Across a Billion Years

  Finally Dihn Ruuu rose and told us, "It is done. They will admit us."

  I asked, "Were you having trouble communicating with them because of changes in the language?"

  "The language of the Mirt Korp Ahm," said the robot coolly, "is not susceptible to change."

  "Not ever} Not even over millions of years?"

  "Not a syllable has altered since I was manufactured."

  "That's incredible," I said. "That a language won't change at all in almost a billion years."

  "The Mirt Korp Ahm have never admired continuous evolution," said Dihn Ruuu. "They seek perfection, and, when they have attained it, seek no more."

  "But how can they tell when they've attained it?"

  "They can tell."

  "And then they stop trying to improve anything?"

  "It is the difference, Tom, between your race and the one I serve. From what I have seen of you, I realize that you Earthfolk are never satisfied; by definition, you will never be satisfied. You are perpetual seekers. The Mirt Korp Ahm are capable of contentment when they reach perfection in any endeavor. You would try to improve on perfection itself."

  I saw now why the 250 million years of our archaeological record of the High Ones had registered so little change. And why they had endured across a billion years.

  A supercivilization, yes. But a supercivilization of supertortoises . . . never sticking out their necks. Achieving greatness and pulling into their shells. Literally building a shell around their own sun.

  Jan said, "If the Mirt Korp Ahm aren't seekers, why did they colonize half the galaxy?"

  "It was," said Dihn Ruuu, "a long time ago, when there still was much for them to learn. As you see, the colonies were long ago disbanded. The Mirt Korp Ahm reversed their outward thrust and returned to their native planet."

  Dr. Schein broke in. "Just now, when you were calling Mirt—did you speak with any Mirt Korp Ahm?"

  "I spoke only with my own kind," said the robot.

  "But the Mirt Korp Ahm—do they still survive inside the shell? Or are we heading for another world of robots?"

  "I do not know," Dihn Ruuu said. "Something strange has happened, I fear. But they would not give me any information about the Mirt Korp Ahm."

  We approached the shell of Mirt and it opened for us. A huge hinged section of the dark, dully gleaming sphere swung out, a section at least the size of Ohio, and we plunged through, not under our own power but once again in the grip of the force with which the planets of the Mirt Korp Ahm control spaceships.

  It was our good luck to be aboard a military vessel, not an ordinary passenger-and-freight ultradrive cruiser; thus our ship was equipped with viewscreens and we were able to watch our own entry into the sphere of Mirt. We saw the vast outer skin of the shell, and the colossal hinged gateway, and the hint of a bright gleam within. Then we sped into the sphere, into a dazzling realm of light. In the center of everything was the sun, white, no larger than Earth's own star, sending forth radiation that danced and glittered over the fantastic sprawl of the sphere's inner surface.

  A single giant city covered that surface. Spidery towers stabbed hundreds of meters into the sky—solar energy accumulators, I learned later. Bright blue points of flame blazed here; giant booms swung and pivoted there; highways sparkled like tracks of fire; somber pyramids of black metal occupied immense areas. Everything seemed in motion, expanding, conquering adjoining territory, sucking in life and power, growing, throbbing. It was not what I expected the world of the conservative, progress-hating Mirt Korp Ahm to resemble.

  But were there in fact any Mirt Korp Ahm here? Or were the robots of the High Ones keeping this unbelievable world alive, obediently carrying on the functions and traditions of their extinct creators?

  We landed, coming down in a target area ten times as large as the one on McBurney IV, and bordered by pulsating generators and accumulators of terrifying complexity and size. Robots who might have been the twins of our Dihn Ruuu greeted us. We were taken from our ship, placed aboard a vehicle shaped like a teardrop of amber, and our tour began.

  "An extended recitation of wonders," according to the Paradoxians, "makes the merely commonplace seem noble and strange." Perhaps so. I will offer no catalog of the miracles of Mirt. Why wrestle into words what everyone will see so vividly in the tridim images? We viewed all the splendour of a billion-year-old civilization; let that bald statement be enough. Our robot hosts were eager to reveal everything. And, like wanderers in a dream, we who had known the High Ones only by the scraps and potsherds of the inconceivably remote past now journeyed—unbelievably, and only half believing—through the living heart of this vanished empire.

