The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “After so many generations?” Lavon asked, surprised. “Wasn’t it Shar III who made the first complete translation? That was a long time ago.”

  The young man turned and looked at Lavon with eyes made dark and wide by the depths into which they had been staring. “I can read what’s on the plate, but most of it seems to make no sense. Worst of all, the record’s incomplete. You didn’t know that? It is. One of the plates was lost in a battle during the first war with the Eaters, while these castles were still in their hands.”

  “What am I here for, then?” Lavon said. “Isn’t there anything of value on the remaining plate? Did they really contain ‘the wisdom of the Creators,’ or is that another myth?”

  “No. No, it’s true,” Shar said slowly, “as far as it goes.”

  He paused, and both men turned and gazed at the ghostly creature which had appeared suddenly outside the window. Then Shar said gravely, “Come in, Para.”

  The slipper-shaped organism, nearly transparent except for the thousands of black-and-silver granules and frothy bubbles which packed its interior, glided into the chamber and hovered, with a muted whirring of cilia. For a moment it remained silent, speaking telepathically to the Noc floating in the vault, after the ceremonious fashion of all the Protos. No human had ever intercepted one of these colloquies, but there was no doubt about their reality; humans had used them for long-range communication for generations.

  Then the Para’s cilia vibrated once more. “We are arrived, Shar and Lavon, according to the custom.”

  “And welcome,” said Shar. “Lavon, let’s leave this matter of the plates for a while, until you hear what Para has to say; that’s a part of the knowledge Lavons must have as they come into their office, and it comes before the plates. I can give you some hints of what we are. First Para has to tell you something about what we aren’t.”

  Lavon nodded, willingly enough, and watched the Proto as it settled gently to the surface of the hewn table at which Shar had been sitting. There was in the entity such a perfection and economy of organization, such a grace and surety of movement, that he could hardly believe his own new-won maturity. Para, like all the Protos, made him feel, not perhaps poorly thought out, but at least unfinished.

  “We know that in this universe there is logically no place for man,” the gleaming, now immobile cylinder upon the table droned abruptly. “Our memory is the common property of all our races. It reaches back to a time when there were no such creatures as man here, nor any even remotely like men. It remembers also that once upon a day there were men here, suddenly, and in some numbers. Their spores littered the Bottom; we found the spores only a short time after our season’s Awakening, and inside them we saw the forms of men, slumbering.

  “Then men shattered their spores and emerged. At first they seemed helpless, and the Eaters devoured them by scores, as in those days they devoured everything that moved. But that soon ended. Men were intelligent, active. And they were gifted with a trait, a character, possessed by no other creature in this world. Not even the savage Eaters had it. Men organized us to exterminate the Eaters, and therein lay the difference. Men had initiative. We have the word now, which you gave us, and we apply it, but we still do not know what the thing is that it labels.”

  “You fought beside us,” Lavon said.

  “Gladly. We would never have thought of that war by ourselves, but it was good and brought good. Yet we wondered. We saw that men were poor swimmers, poor walkers, poor crawlers, poor climbers. We saw that men were formed to make and use tools, a concept we still do not understand, for so wonderful a gift is largely wasted in this universe, and there is no other. What good are tool-useful members such as the hands of men? We do not know. It seems plain that so radical a thing should lead to a much greater rulership over the world than has, in fact, proven to be possible for men.”

  Lavon’s head was spinning. “Para, I had no notion that you people were philosophers.”

  “The Protos are old,” Shar said. He had again turned to look out the window, his hands locked behind his back. “They aren’t philosophers, Lavon, but they are remorseless logicians. Listen to Para.”

  “To this reasoning there could be but one outcome,” the Para said. “Our strange ally, man, was like nothing else in this universe. He was and is unfitted for it. He does not belong here; he has been adapted. This drives us to think that there are other universes besides this one, but where these universes might lie, and what their properties might be, it is impossible to imagine. We have no imagination, as men know.”

  Was the creature being ironic? Lavon could not tell. He said slowly, “Other universes? How could that be true?”

  “We do not know,” the Para’s uninflected voice hummed. Lavon waited, but obviously the Proto had nothing more to say.

  Shar had resumed sitting on the windowsill, clasping his knees, watching the come and go of dim shapes in the lighted gulf. “It is quite true,” he said. “What is written on the plate makes it plain. Let me tell you now what it says.

  “We were made, Lavon. We were made by men who were not as we are, but men who were our ancestors all the same. They were caught in some disaster, and they made us, and put us here in our universe—so that, even though they had to die, the race of men would live.”

  Lavon surged up from the woven spirogyra mat upon which he had been sitting. “You must think I’m a fool,” he said sharply.

  “No. You’re our Lavon; you have a right to know the facts. Make what you like of them.” Shar swung his webbed toes back into the chamber. “What I’ve told you may be hard to believe, but it seems to be so; what Para says backs it up. Our unfitness to live here is self-evident. I’ll give you some examples:

  “The past four Shars discovered that we won’t get any further in our studies until we learn how to control heat. We’ve produced enough heat chemically to show that even the water around us changes when the temperature gets high enough or low enough; that we knew from the beginning. But there we’re stopped.”

