The Godwhale (S.F. Masterworks) (38 page)
Read The Godwhale (S.F. Masterworks) Online
Authors: T. J. Bass
‘Here it is! Another of those damned Hive chips exploded!’ He pulled over his forehead brace and leaned into it as he made the microcuts. ‘I don’t know if it’s worth it. I seem to spend more time putting these in and taking them out than you do using them.’
‘What about those in my brain box?’
‘I’ll take a look at your Big Board when I finish here.’
‘I wouldn’t want to lose my mind. Isn’t there some way to check them now – to predict which are going to fail so you can do preventative maintenance?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve put some in my own mannequin. They check out perfectly every day, then go without warning –
poof!
Mine are the motor coordinating system. When they go I’ll be ataxic or paralysed.’
He lifted out the charred chip and placed it in the diagnostic slot of the circuit analyzer. Tiny probes began a systematic checkout. Larry glanced at the results.
‘Just the same as before: a hole in the centre, all the junctions melted and fused – useless. That crater must be a millimetre in diameter.’
‘A bomb?’ she said, recalling the Hive’s propensity towards wiring explosive loyalty into things.
‘I wonder . . . Let me put a spying optic over your Big Board. There are hundreds of Hive chips in there. If one goes, we’ll have visual records, and can analyze the defective chip as it was immediately before the burnout.’
He finished inside her skull and closed. Moving down her back, he detached the posterior thigh and buttock plates. The big Board pulsed and glowed like a multicoloured honeycomb under a dew-spangled spider web.
‘There is a lot to watch here,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘I’d like to be able to get 500× resolution.’ He reached for one of the better meck eyes, setting it for nine hundred frames per second. Using solid-state switching and focusing, he’d have an image of each chip twice a second. ‘There! This won’t prevent your next burn, but we might be able to find out what caused it.’
She started to leave – a 34-26-38.
‘Sorry about that, but the spy takes up a lot of room. Hopefully, we’ll find the cause of the trouble and have you back down to a thirty-six-inch pair of hips soon. Don’t forget your apron.’
‘After she left, he pulled the service plates on his own mannequin’s forelegs. ‘Might as well spy on these chips too,’ he grumbled.
During the next few days he stayed away from the rail and wore a life jacket. He didn’t want a sudden attack of tremors to throw him into the sea.
Larry was on his pre-dawn deck stroll when his chip went. There was an audible
pop
, followed my the acrid smell of burning insulation. His mannequin stumbled. He swayed against a stack of crates.
‘Help!’
One of ARNOLD’s wives helped Larry back to the tool room. He flushed the panel with inert gas and pulled it. His left leg locked; satyr mode.
‘
Rorqual
, can I have the playback on my left leg optic? Give me 5× at first. Now, go back to the flash. There it is! Give me a 50x of that junction just before it flashed. Now a 500×.’
ARNOLD walked in. ‘I heard you had a fire in your pelvis.’ He grinned. ‘Is that rusty box teasing you again?’
‘Damn,’ mumbled Larry. His eyes were glued to the scope. With his left hand he ran the optic sequences back and forth with time lapse. ‘Damn the Hive. Look at this chip. They purposefully put in a timing device for self-destruct. See that whisper filament? Watch it grow. With each electron another ion is added. When the gap is closed . . . ZAP! The chip burns out.’
ARNOLD nodded.
‘I’ll take it down to the drawing room and have an Electroteck set up a processing bench for these. Well check them all as they come in. The Stokers say the heavy isotopes of hydrogen from the cities are not very pure, but provide a good raw material for extracting our own deuterium and tritium. I guess we’ll have to treat all of the Hive’s items as unfinished products.’
Larry handed the defective chips to the giant.
‘It seems like such a waste of time,’ said the centaur.
‘At least it tells us something about the Hive quality control. And the price is right – a few dead fish.’
The giant left the chips in the E-lab and walked over to the garnet farm. ‘How do the Hive wafers work out?’
‘Fine, but I guess there isn’t much they can do to ruin and expitaxial film, just as long as you keep it three milli-microns thick and use a single-crystal substrate.’
ARNOLD studied the blow-up prints. ‘The pattern of Ys and bars looks sloppy.’
‘I know, but we can get around that by using them in cyber units that have “learning” circuits.’
Wandee acted as the broker for the commodity exchange, trading perch and herring for joules, gigahertz, and megabits. While the cybers, CO and
Rorqual
, haggled over exchange rates, the little grey-haired lady tried to keep the human touch in the trading.
‘And how is my son?’ she asked.
‘That is classified information,’ said Larry. ‘I can’t even open up the optic channels. If you want to see him you’ll have to suit up and spend a lot of time on the market barges. He sometimes goes there with the catch if his ship is handling it.’
‘Is he well?’ she pressed him.
Larry sighed. ‘We have a standard answer for all such inquiries from the Hive:
couldn’t be better!
