The Caterpillars Question - txt

by Farmer, Phillip Jose

  They went down the steps again and passed through several tunnels lit only by pine torches set in wall sconces. They emerged into a vast cavern. This was well illuminated by light from plants growing on the walls and ceilings. These were tangled vines growing luminiferous pods.

  A twenty-foot-wide stream of water coursed from a hole in one wall to a hole at the far end of the cavern. A bridge formed of material like spiderweb silk, its cables attached to the cavern ceiling, crossed the stream. The mouth-watering odor of meat cooked in stone braziers filled the cavern. The smoke drifted slowly along and was sucked up by a large hole in the ceiling. About thirty honkers, adults and a few children, were here. The youngsters were like children on Earth or elsewhere, playing, making a lot of noise, running around, having a good time, and testing the adults' patience.

  Jack expected to be annoyed by them, especially since he needed quiet and privacy to think about his plans and also to talk (via Tappy) to the Integrator. Surprisingly, the noise was not to bother him. Perhaps, his increased empathy made him more tolerant.

  Then he caught sight of a table near the wall and forgot about the infants. He walked to it and bent down to look intently at the objects on its top. They were three concentric circles made of some brown fibrous cardboard and, in the center, a tiny rose-red stone. Bending over to get closer to the stone, he saw that one side of it had been carved to make a sort of throne.

  The inner circle bore on its inner side the same images and symbols that were on the crater-wall ring. These were also on the inner side of the two outer rings. By them were several piles of papyruslike paper. The top pages of these were inked with handwritten characters. These honkers were not proliferates.

  He called to Tappy. Before she could reach him, a honker walked swiftly to him and began "talking." When Tappy got to him, she said, "It's a model of the crater bands. Apparently, there are two similar rings around the one we can see. They're concealed inside the cliff. He says this model is the latest in a long, long series. The honkers have been studying it for many centuries, maybe millennia, trying to figure out what the function of the real rings is."

  A series of loud blasts from the Integrator interrupted her. She said, "He wants to talk to us. Now."

  The Integrator sat on a high-backed and intricately carved chair by a table. He was feeding his body-beasts with meat and vegetables. Another honker was doling out live insects to the mossy oysterlike thing covering the shaman's genitals. Somewhere in the mass beneath its thick greenish hair covering was a mouth.

  At a gesture from the Integrator, Jack and Tappy sat down. But the shaman indicated that he had meant for Tappy only to take a chair.

  She said, "Sorry, Jack. He says this is going to be a long talk, more like a lecture, actually. He doesn't want to be interrupted by my translating what he says. You wander around, do whatever you want to do while he talks. Later, I'll report what he's told me."

  "Don't forget to ask him about the model of the crater rings," Jack said. "I want to know everything he knows."

  "Runner there, that's his name, Runner," Tappy said, indicating the male who had told her about the model, "will guide you. You can go wherever you wish, but he'll see you don't go into dangerous areas."

  Jack bent over and kissed her forehead. "See you." But he did not leave at once. He stayed to watch the Imaget snatch a tiny piece of meat from a dish near the edge of the table. It had to move fast to escape the lunge of the snake thing. Jack paled. It would be a terrible loss if the Imaget were killed.

  However, the hatchling was the fastest creature he had ever seen. Its jump was a blur like a hummingbird's wings in flight. In fact, it looked as if it had zipped from this continuum into another and then immediately reappeared in this world. That was a fanciful analogy, which, however, might be true.

  An estimated hour later, he returned from his tour. Though he could not understand his guide's language, he had comprehended from the gestures that the many caves he had seen were a very small part of the complex. Part of it was a natural cavern network. Another part had been dug by others than honkers, if he interpreted Runner's hand signs rightly. And the honkers had extended the work of their predecessors.

  Many of the caves contained animals and insects. These were obviously being mutated into species the honkers intended to use for their own purposes. One great chamber particularly fascinated him. Millions of green red-spotted flies were in cages made of what seemed to be glass. But this material was excreted by a horde of worms laid out in frameworks. The stuff, when dried, could be used as glassy panes.

  Runner managed to impart the information that the flies were very poisonous.

  Another chamber was devoted to a fungus that ate metal and plastic. The latter material, Jack guessed, came from artifacts which the honkers had stolen from the Gaol or picked up after they had been discarded.

  When Jack was led back to the council chamber, Tappy and the shaman were still at the table. She was drinking ruby-red liquor from a strangely shaped goblet of cut quartz. The Integrator was sipping his drink from another curiously formed stone goblet. Jack took several seconds to realize that the container was made of bone, not stone, and that it had to be the skull of an upper-class Gaol.

  The shaman gestured for Jack to sit down. A honker brought him a stone goblet shaped like a hawk with half-folded wings. Its eyes were large emeralds. The liquor smelled like wine and was wine. It was too thick for his taste, but the glow that came swiftly after swallowing it was pleasant.

