Kirlian Quest (44 page)

"This aspect suffices," she said.

"I think I know how to stop the Amoeba—if it is stoppable at all. To save the Cluster. Perhaps to solve the crisis of energy itself—if there is any solution."

"That seems sufficient."

He knew from her attitude that she was not accepting it. And why
should
she? "I wanted to ask you first, because— But he had to stop. How could he say:
Because I rely most on those with whom I have mated.
There were limits, somewhere. Or
were
there?

"It will be difficult, but I will do it," Sixteen said.

 

* * *

 

"I am Herald the Healer of Slash," Herald said. He was now in Solarian form, and this was Planet Outworld, the heart of Segment Etamin. "My companion is Hweeh of Weew, the astronomer who discovered the threat of the Amoeba." Hweeh was also in Solarian host.

The Solarian Minister of Etamin nodded gravely. "The political pressure from Weew has been great, not to mention that from Qaval. Still, I fail to see how—"

"We must negotiate directly with the Amoeba," Herald said. "Therefore two of us must be mattermitted there in Jet hosts."

"Mattermission
to the Amoeba?
" the Minister demanded incredulously. "The energy expense, the risk—"

"Agents of the Amoeba are already all over the Cluster," Herald explained. "They occupy the Ancient sites. Their preparations are well advanced. We have no time to mobilize for defense, and we cannot afford to wait for committee action. We must go to the Amoeba before the full-scale strike is launched."

"I shall have to put the matter to the Cluster Council."

"There is no time for that! The strike may come within hours, and once it starts we shall be powerless to stop it.
We cannot compete with the Amoeba!
The Amoeba knows we know about it. Already its ships are mattermitting into place."

"But to take on my own authority an initiative that may affect the welfare of the entire Cluster, utilizing two Jet hosts whose home Sphere is not even within my Segment—"

"That initiative must be taken," Herald said. "The hosts must be Jets. I may be the only entity who can persuade the Amoeba to cooperate. It is because of my aura, which they have encountered before, and should recognize."

"But you said the Amoebites are null-aura!"

"Precisely. We must present them with a known aura of considerable intensity. Only through their machines can they identify it, and they may panic if my aura shows up in their equipment—if they have not blocked that off entirely."

"I don't follow all of that," the Minister said. "For the sake of argument, let's assume you are accredited to go. But your companion of Weew does not need to—"

"Not Hweeh," Herald said. "The other Jet is to be a female."

"A female! What possible justification for her?"

Herald knew the Minister would not accept his personal reasoning about Psyche, or consider it relevant to the mission. "I must stand on personal privilege. Jet Sixteen has agreed to accompany me, and I need her. The cost of mattermission for her is trivial, compared to what is at stake."

"Trivial!
I
must stand on common sense!" the Minister retorted. "We must muster every available resource to oppose the Amoeba. Not only would mattermission consume priceless energy, it would betray our plan of defense to the enemy, for they could use their equipment to draw from your mind everything you know."

"That's just what I
want!
" Herald said. "They must learn everything that Sixteen and I know, and verify its complete authenticity. Alone they might distrust me, believing that I had been specifically primed; they will not have my natural body. But Sixteen they will
have
to believe, for she is—"

"Absolutely not! What possible quality could she have that would justify any part of an expense and risk of this magnitude?"

"She is of their type, physically, mentally, and to a large extent in aura too," Herald said. "In effect, a modern Ancient."

"Now you have lost me completely! It is the
Amoeba
you mean to visit, not an Ancient site. Meanwhile other Cluster experts are trying to gain the expertise of the Ancients, so that we can try to defend ourselves against—"

"You misunderstand. The Ancient knowledge is useless to us in this context."

"Useless! It is our supreme and only hope!"

Hweeh cut in. "I fear my friend has not made one point clear. The Amoeba
is
the modern wing of the Ancients. What we took as our ultimate salvation has been revealed as our ultimate threat. God and the Devil are one."

