"I'll be morally indebted if I know!"
As with Tl*m*nch*l and Dr*f*rst*v, Remgar d'Nod's vocabulary had never included the expressionor more importantly, the concept"to be damned." Unlike quite a number of other species with which he was familiar, his own people had achieved their place at the pinnacle of evolution relatively slowly and gracefully, suffering less damage in the process than those, like humans, who had virtually exploded into that awareness of self-awareness which is sapience. They had never (and the "therefore" was strictly Remgar d'Nod's opinion) felt a need for the buffer against harsh reality that religion represents.
Disgusted nevertheless, he cautiously regarded what seemed to be a solid, meter-square block of steel before he gave it an idle push with two of his right legs. There were, he estimated, some 1249 other meter-square steel cubes here exactly like the one he was playing with, lined up in neat rows of 50 by 25.
The object resisted his attentions at first, then it began to slide soundlessly, almost effortlesslythe humans had used the expression "greased ball bearings on Teflon"across the alleyway, also about a meter wide, separating it from its nearest identical neighbor. Although Remgar d'Nod carried an effective weapon, was not alone at the moment, and his eight eyes gave him a full 360 degrees of peripheral vision, the low lighting and even lower ceiling in this peculiar place were beginning to make him feel extremely nervous.
"Model 17 started to explain what this place was for, but then got bogged down somehownot the first time that's happened with her. In the end, she insisted that even the Elders lack a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of basic physics to comprehend what she was trying to tell us!"
He made a trilling noise through the spiracles along his abdomen, the arachnoid equivalent of a scornful snort. It was one thing, he thought, to be insulted directly and deliberately. It was anotherand far more difficult to countenancewhen the insult was casual, accidental, and delivered almost in passing.
The apostrophe-symbol in what he thought of as his "trailing" name stood modestly for a lengthy collection of syllables listing various praiseworthy achievements of his ancestors, many of them scientific in character. When he'd accumulated a list of praiseworthy achievements of his own to be modest about (such as surviving this dumb expedition and maybe even distinguishing himself) another apostrophe might be inserted in his "leading" name. At the moment, the prospects for such an honor didn't seem particularly bright.
"Look at it this way," his companion replied mildly, crossing his eyes. Uncrossing them, he added, "That's why our esteemed employer, Mister Thoggoshaddressed by those who are overly impressed by authority as `The Proprietor'brought us to this asteroid in the first place, isn't it, to gain a better understanding of physics?"
Unlike the other rooms Model 17 had brought back to life over the past several hours as she went through the process of reactivating the entire artificial asteroid, the light in this one had remained dim, tinted a deep, eerie blue.
The large, white, furry canine variously known to friends as "Sam," "Oasam," and "Otusam," moved to sniff at the metal cube in front of him and lift an irreverent hind legbefore he appeared to remember that he was still encumbered by his transparent environmental suit. Remgar d'Nod was well aware that it was an old joke his friend never seemed to tire of repeating, but exactly like crossing his eyes in the presence of sapients whose optical organs happened to be faceted, it was invariably lost on most of his nonhuman companions.
"In that respect at least," the dog continued, "I think we can afford to give Model 17 the benefit of the doubt. How would you like to try to explain the underlying principles of the dimensional translocator which brought us here, say, to one of our new American acquaintances? I'll bet you'd have better luck conducting a seminar for them on the practical application of evil spirits. By the way, did she ever reveal what the tachyon telescope is for?"
Remgar d'Nod kept pushing the cube until it almost touched the next one in line. He felt another hint of resistance, no greater than before, then there were two cubesstill not quite touching one anothermoving along in front of him.
Although he rather liked the sapient dog, the arachnoid engineer found he resented being interrogated this way. Just now he didn't really want to think about physics, the Americans, Model 17, or his employer, Mister Thoggosh. All he wanted at the moment was to get out of this fluorocarbon soup, spin himself a nice tight, dry, little overnight cocoon somewhere, go to sleep, and dream the lucid dreams his people always dreamed, about his wives and children back home in a friendly universe that seemed further away to him every day.
Even more than Tl*m*nch*l, Dr*f*rst*v, and the other sea-scorpionoids he knew, Remgar d'Nod was the descendant of a hunter-warrior race whose nomadic yet highly technologized existence was a continual source of embarrassment to academics and scholars who maintained that, in order for true civilization to develop, a people must first tie themselves to a piece of land, preferably through the practice of agriculture. The culture his immediate ancestors had disappeared from some 15,000 years ago had ranged freely over two planets and three moons in their mechanized wanderings. They'd turned Mars into a hunting garden, been in the process of terraforming Venus, and made everyday household use of catalytic fusion.
