ONE day when he was reading a history lesson about the Reformation and Counterreformation and religious wars of Earth, something puzzled him. He wasn't sure but—Gwen, what is my name? Kip asked.
"YOUR NAME IS KENNETH BREWSTER," Gwen answered. "YOU ARE USUALLY CALLED BY THE NAME KIP. QUERY. YOU HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN THIS. WHY DO YOU ASK?"
"I thought I remembered a different name. Kip, that's all right, I've always been Kip, but it's not the right last name. I remember something else. Shorter."
"I CAN MAKE NO COMMENT AT THIS TIME."
"Does that mean you know and won't tell me?"
"I CAN MAKE NO COMMENT AT THIS TIME."
Kip knew it was no good asking more. When Gwen started saying things like that, she never changed her mind. Sometimes he could think of new ways to ask questions and get around Gwen's restrictions, but never when he was trying to find out about himself or his parents, or Uncle Mike.
Kip was lonely. School was dull, and Kip was bored, and he began to complain about it. Uncle Mike was sympathetic, but he said there wasn't anything he could do. But not long after, Dr. Henderson brought his family out to live at Starswarm. Kip liked Mrs. Henderson because she was always baking cookies and making candy and pickled bushberries for Kip, but mostly he was glad because they brought Lara, and he finally had someone to play with.
Lara was nine, younger than Kip by eleven Earth-months; only they didn't use Earth-months on Purgatory. They used blue-light and plain-light and Michaeldays, which seemed more natural to Kip than Earth-months. But he could think in Earth-months because Uncle Mike made him learn, the way he had to learn everything about Earth. Besides, it was easy to convert from any number to any other. Kip just asked Gwen. Even Dr. Henderson thought Kip was a mathematical genius because of all the things Gwen could do.
Lara was nearly as old as Kip but she wasn't very smart. She knew a lot of stuff from school, but she didn't know about firebrighters, and what months the centaurs were dangerous, and she was even afraid of the dogs. She came to Starswarm in the spring, and when the ice was melted off the lake out on the tundra, Uncle Mike and Dr. Henderson let her go with Kip outside the fence.
Mrs. Henderson didn't like that much. "Eric, are you trying to get our daughter killed?"
"We won't get lost," Kip said. He showed his position indicator card. "Uncle Mike calibrated this when they put the new global position satellites in, so I always know where I am."
"They're going three kilometers," Dr. Henderson said. "It's safe this time of year, and besides, Kip has a gun and a radio."
"A gun! Eric, are you out of your mind!" Mrs. Henderson came out of the house like a charging centaur to gather Lara in her arms.
"Uncle Mike says I can carry it, Mrs. Henderson," Kip protested. "I know how to shoot. I c'd show you, but I'm not allowed unless there's something to shoot at or Uncle Mike tells me."
"There. You see?" Dr. Henderson protested. "Harriet, Lara is safer out there with Kip than she was with you in DeeCee, or in Pearly Gates for that matter."
Mrs. Henderson shuddered but she had to agree to that.
"C'mon," Kip said. He led Lara out through the gates. "Kip," he called as they passed through.
The barrier wouldn't open. Kip looked at Lara in annoyance. "You have to tell it your name," he said.
"Oh. Lara Henderson."
"Who accompanies you?" the gate asked.
"Kip." He grinned at Lara. "The gate isn't really very smart."
The gate opened.
"Silver!" Kip shouted. "Five, Silver."
The dog barked acknowledgment and led half a team out with them. Five was as high as Silver could count. After that, it was just "many." The pack dogs fanned out across the tundra and ran in circles, while Silver paced just ahead of Kip and Lara.
"They seem awfully smart," Lara said.
"Sure. They're dogs."
"We had dogs on Earth, and they weren't so smart."
Kip frowned. He remembered some TRI-V shows with stupid dogs. Were all dogs on Earth like that? He asked Gwen.
