Identity Matrix (1982) (35 page)

"Well?" I asked him.

He shrugged. "All I did was report. Gave a readout, as it were, of all my experiences, feelings, and conclusions. Now it'll be taken higher up, then again higher, and so forth, until it finally reaches the people who make the decisions."

"There seems to be one universal law," I noted, "if even the Urulu have a complicated bureaucracy."

We rested and we waited for quite some time. Food came, and it was as tasteless and as filling as Dan had warned, and more time passed, and hordes of Urulu kept swimming by, giving us the once-over. Except for feeling like a specimen, I didn't really care about that, but I was a little worried about Dory.

She seemed to shrug it off, though, after a while, perhaps concluding that these weren't really people—not her kind, anyway. And we could do little about it, anyway. Still, we felt very exposed, and I wished for some privacy.

We finally slept, and food came again, and I began to worry about things.

Why was it taking so long?

"You have to remember they have to digest an enor-mous amount of data, sort it, analyze it, you name it," Dan consoled. "It all takes time. It's possible they might pass the buck to higher-ups, which means physically leaving and going, since radio waves would take forever. We just have to be patient."

Of his people and my speculations Dan would neither confirm nor deny anything. I understood. Deep down he was still the military man in a war, and this was a military ship.

Finally a Urulu did approach the communications point again; maybe the same one, maybe not. Dan went over and went through the touching ritual again, but did not stiffen. They were talking, somehow, not anything more.

He let go after a moment, turned, and walked back to us. "Misty, Dory—they want confirmation of my feel-ings, which is a really good sign. They want to examine the both of you."

Dory frowned. "Examine us how?"

He smiled reassuringly. "Look, it's nothing, really. Wait until the Grandfather gets here, then just do what I've been doing."

"Grandfather?" we both echoed.

He nodded. "That's the closest I can come in English. Call him, well, a venerated old man, a commanding general, a political leader—a lot of things—and you get some idea."

"What, exactly, is this examination like? Will we be asked questions?" I wanted to know.

He shook his head negatively. "Nothing like that. What he's going to do is read out your matrices. He'll know the both of you better than you know yourselves."

"I don't want anybody messing with my head again!" Dory exclaimed.

"No, no. It's like taking the recording. There's no sensation, particularly, and he's not going to do any-thing to your matrix, just copy it." He paused a mo-ment. "It's the only way."

I sighed. "All right. When?"

He looked up at the swirling gases all around us. "I'd say almost any moment.

See?"

We looked, and for a moment I didn't realize what he meant. Then it registered—the hordes of curious Urulus, the gawkers, had gone. There was nothing at all to be seen except the swirling colors. The boss was coming—they were scurrying back to look like they were busy.

And then the boss came, majestically through the mist. He looked like all the others, but seemed much, much larger; so huge he almost dwarfed our little bubble. All of us could have stood in his brain-case with room left over. I realized that Urulu just kept growing as they got older. I suppose gas giants give you a lot more room.

A huge, cablelike tentacle snaked out and touched the communications plate.

Pauley went over and touched it, again casually, talking rather than anything else.

Fi-nally he let go and turned back to us. "O.K.—who first? Don't worry—he doesn't bite."

Actually, it wasn't the huge creature or the idea of having my mind read out that bothered me the most. It was the knowledge that what this being learned, or thought he learned, from the likes of Dory and me might well determine the future of
Earth—would
determine it, for better or worse.

For, in the end, these were not godlike beings, but
people—a
far different sort, but people all the same.

I stepped up to the plate. "Here goes," I muttered, took a couple of deep breaths, and put my right palm flat on the plate.

Considering my IMC experience I had expected no real sensation whatsoever, but there
was
this time.

Half of me stood there, but the other half seemed floating free in space, hovering in air of spectacular beauty and fluidity. My vision was fully 360

degrees and, even as I was aware of myself, standing there in the bubble, I also saw myself, and Dan and Dory, as if from a different place. I felt reassured, warm, comfortable, yet I could sense in the great being a tremendous feeling of concern, of responsibility, which was there, tangible to me, yet just out of reach, a frame in which I was the picture.

