“Less than an hour,” Warrior replied. “Prepare for maneuvers. The helium beasts have set up a number of force curtains around their vessel. I do not know why.”
Guardian chirped a command to her console, and activated Diplomats forceweb.
She paused, then snaked her left head around to look at Diplomat. He met her gaze with a chemically enhanced calm.
“You had better chew more drugs, Little Talker. You will need them.” She turned back to her console, adjusting schematics. But she kept one head inclined slightly toward her passenger.
The datacube’s contents scrolled across the twin screens in front of Diplomat, one for each head. Within a few minutes, he stopped the screens, opened his supply pack again, and swallowed another, larger drugcud. Diplomat whistled, and data resumed its inexorable flow across his screens.
Guardian had kept silent while Diplomat popped the second mood regulator oval. Now her heads whipped up and faced one another, eye to eye. She growled without her usual roughness.
“Yes,” she crooned, “now you grasp the Hindmost’s concern firmly with both mouths. Two warlike races with interstellar capability, and weapons of mass destruction.” She paused for effect, waiting.
“They have intruded into contested Outsider geometry with reaction drives and nuclear explosives?” Diplomat asked not believing.
“Just so. And not so very long after the Pact.”
The little puppeteer drummed a hoof. “I am expected to communicate with these captives.”
Guardian blinked agreement. “The datacube contains the two downloads to your translator module. You will be able to talk to them, Little Talker.”
Diplomat continued to look at the information scurrying across his screen. He scrabbled in his pack, swallowed another regulator of drugcud. “One of them is a…carnivore.” He had difficulty with the word, which was a puppeteer obscenity, unused in polite society.
“Indeed,” she replied. “They are the larger of the two species, are they not? The ones that call themselves the kzin? But they are not the issue that most concerns the Hindmost, Little Talker, nor me. It is these…humans. Perhaps you recognize their morphological type.”
Diplomat fluted confusion, then fell silent as more data flowed across his screens. He shuddered, and his own forked left tongue touched his lip-fingers repeatedly. He stopped dead, tonguing the left screen to freeze mode.
Ah, Guardian thought. The hoof strikes home.
Diplomat wailed a sudden musical siren of alarm.
Guardian’s heads looked at one another again in the puppeteer expression of humor. “I was wondering,” she softly sang to Diplomat, who was making sounds like a demented calliope, “when you would make the connection.”
Diplomat swiftly wrapped his necks around his body, still keening in fear. The screens froze and then blanked for lack of an operator.
“These…humans are clearly Pak breeders, though they do appear different in many ways.” Guardian reached over with a long neck into her own medical bag, and removed a hypospray of sedative.
Guardian considered the petite puppeteer quivering before her. His necks were tucked so tightly around his body that he looked like a foal’s plaything.
She swallowed in sequence, considering. Despite appearances, this cowardly little Diplomat had saved an entire puppeteer colony world from destruction by the Q’rynmoi. Guardian knew of few of her caste Herdmates who were willing to face the personal dangers that Diplomat had. It was a difficult story to believe, however, seeing him in this state.
It was said by the Hindmost’s psychists that Diplomat’s corrective mindsculpting after that event had been incomplete; they had advised more memory flensing before releasing him to active status.
A Hindmost’s Command remained exactly that, however. The Deepest Council had concurred.
She considered that perhaps there was more to this delicate little talker than met her own Guardian eyes. She couldn’t put her lips quite on it, but there was something different. Something almost brave, despite his periodic catatonic states and whining manner. He would clearly need her help to complete this mission, as well as the reverse.
“You remember the Pak, my little Diplomat, don’t you?” She spoke almost conversationally as she calmly injected the near catatonic puppeteer in the right neck. The hypospray made a hissing sound, loud in the tiny lifebubble. Guardian made adjustments to the ventilation system, flushing out Diplomat’s fear pheromones with fresh, Herd-conditioned air. Diplomat stopped screaming, trembled for a moment and then seemed to fall asleep. She tightened his forceweb harness remotely.
Guardian looked at her own heads again. “Yes. The Pak are not extinct, after all. Despite the efforts of three sentient races and ten thousand years of effort.” She deopaqued a small portion of the hull directly in front of her console made a few further course corrections.
Guardian settled back into her own forceweb harness and whistled a duet with herself softly. The tune soothed her, and reminded the soldier puppeteer of her first days in crèche.
It was a marching song, ancient beyond measure. The music was said to be common when Guardian’s ancestors had led entire herds of Diplomat’s forebears to new grazing grounds with the turn in seasons. The arpeggios sang volumes about order, confidence, and glowing success.
After a few moments, she reached over with a head, and fondly patted the back of the sleeping puppeteer next to her.
“Two warrior races,” she sang quietly. Forked tongues flicked over both sets of lip-fingers. “Two threats to the security of the Race.” Warrior paused, watching their blinking course plot intently on the hullscreen.
“Or perhaps three,” she added, after reflection.
The Outsider ship grew still larger as the Wisdom of Retreat approached rendezvous.
• CHAPTER FOUR
In its youth, the universe was very different. They Who Passed observed the strange fresh wilderness through a window less than an atom wide.
