The Godwhale (S.F. Masterworks) (36 page)

‘I found a midnight swimmer,’ said the meck, ‘a sea nymph who was missing the party.’

Anonymous invitations came out of the darkness.

Iris let go of the ornate tail and clamped her hands on her wet hips, breasts moving, eyes glinting in the firelight. ‘What party? There’s no dancing!’

The beverages had put most of the men down on one elbow. They planned to sleep right where they were. Another violent dance – more of a mating ritual than anything else – was too much to ask.

Larry checked his mannequin’s charge: ample.

‘Centaur mode, please.’

Mannequin arched its pelvis back, separating its four legs. He was a bit shorter, but the goat-like satyr appearance was replaced by a horsey shape. Optics studied the woman’s rhythm. Hooves beat a synchronous tattoo. She turned towards the mythical beast and smiled. ‘Dance!’ she shouted. They whirled and swayed to flutes and drums. The seawater on her skin was replaced by sweat. She climbed on his back. He reared and galloped off down the beach.

‘What got into you? You seemed so sad before the swim,’ said Centaur Larry.

‘I had a long talk with Trilobite out there,’ she said. ‘I found out that ARNOLD is a genetic Carbon Copy of you.’

‘So?’

‘Then this child I carry is your child!’

Larry trotted out of his warm cabin on to a sunlit winter deck – thirty-four degrees; light, sticky snowflakes melted on his shoulders. Chunks of bright, white pack-ice glinted at him from a dull grey ocean. The long eye was spotting icebergs. The snow-removal crews sang their chantey in rhythm with the shovels.

‘Would you chauffeur me around the deck?’ asked Iris, standing olive-skinned in the door of a companionway.

Larry stopped, pawing the snow. She brushed off the saddle area, noticing the new chamois pad.

‘No frost?’ she asked.

‘No frost. An adherent perineum can be uncomfortable. Mount up. I brought a two-holed poncho if the weather worsens.’

Her breasts and belly warmed his back as he reared up and pranced through a snowdrift. Her legs tightened their straddle. He loped and jumped a coil of hose. She became short of breath with her laughter. He slowed, gauging her endurance.

‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘I don’t want anything happening to my descendant in there.’ He reached back and patted her abdomen.

The wind picked up. They donned the poncho to watch an iceberg go by. ARNOLD came out on the deck wearing his angel wings and three layers of polymer foam.

‘I don’t think this is going to work in the Arctic Ocean,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried a quick dip in this icy brine and almost froze my lungs. We’ll have to use the one-eyed Meck Tuna in the basin.’ Then he noticed the two heads above the poncho. ‘What is that wanton female doing? Making a pack animal out of you?’

Larry grinned. ‘We’re just sight-seeing in the northern latitudes – very educational.’

You two don’t look very scholarly,’ said ARNOLD, tweaking Iris’ toe.

‘I like to ride,’ giggled the gravid female.

‘I imagine,’ mumbled the giant angel, ‘but don’t get used to it. As far as I know, Larry here is the nearest thing we have to a horse on the whole planet, and you can’t take him back to your husband.’

She tightened her hug under the warm folds.

‘Where do we begin searching?’ asked Larry.

The Hive gave us eighty-two degrees twenty-three minutes north, nineteen degrees thirty-one minutes east. The bottom is about five thousand metres down.’

‘It’s a job for the Iron Tuna anyway,’ said Larry, galloping off into the snowstorm. Iris pulled her bare feet up. The angel watched them go, wings freezing and drooping.

The child was strong and healthy – black hair, brownish skin, and dark eyes. Iris was pleased.

‘I will be sorry to leave it when I return to my husband,’ she said.

‘There is no need. You will take the baby with you.’

‘That is impossible. Nine Fingers is a king. He is very proud. His crown goes to his firstborn son. This child would not be welcome.’

ARNOLD nodded. ‘I understand a king’s feelings, but you are a bride of the Godwhale. Your child is more than a test of your fertility – it carries a king’s genes. It belongs in a throne room, and it belongs with its mother.’

‘But my husband will not be happy.’

ARNOLD grinned. ‘He will accept the child if it too has only nine fingers.’

The little mother gasped. ‘No. A crown isn’t worth that much.’

‘You want your son with you, don’t you?’

She looked at the small, round face sadly. She didn’t know. The dark, little eyes blinked up at her, trustingly.

‘Is there any other way?’ asked the mother.

‘I see none,’ said the giant.

