“CAN YOU IMAGINE A DISTANCE TWELVE TIMES GREATER THAN the greatest breadth of Carthogia?” Thirg asked Lofbayel’s son, Morayak, who was sitting with his back to the large table strewn with charts and sheets of calculations, in the room that Lofbayel had given Thirg to use as a study while Thirg was residing with the family.
“I think so, though I have never journeyed but a fraction of such a distance,” Morayak said. “Why, it must be greater even than the size of the strange, spherical world of which you and my father speak!”
“Not so, Young-Questioner-Who-Will-Become-Wise-by-Questioning,” Thirg said. He picked up the Skybeings’ globe that the Wearer-of-the-Arm-Vegetable had presented to him as a gift, and looked at it briefly. “In fact such a distance would be a little less than half the diameter of our world, of which I am assured this is a faithful representation.” He put the globe down and looked back at Morayak. “And what of a distance yet twelve times that again—enough to span six worlds side by side? Can your mind grasp that?”
Morayak frowned and stared at the globe while he concentrated. “I’m not sure. To visualize the breadth of Carthogia requires but a simple extension of faculties that are familiar to me, but where is the experience to guide my intuition in attempting to judge a distance through a world rather than across it? But even taxing my mind to that degree does not satisfy you enough, it seems, for now you would have me grapple with conceiving six of them.”
“Then instead of worlds whose surfaces curve in space, let us take as our model, time, which involves no complications from multiplicity of direction,” Thirg suggested. “If the breadth of Carthogia be represented by a single bright, then the distance to which I refer, being twelve times twelve, equates to one Carthogia for every bright contained in the duration of twelve twelve-brights. Now—can you visualize that?”
It took Morayak a few seconds to grasp, but in the end he nodded, at the same time frowning intently. “That is vastness indeed, but it is not completely unimaginable now you have described it thus. My mind is stretched, but I think it can conceive of such a distance.”
“And what of twelve times that, yet again?”
Morayak stared at Thirg with a strained look on his face, then grinned hopelessly and shook his head. “Impossible!”
Thirg paced across the room, swung around, and threw his hands wide. “Then what of twelve times even that, and twelve times that yet again still, and then even twelve times—“
“Stop, Thirg!” Morayak protested. “What purpose is served by uttering repetitions of words that have ceased to carry any meaning?”
“But they do carry meaning,” Thirg said. He moved forward and raised his arm to point. Morayak turned in his seat to look at the large chart on the wall above the table, which Lofbayel had drawn from Thirg’s records of conversations with the Skybeings. In the center it showed the huge furnace in the sky—large enough to consume the whole world in an instant, the Skybeings said—and around it the paths of the nine worlds that circled it endlessly, some of them accompanied by their own attendant worlds, which in turn circled them. It had come as something of a shock to learn that Robia, as Kleippur had named the robeing world, was not even a member of the nine, but just one—although, true, the largest—of a retinue of seventeen servants following at the heels of a giant. Dornvald had remarked that the giant was surely the king of worlds, because of his ringlike crown. But Thirg was pointing not at the giant, but at the third world out from the furnace—a humble little world, seemingly, with just a single page in attendance—which Lofbayel had labeled Lumia, since its sky shone with the heat light that accompanied the Skybeings, or Lumians, as they were now more properly called, wherever they went. Thirg swept a finger slowly across the chart. “That is the distance which separates our world from the world of Lumians, Morayak—the distance they have traveled to come to Robia.”
Morayak stared at him incredulously. “It cannot be!” Thirg nodded. Morayak looked at the chart again, then back at Thirg. “But such a journey would surely require many twelves of twelves of lifetimes.”
“One twelve-bright was sufficient, we are assured. The large dragon that circles beyond the sky is swifter, seemingly, than even the smaller ones which cross above the city in moments.” Thirg studied Morayak’s face for a few seconds and gave a satisfied nod. “Now, methinks, you understand better the wondrousness of the beings you are soon to meet,” he said.
Morayak stared back at Thirg for a moment longer as if unsure of whether or not to take his words seriously, and then looked slowly back at the chart, this time with a new respect. Thirg and Lofbayel were due to leave shortly for Kleippur’s residence to join the Carthogian leaders in more discussions with the Lumians, and Morayak had eventually succeeded in pestering his father into allowing him to go along too. He had been to see the strange growths that the Lumians lived in just outside the city, of course—his father said that the Lumians had created them—and he had caught glimpses from a distance of the cumbersome, domeheaded figures, which apparently weren’t the Lumians at all but an outer casing that they had to wear on Robia because they needed to be bathed in hot, highly corrosive gas all the time; but that wasn’t the same—he wouldn’t be able to boast to his friends about that. “I wonder what kind of a world it is,” he murmured distantly, still staring at the chart.
“Amazing beyond your wildest dreams,” Thirg replied. “Its sky is filled with worlds too numerous to count, extending away as far as it is possible to see, for there is no permanent cover of cloud above Lumia to limit vision. It is so hot that the surface is covered by oceans of liquid ice. Methane can exist only as a vapor. Your body would be much heavier than it is on Robia.”
“What of the countryside?” Morayak asked. “Does it have mountains and forests? Do the Lumians keep herds of bearing-bush formers, and hunt platemelters out on the flatlands? Do they have children who go gasket-collecting among the head-assembly transfer lines, or baiting traps with copper wire to catch coil-winders?”
Thirg frowned, not knowing quite how to explain the differences. “The children there are assembled in miniature form,” he said. “They grow larger by taking in substances which are distributed internally as liquid solutions.”
