The Godwhale (S.F. Masterworks) (37 page)

ARNOLD continued to study
Rorqual
’s printout, which grew and became decorated with brilliant colours, elaborate designs, and miniature pictures. The ship enjoyed all the man-minutes and was actually doodling an illuminated manuscript of geological ages. ‘I think I see now,’ said the warrior giant. ‘There seems to be an abrupt change around the time of your prosimian,
Palachthon
. The chalky Cretaceous ends with a bang – about a third of all animal families were wiped out: dinosaurs, marine reptiles, flying reptiles, ammonites, molluscs, and calcareous nanoplankton. It looks as if your formula does have some magic. I think that someone put this massive extinction in the fossil record, like a bookmark, so we would notice it.’

ARNOLD rolled up the elaborate printout and sat on it. He cleared the table and filled another bowl.

Har’s appetite returned. He now felt that he was on the right planet – where cosmology argued for a deity with a penchant for numbers.

‘There have been other extinctions,’ mused Larry. ‘About two-thirds of the Trilobites were wiped out at the close of the Cambrian.’ He smiled and glanced at the shovel-shaped meck at his side. ‘And I suppose Iron Trilobite will find some satisfaction in knowing he was used for a “bookmark” too. But the most massive extinction was this recent spread of the Hive. Except for synthetic genes, our planet was essentially sterile!’

Rorqual
continued to chart the starship wreckage. The scale model grew.

‘Looks like a bunch of peas in a pod,’ said ARNOLD.

‘That’s the idea,’ said Larry. The pod is the outer super-structure. Each pea is self-contained and can act as a re-entry vehicle.’

‘Why are so many peas missing?’

‘Oh, we just haven’t found them yet . . . or . . .’ Larry’s face lit up with ecstasy. ‘Of course! The peas were dropped! It is possible that the ship made the round trip to Procyon, leaving biota on the new planet before coming back to reseed Earth.’

ARNOLD was fascinated. ‘How can we know for sure? If Man Implanted to one planet, there must be other accessible stars he could have reached. I’d like to believe that our species could excel at something besides war.’

‘Yes, warrior!’ Larry smiled. ‘We could find the answer to that if we located a piece of the starship’s spine – the cephalic bulge, which might house a portion of the brain called the amygdale, or almond. Memories are solid-state in there. All her magnetic bubbles and ionic thoughts are probably gone. That was a rough landing. Implant starships are built in space to live out their existence in the nullgrav and vacuum between planets. Only their pods can live in an atmosphere. Re-entry must have been a harsh way for such a powerful cyber to die.’

The amygdale was located and dissected from a four-mile-long segment of ship spine. It floated in
Rorqual
’s wake, cradled in a foam cocoon. Neurotecks made hookups. The ship probed.

‘It has no personality – just memory banks.’

Larry nodded. ‘That’s the almond. What do you see regarding the Implant?’

Rorqual
was unusually slow in answering. ‘The retrieval stem is Haganoid, but somewhat nonstandard. I haven’t unscrambled the storage sequences yet. They are not linear. Allow me more time.’

‘No rush,’ said ARNOLD. ‘We’ll start back to Har Island. Maybe we can set up the almond in the jungles and probe it at our leisure. It will have an interesting story to tell.’

They attached the macramé to the lobulated white 160-×-120-×-120 foot mass of neurocircuitry and ploughed eastward through the pack-ice. All hands waited anxiously for news of the space colonists.

‘Wiped out?’ exclaimed Larry.

‘One Implant apparently did so poorly that the starship wrote it off as a failure,’ said
Rorqual
. ‘I am still unscrambling the details, but there is evidence for two separate Implants: the first, about a century after launch, succeeded – doubling in population twice under observation. It was this second attempt, much later, that failed. Both planets were biologically hospitable (gy=c), but there was a competitive life form on the second planet.’

‘Which star system?’ asked Larry.

‘The first may have been Procyon. The second is not identified, at least not yet.’

ARNOLD studied the memory logic of the almond. ‘I can’t understand it either. We’ll have to get the starship’s own retrieval system working to sort this out.’

‘But we can guess,’ said Larry. ‘The Procyon Implant could account for several pods and several centuries. Earth could be the second planet (
gy=c
). We know we received an Implant about the time the starship re-entered and crashed in the Arctic. The Hive could be the competitive life form. Those poor colonists wouldn’t have a chance to study the Nebish with those crazy bowmen flying around.’

