Dancers in the Afterglow (22 page)

Ponder sighed. "We assure you that nothing will happen until you have heard us out, and that she will not be killed in any case. Does that satisfy you?" It did, a little.

"However," Ponder continued in that same infuriating fatherly tone, "we said the disposition is up to you. We mean it. Literally. If you will hear us out, you'll understand."

"Go ahead," he responded skeptically. "I'm listening."

Ponder smiled and leaned forward on his desk. "First, let's get rid of some of your questions. What this is all about."

"You realize, of course, that what you say also is eventually reported to the Combine," Daniel reminded him. Just a reminder to the other who was fighting whom.

"Yes, yes, we know," Ponder nodded. "After all, that's what this is all about. First, let us thank you for what you've done for us so far. The project would have been far more difficult without you." Daniel started.
"What?"

Ponder grinned. "Oh, we didn't
expect
you. Didn't know you existed, in fact, at the start. But, you see, we've been short-handed here since the beginning— terribly pressed for time—and you very nicely organized all those people in the bush and kept them out of our way for much of the time. They were a real nuisance at the beginning—one person in the bush, raiding our camps, shooting up things occasionally, tied up dozens, maybe up to a hundred soldiers. You rallied them nicely. Keep them cohesive, and away from our camps and our business. Oh, we had help from others, too, of course," he added cheerfully. "Sten Rolvag, for example. Did a wonderful job, particularly in this critical area. We helped all we could. A cache of medikits here, herding some game animals toward the caves with a flyer, and so forth."

Daniel was aghast. "You mean Rolvag was
cooperating
with you?" He'd known the man was a skunk, but this was beyond belief.

Ponder had a playful expression. "Well, no, not exactly. I think, deep down, he suspected he was being deliberately spared and helped, but he'd never admit it, even to himself. He had what he wanted, and we made certain that he continued to have it. That was one reason we didn't touch the observer radio network. It channeled all those refugees to camps like Rolvag's, where they could be controlled out of the way, and watched. One day, if time had permitted, we'd have taken them, of course, but that wasn't our paramount concern."

"And you didn't have enough time," Daniel shot back. "Right now I'm getting reports that you're losing, that your line is breaking. It won't be much longer."

That big grin was back. "But, we
did
have enough time, though barely," Ponder replied. "Again, partially thanks to you. We really did intend to evacuate as much as possible, so you caused some inconvenience there, but, either way, if you hadn't blown the pads we would have. It'll take them a month to get any kind of force on Ondine with portable pads and small shuttles. Most of them will be construction people, here to rebuild the pads. Another month, with the best automated machinery. By that time the last of the people's camps will be completed, and the final stage will be well along."

Daniel had a sudden, eerie feeling. "Final stage?" he repeated.

Ponder sat back in the big chair and put on his professorial manner. "This brings us," he began, "to what's going on here."

"To begin with," Ponder said, "let's start at the
real
beginning. The original Machists—really just a word we made up, not what we call ourselves—how you humans like labels!" He seemed to lose his train of thought, then got it back.

"Well, as we said, the original Machists came from a planet of enormous mass. They were just about held together by it.
Were,
in fact, which is why they had no real luck with space travel. Well, they went through the usual evolutionary steps, particularly socially, and they built a grand civilization. Stabilized their population at about five billion, provided for all their needs. A society of pure thought and research.

"But what do you do when you finally know everything you
can
know about your own planet and environment? You stagnate, or you strike out, explore. Our bodies, though—well, that's something we can't explain to you. There is no equivalent in your part of the universe. Or ours, either. Let's just say that every time we tried to send anything "organic" up, no matter how good its artificial gravity and environment, we just—well, broke apart. A pretty problem. They had to reach to the stars or stagnate, and the peculiar rules of their biology prohibited that."

Daniel was ahead of him. "But you sent machines out, didn't you? Some of your machines would hold together where your organic material wouldn't. That's why Machist—simply, 'machine.'"

Ponder nodded approvingly. "Yes, yes, that's it exactly! But that didn't solve our problem either. Distances are impossibly vast, and vaster still were the transmission times. Within a thousand light-year area, it was actually quicker to send the machines out and bring them back than to have them transmit data. But most didn't come back. They were all self-aware, of course, but we couldn't think of
everything.
So, research went on. The whole race fell to it, working on nothing else. And, of course, we found the answer. We found a way to mate our own minds to those of our machines, to literally
become
our machines.

"That's what the Machists are, Daniel. They're you."

Daniel sat silently for a few moments. The concept was staggering. Five billion people like him, each sealed in his own spaceship, for all time.

"The computer hardware is far more sophisticated than yours, of course," Ponder continued. "And the design concept was approached differently, but the end result is close enough."

Daniel looked at him. "So there are no Machists on this planet. You're in orbit somewhere, directing all this."

"At the moment," Ponder replied casually, "we're that rather large pitted red asteroid about three hundred meters off your port bow."

And, in his golden egg, Daniel looked and saw it. It was
huge
—more than four kilometers around. He'd seen it before, along with the thousands of other minor moons circling Ondine. He'd tracked them all, too, to avoid collisions. This one had been so subtle he'd not even noticed a slight orbital acceleration.

"How long have you been there?" he asked.

Ponder shrugged. "Not long. You're so small we could never have picked you out. Nonetheless, you are human in reactions—and we've studied human psychology long and well. When you knew we had the girl you became emotional, you thought of nothing else. That disguised our subtle course maneuvers, made on the other side, of course, out of sight. You should know that only a tiny difference will greatly vary an orbit."

"But—but how did you find me?" he stammered. "Out of those thousands of specks ..." He shook his head in wonder.

