The Singers of Time

5

As soon as her mother was asleep Moon stole out of the house and moved silently toward the pen that held Thrayl.

He was alone there. Moon's father had taken him from the common pen with the cows as soon as the Taur's budding horns began to develop. The rest of the breeding herd were sighing and stirring in their own pen on the far side of the thornbush barrier, but Moon slipped past without waking them.

In the light of the full moon the girl could see the sleeping Taur. Thrayl was lying in a corner on a nest of redfruit branches, his great horned head pillowed on one arm. In sleep his broad face was as innocent as any baby's.

"Thrayl," she whispered.

At once the great eyes opened, fastening on her. He rose with that quick Taur grace, the crooked litde legs moving as smoothly as any dancer's. "Moon," he rumbled, almost purring affectionately—the Earth word came humming from his lips, like the mewing of a cat. She saw, with a poignant mixture of sadness and delight, that his horns were brighter in the moonlight, lovely with rainbow hues. The horns dipped as Thrayl bowed his huge head in greeting.

"Thrayl," she whispered again. Her voice was shaking, but determined all the same. "Thrayl, it's time for us to go now."

"Go." He mewed the English word softly. "Moon? Do you do well to do this?"

"Yes! I do very well, Thrayl, because I'm going to save you!" At least for a little while, she added bitterly to herself. She took one warm, solid arm to hurry him along, and he let her guide him, patiently agreeing. She unlocked the gate with her penlight and hurried him through the moonlit hedge. The air was cool and still, and Thrayl's warm odor filled her nostrils—a little like the aroma of new hay when it was cut for bedding in the stalls, a little like the scent of pines in the mountains. It was his very own, the good odor she remembered from the times she used to bathe him, when he was still a tiny calf.

Beyond the hedge they came into the redfruit grove where they used to play. Those trees were old now, gnarled and dying, weeds grown tall in the shadows under them. Thrayl's horns glowed brightly in the darkness under the trees, almost bright enough to show their way—or to betray them, Moon thought, if anyone in the house should wake and come looking for them. They walked more slowly there, close together but not touching. She was oddly shy of physical contact with him. Remembering how she used to pet him, she could hardly bear to touch him now.

He stopped short as they approached Moon's workshed, where she cared for injuries to the livestock—and where, sometimes, her brothers had dehorned and castrated young bulls.

She thought she understood what was in his mind. "No, Thrayl," she explained in annoyance. "Don't be afraid. I'm not going to do—that—to you. I've just got to remove your brand—or, better, change it to something else. Do you understand? It's just in case anyone sees us."

He stood silent, his head swaying as his sweetly glowing horns thrust this way and that, listening to his songs. In the Taur tongue he rumbled softly, "The song is not of fear."

"What then, Thrayl?"

"The song is of a terrible loss," he hummed.

She peered at him with sudden fright. Standing in the shadow of the twisted old redfruit trees, lit with the glow of his own horns, he looked so wonderful and splendid that she was trembling with love and worry. "What loss, Thrayl?" she whispered. "Have I lost something?"

His huge hand pressed her shoulder, hard and reassuring. "The song is not of humans," he said. "The song is full of faraway pain."

She sighed in relief. "Oh, it's just that Turtle thing that had you so worried today. Well," she said practically, "we can't deal with things that are far away, can we? But we've got to get moving. Mother locked the truck, so we're going to have to do a lot of walking before daylight, Thrayl. But I'll be with you."

The great, hard hand stroked her head. "I sing of being with you," he rumbled. "But I sing too of terrible loss and pain."

Beyond the hedge they came into the redfruit grove where they used to play. Past their best years, some of the trees were gnarled and dying, with weeds grown tall in the shadows under them.

Moon led the way by the light of Thrayl's horns. They were walking more slowly now, close together but not touching.

Moon said suddenly, "Thrayl? Your horns are so bright now."

"Bright," he rumbled, solemnly agreeing.

"Do they—do they feel any different?"

