“Yes—it checks with what the Snark said.”
“There were no other—organic races?—alive at the time.”
“Not with technology. So these fellows set out to find what they could—maybe to colonize, who knows? But it didn’t work—and stumbled on us.”
“Created the Bigfoot.”
“No. Made use of him. But that didn’t work very well, either, I gather.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. But Bigfoot was a forerunner, anyway.” “Of what?”
“Of us,” Nigel said, surprised. “We’re the point, you see.”
“The… programming?”
“Ah.” Nigel chuckled, leaned over and put his arm around Nikka. “I see you’ve been talking to my little friend, here. Programming—it misses the whole thing.”
“Why did they do it?” Mr. Ichino narrowed his eyes, as though at a loss.
“The—what did Snark say?—the universe of essences. Organic life can have it, machines can’t. The aliens came to be sure we got it, in time for the—well, the Aquila thing. Whatever’s moving toward us.”
“They knew about it then!” Mr. Ichino rapped a knuckle on the hardwood finish. “When you sent me that star chart I wondered if you’d gone off entirely.”
Nigel gave him a crinkling of the eyes, a merry smile. “How are you sure I haven’t?”
To the look of momentary consternation on Mr. Ichino’s face Nigel gave a barking laugh. “No, no, old friend—I haven’t. What has happened to me I can’t quite say.”
“You seem different.”
“I am different.”
“And the Marginis wreck—they came to give us this? For defense?”
“I don’t know,” Nigel said. “You mustn’t think I understand everything. They came for contact, knowing about Aquila. Knowing all organic life is fragile. But hoping there was some kinship, yes.”
“And something stopped them.”
“Themselves, I expect.” Nigel sighed, shifted his feet, stood with hands in hip pockets. “War. Wasco had weapons. There was probably some conflict within them that eventually caused all that. Why bring nuclear death from the stars?”
“A defense against Aquila?”
“Maybe. Or against some other faction of themselves.”
“We can find that out, perhaps.”
“Can we? I wonder. And anyway—who cares? The causes are dead—we have only the results.”
“The results?”
Mr. Ichino frowned and Nikka lifted her head in interest. The chill of the room had dulled as the diffuse glow of the sun sent shafts of light through the two southern windows. Nigel relaxed. He now needed to be out of this place, beyond this unsatisfying round of explanations, so he tried to compress it.
“It’s really a lot of learned tricks, you know, our past. We learned pair bonding, social mechanisms. Then big game hunting. When that ran out—all planets are finite— there was agriculture. From that came technology, computers, an information rate to match our storage rate. But the world isn’t just that—there’s where the computer civilizations run aground. They’re right, really—we are unstable. Because there’s a tension in us that comes out of how we evolved. Computers don’t evolve, they’re developed. Planned—to be certain, safe, secure. That’s the way they stay, if they survive the suicides of their organic forefathers. But the thing in Aquila is a computer society that opted for the preemptive strike—to stop organic forms before they can spread among the stars, find the domesticated computer worlds, and inevitably destroy them.”
Nigel paused. The cabin held an airless expectancy. “Then we …” Mr. Ichino began.
“We have to become better than we are,” Nigel said. “But, hell, that’s really not it. We can have more power than that blundering bunch of robots in Aquila. By entering into …” Nigel laughed, shrugging. “You’ll see it, you will. The universe of essences. The place where subjects and objects dissolve.”
“The New Sons …” Nikka began. “They talk about…”
Nigel raised his hands, chuckled. “They’re the flip side of an old record—fear of death plus the accumulation of things.”
He turned and looked at the yawning fireplace. “We need more wood,” he said.
As he feels in his pocket for his gloves he finds a coin. Elated, he tosses it up, carving the air. He catches it between his fingers adroitly and lifts it, a brassy circle. The coin, held to the yellowing sun, eclipses it. Perspective defies the innate order. The handiwork of man blinds even this awesome furnace that hangs in the sky.
Nikka said, when the cabin door closed behind him, “What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“You knew him before. Has he changed?”
“Of course.”
“He says he can’t really communicate it.”
“No one has ever been able to.”
