Collected short fiction, p.696
Collected Short Fiction, page 696
“That’s an idea. We’ll keep it in mind,” said Ben Line. In his heart he knew he didn’t want to do it that way. When the next transmission went, he would make it. There were two reasons, one practical, the other not. The practical reason was that Earthmen looked like the people who roamed this portion of the surface of Cuckoo. With editing—to stretch them out and reduce their musculature—they would look even more so. The first efforts at communication had to be for the purpose of building up a store of language that the pmal translators needed in order to function. These had proved difficult enough. Asking one of these primitives to talk to a robot, to a T’Worlie or a creature like the silvery girl was out of the question.
The other reason was the important one. Ben Line Pertin had thought it over carefully and, all in all, he had no particular reason to want, to go on living.
Ben Pertin was not the first human being in the history of the race to reach that conclusion. Many, he felt, had forsaken their tomorrows for reasons far more trivial than his own. The thing that graveled Ben Pertin was that his options were curiously circumscribed. With tachyon transmission a man could die and die and die—and still not be done with either living or dying. However many times Ben Pertin let the tachyon scanners memorize his body structure and translate an exact duplicate to the surface of Cuckoo—and however many times that duplicate met a gory death—he would still be alive in orbit. And he would still be hurting.
Other men in his position could fling their lives away in a reckless gamble against death, and find oblivion. He could not. The only gamble he could take was in a fixed game that he could not lose. The situation made a mockery of courage. Of selfhood.
“I said,” the silvery girl repeated tunelessly, “the T’Worlie Nimmie is speaking to you.”
“Oh, sorry.” Ben Line shook himself to attention and attempted a smile at the butterfly-winged being that hung in the air beside him. “Hi, Nimmie. What’s new?”
“Theory,” whistled the T’Worlie. “FARLINK proposes explication of tachyon interference.”
“Really?” Ben Line was diverted from his internal plan. “What’s that?”
“FARLINK identifies source of interference as exogenous to Cuckoo. Originates elsewhere. Trace-scanning locates source as tight-beam signal generated in our own galaxy. Vector closely equivalent to that of human sun, called Sol.”
Pertin frowned.
“I don’t know about that,” he muttered. “It doesn’t seem reasonable. After all, there is only one tachyon station on Earth capable of this distance and that’s locked in to Sun One. Certainly it couldn’t interfere with reception here—”
“FARLINK adds,” shrilled the T’Worlie, fluttering up and down on its bright butterfly wings, “interfering signal can be identified as mating call of female of human species, beamed from your home world, called Earth, to self, here.”
“Ridiculous!” Ben Line exploded. “Nimmie, that’s insane! Why—”
He paused as a strong ammonia scent made him sneeze. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What does that smell mean?”
“Query. Smell, Ben Line?”
“The gaseous emission that registers on my chemical-stimuli-detecting nerve sensors. I know you T’Worlie express emotions chemically.”
“It is laughter,” shrilled the T’Worlie triumphantly.
“Ah,” said Ben Line. “Then that was a joke.”
“Confirmation,” cried the T’Worlie. “Successful one? Query.”
“Pretty good. Sorry. You caught me off guard or I would have laughed too.”
A whiff of ether-like sweetness expressed the T’Worlie analogue of hurt. “Regret joke unsuccessful,” Nimmie piped sadly. “Not all of communication falsified for purposes of humor. True that FARLINK locates source as near Earth in vector-distance not confirmed. Extreme attenuation of signal renders distance estimate undependable.”
“Strange,” chimed the silvery girl. “Perhaps we should instruct FARLINK to assemble conjectural explanations of this phenomenon.”
“You two go ahead,” said Ben Line. “I have to get some sleep.”
“We will carry on while you are unconscious,” whistled the T’Worlie. Neither he nor Venus slept and both were critical of human slumber. “Personal conjecture: whatever explanations, they will complicate our mission.”
