But Wan-To could see the process going on, and it made him wonder uneasily about his future.
He wished he had someone to talk to about all these things.
He wished, in fact, that he had someone to talk to about anything. He was getting really lonesome.
He brought himself up sharply every time he came to that point in his thinking, because he knew what the perils were of creating company for himself . . .
But in the long run he could not help himself. He succumbed. It was inevitable. Even Adam hadn’t been able to stand the solitude of Eden forever.
Wan-To reminded himself that, whatever else they might be, any new copies of himself first and foremost had to be safe. He wanted no one, ever, sniping at him from ambush again.
So the first playmate he created in his new galaxy was stringently edited, with every character trait that led toward independence of action carefully censored out, and an unswervable devotion to himself tailored in. He omitted all the information that made it possible to use the gravitational forces that could wreck stars; he blotted out the parts that led to such emotions as anger and jealousy and pride. He made the new copy, most of all, content.
His newest copy was only a shadow of himself, really. It wasn’t much smarter than his almost forgotten doppel, Matter-Copy Number Five. It didn’t have enough personality to deserve a real name. Wan-To called it “Happy.”
Happy was certainly happy. Happy took everything in stride. If Wan-To snapped at him, Happy replied with soothing burbles of good-natured sound—you might almost call them “giggles.” When Wan-To was in a bad mood, Happy blithely ignored it.
Since one of the things Wan-To wanted from his dream companions was sympathy, he tried again. The new one was as dumb and feckless as Happy, and as impotent to cause trouble, but it was designed to care about Wan-To; he named it “Kind.”
Within the next few thousand millennia Wan-To had created for himself a “Funny” and a “Sweet” and a “Sympathetic” and even a “Motherly”—Wan-To didn’t call it exactly that, of course, because he had no idea of “mothers”; but if it had been human it would have clucked over him and fretted when he fretted and every day made him chicken soup.
So for a while Wan-To was no longer alone. But they weren’t real company. They were idiots.
He was surrounded by a dozen cheerfully babbling children—sweet, obedient, charming . . .
Stupid.
No matter how much a parent loves his little ones, there comes a time when he wishes they would grow up . . . and Wan-To realized ruefully that he had made that impossible for his new flock. He was almost tempted to make a few more, with just a trifle more of independence and aggressiveness . . .
But self-preservation always intervened.
Then he got his first real surprise.
One of his widespread Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs reported peculiar behavior on the part of a star in its neighborhood. The thing had flared.
Well, that in itself wasn’t very interesting. Stars were flaring somewhere in his galaxy all the time; it was a thing that some stars did. But this one was different. Frighteningly different. It wasn’t behaving in the normal fashion of any proper flare star, but very much the way Wan-To and his earlier family had caused in their jolly little war of brothers. It was what Earthly astronomers had briefly called a “Sorricaine-Mtiga object”—
And it was not natural.
For a moment Wan-To felt stark terror. Had some of the others survived and sought him out here? Had some of his new brood somehow, impossibly, managed to break through their programming? Was there a threat?
If it was, it was not from any of his children. He queried each one of them, sternly, carefully, and their innocently wondering replies were convincing. “Oh, no, Wan-To, I haven’t destroyed any stars. How could I? I don’t know how.” And, “We wouldn’t do anything like that, Wan-To, you wouldn’t let us.”
Nevertheless another star flared.
The alternative possibility was even more frightening. Could one of that old crew of ingrates have followed him here? But there were no signs of it—none of any intelligence in any of the four hundred billion stars of his new galaxy. Not even a whisper of tachyon transmission, not anywhere.
As a last, baffled resort, it occurred to Wan-To to check some of the planets in systems near the flared stars . . . and what he then found was the most incredible thing of all.
There were artifacts there! On planets! There were planets where energy was being released, sometimes quite a lot of it, in forms and with modulations that were never natural!
There was alien life in his galaxy, and it was made of solid matter.
For the first time in many millions of years Wan-To thought of his lost doppel on the little planet he had sent speeding off into infinity. That had told him of solid-matter life, too, and he had dismissed it. But what was going on here was something else. These—creatures—were using quite high-order forces. If they could flare stars, then they knew how to manipulate the vector bosons that controlled gravity. And that meant that they might someday threaten Wan-To.
There was only one thing to do about that. Horrified, Wan-To did what any householder would do when he discovered loathsome pests in his backyard. It was a job for an exterminator.
It was only when Wan-To had made quite sure that none of those pesky little things survived that he thought of his lost doppel again. His good humor recovered, he thought with amusement of the way the doppel had tolerated them.
Well, if it had, Wan-To thought, it probably by now had learned the error of its ways.
But in fact the doppel hadn’t.
It had been a long time for the doppel to be out of contact with Wan-To—not nearly as long, in its time-dilated frame of reference, as it had been for Wan-To himself, of course, but still long enough. It had been quite long enough for the doppel to realize, with a real sense of loss, that there weren’t ever going to be any fresh orders from its master.
The doppel had no way of communicating with Wan-To’s murderous rivals, either. Even if they hadn’t been cut off by the relativistic effects of the system’s all-but-light velocity just as Wan-To himself had, Five had no Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky mechanisms for reaching them anyway. Wan-To had made sure of that. In fact, there was not any intelligent being, anywhere within the range of the doppel’s senses, at all—except for those few strange solid-matter creatures it had permitted to live (for a while) on the surface of its planet.
The doppel certainly had very little in common with such rude entities. But they were there, and even a doppel can get lonesome.
It was for that reason that Five had permitted the survivors among the creatures that fell out of the destroyed Ark to reach the surface of Nebo without being annihilated. One of them, unfortunately, had gotten seriously broken when Five bashed its container, but there were three others.
In its first casual “glance” Five saw that there was nothing about the three surviving little monsters that constituted any kind of a threat. If they had been a little more technologically advanced—if they had carried with them any of that worrisome antimatter that the ship held, or any kind of weaponry more advanced than mere chemistry—then they would have died before they touched ground.
Five was not very intelligent, but it was smart enough to be assured that these things represented no danger at all.
Well, then, what did they represent?
When Five reported them to its master, Wan-To’s response was not very helpful. Wan-To didn’t tell it what to do about them. Wan-To left the matter discretionary.
So Five did what it was best equipped to do. It studied the things.
From the point of view of little Luo Fah, the first in the landing party whom Five chose to examine, that process was terrifying, agonizing, and fatal. Luo had hardly stepped out of the lander, mask pumping oxygen into her faceplate, pistol at the ready, when she was snatched brutally into the air and—well—disassembled. The clothes, the gun, and the air mask were the first to go, as Five methodically dismantled its curious little specimen to see what it was all about. There was stark fear and a lot of pain as things were wrenched off her with little concern for what they did to her clutching fingers and resisting limbs. The next part was far worse, but fortunately for Luo she didn’t feel it. She was dead by the time the interior of her body was opened up for study.
The other two in the team were luckier—for a while.