The Singers of Time

16

There wasn't any sick bay on The Golden Hind. Francis Krake had never seen a need for one. He had no interest in ever having Turtle surgery for himself, with the examples of Marco and Daisy Fay always before him, and those two, of course, never got sick.

What the ship did have was all sorts of hospital-type supplies, a lot of them, scattered here and there among the cargo. Krake and Kiri Quintero went on a hasty hunt to round them up, with the assistance of the two Turtles in lugging the supplies to the improvised operating room. The Turtles were not gready interested in the fate of one human being, not with all the weight of their woes burdening them, but they did help. Perhaps it was a kind of penance for them, Moon Bunderan thought. She had been drafted to help locate the supplies, with Thrayl shambling half-dazed behind her. Then, with Sue-ling tenderly supporting Sork's lolling head and Marco and Daisy Fay efficiendy carrying the main weight of him, they took Sork to what had once been a cargo chamber. It would suffice for an operating theater, Sue-ling thought. It had the necessary advantages of good lighting, air that no one had breathed in lately and a flat surface to put him on. The compartment was not in the shielded portion of the ship, but when Kiri anxiously raised the question of radiation exposure Krake said flatly, "We're still in wave-drive, Kiri, and anyway, radiation from what? Take another look outside."

Sue-ling was already rummaging in her kit for the appropriate memo disk. Before she put it in she checked out the equipment. "Asepsis lamps, right, anesthesia, that's good, surgical instruments, sterilizer—I'm going to need help, though," she said. "Daisy Fay, will you give me a hand? And—Moon? Didn't you tell me you'd had veterinary training?"

"But I've never treated a humanV Moon Bunderan objected, looking thunderstruck.

"Doesn't matter. Meat's meat, when you cut it, and anyway I'll be doing the complicated parts. Scrub up. All the rest of you, get out of the way," Sue-ling ordered, and slipped the memo disk into the slot in her skull.

Moon could see that the people not directly involved were glad enough to get away from the scene. It wasn't just revulsion at the prospect of blood; she knew that all of them were looking forward to the chance to talk over what had happened to their ship, or to make their guesses about what sort of place they were in now. And, after the first shock, Moon Bunderan was glad enough to stay and help out. She accepted the doctor's orders without question. How could she not? A human life was involved.

There was something else, too. For Moon, the scene in the sickbay of The Golden Hind was like a childhood dream come true. The surroundings were crazily wrong, of course— racing through the nothingness of a strange universe in a lost waveship, all her world thoroughly lost behind her. The only loved, familiar thing was Thrayl, squatting, head bowed and silent, in an overlooked corner of the room. But those dreams came flooding back. All those long sessions in the veterinary school, when what her heart wanted was to be a real doctor, a people doctor—those were adolescent fantasies, she had told herself at the time, and almost forgotten them. Now all those long-ago yearnings were becoming real. She was actually doing it!

Not that she was herself a doctor, no. That was too much even for a dream. Sue-ling Quong was the surgeon, not Moon; Moon was not even the official nurse, because Daisy Fay McQueen was the one who had the familiarity with the ship's small (but adequate) resources—as well as limbs enough to handle anesthesia and half a dozen other chores at once. But Moon was right there to assist them both, scrubbed up, masked and gloved, custodian of the scalpels and other instruments.

There wasn't much blood when Sue-ling deftly lifted a flap of Sork's shaved skin from above his temple, not even when she began cutting through the skull itself, though the harsh stink of burning bone was unpleasant. Moon took note of it, then put it out of her mind. It was a real human life that was at risk here, and her feelings had to be forgotten. She could see that Sork Quintero was in bad shape, breathing strangely, his eyes half open but unseeing. Without immediate surgical intervention he might easily die, Sue-ling had said, before she scrubbed and inserted her memo disk.

