The Singers of Time

18

Krake's first thought was to charge after the alien machines— "thought" was too intellectual a word for what he felt; actually it was only the atavistic adrenalin-rush of the attacked and enraged male—but he stopped himself. It wasn't cowardice that stopped him, though he was certain that attacking these mechanical murderers who had slaughtered members of his crew could accomplish nothing but his own quick death. What kept him in the control room was the urgent needs before him.

There was nothing that anyone could do for Chief Thunderbird. Litlun was squatting amid the noisome rubble that had been his Elder Brother, muttering dejectedly to himself, and, queerly, picking up the gobbets and bits—as though neatness could count here! But Kiri Quintero—

Kiri wasn't dead. Not quite. "His heart's beating," Moon Bunderan called from where she knelt with the scorched head in her lap. Krake took one frustrated look toward the corridor, then dropped to his knees beside her.

Yes, there was a pulse, faint but regular at the base of Kiri's throat. "Hold on," Krake said—not so much to Moon as to Kiri himself. While she dabbed at the crusted char, trying not to let the stench of burned flesh affect her, Krake ripped off his shirt and belt, wadding the shirt against the raw meat where Kiri's shoulder and arm had been, winding the belt around the torso to hold it in place. The blood was fountain-ing. But though the wadded shirt was soaked with it at once, the bleeding was at least slowed. It would be the wound to the head that would kill Kiri Quintero, Krake thought, and could only marvel that it hadn't done the job already.

He raised his head quickly, listening to a sudden new outburst of sound from the corridor. It was Marco's voice. He was shouting something—puzzlingly, sounding angry rather than in hurt or fear. Krake swore. "Can you hold Kiri?" he begged Moon Bunderan. "I have to go after them—"

As he tried to rise, the Taur rose beside him and gendy, firmly, pressed him back down. He rumbled something that Krake could not make out. "Make him let go of me, Moon!" he snapped.

But she was listening to Thrayl rather than the captain. "No, Francis," she said. "He says you can stay here. It's all right, he says."

"All rights Krake exploded, staring up at the Taur. The great head was lowered toward him, the eyes bright, the horns brighter still. The majestic head shook slowly as the Taur spoke again.

"He says no harm will come to Marco. The Sh'shrane are confused by them—they think they may be machines like themselves."

"What difference does that make? And how the hell would Thrayl know that?"

"He does know, Francis," the girl said with confidence. "And—oh, Francis! He's saying something else, too. I don't know what he means, but it's about help."

"Help! God, yes! I'd be begging for help, too, if I knew who to beg!"

"No, no, Francis, not like that. He says help is coming.'"

Krake turned his head to glare at her. "Now, where the hell would help be coming from here?" he demanded . . . and, off balance, almost fell as the Taur suddenly released him, straightening.

Krake stared up at the great shape, astonished, almost afraid. Something was happening to Thrayl. The great head was flung back, the strong arms lifted toward the sky; the Taur was rumbling deep in his throat, like a lion's purring. Suddenly Thrayl seemed even larger than before. The needle-sharp horns were almost crackling with internal fires, as brilliant shapes of gold and blue-white light chased each other across them.

Thrayl bent his head back down to regard them. His demeanor had changed—servile no longer, now almost commanding, though the purple-blue eyes were kind and reassuring.

"Help comes here vrom me, Francis Grake," he said, in a voice the captain had never heard from the Taur's mouth before.

Krake almost lost his grip on the belt that was holding Kiri Quintero's life in. The Taur reached down swiftly to place one great paw over Krake's hand, pressing the packing tighter.

"Do nod vear," he said, the voice deep and kind—and in English! In perfect English—or as perfect as the lips and throat of a Taur could make it. Some of the consonants seemed to drag, the vowels were rounder and more liquid than a human would have made them, but every word was perfectly clear. "This Taur's song has been heard vor a long time," the voice proclaimed, "and you are to be aided."

Litlun looked up from the butcher's offal that had been his Elder Brother, both yellow-red eyes starded and watchful. Moon Bunderan clapped a hand to her mouth.

"Who are you?" she wailed. "You're not Thrayl!"

The great eyes looked down benignly on her. "Thrayl is within, and never gone vrom you," the voice said. "All will be well."