‘Impossible,’ said
Rorqual
. ‘No starship could make a round trip to a star and not know it had arrived back at its home sun. Earth’s geography hasn’t changed at all in a few dozen centuries. The Oceans were empty, true – and the Garden flora was sterile – but it wouldn’t take the starship and its crew long to figure things out.’

Larry just waved his hands. ‘But we know the ship spoke to Trilobite just before it crashed into the sea. It was acting mighty funny. Some of the pods seeded successfully, bringing back our extinct species. But these landed outside the Hive – in Oceans, small empty islands, tropical lagoons. I’m certain that the Hive would have wiped out any that landed on its Gardens. Judging from this jumbled almond, the starship was having cerebral difficulties. It may not have been able to help its colonists on Earth.’

ARNOLD stood and gazed at the horizon. ‘Our ancestors returned to Earth and died at the hands of the Hive, and we couldn’t help them!’

‘Maybe,’ said Larry. ‘But you know how many little islands there are . . . A few probably survived someplace. We’ll come across them in our travels.’

The beach was practically empty as the Godwhale nosed into the sand. Only Opal and a few of the elders were on hand. It was an hour before sun-up, and most of the inhabitants of Har Island still slept. The decks were quiet, solemn. Opal twisted her flowered lei nervously. She relaxed when she saw the stoop-shouldered hulk of Big Har. He came out on the deck carrying a glistening white walrus tusk as long as his arm.

‘Are you alright?’ she asked as the crane set him on the sand. He nodded and turned to wave. The ship backed off quietly and was gone before the sun rose.

‘Why are you so quiet? Couldn’t you find your deity?’

Har started walking slowly towards his hut. ‘We found her,’ he said, ‘only she was dead.’

Opal put her arm around her husband’s shoulder. What could she say.

‘But we think we found evidence of an even greater deity – just a clue – a hint. A deity so powerful that creation of whole planets is just a casual hobby – something to play at number games with.’

‘What do you mean?’

He pointed down. ‘This planet, so huge that I can’t even understand the numbers, was put together and set in orbit around the sun to match some silly formula. The gravity times the year equals this universal constant called light-speed. The moon might have been a fine adjustment in the formula – to lower our gravity and provide drag to shorten our year so the numbers came out exactly. Exactly! Creation was just a game!’

Opal hugged him lightly. ‘Now, now, even a deity needs a little recreation. Our home isn’t really a bad place – even if it was made as a hobby.’

Har searched his hut for thongs and hung the tusk over the doorway. Opal noticed the scrimshaw: engraved letters and pictures.

‘What’s that?’

‘A prayer.’

gy = c

‘A prayer?’

‘Yes OLGA’s prayer – to let the Creator of planet Earth know that I got the message: a thank-you for our home.’

‘Your deity isn’t dead.’ She smiled.

‘I don’t know how long
They
live. Earth was built a long time ago – billions of years. I just don’t know . . .’

Larry chatted with Wandee on the long ear. Both were wrinkled and grey.

‘Are the lights still out?’ asked the centaur.

‘Yes, but the deathrate has dropped back to normal. I never realized how dependent we were on the Hive’s circulatory system – air, water, sewage. Whole cities were wiped out when the energy organ blew. Fused our best machine shop too – killing our most skilled. I managed to survive by climbing up to the platform and foraging in the Gardens at night. Almost got killed by a Hunter this morning when I overstayed.’

Larry shook his head. ‘Well, I guess it will be a long time before you are ready to trade with us—’

‘Oh, we’re ready now!’ she said excitedly. ‘If you have food – any kind. I’ll see to it that we get some barges out to the reef. What kinds of things do you want? With a promise of calories, I can get most anything through the CO.’

‘What about the new Chairman?’

‘Oh, we don’t have a Chairman right now. The CO is trying the headless-committee method. After Furlong’s egregious mistake there’ll be no carte blanche for a long time.’

Larry frowned. ‘I hadn’t realized the CO valued individual human life. Ode and Drum – was it their deaths that put the onus on the Chairman?’

‘No. Failure did. Before Furlong, your Benthics were just a few naked savages. Now they are many – with a strong navy and the infusion of ARNOLD’s warrior genes. Our Hive is clearly down a point. Furlong was blamed.’

‘Conflict is unfortunate . . .’

‘But necessary,’ she said. ‘In the eyes of the Hive, Oceans are just a food source. Citizens starve. Do you realize our population density?’