"When your female symb was destroyed at the spaceport, we deduced that you would not abandon the girl. We made a slow show of loading her in the van. Frankly, we thought you'd rush the van, we could cut you down, and achieve the same result. You surprised us by turning noble and blowing the spaceport. Of course, we really
didn't
know where the symb was until you acted."

"You retracked the launch of this symb," he said, almost mechanically.

Ponder shrugged. "Easy when you know that there's to be a launch, can estimate the size of the object, and know its final destination. Ballistics is an exact science. When we computed your trajectory, it was child's play to find you by back tracking."

As they sat, Daniel tried a few maneuvers. The other object matched him, its targeting locked on. He could outdistance it easily if he could first break orbit —but if he started to do that, the thing would have him.

"I assume you're armed," he said.

In answer, the object, so like a pitted asteroid, sent two strong bursts just in front of him.

Daniel sighed. "So you have me. Would it surprise you to learn that it doesn't matter to me?"

Ponder's smile faded. "We're sorry to hear that, although we can sympathize. That, of course, makes the girl even more important, doesn't it?"

The mention of Amara upset him again. Ponder saw it, and threw his hands in the air. "Will you sit there and listen?" he pleaded. "This story isn't finished yet."

"I think I already understand more of it than you do," Daniel replied cryptically. His meaning sailed over the other's head, and Ponder continued.

"Now, as I say, can you imagine five billion people like yourself? Products of a Utopian environment. We poked, we explored, and, finally, we ran into another race. A spacefaring race, yes, but not nearly at our level. We opened contact, we sent out symbs—in our image, of course—and we rejoiced that we'd found another race."

Ponder's expression clouded. "They feared us. They reacted violently at the very appearance of our symbs. They panicked at so many self-sustaining beings hovering off their planets. They attacked us! After a thousand years of wandering, we were attacked irrationally by the first intelligent beings we met! Well, naturally, we defended ourselves. It was a terrible mismatch, we were so far beyond them. And that left us with a large number of captive aliens.

"We experimented, poked, probed, and, we fear, made a lot of errors. But we learned! We had no alternative, other than to exterminate them!"

"You could have just gone your own way," Daniel retorted.

"And have a potential enemy in our backfield out for revenge? No, that wasn’t possible. So, of course, we had to convert them, we had to make them think like us, become a biological analog of ourselves."

"Turn them into living machines, you mean," Daniel said disgustedly.

"No! No!" Ponder protested. "We made them like us, yes. We taught them to think communally, to live without hatred, lust, fear, distrust. A perfect society, but with emotion, with what you might call humanity. The
good
emotions. Love. Trust. Faith. Charity. Mercy. Compassion."

"The things you couldn't find anymore in yourselves," Daniel said softly.

Ponder nodded slowly. "In a way, of course, you are right. We were alone, isolated from one another, except by broadcast. We were of one mind and purpose and set of beliefs, but we could not share directly with one another. But
they
could! And
did!
Our methods worked on their scale as well or better than they did for us!"

Daniel shook his head sadly. "They're your children. That's the way you reproduce. The only way you can feel like real people again."

"It was a mission!" Ponder insisted. "When the second race we met reacted exactly like the first, we realized that we might be unique. They were creatures far, far different from the first group, but they shared the same animalism beneath the surface. They were a race in terrible emotional pain! We learned that the first methods didn't work on another alien species, and we had to adapt them, but we eventually revolutionized the second race as well. And the third. And so on. Thousands of races, now! In one glorious Utopian system!"

Daniel felt ill. "Trillions of monuments to your vain attempt to overcome the loneliness and isolation that traps and drives you."

Ponder sighed in frustration. Their minds were definitely not meeting. Each rejected the other's vision.

"And, finally," Daniel continued, "you ran into the humans and the Combine. And, after some early successes based on surprise, you ran up against a stone wall."

Ponder nodded agreement "The largest civilization we'd ever seen, ever come across. And technologically amazing. We are still learning how amazing. You, for example, are a form we would never have expected to run across. You are, in fact, the greatest threat we ever faced."

This remark piqued Daniel's curiosity. "Go on," he invited.

"We foresee humanity's eventually building more and more of you, in ever more sophisticated models. An animalistic analog of the Machist culture! The damage it would cause! The havoc! Even though we began the Ondine project without knowledge of your kind, you more than justified it.

Daniel thought carefully before saying, "I still don't see it. If there are five billion of you, you could still punch us to hell."

Ponder calmed down. "Oh, that's a mental figure. Actually, there are only ten thousand of us. Not all here, of course. Not at all. In the main the Machists in this battle are from other worlds."

Daniel gasped. "There are a
hundred thousand
minds in that ship of yours?"

"Well, yes," the Machist replied. "We weren't very large to begin with, you see."

"Then minds
can
be mated in the cyborg linkups!" Daniel exclaimed excitedly.

Ponder was cautious. "Well, yes and no. Frankly, if you place just two independent minds in one link, they'll malfunction. One wants to go left, you see, and the other right. And so on, to the infinitely complex, no matter how close they are personally. The only solution is a total mating of the minds. A total merging of identity, of self, so you have one mind that is the sum of all its parts."

Daniel sighed. There went
that
dream. "That explains the camps," he said softly. "The total lack of self-identity in the group."

Ponder nodded. "The meld is essential to the concept. It's achieved in different ways, not only with each race but with each group of individuals within a race, but the end is
always
attainable. Frankly, for such a great, strong race, your psyches are remarkably vulnerable. Perhaps it
is
because you are so far along. You are ready for this stage, you need it to match your material greatness."