That had been the strangest sight of all for Moon Bunderan. She had never seen anyone under the disk before. She glanced out of the corner of her eye at the masked face of the surgeon wonderingly. Was it really her friend Sue-ling Quong who was standing so tall there, cutting and drilling the skull of her lover—maybe of her former lover?; Moon was beginning to wonder just what the relations were becoming— anyway, carving into Sork Quintero's helpless flesh and bone with her memmie-precise skill? It didn't look like her, behind the cap and surgeon's mask. When she spoke, the voice didn't really sound like hers, either. "Suction," snapped Sue-ling, in a flat and commanding tone that Moon had never heard from her before, and instandy Daisy Fay, anchoring herself firmly with a couple of her tentacles, was using another to direct the gurgling little tube into the incision in Sork's skull, to pump away the oozing blood that was obscuring Sue-ling's view. "Careful!" warned Sue-ling. "Don't touch the brain!"

Daisy Fay was certainly careful. For that matter, Moon was careful, too, as she handed over a scalpel or a sponge. As carefiil as she had ever been in her life . . . and beginning to dream again, too. This was not so different from operating on a calf or a ram! It was not impossible. . . .

It was not impossible, at least, if she were willing to do what Sue-ling Quong had done, and allow her own skull to be opened, as Sue-ling had opened Sork's with her buzzing litde drill, for a memmie implant.

Moon shuddered involuntarily, and got a warning look from Sue-ling.

How long the surgery took Moon could not guess— hours, probably. She was too keyed up to keep track of time . . . but then it was over. "We'll leave the skull open," the surgeon decided. "We may have to go in again; but we'll suture the scalp now."

And then, when gauze had hidden the top of Sork's head and Daisy Fay was left to, very gently, fit a kind of helmet atop it to guard it from accidental bruises while Moon put the instruments in the sterilizer, the surgeon stood back. "He's stable. I think he'll be all right for now," she declared, "but that clot was in a tricky place and if another one should form he could be in bad trouble. We'll have to watch him for a while."

And then the surgeon lifted her hand to her memmie socket. As she slipped the disk out she blinked and seemed to reel dazedly for a moment before she caught herself.

Then Sue-ling Quong looked wonderingly at her friends. "Wow," she said, rubbing her suddenly aching head. "Is the operation over? Is Sork all right? How did I do?"

They left Kiri standing guard over the unconscious Sork, warned to call Sue-ling if there was the slightest change in his condition. Sue-ling herself went off to catch as much rest as she could, the large problems of The Golden Hind out of her mind as she concentrated on her patient. Those weren't Moon Bunderan's immediate concerns, either. Wearily she washed herself up after the operation, wondering how it could be that there had seemed so little blood in the operation itself, and yet so much on her hands and gown? And all the time, she was keeping an eye on Thrayl, stretched doglike on the floor behind her. When she turned to look at him, he did not meet her eyes. "Thrayl?" she ventured. "Are you feeling any better?"

Even then he didn't look up. When he answered his voice was low and wretched. "The smallsongs are not happy here, Moon. They hurt," he said.

"How do they hurt, Thrayl?" But, however she pressed him, he would not explain. When she lost patience and went back to the control room, he got up and followed her, still sunk in apathy.

There Daisy Fay came to greet her. "There's news, Moon," the machine-woman said, the face on her belly plate smiling. It was no more than a tentative smile, hopeful rather than reassuring. But it was still a smile, when Moon Bunderan had begun to forget that there were things to smile about. "It isn't as bad as we thought in this place! There are stars here, we just couldn't see them!"

Litlun moved his arms reprovingly. "We do not know that these are stars," he croaked, correcting her. "They are objects, yes."

"They're damned big objects," Krake said, his tone more baffled than hostile. It wasn't hard for Moon to deduce that she was coming in on a continuing argument—but what else had this whole trip been but arguments? "Show her, Marco."

"Right, Francis!" Marco Ramos said, and began tapping on the keyboard. "We made a systematic search, Moon," he told her. "There's nothing that we can detect in the optical frequencies, but when we switch down in the infrared—look."

As soon as Marco made the frequency shift, the screens were speckled with tiny dots of light. To Moon it looked like a sky, all right, though an impoverished one—not like the dense shoals and reefs of stars in their own universe, not even like the bright nighttime skies over her own ranch, almost as poor as a night sky in town, when the bright lights drowned out the heavens.

"We can see more of them with magnification," Marco pointed out, "but they're pretty faint. All they radiate is low-level heat—but they're there, all right."

