Eichra Oren had returned to the low-ceilinged chamber of moving metal cubes and unearthly blue light.
Somehow he knew it was a nightmare. In some corner of his mind he was aware that he was still keeping his vigil with Model 17 on a street bench just outside Dlee Raftan Saon's surgery in the Elders' settlement, just as he knew that he had been completely exhausted by the disorienting shock of losing what amounted to his symbiote.
Knowing that didn't help him wake himself up as he was usually able to, or keep him from reliving the last few terrible moments of Sam's life.
He'd heard the dog screaming (a gut-wrenching sound that couldn't be described any other way) from an adjoining passageway at the same time it came to him over his implant. He didn't remember how he'd covered the intervening distance in the interval of a heartbeat. Sam had been so badly hurt that it hadn't mattered.
In any other context, it might have made the very picture of absurdity. As the arachnid engineer, Remgar d'Nod, stood by helplessly, Eichra Oren had found the terminally injured animal almost standing on his hind legs, his head sticking up like that of a comic decapitation victim from between two of the massive metal blocksblocks now set apart by the space of less than a centimeter.
The worst part was that Sam's mind was still working. He could still communicate his agony electronically. What leaked from around the circumference of the crack between those blocksa fleeting impression of blood-soaked fur was all the man permitted himself nowhadn't borne close examination, and Eichra Oren had been grateful for the low, off-colored light. It had been obvious enough, both to him and to the dog, that from the neck down Sam was already dead.
Thinking fast and acting even faster, on a desperate inspiration which hadn't formed within his conscious mind, Eichra Oren had drawn his razor-sharp assessor's swordeven now he could hear the ringing, steely whisper of the double-edged blade as it leaped from his scabbardand struck off the dog's head, level with the tops of the blocks. Wrapping what was left of his friend in transparent plastic from the environmental suit Remgar d'Nod had shucked off and shoved at him, he'd rushed it to the surface, another journey that he failed now to remember clearly, although he did recall that it had seemed to go on for days.
Similarly, he didn't remember the flight from the excavation site to the Elders' settlement at all. However long it had lasted, it had lasted far too long. In the end, his desperate gamble to save Sam had failed. Instead of keeping his best friend alive, he had taken away his last few minutes and mutilated him in the bargain.
Now, a familiar, disembodied voice echoed inside his skull. "Trust the Force, Boss."
"What!" Eichra Oren shook his aching head, certain he must still be asleep.
"And never let 'em tell you that major wounds don't hurt. Boy, I'd like to find the dickless wonder who thought that one up and squish his gizzard in a vise!"
"Sam!" The possibility that he had gone insane entered the man's mind. "Is that you, Sam?"
"Obi Wan Doggie, himself. I'd make that `in the flesh,' but it would be a base canardor maybe just a baritone canard. While we're on the subject, Boss, let's discuss beheading as a first-aid technique."
Eichra Oren opened his eyes to discover the American TV reporter, C. C. Jones, with Colonel Chuck Tai, late of the PRC Extra-Special Forces, bending over him where he'd fallen off the bench onto the sidewalk. Squatting between the newcomers, Model 17 had extended a cold, hard, but commiserating feeler of some sort and was stroking his arm. Danny Gutierrez leaned on the wall behind them, the usual cigarette smoldering in his hand.
"Hey, I wouldn't get too close, you guys," the lieutenant wisely observed, "just in case he wakes up fighting!"
"My poor, unfortunate friend," Model 17 exclaimed, "I do not know what convulsions are supposed look like in your species, but I believe that you were having them a moment ago, which may account for Lieutenant Gutierrez's rather thoughtless and unsympathetic remark. Are you quite all right now, Eichra Oren?"
"He could start a business called `Thoughtless and Unsympathetic Remarks Are Us.' " Eichra Oren levered himself to his feet, sat down on the bench, and pressed both palms to his eyes. "You wouldn't think I was all right if I told you the dream I just had."
"Why don't you try us anyway?" suggested Danny, dropping the cigarette and crushing it out with his heel. He walked over to put a hand on the debt assessor's shoulder. "I let you sleep, O shamus of shame, because you looked like you could use the rest. You've been dead to the world, snoring at ninety decibels, for over an hour."
"Tell 'em all to go away, Boss," the voice inside his skull demanded, sounding more and more authentically like Sam. "Tell 'em we're busy. We gotta talk."
This time, Eichra Oren almost jumped off the bench. He started to reply, then looked up warily at Danny, the American reporter, the Chinese officer, and the robot, knowing that even if he wasn't losing his mind, none of the four had cerebro-cortical implantswhich seemed to be the source of Sam's voicecouldn't hear what he was hearing, and would assume he'd gone insane. If they hadn't already.
"Mr. Jones," he began carefully, "I understand from Aelbraugh Pritsch that you've been interviewing Colonel Tai about his military unit for the implant network."
"That's right," the reporter replied. "We just finished and were headed to Nellus Glaser's for a beer."