Gravity had made its rule known over vast clouds of gas and dust. Many had coalesced, contracted, and at last collapsed. The gravity-squeezed gas became hotter and hotter, atoms thrusting together in the rough romance of nuclear reactions, releasing energy and transmuting elements. These glowing clouds became hot youthful stars of the first stellar generation, their fusion fires spendthrift with the bounty of gravity’s first clasp.
Still, that initial blaze of starlight was but a dim reminder of the first moments of creation, when all of reality had been hotter by many orders of magnitude.
Clouds of glowing gas, hot young suns set within them like jewels in oil. Twists and spirals of electromagnetic fields. Ions and charged particles streaked along paths appointed by the fresh laws of this space-time continuum. The early days.
Such were the alien vistas observed by They Who Pass, peering through the distorted interdimensional windows of the cosmic strings.
The minds suspended in the other universe were fascinated, in their way, with this strange space-time continuum. They wished to study and examine these new laws roughly ruling the brawling new universe, as if in haste.
But how? They Who Pass were ironically named; they could not pass, through the tortured windows between realities, into such an exotic and alien place. Even if such an act were possible, the laws of existence in the other universe were sufficiently different to make their own survival improbable. But complex data had passed from within the alien universe into their own. Surely the reciprocal would be found to be the case as well.
They Who Pass knew that Mind was only a sufficiently complex pattern of information. Sentience would inevitably arise in such patterns, regardless of the embedding medium and environment.
Though they themselves could not physically traverse their atom-thin window between universes, the entities knew that there were ways in which patterns could be imposed from afar. Near one of the cosmic strings within the new universe, they observed a vast cloud of charged gases, with filigrees of glowing el
ectromagnetic fields running throughout.
Perfect for their purposes.
By something very like induction, yet much more potent, They Who Pass reached through the distorted crack into this reality. Stark pattern imposed on the charged cloud. A structure wrestled into shape—striations of virulent light and murky dust, threads of magnetic fields and inductive heating. Imbalances of electromagnetic force flexed within the cloud, shoving clots of dust and gouts of prickly gas within the structure.
The glowing cloud reacted as They Who Pass challenged it from afar. Networks of dusky plasma sparkled, pinching into new shapes.
The cloud moved, learned, grew. Primitive reflexes drank in new patterns beamed through the twisting aperture of the cosmic string. The cloud stored information, manipulated data, and sent it back through the window between realities to They Who Pass. The cloud finally copied itself into fresh gas clouds, imposed its own patterns in response to the new universe around it.
Such clouds acted like living things. Communication and complexity among the clouds increased exponentially as time unspooled. They Who Pass nudged and directed, moving the plasma clouds toward more capacity and capability.
Eventually, these minds built of hot plasma and cold dust awoke to sentience.
They Who Pass now had intelligent agents within the new universe, semiautonomous explorers ready to travel throughout the strange reality and report back what they found. The clouds developed a society, a culture, as they spread throughout the new universe, unraveling basic laws. They roved the spaces around dead suns, ventured near blazing new-birthed stars.
Always in the service of They Who Pass.
Call the intelligent clouds of dusty plasma the Radiants.
• CHAPTER FIVE
Carol’s eyes opened, gummy and blurred. Above, blue sky. She didn’t believe it.
Carol sat up, rubbed her eyes. The view did not change.
She and Bruno were lying on a flat open area, on some thick ground cover. Like grass, though greener than any Terran grass. An unnatural green. Purplish blue sky stretched above them, speckled with delicate gossamer clouds. Carol stared in amazement, wordless.
The air smelled fresh and antiseptic, with a clean tang of ozone. A breeze touched her arms like the delicate brush of soothing fingers. It was so quiet that Carol could hear her heart beat.
No signs of the weird aliens, kzinti, or even of the fact that they had been locked in battle just a few moments before.
All Carol could remember was losing the suit commlink with Bruno in a snarl of static. Then nothing until she woke up here. Carol turned her head, stretching.
Somehow, behind them, the main airlock to Dolittle hung in midair. The rest of the ship was not there, however. One more impossibility. They seemed to be alone.
Carol rose easily to her feet. Too easily, she realized. She felt better than she had in many months, in years. She walked over to Bruno, and checked over his vital signs. He appeared to be sleeping deeply. She shook him gently awake.
“What?” Bruno began, shaking his head, then stopped in surprise as his eyes opened. He looked around, confused. Then he recognized Carol and wrapped his arms tightly around her.
“I thought I was dead,” he whispered.
“So did I.”
His confused frown deepened as Carol helped him to his feet.
“Don’t ask me,” she told him as he looked around. “Unless you believe in heaven?”
Bruno stooped down and pulled up a small tuft of the dark green ground cover. He showed her the ten-lobed leaflets, and the crimson roots that moved gently while she watched.
“I doubt,” Bruno said softly, “that heaven is sowed with extraterrestrial species of plant life.”
“How nice that you are so sure.”
Carol followed Bruno as he walked toward the magically suspended main airlock of Dolittle. He patted the empty air above and to either side of the metal door, and snorted in satisfaction.
“Try it,” he invited.
