The Singers of Time

13

Marco Ramos thought he had never seen his captain so angry —or worse than just angry: he was baffled. Captain Krake was almost inarticulate, dancing around as he fought to get the words out. He had even forgotten, Marco thought, to get the wave-drive normalized; they would never be able to get into the wave configuration again if that weren't done first. But just listen to him: "You're insane," Krake was shouting as he squinted up at the hard-armored bulk of Chief Thunderbird. "We can't take this ship through a wormhole! That's suicide."

"It is without previous experience and therefore dangerous, yes," the Turtle rumbled. "One is a child of the Mother, however. One must sacrifice personal interests for our brothers."

"That's fine for you, but we're not Turtles!"

"You have accepted our gifts," Litlun squawked severely. "You have entered the service of our Mother; you too are bound by her needs."

"But the Mother is dead," Krake said brutally. "Face it, Lidun."

"Do not call me by that name!" the Turtle screeched, raising himself up to full height.

"Then don't talk like a fool," snarled Krake. "Everybody knows that if you get too close to a black hole you die. Even you—Facilitator."

There was silence for a moment, while one of Litlun's eyes turned to meet one of the eyes of Chief Thunderbird. Ramos felt one of Daisy Fay's tentacles reach out to hold one of his own for comfort. He turned one eye toward her reassuringly —though not at all confident in himself that there was any reason to be reassured. Then Marco cleared his throat—or made the noise that would have signified that, if he had still had a throat to clear. "Captain?" he ventured. "If we're going anywhere, we need to renormalize the wave-drive—"

"Then do it!" thundered the bigger Turtle.

"Well, sure, Proctor," Marco said, "but there were some funny fluctuations in the drive before. This is an old ship, you know," he added persuasively. "It might be about due for a general overhaul. We could contact some of those other Turde ships for help—"

"No!" squawked Lidun. "It is not our intention to contact those other Brotherhood vessels!"

And Chief Thunderbird added suspiciously, "One is not aware of any unusual fluctuations. Go and do your work; then come back and report to us." Then he turned to Captain Krake. "What you said a moment ago, Captain Krake," he thundered, "is untrue. Everybody does not know that transiting a wormhole is fatal. One of you says otherwise—is that not so, Sork Quintero?"

Marco and Daisy Fay, on their way to the wave-drive chamber, tarried to look at Sork, as everyone else was doing. Sork blinked at the Turtle. "Me?" he said. "Are you talking about those old scientific chips? But they aren't me talking, are they?

They're just records of what some professor said in a lecture hall; I don't know, myself, if any of it is true."

"You have told us that these humans believe it to be true," Litlun said severely. "Sue-ling Quong also has said that the chips are authentic. Do you deny the wisdom of your own race?"

"Well, you've been denying it!" Krake put in furiously. "What made you change your mind?"

Silence for a moment. Then Chief Thunderbird said hollowly, "We have not changed our minds. We simply have no choice, because we are desperate."

As soon as they were outside, Daisy Fay turned to Marco. "Is there really anything wrong with the wave-drive?" she demanded.

The face on his screen shook its head. "Not as far as I know, but I wanted to give Francis an excuse in case he needs it. Let's get it renormalized, anyway."

She followed him down the hall. "I hate it when Francis gets so apoplectic," she murmured.

"He's got a lot to get apoplectic about," he told her. He stopped in front of the entrance to the chamber. "Whatever happens, though," he said, "somebody's got to take care of the store. Let's balance the wave converters."

It was a relief to be doing something familiar, adjusting the output potentials in the generators to prepare for the next leap into wave-drive space. But Daisy Fay turned on the intercom, and they could hear the angry voices from the control room. Everybody was in the argument now, Krake bellowing, the two Turtles thundering, Sue-ling and the Quinteros trying to get a word in when they could. Only Moon Bunderan and her Taur were silent.

Daisy Fay sighed. "Everything's so mixed up," she complained. "What should we do, Marco?"

"We'll do whatever the captain wants us to do," he answered at once. "What else?"

She said seriously, "Maybe you had the right idea. Maybe we should disable the wave-drive generators—just until Francis gets things under control ... or the Turtles give up the idea."

"Not without orders from the captain," Marco said at once.

"No, of course not." She sighed again. "Sometimes I wish they'd left me in the snow to die," she said wearily.

Ramos turned both eyes to stare at her. "Never say that! Still," he added softly, "sometimes I remember what life was like—before."

