The Singers of Time

12

What puzzled Moon Bunderan most was that, although it seemed clear that the planet they were aiming toward no longer existed, the Turtles had not given up. They were demanding—no, it was even more astonishing than that; they were almost pleading—for something more.

What that something more was Moon could not say. She had begun listening to all those old lecture chips with the others, but none of them seemed to relate to any reality she had ever experienced, and all too many of them were worrisome.

Thrayl, for instance. What did the Turtles want with him? He looked up at her from where he sat cross-legged on the floor, his gentle eyes concerned. "There is nothing to fear, Moon," he rumbled. "I hear no ill songs for you."

"What about for you?" she demanded. "What are the Turtles going to do with you?"

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "They will do what they must, Moon."

"And what will that be?" But he didn't answer, only took her hand in his and closed his eyes again. Moon fidgeted, ill at ease. This whole situation, she thought, was getting too weird for comfort. She held tight to Thrayl's hard, comforting, three-fingered paw for reassurance. It was the only reassurance she had when these—"beings"—she had gone off with were shouting and squawking at each other.

The fact that they were out of wave-drive now was some consolation. At least in the control room she wasn't surrounded by that frightening sphere of stars and empty space. Only the panels that circled the room were lit, but what they showed was almost as unpleasing to Moon Bunderan.

The strangest thing of all was that none of this stressful weirdness had affected Thrayl. As far as Moon could see, her Taur was quite content. He was gazing peacefully up at that awful great swirl of evil light that was called a "black hole," huge in the lower left-hand corner of one screen—still fiercely bright, though it had been dimmed by the instruments so that its brilliance didn't wipe out everything else in view. Thrayl was even rumbling softly to himself—"purring," Moon called it. She took solace from that fact. If Thrayl was at peace, no real harm could be very near. . . .

Or so Moon Bunderan hoped.

No one else was contented, though. The two Turtles were jabbering to each other, transposes off, and both Sork Quintero and Captain Krake were studying the screens with worry on their faces. When Moon stirred, Krake glanced at her. He smiled, though it was a worn, tense smile. He waved a hand at the screen. "See our present problem? I mean the ships?"

Moon squinted at the screen. There was nothing resembling a waveship, only a faint dusting of green in one spot, hardly visible. "Wait a minute," he said, "I'll brighten the ID signal." As he touched the keypad, abruptly, the dusting turned into a flock of what looked like little green birds, all around the place where the Mother planet should have been.

They were tiny, bright triangles, green as the grass in her own mother's little front yard.

"What are they?" she asked.

"Turtle spacecraft," Krake said briefly. "The bright spots are ID markers projected from the navigation gear. They aren't light, you know. You couldn't see them with the naked eye. They're signals, so one ship can know when another is nearby."

"There are dozens of them!"

He nodded. "They're orbiting something. Do you see what it is they're orbiting?"

She peered hard. Then shook her head. There was nothing there—nothing except, maybe, just possibly—"Is there something there, in among them?" she asked. "That little sort of, I don't know, squiggly thing that I can hardly see?"

Krake nodded somberly, staring at the same object. More than anything else, it looked like a flaw in window glass. "That's it," he said. He peered more closely at the object, looking disgruntled. "I'm not surprised that you don't know what it is. I don't either. I'd say it was a little black hole, except there's no accretion disk around it. I know what should be there, though. The Turde planet. But it's not there."

"I think it might be what they call a wormhole," Sork Quintero said abrupdy.

Moon turned to look at him sharply, wondering if he were making some kind of joke. He saw her expression, and laughed sharply. "Oh, not like a hole in an apple, Moon," he said. "There aren't any real worms in space. But in those old tapes the scientists talked about something like this—about the way a black hole might produce a kind of tunnel through space—or, no, not through space exactly, but—"

He stopped, shaking his head irritably. "I don't understand it," he complained. "The Turtles keep asking me about it, but all I can tell them is what's on the tapes—that some people thought these Svormholes' were actually a kind of gateway to another universe. If that means anything. ..."

