From far away, from another world, someone spoke to her, a voice that she once had known but could not identify. “Here, Meg,” it said, “here is your crystal ball.”
She felt the hardness and the roundness of the ball placed between her palms, and, opening her eyes a slit, saw the polished brightness of it, shining in the rays of the morning sun.
Another mind exploded and impacted in her mind—a cold, sharp, dark mind that screamed in triumph and relief, as if the thing that it had awaited had finally happened, while at the same time shrinking back in fear against the gross reality of a condition it had not known for centuries piled on centuries, that it had forgotten, that it had lost all hope of regaining and that now it found thrust so forcefully upon it.
The unsuspected mind clung to her mind, fastening upon it as the one security it knew, clinging desperately, afraid of being alone again, of being thrust back into the darkness and the cold. It clung to her mind in frantic desperation. It ran along the projections of her mind into that place where spiders and gnats cavorted. It recoiled for a fraction of a second, then drove in, taking her mind with it, deep into the swarm of glittering wings and frantic hairy legs, and as it did, the wings and legs were gone, the spiders and the gnats were gone, and out of the whirlpool of uncertainty and confusion came an orderliness that was as confusing as the spiders and gnats. An orderliness that was confusing because it was, in most parts, incomprehensible, a marshaling and a sorting of configurations that even in their neatness seemed to have no meaning.
Then the meanings came—half meanings, guessed meanings, shadowy and fragmented, but solid and real in the shadow and the fragments. They piled into her mind, overwhelming it, clogging it, so that she only caught a part of them, as a person listening to a conversation delivered in so rapid-fire a manner that only one word in twenty could be heard. But beyond all this she grasped for a moment the larger context of it, of all of it—a seething mass of knowledge that seemed to fill and overflow the universe, all the questions answered that ever had been asked.
Her mind snapped back, retracting from the overpowering mass of answers, and her eyes came open. The crystal ball fell from her hands and rolled off her lap, to bounce upon the stony pavement. She saw that it was no crystal ball, but the robotic brain case that Rollo had carried in his sack. She reached out and stroked it with her fingers, murmuring at it, soothing it, aghast at what she’d done. To awaken it, to let it know it was not alone, to raise a hope that could not be carried out—that, she told herself, was a cruelty that could never be erased, for which there could be no recompense. To wake it for a moment, then plunge it back again into the loneliness and the dark, to touch it for a moment and then to let it go. She picked it up and cuddled it against her breasts, as a mother might a child.
“You are not alone,” she told it. “I’ll stay with you.” Not knowing, as she spoke the words, if she could or not. In that time of doubt she felt its mind again—no longer cold, no longer alone or dark, a warmth of sudden comradeship, an overflowing of abject gratitude.
Above her the great metal doors were opening. In them stood a robot, a larger and more massive machine than Rollo, but very much akin to him.
“I’m called the Ancient and Revered,” the robot told them. “Won’t you please come in? I should like to talk with you.”
23
They sat at the table in the room where Cushing and Elayne had first met the A and R, but this time there was light from a candle that stood at one end of the table. There were Shivering Snakes as well, but not as many as there had been that first time, and those that were there stayed close against the ceiling, looping and spinning and making damn fools of themselves.
The A and R sat down ponderously in the chair at the table’s head and the others of them took chairs and ranged themselves on either side. Meg laid the robot’s brain case on the table in front of her and kept both hands upon it, not really holding it but just letting it know that she was there. Every now and then she felt the presence probing gently at her mind, perhaps simply to assure itself that she had not deserted it. Andy stood in the doorway, half in the room, half out, his head drooping but watching everything. Behind him in the corridor fluttered the gray shapes of his pals the Followers.
The A and R settled himself comfortably in the chair and looked at them for a long time before he spoke, as if he might be evaluating them, perhaps debating with himself the question of whether he might have made a mistake in inviting them to this conference.
Finally, he spoke. “I am pleased,” he said, “to welcome you to the Place of Going to the Stars.”
Cushing hit the table with his open hand. “Cut out the fairy tales,” he yelled. “This can’t be the Place of Going to the Stars. There are no launching pads. In a place like this the logistics would be impossible.”
“Mr. Cushing,” the A and R said gently, “if you’ll allow me to explain. No launching pads, you say. Of course there are no launching pads. Have you ever tried to calculate the problems of going to the stars? How far they are, the time that it would take to reach them, the shortness of a human life?”
“I’ve read the literature,” said Cushing. “The library at the university—”
“You read the speculations,” said the A and R. “You read what was written about going to the stars centuries before there was any possibility of going to the stars. Written when men had reached no farther into space than the moon and Mars.”
“That is right, but—”
“You read about cryogenics: freezing the passengers and then reviving them. You read the controversies about faster-than-light. You read the hopefulness of human colonies planted on the earthlike planets of other solar systems.”
