Identity Matrix (1982) (34 page)

The buzzer gave several short bursts. Pauley nodded to himself, then said, "

We're within range of a perime-ter ship now," he told us, "and the ship's made contact."

I was disappointed. "I was hoping we'd see a Urulu world," I told him.

He chuckled. "You couldn't go there anyway. The closest to it would be something like Jupiter in your own solar system. A big gas giant with beautiful multi-colored bands of gases and a lot of heat from the pres-sure caused by the weight of the incredibly dense atmosphere."

"Your people could live on
Jupiter?"
Dory gasped.

He shook his head. "Probably not. It's not the right mixture. But most of our worlds are similar
looking,
anyway. My own home has a beautiful multiple ring system, like Saturn."

"And you live on a dark ball underneath all those gases?" I pressed, trying to understand.

"No, no. There is a planetary solid there, very dense, but we don't live
on
it.

We live in the middle of the atmosphere itself, kind of like fish in water. It's quite hard to describe, but on many gas giants the protein molecules that form life are found in wide bands of gases heated by radiation from the pressure below and maintained there. We don't ever touch the solid below—the pressure alone, not to mention the heat, would kill us.

"And yet you somehow found the means to get there, even mine there, or you'd never have ships like this, space travel, or any mechanical things," I pointed out.

"That's true," he agreed, "but it's a long, complex story. Maybe, one day, when your people and mine can sit down as friends, we will be able to study the history and development of your people while you study ours. But now is not the time."

We both nodded, understanding what he meant. The sense of high adventure, of new worlds and new experi-ences, faded swiftly as the reason why we were here really came back to us hard.

When your people and mine can sit down as friends... .
That might well depend on what we said and did in the next few hours or days.

There was a thump, and a shudder went through the ship.
Jgur abrix!"
an eerie, nonhuman voice that I can not describe came to us.

Pauley sighed. "O.K. We've docked. This ship is giving the physical requirements for us. When the mother ship has a chamber prepared for us that won't kill us, we'll go through. It's pretty fast we have to be set up to handle a variety of races and requirements, obviously."

Obviously, I realized. Body switchers who sped be-tween the stars at near-instant speeds would need a lot of technical knowledge and skill about an incredibly varied number of lifeforms.

A clanging sound came from the wall behind us through which we'd entered.

Pauley sucked in his breath for a moment, showing his own nervousness, then stood up as well as he could and headed for the wall. "Stay here," he told us, "

until I see what's what." The wall shim-mered obligingly and he vanished behind it. I turned to Dory. "Scared?"

"A little," she responded nervously. "You?" "Frightened to death," I said honestly. "But what's done is done. Here we are—wherever it is."

She squeezed my hand tightly and kissed me lightly.

Pauley was gone for some time, but, finally, he returned and sat down on the blue carpeting, looking a little grim. "Look," he began hesitantly, "I warned you that humans weren't exactly common and that we were very different."

We nodded.

"Well, they've got a chamber for us, but it's little more than a big bubble inside Urulu atmosphere. I got them to darken the floor so we have some solid ground-ing, but it's going to be like being in a giant fishbowl. Just take it easy and remember that you're perfectly safe there, and there's a good deal of machinery main-taining proper air, gravity, and pressure, and a damned thick wall between you and the rest of what you see."

My nerves were getting the better of me. I wanted this over with, and got up.

"I want you both to take your clothes off," Pauley said, starting to undress himself. "I'm afraid you're going to have to play by the rules, and that means you bring nothing in you weren't born with."

"Well, you said it would be a fishbowl," I sighed, and complied.

"In more ways than one," Pauley responded. "You will literally be the object of a lot of curiosity, both professional and just plain gawking."

We were totally stripped now and I looked at him. "Hmm . . . Well hung, Dan."

He grinned, turned, then looked back at us. "You're going to feel a real tingly sensation as you pass out of the hatch," he warned. "Decontamination. A dry shower, sort of. Don't worry—it won't hurt you or your unborn children." With that he stepped through.