Moon blinked at him. "How can there be more than one universe, Sork? I thought a universe was, well, everything there was."

He laughed again. "See what I mean? All of this stuff is just too confusing to take in. Maybe it's all nonsense, I don't know. The Turtles seemed to think so, until just now—"

He broke off, suddenly realizing that the Turtles had stopped their private bickering. Both were listening to him. He said quickly, trying to placate them, "I didn't mean to say anything to offend you."

Chief Thunderbird turned on his transposer. "You cannot offend truth," he said somberly. "But truth—"

Litlun finished for him. "Truth has many guises," he said. "That is right, one believes," rasped Chief Thunderbird, glowering up at the screen with both his eyes. "That place is where our holy home used to be, and now it is gone!"

"And if that is indeed what this human calls a wormhole, perhaps that is where it has gone," Litlun confirmed, glaring at Sork Quintero, who was looking haggard from the long ordeal of his questioning.

Sork shrugged angrily. Captain Krake cleared his throat. "Well, then," Krake said, "that's that, isn't it? What should we do now, turn around and go back to Earth?" A wordless squawk from both Turtles was answer enough. He said, puzzled, "Well, what else can we do? I don't mean to sound insensitive—I know what it means to you. But if the planet's gone, it's gone, isn't it?"

Both pairs of Turtle eyes were on him now—angrily, Moon thought. "The planet has gone somewhere," Litlun corrected him. "If what Sork Quintero says is true—"

"Hey, no!" Sork cried in alarm. "I don't know what's true and what isn't in this stuff—I only told you what the lecture chips said!"

"If it is true," Litlun rasped on, ignoring him, "then this is perhaps a wormhole, and in that case there is much to consider."

"And on that," added Chief Thunderbird, "we must meditate in our own quarters. We will return with our decision when we can."

"Wait a minute!" Krake cried. "What do you mean, 'decision'? We have to talk—"

But they were already gone. "What the hell?" Krake said, in general. "What kind of decision are they talking about? Sork? Do you know?"

Sork Quintero was gazing after them. Then he blinked and looked at Krake. "Do I know?" he repeated. "No. All I can do is guess, and I don't want to do that . . . because it scares me."

Krake fixed him with a hard stare. "Hold it there, Sork. I don't care if you're scared out of your mind. I want to hear what you think."

"It's only a guess," Sork said obstinately.

"Damn it, Sork!"

Sork shrugged. "I think they think the Mother planet has slipped through that wormhole and disappeared into some other universe." And when he saw the looks Moon and the captain were giving him: "And I think they want to follow it."

"Is that possible?" Krake demanded.

"How the hell do I know that?" Sork asked reasonably. "Ask Moon. Ask her Taur, for that matter—they know as much about it as I do!"

Krake was puzzling over the new thought, hardly listening. Then he looked up. "Wait a minute. I thought the lecture chips said these wormholes only lasted for a skillionth of a second—and, real time, it's almost a hundred and fifty years now since the planet disappeared—"

"The chips also said that wormholes were too tiny to be seen," Sork reminded him, and waved to the immense curva-tare on the screen. He was smiling as he turned back to Krake. "Meditating," he said, "sounds like a good thing to do right now, doesn't it? I think I'll do some myself—if I can find something to help the meditation along."

When Sork was gone, Moon Bunderan asked the captain, "What did he mean about that?"

"He's been hitting my whiskey," Krake told her.

In alarm, Moon said, "But Sue-ling says he shouldn't drink!"

Krake cut her off. "He's a big boy, Moon. He can make his own decisions." He shook his head, dismissing Sork. "I don't know what to do," he complained. "I thought the Turtles would want to contact those other Turtle ships, at least. I wish I knew what they've got on their minds."

Moon shivered without answering. She gripped Thrayl's reassuring paw more tightly and Krake, seeing, pursed his lips. "You're lucky," he said somberly. "At least youVe got your pet to comfort you."