Oddly, this feeling, this confidence, reminded me somehow of Stuart, and I felt more comfortable, more at ease.

And then, suddenly, it was over, and I was just touch-ing plastic. I let go with some regret, and Dory hesi-tantly approached.

"It's all right," I told her. "It's—a real experience."

She touched the plate and stiffened, and I knew the process had, once again, begun. It seemed to take a terribly long time, but Dan assured me that, no matter how short it had seemed to me, it was no longer than mine.

"How was it?" Dan asked me.

"It was—interesting," I replied. "It seemed like I got a little into his head, too.

Dan—do you miss it? Floating free like a bird or a fish, seeing a wider and different spectrum, communing with the others of your kind?"

He nodded seriously. "Sometimes I do, very much—like now. Remember; I was supposed to come back years ago."

"Will you stay, then?"

He shook his head sadly from side to side. "No, I doubt it. Not if it goes the way we hope. They'll need somebody who understands humankind, at least as well as anybody can, and I'm the only likely candidate left alive and free. I'll have to train others and ease them in. Still, I like the idea a lot better than before. It's a nicer, cleaner kind of job—to build bridges, rather than blow them up. Harder, though.
Much
harder"

Finally Dory, too, was let go, and returned to us with a dazed expression in her eyes. "Wow!" she breathed. "That's really
something!"

Dan went over and "talked" to the Grandfather again. Then he let go and the huge creature rose majestically and vanished in the billowing clouds, causing a riot of colorful patterns as he went.

"What now?" I asked Dan.

"Now we wait some more," he sighed. "While the Grandfather and
his
bosses and the computers analyze the data." He crossed his fingers. "And then they'll tell us if I played it right."

I realized then what tension he, too, was under, and I recalled his tale of being responsible for another world, far away, being destroyed. He had told that one with too much sincerity and anguish for me not to believe him. I felt a little sorry for him, really, since I knew that this meant almost as much to him as it did to us.

And so we waited, and waited, and waited...

A convulsive shudder went through the ship, starting the interior gases swirling even more and knocking us to the floor of our bubble. I was afraid for a moment it would crack, or, at least, break free and go hurling off into the void, but it soon settled down to a steady vibration.

Dan looked apprehensive but hopeful. "We're mov-ing," he told us.

How long had we been there, I wondered. A day? A week? It was hard to tell from the food cycles and the sleep cycle had changed for us anyway, in response to boredom and the almost hypnotic effect of those clouds.

A Urulu approached the plate, and Dan went to it. He returned in a few moments, looking cheerful. "We've done it! Misty! Dory! They bought it!"

He talked feverishly, excitedly. A small task force was being assembled, he told us, to proceed to Earth di-rectly. The first priority, he told us, would be to hit IMC, to wipe it off the face of the Earth.

"It won't mean that they'll be destroyed," he cau-tioned. "It'll just set them back a few years until they can build a better computer. But it'll be a demonstra-tion of power. Then we're going to contact those leaders of yours, not just in the U.S. but key leaders worldwide. They're going to get an ultimatum of sorts."

I was nervous. Invasion from outer space might guar-antee cooperation but hardly a friendly attitude, and I pointed this out.

"No, it won't be that kind of grandstanding," he as-sured us. "We are going to demonstrate our power for them, once in each key country. Then,
quietly,
we will contact them. The message will be simple, yet star-tlingly complex. We're going to leave them alone, but we will offer complete protection against The Association—for a period. The key to the identity matrix is known now to your people—at least some. When the facts are clear, the others will start to work on it, or steal its secrets—whatever. Then we're going to sit back and watch what you do with it."

I was aghast. "But—Dan! They'll misuse it!"

