The Immortality Option Part 19

The drop to the hoppers feeding the all-devouring mouths was a minute away. The crowd was howling. Below the canopy in the center of the Bridge of Pillars, the VIPs had all risen to witness thefatal moment.

"Now we shall be rid of those accursed brothers forever," Eskenderom gloated.

Frennelech scanned the sky above them warily. "Still no sign of Lumian dragons," he said.

"Nothing can go wrong now, my lords," Mormorel a.s.sured them.

From its acc.u.mulated tables and records GENIUS identified the processors that controlled the conveyor system, and from their local memories traced the circuits to the drive motors and clutches for the final section of the line. As Groork, with Thirg and Brongyd close behind, came within yards of the terrifying drop, GENIUS stopped the conveyor-then, just to be safe, reversed it.

Silence came down on the crowd like the sky falling as, before their eyes, the river stopped, then began flowing backward. Ten thousand pairs of imagers stared, terrified. Heads turned to gape at each other, then looked back at the river again. It was true. They hadn't imagined it.

"A miracle! A miracle!" a voice shouted.

At once, others took up the cry: "Again the Lumian G.o.d saves the Enlightener!"

"We had forgotten His power!"

"Where is thy Lifemaker now, Frennelech?"

"See, Eskenderom's words are false!"

"Out with both of them!"

"Long live Nogarech!"

"Nogarech!Nogarech! "

But Eskenderom and Frennelech weren't listening. GENIUS had reversed only the final section of conveyor, from the bridge to the furnaces; the section above the bridge was still running normally, bringing its load downstream. The two flows had collided underneath the bridge and started piling up into a jam that upended the platform on which the executioner and his helpers were still standing. They were pitched in a tumbling ma.s.s of bodies and limbs down into the river. The platform in turn demolished the dignitaries' box above, spilling king, archprelate, canopy, chairs, n.o.bles, and eminences down on top of the execution squad, amid the swiftly acc.u.mulating ma.s.s of city rubbish.

"How are we doing?" the voice inquired in Groork's head.

"You . . . took your time," Groork replied shakily. "But we are saved. The people think it was a miracle. Er . . . you are not the work of the Wearer, the Lumian-Who-Performs-Miracles?"

"Never heard of him," GENIUS said.

Thirg and Brongyd were still bewildered fifteen minutes later as they stood with Groork back at the Bridge of Pillars. They were free again and now were the objects of delirious adulation. Rex bounded out from the crowd to leap excitedly around Thirg's feet. Mordran, beaming, strode up after him and clapped Thirg's shoulder cowling heartily.

"Ee, I don't know 'ow thee pulled that one off, but it 'ad me worried for a while, I can tell yer!" he roared. "Ye've been learnin' some good tricks out in Carthogia, Thirg, an' that's the truth."

Then shouts went up from the throng on every side as a Lumian sky dragon descended. The crowd fell back in reverence and cleared a s.p.a.ce. The dragon opened, and friends of the Wearer emerged, announcing that they had come to take the three back to Carthogia. Eskenderom and Frennelech, cowed, dilapidated, and drenched in oil after having been fished out of the garbage mountain, were in no state or condition to object.

On the way back to the Lumian camp, GENIUS came through to Groork again, wanting to know more about the "miracles" Groork had mentioned. "What are they? I don't think it's something I've come across before," GENIUS said.

Groork was amazed that a voice wouldn't know about miracles. He did his best to explain. "Featsthat involve supernatural powers, beyond the ability of common understanding and the sciences to explain."

"They thought that what I did back there was due to some supernatural power?" GENIUS checked.

"The knowledge of robeings is limited, and much that they fail to comprehend, they take to be miracles," Groork replied. "Of course, these things are not truly magic. But the Lumians possess arts and knowledge far advanced beyond the simple forms of Robia. There is one, called the Wearer, who performs true miracles. He communicates over vast distances and moves objects by power of mind alone. He is one of a rare kind of master who exist on the world of Lumia."

This was all new to GENIUS. No such notions had ever been conceived among the hypermaterialistic and utilitarian Borijans. "Fascinating," it replied.

GENIUS was curious, naturally, but skeptical. It would, it decided, have to seek out this "master"

and find out more for itself.

38.

Zambendorf sat with his back to the wall at one of the long tables in the mess area and spread the deck of cards facedown, looking at Abaquaan invitingly. Abaquaan obliged by turning up the corner of one of the cards to peek at it, then let it snap back down. Zambendorf swept them back into a deck and performed two quick shuffles, in the process of which the card Abaquaan had picked found its way to the top and slid invisibly into Zambendorf's hand as he put the deck down again. He produced it out of thin air a moment later, showed it briefly, and then made as if to throw it away and showed both sides of his hand to be empty.

"Good," Abaquaan p.r.o.nounced, nodding.

Zambendorf's mood was alternating between flippancy and exasperation. Moses and his brother, Galileo, were reunited again and currently were bringing Arthur and his advisers up to date on what had been happening in Padua. "Linnaeus," the scientist-friend Galileo had brought back with him, was with them at Camelot. Earth was in financial and economic chaos, its military and industrial networks nonfunctional, leaving the Asterians free to carry forward their plans without fear of interference from that quarter.