Moon said seriously, "Thrayl is not my 'pet,' Captain Krake. He's my friend."

"Well, sure. I didn't mean any harm," Krake apologized. Then he cleared his throat. "There's something I've been meaning to ask you. Please don't take this the wrong way— but about you and Thrayl—?"

Moon stood up straight. "Are you asking me if we're doing something together that we shouldn't? That's the way my mother would have put it."

"Oh, no! Really. Nothing like that, only—"

"Only you can't help wondering, can you?" she said sharply. Then she relented. Sounding sad, she said, "A lot of people had that idea. That's why they might have burned him alive if they'd caught us. But Thrayl really is my friend, Captain Krake. He's like—" She paused, considering how to say what she meant. "He's like a child. I saw him born, you know. He was the size of a kitten—young Taurs are tiny—and I was only about eight myself. I used to play with him like a doll, bathe him, sing to him—he heard my songs long before he heard any of the ones he says he listens to now. I'd rock him in a doll cradle, and read to him. I taught him to talk and to read! Taurs aren't stupid, you know!"

"I didn't know he could read," Krake said humbly.

"He can do all sorts of things. Only—well, Taurs are different, you see. A lot of things that are important to us just don't interest Thrayl. He's like a—" She flushed, having trouble getting the word out—"He's like a kind of, well, saint."

She reached over and stroked the huge head. "I kept you in the house until you were too big, didn't I, Thrayl?" The huge eyes seemed to smile with love. "He would die for me, Captain Krake. I know that. And he knows that I would do anything for him, too."

Krake studied the two of them for a while, then glanced toward the door. His expression changed again. "That's not really what I wanted to ask you, though. Why do you think the Turtles want him here?" he demanded.

Moon shrugged. "I don't understand Turtles at all," she declared.

Krake shook his head, baffled. "I think it has something to do with those songs he listens to. What do you know about them?"

"They're beautiful," Moon said positively. "Thrayl told me so, only—well, he can't tell me what they're like, exactly, because he doesn't have the words. He says there aren't any words that he can translate for me, not in his language or ours; they're just beautiful. And he began hearing them as soon as his horns began to grow." She stroked the massive head absently. "He says that the thing he fears most is the thought of something happening to hurt his horns. It isn't being slaughtered and eaten that scares him, you see; he doesn't seem to mind that. I do! But Thrayl wasn't afraid of being slaughtered at all. What he was afraid of was losing his horns, because that would mean losing his songs."

Krake was staring up at that faint pucker in the screen, his brow furrowed. "Do you suppose it could be those songs that the Turtles want to know about?" he asked. "Can Thrayl . . . well, foretell the future, or anything like that?"

Moon gave the question serious consideration. "I would say no," she said finally. "Not exacdy. There have been times when Thrayl seems to know that something is wrong. Or dangerous. Or that there was trouble of some kind ahead. But I don't think the songs are really about us. They're sort of from outside. I don't know where 'outside' is, either," she added, forestalling Krake's question, "but I think it's right outside of everything. Maybe outside the whole universe."

Frowning, Krake nodded slowly—not to show comprehension, Moon thought, but only to show that he had heard the words. She didn't blame him for that. Thrayl's songs were, well, funny, and she knew she didn't comprehend what they were about herself.

She was glad when Daisy Fay and Marco appeared in the doorway. "My turn to relieve you, Cap'n," Marco said, the face on the belly plate grinning cheerfully up at his commander. "What're the orders?"

Krake glanced up again at the blur on the screen. "No orders," he said. "We just wait." He pulled himself erect. "Maybe I'll look in on Sork, keep him from getting too drunk —maybe I can get more sense out of him. You look as though you could use a little rest, too, Moon."

"I'm not sleepy," she objected.

