From the Ocean from teh Stars (81 page)

ing eyes he saw the outlines of a small but complex machine. It was hanging in the air a few feet above the ground, and it was like no robot
he had ever before seen.

Once the initial surprise had worn off, he felt himself the complete master of the situation. All his life he had given orders to machines, and
the fact that this one was unfamiliar was of no importance. For that
matter,
he
had never seen more than a few per cent of the robots that
provided his daily needs in Diaspar.

"Can you speak?" he asked.

There was silence.

"Is anyone controlling you?"

Still silence.

"Go away. Come here. Rise. Fall."

None of the conventional control thoughts produced any effect. The machine remained contemptuously inactive. That suggested two possi
bilities. It was either too unintelligent to understand him or it was very
intelligent indeed, with its own powers of choice and volition. In that
case, he must treat it as an equal. Even then he might underestimate it,
but it would bear him no resentment, for conceit was not a vice from
which robots often suffered.

Hilvar could not help laughing at Alvin's obvious discomfiture. He
was just about to suggest that he should take over the task of communicat
ing, when the words died on his lips. The stillness of Shalmirane was
shattered by an ominous and utterly unmistakable sound—the gurgling
splash of a very large body emerging from water.

It was the second time since he had left Diaspar that Alvin wished he were at home. Then he remembered that this was not the spirit in
which to meet adventure, and he began to walk slowly but deliberately
toward the lake.

The creature now emerging from the dark water seemed a monstrous
parody, in living matter, of the robot that was still subjecting them to its silent scrutiny. That same equilateral arrangement of eyes could be no
coincidence; even the pattern of tentacles and little jointed limbs had
been roughly reproduced. Beyond that, however, the resemblance
ceased. The robot did not possess—it obviously did not require—the fringe of delicate, feathery palps which beat the water with a steady
rhythm, the stubby multiple legs on which the beast was humping itself
ashore, or the ventilating inlets, if that was what they were, which now
wheezed fitfully in the thin air.

Most of the creature's body remained in the water; only the first ten feet reared itself into what was clearly an alien element. The entire beast

was about fifty feet long, and even anyone with no knowledge of biology would have realized that there was something altogether wrong about it. It had an extraordinary air of improvisation and careless design, as if its components had been manufactured without much forethought and thrown roughly together when the need arose.

Despite its size and their initial doubts, neither Alvin nor Hilvar felt the slightest nervousness once they had had a clear look at the dweller in the lake. There was an engaging clumsiness about the creature which made it quite impossible to regard it as a serious menace, even if there was any reason to suppose it might be dangerous. The human race had long ago overcome its childhood terror of the merely alien in appearance. That was a fear which could no longer survive after the first contact with friendly extraterrestrial races.

"Let me deal with this," said Hilvar quietly. "I'm used to handling animals."

"But this isn't an animal," whispered Alvin in return. "I'm sure it's intelligent, and owns that robot."

"The robot may own
it.
In any case, its mentality must be very strange. I can still detect no sign of thought. Hello—what's happening?"

The monster had not moved from its half-raised position at the water's edge, which it seemed to be maintaining with considerable effort. But a semitransparent membrane had begun to form at the center of the triangle of eyes—a membrane that pulsed and quivered and presently started to emit audible sounds. They were low-pitched, resonant boom-ings which created no intelligible words, though it was obvious that the creature was trying to speak to them.

It was painful to watch this desperate attempt at communication. For several minutes the creature struggled in vain; then, quite suddenly, it seemed to realize that it had made a mistake. The throbbing membrane contracted in size, and the sounds it emitted rose several octaves in frequency until they entered the spectrum of normal speech. Recognizable words began to form, though they were still interspersed with gibberish. It was as if the creature was remembering a vocabulary it had known long ago but had had no occasion to use for many years.

Hilvar tried to give what assistance he could.

"We can understand you now," he said, speaking slowly and distinctly. "Can we help you? We saw the light you made. It brought us here from Lys."

At the word "Lys" the creature seemed to drop as if it had suffered some bitter disappointment.

"Lys," it repeated; it could not manage the "s" very well, so that the

word sounded like "Lyd." "Always from Lys. No one else ever comes.
We call the Great Ones, but they do not hear."

"Who are the Great Ones?" asked Alvin, leaning forward eagerly.
The delicate, ever-moving palps waved briefly toward the sky.

"The Great Ones," it said. "From the planets of eternal day. They will come. The Master promised us."

This did not seem to make matters any clearer. Before Alvin could
continue his cross-examination, Hilvar intervened again. His questioning
was so patient, so sympathetic, and yet so penetrating that Alvin knew
better than to interrupt, despite his eagerness. He did not like to admit
that Hilvar was his superior in intelligence, but there was no doubt that
his flair for handling animals extended even to this fantastic being. What was more, it seemed to respond to him. Its speech became more distinct
as the conversation proceeded, and where at first it had been brusque
to the point of rudeness, it presently elaborated its answers and volun
teered information on its own.

