The Singers of Time

4

Sork Quintero stared around in astonishment. Every Turtle he could see was groveling on the ground, all of them keening together in that awful collective moan of misery. Even more surprising was what he saw happening only a few meters away. There a great Taur had lumbered over to lower himself gently to his knees beside a grieving Turtle. Amazingly, the Taur was stretching out one hard, three-fingered paw to touch the Turtle's carapace in sympathy. . . .

Even more amazingly, the Turtle was allowing it.

Sork turned to his brother in bafflement. "What's happening to them, Kiri? They act like they're all going insane!"

Kiri Quintero gazed at his twin. His expression was of a peaceful sorrow, a feeling too immensely sad to be felt as pain. But there was something else in his expression, too, and it annoyed Sork to recognize it. It was pity. Pity for Sork himself. Kiri was sorry for his brother.

"Damn it, Kiri!" Sork exploded. "Don't start that I-know-something-you-don't! Tell me what's going on?"

His twin spread his hands. "I would if I could, Sork," he said reasonably. "I can't. I only know that it's a terrible tragedy, and it's happening on the home world of the Turtles."

"But that's more than seventy light-years away!"

Kiri sighed patiently. "Don't you learn anything from those old lectures? It's all the same, Sork. Time is an illusion."

Sork groaned. More double-talk! "Kiri," he said warningly, "I can put up with your foggy talk most of the time, but what's going on now is serious. Look at those guys!" A couple of the moaning, writhing Turtles were levering themselves ponderously to their feet, trudging slowly and hopelessly away toward the Turtle quarters. "Something big is going on, and I want to know what it is!"

Kiri looked at his brother in surprised understanding. "You're enjoying this," he said.

Sork shook his head, scowling. "No, of course I'm not— Well. Maybe I am, in a way. If whatever this is is bad for the Turtles it might be really good for us. But how can I tell, when I don't have any idea what's driving them so bugs? Anyway," he said, "let's find out where they're going and see what they do."

But as he turned his brother put his hand on his arm. "What is it, Kiri?" Sork demanded sharply.

His twin said, "Sue-ling should be through with her surgery by now. We ought to get her and take her with us."

Sork gritted his teeth. He knew how deeply he loved Sue-ling Quong . . . but why was it always his brother who remembered to consider her feelings?

At first, Sue-ling missed the full impact of what was happening. She was under the disk, and her mind was fully occupied with the work she was doing. When Sue-ling Quong worked under the memo disk, her scalpels went exactly where she wanted them, she could read every sign of color or flaccid-ity or size of every organ like words on a printed page, the location of every blood vessel was clear in her mind, the whole opened body of every patient was as familiar to her as the palm of her own hand. Dr. Sue-ling Quong was a first-class surgeon by anyone's standards. She had proved that at the university medical school, before the whole university was declared obsolete and terminated. But under the memo disk, she was more than that. She was superhuman.

There were two things wrong with that. The first was that when she came out from under the disk, she had no memory of what she had done while it was implanted. All she knew of her own skill was what she saw, later on, in the taped records, and then, as, wondering, she watched herself on the screen, she could only marvel at how much better she was than she had ever been before.

The other thing was worse: it was her realization that all her long years of training were a waste of time. Sue-ling had bitterly opposed closing down the medical school, but she had lost the fight. Schools were now a frivolity. Her decision to come to work in the Turtle compound had been a last resort. She might not have come simply because that exciting new man, Kiri Quintero, had urged it, but there was a more important reason. She was determined to find out just what it was like to be a memmie. She had found out, all right. And now she had to concede that it had made eminent practical sense; for with the disk implanted any warm human body could be as good a surgeon as she.

She instructed the nurses to close and, retreating to the door of the operating theater, reached up and removed the memo disk. Then everything swam around her. At once there was that terrible thudding headache, and she saw, without pleasure, that the nurses were nodding to her with admiration as they readied the patient to the recovery room.

The human administrator of the hospital was standing in the doorway. "He'll be fine," she said. "You did a great job."

"Thanks," Sue-ling said. And then, looking around the room, "What's going on, Lucille? I thought there were some Turtle observers here when I went under the disk."

The administrator said, "Oh, you wouldn't have known, would you? There was some sort of announcement about half an hour ago, and every Turtle around went racing off. Funny thing. I've never seen them show what I could really call emotion before, but this time they were really spooked. There's a meeting going on right now, matter of fact." She turned to go. "Anyway," she called over her shoulder, "your patient is going to get well now."

Sue-ling nodded ruefully. No one could object to being told she had done a good job—even if she didn't really know what the operation had been.

As she came out of the surgery she found the twins waiting at her door. They were looking out over the compound, and for a moment she could not tell which was which. Then they turned to greet her, both faces brightening at the sight of her, and then there was no doubt. Excitement, worry—that was certainly Sork. And the serenity on the face of the other twin belonged, beyond doubt, to Kiri. It was Kiri who spoke first. "We thought we'd take in that Turtle meeting," he said amiably. "They're really all shook up about it, whatever it is, so let's go on over to the arena."

Sork was moody again on the way over, gazing irritably out at the always present trainloads of materials going toward the lifts of the space ladder. "Look at that," he said jealously. "You know what those big chunks of structural steel are? I do. They're pieces of rocket launch towers—human launch towers."

"Which nobody uses any more, naturally," Kiri pointed out blandly.

"But we could use them! We did, once. Human beings used to go into space on their own. Now we're not allowed to any more!"

