Though largely landbound, the Jet body was capable of forward velocity approaching four hundred miles an hour. It was also just about the finest host for archaeological excavation available in the Cluster.
Herald looped about, manipulating his little vanes, coasting on his springy bristles, making a delicate track in the dust. The same jet propulsion that gave such speed served as a gentle or savage excavation mechanism and clearing device for buried artifacts. The easiest way to move dust was to blow it away!
Hweeh, garbed in a powered suit, awaited him. "Perhaps I should have Transferred also."
"No. There is still information locked in your Weew brain that we must have. We can't afford to complicate it by housing your mind in another brain. Anyway, you have such an adaptable body that you are not at much disadvantage." He spoke by imposing vibrations on the column of gas he jetted out. Speech was a subfunction of propulsion.
"With due deference to your more valid pain, I suffer from the loss of the Kirlian Lady," Hweeh said. "She alone could unlock my secrets; without her I am hardly worth your time."
"Without her, I am hardly worth my time," Herald said. "I loved her more than I knew. Were it not for the threat to our entire Cluster, I would release myself to my grief."
"You Slash have extraordinary control."
"We evolved as warriors, and for a thousand years we have labored under the Curse of Llume. We do what is necessary. We do not have to like it."
"In my culture, this would be regarded as a signal of unconcern. I would not have survived the shock you have had."
"That is the difference between our species. You discovered the threat; I attempt to deal with it."
They looked out over the shield of hardened lava. This was Planet Mars, of System Sol, very close to the world from which Psyche's human species had spread.
Because it was in this fashion associated with her, it had a certain poignancy for him. Of course her human form was of little significance; it was her aura that had conquered him. That aura in any other host would have been as delectable. Well, no, not quite; in Solarian host he had been moved by her human form too. He had loved—still loved!—every aspect of her.
How pleasant it would be to simply go into shock, like the Weew. Then he would not have to face a life that had so abruptly and finally been rendered empty.
Pointless to dwell on it. He was a Slash, as he kept reminding himself, able to function regardless. "We are here for archaeological purposes," Herald said. "As well as to give me a rest and to try to complete your healing, in a place safe from enemy intrusion."
"While the committee deliberates whether it will take our warning seriously, and no action is taken," Hweeh said. "At least in my species, shock is open and direct."
Herald paused. "Your ability to assimilate diverse factors and come to the underlying truth is manifesting again, friend of Weew. The Ministers of the Cluster Council seemed most intelligent, but as a group they really did not accomplish much. Do you think they were merely humoring us, and have no real plans for dealing with the menace?"
"That is the purpose of referral to committee. Let us hope that the Duke of Qaval, as adviser to that committee, will prod them into action despite their intent."
"Actually, we did not have conclusive evidence," Herald admitted. "One cannot blame them for their skepticism. If only the Lady—" He broke off.
"You shall heal me, Herald, and we shall complete that evidence. This is necessity."
Necessity. Yes. The salvation of the Cluster was still up to them. But could they do it?
"This is supposed to be the most promising Ancient evolutionary site discovered in the past century," Herald said. "Perhaps we can find here some hint that will lead us to the functioning site that will give us parity with the... enemy."
"Amoeba," Hweeh said. "I am inured to that much, now. I do not think I will go into shock again. It is merely necessary to evoke what remains buried by my prior shock."
"Agreed. I believe the Council shunted us here on the pretext of providing opportunity to evoke that information to keep us from nagging them about more direct efforts. They don't really expect us to come up with anything. Many of them, like that Minister of Dash, don't believe there is anything to come up with. But we shall do our best, nevertheless. Something in this site may stimulate your associations, and then I can use my aura to follow through." He looked about with his special Jet fiber lens. "This is Elysium, Planet Mars...."
"Mars was God of War, in Solarian myth, and Elysium the abode of the Blessed."
Herald continued his survey of the barren plain, trying to picture Solarian gods. "I perceive no blessing. The war reference is apt enough, however." Then he glanced at one section again, orienting his fiber-lens on a stirring of dust in the distance. The image magnified as specialized hairs shifted, and he made out another Jet. "Our guide approaches."
Soon the visitor coasted up. It was a female of the species, distinguished from the male by the pattern of sensory fibers fringing her forward intake. Young, pretty by the standards of this kind, her metallic torso shone sleekly and her propulsion trail had pleasant emanations. But she was not well; there was a jerkiness to her jetting that made her leave a zigzag trail in the dust when accelerating.
"I come to help and be helped," she said as she drew in close, damping her intake neatly. "Which of you is the Healer?"
"I am," Herald said. This form of life was so well suited to travel that his brief utterance caused him to jump forward, but his host converted the motion into a neat little circle. A completely still Jet was a silent one; movement had to accompany conversation.
"I suffer," she said, making her own conversational loop, a bit jerky. "If you can heal me, I will work for you and be your mistress during your stay."
