‘I think you’re wrong, Storm. I don’t think they’ll turn out to be important at all. They don’t conflict with the theory in any
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way, you know, and as we get more data I’m pretty sure everything will fit. It fits too beautifully so far to fail the last test. Besides …’ her thought died away.
‘Besides what? Unblock, chum. Give.’
‘I think those things fit in, already. You see, entities of pure energy can’t be expected to think the way we do. When we meet them—if we can understand them at all—that surface, radius and all, will undoubtedly prove to be completely in accord with their mode of thought; system of logic; their semantics; or whatever they have along those lines.’
‘Could be.’ Cloud’s attitude changed sharply. ‘You’ve settled one moot point. They’re intelligent.’
‘Why yes … of course they are! It’s funny I didn’t think of that myself. And you’re really sold, Storm.’
‘I really am. Up to now I’ve just been receptive; but now I really believe the whole cockeyed theory. I suppose you’ve figured out an angle of approach?’
‘You flatter me. I’m not that good. But perhaps … in a very broad and general way … Heights and depths, remember? And superhuman scope therein or thereat? But we don’t do it, Storm. You do.’
‘Uh-uh. Nix. You and I are one. Let’s go!’
‘I’ll come along as far as I can, of course, but something tells me it won’t be very far. Lead on, Six Cloud!’
‘Where’ll we start?’
‘Now we’re right back where we were before. Do you still favor spectra? Of vibration, say, for a start?’
‘Nothing else but. So let’s slide ourselves up and down the frequencies, seeing what we can see, hear, feel, or sense, and what we can do about ’em.’
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18: Cahuita
On the planet Cahuita, unreckonable years before this story opens, an entity brooded.
This entity, Medury by symbol, was not even vaguely manlike; in fact, he—the third person singular pronoun, masculine, is used very loosely indeed; but since it is somewhat better than ‘ either ‘it’ or ‘she’ will have to do—was not even vaguely corporeal or substantial.
Man’s earliest ancestor, it is believed, came into being through the interaction of energy and matter on the waters of the infant seas of Earth. The first Cahuitans, however, originated in the unimaginably violent, raw, crude energy-flare of an atomic explosion.
This explosion did not take place on Tellus, nor in any time known to Tellurian history. The place of occurrence was a planet in the spiral arm of the galaxy across the tremendous gulf of empty space which we now call Rift Two Hundred Forty; the time, as has been said, was in the unthinkably remote past.
Cahuitans are not, strictly speaking, immortal; but as far as mankind is concerned, and except for exceedingly peculiar violences, they might as well be.
Medury brooded. His problem was old; it had probably been considered, academically, by every Cahuitan then alive. But only academically, and no Cahuitan had ever solved it, for the philosophy of the race had always been (and still is) the simple one of least action—no Cahuitan ever did any job until it became necessary; but, conversely, once any job was done it was done as nearly as possible for all time to come.
Medury was the first Cahuitan to be compelled, by one of the basic urges of life, to deal with the problem as a concrete, not an abstract, thing. The problem was, therefore, his. His alone.
His world, the only planet of its sun, was old, old. The last atoms of its fissionables had been fissioned; the last atoms of its fusibles had been fused; no more fires could be kindled.
The Cahuitans in general did not care. For the adolescents, the time of need for a source of high-level quanta had not yet come. For those already fulfilled* it had passed. While entirely gaseous, the planet would stay comfortably warm for a long
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time. Its energies, with the outpourings of its parent sun, would feed billions of people instead of the mere hundreds of thousands comprising its present population. Jobs*, businesses*, commerce*, and industry* went on as usual, unaffected.
But Medury was affected: basically, fundamentally affected. The time had come when he should progress into completion, and without a new fire the Change was impossible.
For a time which to a human race would have been fantastically long Medury brooded, considering every aspect of the problem; then stirred himself into action. Converting a tiny portion of his non-material being into three filaments of energy, he constructed a working platform by attaching the ends of these three filaments to the cores of three widely-separated suns. Thus assured of orientation, he launched into space a probing needle of pure force; a needle which, propagated in and through the sub-ether, covered parsecs of distances in microseconds of time. And thus for days, years, what might have been centuries and millennia as we of Tellus know time he searched; and finally, he found.
