The Singers of Time

19

Once the world of Captain Francis Krake had made sense to him, but that time was long gone. Now his world had been turned topsy-turvy into a bewildering jumble of killer robots, alien visitors inhabiting the body of a docile Taur, ships that did what he had been quite certain that no ship could ever possibly do. The only sanity left for him was to be at the controls of his ship . . . and it was a measure of how crazy things had become that what he was doing with The Golden Hind was plunging it into the heart of a wormhole!

He had drafted Litlun for the second board. The Turde was fidgety with the cranky nervousness of unexpected hope— over and over he was muttering to himself, disjointed phrases that the transposer picked up as references to the Mother planet, to the death of his Elder Brother. There was no problem with pilotage or navigation. The sweep of Sh'shrane vessels was like a firing-range target, aiming Krake direcdy into the shimmering distortion at their center.

Going through was almost routine. Krake breathed a long, silent sigh when he saw that on the other side of the worm-hole was a normal sky—stars and distant galaxies, nothing threatening, nothing bizarre and unexpected. He sat back, almost at ease at last. He looked around the control room and beckoned to Daisy Fay. "Take this board over," he ordered. "I'm going to see if I can get Sue-ling to get some sleep for a change."

Litlun twisted quickly around to turn both eyes on Francis Krake. "Relieve me too, Captain," he asked. "One must place the remains of the Elder Brother in proper storage."

"Sure. Marco?" And when the machine-man had replaced the Turtle at the second board, Krake turned to Moon Bunderan. "Will you come with me?" he asked.

"Of course, Captain," she said, her mood lightened since her Taur was himself again. She took Thrayl with her to the operating room, of course. She wasn't willing to let him out of her sight, though it wasn't easy to wake him up long enough to make the move. Thrayl's tour of duty as host to— to whatever you might call the visitor which had taken his body over—had used up a lot of reserve strength. All the Taur wanted to do was to eat and sleep, by choice curled up against the feet of Moon Bunderan.

But when they reached the room the girl gasped, staring at the operating table. There was only one form on it, swathed in bandages that covered most of the head, even the eyes. "What happened?" she asked. "Did—did Kiri die?"

Sue-ling raised her head to look at her. She had long since removed the memo disk, and she was glassy-eyed with fatigue. She had to lick her lips before she was able to answer. "Kiri's body did," she said. "But Kiri's still alive—or part of him is, anyway—in Sork's head."

"Sleep," Krake ordered, taking her by the arm and leading her to the door. She hesitated, but obeyed, stumbling away. He turned to Moon Bunderan. "They're both in there," he told her, looking at the swathed head. "Part of both brains— the parts that weren't destroyed."

"But you can't transplant a Ms!"

"You can if you're Sue-ling Quong with a memo disk, and if you have a Turtle with a disk of his own helping you," he said. "At least, he's alive now—or they are, whichever way you can say it. Sue-ling says there's no rejection problem because they're identical twins. They have exactly the same genetic chemistry."

Moon swallowed, and gazed apprehensively at the figure on the table. It did not look reassuring. The only proof that there was still life in the motionless body was the constant background sound of purrings and chucklings from the jury-rigged life-support machinery and the instruments monitoring vital signs. "And he'll—they'll—be all right now?"

Francis Krake crossed his fingers. "That's right," he said, hoping it was true. But Sue-ling had seemed sure of what she was doing under the memo disk. Even Litlun, wearing an identical disk as he shared the surgery with her, had never hesitated or shown any doubt that the procedure would work.

Moon caught him off guard with a sudden chuckle. Krake gave her a swift look, wondering if hysteria had finally caught up with her, but her smile seemed genuinely amused. "I'm sorry, Francis," she said, "but I can't help thinking that that solves one problem, anyway, doesn't it?" And explained: "Now Sue-ling doesn't have to worry about making her mind up between them any more."

"I suppose that's true," Krake said after a moment, and his tone was icy.

Moon gave him a startled look, then a remorseful one. She said quickly, "I mean, if she really still wants one of them—or wants him, I mean ... I don't know what I mean, exacdy," she said, knowing she was making a mess of what she had meant to be an apology. She thought for a moment, and decided to give it up. She sat down on a crate that had once held medical machinery, next to the sleeping Taur, and si-lendy stroked the close-cropped fur between Thrayl's gendy glowing horns.

It was Krake who changed the subject, as uncomfortable as Moon herself. "Tell me about that—what did you call him, a 'poet'?"

