Quofum (25 page)

What did it want from them?

For days, then weeks, they explored the endless underground complex. Freely and without hindrance, the hundreds of lines and cables and lightwires somehow roamed freely with them. Haviti counted two hundred forty-three entering or emerging from her own body. In the course of their wandering they stood on the edges of immense chambers crowded with incomprehensibly advanced machinery and tried to puzzle out their purpose. Once, they found themselves wading waist-deep through a shallow lake of considerable extent. A simple check revealed that the liquid was not water but a soupy brew of glutinous proteins and other organic matter existing in a continual state of disintegrating and recombining. The tepid fluid had no effect, detrimental or otherwise, on their respective tangles of manifold connectors.

Later (weeks later, months later—Haviti could no longer tell) they found themselves standing on the rim of an enormous open space, an artificial underground valley crisscrossed with horizontal tubes and conduits some of which exceeded in diameter that of the average starship. A multitude of brilliantly refulgent geometric shapes darted and flashed throughout the colossal chamber, efficiently executing tasks whose purpose was as unknown as the mechanisms they serviced. Standing on the barrier-free edge looking out over incomprehensible vastness, Haviti found that she was still capable of being staggered by the scale of the subterranean alien technology.

Out of the corner of her left eye she saw N’kosi take a long stride forward and deliberately step off into emptiness.

“No!”
She and Valnadireb rushed toward him, but they were already too late. Then they both stopped, and stared.

Pivoting gracefully in midair, a smiling N’kosi looked back at them. “Since nothing we have experienced or seen so far leads me to believe that our own personal life-sustaining apparatus is anything less than flawless, I thought I would push the limits a little to see what, if any, restrictions there might be.” Turning, he resumed his stroll out into emptiness, capably supported and held aloft by the hundreds of wires and cables that pierced his still human body.

“Come back here!” an anxious Haviti yelled. Taking his time, a sauntering N’kosi transcribed a gradual circle before returning to the solid footing of the overlook.

“Don’t do that anymore,” she growled at him. “No more radical experiments—at least, not without mutual discussion beforehand.”

“Why bother?” Grinning at her, he reached down to grab a handful of the lines running into his body and lift them slightly. “If there was a sudden and unexpected alien equipment failure while I was walking on air, I’d be the only one to suffer the consequences.” His grin faded and his tone turned abruptly and unexpectedly serious. “Would you miss me, Tiare?”

Valnadireb had come close. “We would both miss you, Mosi. As I would miss Haviti, and as I suspect she would miss me.” Pivoting on four trulegs, the thranx xenologist gestured to indicate the immensity of the chamber spread out before them. “I cannot vouch for your emotions or feelings on the matter, but I believe that I am still thranx enough to know that I would not want to wander onward and onward through this place—alone.”

Nothing more was said about N’kosi’s stroll through emptiness, but he did not do it again.

The weeks rolled into months, the months into years, and the years into time without end. They never grew hungry or thirsty, they never felt ill or fell sick.

Throughout it all they did not, as Valnadireb remarked on a day like the one that had gone just before and would with absolute certainty be just like the one that would arrive tomorrow, age.

With time to travel and explore and in the absence of noticeable fatigue, they covered great distances on foot. In the course of their travels they were never able to determine whether the linkages that kept them nourished and healthy and young constantly renewed themselves or were extensions that by now must have been hundreds of kilometers long. It did not matter. There was so much to see, so much to try and absorb, that they never grew bored. Lonely, yes. Homesick, occasionally. But never bored.

There seemed no end to the extraordinary subterranean technological fantasy. For all they knew it might run all the way around the inner rim of the entire planet. The location of the metal shaft that had provided access to the surface had long since been forgotten. They encountered drifting blobs of purposeful energy the size of cities, found their way around or through ranks of conduits large enough to channel small seas, and crossed artificial gorges that consisted of hundreds of levels whose foundations lay beyond their range of vision. And still they never saw another guardian orb.