He was silent for a moment, considering. "Power," he said at last. "Ears when they shine. Eyes when they shine."

"You mean you, well, hear and see through them?"

"No," he said flady. "Only the songs. Nothing on Earth— only the great sad pain from far away."

"Where?" she whispered. "How far away?"

"Nowhere far," he said mournfully. "No far, no when. Nowhere."

Then he stopped short, the horns casting this way and that.

Alarm suddenly flooded through Moon Bunderan. "What is it, Thrayl?" she asked. "Is there someone there?"

"Friend. Yes."

"A million miles away?" she asked bitterly—worriedly.

"No. A good smallsong, Moon, but also sad—and, yes, very near."

Half a kilometer away, Captain Francis Krake was sleeping badly that night.

It wasn't that his mission had failed. Indeed, he had met with more success than he could have hoped for. Certainly he had found the place where the little town of Portales used to be, though it was only the weed-ground mound in the middle of the old courthouse square that proved he was in the right place. Nothing else survived. No buildings—unless you counted something that looked curiously like a great bomb shelter, in the general area of the old college. Only that, and the stones of an old burying ground between the redfruit groves.

Krake had not lingered in the old cemetery. He did not want to find a stone with a name he might know. So he had made a quick trip to town to call the pretty memmie doctor back in Kansas City—no news; but at least no bad news—and then back to his campsite.

The trip was a waste, he told himself. But what difference did it make? He decided to start back the next morning. There was nothing to keep him here any longer.

He had stopped to rent a video set in the town, more to help him waste this wasted time than because of any curiosity about what was going on in this strange, foreign, human world that was no longer his own. But then he had been caught by the news stories. They had upset him. Turtles failing at their jobs, neglecting their assignments—total confusion, it seemed to Krake. And what wild rumors!

Could it be true that the Mother had somehow disappeared?

The thought was incredible. Krake tried to imagine the feelings of the Turtles if anything happened to their Mother. Yes, of course, sooner or later even a Mother would die— though the Turtles had never been willing to speak much on that subject, at least they had admitted that. But nothing would change, really. The death of a Mother was a time of great, complex ritual. One of the nymphs would be allowed to mature—a male would be selected to father the next brood— and the Turtle ownership of the galaxy would go on unperturbed once more.

That would always go on. Nothing, Krake told himself, would ever interfere with Turtle commerce . . . and wondered whether the thought made him pleased or depressed.

He did not really want to think about the Turtles.

He wished them no particular ill—but no particular well, either. True, they had not harmed him in any physical way. Indeed, they had certainly saved his life, for that had surely been lost on that rubber raft in the Coral Sea if their scout ship had not come along. But the price he had had to pay was high.

Every night since then, Francis Krake had gone to sleep with the consciousness of guilt on his mind.

He turned over, trying to put these matters out of his thoughts. There was no reason, he told himself, why he should be wakeful. If he had been disappointed at finding so little left of the town that had been his home, he had had no real hope of finding more than that. And he lacked nothing for his comfort. The rented camping gear was high-tech stuff that made him—at least, that should have made him—as cozy in the tent as he had ever been in his ship. The pop-up tent's memory fabric had immediately assumed the shape best fitted for his comfort. He had cooked a meal with self-heating pans, and if he had also built a fire outside the tent, that was more for the pleasure of looking at it than for any need. There was an incinerating toilet, and a thermo-constant blanket that made night chill irrelevant.

Moreover, you didn't need a memo disk to operate any of it.

Fretfully, Krake scratched the side of the tent. Where his touch stirred to life the phosphors built into the fabric of the tent, a gentle glow sprang up, softly illuminating the inside of the tent.