Eichra Oren nodded. "Well, I may have another story for you, but I don't know whether the headline should read" he glanced up at Danny "`Guilt Gumshoe Goes Ga-ga' or `Deceased Dog Discourses.' " He looked from one face to another and back again, then cleared his throat. "I seem to be hearing Sam over my implant."
There was a long silence.
All three men looked down at him with their hands thrust in their pants pockets, tossing occasional brief glances up and down the street as if to reassure themselves that this embarrassing conversation into which they had somehow fallen wasn't being overheard by strangers. To his chagrin, they were wearing expressions he'd never expected to see directed his way. The black face showed impatient skepticism, even mild contempt, while the yellow seemed inclined to pity. The brown face, Danny's, shook from side to side with an unreadable smile.
"Boss, that's only because I managed to upload all my personality and memories at the height of the excitement downstairs, first into the electronic areas of my brainwhich kept overflowing, by the way, giving me full-chip warnings and scaring the bejabbers out of meand then onto the information storage and communications network."
"In the name of p'Na"
"Hey, it wasn't any big dealexcept that it does constitute the first genuine out-of-body experience ever documented. I'm the document, in fax! At three hundred thousand klicks a second, I was here at the surgery before youand my headwere."
"Eichra Oren." Model 17 touched him on the arm again, shyly. "If you have been driven mad," she told him electronically, "then at least you are not alone, for I have attuned my self-contained electromagnetic communications circuitry to the Elders' network, and I, too, can hear your recently deceased friend."
"Eavesthinker!" Sam's tone was bantering.
Eichra Oren laughed out loud, transforming Jones and Tai's skeptical and pitying looks into expression of alarm until he began to explain what had just happened outside their hearing. Danny understood immediately and began to grin from ear to ear.
"Tell himtell him I'm glad he isn't dead!"
"Actually, it's nice to hear you, Model 17," Sam declared, the robot relaying his words to the astonished Jones and Tai through a transducer on her carapace. "Danny. For that matter, it's nice to be hearing anything, considering the alternative!"
"You'd be in a fix," the lieutenant replied, "if Model 17 hadn't rigged communication with the surface."
"Yes," Tai agreed, "this would be a religious experience instead of an ordinary conversation."
Eichra Oren turned to the colonel. "Tell me one thing ordinary about it and the drinks are on me, Chuck."
"Try and relax a little, Boss. I'll be my old self again in no time at all. Dlee Raftan Saon and Rosalind held onto my headwhich you'll notice I'm not exactly using right nowand are presently extracting tissue from it to clone me a brand-new body. Not a pretty sight, believe me, but I guess the Elders' medical technology is good for something after all, besides helping nautiloids live too long!"
"I believe a highly cogent argument could be made," replied a new voice, "that our friend Sam never did have much use for his head. In the end, that's probably all that saved him. The operation was a failure, but the patient lived."
Dryly chuckling, Dlee Raftan Saon emerged from the dilated door of the clinic with a tired-looking Rosalind Nguyen behind him. The insect physician used all four hands to fluff up the hanging fabric strips of which his clothing was made and sat down, as near as his species ever came to it, on the bench beside the man.
"I'm here to tell you that there's nothing, on this world or any other, quite like laboring for hours performing delicate surgery with an obnoxious patient as a backseat driver!"
Rosalind smiled but said nothing, a look of understanding sympathy in her eyes for Eichra Oren. Wearing surgical greens from Soviet American expedition stores, she pulled the cap off, shaking her hair out and running her slim fingers through it.
"C'mon, now, Doc," Sam complained electronically, "it couldn't have been as bad as that. Why, most of the time I wasn't even there. I was elsewhere, practicing a newfound aptitude for astral projection. Okay, half-astralI had to say it before any of you did. For example, I heard Eichra Oren here promise Danny he'd really listen to Model 17's story about the Eldest."
"You heard that?" Eichra Oren turned back to Model 17, still addressing Sam. "And you let me go on worrying myself towhy didn't you say something?"
"Unaccustomed as I am to public reticence," the animal replied, "I wasn't all that sure myself that I was having a real experience. Or, to be honest, that I was real, myself. It's what comes of reading too many of Heinlein's later novels. Anyway, it was necessary to take a while and sort myself out, if you see what I mean. I used to wonder whether I was a dog with a computer-enhanced brain or a computer in a dog-enhanced cabinet. Now I'm just a former computer or a former dog who doesn't know whether he's a program or a database."
"You mean whether he's kibbles or bits." Danny ground a cigarette on the pavement at his feetEichra Oren hadn't even seen him light this oneand immediately lit another. "Sorry about that, an old commercial I saw once. Speaking of that promise, Eichra Oren, is there any reason you couldn't begin keeping it now?"
The Antarctican looked a question at the two physicians. "At this point, we've done all we can do," Rosalind answered. "The rest is up to automated equipment."
"And Sam's fragile will to survive," Dlee Raftan Saon added, provoking general laughter. "I could use some sleep, myself, but I'm far too . . . what's the expression?"
"Keyed up," supplied Rosalind, "and curiousspeaking for myself."