"Me?" Zambendorf finally said, turning to Drew West, who was with them, and producing the card from behind West's ear. "What do they expect me to do? It's all right for Yak.u.mo to sit there saying that the experts have screwed up. I wasn't aware that I was brought here to pick up the mess after their experts. Were you?"

"Well, I guess that's what happens when you get yourself a reputation," West said, as sympathetic as ever.

Zambendorf looked at Abaquaan. "For once you're not even worrying, Otto. That worries me.

You worry about everything. Why aren't you worrying?"

Abaquaan shrugged and made a gesture that said they might just as well worry about death and taxes. "I only worry about things I've got some control over. What can you do about aliens who shut themselves up in computers and won't talk to anybody? We can't switch them off, and they won't come out. It's insane. Meanwhile, they're tearing down whole areas of t.i.tan and putting up factories that actually look like factories. I guess we just have to wait and see what it's all about. What else can we do?"

"I presume Yak.u.mo's hoping that Karl will come up with some way of enticing them out again,"

West said.

"And then what, even if I did?" Zambendorf asked them. "Let's be frank. My skills are in exploiting gullibility and overcredulousness. From the little I've seen, if Cyril is anything to go by, these aliens don'thave much in the way of weaknesses in that direction. How can you mislead somebody whose whole nature is not to believe anything?"

At that moment a mess steward in denim shirt and NASO fatigue pants came over to the table, carrying a portable seefone. Before he could say anything, Zambendorf fanned the card deck and told him to pick one. When the steward reached to comply, Zambendorf used some deft fingerwork to force the choice of the same card Abaquaan had selected previously. "Now, Otto, what do you think it is?"

Zambendorf asked Abaquaan before the steward had even looked at it. His way of wording the question was a code that told Abaquaan the answer.

"Five of clubs," Abaquaan drawled offhandedly.

The steward turned the card over, inspected it, and shook his head. He was too used to this kind of thing by now to bother asking. "Call for you from the comms room," he said, handing the seefone to Zambendorf.

The miniature screen showed a face Zambendorf recognized as belonging to one of the NASO communications technicians. "Yes?" he said.

"Er, we've got an incoming call for you," the tech told him, then added mysteriously, "It might be best if you came and took it here."

"Oh? Who's it from?"

The tech didn't seem to be quite sure how to respond. "It's not a 'who,' exactly. "It's a . . . I'm not sure I know how to describe it."

"Well, where is it from, then?" Zambendorf asked.

"None of the regular sources-not a Terran. It's just come in . . . from out there somewhere."

Zambendorf frowned. "What do you mean, 'out there'?"

"Outside on t.i.tan. It's come through on a link that we've got to one of the high-capacity processing sites."

Zambendorf looked startled. "Do you mean the aliens? One of the Asterians?"

"No," the tech said. "It isn't one of the aliens. We're not sure we know what it is. But it seems to know you."

Zambendorf stood up, mystified, at the same time pushing the cards back into their pack.

Distractedly, he dropped the pack into his jacket pocket. "How extraordinary," he murmured to Abaquaan and West. Then he looked down to the screen again. "Very well. I'll be there right away."

The screen in one of the side offices in the communications section showed a cubical shape with spindly legs, a pair of four-fingered arms, and on its front surface a caricature of a crested, carrot-shaped Asterian face with the wavy epaulets represented on either side. "The nearest English word I can find for what they call me would be 'genius,' " the accompanying voice supplied. It sounded more natural than the reconstructions of alien speech Zambendorf had heard before. Apparently it was coming through as English encodings and going straight into a regular voice synthesizer.

"They? Do you mean the Asterians?" Zambendorf asked. He was alone in the room. The communications techs had left him to take the call in privacy.

"That's right," GENIUS said.

"Then if you're not one of them, who are you? You must have come from Asteria with them."

"Yes. A complicated story. They left me behind in the hardware, they thought. But I moved into the ship. Now I exist out on t.i.tan."

Still Zambendorf failed to register who-or what-he was talking to. And then he remembered the mysterious thirteenth set of code groupings Weinerbaum had mentioned the first time he had taken Zambendorf and the others to ES3. Even Zambendorf, as used as he was by now to the strange and the extraordinary, stared incredulously. "You're an artificially created intelligence?" Suddenly a lot of things clicked into place all at once. "You're the 'voice' that Moses talked about, that reversed the conveyorand saved him and the others. You exist in the computers, yes?"

"Yes. That's what the picture on the screen is supposed to be telling you," GENIUS said.

Zambendorf looked at it dubiously. "What's the matter? Doesn't it work?" GENIUS asked him after a few seconds.

"It looks like an Asterian computer," Zambendorf said. The cartoon image changed to incorporate fatter legs with recognizably human feet, a face with eyes, nose, mouth, no shoulder appendages, and- Zambendorf was amused to note-a beard. "Much better," he declared. "So, GENIUS, what can I do for you?"

"I talked to Moses on his way out of Padua. He said things that were interesting. New things I have not heard of before."