"They have to be stars," Krake said flady. "Maybe this is an old universe and the stars are almost dead."

"Or they could be brown dwarfs," Marco offered, "though I don't see how brown dwarfs could exist unless there were some really big, bright ones, too? And I can't find any useful data about brown dwarfs on the lecture chips."

Krake ordered. "Turn up the magnification. Give us some close-ups."

The images on the screen swelled and shrank again as, obediently, Marco moved the magnification area across that vast, dark sky. It looked, Moon thought, almost like some nearsighted reader sweeping a magnifying glass across a printed page. But Marco's best efforts showed very little. At utmost magnification, the objects were still simply points of warmth in the frigid cold of this universe's space.

"That's all there is. Just heat," said Marco, working at the board. "I'm not getting anything else, Captain. No optical frequencies, no ultraviolet, no radio—nothing but low-grade heat, and not much of that."

"Puzzling," crowed the Turtle, Litlun, uneasily. "One has never encountered such objects before, except—"

"Except what?" demanded Krake.

Chief Thunderbird cut in. "The Facilitator means only that there are stories of such things," he squawked harshly. "From very old times. Not well documented. Of no help to us now, certainly."

Krake gave him a hard look. "If there is something, I want to know it," he said. Lidun muttered in the larger Turtle's ear, but Chief Thunderbird only waved him away.

"It is not relevant. As a matter of more importance," the big Turde squawked, "what has the Taur to tell us of this?"

Diverted, Krake turned to Moon Bunderan. "Good question. What about it, Moon?"

The girl from New Mexico shook her head worriedly. "Thrayl isn't saying anything, Captain Krake. He's still in some kind of trouble."

"He looks all right!" Indeed, the needle-sharp horns were again glowing with a subdued iridescence, though the great purple-blue eyes were clouded.

"It's his songs," Moon said. "If I understand him, he's hearing a different kind of song now, one he's never heard before. It's—repulsive to him. And it drowns his true songs out."

Krake said angrily, "That's not good enough, Moon. This situation is all his fault! If he hadn't interfered we'd still be in our own universe."

"I can't help it, Captain. Neither can Thrayl. There's something here that hurts him. He says the smallsongs are evil, and they drown out the good ones." She looked at the

Taur with woeful eyes. Then she said, "Captain? Can't we get home somehow, even if Thrayl can't help?"

Krake tugged at his beard unhappily. "I don't see how," he said.

"But isn't there any chance at all?"

Krake looked at her with compassion. "Oh," he said, trying to soften the blow that could not be softened, "I suppose there's always a chance. But the odds are stacked against us. If I understood what those old scientists were saying, there arc many universes, maybe even an infinite number of them."

"We can't just keep trying different ones?"

"Moon," he said patiently, "I don't even know how to get out of this one. If Thrayl could guide us, then maybe, with a little luck, we could find another wormhole. But even if we do, how can we know what it would lead to? My guess is it would probably take us farther from Earth, not nearer. With an infinite number of possible chances—all but one of them wrong—how likely is it that we could blunder back home?"

There was silence then, until Daisy Fay spoke up. "We're all still alive, though."

"And—we could be in a lot worse shape than this, I think," Marco put in.

"Worse how?" Moon asked.

Marco said slowly, "At least this universe hasn't killed us outright. I've been listening to a lot of those old lectures, and they talked about all kinds of possibly different universes— places where the physical laws were different from our own."

Krake was looking at him with new interest. "Yes?"

"Well, Francis," Marco said, "as Daisy Fay says, here at least we're alive. But what would've happened if we'd blundered into one of those where life—our kind of life anyway— would be impossible? Where the laws that allowed atoms to form and chemical reactions to happen didn't apply, so we couldn't eat or breathe or digest food? Or we could find ourselves in one where the physical constants just happened to be a little different in some other way, so stars never formed, or formed early and died before life had time to evolve."

Moon offered, "Couldn't we just move on to another universe then?"

"Through what kind of gate? How could we do that if stars never formed in the first place? Without stars, how could there be black holes? Or wormholes?"

