Infinity One (20 page)

“—we forgot to program so many things into the computer. We forgot to teach them about sex, and love. We forgot to teach them how to build a fire and what clothes are—"

“It sounds hurt,” said Twelve.

“Yes.”

“—there is no time left—no time! I'm so weak. How will they know? I just can’t alter the programs now, I’m too weak—”

The voice stopped suddenly. A whirring sound continued, but there was no more sound.

“Remember,” said Mike, “how we could not get out of Mother until we got old enough, and big enough to figure out the secret?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“We had to be tall enough to work the opening, and smart enough to figure it out. We would crawl back into the cradles and sleep even after we could get outside Mother. Remember the whistle that called us from outside? Then the door would close. I remember most of it. Seven was the one who finally got Mother open. We played outside, but we still couldn’t get too far away. Something was keeping us in. Then we got bigger and smarter, and finally found out how to make Mother open up completely.”

“I remember sleeping where it was warm, and gentle songs,” said Twelve dreamily.

“Yes, and the funny eating place. I wonder if it is still there?”

“Let’s go see,” Twelve suggested in a burst of curiosity.

“I thought you were afraid."

“Not now,” she said.

Behind the whispering voices-room was the room, wide 199

and long, where the cradles were. It was dark, and evilsmelling.

“I remember when this room would light up, like the other room,” said Mike.

“Did you try to make it light?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t work.”

“There!” She pointed.

He put his mouth to the spout.

“It works,” she said.

“Ehh, it’s awful!” He spit out the whitish liquid, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“What about the other food place?”

Beside the spout was a small niche in the wall.

“There’s one in the place now.” Mike took the bright red pellet from the niche.

“I can remember eating those,” she said, but she didn’t make a move to eat it now.

“It is hard. I don’t think I’ll eat it,” he said.

“It came from up inside...”

Mike dipped his fingers once more into the pellet dish. “Another one! I never noticed them falling down into the flat part before, did you?”

“I don’t think we have enough remembering,” she said.

Behind them, in the whispering-voices room, the voice came on again. They left the cradle room so they could hear what the voice was saying.

“I can’t hear, Mike.”

“Shh.”

“—I'm going to die—”

“Die must be a place,” said Mike, authoratively. “Like going to the hill, or across the river to the other sandbank.”

“—the controls work perfectly. Pm sure the design of the cradles will protect them. The entire capsule should continue to work for years ... if it doesn't . . . but I've tested the teaching mechanism, the environmental controls, the relays and the timing devices. Nothing should go wrong—'

“It is getting scary again,” Twelve said.

“—I can see the capsule now, pulling away. I have switched off the air supply in this section. There's no use for me to live. The pain is much worse, and I'm a coward. I don't want to die like Mike and the others. I don't know how long we can maintain orbit ... it is as perfect as l can make it. This is coincidentally recording in the capsule control, as a record in case our orbit decays. We'll be a falling star, every day—”
The voice trailed off, leaving the familiar whirring sound.

“Is it broken again?” Twelve asked.

“No. I think it is all through. I don’t think there are any more words in it. “He touched the turning off finger.

“What does it all mean?”

“I think it is about us. Where we came from. I’ll think about it some more, and I’ll understand better.” He took her by the hand and they left Mother.

Behind them, a whirring thing broke away from the base of the floor, sucking the dirt and dust into itself which they had brought in on their feet.

The group was still on the sandbar. They were clustered together when Mike and Twelve approached.

“Apogee, apogee, apogee!” It was Five’s voice, from the center of the cluster. She was screaming.

The group allowed Mike and Twelve to enter its ranks. Five lay on the sand, with her wild words coming from her mouth in gasps. She was in pain, and she seemed to be saying the words for comfort.

“Seven," she screamed again, then gasped. “It’s trying to get out!”

“What, Five? What’s trying to get out?” He was trying to hold her tossing head on his lap.

“Whatever it was you put in! Apogee! Say the words, everyone, to make the pain go away!” She closed her eyes and stopped writhing for a moment, her breathing a hiss in the evening air.