I looked at Dory. "Ready?"

She nodded. "Let's get this
over
with!"

I stepped through first, then she. I reached the open hatch and paused, bending down and looking out. I let out a gasp and felt Dory just behind me, also peering out.

Pauley's description of his home as something like Jupiter was fairly close.

The world swirled around us, a sea of thick gases that were mostly yellows, reds, or-anges, and purples. It was as if somebody had put a stick in Jupiter and stirred it up.

I stepped out and helped Dory down. Immediately we felt the "shower" and it was no different or worse than the other odd feelings we had had. Turning, looking forward, though, we walked out onto what appeared to be a long, flat piece of dull aluminum, circular and about ninety feet across. The air smelled fresh and sweet, the temperature was warm and comfortable, but there was no visible boundary between the "bubble" and the atmosphere of the rest of the ship.

The floor did not feel cold and metallic to my bare feet, but like soft rubber, with some give to it, and it was at air temperature.

The only features of the bubble were a shiny round protrusion in the center and four seatlike pads around it. Pauley was already at the center and gestured for us to come to him.

The eeriest thing was the silence. It was so quiet we could hear ourselves breathing and the sounds of our bare feet against the odd flooring material. I was glad that Dan had gotten them to color the floor—I felt exposed and off-balance as it was, with nothing save the floor and the protrusion in the middle to get bearings from.

Suddenly there was a loud sound behind us. We stopped and turned as one, watching as the whole rear wall shimmered and a blackish shape receded and disappeared.

"Hey!" Dory called out.

I looked at her. "The ship's gone. We're trapped in here!"

We held hands and approached Pauley. "Don't worry," he said reassuringly.

"You're safe."

"I'm beginning to wonder how I got talked into this," I told him with more seriousness than he took it. I looked at the big center protrusion. "What's that?"

"We'll get food and water from the middle—the hub flips back. The water will be distilled and the food won't be very appetizing, but it'll do."

"I don't exactly feel very hungry," I mumbled, looking around. I felt adrift on a platform, lost in some night-marish sea of colorful clouds. I had the sensation of moving because of that swirl, and it made me slightly dizzy.

"Dan—I hate to say this," I said hesitantly, "but I have to pee."

He laughed and pointed to one of the pads. "Just reach down and flip it up."

He saw my hesitancy, and reached down and pushed against the top. It swung back noiselessly and revealed a rubbery-looking tube. ""Just sit on it—it'll support you," he told me. "Then go.”

Dory looked upset, but I was in no position to argue. It worked fine. Dory, though, seemed irritated.

"Damn it," she grumbled, "I think this is a little
too
public! I'm not sure I
like
shitting in a fishbowl!"

"Well, you're going to have to," Pauley replied. "At least until this is over."

"Dan? Where's the toilet paper?" I asked.

"There is none," he told me. "See that little indenta-tion there by your right elbow? Just keep seated and push it."

I did as instructed, and got the damndest erotic sensa-tion I'd
ever
had—but whatever it did, it worked. I was dry and sanitized.

I got up and lowered the lid. "Now what?" I asked him.

"We wait. I—whoops! Company!"

We turned to see what he was looking at, and got our first view of what I guess was an Urulu.

In some ways it
did
remind you of a jellyfish—a large umbra, but multicolored, below which was suspended a huge brain case of some transparent material, then a chamber I guessed had something to do with digestion, and, oddly, an irislike opening that changed. From the region where the umbra met the brain-case dangled hundreds of incredibly thin tentacles that seemed to be composed of countless tiny translucent blue beads. The whole creature swam effortlessly in the sea of gases, and was partially obscured by them, but it was big—perhaps ten feet across at the umbra, with the brain-case and other organs beneath three or four feet long, and the tentacles reaching down at least fifteen, maybe twenty feet. The umbra undulated constantly and the creature looked incredibly graceful, almost beautiful.

