S-1 lasts for one Ditron summer season (three-fourths of a standard year) at the end of which time a body mass of twenty-five kilos has been achieved and metamorphosis begins. S-1 moves below ground, as a flat, pale-yellow disk about one meter in diameter. It emerges in the spring as S-2, a slender, dark-orange, many-legged carnivore with bilateral symmetry and a fierce appetite. An S-2 Ditron will prey on anything except its own S-1 and S-3 forms. It possesses no known language, but from its behavior patterns it is judged to be of undeniable intelligence. Consideration of the S-2 Ditron first led to that species’ assignment as an intelligent form.
In this life stage the Ditron is solitary, energetic, and antisocial. Attempts to export S-2 Ditrons to other worlds have all failed, not because the organism dies but because it never ceases to feed voraciously, to attack its captors at every opportunity, and to try to escape. A confined S-2 will solve within minutes a maze that will hold most humans or Cecropians for an hour or more.
S-2 lasts for fourteen years, during all of which time the Ditron grows constantly. At the end of this period it masses twelve tons and is fifteen meters long. No more formidable predator exists in the spiral arm (archaeological workers on Luris II have discovered an ancestral form of the Ditron S-2 that was almost twice the S-2’s present size, and apparently just as voracious; it probably, however, lacked intelligence).
The transition to S-3 arrives suddenly, and apparently without warning to the S-2 itself. It is conjectured that the first sign of a change to S-3 state is a substantial fall in Ditron S-2 intelligence, and a sudden urge for clustering. The formerly antisocial creature seeks out and protects the cocoon clusters of other changing S-2’s. Up to a hundred Ditrons tunnel deep into sites by soft riverbanks, where each spins its own protective cocoon. New arrivals protect the site from predators, before themselves beginning to tunnel. Metamorphosis takes place over a two-year period. Emerging S-3’s have dwindled to a body mass of less than one ton. The material of the residual cocoon is a valuable prize, for anyone able to thwart the guardianship offered by the protective S-2’s.
The form of the S-3 is a large-headed upright biped, brownish-red in color, two-eyed, and with bilateral symmetry. Its alert appearance and large brainbox persuaded early explorers of Luris III that the S-3 must be a more intelligent and certainly more friendly form than its S-2 progenitor. [Примечание изготовителя документа: возможно, часть текста потеряна]
CHAPTER 20
The period before the coming of intelligence had been quiet, peaceful, and eons long. The final emergence was a miracle in itself; and like all miracles, nothing before it presaged its arrival.
The nutrients in the middle atmosphere of the gas-giant were rich and abundant; the climate was unvarying; a total absence of competition removed any stimulus to evolution.
The dominant life-form drifted idly in its buoyant sea of high-pressure hydrogen and helium, loose aggregations of cells that combined, dissociated, and recombined with endless variety. The results were sometimes simple, sometimes complex, and always without self-awareness. They had persisted unchanged for eight hundred million years.
When it came, the pressure was provided from without, and from far away. A supernova, nine light-years from the Mandel system, sent a sleet of hard radiation and superfast particles driving into the upper atmosphere of Gargantua. The dominant life-form, tens of thousands of kilometers down, was well protected; it drowsed on. But small and primitive multicelled creatures, eking out their own existence almost at the edge of space, felt the full force of the incident flux. They had been harmless, unable to compete with the loosely organized but more efficient assemblies of life below; now they mutated in the killing storm of radiation. The survivors grew voracious and desperate, and expanded their biosphere — downward. Like vermin, they began to infest the deep habitats and to modify the food chains there.
The Sleepers below had to quicken — or die. At first their numbers dwindled. They mindlessly sought refuge in the depths, down in the unfathomable abyss near the rocky solid core, where living conditions were harsh and food less plentiful.
It was not enough. The vermin followed them, gnawing at their evanescent structures, interfering with their placid drift at the whim of currents and temperature gradients.
The Sleepers had a simple choice: adapt or die. Since permanence of form was essential to survival, they became unified structures. They formed tough skins to protect those structures, integuments hard enough to resist the vermin’s attack. They developed mobility for escape. They learned to recognize and avoid the swarms of starving nibblers. They themselves became rapid and aggressive eaters.
And they developed cunning. Not long afterward came self-awareness. In a few million years, technology followed. The Sleepers pursued the vermin back to the upper edge of the atmosphere, for the first time claiming that domain as their own.
Now they found themselves familiar with and at home in environments ranging from million-atmosphere pressures at the interface with Gargantua’s rocky central core, to the near-vacuum of the planet’s ionosphere. They developed materials that could endure those extremes of pressure, and as great extremes of radiation and temperature. Finally they decided to move to a place where the still-annoying vermin could not follow: space itself.
The technology went with them. The Sleepers became the Builders. They spread with no haste from star to star in the spiral arm. Never again would they occupy a planet. Their homeworld became Homeworld, and finally Old-Home, abandoned but not forgotten. It remained the central nexus of the Builders’ transportation system.
They were Sleepers no more; and yet in one essential way they were as they had always been. The active and aggressive behavior patterns forced upon them by the vermin were only a few millions years deep. They were overlaid like a thin veneer on a deeper behavior, one derived from that idyllic and near-infinite era of idle drifting.
The Builders made their great spaceborne artifacts, with a communication network that stretched across and beyond the spiral arm; but they did so almost absentmindedly, with no more than a small part of their collective consciousness. They were Builders, certainly; but more than that they were Thinkers. For them, contemplation was the highest and the preferred activity. Action was a sometimes necessary but always unwelcome digression.
The new stability persisted for almost two hundred million years, while the Builders busied themselves in a leisurely analysis of the nature of the universe itself. Then came a new Great Problem, more troublesome even than the vermin. And further change was forced upon them…
The-One-Who-Waits fell silent. At some hidden command the lights in the great chamber dimmed further. The alien lifted a few centimeters above the surface of the tunnel, where in front of it sat Julius Graves, with J’merlia and Kallik on each side. E. C. Tally and Birdie Kelly were just behind, cross-legged on the hard tunnel floor and stiff-jointed from two hours of silent attention. When it had finally become fluent in human speech, the voice of The-One-Who-Waits had proved to be slow and hypnotic, forcing the listeners to ignore their surroundings and their own physical needs.
Birdie stirred and inspected each of the others in turn. E. C. Tally was in the worst shape of anyone. The embodied computer was leaning forward and supporting himself wearily on his hands and elbows. Apparently the need for rest and recuperation had not been sufficiently explained to him; before long, by the look of it, Tally would collapse from simple exhaustion.