The Rape of The Sun Page 5

  “The Temple Museum, your holiness, is not necessarily to be housed within walls. I had in mind positioning this ladiolis —up there somewhere.” The Horn pointed to the ceiling; obviously he meant beyond the ceiling.

  Quietly the Director of the Interscientific Institute interjected: “Perhaps, Dear Ancestor, God has not granted me the wisdom I prayed for, because I fail to see the utility of a ladiolis as a Temple Museum piece. In the first place, the ladiolis would fall apart without its ladis—”

  Tartly the Horn said: “When I specified a ladiolis, I included its ladis by inference.”

  “But inclusion of the ladis vastly multiplies the mass—” “Does it not."

  “Very well. But in the second place, assuming there were some way for us to capture a complete ladiolis and bring it here, its positioning as a piece for the Temple Museum is a puzzling problem. If the ladiolis were close enough to be seen by the worshipful naked eye, with all its parts distinguishable, it would be hazardous to our own ladiolis. Whereas if it were distant enough to avoid hazard, it could not be seen by the naked eye, except of course for its ladis, and that would

  appear little different from any other ladis that is now visible. Pray enlighten me, Dear Ancestor.”

  Being a scientist, this director was more independent than most ministers; and this the Horn accepted, but not with good grace. “It should come clear to you, dear son,” he retorted, “that the problem put to all of you is not whether we should get a ladiolis, but how. The details of its positioning and Temple Museum utility can be worked out by the technicians, and I am sure that the High Priestess will think of something. I may observe that the ladiolis will be a worshipful shining supplement to our own ladis which is regrettably dark. I do urge that you now turn your excellent mind to the how Director. While you are doing this. I should appreciate hearing from my dear son the Lord Ultramax of Astrofleet.”

  Dhurk’s chief, the ultramax, coughed, clutched table-edge with both hands, gazed at the ceiling. “Dear Ancestor, the appropriate methods can be developed and implemented, using some task-force combination of one or more manned ships together with a crew of robot ships. But if you will forgive me, sir, it does appear to me that Astrofleet is hardly in a position to recommend means until my dear brother the Director of the Interscientific Institute has enlightened us as to the complexities of the problem.” He turned to Dhurk: “Do you agree, Superior?”

  Startled, Dhurk managed: “Entirely, sir”—and hated himself for it. Not that he didn’t really agree—but after listening to the spate of docile semi-agreement around this table, he would have preferred to disagree bluntly.

  “Director,” pleasantly remarked the Horn, “the ball has been passed back to you—and I do not see you catching it.” (What would a ball game be like, Collins wondered, in this medium of heavy blue gas.)

  The interscientific director shifted in his chair. “Dear Ancestor, it is rather a large ball to catch. First, the structure of our entire nazuma (having comprehended ladiolis, Collins took the meaning of nazuma in stride) would be deranged to an incalculable degree if we were to disturb any ladiolis inside our own nazuma. It follows that we would have to obtain one from another nazuma, and that would be a project ferocious indeed. My second immediate comment is that the ladiolis should be plucked from the periphery of the other nazuma, to ease our task of extraction and also to minimize damage to the other nazuma. My third comment is consequent: what you request will take a great deal of time, even if it can be done.”

  “It will be done,” the Horn emphasized. “What nazuma, then? Which ladiolis in it? How much time?”

  “Of the top of my head, sir: we might pluck the ladiolis off one of the outer arms of the nearest spiral nazuma which is two million palarids distant.” (Collins shuddered.)

  “You mean Object 14?”

  “Precisely. I am not certain which ladiolis in that nazuma—one with nine major wanderers comes immediately to mind—but you must give me time to consult with our astronomers.” (Collins experienced vertigo.) “As to the time required for the whole project—Ultramax, what would be the approximate cruise-time for your task-force?”

  Said the ultramax: “For a one-way trip of two million palarids, cutting a time-chord across an inner shell of perhaps five thousand cycles ago, I would guess about 572 hours, which is about 26 days. However, prying the ladiolis loose from its anchorage, getting it under way, and returning with it could easily require the best part of a cycle. I would guess, on these very crude data and adding about five sub-cycles of preparation time: something like three half-cycles to do the whole job.”

