“You weren’t particularly fast, but eventually you could run down the tired grazer. A guaranteed result, if you persisted. In this tenacity lies your major difference from other omnivores, and certainly from carnivores.” It cackled again. “You boast of your brains, your opposable thumbs, your two-footed grace—but stubborn perseverance is rare, very rare—and we needed that. So we had to use primates . . . alas.”
“Why ‘alas’?” Nigel asked.
“You are cantankerous and difficult to manage. Sorry, but that is true.”
“Well, you weren’t the best pet we ever had, either,” Angelina said.
“I was a poor actor. Actually, I am a diplomat.”
“You don’t seem all that diplomatic,” Benjamin said.
“I negotiate. In the Lanes there are many kinds, but your strategy is shared by no other species here. Some Lanes hold octopus-like creatures who manipulate objects and snare others, but cannot pursue game. Many bright herbivores, too—charming, but in the wrong business to begin with, hemmed in by short attention spans. We needed something which would, for the most abstract reasons, sustain effort over times significant to your own well being.”
“Uh-huh.” Nikka’s mouth was thin, skeptical. “And our ‘abstract reason’?”
“Curiosity, basically.”
“You based your strategy on our getting interested?” Nikka snorted with derision.
“We chose carefully. After all, how did this family come to be settled here?”
Nigel laughed. “We came this far, why not farther? Touché!”
“The Grey Mech didn’t have anything to do with it?”
The raccoon lowered its head, concentrating on grooming itself. Nigel guessed that it was embarrassed—to the extent that any human category could apply to this strange thing. “Well, we did have to begin matters.”
“By slamming us forward in the wormhole.” Nikka’s eyes were narrow slits. “So we couldn’t get back.”
“Such are the vagaries of any wherewhen string,” Scooter said.
Nigel said, “By ‘wherewhen string’ I suppose you mean a wormhole path through the esty?”
“Yes, we term it differently—”
“Cut the techtalk!” Nikka fumed. “This, this pet got us blown—”
“Let it go on,” Nigel said, hoping he could calm her.
Scooter had dashed down the porch. It turned back and said hesitantly, “We calculated that if the Grey Mech knew of this particular vortex, and guessed our plans, it would attempt to seal it—which would boost you along in the wherewhen string, I mean, the wormhole . . . perhaps.”
“Rodent!” Nikka sprang up and kicked at the raccoon. It squealed and scampered out of the way. Nikka followed.
It cried, “I assure you, there was no—” another kick, closer this time, “no other way!”
“You risked my family for, for—” Nikka sputtered angrily.
It reached safety, hanging on a splintered beam beneath the overhang of the wrecked roof. “For greater causes than you can know,” the raccoon said, regaining its dignity.
“You little rat!” Nikka swiped, but it swung farther away.
It said earnestly, “The knowledge and data you bring—and do not forget that the recording devices in your Causality Engine will give us precise measurements—can reconcile the long struggle between us, the organic living Phyla, and the mechs.”
“You risked our lives—my son!—on a plan—”
Angelina threw a chunk of roofing at Scooter, narrowly missing. Nigel stood, blocking her from another shot. They were not truly angry with this raccoon, he saw. Ito, lying inside, body worked and threaded, battling, his fate hinging on mechanical help—that was the root of their rage. And until their wait was over, they would know no rest.
Nigel sighed, held up a hand. “Belay that! Let this thing speak.”
“Thank you.” It smoothed its fur and began again.
THIRTY-TWO
Larger Agencies
There was only one Grey Mech of their era. It had just perished above their home, fried by the torrents of particles sputtering into the space between the two wormhole mouths.
Causality was indeed insured, by the frying foam of the quantum. The wormhole could not connect, could not break through the Cauchy Horizon. In the end, Nature kept its causal books balanced with a furious storm of emission, dissipating the wriggling elastic energy of the wormholes.
And all energy can be used as a weapon.
The Grey Mech was a censor. It had wanted to stop the information about long-term mech purposes from reaching the organic life-forms of this era. The mechs feared that their organic enemies would disrupt their gossamer-thin experiments in electron-positron plasma. Simply flying a starship’s roiling plasma exhaust through a delicate whorl of magnetic fields and lacy filaments could devastate the work of centuries.
“Wouldn’t mind doing just that,” Benjamin said when he heard the idea. Antagonism to mechs ran deep in the blood of many organic races, not just humans.
But up ahead along the curve of grand time, other Grey Mechs arose.
The mech vs. Naturals war stretched like a stain across millennia in the esty. Nothing could truly stop the inherent competition, growing out of a Darwinnowing commanded in all Phyla and Kingdoms of life—not even this strange voyage along the “wherewhen string” and back.
