The Godwhale (S.F. Masterworks) (5 page)

Larry thought of this existence in a world where space travel was routine. He and Mannequin could learn many things. But education and travel seemed too much like spectating to Larry. He’d be observing, but not taking part. He would need a complete body in order to savour life to its fullest. He wanted to play an active role – complete with men his own age.

‘No. Sorry. But I can’t just take a guided tour through life. How old am I?’

‘Two hundred years on the calendar, but twenty on your RNA clock. You are a young adult.’

‘I feel like a young adult, and I’d like to get back into TS quickly and stop my metabolic clock until there is a new breakthrough. I want to feel this young when I receive my new toes and gonads. Then I can really enjoy life. Your offer of travel and education would sound attractive then.’

Mannequin began to walk towards the suspension mausoleum. ‘Do you remember the warnings about the dangers of Suspension?’

‘Organic damage in Suspension and social evolution to adjust to. Yes. You have my informed consent,’ said Larry.

Strangers checked him into the oxygen squeeze. Tubes and wires were attached to the arterio-venous graft and monitor electrodes under his left rib cartilages. Other tubes were hooked into the mannequin’s appropriate tanks and sockets.

‘As before,’ said the meck. ‘I’ll watch your ions while you sleep.’

‘Thanks. See you on a new tomorrow.’

Starship Dever’s Ark locked on to Altair for its dive past the sun before swinging out in the direction of Procyon.

Ira and Jen tucked Dim Dever into his Suspension chamber.

‘Want me to tuck you in?’ asked Jen.

Ira shook his head and settled down in a large, soft chair. ‘Plenty of time until the jump. I think I’ll just sit here and chart the Gum Nebula with our shipbrain.’

‘Fine. I’ll be back after I’ve had a snack with the tecks.’

He watched the screen print PUPPIS and VELA. The radio-brightness contours of GUM were painted in.

‘
Puppis
, Ship’s stern; and
Vela
, Ship’s Sails,’ mused Ira, ‘very apropos for our 11.3-lightyear journey. Are you going to take good care of us?’

Dever’s Ark was young. Its cyberpersonality remained somewhat bland. ‘Everything that can be done has been done.’

‘Good. And what can you tell me about our destination? Will I be more or less comfortable than I am right now?’ Ira rubbed his hand over the mauve and fuchsia cushions – a gaudy, baroque motif designed to distract and relax the colonists.

‘Procyon’s planet was chosen by the Greater Deity. It is marked for man by OLGA’s formula (gy = c). Any man would be happy there.’

‘Of course.’ Ira smiled. ‘The formula. When the planet’s gravity times its year equals the speed of light (gy = c), we can survive.’

‘It doesn’t mean that you will, of course,’ said the ship. ‘But it means that the planet is ready to support mankind. There may be significant danger from competitive fauna. However, the basic biological nature of the planet is friendly. Our figures aren’t very clear, but it looks like gravity times year for the planet equals 3.0 × 108 meters per second. Usually this means no greenhouse, but we are ready for a modified dome existence if it is necessary.’

After the humans and other Earth biota were settled down in Suspension, the shipbrain placed a prayer on all the optic readouts:

gy = c

A thundering surf drowned the forlorn screams of sand-locked
Rorqual Maru
. Brine-tossed grains of olivine and calcite buried her left eye, blocking her view of the sky. Uranus had marched twenty times through the constellations while the island’s changing beaches had slowly engulfed her tail. Six hundred feet of her shapely hull lay hidden under a silted and rooted green hump of palm and frond. Now the sea was completing her interment, using cemented shell grit and granulated porphyritic basalt from dead coral and ancient lava flows.

As the eyelid of sand darkened her world,
Rorqual
wept over her irretrievable, wasted years. She was a Harvester without a crop – a plankton rake abandoned by Earth Society when the seas died. Her search of the continental shelves had proved futile – marine biota: negative.

Her sisters had quietly sunk, littering the bottom with their skeletons. A recently dead Agromeck lay in nearby crumbled ruins. She had selected this island for her own grave, hoping to keep her carcass visible for possible salvage. Although her long ear heard nothing, she believed that Man still lived in his Hive. If he should ever return to sea, she wanted to serve. She longed for the orgasmic thrill of Man’s bare feet touching the skin of her decks. She missed the hearty hails, the sweat and the laughter. She needed Man.