AND indeed they would, thought Ben Line Pertin as he headed toward his living quarters, located at the high-gravity shell of the satellite. No random tachyonic transmissions should be coming in, especially from the galaxy itself, where all known tachyon sources had been long since identified, located and compensated for. It was one more irritation in a life that had become increasingly overweighted on the downbeat side.
What I need. Ben Line thought, is a meal, a bath and bed. In that order.
But he would not find much pleasure in those either, he knew. The meal would be out of a dry pack and into a microwave oven—and would taste like it. With only three human beings on the wheel and a dozen other races with different diets also aboard, not much space was wasted on epicurean cookery. The bath would not feel much more satisfying. The wheel was in free-fall and the only way to bathe was through a sort of hose-down from jets inside a thing like a huge bottle. There was not a lot of pleasure in the experience—even after you learned how to get clean without inhaling several gallons of water. And the bed, of course, would be solitary.
Ben Pertin hurled himself out of the communications room in a savage mood. He was the first human being to reach this point in space, tens of thousands of light-years outside the galactic spiral.
He was a conqueror by any standards the history books could measure.
What he felt like was a victim.
PERTIN’S “bed” was a cocoon that could shelter, feed, protect and nurse him—as well as entertain and even educate him. It felt like a prison. Fed and bathed, he floated in it and could not sleep.
There was a sore place in his mind to which his consciousness always returned—like something caught in a tooth that the tongue cannot resist probing.
That something was himself. Another self: the Ben Pertin from whom he had been copied. That Ben Pertin was forty thousand light-years away, in the artificial satellite that hung in the Orion gas cloud and was called Sun One. To Ben Line Pertin he seemed both farther than all those lights—in the sense of representing something unattainable—and closer than Ben Line’s own skin.
That other Ben Pertin—lie was called Ben Charles—would be enjoying the domestic pleasures of marriage, as well as an interesting and productive career and all the amenities Sun One offered its citizens. Lucky man, thought Ben Line, hating him.
Yet that man, too, was himself. Only a couple of months earlier they had been not only identical but coincident. That was before Ben Line had come here. He remembered perfectly well what had happened. He had risen that morning from the arms of his new bride, kissed her goodbye—but only as any suburban commuter kisses his wife au revoir for the day—and entered the tachyon transmission chamber on Sun One.
There the tachyon beams had scanned his body, built up a pattern of atoms and molecules and transmitted that pattern at the velocity of tachyons, the particles whose lower limiting velocity is the speed of light. And that pattern had been received here, had been reconstructed here, atom for atom and link for link.
So on Sun One, one Ben Pertin had walked out of the chamber, in no way different from what he had been when he had gone in. He had done whatever he had had to do during the balance of that working day and at the end of it had returned again to Zara, his/their wife.
But on the wheel, another Ben Pertin had floated out of the receiving chamber and felt the instant shock of knowing that he had lost the gamble. He was the one on the wheel, which he looked at with some curiosity but not much pleasure.
If you had put the two Ben Pertins side by side, no clue could have told you which was the original and which the copy. Both were originals. Neither was a copy—except in some abstract, irrelevant sense that meant nothing when it was considered that each had a complete store of everything Ben Pertin had ever had, from DNA linkage to the last, most evanescent memory of infancy.
There was only one real difference: One was there, the other was here. One was living a normal life on Sun One. The other was doing a necessary job—without joy—on the orbiter, which he would never leave.
That was the paradox of tachyon transmission: since it was only a pattern that was transmitted, the object being transmitted remained unchanged. No matter how often you left, you always stayed behind.
Ben Line Pertin tossed angrily against the restraining web of his cocoon. That was the damned unfair part of it, his mind cried. Why couldn’t Zara join him?
It would cost her nothing. Like him, one of her would walk out of the tachyon chamber on Sun One, the other would be here. They would be together. He would no longer be alone.
He groaned resentfully, angrily, petulantly.
