Wolfbane

14

For a little while Gala Tropile was almost a queen of the mad and ragged little band. She had status enough for that as the wife (or was it the widow?) of the voice from the black cone. Having benefited from Tropile’s tutoring during their abrasive marriage, she was Wolf enough to take advantage of that fact. For nearly two days Gala Tropile waved others imperiously out of the way at the feeding pipes and chose the best places to sleep. Only for two days. The reason her reign didn’t last longer was that she was by no means the only Wolf around.

Besides, the voice from the black cone wasn’t always Tropile’s.

It was all very confusing.

Directions came now and then from the loudspeaker cone to the people in the corridor. Metallic spiders came and eyed them, and went away again. The people tried to question the voices from the loudspeaker, and they always got answers, but seldom the answers they wanted to hear. Or that even made sense:

^What do you want with us, damn you?”

“We want you to be mice,” said the black cone.

Mice? How mice? Why mice? But the cone had fallen into one of its silences again.

Then:

“Sometimes you say you’re Tropile, sometimes you say you’re this Django Tembo or somebody else. Who are you?”

“Yes.”

It was absolutely infuriating. Ragged-nerved, the corridor people squabbled among themselves. They did not dare outright violence, at least at first; it was not a good idea to end an argument by punching your opponent out, when you were starkly aware that next time you slept he might stay awake, waiting. So they took out their fury on their surroundings, smashing, damaging, ruining. (Very like mice.) And still tried to get sensible answers:

“What—exactly, please!—are you going to do with us?”

“We will tell you,” said the voice—Tropile’s this time, as it happened. And it added, “Soon we will begin to starve you.”

“Starve? Why? When? What for?”

“To make you mousier. Soon.” And when they could get no further answers from the black cone, the marooned band tried to prepare for this new, intolerable aggravation. They would have stored up Food and water if they could. They couldn’t. Their raw materials were only the chips from the giant machine tools, and they were good tools; they made minimum chips. The lathes pared off helices of metal and plastic which were pretty and next to useless. The milling machines shaved off long needles that fell in showers to be washed away by the periodic inundation of the shop. They tried bending the helices back and forth to snap off slightly-distorted squares of metal from them, and they did. They bundled the milling machine chips to make stakes and hammers, and tried to pound their metal squares into storage pots, and it just didn’t work. If the metal that peeled from the lathes happened to be brittle enough to snap into plates, it could not be ductile enough to draw into pots. Three attempts to anneal the plates in the adjoining foundry’s terrible heat ended fatally; the place was impossibly dangerous. One grew faint and vague in the heat and bad air; one stumbled into a naked high-tension cable, or a bubbling crucible, or onto the die of a champing automatic hammer. They were apprehensive, and bored, and nasty-tempered and well-fed—just what the Snowflake wanted them to be.

In its almost-final stage of evolution, the Snowflake could hardly have been seen in its tank by an outside observer, there were so many wires. It had long ago delegated its Pyramid-assigned task to an octet in a spare tank; there had been no difficulty in duplicating the input-board or the output-switches, but the programming of the octet at double-remote control had been insanely difficult, demanding total recall of the Snowflake’s own programming and its duplication, step by step, upon the spare. Once this had been done, however, and all sixteen hands were freed, the Snowflake had the freedom of the binary. Its wires and cables went everywhere; gradually its metal spider-spies were retired, for the Snowflake acquired direct-reporting eyes and transducers of its own. It diverted and armor-plated a supply of its nutrient fluid calculated to last out any emergency; it co-opted generators to stand by ready to be cut in upon any power failure of its pumps; it shielded itself in steel, soft iron, lead and cadmium against physical, magnetic and radiational attack; it mounted itself and its whole huge supply-complex in caterpillar treads.

The spider-spies continued to serve it only in one area: the chamber under the North Pole. It was felt that the deliberate archaism of the great room’s equipment argued against insinuating its scanners there. If a cable crawled down a conduit of the nutrients area it was of no concern to a Pyramid going by. That was what Componets were for—to lay cables in the right places at the right time. Under general directives they did so. No quantity of transducers turning up throughout the binary could be a cause for alarm; doubtless it was some quality—or traffic-control system going into effect to ensure the continuance of the

Pyramid’s environment without cost or care to them while they—did what?

While they performed their interminable round of experiments on the tentacled creature under the crystal dome. Performed them in slow and stately tempo, slower than their normal motions down corridors, or their flares of electrons to manipulate relays, damping rods or pinch fields.

“I wish—” said Glenn Tropile fretfully. He didn’t have to finish the sentence. Alia Narova finished it for him.

“I, too, wish we knew what that was all about,” she said, “but we don’t.”

When the Snowflake tired of wondering about the North Pole, it could get a little variety in its collective life by wondering about the South.

The most interesting thing about the South Pole was that it was so uninteresting. Nothing ever went there, neither Pyramid nor Component-driven mechanism. Nothing seemed to take place inside it. There were no Eyes there, no instruments to detect. The best guess of the Snowflake (actually, the only one it had) was that it was a junk heap.

“Archeologists,” declared Corso Navarone, “find all sorts of interesting things in junk heaps. Let us look at this one.”