"Oh, yes," Moon said gladly. "Only 'poet' isn't quite the word. He told me the right word for Earth people to use was 'aiodos'—it's an old Earth word, he said, from the Mycenae-ans. Whoever they were. It means a kind of a bard; Homer, he said, was an aiodos." Thrayl stirred in his sleep. She scratched the warm, broad skull, and the Taur made a sleepy rumbling sound and was asleep again.

"Some poet," Krake observed. "He tamed those Sh'shrane without even working up a sweat."

"I guess they're not just poets, Francis." She looked up at him wonderingly. "It's like a fairy tale, isn't it? When he was talking to me, it almost felt as though he should have started with 'once upon a time'. ..."

Once upon a time, the aiodos had said, or almost said. . . .

Once upon a time, a long time ago (but, really, all time was one, the aiodos had also said), the aiodoi were organic creatures who lived on a planet in a galaxy within a universe very far from Earth's—the very universe they had just left, in fact.

"They were living people, like us?" Krake asked.

Moon shook her head. "He never said they were like us," she corrected him. "Only that they were biological creatures, the same as we." In physical appearance, she said, they hadn't looked at all like human beings. In other ways, though, they were very much like us. As with the human race, these people had been ingenious and forceful, and also sometimes thought-fill and sometimes wise.

But, as with the human race, the active and ingenious ones were not necessarily the same ones who were both thoughtful and wise.

These beings had evolved, as living things always do. They had sharpened their intelligence. As the millennia drifted by they discovered fire, and agriculture, and machinery—just like human beings—and, like human beings, they built cities and prospered immensely. When they had reached a stage of burgeoning science and technology, the wise ones among them studied the stars and planets out in space. The ingenious ones took that knowledge and used it. They built ships to venture out to explore these other worlds—and not just to explore them, but to own them.

"Those were the Sh'shrane?" Krake guessed.

"And the others the aiodoi? Not yet, Francis," Moon said, "but that's what they became—over a long, long time."

It took a long time. During all that time many things were happening. Among others, the explorers and conquerors went farther and farther into space. Now and then, at this time and that, their explorations encountered other races of beings, some of them almost as intelligent as themselves. The stay-at-home wise ones welcomed these discoveries with delight. The adventurers had other views. The other races they found were sometimes absorbed into their own growing empire. More often they were brushed aside ... or simply destroyed.

The ones who became the Sh'shrane were great destroyers. Ultimately they even destroyed their own bodies. Simple organic flesh was not hard enough or strong enough to meet their desires.

At first they had sought out warm and fertile planets like their own, but those were rare. There simply were not enough of that kind to suit the wishes of the voracious Sh'shrane. That problem had a solution, though. The ones who became the aiodoi helped them find it; they showed the conquerors how to change themselves to adapt to harsher environments, with prostheses and mechanical supplements, until they were more than half machine—humans would have called them "cyborgs." Now they were truly fitted for the work of conquest and subjection they had chosen for themselves. They were exempt from the needs of flesh and blood. They could survive in any gravity or atmosphere, or even in none at all.

Ultimately (Moon Bunderan told the captain wonder-ingly) the Sh'shrane lost the organic component of their bodies entirely. Their minds were machine-stored, in rustless, ageless, computer-like things, and the machine bodies they were housed in never died. The Sh'shrane doubled in numbers, and doubled again and again, until one single galaxy was too tiny to hold them all—until, at the last, they came to believe that not even a single universe was large enough to contain the mighty and irresistible Sh'shrane.

While the aiodoi. . . .

The aiodoi, too, had transcended flesh and blood.

They chose a different pathway. Not into inorganic matter; not into matter at all. The intelligences who were becoming the aiodoi had long ago discovered the principles of the wave-drive. They had given it to the Sh'shrane, as they gave so much else—of course, for without the wave-drive the Sh'shrane could hardly have ventured outside their birthright solar system. But the aiodoi found a different use for the wave-drive.

As the wave-drive ships became more and more sophisticated, they no longer depended entirely on mechanical components. Finally they required no mechanical components at all. The aiodoi learned from their ships the freedom of mat-terless existence. They transformed themselves. From organic beings tied to a benign environment, they came to exist as standing waves of pure energy, self-sustaining assemblages that

Earthly scientists would have called solitons. They were continually in motion; and they, too, became immortal.