Larry studied the child. ‘It’s a shame, really: the child has more of the brown than the olive. He actually looks like the King’s child. Wait, there may be a way.
Rorqual
, can you dig up old optics of the King and Queen to compare their pigments more precisely?’

The ship matched the skins with mixtures of bright primaries through a sliding filter of brown and olive. The dermal colour index was printed out as a six-digit number: three digits for primary mix and three digits for the dull filter. When the child was compared, he came much closer to the light-skinned King.

‘Good,’ said Larry. ‘Babies are usually lighter than their parents at birth. He might darken later, but right now he matches the King. Now, if we mix a pigment to match the mother – olive – and tattoo the tenth finger darker—’

‘I see!’ said ARNOLD. ‘We tell the King that the mother’s genes supplied the extra finger.’

Larry nodded. ‘By the time genetic theory reaches the island, the child will have his rightful place beside his mother. They’ll learn that acquired characteristics aren’t hereditary: a lost finger doesn’t show up in offspring. But the tattoo will be magic enough to win the child a home right now.’

The giant chided the centaur for showing so much interest in the child: ‘You’re too soft. Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think the infant was your child – not mine.’

‘And we know that is impossible.’ Larry smiled.

Larry studied the charts of the wreckage. ‘There are miles and miles of it down there: fragments of fuselage and super-structure. And entire fleet of Harvesters must have gone down. We’re just looking at an old graveyard – or some floating city was scuttled here during the Age of Karl.’

‘Maybe,’ said
Rorqual
, ‘but the sedimentation pattern suggests that it has been there less than a hundred years, certainly much less than a thousand. The attached marine life is all recent. There is no trace of calcium or silicon buildup by organisms before the worldwide Ocean kill.’

‘That recent?’ mumbled Larry. ‘But you and Trilobite had searched the Oceans thoroughly. There were no Hive vessels of this size and number – just an occasional hovercraft.’

The Iron Tuna found a long fragment and sent up the measurement. ‘This is no hovercraft,’ said ARNOLD. ‘Here’s an outline of something nearly a mile long!’

The scale printout gradually took on detail. Smaller fragments with similar characteristics lay nearby. These were hoisted to the deck and studied.

‘Here’s the letter P and there’s an I.
Pi
? The pieces don’t fit. Maybe it is
ip
. . . “ship”?’

‘Look at the scale model of that mile-long fragment.
Rorqual
is copying it because it’s too big to bring up. Good girl! Give a model of all the bigger fragments. Maybe we can assemble it here on the worktable – like a jigsaw puzzle.’

The irregular fragments took shape – oblong segments of hull.

‘Looks like a whale. Another Harvester?’

‘It can’t be! Look at the scale. It must be four or five miles long!’ exclaimed Larry.

‘A floating city. It must be a city. But where in the Hive could it come from? Twenty years isn’t that far back.
Rorqual
had a good sharing with the CO and there was no record of it in the Hive. Odd.’ ARNOLD scratched his chin – male stubble. ‘Here are some more letters –
RO
. Isn’t that a Greek letter?’

‘
Rho
,’ corrected
Rorqual
. ‘This is just a word fragment –
RO
. The R piece fits behind the previous P piece. We have a
PRO
.’

‘Well,
Rorqual
, you have enough data to tell us . . . a five-mile-long hull with the name
PRO
and an
I
,’ said Larry. ‘Search your memory.’

‘Nothing in the Hive. No surface ships of the pre-Hive era. No floating cities. Negative. Negative. Negative,’ said
Rorqual
. ‘But when I go back to the era of the Komputerised Aerospace Research Lab – KARL Era – I find a spaceship with the name of “Procyon Implant” that fits these characteristics. But that ship Implanted out successfully on a trip eleven point three light years long.’

‘The Dever’s Ark!’ exclaimed Larry. ‘It didn’t make it? Could it have just circled the sun and fallen back to Earth after thousands of years?’

‘Possible,’ said
Rorqual
.

‘That would explain how the biota returned to Earth. Implant starships are set up to seed a planet. We’ve been looking for a machine built by the Dever Clan – my descendants.’

Big Har, who had remained silent, picked up a crusted relic from the wreck. ‘This is all that remains of our deity? A dead machine?’

Larry was almost in tears. ‘They failed? Ira, Jen-W5, Dim Dever . . . failed?’

ARNOLD scoffed: ‘I would expect the Hive to fail!’