  "Where are the Mirt Korp Ahm themselves?" we kept asking. "Do they still exist?"

  "They still exist," Dihn Ruuu told us at last, having learned it from the other robots. "But they have changed. They are no longer as I knew them."

  "Where are they?"

  "They receive special care."

  "When will we see them?"

  "In time," said the robot. "At the proper moment."

  We doubted that. We all were sure that the High Ones had died out long ago; and that the robots, unwilling to accept the hard truth of that, had been living a weird pretense, masterless for millions of years. We were wrong. In their own good time the robots allowed us to meet the Mirt Korp Ahm. It was on the ninth day of our visit. A vehicle of a kind we had not used before called for us and took us down a sloping track into the depths of the sphere, a dozen levels beneath the surface, into a cool green world of silence, where floating globes of light drifted ahead of us down intricate webworks of corridors.

  Dihn Ruuu said, "The current Mirt Korp Ahm population of Mirt, I have been told, is 4,852. There has been no significant change in that figure in the past hundred thousand years. The last actual death was recorded here 38,551 years ago."

  "And the last birth?" Mirrik asked.

  Dihn Ruuu stared at him a long moment and replied, "Approximately four million years ago." After that their fertility was exhausted."

  I tried to comprehend the nature of a race whose last baby had been born in the epoch of the subhuman man-apes, whose last death had occurred in the time of the cave painters.

  A sliding panel rolled back and we peered through a thick crystal wall at a member of the Mirt Korp Ahm. In a cavernous six-sided room that reminded me of the rock vault in which we had found Dihn Ruuu, a cluster of massive machinery converged on a cup-shaped couch of glossy blue metal. Enthroned on the couch sat a being of great size, perhaps twice the size of a human, dome-headed, four-armed, covered with scales, indeed a High One such as we had seen in the projections of the globe.

  Life-support mechanisms surrounded and practically engulfed it. A dozen small cubical structures were fastened to its limbs; a complex device was strapped about its chest; wires ran from its skull, its body, its wrists. This entire immense room was a nest of equipment that served to sustain the flicker of life in this creature, to nourish it and keep its organs pumping and drain off the poisons of age.

  For this High One was old. Hideously, frighteningly old.

  Its body was wrinkled and pouchy; its scales no longer overlapped, but had spread apart to show folds of soft grayish skin, and in places the scales had flaked off altogether; the eyes were dull; the expression was slack.

  The High One did not move. It gave no indication that it was aware of us. It might have been a waxen image of itself, except for the faint sign of the rise and fall of its breath. Locked within its cradle of cables and conduits and muscle-stimulators and energizers, the prisoner of its own hunger to survive, it seemed lost in a dream of bygone thousands of centuries. We stared at it as if it were a royal mummy come to life, or the last of the dinosaurs.

  Commander Leonidas had brought one of his TP people along from the ship. "Can you read it?" Leonidas asked. "Do you pick anything up?"

  TPs are not ordinarily supposed to be able to communicate with nonhuman species. B
ut sometimes an alien race carries a strong residual load of latent TP —maybe not strong enough to let members of that race read each other, but enough so that a good Earth TP can pick up stray scraps of thought. Nothing coherent, just flickering impressions rather than full phrases. The TP with us, a man named Davis, pressed close against the crystal wall, closed his eyes, entered into deep concentration. When he turned away moments later, his face was pale and furrowed in disgust.

  "A vegetable," Davis said softly. "The

  mind of a vegetable… but an insane vegetable."

  "Ozymandias," Mirrik murmured. "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair."

  Dihn Ruuu said, "They are all like that. Their bodies will endure until the end of time, perhaps. But their minds . . . their minds . . ."

  "More dead than alive," Dr. Schein said. "And yet they live on."

  "It is no favor to them," muttered Dr. Horkkk. "This death-in-life is an indecency! Their time is over. Let them rest."

  Yes, let them rest, I say.

