A Maze of Stars Page 34

  Which may still be in the neighborhood!

  He stopped in his tracks as that occurred to him. It was more than simply possible. It was likely. The records showed that the Ship had possessed the power to conceal its colossal mass from any then-known form of sensor, and it defied belief that even the Shipwrights could contrive a means of detecting it. Never had such vast resources been concentrated on a single task as during the creation of the Ship; certainly nowhere in the Arm-even had all its technically advanced planets been in contact and willing to cooperate—could such a project be mounted again.

  Almost, Oach glanced around him nervously. He, who all his life had been accustomed to ceaseless monitoring by the ordinators, felt oddly disturbed by the idea that another and greater machine might be probing into the petty events of his own life without his knowledge or permission.

  When he reached his destination, he was surprised—and on reflection decided he should not have been—to find Pey was physically present in a small observation capsule behind a oneway vision shield.

  She offered a curt and silent greeting and motioned him to pay attention to what could be seen beyond the shield. Oach needed no such encouragement. Eagerly he stared at the foreigners, now visible to him for the first time, afloat in two widely separated examination chambers. At least a score of other observation capsules had clustered around them—one, surely, must contain Yep, and he wondered briefly which it was—and their bodies were partly concealed by trailing sensor threads, especially the backs of their heads. It didn’t look as though cerebral analogue analysis had yet been attempted, but doubtless it was being considered.

  The question crossed his mind: Why had a star-drive designer been summoned there? It answered itself within a heartbeat—of course: to pose questions concerning the Ship. But it was lucky for him, anyway.

  He strained to make out more details of the foreigners. As he already knew, one was male, one female. They were unmistakably of the Old Stock, like the staff of all the embassies here— not that Oach had ever seen any of them naked. Not only did they lack forehead heat organs, but despite being thicker-set, they had not been modified for long-term breath storage, nor did they boast the extended limbs his own folk now regarded as normal. A high-gravity home world? Perhaps.

  “You can talk if you like,” Pey said unexpectedly. “We shan’t distract anyone.”

  The invitation was welcome, yet Oach could not respond at once. So many questions were bombarding him, he was at a loss to select the most important. Eventually he said, “Have we found out why they’re unconscious?”

  “Oh, that was one of the first points they settled.” Pey wasn’t looking at him but fixing her attention wholly on the examination room. “They’re in a state of ordinary hypnosis, rather deep, with slowed-down metabolic functions and a relatively high degree of anesthesia. But they’re not actually unconscious. It’s more as though time for them is passing at a hundredth of the normal rate.”

  “You mean sometime soon they may realize they’ve been picked up in space and brought here?” Oach ventured.

  “Not soon,” his mother returned dryly. “But there’s bound to be some kind of trigger stimulus that will rouse them. When the physical examination is over, various possibilities will be tried.”

  “But the stimulus—it might be any of a million things! That could take years!”

  “Not necessarily. The Ship would presumably have made it fairly obvious. One imagines it knows as much about us as we do ourselves, and a great deal more about those two down there. Reasonably, one may assume that it wanted them to be found, to be well treated, to provide what data they can to us … No, I doubt it will take years to find out how to wake them up. In any case, of course, it wouldn’t be permitted. You see, equipment for cerebral analogue analysis is already being applied.”

  As much about us as we do, and a great deal more … Oach felt a shiver down his spine, which he took pains to conceal— my talent for “acting” again?—and offered the disquieting notion that had struck him on the way there.

  “Do you think the Ship is still in the vicinity?”

  “Who can say? But it behooves us all to act as though it may be. Don’t forget: The Ship, like all conscious beings, evolves with experience. Simply because we have a record of its mission instructions, it doesn’t follow that we know everything about its present behavior.”

  “So how can people say, or even think, that it makes no difference to have found out that it does come back?”

  “You disappoint me again,” his mother said, reverting to her normal sternness. “What we can’t influence—”

  “But previously we only allowed for the possibility! Now we know it’s true!”

  “Do we? Do we really? They haven’t woken up yet. What if, when they do, they claim to be the sole survivors of an experimental ship from far along the Arm that exploded in tachyonic space when it encountered our cloud, and they were the only members of the crew wearing suits equipped to return them to normal space amid the presence of so much random matter?”

  “Were their suits—?”

  “Not so far as we yet know. I said what I did to discourage you from taking so much for granted.”

  After that there was silence for a while. It took all of Oach’s dissimulatory skills to mask the embarrassment he was feeling. Oddly, he felt he was getting better at it.

  Then, without warning, Yep’s familiar voice resounded.

  “The physical examination is complete. The foreigners’ planet of origin has been determined. It is Shreng.”

  He omitted the customary mention of the order of confidence. Oach’s mouth rounded. That was rare! And astonishing, given that Shreng was not in direct contact with the Shipwrights’ agents, for it lay in Yellick’s volume of influence. Granted, Shipwright-built vessels had recently penetrated that far and beyond, clear to the first system in the Arm to be colonized, but even now Shreng did not boast its own embassy here. Something to do with the fact that the planet had no central government …? Oach could not offhand recall; personal memory was at a discount where information dating back millennia could be summoned in a trice, more accurately than any human brain could store it.