“Some of it might have worked,” said Cushing stubbornly. “Men, in time, would have found better ways to do it.”
“They did,” said the A and R. “Some men did go to some of the nearby stars. They found many things that were interesting. They brought back the seeds from which sprouted the belt of Trees that rings in this butte. They brought back the living rocks, the Shivering Snakes and the Followers, all of which you’ve seen. But it was impractical. It was too costly and the time factor was too great. You speak of logistics, and the logistics of sending human beings to the stars were wrong. Once you get into a technological system, once it’s actually in operation, you find what’s wrong with it. Your perspectives change and your goals tend to shift about. You ask yourself what you really want, what you’re trying to accomplish, what values can be found in the effort you are making. We asked this of ourselves once we started going to the stars and the conclusion was that the actual landing on another planet of another solar system was, in itself, of not too great a value. There was glory, of course, and satisfaction, and we learned some things of value, but the process was too slow; it took too long. If we could have sent out a thousand ships, each pointed toward a different point in space, the returns would have been speeded up. It would have taken as long, but with that many ships there would have been a steady feedback of results, after a wait of a few hundred years, as the ships began coming back, one by one. But we could not send out a thousand ships. The economy would not withstand that sort of strain. And once you had sent out a thousand ships, you’d have to keep on building them and sending them out to keep the pipeline full. We knew we did not have the resources to do anything like that and we knew we didn’t have the time, for some of our social scientists were warning us of the Collapse that finally overtook us. So we asked ourselves—we were forced to ask ourselves—what we were really looking for. And the answer seemed to be that we were seeking information.
“Without having lived through the era of which I talk, it is difficult to comprehend the pressures under which we found ourselves. It became, in time, not a simple matter of going to the stars; it was a matter of pulling together a body of knowledge that might give us a clue to actions that might head off the Collapse foreseen by our social scientists. The common populace was n
ot fully aware of the dangers seen by the scientists and they were generally not aware at all of what we were doing. For years they had been bombarded by warnings from all sorts of experts, most of whom were wrong, and they were so fed up with informed opinions that they paid no attention to anything that was being said. For they had no way of knowing which of them were sound.
“But there was this small group of scientists and engineers—and by a small group I mean some thousands of them—who saw the danger clearly. There might have been a number of ways in which the Collapse could have been averted, but the one that seemed to have the best chance was to gamble that from the knowledge that might be collected from those other civilizations among the stars, an answer might be found. It might, we told ourselves, be a basic answer we simply had not thought of, an answer entirely human in its concept, or it might be a completely alien answer which we could adapt.”
He stopped and looked around the table. “Do you follow me?” he asked.
“I think we do,” said Ezra. “You speak of ancient times that are unknown to us.”
“But not to Mr. Cushing,” said the A and R. “Mr. Cushing has read about those days.”
“I cannot read,” said Ezra. “There are very few who can. In all my tribe there is not a one who can.”
“Which leads me to wonder,” said the A and R, “how it comes about that Mr. Cushing can. You spoke of a university. Are there still universities?”
“Only one I know of,” said Cushing. “There may be others, but I do not know. At our university a man named Wilson, centuries ago, wrote a history of the Collapse. It is not a good history; it is largely based on legend.”
“So you have some idea of what the Collapse was all about?”
“Only in a general way,” said Cushing.
“But you knew about the Place of Going to the Stars?”
“Not from the history. Wilson knew of it, but he did not put it in his history. He dismissed it, I suppose, because it seemed too wild a tale. I found some of his notes, and he made mention of it in them.”
“And you came hunting for it. But when you found it, you did not believe it could be the place you were looking for. No launching pads, you said. At one time there were launching pads, quite some distance from this place. Then, after a time, after we saw that it wouldn’t work, we asked ourselves if robotic probes would not work as well as men.…”
“The gossipers,” said Cushing. “That is what they are—robotic interstellar probes. The Team looks on them as story tellers.”
“The Team,” said the A and R, “are a pair of busybodies from some very distant planet who intend some day to write what might be called “The Decline and Fall of Technological Civilizations.’ They have been vastly puzzled here, and I’ve made no attempt to set them straight. As a matter of fact, I’ve made it my business to further puzzle them. If I gave them any help, they would hang around for another hundred years, and I don’t want that. I’ve had enough of them.