But when Daisy Fay said amiably, "I've got some tea in my room, if you'd like some," Moon jumped at the chance. Anything was better than sitting in this cold, impersonal control room, waiting—and not even knowing what you were waiting for. Besides, she was curious about the machine-woman's living arrangements.

But as they were leaving, Moon paused at the doorway. "Captain Krake? They really are important, you know," she said suddenly. "Thrayl's songs, I mean."

"I'm sure of that," the captain said wearily. "I only wish I knew why."

Daisy Fay McQueen's quarters were a surprise to Moon Bunderan. Pictures on the walls—landscapes from Earth mosdy, and photos of what looked like some big city from pre-Turtle days, all skyscrapers and crowded streets and automobiles. There were flowers in fixtures on the walls—not real flowers, Moon saw, but there probably wasn't any real way for Daisy Fay to grow her own on the waveship. Then, while Daisy Fay was setting a funny little pot to boil and getting out cups, Moon said, with a shock of surprise, "You don't have a bed?"

"Moon, hon, what would I do with a bed?" There was laughter in the machine-woman's voice. "We're not in the shielded area, either, in case you didn't notice. Marco and I don't need shielding, at least not most of the time—we're almost as good as Turtles that way. Now don't worry," Daisy Fay added quickly, waving a couple of arms reassuringly as she saw Moon Bunderan's sudden expression of concern, "there's nothing near enough for its radiation to hurt you." The machine-woman set the cups on a shelf before moving over to the side of the chamber and pulling a bench down out of the wall. "But I do like to keep some reminders of when I was a fully organic human," she sighed. "I had this put in so Francis could be comfortable when he comes here. You can use it, Moon."

Moon sat down diffidendy. Beside her, Thrayl squatted cross-legged on the floor, his eyes on Daisy Pay McQueen. Moon rested her hand affectionately on the broad space between the horns on his head, scratching gently into the fine short fur. To make conversation, she said, "I guess the Turdes took pretty good care of you, back on the orbit station?"

The face on Daisy Pay's video screen looked a little embarrassed. "Well, yes," she said, and then added, "To tell you the truth, Moon, there wasn't much wrong with us, really."

"But Captain Krake said you were being, well, repaired."

"Sort of maintenance, yes," Daisy Fay admitted. "That wasn't the real reason we didn't go down to the surface with him, though. We just—didn't want people staring at us." Ab-sendy she stroked her round body with a tentacle. "I know we look pretty funny, Moon. You can't blame the Turdes, though —they used themselves for models, I guess."

Moon cleared her throat. "Daisy Fay? Do you mind if I ask you something?"

"Not a bit," said the machine-woman cheerily. "I even know what you want to know. How we got this way, right? It's all right. I'm sort of proud of it, in a way—I'm the only female half-robot human in the universe, right? And it beats being dead." She squatted down on four of her eight tentacles. Like Moon, she reached out gendy with one of her arms and rested it lightly on the Taur's massive shoulder. Thrayl blinked at her but made only a faint, friendly sound deep in his throat.

"It was during the war," Daisy Fay began. "I was a reporter for a Chicago newspaper—do you know what a newspaper was?"

"For telling people what was happening in the world? Before they had videoplates?"

"That's right. I .vasn't very experienced at it, but most of the men were away in the service and they had to give even a young female cub like me a chance. They sent me down to South America to report on how some of the other countries were planning for life after the war. And I had to fly across the Andes—that's a mountain chain in South America—"

"I know where the Andes are," Moon assured her. "They're still right in the same place."

"Yeah. I suppose they would be. Anyway," Daisy Fay said, her tone suddenly harsh, "we crashed."

"Crashed? The plane fell out of the sky?"

"That's right—remember, Moon, this was a long time ago. Planes weren't all that reliable then. There were six of us in the plane, an old DC-2—that's a kind of small commercial propeller plane. Marco was the copilot. While we were trying to pick our way through the passes a storm came up and we flew right into a mountain."