  And so a billion years of greatness comes down to this: empty creatures rotting in crystal cages, while bustling robots thrive and multiply and eagerly serve. Our quest is over. We have found the High Ones, we have intruded on what should have been private, we have peered into the nightmare of the galaxy's loftiest race in extreme old age.

  I wish we had never been allowed to see this.

  I pray that Earth in its old age, a million or a billion years from now, will die the quick and clean death that planets as well as people deserve, and that no strangers will come spanning the stars to stare at the dismal, dilapidated, deathless heirs to all our magnificence.

  We left this underworld of suspended lives and cheated deaths, and returned to the glowing surface of Mirt, and we thought our tour of wonders was at its end.

  We were wrong, for Mirt had one amazement left for us, the one which has so enormously transformed the existence of every being in the galaxy and thrust us into a new and strange and exciting era.

  Dihn Ruuu led us to a long vaulted room piled deep with the bewildering devices of the High Ones, and as we passed through it I noticed familiar objects on a shelf.

  "Look," I said. "Commemorative plaques!"

  Half a dozen of the bright metal disks were stacked there, identical to those that had been excavated so frequently in the ancient sites of the High Ones. None of the others showed much interest in what I had found; they sped onward to some kind of sculpture made of many thin spokes bent and bunched in curious patterns. But I called Dihn Ruuu over and asked the robot about the plaques. The robot scooped them up, spread them on one huge hand, and said, "They are activators."

  "Activators of what?"

  By way of answer he reached into the shelf and tugged forward a circular band of smooth white metal, pierced by three slots.

  "The thought amplifier," Dihn Ruuu said. "Which permits communication between mind and mind."

  "Can you show me how it works?"

  "The activators must be inserted in the slots. Then one places the amplifier on the head—"

  I snatched the disks and the band from Dihn Ruuu and with trembling fingers shoved the activators into place. Dihn Ruuu made no comment. At the far end of the hall, Dr. Schein turned, looked back at me, and called, "What are you doing, Tom?"

  "Nothing," I said, and lifted the thought amplifier to my head.

  I knew the risks were tremendous, but I refused to think about such things. All my life had been only a prologue to this moment, all the years of being incomplete, isolated, cut off. Now I saw a chance to become complete after all.

  I brought the thought amplifier down until it encircled my temples.

  I felt as though a spike had been hammered through my skull. I reeled; perhaps I fell; I could no longer see. Tongues of fire danced in my brain. My mind fled from my body, roaming the long room at will-Encountering another mind-Contact!

  A silent voice said—

  — Who's there? Who's calling?

  —Tom Rice, I replied.

  —But you're not a TP!

  —Now I am.

  I knew that my mind was touching that of Davis, the Pride of Space's TP man. I felt closer to this stranger than I had ever been to anyone. Our minds met and could have merged; and I let out such a whoop of excitement at my new power that Davis recoiled, stunned, in pain, and sealed his mind off from me. No matter. I was no longer aware of pain myself. I moved away from Davis' mind—outward-Out into space.

  How easy it was to leap across the light-years! In wonder and awe my mind roved the galaxy. I felt impulses of thought rising toward me here, there, bright glints of light lancing through the darkness as other TPs wondered who this stranger was. I touched the mind of Nachman Ben-Dov, the Israeli Buddhist, on Higby V. Who's that? he demanded. What's your signal? Who are you?

  — Tom Rice, I told him.

  —But how—?

  I opened my mind and let him see how, and our minds touched, and I felt the strength of him, that rock-steady man. I sensed another mind near his, and probed, and it was that of Marge Hotchkiss; and somehow that unpleasant woman did not seem unpleasant now, for I saw beyond her irritability, her laziness, her selfishness, to the—well, call it the soul—beneath. From Marge I moved to the mind of Ron Santangelo, who greeted me in surprise and amazement, and then a whole chorus of TPs erupted, voices out of every corner of the universe, asking how it was that someone not born to the TP power was able to touch minds to them, and for one breathtaking moment I was in contact with thousands of TPs at once; I was plugged into the entire TP net.

  And then I picked up the voice I had been waiting for.

