the dying mech into using its last resources to build an airlock bridge, they boarded Harry’s station, saving him from asphyxiation while he sprawled on the deck, stunned and unconscious.
The mech then expired, contributing its mass as temporary fertilizer to this matter-parched desert.
“We never could figure out where we were, or why it took us here,” Dwer explained, while wolfing down a triple helping of Harry’s rations. “The machine never spoke, though it seemed to understand when I talked in GalTwo.”
Harry watched the boy, fascinated by Dwer’s mixture of the savage and gentleman. He never denied being a sooner — descended from criminal colonists who had abandoned technology over two centuries ago. Yet, he could read half a dozen Galactic languages, and clearly grasped some implications of his situation.
“When the mech took us aboard, near the red giant star, we thought we’d had it. The scrolls say machines that live in deep space can be dangerous, and sometimes enemies to our kind of life. But this one made a shelter for us, improved our air, and fixed the recycler. It even asked us where we wanted to go!”
“I thought you said it never spoke,” Harry pointed out.
Rety, the teenager with the scarred cheek, shook her head.
“One of its drones came aboard with a piece of metal that had words scratched on. I dunno why it used that way to talk, since we had a little tutor unit that could’ve spoken to it. But at least the robot seemed to understand when we answered.”
“And what did you say?”
Both humans replied at the same time.
Dwer: “I asked it to take us home.”
Rety: “I told it to bring us to the most important guys around!”
They looked at each other, a smoldering argument continuing in their eyes.
Harry pondered for a long moment, before finally nodding with understanding.
“Those sound like incompatible commands. To you or me, it would call for making a choice between two options, or negotiating a compromise. But I doubt that’s what a machine would do. My best guess is that it tried to combine and optimize both imperatives at the same time. Of course its definition of terms might be quite different from what you had in mind at the time.”
The young humans looked confused, so he shook his head.
“All I can tell for sure is that you were definitely not heading back toward your sooner colony when I found your trail.”
Rety nodded with satisfaction. “Ha!”
“Nor were you aimed at Earth, or a base of the Great Institutes, or any of the mighty powers of the Five Galaxies.”
“Then where—”
“In fact, the mech was taking you — at lethal risk to itself — into dimensions and domains so obscure they are hardly named. It seemed to be following the cold trail of two—”
A warning chime interrupted Harry. The signal that another of Wer’Q’quinn’s little camera packages lay just ahead.
“Excuse me awhile, will you?” he asked the humans, who seemed to understand that he had a job to do. In fact, even Rety now treated him with respect that seemed a little exaggerated, coming from a member of Harry’s patron race.
He got busy, using the station’s manipulators to recover the final probe, then spraying it with a special solvent to make sure no memic microbes clung to the casing, before stowing it away. Nearby, the Avenue gleamed with starlight. The realm of material beings and reliable physical laws lay just a few meters away, but Harry had no intention of diving through. His chosen route home was more roundabout, but also probably much safer.
While finishing the task, he glanced back at Dwer and Rety, the two castaways he had saved … and who in turn had rescued him. They were fellow descendants of Earthclan, and humans were officially Uplift-masters to the neo-chimp race. But legally he owed them nothing. In fact, as an official of one of the Great Institutes, it was his duty to arrest any sooners he came across.
And yet, what good would that accomplish? He doubted they knew enough astrodynamics to be able to tell anyone where their hidden colony world lay, so nothing could be gained by interrogating them. From what they had said so far, their settlement was highly unusual, a peaceful blending of half a dozen species that were mostly at each other’s throats back in civilization. It might be newsworthy, in normal times. But right now, with all five galaxies in a state of uproar and navigation lanes falling apart, they seemed likely to fall between the cracks of bureaucracy, at Kazzkark Base.
Anyway, Harry was surprised to learn how pleasurable it was to hear voices speaking native wolfling dialects. Though a loner most of his life, he felt strangely buoyed to have humans around, who were very nearly his own kind.
The camera slipped into its casing with a satisfying clank. Checking his clipboard, Harry felt a glow of satisfaction. The last one. I know some other scouts were betting against my ever returning, let alone achieving success. I can’t wait to rub their noses — and beaks and snouts and other proboscides — in it!
With a heavy limp, his battered station turned away from the Avenue at last, heading toward a cluster of slender towers that he now knew to be legs of several huge, metaphorical chairs and a giant table. His best route home.
I wonder how long this zone will stay coalesced around my viewpoint seed. Will it melt back into chaos when I’m gone? Or is that a symptom of what Wer’Q’quinn keeps warning me against — an inflated notion of my own self-importance?
In fact, Harry knew he wasn’t the first material outsider to pass through this zone in recent times. Before he came, and before the hapless mech, two other spacecraft had passed through — one chasing another.
Could all of this — he looked around at the vast furniture and other chachkis of an emblematic parlor — have already taken shape before I arrived? I sure don’t consciously recall ever being in a room like it before, even as a child. Maybe one of those vessels that preceded me provided the seed image.
It bothered him that he still had no idea why the mech had brought Dwer and Rety here.
Combining two request-commands. Taking the humans “home,” and bringing them to “the most important guys around.”
He shook his head, unable to make sense of it.
One thing, though. I know the Skiano missionary is gonna plotz when he sees the three of us Earthlings — two actual living humans and a transformed chimp — striding along the boulevards of Kazzkark. It oughta make a sensation!
A table leg loomed just ahead, the one Harry hoped to ascend back toward his chosen portal, assuming it remained where gut instinct told him it must.… And if the station was still capable of climbing. And if …
Pilot mode popped into space nearby, a cursive P rotating in midair.
“Yes?” Harry nodded.
“I am afraid I must report movement, detected to the symbolic left of our present heading. Large memoid entities, approaching our position rapidly!”
Harry groaned. He did not want another encounter with the local order of life.
“Can we speed up any?”
“At some modest increased risk, yes. By twenty percent.”
“Then please do so.”
The station began moving faster … and the limp seemed to grow more jarring with each passing step. Harry glanced at Rety and Dwer, who as usual were bickering in a manner that reminded him of some married couples he had known — inseparable, and never in accord. He decided not to tell them quite yet. Let ’em think the danger’s over, for a while longer at least.
Stationing himself near a portside window, Harry peered through the murk.
We only need a few more minutes. Come on, you memoid bastards. Leave us alone just that long!
Harry’s back itched, and he started reaching around with a hand to scratch it … but stopped when the job was handled more conveniently by his new appendage. His tail, lithely curling up to rub and massage the very spot. At once, it felt both natural and surprising, each time it moved to his conscious or unconscious will.
He caught the two young humans staring at him. Dwer at least had the decency to blush.