The Minister gaped. "The—but the Amoeba is non-Kirlian!"

"Precisely," Herald said. "This is the disaster that has befallen us. We thought the Ancients were the super-Kirlians. But Melody of Mintaka discovered the truth: The Ancients were in fact
non
-Kirlian. In the war between Kirlians and non-Kirlians,
they were the enemy.
And now they have returned, to complete the job left unfinished three million years ago. Unless we can somehow talk them out of it. It is a small chance. But as Kirlians, we can be of use to them. They may agree to spare us, if we show them how we can serve—"

"No!" Hweeh said to Herald. "The Ancients were not the enemy." And he explained. And Herald was amazed. He had been blind—again.

 

* * *

 

Herald jetted from the mattermission receiver. It had worked! He was in an Amoeba ship!

It was a strange one. There was no deck, only a web-work of fibers anchoring the vital mechanisms in place. The outer shell was not metal or even solid. It seemed to be a field of force, holding in atmosphere, light, and heat. Beyond it the huge glowing mass of Furnace showed, individual stars glinting clearly around its fringe. Herald felt sudden nostalgia for Flame; had she made it home after all? But he was sure she had not.

There seemed to be no gravity here, but in this host it hardly mattered. It merely meant the support brushes were free for other purposes. The main jet propulsion was as effective as ever. The anchoring pattern tended to separate the ship into compartments, and this helped him orient. This was a ship designed for deep space, completely.

In a moment Sixteen joined him. "Oh, Herald—I'm terrified!" she said as she braked uncertainly to a hovering halt. "I'm afraid it is triggering my—"

"Hang on," he said. "I know you are ill, but this is not the vacuum it seems. The Amoeba ships travel by mattermission, so they have to reduce their mass to a fraction of what is normal by our standards, to conserve energy. In fact, there is virtually
no
mass, apart from the life-support systems, weaponry, and personnel, and those are surely stripped to their minimums. To a considerable extent, these ships
are
energy, for
that
can be Transferred. They coordinate Transfer and mattermission, jumping the whole ship by means of these two modes simultaneously. That was why it was so difficult for Cluster astronomers to determine the nature of this fleet. All that showed was the collection of artifacts within each vessel. The ships mattermit on short hops by shooting out micro energy receivers, which instantly form a mattermission receiver, so that the solids can follow. It happens so swiftly that it looks as though the whole ship is mattermitting without receivers. For longer jumps they need pre-existing receivers, of course, but these don't have to be ship-size, but just enough to start the buildup on the larger receiver. Apparently the Ancients left millions of such receiver-nodes around, forming paths between their full-scale permanent receivers, and enough are still operative to make Cluster travel quite feasible for the Amoeba. Just one example of the sophistication of their technology, then and now. For travel between Clusters, a variant—"

"I am not ill," Sixteen protested. "My infirmity stems from—"

An Amoeba-Jet arrived. He spoke in the alien Ancient language which Herald could understand in part because of his recent experience in the Ancient equipment. But the Amoebite's voice emerged from a tiny energy vortex in what was evidently the ship's control section, duplicating the Etamin language in which Herald had conversed with Sixteen. The implications were formidable: first that even translation equipment here was nonsolid, and second that the Amoeba not only understood the communication modes of the Cluster, but had incorporated them into its equipment. Just a few words had been enough to enable the machine to orient. The same had happened during the Moderns' androids fracas, so it was no fluke. If the Amoeba knew this much about modern culture, what secrets remained to the Cluster?

|||What is this intrusion?|||

Now it comes.
Herald deemed the odds 50-50 that they would be vaporized on the spot. "We are envoys from the Cluster," he said. "Herald of Slash and Sixteen of =."

|||Politics are outside my competence. Go to my Unit Officer, Three.|||

A lowly functionary! Maybe just as well. This creature lacked the authority to make decisions, so could neither accept nor execute intruders. Yet this act of relaying the envoys lent a certain validity to the mission. "Send us there," Herald said.