"Here comes the messenger-boy," Pauley said. "I'll be talking to him for some time, so excuse me. Just amuse yourselves."

"Never have I felt less like amusing myself," I grumbled.

Pauley went over to the edge of the bubble. The Urulu approached the same spot, and suddenly a tentacle shot out and touched the side of our shield against its world. A small, brownish disk shape appeared where it touched, and Pauley reached out and put his hand on the disk. Almost at once he stiffened and seemed to go into a trance. I realized that the two were talking in some way, perhaps related to the identity matrix transfer itself using that area as a conductor to replace physical contact.

Dan said he might be a long time, and his conversa-tion or whatever it was dragged on and on. We sat on the spongy floor and waited, having nothing else to do and no place else to go.

As it went on, we began to see other shapes, other Urulu floating by, a few at a time. Although no eyes were evident—the iris beneath was almost certainly a mouth—there seemed no doubt after a while that we were the object of curious attention.

"You know," Dory remarked, "they really have a kind
of graceful beauty about them, don't they? I wonder what it's like to float in all directions and glide through that? Kinda like a bird."

I nodded, not mentioning that I was beginning to feel like a zoo animal. Still, there was a great fascination in the huge creatures, and I began trying to deduce things from them.

It seemed impossible that such creatures could have built great machines that would fly to the stars. How would they even
see
stars in this kind of atmosphere? I thought they were probably much older than mankind, even on a relative scale. Progress, which for humans had come in comparative quick jumps, had to have come very, very slowly to such people. But how could such as they have even developed the means to get to, let alone mine, a hot planetary center under huge pressure? Was it possible that Pauley had been giving us another untruth, or at least half-truth, about their history when he said that they had developed the body-switching tech-nique as a defense against predators? In their element, they looked more than capable.

But what if life had developed in a layered system within a gas giant? Or what if they bred forms of life, weaved them from the floating nucleotides of their gas-eous environment, that could take those pressures? Took what might have been a sophisticated communications process and discovered from it the secret of the identity matrix?

I would imagine them moving, then, from layer to layer, their minds travelling through those new crea-tures they made at each step tailored for that particular environment, until, in one direction, they reached the planet and in the other saw the stars. Could their so-phisticated powers, then, have developed not as a result of predators but rather as the result of a frontier psy-chology? Would we ever really know these strange people?

They, then, would see bodies mostly as tools, form following function, a concept that would eliminate a lot of the root causes of hatred, prejudice, divisions which marked our own terrestrial people. In our society form followed function only in our tools; in a sociological sense, function followed form, as was so graphically illustrated by my own self. The fact that Victor looked like a wimp made him something of a wimp, but also produced, through social pain and introversion, a social scientist, author, teacher, whose work had to be every-thing in his life because his form, socially, turned him inward. I, on the other hand, was a buxom beauty who turned people on when I walked into a room. And what did I do for a living?

If I were at all right in my theories of the Urulu, it explained why our form of life and theirs had taken such different paths, and why the Urulu themselves might hardly believe we could have a meeting of the minds.

I shared these ideas with Dory, but she just shrugged and shook her head.

Life, I knew, was simpler for Dory than for me. Things were practical—what was, was—or they were beautiful, ugly, that sort of thing. She was the hardhead and I was the dreamer, which is why, I think, we complemented each other so well. Without her prac-ticality, her good common sense, her ability to face life on its own terms as a series of practical problems to be solved, I'd not be able to survive. But without people like me to wonder and speculate on the unknowable, there would be not only no science, but no poetry, either.

"I wonder how they fuck?" she mused, showing the difference between us.

I managed a chuckle. "They probably lay eggs. Or they might not even have sex as we know it." I put my arm around her. "We just have to hope that they have love."

Pauley finally disengaged and seemed none the worst for wear. He came back over to us and sank down wearily. His Urulu contact floated off and was soon lost in the billowing gases.