"THE DOGS AT STARSWARM STATION ARE THE PRODUCTS OF GENETIC ENGINEERING EXPERIMENTS PERFORMED BY DR. ERIC HENDERSON AND HIS PREDECESSOR DR. MARY BUDONNIC. THEIR INTELLIGENCE AND TRAINING IS ALSO ESPECIALLY STIMULATED BY BONEWITS RNA INJECTIONS. ALL THE DOGS AT STARSWARM ARE DESCENDED FROM A SINGLE CLONED PAIR WITH GENETIC MATERIAL ADDED FROM THREE EARTH STRAINS. THEY ARE PREDOMINANTLY MALAMUTE AND SIBERIAN HUSKY WITH GERMAN SHEPHERD ADDITIONS. THEY—"
"Enough." Kip thought.
Lara was dancing in the afternoon sunlight. "Where are we going?" she asked.
"There's a lake," Kip said. "Just over that hill—"
"Race you!" Lara shouted. She ran, getting a good head start while Kip stared at her. The dogs barked and ran ahead eagerly.
"Sure!" Kip began to run.
They ran across the tundra. There were bright flowers among the blue-green grasses. Roots of flappergrapes poked up through the soil. In three blues they would have elephantine leaves to gather as much sun as they could, but for now they looked dead.
The lake was ahead and they ran for it. Kip automatically avoided the paths the others had taken. The tundra was easy to tear up in the spring, and the mud flats took a long time to grow over. Then he stopped. Lara stopped beside him, panting slightly. "That's fun," she said. "Why can't we run?"
" 'Cause you don't know where to step," Kip said. "See the holes? Maybe firebrighters in them. They can't hurt you much this time of year, but if one comes out, it'll stink something awful. Really awful. You'll really hate it. And see the purple patch over there? Not cabbage at all, it's a bird, and he wouldn't like you to step on him."
"Oh." She eyed the motionless purple. It looked like a cabbage weed. "Is it dangerous?"
"Naw. Nothing much can hurt us this time of year. The centaurs are too skinny. They'll be in their caves in the archtree groves, eating up all the stored-up roots to get fat again so they can go hunting for caribou."
"Caribou?"
"Don't you know anything? The Great Western people brought caribou, and lots of other things that live on Earth, and turned 'em loose out here. Balanced ecological group, they called it. The scientists at the station didn't like it, but they couldn't stop them, because Great Western owns all the land on the planet except for this area around the station. So they turned them loose and now they're all over."
"Do you remember that?"
"Naw, it was before I came. Before your father came, back when Dr. Budonnic was in charge. They brought all kinds of animals. Lots of the animals died off, but some of them did right well. Uncle Mike hunts caribou for dog food, the caribou herds are big enough now. Some say too big. Centaurs hunt them too."
"Oh. How can centaurs eat things that come from Earth? Why wouldn't they poison them?"
Kip looked at her with new respect. "Good question." He looked thoughtful for a moment.
"If caribou are from Earth how can centaurs eat them?"
"ALL EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE SO FAR DISCOVERED IS BASED ON THE SAME NUCLEIC ACIDS AND IS THUS RELATED. ALTHOUGH THERE ARE VARIANTS, NEARLY ALL EARTH LIFE IS BASED ON CLOSELY RELATED GLUCOSE CHEMISTRIES AND EMPLOYS SIMILAR PROTEINS. THIS HAS PROVED TO BE TRUE FOR LIFE DISCOVERED ON WORLDS OTHER THAN EARTH. THEREFORE IT WOULD BE SURPRISING IF THE CENTAURS WERE NOT ABLE TO EAT AT LEAST SOME EARTH PROTEINS. THE THEORY—"
"Enough!" Kip didn't really understand all that, but he could ask Gwen later if he wanted to. "Maybe life is the same all over the universe," he told Lara.
They walked on toward the lake. "If that bird can't hurt us, why were you worried about stepping on it?" Lara asked.
" 'Cause you'd hurt it," Kip said. "Uncle Mike says never hurt things unless you have to, but if you have to do it, shoot straight and don't miss. I shoot meat for the dogs sometimes," he bragged. "And even for us."
Lara looked slightly ill, but she didn't say anything. She'd been told people ate natural foods on frontier worlds, so she'd been ready when they moved to Pearly Gates City. After their months in town, she thought she could eat anything, although the first time she was faced with real meat it took real effort to get it down. Now she liked hamburgers.
But it was so lonely out here! She looked at the empty horizon. A vast field of brush-covered rolling hills and small lakes, dotted with clumps of forest, and the only sign that humans had ever been here was the fenced enclosure behind them. She shivered. It made her afraid.
