Divergence

CHAPTER 20

The period before the coming of intelligence had been quiet, peaceful, and eons long. The final emergence was a miracle in itself; and like all miracles, nothing before it presaged its arrival.

The nutrients in the middle atmosphere of the gas-giant were rich and abundant; the climate was unvarying; a total absence of competition removed any stimulus to evolution.

The dominant life-form drifted idly in its buoyant sea of high-pressure hydrogen and helium, loose aggregations of cells that combined, dissociated, and recombined with endless variety. The results were sometimes simple, sometimes complex, and always without self-awareness. They had persisted unchanged for eight hundred million years.

When it came, the pressure was provided from without, and from far away. A supernova, nine light-years from the Mandel system, sent a sleet of hard radiation and superfast particles driving into the upper atmosphere of Gargantua. The dominant life-form, tens of thousands of kilometers down, was well protected; it drowsed on. But small and primitive multicelled creatures, eking out their own existence almost at the edge of space, felt the full force of the incident flux. They had been harmless, unable to compete with the loosely organized but more efficient assemblies of life below; now they mutated in the killing storm of radiation. The survivors grew voracious and desperate, and expanded their biosphere — downward. Like vermin, they began to infest the deep habitats and to modify the food chains there.

The Sleepers below had to quicken — or die. At first their numbers dwindled. They mindlessly sought refuge in the depths, down in the unfathomable abyss near the rocky solid core, where living conditions were harsh and food less plentiful.

It was not enough. The vermin followed them, gnawing at their evanescent structures, interfering with their placid drift at the whim of currents and temperature gradients.

The Sleepers had a simple choice: adapt or die. Since permanence of form was essential to survival, they became unified structures. They formed tough skins to protect those structures, integuments hard enough to resist the vermin’s attack. They developed mobility for escape. They learned to recognize and avoid the swarms of starving nibblers. They themselves became rapid and aggressive eaters.

And they developed cunning. Not long afterward came self-awareness. In a few million years, technology followed. The Sleepers pursued the vermin back to the upper edge of the atmosphere, for the first time claiming that domain as their own.

Now they found themselves familiar with and at home in environments ranging from million-atmosphere pressures at the interface with Gargantua’s rocky central core, to the near-vacuum of the planet’s ionosphere. They developed materials that could endure those extremes of pressure, and as great extremes of radiation and temperature. Finally they decided to move to a place where the still-annoying vermin could not follow: space itself.

The technology went with them. The Sleepers became the Builders. They spread with no haste from star to star in the spiral arm. Never again would they occupy a planet. Their homeworld became Homeworld, and finally Old-Home, abandoned but not forgotten. It remained the central nexus of the Builders’ transportation system.

They were Sleepers no more; and yet in one essential way they were as they had always been. The active and aggressive behavior patterns forced upon them by the vermin were only a few millions years deep. They were overlaid like a thin veneer on a deeper behavior, one derived from that idyllic and near-infinite era of idle drifting.

The Builders made their great spaceborne artifacts, with a communication network that stretched across and beyond the spiral arm; but they did so almost absentmindedly, with no more than a small part of their collective consciousness. They were Builders, certainly; but more than that they were Thinkers. For them, contemplation was the highest and the preferred activity. Action was a sometimes necessary but always unwelcome digression.

The new stability persisted for almost two hundred million years, while the Builders busied themselves in a leisurely analysis of the nature of the universe itself. Then came a new Great Problem, more troublesome even than the vermin. And further change was forced upon them…

The-One-Who-Waits fell silent. At some hidden command the lights in the great chamber dimmed further. The alien lifted a few centimeters above the surface of the tunnel, where in front of it sat Julius Graves, with J’merlia and Kallik on each side. E. C. Tally and Birdie Kelly were just behind, cross-legged on the hard tunnel floor and stiff-jointed from two hours of silent attention. When it had finally become fluent in human speech, the voice of The-One-Who-Waits had proved to be slow and hypnotic, forcing the listeners to ignore their surroundings and their own physical needs.

Birdie stirred and inspected each of the others in turn. E. C. Tally was in the worst shape of anyone. The embodied computer was leaning forward and supporting himself wearily on his hands and elbows. Apparently the need for rest and recuperation had not been sufficiently explained to him; before long, by the look of it, Tally would collapse from simple exhaustion.