‘There was no Hive then,’ said Larry. ‘Just cyberdeity OLGA and KARL, her servant. The Golden Age! The land population was only one percent of what it is now. Look at the species that were on the Ark. None of these survived the harsh competition with the Nebish.’

‘Then Man failed to reach the stars,’ mumbled ARNOLD. ‘What is so terrible about that? Maybe Man wasn’t meant to succeed. After all, we are just animals – a higher animal, perhaps – but we eat, sleep, mate, and die like any other creature. Why get all emotional about an effort to see space? It happened a thousand years ago!’

Larry moved his mannequin over to the port and gazed out into the frozen, grey Arctic sea. ‘I like to think that Man is the highest creature in the Universe – that Earth is the most important planet – and that I am . . . well . . . at least significant.’ ARNOLD apologized: ‘I’m just a warrior. For me to go into battle with those daydreams would be very bad. I might hesitate. But you have always been a deep thinker. I’m sorry if I offended you. Let’s eat.’

Har’s appetite was poor. ‘I still feel as if we have a deity looking over us. We prayed for food to return to the sea and it did – after thousands of years of sterility. It takes a deity to do that – perhaps a deity guiding a starship?’

Rorqual
reassured Big Har: ‘It is good to have a deity, and there is solid evidence that the entire Universe was built for intelligent life forms on this planet, if we accept the cosmologist’s premise that a Creator would sign his work.’

Larry’s eyes lit up: ‘Of course! The anthropocentric-universe argument:
gy = c
! The most fundamental constant in the Universe is the speed of light. What is it – exactly?’

Rorqual
printed out:
c
= 2.997925010 × 10
⁸
metres per second

‘Yes. Now if we multiply Earth’s gravity acceleration in meters per second per second (m/sec2) by the Earth year in seconds, we’ll have speed (m/sec).
Acceleration
times
time
equals
speed
. For planet Earth this speed is precisely light-speed; or at least it was when our first anthropoid ancestor set foot on the ground.’

ARNOLD frowned. ‘You mean that this constant can be measured everywhere in the Universe – and our planet’s gravity times its year equals it?? What is this math? In round numbers?’

The screen glowed reverently: OLGA’s formula:

98 m/sec
²
× 3.0 × 10
⁷
sec = 3.0 × 10
⁸
m/sec

‘Also used as index for hospitality when evaluating the planets of distant star systems.’

ARNOLD nodded. ‘Close – only a two percent error.’

Larry smiled. ‘That error vanishes if we get down to exact figures. Light-speed is a bit less than your figure – 2.9979 × 10
⁸
. That never changes. The year is a bit longer each century – about two-thirds of a second. Now it is about 3.15577 × 110
⁷
seconds, but when Man’s prosimian ancestors appeared, the Earth year was precisely 3.065 × 10
⁷
. Gravity varies slightly from equator to pole, but the site of Man’s oldest fossil ancestor has a
g
of 9.78 m/sec
²
. Now the more exact formula is:

9.78 m/sec
²
times 3.065 × 10
⁷
sec = 2.9979 × 10
⁸
m/sec

‘And that comes out right on the nose! The year was a bit shorter before prosimians, and longer after – so there was a time when the formula was accurate to an infinite number of decimal places.’

ARNOLD continued to question the math. ‘I suppose it comes out the same no matter what units you use – feet per second? Miles per hour?’

‘Of course. Just keep the units the same all the way through.’

‘Does it come out like this for all the planets?’

Rorqual
ran a quick check: ‘The formula only gives ten percent of light-speed for Mercury, sixty-six percent for Venus, and seventy-five percent for Mars. The outer planets are many decimal points off.’

‘Interesting,’ said ARNOLD. ‘But if Venus or Mars were a bit larger or slower they’d be right in the formula too. Maybe all biologically rich planets fit the formula.’

‘Maybe,’ said Larry. ‘But this in itself makes the cosmologist very happy. Such an orderly Universe!’

ARNOLD asked
Rorqual
for another printout. This time he wanted to study fossil mankind. ‘Why go way back to the prosimian? What’s wrong with the first hominid – that Miocene pongid, Proconsul? Why not use that year?’

Larry frowned. ‘That year was 3.1416 × 10
⁷
seconds long. In the formula g × y = c the answer is light-speed plus an error of plus one and a half percent. Don’t let the figure 3.1416 excite you: it is
pi
, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. However, its appearance here, in the number of time divisions in a year, is just an artifact of our unit of time. Unlike light-speed, which is a universal constant in any units.’