Larry tried to extrapolate from one of the island communities where ‘crowded’ meant fifty per square mile. In those cultures many calories came from the sea. He knew the Hive density was much higher. ‘Five hundred per square mile?’

Wandee laughed bitterly. ‘I wish it were true, but you are two decimals off: fifty thousand per square mile, for every mile of all the major land masses – totalling 3.5 × 1012 for the planet. That is why we literally eat each other and process our sewage and garbage – to shorten the energy cycle, close the loop in the nitrogen cycle. The CO feels the hunger of the dying Nebish. Ocean calories are needed.’

‘Perhaps we can help each other – trade our catch for your manufactured products and tools. I’ll work up a shopping list and get back to you.’

‘Fine.’

‘You did what!’ exclaimed ARNOLD.

‘But she is your mother-figure – such a nice old grey-haired lady—’

‘Se’s a member of the Hive and as such can’t be trusted. If you give them a shopping list they’ll know our weaknesses.’

‘Look,’ explained Larry. ‘They built those Harvesters. What can they learn if we just order a few replacement parts? It will cut down on our own ship time. All they want is a few tons of extra plankton – calories. We can spare that. Besides, it gives us a chance to study their technology too. But I doubt they’ll be much of a threat in the near future: they can’t even get their lights back on – and they starve.’

AROLD glanced at the ship. ‘What do you think, old girl? Is it safe to deal with the Hive?’

‘Negative. The Hive will always be a threat to those who live Outside. However, the benefits of trade outweigh the hazard for the foreseeable future.’

‘Why do you say that? Three trillion Nebishes with a planet-wide brain? Isn’t that a threat?’

Rorqual
sounded confident. ‘When I shared with the CO I felt the burdens of the cities. They are so overwhelmed with basic bodily functions that they have no energy or time for philosophizing. They are so busy with today’s technical problems that they forget the basic theories. They remember Einstein’s equation, E=mc2 but they forget OLGA’s equation for a habitable planet, gy=c. When I tried to reach old fossil records I found abundant silly details about some of the more colourful creatures like the thirty-foot Devonian placoderm and the larger reptiles. But no thought was given to important details of the expanding universe, the age of elements, chemical evolution, or paleoclimates. Why there was no record of the Gum Nebula, the largest known nebula in our galaxy!’

ARNOLD shook his head. ‘You and Trilobite think too much. I guess it was all those centuries of wandering around alone, ruminating. OK. If you think it is safe to trade, we’ll trade. But keep your guard up!!’

‘Yes, Captain. Shall I print out the items we need?’

‘Fine – with copies to Larry, Tool Room, Electroteck Foreman, and Stokers.’

Copies of the shopping list were passed around at the evening meal. Larry was spooning up a sweet compote of fruit and syrup, getting some on his chin and the list.

‘Why do we need these permalloy garnet wafers for the “bubble brain”? Aren’t we growing our own?’

‘Yes,’ answered ARNOLD. ‘But we’re only getting two point five megabits per square inch. I guess
Rorqual
wants to compare quality.’

Larry nodded. A form of technical spying!

He read on: one thousand joules per nanosecond neodymium glass rod for lighting the ship’s fire. Microwave gear in the one-to-ten gigahertz range. Sandwich-hetero-structured diodes of gallium arsenide substrate with doping using a variety of elements: tin, aluminium, silicon, zinc, and germanium. Super-conductors of tantalum disulfide and pyridine with an intercalated crystal structure and periodicity of twelve angstroms. Deuterium. Tritium.

Larry folded up his list. ‘I can’t see anything wrong with the list – pretty basic junk for a teck to play with. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to increase our supplies.’

ARNOLD nodded. ‘Send it to Wandee.’

Larry walked into the tool room to find Slot Machine stretched out on a work bench. Her 34-26-36 android frame had a bulky pelvis to house the primordial rusty box. Three square navels blinked out of soft syntheskin, reading: bar, cherry, lemon.

‘Back again?’

‘Fire in my skull this time,’ she said.

He detached her scalp and apron, rolling her on to her side. Reaching overhead, he pulled down the power key and opened her service panels. Neck and shoulder circuits were bright and shiny, winking back at him with silvery beads and wires. The neural web inside the skull resembled a dusty cobweb – soot. He pulled down the viewer and attached it to his forehead. Blowing carefully with his nitrogen gun he checked each chip.