There was a fresh racket from the hallway. The great head lifted, the horns thrusting toward the doorway. Then the Taur looked down again. He released his hold on Krake's hand and placed his paw gently on the faint stirring of heartbeat at the base of Kiri's throat. The horns blazed brighdy for a moment.

"There is time," he said, "but Kiri Quintero musd have help now. Francis Grake, pick him up. Take him to Sue-ling Quong. Facilitator, you will assisd."

Moon sobbed, "But the Sh'shrane are out there!"

The great head nodded comfortingly. "The Sh'shrane," said the beautiful organ voice, with a note of sadness, "will nod intervere again. Come now."

And the being that had been Thrayl turned and moved quickly, dancingly, toward the door. Those sharp horns were now shining so bright that they made faint, shifting pools of light on the corridor walls as the Taur led the way.

There was no way to refuse those orders. Lidun set down the fragments he had collected of Chief Thunderbird's anatomy. With Krake, he lifted what was left of Kiri Quintero and, Moon Bunderan by their side, they followed.

Shock had robbed Francis Krake of imagination. He didn't question his orders. He didn't even try to guess where the thing in the body of the Taur was leading them, or what they would find when they got there. He expected no one thing more than any other. . . .

And yet when he entered that corridor and saw what was there he gasped.

Those violent, vicious murder machines, the Sh'shrane— they were lined up like statues against a wall. They did not move or threaten. They made no sound. Their stubby tentacles were still, as silent and motionless as though frozen. Their eyes did not even follow as the thing that had been the Taur passed them without a glance.

Marco was standing there—alive! Well! He dodged out of the way as Thrayl passed, rumbling softiy, reassuringly. Marco's eyestalks were roving bewilderedly, and the expression of the face on his belly plate was incredulous. He turned the eyes on his captain. "Francis," he begged, "what the hell is happening? Those things looked like they were going to kill us —then, all of a sudden, they just stopped V

Krake didn't even try to answer. "Give us a hand with Kiri," he ordered.

The machine-man gasped as he saw the wounds. He ran to obey, but even so couldn't help asking, "But what's happened to Thrayl?"

"We'll explain later," Krake promised, a promise that he had no confidence he could really keep. Thrayl was in the doorway of the operating room, speaking to those inside. Daisy Fay's red ball of a body squeezed through past him, her eyes peering down the corridor.

"Oh, dear heaven!" she cried. "What happened to Kiri?"

She got out of the way as the drafted corpsmen carried him through. The being in Thrayl's body said, its voice rich and reassuring, "You are to help him, Daisy Fay McQueen, and—" as Sue-ling looked up from Sork's figure on the operating table, her face expressionless in the memmie mask—"you, Sue-ling Quong, will do whad is necessary."

"Of course," she said, with neither surprise nor doubt in her voice. She made room on the operating table for Kiri to be set down beside his brother, and bent to study his wounds without haste or emotion.

"All of you," said Thrayl, "will assisd in this—" he gestured with a three-fingered paw at Krake, his crew and the Turtle— "excepd for Moon Bunderan. She is to come with me."

Moon shrank back. "But the Sh'shrane are out there," she sobbed.

The Taur head bent to gaze kindly down at her. "Yes, the Sh'shrane," said the rich voice, a note of sadness coloring it. "Do nod fear the Sh'shrane. I will arrange whad musd be done vor the Sh'shrane." He was silent for a moment, as though sorrowing, before he finished, "I musd, vor they are the other halve of we."

What Krake did then he did almost without the use of his mind. He followed orders. He didn't bother to think, because there was no way of understanding what was going on.

It was only Sue-ling, of all in that room, who seemed unaffected, businesslike, competent. The memmie disk insulated her from astonishment and worry. She said crisply, "Daisy Fay, prep the patient. You others, scrub up. Litlun, you're the only one who can wear a memo disk; there's a spare in my bag. Use it, because you're going to assist."

No one argued. Everyone seemed to be in the same semi-shock as Krake. They did what they were told—even when what they were doing was wholly outside any previous experience, as it was for Francis Krake.