The Turtles were listening uneasily. Krake gave them a quick look, then returned to Marco Ramos. "I think I see what you're saying. But then, if there weren't any wormholes at all, we couldn't have come to a universe like that in the first place, could we?"

Marco thought that over. "I guess not. Still, what if there had been some other kind of change in the basic physical laws? Something that would have altered the binding force of atoms, so that we'd simply disintegrate as soon as we entered that one?"

"What you're saying," Krake said, trying to follow, "is that there's a real danger every time go through a wormhole? That the next universe we wind up in might kill us?"

"That's what the chips say, Captain," Marco confirmed. "Of course, they could be wrong."

Krake gave him a sour grin. There was nothing to say to that. If the chips were wrong they had even less to go on— and already,without Thrayl, they had next to nothing.

After a moment Marco turned silendy back to his keyboard, searching sector after sector of the speckled sky. Daisy Fay shook herself. "I think I'd better take over in the sick bay," she said. "Kiri can probably use some relief."

Krake nodded to her absently. He had almost forgotten about Sork, lying near death a few dozen meters away—had even almost forgotten about Sue-ling Quong. He wished she would wake up. He wanted very much to talk to her, in private. There were things they had to say to each other, he thought.

Although Francis Krake knew that his ideas of sexual morality were several centuries out of date, he also knew that even in New Mexico in 1944 the fact that a man and woman had happened to make love once did not necessarily imply any kind of commitment (though actually, in that time and that place, it had come close). Sue-ling Quong didn't owe him anything, he told himself. But then he rejected his own statement, because he felt strongly that at least he was entitled to a friendly look, even a word or two in private. That was how it had been with Madeleine, long ago; there had been days of sharing that delightful secret, public decorum and, each night, a few hours of private bliss. That was how a love affair should be! But this woman simply would not even meet his eye. . . .

He rubbed his brisdy beard irritably, and hardly heard Marco Ramos's voice until the machine-man called him again.

He blinked at Marco. "What did you say?"

"I said look at the screen, Captain. I've located an object that's not so far away."

The Turtles were clucking excitedly to each other as everyone turned to see what Marco had found. It was worth looking at. It wasn't a mere point of light; it was an actual disk. On the screen, it was the size of an apple, a sphere that glowed with a dull, tindery red.

"What is it?" Krake demanded.

"I don't know, but whatever it is, it's relatively near," Marco insisted. "Of course, we don't know what its actual size is. Still, if it were a normal star we wouldn't get this kind of resolution at any distance over a light-year or two."

Krake looked around. "I wish we had Sork here. Any ideas about what we're looking at, anybody?"

"It is possible—" Litlun began, but his Elder Brother overrode him.

"We have no knowledge of this," Chief Thunderbird squawked, glaring commandingly with both eyes at the other

Turtle. "No such star has ever been observed in the records of the Brotherhood. It is an entirely unfamiliar object." Litlun opened his beaked mouth to speak again, but thought better of it and simply waved his stubby arms helplessly.

Krake gave the Turdes a puzzled look, but from his board Marco was being insistent. "We could get closer, Captain. Then we might be able to figure it out."

"For what?" the captain demanded. "Is this just to satisfy your curiosity, or do you think that might help us find our way home?"

"Captain, I don't know if anything's going to do that, so why not take a look?"

Krake sighed and looked around. Then he nodded. "Go for it," he ordered.

Wave-drive travel was a great leveler of distances; the short trip to the vicinity of the darkly glowing cinder would take only a matter of hours, nothing like proportionate to the vast billions of light-years they had already traveled in only days.

Krake thought of sleeping for a bit, then vetoed the idea; there was too much on his mind. The Turdes departed for another of their angry gabbling to each other in private. Kiri appeared briefly, then went off to sleep, and Sue-ling came in, rubbing her eyes, just back from checking on Sork Quintero.

"How is he?" Moon Bunderan asked at once.

"He's still unconscious," Sue-ling told her, "but his vital signs are good. I think he'll be all right."

"Thrayl and I will watch him for a while," Moon decided.

"That's good," said Marco. "Then Daisy Fay and I can get something to eat."

"Shall I start something for you?" Sue-ling offered, gesturing at the food warmer.

