Across a Billion Years

  It turned to the instruments itself and touched one of the controls. Instantly images burst forth: the same sort of screenless projection that came from our globe.

  We watched a kind of travelog of the High Ones' supercivilization. The scenes were different from those out of the globe, but similar in feeling, showing us all the magnificence and splendor of these people. We saw shots of High Ones cities that completely eclipsed the earlier one—cities that seemed to occupy whole planets, with patterns of aerial cables shifting and crossing and interlocking and apparently slipping in and out of dimensions. We saw grandees of the High Ones moving in stately procession through lofty, glittering halls, each being surrounded by dozens of robot servants of all sizes, shapes, and functions, catering to the smallest whim. We looked through tunnels in which vast machines of unfathomable purpose throbbed and revolved. We watched starships in flight, saw High Ones explorers landing on scores of worlds, stepping forth confidently equipped for every sort of environmental condition from dismal airlessness to lush tropical greenery. We received a dazzling view of this most incredible of civilizations, this true master race of the universe's dawn. The globe had shown us only a fraction of it. Brilliant, vivid scenes poured from the vault wall for more than half an hour.

  Temples and libraries, museums, computer halls, auditoriums—who knew the purposes to which those colossal structures had been put? When the High Ones gathered to watch a gyrating point of light, as we saw them do, what kind of beauty did they comprehend? How much information was stored in those glistening data banks, and information of what kind? The star-ships that moved so effortlessly, seemingly without expenditure of fuel—the elegance of the house furnishings —the incomprehensible rituals—the dignity of the people as they went serenely through their day's activities —all of this conveyed to us a sense of a race so far beyond the attainments of our era that our pride in our own petty accomplishments seemed to be the silly posturing of monkeys.

  And yet . . . they are gone from the universe, these great beings, and we remain. And, little creatures that we are, we still have managed to find our way through the stars to this place and to set free the guardian of this ancient vault. Surely that is no small achievement for a species only a million years or so away from apehood. Surely the High Ones, whose time of greatness had lasted a century to each of our minutes, would agree that we have done well for ourselves thus far.

  And there was irony in watching this humbling display of glittering greatness, and in knowing that the makers of that greatness had vanished into extinction hundreds of millions of years ago.

  "Ozymandias," said Mirrik gently, looking at the images from outside the cave.

  Exactly so. Ozymandias. Shelley's poem. The "traveler from an antique land" who finds "two vast and trunkless legs of stone" in the desert, and beside them, half sunk in sand, the shattered head of a statue, still wearing its "sneer of cold command"—

  And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  Precisely so. Ozymandias. How could we tell this robot that its fantastic creators no longer existed? That a billion years of rock covered the ruins of their outposts on dozens of planets? That we had come seeking a mystery locked in a past so distant we could barely comprehend its remoteness? While this robot waited here, the patient, timeless servant, ready to show its movies and impress the casual wayfarer with the might of its masters . . . never dreaming that it alone was left to tell the tale and that all its pride in that great civilization was a waste.

  The projections ended. We blinked as our eyes adjusted to the sudden dimming of that brightness in the vault. The robot began to speak again, slowly, enunciating clearly, using the same sort of tone we would use in speaking to a foreigner or someone who is slightly deaf or a little dull in the skull. "Dihn ruuu . . . mirt korp ahm . . . mirt chlook . . . ruuu ahm . . . hohm mirt korp zort . . ." As before, Dr. Horkkk patched together some sentences in reply, with random combinations of dihns and ruuus and ahms. The robot listened to this in what struck me as an interested and approving way. Then it pointed several times to the inscription node Dr. Horkkk was carrying and spoke in an apparently urgent manner. Of course there was no hope of real communication. But at least the robot seems to think we're worth trying to reach. Coming from a machine of the High Ones, that's a compliment.

  January 4

  Dr. Horkkk has spent most of the last two days running tapes of his "conversation" with the robot through his linguistic computer, trying to wring some meaning out. Zero results. The robot spoke only about two dozen different words, arranging them in various ways, and that's not enough to allow the finding of a meaningful pattern.

  The rest of us have constantly been going back and forth between the ship and the vault, taking full advantage of the robot's hospitality. By now it's quite clear that the robot isn't hostile. The death of 408b was a tragic mistake; the vault evidently was designed not to admit anything without the robot's permission, and if 408b hadn't impulsively rushed in the moment the door came loose, it wouldn't have been killed. Once we established that we were friendly organisms, the robot turned the lightning field off, and we now are welcome to enter the vault as often as we please.

  We are getting bolder. The first day we stood around edgily as if expecting the robot to change its mind and zap us any minute, but now we've made ourselves at home to the extent of making a full tridim record of the machinery and taking plenty of shots of the robot itself. What we don't dare do is touch any of the machinery, since the robot is plainly the custodian of the vault and might very well destroy anyone who even seemed to threaten its contents. Besides, with 408b gone we have only the flimsiest notions of what that machinery is all about.

