Kirlian Quest (36 page)

"Maybe they thought they
had
exterminated us," Sixteen said. "They might have confined us, then suffered a record-keeping error and overlooked the final act. Our very isolation may have saved us."

But Herald was on another thought. "They destroyed all the sapients of their time, and spared all the subsapients. A straight, selfish act of empire-preservation. These Martians might have posed a threat, but the primitive Earthers did not. And my own subsapient Slash ancestors would have been spared on the same basis. And all the other contemporary species of the Empire. So it is no coincidence that new sapience emerged about the same time all over the Cluster, it was an act of pure selection by the Ancients. Only those species
below
a certain level were permitted to continue their development
That
must be the secret Melody refused to tell! Because it diminishes the image we have of the Ancients; it shows them as selfish, short-range creatures." But somehow he couldn't see an entity like Melody of Mintaka being silent on such a point; she would have enjoyed puncturing the Ancient image.

"Then every Spherical species today owes a debt to the Ancients," Sixteen said. "But I'm not sure it is true."

Herald was achieving increasing respect for her acumen. Sixteen had a much larger background of personal and species information than he had suspected. No doubt his own host had similar information, but his host was essentially unconscious during the healing process. "How so?"

"All we know is that the Ancients destroyed the sapient Worms of Mars, and spared the humanoids of Earth. We assume this to be true elsewhere—and I don't question this extension—but it cannot have been done on a sapient-nonsapient basis."

"Why not?" Herald was really intrigued. This extemporaneous discussion was bringing them much closer to comprehension of the nature of the Ancients than his prior lines of research had done. He noted how the wan sunlight flashed off her sleek fuselage, making a small iridescent splay.

"The Worms of Mars were colonists. They came from another world. What world? Not Earth; there were no sapient worms there; and if there had been, why was not Earth destroyed or sterilized? It must have been another system. But our surveys reveal no worlds in this neighborhood that such sapients could have come from. Either a world is complete with all its species in unbroken lines of evolution for billions of years, or it is dead, with all extinct. If there had been any Worm cultures in this region of space, the Lodo ship could have been directed there, so that we would not have had to go to the trouble of Lodoforming Mars for their habitation."

"That makes sense," Herald agreed. "Far simpler to sterilize a full world, or leave it alone. Selectivity within a world would be extremely tedious and uncertain."

"Yes. So assume the Ancients destroyed the Mars colony and the full world from which the Worm colony came, too. They therefore destroyed all the nonsapients of that world as well."

"That's right!" Herald said. "Had they been protecting nonsapients, they would have
taken
the trouble to be selective within given worlds. So they obviously did not care about
us
. All they wanted to do was root out all sapients, regardless of what other species suffered. Had Earth, or Slash, or any other contemporary-sapient planet had sapients then, it would have been destroyed. So our survival is mere coincidence."

"Yes. But why did they depart, leaving us weed-species to take over what they had cleared for themselves?"

Weed-species
—an intriguing concept! "That mystery remains. Perhaps Melody of Mintaka knew. Maybe it was remorse."

"Maybe," she agreed. But they both doubted it.

 

* * *

 

Jets did not exactly sleep, but they did require a periodic lapse of activity for proper health. The Martian day-night cycle was almost precisely the same as that of Earth, which had become the standard for this region of space, so it was convenient to indulge in the lapse during the cool night. In the morning, Sixteen gave Herald another dose of the drug, and they consumed puffs of nutrient gas from bubbles she had brought along. Once they were grown, Jets did not require much solid intake.

Now his host's physical strength was at par again. He zoomed zestfully up out of the giant crater without even feeling strain. "Next best chance is the chasm," he announced.

"But that's a quarter round the planet!" Sixteen wooshed.

"Right. So we'll have to hurry." And he accelerated to fifteen meridians per hour, close to top speed, going down the volcanic slope and across the monstrous lava plain to the southeast.

"I'm not absolutely sure Sphere Slash is beyond sub-sapience," she said under the cover of the increased blast of her propulsion. But she let him proceed.

The west terminus of the ninety-meridian chasm was no farther away from the volcano than the volcano was from the Ancient archaeological site. In three hours they were maneuvering through the heavily cratered plain beyond the lava rim, locating the gorge.

The chasm was extremely long, broad and deep; it would take hours to traverse its length. Its sides were not straight but highly serrated. Flash flooding at some time in the planet's past had resulted in spot erosion. But there was very little free water on Mars, and most of that was frozen, since the surface temperature seldom passed the melting point of water; only extraordinary local meteorological conditions ever made it rain.

Somewhere along this phenomenal crack in the planetary surface was an Ancient site. There had to be. Because without it, contemporary civilization was lost. Or was the drug exaggerating his concern, as it had before?

He quested along the northern face of it, slowed by the extreme contours, and Sixteen followed the southern wall. She could not detect the Ancient aura, but she would perceive any artificial alteration of the chasm.

Hours passed without success. The canyon went on and on, its offshoots branching interminably, all requiring exploration, consuming his waning energy. Herald continued, refusing to give up hope, slowing his velocity to conserve his host's resources. The drug was wearing off again; but perhaps the very next wrinkle would reveal the site, or the next, or the next...

Suddenly a subcanyon opened out from the floor of the main one. There had been a number of these irregularities before; the bottom was by no means flat. But now, tired, distracted, disappointed, and careless, he shot over the brink and dropped into the jagged crevice before he saw it. For an instant it reminded him of his drop into the hot pit of the Amoeba's laser strike, but this was cold, hard rock. He had been paying more attention to the sides of the chasm than to the front.

He came to a stop safely, but his strength was gone. Hardly able to emit a decent jet, he could not get out.

In moments Sixteen was there. "It's happened again," she exclaimed. "I have been so absorbed in the search I neglected you."

