes next. They were compound, radiating red and infrared. The radiation came from a ring that surrounded the conventional animal optic in the center and provided controlled illumination for viewing objects when the sun’s radiation was blocked by the planet.

  Then she turned her attention to the blackbody surface and found that to be more of a problem than the aerodynamics and the optics. She experimented on her arm as she sat in the back seat of the lorry but finally had to give up and settle for a blackish gray with a soft, silvery lustre, just as she had finally given up matching the details of hair and skin coloring of the mammals.

  Next, she attacked the source and nature of the green flame that had burst from the alien, Synapo. She had the feeling that it was a tool, if not a weapon, that was required to provide a satisfactory imprint. She designed a small electrolytic cell, compressor, and high-pressure storage containers for hydrogen and oxygen and a release orifice at the rear of her oral cavity, but she kept her conventional speakers for communication. And she added a small factory to fix nitrogen in the form of ammonia to provide the trace of that compound that gave the flame its green color.

  All during that period of analyzing the alien, Synapo, she was absorbing the powerful masculinity he radiated, intercepting and recording the red glare of his eyes, sopping up his physical essence, the body language, the subtle mannerisms that escaped that otherwise all-absorbing black silhouette.

  Finally she was ready, and she set the organometallic cells of her body and their pseudoribosomes to the task of altering her genetic tapes — her robotic DNA, her equivalents of messenger and transfer and ribosomal RNA — and the myriad other factors contained in her multibillion microbotic cells that would finally effect the alien imprint.

  As her form changed, she stepped up to stand on the back seat of the open lorry to give her forelegs room to develop into wings, and then as her long hind legs shortened and thickened, she braced them against the back of the seat to steady herself.

  With their attention on the meeting, the two robots in the front of the lorry did not observe the transformation, nor did the mammals in the meeting who faced away from her. She was under observation only by the aliens, and they seemed not to notice or to care.

  Finally, the transformation was complete, save for the hook and its tether, that she had programmed last because of its different matrix, a stainless form of shining steel configured in a hollow curved horn and a fine-stranded but sturdy flexible cable. She hoped to fly, but she had abandoned the balloon and the act of ballooning she had witnessed the evening before. The hook, then, was purely for effect.

  Comfortably masculine now, SilverSide was standing on the back seat of the lorry, fully erect — three meters high — with his wings folded tightly against his body as though he had just emerged from a cocoon like a newly metamorphosed butterfly. He felt the need to open and exercise them, to get the feel of them, and with that he recalled flying in
bird form on the wolf planet.

  The mammals and the aliens were still absorbed in their meeting. The aliens apparently thought the growing SilverSide was a natural phenomenon associated with the lorry, for they gave no sign of looking directly in SilverSide’s direction.

  Slowly he opened his wings. The thin, tough, organometallic membrane rustled faintly as he unfolded the airfoil to its full twenty-five meters. He found then that he could not avoid measuring air currents.

  He had not been aware of even a faint breeze as he had stood there on the back seat with his wings folded, but now he felt the gentle pressure acting on his wings, pressing his simulated, feathery cold-junction against the back o (the seat. He resisted the torque that was endeavoring to tumble him out of the back of the lorry only with a distinct effort by digging his toes into the seat cushion.

  The effort was more than he cared to maintain, so he folded his wings back against his body, reducing the wind area.

  Then he turned, walked across the seat to the side of the lorry, hesitated — looking at Wolruf who was running toward him and shouting his name — and then spread his wings again and hopped over the side. He felt again the glorious sensation of flight, of being airborne, as he gently glided to the ground. When his feet touched, he fell flat on his face, his wings outspread, with a feeling of slow motion that began with his dragging toes digging shallow furrows in the dust next to the roadway.

  With difficulty, he got up, using his wings to lever himself erect before folding them into his body, and then Wolruf was on him, hindlegs straddling his back and pinning his wings to his sides, hands grasping his hook to keep her purchase. And Derec was winding a rope around both him and Wolruf, binding them together.

  Chapter 18

  THE BLACK VISITATION

  ARIEL WAS ABOUT to wrap up the meeting. Wolruf had hit the high spots of the technical effort involved in establishing the robot farms and had given her detailed schedule; and Derec had described the external modifications of the city to provide local and interstellar terminal facilities, the minimal effect those changes would have on the meteorology, and the detailed schedule to effect those changes.

  Ariel began her recap.

  “I would like to briefly review the farm program again and summarize the schedule, but before I do, are there any other questions on the work that Wolruf and Derec described?”

  “No,” Synapo said. “It was all quite clear.”

  “Was it acceptable?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  Synapo turned to look at his companion.

  “Sarco?” he queried, “Any objections?”

  “Not for the moment,” Sarco replied. “The farm machinery is highly suspect, but we must take you at your word, at least for now. Time may tell us otherwise. And, too, I am concerned...”

  He stopped talking briefly, then:

  “By the Great Petero!” he exclaimed. “What is that, Synapo?”

  Both aliens had turned slightly to the left to focus those red eyes on something behind her. Ariel turned to look herself and saw a dark gray monstrosity on the back seat of the lorry with gigantic wings hovering over the vehicle like some kind of avenging angel.

  Then it slowly folded its wings and started walking across the seat to the side of the lorry, where it spread them once again, and Ariel knew instantly what was going on.

  But Wolruf had anticipated her by significant seconds and was already running toward the lorry, shouting, “SilverSide, SilverSide,” over and over again, as though shrill decibels would anchor him to the ground.