Learning and learning, always learning, the aiodoi began to comprehend the mysteries of the quantal realm. They had long since recognized the plurality of universes. Now, bound by neither space nor time, the aiodoi reached out to them. Through the manipulation of their own energy spectra, through the fluctuating creation of new wavicles in the false vacuum that underlay everything, everywhere, the aiodoi were always in touch with each other. More than that. The aiodoi were always one great chorus, hymning the praise of the majestic wholeness of all.

The aiodoi were never alone. There was no space and no time between universes, and so the aiodoi in the far past were in intimate contact with those in the far future—though, to them, there was no past or future. They were the aiodoi, and they were everywhere and everywhen.

They knew that when they themselves reached out to other universes the hard, hostile ships of that worser half of themselves, the Sh'shrane, would be quick to follow. Follow the Sh'shrane did. And when they discovered that race of beings that humans called "Turtles" they did as they had always done.

They waged war against them.

But that, in the end, the aiodoi would not permit. They could not allow the great plexus of universes to be polluted by the viciousness of those alter-ego personalities they had left behind. The aiodoi acted. They abandoned that birth universe to the Sh'shrane. They drove the Sh'shrane ships back inside it, and closed off its wormholes, quarantining it. . . . For a time.

Francis Krake listened to all she said, hardly able to believe, even less able to doubt. He asked, "So the Sh'shrane wouldn't let it go at that? They just bided their time, and then they tried again?"

Moon nodded somberly. "They didn't forget the Turtles. They couldn't forget the only war they hadn't won. This time they attacked the Mother planet itself. They dragged it through the wormhole and destroyed it. I suppose then they thought it would be easy enough to mop up the rest of the Turtles. . . . But the aiodoi would not let that happen, Francis."

"They did, though. They let them wreck the Mother planet."

She nodded earnestly. "I think he was sorry about that. He said, 'We were listening to other songs.' But they've made up for it. It's really over for the Sh'shrane now. The aiodoi won't ever let them out of their own universe again. Not ever."

When they were back in the control room Krake took his place at the board, listening to the fourth or fifth repetition of Moon Bunderan's story. Naturally she had to repeat it for everyone else on The Golden Hind—once to each handful of them as they returned from sleep, or wherever they had been, and several times over for all of them, to answer questions— or, more often, to tell them what questions she couldn't answer. Krake listened without speaking, but at the other board Litlun was full of agitated questions. "That's all I know," the girl said at last, almost cross. "I've got to take care of Thrayl. Anyway, it makes no sense to keep on asking about things I don't know anything about. I think what I've said already is all the aiodos wanted us to know."

Daisy Fay spoke up. "But there arc things we have to know. We need to set a course, Moon. Didn't the—aiodos—tell you where we're supposed to go?"

The girl shook her head, already on her way to the food warmer. "I think Thrayl will do that, when he's had something to eat. And the other thing I think—" She pursed her lips before she said it. "I think he wasn't talking about where we were going, so much as when."

That made the Turtle squawk excitedly. "One must ask more!" Litlun said, the voice from the transposer almost trembling. "Is it possible then that one can really return to the planet of the Mother before it was destroyed?"

Moon was already on her way to the warmer. "I think that's what he meant," she confirmed.

"But that is traveling back in time!" the Turtle barked.

Moon shrugged. "All I can tell you is what he said: 'There is no time. There is only an eternal now.' Whatever that means."

Tired of questions that had no answers, Krake rubbed his eyes wearily. It wasn't just fatigue, though there was plenty of that. It was the harsh, ammoniacal stench left by the destroyed body of Chief Thunderbird that made his eyes sting. Looking at Moon Bunderan popping a meal into the warmer reminded him that he was hungry, too—and made him wonder if he could get anything down in that pervasive stink.

Moon saw his expression. "You don't notice it so much after a while, Francis," she said. "The air circulators are cleaning it up."

"Not fast enough," he grumbled. He watched her give the first meal to the awakening Taur, who ate quickly—and fastidiously, too, as he always did; but mostly quickly, and held out his plate for more as soon as he was through. Moon ruffled his head affectionately.

"I'll have something for us right away, Francis," she promised. She glanced at the Turtle, glumly staring with both eyes. "I'm sorry I can't tell you more, Lit—I mean, Facilitator," she said, softening. "I'm sorry about your friend, too."

Lidun was silent, studying her. "One suffers pain at the loss of an Elder Brother," he said at last. "It is no more than that." Then suddenly he turned his whole body to confront Moon Bunderan. "The Taur is now fully awake!" he said, his tone abruptly peremptory. "Can he not now tell us what we must do?"

