The Silkie Read online

  His was a skilful counteraction, for the golden dot switched positions in space, moved from his left to directly in front of him.

  How many light-years were involved in that switch, Cemp could not determine. For N'Yata was still at a very remote viewpoint, and the vast distances defied measurement by his one-half-step-lower techniques, in which he reflected the condition of the Nijjan body he had duplicated.

  You can still betray! That was the thought-feeling that flowed back now from the golden dot to Cemp. Having sent the message, the dot began to recede. Cemp felt a distinct drop in his own energy level to a still lower (than betrayal) level, of grief and apathy. As he watched the dot go, the first longing came for death, so great was the outflow of his life energy.

  He recognised it as a half-hearted attempt to kill him, sensed that even though she knew he was not the real G'Tono, she was puzzled and that in the final issue, she could not bring herself to destroy another Nijjan, not even a duplicate one.

  Her withdrawal was an intent to consider the problem. He felt her let him go...

  His thought ended. He was back in the computer room. Cemp glanced over at Baxter and telepathed, 'what happened?'

  Having asked the question, Cemp grew conscious of three things. The first of these was merely interesting. During Cemp's ... confrontation with N'Yata, Baxter had moved away.

  The man stood now staring at Cemp, a wary expression on his lean face.

  Once more, Cemp asked, 'I had an experience. what seemed to occur while I was having it?' It was the same question as before, but more detailed.

  This time, Baxter stirred. He said aloud, 'I don't get your thoughts any more. So let me just say that right now, I sense that your Nijjan body is radiating more force than I can take. Evidently, you're in a different energy state.'

  Cemp was remembering his own earlier problem in receiving the communication of the Nijjan. After a moment's consideration of the difficulty, he tentatively tried for an adjustment of output in the bank of cells devoted to the problem, and then he telepathed to Baxter, again tentatively.

  An expression of relief came over the lean man's face. 'Okay,' he replied, 'we're on. what happened?'

  Cemp hastily reported his experience, finishing, 'There's no question that my original use of logic of levels confused the first Nijjan I met, whose name I gather is G'Tono. By spiraling him up to a superwin situation, I escaped whatever he had in mind. And now, by becoming a duplicate of him — essentially that's all I did — I momentarily confused N'Yata. But she recovered fast, and so time is of the essence.'

  'You think —'

  'Wait!' admonished Cemp.

  The second awareness was suddenly in Cemp's mind, and that was not merely interesting; it was urgent — consciousness of being a Nijjan.

  It had all happened so fast. At the moment of change, instant transfer to a confrontation with N'Yata; then back here ...

  Now, Cemp realised that as a Nijjan he could hear sounds. Baxter's human voice had penetrated to him at a normal level — sea-level Earth pressure, it seemed.

  With that to start, Cemp did a lightning-swift orientation — not only sound but sight, feeling, proprioceptive sensations; an apparently human physio-emotional spectrum.

  And he could walk. He felt odd-shaped appendages that held him, balanced him, enabled him to stand ...and armlike things, more sinuous.

  Cemp was not surprised that he was aware of human qualities. Change of shape was not change of being, but a chameleonlike alteration of appearance — a total alteration as distinct from merely a method of concealment; not simply blending with a background.

  He was the human-Silkie Nat Cemp, in the shape of a Nijjan. His Earth-born cells were the basic stuff of his new body, different undoubtedly from the actual cells of a Nijjan.

  Yet the similarity, in its finer details, was sufficiently intricate to be interesting to Cemp. It made him hopeful that by being a Nijjan shape, he would be able also to discover some of the secrets of that shape's abilities.

  His attention continued to leap from point to point of his Nijjan body.

  The legs and arms — being able to have them in the vacuum of space — that was different from Silkie-human.

  The Silkie shape could survive in space only if the interior flesh and structure were separated from the vacuum by a steel hard chitinous substance. For that, even legs had to be massive. And so Silkies had semi-legs and nothing but a grimace where the face and head should be.