“The travelers—those probes you call the gossipers—could be made far more cheaply than starships. The research and development was costly, but once the design was perfected, with the various sensors all worked out, the information processing design—so that the probes could use their own data to work out information instead of just bringing back to us masses of raw data—once all this was done, they could be made much more cheaply than the ships. We built and programmed them by the hundreds and sent them out. In a century or so, they began coming back, each of them crammed with the information he’d collected and stored as code in his memory storage. There have been a few of them who have not come back. I suppose that accidents of various kinds might have happened to them. By the time the first of them started coming back, however, the Collapse had come about, and there were no humans left at this station. Myself and a few other robots, that was all. Now even the few other robots are gone. Through the years, there has been attrition: one of them killed in a rockfall; another falling victim to a strange disease—which puzzles me exceedingly, since such as we should be disease-immune. Another electrocuted in a moment of great carelessness, for despite the candle, we do have electricity. It is supplied by the solar panels that top this building. The candle is because we have run out of bulbs and there is no way to replace them. But, however that may be, in one way or another all the robots but myself became dysfunctional until only I was left.
“When the travelers came back, we transferred their coded data to the central storage facility in this place, reprogrammed them and sent them out again. In the course of the last few centuries I have not sent them out again as they came back. There has seemed little sense in doing so. Our storage banks are already crowded almost to capacity. As I transferred the data, I should, I suppose, have deactivated the travelers and stored them away, but it seemed a shame to do so. They do enjoy life so much. While the transfer to the central banks removes all the actual data, there is a residue of impressions remaining in the probes, only a shadow of the information that they carried, so that they retain a pseudomemory of what they have experienced and they spend their time telling one another of their great adventures. Some of them got away that first night you arrived, and before I called them back, they had given you a sample of their chatter. They do the same with the Team and I have made no attempt to stop them, for it gives the Team something to do and keeps those two roly-poly worthies off my back.”
“So, laddie boy,” said Meg to Cushing, “you have found your Place of Stars. Not the kind of place you looked for, but an even greater place.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Cushing to the A and R, “is why you’re talking to us. You sent us word—remember?—that the place was banned to us. What made you change your mind?”
“You must realize,” said the A and R, “the need for security in a place as sensitive as this. When we began developing the facility, we looked for an isolated location. We planted the belt of Trees, which were genetically programmed to keep all intruders out, and planted around and outside the belt a ring of living rocks. The Trees were a passive defense; the rocks, if need be, active. Over the years, the rocks have been largely dispersed. Many of them have wandered off. The Trees were supposed to keep them in control, but in many cases this has not worked out. At the time this station was established, it seemed to be apparent that civilization was moving toward collapse, which meant not only that the station should be kept as secret as possible but that defenses be set up. Our hope was, of course, that collapse could be staved off for another few hundred years. If that had been possible, we might have been able to offer some assurance that we were working toward solutions. But we were given somewhat less than a hundred years. For a long time after the Collapse came about, we held our breath. By that time the Trees were well grown, but they probably would not have held against a determined attack made with flamethrowers or artillery. But our remote situation, plus the secrecy which had surrounded the project, saved us. The mobs that finally erupted to bring about the Collapse probably were too busy, even had they known of us, to take any notice of us. There were richer pickings elsewhere.”
“But this doesn’t explain what happened with our party,” said Cushing. “Why did you change your mind?”
“I must explain to you a little further what has happened here,” said the A and R. “After the human population finally died off, there were only robots left and, as I’ve told you, as the years went on, fewer and fewer of them. There was not much maintenance required, and so long as there were several of us left, we had no problem with it. You must realize that the data-storage system has been simplified as much as possible, so that there are no great intricacies that could get out of whack. But one system has got out of whack and presents some difficulties. For some reason that I am unable to discover, the retrieval system—”
“The retrieval system?”
“That part of the installation that enables the retrieval of data. There are mountains of data in there, but there is no way to get
it out. In my humble and fumbling way I have tried to make some head or tail of it in hopes I could repair whatever might be wrong, but you must understand, I am no technician. My training is in administrative work. So we have the situation of having all that data and not being able to get at any of it. When you came along, I felt the faint flutter of some hope when the Trees reported to me that there were sensitives among you. I told the Trees to let you through. I had hopes that a sensitive might get at the data, might be able to retrieve it. And was shocked to find that your one outstanding sensitive was not looking at our data at all, but at something beyond our data, overlooking it as a thing of small consequence.”
“But you said the Trees told you,” protested Cushing. “It must be that you’re a sensitive, yourself.”
“A technological sensitivity,” said the A and R. “I am so designed as to be keyed in to the Trees, but to nothing else. A sensitivity, of course, but a contrived and most selective one.”
“So you thought that a human sensitive might get at the data. But when Elayne didn’t do it—”
“I thought it was all a failure at the time,” said the A and R, “but I’ve thought it over since, and now I know the answer. She is in no way a failure, but a sensitive that is too far reaching, too keyed in to universal factors, to be of any use to us. When she inadvertently caught a glimpse of what we have in the data storage, she was shocked at it, shocked at the chaos of it; for I must admit that it is chaos—billions of pieces of data all clumped into a pile. But then there came this morning another one of you. The one that you call Meg. She reached into the data; she touched it. She got nothing from it, but she was aware of it.…”