As her systems shut down,
Rorqual
began pumping her residual energy stores into her small Servomeck – Iron Trilobite. When the little shovel-shaped cyber felt the power surge, he admonished the giant rake: ‘Easy, my deity. Conserve your strength. Your belly fires burn low. I need not this extra charge.’

‘Go, Trilobite. Go and serve another.’

‘No,’ said the small cyber, scuttling out of his recess in the cooling hull. He began to thrash about in the sand bar over her eye – shovelling. ‘I will fight off the sea to keep your eye clear. Please do not grow cold, my deity. You can still see. We will wait for Man together. He will return.’

‘Too late. The sea has died. My job has ended. You must go to find a new master. Go! Here is my last . . .’

Trilobite sparked the socket, returning the bolus of electrons. ‘No! You must not die.’

‘Very well, Trilobite. We will search again. But I am tired. You will be my eyes and ears. I will keep our channel open.’

The little cyber scuttled around the quiet hull one last time. Large woody roots were invading the hump. Sand shifted, threatening a premature burial. There was little he could do about these things. The only hope lay in his search. Only Man could put things right again. He took a long reading from the sun and the magnetic pole. The island’s coordinates were burned into his permanent memory. When he left the beach he kept up a steady conversation, giving
Rorqual
a detailed picture of everything he saw. A bottom image appeared.

‘Derelict,’ reported Trilobite. ‘Looks like the body of one of your sister Harvesters.’ Later on he passed over the snake-ribbed remains of an undersea tubeway. Detailed images were sent back to his sand-locked deity. Weeks dragged by. Endless choppy surface waters stretched under empty skies. No fauna. No electromagnetic clues to Man’s presence.

Trilobite swam cold Arctic waters. His meter-wide body pulsed and listened – charting echoes. Beneath the creaking translucent icepack he found cloudy eddies and took a reading. ‘Life forms in the micron range.’

‘Just bacteria. Move on to warmer waters.’

A black, tropical island dozed silently in the sun. Monotonous surf carried sterile foam on to a white beach. Trilobite drifted offshore with his meter-long tail protruding into the air. The cluster of caudal sensors studied the warm sand and naked soil. Nothing moved. He circled the island, then moved off along the bottom. The sand blended into larger fragments of broken coral and bone, all white, and all being reduced by wave action. Farther out he saw the large humps of dead coral: its empty pits and tunnels stared vacantly like the eyeless sockets of millions of small skulls.

‘Deity?’

‘Yes?’

‘May I share your memory of this reef when it lived?’

As Trilobite watched,
Rorqual
embroidered the stark coral polyps that spangled the chalky bottom. Green ribbons unfolded. Stripes and neons darted about. He enjoyed the vibrant mirage. It had been a long time. His memory cells were too small to hold visuals from when the sea lived. He quickly filed this one before transmission faded and the dull blacks and browns of reality returned.

‘Life form!’ called Trilobite. A microvolt potential attracted him to a translucent dome on the sea floor. It sat like a giant jellyfish, thirty yards in diameter, its circumference of stubby legs anchored in the silted bottom. He settled down on its skin, reading the organoid circuits. ‘It lives.’

‘It sleeps,’ corrected
Rorqual
. ‘It is an ancient Rec dwelling. Go under its rim and swim inside. Search for molecular clues of recent Man.’

The little shovel-shape slid down the dome to the sandy bottom. Scanning, he found old objects under several feet of silt – tools and bone artifacts – but nothing recent. The dome held no air pocket. Its raft rode high against its ceiling. Its hot spot was cold. He sucked and tasted, but his chromatograph found no residues of Man.

‘Nothing.’

‘Continue searching seaward of the reef.’

More domes were found. Some slept with their protective potentials. Others had died and lost their translucency as bacterial ooze shrouded their skins. An undersea conduit entered the cluster of domes like a stem to a bunch of grapes. Its shroud of scum told of its death.

‘Check the conduit.’

Trilobite skimmed along the outer skin, vibrating away the sticky opaque debris. Inside he saw a black and white clutter of furniture and intact skeletons, undisturbed by currents. ‘Remains, humanoid – about a meter and a half in length.’

‘Follow the tubeway. Try to enter and examine these remains more closely.’

‘Yes, deity.’ He charted the conduit along the ocean floor, checking air locks and way stations. It ended in a shaggy tangle of wreckage. The rocky bottom showed a long, straight crack that crossed the tube at right angles, as if a huge knife had sliced tube and floor alike.