She waved her tentacles in agreement. "So far away—so long ago. Are you sorry, ever?"

"Sorry that the Turtles rescued us? Never!" he said staunchly. "It's better to be alive than dead."

She looked at him for a long moment before speaking. "But that's the question, isn't it? Are we really alive, Marco?"

"You know we are! Well," he qualified, "not in the same way as—before—maybe, but we're alive all right." His eye-stalks turned toward her, and the look on the face on his belly platen was serious. He said, "In a way, this isn't just life for me, you know! It's almost—heaven. It's what I dreamed of as a child. I've told you why."

Daisy Fay turned one eye on her companion, the other busy on the dials as they worked. In the background they could hear the shouting from the control room, words like wormholes and other universes and, most of all, Krake's raging voice refusing to do what the Turtles were demanding. "Tell me again, Marco," she whispered, her voice almost shivering.

He touched her slick red shell affectionately and obediently began the old story, the one that told of their humanity —so easy to forget these days, especially when you caught a glimpse of yourself in a mirror! "I was a poor farmer's son," he said, by rote. "Back in Chile, in our old Twentieth Century. I was growing up to a life of—nothing. No money. No hope, except trying to scratch a living out of the soil."

"I know," the girl murmured, touching his hard shell with one supple arm.

"But when the clouds lifted I could see a mountaintop far away. There was something on it that looked like a snow-white bubble, the most beautiful thing I could see. They said it was called an 'observatory.' They said astronomers worked there, exploring the universe through their telescopes—and, oh, Daisy Fay, I wanted so badly to be one of them! I'd go out in the pastures at night and lie on my back, gazing up at the stars—the Southern Cross, and Alpha Centauri and all of them. . . . There was another boy in my town, a storekeeper's son. He had more money than I did, but he was interested in the same things. The two of us ordered some materials through the mail. I didn't have any money, but he paid for them and I did most of the work, and we built a litde telescope. God, Daisy! That was so wonderful, looking at the moons of Jupiter and at the Great Nebula in Orion, and the Magellanic Clouds. . . . And then I got a chance to go away to school in the Army and they made me a pilot. I studied navigation, and I wondered if my country would ever let me go to college when I got out, maybe study astronomy—"

He laughed. "It didn't work out that way, of course. I probably never would have got to college, anyway. But the Turtles did the next best thing for me, didn't they? Now I don't just look at the stars—I go out and roam among them!"

"And this is what you call heaven?" Daisy Fay asked won-deringly.

"It's close enough for me," Marco told her seriously. "At least—considering that we lost a lot of options when the plane crashed." Gendy their eyestalks kissed and parted. "It isn't just the stars, Daisy Fay, they're only one part of this heaven. The other part is the one that's really important, and that's having you here with me. I remember watching you board the plane," he whispered, his limbs shuddering. "You were so beautiful!"

"I was just an ordinary woman, Marco," she told him, but not very insistently.

"You were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen! And that's why this is heaven, Daisy Fay. I have my childhood dream—and I have you!" They clung to each other for a moment, lovingly and hopelessly.

Then a raucous screech from the passageway interrupted them. "Ridiculous humans!" rasped Chief Thunderbird. "Why are you not tending to your work?" The Turtle quickly scanned the generator panels, then said, slighdy mollified, "One sees you have balanced the converters and there is no indication of irregularity. Come, then! It is time for us to act!"

Sork Quintero was saying, for the thousandth time it seemed: "Yes, the old scientists said it was possible for a black hole kind of thing to be a way of getting into another universe. They called them Svormholes.' Yes, I suppose it's possible that that's what happened to your planet, and, yes, I suppose we could follow. But, dear God, I beg you, don't try it!"

"We have no choice," said Chief Thunderbird, stalking into the room. "Come, the wave-drive is ready. There is no reason for delay."

Sork licked his lips, staring at the two Turtles. "But don't you remember what the tapes said? Wormholes—if there are such things as wormholes—aren't permanent fixtures. They open and close."

"That is not true, because there it is!" squawked Litlun in triumph, gesturing with a webbed claw at the curious spot on the screen.

"There what is? How do you know it's the same one? Think it over," Sork begged. "When did the planet vanish? Almost a hundred and fifty years ago! Time enough for the message to reach Earth and for us to get back here!"

Chief Thunderbird drew himself up. "This fact is known," he stated.

"But is it understood?" Sork demanded. "Even if all this stuff is right—and we don't know that!—that could be an entirely different wormhole, that might lead somewhere else entirely!"

