The Singers of Time

9

For Sue-ling Quong, this was becoming a real adventure. It was exciting! It made her feel young again—as young as Moon Bunderan, or even younger, for the girl from New Mexico seemed to be able to take all in her stride . . . while Sue-ling was experiencing one thrill after another. When she looked around the control room of The Golden Hind she was not only impressed, she was starded, as well, and even delighted, like any tourist visiting a wondrous place never seen before.

The heart of a waveship was certainly impressive to look at. There were banks of controls—two separate sets of them, it seemed, though for what reason Sue-ling could not guess. Though it was a large room it was crowded now. The two Turtles and Moon Bunderan's Taur took up more space than anyone else, but the little band of human adventurers now numbered seven—well, Sue-ling thought, assuming you included as human these odd new robotic things that said they were Francis Krake's crew.

But some of the pleasure and excitement were spoiled for Sue-ling Quong by the childish, abrasive, deplorable way everyone was acting! She was almost ashamed of her friends— well, when you came right down to it, she admitted to herself, only two of them. Kiri as always was quiet and generally placatory; Moon Bunderan and the two robotic crew members were mostly listening. The offenders, really, were Francis Krake, veins starting out on his dark temples as he shouted at the two Turties—though Sue-ling had long since lost track of just what it was the captain and the Turtles were arguing so vehemently about . . . and, yes, that problem child, that loved one who was so seldom lovable, Sork Quintero. He was so up! She toyed with the thought that perhaps he'd started drinking again—but where would he get liquor on this spartan waveship?

Willing to do anything to stop the bickering, Sue-ling marched up to Sork, took his arm, pulled him away. "What's the matter with you?" she demanded. "Can't we just get started without all these cat fights?"

Sork stared at her unbelievingly. "But didn't you hear what that big Turtle's saying? He wants us to find their missing Mother—or get them a new one, or something. They're really out of their minds now, Sue-ling. I thought Litlun was crazy when he was trying to buy everything in sight—the Taur, the lecture chips—but this is really loopy."

Sue-ling interrupted him. "I've been thinking about that. Are they all connected?—the Taur, the chips, this trip?"

Sork blinked at her, trying to wrestle this new datum into his overriding plan. "I don't know," he said at last. "That's not what I'm worrying about, anyway. What's on my mind is— what if they succeed?"

Sue-ling gazed at him, not understanding. "Yes?"

"Don't you see? Litlun wants us to help him keep the Turtle race alive—but that's not what we want! If they all die off it will be the best thing that ever happened to us!" Sork turned to his brother and Moon Bunderan, drawing near

them to get away from the storm center. "Isn't that true, Kiri?" he demanded.

Even Kiri's calm had been frayed by the squabbling. He gave his brother a tired, forgiving smile and said gently: "Whatever is right will happen, Sork."

Moon Bunderan turned and looked up at him. "Are you sure of that, Kiri?"

"Very sure," he said positively, though his face was still strained.

"Oh, I hope you're right," the girl from New Mexico told him. "But I'm still afraid of that little one. Why do you suppose he wants Thrayl?"

Sork made a sweeping-away gesture, dismissing all such questions at once: "Turtles! Who knows why they want anything? What matters is what we want. Shall we help the Turtles survive?"

The little red robot thing named Marco was scuttling over to them. "Friends," he callcd out, the face on his belly smiling up at them, "it looks like we're going to be on our way. I suggest you all hold onto something for undocking!"

"Have they settled what they're going to do?" Sork Quintero demanded.

"Settled?" The face was laughing now. "No, you can't say anything's really settled . . . but we're taking off anyway!"

In the control room the Turtles had moved to one side, out of the way. Francis Krake was at one of the control boards, looking irritated but determined. Daisy Fay McQueen was at the other board. "Screens!" Krake called, and Daisy Fay touched a button with one of her long tentacles.

Sue-ling caught her breath. The walls around the control room blinked and disappeared! She was looking at a view of

the space around the Hind, almost as though there were a transparent band circling the control room.

"It's all right," Marco whispered, seeing her surprise. "Daisy's just turned on the external screens so we can see what's happening—there aren't any windows in a waveship, you know. But the screens are pretty good, aren't they? Now the captain's going to start the undocking."

So he did. "We go," called Krake, moving some toggles on his board.

Sue-ling grabbed at one of Marco's tentacles as the floor seemed to lurch under her. Outside, she saw the umbilical to the orbit station they were moored to. No longer! Tie clamps were parting. Lax cables dropped away and were automatically reeled in to the station. Set free from its moorings, The Golden Hind drifted clear.

Sue-ling winced in the sudden blaze of eye-straining light as the docks of the orbit station burned behind them in the light of the naked Sun, an ungainly tangle of tanks and valves and connected passageways.

