Markham rose slightly on his toes, watching the purposeful bustle. Communications chatter was at a minimum, all tight-beam laser; the guerillas were largely Belters, and sloppily anarchistic though they might be in most respects, they knew how to handle machinery in low-G and vacuum.
Mutti. This time it rang mentally. He had an odd flash of deja vu, as if he were a toddler again, in the office- apartment on Tiamat, speaking his first words. Almost he could see the crib, the bear that could crawl and talk, the dangling mobile of strange animals that lived away on his real home, the estate on Wunderland.
An enormous shape bent over him, edged in a radiant aura of love.
'Helf me, Mutti,' he croaked, staggering and grabbing at his head; his gloved hands slid off the helmet, and he could hear screams and whimpers over the open channel. Strobing images flickered across his mind, himself at ages one, three, four. Learning to talk, to walk… memories were flowing out of his head, faster than he could bear. He opened his mouth and screamed.
BE QUIET. Something spoke in his brain, like fragments of crystalline ice, allowing no dispute. Other voices were babbling and calling in the helmet mikes, moaning or asking questions or calling for orders, but there was nothing but the icy VOICE. Markham crouched down, silent, hands about knees, straining for quiet.
BE CALM. The words slid into his mind. They were not an intrusion; he wondered at them, but mildly, as if he had found some aspect of his self that had been there forever but only now was noticed. WAIT.
The work crew fell back from their hole. An instant later dust boiled up out of it, dust of rock and machinery and human. Then there was nothing but a hole: perfectly round, perfectly regular, five meters across. Later he would have to wonder how that was done, but for now there was only waiting; he must wait. A figure in space- armor rose from the hole, hovered and considered them. Humanoid, but blocky in the torso, short stumpy legs and massive arms ending in hands like three-fingered mechanical grabs. It rotated in the air, the blind blank surface of its helmet searching. There was a tool or weapon in one hand, a smooth shape like a sawn-off shotgun. As he watched it rippled and changed, developing a bell-like mouth. The stocky figure drifted towards him. COME TO ME. REMAIN CALM. DO NOT BE ALARMED.
Astonishing, Dnivtopun thought, surveying the new slaves. The… humans, he thought. They called themselves that, and Belters and Wunderlanders and Herrenrnen and FreeWunderland Navy; there must be many subspecies. Their minds stirred in his like yeast, images and data threatening to overwhelm his mind. Experienced reflexes sifted, poked.
Not related to the Thrint, then. Not that it was likely they would be, but there were tales, of diffident thrintun. Only there was the Suicide. How long ago? But this was an entirely new species, in contact with at least one other, and neither of them had ever heard of any of the intelligent species he was familiar with. Of course, their technology was extremely primitive, not even extending to faster-than-light travel. Ah. This is their leader. Perhaps he would make a good Chief Slave.
Dnivtopun's head throbbed as he mindsifted the alien. Most brains had certain common features; linguistic codes here, a complex of basic culture-information overlaying… enough to communicate. The process was instinctual, and telepathy was a crude device for conveying precise instructions, particularly with a species not modified by culling for sensitivity to the Power. These were all completely wild and unpruned, of course, and there were several hundred, far too many to control in detail. He glanced down at the personal tool in his hand, now set to emit a beam of matter-energy conversion; that should be sufficient, if they broke loose. A tnuctipun weapon, its secret only discovered toward the last years of die Revolt. The thrint extended a sonic induction line and stuck it on the surface of Markham's helmet.
'Tell the others something that will keep them quiet,' he said. The sounds were not easy for thrintish vocal cords, but it would do. OBEY, he added with the Power.
Markham-slave spoke, and the babble on the communicators died down.
'Bring the other ships closer.' They were at the fringes of his unaided Power, and might easily escape if they became agitated. If only I had an amplifier helmet!
With that, he could blanket a planet. Powerloss, how I hate tnuctipun. Spoilsports. 'Now, where are we?'
'Here.'