Pulling in all his extensions, he shot a tight beam to a fellow-being, Litosa by symbol, and tuned his mind precisely to hers. (‘Hers’ being perhaps a trifle better than either ‘his’ or ‘its’.)
‘For some little time you too have felt the need of fulfillment,’ he informed his proposed complement in level, passionless thought. ‘You and I match well; there being no duplications, no incompatibles, no antagonistics in our twelve basics. Our fulfillment, Medosalitury, and our products Midora and Letusy, would all three be super-primes.’
‘Yes.’ What a freight of rebellion against fate was carried by that monosyllable! ‘But why discuss it? Why reach for the unattainable? From now on we die—we all die—unfulfilled and without product. All life in this universe—in this galaxy, at least—ends with us now here.’
‘I hope not. I think not. There are many solar systems …’
‘To what end?’ Litosa broke in, her thought a sneer. ‘Can you kindle utterly frigid fuel? Can you work in a sun’s core? Or can you, perhaps, take a piece of star-core stuff through empty space to a cold planet and …’ The thought changed in tone, became what would have been on Earth a schoolgirl’s
* The reader will please understand that I am doing the best I can with words we all know. E.E.S.
rss
BC/
squeal of rapture:
‘You CAN! Or you wouldn’t have brought up such a harrowing subject. You REALLY CAN!’
‘Not that, exactly, but something just as good. I found sparks and kindling on a cold, solid planet.’
‘NO!’ The thought was ecstasy. ‘You DIDN’T!’
‘I did. Whenever you’re ready, we’ll go.”
‘I’ve been ready for CYCLES!’
The two beings linked themselves together in some fashion unknowable to man and shot away through the airless, heatless void. Heatless, but by no means devoid of energy; the travelers could draw sustenance enough for their ordinary needs from the cosmic radiation pervading all space.
Across Rift Two Hundred Forty they flew and on through interstellar space. They reached our solar system. On the third planet, our Earth, they found several atomic power plants. There were no loose atomic vortices—then.
‘Hold on! Wait!’ Litosa exclaimed, and the strangely-linked pair stopped just short of the glowing bit of warmth—the raging incandescent, furiously radiating reactor in the heart of one of Earth’s largest generating stations—which was its goal. ‘There’s something funny about this. How could there possibly be even one little spark like this, to say nothing of so many, on such an utterly frigid planet, unless some intelligent being started it and is maintaining it for some purpose? There MUST be intelligence on this planet and we must be intruding shamefully. Have you scanned? Scanned. CAREFULLY?’
‘I have scanned. Carefully, completely. Not only on this planet’s surface, but throughout its depths. I have scanned, area by area and volume by volume, this sun and its every planet, satellite, and asteroid. There is no intelligence here. More, there is no sign whatever of any kind of life, however rudimentary, latent, or nascent. I have been able to find nothing whatever to modify our conclusion of long and long ago that we are the only life, intelligent or otherwise, in existence. Scan for yourself.’
Litosa scanned. She scanned the sun, the planets, the moons and moonlets, the asteroids down to grains of sand and particles of dust. Still unsatisfied, she scanned all neighboring solar systems, from Centralia to Salvador. Then, and only then, did she accept Medury’s almost unacceptable conclusion that these
providential sparks were in fact accidental and were in fact, by some process as yet unknown to Cahuitan science, self-balancing and self-sustaining.
Medury and Litosa, woven into a fantastically intricate and complex sphere of ultra-microscopic filaments, flashed into the heart of the reactor, which thereupon went instantaneously and enthusiastically out of control.
And from the pleasant warmth of the incubator-womb—to us of Earth the ravening fury of the first loose atomic vortex— there emerged the fulfillment Medosalitury. This entity, grave and complete and serene as an adult Cahuitan should be, wafted itself (there is no question as to which pronoun is to be used here) sedately back to its home planet.