His whole £ body stiffened, almost falling against the panoramic wall. "You believe? Others think I delude myself about her survival—"
"I know! I doubted, but I saw you actually enter the machine, so I tried it myself. While you led the Amoeba a merry chase across the Cluster, distracting them, I surveyed quietly for her aura, and the Ancient net told me. She did inhabit the sites, her aura alone, enhanced. Hers was the highest aura ever—"
A pattern of interference rippled across the screen. The image of a Jet appeared. |||Activated site discovered!||| it exclaimed. |||The £ site!|||
"The Amoeba has found us!" Herald cried.
"Transfer directly out—now!" Flame screamed, her image wavering high and yellow. "The Cluster needs you. We can't escape physically; they will control the mechanism."
"We both must Transfer out! You go home to Furnace; I'll go to Slash!"
"Yes!" she agreed. "Then we will each report to the Council!"
He concentrated... and felt the power of the site take hold. But as it started, another ripple of interference came. The Amoeba could not use the Kirlian properties directly, but could perceive the activity of this unit via their instruments. Now it was throwing up machine-Kirlian blocks to cut them off. If Herald made it through to his Slash body, his aura would be so garbled that he would be insane.
Flame's aura plunged into the circuitry, driving back the interference momentarily, clearing the way for him. "Go, Herald, go!" she cried, her flame image flickering with the desperate effort.
He had to go, knowing that she, choosing to facilitate his Transfer, had trapped herself instead. He shifted his destination to his Solarian host on Planet Keep, since the Amoeba had overheard his Slash destination and blocked it off. He tried to draw Flame along with him, but could not. There was no available female host on that section of the planet. All he got was a part of her, a final faint message: Psyche... at... Amoeba!
He had delayed too long. The Amoebites had cut him off again. They were operating the circuits, narrowing down his options, beating down Flame's valiant resistance. Non-Kirlian they might be, but they certainly knew how to operate this Kirlian equipment! One last chance—
He shifted destinations again. And suddenly, as his identity was wrenched from the troubled circuitry of the site, and from the beautiful entity he could have loved, who had forfeited her own chance to escape for him; he suffered the most momentous realization of all. The intellectual impact was such as to numb his mind. He had now explored the Ancient equipment even further than Melody of Mintaka had, and knew what she had discovered. He knew the secret of the Ancients—and knew despair.
12
Amoeba of Space
X We are discovered! X
& It does not matter. The weed-species cannot mobilize in time to take effective resistance. We shall proceed on schedule. &
X What of the reverification? X
& We must do it if we can. Should it be convenient to pick up any sapients for this purpose, we shall do so. &
X But we shall not delay action hour for this purpose. X
& We shall not delay it. &
Herald found himself in the Jet host on Mars.
The host was weak, of course. He had not yet recovered from either the physical injury or Herald's strenuous travels around the planet. He was under continued medical care, inactive, as the Jet archaeologists still labored to salvage artifacts from the bombed site. But he was recovering —and Herald had no intention of complicating his health again.
"Bring me Sixteen," he said.
The medic balked, not realizing who was speaking through the host. "She cannot be disturbed."
Herald forced his ailing host to move. "This is critical. Read the aural indicator, perceive my identity. My mission is to save the Cluster from invasion." And to recover Psyche! he added mentally. He. honestly could not tell which was more important to him at the moment—or whether there was really any chance of doing either. No wonder Melody had kept her silence. He now knew more about the Ancients than she did, and the situation differed: It was correspondingly worse.
The medic yielded. He summoned Sixteen.
She came, jetting very slowly and with poor control. "Herald," she said with a gust of gladness. "I thought I would not encounter you again."
Suddenly Herald was ashamed. "Sixteen is your illness because of me? Do you require healing?"
"No illness, Herald. I brought it on myself—"
"I have mistreated you; and now I propose to aggravate it."
"You misunderstand. I always knew—"
"My legal fiancée, Flame of Furnace, gave up her freedom, perhaps her very identity, to promote my welfare. Only through her agency was I able to return here, escaping the Amoeba. Now I must ask you to do the same."
"I will, Herald, I will! Yet—"
"This also you must know: Flame located... my dead wife. Psyche is alive."
"She—not dead?"
"Psyche's aura survives. It is imprisoned in the equipment of the Amoeba which now ties into that of the Ancient sites, because the Amoeba has taken over those sites. I must go to the Amoeba to fetch her out. My true love."
"No wonder your legal fiancée died!" Sixteen said.
No wonder! He did not even try to justify it morally; he simply had to do it. "Will you help me?"
"Herald, I am... I can't—" She broke off. "How may I help you?"
"I need a host for Psyche. To bring her back. Because she no longer has any body of her own."
Sixteen considered. Herald blanked his mind to what might be going through her mind. "To be the host... for your dead true love. To make her live again."
"It is also an extremely dangerous mission. We may both die. We face a situation that may be impossible to accomplish. We go to the heart of the Amoeba itself."
"Yes," she said slowly. "If I do this, I must either die, or yield my body to... to another female."
"Sixteen, I know you love me!" Herald blurted. "You told me you loved Hweeh of Weew, but you lied. I... do not love you. It is a terrible thing I ask of you. But such is my desperation, I ask it anyway. The Amoebites resemble Jets; perhaps as Jets we can negotiate with them." Yet Melody's secret undermines it all, for they are not Jets! "You have little to gain, everything to lose, as did Flame, when she helped me. But there is another aspect—"
"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 can
not 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's 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. 3Envoys from the Cluster?3 the Unit Officer inquired. 3This 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. 0Weed-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 allowe
d 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.