And perhaps, Remgar d'Nod thought, because they'd never beaten their swords into plowsharesthe latter demanding greater brute strength and sexual dimorphism from their wielders than the formerthey were unique among arachnoids in that females were neither morphologically nor socially dominant. Most other sapients had difficulty distinguishing the males of his species from the females.
Remgar d'Nod stood twice as high as Sam at the shoulders and was covered with a soft tan-brown pelt shading to a creamy color at the rounded crest of his carapace and almost to black at the dainty tips of the plump legs curled beneath his body. His eight eyes were of assorted sizes, every one of them bright with intelligence, curiosity, and humor. An arachnid biologist would easily have spotted the tiny, alert jumping spider in his evolutionary past, slightly wider than it was long, little more than a ferocious little ball of fur and fangs.
A hundred million years of evolution had not left his species unchanged. For one thing, they were much larger than their ancestorsalthough small as sapient spiders wenthaving benefitted from the same mutational chemistry that made that sort of size possible for sapient arthropods elsewhere. They still spun fiber useful for hunting, fishing, and making shelter (although domesticated non-sapients kept by his people did it better and there had been a flourishing synthetic industry in his home universe, as well). But they ate solid food and gave live birth to blond-pelted bright-eyed children who clung easily to the thick fur of either parent, the females producing a fine, soft, easily digested silk for the young which other species sometimes compared to spun-sugar candy.
"The tachyon telescope?" he repeated Sam's question at last. "Certainly she explained it . . . sort of. In that polite, matter-of-fact way of hers, she informed us ignorant savages that it was for seeing anything out in the galaxy, beyond the Solar System, that happens to be moving faster than the speed of light."
"Hmph." The dog sat on his haunches between two stationary cubes. "How much would there be to see?"
"From what she said, more than you might guess." Experimentally, he applied sideways pressure until his cubes not-quite-collided with one to the left. He then pushed all three on an odd, unpredictable diagonal. "She told us that the universeany universeis full of natural objects moving faster than light, but that they can't be seen by anyone moving slower, which makes a crazy kind of sense, I guess. She says that's where we'll find the so-called missing matter astrophysicists worry about so much. She implied even morean entire mirror-universe in which tachyons are basic particles like quarks or photons, complete with the analog of stars, galaxies, and living ecologiesbut wouldn't go into any detail about it."
"As if we didn't have enough universes on our hands, already." The dog chuckled, a very humanlike sound coming from his suit transducer. Unlike many of Mister Thoggosh's land-dwelling employees, he didn't care for swimming in oxygenated liquid fluorocarbon even under the best of circumstances and had refused to take his filmsuit off down here. "Personally, I'd guess that anything moving faster than light would stir up a pretty visible racket, especially whenever it happened to smack into something going slower than light. Did she happen to say what she intended to look for with that thing? Or why it was so all-fired important to get it operating right after she came out of hibernation?"
At last Remgar d'Nod let the cube go, watching it and its displaced companions slowly reverse themselves and begin drifting back to their proper places. The fascinating thing, the reason he'd pushed them off sideways, was that any stationary cube which happened to be in the way would politely move until the displaced cubes had passed, then go back to where it belonged. Why, he couldn't say.
"I'm afraid she didn't, Sam. I have half an idea she wants to see what became of the Predecessors. If it works like a radio telescope, maybe she can even consult with them."
" `A radio for speaking with God,' " Sam quoted in a French accent. The citation was lost on the arachnoid. Probably another old American TV show he'd dredged up.
"She does seem extremely disappointed for some reason," he told the dog, "that the Successors turned out to be molluscs, rather than arthropods." All three metal blocks were back in place now, and he had exhausted his patience. "Listen, Sam, I don't want to be rude, but I have work to do. Is there some point to all this?"
The dog appeared to lift an eyebrow. "I certainly hope not."
"What?"
"Look, Remgar d'Nod old buddy, it wasn't simply to annoy you that I asked you to step into this square-balled billiard parlor for a little chat with me. In the light of certain disturbing facts we've already uncovered, my boss was worried by the reports you and the others sent back of your initial interview with Model 17. That's why we hustled down here after communications were restored."
The spider focused his full attention on the dog. "Certain disturbing facts such as . . . ?"