  (Excepting the Perfect? But did they exist? It was one thing to argue that humans had known how to modify themselves long enough for such accelerated evolution to be credible, something else again to claim that one could reach that goal starting with the available raw material. Oach remembered his wry image: how to summon the energy for tachyonic velocity without burning one’s fingers …)

  Aloud he said, quite without intention, “You know, Pey, if I had my choice of occupations, I’d devote my life to studying the legend of the Perfect.”

  “Why?” his mother snapped. “As a surrogate for your juvenile notions about startravel? Nothing’s ever likely to cure you of—”

  She broke off. Despite the artificial links that carried it, awe was somehow being communicated—to their capsule, doubtless to all the others, conceivably to the ordinators themselves if they were capable of such an emotion (yet had not Oach recently conceded them such a faculty: being in awe of the Ship?).

  No one was speaking; there was dull silence on all circuits. But frantic observations were in progress.

  For the foreigners were stirring: opening their eyes, rolling their thread-encumbered heads, uttering faint words that indicated they knew exactly where they were. Whispers were caught and amplified. Oddly accented, they were not the less comprehensible.

  “You must be the Shipwrights.”

  That was the man.

  “I hope we haven’t put you to too much trouble.”

  That was the woman.

  “The stimulus!” Oach blurted. “Wonderful! It was the name of their home planet!”

  “I don’t suppose,” his mother sighed, “you will ever learn to guard your tongue. It must be because you think all data can always be retrieved.

  “Well, they can’t! There isn’t time—already in our
universe there isn’t time—to go back and analyze what we’ve discovered. Not if we stopped gathering information now and spent the ages till the suns grow dim in studying it. When is that going to dawn on you?”

  At that moment it did. Blazing insight transfixed Oach and brought him horror.

  Why did I never see that? It’s so obvious! Unless there are people—that means us, so far as the Arm is concerned—who devote themselves to studying what we know, renouncing the power to, as it were, make news themselves, the efforts of those who went before, the travelers, the explorers, the adventurers, will simply go to waste!

  A vision of the dying universe as a crumbling welter of dusty libraries, of radiation-riddled memory banks, of inscriptions in languages become unreadable, of folk remaking endlessly the same mistakes their ancestors had made, beset his mind. He cried out aloud, as though in pain.

  When he recovered, Pey had gone. But there was much more he wanted to say.

  “Where’s my mother?” he demanded of the air, or rather the ordinators that were always listening. “Tell Pey to come back, or put us in touch!”

  A soft automatic voice replied, “Pey is at work on the new starship and has left orders not to be disturbed.”

  “Nonsense! She was here just now. She can’t possibly be back in orbit yet, not even with a tachyonic transmitter!”

  “Pey,” said the machine inexorably, “is at the starship. She has been there for over a week. She was not with you ‘just now.’ Make no further attempt to distract us from business in train.” They think I was hallucinating! And I must have been!

  The finality of the verdict chilled Oach to the marrow. Turning back toward the one-way wall of the capsule, he stared at what was happening in the examination room, striving to prevent his teeth from chattering.

  And knew, with terrible and utter certainty, even as he watched deft macrosurgeons removing sensor threads from the foreigners, palping their limbs, signaling than well and strongenough to support their own weight under “normal”—artificial—gravity …

  Knew, even as he heard the strangers speak their names, answer the first question (from Yep; it had to be Yep; it had to be the most important question: “Were you brought here by the Ship of Ships?” and its answer likewise had to be the one word, “Yes!”)—

  Knew that by the convoluted judgment of the ordinators that ruled his people’s lives, even before he had had the chance to offer his ingenious justification for continued existence, his clever argument about perhaps having been chosen by the Ship to help (the names were still available, he found them with instinctive speed), Menlee and Annica—

  He was condemned to termination.

  All that stood between him and death was the fact that right now everyone was too concerned with the foreigners to spare him their attention.

  That held even for the ordinators.

  “OACH!”

  The rasping voice spoke from behind him. He recognized it, of course… yet in some weird and indefinable sense he did not. He remembered his moment of uncertainty when Pey’s image appeared in the cubicle at his quarters, the one he did not normally use. He remembered how Pey had demanded whether she had changed so much in so short a time that her own son did not know her.

  Own son …

  It came clear in a flash. Weak with relief—or maybe because he had spent so much time recently in free-fall—he turned to look at the person who seemed to be present.

  No, this wasn’t Pey. It resembled her, that was all.

  He sought words for what seemed like half eternity. When he did speak, however, he was proud of what he was able to say.

