Kirlian Quest (42 page)

"Strange that a creature as cognizant as Melody of Mintaka should desert her innocent host in a place like this, permitting her to die of hunger and confinement."

That bothered Herald too. "What happened to the two prior hosts?" he demanded of the image-machine. Maybe the site itself would answer.

It did. By a rapid series of images it told how the £ had been given suitable food refined by the site equipment, and granted visions of all the beautiful things they could imagine, creating a kind of perceptual paradise. It was not reality, but it had been a good deal more satisfying than many realities were. They had lived a long time before dying natural deaths.

"It was an idle question," Flame said. "But I am glad to have the answer. It seems the Ancients were not cruel." She looked about at the changing images around them. "We should get on with the mission, before the Amoeba does. I suffer premonitions of impending doom."

"It is not necessary for you to risk yourself further," Herald told her. "Now that you have enabled me to enter the site, you can Transfer directly back to your natural host in Furnace, assured that your £ host will not suffer."

Her image flared with irritation. "While the Amoeba bombs this site and attempts to eliminate you," she replied. "If the enemy succeeds, the entire Cluster will be sterilized, including Furnace. I have nothing to gain by going home before the job is done."

Herald liked her better and better. "Then help me search. I must discover the technology of the Ancients, and how to apply it rapidly, and get that information to Cluster specialists. You can zero in on the secret Melody of Mintaka would not tell. It must have relevance to the contemporary situation."

"Let me remain here, interrogating the unit. You must Transfer elsewhere, where the Amoeba cannot trace you."

She was offering to be decoy, and he had to accept. "If the site is attacked, go home immediately," he told her. "I will Transfer to my own body in Slash, or some other convenient host, from whatever site I occupy."

"You will occupy a
site?
There would be no host there!"

No
living
host. His whole personal quest was based on the assumption that the sites could be occupied by auras. If Psyche lived, she was in an Ancient site, using it as a host, maintaining herself through constant enhancement of her aura. If
she
had done it,
he
could do it. If she had not done it, then he did not want to live. This was the critical test. "My aura will imbue the Ancient equipment itself. I will have its secrets–from within."

"May you succeed," the image-Flame whispered, amazed. She did not say what she obviously thought:
impossible
.

He concentrated.
Take me to a safe site with usable machines,
he thought, hardly expecting it to be this easy.

 

* * *

 

He was in deep space.
Deep
deep space! Intergalactic space, perhaps inter-Cluster space.

He rotated, guiding his orientation by willpower, since he had no body. Now he saw a Galaxy, so far away it resembled a diffuse star. It was Andromeda! Or the Milky Way, or some other great Galaxy of the Universe.

Was he lost in some far Cluster? He had not anticipated
this!

How was he able to see, since he had no body? None of this made much sense.

He examined his situation more closely. Now he turned his lens on it. His apparatus was a conglomeration of antennae, baffles, and refractive fields. A functioning Ancient machine, in a safe location. A million light-years from the nearest Galaxy. Well, he had asked for it.

His aura had animated the machine.
It was possible!
He was now a robot in space. No one suspected that the Ancients had left functioning equipment out here! Not that it made much difference, as no telescope could resolve so small an object at such a range. No physical ships would be traveling out here. It would take them at least two million years to get this far, and any that did that not only had to be freezers, they had to predate all contemporary cultures by two million years, and postdate the Ancients by one million years, which meant they could not exist anyway. Even the survey Net could not pick this up. The Net did not go this far out, and the receivers were not nearly sensitive enough. Only freak luck would show a space-borne extra-Galactic Ancient site, which was why this one was safe from discovery by Cluster entities—or the Amoeba.

If he could report the site's precise location, the Cluster Council could have their experts attempt to tune it in, and mattermit a specialized crew here.

Mattermit?

Yes, this
was
a mattermission station. He recognized it as such because he was
of
it. It was also a Transfer station intended for energy transport. Evidently the Ancients had Transferred a sapient entity along with their shipments of energy, to supervise operations. Though what they were doing way out here in nowhere was not clear.

This might be the only surviving space station, or there might be hundreds, some much more conveniently placed for investigation by Cluster experts. He would have to perform a survey. He had already established that a high-aura creature
could
occupy Ancient equipment; therefore victory on both Cluster and personal fronts was within reach. The Cluster could achieve Ancient science, which was turning out to be even more marvelous than he had really dared hope, and he could recover Psyche. Maybe this was where the Ancients themselves had gone: into their own equipment! Unfortunately, they had not been able to reproduce themselves there— No, they would not be such fools! All would soon be known. But until he knew where he was, he could not accomplish much.

Location: exactly where was he? He needed some sort of spatial coordinates, precise ones. Was there orientation equipment here? There should be–and there was. As he thought of it, this subunit became functional. He focused his scopes and antennae, becoming aware how marvelously efficient they were, and in moments had his answer. He was at the fringe of the Cluster ellipsoid, and the Galaxy he saw was Milky Way.

He noted his position as precisely as possible, then concentrated again:
nearest other functioning unit.

And found himself in orbit about Cloud 9. In an instant he had jumped another million light-years. The implication was plain: However many Ancient units had been in Cluster space originally, few remained now. That suggested a fair attrition rate. The machines were
not
perfect. Not quite.

How many such stations had there been originally? He could not tell; the information was not in the Ancient memory banks. These were functional sites, not memory-storage units. Probably a landbound site, such as the one he and Flame had entered, would be more complete. Maybe she was getting all the information they needed while he wasted his time traveling.