  As it turned out, Wolruf had nothing to worry about. SilverSide came to rest flat on the ground, spread-eagled. And by the time he picked himself up and retracted his wings, Wolruf was clinging to his back, and then Derec was trussing them both up with a rope he had hastily dug out of a locker on the side of the lorry.

  Ariel was torn between getting involved in the fracas herself and preserving some kind of composed demeanor for the benefit of the aliens. She felt her position as official negotiator and ostensible leader of the robot city task force with special keenness ever since she had been able to parlay her visit into that position: leader without portfolio.

  As Derec was wrapping SilverSide and Wolruf round and round with rope, Ariel turned back to the aliens in time to hear Sarco say, “Perhaps this gives us a better idea what further menace lies off-world, Miss Ariel Welsh. We resume construction of the node compensator tomorrow morning.”

  He had rotated his hook forward as he spoke. Then, as he turned away, a broad green flame a meter long blazed from below his eyes, and he flapped into the air.

  The heat from the flame hit her like the breath of a blast furnace.

  The alien Synapo stood facing her as his colleague flew off.

  When he spoke it was in a fashion that left no doubt as to the temper of his thoughts. The words seemed to modulate the small green flame that flickered below his glaring red eyes, a waxing and waning fluorescence that resonated with the strange buzzing sound it imparted to his words.

  “You have violated a trust and humiliated me before the elite, Miss Ariel Welsh.”

  And he, too, turned and flapped into the air.

  She stood there a long time watching them as they slowly and gracefully circled higher and higher above the dome. The first leveled off and took up a flight pattern around the exact center of the dome. The second, however, continued upward, circling and circling until she lost it in the shimmer of the atmosphere.

  Derec had come back to stand beside her, but she had not heard him.

  “A setback, surely, but perhaps not a large one,” he said.

  Startled, she turned to look at him coldly but said nothing before walking back to the lorry. Jacob was standing at the controls. Mandelbrot, standing between him and SilverSide, had hold of the end of a rope where it trailed away from the coils that encircled SilverSide and pinned his wings to his sides. Wolruf was sitting on the front seat directly behind SilverSide. Derec had unwound her from SilverSide once they thought he was under control.

  Ariel climbed slowly in and sat down on the back seat.

  Derec climbed in and came back to sit beside her. Jacob drove the lorry onto the road and then headed rapidly down Main Street toward the apartment.

  “I warned you about SilverSide,” Derec said. “You knew he could change form. I admit I didn’t expect a change at so inauspicious a time. What did the aliens say before they flew off?”

  “They were frightened, naturally, and angry. They had no reason to suspect we were going to produce a being in their own image, and twice as big. In their minds, I have betrayed their trust. They said as much. And they will close the dome tomorrow morning,” Ariel said. “Your new protégé has just closed this planet to further development. Unless your genius and his remarkable abilities can somehow miraculously arrest the inevitable.”

  “You’re being sarcastic, my dear,” Derec confirmed.

  A couple of intersections passed swiftly behind, and then he said, “But you know we might just pull off that miracle.”

  “Fat chance,” she said.

  “No. A slim chance, but a chance nonetheless.”

  She didn’t answer, but got up and went to the front of the lorry to sit on the front seat directly behind Jacob Winterson. Right then, Jacob seemed like the only friend she had. She looked right through him, though, staring into a grim tomorrow and not seeing at all his remarkable musculature.

  Wolruf reached over and laid a fat-fingered hand atop Ariel’s small hand. Ariel didn’t move and hardly noticed. After a moment the hand was withdrawn.

  When they got to the apartment, she jumped out before the others and strode off. It was a walking pout, a demonstration for Derec’s benefit, and she admitted that with one part of her mind. With the other part, she half expected him to come after her and was disappointed when he didn’t. She could now think of several things she wanted to say to him. She returned as Jacob was putting lunch on the table.
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  After a lunch that tasted like sawdust, she went out on the balcony to get away from the others but took Jacob with her. They sat down on the bench that lined the streetside rail.

  “Jacob, did SilverSide give any indication he was going to pull a stunt like that? Where is he, anyway?”

  She hadn’t thought to ask until that moment. She had wanted to forget about SilverSide, and she had succeeded better than she expected. Her thoughts had been on Aurora. She had felt quite homesick all through lunch, and Derec hadn’t helped. He had been just as silent as she. Her walk had cooled her irate thoughts. She didn’t feel up to an argument so she kept quiet and ate. Immediately after lunch Derec had jumped up and gone into the small bedroom.

  Her feeling of isolation had been intensified not only by Derec’s silence, but by Wolruf’s silence as well. That, too, had persisted all through lunch. She felt again the soft touch of Wolruf’s hand as it came to rest on her hand when they were riding back in the lorry.

  “To answer your most immediate question first, Master Derec forced SilverSide to lay on the floor of the small bedroom when we first came in,” Jacob said. “SilverSide had trouble getting through the doorways. He was both taller and wider than the openings. It was difficult for him to bend over and at the same time go through the doorway sideways while wrapped with rope.

  “To answer your first question, the wild one, as Mandelbrot calls him — it seems particularly apt — the wild one talked to us briefly, but he gave no indication that a change was imminent.”

  “He said nothing unusual, then?” Ariel asked.

  “He seems not to know what humans are. This matter of imprinting and changing from one form to another: were you aware that he goes through these changes seeking to find the species he can finally call human?”

  “Derec suggested that might be the case.”

  “Will he then cease to protect what he considers the lesser species?”

  “I presume so. Derec seems to think so.”