Across a Billion Years (24 page)

Absolute dejection was what we all felt. We couldn’t understand what Galaxy Central was up to, but it was utterly clear that we were going to be hauled away from our work, forced to defend our actions before the bureaucrats, and probably prevented permanently from seeing the planet of the High Ones. By the time we got everything straightened out, some other expedition would have been assigned to that plum.

The Commander produced a little data viewer and said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a personnel inventory. As I call your name, would you kindly acknowledge? Dr. Milton Schein?”

“Yes.”

“Pilazinool of Shilamak?”

“Yes.”

He went right through the list. Naturally, 408b of Bellatrix XIV did not reply. On the other hand, one robot of alien design had been added to the group but wasn’t on Commander Leonidas’ roster. Dr. Schein explained impatiently that 408b had been killed in an accident last December, that the robot was a High Ones product that we had picked up at the same time, and that Galaxy Central knew all this anyway, since he had passed it along via TP during our stop at Aldebaran IX.

“Aldebaran IX?” Commander Leonidas repeated blankly. “Your dossier doesn’t include any messages sent from Aldebaran IX.”

“In early February,” said Dr. Schein. “We went there after leaving the asteroid in the 1145591 system where—”

“Hold it,” the Navy man cut in. “Galaxy Central asserts that you were last heard from on a planet called Higby V, where you’re supposed to be conducting an excavation of some old ruins. You left Higby V without authorization and disappeared. That was in violation of your agreement with Galaxy Central, and therefore—”

Dr. Schein broke in, “We left Higby V to go to 1145591, and from there we went to Aldebaran IX, where I sent a complete TP report to Galaxy Central.”

“Not as far as anyone told me, Doctor.”

“There’s been a mistake,” Dr. Schein suggested. “A computer error—a data transposition—a dropped bit. This whole arrest order must be erroneous.”

Commander Leonidas looked troubled. Also puzzled.

Pilazinool said quietly, “Commander, precisely how did you trace us to McBurney IV?”

“I didn’t trace you anywhere. I was ordered to come here and pick you up. Presumably Galaxy Central knew you were here.”

“Galaxy Central did know,” said Pilazinool, “because Dr. Schein sent word from Aldebaran that we were coming here. At the same time, he received full authorization from Galaxy Central to make this trip. If Galaxy Central lost track of us after Higby V, as you claim it says, how could Galaxy Central possibly know we had gone to McBurney’s Star?”

Commander Leonidas had to admit the logic of that.

He fumbled through the text of his arrest order, looking for a solution to the inconsistency, and didn’t find one. Leave it to the galactic bureaucracy: the right hands know not what the left hands are doing. Or tentacles, as the case may be.

Pilazinool said, “Do you have TP personnel on this ship?”

“Yes,” said Commander Leonidas.

“I think,” said Pilazinool, “you’d do well to put through a call to someone at Galaxy Central right now and get things straightened out.”

“That might be a good idea,” the Commander agreed.

Getting anything straightened out with Galaxy Central is a slow business. Everybody important went off to the TP section, and a few frantic hours followed. What finally emerged was the realization that one officious vidj at Galaxy Central, remembering that we had promised to ship the globe there as part of the agreement letting us go on to 1145591, realized the globe hadn’t showed up. He called Higby V and found that we were gone, globe and all. If he had bothered to run a routine data-tank recap, he’d have found that we had sent word from Aldebaran that it had been necessary to take the globe with us. Instead, jumping two or three notches in the sequence of events, this particular blenking feeb had cleverly ordered a computer search of all ultraspace transit vouchers for the past six months, in order to find us, and thus turned up the fact that we had gone from 1145591 to Aldebaran and from Aldebaran to McBurney’s Star. We had Galaxy Central’s permission to do all this, but he didn’t check the correspondence tank, just the transit data. Whereupon this dreary zoob erroneously concluded that we were unlawfully running all over space on Galaxy Central’s thumb, as well as taking valuable property in defiance of an agreement, and decided to put a stop to this squandering of public stash by arresting us instantly. Hence the order to Commander Leonidas to put the yank on us at McBurney IV.

I repeat all this devious foolishness because it gives a beautiful illustration of how catastrophes can sometimes turn out pretty well. By the time Dr. Schein got finished making TP calls to Galaxy Central, you see, he had accomplished more than getting that dumb arrest order blotted. He had explained, to someone
very
high in the hierarchy, all about Dihn Ruuu, the Mirt Korp Ahm, and the hidden world of Mirt. And, since Commander Leonidas and his ultraspace cruiser are now conveniently in orbit around McBurney IV, it will not be necessary for us to wait weeks and weeks to arrange our transport to Mirt.

Commander Leonidas will take us there.

We leave tomorrow—for the home planet of the High Ones.

May 1, 2376

Mirt

N
OW I KNOW THAT
I have been talking only to myself all the time I’ve been dictating these cubes. Lorie will never play them. What I have been composing over these past nine months, imagining I was writing letters to my sister on Earth, is actually a memoir of my own adventures, a diary for my own amusement.

In that case, I suppose I should complete the record by setting down the outcome of this phase of the story. The story doesn’t end here; it’s really only beginning. What is yet to come is the real research, the sorting out of the immense treasury of new knowledge that we’ve acquired. But that promises to be at once more exciting and less dramatic, if I follow what I’m trying to say. I mean, the next phase of discovery won’t unfold in such a fantastic rush of events—I hope.

The
Pride of Space
brought us to Mirt by early April. Dihn Ruuu, Commander Leonidas, and Nick Ludwig plotted our course together, after sighting the hidden star by infrared. Cautiously the cruiser pulled up ten light-minutes away from the dark shell that houses the High Ones. There was no telling what defensive weapons might go into action against a ship that came closer without permission.

The shell that is Mirt is the most awesome thing I have ever seen. From a distance of ten light-minutes it appears to fill half the sky, a great dark curving shield with a diameter greater than that of Earth’s whole orbit. Even while Saul had been explaining Dyson spheres to us, I hadn’t really considered in serious practical terms what it means to build a sphere big enough to contain a sun. I know now.

Dihn Ruuu, using High Ones broadcast equipment acquired on McBurney IV, put through a signal to Mirt and requested entry permission for us. The robot needed three and a half hours to get its message across. Because of our distance from the sphere, there had to be a lag of ten minutes between the time any audio signal was transmitted and the time it was received, but this alone couldn’t account for Dihn Ruuu’s seeming difficulties in persuading Mirt to let us in. The incomprehensible exchanges of alien words went on and on.

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 splendor 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.