"This is only speculation, and in any case does not matter," squawked Litlun.

"Hey, wait a minute!" Krake put in. "It matters to me! Sork's right. If we don't know that's even the same worm-hole—"

"What we know," Chief Thunderbird declared, "is that there is a chance it is the thing we seek, and that by entering it we can save the Mother. Therefore we will do it."

"The hell you say," cried Krake. "You can't make that decision for us! We'll decide that question democratically, by a vote."

Litlun squealed in rage. "What is 'vote,' Captain Krake? It is not a matter of voting when the future of the Brotherhood is at stake!"

"Voting is how we humans decide what to do," Krake said angrily, "and there are more of us than of you on this ship, so our rules decide. Come on, everybody! Vote! Everybody who says we don't do this crazy thing, raise a hand!"

His own hand was the first up, followed loyally by a tentacle each from his crew, Marco and Daisy Eay. And, a moment later, by Sork Quintero. Krake waited only half a second before shouting at the others: "What's the matter with you? Kiri? Sue-ling? Moon? Vote, goddamn it!"

Chief Thunderbird roared triumphantly: "They agree with us! Very well, we will be bound by this vote! Now raise hands, those who would take this risk to save the Brotherhood and the sacred Mother!"

And his own hard arm shot up, and Lidun's . . . and then Sue-ling, her voice low, said: "I'm sorry, Sork, but I think they deserve their chance." As she raised her hand, Kiri shrugged and joined her, avoiding his brother's eye.

"Four to four?" Krake whispered unbelievingly. "But you're out of your minds, all of you—well, what about you?" he challenged, glaring at Moon Bunderan.

But she wasn't looking at him. She was looking up at the face of the Taur, her expression worried. "I—I don't know," she whispered. "Something's wrong. Thrayl? What is it?"

The Taur didn't answer. His eyes had the glazed expression of his trance states, listening to the voices.

"Come on, vote!" Krake rasped. But Chief Thunderbird cried triumphantly:

"She is not voting for you, Captain Krake! Therefore there is no 'majority,' and we will proceed. Younger Brother, direct this ship to the wormhole!"

"The hell you will!" Krake raged, and turned to grab for Litlun as the Turtle was already at the control board, setting a course for the wrinkle in space.

Krake was not in time.

The Taur's expression cleared. Soundlessly he fixed his huge purple-blue eyes on Krake and moved forward, faster on his bowed litrie legs than Marco Ramos would have believed possible. The Taur caught the helplessly struggling Krake up in his hard arms and held him there.

"Do it!" shouted Chief Thunderbird triumphantly, and Litlun tapped out a swift combination on the keys; and the flare of light told them that The Golden Hind was entering wave-drive.

"Call your damn animal off!" Krake begged Moon Bunderan in fury, struggling against the Taur's iron grip- But Moon was shaking her head helplessly. Krake blinked as the transition flash lit the simulated sky. As soon as it was over he could see that the Turtle's course had been right on target; they were driving direcdy toward that terrible wrinkle in space at light speed.

"Stop it, please!" Krake begged, writhing uselessly in Thrayl's arms. "We can't do this! You're endangering my ship! Marco—Daisy Fay—stop him!"

"No one is to stop this process!" Chief Thunderbird roared. "It is for the salvation of the entire Brotherhood and our sacred Mother!"

Krake swore violendy to himself as he watched. The accretion disk of the old black hole was whirling, crawling away as they dropped toward the wormhole. Accelerating to light speed, their subjective time slowed almost to a stop, he could see the wrinkle expanding, and the clustered green ship beacons bloating too. Krake heard a low-toned moan from Thrayl —of agony or delight, he couldn't tell.

"It's too late, Francis," Daisy Fay said, her voice trembling. "We're too close now. We have to go in—and through—or we'll get torn apart."

The dome went black, all but that strange wrinkle, Thrayl's horns glowing milky white against the darkness. Krake felt the Taur shudder in a kind of ecstasy. Across the cabin, what Sue-ling Quong felt was a sort of shock in the deck beneath her feet that rocked her with a wave of nausea. Blind in the internal darkness of the control room, she clutched at Sork and Kiri.

"The wormhole," she heard Sork's whisper from close beside her, and even in that moment she could not escape the morning-after sourness of his breath. "We're in it. ..."

