The Singers of Time

17

Francis Krake couldn't help himself. When he saw the giant Turtle roughly shoving Marco out of the way to take over the controls of the Golden Hind he leaped forward with a roar.

Chief Thunderbird didn't surrender the board willingly. He cawed frantically at Krake as he resisted, striking at the captain with his clawed forelimbs, but Krake would not be denied. Although the Turde was half again his height and much more than twice his mass, it was Francis Krake who wound up with his fingers on the board.

Krake knew that he wasn't being sensible. There was nothing he could do at the controls that the Proctor couldn't do as well. Krake knew that the Turtle was at least as good a pilot as he, but that didn't matter. The Golden Hind was his ship.

Krake turned his back on the bleating Turtle. He absently rubbed at the blood on his forearm, where the Turtle's claws had broken the skin. Krake swore monotonously to himself, staring up at the screens as the simulated sky began slowly to revolve around them. Both Turtles were screeching at him all the while, transposes forgotten, but Krake wasn't listening. The ship was turning too slowly! Yet he knew it couldn't be helped. There was no way to make the turn go faster. A wave-ship was not a fighter plane; it couldn't stop and turn and reverse, skittering all over the sky like the P-38s and P-51s Krake had flown in the South Pacific. It was like a vast liner. All you could do was change the direction of thrust, and the resulting vector would slowly, bit by bit, alter the direction of travel.

Lidun finally remembered to turn on his transposer. "Run, Krake!" he begged. "Get away from them quickly, please!" And Chief Thunderbird, fumbling with his own speaking machine, echoed:

"Quickly! For one believes they are the Sh'shrane!"

"I'm going as fast as I can," Krake said tighdy. He took one second to glancc around the chamber. Sue-ling was crouched over her patient, her face white with worry, Moon holding tight to her crushed-looking Taur, the others simply waiting. Then he returned to the screens. The red and green blotches were still coming in their direction—more ships than ever, he saw, scowling—but not direcdy at them. The oncoming ships were displaced a few degrees to one side now, and the angle growing.

Krake allowed himself one final oath. Then he turned around, tugging at his beard as he glared at the two Turtles. He said flatly, "We'll miss them, I think. There's nothing else we can do now, so let's hear some truth from you two! Who are the Sh'shrane?"

The Turtles were silent for a moment, their eyes wandering at random. Then they exchanged glances and Chief Thunderbird spoke for both of them.

"They are our ancient destroyers," he said, tolling the words like a dirge. "They killed us by the thousands, and now we are helpless in their midst."

As the Turtles began to speak, Sue-ling lifted her head. "Sork's worse," she said briefly. "Kiri! Please get my bag— hurry!" And, at a moan from Sork, she bent down to him again, her eyes wet.

Krake saw, but had no time to observe. He took his eyes off Sue-ling Quong and turned to the Turtles. "All of it," he grated. "Everything you haven't told us already!"

Chief Thunderbird said, his bearing hopeless but still with some dignity: "There is little to tell. It was many Mother-lives ago. We were conducting our business without harm to anyone—" Krake barked a sardonic laugh at that, but the Turde went on unheeding—"when our ships began to disappear. Then fleets of other ships began to appear on our screens. They were not like ours, Krake. They were far more maneuver-able, and—they were armed."

"So were ours," Litlun put in despairingly.

The Proctor turned both eyes to glare at him, then surrendered. "Yes," he admitted, "one must say that is true. True at that time—which was many, many Mother-lives ago. Our armaments made no difference. Their weapons were better than ours, and so were their ships."

Out of the corner of his eye Krake saw Kiri Quintero hurrying back with Sue-ling's supplies. She wrenched the bag open, found her memo disk and slipped it into the slot in her skull. Krake looked away, unwilling to see her go under the spell of the disk. "What else?" he demanded of the Turtles.

"There is no 'else,'" Chief Thunderbird squawked. "They attacked us. We resisted. They defeated us—over and over. They even approached the holy planet of the Mother Herself!"

He stopped there, wrapped in silence and fear. Krake gnawed a strand from his beard. "Well?" he demanded. "What then?"

Chief Thunderbird drummed restlessly on his belly plate. "They went away," he said at last.

Krake stared at him. "What do you mean, Vent away'? First they attack and beat you—then they just leaveV

"That is the case," the Proctor agreed. "You are puzzled, one sees. Yes, that is appropriate. We too were puzzled; the records of the time show long debates, questions, speculations —but there is no answer to those questions, Krake. The Sh'shrane simply went away."