Silver whimpered and growled.
"What's that?" Kip asked.
The dog growled again and moved closer to Lara.
"What are you afraid of now?" Kip asked.
"I'm not afraid!"
"Yeah you are. Silver says you are. You make him nervous. They can smell it, you know. They don't like it when people are afraid."
"Oh." She reached down to scratch Silver's ears. "It's all right." Silver made a different sound, and Lara laughed. "Daddy says he'll get me a puppy when I learn more about the dogs here."
They had reached the lake, a bowl of fresh water six kilometers across and two hundred meters deep sitting atop the tundra. There was a hill at the far end of the lake, a rounded mound that someone had named Strumbleberry. Thornbush and blazewood, mixed with something resembling Earth's oleanders, grew all around the lake. Most of the lake edge was blocked by thickets, but where Kip and Lara stood all the vegetation had been cleared away.
Tiny jewels sparkled at the lake surface. Lara stared in fascination. Kip watched her for a while.
"Mukky and Silver'll have pups about the time you are ready," Kip said. "I'll ask Uncle Mike if you can have one."
"Why—thank you, Kip." She smiled shyly, then wondered what to say. "What are the little colored things on the water?"
"Look close and you'll see they're all connected by threads. Like a big spiderweb. And there's more threads lead down to the main plant at the bottom. That's the reason for Starswarm Station being here. It's what your father studies all his life."
"Oh! That's a Starswarm?"
"Medium-sized. Big ones grow in bigger lakes, and really big ones in the saltwater bays. Your dad says this is one of the oldest, maybe thousands of years old. Watch." Kip found a small stone and tossed it into the center of the lake. As it sank the water glowed with thousands of tiny fireflies winking in the depths.
"Kip, that's beautiful! What was it?"
"Your daddy says nobody really knows." Dr. Henderson was right too, Kip thought. Not even Gwen knew for sure about Starswarms. "I heard him telling one of the technicians he thought the plant parts were talking to each other and used those light flashes instead of a nervous system. See, there's a big thing coming up from the bottom? It's part of the Starswarm. The big Starswarms, the ones out in the ocean, they say they have tentacles that could catch a man if he'd stay still long enough and not cut himself loose. They eat anything. Watch."
Kip got down on his knees and examined plants until he found what he was looking for. He plucked a leaf and showed it to Lara. "Little bugs on the underside," he said. "Now watch."
He threw the leaf out into the water. As it touched the surface, a black snakelike tentacle came from nowhere to seize it. Leaf and tentacle vanished amid a shower of lights. "I think it likes those bugs," Kip said. "It takes all of them I can throw in." He knelt and found another leaf and threw it.
"Wow, it almost caught that one in the air," Lara said. "Can I throw it one?"
"Sure. Look, you find the bugs on this kind of plant." He indicated a bunch of leaves that spread out from a central stem and lay along the ground. "Look for a leaf with little holes in it. That's where the bugs will be, on the underside of the leaf."
She found a leaf and examined it. "Here are some." She picked the leaf and threw it in. This time it floated for a moment before the tentacle grabbed it.
"You sure know a lot," Lara said.
"Yeah, a little." Kip took a spool from one pocket and a telescoping rod from another and began to assemble his fishing outfit.
Lara watched appreciatively. She was used to other children knowing less than she did, usually a lot less, and here Kip wasn't much older than she was and knew more. She was a little irritated, but Daddy had told her to be nice to Kip. He certainly was about the smartest boy she'd ever met.
"You know a lot about Starswarms. Do you know as much as Daddy?"
"Naw, only what he tells me." Which was true, and it puzzled Kip. Most things Dr. Henderson knew were known to Gwen as well, just as she knew most of what everyone else knew. But data on the Starswarms and the work of the station were strangely lacking. Once in a great while, Gwen would suddenly learn a lot about Starswarms and Starswarm Station as if Dr. Henderson had been talking to her; then she wouldn't know any more for a long time again.
Kip was beginning to suspect that Gwen was a computer, although he hadn't dared ask her yet because she might get mad. She never had got mad at him, but everybody else did. Even Uncle Mike could lose his temper and yell at him or swat him a couple, especially if Kip asked too many questions at the wrong time.
