"Sh'shrane! Sh'shrane!"
The aiodoi, though they sing all, also hear all. Some of the smallsongs they heard were doleful, and some were painful, and some were tinged with fear; yet they sang on, and did not neglect such other songs as that of the old Earth scientist/poet.
"If you take seriously that anthropic-universe idea we were talking about, you're probably going to be asking yourself some logical questions.
"Okay, you say. I'll buy into the idea that this particular universe we inhabit couldn't just happen to be so neatly adapted to the needs of intelligent living things like us. Fine, but if that's true, where did it go wrong?
"That is, here we are, sitting on one measly litde planet of a third-rate star, which is only one of the two hundred-odd billion in our own galaxy alone, and God knows how many more in all the other external galaxies.
"So why is it just us? If the design of the universe was so hotsy-totsy for smart living things, shouldn't there be some others around somewhere?
"That's a fair question, and people have been asking it for a long time. The question even has a name. It's called 'the Fermi question' after an Italian scientist who was the first one to ask in public, 'Where is everybody?'
"A lot of scientists took the question seriously, and a bunch of good ones began spending time looking for an answer. One place to look was in the zillion flying-saucer stories that went around in those days, so some scientists began investigating them. It was a dead end. Out of all the tens of thousands of reports of sightings and abductions and what-all, they never found one with any solid evidence to prove it—and an awful lot that were clearly the work of loonies or cheats.
"Other scientists begged or stole time on radio telescopes, and they listened devotedly, day after day, for some sort of non-random message from Out There. They never heard one, though.
"Later on, a man named Freeman Dyson, an Englishman who became an American, had a different idea. Dyson said he thought that any truly advanced technological race would probably be enough like ourselves that it would want to do a lot of high-tech things, and that if so it would need energy to do them with. Where would it get that energy? Why, said Dyson, the best place would be to trap the radiation from their nearest star. What he thought they might do was take all the planets in their solar system and grind them up and rearrange them as a hollow sphere, putting a kind of wall around the star. That way they could use all the star's highest-level energy for their industry—or whatever—and let the waste heat radiate away from the outside of the sphere. So Dyson asked that infrared astronomers keep their eyes open for such weakly radiating infrared objects, which came to be called 'Dyson spheres.'
"So a lot of astronomers did that . . . but they never found any Dyson spheres.
"What it all adds up to is that Fermi's question is still unanswered.
"If you want my personal opinion, the answer's pretty simple. Where is everybody? There isn't any 'everybody' but us. We're all alone in this great big universe."
And the aiodoi sang:
"To seek forever, and never to find, that is to fail. "To seek for a while, and then stop seeking, that is also a failure; but it is a failure of the self.
"To seek and fail when the object of the search is almost at hand—that is sorrow."
17
Francis Krake couldn't help himself. When he saw the giant Turtle roughly shoving Marco out of the way to take over the controls of the Golden Hind he leaped forward with a roar.
Chief Thunderbird didn't surrender the board willingly. He cawed frantically at Krake as he resisted, striking at the captain with his clawed forelimbs, but Krake would not be denied. Although the Turde was half again his height and much more than twice his mass, it was Francis Krake who wound up with his fingers on the board.
Krake knew that he wasn't being sensible. There was nothing he could do at the controls that the Proctor couldn't do as well. Krake knew that the Turtle was at least as good a pilot as he, but that didn't matter. The Golden Hind was his ship.
Krake turned his back on the bleating Turtle. He absently rubbed at the blood on his forearm, where the Turtle's claws had broken the skin. Krake swore monotonously to himself, staring up at the screens as the simulated sky began slowly to revolve around them. Both Turtles were screeching at him all the while, transposes forgotten, but Krake wasn't listening. The ship was turning too slowly! Yet he knew it couldn't be helped. There was no way to make the turn go faster. A wave-ship was not a fighter plane; it couldn't stop and turn and reverse, skittering all over the sky like the P-38s and P-51s Krake had flown in the South Pacific. It was like a vast liner. All you could do was change the direction of thrust, and the resulting vector would slowly, bit by bit, alter the direction of travel.
Lidun finally remembered to turn on his transposer. "Run, Krake!" he begged. "Get away from them quickly, please!" And Chief Thunderbird, fumbling with his own speaking machine, echoed:
"Quickly! For one believes they are the Sh'shrane!"
"I'm going as fast as I can," Krake said tighdy. He took one second to glancc around the chamber. Sue-ling was crouched over her patient, her face white with worry, Moon holding tight to her crushed-looking Taur, the others simply waiting. Then he returned to the screens. The red and green blotches were still coming in their direction—more ships than ever, he saw, scowling—but not direcdy at them. The oncoming ships were displaced a few degrees to one side now, and the angle growing.
Krake allowed himself one final oath. Then he turned around, tugging at his beard as he glared at the two Turtles. He said flatly, "We'll miss them, I think. There's nothing else we can do now, so let's hear some truth from you two! Who are the Sh'shrane?"
The Turtles were silent for a moment, their eyes wandering at random. Then they exchanged glances and Chief Thunderbird spoke for both of them.
"They are our ancient destroyers," he said, tolling the words like a dirge. "They killed us by the thousands, and now we are helpless in their midst."
As the Turtles began to speak, Sue-ling lifted her head. "Sork's worse," she said briefly. "Kiri! Please get my bag— hurry!" And, at a moan from Sork, she bent down to him again, her eyes wet.
Krake saw, but had no time to observe. He took his eyes off Sue-ling Quong and turned to the Turtles. "All of it," he grated. "Everything you haven't told us already!"
Chief Thunderbird said, his bearing hopeless but still with some dignity: "There is little to tell. It was many Mother-lives ago. We were conducting our business without harm to anyone—" Krake barked a sardonic laugh at that, but the Turde went on unheeding—"when our ships began to disappear. Then fleets of other ships began to appear on our screens. They were not like ours, Krake. They were far more maneuver-able, and—they were armed."
"So were ours," Litlun put in despairingly.
The Proctor turned both eyes to glare at him, then surrendered. "Yes," he admitted, "one must say that is true. True at that time—which was many, many Mother-lives ago. Our armaments made no difference. Their weapons were better than ours, and so were their ships."
Out of the corner of his eye Krake saw Kiri Quintero hurrying back with Sue-ling's supplies. She wrenched the bag open, found her memo disk and slipped it into the slot in her skull. Krake looked away, unwilling to see her go under the spell of the disk. "What else?" he demanded of the Turtles.