He did not mind. It still was a life and he saw a lot of places — very different places — and saw them, no matter what conditions might obtain, in perfect safety. For there was nothing that could touch him-tooth, or claw, or poison, no matter what the atmosphere, no matter what the gravity, no matter what the radiation, there was nothing that could touch him. There was nothing of him to be touched. He walked — no, not walked, but moved — in utter nonchalance through all the hells the galaxy could muster.
A second sun was rising, a great swollen, brick-red star pushing its way above the horizon, with the first one just beginning to slide toward the west — as a matter of convenience, he thought of the big red one as rising in the east.
K2, he read it, thirty times, or so, the diameter of the Sun with a surface temperature that was possibly no more than 4,000°. A binary system and maybe more than that; there might be other suns that he still had yet to see. He tried to calculate the distance, but that would not be possible with any accuracy until the giant had moved, higher in the sky, until it had moved above the horizon that now bisected it.
But the second sun could wait, all the rest of it could wait. There was one thing he must see. He had not realized it before, but now he knew there was one thing about the landscape that had been nagging him. The crater did not lit. It had all the appearances of a crater, but it had no right to be there. It could not be volcanic, for it sat in the middle of a sandy terrain and the limestone thrusting from the hillside was sedimentary rock. There was no trace of igneous rock, no ancient lava flows. And the same objections still would hold if the crater had been formed by meteoric impact, for any meteorite that threw up a crater of that size would have turned tons of material into a molten mass and would have thrown out a sheet of magma, of which there was no' sign.
He began drifting slowly in the direction of the crater. Beneath him the terrain remained unchanged — the red soil, the purple fruit and little else.
He came to rest — if that is what his action could be called — on the crater's rim and for a moment failed to understand what he was seeing.
Some sort of shining substance extended all around the rim and sloped inward to the center to form what appeared to be a concave mirror. But it was not a mirror, for it was nonreflective.
Then, quite suddenly, an image formed upon it and if he could have caught his breath he would have.
Two creatures, one large, the other smaller, stood on a ledge above a deep cut in the earth, with a striated sandstone bluff rising up above them. The smaller one was digging in the bluff with a hand tool of some sort — a hand tool that was grasped in what must be a hand, which was attached to an arm and the arm hooked up to a body, which had a head and eyes.
Myself, he thought — the smaller one, myself.
He felt a weakness and a haziness and the image in the mirror seemed to be trying to pull him down to join and coalesce with this image of himself. The gates of memory opened and the old, restricted data came pouring in upon him — the terms and relationships — and he cried out against it and tried to push it back, but it would not push back. It was as if someone were holding him so he could not get away and, with a mouth close against his ear, was telling him things he did not wish to know.
Humans, father, son, a railroad cut, the Earth, the finding of that first trilobite. Relentlessly the information came pouring into him, into the intellectual force field that he had become, that he had evolved into, or been engineered into, and that had been a comfort and a refuge until this very moment.
His father wore an old sweater, with holes in the elbows of the sleeves, and an old pair of black trousers that were baggy at the knees. He smoked an ancient pipe with a fire-charred bowl and a stem half-bitten through, and he watched with deep paternal interest as the boy, working carefully, dug out the tiny slab of stone that bore the imprint of an ancient form of life.
Then the image flickered and went out and he sat (?) upon the crater's rim, with the dead mirror sweeping downward to its center, showing nothing but the red and blue reflections of the suns.
Now he knew, he thought. He knew, not what he was, but what he once had been — a creature that had walked upon two legs, that had a body and two arms, a head and eyes and a mouth that cried out in excited triumph at the finding of a trilobite. A creature that walked proudly and with misplaced confidence, for it had none of the immunity against its environment such as he now possessed.
From that feeble, vulnerable creature, how had he evolved?
Could it be death, he wondered, and was aghast at death, which was a new concept. Death, an ending, and there was no end, never would be one; a thing that was an intellect trapped within a force field could exist forever. But somewhere along the way, somewhere in the course of evolution, or of engineering, could death have played a part? Must a man come to death before he came to this?
He sat upon the crater's rim and knew the surface of the planet all about him — the red of land, the yellow of the sky, the green and purple of the flowers, the gurgle of the liquid running in its courses, the red and blue of suns and the shadows that they cast, the running thing that threw up spurts of sand, the limestone and the fossils.
And something else as well and with the sensing of that something else a fear and panic he had never known before. Had never had the need to know, for he had been protected and immune, untouchable, secure, perhaps even in the center of a sun. There had been nothing that could get at him, no way he could be reached.
But that was true no longer, for now he could be reached. Something had torn from him an ancient memory and had shown it to him. Here, on this planet, there was a factor that could get at him, that could reach into him and tear from him something even he had not suspected.
He screamed a question and phantom echoes ran across the land, bouncing back to mock him. Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? Fainter and fainter and the only answers were the echoes.
It could afford not to answer him, he knew. It need not answer him. It could sit smug and silent while he screamed the question, waiting until it wished to strip other memories from him, memories for its own strange use, or to further mock him.
He was safe no longer. He was vulnerable. Naked to this thing that used a mirror to convince him of his own vulnerability.
He screamed again and this time the scream was directed to those others of his kind who had sent him out.
Take me back! I am naked! Save me!
Silence.
I have worked for you — I have dug out the data for you — I have done my job — You owe me something now!
Silence.
Please!
Silence.
Silence — and something more than silence. Not only silence, but an absence, a not being there, a vacuum.
The realization came thudding hard into his understanding. He had been abandoned, all ties with him had been cut — in the depth of unguessed space, he had been set adrift. They had washed their hands of him and he was not only naked, but alone.
They knew what had happened. They knew everything that ever happened to him, they monitored him continuously and would know everything he knew. And they had sensed the danger, perhaps even before he, himself, had sensed it. Had recognized the danger, not only to himself, but to themselves as well. If something could get to him, it could trace back the linkage and get to them as well. So the linkage had been cut and would not be restored. They weren't taking any chances. It had been something that had been emphasized time and time again. You must remain not only unrecognized, but entirely unsuspected. You must do nothing that will make you known. You must never point a finger at us.