"Board green," Daisy Fay called, and took her fingers off the board. Off in a corner Marco turned a smiling face up to Sue-ling Quong.

"That's it," he announced. "Now we'll start the mass-drive as soon as we drift clear of the structure. Then we have to move out of range of the station before we go into wave-drive. It'll take a little while."

Uncomfortably, Sue-ling remembered to let go of his tentacle. "Thanks," she said. "Is that all there is to it?"

"Well, all for just now," he said. One of his eyes turned, gazing around the room. "We haven't got you settled yet, have we? Would you like me to show you to your quarters? There'll be time before we go into wave-drive."

Sue-ling, grateful, said, "Oh, I'd like that—but I don't want to miss when we do that, you know."

Marco was chuckling. "You mean miss the experience of knowing when we go into wave-drive? Oh, I wouldn't worry about that, Sue-ling. You'll know, all right."

On the way to Sue-ling's quarters they passed the cubicle where Sork was busily listening in again to the old lecture chips. "Are you sure you don't mind doing this, Marco?" she asked. "Missing the lectures, I mean?"

The face that looked up at her from the belly screen looked a little embarrassed. "Well, a little," he admitted. "But Sork promised to let me borrow them later on. I don't sleep much, you know—don't have to sleep at all unless I specially want to. So I have the time. And actually I've been really fascinated by all that old stuff." He hesitated, then turned an eye to look at her. "I wished when I was a boy that I could be an astronomer," he confessed.

"You're better than any astronomer now. You actually go out and touch these other worlds," she told him, and wondered if she meant it.

And yet, funnily, she did. Sue-ling was beginning to believe that whatever had happened to Marco had not been all loss. With his eight tentacles to pull him along, he scampered through the walkways of the waveship like a mechanical dog.

And that was another strange—but, really, very nice!— sensarion for Sue-ling Quong, to be in the company of this funny-looking robot who said he was a human being. On balance, she was pleased to be with him rather than the others just now. As a practical matter, she wanted to know where she was going to sleep. As an emotional one, she was glad to be away from the constant, draining squabbles in the control room.

"You want to get to know these sections of the ship, Sue-ling, because you'll have to spend a lot of time here. At least while we're traveling on rocket drive you will," Marco called, one eye wobbling back to look at her as he led the way. "These parts are pretty well shielded, but even here you need to be careful sometimes, if there's a solar flare or anything."

"Solar flare?" Sue-ling repeated questioningly.

"That's a sudden flux of radiation from a star. Of course, you only have to worry about it when we're near one, like now. Usually when we're traveling we'll be in wave-drive and pretty far away from any star—it's a big universe, you know. Not that even a solar flare could do us any harm in wave-drive, for that matter. Anyway, the Sun isn't flaring right now." Marco gestured casually around with a couple of his tentacles. "All these areas are shielded against radiation. Daisy Fay and I don't care; we're not very sensitive to radiation. But Francis is. When the Turtles had the Hind they used these spaces for cargoes that might have been damaged by radiation."

"What kind of cargoes would that be?"

Marco's tentacles writhed, and the picture on the belly plate shrugged. "I would guess they were mostly living things of one kind or another. The Turtles wouldn't need shielding themselves, of course. They thrive on radiation. Now, take a deep breath, Sue-ling. Can you smell anything?" Both eyes turned to regard her.

Sue-ling sniffed thoughtfully. Then she nodded. There was indeed a faint, sour reek in the air. "I think so. Like something spoiled."

"That's it. I can't smell anything any more," Marco apologized, "so I can't tell for myself. But Francis used to complain that there was always a stink in this part of the ship. It comes from something the Turtles were hauling, I guess." He hesitated, the eyes roving around to study Sue-ling's face. Her eyes were fixed on him. "Is something the matter?"

Embarrassed, Sue-ling cleared her throat. "I was just wondering—" she began diffidently.

The machine-man laughed out loud. "I know what you were wondering. You want to know how I came to look this way, don't you?"

Sue-ling flushed. "I'm sorry, Marco. I don't want to be rude."

"Don't worry, Sue-ling. You won't hurt my feelings asking about it. I know what I look like. I can't say I enjoy it, really. But it's a lot better than being dead. And that was the only other possibility for me."

The face on the platen looked grim for a moment, then relaxed. "It was a long time ago," Marco said. "I guess Francis told you about the Turtle scout ship that was exploring the system, a couple of hundred years ago. . . ."

She nodded. "They found him adrift in the Coral Sea and picked him up."

"That's right. But Francis wasn't the only one they picked up." The tentacles and eyestalks moved restlessly, and the face on the belly plate looked somber. "I think the war frightened the Turtles," Marco said. "They don't like wars, because of what the Sh'shrane almost did to them a long time ago—"

"Sh'shrane?"