“What’s wrong with Five?” Mike asked.

“She’s hurting,” said one of the girls.

“I didn’t do anything," sobbed Seven. He turned his terror stricken face toward Mike. Rivulets of tears streamed down his grimy cheeks. Fear brightened the whites of his eyes.

“I told you so,” Mike said.

Softly, at first, one of the group began chanting the song. The others joined in the chorus.

“Intelligence-quotient, irrelevant;

If I only knew what it meant.

Fahrenheit, DNA, surface tension..

Five screamed again, but they only chanted louder, until her screams were part of the chant.

“Father, pregnant, colonial extension!”

They said it all, until the end, and Mike felt himself drawn in, singing with the rest of the group.

When it was over, Five was still. She didn’t writhe. Her face was a white petal against the dark, twisted strands of her hair. The night was gone, and the morning touched the sky over the river valley. They were all asleep now, except for Seven who still held the silent face of Five in his lap. He moved her aside so he, too, could rest, and folded himself into an infant at her side.

Mike awoke first, and sat looking at Five. She was not breathing. Twelve opened her eyes and sat up. Mike stood, stretched, and began walking away. Twelve followed.

“Is she asleep?”

“No!” Four said through his teeth. “She won’t ever sing again, or move, or do something.’” His mind was full of words and pictures, of the thoughts of empty cradles and cradles which were still full. “She’s like a geezzl when it has been run down and stepped on.”

“Wait, Mike .. .”

Mike ran into the bushes, suddenly afraid and not knowing why.

“Tell me what it means, Mike.”

“I don’t know. I’ll never know, now that I’ve broken into Mother.” He turned on her in anger. “Why do you follow me everyplace I go? Ever since we were little, you hang around after me.”

She stood still, her eyes pouring out the laughter and tears and all their times together.

“Why don’t you leave me alone?” He choked.

Her mouth trembled slightly.

“How would you like for me to do that for you?” He screamed at her. “I could, you know! If you don’t stop bothering me, I’m going to put something into you just like Seven did to Five.” The branches of a nearby tree caught at his face when he turned from her gaze.

He sat on the hard ground and cried, and when he stopped shaking, her hand was on his shoulder. “Five won’t ever sing anymore,” he said.

“No.”

“There aren’t any more songs, then.”

“Mike, I can remember the songs, some of them. I even made up one of my own, after hearing Mother talk . . .”

When he turned to Twelve she was laying back against long, brown grass. She smiled.

Mike lay beside her, on his back. “There’s a falling star,” he said, pointing.

“The star of morning,” she said, quietly.

Who would you choose as the five most famous science fiction writers of today? It's certain that anyone's list will include Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov . . . and Poul Anderson. And we're pleased to present all three in this volume. The following short novel tells of the time when men have returned to the Moon .
..
for the third time
...

After the thrust and hiss of orbital assumption, there was a great silence. The ship freefell around the Moon. She would complete a circuit while her crew verified that all was in order and got a lock-on to Ground Control, before starting descent

Marbled blue and white, scars hidden by remoteness, altogether beautiful, Earth’s lighted half circle dropped beneath the Lunar horizon. That land became a jagged darkness; and because the Comunicators had turned off their cabin illumination, fainter stars appeared to them until their viewport was one wintry blaze.

Brother Roban thought he had grown used to the sight during transit. But suddenly it was as if the knowledge entered him, not as before into his brain or his excited heart, but into his entirety—that the Order was indeed bound home again; today, in his own young person; back to that web of whispers across space and the centuries which was its reason for being and perhaps the reason for life. Weightless in the chair harness, his burly body turned insubstantial as a dream and his awareness whirled forth among the constellations.

A hand fell upon his. A voice murmured, “Steady, son.”