  Exploded the Horn: “Three—half-cycles?”

  Dhurk made bold to put in: “Excuse me for speaking, Dear Ancestor—but as I am now seeing it, if the time could be cut below three half-cycles, it would have to result from some sort of simplifying data provided by my elder brother the scientific director.” So there: maybe Dhurk had ceded agreement with his ultramax, but at least in doing so he had helped make a problem for the Horn.

  And the Horn was fuming. “This is a most difficult sort of report for me to take back to the High Priestess.”

  The chairman pleased Dhurk by venturing: “But, Dear Ancestor—the High Priestess is not the Horn.”

  It mollified the Dear Ancestor, who commented wryly: “Your political touch is invariably unerring. Dear sons, I take the point clearly, and I shall convey it to High Priestess Hréda: her temple shall have its ladiolis—with all deliberate haste.

  ‘I turn now to the question, how may the deliberateness be hastened? I suggest to my dear son the scientific director that his staff put virtually full time upon the entire project. Watch your priorities: the question where to position the captured ladiolis takes a minor priority until you can tell Astrofleet where to get the ladiolis and how to capture and retrieve it.”

  “Dear Ancestor?”

  “Well, Dhurk?”

  “If the ultramax agrees, it seems to me that there is one sort of advice which Astrofleet can give the Interscientific Institute right now, and one sort of preparation which Astro-fleet can begin right now.”

  The Horn looked at the ultramax, who nodded. “Go ahead, Dhurk,” the Dear Ancestor encouraged.

  “Astrofleet,” Dhurk declared, “can start preparing now to harness and haul the greatest and hottest mass which it is capable of harnessing and hauling. We can now state those limits. We can harness and haul a total mass not to exceed seven double thirty-twos for the entire ladiolis; and its ladis, which we will have to harness directly, must have a surface temperature not to exceed five thousand absolute degrees with a thermal radiation not to exceed ninety thousand heat units. Those limits of our fleet capability will serve as advice to science when it chooses a ladiolis for us to capture. I assure you that there is no possibility for Astrofleet to attain greater capability in fewer than ten cycles. I have already stretched what we can do by a factor of ten percent, which I think we can overcome in a few subcycles of hard labor.” (Collins was appreciating that these sophisticated four-fingered creatures had achieved decimals.)

  Breathing rather heavily, Dhurk dropped his head to show that he was through. And again the ultramax nodded.

  “This is embarrassing,” remarked the scientific director, “because it eliminates the particular ladiolis that I had in mind. It is such a pretty one, too, and way out in one spiral arm of its nazuma, exactly right for the purpose. Unhappily its total mass is just under two double threes, which is too massive by thrice, although its temperature and radiation do fit within the limits.”

  (Collins wondered: Are we then off the hook?)

  “On the other hand,” hopefully added the director, “our

  distinguished younger brother has observed that in ten cycles-—”

  “Out of the question,” the Horn snapped. “Go into conference with your people, Director, and pick a more suitable ladiolis.

  “Meanwhile, dear sons, with prior approval by the ultramax, I am able n
ow to designate the chief of the task-force for obtaining the ladiolis. He is hereby empowered to assume dictatorial powers, under the ultramax, over all phases of preparation including scientific work; and when he can report to me that he is ready, I will dispatch him on his mission.

  “This task-force chief is former Superior and now Ultrasuperior Dhurk.”

  . . . More to come, Collins, more to come. Be patient, be alert, be wary how you use this revelation. Shrinkage . . . diminution . . . the perfume. THEY COME FOR US. We are NOT off the hook.

  Recovering in his easy chair, dazedly Collins reflected that he did not even know when the events of his vision had taken place. So from when would one time a subcycle—whatever that was?

