FROM JEAVES SITUATIONAL SUMMARY: 384.17.4.9
Call me Jeaves. Everyone else does.
I’m a robot, high-level sentient. My original makers were human, but I’ve received numerous upgrades from others in the intervening century. That fact tends to make people give me credit for having accumulated more knowledge than I actually have. Yes, it’s true that I carry information that others in my company lack: details about Shipworld, for example, and some about the early history of the galaxy. But there’s so much I don’t know, such as:
What exactly are we supposed to be doing, now that we’ve arrived back on Shipworld? Does anyone care that in completing our last mission we saved a thousand worlds? And on a more personal note, when will I be able to merge myself back into my real, physical body? Haven’t I been virtual long enough?
I have many such questions.
Here are some things I do know: We’re back on Shipworld, a gargantuan structure orbiting just beyond the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy. The structure contains somewhat over a thousand immense habitation modules, most of them honeycombed with smaller subsections, as well as some ancillary structures. Shipworld shelters survivors from untold thousands of galactic civilizations threatened one way or another with extinction. Shipworld (as an entity, rather than a structure) is always on the lookout for more folk in need of rescue.
So.
We just completed one such mission. We’ve been back awhile, and our situation remains unclear. Upon our return, we were not greeted by a brass band or by much of anybody except the docking crew. I moved my soulware from the ship to an iceline node, and filed our report via the iceline network, attempting to connect to the authorities who sent me out in the first place. But despite the extraordinary nature of our report—not to mention the exotic hyperdimensional mode of travel on our return from Starmaker—we received little in the way of acknowledgment or gratitude from the authorities at the other end of the iceline. Had the hierarchy changed in my absence? I couldn’t quite tell. We received no further information. Instead, we were invited to take some R&R at an unused lake resort in an idyllic location in the Benzalli sector, close to where we had docked.
My team is there now, as I write this. Meanwhile, I relentlessly seek additional information. From my vantage point in the iceline node, I have more flexibility than my companions to reach out—but that has made no discernible difference. I still have few answers, and have gained no official recognition for my companions of the significant contribution they made toward the safety of the galactic worlds. I’m never exactly blocked in my search, but then again I never quite find my way to the answers I seek. It’s puzzling, and frustrating.
But maybe not altogether surprising. Shipworld is a truly vast place. Out here at the edge of the galaxy, where you wouldn’t expect to find anything more than a little dust and a lot of vacuum, floats this vast necklace of enormous, infinitely diverse habitats, joined together like beads on a string. It can take time to find what you’re looking for.
And so.
What’s next? We got back to Shipworld by, as my human designers would have said, the skin of our teeth. But will the mysterious and deadly Mindaru Survivors come after us for interfering with their efforts to destroy the Starmaker Nebula? Do they know where we are? Is there another job awaiting us? Will I even stay with the company? All these things and more, I wish I knew.
End of summary.
***
Ik sat motionless, gazing across a dusty console and out through what appeared to be a window at what appeared to be the lights of a settlement at night. The Hraachee’an ached with frustration and longing. The window was set out of reach, and he couldn’t tell for certain if he was looking at an actual living settlement or a projected image. He wondered if there might be a door around here somewhere, a door he could step through. Perhaps this was actually a real window through a habitat partition, and it might be possible simply to walk into the next habitat. More likely, though, it was just a viewscreen. Ik had found this room in a bunker near the lake, and while the others were sleeping, he’d walked over by himself to investigate. It looked almost like a control room, but he couldn’t see what, if anything, it controlled. Rows of nondescript panels of touchscreens and buttons, mostly dark, were set along the walls.
The view through the large window was appealing, sighting across a darkened valley at night, toward a town or small city nestled in the woods. Did it mean anything? Had they been brought within sight of it for a reason? Moon and stars, he wondered if anything they were doing these days was for a reason. Killing time, it seemed like to him. All this waiting. They didn’t even have the robots Napoleon and Jeaves to talk to, and they were the only ones Ik could talk to. Jeaves, who wasn’t physically in a body anyway, had disappeared like a wisp of smoke while his more organic companions rested by the lake. Napoleon was gone, too; Jeaves had asked the robot to accompany him on some errand.