  — Tom, how wonderful! I never thought this would happen!

  —Neither did I, Lorie. Neither did I.

  My mind went forth fully to my sister, and hers to me, and the other TPs dropped away, enclosing us in a sphere of silence, leaving the two of us in undisturbed contact. We opened our minds to one another, and there came pouring out of Lorie across hundreds of light-years such a flood of love and warmth that I nearly had to break contact to keep from drowning in it; and then she moderated her output, and we adjusted frequencies as I was learning moment by moment to do, and our minds merged.

  Merged. Totally.

  In that instant of union we learned all that there was to learn from one another. She drew from me every detail that has gone onto these message cubes, everything from the boredom of the ultradrive voyage to Higby V through the finding of Dihn Ruuu to the moment when I had donned the thought amplifier. Lorie will not have to play the cubes; she knows the whole story of my adventures.

  And I drew from her, in that first excited burst of contact, the essence of the paralyzed girl who is my sister, and I realized that I had never really known her before. It had been foolish of me to pity her and coddle her, to try to shield her from my own happinesses so she would suffer no envy. She is anything but pitiful, anything but envious. She is strong, perhaps the strongest person in the universe, and her paralysis means nothing to her, for she has friends everywhere and envies no one, least of all me. In the meeting of our minds I discovered that it was I, deprived of the TP power, who had been the real cripple. Lorie had pitied me even while I had pitied her, and her pity had been far more intense and with much better reason. There was an end to pity now. — This is Jan, I said, and transmitted an image. —She's beautiful, Tom. I know you'll be happy together. But why don't you give her the amplifier too?

  —Yes. Yes, I will. Right—now—

  But I felt a fierce wrenching sensation, and my contact with Lorie broke, and I was alone, terribly alone, once more locked into my skull.

  "He's coming out of it!" Dr. Schein's voice said. "He's all right!"

  I opened my eyes. I lay sprawled on the cold stone floor of the long room. Everyone stood clustered anxiously about me. Saul had taken the amplifier from my head. Jan, frightened, clung to Pilazinool. I tried to get up, swayed dizzily, and made it on my second try.

&nbs
p; "Give that to me!" I yelled, reaching for the amplifier.

  Saul held it back. Dr. Schein said, "Tom, that thing can be dangerous! You don't know—"

  "You don't know," I shouted, and lunged at Saul, who yielded the amplifier. I suppose I must have seemed like a madman to the others. They backed away, frightened. I gestured at Dihn Ruuu and ordered the robot to get me a second amplifier. The robot obeyed, inserting the activator plaques itself. "Here," I said to Jan. "Put it on your head!"

  "No, Tom, please—I'm afraid—"

  "PUT IT ON," I said, and she put it on before anyone could stop her, and I donned my own amplifier again and closed my eyes and felt hardly any pain at all as my mind broke free of my body, and I reached out, and there was Jan.

  —Hello, I said.

  —Hello, she replied, and our minds met and became one.

  And that is how eleven archaeologists set out to dig up some broken old artifacts, and ended by changing the whole nature of human life. Not only human, either. The thought amplifiers work for all organic life-forms, and so for the first time aliens will enter the TP net. There are enough amplifiers on Mirt alone to supply the populations of a dozen worlds. Later, we can manufacture our own.

  And so it is the end of secrecy and suspicion, of misunderstanding, of quarrels, of isolation, of flawed communication, of separation. As the amplifiers go into use, anyone will be able to contact anyone else, instantaneously, over a gulf of half the universe if need be, and achieve a full meeting of souls. What has been the special province of a few thousand TPs is now open to everyone, and nothing will ever be quite the same again.

  * * *

  We leave Mirt tomorrow. We may never come back; others may finish what we have begun here, while we go on to other sites. We can't pretend that we're doing anything but sightseeing now. For a month we've roamed this sphere of miracles, simply staring, making no systematic examination. We can't. There's too much here.

  We need to go away, to take stock, to gain the long view of what we've already found, before we can push on with the job of penetrating the mysteries of the civilization of the Mirt Korp Ahm. Things have happened much too swiftly; we have to regain our balance.