She stopped for a moment, only her tentacle gently stroking the Taur's shoulder. The face on her belly plate looked sad. Then she made a sudden movement of her tentacles and went on. "It wasn't anybody's fault, you know. Least of all Marco's; he wasn't even at the controls just then. But there we were. The pilot was killed outright, and so were two passengers. The only other passenger, a woman, was badly hurt. So Marco and I tried to get her down the mountain in a litter, because we knew she'd freeze to death out there, at that altitude, in the blizzard. ..."

She stopped. The gentle waving of her arms slowed, as though saddened. "Well, there was an avalanche. We were carried down the mountain. Buried under snow. Really messed up—both Marco's legs were broken, and so was his back. He couldn't move. I was a little better off—just one arm broken, but it was a compound fracture and it hurt like—well, we were in bad shape. And freezing, of course. Our only hope was the Mae West radio that we'd carried with us."

"What's that?"

"A Mae West? It's a kind of portable radio—you powered it by hand cranking it. But that wasn't a good chance, because we were in a high valley, and the radio wouldn't go through mountains."

She made a sound that was almost a laugh. "It turned out that it didn't have to. I didn't expect any planes would find us, and I was right about that. They didn't. But then down came this funny-looking thing—it looked like a banana with tiny wings, long, and a little bent, and it was shooting out pale blue flame from the bottom. I thought I'd died, or was dreaming—well, you know what it was."

"The Turtles?"

"Right the first time! It was a Turtle scout ship. Believe me, when I saw what was coming out of that ship to pick us up I thought I was really crazy! And then I passed out—and when I woke up again I was like this."

"So the Turtles turned you into a—" Moon bit her tongue to keep from saying the next word.

"They repaired me," Daisy Fay corrected. "They did the best they could, Moon. Marco and I were among the first human beings they'd ever seen. They knew what Turtles were like, which is why they sort of used themselves as a model for rebuilding us—but what did they know about human anatomy then?"

"They learned from experimenting on you?"

"That, and the cadavers. Mostly from the cadavers." Daisy Fay sounded sad. "Because not everybody they tried to save survived. We were lucky." She roused herself, her tentacles waving gently. "But the tea's ready now, Moon. How do you like yours?"

Curiously, Moon Bunderan found herself relaxing in the warmth of Daisy Fay's friendship. It was almost like being home again, sitting in a friend's kitchen—not that this wave-ship cabin was in any way like a New Mexican kitchen, or

Daisy Fay at all like the friends of her life back home. But it was all so comforting—

Comforting, at least, until she saw what Daisy Fay was doing with her tea. She must have gasped, because the eyes swiveled toward her.

"Sorry," Moon managed to get out, averting her eyes. The robot-woman had fastidiously opened a little hatch just under the video screen and with two tentacles delicately poured a bit of the tea into it.

Then the face on the belly screen smiled up at her. "I'm sorry," Daisy Fay said ruefully. "I forget how funny it must look. The food tastes just as good, though.

You see, Moon," she said earnestly, "we're still human. Our brains, most of the circulatory and digestive system, all the glands and so on—they're all still inside here. It was only the peripherals of our bodies that were totally destroyed."

Moon pushed her luck one step farther. "And, uh, can you and Marco—?"

Daisy Fay sighed. "I wish," she said regretfully. "No, that's as far as our biological parts go. We can't have sexual relations. The Turtles just never bothered with that part—I guess because they just didn't understand that human beings might have a need for such things. They never do it themselves, you know—except for the Mother and the one-in-a-billion lucky male who gets the chance when a new Mother's ready. And it—" she hesitated. "It's really a pity," she said, "because you should have seen Marco before the accident. He was gorgeous. He wasn't really tall. I think I had an inch or so on him when I was wearing heels, but that didn't matter. Marco was beautifully built, with those soft brown eyes—the kind of Latin lover we used to hear so much about, back in those days. Oh, I had a real case on him, all right. I wouldn't have been on that plane if I hadn't. And then we crashed, and that was the end of that. We never did get a chance to make love. ...