Moon stood up to confront him, one hand straying protectively to rest on Thrayl's broad head. "Leave him alone," she commanded. "He's had a hard time!"

"But one wishes to know," Litlun pleaded, both eyes rotating around the control room, seeking support.

He got it from the Taur himself. Thrayl paused in his delicate eating and looked up, the huge eyes kindly. He rumbled something to Moon, paused, added something else and then quiedy returned to his meal.

"What did he say?" Krake demanded, as impatient as Litlun himself.

Moon glanced doubtfully down at Thrayl. "He said, yes, he will take us to your Mother planet, Facilitator, but we must use up many, many long years first. And he also said something for you personally. He said—" she hesitated, then finished—" 'The Facilitator should know that a fine, good thing may come of a selfish wish.'"

"What do you mean, 'use up' years?" Krake demanded, but Moon wasn't listening to him. She was looking at the Turtle, who was muttering agitatedly to himself.

"Do you want to tell us something, Facilitator?" Moon asked, her tone kind and friendly.

The Turtle drummed his claws on his belly plate for a moment, his eyes wandering. Then he engaged his transposer and said in a burst: "One was not selfish! One wished only for the privilege of doing a great thing for the Brotherhood! The Proctor was wrong!"

They were all looking at him now, fascinated by the spectacle of a Turtle experiencing an emotional outburst. "One perceives justice in the Proctor's death!" he cried. "One grieves, but he was at fault. It was this one, not the Proctor, who devised the plan to use this ship for the Mother's sake. It was improper of the Proctor to insist on coming along, when he knew that only one male could receive the reward of success and pair with a new Mother." He turned away, glaring emptily up at the whirling star patterns on the screens.

"Are you saying he forced you to bring him along?" Krake asked.

"Force?" The Turtle rotated one yellow-red eye back to gaze incredulously at the captain. "There is no intelligence in that question. How could one Brother ever force another?"

"Then why did you let him do it?"

The Turtle gave him both scorching eyes now. "Why? Because he was one's Elder Brother." He closed the parrot beak with a snap, and then, without a word, gestured to Marco Ramos to take his place and waddled away to his solitary room.

As Marco slipped into place he turned his eyestalks on his captain. The face on the belly plate was grinning wryly as he said, "Turtles, Francis. We'll never understand them, will we?"

No, Francis Krake knew, he would never understand Turtles. He could accept that equably enough. It was only one more failure of comprehension to add to all the others that had borne themselves upon him. If he did not understand what made Turtles do the things they did, he was certainly no better at understanding these things called aiodoi, or the Sh'shrane—or, most of all, women.

He found himself yawning. He knew that he should go off to his own room and sleep. He even wanted to. He simply did not have the energy to make himself get up and do it. He sat before the board, gazing wearily at the changing constellations outside the ship, and was all but asleep when he heard Marco Ramos calling to him from the other board. "Francis! I've got something to show you!"

Krake shook himself awake. He turned toward the second board, where Marco had thrown a grid of rainbow lines on a small screen. It was too far to make them out, but he didn't have to. Marco was pointing up at the outside view. "Notice anything about those external galaxies?"

Krake blinked up at them. "You didn't expect to see much of external galaxies at normal magnification—the Magellanic Clouds, yes, and M-31 in Andromeda if you looked in the right place, maybe one or two others. . . .

But now there were fifty or a hundred in plain sight. Puzzled, he turned to Marco. "Why are there so many of them?"

"That's what I wanted to know, Francis. It isn't that there are so many. It's just that they're so close! So then I began checking spectra." He waved to the rainbow patterns. "Look at the elemental abundances, Francis. Out of the first fifty stars I looked at, every one was metal-poor. Almost pure hydrogen and helium, no matter what kind of star it was!"

That woke Krake up. "The stars are different? You mean, then this isn't our universe?" he asked, bracing himself for new trouble.

"Oh, no, that's not it, Francis. At least, I don't think so. I think it's our universe, all right, probably even our own galaxy —it wouldn't make sense for the aiodoi to have sent us into a different one, would it? But early. When the universe was young. It hasn't even expanded very much yet—that's why we see all those galaxies outside our own." The metal-man's tentacles were waving excitedly and the imaged face wore an expression of delight. "That explains what Thrayl was trying to tell us, skipper! We have to keep going at wave-drive speed—time-dilated, just using up time—until the universe gets old enough for our own planets to be born!"