  The Nijjans evidently had the same ability without change of form. A hard substance? It didn't seem that way. It seemed more like a different molecular structure.

  No time to investigate that!

  On a higher level, there was in the Nijjan body the entire magnetic wave hand and radiation sensitivity; also, awareness of gravity and all the stasis centers that made it possible for Silkies to operate stably in the vacuum of space.

  More...

  Cemp perceived another set of control centers high in the thickest part of the pyramidal shape. But these neural areas were silent, flowed no energy, and responded to none of his hastily directed thought commands.

  If there was any automatic activity above the level of mere chemical survival in that mass of nerve substance, Cemp could not detect it.

  He surmised uneasily: the space-control lobe of the Nijjan brain? And he had no time to experiment with it. Not yet.

  What was particularly frustrating was that there was no larger pyramidal energy image projecting from him. So that was not an automatic process. Could it be an output of some kind from the space-control cells?

  No time to investigate that, either — no time, because his third awareness was forcing in upon his attention, and that was something he could do something about.

  By his reasoning, furthermore, it was related to the second awareness he had had. Thus, he was not really turning away from what it was like to be a Nijjan to something less urgent. Not completely turning, anyway.

  'Wait ... a little longer,' Cemp repeated to Baxter. Having telepathed the second admonition, Cemp put out another thought on a magnetic beam that a human could read.

  The thought was directed toward the Earth headquarters of the space Silkies. It was on an open channel, so he was not surprised when he received answers from three minds, one a Silkie female.

  All three answers were the same: 'We space Silkies have agreed that we will not discuss our affairs on an individual basis.'

  'What I have to say is very urgent. Do you have a spokesman?' Cemp asked.

  'Yes. I-Yun. But you'll have to come over. He can talk only if some of us are monitoring.'

  The implication was of group thinking and group action; decisions by many, not merely one; Considering the restrictions — which he did fleetingly — Cemp had a sudden intuition, a thought that was surely an insight of major import.

  'I'll be there in ... ' Cemp began.

  He paused, turned to Baxter, and asked, 'How quickly can you get me over to space Silkie headquarters?'

  Baxter was pale. 'It would take too long, Nat,' he protested. 'Fifteen, twenty minutes — '

  'In twenty minutes; so get everybody together in one room!' Cemp completed his thought to the Silkies in their distant headquarters.

  Whereupon, he mentally persuaded Baxter, still objecting, to literally run to the nearest elevator. People turned and stared as the silvery Nijjan body and the human being ran along side by side. But Cemp was already explaining, already convincing the other.

  As a result, what authority could do was done.

  A down elevator stopped on an emergency signal, picked them up, and whisked them to the roof. A helijet, about to take off, was held back by a preemptive control-tower command, and presently it was swooping across the rooftops of the huge buildings that made up the Silkie Authority, soaring many degrees indeed away from its original destination.

  It zeroed in presently on the landing depot of the three-story building that had been assigned as a preliminary head
quarters of the space Silkies.

  During the flight, Cemp resumed his magnetic-level communication. He told the receiving trio who the enemy was and explained, 'Since I had no reaction to it in my Silkie form, I'm assuming that those of us born on Earth do not have any old reflexes on the subject of Nijjans. But it seemed to me that the meteorite Silkies might.'

  There was a long pause, and then another mind sent a thought on the magnetic beam. 'This is I-Yun. All restrictions are temporarily off. Answer with any truth you have, anyone.'

  The female Silkie's thought came first. 'But it's so many generations ago,' she protested. 'You believe we'll have an ancestral memory after such a long time?'

  Cemp replied, 'If that's what it takes, I can only say I hope so, but...'

  He hesitated. what was in his mind was even more fantastic. He had got the impression from the Glis that a number of really original Silkies were still around.

  His brief hesitation ended. He sent the thought.