Sue-ling said, "Of course we are, Sork. Some of us are, anyway."

"Sure—a very few—as passengers! On Turtle ships!"

"But the Turtle ships are so much better," she said reasonably. "There isn't any need for ours."

He glared at her, and might have answered with words he would regret, but he was spared. They were at the Turtle amphitheater and the time for conversation had run out.

And—thought Sue-ling—just about in time. If only Sork wouldn't squabble so much—

Or if only Kiri were Sork.

Sue-ling sighed. One day soon, she knew, she would have to make up her mind which of the brothers she was going to cleave to, as the old people put it so strangely, and which she would shun.

But she planned to put that day off as long as she could.

When Turtles met formally, the place where they gathered was an arena, a little bit like an audience chamber, something like the great hall of a temple. The place was built to the heroic Turtle scale, and it was filled with a seething, muttering crowd of the aliens. Sue-ling saw that the areas where their memmies were allowed to observe were only sparsely occupied. Most people didn't care what the Turtles did, Sue-ling thought—probably because it was so hard to tell what was on their minds anyway.

She led the brothers to seats in the human area. Those seats were a concession to the short size of human beings— and to the fact that human beings needed something to sit down on. Turtles never sat. They couldn't. Their anatomies did not bend at the hips. But the presence of seats was the only concession the Turtle designers had made to the needs of their vassals. The steps and the platforms were Turde-sized, far taller than any normal human being would have designed. Altogether, the vast, chill cavern of a room was overwhelming. The walls were immense gray granite blocks, and they climbed higher than a human found comfortable to the dark-shadowed vault of the roof. A pair of massive square pillars rose to flank the tall dais where the leaders would appear, and between them hung a gigantic, dimly glowing image of the Turtle deity, a hundred times the size of the little emblems that were all over the compound.

Sue-ling gazed at the image with renewed interest. The Turtle deity was always represented as a wide-winged female. It was the only female Turtle any of them had ever seen. Real Turtles—the male ones, anyway—never had wings, she thought. Why did they show her like that? And she was depicted as descending from the sun (but not at all Earth's sun— too dim and too reddish in color) to bring new life for them.

It was a pity, she thought with detached interest, that the Turtles were so unwilling to talk about their origins or their home planet—especially about their religion. If religion was what it was. . . .

But then, so much about the Turtles was still a mystery.

Sue-ling felt very strongly that the coming of the Turtles had been a blessing for the human race. Well, she usually felt that way—except when she had been listening to Sork Quintero. Sork was one of the few who doubted that.

When the Turtles first showed up, a hundred years earlier, the human race had been angry, belligerent, frightened— mostly frightened—at the sudden presence of these creatures with better science and unfathomable plans.

Yet the Turtles had seemed to know just how to quiet human fears. Sue-ling blinked as it came to her just how that had been possible: It was people like Francis Krake, captured and carried away for study, from whom the Turtles had learned what to do. Undoubtedly Krake had told the Turtles enough about humanity to pave their way. So when the Tur-des at last showed themselves to the human race they made their intentions clear at once. They came as traders, they proclaimed in their radio broadcasts from orbit. And trade they did. Wonderful trade, that benefited all of humanity. Without compulsion. Without threat. The Turtles carried their way simply by making humanity offers it could not refuse.

She looked around her curiously. No Turtles had appeared yet on the dais. Next to her, Sork was saying to his brother, "On the tape they were talking about something they call the 'anthropic principle,' Kiri—ever hear of it? I don't understand it very well, but it has something to do with the fact that our universe is exactly what we need to permit human life—and, I guess, Turtle life and Taur life, too."

"So? We're here in this universe, aren't we? Naturally it's just right for us."

Sork was shaking his head. "No, it's more complicated than that. See, the universe could have been quite different, they say."

"Shut up and sit down," his brother commanded. "The Turtles are getting ready to do something."

The aiodoi did not laugh, but they could be amused. As they heard the song of the Earth scientist who was almost an aiodos they might have smiled tenderly, for the burden of the song was so sweet, and so touching, and so childishly, basically wrong.

"Today we're going to take a little excursion into history. We're going to go pretty far back, in fact as far back as the beginning of our universe.

"To make it easier to comprehend, we're going to do it in three stages, in the same way that human history is handled. As you undoubtedly remember from your humanities classes, human history is divided into three parts—prehistory, ancient history, modern history—and we're going to make the same three divisions in the history of our entire universe.

"I have to caution you first that this does not square with the Hawking notion of imaginary time and endless universes popping up and dissolving. It doesn't contradict it, either. But for this session we will think only of the universe that we think of as beginning with the Big Bang.

"In this schema, what we will call modern universal history starts about fifteen billion years ago, which is to say, about one second after the Big Bang itself.

"By then everything is pretty well decided. Protons and electrons have already formed; the matter-antimatter mutual annihilation has taken place, leaving the excess of what we call normal matter that we observe when we look around us. All that happens after that first second is that nuclear processes begin to happen, plasmas condense into galaxies and stars, planets are formed and, after a while, living things begin to evolve—just routine stuff. The modern history of the universe isn't really that interesting. It's all cut and dried, you see; the time when all sorts of 'decisions' are up for grabs is before the end of that first second.

"So let's forget about those fifteen billion years of modern universal history, and get to the interesting stuff. We'll do that in our next session, because I've got plans for the rest of this one. Take out your pens and papers, please, because I'm throwing you a quiz."

And the aiodoi sang on, almost laughing at the sweet, sad, time bound creatures who believed in such a word as "history."