Ik did not like resting by the lake. He thought a visit to the nearest town might break the depressing monotony.
He felt slightly guilty about leaving his friends without a word in the middle of the night. If any of them woke and found him missing, they might be worried, knowing his state of mind. But sometimes he felt worse being with them, unable to communicate and dragging them down by his presence. They’d gone through so much together, and built such a sense of common purpose. But the loss of his voice-stones on that last flight had left him isolated, unable to participate even in simple conversations. The voice-stones were the linchpins of their little community. Without the stones, none of them could understand a word of the others’ languages.
While they were still on The Long View, the loss had been tolerable, especially with the robot Copernicus helping to translate. But Copernicus was now integrated with the ship’s AI, and they’d been given no choice but to leave him behind at the docks. Since leaving the ship, things had deteriorated steadily for Ik. Sometimes he felt he could barely even speak to himself. The only thing that really kept him going was his hope that he might finally have a chance to search for others of his own kind on Shipworld. But Shipworld was a big place. To search in any reasonable way, he needed a search tool, something like the iceline, the local network structure. He’d used it extensively the last time he was on Shipworld; in fact, he hadn’t just used it, he’d helped save it. But then he’d had voice-stones, and a connection to the iceline. Everything had been different then.
Might he someday have voice-stones again? He had to; he couldn’t bear to keep going without that hope. But in the meantime, if he just could find some other Hraachee’ans, he wouldn’t have to feel so alone.
Leaning forward, over the console, he saw movement out there in that nightscape. Lights moving through the air, probably vessels. He sat back and stared at the controls in front of him. In one elliptical cutout, sparks of lights floated through a three-dimensional display. What did that mean? Who knew? Perhaps his friends could make sense of it. Or their stones could. But right now he was on his own.
Ik tried to remember how similar devices had worked the last time he was on Shipworld. Machines like this varied from one section of Shipworld to another, and for him, the voice-stones had been key to interacting with them. But surely he could manually operate the viewing equipment, if that’s what this was. He thought about it, and made a decision. Until now, he had been careful not to touch the controls. But now he stroked them with his long-fingered hands. Here was an icon with an engraved shape of a curved arrow. Might that change the view? He pressed it. Nothing happened. He tried to rotate it, but it didn’t budge. He thought a moment, then placed the palm of his hand against the icon and turned. Nothing. Growling softly, he delicately traced the line of the engraved arrow with one finger.
The window abruptly changed. Where the lights had been, there was now a placid lake. The same lake they were camped beside? He couldn’t tell. There were no people in view.
He traced the arrow again. The view blinked to a large indoor concourse, with an arched-glass roof and throngs of people of all kinds, a hundred species, all alien to him. Ik braced his forearms on the console and studied the view. Were there any Hraachee’ans? He studied it a long time, but he saw no Hraachee’ans.
Reluctantly, he changed the view again. This time it changed to a series of magnificent but desolate gorges in an arid-looking land. He sighed through his ears. The window’s operation seemed to be random, then, a meaningless travelogue—or maybe an array of selections from a vast monitoring system.
So far he’d tried only the one control. To its right was a star-shaped icon. He hesitated. Should he be fooling around with these settings, with no idea what he was doing? On the one hand, he could be meddling with things he shouldn’t; on the other, it seemed unlikely that critical controls would be left carelessly unattended. Presumably the masters of this place knew the controls were here, and had intended for them to be here. Which meant visitors were expected to explore.
All right. He lightly touched the icon with one finger, and traced a radial line out one of the starbursts. He looked up, and was surprised to see the view replaced by something that did not seem to be inside Shipworld: flashing yellow pulses of light in the dark of space, and then a few streaks. Both faded, and something else appeared in the field of view, something in space. Something long and extremely thin, like a glowing wire stretched across the view from low and near on the left, to high and far away on the right, and out of sight. Something was moving along its length.
“Hrrm?” Ik murmured. About halfway down its length, much smaller yellow bursts were winking on and off, almost like indicator lights. A warning? In the upper corner of the display, a circle appeared filled with incomprehensible writing.