"Until now," said Litlun unhappily.

Krake shook his head, and turned to stare up at the growing cluster of red and green markings on the screen. There were at least a hundred of them now, he saw, but their pattern was spreading out, fanwise, like the spray from a garden hose being turned across a lawn.

"Proctor?" Moon Bunderan ventured. "Are you sure these things on the screen are the—the Sh'shrane?"

"The instrument readings are the same," Chief Thunderbird said simply. "Those are the indications of their ships." He might have said more, but there was a sudden, low bleating sound from the Taur.

"Wait," Moon said, putting her ear close to the great bull head to listen. Then she looked up. "Thrayl says it is true. They are the same."

"How the hell does he know that?" Krake demanded, but Litlun was gabbling already.

"Of course they are the same! And they are most terrible, for they are not living things at all."

"Machines," said Chief Thunderbird. "They are machines. Not the same as the Brotherhood, not like the Taurs, not even like humans. They arc only machines."

"And they kill" said Litlun, his eyes rotating fearfully.

Krake sat back, puffing out his cheeks in frustration. "Are you telling me they're robots or something like that?" he began. "Because if you are—"

He didn't finish. Marco interrupted him. "Captain?" he said. "Look at the screen."

Krake turned to do it, and his eyes widened. There were as many of the blotches as ever, but they seemed smaller, paler than before. And in the moment he watched they were beginning to disappear.

Krake took a deep breath. "Well," he said, "whatever they are, it looks like we've lost them."

"One is not sure of that," Chief Thunderbird said despairingly.

Screens back on the infrared, Krake could see the great, ruddy coal dwindling behind them, and nothing at all of those frightening "Sh'shrane" ships. He left Marco at the board with orders to keep running—not because he thought it was the best thing to do, but because what better choices did he have?

Sue-ling Quong had removed the chip from her skull again and was hovering over her patient, Moon Bunderan at her side. "Get some rest, Sue-ling," Moon urged the older woman. "I'll watch him."

"He's lost sensation in his left side," Sue-ling fretted. "There might be a clot—I think I'll probably have to go in again."

"Not the way you are," Moon insisted. "You didn't have enough rest to go into a surgical operation again. Get some more sleep—I'll watch over Sork." She turned to look sadly at her Taur, who was slumped against a wall, his great eyes open but unseeing. "I can watch two patients as well as one," she said.

Sue-ling was suddenly remorseful. "I've been forgetting about Thrayl. I'm sorry, Moon. He looks like he needs help, too."

"There isn't any help I can give him," Moon said sadly. "He refuses food, water—he refuses everything, even to talk most of the time. When he speaks at all he talks about great pain and a kind of crippling anger that I just don't understand."

"But at least I should check him over!"

"Oh, Sue-ling," said Moon, half amused, half exasperated, "what do you know about Taurs? IVe tended them all my life, and I'm telling you it's nothing physical with Thrayl."

Sue-ling looked doubtful, but Moon was firm. "Captain Krake," she called. "Please make her get some more rest." And, surprisingly, Sue-ling submitted, and it was only when Moon was watching them leave together that she began to wonder if she had made a mistake.

Long before they reached Sue-ling's room, Francis Krake was wondering the same thing. He could feel himself getting ill at ease. "I don't really have to escort you, Sue-ling," he said. "I do think you ought to rest a little more, though."

But she said, "Please. I'm not going to sleep, Francis. I have to check Sork again in an hour." She sat down on the edge of her bed, then leaned back and closed her eyes. For a moment Krake almost believed that she really had dropped off, but just as he was about to leave quiedy she spoke again.

"Sork isn't doing well at all. I think he's paralyzed on one side."

"So you'll have to operate again?"

She opened her eyes and regarded him. "If I thought I could do any good, do you think I'd be loafing around here? I just don't have the tools. If we were on Earth I could do lots of things—transplant fetal tissue, perhaps, or maybe repair the damage with microsurgery. But what can I do on this ship?" She shook her head. "But if he continues to get worse, I'll have to try, anyway."

She sat up, putting that thought out of her mind. "So talk to me, Francis. Tell me what's been happening. What were those things on the screen that had the Turtles so frightened?"

Krake had forgotten that Sue-ling had been under the memo disk through much of the incident. He said, temporizing, "If you just rest for a while now I'll fill you in later—"

"Now, Francis!"

