But its effects could be changed, with adroit care. Up ahead, solving the puzzle of how to make an electron-positron plasma would require cooperation of both mechs and organics. But that alliance could never come about if the past could spread its venom to the future.
So to thwart this era’s mechs, a future one had voyaged into its own future—where it knew the crucial moment awaited.
There, on the wasted plains, as their tiny fragment of a farm stuttered at the edge of infinity’s abyss, the Walmsleys had learned the mechs’ final destiny. Only that truth could disarm the age-old hostility between the two great Forms of life.
“That is my task,” the raccoon said. “As a diplomat.”
“A diplomat from where?” Nikka demanded, still not quite convinced.
“The Old Ones?” Nigel asked.
“They are a part of it, yes.”
“I don’t get it,” Nikka said.
“There are several higher orders than yourselves.” The raccoon groomed itself, as if this were everyday talk. “Did you think the galaxy was a simple division between organic forms and mechanicals?”
“Well . . . yes,” Angelina said lamely.
“There are other substrates. Other media, perhaps I should say.”
“Such as?” Nikka pressed.
“Magnetic fields. Collaborations of organics and mechanicals. And inscrutable symphonies of all three, forms that I can but glimpse.” Its bandit eyes glittered and Nigel felt a keen intelligence having fun. Playing with a pet?
“That’s who sent the bodies back, started all this?” Angelina asked.
“Oh no—those were sent by humans. They quite rightly sought to warn you.”
“And you work for something bigger, higher?” Nigel asked.
“So I believe. Do you know who you ‘work for’?”
Nikka laughed suddenly. “We thought, for ourselves.”
“There are larger agencies,” Scooter said, its eyes gazing reflectively into the distance. “We might as well call them gods.”
Nigel thought of the God he had appealed to, for Ito. A God outside time somehow, a bare minimal God who could at least salve the wounds He could not prevent. In a universe apparently devoid of meaning, that was the merest scrap one could hope for. But the raccoon spoke of higher orders still.
“I do not believe we can in principle answer such questions,” Scooter said. “They may function outside our conceptual spaces, their acts indistinguishable from natural law.”
Nigel suddenly wondered whether the human category of science, and physical order, might be a reflection of something deeper. What imposed the order, after all?
He asked the raccoon, but it was silent.
Nigel remembered long ago thinking, I wonder if our pets sometimes feel what we’re feeling now. Confronted with something nonchalantly superior, what did a pet feel? Awe? Mild irritation at the presumption? He looked at the raccoon, which had deceived them so long, and thought about the muscular intelligence that lay behind such a simple act.
“You’re pretty arrogant,” Nigel said.
“Do not mistake the messenger for the message,” Scooter replied, licking itself.
“Such a neat creature, too,” Nigel said sarcastically.
“Sometimes it is not particularly pleasant to be a conscious being,” Scooter piped, “but it is always a pleasure to be a mammal.”
Nigel realized that this animal was really quite a remarkable job. Scooter looked, smelled, and acted like an Earth-derived raccoon, fresh from the gene vaults humans had brought here.
But it was a construction, made by—what? There are several higher orders . . . He remembered a crude sketch, shown him long ago. Highers. More than Old Ones?
And what were they? The semi-humanoid thing he had seen at the stutter-point? Had that thing sent back the bodies, to catch the eye of curious, persistent humans? And unfurled the esty itself, to show those humans the phosphorescent positron sky?
Awe, he remembered, was a mingling of fear and reverence. Something in him, hominid-deep, had a cold, clear fear of the little raccoon. And what it implied.
THIRTY-THREE
No Erasures
Perhaps all this would bring peace with the mechs. Perhaps they would be able to get their farm back into workable order. Perhaps.
None of that mattered a jot, compared with the moment when Ito emerged from the cyclers. Gray, muscles shriveled, skin patchy. Alive.
“I . . . what went . . . on?” Ito shook his head and tried to sit up. His mother restrained him. Which was difficult, because she was showering him with tears at the same time.
He blinked, solutions still giving his face a glossy sheen. “I’m, ah, hungry.” He frowned in puzzlement as they all burst out laughing.
He was back. But not all of him, they learned in the weeks ahead. It was an Ito but perhaps not the Ito.
No transcription is ever perfect. Some brain cells were lost, unread by the recorders, mangled in the minute processing.