She was silent for a mourning moment. Then the face on the belly screen brightened again. "But at least we're alive," she said staunchly. "And we're together!"

Later on, affectionately feeding her Taur, Moon shivered, thinking about how "lucky" Daisy Fay McQueen and Marco Ramos had been. "I don't know, Thrayl," she murmured, rubbing the soft spot between his horns. "It's better to be alive than dead, sure, so that was good luck. . . . But what kind of life is it for Daisy Fay?"

The Taur, squatting beside her, turned his huge purple-blue eyes on her but did not stop delicately munching at the redfruit in his hard three-fingered hands.

"When you come right down to it," she went on, "what kind of life is it going to be for us? These are all good people we're with, Thrayl, I'm sure of that—well, not counting the Turtles, I mean. I don't understand the Turtles real well. But Captain Krake and the others—I trust them. Only all this is getting pretty scary."

The Taur mooed gently at her—not a word, just a sympathetic sound. It was all she expected—or needed; this was the way she had talked to Thrayl when he was a tiny calf, bringing him all her litde problems, not needing answers from him only the comfort of his listening ear. She smiled, feeling better.

Then, finishing the last of his redfruit, the Taur stood up, gazing at her expectantly. "Time to go to see what the others are doing?" she asked. "The Turdes are taking so long—I wish I knew what they were thinking about." She sighed and took the huge, hard hand. "We did the right thing, Thrayl," she told him seriously as they walked toward the control room.

"We couldn't let them maim you, could we? But, oh, I'd be really happy if I just knew what was going to happen next." But an hour later, when she did know, she wasn't happy at all.

Though the aiodoi are not guardians, they do observe. Sometimes what they observe makes a song for them to sing, sometimes only a song they hear; for they are aiodoi, and singing is their life.

"You remember we were talking about interuniversal travel through wormholes, and we said there were a couple of tough problems that faced any prospective voyager.

"One thing you could do would be to find a wormhole and go there. You're not likely to find one in Low Earth Orbit, of course, because a wormhole is enough like a black hole that you'd have a hell of a problem with gravitational attraction. It would tear the Earth into confetti, even if there weren't also the certainty of damaging radiation from its accretion disk. So there surely isn't one nearby, or we'd know it.

"So if you want to reach a wormhole, you definitely first

have to invent some kind of really fast spaceship to take you to where one is.

"That sounds all right, as long as nobody actually asks you to build one. It isn't. The bottom-line trouble with trying to find wormholes is that they are extremely hard to find. You can't see the things. They're very small—ten to the minus thirty-third centimeters in diameter, give or take a bit—and they don't last very long ordinarily, say ten to the minus forty-third seconds.

"That's to say, your average wormhole is about the size of a typical quantum fluctuation in the structure of our universe. The wormholes, if they exist, are in fact quite indistinguishable from the 'space-time foam' which is the basic structure of everything.

"Still, if you are lucky enough to find one of the things at all, there are some neat things you can do. And even if you can't find one, perhaps you have another shot. Maybe you can make one—or make an existing one big enough, and long enough lasting, to do you some good.

"Some people at Cal Tech figured out a theoretical way of using the Casimir effect for that purpose. A man named Alan Guth, with the help of two people named Edward Fahrl and Jumal Guven, said you could perhaps do the job by heating a volume of space to about ten to the twenty-seventh Kelvin— here, I'll write it on the board for you—

"1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kelvin

"—or, alternatively, you could compress some matter a lot —down to black hole densities, far denser than even a neutron star.

"If you were able to do either of those things, then you really might have something. At those figures, a wormhole might well open up, and, if Mellor and Moss are right, you might even be able to send something through it. Not matter, probably. But something.

"Lots of luck if you decide to try."

And the aiodoi sang on: "What is luck? "There is no luck.

"Luck is the chance that something may happen. "And everything that may happen does."