Alvin lost all consciousness of the passage of time as Hilvar pieced
together the incredible story. They could not discover the whole truth; there was endless room for conjecture and debate. As the creature an
swered Hilvar's questions ever more and more willingly, its appearance began to change. It slumped back into the lake, and the stubby legs that had been supporting it seemed to dissolve into the rest of its body. Pres
ently a still more extraordinary change occurred; the three huge eyes
slowly closed, shrank to pinpoints, and vanished completely. It was as if
the creature had seen all that it wished to for the moment, and therefore
had no further use for eyes.

Other and more subtle alterations were continually taking place, and
eventually almost all that remained above the surface of the water was
the vibrating diaphragm through which the creature spoke. Doubtless
this too would be dissolved back into the original amorphous mass of
protoplasm when it was no longer required.

Alvin found it hard to believe that intelligence could reside in so un
stable a form—and his biggest surprise was yet to come. Though it seemed
obvious that the creature was not of terrestrial origin, it was some time
before even Hilvar, despite his greater knowledge of biology, realized the type of organism they were dealing with. It was not a single entity;
in all their conversations with it, it always referred to itself as "we." In
fact, it was nothing less than a colony of independent creatures, organized
and controlled by unknown forces.

Animals of a remotely similar type—the medusae, for example— had once flourished in the ancient oceans of Earth. Some of them had

been of great size, trailing their translucent bodies and forests of stinging
tentacles over fifty or a hundred feet of water. But none of them had
attained even the faintest flicker of intelligence, beyond the power to
react to simple stimuli.

There was certainly intelligence here, though it was a failing, degen
erating intelligence. Never was Alvin to forget this unearthly meeting, as Hilvar slowly pieced together the story of the Master, while the protean
polyp groped for unfamiliar words, the dark lake lapped at the ruins of
Shalmirane, and the trioptic robot watched them with unwavering eyes.

☆
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Master had come to Earth amid the chaos of
the Transition Centuries, when the Galactic Empire was crumbling but
the lines of communication among the stars had not yet completely
broken. He had been of human origin, though his home was a planet circling one of the Seven Suns. While still a young man, he had been forced
to leave his native world, and its memory had haunted him all his life.
His expulsion he blamed on vindictive enemies, but the fact was that he
suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed, attacked only Homo
sapiens among all the intelligent races of the Universe. That disease was
religious mania.

Throughout the earlier part of its history, the human race had
brought forth an endless succession of prophets, seers, messiahs, and
evangelists who convinced themselves and their followers that to them
alone were the secrets of the Universe revealed. Some of them succeeded
in establishing religions that survived for many generations and influ
enced billions of men; others were forgotten even before their deaths.

The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the
cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could
never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, nor the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as
they contemplated the stupendous Universe in which they found them
selves. What it did weaken, and finally obliterate, were the countless
religions, each of which claimed, with unbelievable arrogance, that it was the sole repository of the truth and that its millions of rivals and predeces
sors were all mistaken.

Yet, though they never possessed any real power once humanity had reached a very elementary level of civilization, all down the ages isolated

cults had continued to appear, and however fantastic their creeds they
had always managed to attract some disciples. They thrived with particu
lar strength during periods of confusion and disorder, and it was not
surprising that the Transition Centuries had seen a great outburst of ir
rationality. When reality was depressing, men tried to console themselves
with myths.

The Master, even if he was expelled from his own world, did not leave it unprovided. The Seven Suns had been the center of galactic
power and science, and he must have possessed influential friends. He
had made his hegira in a small but speedy ship, reputed to be one of the
fastest ever built. With him into exile he had taken another of the ultimate products of galactic science—the robot that was looking at Alvin
and Hilvar even now.

No one had ever known the full talents and functions of this machine. To some extent, indeed, it had become the Master's alter ego; without it,
the religion of the Great Ones would probably have collapsed after the
Master's death. Together they had roved among the star clouds on a
zigzag trail which led at last, certainly not by accident, back to the world
from which the Master's ancestors had sprung.

Entire libraries had been written about that saga, each work therein
inspiring a host of commentaries until, by a kind of chain reaction, the
original volumes were lost beneath mountains of exegesis and annotation.
The Master had stopped at many worlds, and made disciples among
many races. His personality must have been an immensely powerful one
for it to have inspired humans and nonhumans alike, and there was no
doubt that a religion of such wide appeal must have contained much
that was fine and noble. Probably the Master was the most successful—
as he was also the last—of all mankind's messiahs. None of his predeces
sors could have won so many converts or had their teachings carried
across such gulfs of time and space.

What those teachings were neither Alvin nor Hilvar could ever dis
cover with any accuracy. The great polyp did its desperate best to convey
them, but many of the words it used were meaningless and it had a
habit of repeating sentences or whole speeches with a kind of swift me
chanical delivery that made them very hard to follow. After a while
Hilvar did his best to steer the conversation away from these meaningless morasses of theology in order to concentrate on ascertainable facts.

The Master and a band of his most faithful followers had arrived on
Earth in the days before the cities had passed away, and while the Port
of Diaspar was still open to the stars. They must have come in ships of many kinds; the polyps, for example, in one filled with the waters of the