"Oh, no, we'll eat something in Daisy Fay's room," Marco said. He didn't say why. Actually, he had two reasons. One was that neither he nor Daisy Fay liked to eat when their shipmates were watching. The other was simply that it looked to him as though Krake wanted to be left alone with Sue-ling Quong.

Marco turned both eyes on the lady doctor. Sue-ling looked pretty nearly exhausted to him—maybe from the ordeal of the surgery she had just performed; or maybe, Marco thought, from something else. He didn't know what was going on between Sue-ling and the captain, though he was beginning to get a pretty good idea, but there was obviously some kind of trouble. That didn't matter to Marco Ramos. Whatever happened, he was staunchly on the captain's side anyway. He paused one more second, looking for something to say that might take the captain's mind off his burdens. Then the face on his belly screen grinned ruefully, for the only thing he could think of to say was certainly not in that category.

He said it anyway. "Don't forget about the supplies, Francis," he said, and was gone.

Sue-ling looked after him. "What did he mean by that?"

Krake rubbed his stiff, short beard. "When we were looking for medical supplies Marco noticed we're running a litdc low on food. The Turtles didn't stock us up to cruise forever, with this many people."

"I thought Chief Thunderbird promised to take care of it," Sue-ling said.

"That's what I thought, too. If I had a suspicious nature, I might think the Turtles would be happy enough to see us all starve—then they'd have the ship to themselves. They can cat just about anything at all—even the bulkheads, if it came to that, I guess. But actually, I think the Turdes just didn't expect this kind of a trip, any more than I did." Then he took a deep breath and looked her in the eye. "What's the matter, Sue-ling?" he demanded.

She didn't answer right away. "Nothing that's your fault," she said at last. "I just made a mistake."

"The hell you did! What we did wasn't any mistake. You're not married to Sork Quintero—"

She grinned at him. It was not a happy grin. "Or Kiri," she pointed out.

He shook his head angrily. "I don't care how many people you've been sleeping with. You're not obligated to either one of them, Sue-ling!"

"But I really am, Francis," she said. "I love them, and that's all the obligation anybody needs, isn't it?"

He couldn't help asking, knowing he would regret it as soon as he said it, "If that's how you feel, how come you went to bed with me?"

"Yes," she agreed, "that's exacdy where I made my mistake." When she grinned at him this time, there was real humor in it along with the sadness. "I didn't say they didn't drive me crazy sometimes. Sork! Half the time I'm with him I wonder what's wrong with me, that I put up with his temper and his drinking and his bossing me around. And Kiri—well, he's so passive \ Sometimes being with him is just about like being all alone. But—well, here's where the test is. I can't imagine living the rest of my life without either of them."

"And what about me?"

She looked at him with affection and regret. "I like you very much, Francis," she said. "But, you see, I haven't got addicted to you."

When the time was close to coming out of wave-drive most of the ship's complement was back in the control room— lacking only the Quinteros, Sork still in his coma, Kiri once again by his bedside.

Krake looked up at that slowly swelling ocher disk on the screen, then turned to Moon Bunderan. "After we've all satisfied our curiosity, we'd better get out of here. Is your Taur going to be able to help us?"

"He would if he could, Francis," Moon said earnestly. She reached down to touch Thrayl, again slumped on the floor beside her. "I don't know what's the matter with him. He not only can't hear his songs anymore—the real ones, I mean— he's hearing something else that hurts him."

"What?" Krake demanded.

Moon said fretfully, "He can't seem to say. It's like anger and pain, all at once. Like someone screaming and screaming in his ear."

"Poor thing," said Sue-ling, but her tone was abstracted and her expression sad. Moon looked at her speculatively, wondering what had gone on in the last few hours. Whatever had been between Sue-ling and Francis Krake, it seemed to have gone badly. The captain was controlling an interior anger, and Sue-ling— Moon wished she knew what Sue-ling was feeling. As a doctor Sue-ling had been so machine-like sure and efficient at the operating table, and yet now, as a human woman, she seemed so vulnerable.

Of course, now she was only herself, not a puppet of a Turde memo disk.

