Krake flushed. He tugged at the beard for a moment, then said, "I guess there is something I should have mentioned. Well, not anything wrong, but anyway there's something different—about Marco and Daisy Fay, I mean. My crew."
"What about them?" Sork demanded suspiciously.
Krake ran his fingers through his cinnamon-colored beard. "They're a little unusual," he said.
"Unusual how? Do we have to drag it out of you? If youVe got something to say, then say it!"
Krake held up a mollifying hand. "All right, youVe made your point. It's just that, you see, when we were—rescued—or kidnapped, whichever way you want to look at it—both Daisy Fay and Marco were in really bad shape. They'd been in a plane crash, and then, to make it worse, they were trapped in an avalanche. They had it all—frostbites, broken limbs, terrible internal injuries—it was a miracle the Turtles were able to keep them alive at all."
Sue-ling said sympathetically, "We know what great surgeons the Turtles are—they're where I get the memo disks I use myself."
Krake nodded. "Exactly. Or, I mean, that's not exactly what I was going to say. Remember, when the Turtles worked on us they'd never dealt with human beings before, so they had to—well—sort of figure tilings out as they went along. And-"
That was as far as he got. There was a lowing sound from the Taur, whose horns had begun to glow in prismatic colors, and Moon Bunderan said softly, "Oh, my dear Lord! What are those?"
Around a bend in the hall came two figures. Sork gasped as he saw them, and even Kiri caught his breath.
They did not look at all human. They were two hard-shelled, egg-shaped bodies, one glinting of copper, the other the black of Japanese lacquer. Each had eight boneless, prehensile limbs protruding from the globular body, all of them writhing at once. Two large eyes—Turtle eyes, not at all the eyes of human beings—gazed out at the newcomers from the ends of flexible stalks. And, strangest of all, there was something like a video screen on the belly of each shell, and each screen showed a friendly, animated human face.
"Hello, Francis," said a voice from the copper-colored one. The face on its screen was that of a young woman, fresh-faced and eager. The machine turned to the others in the group. "I'm Daisy Fay," it said.
"And I'm Marco," said the other, the voice human enough to sound embarrassed, the face on the belly screen a dark-skinned man with an engaging, diffident smile.
Sork whirled on Francis Krake. "And these are your crew?" he demanded.
Krake sighed. "I tried to tell you," he said. "They've been like this ever since."
Though the aiodoi are not of space and time, it is of space and time that they sing, and it is to the smallsongs of space and time they hear (for they hear all songs, always and everywhere) that they listen most closely . . . even though so many of the smallsongs are sad, or angry, or simply wrong.
8
"Today, class, we're going to talk about a different kind of history. We discussed the three ages of mankind briefly, and the three ages of the universe in a little more detail. Today we're going to discuss the three ages of mankind's understanding of the universe. That's history, too, and you can write it in three words. The three words are: "Caprice, "Causality, and "Chaos.
"Those are the three big Cs.
"The first C was the age of Caprice, and it lasted the longest time, maybe a million years. That was the time when everything was a superstitious marvel. For all that time, people thought that the Sun rose, the lightning struck and the wind blew not for any natural reason, but simply at the Caprice of some supernatural being—or beings. Sometimes the people thought there were any number of them, maybe one for every rock and tree and cloud.
"Some of the things that happened were really important to the people. If the rain didn't fall at the right time, you got no crops. If the Sun disappeared in an eclipse, you would do anything to get it back.
"So primitive man did his best to make deals with these Capricious supernatural entities. They sacrificed harvest grains to them, or animals, or sometimes their own children. They made love in the furrows of their fields to encourage the harvest gods to be fertile—whatever it took. Or whatever kind of bribe or inducement they thought it might take.
"Then some people got a little smarter. The smartest of them, way back then, were the ancient Greeks. They got an idea in their heads. Suppose, they suggested, things didn't really just happen because of some supernatural Caprice. Suppose there were laws that governed things like the procession of the seasons, and the movement of the planets about the sky, and everything else in the observable world.
"Suppose, in other words, that everything had a Cause.
"That is the state of mind that we now call 'scientific.' It began about six centuries before Christ, in the Greek settlements on the west coast of Asia Minor. It was the first notion of Causality, and it lasted for two and a half thousand years.
"The Greeks carried the burden of the Causality idea for almost half that time. Then the rest of the world began to get the idea at, oh, let's say, about the time of Copernicus. By then we began to have all those great minds trying to figure out just what Caused things to happen—people like Kepler and Galileo, Robert Boyle and Christiaan Huygens—Isaac Newton, one of the greatest of them all—Dalton, Carnot, Faraday, Maxwell—right up to Albert Einstein and his lifelong search for a Unified Field Theory that would explain the Causes of everything.
"All of them were looking for the same thing, you see. They were trying to figure out the rules by which A interacted with B to produce the state C. All Causal, by their basic nature.
"Then things began to go a little sour for Causality, because along came Planck, Heisenberg and Stephen Hawking to tell these great seekers that they had been looking in the wrong place.
"In the right place—in the place where first explanations had to be found—Causality broke down. There were events which did not have specific, identifiable causes. Some kinds of information had to remain forever unknown. Some processes, in short, were intrinsically Chaotic . . . which meant that no matter how much you knew about the state of System X today, you had no way of predicting what its state would be tomorrow.
"That's when Chaos came along. It wasn't welcome. People like Einstein really hated it. 'God does not throw dice with the universe,' he protested, and Hawking came back with his famous riposte: 'God not only throws dice, he sometimes throws them in places where they can't be seen.'"
And the aiodoi, who saw all always, sang: "Of course.
"No one can see what is never there."
Kiri Quintero looked placidly at the thing with the copper-colored shell that was approaching him. "Hello," it said in a warm female voice, extending a tentacle to take Kiri's hand. "I'm Daisy Fay. It's just wonderful to see human beings again —besides Francis, I mean."
To Kiri's mild surprise, the tentacle felt warm and soft, not metallic at all. "Hello," Kiri said. "I hope you'll excuse my friends. We just didn't know exactly what—uh—"
The biomech laughed. "What we looked like? Francis didn't tell you, did he? Well, I know we're a surprise to you. We were pretty much a surprise to ourselves when we woke up the first time! But the Turtles have done a good job, especially now, considering what it's been like for them, the last few days. Chief Thunderbird's a righteous tyrant, when he wants to be, and he usually does. But he made sure they checked us over and got us in shape for the next mission."
Beside Kiri, his twin brother said, shuddering, "Like that kind of shape?"