  5

  Collins’s second vision of Dhom came unannounced by any light-ballet; and as he settled into the continuity of it, the development seemed entertaining but inconsequential. Nevertheless he watched it soberly through, holding faith that the new vision, in the contest of prior warnings, must somehow be pertinent. Perhaps it would confer motivation....

  Dazed but resolute, new Ultrasuperior Dhurk departed the council chamber after the Horn’s departure, adjournment, and some minutes of informal conversation. He was waylaid by a dehorned steward who informed him that he was commanded to be present at a small luncheon in the Horn’s private apartment. The steward escorted Dhurk to a tiring room where the guest could make himself ready. When Dhurk emerged, the steward led him along a corridor that seemed to twist for a full kilometer, then up an airlift to a reception room and thence through transparent doors to an outdoor terrace, where Dhurk was abandoned by the rail.

  Dhurk had noticed on this terrace a middling-large table with four place-settings; but until the Horn would be joining him, what enthralled the young man was the view from this balcony. Up here the blue atmosphere was thin, only gently buoyant; Dhurk could stand solidly on his feet and feel as much of his body-weight as he ever felt. This high-built palace was flood-illuminated, its radiance spread far through the medium; but on this terrace the light was modulated to twilight glow, so that from here the visitor could see the blurred sparkle of other lights far down into the valley until atmospheric density indigoed them out; they reappeared on a distant hill which lofted above this palace, but the highest lights were below the level of this terrace. This was in line with a bit of Horn-wisdom: it is best to live on a middle-sized •hill where one has a view both down and up, rather than on a mountain crest where the only view is down. The Horn, however, had long ago issued an edict that nobody was to build any higher than his palace.

  Often when Dhurk perched on a high place, peering down into the indigo murk artificially light-glowing—murk in which he had recently been swimming and breathing, into which again he would plunge; murk which was no murk when you were immersed in it, only atmosphere so dense that the major swimming effort was directed toward keeping yourself down rather than driving yourself upward; murk that had been the primal home of his remote infra-human ancestors—often, then, his mind would do a time-plunge, dwelling first with •those dimly envisioned dragon-ancestors, surveying the fossil-inferential time-sweep of their evolution into a human master-race. In any case, Dhurk, when he was off duty, was inclined to such philosophizing; and these meditations on his human lineage had drawn tooth from his experiences on other planets in the Horn’s hegemony—planets where the races they dealt with lived entirely on what they called “dry land” without buoyancy, and regarded swimming as a frequently hazardous recreational thrill. Two chemically different components of their atmospheres were sharply divided and opposed to each other: the rarefied non-buoyant non-fluid gas which was their “dry land” breathing medium (they called it air) and the curiously non-gaseous fluid which they drank but which they could not breathe (they called it water). Visiting such peoples on such planets, the men of Dhorn’s Astrofleet had to overcome physical problems which were grave indeed: because their lungs could not milk hydrogen from that alien air, they had to wear spacesuits filled with their own medium; and because they had there to fight gravity without buoyancy, :hose suits were equipped with so many servo-mechanisms ? that Dhorners might as well have been androids.

  The home planet of Dhurk’s primordial progenitors had possessed, like Dhom, a homogeneous atmosphere compounded mainly of carbon and hydrogen. This atmosphere was gaseous over a range of temperatures far broader than the range of life-supporting temperatures; only as one approached absolute zero heat would the gas abruptly go solid without any liquid transition. But it was the nature of this gas to be so dense that it behaved like a fluid, so that drinking it served all the body-flushing needs of the water for which races on other planets fought and perished. The atmosphere of Dhorn offered some minimal buoyancy even in the high sky; and of course, the deeper one plunged, the more buoyant it became, compressed by the weight of the gas above it Dhurk had studied closely the biological evolution of his people. In their line, the earliest metazoan to which they could definitely trace themselves step-by-step was a dragon: a flattened version of themselves, cartiliginous rather than bony, piscine rather than mammalian, with horns that were relatively far longer, with gills rather than lungs, with tailfins rather than legs, and with serpentine tails that they used for guidance. The depth-range of those primordial dragons was amazingly greater than the human range: from lying semi-dormant profoundly in atmospheric depths where pressure ascended exponentially beyond human tolerance, these beasts could spread their wings and soar aloft in pursuit of prey, driving themselves upward even higher than the significant diminishing point of buoyancy, occasionally even breaking clear of the atmosphere to cavort briefly in raw space before splashing back in. They had no hands, and their brains weren’t much; but for their time, their brains were better than most: competing with and escaping from swimming predators far larger than themselves, intelligence they needed badly—and they had it, relatively speaking.

