After a long moment of staring silence, Jory turned toward the others, her eyes gleaming in the dim light from the wheel-house as she fixed them with a percipient gaze, cocking her head to one side. “Have any of you heard of the Arbai?”
After a moment’s silence, Bertran replied, “We know only what Fringe and Curvis told us. It was an Arbai Door we fell through on Earth and arrived through here.” His eyes were fixed on the ominous shapes. “The Arbai spread such Doors about, and there was a great plague that would have wiped out humanity had we not closed the Earth Door in time.”
“An extinct race, Fringe and Curvis said,” said Nela. “And Celery also said something of the kind.” She could not take her eyes from the shore where the things were now hopping over something she could not see: like toads, laboriously, but with no slowing of their forward motion. “Celery said the Arbai were about to be, or already were, extinct.”
Jory said, “In my travels I learned something about the Arbai. It was the Arbai who discovered that time and space flow back and forth through wormholes among the universes to keep the energy density constant. As you have remarked, they were the inventors of the wormhole Doors, which make distant points adjacent by going outside our space and coming in again, a concept that human engineers have adapted and—so they claim—improved upon. Eventually, the Arbai became preoccupied with questions of morality. They, like Nela, had always believed that interference with other races was wrong, but their reasoning was quite different from hers. They believed interference was wrong because they had no concept of evil. Their language had no word for it. They could not perceive it when they saw it.”
“They’d have made perfect Enforcers,” snorted Nela.
“Not really, no. The plague that killed them was purposefully directed against them by creatures all of us here would call evil, but the Arbai could not see it and thus had no defense against it.”
“That must have presented them with a dilemma,” said Bertran, nervously watching the shore. The ship was coming very close, and he felt his anxiety increase with every ripple that fled beneath the hull.
“A dilemma indeed,” Jory remarked. “Most of their race had already died before they knew the reason. The few remaining chose to put all the energies they had left into what they thought of as a moral solution to the problem. They decided that the ‘problem’—which they did not call evil—had arisen out of the inability of disparate creatures to completely understand one another, so they withdrew to a distant place and built a communicator.”
“An Alsense machine?” Curvis asked, almost distracted from the approaching shore by this revelation. “The Arbai created the Alsense machine?”
Asner shook his head, answering for her. “No, an Alsense is merely a contextual device that compares speech patterns to a library of such patterns, establishes similarities, extrapolates possible meanings, then refines these from continuing utterances. Among languages based on common thought systems, an Alsense serves well enough….”
Jory interrupted. “The Arbai did better than that. They built a true communicator. An empathetometer. A meaning feeler. With typical understatement, they called it the Arbai Device.”
Danivon said, “How very interesting.” He fidgeted, approaching the rail, then stepping away from it, finally blurting, “Shouldn’t we be coming about? We’re getting very close to the shore.”
“I’d noticed that,” said Asner. “Perhaps the captain wants to get a better look at those things.”
“Better in daylight,” whispered Nela. “I think. Though spirits can’t cross running water.”
“Is that so?” asked Asner.
“In our time it was said to be so. In fairy tales. Evidently it’s true here, now.”
They fell silent as the ship drew ever closer to the shore. “There’s the reason we’re coming so close,” said Asner, pointing upstream where a foam of white showed dimly. “There are rocks midriver. The captain is coming as far as possible to port so our next tack will bring the rocks on our starboard side.”
“You were speaking of the thing the Arbai invented,” said Danivon from a dry mouth. “Are you implying there’s such a device here on Elsewhere?”
Jory tore her eyes away from the bank where the shapes danced and jittered, seeming almost to extend themselves onto the surface of the water. “How could there be? If evil results from a lack of empathy (which the Arbai believed), and if evil is included in diversity (which you Enforcers seem to believe), then wouldn’t diversity also result from a lack of empathy? In which case, the presence of an Arbai Device here on Elsewhere would have destroyed all diversity long ago.” She gave him a distracted look and turned back to the rail. Bending and twisting, the flattened luminosities oozed outward, becoming elongated, stretching themselves into tentacles.
“Why are we discussing Arbai Devices?” demanded Bertran. “Has it something to do with these … these things?”
“I was only thinking,” said Jory. “That I’d like very much to understand what they are and why they are following us.” She laughed, without amusement. “Quite frankly, I was wishing we had the Arbai Device, here and now!”
“Ready to come about,” cried the captain.
The group fell silent, holding their breaths. The boom swung, the sails rattled, the ship began moving away as the forms along the bank became suddenly agitated, flopping toward the water in spasms, as though to fly across it.
“Ware,” screamed the lookout from the mast.
“Hard a’port,” shouted the captain, his voice cracking.
The Dove shuddered and bucked as something huge rubbed along its starboard side, thrusting it inexorably shoreward.
“Ware,” screamed the lookout again, “two of them!”
Over the starboard rail loomed the head of a monstrous gaver, jaw gaping, teeth gleaming in the dim lights from the wheelhouse, lurching upward toward the watchman on the mast.
“God, look at the size of it,” marveled Danivon aloud, too astonished in that instant to be fearful. “The size
