“Stop that, E.C. I can’t think when you keep on counting.”
“Indeed? How strange. I have no such trouble. I offer condolences for your restriction to serial processing.”
“Talking like that is just as bad. Keep quiet. Just tell me when it’s every minute.”
“Very well, Commissioner. But one minute has already passed.”
“So tell me when it’s two.” Birdie turned to Kallik. “You have better ears than we do. Did you hear any sounds from in front of us?”
Kallik paused to reflect. “Sounds, yes,” she said at last. “But nothing remotely human. Wheezing, and groaning. Like a venting Dowser.”
“Now come on, Kallik. There can’t possibly be a Dowser here — it would fill up the whole planetoid. Were there any words?”
“Possibly. Not in a language that I am able to comprehend. But J’merlia is a far better linguist than I am, perhaps you should ask him.”
“He’s not here — he’s with Graves.”
“When he returns.”
“But if he returns, I won’t need—”
“Two minutes,” Tally said loudly. “May I speak?”
“My God, E.C., what now? I told you to keep quiet. Oh, go on then, spit it out.”
“I am concerned by our immediate environment. As you may know, the functioning of my brain requires shielding from electromagnetic fields. As a result, the protective membranes contain sensitive field monitors. The corridor in which we are standing contains evidence of field inhibitors, and that evidence becomes stronger the farther that we go.”
“So what? Don’t you think we have more important things to worry about?”
“No. Assuming that the field inhibitors are functional, and that the interior structure of Glister relies upon the same methods as the surface for its stability, we would experience a significant change in environment were the field inhibitors to be turned on. As they could be, at any time.”
“Change of environment. What do you mean, a change of environment?”
“In simple terms, we would fall through the floor. After that, I cannot say. I have no information as to what lies below. But let me observe that the outer parts of Glister average fifty meters between successive interior layers. A fifty-meter drop in this high a gravity field would render everyone of our party inoperative, with the possible exception of Kallik.”
“Gawdy!” Birdie stepped sharply backward and stared down at his feet. “A fifty-meter fall? We’d all be mushed.”
Before he could say more there was a patter of multiple feet in the tunnel ahead of them. J’merlia came scuttling back.
“It is all right,” he said excitedly. “Councilor Graves says that it is safe to move forward to join him. He is in conversation with a being who dwells within Glister. It can converse in human speech — and it knows the present whereabouts of Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda! It means us no harm, and we are in no danger. Please follow me.”
“Now hold on a minute. And you, too, Kallik.” Birdie grabbed the short fur on the back of the Hymenopt, restraining her — though if she had decided to go, nothing he or any human could have done would have stopped her. “You can tell us we’re safe, J’merlia, but that’s not what E.C. says — according to him, the tunnel floor could dissolve underneath us, any time. We’d all fall through and be killed. The farther we go the worse it gets. Can’t whoever it is wait just a bit, while we check if we’re safe?”
“I do not know.” J’merlia stood thinking for a moment, his narrow head cocked to one side.
“I suppose it can,” he said at last. “After all, it’s been waiting for six million years. Maybe a few minutes more won’t matter too much.”
From the internal files of the embodied computer E. Crimson Tally: A note for the permanent and public record, concerning new anomalies of human behavior.
A recent experience leads me to suspect that the information banks employed in the briefing of embodied computers are so flawed in their representation of human reactions that their data are not merely useless but positively pernicious.
My observation is prompted by this recent experience:
After the removal and reinsertion of my brain, it was not clear to me that I would be able to perform at my previous level. Although my brain itself of course functioned as well as ever, the body’s condition was obviously physically degraded. Moreover, I believed that my interface was impaired, although I knew that I was not the best judge of that.
Tests would easily have confirmed or denied the hypothesis of reduced function. However, without any procedures for performance evaluation, the humans of the group have treated me with noticeably increased respect following the event of brain removal and subsequent violent interruption of the interface.
Logic suggests only one explanation. Namely, the presence of a bloodied bandage around my head, which to any rational being warns of reduced function, has been taken instead as an elevator of status. Physical damage in humans demands increased respect. The more battered my skull, the greater the deference with which I am treated!
One wonders to what extremes this might be carried. If the top of my head were missing permanently, would all my actions be increasingly venerated?
Probably.
And if I were to be destroyed completely?
This matter demands introspection.
CHAPTER 18
Birdie had worked twenty-six and a half years — which felt like forever — for the government of Opal. Based on that, he had often said that humans were the most ornery, crackpot, cuss-headed critters in the universe.
But he would not say it anymore. There were others, he had just decided, who had humans beat for madness, from here to Doomsday.
They had been standing at the end of the tunnel, over a horrible sheer drop into nothing. And there was Julius Graves, with that big bald head of his, leaning out over the edge looking at a thing like a big silver teapot, with a flower for a spout, floating on nothing. And Julius, or maybe it was Steven, was talking to it, as if it were his long-lost brother.
“I do not follow your meaning, The-One-Who-Waits,” he said. “This is our first visit. We have never been here before.”
And the teapot had talked back!
Not at first, though. First it made a noise that sounded to Birdie like a set of bagpipes that needed pumping up. Then it wheezed. Then it screeched like a steam blower. Then it said, imitating Graves’s accent, “Not you, the individuals. That was not my meaning. You, the species.”
Which seemed to make no more sense to Graves than it did to Birdie, because the councilor had wrinkled up his bulging bald head and said, “Our species has been here before?”
There was another groan, like the sound made by a dying dowser — Kallik had been right about that. Then: “The necessary members of your species came here. We had more than were needed. One would have been sufficient. But three humans came, including the one with the special additions.”
At that Kallik gave a screech right in Birdie’s ear, louder than anything the teapot-creature had produced. “Additions!” she said. “Augmentation. That must mean the master Nenda. He was here, and he is still alive.”
The-One-Who-Waits must have understood her, because it went on, “One with augmentation, yes, alive, and there was also a necessary one of the other form, the great blind one with the secret speech. She, too, was passed along.”
And that set J’merlia off, as bad as Kallik. “Oh, Atvar H’sial,” he said, grabbing Birdie’s arm and moaning the Cecropian name like a hymn. “Oh, Atvar H’sial. Alive. Commissioner Kelly, is that not wonderful news?”
Birdie chose not to answer. It seemed to him that the survival of any bug was no big deal, and especially one that had used J’merlia as a slave. But he was learning fast. Lo’tfians and Hymenopts had their own weird rules of what was important.