Zambendorf felt as if he were in a mobile coffin, entombed in a dark mausoleum of ice. He disliked wearing the cumbersome EV suits, and as a rule ventured from Genoa Base or the relatively comfortable vehicular shirtsleeve environments as little as possible. But the tension was beginning to have its effect even in Genoa City itself, the center of Arthur's recently founded liberal experiment. Many of the Taloids who had previously gone out and worked willingly with the Terran scientific parties were no longer showing up. Those who did were nervous and subdued, fearful of retaliation from their own kind. Zambendorf had decided on a personal visit to "Camelot," Arthur's residence in Genoa, to present the case that all Terrans should not be judged by the isolated action of a few and to reassure Arthur that the general support for Arthur remained undiminished.
He was sitting with Otto Abaquaan and Dave Crookes in an ice chamber furnished with odd Taloid pseudovegetable shapes and walls decorated with strange designs in plastic and metal. Across from them, looking like gigantic, upright, outlandishly garbed insects in the light from a NASO lamp turned to minimum power—installed for the Terrans' benefit—were Arthur and two of what seemed to be his military advisers. Also with them was a Taloid known to the Terrans as Moses, one of the rare "mystic" breed who possessed a measure of the residual radiosensitivity that Crookes had been investigating. Moses had a brother, Galileo, who had gone back into Padua some time earlier to visit former friends. As yet, Galileo had not returned. Concern was rising among both the Genoan Taloids and the Terrans over Galileo's whereabouts, especially with fugitives from Padua bringing back accounts of the militant revivalists stirring up hostility.
"Arthur has been getting reports of unrest all over Padua. And there are agents operating here in Genoa," Dave Crookes's voice said over the local channel. He was the most proficient of the three at interpreting the translations on the screen of the transmogrifier, placed on the table between the two groups. "The incident at the village doesn't make sense. He can't understand how it could be to the good of anything that Earth wants."
"The Lumian house can be divided, just as the houses of Robia are divided," Lyokanor, intelligence adviser to Kleippur, translated as the Lumians' showing vegetable presented their reply.
Kleippur had come to realize by then that the Lumian ability to travel from another world over a distance that defied imagination did not signify godlike unity of purpose among them, any more than it did any godlike mastery over the elements. The hair-faced one was known among robeings as the "Wearer" from the peculiar vegetable with framed pictures that he had worn on his arm at the time of the first meeting between Lumians and robeings. Lumians used such artificially made vegetables to talk to each other over great distances. That the Wearer had troubled to come to Kleippur's palace in person with his two colleagues brought some encouragement.
Kleippur looked across at the jellylike face glowing eerily inside the false outer casing filled with corrosive gases. "Why should any confederation on Lumia seek to send Kroaxia back into the ways of superstition and ignorance?" he asked. Lyokanor repeated the question in terms that the Lumian showing vegetable would better understand.
"Why should anyone on Earth want to support the revivalists in Padua and send everything here onto a reverse course?" Dave Crookes summarized for Zambendorf and Crookes.
Zambendorf sighed. It was clear that the policy being hatched behind the scenes was to turn Titan into a manufacturing colony. The incidents involving the military were almost certainly part of a campaign of manipulating the public's perceptions to suit it. He answered frankly. "There are some on Earth who want Padua's old leaders back in power. They want their cooperation in organizing Titan to supply the needs of Earth. The Taloids that they would wish to be in charge are the ones who command and control, not those like Arthur, who would liberate and enlighten."
"There are Lumians who seek to tame Robia's forests into becoming a producer for Lumia," Lyokanor said to Kleippur. "To this end, they desire to appoint as their lieutenants the priests and monarchs who would subdue robeings to the task, not those such as thee, who would free them to follow their own inclinations."
"But are not the ways of Lumia the ways of reason?" Kleippur objected. "For is it not the method of reason that enables them to travel beyond the sky? What disciples of reason would restore those who claim such privilege of supernatural insight that no robeing may contest them? Yet all of their supplications and incantations cannot cause a pebble to rise a finger's length from the desert sands."
Crookes translated. Zambendorf replied, "Reason emerged on Earth only after a long struggle. And it's far from over yet—as Arthur can see for himself from these latest events."
"But reason would win on Titan in the end, would it not?" Arthur pressed.
"We would be dishonest if we tried to pretend that there can be any guarantee," Zambendorf said. "But we will do all in our power to make it that way. That's why we came here."
Groork, Hearer-of-Voices, brother of Thirg, the Asker, who was missing in Kroaxia, looked at Kleippur. "We trusted the Wearer before, when the factions of Lumia clashed and the Wearer's words were true," he said.
Kleippur nodded and declared, "And we shall continue in our trust now." He turned and delivered the same message to the Lumian showing vegetable.