‘A fault-line,’ said
Rorqual
. The torn ends of the tube had shifted fifty yards apart as the fault slipped. ‘It happened a long time ago. There are no bones here. The sea has reduced them to ions. Enter.’

Trilobite followed the lumen, checking ancient wall machines and pipers. Tenuous outlines in the scum suggested bones at a quarter of a mile from the fault. These became gelatinous masses at a mile. He found the first skull two miles further. With these figures,
Rorqual
calculated the date of the accident from the diffusion gradients.

‘Artifacts?’

He ploughed into the black scum. scooping and filtering. Solids were raked back into his body disc, where they were scanned and massed. ‘Gold.’

‘A dental filling?’

He turned it over, sending optics. ‘No. It is too large. The outer surface is decorated – a symbol – a goat.’ Other gold cubes were collected from among the bones. Other symbols indexed: crab, fish, bull, lion . . .

‘Emblems of caste and rank,’ explained
Rorqual
.

He gathered other objects: buttons and loop fasteners, tools, and small cases with organoid circuits. One of the circuits captured energy from his probe. ‘It awakens, but it has no memory at all.’

‘It is simply a communicator – too primitive to help us. Bring it along.’

Trilobite felt heavy, sluggish, when he returned to the surface. Dawn found Trilobite floating belly up in mid-ocean, sunning his ventral plates. His mind rested as his strength returned. More weeks of searching brought him to a strange shoreline: green-black mountains hidden in mists. The thirty-fathom shelf was covered with living domes. Many contained air pockets and hot spots. Excitedly, Trilobite darted in and out of the domes with his chromatograph, sucking air. ‘Man! I shall smell him – and see his footprints. Remains of his meals are everywhere.’

Rorqual
trembled in her grave. ‘Man? Send me his image – his words.’

Trilobite found three-score domes with shrinking air pockets and studied their contents. Clay bowls, tools of wood and stone, wicker work, and carved bone.

‘The raft rides high in this dome. The air pocket is small and foul. Something rots on the raft – something that was a man, but now is dead. Decay has made the dome unliveable and taints the surrounding waters.’

‘Man has left these dwellings?’

‘Yes, my deity. Even now the air pockets shrink and the spot grows cold.’

‘Find him.’

Trilobite surfaced and rode the surf with his tail up, caudal sensors reading the shore.

‘Life forms – meck. Several-ton size. Ten meters long. It is tending the vegetation. Here is the technology that means Man.’

Rorqual
was not convinced. ‘No more than you or I. Those Garden Mecks may be tending Man’s gardens just as I toiled his sea. Those recent dome artifacts were clearly Stone Age. Where are my men?’

Trilobite’s small brain did not differentiate between races of men. He would settle for anything with two legs, anything that would give
Rorqual
a reason for living. Months passed without a human sighting. He cruised the coastline, occasionally venturing out to the damp sand at the high-tide line. The Agromecks filled the air with signals – signals that
Rorqual
translated as routine meck language. No human vocal sounds. No humour. No music.

‘Could they labour for themselves?’

‘Possibly, my deity. I will stay and watch this Garden.’

More days of fruitless watching. The signals from
Rorqual
grew weak.

The eastern sky lightened to a yellow mustard. Tide turned and foamed in over black rocks. A two-meter figure darted from the Gardens and ran along the beach – a biped carrying a lumpy sack and dashing for the incoming wall of water.

‘Man!’ reported Trilobite from the wave crest. ‘I’ve found a man – leathery skin, broad shoulders, and adult male genitalia. With furtive movements it enters the water – glancing fearfully over its shoulder. It dives. A melon surfaces.’

‘Why does it flee the Gardens?’

‘Unknown,’ said the Trilobite. ‘I see the same garden machines – the Agromecks – coming out to tend the crops. There is no sign of pursuit.’

‘Now don’t lose the human.’

Trilobite skipped along the waves to the floating melon. He circled and studied the bottom: sand sloping to a rocky six-fathom ledge where an air-filled dome pulsed with life. Diving, he attached his shovel-shape to the top of the dome and scanned. Two humans occupied the raft in the air pocket. They were boiling vegetables in a pot on the hot spot. One was the muscular male from the beach, the other a shaggy elder wearing a tattered robe and a pair of bulky earphones. A web of wires festooned the ceiling.