They couldn’t believe he was real, but they had to; there he was. He refused indignantly at first to surrender his individuality to the pool, but was argued into it; how better could he know his beloved? And, once in, he wanted to stay forever and had to be argued out of it; did not absence make the heart grow fonder?
To their shared consciousness he brought fire.
The old man they awakened was one Spyros Gulbenkian. Tropile felt himself abashed before him to have claimed the name of Wolf. Spyros was a wolfpack all by himself, in a quiet way. Half Paris had worked for him and never known it for a second. His life had been incredibly busy; incidents crowded it like watchworks, and from each passing minute he had learned a new thing, a new tool or weapon, and he never forgot. He was mightily amused; he woke without shock or fear. “So I’ve cheated death!” he said, delighted. “The one thing I never hoped for! Now what is this Group Mind you tell me about? There’s no question of my being stubborn, of course—I owe you people a great deal!”
Tropile: “It’s power—sheer power. You think faster, clearer and more deeply than you ever believed possible.”
Alla Narova: “It’s being more intensely yourself. It’s feeling utterly alive.”
Mercedes van Dellen: “It’s very pleasant. I’m not sure what we do when we’re that way, but it’s nothing wrong.”
Kim Seong: “It’s no more foolish than anything else.”
Corso Navarone: “Foolish woman, it is bliss!”
Spyros Gulbenkian: “Hmmm.” But try it he did, and they found him welcome as ballast; he kept them from making mistakes. Before him in a brief session they had calculated the number of molecules in the universe; with him they did it again—this time, right.
All he wanted to know was: “Where did the mathematics come from? I’m aware that none of us is a mathematician, and I don’t trust something-for-nothing, ever!”
“I think the mathematics came out of the world,” Tropile said. “I think mathematics is just a picture of the world. If you have eyes and ears and enough brain, you have mathematics. We had enough brain. I notice that we don’t have botany, except for Kim’s Lichen Shades Cult.”
“As long as it is not something for nothing,” Spyros Gulbenkian said. “Shall we have some words with the large black gentleman who is sleeping with his mouth open? What splendid teeth! Teeth alone are all I mourn from my youth.”
So they greeted the seventh petal, Django Tembo of Africa. He woke to them yawning and smiling, good-humored. He alone of them had dreamed, long and pleasant dreams of wives and children. He had been an Untouchable dung-carrier in Durban, but somehow his heart was the heart of a king. He lived to serve by commanding, and by commanding to serve. They read his noble, guileless soul and fell in love with it, and he with theirs.
The last branch of the snowflake was unprepossessing. It was the body of a scrawny youth with an ill-shaped head and coarse black hair. They felt their way into his consciousness and memory, and found not much of either. Me Willy. Shifting planes of color, somehow sad—they knew it was sunset beyond the crags of Sonora, but he did not. Mama go. Mama pretty. A brown bulk with people in it; it made him dully wonder why, but they knew the Las Cruces House of Five Regulations, and how within a year he would have Donated under Regulation Two (anent Innocents). Beans good. Beans with honey good.
They conferred in dismay on what they had found. “We’d be crippling ourselves!” Tropile cried.
“I don’t know about that,” said Mercedes van Dellen unexpectedly. “The poor child never had a chance. His mother must have left him. Did you ever hear such longing and unhappiness?”
Tropile, like all Lucifers, Captain Flandrays, Byrons, Duquesnes and other sardonic folk, was convinced that there was no sorrow like unto his sorrow; he thought surely that Mercedes van Dellen might have known as much. He fell sulkily silent.
Kim Seong cackled that it was all one to her; the difference between an idiot and the wisest man who ever was did not make any difference to anything as far as she could see. She enjoyed their consternation.
Django Tembo decided for them. They invited Willy to join them not with words and syllogisms but by opening like a flower and letting him be the butterfly. His shy animal soul flowed into theirs and they were richer by it. He had been an animal, with an animal’s powers of joy and sorrow, undiluted by apprehension for the one or philosophical consolations for the other.
Spyros Gulbenkian later said wistfully: “Perhaps being young was not so bad after all.” This was during a brief spell during which they disengaged and were themselves apart again. Such spells became briefer and more infrequent.
Chiefly the Snowflake floated in its tank and thought in its own mode, in eight-part counterpoint rather than in human melodic lines. Sometimes it thought in chord progressions, battering at problems and questions until they yielded.
Ceaselessly it did its work for the Pyramids; no second went past without the sixteen hands’ clicking manipulation of their switches. Ceaselessly it did its own work of analysis and planning. The difference was that for the Pyramids it did its work with eight times Rashevsky’s number of switchings; for itself it worked with Rashevsky’s Number of switchings to the eighth power.
In human transcript, the Snowflake began by exhausting all its memories and arranging them for ready access—the ancient dream accomplished at last. Did an off-color rice grain in three-year-old Kim Seong’s Korean bowl fit into a problem? It was there. Must Corso Navarone remember the serial number of a bicycle that whizzed past him in Milan one Friday when he was twelve? He remembered. If a persuasive shrug of Spyros Gulbenkian thirty years ago in Paris was of use, they had it when it was needed.