Their absence made perfect sense to Haviti. There was no need for the complex to be on guard against wandering organic components that had by now become part of its own structure.

Then there came a day, quite unexpectedly, when certain things were revealed.

They were strolling, purposefully and without fatigue, through a forest of spiraling crystals of varying color and refractivity. Above the crystalline spires fist-sized balls of energy were sparking briskly back and forth. The forest might have been a mechanism for channeling power, an advanced apparatus for analyzing the underlying nature of matter, or a game akin to chess. They had no way of knowing.

What they did know was that without warning or preamble, their surroundings suddenly went dark.

It was the first time—indeed, the only time—that the light had gone out since they had originally entered that long-forgotten, long-since-left-behind tunnel. Confused and bewildered, they used the sound of their voices to draw anxiously close to one another.

“What now?” an uneasy N’kosi murmured.

“Patience.” Valnadireb’s terranglo was calm and steady as always. “Illumination will return.”

“I wish I possessed your sense of certainty,” the other xenologist muttered.

“I have no choice but to be certain,” the thranx replied evenly. “To believe otherwise would, I think, lead quickly to madness.”

Something had attracted Haviti’s attention from the moment the light had died. Perhaps her vision had become more sensitive than that of her companions. Or maybe she just happened to be looking in the right direction at the right time.

“I see something.”

“Where?” N’kosi asked. She sensed that her friend was very close to her.

A moment more and he did not have to ask for directions, nor did Valnadireb. The burgeoning glow became visible to both of them.

From a bright pinpoint in the distance the light expanded until it filled the space directly in front of them. Images had begun to materialize within the darkness. No sound accompanied them. Their appearance did not violate the interminable stillness and silence of the underground world.

No accompaniment was necessary. As trained scientists they had no difficulty comprehending or interpreting what they were seeing. It was an unmistakable panoply of biological progression. Not an allegory, but a realistic representation of the evolutionary modus as it was being played out on Quofum.

First came the empty, waiting, open world that all but begged to be seeded with life. Single-celled creatures appeared, swiftly multiplied, advanced and fractured and fledged. Since the presentation was not taking place in real time Haviti and her colleagues had no way of judging the pace of the process. They did, however, appreciate the incredible variety of developing life-forms and the insane speed with which they emerged, diverged, and speciated. Haviti let out a little cry of recognition when the ancestors of her seals first appeared. All three of them identified the progenitors of the fuzzies and the spikers, the stick-jellies and the hardshells.

A cavalcade of other intelligent races rose and fell. Some, like those who had built the sunken city Haviti had explored, achieved admirable levels of refinement before falling back, overcome by disease, war, internal dissension, or their own lack of drive. Most never reached such heights.

The depiction of Quofum’s wildly diverse evolution abruptly vanished, to be replaced by a portrayal of one species. Individually they were small and physically unimpressive; multiarmed, soft-bodied creatures who moved about on a quartet of sticky pseudopods. Their four eyes were horizontal in shape with matching longitudinal pupils. What they lacked in size and physical strength they made up for according to their description with a ferocious intelligence, curiosity, and intensity.

Representations of individual star systems appeared, then entire galactic arms. The inoffensive but dynamic beings were shown spreading from system to system. Their persistent inquisitiveness led them to explore ever farther outward in every direction. Then one of their earliest, most far-reaching probes encountered something outside the Milky Way. Something immense, something inconceivably vast. Something evil.

Something coming this way.

The multiarms did not panic. That was not their nature. They deliberated, analyzed, evaluated, and considered. Reaching a decision, they then embarked on not one but on a pair of sophisticated and highly structured schemes for dealing with the unprecedented oncoming menace. These were now depicted in more of the softly shimmering imagery. Haviti and her companions caught their breath at the scope of not one but of both the contemplated solutions.

The first consisted of running away.