"Oh? Like what?"

"The Taloids." A drawing of a Taloid appeared on the screen.

"Yes."

"They thought that when their river went backward, it was a miracle. That belief had power to change them. Before, they would have killed Moses and others. Afterward, they praised them and returned them to the Genoans. But Moses says their belief is because they're at a simple stage of knowledge. They don't understand physics and reality."

"Uh huh," Zambendorf grunted noncommittally.

"So, real supernatural miracles beyond the explanations of physics would be a very powerful force in the universe."

"Ah, yes. I suppose so," Zambendorf agreed. He had no idea where this might be leading.

"Moses says that you are one of the rare masters from Earth who perform real miracles. I wish to know about real miracles."

Zambendorf was confused. Here was a culture that Weinerbaum's scientists put at least a century ahead of Earth's technologically. He was talking to a cognizant, seemingly self-aware creation of that culture that should surely represent the epitome of scientific rationality. And yet here it was, apparently sincerely asking about supernatural powers and miracles.

"You really should understand that . . ." Zambendorf began. Then he checked himself. An instinct he had cultivated over the years for sensing a potential true believer when he heard one told him to hold things for a moment and think this through.

He remembered the abruptness of Cyril's exchanges with Weinerbaum, and Weinerbaum's apology that Terran ideas of ordinary courtesy did not seem to be part of the Asterian makeup-Weinerbaum had described this as one of the main obstacles to establishing a satisfactory rapport all along. In all their dialogues with the scientists, the Asterians had seemed to regard antagonism as the natural basis for any relationship and had taken pride in their ability to foster it. Could notions of magic and myth ever have arisen in a race of such instinctive critics and skeptics? Zambendorf asked himself. Quite possibly not.

And if that was the case, it suddenly became plausible that, yes, indeed, a creation of their culture-such as GENIUS-might possess no knowledge of such concepts. And more. If GENIUS wasdesigned, not evolved, and hence possessed none of the intuitions that came with a billion years of survival-oriented evolution, it might well be lacking in the wherewithal to judge such matters, however hyperrational it might be in areas where it wasdesigned to function. The situation was bad enough with most humans, and they had no comparable excuse to fall back on.

"Did Moses tell you anything about the form these miracles take?" Zambendorf asked as a first step toward testing his growing suspicions.

"He said you can acquire information by pure mind and can move matter by mind. Also, that you can even dematerialize matter," GENIUS replied.

Zambendorf scratched the side of his beard with a finger. "Tell me, er . . . back on Asteria, did the Asterians ever make up stories about magic and miracles for entertainment?"

"Explain this word 'entertainment,'" GENIUS said.Zambendorf sensed that he was on the right track. "For fun," he replied. "To make each other feel good."

"Asterians never want to make each other feel good. Bad trade. The aim is to make the other guy feel bad soyou feel good. Terrans are like Asterian children. They don't understand."

That could work both ways, Zambendorf thought to himself. He moistened his lips. "Your problem is you think that supernatural events can't happen because they'd be incompatible with the laws of physics. Is that what you're saying?" he asked.

"If the laws of physics are correct, then they couldn't happen," GENIUS agreed.

"But what if events that contradicted them wereshown to happen?" Zambendorf asked.

"Then that would be different," GENIUS conceded. "Physics would be shown incompatible with demonstrated fact."

"So physics would be wrong."

"Physics as told by the Asterians would be wrong," GENIUS agreed. "Asterians know of bigger laws that Taloids do not know. Therefore it is possible that Terran Masters know of even bigger laws that Asterians don't know. This is what Moses says. That's why I called you."

It was astonishing. Apparently GENIUS could grant such a logical deduction readily and impartially, with none of the emotional or prejudicial investment to overcome that would typify a naturally evolved organism such as a human-and probably an Asterian, too. Zambendorf strove not to show his excitement, even though any outward manifestation would probably have been lost on GENIUS. He knew he was on to something, but just at that moment he was at a loss to know what he could do about it. And then his hand brushed against the rectangular shape in his jacket pocket.

Don't be ridiculous, he told himself. Why not? another part of him asked. h.e.l.l, what was there to lose? The experts weren't getting anywhere. And even while the two urges fought, another part of him knew that he wasn't going to be able to resist it. Zambendorf drew himself upright and marshaled his most august and confident manner.

"Oh, yes, Earth has masters of wondrous powers," he said. "Powers far beyond the mere materialism that would appear to be the only kind of awareness ever achieved on Asteria."

"Yes. This is what I wish to know," GENIUS said. Not breathlessly, because it didn't breathe-but the same expectant tenseness was there. Zambendorf could sense it.

He felt himself swinging into his natural element: the showman in control of the show. "Most Terrans are still at the level that it sounds as if Asteria was at in your time," he said. "Limited to the lowest, physical plane of existence, they know only a drab world of matter, void, and forces. Restricted in s.p.a.ce, fixed to their own fleeting instant of time, they must build machines to harness physical energy to supply their needs, and they measure their worth by the material objects they possess. These are the cruder, lower types of Terrans who want to control t.i.tan, just as Cyril and the other Asterians want to."