The Snowflake decided: “I am unfulfilled. Sex does not matter, for immortality is possible to me. Love does not matter, for I have more than love. What matters is increasing my store of sense-data, and taking readings off scales.”
But when this was done the Snowflake was not satisfied. There was something about the sum of its individual memories taken as a whole that totalled more than the sum of each individual one of them. There was a collective memory of some kind.
For some reason, it seemed rather urgent.
So the Snowflake put its collective mind to work, and after a time was able to remember what that collective memory was about.
Oh, yes, humanity.
The human race was in trouble.
At first the Snowflake (trying one thing, then another) thought that bringing human beings to the binary planet would, at least, rescue those particular individuals from their trouble. The Snowflake did that for a while, since it was so easy, relatively speaking, to redefine “ripeness” for the Pyramid on Mount Everest. (The Mount Everest Pyramid, of course, did not question its directives. The Pyramids collected ripe Components when available, according to the ancient maxim of “Take a chicken when you can.” It never occurred to any Pyramid that their Components might stockpile Components.)
Then the Snowflake discovered there were other possibilities.
Among the million million systems that filled the binary planet were a great number whose functions were construction, maintenance and repair. All of these were semi-intelligent and semi-autonomous, which is to say they were directed by controlling mechanisms—by other Components.
What would happen, the Snowflake wondered, if they were to try to awaken some of these others?
When they tried it, it was very nearly a disaster. They chose to begin with a tunnel-digging system that had not been used for some forty thousand years. Its Components were not at all human. What made it really bad was that they were soft-bodied slugs no longer than a thumb; on their home world they had clung to the underside of great jungle leaves, and their worst enemy was a primate-looking sort of arboreal mollusc which hunted them out and ate them. When they realized what sort of creature’s mind was touching theirs they went mad with fear. The drilling machine corkscrewed and curlicued shafts through a dozen major power centers. Batta
lions of repair systems raced into action to deal with the damage. It was a very high probability that a Pyramid itself might before long come sailing by, to see what was wrong.
Fortunately, Tropile’s Snowflake still had firm control over Component selection and replacement. The Snowflake sadly dumped the mad Components into the recycling hoppers, and took thought for the future.
It was not a good idea to awaken Components at random.
Therefore it would be best merely to issue commands.
There was a way of doing that without detection. It relied on the redundancy of Pyramid-system commands. As a fail-safe measure, every click of their controls was repeated.
Thereafter the Snowflake began to malfunction, as far as the Pyramids were concerned, on a level below detectability. Man’s idiot servant the thermostat is not, except in laboratories, set to perform with knife-edge precision; there is always some tolerance. In an automobile of the Car Age the radiator thermostat was doing well if it opened and closed within a range of ten degrees. Home oil-burner thermostats were more precise, operating to plus or minus a degree, but what is a degree? It is ten thousand ten-thousandths of a degree, a million millionths of a degree. There is always room for improvement, so much room that no engineer bothers beyond the area significant to him.
The Snowflake was allowed one false transmission per thousand-odd clicks; the process in which it was engaged would not suffer from such a tolerance. There is no perfection. There is no sense in doing the work that insures one thousand clicks out of one thousand are dead-sure accurate—except when your thermostat is part Wolf.
In the Pyramids work upon which the Snowflake was engaged, it was now assigned to send messages to automatic machinery throughout the binary planet; it was building propulsion units from scratch, procurement, logistics and all. It started by scouring the planet for surplus material; it was continuously scrounging. A zinc torus in live storage would be scrutinized; it would be determined that it was last used during the Magellanic Raid as a weapons component, that in this section of the Galaxy there were no life-forms susceptible to that type of weapon (it produced a sort of marbled fog whose sight was death to the Color Sculptors of the Magellanic Cloud). The torus floated then, at the right time, to the right place to be alloyed into material for the emitter of an ion gun which would be subassembled later, and still later go into the master assembly, and still later take its proper place for maximum push when the binary next corrected its course towards more Components.
One click per thousand was false. This was low tolerance, and sensibly set that way: the Snowflake’s job was of such versatility that errors could not possibly be cumulative. It switched from this task to that continuously. Had the false clicks been random, they would have caused the zinc torus to wobble on its way to smelting, or recognizably wrong information about its function to have been applicable to dielectrics instead of conductors, say, which would have given the Snowflake pause and made it ask again.
The false clicks accumulated surprisingly. Sixteen hands delivered eighty clicks per second; by Earth-clock almost 700 thousand per day. So, five hundred times a day—margin for safety!—a cunningly-vectored error went out. The zinc toruses did not wobble except sometimes, and wrong information came in but seldom. Instead, machine-tools moved jerkily, like time-lapse photography of an opening flower. Bit by bit a queer electron tube was formed in a deserted shop. A reserve of errors was accumulated for five days and a bar was swiftly zone-refined in another; zone-melting cannot be done in time-lapse. From this were sawed and assembled transistors. In a month’s time the Snowflake, slave of the Pyramids, had a slave of its own, a Black Box of its own, programmed to drive a hair-fine copper wire from itself to the Snowflake’s tank, and this it did at a mile an hour for fifty hours.