What Krake knew best about Sue-ling Quong was that she could be just as stubborn as he. "All right," he said, and told her, as briefly as possible, everything that had happened, and everything the Turtles had said. She was wide awake long before he was through. "I'm sure they suspected it was these machines they call the Sh'shrane right away," he finished, "but Chief Thunderbird wouldn't tell us that. Maybe it was too frightening for him."

"You say they're supposed to be machines?"

He nodded. "If they're really the Sh'shrane they are. The Turtles found that out long ago, in that old war, when they captured a couple of shot-up Sh'shrane ships. The crews inside were dead, of course. If you can say that a machine is 'dead,' because that was what they were. Litiun says they were really ugly things. Naturally, the Turtles would be bound to think that anyway. But, from what they say, the Sh'shrane do sound rather nasty—pyramidal metal bodies, with a lot of tentacles-"

"Like Marco and Daisy Fay?"

Krake gave her a suddenly hostile look. "My friends are people, Sue-ling!"

She was penitent. "I didn't mean anything by it. They're my friends, too. I'm sorry I said that." Then she shivered. "And it's these Sh'shrane things that are chasing us now?"

"They were. Maybe. I mean, if the things chasing us really were the same Sh'shrane. But you don't have to worry about them, Sue-ling. Whatever they were, they're no danger to us now. You know we're safe as long as we're in wave-drive—one photon can't catch up with another."

"You're sure of that?" He nodded, half amused, and she sighed and closed her eyes.

He looked down at her, wondering if he ought to leave— knowing the answer, unwilling to do it. In Francis Krake's eyes at that moment, Sue-ling Quong appeared to be the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Not at all an ordinary-looking one, of course. In particular, he thought (remembering that long-ago love for the first time without pain), not at all like the lost Madeleine McKay. Sue-ling's eyes were almond-shaped and long, but they were intensely blue. Her high cheekbones were Oriental, but her hair was a lustrous coppery red. She was an arresting blend of East and West, and Francis Krake, who had missed the experience of the last few centuries of interbreeding, thought her a srartlingly desirable one.

Without thinking, he reached out curiously to touch the rubbery lips of her implant socket.

Her eyes opened at once, looking up at him. "Please don't, Francis," she said.

"I was just curious," he said, excusing himself, not truthful.

"Does it repel you?" she asked.

"—No," he said, not sure that was truthful, either. "Does it hurt?"

"Of course not. . . . But I don't really like it, Francis. I wasn't always a memmie. I was an ordinary human doctor, but then, when I found myself working with memmie surgeons, with all those Turtle skills, I decided I had to be able to do the things they could do. So I made up my mind." She shrugged. She was particularly beautiful when she moved like that, Krake thought, her soft, warm shoulders moving so gracefully. "The next day I let them slot my skull."

"And now you're sorry?"

"Sorry? What's the good of being sorry? It's done, and there it is."

"It doesn't change anything. You're still very beautiful," he told her.

That stopped her. She looked at him in a different way. "Francis," she said seriously, "I'm sorry if I'm still giving you any wrong ideas, but please don't. That's the one thing I am sorry about. You're a wonderful man, and any woman would be proud to have you for a lover—but I've still got those other commitments." She smiled regretfully up at him. "I know I forgot them for a while. But I have to start remembering again."

When push came to shove, Sue-ling refused to stay away from her patient for the full hour. Krake was glad enough of that. It was frustrating to be alone in the sight and smell of her, and not be allowed to touch . . . and he was beginning to want to be back in the control room of his ship, too.

There seemed to be no need for that. As he stood behind Marco Ramos at the board, staring up at the screens, the dull coppery disk had long since dwindled to be just another coal in those hostile skies. "I don't see any trace of the Sh'shrane ships," Krake said.

"No, Captain. They just disappeared half an hour ago. I guess we're home free."

Krake made a noise in his throat. In lighter mood it might have been a laugh. "Free, probably. Home, I doubt," he said.

Marco twisted one eyestalk to regard him. "Have you got any new orders for me, Captain?"

Krake shook his head. "Continue as you are. I don't know where we're going, but we're certainly on our way." Feeling helpless, and angry at himself for the feeling, he turned to Moon Bunderan. "Any bright ideas from Thrayl?"

She sighed. "Nothing useful, I'm afraid. All he says is that the bad song is getting very loud. I'm worried about him, Captain."

Krake didn't respond. He didn't want to say the truth, which was that he was worried about all of them, himself included. He turned to the room at large. "Any ideas, anybody?" But Kiri Quintero merely looked politely apologetic, Marco and Daisy Fay were silent and the Turdes were muttering unhappily to each other, their transposes off, paying no attention to the others.