"That's the one thing we plan to point out to them. If they misuse it, if they go the way of The Association, we will abandon them to the enemy, for there won't be a dime's worth of difference between them anyway. But as they learned to fear the atomic bomb so much they have never used it against one another after the first time, so they might do the same here with the identity matrix. If they use it to learn, to grow, to change their society and their attitudes, then they make history. They become the first race of their type to transcend their physical limits, their petty hatred and prejudices. If that happens, humanity will gain not only a host of friends, but the stars—and inner rewards you can't even dream of right now."

I shook my head. "It's no good. We'll blow it. We always blow it. Besides, totalitarianism seems to be the natural trend of mankind."

He smiled humorlessly.
"They
think so, too. But they're willing to give you the chance."

I looked at him. "What about you, Dan? What will you do, now?"

"I'll be there, with you," he told us. "Like I said, training others, putting evaluators in place, so we'll know. God bless Stuart Eisenstadt! How I'd love to find him and give him the news."

That brought me up short. "You might kill him. He's probably in IMC."

He nodded. "I thought of that. But so are some of our people, remember.

Don't worry—the odds are we won't kill anybody. It's the
computer
we're after."

"And we're heading home
now?
"
Dory asked, sound-ing anxious.

"Soon, anyway. They'll warn us when they make the jump. Then be prepared—the three of us have some work to do."

"Huh?"

"Well,
my
people can't go into IMC. They can't even breathe there."

Chapter Sixteen

When we arrived off Earth they brought a small ship for our use. The interior smelled like it had been put together expressly for us, which it might have been.

If Pauley was really serious about the amount of physical time needed to traverse space, they'd have loads of time to refit whatever was necessary if they just didn'

t go into suspension in one part of the ship until they fin-ished what they were doing.

It was larger than the one that had brought us—Dan could stand in it—and had one of those combination food and water dispensers and johns as well, not to mention three very comfortable form-fitting chairs. It also had a small screen that showed us where we were heading, but little else. The carpeting was yellow instead of blue.

Dan was getting information from a small hand plate near his chair. I tried it once, but the images and lan-guage were far too confusing and just made me dizzy.

"They found The Association's base," he told us. "It was pretty far out on a chunk of rock that's one of

Neptune's moons. No ships got off successfully, so they think they cleaned out the nest. It wasn't a big opera-tion, anyway. They didn't need much."

"They sure did a lot of harm for a little bunch," Dory commented, and I nodded.

"It's not numbers but technique and knowledge, expe-rience, that counts," he noted. "The cleanup below will be a lot tougher. Thanks to Parch the leaders have already gone underground down there and will take a lot of digging out. I'm not worried, though—they have no place to go now."

We looked at the screen, filled now with the great blue-white ball of our beautiful world. It looked just like the pictures from the orbital stations.

"Dan—how are we going to work this?" Dory asked. "What's the procedure?"

"O.K. First the big ship will move into position in orbit and assume a stationary orbit over IMC. They will train a beam on an area of about twenty square miles around IMC, essentially putting every living thing in the area into a suspension similar to the one we use for space travel. It might cause some deaths or injuries—people driving, like that—but it's far less damaging than any other thing we could come up with and its very ease should scare the hell out of the government. In the 'showers' we've been getting we've been coated with a compound that permeates the skin and will render us impervious to this kind of suspension field. The task force will cover us and the big ship, vaporizing any missiles, planes, or other nasties that might be thrown at us."

"All right," I said, "but what do we do?"

"See those plates next to your chairs there? Put your hands on them when I tell you."

I looked nervously at mine. It'd given me only gibber-ish and headaches when I'd tried it.

"They have your matrices, remember. They're going to link up through you, attuned to you. It won't last more than a few hours at best, but we shouldn't need very long."

"But the electronic security—we don't know the
codes!"
Dory protested.

"You won't feel it, but you're going to be linked to the most powerful portable computer I know of," he replied. "Just let it do the thinking. Once inside, I want you, Dory, to head for the programming department. You worked there and know it best."