Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Tamise Totterdell and theOnline Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from "Worlds of If" November 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
They weren't human--weren't even related to humanity through ties ofblood--but they were our heirs!
SWEETTheir blood and sticky
By ALBERT R. TEICHNER
The machine had stood there a long time. It was several hundred feetlong and could run on a thimbleful of earth or water. Complete initself, the machine drew material from the surrounding landscape,transmuting matter to its special purposes. It needed sugar, salt, waterand many other things but never failed to have them. It was stillworking. And at the delivery end, where the packaging devices had beenbroken down, it turned out a steady turgid stream on the ground ofpink-striped, twisting taffy.
Once the whole vast desert area had been filled with such devices,producing all the varied needs of a very needful human race. But therehad been no machine to produce peace. The crossing shock waves of fusedhydrogen had destroyed the machines by the tens of thousands, along withall the automatic shipping lines, leaving only, in the quirk of apressure cross-pattern, an undisturbed taffy-making machine, oozing itsspecial lava on the plateau floor.
It had been working seven and a half million years.
It continued to repair itself, as if a child of the race that hadstarted all this would come by it at any moment to tip an eager pinky inthe still-warm taffy to taste its tangy sweetness. But there were nohuman beings. There had been none since the day when the packagercollapsed, at the edge of the total-evaporation zone.
* * * * *
Creno set a few of his legs on the edge of the glassy, weathered ridgeand gazed over the plateau. Harta, next to him, trembled as sheadjusted to the strange hardness of these four dimensions. "Being is athin thing here," she said.
"Thin, yes," Creno smiled. "An almost dead world. But there is a mysteryin that almost to make the journey worth the coming."
"What mystery?" But Creno was of the wisest on the home planet and hersense feelers scanned once more to find what he must mean. "I _do_ feelit! Everything dead but that one great mental thing moving, and afour-dimensional stream coming out in the vibrations of this world!"
"I have been watching it," said Creno. "What kind of life can that be?You are a sharp sensor, Harta. Focus to it."
She strained and then relaxed, speaking: "The circuits are closed intothemselves. It learns nothing from outside itself except to move andextend its metal feelers for food. Soil is its food. Soil is its energy.Soil is its being."
"Can it be alive?"
"It is alive."
All his legs rested now in a row along the ridge. He too was relaxed asone mystery disappeared. "I feel your feelings, but the thing is notalive. It is a machine."
"I do not understand. A machine in the middle of a dead world?"
"Whether we understand why or not, that is what it is--a machine."
Harta throbbed with excitement. How could Creno be wrong? He kneweverything as soon as the facts were in his mind. Yet here now wereliving things crawling toward the machine, just like the excrescence atone end but in no way a part of it! The feeling of _willed_ effort asthey crawled slowly toward it, white and pink striped, reaching graspingfeelers into the turgid product, taking it in, then rising on easinglegs as the food spread within them.
"There _are_ living creatures here!" Creno pondered. "I feel yourmessages. Twenty, thirty--a horde is crawling from that mountain towardit."
"Four thousand three hundred and ninety-one," said Harta. Sheconcentrated. "There are three thousand and five more in the mountaincaves, waiting to come out as the others return."
* * * * *
They came in groups of about a hundred, pulling themselves slowly towardthe edges of the great sticky lake that lay within the vaster area wherethe pink matter dried and crumbled into the strong breeze. Some weresmaller than others, offspring who were nudged along by their elders.But these small creatures were the ones who scampered most of all afterthey had fed. Joyously they danced back toward the mountain. A few ofmedium height went back in pairs, firm taffy fingers intertwined in eachother.
"They mate," said Creno. "It is their custom."
"How tiring they are," said Harta. "I have lost interest. We have seenthirty-one worlds with such customs and these creatures are too simpleto be interesting. Let us go home or try some other system."
"Not yet," Creno insisted. "We passed through the ocean and surveyed thelands of this tiny planet. Nowhere else has there been the tiniest unitof life. Why at this one spot should something exist?"
"But we have several parallel situations," Harta protested. "They werecolonies landed in one spot by the civilization of another planet. Theylanded here with their feeder machine. And that is the explanation."
"Your mind does not function well in a four-dimension continuum, Harta.You will need more training--"
"But these cases are rare, and, Creno--"
"I know they are rare, my child. But still they exist. You will have tolearn eventually, a little at a time. Now then, it is a rule of suchlimited dimensional realms that the movement of matter and events fromplace to place is highly difficult. Certain compacting procedures mustbe observed. To transport a machine this size across their space wouldhave required enormous effort and an intelligence they do not yet have.More than that, it would have been unnecessary. A smaller device wouldhave supplied them with food. I am forced to conclude that--somehow--weare approaching this problem backwards."
