Skylark DuQuesne

6. OF DISEMBODIED INTELLIGENCES

WE have now seen how the ripple of thought that began with the conference between Seaton and his advisors from the Green System had spread throughout all of recorded space, and how it had affected the lives and destinies of countless millions of persons who had never heard of him.

Yet a few threads remain to be drawn into our net. And one of these threads represents the strangest entities Seaton had encountered, ever… as well as the most deadly.

To understand what these entities are like, it is necessary to look back to their beginnings.

These are most remote, both in space and in time. In a solar system so distant from that of Sol as to be forever unknowable to anyone of Earth, and at a time an inconceivably vast number of millennia in the past, there once existed a lusty and fertile Tellus-type planet named Marghol. Over the usual millions of years mankind evolved on Marghol and thrived as usual. And finally, also as usual and according to the scheduled fate of all created material things, the planet Marghol grew old.

Whether or not a Tellus-type planet ordinarily becomes unfit to support human life before its sun goes nova is not surely known. Nor does it matter very much; for, long before either event occurs, the human race involved has developed a faster-than-light drive and has at its disposal dozens or hundreds of Earth-like planets upon which even subhuman life has not yet developed. The planet Marghol, however, while following the usual pattern in general, developed a specific thing that was, as far as is known, unique throughout all the reaches of total space and throughout all time up to the present.

On Marghol, during many, many millions of years of its prime, there had continued to exist a small, tightly-inbred, self-perpetuating cult of thinkers — of men and women who devoted their every effort and their total power to thought.

They themselves did not know what freak of mind or quirk of physical environment made the ultimate outcome possible; but after those many millions of years, during which the perpetually inbreeding group grew stronger and stronger mentally and weaker and weaker physically, the seven survivors of the group succeeded finally in liberating their minds — minds perfectly intact and perfectly functioning — from the gross and perishable flesh of their physical bodies.

Then, able to travel at the unmeasurable speed of thought and with all future time in which to work, they set out to learn everything there was to know. They would learn, they declared, not only all about space and time and zero and infinity and animals and people and life and death, but also everything else comprising or having anything to do with the totality of existence that is the Cosmic All.

This quest for knowledge has been going on, through universe after universe and through dimension after dimension, for a stretch of time that, given as a number in Tellurian years, would be a number utterly incomprehensible to the human mind. For — what perceptible or tangible difference is there, to the human mind, between a googolplex of seconds and the same number of centuries? And, since these free minds ordinarily kept track of time only by the life-cycles of suns, the period of time during which they had already traveled and studied could have been either shorter or longer than either of the two exact figures mentioned.

Seven free minds had left the planet Marghol. They called themselves, in lieu of names, “One” to “Seven” in order of their liberation.

For a brief time — a mere cosmic eye-wink; a few hundreds of millions of years — there had been eight, since One had consented to dematerialize one applicant for immortality.

The applicant Eight, however, sick and tired of eternal life, had committed suicide by smashing his sixth-order being out of existence against Richard Seaton’s sixth-order screens.

Now those seven free minds, accompanied by the free mind of Immortality Candidate Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne, were flying through ultra-deep space in a time-stasis capsule. This capsule, as has been said, was designed and powered to travel almost to infinity in both space and time. But, as the Norlaminians pointed out to Seaton, his basic assumptions were invalid.

Nothing happened, however, for week after week. Then, so immensely far out in intergalactic space that even the vast bulk of a galaxy lying there would have been invisible even to Palomar’s “Long Eye,” the hurtling, capsule struck a cloud of hydrogen gas.

That gas was, by Earthly standards, a hard vacuum; but the capsule’s velocity by that time was so immensely great that that cloud might just as well have been a mountain of solid rock. The capsule’s directors tried, with all their prodigious might and speed to avoid the obstruction, but even with fullest power they did not have time enough.

Eight multi-ton power-bars of activated uranium flared practically instantaneously into ragingly incandescent gas; into molecular, atomic, and subatomic vapor and debris. A fireball brighter than a sun glared briefly; then nothing whatever was visible where that massive structure had been.

And out of that sheer emptiness came a cold, clear thought: the thought of Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne.

“One, are you familiar enough with this region of space to estimate at all closely how long we were in that stasis of time and where we now are with reference to the First Galaxy?”

Freemind One did not exactly answer the question. “What matters it?” he asked. If the thought of an immortal and already incredibly old and incredibly knowledgeful mind can be said to show surprise, that thought did. “It should be clear, even to you of infinitesimally short life, that any length of time expressible in any finite number of definite time periods is actually but a moment. Also, the Cosmic All is vast indeed; larger by many orders of magnitude than any that the boldest of your thinkers has as yet dared to imagine.

“Whether or not space is infinite I do not know. Whether or not my life span will be infinite I do not know. I do not as yet completely understand infinity. I do know, however, that both infinite time and infinite space are requisite for the acquisition of infinite knowledge, which is my goal; wherefore I am well content. You have no valid reason whatever for wishing to return to your Earth. Instead, you should be as eager as I am to explore and to study the as yet unknown.”