They jetted back to the mattermitter. And emerged in a larger net ship.
3
Envoys from the Cluster?
3
the Unit Officer inquired.
3
This would be for reverification. Go to the Action Unit Command, Zero.
3

Reverification? Well, if they fit some slot in the Amoeba's conception, so much the better. All Herald needed was the chance to talk to an entity in authority. Since there was obviously a hierarchy here, with all routes leading to the top, things were already more promising.

The third ship was larger yet.
0
Weed-species envoys are not in Action competence,
0
the Commander said.
0
However, reverification is in order at this time. Go to the Coordinator,
&. 0

That sounded high enough. At last they emerged in a huge sphere ship. The Coordinator looked like any other Amoebite, but he spoke with an authority that rang through even in translation. He gave Herald no chance to talk. &There is nothing to negotiate. We have no conceivable use for your services. Your kind shall be exterminated. We allowed your entry only to implement our final verification, which we shall perform on you immediately.
&

"Exterminated?" Herald asked. "For what purpose?"

&
To render this Cluster suitable for Soul Sapience.
&

This was his entry! Herald struck fast and hard, not yielding the communication floor before he had to. "Soul Sapience," he repeated. "What we call Kirlian Sapience. You eliminated every other non-Kirlian species in every cluster you traveled to. Sapient and non-sapient—all have fallen to your ruthless conquest. You spared only the Kirlian subsapients, hoping that in time some of them would develop sapience. For you knew they had that potential—if only the devastating competition of the non-Kirlian species were eliminated. Then you eliminated yourselves, by forming your vast space fleet and leaving the Cluster. You went to other Clusters doing the same thing, promoting Kirlian life at the expense of non-Kirlian life, though this destroyed all other sapience you encountered. This was a phenomenal effort, requiring tremendous energy and time and patience, because sometimes you have to portage across enormous volumes of space where no trail of mattermission nodes exists. But you are capable of these, because you can 'turn off' for centuries at a time, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of years, and turn on again when you arrive at your next target Cluster. You can do this because you have no organic nervous system as we know it, nothing to degenerate from lack of use. All that remained behind you were your highly sophisticated network of stations, keyed to open only to the living presence of high-Kirlian auras and to your own special code signals.

"Now, after three million years, you are on the second loop—or is it the tenth loop, or the hundredth?—and it has been so long, and you have done it so many times, that you have forgotten the true nature of your quest. You retain the words without the meaning: Soul Sapience. Faced with the actuality of your three-million-year object, or your thirty-million-year object, or however incredibly long it has been, you assumed automatically that the myriad high auras of this Cluster were either animal—or mechanically generated. Since sophisticated machine-generated auras may be capable of keying open your old sites, you sought out these auras and destroyed them routinely. But your main mission was to sterilize all sapience here, as you have done for so long you have no records of the time when this was not the case, when you yourselves were an evolving species with a future distinct from your past.

"For you are the modern representatives of what we call the Ancients, that mighty species we supposed were the ultimate Kirlians. We strove so desperately to master your colossal technology, to comprehend your science and your rationale and your mysterious fate, never suspecting that these things were not because you were superior, but because you were inferior. You pushed Kirlian technology far beyond what we have because that was the only way you could use it. Your machines
had
to be virtually perfect. You
have
no auras of your own.

"And so we are mutually guilty.
We
were looking for super-Kirlians, so did not recognize you when you came.
You
were looking for weed-species, so did not recognize the developed fruit of your prior effort here. We
both
saw you as conquerors, as exterminators, so of course you were. But now we can work together to solve the problem we both face. Energy."

The Coordinator did not respond.

"We assumed that your Kirlian science had eliminated Spherical regression," Herald continued with more confidence. "Actually, you never settled long enough in a cluster to experience it. You use half-light-speed ships for your maneuvering, and special mattermission and energy-Transfer for the long hops. It takes a great deal of time, but you
have
that. What you
don't
have is aura—and that is what motivated you to undertake this fantastic everlasting mission."