Cluster (30 page)

“Andromeda!” Flint exclaimed, suddenly seeing it. “That must be it!”

“And beware—for she obviously has a way to orient on your transfers. Wherever you go, she can go, and she will kill you. She knows you while you do not know her, and you have humiliated her. Never forget she is a woman, though quite unlike Honeybloom. Whatever guise she wears, wherever she hails from, her motive is not yours. Hell hath no–”

“Hell is a straight line, in Polarian mythology,” Flint said. “And a dry place without zones in Spica. Shaman, you have saved my life!”

“I hope so. Tomorrow I will see your widow about your death. That was a very nice gesture on your part, Flint.”

“I do seem to achieve my best effects in the modes of my deaths. It was circular. What else was there to do?”

“Nothing else. But it took a man to do it.”

They stood up and shook hands, Imperial style. “Farewell, friend,” the Shaman said.

“Farewell—friend,” Flint echoed, feeling the tears in his eyes that had not been there when he parted from Honeybloom. He had thought he had come to see her, but now he knew it had been for this conversation with the Shaman. He would never see either of them again.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 9:

Daughters of the Titan

 

 

*notice: multiple mattermissions to hyades open star cluster, including 200 kirlian enemy entity*

–hyades! That means they've found it! Send agent immediately–

*she is only just freed from spica her kirlian is down*

–I know mattermit her there–

*to
another galaxy?
the energy expense*

–call for concurrence, all available entities–

%::CONCURRENCE%::

–that satisfy you? this is an emergency! mattermit her NOW!–

*(sigh) POWER*

–CIVILIZATION–

 

*
 
*
 
*

 

 
“We have another mission for you,” the Minister of Alien Spheres said as Flint animated his own, restored body.

“Not today, Imp,” Flint said. “My Kirlian's so low I'm ready to phase into the next host I animate. I must have been six months on the road.”

“Three months. Your aura intensity is down to fifty percent, still the highest we have. You're not in trouble yet. But in this case you'll use your own body, because there are no hosts where you're going. In fact, no life there at all.”

“What kind of a Sphere has no life in it?” Flint demanded, intrigued.

“An Ancient Sphere.”

The Minister paused to let that sink in. Flint knew about the Ancients, of course. Some of their earthworks were on Outworld, and others were scattered across the galaxy. The Ancients had had the hugest interstellar empire ever known, perhaps three million years ago; they had possessed secrets of technology that modern Spheres could only glimpse. “You have my attention,” Flint said.

“We have located a well-preserved Ancient colony in the Hyades, a hundred and thirty light years from Sol,” the Minister said. “Do you know what that means?”

“Taurus Constellation. The Horns of the Bull.” If there was one geography Flint knew well, it was that of the near stars.

“The horns of a
dilemma
. The Hyades are at the approximate intersection of four Spheres: Sol, Polaris, Canopus, and Nath. All have colonies there, but these have their own primitive mores and we prefer not to involve them. This is a matter for the Imperial Planets, but none of these four exercise specific authority in that region.”

“Because none
want
to. A hundred or so stars jammed into a cubic parsec of space. Hard to get a night's sleep, with all that starlight.”

“It's not that bad. It's an open cluster, not a closed one. The question is, which Sphere has jurisdiction now? The Ancient site may be the most important find in the galaxy. Who excavates it?”

“What makes you so sure there's any more there than there's been anywhere else? Three million years make a big difference.”

“This one's on an airless planet, and it hasn't been touched.”

“Airless!” Flint said. “No deterioration?”

“Almost none. It's the best-preserved Ancient site ever discovered, we believe. A peppering of meteorite pocks, but apparently its isolation in the cluster protected it pretty well even from space debris. Otherwise, it's intact.