Morayak stared at him in astonishment. “But how could the substances know where to be deposited?” he objected. “All form would surely be lost.”
“The process is beyond my understanding,” Thirg admitted. “Perhaps that is why the Lumians exist as jelly and must remain inside outer casings to preserve their shape. But natural assembly is impossible on Lumia because there aren’t any machines...save for a few which aren’t alive, but were created by the Lumians.”
“It’s true then—the Lumians really can make artificial machines?”
“Oh yes—those are the only machines they know. They do have animals and forests, but they’re not machines. They’re made of, well...the best way I can find to describe it is ‘naturally occurring organics’—very like the Lumians themselves.”
Morayak looked perplexed. “But artisans must exist to create organics. How can there be ‘natural organics’?”
“I too am learning,” Thirg reminded him. “We both have many questions that will tax our patience for a while yet.”
“But organic forests and animals...a whole world full of such unsightliness?” Morayak made a face. “It sounds so ugly, so unnatural...How could anyone live there? Is that why they have come to Robia—to escape? But how—“
Lofbayel’s wife, Kersenia, came in. “Ah, I thought I’d find you two here,” she said. “Lofbayel has hitched up the cart and is waiting before the house for you now.” Morayak got up, and followed with Thirg behind as Kersenia went back to the hallway inside the front door. “And remember, don’t go getting in the way or making a nuisance of yourself,” she said as Morayak put on his coat. “You are a very lucky and privileged young robeing to be invited to the residence of Kleippur. Don’t let your father down, now.”
“I won’t,” Morayak promised.
“I’m sure you have no cause to worry,” Thirg said.
Thirg and Morayak left the house and climbed up beside Lofbayel, and Kersenia stood in the doorway to see them off as the cart turned onto the roadway in the direction of the city. It was good, Thirg thought to himself, to see the family living free and without fear, with Lofbayel pursuing his studies openly and able to teach at last in the way he had always wanted. He wondered if what he was seeing could be an omen of things to come on a larger scale for the whole robeing race. For the Lumians seemed to respect freedom and knowledge, and to share generally the values that Thirg felt Kleippur and his vision for Carthogia symbolized. Could the Lumians be offering a new future of opportunity for all robeings, just as Carthogia offered a new future of opportunity for Thirg, and for Lofbayel and his family? Would the old ways of the whole world of Robia now fade into the past and be forgotten, just as Kroaxia was already fading into their personal pasts and being forgotten?
So possibly the priests and the Scribings had been right after all in a way, Thirg thought to himself. If the Lumians were indeed the Lifemaker, then perhaps the Lifemaker did offer salvation from the toil and drudgery of worldly life...not in some hereafter world, however, but in this one—simply by taking the toil and the drudgery out of it. That would seem the eminently sensible and simple way of accomplishing such an objective, after all. Why would a Lifemaker—especially one as intelligent and all-powerful as the priests were always depicting—choose to do things the difficult way?
But Thirg had learned from long and bitter experience not to let his hopes run too high about anything. There was always too much that could go wrong, and usually it found a way of managing to. He wondered if lifemaking Skybeings had the same problem.
“What he’s doing is not compatible with the policy objectives that have been confirmed from Earth,” Daniel Leaherney said to Caspar Lang, on the Orion, “Also I’ve been getting complaints that his style is interfering with the ability of the personnel who are properly empowered to handle our relationships with the aliens to discharge their duties in an effective manner. Can I leave it to you to straighten the situation out?”
“What you mean is that Giraud’s developing an inferiority complex because the Taloids take more notice of Zambendorf than they do of him, Seltzman doesn’t feel he’s getting all the glory he should be getting, and someone stuffy among the scientific chiefs—probably Weinerbaum—is getting jealous and thinks his dignity’s being threatened,” Lang said. He was getting just a little bit tired of having to stay up in the ship all the time, taking care of everyone else’s problems.
Leaherney exhaled a long breath and snapped, “Look, that psychic is getting in everyone’s hair and taking over the show down there as if this whole mission had been put together for no other reason than to boost his act. Your corporation sent him here, Caspar, and it’s your responsibility to keep him under control. So read it any way you like, but I want something done about it.”
An hour later Lang, feeling even more incensed after Leaherney’s uncharacteristic outburst, was looking grim-faced across his desk at Osmond Periera. “Where’s the schedule of the experiments you were supposed to be carrying out with Zambendorf?” he demanded.
Periera looked flummoxed. “What? Why, er...I thought that was just part of the Mars cover story. I thought—“
“The corporation isn’t paying you to think; it’s paying you to know,” Lang fumed. “Have you any idea how much it’s cost to bring you people this distance? My understanding was that you are here to investigate a serious scientific phenomenon.”
“Well, there’s no question of that, but—“
“Then how much longer do I have to wait before I see something happening?” Lang asked. “You’re supposed to be responsible for organizing the experimental program, okay? Well, it’s about time you started organizing something. You don’t expect me to do it for you, do you?”
“No, of course not, but I...I, that is...He’s down at Genoa Base One.”
“Well, get him back up from Genoa Base One!” Lang yelled. “I agreed to his going down on one trip to see the surface. Okay—he’s seen it. Now get him back up here and make a start on the job you were brought here to do. And nobody—repeat, nobody—from that outfit goes down there again until we start seeing some results. Understood?”
Periera gulped and nodded rapidly. “Yes, yes, of course.”
“Good.” Lang reached over to call his secretary on his terminal screen. “Get this update on personnel authorizations into the system right away, Kathy. Karl Zambendorf is recalled to the ship forthwith, and approval for surface descent is denied him and his party until further notice.”