One specimen had been enough for Five to deduce, roughly, how these things worked. They had a chemical basis, it perceived. They required an influx of gases (it didn’t call the process “breathing,” but it understood the necessity from the distress Luo had exhibited when it took her mask away). So it determined simply to observe the others for a while.
Five was cautious, of course. When it detected electromagnetic radiation, definitely patterned in nonnatural ways, coming from something inside the lander it could not permit that—who knew what the purpose of it was? So it destroyed the lander’s radio transmitter with one quick, controlled bolt. That was bad luck for the man who happened to be the one transmitting, because the blast burned his face quite horribly. But it wasn’t quite as bad for Jake Lundy, because Five then perceived that it had to be more careful with these things.
Five did not exactly have emotions. What Five had was orders. They were the commandments written in stone. They could not be violated . . . but what a pity that they hadn’t included instructions for dealing with these solid-matter creatures and their artifacts.
Five also had a good deal of resourcefulness. What it didn’t know it was quite capable of trying to learn. It was always possible, it reasoned, that at some time Wan-To would call again and would want to be fully informed about these unexpected visitors.
So it permitted those two to live. They were fascinating to watch. Five was fascinated to observe, as the burn victim’s wounds slowly began to heal, that they seemed to have some sort of built-in repair systems, like Five itself. (But then why hadn’t the two earlier ones managed to put themselves back together?) As Five learned more and more about their needs it even provided them with the kinds of air they seemed to want—the kinds, at least, that they kept inside their vehicle. When it deduced they also needed water—by observing how carefully they measured it out to each other in captivity—it made them some water. When it discovered they needed “food”—which took quite a while longer, and the two survivors were cadaverous by the time Five got to that point—that was harder, but Five had of course long since investigated the chemistry of the things the specimens had eaten, and of the excrement they insisted on carrying outside and burying. It was no impossible task for Five to create a range of organic materials to offer them; and some, in fact, they did seem to be willing to “eat.”
Unfortunately for Jake and his one surviving companion, that was pretty late in the game.
Five saw that things were going badly for its specimens. They were moving slower and more feebly. Sometimes they hardly moved at all for long periods. They spent a lot of time making sound vibrations to each other, but those slowed and became less frequent with time, too, as did their peculiar habit of, one at a time, making those same sound vibrations to a kind of metallic instrument. (Naturally Five investigated the instrument, but it seemed to do nothing more than make magnetic analogues of those vibrations on a spool of metal ribbon, so it returned the thing to them only slightly damaged.)
Five wondered why they didn’t copy themselves, so as to have new, young beings of their sort to carry on for them. It thought that would be nice. That would provide a permanent stock of such playthings; Five could investigate them in detail, over a long period of time, offering them all kinds of challenges and rewards to see what they would do.
Disappointingly, the time came when the second of them stopped moving entirely, and as the body began to bloat Five reluctantly conceded that its specimens had died. And they hadn’t ever copied themselves!
Five could not understand at all. It had never occurred to the doppel that they were both male.
A little while later—oh, a few hundred years—when the specimens were long dissolved into uninteresting dust, Five got another surprise.
When the doppel had not heard from Wan-To for all that time, because the relativistic shift had decoupled its Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pair, it began to wonder if it should not try some other kind of communication. Or, more important, whether Wan-To was trying to call it, say, by means of tachyons.
So it began listening more intently on the tachyon frequencies, then even on the unlikely electromagnetic ones. It heard nothing—nothing, at least, from any stellar source anywhere, except for the endless hiss of hydrogen and the chatter of carbon monoxide and the mutterings from all the other excited molecules in the stellar photospheres and gas clouds—nothing that was artificial.
Until it realized that there was, in fact, a quite definitely artifactual signal beginning to come in now and then on the radio frequencies. It closely resembled the one that had caused it to destroy the lander’s radio—and it came from Five’s own solar system.
In fact, it came from a planet. That was astonishing to Five. A human being would not have been more surprised if a tree had spoken to him.
Of course, the doppel had no idea what messages were being conveyed by these bizarre signals, but once it had located their source it took a closer look in the optical frequencies, and what it saw gave it a start.
The hulk of the ship it had blasted was beginning to move under its own power again. It was being hijacked!
In that moment of discovery, Five came very close to again unleashing the forces that had destroyed Ark in the first place. If it had been a human, its fingers would have been on the button. Since Five was only a matter doppel it had no fingers; but the generators which produced the X-ray laser began to glow and build up to full power.
But they didn’t fire.
Five withheld the command. It couldn’t make up its mind what to do. If only Wan-To could be asked for instructions!
Fretfully Five ran over its instructions. There was nothing useful in them about solid-matter beings. All Five was ordered to do, really, was to snatch this group of stars out of its neighborhood and fly it away. It had done that. And it had no useful further instructions.
Five tried to do what its program had never intended it for; it tried to decide on its own if its instructions had some sort of built-in termination. The energies of the stars themselves kept pushing them faster and faster, by always lesser increments of velocity, right up against that limiting velocity of light itself.
Should Five allow them to go on accelerating forever? Trying to accelerate, at least—the rate of acceleration was always dropping now, asymptotically to be sure, but converging toward c itself.
If not, when should Five stop it? If it stopped, what should it do then?
Five had no answers to those questions. It would have to use its own discretion, perhaps—but if it guessed wrong, Wan-To might be angry.
Five was desperate, but not desperate enough to risk that. Not yet.
CHAPTER 18
Because the plan to revive Mayflower’s MHD-microwave generators had originated with the Great Transporters, it was a Great Transporter woman named Tortee who was in charge. When Viktor and Reesa reported to her room she was waiting for them. Not patiently.
Tortee turned out to be incongruously fat, and that was astonishing to Viktor. How could anyone get that much to eat in this mob of the underfed? She was lying back on a chaise longue, blankets wrapped over her plump legs, and she glared at them suspiciously. “Who are you? Where’s that silly little bitch with the tea?” she demanded. “Never mind. Where were we? Oh, yes,” she remembered, sounding spiteful, “what they want to do is to try to start up the orbiting power generator again. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Of course, Tortee,” Reesa said, causing Viktor to look at her sharply. Her tone had been admiring and deferential. Even soapy.
“Well, it’s a waste,” Tortee grumbled. “What they want us to do is take the little bit of fuel that’s left in Ark and transfer it to Mayflower, turn it into electricity, beam it down. It’s crazy.”
“I guess so,” Viktor said slowly. Following his wife’s lead, he was doing his best to be agreeable to the old woman—Reesa’s eyes were on him, to remind him. Still, the plan didn’t sound entirely crazy to him. It wasn’t that different from what he had helped do a few hundred years before. But Tortee was the boss of the project that had got him off the shit detail, and he didn’t want to argue with her—especially not here in her own room, with view screens and computer terminals all around her. Terminals meant data. He coveted that room—not least for its huge, wide bed.