bright they weren't too primitive, and they had had thousands of years to refine their ships, with Tnuctipun input.'
'Could it be a naval base rather than a ship?' asked Peter Robinson. 'That would account for the size. Why, hundreds of years ago humans blew up Confinement Asteroid into something bigger than this. Sol's old Gibraltar base is bigger. So are Tiamat and many others. That might account for the massive fuel tanks: fleet replenishment.'
'I see no docking ports,' said Charrgh-Captain. His pursuit of the answer to the puzzle seemed for the moment to have overcome even his loathing for the Wunderkzin, so that he answered him thoughtfully. 'And would not a base have workshops, accommodation for crews, and defensive weapons? We see no evidence of any of those things. The sensor shows gold, which may be worth stripping. But this'-he stabbed at one of the boxes of light on the screen-'I do not like. These read like organic compounds.'
Yes,' said Gatley Ivor. 'That is the composition of thrint tissue. I agree it is not reassuring. But it is apparently quite inert.'
'Thrint corpses?' asked Melody.
'Great masses of inert organic tissue. That's all I can say so far.'
'Thrint and tnuctipun were both carnivores. If this was a tnuctip artifact I would suggest a larder of enemy's meat.'
'The thrintun sent out a command that every sapient mind must die,' said Gatley Ivor. 'The open question is, did they include themselves? The survival of the Grogs on Down suggests they didn't. We aren't sure, though. Perhaps they thought life without slaves would be no life at all, and they might as well all die together. Some think they had degenerated to the point that, left to their own devices, they could hardly have fed themselves, let alone maintained complex machinery and the luxurious conditions they had come to need. Students have been awarded doctorates for arguing for and against both propositions. Anyway, they died. The Grogs might be descendants of a late-emerging group.' Gay struck her fist on the table with a shout of triumph. 'An ark! It's an ark! That's the only explanation!'
'Arrk?' Charrgh-Captain pronounced the word easily, but his ears betrayed puzzlement. 'A refuge, to preserve some remnant of their race so that they might begin again. That also accounts for the setup in the control chamber: They knew no one else was coming to get them out… The series of clocks to switch off the main stasis field is a series of fail-safes.'
'Fine,' said Richard. 'But where are they? Peter detects no trace of alien minds. There's all that inert tissue. Slavers in frozen sleep?'
'No. A DNA bank, maybe. Slaver genetic material with mechanisms for rearing little Slavers. That might not need much space. All that tissue… like the yolk in an egg. Food.'
'Slaver genetic material? There's a nasty thought! What do we do?'
'Destroy it at once!' Charrgh-Captain's voice contained no doubt.
'We have a little time, I think. They can hardly produce adult thrintun instantaneously. And there still appears to be no activity but a very faint energy discharge.'
'And where,' said Gatley Ivor, 'are the facilities for young thrintun? There would be creches, surely. Things of that nature. We know they took several years to mature and develop the Power. As infants, even as adolescents, they would need to be cared for, disciplined, taught. It would cost little to have living slaves to care for them- during the time spent in stasis they would consume no stores-and, indeed, why not living Thrint adults to direct the slaves? Why did the adult Slavers who built the ark not take the elementary step of preserving their own lives inside it?'
'Maybe they are the thrintun in the control chamber,' said Gay. 'Maybe there were other facilities outside the stasis field that have been lost. Perhaps they were attacked and had to put it into stasis before the crew could be embarked.'
'It seems the artifact came out of stasis periodically, and then returned to it,' said Charrgh-Captain. 'Why should an arrk do that?'
'That is simple. They wished to ensure their enemies were truly dead,' said Peter Robinson. 'Perhaps when they first emerged from stasis they detected mental emanations from live tnuctipun. Perhaps not all tnuctipun were killed by the suicide command: They may have been coming out of their own stasisprotected arks and shelters for some time. This thrintun ark would return to stasis till all possible enemies were dead.'
'That doesn't quite fit, Peter,' said Richard. 'The great floating stasis-bubble would be vulnerable to attack if any tnuctipun were still around. They could detect it, close on it, turn off the field-child's play for the tnuctipun, who invented the field anyway-and do a thorough job of destroying whatever was inside. And if it was an ark like that, one would expect it to be defensively armed, as well as mobile. Besides, given that a lot of genetic material might have been preserved in a small space, a smaller artifact would surely have been big enough.
'Another possibility occurs to me. Suppose the thrint knew the simple, blanket suicide command-easier to transmit, perhaps, than a selective one to kill slaves only-would get them too? Surely many would seek refuge in stasis fields. But they would have no one to get them out. The purpose of this artifact and its array of clocks may be to ensure that some would come out of stasis in the future to release others elsewhere.'
'But they didn't,' said Gay.
'We have found ancient artifacts estimated at much less than three billion Earth years old. That suggests arks or colonies emerged from stasis from time to time,' said Gatley Ivor. 'For some reason they didn't survive, but they might be connected to the attack on this ark's control center. Perhaps some later merging tnuctipun came on it and attacked it but didn't survive to finish the job, disabling it without destroying it. If there was fighting in spaceships or on the surface of the big field, there would be no trace of that fighting now. Perhaps gun turrets or other weapons mounted on the surface were destroyed in the fighting or have disintegrated under meteor and dust bombardment since.'
'Yes, for some reason they didn't survive,' said Gay.
'Too much of the infrastructure of their-well, I suppose you have to call it their 'civilization,' for want of a better word-was gone.'
'Yet at least tnuctipun emerging from stasis should have survived,' said Charrgh-Captain. 'They were masters of science and technology. Not even clever races like the Jotok or the Pak-yes, humans, I know about the Pak- discovered a hyperdrive. Modern stasis fields are mere copies of the tnuctipun originals. Their biological engineering has survived on many worlds. They knew all the mechanisms of genetics and cloning. Surely any tnuctipun arrk would have carried copious genetic material so they could repopulate the universe with their own kind. Without the Slavers they could have rebuilt their civilization in a single generation, perhaps. What happened to them? Anyway, this is not a tnuctipun arrk, whatever it is… Urrr,' he growled. Normally kzintosh would no more betray bewilderment by thinking aloud, least of all in front of aliens, than they would betray fear. 'The shape is not optimal for any utilitarian purpose. It has no warlike purpose. It is not a weapon or a weapons system. It is not a dreadnaught. There are no gun-ports, no missiles, no weapons of any kind. It has no room to carry fighter-craft or infantry.'
'Greenberg drew all he remembered of thrintun artifacts,' said Gatley Ivor. 'But I don't recall anything like this.'
'Grrinberrg?' asked Charrgh-Captain. 'I remember the name from my human Studies. Was Grrinberrg not a human who somehow defeated a Thrint?'
'Yes, a human telepath. He learned something of its mind.'
'A Slaver was released from stasis on a world of the Patriarchy,' said Charrgh-Captain. 'Fortunately, it could control only a limited number of minds at one time. A Hero employed guile to escape and give warning. We destroyed the relevant continent with missiles from space. Many Heroes died-some of them undignified, dishonored deaths, still slaves of an alien mind, and we destroyed most of the habitable land on the planet and made species extinct.'
'Was that a grief to you?' asked Gay.
'The Fanged God set us to dominate and prey upon other species, not to exterminate them unless we must. Even when we boiled the Chunquens' seas, we did it selectively. Otherwise the humans of Wunderland might have fared differently… And the shape… Gay, you are right to be puzzled. Almost it reminds me of something, but I cannot think what.'
'I have a similar feeling,' said Peter Robinson. 'Also, I have an intuition that the shape is of importance. My
