The Sea is Full of Stars

“But—you know they’re going to find out what you did to the two girls, and you know the penalty for that. They’ll have us taking their places! They’ll turn us into slaves for some other rich old fart, but unlike them, we’ll know!”

Jules Wallinchky grinned. “Son, this old fart’s not nearly there yet.” He turned to the console, not having either of the women with him. “Identity of the man in the robe and mask?”

“Unknown. I have no data on which to identify him.”

“Does anything correlate with anyone in your memory?”

“There are no perfect or close approximations that I can find,” Core informed him. “The mask and robe are lined to prevent the usual scans from getting precise information. I have no fewer than six different heights, the range being as great as 7.6 centimeters. Weight is 102.05 kilograms, but how much of this is in the cloak and mask cannot be determined, either.”

“Can you determine anything about him?” Ari asked it.

“He is male, he is trusted by the Inspector, and he has had serious medical treatment recently. He is old, but in excellent physical condition, barring the recent injury, which appears to have involved replacement skin. He also has earlier replacements, including some to skeletal structure. He is not a telepath but does appear to have some abilities in the paranormal bands, if weak. He was not particularly worried or angry at the exchange here. General circumstantial evidence suggests he is a spacer by profession, either military or civilian. There is nothing more I can give you on him.”

“Could he be Kincaid?” Wallinchky asked.

“He could be Kincaid. Or he could be several million other Terran men past middle ages or into rejuves,” the computer responded pragmatically.

“Why didn’t you have one of the girls lift off that mask or just hold ’em both?” Ari asked his uncle. “We couldn’t be in any worse shape than we are now.”

Jules Wallinchky gave his nephew a slight smile. “And that question is why this O’Leary is a nervy but smart detective and you would not be first in line as an heir,” he responded. “As he said, you don’t come in like this, and announced, without backup. Enough backup to blow us and the whole complex to hell if need be. The thing that keeps them from doing that is being able to see and remain in communication with the Inspector. So long as he’s here, they won’t come in because we have no escape, apparently, so why not be patient and reclaim the artwork as well? And he knew I understood that, which is why I couldn’t touch him. He knew I could never allow such beauty, such genius, to be blown to bits. No, we’ve bought time. Ah! Here are the girls, back from escort duty! Alpha, Beta, you may go and remove that mock android costume and makeup and then return here. We’ve suitably confused them, but from this point it’s moot.”

They turned and left, leaving Ari, sweating in spite of the perfect climate control, staring out into nothingness.

“Cheer up, nephew!” Jules Wallinchky said. “You miss the point! I very much hope that this is Kincaid. In fact, I’m going to base my future plans on it.”

Ari halfway came back to reality from imagining being under the brain scrambler at a Criminal Treatment Center. “Huh?”

“Kincaid has lived only to destroy Josich. Josich wasn’t among the bodies, but he and some close family members cum bodyguards vanished. Where did they go? How? And why?”

“I dunno. Vaporized? It looked like they activated some defense grid from ancient times. I never even believed that these places still had anything working on them. Incredible. But they’re dead.”

“Ancient,” Wallinchky repeated, chuckling. “A billion years or more… Humanity wasn’t even a mathematical possibility back on Old Earth, there might not even have been dinosaurs—I’m not too clear, but it’s that far back. Volcanoes and dark seas and chemical muck that might one day become life. They were already colonizing the stars back then. Had colonized, probably. Had cities and a vast interstellar civilization. They’ve been everywhere we’ve ever looked. Imagine that, Ari—a billion years or more! And their greatest machine still works!

“No spaceships, no spaceports, no art or sculpture or furniture. Just some very ugly, basic structures, to our eyes, and a layout that’s lasted because some of their old worlds are devoid of anything that might wear them down. There are probably others now, so cratered or eroded there’s no sign. Like gods of ancient Greece and Rome—just think of your creation and there it is. Energy, some sort of limitless energy source we haven’t found, converted to whatever they desired. But not by magic, nephew. By a science so advanced it just looks like magic to us. And the damned super computer that did it still works!”

“So? What good does that do us?” Ari asked, wondering if his uncle was finally cracking under the strain.

The big man snapped his fingers and had another cigar placed in his mouth and lit. He settled back in his chair, looking oddly younger, somehow, than he usually did.

“If their world’s computer was still turned on, want to bet that the one that’s under our feet now isn’t still on, too? I’ve thought so for years. Alpha, what are the odds that the great machine of the Ancient Ones that’s in the center of this world is still alive?”

“One hundred percent, Master. We can feel it and sense it doing things quite often.”

Ari was suddenly doubly unnerved. “You mean it’s still alive?”

“Not as you think of it, sir,” Beta responded. “It is artificial in nature, but the tissue that fills the planet was grown, not manufactured. Researchers have theorized that it performs much like a monster organic brain, one with near infinite capacity.”

“You mean it’s alive?”

“In the broadest definitions of that word, sir, yes.”

Jules Wallinchky blew a huge cloud of smoke and said, “Don’t be such a yellow dog, nephew! It’s a grander scale of the road we’re traveling now! The computer that runs this place is a hell of a lot smaller, but it’s still huge, its capacity is enormous, it is self-aware and it makes decisions, and it is self-repairing and self-expanding. It also feeds us and gives us breathable air and all the rest by basic energy to matter and matter to energy conversions. I can’t wave my hand and say ‘Let there be light’ and then direct where the moons and planets might go, but I can already order up an excellent filet mignon you can’t tell from the finest cuts of real meat, and both you and I have had the real thing. Look at what it did with these two! One day we’ll have the same sort of thing the Ancient Ones had. It probably will be done differently, and who knows what we’ll do with it or how we’ll handle it or whether we’ll get that kind of power too early and use it to wipe ourselves off the galactic map, but it’s coming. That’s not for us to see, though, nephew. But that shot of the attack on Josich was a real eye-opener.”

“What do you mean?”

“How’d those gods get from world to world? If you were a god, you wouldn’t want to have to travel on a ship like we do. You’d want to simply wish yourself where you needed to go and then go there, your brain instantly reconnected to the local computer so you remained a god. Now, Josich had that doohickey gadget we stole as some kind of interface to the Ancient Ones’ local god machine. It was on and working when they attacked. Odds were, they hadn’t done much with it, but now there’s an attack while everything’s boosted. Now everything’s getting blown to Hell. Josich is running for his life in panic, since there was no escape running that way. Suddenly the machine snaps on, there’s this disappearance, then a beam is shot into nothingness. I think the big machine got the message. Probably not in words, probably in sheer panic. Something like, ‘Get me outta here!’ The sheer emotion of that is picked up and understood. The thing, well, gets him outta there.”

Ari turned and looked again at his uncle. “To where? Where would it send him? To another world like this, with no ship and no supplies, so eventually supplies run out? Or—something else?”

“I have no idea,” Jules Wallinchky responded. “But, considering we’re in an almost velvet-lined version of Josich’s state, I’m game to find out.”

“What?”

“There have always been a lot of mysteries in space, nephew. Ships found in perfect condition but with no captain or passengers. Colonies where people simply vanish even though there’s no place to go. Lots of legends, stories, some true. If I can’t keep all this, son, I’ll give it back to posterity and take a chance at a new start. I haven’t had a real adventure, a real challenge, in a very long time. I’ve been so bored I just had to go on this job, and I’m paying for it. Maybe it’s a good thing, though. I felt