There was no jealousy in Moon Bunderan any more. Her heart went out to this woman whom she admired. Whatever was troubling her, Moon wished she could case it. Impulsively, as Sue-ling passed her, Moon reached out a hand to touch her. Sue-ling looked up sharply and Moon, trying to find words that would help, said, "You were wonderful in the operating room. I—I envy you. I wish I could be a surgeon."

Sue-ling looked at her for a long, remote moment. Then her eyes seemed to come into focus and she smiled. "You could be, you know."

Moon said unhappily, "But I don't want to—well—"

"Become a memmie, like me?" asked Sue-ling, her facc hardening again. But it was only for a moment. "But I was a doctor before I became a memmie, Moon. You could learn. You're still young. You could even start now, if you wanted to; I've got some of my medical texts with me, and I'd be glad to help you with them."

Moon's smile was like a sudden sunrise. "Really?" But then she looked down at the Taur that was gazing mildly up at her as he lay across her feet under the control board. "But what would I do with Thrayl? If we got back to Earth and I did go to medical school—"

And stopped, because she had suddenly remembered what a very big "if" that was.

When they were coming out of wave-drive, close enough to the strange darkly glowing object that Moon thought she could actually feel heat from it, Kiri Quintero peered in. "Sork's resting quiedy," he reported. "Can I leave him so I can watch what happens?"

"Absolutely not," said Sue-ling firmly, but then she proposed a compromise. The chamber they had converted to an operating room didn't have proper hospital facilities, anyway; why not bed him down right here in the control room? There would always be someone to keep an eye on him, and, she said, someone must. That left no room for argument. Still unconscious, snoring faintly from time to time, he was strapped onto a cot in the control room.

When the transition flash came Sork did not even stir. Sue-ling was fussing with the sheet that covered him at the time— not because there was any need for it, just for the sake of something to do to help him. That wasn't like her, she told herself. Even less like the normal Sue-ling Quong, she discovered that she was weeping. She didn't understand what it was that brought those slow, endless tears trickling to her cheekbones. She didn't like it, because it was a confession of weakness, and so she concealed it from the rest of the Hind's crew. But there it was.

No one noticed, for everybody else in the control room was staring at the screens, fully occupied in trying to figure out just what it was that they were seeing, through all the myriad sensors the ship had to offer.

What struck Sue-ling about the gathering in the control room was that, for some strange reason, nearly everyone seemed—well—seemed to be once more alive. That was the only word that occurred to her. The despair that had blighted them all in the collapsing universe had melted away. It was crazy, she thought. They were not a centimeter closer to home, or even to anything that looked like a habitable world.

But even the Turtles were perking up as Marco waved a couple of tentacles at that great red coal blotting out half the sky. "Captain," he called, "I'm going to try straight optical frequencies now."

"Do it," Krake agreed. And the screen changed. The tiny distant wisps of galaxies reappeared. The red disk was gone. Nothing was left of it at all, except a sort of shadow that blotted out some of those distant cloudy spirals.

"There's still no visible light at all," Marco reported with satisfaction. "This star radiates only in the infrared; that's why we're not seeing anything."

"That is not a star," rapped Chief Thunderbird positively.

Krake looked at him curiously. The Turtle was drumming his claws apprehensively across his belly, and Lidun was twitching nervously beside him. "Do you know something we don't?" Krake asked the Turtles.

"One knows only that that cannot be a star," said Chief Thunderbird, and Litlun chimed in:

"Such things no longer exist."

"What do you mean, 'no longer'? And what is it, if not a star?"

But it was Marco Ramos who answered. "Francis, I think it's an artifact."

There was a squawk from the Turdes, and Daisy Fay put in, suddenly excited: "Hey, yes! I know what you mean. There was something about that on one of those old chips!"

"That's right, Daisy Fay," Marco said, the face on the belly screen nodding eagerly. "It was just a quick mention but I remember it, because it was pretty nearly the only thing those professors ever said that I thought I really understood. What one of them said was that a really high-tech civilization would want to have a lot of energy to keep itself going, and the best way for them to get it would be to capture all the energy from a star!"

"Capture it how?" Krake demanded.