Herald considered. He had encountered many divergent aspects of culture in the Cluster, and could adapt. In some, sexual interaction was a form of polite greeting; in others, there were stringent restrictions. The Solarians tended toward the latter type, though individuals like his ancestor Flint of Outworld seemed to have been closer to the former type. The Jets seemed to be about in the center, recognizing sex as a living need, to be indulged in in semi-casual fashion. A sensible attitude. But sex was not for him during his bereavement. "I need no mistress, but can use a guide. I will heal you, if your problem in amenable to my power."
He moved close to her and touched her with his grasping fibers, letting his aura interact with hers. And was amazed—for she had no aura!
No, he had misread. She did possess aura, but it was fractional, so slight as to be barely detectable. Perhaps one two-hundredth of sapient norm. The inverse of his own. And this was not the result of fading or illness; it was natural to her. He realized that his own host had a similar level, making it a virtual aural blank. Preoccupied by other matters, he had never thought to check. Apparently low aura was a survival trait in the Jets' home Sphere near the hole in the glob.
His aura enveloped her, penetrating to her deepest animation. She was a very nice creature, as was evidenced in her self-perception as reflected in her trace aura. "What is your nomenclature?" he inquired gently, the jet of his speech spinning them both about.
"We use no names, here, merely numbers," she replied. As she talked, be felt the aural interactions of the nervous signals directing her motion, locating the flaw that made her unwell. It was subject to his type of healing. "I am Worker Sixteen."
Sixteen—the approximate age in Sol-years of his erstwhile wife. Evocative number! "Relax, Sixteen, heal," he said. "My aura touches yours."
"I don't feel anything," she said.
So low a Kirlian that even in this intimacy, which was in certain respects closer than the sexual one she had proffered, she could not perceive his power! He had not known that any such species existed in the Cluster.
But soon he became aware of something else. She could not feel the healing—because it was not occurring. His aura was present but not acting.
Herald broke contact. "I have gone into shock, in my fashion!" he said, horrified. "I cannot heal!"
"This cannot be," Hweeh said. "Your aura remains."
"Verify her condition for yourself," Herald said, disengaging. "I have not affected her."
Hweeh jetted his suit over, touching a sensory appendage to Sixteen's gleaming chassis. He paused, concentrating. "You are mistaken. You have healed her."
"I have not. I do not delude myself about failure."
"Perhaps you have overlooked success, then." Hweeh broke contact. "She is well now, unless I delude myself. Sixteen, please jet at speed for us."
"But I cannot—" she protested.
"Take off!" Hweeh said.
She took off, stirring up the dust explosively. She accelerated rapidly in a straight line, then banked in a great loop, leaving a horizontal tail of suspended dust. She braked suddenly by flipping her exhaust to the front, making a very pretty cloud, then accelerated forward again. Her trail was without divergencies.
"You have healed me!" she cried, zooming between them and making an intricate triple spinabout on her way out for another run.
Herald looked at Hweeh. "Neither am I a fool," be said quietly, so that his body hardly moved. "You healed her, Weew."
Hweeh made a negligent quiver of an appendage. "Perhaps her faith has made her well. It was a minor malfunction of her control system."
"Of course, her faith made her well. That is how healing works. But it was your aura that enhanced that faith, not mine."
"I learned the art from you, from the many times you have practiced your immense reassurance on me. My aura is far more powerful with respect to hers than yours is with respect to mine, so my relatively clumsy effort seems to have had effect, but it is your skill I attempted to emulate. Therefore it is really your success. I sought to protect your reputation from question by those not in a position to understand."
"How can I heal you, when you now possess the talent I lack?"
"You will recover," Hweeh said confidently. "Your indisposition is temporary. Then you will heal me."
Touching confidence! But Herald remembered Psyche, burning, burning, jerking her pale-blue legs away from the terrible fire, and knew that his soul had been consumed with hers. Without her, he was no more than a shell.
The dig was extensive. The site had been buried under packed Martian dust laid down in the course of three million years of seasonal planetary dust storms. Crews of Jets had labored for years, carefully blowing out the dust and salvaging structures and artifacts with meticulous care. "We discovered it by accident," Sixteen told Herald. "Rather, the Lodoformers discovered it."
"Segment Lodo is converting this planet to their use?" Hweeh inquired. "They are neighbors of ours, but still five thousand parsecs from here. It would have taken one of their ships thirty thousand years to travel that distance. And why should Segment Etamin give up a planet so near the home of one of their founding species? This is Mars, adjacent planet to Earth, origin of the human Solarians."
"Mars was mined out two thousand years ago, as were all the Sol System minor moons and planets," Sixteen said. "The Solarians extracted all its commercial resources and left it dead, so it is not useful to them or any other Segment Etamin species. In any event, Planet Earth has lost much of its political clout. The Sol-Polaris regime of Planet Outworld dominates this region. Since Mars is the only world within three hundred parsecs that is suitable for Lodo, the Cluster Council made it available."
"But the time factor!" Herald protested. "Segment Lodo did not exist thirty thousand years ago. In fact, Star Lo had barely established relations with Star Do via radio signal. They could not have sent—"
"They used mattermission," she explained. "They drew on the resources of a local neutron star to catapult their freezer-ships as far as six thousand parsecs. This occurred during their 'Fool' period three thousand years ago. The ships then oriented on the most promising systems and closed on them at half-light speed. Most have now been settled, but a few ships remain in space."
