III
Samm floated like a dead man in his gargantuan body.
Folly drifted like a fruit beside his hand.
At last there came words from Finsternis:
“You can think now, if you want to. You can chatter at each other again. I’m through.”
Samm thought at him, and the thought-pattern was troubled and confused. “What happened? I felt as though the immaculate grid of space had been pinched together in a tight fold. I felt you do something, and then there was silence around us again.”
“Talking,” said Finsternis, “is not operational and it is not required of me. But there are only three of us here, so I might as well tell you what happened. Can you hear me, Folly?”
“Yes,” she said, weakly.
“Are we on course,” asked Finsternis, “for the third planet of Linschoten XV?”
Folly paused while checking all her instruments, which were more complicated and refined than those carried by the other two, since she was the maintenance unit. “Yes,” said she at last. “We are exactly on course. I don’t know what happened, if anything did happen.”
“Something happened, all right,” said Finsternis, with the gratified savagery of a person whose quick-and-cruel nature is rewarded only by meeting and overcoming hostility in real life.
“Was it a space dragon, like they used to meet on the old, old ships?”
“No, nothing like that,” said Finsternis, communicative for once, since this was something operational to talk about. “It doesn’t even seem to be in this space at all. Something just rises up among us, like a volcano coming out of solid space. Something violent and wild and alive. Do you two still have eyes?”
“Seeing devices for the ordinary light band?” asked Samm.
“Of course we do!” said Finsternis. “I will try to fix it so that you will have a visible input.”
There was a sharp pause from Finsternis.
The voice came again, with much strain.
“Do not do anything. Do not try to help me. Just watch. If it wins, destroy me quickly. It might try to capture us and get back to Earth.”
Folly felt like telling Finsternis that this was unnecessary, since the first motion toward return would trigger destruction devices which had been built into each of the three of them, beyond reach, beyond detection, beyond awareness. When the Instrumentality said, “Do not come back,” the Instrumentality meant it.
She said nothing.
She watched Finsternis instead.
Something began to happen.
It was very odd.
Space itself seemed to rip and leak.
In the visible band, the intruder looked like a fountain of water being thrown randomly to and fro.
But the intruder was not water.
In the visible light-band, it glowed like wild fire rising from a shimmering column of blue ice. Here in space there was nothing to burn, nothing to make light: she knew that Finsternis was translating unresolvable phenomena into light.
She sensed Samm moving one of his giant fists uncontrollably, in a helpless, childish gesture of protest.
She herself did nothing but watch, as alertly and passively as she could.
Nevertheless, she felt wrenched. This was no material phenomenon. It was wild unformed life, intruding out of some other proportion of space, seeking material on which to impose its vitality, its frenzy, its identity. She could see Finsternis as a solid black cube, darker than mere darkness, drifting right into the column. She watched the sides of Finsternis.
On the earlier part of the trip, since they had left the people and the planoform ship and had been discharged in a fast trajectory toward Linschoten XV, Finsternis’ side had seemed like dull metal, slightly burnished, so that Folly had to brush him lightly with radar to get a clear image of him.
Now his sides had changed.
They had become as soft and thick as velvet.
The strange volcano-fountain did not seem to have much in the way of sensing devices. It paid no attention to Samm or to herself. The dark cube attracted it, as a shaft of sunlight might attract a baby or as the rustle of paper might draw the attention of a kitten.
With a slight twist of its vitality and direction, the whole column of burning, living brightness plunged upon Finsternis, plunged and burned out and went in and was seen no more.
Finsternis’ voice, clear and cheerful, sounded out to both of them.
“It’s gone now.”
“What happened to it?” asked Samm.
“I ate it,” said Finsternis.
“You what?” cried Folly.
“I ate it,” said Finsternis. He was talking more than he ever had before. “At least, that’s the only way I can describe it. This machine they gave me or made me into or whatever they did, it’s really rather good. It’s powerful. I can feel it absorbing things, taking them in, taking them apart, putting them away. It’s something like eating used to be when I was a person. That wild thing attacked me, wrapped me up, devoured me. All I did was to take it in, and now it’s gone. I feel sort of full. I suppose my machines are sorting out samples of it to send away to rendezvous points in little rockets. I know that I have sixteen small rockets inside me, and I can feel two of them getting ready to move. Neither one of you could have done what I do. I was built to absorb whole suns if necessary, break them down, freeze them down, change their molecular structure, and shoot their vitality off in one big useless blast on the radio spectrum. You couldn’t do anything like that, Samm, even if you do have arms and legs and a head and a voice—if we ever get into an atmosphere for you to use it in. You couldn’t do what I have just done, Folly.”
“You’re good,” said Folly, with emphasis. But she added: “I can repair you.”
Obviously offended, Finsternis withdrew into his silence.
Samm said to Folly, “How much further to destination?”
Said Folly promptly, “Seventy-nine earth years, four months and three days, six hours and two minutes, but you know how little that means out here. It could seem like a single afternoon or it could feel to us like a thousand lifetimes. Time doesn’t work very well for us.”