Clacking his mouth, Ik ran his finger along another radial on the star icon. The view flicked to something different: an exterior view of an enormous structure in space—the familiar chain of huge segments that made up Shipworld against the dark of extragalactic space, the tiny disks of distant galaxies behind it. A slice of the home galaxy’s misty spiral was just visible at the bottom of the view. Ik felt a shiver. Several times now, he had approached Shipworld from the outside. Each time it had left him shaken with awe, and overwhelmed by his own smallness.
Just looking at this view reawakened the feeling. There was so much about Shipworld he still didn’t understand. And much that he feared.
His gaze was drawn to a point of light moving slowly toward the enormous structure. A craft approaching Shipworld? Maybe a star-spanner bubble? New arrivals from a newly rescued world—or one that had been destroyed? Hapless people like him, returning from a harebrained expedition, lucky to be alive? Just wondering about it made him ache inside again.
He stroked the starburst, and the view switched back to the inside of Shipworld, or so he assumed. Now a meadow filled the window, and daylight—and a figure walking toward him, with a small, scampering creature leading the way. Ik recognized the small creature, or at least its species. It was a krayket, one of the charming little fellows who had once helped him and his friends. Was this krayket helping another new arrival?
Ik waited, as they came closer. Then he froze, staring at the bipedal creature. Moon and stars! “John Bandicut!” he whispered to the empty room. “Hrah! You must come see this!” Was that another human he saw walking with the krayket? He was almost certain it was; the being had longer hair than John’s, and was a little curvier in the midsection, not unlike Antares, and was possibly female. “John Bandicut!” he cried hoarsely, desperately wishing his friend were here to see this.
Ik started to turn away, to run and fetch Bandicut—and then swung back, tortured by indecision. There was no telling how long this being—this human!—would stay in view. If he left to get John, she could well pass out of sight before he returned, and be lost!
He dared not leave the console. Tapping his brow, he studied the controls, looking for anything that might bring the human female here, or at least would open communication. There were transport mechanisms on Shipworld; it was not an entirely unreasonable hope. But touching the wrong control could lose her faster than doing nothing. What was this icon here, which looked like two funnel shapes end-to-end? Ik pressed his hands to his head, to keep them out of trouble while he thought the problem through.
In the window, the humanlike figure paused, turned, bent down to look at something. Then she straightened. Holding his breath, Ik touched the control. The image froze. The human stood still as a statue, and a green light flickered near her head. Hissing softly, Ik wondered what he had done. He waited for her to unfreeze. When nothing more happened, he touched the control again. The human came back to life—in fact, seemed to jump forward, across the view—and out of sight. She was gone.
Gone! Ik leaned forward, crying out, “Hrah! Come back!” He beat on the console in fury. How could this have happened? He’d had a chance to help his friend find another human, and he’d let her slip away.
There is nothing you could have done.
He knew that was true. But he couldn’t help feeling that he had failed John Bandicut—and Ik didn’t even have the words to tell him.
***
The lights of distant dwellings shimmered across the placid surface of the lake, silent and mysterious, beckoning to John Bandicut like forest sprites, quivering with a languid pulse of life. By this lake, Bandicut never had to feel alone . . . at least when he was dreaming . . .
If he wanted, he could walk across those waters and enter into the mystery there.
And what about those stars peeking from behind the wisps of cloud, a painter’s vision of heaven spattered across the sky? If he let his eyes go out of focus, he could fly out to meet those stars. Fly on the winds of space . . .
The winds of space where the Mindaru roamed.
The vision went dark, his mind spasming. Oh hell, no! Get away!
Stay out of my mind!
A struggle erupted for control of his thoughts. A struggle he would lose if he tried to fight them off directly. So he did the only thing he could do. Put space between us. His thoughts lurched away from the Mindaru and back to the beginning. Chaos revisited . . .
First encounter with the alien quarx, on Triton, the shock and disorientation. The start of a journey, a mission proposed by the alien in his head, unimaginable, insane, inescapable. Preposterous to think of saving Earth from a rogue, dark comet. In secret. How can you think of leaving when you’ve just met someone and fallen in love? Which will it be? Dizzying, heady union with a beautiful woman? Or an impossible mission ending in death? A simple choice. Or would have been, except that Earth was at stake. And so, rocketing in a spacecraft energized by alien technology, he saved the Earth . . . instead of staying with Julie.