"But mattermission requires a receiver!" Herald said. "They could not simply fling out randomly!"
"There are receivers scattered about in space," Hweeh said. "I have identified a number of them, in the course of my researches. Often they pass unnoticed, as they resemble derelicts, but some are functional. Most are from now-vanished local cultures, but some could derive from the Ancients."
"Live and learn!" Herald said. "How much of the Universe passes within easy range of our perceptions, yet is missed because we fail to comprehend the obvious? Are we willfully blind to the ready solutions to our quests?"
"It only seems that way," Hweeh said. "The necessary compromises of civilization tend to channelize our thinking, until need and accident reform the channels. Only through highly selective blindness can we filter out the irrelevant, and of course on occasion some of that turns out to be more relevant than first supposed. I conjecture that the higher the level of civilization, the greater the blindness to the irrelevant, until changing needs cause the extremely narrow focus to exclude the relevant as Hell. Then the civilization falls. Possibly that is what happened to the Ancients."
"Intriguing hypothesis," Herald said. "But I am skeptical. Such knowledge as the Ancients had...." He thought of something else. "Do you suppose the Amoeba could have used—?"
"I'm sure of it. A spaceship-sized receiver, left in deep space by the Ancients. The Amoebites could have located it by a sophisticated mattermission search—since their science seems nearly equivalent to that of the Ancients, they surely have means to do this—and used it for their staging area. They could have shipped through equipment and technicians to build a hundred or a thousand additional such receivers, then brought their ships through as fast as half-light speed could clear them out of the way. Hence the Amoeba pattern of expansion. It could still take decades to transmit such a fleet, but it could be and evidently has been done." He paused, startled. "You have elicited more of my buried information, without even using your aura!"
"You are healing yourself," Herald said. "We learn more and more about the Amoeba—except how to stop it."
"That is why we explore this site," Hweeh reminded him. "If we discover here the key to the Ancients' rationale...."
In a buried, nonfunctional Ancient site? Unlikely! Yet their discourse about the blindness of specialization encouraged him. Maybe there was something here that others had overlooked, because they were looking for things, not insights.
"So now the Lodo freezer is arriving at Mars," Herald said. "And the red planet is being Lodoformed for their colony."
"Yes," Sixteen agreed. "It has provided beneficial employment for the local Solarians for the past fifty years. In twenty more years the Lodo ship will arrive. There would have been no complications, had not the Lodoforming crew, in the course of filling in the strip-mining pits of past Solarian excesses, uncovered relics of the Ancients. Thus we of Jet were imported to salvage this site, as Solarians could never have done it rapidly and expertly enough. And now a complication of our schedule has brought you here."
Herald remembered: There had been an item on his itinerary about System Sol, before the events of Planet Keep and the manifestation of the Amoeba had hopelessly shuffled his schedule. So some bright light in the Cluster Command must have decided that the best place to send him was one he should normally have visited anyway. That way, any suspicion by outsiders might be alleviated; he obviously was not going out of his way.
"There is still confusion," Hweeh said. "Lodo is an advanced Segment, with a high social organization and technology. In that respect it parallels Weew itself." He seemed unconscious of the slight he was giving other Milky Way creatures. It was an arrogance common to center-galaxy cultures, here and in Andromeda. "I have dealt with Lodo specialists in research astronomy, comparing notes and exchanging data, and found them creditably competent. Surely the Lodo colony could have excavated the Ancient site conveniently."
Sixteen made a hoot of gas. "The Solarians insisted on having the site excavated under their auspices, before Lodo arrived."
"Segment pride," Herald said. "Common to many cultures."
"Pride is essential," Hweeh said. "Each Segment must be the best—in its own estimation." Herald was unable to tell whether there was tolerant humor in the remark, but he suspected there was.
"I also have had dealings with Lodo," Herald said. "I know the Segment only through its heraldry. It is a Scepter culture, whose emblem is a worm in the ground. I find it odd that such a species should turn its attention so formidably to space."
"Not odd at all," Hweeh said. "Population pressure can cause drastic alterations of perspective. Only in space was there sufficient ground for the Worms of Lo and Do."
In the cleared section of the site, there were no squared-off Solarian-style structures, or round Polarian-style ones. Instead there were cutaway sections showing a labyrinth of tunnels. In some cases, the tunnel walls were bare shells, seemingly too thin to support the weight of the mass of other tunnels and driftdust above. The binding cements were evidently very strong and durable, and of course the circular cross sections of the tunnels were able to support much weight.
"Do you know," Hweeh remarked, "this strongly resembles the metropoli of Lodo. Could the Ancients have been Worm-entities?"
"The thought occurred to me also," Herald said. "Yet I have considered other Ancient sites, and they were not of this type. I think it more likely that the Ancients were a conglomerate, much as our Cluster is today. In each region of space, the Ancient society was represented by its local species. Here on Mars, it could have been a Worm-sapient."
"It is difficult to perceive how such a conglomeration could have achieved the uniformity of culture and technology we have noted across the Cluster," Hweeh said. "The Ancients seemed to have no Spherical regression of the kind we suffer from today."