"Backwards? You mean they made the machine here after they came?"
He did not reply to that. "We must concentrate together on thinkingourselves into their functioning in their manifold."
Harta followed his suggestion, and soon their thoughts were moving amongand within the striped creatures. The insides of their bodies consistedof fundamentally the same taffy substance; but it had been modified byvarious organic structures. All, though, were built of the samefundamental units: elongated, thin cells which readily alignedthemselves in semi-crystalline patterns.
"Enough," Creno said, "back to the hill."
Their rows of thin limbs rested on the ridge crest once more. "We haveseen such cell crystals before," she sighed. "The inefficiencies in sucha poverty of dimensions! Do you still think we have looked at itbackwards?"
"Of course we have. They did not bring the machine or make it--themachine made them!"
"That is not possible, Creno, great as you are in these matters. We havenever seen life created by a machine before. No one ever has, from themillions of reports I have seen at home."
"Maybe we have and not known it. The life we have seen always evolvedthrough enormous eons and we could not see its origins clearly in mostcases. Here we are dealing with something that has taken comparativelylittle time." He stopped, shocked that he, an elder, had said so much."No, disregard such theories. You are still too young to bother withthem. Here is the important thing--this machine was left by an earlierrace that disappeared. Everything else was destroyed but it went righton producing its substance."
"The substance is not life."
"It is only four-dimensional matter, right. But over a long enoughtime--you know this as well as I do--random factors will eventuallyproduce a life form. By some trick of radiation this process has beenspeeded up here. The substance the machine produces has in turn producedlife!"
* * * * *
Creno sensed with a tremor some dangerous s
hifting in Harta'sconsciousness. As an elder it was his duty to prevent a prematureinsight in the young. It had been a mistake to bring this up. He must gono further.
It was not necessary. Harta took it up for him.
"Then any substance producing life and modified by it could--if you gofar enough back--be the product of a machine. But it would have taken solong to produce life that the original matter, that bore the directimprint of the machine, would have disappeared."
"An error," said Creno desperately. "There is just this case."
"By the time these creatures have arrived at self-knowledge the machinewill be gone. They will not know it ever existed, and--"
"That is all it means. There is just this one case. Now we must leavethis unimportant example of minor dimensions!"
He strained consciousness to a forward movement but Harta remainedbehind. He had to pull back. "Start," he ordered.
Her mind's obstinately frozen stance made him freeze too. He applied allhis force to bring her back into control, but she still held fast.
"Something more is hidden from me. I will be back," she said. And shedisappeared from the ridge.
He had never faced such a quandary before on a training trip with ayounger one. If he went in pursuit he would find her ultimately--thatwas in the nature of being older and wiser--but, if she revolted againsthis pursuit, she could extend the time considerably on this forsakenplanet. And he wanted to get her away as soon as possible.
The more time here the more chance that the awful truth would come toher before her time.
He watched the growing waves of creatures floundering toward the vastoozing puddle, which refilled itself as quickly as it was diminished bythem, and the receding waves of those that had already fed. This, hecould see, was an endless process. The whole life of the species movedin continuous systole-diastole around the machine.
Soon he would have to go in search of her.
But then she was back at his side, her being for this world once moresolidified. She concentrated for a moment on the pink-striped waves ofrippling inward and outward around the great sustaining pool, thencommunicated with him.
"We can leave now. There is nothing more to see."
Something in her mind remained closed to his, as the mind of youngernever should be to older. But at least he could see with relief that theworst had not happened. The deeper knowledge had not arrived to her tooearly when it could only hurt. All he found turned to him--as theyreceded from this thin-manifold universe, then moved up the dimensionladder to their home level--was a surface of happiness.
Suddenly, though, as they prepared for flight in that hyperspace all herjoy was gone.
"I saw it," she said. "In my free and unrestricted spirit I moved deepinto the substance of that world, below all the total ruin, far below.And there was a monstrous machine, near the molten core, almostinfinitely older than the feeding one far above it. And it, too, hadbeen left in a stratum where all else was destroyed. I could see it hadonce produced the ooze from which came the life from which in turn comethe beings by whom the machine above it was made. Maybe they, too,thought they were free and unrestricted!"
He sighed for the bitter cost of knowledge.
This one would no longer go forth in the joy of mere exploration, and hewould no longer live vicariously in the happiness of another being'sinnocence. Now Harta, too, would be seeking the answer to the questionof original creation, the answer that he had not found in his journeysacross a myriad worlds and dimensions....
That no one had ever found.
END