"And curious," the insect doctor agreed, "speaking for both of us." He turned to Tai, doing a fair imitation of a human American southern accent. "You bein' the only cunnel heah, Cunnel, may Ah suggest that we-all repaih to mah officewhere we kin all sit on the floah as comf'table as we can on the sidewalk out heahfor brandy an' cigahs?"
Eichra Oren stood up, stretching. "Good idea, Raftan, only make mine coffee, with a Turkish accent."
"In the name of the Grrreat and Merrrcifool," replied the insect, "kindly walk this way, Effendi."
"If I tried to walk that way" Sam's disembodied voice began.
"I'd wind up in traction!" Danny, Jones, Tai, and Rosalind finished for him in unison. Together they entered the surgery and found places to sit in the doctor's officeonly Model 17 sat on the floorwhile their host ordered coffee and other refreshment, found a chair for himself, then filled and lit his pipe.
Jones pulled the glittery golf ball from his pocket.
"By this time, I'm curious, too," Eichra Oren told the robot. "Please feel free to satisfy our curiosity, Model 17. You have the audience you wanted."
"At last." Model 17 began, "How much do any of you know about slime molds?"
"Yech!" That was Danny, about to take a bite of ice cream covered with butterscotch syrup.
"About as much as I ever wanted to," Sam replied through the same speaker she'd used. "Practically nothing. I know they're like the Rio Grande, an inch deep and a mile wide."
"More on the order of a meter wide and a few dozen millimeters deep," corrected Dlee Raftan Saon. "To borrow Sam's unique manner of stating things, a slime mold iswell, more of an animal than a plant, that doesn't seem to know whether it's one big single-celled organism with thousands of nuclei, a single multicelled entity, or thousands of separate creatures which look rather like tiny worms. At one time or another, depending on temperature, available food or moisture, or maybe just its mood, it can be any of the threeor convert itself into a fine, dry powder and simply blow away on the wind to a better location."
"God," Danny gulped, "it sounds like something Spock and Captain Kirk would have to fight!"
Rosalind laughed. "Yes, but they're real, and just about as mundane as any living thing ever gets. People scrub them off their shower curtains every day without knowing it. They're a very ancient kind of organismPrecambrianone of the first ever to evolve."
"And in at least one universe, the first to evolve intelligence," declared Model 17 with an electronic shudder. "They are the only Precambrian organisms ever to do so."
"And yet they left no traces of it," Dee Raftan Saon mused.
"The Eldest constructed no artifacts that we know of," Model 17 explained, "but created whatever they required out of their own substance, and perhaps even their thoughts. In all the myriad alternative worlds of infinite probability, neither they nor their soft-bodied nonsapient ancestors left any fossil record."
"I see."
"Nor," she continued, "does it appear that they could be killed in any way we know the term."
"What do you mean they couldn't be killed?" Sam demanded, "They're slime mold. Enough household disinfectant and"
"So what happened to them, then?" Rosalind asked.
"In their own universethe one we presently occupyafter a bitter conflict lasting millions of years, of which I feel fortunate to have been given little useful memory, my builders believed they had imprisoned the Eldest in eternal frozen sleep in the absolute cold of the Cometary Halo. Even thus contained, the Predecessors greatly feared that the Eldest might somehow be awakened accidentally."
"So greatly," asked Eichra Oren, "that they invented the Virtual Drive just so they could flee the Solar System?"
"Yes," Model 17 answered. "I am afraid that correctly states the facts of the matter."
"And now," the Antarctican persisted, "the Eldest are awakening?"
"Yes, Eichra Oren." She gave him one of her almost-sighs. "I have just seen indications of it by means of what the Soviet Americans call my tachyon telescope."
Dlee Raftan Saon blew multiple smoke rings from the spiracles along the sides of his abdomen, forcing the humans to revise some of their theories about his respiratory process. "I'd like to see that myself, Model 17, very much."
"You are most welcome to at any time, Doctor."
"Thank you. Some of my colleagues here believe that your fears regarding the Eldest are an expression of mass paranoia among your builders induced by fundamental contradictions between their natural collectivism and the sapience they evolved into."
Model 17 was less capable of facial expression than the mantislike doctor or she would have nodded. "This is why they were reluctant to take my warning seriously?"
Laying a gentle hand on Model 17's carapace, Rosalind hunkered down beside the robot trilobite. "I'm one of those colleagues Raftan mentioned, Model 17, and I won't deny that I still believe that the contradictory beliefs he refers to can have dangerous consequences both to those who hold them and everyone around them. Except by way of contrast, intelligence and socialism don't even belong in the same sentence, let alone the same belief system."
"I am most sincerely grateful for your honesty, Doctor Nguyen," the robot answered her.
"That's about the most polite way I've ever heard of telling somebody to go to hell, but you're welcome anyway, Model 17, and I am willing to listen seriously about the Eldest. If they're stirring out there, what will you do about them?"
"What I shall do? Some of it I am already doing, preparing for the conflict inevitably to come. The rest depends on how easily I convince you and your companions to travel aboard this vessel with me to the Cometary Halo, where I hope to reimprisonor even destroythe Eldest while they are not yet fully awakened."