So, from its locus at South Latitude 12, the Snowflake began to manufacture and drive southward a special cable, coaxial and filled with inert gas, a marvelous nerve trunk over which the most complex messages could be sent and received. The intuition was that this would be the case. Through the lowest levels of the undermined planet crawled a caterpillar-tread device, heaving the cable behind it. It extended a teflon snout into chambers of corrosive atmosphere and skirted them; it shunned the red-lit storage and access spaces for the lower, darker tubes bored through bedrock, not yet crammed with pipes and wires, not yet visited incessantly by scuttling repair-machines. Its outriders, tapped into the cable, rolled inertly along, waiting with machine patience for their tasks. One squad of them was an excavation group-derricks, angledozers, mining machines that undercut, blasted and wiped up debris with scything paws onto an endless belt that shunted it away from the field of operation. Another group, echeloned behind the excavators, consisted of transducers—artificial sense organs of every kind, very cold and scientific, reporting themselves coldly in scribed curves, needles jogging on scales, counter-readings, whining modulations of whining carrier waves. And behind them, almost apologetically, rolled self-propelled color-image orthicon tubes, mere television, which reported only pictures, surfaces—not even X-ray deep.

The voice of ex-Citizen Roget Germyn was ragged with nerves. He snarled at Muhandas Dutta of Durban: “Get away from the tap. You saw me headed for it. Then you got up and started to it.”

Muhandas Dutta, formerly a leading exponent of the Rice Tasting Cult, well on his way toward a Grand Mastership in it, snarled back: “I’ve better things to do with my time than notice who’s wandering across the floor. I was here first, flat-belly.”

The epithet was foolish; the belly of Muhandas Dutta was quite as free from honorable hunger-bloat as that of Roget Germyn. But old things mixed with the new. “Muscle boy!” Germyn sneered. “Gobbler! Shouter! Strider!” Schoolyard epithets, and he was shouting them. The tap bubbled quietly between them as they stood with veins distended, fists clenched and eyes bulging; its sticky glucose solution bore the precious iron, iodine, sulfur, phosphorus, potassium along in an unending runnel down the slightly-slanting floor to the eight-inch drain. Glutamic acid, without which ammonia accumulates in the brain and kills, dribbled along the floor while they glared, and D-ribose, and D-2-deoxyribose, adenine, guanine, uracil, cytosine, thymine and 5-methyl cytosine without which no thing higher than a trilobite can pass on its shape and meaning to its next generation. Over the rivulet of life they glared, ignoring the long row of bubbling taps they might have resorted to at their right and their left; this one is mine, mine! Be damned to sense, be damned to abundance; kindness be damned to hell; it’s mine!

A Wolf, now red-eyed not with feral lust but with fatigue from his endless job of keeping the peace, ambled over. “Break it up,” said Haendl. Muhandas Dutta was nervously clutching the dagger-like milling machine chip thrust through his loin cloth, all that remained of a Citizen’s decent robes. Haendl turned his back on him and the dagger, stooped and took a long swig at the bubbling tap. There was some stir of action behind him; at his leisure he straightened up and turned around. Dutta had drawn his weapon and aimed it; before the plunge Germyn had seized his wrist. They stood now locked and straining silently. Haendl wrenched the dragger from Dutta’s weakening grasp and tossed it along the floor, clattering. The strained tableau collapsed; the men panted and glared, Dutta rubbing his wrist.

“Everybody’s nerves are on edge,” Haendl lectured them. “The fact that everybody’s nerves are apparently supposed to be on edge doesn’t matter. We’ve got to be a little more gracious, or we’ll all wind up in a mutual massacre. Dutta and Germyn, suppose you pretend that I’m very old and wise and take my advice. There’s a perfectly good food tap over there for you, Dutta, and a perfectly good one for you, Germyn, as soon as that Russian fellow’s through with it. I suggest each of you go to his own tap and fill up.”

“Flatbelly!” Dutta sneered, but he went, looking over his shoulder at Germyn.

“Muscle boy!” Germyn sneered, and he went to his tap, not turning his back on the African.

Then they bent to drink, but then there was nothing to drink.

With a final bubble the taps ceased to run, and did not start again.

Pandemonium spread through the acre of corridors. People came stumbling and sobbing to the taps. The door guards and the relay of runners deserted their posts and raced to the food taps. Some licked at the floor where the last of the sticky stuff was drying, awaiting the glycerine inundation. A few lucky ones battered their way to the eight-inch drains and thrust their arms down them as far as they could go, smearing and coating their arms and hands with what clung to the sides of the drainpipes; then they licked at themselves like cats.

Haendl, who had only a few minutes ago been savagely amused that his role was to keep ex-Citizens from tearing one another apart, to urge them towards graciousness and consideration, was now not amused. He said to Innison, the two apart from the churning mob: “Next the water goes off. Next, of course, we start spreading out and, I suppose, dying—most of us.’ They walked to the black cone of the loudspeaker-microphone; the guards who should be there to shield whatever was at the other end from vain importunings were away. The black cone was humming, which meant that it might be addressed. But Haendl backed away, drew Innison with him and said: “I’m damned if I will. I’m damned if I’ll give it a chance to tell us to be good mice.”