  "I like it fine," Tappy said. "But you should know it's made from insect blood."

  If he had not swallowed so much of the liquor, he might have gotten sick. By now, he didn't care if it had been made from horse manure. This world wasn't such a bad place after all. In fact, he felt as if everything was going to work out in Tappy's favor. The Gaol would be utterly defeated, and all would be well in the world.

  While Tappy related her conversation, the shaman went to sleep. Some sudden honks and the wild waving of his hip tentacles indicated that he was having a dream. Or a nightmare.

  "What'd he say about that?" Jack said, pointing at the crater-ring model.

  "The shamans still have no idea what the crater ring is for. It was there when their ancestors climbed the crater wall and came down onto the floor. By the way, their name for themselves can be translated as 'the Latest.' Nobody knows why they're named that. They do have myths about its origin.

  "Anyway, when the Latest got here, they saw the moving circle, and, of course, it's intrigued them and even become part of their religion. The original settlers thought that the images on the band were representations of the gods and the symbols were holy messages. If deciphered, they would bring permanent peace and plenty to the honkers, other peoples, too. The more enlightened now believe that the ring was made by a species that came here from another planet."

  "Ring? The model shows three rings. How do they know there are three?"

  "You'll know when we see a burial chamber of the people who made the rings. The honkers call them the Makers. We'll see the chamber soon. Oh, yes, I almost forgot. The honkers call the rings the Generator."

  "Generator of what?"

  "The murals in the burial cave imply that the rings are a generator of some sort."

  "And what happened to the Makers?"

  "The honkers believe that the Makers built the Generator as a weapon against the Gaol, a last-ditch stand. But the Gaol killed all of them before it could be used. The Gaol had no idea what the ring was for. They consider it to be a great curiosity but not worth intensive investigation. To them, it's some kind of religious artifact."

  "All those millennia, and the honkers don't have the slightest idea what its purpose is or how to operate it?"

  Despite his strong pleadings, she refused to say more about it.

  The Integrator was absent during the following "day." Jack asked Tappy if she knew where he was.

  "He's gone ahead to the burial chamber we're to visit. He
didn't say much about what he'd be doing there except that he had to repaint some of the murals. They're so ancient they need retouching now and then. I suppose he's going to prepare the chamber ritually for our visit."

  The day after that, they were awakened early— or he thought it was early since there was no sun to go by— and were given breakfast. Immediately afterward, Candy accompanying them, they started their journey through the tunnels and the caves. Three lesser shamans led the way. These lacked the implanted animals, but the genitals of each were covered with the mossy oyster-thing, and each had a pale snake-thing coiled around his or her neck.

  Throughout the journey, Tappy was silent. Jack asked her what was depressing her. She only replied that she had much to think about and was trying to work her way through them. Would he please not be worried about her? She would be all right soon.

  After three meals, the party came to a halt. The Integrator was waiting for them in a tunnel. The luminiferous pods growing on the vines on the wall showed two large packs, a large canteen, a chamber pot, and a collapsible wooden ladder on the floor. The Integrator had camped here, Jack thought. But why at this place? It looked like every other tunnel the party had traversed except that one section of the wall was bare of the vegetation.

  But the honkers, including the lesser shamans, were obviously awed. All halted when they were thirty feet from the Integrator, bowed, and honked softly.

  Tappy had spoken about the chambers during their trip. Nobody but the chief shaman entered them except for some highly placed shamans who repainted the murals when they needed it.

  The Integrator, honking a "chant" over and over, danced around the tunnel in a tight circle. Then he went to the bare section and pushed on it. It swung out at one side and in at the other. It was a door of stone on pivots in its center. Musty air rushed out.

  Jack looked into the darkness within. The shaman, after some more incomprehensible "chanting" and dancing, lit a pine torch. The flame wavered slightly, showing that the tunnel had some ventilation. The shaman posed in the doorway, facing toward Tappy. He honked at her, genuflected three times, turned, and walked into the darkness.

  Tappy said, "You and Candy are allowed, too, Jack."

  Candy just behind him, he followed the girl and the shaman for about twenty feet. The tunnel began curving here. After two hundred paces, counted by Jack, the tunnel straightened out. Immediately, a large arched doorway was ahead of them. The shaman walked through it, his torch lighting up the immense chamber. He set that in a wall sconce, then lit two more torches he had carried in a bag on his back. He handed one to Tappy and one to Jack.

  There were several fascinating objects seen dimly in the shadows deeper within the chamber. But a mural near him caused him to stop and study it by the light of his torch. It looked as if it had been painted yesterday. In fact, he could smell the paint.

  He said, "I can't believe it."