  “Why?”

  “Because heat produced in open water is carried off as rapidly as it’s produced. Once we tried to enclose that heat, and we blew up a whole tube of the castle and killed everything in range; the shock was terrible. We measured the pressures that were involved in that explosion, and we discovered that no substance we know could have resisted them. Theory suggests some stronger substances—but we need heat to form them!

  “Take our chemistry. We live in water. Everything seems to dissolve in water, to some extent. How do we confine a chemical test to the crucible we put it in? How do we maintain a solution at one dilution? I don’t know. Every avenue leads me to the same stone door. We’re thinking creatures, Lavon, but there’s something drastically wrong in the way we think about this universe we live in. It just doesn’t seem to lead to results.”

  Lavon pushed back his floating hair futilely. “Maybe you’re thinking about the wrong results. We’ve had no trouble with warfare, or crops, or practical things like that. If we can’t create much heat, well, most of us won’t miss it; we don’t need more than we have. What’s the other universe supposed to be like, the one our ancestors lived in? Is it any better than this one?”

  “I don’t know,” Shar admitted. “It was so different that it’s hard to compare the two. The metal plate tells a story about men who were travelling from one place to another in a container that moved by itself. The only analogue I can think of is the shallops of diatom shells that our youngsters used to sled along the thermocline; but evidently what’s meant is something much bigger.

  “I picture a huge shallop, closed on all sides, big enough to hold many people, maybe twenty or thirty. It had to travel for generations through some kind of medium where there wasn’t any water to breathe, so the people had to carry their own water and renew it constantly. There were no seasons; no ice formed on the sky, because there couldn’t be any sky in a closed shallop; and so there was no spore formation.

  �
��Then the shallop was wrecked somehow. The people in it knew they were going to die. They made us, and put us here, as if we were their children. Because they had to die, they wrote their story on the plates, to tell us what had happened. I suppose we’d understand it better if we had the plate Shar I lost during the war—but we don’t.”

  “The whole thing sounds like a parable,” Lavon said, shrugging. “Or a song. I can see why you don’t understand it. What I can’t see is why you bother to try.”

  “Because of the plate,” Shar said. “You’ve handled it yourself now, so you know that we’ve nothing like it. We have crude, impure metals we’ve hammered out, metals that last for a while and then decay. But the plate shines on, generation after generation. It doesn’t change; our hammers and our graving tools break against it; the little heat we can generate leaves it unharmed. That plate wasn’t formed in our universe and that one fact makes every word on it important to me. Someone went to a great deal of trouble to make those plates indestructible, and to give them to us. Someone to whom the word stars was important enough to be worth fourteen repetitions, despite the fact that the word doesn’t seem to mean anything. I’m ready to think that if our makers repeated a word even twice on a record that seems likely to last forever, then it’s important for us to know what it means.”

  Lavon stood up once more.

  “All these extra universes and huge shallops and meaningless words—I can’t say that they don’t exist, but I don’t see what difference it makes,” he said. “The Shars of a few generations ago spent their whole lives breeding better algae crops for us, and showing us how to cultivate them, instead of living haphazardly on bacteria. Farther back, the Shars devised war engines, and war plans. All that was work worth doing. The Lavons of those days evidently got along without the metal plate and its puzzles, and saw to it that the Shars did, too. Well, as far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to the plate, if you like it better than crop improvement—but I think it ought to be thrown away.”

  “All right,” Shar said, shrugging. “If you don’t want it, that ends the traditional interview. We’ll go our—”

  There was a rising drone from the tabletop. The Para was lifting itself, waves of motion passing over its cilia, like the waves which went silently across the fruiting stalks of the fields of delicate fungi with which the Bottom was planted. It had been so silent that Lavon had forgotten it; he could tell from Shar’s startlement that Shar had, too.

  “This is a great decision,” the waves of sound washing from the creature throbbed. “Every Proto has heard it, and agrees with it. We have been afraid of this metal plate for a long time, afraid that men would learn to understand it and follow what it says to some secret place, leaving the Protos behind. Now we are not afraid.”

  “There wasn’t anything to be afraid of,” Lavon said indulgently.

  “No Lavon before you, Lavon, had ever said so,” the Para said. “We are glad. We will throw the plate away, as Lavon orders.”

  With that, the shining creature swooped toward the embrasure. With it, it bore away the remaining plate, which had been resting under it on the tabletop, suspended delicately in the curved tips of its supple ventral cilia. Inside its pellucid body, vacuoles swelled to increase its buoyancy and enable it to carry the heavy weight.

  With a cry, Shar plunged through the water toward the window.

  “Stop, Para!”

  But Para was already gone, so swiftly that it had not even heard the call. Shar twisted his body and brought up one shoulder against the tower wall. He said nothing. His face was enough. Lavon could not look into it for more than an instant.

  The shadows of the two men began to move slowly along the uneven cobbled floor. The Noc descended toward them from the vault, its tentacle stirring the water, its internal light flaring and fading irregularly. It, too, drifted through the window after its cousin, and sank slowly away toward the Bottom. Gently its living glow dimmed, flickered in the depths, and winked out.