“How did Earth ever find this place, anyhow?” asked Samm.
“All I know is that it was two very strong telepaths, working together on the planet Mizzer. An ex-dictator named Casher O’Neill and an ex-Lady named Celalta. They were doing a bit of psionic astronomy and suddenly this signal came in strong and clear. You know that telepaths can catch directions very accurately. Even over immense distances. And they can get emotions, too. But they are not very good at actual images or things. Somebody else checked it out for them.”
“M-m-m,” said Samm. He had heard all this before. Out of sheer boredom, he went back to swimming vigorously. The body might not really be his, but it made him feel good to exercise it.
Besides, he knew that Folly watched him with pleasure—great pleasure, and a little bit of envy.
Casher O’Neill and the Lady Celalta had finished with making love.
They had lain with their bodies tired and their minds clear, relaxed. They had stretched out on a blanket just above the big gushing spring which was the source of the Ninth Nile. Both telepaths, they could hear a bird-couple quarreling inside a tree, the male bird commanding the female to get out and get to work and the female answering by dropping deeper and deeper into a fretful and irritable sleep.
The Lady Celalta had whispered a thought to her lover and master, Casher O’Neill.
“To the stars?”
“The stars?” thought he with a grumble. They were both strong telepaths. He had been imprinted, in some mysterious way, with the greatest telepath-hypnotist of all time, the Honorable Agatha Madigan. In the Lady Celalta he had a companion worthy of his final talents, a natural telepath who could herself reach not only all of Mizzer but some of the nearer stars. When they teamed up together, as she now proposed, they could plunge into dusty infinities of depth and bring back feeling
s or images which no Go-Captain had ever found with his ship.
He sat up with a grunt of assent.
She looked at him fondly, possessively, her dark eyes alight with alertness, happiness, and adventure.
“Can I lift?” she asked, almost timidly.
When two telepaths worked together, one cleared the vision for both of them as far as their combined minds could reach and then the other sprang, with enormous effort, as far and as fast as possible toward any target which presented itself. They had found strange things, sometimes beautiful or dramatic ones, by this method.
Casher was already drinking enormous gulps of air, filling his lungs, holding his breath, letting go with a gasp, and then inhaling deeply and slowly again. In this way he reoxygenated his brain very thoroughly for the huge effort of a telepathic dive into the remote depth of space. He did not even speak to her, nor did he telepath a word to her; he was conserving his strength for a good jump.
He merely nodded to her.
The Lady Celalta, too, began the deep breathing, but she seemed to need it less than did Casher.
They were both sitting up, side by side, breathing deeply.
The cool night sands of Mizzer were around them, the harmless gurgle of the Ninth Nile was beside them, the bright star-cluttered sky of Mizzer was above them.
Her hand reached out and took hold of his. She squeezed his hand. He looked at her and nodded to her again.
Within his mind, Mizzer and its entire solar system seemed to burst into flame with a new kind of light. The radiance of Celalta’s mind trailed off unevenly in different directions, but there, almost 2° off the pole of Mizzer’s ecliptic, he felt something wild and strange, a kind of being which he had never sensed before. Using Celalta’s mind as a base, he let his mind dive for it.
The distance of the plunge left them both dizzy, sitting on the quiet night sands of Mizzer. It seemed to both of them that the mind of man had never reached so far before.
The reality of the phenomenon was undoubtable.
There were animals all around them, the usual categories: runners, hunters, jumpers, climbers, swimmers, hiders, and handlers. It was some of the handlers who were intensely telepathic themselves.
The image of man created an immediate, murderous response.
“Cackle gabble, gabble cackle, man, man, man, eat them, eat them!”
Casher and Celalta were both so surprised that they let the contact go, after making sure that they had touched a whole world full of beings, some of them telepathic and probably civilized.
How had the beings known “man”? Why had their response been immediate? Why anthropophagous and homicidal?
They took time, before coming completely out of the trance, to make a careful, exact note of the direction from which the danger-brains had shrieked their warning.
This they submitted to the Instrumentality, shortly after the incident.
And that was how, unknown to Folly, Samm, and Finsternis, the inhabitants on the third planet of Linschoten XV had come to the attention of mankind.
IV
As a matter of fact, the three wanderers later on felt a vague, remote telepathic contact which they sensed as being warmhearted and human, and therefore did not try to track down, with their minds or their weapons. It was O’Neill and Celalta, many years later by Mizzer time, reaching to see what the Instrumentality had done about Linschoten XV.
Folly, Samm, and Finsternis had no suspicion that the two most powerful telepaths in the human area of the galaxy had stroked them, searched them, felt them through, and seen things about them which the three of them did not know about themselves or about each other.
Casher O’Neill said to the Lady Celalta, “You got it, too?”
“A beautiful woman, encased in a little ship?”
Casher nodded. “A redhead with skin as soft and transparent as living ivory? A woman who was beautiful and will be beautiful again?”
“That’s what I got,” said the Lady Celalta. “And the tired old man, weary of his children and weary of his own life because his children were weary of him.”