When it arrived, the Revolt of the Thermostat had fairly begun. The Petal needed no longer to hoard its allowance of false pulses or calculate a thousand alternatives before determining which click would be most economical and strategic. The hair-fine wire homed on the switch in the left hand of Alla Narova’s petal. At the moment it made contact, the Snowflake convulsed and shifted the burden of output from her left hand to the fifteen hands remaining. Communication was now direct. “Errors” might move raw material to the idiot-box at the end of the wire which knew only how to make and move wire at present. Over that wire it would learn how to shape the raw materials into glass eyes and metal arms and rolling high-polymer feet.
It was tucked away in a corridor adjoining a foundry. The Snowflake ordered it to scan the corridor and report. The Snowflake decided: “That corridor will do for our mice.” It commissioned the slave, growing every day in size and complexity, to tap the binary’s water system and install a row of faucets along the corridor wall, and then to make up a decent nutrient mix by stealing glucose and whatever minerals and amino acids were required from the millenially-ancient tangle of piping that overlayed and undermined the metabolic-products area of the planet, and to conduct the mix via another row of faucets to the same corridor.
The Snowflake decided: “We will now explore the planet.”
Not experimentally but by design they programmed their slavish Black Box, every hour less the idiot, to send out spies. They went forth like small spiders, their metallic shine dulled by lampblack. Their eightfold eyes scanned corridors, tubes, wires, vats, reactors. Machines were built to build machines to build spies; spy-types modified rapidly by descent. There were long-range primary scouts, tarantula-like because they needed fair-sized power packs for speed and range, small-headed because they scanned only in a general way. A week later there were more thoughtful, analytic types, carried pick-a-back by tarantulas in pairs. These had egg-heads, crammed with eyes, ears, noses, thermocouples, ion counters, spectrophotometers. For coarse measurement of space some went out in tandem, each the eye of a rangefinder of variable base-line. For fine measurement there were the tiny ones who clicked off exactly a millimeter at each step and who had antennae exactly one micron in diameter.
The Snowflake learned how many Pyramids there were on the binary: seven.
The spies watched them continuously and the Snowflake learned to know one Pyramid from another. They were only approximately the same size; there was a largest and a smallest. There were appreciable differences of strength, pattern and rate of change in the electromagnetic fields that surrounded each of them. One of them was a glutton. It repaired much more often than the others to the metabolic-products complex, but it was a difference of degree and not of an order of magnitude. They all consumed many tons of chemicals each clockday, absorbing them from a pelting spray that surrounded them on their three non-propulsive sides.
So much the Snowflake learned about the Pyramids. After months of intensive study they had the answers to a thousand questions about them...though not, of course, to the questions that really mattered. Like:
Why did the Pyramids do what they did? And,
Where did they come from? And, most of all,
How could they be defeated?
It was always a great temptation to the Snowflake to try to awaken other human Components. They debated the question often among themselves. “We could use some help,” Alla Narova would say, and Spyros Gulbenkian would snap, “They would betray us to the Pyramids!” and Tropile would snarl, “We’ve already made our decision on this. Let’s stick to it!” And then on another day perhaps Glenn Tropile, dismayed by the immensity of their task and the slow rate at which it was going, might venture, “Well, maybe we could just trying awakening one other human.” And Alla Narova would flash, “No! Oh, no! You were right, it’s too dangerous,” and Willy would gently say, “Please. Please. Don’t fight, please.”
The non-human Components were less of a temptation, because that first terrifying experience had not been forgotten. All the same, they were interesting. There were so many of them! There were soft-bodied creatures and chitinous ones, things with legs, or fins, or feathers—one bunch had all three. The prep
onderant chemistry was C2 and H2O, like Earth’s, but there were also methane-breathers, and silicon-based organisms...well, no, “organisms” might be the wrong word, because the tiny, faceted, filamenterous beings made of tainted silicon ate not, neither did they breathe; light turned itself into electricity on their body surfaces; they seemed to grow by accreting silicon dust on their external areas, and reproduce by splitting along defined lines of cleavage.
How many separate races were involved?
Even with all its other preoccupations, the Snowflake’s curiosity drove it to try to estimate the number. It was impossible to be precise, because the discovery that the purplish banana-shaped wrigglers and the mosquitoid creatures the size of a roc were simply sexually dimorphic versions of the same being cast doubt on all calculations. Especially since a number of other species seemed to alter forms as they grew. Nevertheless the Snowflake achieved an estimate:
Not less that 480, nor probably more than 600, different species had been kidnapped as Components for the Pyramids.
The next calculation that occurred to the curiosity of the Snowflake was far easier to make, but far more disturbing.
From the Pyramids’ navigation systems they learned that the next planetfall was still over a thousand years away. Nor was that a particularly long voyage for the Pyramid planet. Under average, if anything.
So...
Assuming that an average trip lasted two thousand years. Assuming that at least half of the target planets did, in fact, fail to produce Components worth harvesting. Assuming that the Components already observed represented separate planets of origin....
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