That left Sue-ling Quong.

She was ignoring everyone but her patient, crouched over Sork's silent form, methodically rolling the sensors over his body to check for pulse, temperature and other vital signs. Krake didn't like staring at her, but he couldn't help himself, though the sight brought him no more than a feeling of desolation. He had no right to Sue-ling Quong, he reminded himself . . . but it hurt just as much as though he had.

She looked up. "He's deteriorating, all right," she reported, her face drawn but determined. "I'm going to have to go in again."

"But you said you needed things you don't have here."

"That's right," she said, "but what choice have I got? He's going to die if I don't do something. Maybe I can patch him together a little better . . . but I'll have to have help. Daisy Fay, Marco—will you give me a hand with him?"

"I'll do it," Moon Bunderan offered, but Sue-ling shook her head.

"Not this time, Moon. You take care of Thrayl."

"Do what she says, Marco," Krake ordered, and slipped into the place before the board to relieve him, while Kiri Quintero silently took the other board over from Daisy Fay McQueen. Krake watched without joy as his crewmates carried Sork Quintero away. Francis Krake certainly did not wish Sork any harm. There was, it was true, a part of his mind that was calculating the effect Sork Quintero's death, if that happened, would have on his own chances with Sue-ling . . . but that was not a thought he wanted to concentrate on. It was ugly. It was also stupid, because whatever happened to Sork, there would be no practical benefit for Krake as far as Sue-ling was concerned while Kiri Quintero was still around. . . .

He turned when he heard Kiri call his name. Kiri was looking unusually agitated. "Francis?" he called. "Have you been looking at the screen? Is there something wrong with our instruments?"

Startled, Krake swung back to stare. Yes, there did seem to be something unusual there on the screens. It was no more than a faint, fuzzed appearance, hard to detect, much less to identify. It wasn't easy for Krake to be sure even that anything was actually there, for it was no more than the almost invisible haze of a summer morning's mist.

But it had not been there before.

Suddenly alarmed, Krake touched the board, switching frequencies for the sensors. One after another he scanned every octave of the electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared, optical, all the way down through microwave—yes, the fuzz was there in every frequency, all over the sky. And it was growing rapidly denser until it became a milky glow, like a bright fog, all around The Golden Hind.

"What the hell!" Krake snapped. But his voice was drowned out by a simultaneous keening from both Turtles. "One knew it!" Chief Thunderbird moaned, and Lidun cried:

"It is surely the Sh'shrane!"

Krake looked at them, baffled. "What are you talking about? There's no way those ships could catch up with us in wave-drive!"

Chief Thunderbird was frantic. "One has told you their ships are better than ours!" he bellowed.

"But there's no ship there," Krake said reasonably, "only a kind of—"

"Smudge," he had been going to say. He didn't get the word out.

Suddenly there was a ship.

More accurately, there was a piece of a ship. The stranger did not appear on the screen at once. It began to show up bit by bit, like an ancient dirigible poking its nose out of a cloud. It kept on coming.

A ship it certainly was. A ship of unfamiliar design, football-shaped, and huge. When the last of it had emerged from the milky cloud, its bow was almost touching the hull of The Golden Hind.

"It is truly the Sh'shrane," moaned Chief Thunderbird.

Krake shouted in wordless startlement and anger. He pounded on the keys of the controls—trying to accomplish what, he could not have said—to do anything, to change the course, to come out of the wave state—it made no difference, for nothing worked. The Hind did not respond.

The strange vessel settled itself against the hull of The Golden Hind with a solid nudge and hung there. A hatch in its side opened. And out of it came—

Sh'shrane.

There was no doubt that that was what they were, metal monsters no larger than a cat, waving short, stubby, flexible members like arms. They collected at the hull of the Hind and then began crawling purposefully along it toward the lock of Hind's scout ship.

"But we're in wave-drive," Krake said stupidly. He could not believe what he saw. Everyone knew that a ship in wave-drive was completely isolated from every material object in the universe. There was no way these things could have reached them!

But they had. He watched them, unbelieving, as they clustered around the exterior lock of the scout ship. It opened to them. They disappeared inside.

Then, a moment later, the interior hatch to the Hind itself swung open, and five of the alien machines boiled through.

Krake was frozen in astonishment, but others were not. Everyone in the control room of the Hind was shouting at once, and some were acting. Chief Thunderbird threw himself despairingly at the invaders, Kiri Quintero only a moment behind him . . . unfortunately for the Proctor, for it was his death.