“Which means there may be a functioning machine, an Ancient machine–”

“Or an Ancient library that would enable us to crack the language barrier and learn all their secrets,” the Minister said, his pale face becoming animated. Flint had regarded the Ministers as basically devoid of individuality, but now a bit of character was beginning to show. This one really cared about his alien Spheres. “The Ancients had no Spherical regression; they were able to maintain a galactic empire with uniform culture and technology, as far as we can ascertain. They solved the energy problem. If we had that secret–”

“Then I could retire,” Flint said. But the notion no longer filled him with enthusiasm. He had had himself put in the records as officially dead, so that Honeybloom would have his pension. There was no longer any life to retire to. And this business of traveling to strange civilizations had slowly grown on him; this was his type of adventure.

“You could retire, having saved our galaxy,” the Minister agreed, not aware of the irony. “We have elected to compromise. We have sent message capsules to all our neighbors with the news. The potential significance of this discovery transcends local Sphere boundaries. The other Spheres of this cluster have agreed to a cooperative mission, with all discoveries to be shared equally, for the good of the galaxy. They are notifying
their
neighbors, and we hope several of these will participate also. We have of course also advised Sphere Knyfh of the inner galaxy, but naturally they cannot afford to mattermit a representative five thousand light years on speculation.”

Flint nodded. “If all the Spheres mattermit their own physical representatives to the Hyades that will be some menagerie.”

“That why we're sending you. You have had direct experience with some of those creatures. You will be able to recognize them and deal with them despite their strange or even repulsive aspects. Other humans would be at a disadvantage.”

“That's true,” Flint agreed, remembering the way human beings had seemed to him when he occupied a Polarian host. He had been shocked and nauseated, and so had blundered badly. Of course, he still suffered some from an aversion to illness or deformity. His recent excursion in the body of a one-armed boy had been a real exercise in control. But alienophobia was a nearly universal phenomenon. This Hyades group would not be the most compatible assemblage.

Yet the prospect remained intriguing, and not merely because of the monstrous potential of the Ancient site. To deal physically , in his own body, with all the alien sapients he had known only in transfer...

 

*
 
*
 
*

 

He arrived at Gondolph IV at night. Four bright stars were visible in the sky, overwhelming the more distant field. They were Gondolph's neighbors, II, III, V, and VI, all within half a light year, but they had the aspect of stars, not suns. No perpetual day here after all; the cluster was not that tight. Maybe someday he would visit a closed or globular cluster;
then
he'd see something.

The cluster of civilizations was not that tight, either. He thought. Each Sphere functioned independently of its neighbors, with only minor interactions. Together the massed Spheres made up the disk-shaped cluster of the Milky Way galaxy, like so many cells forming a creature. The Milky Way had also operated largely independently of its neighbors in the cluster of galaxies. Until recently.

Flint was in a spacesuit, and it was no more awkward than adapting to an alien host-body. This was not like the old Luna spacesuits, clumsy and suspect; the material of this suit fit him like a sheath of exterior muscles. It yielded whenever his motions required, but maintained comfortably normal atmospheric pressure. A porous layer next to his skin permitted the transfer of fluids and gases necessary to his health. His body would not suffocate from lack of oxygen and drown in its own sweat. It had discreet airlocks for intake and outgo, so that all natural functions could be accommodated readily and safely. The suit was tough, but had its limitations. If it were perforated and not immediately patched, he would quickly die of exposure and decompression. Therefore he carried no power weapon; it was too possible for it to be used against him. He was, however, armed, unobtrusively.

He looked about. The Hyades, mythologically, were the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the nymph Aethra, and they were half-sisters to the Pleiades. There were two ways to relate to the present situation: the Titan was the Milky Way galaxy, and his daughters the Spheres, perhaps seven of which would be represented here. Or the Titan was the empire of the Ancients, and his daughters were the scientific and cultural artifacts left behind, each one of immense potential significance to the contemporary scene.

At a time like this, he longed for the ability to journey back to the time-frame of the ancients. Not merely to penetrate their technological and cultural secrets, but just to get to know them as individuals. Surely they had been something very, very special.