There was really nothing more to be said. It had been just a gesture, after all. The meeting ended after an exchange of formalities, and the Taloids escorted the visitors back to the NASO ground transporter waiting outside.
On the way back to the base, Zambendorf had an uncomfortable sense of foreboding as he gazed out at the rock and ice buildings in the twilight of Genoa City, with glimpses of strangely clad robots caught in the headlight beams. At heart, he was perhaps the truest kind of scientist, valuing reason and knowledge for their own sake. It had nothing to do with diplomas and qualifications. He had come to live the life he did out of scorn for a society that lavished wealth and accolades on charlatans, while paying its discoverers of real truths only tokens. Very well, Zambendorf had decided. If that was what the world wanted, that was what he would give it—and prosper comfortably from doing so, until it came to its senses. "When I am no longer able to make a living, then people might have learned something," he often said.
But in the Taloids he had encountered something different. In the process of freeing themselves from their own age of superstition and repression, their intellectual explorers had responded with an eagerness worthy of the pioneers of Earth's Renaissance toward the prospects of the new learning and enlightenment that had come with the Terrans. Comparing this to the stubborn rejection of reason that he had witnessed on Earth every day, Zambendorf had always felt a close affinity for Arthur and his endeavors to bring reason to his part of the Taloid world. Now all that was threatened. Zambendorf was not in control of events that were important to him, and that was not a feeling to which he was accustomed.
Abaquaan was also in one of his rare reflective moods. He hadn't spoken much since they had left Camelot and, for the last several minutes, not at all. Then, all of a sudden, he half raised an arm to indicate the scene outside the vehicle and murmured more to himself than to anyone in particular, "I wonder if we'll ever know who they were."
The remark caught the other two unprepared. "Who?" Crookes asked with a start, returning from some reverie of his own.
Abaquaan gestured again. "The aliens. The ones whose self-replicating factory program screwed up and started all this off . . . assuming you guys are right about it. I wonder if we'll ever find out who they were, what they were . . . Oh, I dunno."
"Pretty much like ourselves in the ways that matter, I shouldn't wonder," Crookes said. He shrugged. "Survival has to be the same kind of game anywhere. Look around you: even with machines."
"But they are fascinating questions," Zambendorf agreed. "Where did they originate, do you think, Dave? How far away might it have been? How long ago?"
Crookes turned up his hands. "It could have been light-years away, maybe millions of years ago—even before we existed."
"Could they still exist?" Zambendorf asked.
"Anything's possible, I guess," Crookes replied. "But if they do, then where are they? It seems strange that they'd set up whatever started all this and then never show up to collect. Don't you think?"
Zambendorf thought it over, then nodded. "Yes, I suppose you're right." He sounded disappointed. "If they were going to put in an appearance, then in all this time you'd think they'd have done it by now, wouldn't you? I guess it's all something that we'll just never know."
In the heart of one of the more densely mechanized areas, not very far away from the city, other scientists from the mission had been conducting an investigation that now occupied two permanent huts crammed with processors, analyzers, and electronic test equipment, along with a gaggle of NASO vehicles drawn up outside amid a tangle of cables. Inside one of the huts, Annette Claurier and Olaf Lundesfarne, two of the computer specialists, debated animatedly as they tried to make sense of the data patterns shifting and changing on the screens in front of them. The screens were monitoring the control processors of one of the stations where some types of Titan's machine animals were assembled and activated.
The mathematicians and robotics specialists believed that they had located the "genetic" software, passed down through countless generations, that was responsible for directing the assembly and initial start-up process. But certain of the "genomes" also seemed to contain huge blocks of redundant coding that had no apparent connection with any such essential process—strangely reminiscent of similar strings found in Terran DNA. But that was not to say that it didn't do anything.
"Look, the structure here is completely different from the surrounding functional code," the Frenchwoman insisted, pointing with a finger. "More ordered. But compare it with this here, which we know consists of assembly instructions. It's chaotic—clearly the result of an evolutionary process. But this other kind is regular and structured. I say it goes back much farther—from before anything started to evolve."
The Norwegian consulted another array of symbols. "But its activity index is rising. Look at these interrupt vectors. It's doing something."
"There's no correlation with the assembly routines or the initiation sequencing," Annette said. "Whatever it's doing has got no connection with making animals. It's something else, something autonomous."
A silhouette darkened the doorway in the partition dividing the hut, and the chief scientist, Weinerbaum, stepped into the light. "What's all the excitement in here?" he inquired. "Are we getting somewhere with those redundant blocks?"
Annette turned in her seat and waved a hand at the bank of glowing screens and control panels taking up one complete wall of the room. "I'm not so sure that 'redundant' is the right word, Professor," she replied. "But we've certainly stumbled on something here that's very different. It's showing extraordinary complexity and a strange tendency to self-assemble. This may sound silly, but I almost get the feeling we're reactivating something that's trying to come alive."