  Above him was a painting depicting, among other things, a group of four people. No. Change that to three people and one weird being who looked as if it were half machine. The human beings were a young female, a somewhat older male, and a woman. But a section of clockwork and wires was exposed in a hole in the woman's chest. That meant what? That she was not really a human being. She was an android.

  And, though the half-machine did not look much like Garth, it portrayed a cyborg fitted with wheels.

  To one side was another painting. It was clearly the space-time vessel in which he and Tappy had taken refuge and found the androids in it. Squiggly lines around it represented, he supposed, the pulsations emanating from the vessel.

  All the images had been freshly repainted.

  Jack's heart was clenching as if it were a hand desperately squeezing down on ectoplasm. Though he did not want to look again at the young female in the painting, he forced himself to do so.

  She did not have Tappy's features. But she had that sweet expression Tappy so often had and that wondering look. Like the faces of Alice in Wonderland and of Dorothy in Oz. The artist had also managed to give a sense of both vulnerability and invulnerability. Jack had never seen anything to match the contradictory impressions in any work by an Earth artist, and he thought he had seen all the works of the great ones and the near-greats.

  She wore a blue robe of some sort. It was not a nightgown, but it could easily have been used for that purpose.

  A circular section in her breast and stomach areas was white. Representations of rays emanating from the central brightness shot through her body and several feet beyond her. Was that symbolic of the Imago?

  He looked more closely. On her left breast was a vague tentacled shape through which the fabric of the robe could be seen. The Imaget?

  The hairs on the back of his neck seemed to be standing up, and cold raced over his skin.

  The young male did not have his face, and his clothes were not those of any Terrestrial. But he held a painter's brush in one hand.

  The four certainly seemed to represent prophecies or predictions of the coming of Tappy, Jack, Candy, and Garth. Impossible— yet, there they were, and the young human female shone with the Imago within her, and she bore the Imaget on her breast.

  He stepped back, lifted the torch higher, and saw the image above the group. It was of tongues of fire shooting above the heads of the four persons. Above these were images of the crater-wall rings and their figures and symbols.

  From its interior sprang more tongues of fire. And in their midst were upper-class Gaol, the ratcages. Some of them were burning.

  How would the rings be powered? The outer one had been rotating slowly for many thousands of years. Some kind of machinery had to be turning it, the other rings, too, he supposed. Nothing in the painting indicated what that could be. Was there a vast engine deep under the crater floor? What did it use for fuel? A shaft plunging to the hot core of the planet? A shaft which conducted the heat to the machine, where the heat was converted to electricity? Or had the Makers possessed means of which Terrestrials had no inkling?

  By now the Integrator was bobbing up and down and whirling with an agility and endurance amazing for such an old person. He was also honking loudly.

  Jack moved close to Tappy and spoke softly. "This couldn't be just coincidence."

  He felt numb, but deep within him was a fiercely hot ball of excitement. "My God! Predictions can't be valid. No one can look into the future and see what's coming. Not about what individuals'll be doing, anyway. Especially if they won't exist for thousands of years. If true prophecies or predictions could be made, we'd just be machines rolling along tracks that were laid in the beginning of time. There'd be no free will.

  "Past, present, and future would be fixed. We wouldn't be responsible for anything we did, good or bad. No, I just can't swallow that."

  Tappy looked as if she had just seen some horrible monster coming out of a wall.

  She said, "I can't believe it either, Jack. The Integrator told me about this, but he made me promise not to tell you about it. It was all I could do to keep silent. But I think I couldn't really believe what he said. I thought we should see this before we got high hopes, too high, and then fell off the wall like Humpty Dumpty."

  Jack tried to dispel the numbness but failed. When he spoke, it was as if he were under water.

  "Maybe someone— who, I don't know— is trying to make this prophecy, this prophetic mural, come true. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy. That'd be the only rational explanation. But who could be doing this if that is the case?"

  "I'm really confused," Tappy said.

  "Me, too."

  She smiled, though it was obviously difficult for her to do. She said, "What difference does it make if we are programmed? Does it really matter if Fate or Someone has determined our lives? Or if we screw it all up by ourselves? We think we have free will. Even if it's a delusion, we wouldn't believe it. Not if we had solid proof. We'd deny it. So why worry about it, rant and rail and curse the gods? We can only act as if we truly wer
e the masters of our destinies."

  Jack could only grunt. But she was right. And her attitude and her manner of speaking showed that she had matured far beyond her years. Perhaps the false experiences had had some effect after all.

  "I suppose," he said, "that the brightness within the girl and the rays shining from it symbolize the Imago?"

  "That's what the Latest believe. That's why the Integrator sent that honker to plant the egg-seed in me. The ability to do that, make the egg-seed, I mean, was within their powers long, long ago. They were just waiting for the right person to come along— me— and to do it. There's another burial chamber, miles from here, that gives instructions for doing that. It's in the characters of the alphabet used by the Makers, but with it are images that indicate how to do it."