  The robot has run its travelog several more times for us, and we've filmed it in its entirety. This is catching your archaeology on the hoof, all right: instead of digging up broken bits and rusty scraps of the High Ones' civilization, we have glossy tridims of the actual cities and people. Looking at them gives us an uncanny sensation. It's something like having a time machine. We've learned more than we ever dreamed was possible about the High Ones, thanks to the globe and what the robot has showed us. We know more about these people of a billion years ago, suddenly, than archaeologists have ever managed to find out about the Egyptians or Sumerians or Etruscans of the very recent past.

  The robot goes through the same curious pantomime routine whenever we visit it. It points to us, points to itself, points to the stars. Over and over. Pilazinool argues that the robot is telling us that it would like to lead us somewhere—to some other vault, maybe, or even to a planet once inhabited by the High Ones. Dr. Horkkk, as usual, disagrees. "The robot is merely discussing origins," Dr. Horkkk says. "It is indicating that both itself and ourselves come from worlds outside the solar system of GGC 1145591. Nothing more than that."

  I like to think Pilazinool is right. But I don't know, and I doubt that we'll ever know.

  Communicating by pantomime isn't terribly satisfying.

  * * *

  Three hours have gone by since the foregoing, and everything has turned upside down again. Now the robot is talking to us. In Anglic.

  Steen Steen and I were sent across to the vault to get some stereo shots of one instrument panel, because we had botched the calibration on the first try. We found the robot busy in one corner with its back to us. Since it was taking no notice of us, we quietly went about our business.

  Five minutes later the robot turned and came clanking over. It extended one arm and aimed an intricate little gadget at us. I thought it was a gun and I was too scared to move.

  The robot said, slowly, with great effort:

  "Speak . . . words ... to ... this."

  I did a quick spectrum trip of astonishment. So did Steen, whose mantle fluttered within his/her breathing-sui
t.

  "It was speaking Anglic?" I said to Steen.

  "It was. Yes."

  The robot said again, more smoothly, "Speak words to this."

  I took a close look at the gadget in its hand. It wasn't a gun. It consisted of an inscription node with a tesseract-shaped puzzle-box mounted at one end. Within the struts of the puzzle-box glowed a deep crimson radiance.

  "Words of you," the robot said. "More. To this."

  The situation began to acquire some spin for me. The robot had been listening to us speak—recording our words, prying into them for meanings—and had taught itself Anglic. And now it wanted to increase its vocabulary. Perhaps, I thought, an inscription node with a puzzle-box attached is a kind of recorder. (I was wrong about that.)

  Steen figured this out a fraction of a second ahead of me. He/she nudged me aside, put the voice-output of his/her breathing-suit close to the glowing end of the puzzle-box, and began rapidly to speak—in Calamorian! He/she spewed forth at least a dozen sentences in his/her native tongue before I woke up, grabbed him/ her, and pulled him/her away from the robot.

  "Get your sposhing hands off me!" Steen shouted.

  "You idiot, what was the idea of speaking Calamorian?"

  "To program the robot's translating machine!" Indignantly. "Why can't it be given words of a civilized language?"

  I was so furious over Steen's stupid militancy that I overlooked the important thing he/she had said, for a moment. I said, "You know damn well that Anglic is the official language of this expedition, and you've agreed to use it throughout. If we're going to give this robot words, they ought to be in only one language, and that language should be—"

  "The robot should have a chance to know that Anglic is not the only language in the cosmos! This suppression of the Calamorian language is an act of racial genocide! It—"

  "Shut up," I said, not very tolerant of Steen's outraged racial pride. Then I reacted to the right thing at last, "—translating machine?"

  Of course.

  Inscription nodes and puzzle-boxes weren't separate artifacts. They were meant to work together, as this robot had assembled them. And they weren't recording devices, either.

  They were machines for converting the babble of primitive barbarian races into the language of the High Ones.

  Steen had seen this quickly, and wanted to get his/ her own wonderful Calamorian language into the record, in defiance of expedition agreements. Maybe doing it enhanced his sense of racial pride, but it also quonked up our chances of quick communication with the robot, since it had placed a dozen incompatible sentences on the record. No translating machine ever invented would get anywhere operating under the assumption that what Steen had just blurted and what the rest of us had been saying were both the same language.

  I warned Steen not to try it again. Steen gave me a surly look; but he/she had scored the intended point and now subsided, leaving me a clear shot at the translating machine.

  I bent close to it.

  Then I wondered what I ought to say.

  Words wouldn't come. Steen Steen had probably bellowed some glib testimonial to the everlasting merits of the Calamorian people, but I wasn't about to do that, and I developed a paralyzing case of mike fright as I tried to imagine the most useful and appropriate possible statements.

  The robot said encouragingly, "Speak words of you to this."

  I said, "What kind of words? Any words?"

  Then silence. Steen laughed at me.

  I said, "My name is Tom Rice. I was born on the planet Earth of the sun Sol. I am twenty-two years old."

  I stopped again, as if the machine needed time to digest one set of statements before receiving another. It didn't, I now know.

  "Speak more words," prompted the robot.

  I said, "The language I am speaking is Anglic, which is the most important language of Earth. The language spoken by the last voice was Calamorian. This is a language of another world in a different solar system."