For Moon Bunderan it was a giddy feeling, as though she were plunging headfirst into a widening whirlpool. The wormhole brightened before them until it filled one whole side of the globe, its center an ebony pit, ringed with faint spinning spirals of tenuous gas.

The darkness lasted only an instant. . . .

And then, without warning, the whole sky shone!

Ten thousand suns blazed out all around the slender bridge, above it and below. Krake glared at the spectacle, almost sickened; no human being had ever seen a sky like that before. The falling sensation had vanished. Though there was no physical sensation, something in his unadapted sensory systems was crying to him that he was rising—zooming—soaring into that burning splendor of stars, away from the maelstrom of fire that was the wormhole. He could still see it behind them. Its center was a blinding pit, ringed with spinning spirals of glowing gas and dust. A vast blue plume trailed out of it toward them.

There was a rapturous moan from Lidun at the controls. "We're through!" he rasped. "We've followed the sacred Mother!"

"My God," Sue-ling Quong whispered. "And we're still alive."

Krake bellowed and pulled away from the Taur. "We're alive, all right," he roared, "but what's happened to my ship? Look at that thing!" In the screen behind them a vast accretion disk spun ominously, but receding rapidly as they drew

away.

"Do not interfere, Krake! Attend me, Facilitator! Where is the Mother Planet?" Chief Thunderbird croaked eagerly. "Can you see it on the screen?"

But Lidun was gazing in shock at his navigation board, sparkling with evil red error signals. "Something's wrong," he said in dismay. "What has happened, Elder Brother?"

Krake shouted in wordless anger at what the instruments were telling him about the condition of his ship. Drowning him out, Chief Thunderbird screamed, "Have you damaged the navigation? It is inexcusable!"

"No, no," Litlun said feebly, his yellow-red eyes wandering about helplessly. "One did nothing wrong! But—see for yourself, there are no reference points, nothing is as it should be."

"Fool! Of course not! This strange notion is true; we're in another universe, and certainly there are no familiar reference points! It is the Mother planet you must find, not some distant star!"

"But, Proctor," Litlun sobbed, waving his arm at the screen around them. "Don't you see? There are no navigation beacons. There is nothing to guide us. The Mother planet— its entire network of navigation satellites and beacons—it is not here."

"Marco?" Krake snapped, turning to his crewman.

But Marco said helplessly, "I'm still trying, Captain, but— I think he's right. I'm not getting any beacon readings at all."

"Keep trying," Krake ordered. It was only instinct speaking though. Half to himself, he said, to no one in particular, "There's not much chance."

Chief Thunderbird glared madly at him for a moment, then seemed to collapse. With a wordless howl of despair he fell against the wall, pounding his carapace against it. "Failed," he moaned. "We have failed."

For a moment it seemed the huge Turtle was on the verge of some catastrophic action—suicide, perhaps; or an apoplectic fit, if Turtles could have such things—even, almost, as though he were going to attack, physically attack, Francis Krake. Or Sork Quintero, or Kiri, or even Chief Thunder-bird's own Younger Brother—anyone, almost, it seemed. Krake had never seen a Turtle so excited. The coppery eyes were revolving wildly, the claws drumming furiously against the belly plastron. . . .

Then the Taur spoke up. It wasn't a word Krake could recognize, hardly more than a loud, commanding bull's bellow. Everyone turned to him and Moon Bunderan. "What did he say?" Chief Thunderbird rasped at the girl.

And hesitantly, bewildered, she said, "I think what Thrayl said was, 'Not yet.'"

Not yet, Krake thought to himself in the sudden silence that fell in the control room. Not yet! Did the stupid creature possibly mean that there was still a chance? Or did he mean something else entirely, something that only a Taur could understand? He opened his mouth to ask an angry question . . . and closed it again, for Marco Ramos was waving agitatedly to him from the control board. "Captain?" he said, his voice shaking. "Look at that."

Krake followed the machine-man's stare to a corner of the board. It was at absolute maximum magnification, the tens of thousands (no, now it was hundreds at least!) of blue-white suns almost blinding him. But there, among them, almost hidden in the brilliance—

It was faint, but it was undeniably green, and it had the characteristic Turtle delta shape.

"The Mother planet!" Litlun squealed, almost hysterical. "One may yet win through!"

"I'm not sure of that, Lit—Facilitator," Marco said quickly. "It looks to me like a ship signal, not a planetary beacon."

"No matter!" cawed Chief Thunderbird, miraculously revived. "Where there are ships of the Brotherhood, then we will find our Mother! Krake! Set course for that beacon at once!"