“Not so old,” said Casher O’Neill. “And isn’t that a spectacular piece of machinery they put him into? A metal giant. It felt like something about a quarter of a kilometer high. Acid-proof. Cold-proof. Won’t he be surprised when he finds that the Instrumentality has rejuvenated his own body inside that monster?”
“He certainly will be,” said the Lady Celalta happily, thinking of the pleasant surprise which lay ahead of a man whom she would never know or see with her own bodily eyes.
They both fell silent.
Then said the Lady Celalta, “But the third person…” There was a shiver in her voice as though she dared not ask the question. “The third person, the one in the cube.” She stopped, as though she could neither ask nor say more.
“It was not a robot or a personality cube,” said Casher O’Neill. “It was a human being all right. But it’s crazy. Could you make out, Celalta, as to whether it was male or female?”
“No,” said she, “I couldn’t tell. The other two seemed to think that it was male.”
“But did you feel sure?” asked Casher.
“With that being, I felt sure of nothing. It was human, all right, but it was stranger than any lost hominid we have ever felt around the forgotten stars. Could you tell, Casher, whether it was young or old?”
“No,” said he. “I felt nothing—only a desperate human mind with all its guards up, living only because of the terrible powers of the black cube, the sun-killer in which it rode. I never sensed someone before who was a person without characteristics. It’s frightening.”
“The Instrumentality are cruel sometimes,” said Celalta.
“Sometimes they have to be,” Casher agreed.
“But I never thought that they would do that.”
“Do what?” asked Casher.
Her dark eyes looked at him. It was a different night, and a different Nile, but the eyes were only a very little bit older and they loved him just as much as ever. The Lady Celalta trembled as though she herself might think that the all-powerful Instrumentality could have hidden a microphone in the random sands. She whispered to her lover, “You said it yourself, Casher, just a moment ago.”
“Said what?” He spoke tenderly but fearlessly, his voice ringing out over the cool night sands.
The Lady Celalta went on whispering, which was very unlike her usual self. “You said that the third person was ‘crazy.’ Do you realize that you may have spoken the actual literal truth?” Her whisper darted at him like a snake.
At last, he whispered back, “What did you sense? What could you guess?”
“They have sent a madman to the stars. Or a mad woman. A real psychotic.”
“Lots of pilots,” said Casher, speaking more normally, “are cushioned against loneliness with real but artificially activated psychoses. It gets them through the real or imagined horrors of the sufferings of space.”
“I don’t mean that,” said Celalta, still whispering urgently and secretly. “I mean a real psychotic.”
“But there aren’t any. Not loose, that is,” said Casher, stammering with surprise at last. “They either get cured or they are bottled up in thought-proof satellites somewhere.”
Celalta raised her voice a little, just a little, so that she no longer whispered but spoke urgently.
“But don’t you see, that’s what they must have done. The Instrumentality made a star-killer too strong for any normal mind to guide. So the Lords got a psychotic somewhere, a real psychotic, and sent a madman out among the stars. Otherwise we could have felt its gender or its age.”
Casher nodded in silent agreement. The air did not feel colder, but he got gooseflesh sitting beside his beloved Celalta on the familiar desert sands.
“You’re right. You must be right. It almost makes me feel sorry for the enemies out near Linschoten XV. Do you see nothing of them this time? I couldn’t perceive them at all.�
��
“I did, a little,” said the Lady Celalta. “Their telepaths have caught the strange minds coming at them with a high rate of speed. The telepathic ones are wild with excitement but the others are just going cackle-gabble, cackle-gabble with each other, filled with anger, hunger, and the thought of man.”
“You got that much?” he said in wonder.
“My lord and my lover, I dived this time. Is it so strange that I sensed more than you did? Your strength lifted me.”
“Did you hear what the weapons called each other?”
“Something silly.” He could see her knitting her brows in the bright starshine which illuminated the desert almost the way that the Old Original Moon lit up the nights sometimes on Manhome itself. “It was Folly, and something like ‘Superordinated Alien Measuring and Mastery machine’ and something like ‘darkness’ in the Ancient Doyches Language.”
“That’s what I got, too,” said Casher. “It sounds like a weird team.”
“But a powerful one, a terribly powerful one,” said the Lady Celalta. “You and I, my lover and master, have seen strange things and dangers between the stars, even before we met each other, but we never saw anything like this before, did we?”
“No,” said he.
“Well, then,” said she, “let us sleep and forget the matter as much as we can. The Instrumentality is certainly taking care of Linschoten XV, and we two need not bother about it.”
And all that Samm, Folly, and Finsternis knew was that a light touch, unexplained but friendly, had gone over them from the far star region near home. Thought they, if they thought anything about it at all, “The Instrumentality, which made us and sent us, has checked up on us one more time.”
V
A few years later, Samm and Folly were talking again while Finsternis—guarded, impenetrable, uncommunicating, detectable only by the fierce glow of human life which shone telepathically out of the immense cube—rode space beside them and said nothing.
Suddenly Folly cried out to Samm loudly, “I can smell them.”
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 77