  'You mean, like 100,000 years old?' came an astonished male Silkie response.

  'Maybe not that long,' said Cemp. 'In fact, I compute from feeling-thoughts I recorded that it's not more than 100,000 years since the Glis attached the Silkies to him. But anywhere from 5,000 to 100,000, yes.'

  There was a pause; then, 'What do you expect such a Silkie to do? Defeat a Nijjan? Remember, our understanding is that we Silkies were the ones who were defeated and decimated. And besides, how will we find the old ones? No one remembers anything like that far back; the Glis with its memory-erasing techniques saw to that. Do you have a method of stimulating such ancient reflexes?'

  Cemp, who had the perfect, practicable method, wanted to know how many Silkies were in the building at this very moment.

  'Oh, about a hundred.' That was I-Yun.

  It seemed a sizable cross-section. Cemp wanted to know if they were all together as he had requested.

  'No, but we'll get them here if you wish.'

  Cemp very much wished. 'And quick!' he urged. 'I swear to you that there's no time to waste.'

  Presently, Cemp sent another magnetic-level message. 'Mr Baxter and I are now landing on the roof. We shall be down in the big room in about one minute.'

  During that minute he sent streams of thoughts down to the group, explaining his analysis.

  The decisive question was, since the Silkies had indeed been decimated in the long ago by the Nijjans, how had a few survived?

  Why had not all Silkies been exterminated?

  Since the survivors, or their descendants, were the only Silkies available, the answer must be buried deep in their unconscious minds, or else be available by stimulation of ancestral DNA-RNA molecules.

  Cemp and Baxter emerged from their elevator and started along a corridor toward a large green door.

  At this penultimate moment, I-Yun's thought showed a qualm. 'Mr Cemp,' he telepathed uneasily, 'we have cooperated with you more than we intended to cooperate with anyone on Earth. But I think we should know before we go any further what — '

  At that point, Baxter opened the green door for Cemp, and Cemp walked into the big room.

  Cemp was aware that Baxter was returning along the corridor, running at top speed — his retreat was actually protected by an energy screen that Cemp put up at the moment he went through the door. But the agreement was that Baxter would get out of the way, so that Cemp would not have to devote attention to his defense.

  Baxter had come this far because he wanted to see the room where the space Silkies were waiting. With that much previsualisation, he could get the rest by way of the telepathic channel Cemp left open for him.

  In an emergency his experience might be useful. That was the thought..

  * * *

  XXVIII

  AT THAT INSTANT of entry the scene spread before Cemp was of many men and women, sitting or standing. His Nijjan body had visual awareness to either side, so he also noticed that four Silkie shapes 'floated' near the ceiling on both sides of the door. Guards? He presumed so.

  Cemp accepted their presence as a normal precaution. His own quick defense against them was to put up a magnetic signal system that, when triggered by any dangerous force, would automatically set up a screen.

  The majority of the occupants of the big room were not a prepossessing lot, for the human shape was not easy for these space Silkies. But humanlike they were. And as Cemp entered, they naturally focused their gaze on him.

  Every pair of eyes at the exact same moment saw the silvery glittering body of a Nijjan.

  How many individuals were present, Cemp did hot know or count, then or later. But there was an audible tearing sound as all over the room clothes ripped, threads parted, and cloth literally shredded.

  The sound was the result of a simultaneous transformation by the majority from human to Silkie. About a dozen people, eight of them women, merely gasped, made no effort to change.

  But — three individuals turned into Nijjans and, having be come so, instantly scattered. They ran off in three directions and came to a halt each in a separate corner; they did not actually leave the room.

  Cemp waited, tense, all receptors recording, not knowing what more to expect. This was what he had hoped for; and here, in its potentiality, it was. Three. Almost incredibly, three out of a hundred or so had responded with — what? He wanted very much to believe that theirs was an age-old reflex that operated in the presence of Nijjans.