The multiarms accomplished this by a means as direct as it was breathtaking in scope. Utilizing everything from chaos theory to a mastery of the hard science of multiple dimensions to a knowledge of the true physical makeup of the universe, they constructed machines that could generate folds between dimensional planes. They then proceeded to move their entire civilization of billions upon billions of souls from the present universe into another. If the universe that contained the impending evil was eventually consumed by it, they would be immune from the resulting catastrophe.

But concurrently with the escape mechanism they employed, they also constructed another device. Accelerated through a dimensionally altered variant of space-minus, it was sent at a velocity faster than one that was even mathematically comprehensible toward a portion of the universe occupied by an astronomical phenomenon known as the Great Attractor. This diffuse concentration of matter some four hundred million light-years across was located two hundred fifty million light-years away from the Commonwealth in the direction of the southern constellation Centaurus, about seven degrees off the plane of the Milky Way—allowing for red-shifting.

The device built by the multiarms arrived there safely, situated itself at the center of the Attractor in the region known to humanxkind as the Norma supercluster—and waited. Waited to be directed at the oncoming threat, and activated. Even though the multiarms had successfully escaped to another universe, they still retained an interest in trying to stop the vast malevolence that threatened to annihilate all the other less fortunate sentient species of the galaxy they had forsaken. In accordance with this desire they had left behind warning devices and accessways to enable them to be alerted in the event of a change in the course or behavior of the Great Evil. They had very recently been so alerted and so warned. In response, they prepared to activate the device now waiting at the center of the Great Attractor.

And failed.

In constructing it and carefully positioning it in the universe they had left behind, they had neglected to append the final means necessary for its activation. In the immensity of time that had subsequently passed, information had been lost, mechanisms no longer required had been forgotten, and the need for backups had been overlooked. Hurriedly (by their standards), they set about trying to reconstruct the vital, indispensable, final component that was necessary for the activation of the galactic defense mechanism they had built. They were still trying.

On Quofum.

Quofum, an unimportant planet that slipped in and out of Commonwealth notice. Quofum, an entire world that was nothing but one long extended attempt to replicate a core element of the solitary device that had been drifting in the center of the Norma supercluster for the preceding four hundred million years. Quofum, where even the incredibly advanced science of the multiarms had so far failed to reproduce the problematical final factor that would allow the half-forgotten instrumentation to become activated and respond to the incoming threat.

Quofum, where their lofty but imperfect science had failed to evolve it.

That
, the presentation explained, was the driving force behind Quofum’s outrageous riotous biota, behind its uncontrolled runaway speciation. The multiarms were trying to evolve something that was essential to the activation of their now incredibly ancient apparatus. In the absence of critical long-forgotten knowledge they had thus far failed. In the meantime, the evil that was racing toward the Milky Way had entered a state of steady, continuous acceleration. Given present projections it was likely to arrive before the determined but regretful multiarms could succeed in their work. The multiarms would be safe in their other universe. As for the universe they had departed…

In the universe they had departed, the Commonwealth and everything in it would be destroyed. The Great Evil would sweep through and continue on to the next galaxy, and the next, ever onward, all-consuming, until the entire sum of the universe itself was a black and dark and empty place. The multiarms would sorrow for what they had left behind and could not save, and go on with their lives. All this, Haviti and N’kosi and Valnadireb saw, would come to pass.

Unless…

Unless the device the multiarms had left behind in the heart of the distant Norma supercluster could be activated. It preserved its programming, it retained its functionality, it was ready. All it needed was to be triggered.

But not by the three marooned visitors. They had been maintained, and helped, and even improved by the machines of Quofum in the hope that they might provide, if not a solution to the great ongoing conundrum of the previous four hundred million years, at least a hint in the right direction. From their distant and difficult and other-dimensional vantage point the multiarms had been studying both thranx and humans, along with every other intelligent species that had arisen independently in or near the Commonwealth. A few of the most hopeful among the otherwise pessimistic watchers thought they detected the tiniest flicker, the briefest glimmer of promise among both allied species. To date, that was all they had glimpsed. That hope, if little else, remained alive.