After three tours of combat duty in the South Pacific, Krake was no stranger to blood. Still, this kind of controlled, deliberate bloodletting made shivers run up and down his back. He was given the task of sterilizing instruments, not a part of the operating team at all—not a disappointment to him at all. He could hardly see what was happening on the table, for all the figures crowded around it. Lidun was methodically cauterizing blood vessels in the hollow where Kiri Quintero's shoulder had been, with a stink of burning flesh rising from the operation. Simultaneously Sue-ling was opening Kiri's skull, concentrating on what she was doing and yet sparing enough thought to keep an eye on Daisy Fay, monitoring Sork Quintero's condition at one side of the table, while Marco Ramos acted as assistant to all three operations at once. It was a great blessing that the machine-bodies of his crew had so many limbs to help with, for both of them were doing a dozen things at once.

Krake was careful with all the instruments in the radio-clave, giving each one its full time in the germ-destroying radiation, carefully setting each one down in a sterile bed of cotton with his gloved hand. But he could not help listening for sounds from outside. He had not forgotten that silent, petrified row of killer machines, immobile no more than a dozen meters away; he knew that that huge, strange Sh'shrane spaceship was still just outside the hull of the Hind. He knew most of all that his ship had been boarded by inimical aliens, and against them he had been as helpless as a child.

But it was all so incredible! No ship could have caught them in wave-drive! He could hardly accept the fact that he had seen what he had seen . . . especially could not believe that they had been reprieved by—by whatever it was that was living in the body of the Taur, Thrayl. It was all too much. Too many shocks. Too many marvels. . . .

He closed his mind to it all. He hardly even glanced at what was happening on the operating table. He took the soiled scalpels and forceps as Daisy Fay or Marco handed them to him, cleaned them, sterilized them, readied them for their next use—and went on doing that, for hours he did not count.

It was only when Sue-ling at last said, her voice bone-weary, hardly more than a whisper, "We can close now," that he gave himself the freedom to act on his own. He turned away from the table and toward the door. Halfway along the silent, empty corridor—where were the Sh'shrane?—he began to run.

When he burst into the control room, once again, he was ready for anything—anything but what he saw.

His first look was at the screens.

What he saw there made him swear in consternation and rage. The milky glow was gone, but the sky around The Golden Hind was not empty. It was littered with the great, gleaming eggs that were the Sh'shrane spacecraft. There were hundreds of them, all in easy optical range!

He turned toward the figures at the control board, and stopped short. The Taur was gazing at him peacefully. "Do nod vear," said the voice that was not Thrayl's. "They are here by my will. They are to do whad musd be done vor you."

"And what's that?" Krake asked.

The Taur did not answer, but the horns were so bright that Krake could hardly bear to look at them. He turned and looked around the control room.

It was only then that Krake's mind registered the fact that the five Sh'shrane robots were no longer in his ship. "They're gone?" he said, meaning it as a statement, worry turning it into a question.

Moon Bunderan put her hand on his. "He made them go, Francis," she explained. "He even made them clean up first."

"Clean up?" And then he saw that some of the gore that had splattered the control room was gone. Moon Bunderan nodded toward a heap of something in a corner of the room, covered with a cloth. But from under the edge of the cloth one detached red eye was glaring sighdessly at the world.

The Taur was standing there, silent and benign, regarding them with kindness. Krake opened his mouth to ask a question, but the Taur was turning toward the doorway.

Flapping and squawking, Lidun came hurrying in, his memo disk in his hand. The Turtle's first look around was as startled as Krake's. He saw the little pile of parts that was all that was left of the Proctor for Humankind and snatched the cloth off, to make sure everything was there. Only after that did he look up at the screens.

Litlun shrieked, pointing at the vast fleet outside. Moon hastened to reassure him. "It's all right, Facilitator. See, they're doing what he wants them to do."

The Turtle turned both eyes on Thrayl, then back at the screen.

And Krake saw it too. Something was happening with that vast congeries of Sh'shrane vessels. They were not just a milling mob, nor were they assembling to attack. They seemed to be forming in a kind of pattern, two-dimensional, radially symmetric. They were taking position as though creating the nodes of an immense spiderweb in space near The Golden Hind.

And in the middle of that giant web, a faint discoloration was beginning to appear.

Thrayl spoke. "They are opening the way vor you," said the organ voice. "Id is whad they do. Id is the lasd time they will do thad, vor anyone." The being was silent for a moment, then, sounding almost regretful, said, "This will take you where you wish to go."

Litlun cawed excitedly, "To the Mother planet? But it was destroyed!"

"Id was destroyed then. Id is nod destroyed now. All rime is one time," the voice said, as the great purple-blue eyes gazed once more around the room, and the huge Taur face seemed to smile.