But he still needed to identify the ones that remained. Not only would analysis of their equipment offer the Cluster parity with the Amoeba—and perhaps superiority—but each could be an excellent base for launching attacks against the enemy. It would take the best Cluster industries a significant period to build sophisticated new equipment along Ancient lines, even given full blueprints, assuming the Cluster Council ever let the blueprints get out of committee. In that period the Amoeba could overrun it all. It would be necessary to use the stations already in place to stave off the enemy thrust until the new weapons were ready.

Still, why mattermit technicians out to a space station, if there were planetbound ones available? If he could find one, and get news out about its location before the Amoeba struck, they might get a Cluster battlefleet into position to protect it. Those energy-globe Amoeba ships were effective, but they would find armed Cluster battleships to be much more of a challenge than an unarmed archaeological mission.

He considered the geography of the Cluster. Where would a planetary site be most accessible to the natives, and least accessible to the Amoeba? Not in deep space, certainly. But Amoeba ships had come to Planet Keep and Planet Mars within the Milky Way Galaxy, so a Galaxy was no protection either. And he had fought, as it were, hand to hand with the Amoebites in the globular cluster orbiting Pinwheel. They might be non-Kirlian, but they could certainly get around. Probably the Amoeba could strike anywhere, and within minutes. Except perhaps at a major Cluster military base, or a fleet of battleships. A military base? Why not? Technology alone made the Amoeba superior. Nullify that, and the advantage would swing firmly to the Kirlian Cluster. At a military base, it would be a straight one-to-one combat without frills. The Amoeba's technological sophistication would be matched by the sheer firepower of the base.

But how would the Ancient equipment know where contemporary bases were? The Ancients had put together their Empire three million years before such bases had been established. Unless the Ancient equipment monitored such things....

No harm in trying, anyway. So far he, like other contemporary entities, had consistently underestimated the capacities of the sites. He might find out more by investigating the instruction banks of the equipment itself, but this was like delving into a host-memory: tedious and time-consuming. Easier to make it operate in its own fashion. He wanted his answers
now
, before the Amoeba struck.

He willed—and was there. In a planetary site near a military base. He looked out of his lens and saw—

A Jet.

So he had reached a site in Sphere Jet, Sixteen's globular Cluster home near the black hole. Of course the Ancients had been here, since they had taken the trouble to isolate the low-aura Jets. Well, the Jets were part of civilization now, fully sapient and with more aura than they had had three million years ago. Too bad they had not known about this Ancient site in their midst.

Too bad for
them;
perhaps fortunate for the rest of the Cluster. Had they discovered this site a million years ago, the Jets would have become the Cluster enemy.

Not known? He was looking into a chamber of the site itself. The Jet was inside the site!

Maybe the Jets did not realize its significance. They might think it was merely an interesting artifact. He would contact them.

How? He was in the Ancient circuitry, his aura little more than a current within it. As Psyche's aura must be, somewhere. Getting in direct touch with a creature outside this circuitry was a problem. He had no living host to step into, unless he tried for the Jet himself, and he hesitated to do that yet. It might only foment confusion.

Well, he could operate the equipment to a certain extent, as he had done in space, turning perceptors about. Could he make this machine speak?

He tried.
Attention
, he thought. Too bad there was not a vision screen or animation chamber here. He could really communicate with one of those!

The Jet in his view reacted. It wooshed something in an unfamiliar language. Certainly not the language Sixteen had used briefly, =, and no variant of it; the fundamental precepts and inflections differed.

But then Herald's circuits meshed, and meaning came through. And the invocation of those special circuits told him something else. This language was related to that of the Ancients themselves, for the equipment could comprehend it directly.

No. It had to be a full translation rendered
into
Ancient by this amazingly sophisticated site. Naturally it seemed like Ancient to him, at the receiving end. The reason he had not understood the Jet original was that the modern language was not immediately comprehensible either to him or to the Ancient equipment. It had to be classified and rendered into machine-language. The Ancients would have understood the speech of Jet three million years ago, so the equipment could trace its considerable evolution.

Other Jets appeared. They operated the inputs. Naturally they were curious about this manifestation of the site. He was curious about
them
, too. If they understood this equipment well enough to tune the controls, why hadn't they understood it well enough to Transfer to the main centers of the Cluster, instead of remaining in isolation? They could not have discovered this site just in the past day; they moved around in it with too much familiarity.

Of course. They were low-Kirlian and so could not Transfer. Still, why hadn't they told the Cluster Council about this site, knowing how important it was? Were they saving it for their own use, contrary to Cluster policy?

Herald decided on caution. He really knew the Jets only from the one archaeological expedition on Planet Mars, and from Sixteen. That had been a separated group, reared in the Galaxy. Their home culture in Sphere Glob might be quite different, with secrets and motives unsuspected by other Clusterites. These Jets might not be quite as friendly as he had thought at first. If he had been a member of a culture restricted to a globular Cluster, adjacent to a dangerous black hole, for three million years, how would
he
feel about outsiders? Particularly when the first outsiders had done the restricting and the later outsiders had alleviated it only to the extent of taking (and never returning) sapients as samples for study. No question about it: He would be extremely cynical about the motives of aliens!

Now their dialogue filtered through to him. |||The machine spoke! Is it a communication from the ancient ones?|||

Not the = of Sphere Jet, but the ||| of the site. A full translation! He was already coming to comprehend the Ancient mode better.

|||No. Consider the readings. There is an abnormality in the machine. It is very old; such problems are to be expected.|||

Time to get in touch, since they were now aware of him anyway. As they were low-Kirlian, they could not get at him even if they weren't friendly.

No abnormality,
he willed.
I am Herald the Healer of Sphere Slash, Andromeda.

|||It must be a recording,||| a Jet said.

|||No, the readings indicate aural flow in excess of aperture-keying intensity. A definite malfunction.|||