  As I spoke, I saw streams of High Ones hieroglyphics rippling along the surface of the inscription node. The gadget was converting my sounds into the written characters of the ancient language. What good that did was hard to say, in terms of communication. When I write Dihn ruuu mirt korp, I'm converting the robot's sounds into our kind of alphabetic writing, but I'm not getting one step closer to understanding what those sounds mean.

  It must have helped, though. Because the speaking vocabulary of the robot expanded from minute to minute.

  "Say name of other one," it said.

  "He/she is Steen Steen of Calamor. We have come here to seek information about the builders of this vault."

  "Say more names of things."

  I indicated and named the vault, the door, the ship, the heavens, and as much else as was within pointing range. Carefully choosing my words, I spelled out the fact that we knew that a great deal of time had passed since the construction of the vault. I tried to explain that we were archaeologists who had excavated many remains of the High Ones, but that no member of any existing species had ever encountered a living High One. And so on.

  The robot studied the changing hieroglyphics on the inscription node with intense interest, but confined its statements to brief, brusque commands to go on talking. By now the translating machine had absorbed a healthy chunk of data. By now it had struck me that we ought to be letting the others in on what was going on, too, and I said to Steen, "Switch to ship frequency and call Dr. Horkkk here."

  "While you feed the robot with poisonous lies?" Steen said. "You call!"

  Resisting the impulse to kick Steen in the ribs, if Steen has ribs, I switched channels briefly, summoned everyone from the ship, and cut back to vocal output. The robot wanted more words . . . and more . . . and lots more. It soaked them up.

  Dr. Horkkk and Pilazinool arrived, with the others not far behind. I explained the situation. Dr. Horkkk began to glow with excitement. "Keep talking," he said.

  I kept talking.

  I talked myself hoarse, and then Jan took over, and after her, Saul Shahmoon. It didn't matter much what we said; we were stocking a high-powered computer with data, in essence, and the computer would take care of sorting things out and making sense of them. Dr. Horkkk seemed to tingle in amazement and perhaps a sort of dismay, for such a sense-from-noise machine was exactly what he had been trying without success to develop in his whole career.

  After more than an hour the robot was satisfied.

  "No more words," it said. "The rest will fit in by themselves."

  Translation: the machine now was sufficiently stocked with Anglic words. It would arrange them, make them accessible to the robot, and deal with additions to its vocabulary by interpreting them in context as they came along.

  The robot was silent for perhaps five minutes, studying the ebb and flow of hieroglyphics on the inscription node. We didn't dare speak.

  Then it said, in fluent Anglic that reproduced my own accent and pronunciation and even tone of voice, "I will name myself for you. I can be called Dihn Ruuu. I am a machine produced to serve the Mirt Korp Ahm, whom you call the High Ones. The meaning of my name is Machine To Serve. My purpose is to remain in readiness so that I may serve the Mirt Korp Ahm if they come back to this solar system."

  Another long silence. Dihn Ruuu seemed to be waiting for questions.

  Pilazinool said, "How long has it been since the Mirt Korp Ahm were on this place?"

  "How shall I say the time?" the robot asked.

  "That's a tough one," Pilazinool muttered. "We haven't defined our units."

  Dr. Horkkk took over, and I must say he performed brilliantly. "Our basic unit is the second," he said. "The sound I will make is one second in length." He flashed an order back to the ship's computer, which obligingly generated a tone lasting one second. Then he explained how the Earth-standard time units are built up, sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, and so on up to a year. The robot, obedient machine that it was, refrained from making s
arcastic comments about this inexact and arbitrary system that we have compelled all other races to adopt, at least in their dealings with us. (Why sixty seconds to a minute? Why twenty-four hours to a day? Why not a sensible system built on tens, or logarithms, or something orderly? Ask the Babylonians. I think they invented it.)

  When the robot had grasped our time system, Dr. Horkkk moved on to our distance system, blocking out a line one centimeter in length on the vault floor, and then a one-meter line, and finally instructing the robot to visualize a kilometer as a thousand meters. Finally Dr. Horkkk proceeded to define the orbital velocity of this asteroid in terms of kilometers per hour. The robot stepped out of the vault and scanned the heavens for about half a minute, probably measuring parallax effects so it could see for itself how fast the asteroid was traveling through this solar system. Whatever fantastic computing machine is under its skull was quickly able to calculate the orbital velocity of the asteroid in terms of High Ones units of time and distance, and to work out a correlation from that to Earth-standard figures.

  The robot said, "I will confirm. The orbital period of this asteroid is one year, six months, five days, three hours, two minutes, and forty-one seconds."

  "That's right," said Captain Ludwig.

  "Very well," Dr. Horkkk said briskly, as though it were not at all a miracle that this alien machine could learn so fast and that it could calculate orbital periods by a mere glance at the sky. "Now we may proceed. Can you give us an estimate in our terms of the time elapsed since the most recent visit of the Mirt Korp Ahm to this asteroid?"

  Again the robot studied the sky—this time, apparently, scanning the stars and measuring the shifts in constellations that had taken place since its last look at the outside world.