"They were the ones the Turtles did have a war with, long ago. I don't know much about it," he apologized. "It isn't a subject the Turtles like to talk about. But the Turtles lost that war, I think. I guess when they saw a good, big war going on on Earth, the Turtles couldn't help wondering whether this unruly new race of aliens—us—might be a problem for them. So they took samples. The samples were always individuals who were right at the point of death, like Daisy Fay and Francis and me. And they always did it where it was safe, in places where their scout ship could not be seen or detected by the primitive radar of the time."

"And that's all they took? Just the three of you?"

"Oh, no. Altogether they picked out twenty-two specimens—some of them corpses, some of them so near death that even the Turtles couldn't save them. We're just the only ones that survived. I was lucky—I guess," he finished.

Sue-ling listened attentively, particularly interested in the medical aspects of his story. "Francis was the only one in good health then. Of course, he was going to die of exposure if they hadn't taken him."

Sue-ling thought wonderingly of how the Turtles had managed to create artificial bodies for the two who could be saved, using the nineteen cadavers for dissection and study. That was how the Turtles had been able to develop the memo disks, Marco said.

Evidendy there were Turtle medical skills they had not seen fit to pass on to their humans . . . although, on second thought, she wasn't entirely sure of that. Perhaps, she mused, they were embodied in memo disks and it simply happened that she had been using them all along without knowing she was doing so. . . .

She was startled to feel Marco Ramos's tentacle on her shoulder. "What is it?" she demanded, suddenly alarmed.

"I just wanted to tell you," the machine-person said reassuringly, "that I hear Daisy Fay coming. I didn't want her to startle you. She's got someone with her."

The someone was Moon Bunderan. "I thought I'd find you here," Daisy Fay told her partner. "We got tired of listening to them argue, too."

Sue-ling impulsively put her arm around the younger woman. "Where's your, uh, friend?" she asked.

Moon shook her head. "Thrayl's in one of his moods," she sighed. "He's just squatting there with the others, not paying any attention to them. I think he's worried because his songs are all mixed up and confusing."

"He's not the only one," Daisy Fay said morosely. "I don't know what's happening, either. The Turtles have some kind of plan, and they insist on carrying it out—and Francis is telling them it's his ship, and it's all a mess." Her tentacles writhed.

"The big thing," she said, "is Chief Thunderbird has decided he's the captain."

"Oh, hell," said Marco. "That's really going to tear it."

"Already has," Daisy Fay sighed. "Naturally Francis says there's only one captain for The Golden Hind and that's Captain Francis Krake. Heaven knows how they'll sort it out. Meanwhile we're just floating around in space, till they come to some agreement."

The robot-woman's tentacles floated around, and her face looked up at the humans. "Anyway," she said, "we've got some time before we go into wave-drive. How would you like it if Marco and I showed you around the rest of the ship?"

For Sue-ling everything was beginning to seem dreamlike. None of this was part of her old familiar life! Nothing had been, really, since the day her university had closed down and she had come to the Turtle compound in the hope of something more important to do with her life. But to be here—in a Turtle wave-drive spaceship!—with these strange half-human robots for companions—not to mention a pair of Turtles— and, by every token, on the verge of a trip into deep space, with the knowledge that everyone she had left behind would be dust by the time she saw Earth again—

It was all simply too strange.

With Moon Bunderan, she followed the two robot-people down the empty passageways of The Golden Hind. There was nothing familiar here at all. She gazed uncomprehendingly as Daisy Fay, tentacles awave, gestured at two huge black cylinders looming above a passage. They were decked with a maze of knobs and colored lights. "Those are the antimatter generators," Daisy Fay said proudly.

"Antimatter," Sue-ling repeated, frowning up at the glowing board.

"That's what we use for the mass-drive," Marco Ramos put in. "The ship has two drives—mass reaction for short trips and docking maneuvers, and also for landing on a planet when we have to. Mass drive is just a kind of rocket, if you know what a rocket is."

She nodded. "Human beings used to use rockets to travel in space."

Marco gazed up at her ruefully. "So they tell me. It was all before my own time, of course—or after. Anyway, those early rockets were all chemicals. Like big firecrackers. These are a million times more powerful."

"But of course," Daisy Fay chimed in, "they're no good at all for interstellar travel."

"Right," Marco agreed. "For that we have to use the wave-drive. We'll show you the wave-drive stuff" in a minute, but let's finish up here first. Do you know what antimatter is?"

His eyes weren't on Sue-ling but on Moon Bunderan, who was gazing around with awe. "Well, yes," Moon hedged. "At least, sort of—"

"It's common matter turned inside out," the robot-man explained. "The electric charges are all reversed: the shells of the atoms are positrons, instead of electrons; the cores are antiprotons. Antimatter would be a deadly explosive if it got free—but it doesn't.