But if Gwen were a computer, then she had to be the big computer in Dr. Henderson's laboratory. There weren't any others around that were smart like Gwen. There were the little boxes that people carried to do their math—Kip had one and knew how to use it, but he didn't unless somebody was watching because it was easier to ask Gwen—and there were the larger computers on the sleds and at the gate, but none of them were very smart. They couldn't really talk to you.
And that was the problem, because if Gwen were Dr. Henderson's computer she ought to know everything Dr. Henderson did, and she didn't. And if that wasn't who she was, she couldn't be a computer at all. Besides, how could a computer put a voice in your head?
The lab computer could talk. So could the gate computer, but the lab computer was much smarter than the gate. Sometimes it reminded him of Gwen, but it wasn't really as smart as Gwen even if it was the smartest computer at the station. When you talked to the lab computer, no matter how smart it was, you never thought you were talking to anything but a computer. Gwen was different. Gwen was like a real person except you could never see her.
Kip got the rod and reel assembled and tied on a lure. His cast wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good. The lure arched out into the lake and dropped into one of the fissures of the Starswarm. It was no good dropping it into the matrix of threads, because they were tougher than Kip's line and his lure would probably be lost. Kip reeled in slowly. He wasn't expecting to catch anything much in the lake this close to the station, and he watched Lara shyly as he reeled.
She was a little taller than he was, with golden hair hanging below her shoulders and bright blue eyes that were a match for Purgatory's perfectly clear skies. Her face was tanned but not what it would be after a few months of summer. She was slim like a boy and wore a coverall just like Kip's, and boots like his of course.
Sometimes Uncle Mike whistled at girls on TRI-V, and at live ones when they went to Pearly Gates. Once Uncle Mike had left him with the dogs in a hotel room while he went back to find a waitress they'd met. Uncle Mike hadn't come back until nearly dawn, and Kip knew he'd taken another room in the hotel. That waitress had looked a little like Lara. Kip wondered if Lara wanted to be whistled at, and if she would expect him to do anything else.
In fact, Kip's intellectual knowledge of sex would have shocked Mrs. Henderson silly, and probably would have astonished his Uncle Mike. Gwen didn't think sex was a restricted subject. Kip hadn't understood all the terms she used, but he was quite aware that little humans were made the same way that puppies were, and that men thought going to bed with girls was a lot of fun. Kip wondered why, and if Lara liked that sort of thing. He was vaguely aware that she might not know anything about it, since young people on TRI-V seldom did.
"Will Lara want me to have sex with her?" Kip thought.
"THE PROBABILITY OF A FERTILE UNION AT YOUR RESPECTIVE AGES IS EXTREMELY LOW."
"That's not what I asked."
"IT IS NOT CUSTOMARY FOR HUMANS TO HAVE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS AT YOUR AGE. ADDITION. SEARCH OF RECORDS REVEALS THAT IT IS A CRIME IN FEDERATION LAW AS WELL AS UNDER THE GREAT WESTERN ENTERPRISES REGULATIONS FOR HUMAN FEMALES OF HER AGE TO HAVE SEXUAL RELATIONS OF ANY KIND WITH ANY PERSON. QUERY: IS THE SITUATION ONE THAT REQUIRES URGENT DECISION?"
"Gosh, no. "
"THEN I SUGGEST THAT YOU ASK YOUR UNCLE MIKE, I STATE
A GENERAL INSTRUCTION: YOU ARE TO REFER PROBLEMS OF AN ETHICAL OR MORAL NATURE TO YOUR UNCLE MIKE. YOU MUST ALWAYS DO WHAT YOUR UNCLE MIKE SAYS."
"All right, all right." Kip was getting tired of that instruction. Gwen, why do men want to go to bed with girls? I can't see that it would be any fun at all."
"IT IS LIKELY THAT YOU WILL HAVE MORE UNDERSTANDING OF THIS QUESTION WHEN YOU ARE OLDER."
That was the trouble with the world, Kip thought. You'd always understand when you were older, but you never seemed to get older after all. But then he caught a nice snapper, and that was so much fun he forgot all about his problem. He caught another, a little one with only eight developed legs, and threw it back. Then he showed Lara how to use the reel, and she caught a ten-legger. They were very proud of themselves when they took their prizes back to the station, and Mrs. Henderson cooked them for supper.