At the front, Graves sat with his face invisible to Birdie. The two aliens by his side had expressions unreadable at the best of times. The only thing they seemed to care about was finding Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial, so that they could grovel again to their old masters. They were sprawled on the floor, all jointed legs, staring up at the shining body a few feet away from them.

“And what was the new Great Problem?” Graves asked.

“That information was not considered useful to me.” The weary voice sounded more tired than ever, as though it would welcome a rapid end to the conversation. “I, of course, was created by the Builders, long ago, so although my data sources here are large, they are limited to information judged necessary for my effective functioning. You will obtain more answers than I can give you when you reach Serenity — the main artifact, far from the main galactic plane.”

“And we will find the Builders there?” Graves had become the official spokesman of the group.

“That information also is not available here.” The-One-Who-Waits paused. “The present whereabouts of the Builders are unknown to me. But this I know, that you must work with Speaker-Between, the Interlocutor, one who wears my shape. When the Builders chose to move to Serenity, they also postponed certain other decisions until particular events occurred. Those events are now imminent, and involve Speaker-Between.”

“When did the Builders leave the spiral arm?”

“I am not exactly sure.” The-One-Who-Waits made a now-familiar soft bubbling noise, like water boiling over, and went on. “I myself waited for six million of your years, in the interior of that planet you call Quake. But of course, I was already old before that… I am not sure how old. Mmmm. Ten million of your years? Twelve?”

There was another substantial silence, during which Birdie wondered if Builder constructs could suffer from senility.

“I would be still waiting still,” The-One-Who-Waits went on, “but a few weeks ago the signals were at last received. They indicated that every Builder structure in the spiral arm had finally been visited by a member of one of the chosen intelligent species.

“The plan could at last proceed. The tidal energies available at Quake during Summertide were harnessed to open the planet. They permitted me to be sent to the vicinity of Old-Home. I came to the gate of the transportation system, where we are now.

“Very soon you will enter that gate, at your own request. Unless you have a final question?

“If we may not meet the Builders, even on Serenity, can’t you at least describe to us what they look like?” Graves said.

“It is not necessary for me to do so. You are already familiar with ones who wear the external appearance of the Builders: the Phages.”

“There’s a popular theory that says the Phages are artifacts,” Steven Graves said. “Are you saying that the Phages were constructed by the Builders in their own image, to look like them?”

“No. The Phages are Builders — devolved forms, debased and degenerate. Their intelligence has been lost. They are able to propagate themselves, and to perform the most elementary acts of matter and energy absorption, and that is all. For all the time that I have known, they have been a nuisance to every free-space structure in the spiral arm. Planetary interiors, like the inside of Quake, are safe, and intense gravity fields discourage their presence.”

“What happened, to turn Builders into Phages?” Graves asked.

“I cannot say.” The-One-Who-Waits was stirring, lifting higher off the floor. “I know only that it was another consequence of the Great Problem, the one that led the Builders to leave the spiral arm and seek a long stasis in the Artifact.

“Now, no more questions. It is time for you to enter the gate.”

Birdie looked all around him. All this talk about a gate. There was nothing in sight that resembled a gate, even vaguely.

“I don’t know where your gate is,” he began. “But about that safe passage that you promised us, back to our home planets—”

He was in midsentence when the floor evaporated beneath his feet. He heard a rushing sound all around him. Birdie took one look down. He was falling, dropping into nothingness.

He closed his eyes.

Looking back on what happened next, Birdie decided he must have kept his eyes squeezed tight shut until he felt firm ground again beneath his feet. Or then again, maybe he had just fainted. He was not willing to argue that point. He knew only two things for sure: First, when the others described the journey, he had no idea what they were talking about. He did not remember one thing about it.

Second, when he did finally open his eyes…

He was standing on a flat, endless plain, beneath a dull and featureless ceiling of glowing grayness.

And he was not alone. Surrounding him, looming over him, reaching out toward him with pale-blue tentacles, even before his eyes had finished opening, were—

— the stuff of nightmares.

He saw a dozen hulking bodies of midnight blue. They were closing in, sharp beaks gaping.

At that point Birdie felt more than ready to close his eyes and faint again.