The Turde didn't have a chance. The leading Sh'shrane hardly paused in its advance. It simply raised a stubby tentacle and pointed it at him. A fat, violet spark leaped out from the end of the tentacle and flew at the Turtle. The spark was lethal. There was a horrid splatting sound, and a reek of chemicals and foulness, and the body of Chief Thunderbird burst like a child's balloon. Bits of Turtle flesh and chitin scattered horribly around the control room, splattering on the walls and furnishings and people like an awful rain. . . .

And behind Chief Thunderbird, Kiri Quintero was caught in the same blast. His arm and shoulder were ripped away, his head burned black on one side.

Litlun screamed in horror and pain. He dropped frantically to the floor, to scrabble in the butcher's offal that had been his Elder Brother. Moon Bunderan ran to Kiri's side, Thrayl painfully rising to follow her, his great horns questing from side to side.

Krake did not will any action from his own body, but his body had a will of its own. Before he knew it he was charging toward the Sh'shrane—not for any reasoned purpose, only to attack; knowing that no bare-handed attack could accomplish anything but his own death. He could see death coming at him, as two of the machines raised tentacles and pointed them toward him—

And then they stopped.

They froze in place, all five of the Sh'shrane. Every one of them turned abruptly toward the passageway.

There the bouncing red form of Daisy Fay McQueen had appeared, drawn by the commotion in the control room. She stopped short in horror at what she saw.

The Sh'shrane seemed to confer inaudibly among themselves. Then they simply ignored all the survivors in the control room. They advanced on Daisy Fay and bore her back, protesting, struggling, until the sounds of her voice faded out and they were out of sight.

Then there was silence in the abattoir that had been the control room, except for the sounds of weeping from Moon Bunderan. "It's Kiri," she said, sobbing. "I think he's dead."

Though the aiodoi sing on, they listen more intently now to the smallsongs from everywhere. Especially they listen to the song of that aiodos among them who sings lovingly ofall, and yet intends to give up eternity for life. This is a grave concern to all the aiodoi, who seldom act but only are. Yet they sing on, and listen on, to the songs of the old Earth scientist and poet.

"Let's talk a little more about the fine structure of the universe, and what it contains. We'll start by talking about pi.

"You all know what pi is. It's the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, and when you measure it out it's a little more than 3. I can be more exact than that, though. To fourteen places, pi is 3.14159265358979.

"I hope I've impressed you by remembering all that, but so you won't get too impressed I'll let you in on a trade secret. An old-timer named James Jeans had trouble keeping that value of pi in mind, so he made up a mnemonic for it. You know what mnemonic is? It's a device to aid your memory, like the notes you scribble on your cuffs before a final. In this case, you use the mnemonic by counting the letters in each word—3, 1, 4 and so on—and it goes:

" 'How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics.'

"You mustn't think that even that fourteen-place figure is right, though. It isn't. It's still an approximation. People with computers have carried pi out to thousands of decimal places now, and they'll never end, for pi doesn't have an end. It's an irrational number.

"Before computers, mathematicians used to amuse themselves calculating extra decimal places for pi by the method of inscribing polygons inside a circle. You can get as close as you like—up to a point—just by increasing the number of sides of the inscribed polygon.

"Now, we already know that they'll never get to the real value of pi, because it doesn't have one, being irrational. But let's make believe it isn't. A question for you all to consider is this:

"Assume the biggest circle you can imagine, with the maximum number of sides; and assume you have all eternity to count and measure the sides. Is it possible to get this mythical 'exact' value for pi that way?

"Answer: It is not. The reason is what we call 'space-time foam.'

"In order to get the maximum closest possible value for pi, the sides of your polygon would have to be very, very small. But smallness has a limit.

"You can't have anything smaller than Planck's ten to the minus twenty-seventh centimeters, because below that size the concept of size itself doesn't exist; it is a philosophical abstraction, irrelevant to quantum considerations. Nothing gets shorter than that. There you are in the realm of quantum effects, and everything is dominated by the superforce.

"Which, you remember, is the force that lets you do anything at all to anything at all. If we could ever learn how to control the superforce . . . well, then you could forget all the 'can'ts' and 'impossibles' I've been saying to you, because nothing at all would be impossible ever again."

And some of the aiodoi sang: "Of course."

And some of the aiodoi sang as always, but listened and listened for the song of that aiodos among them who had chosen to begone.