“Bit of trouble. Let’s get on with the job.”
13. Ship of Knyfh
/I wish the support of quadpoint in this crisis/
:: only proceed to action hour you will have support ::
/and if there are complications of the nature — feared?/
:: then quadpoint will resolve them ::
Melody transferred next to a ship of Segment Knyfh. She had no idea what she would encounter there—which was why she selected it. She now had a rough working knowledge of the Swords of Sol, the Cups of Spica, the Disks of Polaris, and the Scepters of Canopus, but the Atoms of Knyfh were a complete mystery to her, despite the fact that her own Sphere Mintaka used a roughly similar type of ship. She didn’t understand her own Sphere’s ships either. A mystery in the power of the enemy was not good; she had to know its capabilities.
The Knyfh vessel was indeed like a giant atom, an almost perfect replica of the symbol for the Suit of Aura in the Cluster Tarot deck. Two spheres spun in close magnetic orbit about a common center, like a proton and a neutron. Farther out there were a number of rapidly orbiting spots, moving so fast they were virtual rings or globes: the electrons. These were the light-gathering units, but they also seemed to serve admirably as a kind of defensive shield. What would happen to any solid object that attempted to penetrate that glittering barrier?
Segment Knyfh was generally considered to be more advanced than Segment Etamin. A thousand years before, an emissary from the then Sphere Knyfh had brought the gift of transfer to the then Sphere Sol, initiating the explosive expansion of Sol’s empire of influence. However, there had never been a close association between the two. Segment representatives met from time to time to determine galactic policy, but news of these contacts was not generally published widely in Sphere Mintaka. So the nature of the other great segments of the Milky Way galaxy was almost as mysterious to Melody as those of Andromeda. She knew the names of the ten major segments, and that was about all.
“Freng, Qaval, Etamin,” she thought to herself in a kind of supportive litany. “Knyfh, Lodo, Weew, Bhyo, Fa¿, Novagleam, and Thousandstar.” In her youth she had dreamed of what life must be like in Thousandstar, most distant of the segments, and popular literature had many fanciful stories about such places. But genuine information was scant.
So now she went to this representative of the token contingent of the allied segment, and found herself in the incredible body of a sophisticated relative of the magnets. This was no physical ball, but a miniature of the ship, with a compact nucleus of five spheres and a scintillating outer energy shell that rolled across the deck. The magnets Melody had known were bound to the metal passages of a ship, but these atom-hosts used magnetism mainly internally. They could levitate in the vicinity of metal, but could also travel elsewhere, much as Polarians did, utilizing the principle of the wheel. Most—virtually all—of the mass was in the nucleus, so that there was plenty of leverage to control the orientation and motion of the shell.
It was a very nice body, though it was not precisely a body at all by her prior definitions. But she could not concern herself about that; she had to deal with the Andromedan entity that had made it hostage. And it was a savage one: Bluefield of oo. Not the blue of a field of Solarian flowers or of a mournful Mintakan tune, but the hue of an intense magnetic field. Had this entity possessed an aura to match her electrical power, Melody would never have been able to transfer to it. Bluefield fought in the fashion she knew best, sending jolt after jolt of magnetic energy through host and aura, disrupting both by associated currents. Melody was very nearly dislodged before she learned to parry the ferocious onslaught. As she had nowhere to go, loss of her hold would have meant extinction; contrary to spiritualistic folklore, no aura could exist in the absence of some type of host.
But again her overwhelming superiority of aura saved her. She simply had more intensity than any other entity could cope with. She closed in on the Andromedan sentience, tightening her hold. “Yield, Bluefield—so I won’t have to destroy you.”
To her surprise, Bluefield yielded. Suddenly Melody was in her mind. The oo entities were of the broad class of magnetic sapients, structurally between the solid magnets like Slammer, and the atomic Knyfhs. They had two charged spheres in orbit about each other, but no outer energy shells, and could move anywhere by “walking” the spheres. They were unique (in Melody’s limited experience) in that their sapience was housed in two physically unconnected units; a single unit could not function intelligently. The magnetic interactions between the parts not only made motion possible, it made thought possible!
Melody’s Mintakan brain was tripartite, each section dominating a type of music: string, percussion, wind. The Solarian brain was bipartite, resulting in confusing dichotomies. This oo mind reflected the split brain of the Andromedan creature, but it was not very much like the human brain. The two parts could separate and reunite with other parts, forming new entities. There were actually four sexes, which could unite in six distinct combinations. The complete entity was therefore technically neuter, or bisexual. Melody, a changeable neuter, had been able to enter this hostage; a truly sexed entity would have been balked.
The Sphere Knyfh host was also technically neuter. Any Knyfh could mate with any other, their mergence of nucleus and electron orbit resulting in prompt fissioning into two new compromise entities. Thus in both species, population was stable; new entities could be produced only from the parts of the old ones.
Melody paused. There was something strange about this. Population could shrink, from the demise of individuals, but if population could not grow…
How had either Knyfh or oo ever gotten started? There had to be a way to create new individuals, to increase the size of the total population. Otherwise the colonization of a sphere or segment would have been impossible. A planet might have several billion sapient inhabitants; a sphere required trillions. Where did they come from?
Melody probed… and her amazement grew. Neither Knyfh nor oo knew the source of their populations. Mergence and fission proceeded indefinitely; prior combinations were impossible to trace down. Their populations did expand, but there was no known origin of individual entities. They were just there, and seemed always to have been there, logic to the contrary.
Knyfh and oo logic did not struggle with this concept. It was not a logic Melody could readily understand, but it seemed to serve well the needs of the species who used it.
At the moment, she had another concern: to rid the ship of hostages. There were nine of them, all with high auras. She had overwhelmed the one with the lowest Kirlian intensity. This ship was the Ace of Atoms; Andromeda had regarded it as a critically important target!
Bluefield was liaison officer to the Knyfh crew. On this ship, like all so far, none of the crew was hostage. The most efficient use of Andromedan power was in making the leaders hostage; the crew merely followed orders. It simplified recovery of the ships; eliminate the hostages and all was well. The crew would never know the difference.
Melody performed the routine duties required of her host, drawing on the hostage-mind. There were always snarls to be untangled, substitutions of all entities, special situations. Melody could not leave her post without suspicion until her shift expired, which meant delay, but she managed to use the time to fill in her gaps of knowledge. She hovered at the communications console, making her decisions known by coded fluctuations of her electron shell, and learned.