The tenderness in gesture and tone was astonishment enough to recall him. For a moment he gulped. One does not easily leave the fringes of eternity. Flesh enclosed

him in pulse, breath, moist skin, the scratchiness of coarse fabric, a gust of faintly acrid-smelling air from a ventilator. Walls of metal enclosed him in narrowness and bleakness. Knowledge enclosed him in mortality, his own and mankind’s.

Once a trip from Earth to Moon was nothing. Well-nigh flying themselves, the argosies plied in days from Mercury to Pluto. Treasure was aboard them, and humanity and human hopes. But the last such voyage ended more than three centuries ago. The means no longer exist to build that kind of vessel. We are lucky we can again lift off even this clumsily, from the wreckage of our latest dark age.

“You aren’t ready for an ecstatic experience,” Primary Luizo said, still with a gentleness Roban had never met from him before. “Later, yes. I am glad to see you are among those who can have them. But best with preliminary training, and the first few times under guidance. Otherwise it can overwhelm you. I don’t think you would really be happiest as an ascetic.”

“M-m-maybe not . . . sir,” Roban mumbled.

The lean features of his superior stiffened into their usual mask. The accented Inglis harshened anew. Luizo came of the Ali de Marokh family, barons who held their Near Eastern marchlands against raiders from desert and sea when civilization had crashed to its nadir, and afterward were in the vanguard of its return. Though he himself had early joined the Order, the soldierly style had remained with him through the years of his life. Under his directorship, Australia Station operated as much like an army base as a conservatory of learning.

“Besides,” he said, “we have practical problems. Two of us, to get the whole enterprise started over.”

In Roban, anger shouldered wistfulness aside and filled the space where awe had been. “Among a pack of Dom-inists!” he exclaimed. “How much damage have those barbarians done?”

“Control your emotions,” the Primary said. “Nobody
208

would be sent here who was not a technological competent: not when ships and facilities are as crude as now. He wouldn’t survive. It is a bare ten years since spaceflight resumed.”

“That makes ten years they’ve sat on our property.”

“I told you to curb yourself, Brother.”

Roban looked into Luizo’s eyes, glacial green in the dark, aquiline face. “Yes, Primary. I’m sorry.”

He bowed his head, as befitted a mere techno reprimanded by an administrator who had, moreover, spent a working lifetime among the records of messages from the stars. His floating hands sought each other and twined fingers till the knuckles stood white. It was bitter for Brother Roban of the Order, who had been plain Roban Stacket of Seattle in Norrestland, to be meek toward those who had conquered his country.

He often wondered why Luizo chose him to come when the Domination of Baikal announced it would ferry a pair of Communicators to Farside. He could readily understand that the Board of Directors would vote the honor of heading and organizing that mission to Luizo himself. The Primary had done more than turn half-ruined Australia Station into a secure and prosperous center for scholars and their families. He had also, alone in mystery, found new interpretations that answered old riddles about what the Others meant in certain of their transmissions. If anyone could bring humankind back into the transgalactic web—could even, maybe, regain the Order’s ancient control of the transceivers—Luizo was the man.

But why, out of every possible assistant, did he choose me? I’m just a fisherman's son. I only joined a few years back, after I couldn’t stand any longer seeing foreign troops on my soil that had been free.

Could that be his reason?
Roban thought abruptly.
The Order of Communicators is supposed to stand outside all politics, all nationality; it speaks to the stars on behalf of our whole species. And by and large, our membership’s really held that attitude. Otherwise I don't suppose we'd have lasted through the ups and downs and ins and outs of two thousand years. Myself, though—well, I've seen the vision too, when studying the archives or standing out in the night and looking upward—but I haven't forgotten bombs and fire when I was small, Mother crying when Dad never came back, slant-eyed men barracking to this day in
(whisper it)
Liberation House.

With a tingle:
If a chance comes
. . .
to do something ... I’m strong and ready.

Swift in her low orbit, the ship raised the terminator. Day burned, first a thin line ahead, then a pockmarked stone waste beneath; and the constellations paled before human eyes while they reeled across heaven. Roban strained forward in his harness. “Can you spot the Station, sir?” he asked out of a tightening throat.