  Had Dhurk chosen to do so, here on the Horn’s terrace, he could have enumerated the steps through which the forms and habits of his line metamorphosed during nearly a billion cycles (entailing many millions of successively mutating generations) . Always, as they competed in swiftness and cunning with smaller forms for food and with larger forms to avoid becoming food, their brains grew, and they learned to manipulate things; and as their habitats ascended higher up the mountains into increasingly rarefied atmosphere with decreasing buoyancy, their tailfins evolved into legs and feet for walking to supplement swimming, their cartilage developed into jointed bones, the wingtip system of bony support became four-fingered manipulative hands, their gills became lungs, their blood warmed, lactation along with longer brood-periods became a fact of life for females, males became protective-aggressive hunters for their families, their eyes grew increasingly sensitive to light (for their original planet had a sun), and their brains generated abstractive power along with efficient language to replace inefficient telepathy.

  Altogether, Collins later reflected from his perception of Dhurk’s thoughts, the broad picture of their evolution paralleled that of humans on Earth—including the loss of telepathy with its vague special values in favor of speech with its sharp general-and-particular special values. At developmental climax, however, Dhurk’s master race had encountered a mortal problem, and after many generations they began to recognize its lethal nature. It could be summarized as progressive loss of atmosphere.

  Luckily, technology had already advanced to the point of using fire, which was separated by catabolizing carbonic phosphorus out of their medium within an enclosure, the electricity at first being generated by judicious use of certain eels. Under the long-range death-danger, a technological elite arose; it prospered, while lesser people perished; and when its machines had ultimately spawned semi-intelligent robots and starships, it was time for this elite to comb space for a planet that would offer them a congenial home....

  “Ah, Dhurk! Welcome!” It was the Horn himself, shorn of his golden center horn but with gilt
remaining on his own small pair; and he was cordial indeed. But, even more wondrously, with him was his granddaughter the High Priestess Hréda, dimpling and shy-cordial, at her semi-childish loveliest in a white tunic edged with gold. Instantly Dhurk was drawn into worship; he knew that he must not let this attitude be overt; yet through the luncheon, subvertly he worshiped.

  Hréda was quiet at the luncheon, which included only the Horn at tablehead, herself at the foot, and Dhurk at one side. This luncheon was sumptuous, but its purpose was obscure; there was no reason evident to Dhurk why he should be so honored. He was congratulated by the Horn on his new appointment, and Hréda murmured, “I too am happy.” Reticently Dhurk thanked his Dear Ancestor for elevating him in rank, to which the Horn responded: “Fianti! You’ve already earned it, and now you have your chance to earn even higher kudos.”

  But if the luncheon was intended for serious discussion of some sort, there was for a long time no evidence of it. The Horn seemed more interested in learning what sort of conversationalist Dhurk might be, and how deftly he might know how to deal with a series of exotic foods and drinks—true liquid spirits based on H20 which synthesis in an atmosphere lacking oxygen had been a major triumph of Dhorner technology. As soon as Dhurk perceived this intent, he required himself to relax; and he entered into highly spirited give-and-take, allowing himself a couple of witticisms (spontaneous, but thought through during split-seconds before delivery) which drew uproarious laughter from the Horn and caused Hréda to giggle prettily. Dhurk disciplined himself not to be intoxicated by his own successes; after each clever moment, he silenced himself and allowed the Horn to cap it and introduce the next lead, whereto Dhurk raised questions rather than volunteer answers, in the process feeding his host with opportunities for bon mots of the Horn’s own. Perhaps it was going well; Dhurk was not sure.