Krake blinked at him. "But then—then—how will we ever find them?"

"Thrayl will find them for us," Marco assured him confidently. "He as much as said he would, didn't he?"

"Of course he will," Moon Bunderan put in as she entered the room, hand in hand with Sue-ling Quong. "Why did you ever doubt it?" She turned toward Krake. "And we've just looked in on the patient, Sue-ling and I, and he's doing fine."

"That's good," Francis Krake muttered, suddenly brought back to his loss. The glow on Sue-ling's face was a wound in his heart. He looked at her, trying to keep his face emotionless—or even happy for her, though that was hard. He did not want to see her like this, or to think of her being fiercely protective of Sork—or Kiri—or Kiri/Sork, whatever they might call this collective new person. He did not want to dwell on the picture of Sue-ling changing him, doing bedpan duty, hovering over him as he opened his eyes for the first time. . . .

He was, in short, jealous. He said, unaware of how revealing his words were, "I suppose he won't be out of danger for a long time, though—putting two brains in one skull—I guess it will be a miracle if he finally survives."

Sue-ling looked at him sharply. "Miracle? We don't need any miracle, Francis. He's going to make it."

He shrugged, unwilling to say more. She studied him for a moment before speaking. "Francis," she said, "that was an unusual operation, all right, but I had two unusual subjects. You know that Sork and Kiri were twins." He nodded curtly. "What you probably didn't know was that once they were what people used to call Siamese twins. They were a kind of genetic accident—not startlingly rare, but not common, either. Before they were born the doctors discovered they were physically linked together. In the old days, babies like that went to term and were born that way. Sometimes they had to go through their whole lives joined together—sometimes as circus freaks! But we're better than that now, of course. The Turtles helped. Their memmie doctors did some intrauterine surgery, separating the two babies while they still had a chance to develop normally."

"Normally," Krake repeated. His tone was neutral, but Sue-ling did not miss the sneer in the word itself.

She flared up. "You're damn right they were normal! Considering what they could have been, anyway. They were joined at the brain, Francis! They had only one brain between them. The surgeons had to separate them by cutting through the corpus callosum."

She had his full attention now. "Corpus—?"

"Callosum. It's the thing that links the right and left halves of the brain together. They did the operation while the embryos were still plastic, and so there was time for each to develop another half-brain to replace what was missing. But still—" She bit her lip. "You know there are differences between left- and right-brain types? That's what happened to them . . . only now the two halves are back together again. Francis, they won't only recover—they'll be better than ever, because they'll be one single person again!"

He looked at her in bafflement. It was all too much for him to take in.

"I hope so," he said. "I mean, I'm sure you're right, Sue-ling."

He stopped there, tugging fretfully at his beard, trying to think of something else to say. Congratulations? I hope the two of you—or the three of you?—will be very happy?

It was too much for him. He stood up, waving Daisy Fay to take over the board for him. "Call me when we've got some piloting to do," he said, to no one in particular, and lurched away toward his own room. He was too full of his own woes to notice the way Moon Bunderan was following him with her eyes, watchful, sympathetic . . . and confident.

In the great many-voiced rejoicing song of the aiodoi, as they welcomed thf one who returned, there was a special joy for the beings of Earth. Those beings did not know how they sang, nor did they hear the songs of others. They had never learned to listen, as the Taurs had long ago, but such learning could not be far away. And so the aiodoi listened with delight to another faint, faroff song from that tiny, distant planet. It was not even altogether a real song. It was hardly more than a verse, a fragment; but even that the all-hearing aiodoi heard, and welcomed.

"I'll tell you what Paul Davies says about those 'other universes' in the Everett many-worlds interpretation. He says that when we open the box on Schrodinger's cat what we find out isn't whether or not the cat died, but only which universe we are in.

"Remember, I am speaking of universes. Not just local

groups, like a galaxy or a cluster, but everythings. With their own spaces and dimensions and times. Every one of those universes is all the things any universe is. In their 'real time' the vacuum fluctuations will produce all the things any universe can exhibit—stars and metagalaxies and 'people'—oh, an immense number of people, or so one would like to believe, each of them of a kind but different from all others of its kind because they are individuals; each kind different from all the other kinds, but like them, too.

"At least in one respect they will all be alike.

"Eventually they will all die. And, sooner or later, so will their universes."

And the returning aiodos sang:

"And we will await them when they do."