  Could it be that the defense against a Nijjan was — to be a Nijjan?

  It seemed almost too elementary. Raised numerous questions.

  Cemp received a thought from Baxter: 'Nat, do you think the old Silkies of long ago might have been killed one by one because they were surprised and couldn't turn Nijjan quickly enough?'

  It seemed reasonable. The lag, always that lag in the transmorpha system, had been a dangerous few moments for Silkies.

  But the question remained, after turning into Nijjans, what did they know? And what could they do against real Nijjans?

  Out of the darkness of unknown numbers of millennia, from somewhere below the mist of forgetfulness created by the Glis in its effort at total control, had now come a response. Like a pure light carrying images from a projector, it shone from that far-distant time into the here and now.

  Was there more to those images than appeared on the surface? More than the transformation itself?

  The swift seconds ran their course, and Cemp got nothing more, nothing special.

  Baxter's anxious mind must have registered Cemp's developing disappointment, for his thought came, 'Isn't there some association they've got with the changeover, some reason why the transformation was successful?'

  Cemp took that thought, made it his own, transferred it to a magnetic wave, and sent it on to the three Silkie-Nijjans.

  With that, he got his first nonautomatic response. Said one, 'You want my moment-by-moment reactions? Well, the reflex that was triggered had only an ordinary transmorpha lag. I estimate no more than seven Earth seconds was what the changeover required. While waiting for the change, and immediately after, my impulse was to escape — but of course, I only ran a few yards and then recognised that you were not a true Nijjan At which moment of awareness I stopped my flight. There followed intense anxiety — memories, obviously, since I had no reason to feel any of that here. But that's it.'

  Cemp asked quickly, 'You had no impulse to use any attack or defense energies?'

  'No, it was just change and get out of there.'

  One of the remaining two Nijjan-Silkies was able to add only a single new thought. 'I had the conviction,' he said, 'that one of us was doomed, and I felt sad and wondered who it would be this time.'

  'But there was nothing,' Cemp persisted, 'about how one of you would be killed and, I presume, no awareness of the means by which the Nijjan had suddenly appeared in your midst without advance warning?'

  'Nothing at all,' answered the three in unison.

  Baxter's third thought intruded. 'Na
t, we'd better get back to the computer.'

  En route, Baxter made another, more far reaching decision.

  Preceded by a private emergency code known for its extreme meaning only to its recipients, he mentally projected by way of a general-alarm system in the Silkie Authority a warning message to all Silkies and all Special People' — slightly more than six thousand persons....

  In the warning Baxter described the Nijjan danger and the only solution so far analysed for Silkies — change to Nijjan and scatter!

  Having completed his own message, Baxter introduced Cemp, who broadcast for Silkies only the Nijjan image.

  Shortly after, Baxter and Cemp completed their trip to the computer, which said, 'Though these new data give no additional clue to the space-control methods of the Nijjans, we can now view the nature of the battle by which the old Silkie nation was gradually decimated. The method was a cautious, never-alerted system of one-by-one extermination.'

  The computer thought it interesting that even the higher-type Nijjan female N'Yata had not made a serious attempt to kill Cemp while he was in his Nijjan form.

  Listening to the analysis, Cemp was plunged into gloom. It was clear now that, first, the Glis molecule, and then his small use of logic of levels on betrayal, had saved him in his first two encounters.

  He wondered blankly, what could be the nature of space that man or Silkie had never so much as dreamed of? ... Nothing to something to nothing, and that slightly caved-in — collapsed — body of Lan Jedd; these were the only clues.

  'Space,' said the computer in answer to Cemp's question, 'is considered to be an orderly, neutral vastness wherein energy and matter masses may interact according to a large but finite number of rules. The distances of space are so enormous that life has had an opportunity to evolve at leisure in innumerable chance ways, on a large but finite number of planets on which — accidentally, it is presumed — suitable conditions developed.'