But now to meet his companions, and commence the archaeological research. A Nathan lifeship had discovered the site and set down the first mattermitter. For reasons comprehensible only to the Nath mind, that device had sat on the planet unused for twenty Earth years. News of galactic peril brought by micromessage from Sphere Polaris, and the quick transmission of transfer information had brought this site back into awareness. The Nath government had recognized the possible relevance and finally revealed the existence of its device. After that, things had moved rapidly. More mattermission units had been sent though the first and attuned to their Spheres of origin. Thus all representatives could be shipped at a common time.

They were to meet at a designated staging area within the site. Flint wondered why the units hadn't been grouped together to begin with, but assumed it was to provide a certain initial privacy. The shock of coming face to face with alien monsters—yes, it was better to allow some spacing and nominal adjustment room. But the Nathan organizers might have had some quite different notion.

Flint's eye was attracted by a surprising but familiar form: the disk of a Canopian flying saucer. He had thought those craft were airborne, but evidently they used another mechanism. At least this one did, for it traversed the vacuum effortlessly. It spotted him, and coasted down to hover close above. “Conveyance, Sphere Sol?” its speaker inquired in the standard language of Imperial Earth. The sound actually came from vibrations in Flint's own suit; evidently radar was projected to it to stir the sound, as vacuum would not.

“Sphere Canopus comes in style,” Flint observed, grasping the flexible ladder that descended for his convenience. Now that he was in physical contact, sound was no problem. “You mattermitted the whole craft?” That would have cost tens of trillions of dollars worth of energy, unless they had worked out a really economical system.

His benefactor turned out to be a Master: facet-eyed, mandible-mouthed, with wings forming a cloak, and half a dozen spindly legs. It looked like a monstrous insect, and perhaps it was, but it was also highly intelligent and of inflexible nerve. In Sphere Canopus these were the Master species, while humanoids were Slaves. Flint had learned the hard way not to interfere with that social scheme. In fact, he had developed a lot of respect for the Masters. “What we do, we do properly,” it said in its melodious voice. “This does not imply any pleasure in the task.”

Of course. The Canopian Masters wanted to be left alone to run their Sphere in their efficient fashion. Slavers generally did not appreciate the cynosure of dissimilar cultures. But the one in change of Flint's case when he had visited in transfer, B:::1, had yielded to the inevitable, and Canopus had joined the galactic coalition.

Flint settled into the second depression in the upper surface of the disk, beside the pilot. “I am Flint of Outworld. I visited your Sphere a few months ago.”

The Masters seldom showed emotion, but something very like surprise made this one's mandibles twitch. “I regret I did not recognize your specific identity in your natural host. I am H:::4, of Kirlian intensity forty five.”

“Your government risks a high-Kirlian entity on a mattermission mission?”

The Master extended one thin leg to touch Flint's shoulder. Even through the suit, Flint felt the power of the aura. It seemed higher than forty-five—unless his own reduced aura made the differential seem less. “The secret of the Ancients necessarily involves some aspect of Kirlian force. I suspect all representatives here will be Kirlian, even as you and I.”

A good answer. Obviously the Council of Ministers had had more than Flint's travel experience in mind when they selected him.

“If we discover what we hope,” Flint said, “the mutual threat will be considerably abated. With the science of the Ancients, whether Kirlian or otherwise, our galaxy should be invulnerable.”

“Perhaps. Yet the Ancients perished.”

“After maintaining their empire for a million years or so.”

“Strange that they should fade so suddenly and completely, after such longevity,” the Master observed.

“Yes. That is one of their fascinating mysteries.”

“We regard it as ominous rather than intriguing.”

The saucer dropped down, and Flint climbed out from the visitor's well. “Thank you for the lift,” he said.

“It has been an honor to serve. You are known to us.” the craft set off to locate a new entity.

Flint stood where he was for a moment, pondering. The exchange had been perfectly amicable, but the Master had shown him that it had come thoroughly prepared. An excellent ally, or an extremely dangerous enemy. The Canopians evidently were convinced of the importance of this site.