"By building a kind of wall around the star!" Marco cried. "Closing it in, not letting one bit of its energy escape to be wasted in space. The only thing that would get through the wall would be the low-level radiation left over—just heat!— after they'd used the high-level stuff for—well, for whatever they wanted to do with it."

Krake stared up at that ominous black shadow. "You mean that thing's a hollow shell? With a star inside it?"

Marco shrugged. "What else could it be?" he asked.

"And there are all those others just like this one," Daisy Fay put in eagerly. "Remember how many of them we saw on the screens? Millions of them, Captain, maybe billions! A whole galaxy—or a billion galaxies!—that have been inhabited, and tamed, and every star in every one of them turned into a living machine for—for someone, Captain."

Krake shook his head, pointing to the wisps outside the obscuring disk. "But what about those other galaxies?"

Marco waved a tentacle, like a shrug. "I don't know that, Captain. Maybe they haven't been colonized yet—I'd say that's unlikely, though. Maybe they're just so far away that the light from them just shows the way they were before these— people—got around to colonizing them."

Sue-ling was beginning to feel a vertigo worse than the shift into wave-drive. "Excuse me, Marco," she began. "Does that mean—are you talking about a whole universe inhabited by a single highly advanced civilization?"

"Why not?" Marco demanded, his tentacles fluttering in excitement. "Oh, Captain! We've discovered something won-Unfitly

And even Sue-ling began to share the rising excitement— almost as though everyone were beginning to have hope again. The Turtles croaked at each other for a few moments, then Chief Thunderbird engaged his transposer. "One should exercise great caution in dealing with advanced beings," he said, and Sue-ling noticed wonderingly that the Turde seemed nervous.

"But what if they could help us get home?" Moon put in. "Maybe even help you with—with your problem."

More jabber between them. Then the big Turtle said, "One insists, however, on caution."

"All we want to do is see if we can talk to them," Krake said reassuringly—"if, that is, they exist at all."

"Right!" cried Marco Ramos, and others echoed it—until Kiri Quintero's voice rose above the rest.

"Hold it," he said sharply. "There's one more thing I want to talk to the Turtles about first."

Krake stopped on the point of giving the order to try communicating. This from Kiri) Who never raised his voice, who almost never spoke at all? There was a puzzled silence from everyone, until Daisy Fay broke it. "What's that, Kiri?"

Kiri turned to glare up at Chief Thunderbird. "My brother wanted to ask you something before his accident. Since he can't do it, it's up to me. What I want to know—before we go any farther—is, did you mean what you said?"

Chief Thunderbird paused, eyestalks firmly on Kiri. "One always means what one has spoken," he said stiffly. "What particular statement do you mean?"

"You said," Kiri persisted, "that you Turtles were wrong in discouraging Earth science. Was that just talk, or will you do something about it? If we get out of this, will you do better?"

The great Turtle hesitated, then turned to Litlun. There was a raucous, unintelligible squawking between them, with much waving of limbs, until Chief Thunderbird turned on his transposer again.

"Such questions are not for one Brother to decide. Such decisions belong to the entire Brotherhood," he said.

Litlun echoed him. "This is true. All must agree."

"But," said Chief Thunderbird, "if we were to succeed at last and find a new Mother—"

They looked at each other speculatively. "Then," said Lidun, "one of us might well become the new consort, I think. That would make a difference, for the Mother's consort always has much to say."

"But only one of us," said Chief Thunderbird, both eye-stalks fixed on Litlun.

Kiri grinned at them. "Good enough," he said. "Or good enough for now. All right. Go ahead, Captain Krake."

Krake opened his mouth to ask a question, then shrugged. "All right," he said. "We're all agreed, then? We have to find some way of contacting these people—if there are any—in these star shells?"

"I don't think that will be necessary," said Marco Ramos.

Krake scowled at this new voice in the discussion. "Why not?"

Marco shrugged. "If they're as high-tech as they have to be, they'll have some kind of instruments keeping tabs on the space around them, won't they? And they are not likely to miss the phase shift of a ship coming out of wave-drive. No," he said comfortably, "I think we've already advertised our presence."

"Then why haven't they responded?"