The phalanx of machinery at the end of the coaxial cable had reached the South Pole of the binary. Capsules on tank-treads split along their lateral axes and their tops reared back like clamshells; some extended derricks before and counterweights behind; some blossomed with petals that were tungsten-carbide iiozer blades. They attacked an immemorial junk pile, gently prying or fiercely ramming as need was. They burrowed through holed and oxidized piping, tangled old convection plates from ancient heat-exchanger apparatus, the lead jacket of an obsolete thorium reactor, the cans of thorium themselves, the scrapped cylinder of a relatively small fusion reactor and the tumbled heaps of cer-met bricks which once had jacketed it.

They came to a vaulted wall beneath the rubble; oxyhydrogen blowpipes drilled at it, and the mining machinery inserted and tamped explosive charges. No danger of damaging what was within; sonar said it was a dozen HE blasts to the other side. The explosive blew, and sheared off slices; the catspaws of the machines swept them aside. Eleven times more the tamp-blast-and-sweep cycle, and then delicate drilling, and then the hole-through into a chamber the duplicate of that at the North Pole, but with no blue-green monster under a crystal dome.

Instead, there were books.

Circular crystal plates with gold symbols plated onto them, the plates not bound but merely stacked together with blessed inefficiency; the golden text was raised a little, so the stacked plates did not fit snugly together. The books were heaped and tumbled on shelves, tables and the floor. It was a warm sight absorbed by the image-orthicon eyes, pulsed back along the coaxial cable, displayed to the sixteen eyes of the Snowflake on a round television screen.

The Snowflake gazed, coldly understanding, on the warm sight and some of its hands clicked out messages to manipulating machines at the end of its seventy-six geographic degrees of coaxial arm. Metal fingers spread the crystal-and-gold pages, the largest set of pages logically first. The beautiful strange letters ran unbroken in a spiral from the rim of each plate to the center, with the logic of boustrophedon writing, the ancient first-to-the-right-then-to-the-left lines that somehow lost out to the system which demanded a break and wrench of the eyes at the end of each line. The Snow-flake noted the nature of the “ink and paper;” it was not accidental. They were chosen for the highest possible contrast. The color contrast was absolute; the plates were transparent and the text opaque. They contrasted in tactility; the plates were smooth and the gold was grainy, unburnished. Instruments told the Snowflake that the contrast in conductivity was as extreme; the plates were insulators and the symbols superconductive. The messages left there at the South Pole had been left to be read by almost any eyes, any hands, or whatever unimaginable beings might read by electricity. There had to be a key, and there was: on the set of largest plates.

A wearying, difficult, often-imagined program began. A single man of Earth could eventually have learned much of what was oh the largest plates; it began with arithmetic—of course, binary. A dot is a dot; a dot and a space are two dots. Two dots are three dots; their zero was really zero—nothing, a discontinuity in the flowing script. A gracious, subtly-curved eye-shape was the addition-operator; negative numbers were made not of dots but little sun-bursts, and so on. It was only mathematics; the Snowflake plowed deliberately through it all, kid-stuff geometry, the functions of the conic sections. It was not very elegant; the Snowflake felt that elegance had been foregone and crude old concepts resurrected from primitive days. But the Snowflake learned; this is “height” sign, this is “skill” sign, “big,” “bigger than,” “includes,” “logically implies”—and then on to the first reader, the second-largest of the sets of plates. Blue-green, tentacled monsters were the subjects; eating, sleeping, crawling (but say “walking”) were the verbs. Monsters (but say “men”) watch the stars. The great sun rises and warms men. The spermatiferous man impregnates (“loves?”) the ovipositing man—whom you might as well call a woman, for she is. For one hundred and sixty-six days the laid egg is—it certainly seemed to be worshipped. Then the child is born, and the second degree of worship is accorded to it. A small—Something—is assigned to the child, and the child is cleansed with the mouths of its—certainly not “impregnating” here; certainly “loving”—parents. The child eats good food under the guidance of its parents and its Something-again. The child sleeps too heavily and the Something-again wakes its parents who in loving concern do something about it, the Snowflake could not make out what. The child learns to count and to read books like this. The modified-loving Something-again helps. The child walks, the child runs in the sun, the child goes far and fast riding the Something-again, for the Something-again has grown with the child. Then the child is half-grown and the third degree of worship is accorded to it and it begins to master the Twelve Hundred and Eighteen Books of First Importance. When that is done the child is grown and is a child no longer but a man or woman, and its Something-again too is grown. The new-grown man is modified-loving to the full-grows Something-again, for there is a certain danger in Somethings-again, useful in everything though they are. Absent-mindedness in the treatment (“tentaculation”-”handling”) of a full-grown Something-again can be fatal—

The Snowflake quivered in its nutrient bath when it realized that absent-mindedness had been fatal. The full-grown Pyramids, convenient things to have around, had risen immemorial ages ago and destroyed their masters who had built diem, gutted their pleasant planet and turned it into a bleak junkpile, a fit environment for the machines they were.