  For many days, Lavon was able to avoid thinking much about the loss. There was always a great deal of work to be done. Maintenance of the castles was a never-ending task. The thousand dichotomously branching wings tended to crumble with time, especially at their bases where they sprouted from one another, and no Shar had yet come forward with a mortar as good as the rotifer-spittle which had once held them together. In addition, the breaking through of windows and the construction of chambers in the early days had been haphazard and often unsound. The instinctive architecture of the Eaters, after all, had not been meant to meet the needs of human occupants.

  And then there were the crops. Men no longer fed precariously upon passing bacteria snatched to the mouth; now there were the drifting mats of specific water-fungi and algae, and the mycelia on the Bottom, rich and nourishing, which had been bred by five generations of Shars. These had to be tended constantly to keep the strains pure, and to keep the older and less intelligent species of the Protos from grazing on them. In this latter task, to be sure, the more intricate and farseeing Proto types cooperated, but men were needed to supervise.

  There had been a time, after the war with the Eaters, when it had been customary to prey upon the slow-moving and stupid diatoms, whose exquisite and fragile glass shells were so easily burst, and who were unable to learn that a friendly voice did not necessarily mean a friend. There were still people who would crack open a diatom when no one else was looking, but they were regarded as barbarians, to the puzzlement of the Protos. The blurred and simpleminded speech of the gorgeously engraved plants had brought them into the category of community pets—a concept which the Protos were utterly unable to grasp, especially since men admitted that diatoms on the half-frustrule were delicious.

  Lavon had had to agree, very early, that the distinction was tiny. After all, humans did eat the desmids, which differed from the diatoms only in three particulars: their shells were flexible, they could not move (and for that matter neither could all but a few groups of diatoms), and they did not speak. Yet to Lavon, as to most men, there did seem to be some kind of distinction, whether the Protos could see it or not, and that was that. Under the circumstances he felt that it was a part of his duty, as the hereditary leader of men, to protect the diatoms from the occasional poachers who browsed upon them, in defiance of custom, in the high levels of the sunlit sky.

  Yet Lavon found it impossible to keep himself busy enough to forget that moment when the last clues to man’s origin and destination had been seized, on authority of his own careless exaggeration, and borne away into dim space.

  It might be possible to ask Para for the return of the plate, explain that a mistake had been made. The Protos were creatures of implacable logic, but they respected men, were used to illogic in men, and might reverse their decision if pressed—

  We are sorry. The plate was carried over the bar and released in the gulf. We will have the Bottom there searched, but…

  With a sick feeling he could not repress, Lavon knew that that would be the answer, or something very like it. When the Protos decided something was worthless, they did not hide it in some chamber like old women. They threw it away—efficiently.

  Yet despite the tormenting of his conscience, Lavon was nearly convinced that the plate was well lost. What had it ever done for man, except to provide Shars with useless things to think about in the late seasons of their lives? What the Shars themselves had done to benefit man, here, in the water, in the world, in the universe, had been done by direct experimentation. No bit of useful knowledge had ever come from the plates. There had never been anything in the second plate, at least, but things best left unthought. The Protos were right.

  Lavon shifted his position on the plant frond, where he had been sitting in order to overlook the harvesting of an experimental crop of blue-green, oil-rich algae drifting in a clotted mass close to the top of the sky, and scratched his back gently against the coarse bole. The Protos were seldom wrong, after all. Their lack of creativity, their i
nability to think an original thought, was a gift as well as a limitation. It allowed them to see and feel things at all times as they were—not as they hoped they might be, for they had no ability to hope, either.

  “La-von! Laa-vah-on!”

  The long halloo came floating up from the sleepy depths. Propping one hand against the top of the frond, Lavon bent and looked down. One of the harvesters was looking up at him, holding loosely the adze with which he had been splitting free from the raft the glutinous tetrads of the algae.

  “I’m up here. What’s the matter?”

  “We have the ripened quadrant cut free. Shall we tow it away?”

  “Tow it away,” Lavon said, with a lazy gesture. He leaned back again. At the same instant, a brilliant reddish glory burst into being above him, and cast itself down toward the depths like mesh after mesh of the finest-drawn gold. The great light which lived above the sky during the day, brightening or dimming according to some pattern no Shar ever had fathomed, was blooming again.

  Few men, caught in the warm glow of that light, could resist looking up at it, especially when the top of the sky itself wrinkled and smiled just a moment’s climb or swim away. Yet, as always, Lavon’s bemused upward look gave him back nothing but his own distorted, hobbling reflection, and a reflection of the plant on which he rested.

  Here was the upper limit, the third of the three surfaces of the universe. The first surface was the Bottom, where the water ended.

  The second surface was the thermocline, definite enough in summer to provide good sledding, but easily penetrable if you knew how.

  The third surface was the sky. One could no more pass through that surface than one could penetrate the Bottom, nor was there any better reason to try. There the universe ended. The light which played over it daily, waxing and waning as it chose, seemed to be one of its properties.