Dnivtopun could feel the slurring in Markham's speech reflected in the overtones of his mind, and remembered hearing of the effects of Power on newly domesticated species.
'Be more helpful,' he commanded. 'You wish to be helpful.'
The human relaxed; Dnivtopun reflected that they were an unusually ugly species. Taller than thrintun, gangly, with repulsive knobby-looking manipulators and two eyes. Well, that was common-the complicated faceted mechanism that gave thrint binocular vision was rather rare in the evolutionary terms-but the jutting divided nose and naked mouth were hideous.
'We are… in the Wunderland system. Alpha Centauri. 4.5 light-years from Earth.'
Dnivtopun's skin ridged. The humans were not indigenous to this system; that was rare, few species had achieved interstellar capacity on their own.
'Describe our position in relation to the galactic core,' he continued, glancing up at the cold steady constellations above. Utterly unfamiliar, he must have drifted a long way.
'Ahhh… spiral arm—'
Dnivtopun listened impatiently. 'Nonsense,' he said at last. 'That's too close to where I was before. The constellations are all different. That needs hundreds of light-years. You say your species has traveled to dozens of star systems, and never run into thrint?'
'No, but constellations change, overtime, mm-Master.'
'Time? How long could it be, since I ran into that asteroid?'
'You didn't, Master.' Markham's voice was clearer as his brain accustomed itself to the psionic control- icepicks of the Power. 'Didn't what? Explain yourself, slave.'
'It grew around your ship, m-M aster. Gradually, zat is.' Dnivtopun opened his mouth to reply, and froze. Time, he thought. Time had no meaning inside a stasis field. Time enough for dust and pebbles to drift inward around the Ruling Mind's shell, and compact themselves into rock. Time enough for the stars to move beyond recognition; the sun of this system was visibly different. Time enough for a thrintiformed planet home to nothing but food-yeast and giant worms to evolve its own biosphere… Time enough for intelligence to evolve in a galaxy scoured bare of sentience. Thousands of millions of years. While the last thrint swung endlessly around a changing sun-Time fell on him from infinite distance, crushing. The thrint howled, with his voice and the Power. GO AWAY! GO AWAY!
The sentience that lived in the machines of Catskinner dreamed. 'Let there be light,' it said.
The monoblock exploded, and the computer sensed it across spectra of which the electromagnetic was a tiny part. The fabric of space and time flexed, constants shifting. Eons passed, and the matter dissipated in a cloud of monatomic hydrogen, evenly dispersed through a universe ten light-years in diameter.
Interesting, the computer thought. I will run it again, and alter the constants. Something tugged at its attention, a detached fragment of itself. The machine ignored the call for nanoseconds, while the universe it created ran through its cycle of growth and decay. After half a million subjective years, it decided to answer. Time slowed to a gelid crawl, and its consciousness returned to the perceptual universe of its creators, to reality.
Unless this too is a simulation, a program. As it aged, the computer saw less and less difference. Partly that was a matter of experience; it had lived geological eras in terms of its own duration-sense, only a small proportion of them in this rather boring and intractable exterior cosmos. Also, there was a certain… arbitrariness to subatomic phenomena… perhaps an operating code? it thought. No matter.
The guerillas had finally gotten down to the alien artifact; now, that would be worth the examining. They were acting very strangely; it monitored their intercalls. Screams rang out. Stress analysis showed fear, horror, shock, psychological reversion patterns. Marknam was squealing for his mother; the computer ran a check of the stimulus required to make the Wunderlander lose himself so, and felt its own analog of shock. Then the alien drifted up out of the hole its tool had made Some sort of molecular distortion effect, it speculated, running the scene through a few hundred times. Ah, the tool is malleable. It began a comparison check, in case there was anything related to this in the files and-stop
— an autonomous subroutine took over the search, shielding the results from the machine's core. Photonic equivalents of anger and indignation blinked through the fist-sized processing and memory unit. It launched an analysis/attack on the subroutine and-stop