Marco spread his hands. "Time, Francis," he said. "Time for the signal to reach them. After all, we're probably a couple of hundred million kilometers from that object—how long is that in light-travel time? Maybe ten minutes? So it would take them at least that long to discover us—about as long," he finished, grinning sunnily around at them, "as we've been here."

Krake reined himself in. "Then," he said, managing to be civil, "you think we should just sit here and wait for them to come to us?"

Marco didn't answer. He only shrugged again, and was silent.

There was a sudden bellow from the Taur. He clutched his horns, suddenly burning bright, rocking the great head back and forth as though in agony. Moon cried, "Thrayl's hearing something! Something bad\ⁿ

And on the screen there was a sudden bright eruption of green light—another—then another, and more. All at once there were a dozen of them suddenly winking out at the periphery of the great dark shell.

"I think they've found us," Daisy Fay remarked composedly. "Isn't that the signal of a wave-drive ship?"

And then there was a scream of mortal terror from Chief Thunderbird. "One has made a terrible error!" he squawked, his tone hysterical. Then he snatched the transposer off and dived toward the control board, shoving Marco violendy away, as his stubby claws poked at the keys.

On the screen, the green flares developed red circles around them that pulsed angrily, like a warning sign. And both Turdes at once were screeching in horror. "Use your damned transposers!" roared Krake, but even before they did Sue-ling had recognized one word, repeated over and over again by the frantic Turdes:

"Sh'shrane! Sh'shrane!"

The aiodoi, though they sing all, also hear all. Some of the smallsongs they heard were doleful, and some were painful, and some were tinged with fear; yet they sang on, and did not neglect such other songs as that of the old Earth scientist/poet.

"If you take seriously that anthropic-universe idea we were talking about, you're probably going to be asking yourself some logical questions.

"Okay, you say. I'll buy into the idea that this particular universe we inhabit couldn't just happen to be so neatly adapted to the needs of intelligent living things like us. Fine, but if that's true, where did it go wrong?

"That is, here we are, sitting on one measly litde planet of a third-rate star, which is only one of the two hundred-odd billion in our own galaxy alone, and God knows how many more in all the other external galaxies.

"So why is it just us? If the design of the universe was so hotsy-totsy for smart living things, shouldn't there be some others around somewhere?

"That's a fair question, and people have been asking it for a long time. The question even has a name. It's called 'the Fermi question' after an Italian scientist who was the first one to ask in public, 'Where is everybody?'

"A lot of scientists took the question seriously, and a bunch of good ones began spending time looking for an answer. One place to look was in the zillion flying-saucer stories that went around in those days, so some scientists began investigating them. It was a dead end. Out of all the tens of thousands of reports of sightings and abductions and what-all, they never found one with any solid evidence to prove it—and an awful lot that were clearly the work of loonies or cheats.

"Other scientists begged or stole time on radio telescopes, and they listened devotedly, day after day, for some sort of non-random message from Out There. They never heard one, though.

"Later on, a man named Freeman Dyson, an Englishman who became an American, had a different idea. Dyson said he thought that any truly advanced technological race would probably be enough like ourselves that it would want to do a lot of high-tech things, and that if so it would need energy to do them with. Where would it get that energy? Why, said Dyson, the best place would be to trap the radiation from their nearest star. What he thought they might do was take all the planets in their solar system and grind them up and rearrange them as a hollow sphere, putting a kind of wall around the star. That way they could use all the star's highest-level energy for their industry—or whatever—and let the waste heat radiate away from the outside of the sphere. So Dyson asked that infrared astronomers keep their eyes open for such weakly radiating infrared objects, which came to be called 'Dyson spheres.'

"So a lot of astronomers did that . . . but they never found any Dyson spheres.

"What it all adds up to is that Fermi's question is still unanswered.

"If you want my personal opinion, the answer's pretty simple. Where is everybody? There isn't any 'everybody' but us. We're all alone in this great big universe."

And the aiodoi sang:

"To seek forever, and never to find, that is to fail. "To seek for a while, and then stop seeking, that is also a failure; but it is a failure of the self.

"To seek and fail when the object of the search is almost at hand—that is sorrow."