"Give me the drug," Herald said weakly.

"No! You've had a dose and a booster. A second boost in this circumstance could kill your host."

"If you don't, we can't even make it home," he pointed out. "They'll never find us here, and they're too busy to look anyway. We're as lost as the Ancient site."

"I could return for help," she said. "But you need my care. You don't understand the nature of your host. You think that because it can travel at speed, it is fit. A jet can
always
travel at speed. When his propulsion fails, he is close to death. Oh, I should never have—"

"
You
don't understand the nature of my imperative," Herald retorted, clinging to consciousness. "Death is no specter in the face of the threat to the Cluster."
And to Psyche!
"We shall
all
die if I don't find what I seek." But he knew he was exaggerating. All he had to do was rest for a few hours, letting his host recover in its own time, until it could tolerate the drug. If he were reasonable— But he was
not
reasonable!

"We don't understand each other," she said. "I must operate on one immediate principle: preserve your life and health. I know of only one other way, and that is unethical."

"How can it be unethical to implement your assignment?" Herald demanded.

"It is a matter of means and ends. There is a conflict of interests."

"A conflict of interests," he repeated, musingly. "Could that account for the anomalies of the Ancients? They had a special mission we do not understand, whose objectives were contradictory. Are we, perceiving those contradictions but not the rationale, misjudging the nature of the Ancients?"

"That could be," she agreed, relieved to have him talking instead of demanding the drug. "They may have had reasons to eliminate certain types of creatures who happened to be sapient, and to spare certain others. We perceive only the sapient/nonsapient distinction, but if that were coincidental..."

"If only we knew the nature of the species they destroyed," Herald continued. "The Worms are only one example; that's not enough to determine a pattern. I'd hate to think that they were saving whole planets as food animal production units, but we can't be
sure
. To compare the ones eliminated to the ones spared—"

"The aura!" she exclaimed. "Now we know that non-Kirlian life is possible. Even non-Kirlian sapience! Could those destroyed species have—?"

It burst upon him like a nova. "Non-Kirlian sapience! If it evolved more rapidly than the Kirlian forms, even though restricted by its inability to Transfer, it could dominate the Cluster, as the reptiles of Earth's dinosaur days dominated the mammals, or the Dash buds of my own Galaxy even now dominate the £ tripeds."

"Those forms would have to be eliminated, to promote the forms with greater potential," she finished. "Like weeding a garden to favor the more delicate but productive plants."

The concept of weed-species, again, this time with more force. "Then the contemporary sapients were not selected randomly," Herald said excitedly. "
Their auras determined their selection.
They were given the chance to develop, when otherwise the non-Kirlians would have squeezed them out."

"The Ancients must have been the first major high-aura species," Sixteen said. "They evolved in some isolated region, as we did, where there were no non-Kirlians, so they were not eliminated before they achieved their potential. When they expanded into the main Cluster they discovered it was dominated by a type of life that had to waste energy using mattermission because they couldn't Transfer. And these species were suppressing the Kirlians. Within a given system, where planets might be separated by no more than light-minutes, mattermission would be a highly feasible mode of transport; it is only at the interstellar range that Transfer dominates. So the Kirlians had the potential to govern whole galaxies, and when the non-Kirlians realized this, it was savage war. Only one side could prevail; they thought they could not coexist. So the Ancients set out to promote permanent civilization by eliminating all the non-Kirlians. It may have been the only way. They were the progenitors of our modern culture."

"But why did they disappear?" Herald asked, returning to the old mystery. "The Ancients won; they should have remained to help their own kind along."

"Maybe they
did
stay," Sixteen insisted. "We find their ruins, their deserted stations, but maybe those were merely for the war effort, and when it was over they abandoned such instruments and settled down within a few pleasant systems and left the other, nonsapient Kirlians alone. You say there is no significant pattern to the manifestations of the highest auras, but if there were a number of types of creatures making up the Ancient nucleus, with several families of auras, and these auras manifested every few generations, so that there would always be a way to key open their Ancient sites in case of emergency—"

Herald had another powerful flash of comprehension. "Psyche!" he cried. "Keyed to the Ancient site!"

"What?"

"I knew one such creature! A Solarian who was in tune with the Ancients. Maybe she
was
an Ancient!"

"Then we have an excellent lead," Sixteen said excitedly. "We must get back and consult with Hweeh, and get in touch with that Solarian."

Herald sobered. "You said I was too weak for the drug."

"There is one emergency way to prepare you for it, by drawing on an untapped resource within your host. It is not precisely ethical, but in the circumstance—"

"We may have solved the mystery of the Ancients," Herald remarked, "but the mystery of your ethics is growing! What is the problem?"

Sixteen jetted a gust of apology. "It is a little-used measure, because of the social implications."

"Forget the social implications! I am not of your culture."

"It is to invoke that store of energy normally reserved for the reproductive effort. It is untapped in normal endeavors. But the amount of reserve energy is normally enough to restore operative function to—"

"You are speaking of making love?" he inquired. "There is something you should know. I don't—"

"Yes, you told me before. You are of another species, only borrowing this host, and you do not wish to have a mistress. It is unethical for me to bring it up a second time. This is why I hesitated."

Herald had been about to mention his true relation to Psyche, but suffered a second thought. This Jet maid, in the line of duty as she perceived it, was about to make a remarkable offer—for his benefit and that of the Cluster. Apparently his refusal to take her as a mistress at the outset had fixed their relationship in a nonsexual mode, so that it was extremely difficult for her to change now. He had encountered similar conventions elsewhere. There were about as many intricacies connected to the processes of reproduction as to any other sapient need. It would not be right to embarrass her further by informing her of his inability to love any female other than his wife.

"I need not prevail on you to that extent. In a little while I will be recovered enough to tolerate the drug again."