Then, "Id is finishd," the voice said. And Thrayl's body slumped to the floor, the eyes suddenly sightless, while the horns went almost black.

Moon Bunderan cried out and flung herself on the body of her friend, hugging the huge head in her arms. For a moment she looked desolated.

Then the eyes began to live again, and the great horns once more became milkily opalescent.

The Taur sat up. Thrayl stretched, yawned, touched Moon with an affectionate paw. He muttered something to her . . . and then lay peacefully down on the floor of the control room and went to sleep.

Francis Krake shivered, aware that there was one less person in the room. "What did he say?" he demanded.

Moon looked at him wonderingly. "He said you can take the ship through that wormhole out there now, Francis," she whispered in awe. She looked down lovingly at her Taur, restored to her, and when she looked up again at the captain her eyes were brimming with glad tears. "Oh, Francis," she said, "I really think it's going to be all right now!"

The songs of the aiodoi swelled in triumph and welcoming as the one who had gone from among them returned, and they listened to the old smallsongs from Earth:

"When we talked about that other dimension we call time, we noted that the strangest thing about it is that it only goes one way. We are always going toward the future. We never see time going from the future to the past. It's as if there were an arrow on a one-way street, an 'arrow of time,' as some people call it.

"That arrow has a name. It's called 'entropy.'

"The figure of merit for the entropy of a system is the logarithm of the number of microscopic states the system can assume. You have to remember that, because you might easily get it on a test, but there's a more common way of putting it.

"Entropy can be called a measure of increasing randomness. That's why my brother-in-law calls their two-year-old 'Entropy' for short, because when she enters a room disorganization begins at once.

"We always observe that things proceed toward increasing disorder. For instance, consider a watch.

"A watch is made up of hundreds of parts, all complicated. There are gears and springs and jeweled bearings and case and cover—remember, I'm talking about the real watch, the wind-up kind, not what you all have on your wrists these days. A watch is highly ordered. If anything changes in it, it has nowhere to go but downhill. It may rust, or fall apart, or be stepped on and crushed. Or it may fall into a vat of molten metal and cease to have any recognizable identity at all. And you know that any of those things can happen, and you also know that if they do there is no way in which the disordered parts can turn themselves into a watch again.

"Right?

"Wrong. There is a way in which a watch can spring from completely random materials—in fact, that's how all your watches came to be.

"It happens all the time. Random dust and gas clouds collapse into stars; big stars explode into supernovas; new stars and planets form out of the supernova residue—life appears— intelligence appears—watchmakers appear, and make your watch for you. But disorganized matter became organized, and thus entropy is violated—right?

"Wrong again.

"There's nothing in the entropy concept that says that some part of a system can't become temporarily more highly organized, only that the whole system must become more disordered with time. And the whole system, if you allow baby universes and all that other Hawking stuff, is very large indeed.

"That's an example of Treiman's theorem.

"Sam Treiman was a Princeton scientist, whose best-known theorem is 'Impossible things don't usually happen.'

"But some things we would like to believe impossible actually do happen now and then, and you can sometimes get a special dispensation from even the law of entropy.

"For instance, there is Bell's Theorem.

"John Stewart Bell says that there aren't any purely local effects in the quantum universe. Every last electron, no matter where it is located, is connected with every other one. As Nick Herbert puts it, in the cosmological model of Bell's Theorem, 'an invisible field informs the electron of environmental changes in superluminal response time.' Which means that Einstein's speed limit does not apply in the quantum universe as far as information is concerned.

"Startling enough for you? Then let's go a step farther. If you want a real exemption from the laws of entropy—and just about everything else—remember that 'superforce' we talked about a while ago. That will cheerfully break just about any law you can think of. Why not? It's a superforce. Within its own domain, entropy means nothing to it. The superforce will do anything at all, you remember, even reversing the flow of entropy. Even allowing time travel. Bell's Theorem lets you postulate that some kind of instrument, or person, somewhere, can be in instantaneous contact with everything else . . . but the superforce lets you be in contact with everywhen."

And the aiodoi, who knew well of the wholeness of all, sang on. Their song welcomed the one from among them who had gone but is gone no more, and the glad smallsongs sounded against their own song, and the harsh and hostile smallsongs of the others were no longer heard.