’
Iris wrapped up her son and picked up the bundle of possessions she had accumulated. Larry stood in the doorway to help her with her burdens. She tied on her lavalava – added some leis to cover her large, lactating breast – and stuck a flower in her hair. She climbed on his back, took the infant from the aide, and rode him out of the doorway, up the ramp, and on to the foredeck beside ARNOLD. Ring Island was just ahead.
Larry pawed restlessly.
ARNOLD watched the natives chant and toss flowers at their Godwhale. The string of green biscuits in the whale’s wake was collected between canoes.
‘We’ve given them a god,’ said the giant, ‘easy enough when their problems are small.’
‘And when they’re unsophisticated,’ added the centaur. ‘Look at their serene expressions. They’ve found their deity and know that they are loved by her. That should make them feel pretty secure.’
The mean of
Rorqual
remained aloof as the Queen’s homecoming celebration picked up steam.
‘Notice all the skin colours,’ said Larry, ‘olives, browns, yellows . . .’
‘So . . . ? Like any of the islanders.’
‘I was just hoping I could recognize one of the Procyon Implant’s rainbow mix. Remember the stills of that herb island I visited with White Belly? The fuselage in the swamp might have been a pod from the starship – to explain the radiating Gardens. If there had been humans in the Implant, they could have migrated south—’
‘To these islands?’ said ARNOLD. ‘Possible, I suppose. We’d need genotype records from the Implant and “gene flow” maps of the islander’s migrations to be sure.’
Larry nodded. ‘The almond might tell us which of the rainbow mix were dropped on Earth. If some of the rare antigens were included we could search for them. It might take the rest of my life to complete the study, but it would be interesting to find out.’
ARNOLD just shrugged. ‘You do what interests you. As for myself, I don’t see the difference between a primitive gene surviving the Hive as a Benthic – or as a starship passenger. Either way you are dealing with a basic set of human traits leapfrogging into the future and losing their cultural heritage. You’re the only one around with a personal knowledge of our history, and I can’t see that it does you any good.’
‘Insight?’ said the centaur.
‘You think too much as it is. Like your interest in
gy=c
. All it proves is that our planet might have been built at the whim of a superbeing. I was built at the whim of the Hive. I try to ignore it. We’d all be happier if we were accidents of Nature.’
‘Maybe . . .’ said Larry.’
Rorqual
backed out of the cortege of ceremonial canoes. Larry stood on the foredeck sniffing his garlands and waving. Mannequin pawed restlessly. ARNOLD leaned out of the portal whispering.
‘Did you see the look in Nine Fingers’ eyes when he saw that tattoo? I never thought a dark finger could make that much difference.’
‘Just another miracle in the psychology of fatherhood.’ Larry smiled. ‘He wanted a son. Now he has one. Until they study genetic theory, there is no doubt in their minds that the child is the true young prince of Ring Island. He has his father’s colour except for the finger, which he got from his mother.’
‘Obviously,’ agreed the giant.
The aide interrupted them with a report of the island’s annual catch and census.
‘It looks like our opening the reef was just what they needed. The lagoon’s fish population is way up. They even caught the white shark on one of the night throw-lines. Look at the size of the tribe! In a few years they should be up to a hundred again.’
‘That’s about right for the land – two square miles. They need that many to maintain the arts of boat and net.’
Larry frowned. ‘But I don’t want to give you the impression that people should cooperate and work together.’
‘No, of course not,’ laughed ARNOLD. ‘We just visited this island so I’d have someone new to sleep with.’
Larry shrugged. ‘Well, Nine Fingers wanted a prince and you were the only King around – a real Hive-certified King Rooster!’
Laughter across the waters.
The young King held his new son high so everyone could see. ‘Our women are fat. Our babies many. The lagoon is rich. Gardens grow tall.’
Iris praised the young lad who had caught the white shark. She talked of her voyages in the Godwhale – meeting angels, centaurs, and dwarf Hive dwellers. Her gifts included a bucket of ice and a description of a land where such delicate white stuff extends from horizon to horizon. As she talked it melted away.
Truly, a wondrous adventure for a young Queen! Nine Fingers’ crown sat more comfortably on his head as his olive-fingered son grew tall and strong.
Rorqual
cruised another Ocean. On her screens she carried the prayer:
gy = c
Planet Earth was still hospitable towards Man!
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NOVELS
Half Past Human (1971)
The Godwhale (1974)
T.J. Bass
(Thomas Joseph Bassler) was an American science fiction writer and doctor, principally known for his ‘Hive’ stories. The first of these, published in
Galaxy Science Fiction
and
If
, were combined into the novel
Half Past Human
, which was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1972. Its loose sequel,
The Godwhale
, was also nominated three years later. His work explored the theme of overpopulation and was notable for its strong command of biological extrapolation. He died in 2011.
A Gollancz eBook
Text copyright © Thomas J. Bassler 1974
Introduction copyright © Ken MacLeod 2013
All rights reserved
The right of T.J. Bass to be identified as the author of this work, and the right of Ken MacLeod to be identified as the author of the introduction, has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2014 by Gollancz
An imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London,
WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN
978 0 575 13013 5
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