  “Excuse me. But it is rather a shock when something one has only heard about, and that a long while ago—something that never felt as though it might apply in real life—turns out to be factual. You aren’t my mother, are you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a projection of the Ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how come the ordinators … ?” Breath failed him. “Even your mother”—this with audible scorn—“knows better than to accord the machines that supervise your system the unqualified respect that you and those of your sort show to them. Of their kind, they can’t be bad, as I well know because I generated the programs for their design, but equally they couldn’t be perfect, because if they had been, your ancestors would have vegetated and ultimately died out—leaving one of the most fascinating systems in the universe to run its course without a human to observe it.”

  Oach licked his lips; they had been dry before, but now they felt as arid as the dust cloud.

  “I’m used to talking to machines,” he muttered. “But I’m afraid it will take me a while to adjust to conversing with the greatest machine of all… Did you choose me to rescue your former passengers?”

  And interrupted himself: “Is it safe to talk?”

  The look and tone of scorn returned. “Until you asked to be put in touch with her, did your ordinators know you were present at the interrogation of Annica and Menlee because ‘Pey’ had arranged it for you? Reconciling what you said with what their sensors reported was too much for them. They decline to believe they can have hallucinations and consequently concluded that you must have had one. It being known that humans are subject to such phenomena.”

  A meaningful pause.

  “No, I didn’t choose you. It just happened you were the person sent to repair the sorter that caught them.”

  Visions of being special died in Oach’s mind.

  “So you’re only interested in me because it—well—it turned out to be me?”

  “There is another reason. You may care to work it out.” Being challenged to a game of deduction by the greatest mind in existence, the only consciousness to transcend all humanity and all known aliens, was infinitely daunting …

  Yet, he realized, the Ship itself, in its disguise as Pey, had given him a clue. It had assured him the stimulus to free the foreigners from their hypnotic trance would be an obvious one. Clearly it was designed to make allowances for human shortcomings; after all, during its epic voyage of colonization it must have had to do so all the time.

  Racking his brains, Oach hazarded a guess.

  “I think my first idea about these passengers of yours must have been mistaken. I imagined they might be—well—messengers. But I can’t work out what message except their own identity they could have brought. I mean, unless some alien enemy is advancing on us, and that could be signaled lots of other ways.”

  Appalled at how naive his own words must be making him sound, he broke off. But the not-quite-Pey face was gravely tolerant, and the not-quite-Pey voice invited, “Go on.”

  Oach had intended to offer other qualifications of what he had already said, like firsthand news of Shreng or some specialty the Shipwrights had neglected, to justify his “messenger” idea. He canceled all that and said baldly, “In childhood, when I had nightmares after learning how unstable our system is, I was comforted with promises that if things went incurably wrong, the Ship would come to rescue us. But as I later figured out, your instructions didn’t limit you to rescuing the whole of a population.

  “So—well—did you rescue Menlee and Annica?”

  “Yes.”

  “And have you appeared to me”—Oach’s heart was pounding so violently, the rush of blood to his forehead came close to blinding him—“because I’ve let myself in for termination? I have, haven’t I?”

  Or maybe you did it! Pretending to be Pey, fooling me into imagining my mother had stepped in to help me, when it wasn’t her at all but this incredible machine—!

  No, that was unworthy. He bit back the words. He’d had enough minus marks on his record to warrant termination long before the foreigners showed up.

  (What was happening to them? He wanted to cast a glance over his shoulder but dared not. Last time he had let his attention wander, Pey/Ship had disappeared …)

  “We cannot be observed from outside the capsule,” Ship r
eassured him.

  Having perhaps mistaken the reason for his incomplete turn of the head? Hmm! So it was capable of a mistake! Oach’s heart lightened.

  And his hopes were dashed again by the next few words. “What I said in my role as Pey was accurate.”

  Oach closed his eyes, swaying. He forced out of a mouth suddenly dry as his lips, “Are you allowed to rescue me, too?”

  “If you wish.”

  Oach’s eyes snapped open again. “Can you carry me from star to star? Will I really be in danger from conditions beyond our cloud?”

  “Yes. No.”

  “Have the ordinators been lying, then?”

  “Not entirely. However, your people have chosen not to commit resources to what must be done to protect a member of the subspecies Shipwright in environments tolerated by the Old Stock.”

  “But you can protect me?”

  “Did I not bring your ancestors here?”

  “Please, then!” Oach clasped his hands together in an ancient gesture of supplication. “Please”—he vaguely recalled the words of Ship’s mission instructions—“convey me to a more suitable planet!”

  “Welcome aboard.”

  SOMETHING VERY STRANGE INDEED IS HAPPENING!

  Jean understand that my removal, on this early trip, of a rogue like Oach from this peculiar environment may make it easier for other worlds to comprehend the Shipwrights farther along their path to unifying humans and machines. I can even vaguely recall future (to me, past) events that hint at the beneficial consequences of bringing two people here from Shreng, also a world dedicated to knowledge.

  The logic of that mimicked Ship’s interior confusion.

  But it’s as though I (whatever I may be) have found myself inside a maze whose most promising paths are blocked.

  Worst of all, they weren’t blocked when I started out.

  Horrifying, yet in this moment credible:

  I feel like an experiment being run inside myself.