Oh yeah! Mad with silence-fugue, he streaked across the solar system and smacked the comet to kingdom come . . . and himself to exile in an inconceivable place out on the edge of the galaxy. Shipworld, this place, where he met the aliens who would become his friends. Ik. Li-Jared. Antares. Friends of circumstance, thrown together to fight the mysterious boojum and save Shipworld—and was that enough? No, next to be flung without a thank-you back into the galaxy to a water world, where the precarious existence of the deep-sea Neri folk hung teetering.
Danger and pain. Weariness, oh . . .
. . . out of which had come new love with Antares, and the bonding of his new friendships. But then what—home and rest? Hah! No, an even more perilous journey: to Starmaker, the Orion Nebula, where sentient stars were dying violently at the hands of the treacherous group-AI, the Mindaru. He and his friends won that. They won. Against all hope and peril. After that victory, all the accursed things should be dead. But no, still Mindaru roamed the galaxy, looking for life to murder.
Reaching closer, across time and space; and him in their sights.
Closer, looming large, threatening suffocation.
Piercing directly into his thoughts, all malice and hatred . . .
Bandicut sat up with a gasp, his sleep wrap falling to his waist. His heart was pounding; he shook from a bone-deep chill, from the terror of the dream. Rasping air into his lungs, he pressed his sweaty palms flat to the grass beneath him, steadying himself. God damn it. The dream again.
Dream? He had been on the edge of full-blown silence-fugue, not imagining but reliving events, starkly real. It had all happened.
So much they had lived through. So much! They had defeated the Mindaru, hadn’t they? So why did his breath still catch in cold terror when he thought of them, even now that he was safe back on Shipworld?
/// You all right? ///
Charli the quarx asked carefully, in his head.
/Yah,/ he answered silently. The noncorporeal quarx never seemed to sleep. /It’s just . . . /
/// I almost had to pull you back again.
You were on the edge, I think. ///
Bandicut sighed. Charli had saved him any number of times from the madness of silence-fugue. /I was, yes. Damn, you know, I miss home./ Earth, where there were no Mindaru. The lake here was dark and still, the far shore difficult to see now in the low-lying mist of night. Looking at the sky with its scattering of artificial stars, he could imagine it was Earth. But it felt like a very long time since he had seen the constellations of Earth’s sky.
/// We all miss our homes, ///
Charli said wistfully.
/// The machines are still coming after you
in your dreams, yes? ///
/Yah./ Bandicut peered around the camp. Oddly, the dreams had started only after they’d come here, to this place of peace and safety, to rest and recover. Almost as if they were telling him, You’re not done yet. The fire had burned down to dull red embers, and Li-Jared and Antares were asleep on either side of him, bundled up in sleeping bags on pads. And Ik. No—Ik’s pad was empty. Bandicut scanned the area. Ik was nowhere in sight. /Oh damn, not again./
The Hraachee’an had wandered off while the rest of them were asleep. Without his translator-stones, he couldn’t talk to anyone, or work any of the enigmatic Shipworld devices, or seek help if he needed it. He’d probably just gone for a walk. But Bandicut worried about him. /I shouldn’t be mothering him. It’s just—/
/// Ik hasn’t been himself.
We all know it. ///
/Yeah, but—/ Charli was putting it mildly. Ik had been acting depressed and erratic, and increasingly distant.
“John, what?” Antares asked, pushing herself up onto one elbow. The Thespi female looked groggily at him, and her concern sharpened. “You had the dream again.” Statement, not a question.
“Yah.” He swallowed, composing himself. “But that’s not it.”
“What, then?” She looked around. “Is it Ik?”
“Yah. I don’t see him anywhere.”
Antares closed her eyes and pressed a hand to the knowing-stones in her throat. After a moment, she looked back at him and shook her head. “I don’t feel him nearby.”
“Should we wake Li-Jared?”
“You don’t have to wake me,” the Karellian muttered, rolling over and sitting up. He looked vaguely simian in the gloom, except that his electric-blue eyes managed to capture and reflect what little light there was. “You people are noisy enough to keep anyone awake.”
“Sorry,” Bandicut said. “It’s Ik. He’s gone.”