The worst part of his resentment was that in the end it was directed against himself. It was his own fault that Zara was not here now. It was he who had persuaded her not to come with him at first, not until the orbiter had been made more comfortable. She had wanted to come. But she had listened to him, had finally agreed and promised to come later.
A lying, deceitful promise. She not only had not come, she wouldn’t even answer his tachyon messages. Not for weeks. First he had suggested she might come—then asked outright—finally pleaded. No answer.
When Ben Line Pertin finally fell asleep his dreams were harsh and punitive.
HE AWOKE in time for an all-hands review of the material gathered on Cuckoo.
In all, forty-one beings were living on the orbiter at that moment, counting collective entities as a single creature. They fit nicely into a cylindrical chamber not much more than fifteen feet across, partly because most of them were rather smaller than human beings, mostly because placement in free-fall was volumetric rather than planar. The sole T’Worlie acted as sort of general chairman for the meeting. Out of the bat’s head perched on his butterfly-like body he squeaked a short sentence and all around the room the pmal translators of the various beings rendered it into their own language.
“I will display the information gathered so far on Cuckoo.”
In the center of the chamber a holographic display quickened into life. It showed a deep red sphere, floating in emptiness. There was no hint of dimension, because there was nothing nearby to compare it with, but the voice accompaniment to the display began to give the values for its physical characteristics and all the pmal translators faithfully relayed the information to their owners. Radius, slightly under one A.U. Mass, about equal to Sol. Density, very low—less than what in some Earthly laboratories was considered a hard vacuum. And yet the thing had a solid surface.
This was a familiar wonder to Ben Line and the other beings, but they listened anyway. So much about Cuckoo was still unbelievable. Not only did it have a surface, but on that surface lived its creatures.
The sphere in the display grew and broke off into a section, which expanded, turned slowly to present itself to each of the creatures in the room. It grew larger and they were looking down on a landscape between two enormous mountains and there became visible the strangest phenomenon of all. The creatures living there seemed biologically similar to some races native to the galaxy.
Any connection was impossible.
Cuckoo had never been part of the galaxy. Its present course was aimed arrow-straight at the Orion arm. It had clearly been on that course for a long time—and it had originated in some other star cloud.
Ben Line Pertin, listening and watching, realized someone was touching him. He turned and saw a woman of the Purchased People. She rode the satellite as proxy for some water-breathing race from a star on the far side of the galaxy invisible to Earth and never named by it, Ben knew.
She said tonelessly, “While you were sleeping, Ben Line Pertin, this came addressed to you with the last lot of supplies.”
He nodded thanks—not to her; the imprisoned personality inside that skull neither expected thanks nor would know what to do with a courteous gesture—but to the distant mollusc-like creature that owned her and operated through her body.
He was about to turn back to the hologram when he realized what the woman had given him. It was a message cassette. There was no reason for anyone to send him a scaled cassette unless it was private—and there was only one person who would want to send him a private message.
That person was Zara.
SUDDENLY Ben Line wanted nothing as much as he wanted the meeting to end so that he could put the cassette into his private holovision tank. But it wouldn’t end and he could not leave—the topic had turned to one of his own specialties, the meteorology of Cuckoo. Long since the orbiter had dropped automatic weather stations all along its trail and they had begun to show tentative patterns for the climatology and air-mass movements of the enormous sphere. It was only a beginning. In that immense ocean of air, the seeded stations sketched out only a line, but still Ben Line had to summarize what was known.
As he finished, the FARLINK screens lit up with an overriding message.
ATTENTION. PROGRESS REPORTED ON TACHYONIC INTERFERENCE. FOLLOWING SAMPLE ANALYZED.
The computer blanked out, then displayed shaped waves glowing on the screens, followed by endless strings of binary numbers, while bird chirps sounded in the speakers. “Conjecture,” whispered the T’Worlie beside Ben, a vinegary scent of excitement showing that its equivalent of adrenalin was flowing. “Analysis shows message.”