The aiodoi never fear the future, either for their own sake or for the sakes of those whose songs they listen to, for the future and the past are all one to them. They are not trapped within time. The aiodoi are not trapped within space, either, for they live within all dimensions and none, and they listen kindly to the yearning songs of those who are.

"We've talked about the four dimensions of space-time, but I ought to tell you that that's really pretty old-fashioned stuff. A lot of the current cosmologies need more than four dimensions to make sense, especially the group that are called 'Kaluza-Klein' theories.

"In order to talk about Kaluza-Klein theories, we should start by saying what a Kaluza-Klein theory is, or maybe even by saying who these two guys, Kaluza and Klein, were in the first place.

"Long ago—in 1919, to be exact—Theodor Kaluza was what they called a 'privatdocent.' There's no exact American equivalent, but it was sort of like being a teacher in a junior college. It was the kind of job that didn't have any serious academic rank. Basically Kaluza was the sort of person who teaches the freshman courses no serious scientist wants to be bothered with.

"He wanted more for himself, so on the side he tried to do some real research of his own. When Arthur Eddington gave Einstein's relativity theory its first observational support—that happened, you remember, in his expedition to view the 1919 solar eclipse—Kaluza felt there was something in this 'relativity' idea that would repay some serious investigation. So he began looking into the mathematics of it.

"I have an idea of my own about the reason why Kaluza was particularly attracted to the Einstein theory. I think it might have been because he knew that Einstein, too, had started out as a privatdocent, and look where the man was now! Anyway, Kaluza tried to figure out just how Einstein's relativity theory worked when expressed in formal mathematical terms.

"It seemed to him that it worked best if you brought in some extra dimensions.

"With all his best efforts, it didn't work as well as he might have hoped, though. The equations wouldn't quite balance. What Kaluza didn't know was that there was a flaw in his theorizing. The place where he went wrong was that all of Kaluza's ideas had been unquestioningly based on the classical view of the universe.

"You can't blame him for that—after all, so were Einstein's! But, as time went on and scientists began to get a better handle on what 'reality' was like, it became obvious that the classical view was wrong somewhere.

"For instance, take the way light is generated by electrons changing orbit within an atom. That was an observable fact, but the classical theories about it didn't square with the observations. Classical theory said white light should be emitted—a mixture of all colors, all across the rainbow, uniting to form what we perceive to be Svhite.' It didn't happen that way, though. Each excited atom produced its own specific colors— you know that's true if you remember that that's basically how we can tell what elements are in a star, when we turn the spectroscope on it, by the particular colors associated with each excited atom.

"Then along came quantum mechanics.

"Quantum theory told us that electrons couldn't revolve in just any old orbits. There were certain forbidden orbits, and the electrons were restricted only to the permissible ones. Then it all began to make sense, and it became possible to understand why sodium atoms, for instance, radiated only yellow light instead of all the colors of the rainbow mixed together as white.

"So, as quantum mechanics got popular, a Swede named Oskar Klein tried putting Kaluza's ideas of extra dimensions in quantum mechanical form . . . and, voila, the Kaluza-Klein theories were born. About a million theorists have been playing with them ever since.

"That's what a Kaluza-Klein theory is. It is a quantum mechanical theory which invokes extra spatial dimensions to explain the relations among particles and forces. In a Kaluza-Klein theory there aren't any zero-dimensional points. Each 'point' that we perceive as a simple location, without extension in any direction at all, is actually something that we might try to visualize as a litde circle; and the circle goes in other dimensions.

"How many dimensions are involved?

"Ah, well, let's not limit ourselves here. We don't quite know how many we have to have. There are some theories which require twenty-six spatial dimensions to work. They don't all need that many. Kaluza himself only needed four spatial dimensions—plus the dimension of time, making his formulation five-dimensional in all.

"Personally, I like the ones that have nine spatial dimensions—plus time, making ten spacetime dimensions in all— but a lot of people who are just as intelligent as I am—well, almost, anyway—prefer eleven. So take your pick. There isn't any right answer—or, anyway, if there is one, no one knows what it is. So you don't have to worry. I promise that you'll never get that question on any quiz from me."

To all of that the aiodoi listened, tenderly amused; but there was one aiodos who sang strongly of something else: "The song of elsewhere is a good song. "But for those who live in no elsewhere, "There is an elsewhere that can do harm. "And we are part of their elsewhere." And the rest of the aiodoi were troubled as they sang.