Carol found that the airlock door seemed to be set in an invisible wall. The wall didn’t feel hot or cold, like metal or plastic or stone. It was a hard, sharply defined barrier that they merely could not see. Except for the fact that heat conduction seemed perfect, it might have been optical diamond. The grassy plains beyond the wall were doubtless illusory, intended to give the impression of greater open space within their…cage.
Working together, she and Bruno quickly determined that their…yard was in fact about two hundred meters across, bounded by curving walls of invisible material. Dolittle clearly abutted it, with only the main airlock permitted to penetrate the force-wall.
The airlock opened normally, and they found Dolittle complete inside. Intact, though none of the sensory net or computer systems responded to commands. There were plenty of supplies still. They both noticed and commented on the one thing out of place: Dolittle was spotless, not as they had left it.
Carol stepped outside the spacecraft, back onto the too-green lawn. Soon Bruno joined her. They watched the ersatz clouds for a time, enjoying the quiet despite themselves.
It was good to breathe what smelled and felt like fresh air, especially after years of recycler stink.
“So,” Bruno said finally, “I guess we just wait. Like before.”
Carol was considering suggesting to Bruno an interesting way to just wait when she heard someone clearing his throat behind them. They both leaped to their feet and whirled around.
It was then that Carol rethought her joke about religion, and decided that she didn’t have a sense of humor after all.
Before them stood Colonel Buford Early.
Carol froze. Early looked precisely as she remembered him from their last briefing. His teeth were gleaming white, clearly prosthetic in his seamed and ageless face; his uniform was spotless. There was even the familiar arrogant twinkle in the old, old eyes.
“Bruno, son,” Early said in an upbeat tone that was bizarrely inappropriate to their present circumstances. “And the lovely Captain Faulk. The pleasure is mine, entirely.”
She looked over at Bruno, who stood there, mouth open. Carol knew that Bruno saw Early as something of a father figure. She elbowed him hard to snap him out of it.
“Colonel Early,” Carol said evenly, “could you please tell us how you came to be here?” She paused, then added more plaintively than she had intended, “And precisely where ‘here’ is?”
Early’s expression did not change. His smile was fixed, mindlessly benevolent. His words came out strangely, in bursts. “It is important to relax, to take things one step at a time. To think. Proper channels of communication are necessary. So many errors are made through hasty conclusions. Too much information often leads to confusion, and ill action. Would you not agree, Bruno?” Each sentence fragment sounded subtly different in tone from the last.
“Carol?” Bruno whispered. Carol was glad to see that Bruno saw the simulacrum for what it was.
“Humor it,” she murmured back.
Bruno straightened his shoulders. “Quite right, Colonel Early. But how goes the war against the kzin?”
Again, Early’s face did not change. The relentlessly upbeat grin stayed in place.
“War is an evil. Yet sometimes an evil is necessary to preserve a greater good. Death is tragedy. Kzin are scream-and-leaping ratcats. Their strategies are improving.”
Carol scowled. “That isn’t even a good imitation Early,” she whispered as the figure in front of them continued to mix and match platitudes.
“Loud and clear,” Bruno replied. “Those are just comments and speeches of Early’s, cobbled together in response to questions we are asking.”
“Are you now calm?” the Early-thing asked them brightly, “Calmness is the first requirement for debriefing.”
Carol casually pulled a stylus from her coverall pocket, and tossed it underhand at the replica of Buford Early.
The figure made no effort to catch it. The stylus passed through a
nd landed on the grass behind.
A distortion band started at the bottom of the figure’s boots, and shimmied up and through its body.
“A lack of trust is deplorable,” the perfect replica of Early said with the same unchanging smile. “Misunderstandings abound. Trust is fundamental.”
“A hologram. Good, too,” Bruno said.
Carol nodded, then walked directly through the projected figure and picked up her stylus, replacing it in her coverall pocket. She walked back through the hologram to return to Bruno’s side.
The replica of Buford Early vanished.
Carol looked up into the purple false sky, and spoke calmly.
“Show yourself, or speak to us.”
A voice spoke from all around them, still in Early’s tones.
Sorrow mine.
“Excuse me?” Carol asked, confused.
“I think that they’re apologizing,” Bruno whispered in her ear.
Bruno-entity correct. I/We intend null upset, null confusion. Attempt calm failure. Accept.
It was very strange to hear such odd words in Early’s familiar voice.
“Why do you use Buford Early as a model?” Bruno asked the air around them.
Question One. Curiosity/Innovation valuable. Bruno-entity internal patterns acquired. Electrons flow interestingly. Patterns clearer than Carol-entity. Projection intended as communication-enabler.
“They accessed your interface and read your mind?” Carol asked Bruno, studying his pinched expression and thinned lips.
Discomfort sensed, source Bruno-entity. Sorrow. Pattern acquisition necessary. Knowledge of Bruno-entity and Carol-entity required. Provisions for continuance. Accept.
“They needed to know how to keep us alive,” Carol commented to Bruno. He still looked a little uncomfortable.
“Are you the…um, entities that analyzed our spacecraft?” Bruno asked.
Truth. One.
Carol smiled a little. “What should we call you? Does your race have a name?”