He slid his feet into his boots, rose and stepped outside, looking fretfully around. A gentle sighing of breeze in the redfruits, a faint purring from the stream down the hill—apart from that the woods were silent. Overhead the Moon was ivory-bright. Squinting, Krake thought he saw a glint of metal in the Moon's lower hemisphere—was it, he wondered, the human Moon base that the Turtles said had been abandoned there? It was still wonderful to Krake to think that his own race had somehow stretched out into space on its own, with no help from Turtles or anyone else—but, of course, that was all history. There was nothing left of that human presence in space. Krake knew that once there had been all sorts of human-built communications and surveillance satellites in orbit —but the Turtles had removed most of them, because they endangered the elevator cables of their skyhook.

Given a choice, Krake told himself justly, between a scattering of satellites and the entry to the galaxy that the Skyhook offered, obviously the Skyhook was a better bargain. But, all the same, he wished something important still remained in space that was entirely, and independently, human.

He craned his neck toward the south and east, hoping for a glimpse of the Turde orbital station at the top of the Skyhook, where his crew were waiting for their next tour of duty. He couldn't see a thing. He knew, though, that the Turtles had their own remote orbiters and that they could certainly see him—see his campfire, at least; just as they had seen his downed plane and life raft, and so much else, all those years ago.

He stirred resdessly. Sleep was far away. The wind was picking up, and the Moon was disappearing into a growing mass of cloud. He wondered if it was going to rain, after all. There were sounds in the brush all around him—

Krake froze, bolt upright, listening.

Not all those sounds were the wind! He fumbled in his pack for his flashlamp and turned it on, looking toward the stirrings in the brush.

Two figures were coming out of the woods along the stream, and one of them was certainly not human.

Krake listened intendy, ready for whatever might be coming. They said there wasn't any crime any more on Earth, but he had never believed that . . . certainly did not want to risk having one of those rare crimes happen to him. . . .

"Captain Krake?" It was the girl's voice, the one he had met along the road. "Captain Krake? It's me, Moon Bunderan. Will you help us, please?"

The Taur was deep in meditation, paying no attention to the talk of the humans. Krake crouched on one side of his little campfire, staring across the flames at the girl who looked so much like the woman he had left behind so long ago. He was shaking his head in astonishment at what she was asking. "But I can't take you anywhere, Moon," he said. "Where could we go? I have no home here on Earth. You certainly don't want to go with me on my ship, do you?"

"I do! do! Please take us anywhere where Thrayl will be safe," she begged.

He grimaced, half amused at her obstinate assurance, much more than half determined to save her from a serious mistake. "You wouldn't say that if you knew what it was like in a waveship, Moon. It's terribly lonesome. There'd just be me and my crew—no," he said emphatically, to keep her from arguing, "that's out of the question."

"Then take me to the orbit station with you!"

He said reasonably, "That's no good, either. The Turtles won't let you stay on their orbiter, Moon. Even if you got there, they'll just notify your parents, and then they'll come after you. And I won't be staying there myself; I'm going up to my ship as soon as my crew's ready, and then—off. Somewhere. Wherever there's a job for me."

"But they'll hurt Thrayl," she sobbed.

"You told me yourself that he doesn't mind—"

"I do! I mind terribly."

He sighed. Had there ever been a time when he could talk easily to a young woman? If so, that time was long gone. He did his best: "You don't know what you're asking, Moon. Are you prepared to leave your family permanently? Once you get in a starship you've left everybody you know on Earth forever."

She looked puzzled in the light of the fire. "Forever? But can't I come back to Earth?"

"To Earth, yes," he said bitterly. "I've just done that. But it's not the same Earth you come back to, Moon. Time dilation makes sure of that."

"I know all that, and I don't care! They don't need me any more. My brothers will stay on the ranch, that's the only thing they really care about—except going into town to look for girls. And I'm Thrayl's only friend. If I don't save him, who will?"

The girl thought for a moment, then added honesdy, "I don't want to stay here anyway. I want a bigger life than this, Captain Krake."

"Bigger how?"

"I don't know that, exactly," she admitted. "I just know that it's time for me to go."