But Nimmie’s conjecture was wrong. The curved screens flashed again with the all-stations call of urgency, then lit up with the message in half a hundred scripts.
LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF THIS SAMPLE NEGATIVE. TECHNICAL STUDIES, HOWEVER, IDENTIFY SIGNAL AS COMMUNICATION OF TUNING DATA FOR TACHYONIC REPLICATION TRANSMISSION. PRESUMPTION: SOME MATTER IS TO BE REPLICATED FROM CUCKOO TO SOURCE.
“Ben Line,” chimed the silvery girl in sudden comprehension, “do you understand what that means?
It means we can replicate our own matter at the source of this transmission. We can send a copy of one of us! We can find out where this signal comes from by sending someone there who can report back in a language we can understand.”
“If he lives long enough,” grunted Pertin. He understood the importance of what was being said, but in his personal scale of values nothing was quite as important as the cassette he had been clutching, all this long while, in his hand.
And at last he was able to excuse himself, hurl himself through the passages of the orbiter to his private cocoon, squirm in, seal, and then slip the cassette into the vision stage.
A SILVERY glitter of cloud sprang up before him and condensed into the face and form of Zara, his wife, looking meltingly beautiful and overpoweringly sad.
She gazed at him silently for a moment, as though unsure of what to say. And then—
“Dear Ben,” she said, “I don’t know how to tell you this. I’m sorry to answer you this way. The truth is, I just can’t face you.”
She paused, biting her lip.
“You see,” she said, “I’m not going to come to join you. I know how disappointed you will fee!—disappointed in me, because I promised. But I can’t.
“I’m pregnant, dear,” she said. She hesitated and added: “You know that Ben and I—I mean, you and I wanted to have a child. We were given permission before—before you left. Well, now we’re going to—in about five months.
“So you see I can’t come now. It would be one thing for you and me to live on the orbiter and to know that we’ll die there. Being together would make all that worthwhile. But not our baby, Ben! I just can’t do that.
“Of course, after the baby is born . . .
“If you still want me we’ll talk about it then. I promise you, Ben, dear, I want to be with you. All of me wants to be with all of you. There must be a way, but for now I can’t see what it is.” She hesitated, then said in a rush, “I’m going to stop now, Ben, because I’m going to have to cry. I do love you! Oh, God—”
And the image faded and was gone, leaving Ben Line Pertin more alone than he had ever been.
V
ORG RIDER washed his torn garments in a rain pool and spread them on a rock to dry, but the death-weed stench of the watchers was still in his nostrils. He was out of the storm area now. The rock where the stranger had been killed and the watchers had treated him with such contempt was far out of sight in the rain clouds. He was cold and his aches and pains were enormous, but he was alive and free. It was more than he had expected moments earlier.
He fished bare-handed in the pool for horny brown scuttling creatures and kindled a small fire to broil them. They were much like pond-dwellers he knew from his own mountain and when they were cooked they tasted as good. He was overpoweringly weary, but he forced himself to catch more of the scuttlers and prop them over the lire to take with him.
Then he wrapped himself in his wings and was immediately asleep.
When he awoke the first thing he felt was the black weight of the watchman’s eye against his throat.
His fingers closed around it and he came close to ripping it off and throwing it in the pool. But it could not harm him while he was wearing it, he thought, and he had not forgotten the warning about what would happen to him if he took it off.
Warm and dry, he filled his waterskin, caught and broiled one more meal of scuttlers, then strapped on his gear and dove out from the hillside to catch the wind.
He was more cautious than ever now, turning suddenly to search the sky behind him to see what might be following. Nothing was, neither small watcher nor ship carrying the repellent creatures who had marked him with the thing around his neck. He was not so far from the rocky, desolate upper reaches of Knife-in-the-Sky that sighting orgs would be too unlikely. But he saw nothing like an org . . .