"You see," he went on, warming up, "when antimatter meets the normal stuff it reacts. The unlike charges cancel into gamma radiation. These generators simply create it by reversing a few of the charges in a stream of fuel atoms. Then the new antimatter reacts instantly with the normal atoms in the same stream, the mass converts to energy and it comes out as electrical power. That's our mass drive: electrical rockets."

Moon nodded as if she understood. Satisfied, Marco charged ahead. They went through another passage, tugging themselves along by holdfasts, and came out on the naked curve of the hull. "We're taking a chance here," Daisy Fay warned, "because we're out of the shielded section of the ship. But this is where the mass-drive thrusters are, and the wave-drive equipment just aft of this compartment." Sue-ling felt the air colder here, and it was alive with a faint vibration from the dark metal all around them.

"The mass thrusters," Daisy Fay said, waving a tentacle at a maze of thick pipes and humming machines. "The pumps and the energy exchangers, where the exhaust mass becomes a superheated plasma that goes out through the external rocket nozzles."

Sue-ling stood staring, until she saw the others moving away. She hurried after them, caught up as Daisy Fay was indicating a web of heavy cables that spread to a thick, bright metal ridge that curved around the hull.

"The wave-drive," Daisy Fay said with satisfaction.

"I don't understand the wave-drive at all," Moon Bunderan declared positively.

"No, of course not," Marco said reassuringly. "I don't really understand it myself—but I know it works. Of course, you can't really see much of it. Do you know what particle-wave duality is?"

"No," said Moon flatly.

"It's simple enough. Particles and waves are just two aspects of the same thing, you see," Daisy Fay put in. "The drive turns our particles into waves, and we travel at the speed of light. Of course, we can't use the wave-drive for launching. That's why we're out here, away from the orbit station. We have to get well away from the docks before we can shift into it."

"Will it hurt?" Moon asked, observing with pleasure that her voice did not quaver.

"Oh, no. Anyway, it shouldn't." Daisy Fay's cyestalks tipped back and forth like shaking heads. "The effect is hard to describe, because of our language and the way we've learned to think. Even the terms 'particle' and Svave' don't fit quantum reality. You'll probably know when we shift—"

"You positively will," Marco laughed.

Daisy Fay turned a warning eye on him. "But don't worry about it. Different people feel it differently," she said.

Sue-ling stirred herself. "Differently how?" she asked.

"Well," Daisy Fay began, considering, but was interrupted by a blare: Francis Krake's voice, coming over the ship's internal communications system.

"Marco, Daisy Fay!" he was saying. "Take your places for wave-drive entry!"

"We'd better get back in the shielded room," Daisy Fay said, and her voice seemed to smile. "You're going to have to start learning how to run the ship if you're going to be part of the crew, because it seems we're on our way. I won't have to try to explain how it feels. You'll find out soon enough!"

The songs of the aiodoi are heard by many, in many places, and often they are loved. The aiodoi sing frequently to the Taurs, and the Taurs love to hear them. The aiodoi do not sing to humans, because the humans cannot hear. Nor do they sing to the Turtles, who will not listen. But the aiodoi themselves always listen to the smallsongs from everywhere, and when they listen it is always with love, even when they listen to the childish babblings from Earth.

"I talked about rotating an electron last time because I wanted you to get ready for some other rotating phenomena —not just in space, but in space-time.

"I have here in my hand a bust of Abraham Lincoln. Look it over. It has three spatial dimensions—top/bottom, left/ right and back/front. Since I am now holding it what we call 'upright,' I share those dimensions and directions with it. My 'up' is the same as Honest Abe's 'up.'

"Now let's rotate it ninety degrees—standing old Abe on his right ear, as you see. I have rotated it on its back/front axis, and now the bust is lying on its right side. The direction I would call 'up' is now 'left' to Abe. Contrariwise, what is 'up' to Abe Lincoln is now what I would call 'right.' But that doesn't cause any real confusion. The only people who are confused would be outside observers. Both Abe and I see clearly that up, right, back, front and so on remain in the same direction as ever—relative to our own individual selves.

"All that is such simple stuff that you don't even need to think about it ... in three-dimensional space.

"But we're thinking now about space-time, and space-time has four dimensions. The other dimension is past/future; it is the dimension of time.

"So, while in 3-D space we had a choice of three axes to twist the sucker around on, now in 4-D space-ftwf we have a choice of four.

"When we rotated Abe's bust in 3-D, his left/right became our up/down. But what if his left/right now becomes our past/ftiture? Nothing's going to look different to Abe. He still sees left and right as left and right.

"But how does he look now to us?

"I'm going to leave you with that question for a while. We won't come back to it for a while, but when we do I'm going to relate it to the proposition we call 'CPT invariance.'"

And the aiodoi sang:

"What is so is so.

"What is right is right.

"That is the real and the only invariance."