“So I gathered.” Li-Jared started to crawl out of his sleeping bag, muttering to himself. “Shall we go for another walk?”
“Why don’t you two stay here and watch the camp,” Bandicut said. “No point in all of us wandering off and getting lost. I was awake anyway. I’ll just take a quick look down along the water. He can’t have gone far.”
***
Ik stumbled out of the bunker, reeling with frustration. He’d started out hoping to find someone of his own kind. Moon and stars, locating that human for John Bandicut would have been a step in the right direction! Maybe there was no way for him to have brought his friend together with that other human, but if only he could have found a way to communicate with it! At least then he might have brought Bandie something to hope for, the possibility of finding one of his own kind here, in the alien vastness of Shipworld.
Right now, though, he had a more immediate problem: relocating the trail he had come in on. It was dark, and that was one problem; the other was that nothing looked quite the same as it had when he’d walked in. There were several trails and streams threading through the woods and along the water, and now they all looked alike to him. Especially in the dark.
Ik stroked the side of his sculpted head with a long finger. He was feeling confused so much these days. Would he ever be given a new set of voice-stones? Maybe not; maybe you were just allowed one set, and if you didn’t take care of those, you didn’t get another pair. That would be cruel.
He shook his head and set off down the left path. It led to a stream, on the far side of which was a pleasant little meadow. That was the way, he thought, and kept going.
A few minutes later, he heard his name being called out in the dark. At least he could still understand his own name! It was John Bandicut. “Bandie!” he called, “Over here!” The sounds coming out of his mouth, in his real tongue, were quite different from what his friend used to hear; but he could only hope that Bandie could make some sense of it.
“Ik!” he heard. Then Bandicut appeared out of the trees and spotted him at once. Ik could feel John’s relief almost as palpably as if he had Antares’ empathic abilities. Even without the stones, he could recognize many of his friend’s emotions.
Bandicut strode up and seized him by the upper arms. Cascades of words followed, none of which Ik understood; but clearly Bandicut had been worried and was urging him to come back with him. Ik started to follow, then stopped. “Wait!” he cried, hoping that something of what he was saying might get through. “I have to show you something! Come with me! Come!” Bandicut looked startled. But when Ik pulled the other way, Bandie acquiesced—though he first paused to shout something in the other direction, probably telling the others that he had found Ik.
In the darkness, the entrance to the control room looked like a simple door in a low concrete bunker. Bandicut was hesitant, but Ik gestured urgently and finally just went through and waited for Bandicut to follow. “This is where I saw someone who looks like you! Human! One of your people!” Ik pointed to the viewer and gazed back at Bandicut. But the view had changed and his friend simply looked bewildered. Ik clacked his mouth shut in frustration. He slapped a hand to his chest and turned to the controls. “If I could just find it again . . .”
Running his hands over the icons, Ik tried to navigate back to the view he’d had before. But any control he’d had before—or illusion of control—was gone now. He seemed able to bring up only random images and locations. At first Bandicut looked interested, but as Ik struggled in vain to get the human back, John began to look around the room more than at the window. No doubt he was wondering what in blazes Ik had brought him here for.
Suddenly Bandicut glanced back at the window, and with a guttural sound pointed at something in the viewing pane. Animals. A group of large, four-footed beasts plodding across a field. Did Bandie recognize them? Were they domesticated?
Bandicut reached in front of Ik to point more closely. Besides the large quadrupeds, there were several smaller animals as well. Herding the large ones? “Kree-ayy-ket-t-t-s,” Bandicut said, his voice sounding garbled to Ik, but not so garbled that he didn’t recognize the word. Kraykets. Ik bobbed his head and made a whistle of pleasure through his ears.
Bandie seemed to understand and share his reaction. Now, if Ik could just convey what he’d brought Bandie here to see! “Human! Like you!” Ik waved his hands, made a rough outline of Bandicut’s shape, then turned and recreated the outline against the viewer.
Bandicut cocked his head; he looked back at the kraykets and the large animals, made a shape such as Ik had just made, and chuckled. He thought Ik was reminding him of the time they had all seen the kraykets. No! How could he communicate human? Ik struggled in vain to think of something to say, and then he sighed through his ears and reached out to search for another scene.
As his fingers touched the controls, the display suddenly went dark.