“I have unfinished business there.” DuQuesne’s thought was icy cold. “I’m going back there whether you do or not.”

“To kill beings who have at best but an instant to live? To rule an ultra-microscopic speck of cosmic dust? A speck whose fleeting existence is of but infinitesimal importance to the Great Scheme of Things? Are you still infantile enough, despite your recent transformation, to regard as valid such indefensible reasons as those?”

“They’re valid enough to me. And you’d have to go back, too, I should think. Or isn’t it still true that science demands the dematerialization of the whole Skylark party?”

“Truth is variable,” One said. “Thus, while certain of our remarks were not true in the smaller aspect, each of them was designed to elicit a larger truth. They aided in the initiation of chains of events by observation of which I will be able to fit many more constituent parts of this you call the First Universe precisely into place in the Great Scheme.

“Now as to you, DuQuesne. The probability was small that you were sufficiently advanced to become a worthy member of our group; but I decided to give you your chance and permitted Richard Seaton to do what he did. As a matter of fact I, not Seaton, did it. You have failed; and I now know that no member of your race can ever become a true Scholar. In a very few millions of your years you would not be thinking of knowledge at all, but merely of self-destruction. I erred, one-tenth of a cycle since, in admitting Freemind Eight to our study group; an entity who was then at approximately the same stage of development as you now are. I will not repeat that error. You will be rematerialized and will be allowed to do whatever you please.”

The mind of DuQuesne almost gasped.

“Out here? Even if you re-create my ship I’d never get back!”

“You should and will have precisely the same chance as before of living out your normal instant of life in normal fashion. To that end I will construct for you a vessel that will be the replica of your former one except in that it will have a sixth-order drive — what your fellow-human Seaton called the ‘Cosmic Energy’ drive — so that you will be able to make the journey in comparatively few of your days. I will instruct you in this drive and in certain other matters that will be required to implement what I have said. I will set your vessel’s controls upon your home galaxy at the correct acceleration.

“I compute… I construct.”

And faster by far than even an electronic eye could follow, a pattern of incredibly complex stresses formed in the empty other.

Elemental particles, combining instantaneously, built practically instantaneously upward through electrons and protons and atoms and molecules beams and weaponry up to a million tons or more of perfectly-operating superdreadnought — and at the same time built the vastly more complex structure of the two hundred pounds or so of meat and so forth that were to enclothe Freemind DuQuesne — and did the whole job in much less time than the blink of an eye.

“… I instruct… It is done,” and all seven freeminds vanished.

And DuQuesne, seated at a thoroughly familar control board and feeling normal gravity on the seat of his pants, stared at that board’s instruments, for a moment stunned.

According to those instruments the ship was actually traveling at an acceleration of one hundred twenty-seven lights; its internal gravity was actually nine hundred eighty-one point zero six centimeters per second squared.

He stared around the entire room, examining minutely each familiar object. Activating a visiplate, he scanned the immense skyrover, inside and out, from stem to stern: finding that it was in fact, except for the stated improvements, an exact duplicate of the mighty ship of war he had formerly owned: which, he still thought, had been one of the most powerful battleships ever built by man.

Then, and only then, did he examine the hands resting, quiescent but instantly ready, upon the board’s flat, bare table. They were big tanned, powerful hands; with long, strong, tapering, highly competent fingers. They were his hands — his own hands in every particular, clear down to the tiny scar on the side of his left index finger; where, years before, a bit of flying glass from an exploding flask had left its mark.

Shaking his head, he got up and went to his private cabin, where he strode up to a full-length mirror.

The man who stared back at him out of it was tall and powerfully built; with thick, slightly wavy hair of an intense, glossy black. The eyes, only a trifle lighter in shade, were surmounted by heavy black eyebrows growing together above his finely-chiseled aquiline beak of a nose. His saturnine face, while actually tanned, looked almost pale because of the blackness of the heavy beard always showing through, even after the closest possible shave.

“He could rematerialize me perfectly — and did,” he said aloud to himself, “and the whole ship — exactly!”

Scowling in concentration, he went into his bathroom and stepped upon the platform of his weight-and-height Fairbanks. Six feet and seven-eighths of an inch. Precisely right.

Two hundred two and three-quarters pounds. Ditto.

He examined the various items of equipment and of every-day use. There was his cutthroat razor, Osnomian — made of arenak — vastly sharper than any Earthly razor could possibly be honed and so incredibly hard that it could shave generation after generation of men with no loss whatever of edge.

Comb, brush, toothbrush, lotion — inside the drawers and out — every item was exactly as he had left it… clear down to the correctly-printed, peculiarly-distorted tubes of tooth-paste and of shaving cream; each of which, when he picked it up, fitted perfectly into the grip of his left hand.

“I’ll… be… totally… damned,” DuQuesne said then, aloud.