"Consider the implications." Somehow the shaggy white creature managed to convey a shrug. "In our explorations so far, we've yet to find a single doornot even to what are clearly personal quarterswith a lock on it. And if we're right about the bathrooms, not one has a partition in it or a private stall."
"That's what's so disturbing?" Remgar d'Nod snorted again. "Sam, I know of many peoples, certain tribes among my own species, without much sense of privacy or property"
"Okay," the dog persisted, "how about this: we've discovered several medical facilities aboard this overblown bowling ball. What you may not know is that RosalindDr. Nguyensays they're all just Band-Aid emporia for minor wounds, the school nurse kind of thing. Dlee Raftan Saon agrees: no equipment or supplies for dealing with major trauma, nothing at all to cope with disease."
"Interesting." The arachnoid thought about it. "No, I hadn't noticed that. Maybe the Predecessors had eradicated disease altogether. Judging from their engineering, they were pretty advanced. But what if they hadn't, Sam? What does it prove?"
"Not a blasted thing. But it gives us a very unpleasant idea." Sam lifted a hind foot to scratch behind one ear and was again impeded by his suit. "My boss thinks he knows what those big rock tumbler things are for. He thinks they're for grinding up the bodies of deador maybe just injured and uselesstrilobites. Have you noticed how close they are to the kitchen facilities?"
Remgar d'Nod swallowed uncomfortably. "Ugh."
"I'll see that `ugh' and raise you a `yech.' Add it up yourself: no personal privacy, no heroic medicine, presumptive evidence of cannibalism. Model 17"
The spider interrupted. "You think she's dangerous to us?"
Sam shook his head. "Not directly, perhaps, but Model 17's a cybernetic device constructed and programmed by a race of apparently antlike sapientsand that contradiction's disturbing enoughwho never got around to inventing individualism. She was created to serve Successor species, yet unavoidably the Predecessors will have built into her many of their own values and prejudices."
"Well," the arachnoid argued, thinking of the robot's repeated apologies to Valerian, Betal, Jones, Ortega, Ortiz, Tl*m*nch*l, Dr*f*rst*v, and himself, "once she got the idea who we wereor weren'tshe seemed to treat each of us as individuals."
"She's a very talented device. Her builders knew she'd be dealing with beings who possessed viewpoints quite different from their own. But she was constructed hastily, according to what she told you, and shut off before any extensive testing."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning nothingwe hope. But deep down, she reflects the values of her makers. Even if we're only right about the locks, the infirmaries, and the bathroomsnot the tumblers or the kitchensshe inherently needs to be part of a tight-knit community of beings identical to herself. Now she's unique and alone. And she's been conscious long enough for the isolation to begin driving her insane."
Remgar d'Nod would have shaken his head had he been capable of it. "Can a machine go insane?"
"You haven't seen 2001 a Space Oddity?" Sam peered suspiciously around the corners of the cubes to his right and left. "What worries Eichra Oren and me most is something else you may not have noticed. We're keeping quiet about it, so far. At the air lock, we've found what could be evidence of comings and goings during the late lamented unpleasantness with this Earth's gaggle of governments. Either some of the troopies got down here, which we doubt, or something from down here got up there. If it was Model 17, why didn't she mention it?"
The spider sighed exasperatedly. "Why not ask her?"
"I'm here because I use my implant for more than communicating. You might even say I am my implant. My boss thought I might see things from Model 17's point of view better than a natural sapient. If I had fingers and she had a nose, I'd try the Vulcan mind-meld. But I haven't asked because she isn't here now. She left after we came down, saying she had maintenance to perform. Eichra Oren was right: it sounded phony to me. She didn't say where or to what, but she trundled off, deeper into the asteroid, like a bat out of New Jersey."
"Which is why you asked me about the tachyon telescope. Well, I've given you everything I know, Sam, plus my unsubstantiated opinion that she wants to see what became of the Predecessors and maybe even talk with them. What else can I do for you?"
Sam peered around the cubes again, in imitation of the Soviet Americans, making sure they weren't being overheard. "You realize there's another, more ominous possibility."
Remgar d'Nod flapped his palps in an impatient gesture. "And what might that be, my mammalian friend?"
Sam looked around again and lowered his voice. "That if it's dark outside, before putting your car in gear it's always a good idea to turn on the headlights."
"You mean"
"I mean a tachyon telescope might be how a faster-than-light starship sees where it's going. Maybe we're all about to take a little trip, whether we want to or!"
Without warning, the metal blocks Sam sat between suddenly slammed together, snapping the dog's ribs, crushing his pelvis, and fracturing his spine.