He gazed at her helplessly. He could see nothing but difficulties, though he found himself longing to help. "I guess," he said at last, "I might be able to figure out a way to take you as far as the Turtle compound at Kansas City—"

"Oh, yes! Thank you! That would be wonderful!" At least for a beginning, Moon added to herself.

He gave her a suspicious look. "But I don't see how we could really get away even with that, because we can't take commercial air transportation," he pointed out. "If your family knows you've run off, they'll have reported it. The authorities will be watching for you and Thrayl."

"There must be some other way!"

"I don't know of any."

"Sure you do. Your car." She pointed triumphantly to the three-wheeler pulled up under the trees. "We could drive the car to this space ladder."

Krake stared at the huge Taur. Even squatting on the ground in his "listening to the songs" posture, he was almost as tall as Krake himself. "What, the three of us in that little thing? Including him ? It would take us days to get there if we drove!"

She said sturdily, "That's no problem. I can drive, too, so we can spell each other. Go straight through. And Thrayl can curl up in the back—we could cover him with your blankets, maybe."

"My camping gear has to go in the back!"

But Krake knew it was a losing argument for, when push came to shove, he could not resist those eyes. And what, he asked himself, were a tent and some odds and ends worth, after all? Why not just abandon them here, forfeiting the deposits? The money didn't matter.

And as to the things themselves, he would never need them again. Not in space. Not at all, unless he ever returned permanently to Earth . . . and Francis Krake had long decided that that he would never do.

The Earth singer sang on, trapped in his error, unable to sing the truth that even the error revealed:

"You remember our last class, I hope. In it we said that we are going to divide the history of the universe—our own personal universe, that is, the one we can experience, at least in theory—like the history of the human race, into three eras: Modern, Ancient and Prehistoric. We've already dealt with the modern era, which is to say the part beginning one second after the Big Bang.

"Now let's look at Ancient History. Don't get hung up on proportions, though. In human terms, Ancient History goes back several times as far as modern. That isn't true of the ancient history of our universe. It lasted only a little less than that one second.

"Even so, an awful lot of things happened in that second.

We can divide even the Ancient History of the universe into several eras. Ancient History starts at ten to the minus-43d power seconds, and the first part of it is the Grand Unified Theory, or GUT, Era. That goes from ten to the minus 43 to ten to the minus 37 seconds, which is to say that it lasts altogether for a little less than 1 divided by 10,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 seconds—that is, it is just under one ondecillionth of a second.

"That doesn't sound like much. Well, it wasn't. But it was enough to set the foundations for the Grand Unified Theory, and that's quite a lot.

"After the GUT era, things happened a little slower. Then we have the era when the hadrons begin to form—that runs to about a millionth of a second, which doesn't sound like much, either, but it's a lot more than an ondecillionth—and then the considerably longer era when the leptons begin to form, which uses up the rest of that first second of Ancient History. That's not too interesting, either.

"It is the GUT era, and the time before it, where the big events happen.

"The GUT era of ancient universal history is a time of very high energies and consequently of very heavy particles. It is also the time when space itself can be said to begin to exist.

"Now, some of you may be raising an eyebrow at that. You may have some dumb questions stirring around in your mind. For instance, how can there be anything before there was space for it to be in, you may ask.

"Let me show you why that's a dumb question. Spacc implies some kind of structure. The smallest structures we know, and we think probably the smallest structures that exist, are at the Planck length, which is somewhere around 10 to the minus 35th meters.

"But space does have a structure. It isn't a seamless nothingness; it is something like a collection of tiny, Planck-length cells. Sometimes we call that basic, underlying structure of

everything 'the spacetime foam,' because at those very early epochs we can't even distinguish the dimension of time from the spatial dimensions.

"So that's the GUT era. It is the time of ultraheavy particles and spacetime foam; and that's all we need to say just now about Ancient History."

And the aiodoi sang sweet and complimentary songs of how pretty that song was, as a human might of a two-year-old's first attempt at carrying a tune ... and how childishly wrong.