-It ran when it saw me, Quester said. There’ll be others coming.
-This is your planet, Changer. You know what to do.
-Yes, Thinker, Changer said, my planet. But our knowledge is one knowledge.
-But you’re the quicker at it. The knowledge is too much, there is too much of it. We follow you, but slowly.
-Thinker’s right, said Quester. The decision’s up to you.
-They may not know it’s me, said Changer. Not right away. We may have a little time.
-But not too much.
-No, Quester, not too much.
And that was right, thought Blake. There would be little time. The screaming nurse racing down the hall would bring the others tumbling out – interns, other nurses, doctors, the maintenance men and the people in the kitchen. In just a few more minutes the hospital would become a churning turmoil.
-The trouble is, he said, that Quester looks too much like a wolf.
-Your definition, Quester said, means one that eats another. You know that I would never…
No, Blake told himself. No, of course you wouldn’t, Quester. But they will think you would. When they see you they will think you are a wolf. Like the guard that night at the senator’s, seeing you outlined against the lightning flash. And filled with the old folklore of wolves, reacted instinctively.
And if anyone should see Thinker, what would they think of him?
-What happened to us, Changer? Quester asked. Twice I broke free, once in wet and dark, again in light and narrow.
-Once I broke free, said Thinker, and I could not function.
-Later we will think of that, said Changer. Now we’re in a jam. We must get out of here.
-Changer, Quester said, we must stay as you. If, later, we need running, I can run.
-And I, said Thinker, if we need it later – I can be anything at all.
‘Quiet!’ said Blake aloud. ‘Quiet. Let me think a second.’
13
First, there had been himself, a human – a simulated human, an android, a man made in a laboratory, the open-endedness, the werewolf principle, the biological and intellectual flexibility which shaped him as he was.
A man. A man in everything but breeding. And a better man than a normal man could ever be. Immune to illnesses, self-healing, self-repairing. With the same intellect, the same emotion, the same physiological processes as any other man. But a tool as well, an instrument – a man designed to do a certain job. An infiltrator of the alien form. And so psychologically balanced, so unhumanly logical, so flexible, so perceptive that he could change into an alien form and assume an alien intellect and alien emotion without the mental violence, that might tear a normal man apart.
Second, there had been the Thinker (what else could one call it?) – a formless mass of flesh that could assume any shape it wished, but which through long convention preferred a pyramidal shape as the optimum for function. A dweller in the raw savagery of a swampland planet – a primal place where a newborn sun poured out a withering flood of light and energy. Monstrous forms crawled and swam and shambled through the swamps, but the thinkers had no fear of them or any need of fear. Drawing their very sustenance from the overpowering storm of energy that lashed the planet, they had their own unique defence, an envelope of interlocking lines of force which walled them in against the ravening world they inhabited. There was, for them, no thought of life or death, but only of existence – for there was no record nor remembrance of birth, no instance where one had ever died. Brute physical forces, under certain circumstances, could dismember them, scattering, the flesh, but from each piece of sundered flesh, packed with the genetic memory of the entire creature, a new entity would arise. Not that this had ever happened, but the knowledge that it could happen and its consequences was a part of the basic mental information with which each thinker was equipped.
The Changer and the Thinker, and the Changer had become the Thinker – by the wiles and schemes and the tricky techniques of that other tribe of thinkers many light years’ distance, a simulated man became another creature, with all that creature’s thoughts and memories, with all its attitudes and motives, with all its physiological and psychological equipment. Became, in effect, the other creature, but still with enough of man left in him that he recoiled and cringed away from the terror and the solemn greatness of the thing he had become, saved only by the mental armour that had been built into him on that planet so far off that, from this point in space, its sun could not be seen.
Cringed away, but only marginally – only in the hidden corners of the mind stuff that was the alien creature. For he was the creature, and the human part of him was driven deep into the folds of solid flesh and mystic mind that made the creature of the swamps. But as time went on the human mind emerged to take its rightful place, the horror now submerged and finally forgotten. having learned to live in this new body on this different world, enraptured and thrilled and filled with bursting wonder at this new experience of two minds existing side by side, neither claiming ascendancy of the other, not jockeying for position, not contending, for they both belonged to an entity that now was no longer purely human or purely creature of the swamps, but the two of them in one.
The sun blazed down and the body sucked in the energy and the swamp was a place of beauty because it was the creature’s home. A new life was there to touch, to explore and comprehend, to wonder at and appreciate – a new life and a new world and an added viewpoint for both the alien and the mentality of humanity.
There was a favourite Thinking Place and there was the Favourite Thought and at times (not often) a shadowy communication with other fellow creatures, a hazy reaching out of minds that brushed against each other briefly, like a hand touch in the dark, and then withdrew. For while communication was possible, there was little need of it; each of the thinkers was sufficient to itself.
Time had no meaning, nor did space, except in so much as either one or the both of them were considerations in the Thought. For the Thought was all – it was the reason for existence, it was the task and dedication, and it was pointed towards no end, not even the completion of itself, for there could be no end to it. It was a thing that went on endlessly and it fed upon itself and there was no belief nor hope that it ever would be done.
But time now was a factor, for the human mind was triggered to a time when it must return and it had returned and the Thinker became a man again. The data that the man had gathered was packed into a memory core and the ship leaped into space again and went on and on.
Now there was another planet and another creature and the Changer became the other creature as he had become the Thinker and went out upon the planet in the guise of the creature that he had become.
The planet was as cold and dry as the first had been hot and damp, with the feeble sun far off and the stars glittering like sharp, hard diamonds in the cloudless sky, the ground dusted with the white of snow and sand, drifted into dunes by thin and keening winds that swept the land at frequent intervals.
Now the human mind ran in the body of a quester that ran in a pack of questers across the frigid plains and along the rocky ridges, running with a pagan joy beneath the diamond stars and the lanterns of the moons, seeking out those holy places where by long tradition they held communion with the stars. But by long tradition only, for at any time or place they could snare the pictures radioed out unconsciously by the many cultures that lived on other solar systems.
Not understanding the pictures, nor even trying or wishing for an understanding – simply grasping them and holding them for the aesthetic value that could be gained from them. Like a human, thought the human mind inside the quester body, might wander the galleries of an art exhibit, to stop and stare at some painting which held within its colour and its composition a truth that spoke in silent tongue – a truth that could not be told in words, but that need not be told in words.
A human mind inside the quester body, and another mind as well; a mind that came creeping out and a mind that should not be there, that should have disappeared when the simulated human had shed the body in which that mind was housed.