XIII
Citizeness Roget Germyn, widow, woke from sleep like a well-mannered cat on the narrow lower third of the bed that her training had taught her to occupy, though it had been some days since her husband’s Translation had emptied the Citizen’s two-thirds permanently.
Someone had tapped gently on her door.
“I am awake,” she called, in a voice just sufficient to carry.
A quiet voice said: “Citizeness, there is exceptional opportunity to Appreciate this morning. Come see, if you will. And I ask forgiveness for waking you.”
She recognized the voice; it was the wife of one of her neighbors. The Citizeness made the appropriate reply, combining forgiveness and gratitude.
She dressed rapidly, but with appropriate pauses for reflection and calm, and stepped out into the street.
It was not yet daylight. Overhead, great sheets of soundless lightnings flared.
Inside Citizeness Germyn long-unfelt emotions stirred. There was something that was very like terror, and something that was akin to love. This was a generation that had never seen the aurora, for the ricocheting electron beams that cause it could not span the increasing distance between the orphaned Earth and its primary, Old Sol, and the small rekindled suns the Pyramids made were far too puny.
Under the sleeting aurora, small knots of Citizens stood about the streets, their faces turned up to the sky and illuminated by the distant light. It was truly an exceptional opportunity to Appreciate and they were all making the most of it.
Conscientiously, Citizeness Germyn sought out another viewer with whom to exchange comments on the spectacle above. “It is more bright than meteors,” she said judiciously, “and lovelier than the freshly kindled Sun.”
“Sure,” said the woman. Citizeness Germyn, jolted, looked more closely. It was the Tropile woman—Gala? Was that her name? And what sort of name was that? But it fitted her well; she was the one who had been wife to Wolf and, more likely than not, part Wolf herself.
Still, the case was not proved. Citizeness Germyn said honestly: “I have never seen a sight to compare with this in all my life.”
Gala Tropile said indifferently: “Yeah. Funny things are happening all the time these days, have you noticed? Ever since Glenn turned out to be—” She stopped.
Citizeness Germyn rapidly diagnosed her embarrassment and acted to cover it up. “That is so. I have seen Eyes a hundred times and yet has there been a Translation with the Eyes? No. But there have been Translations. It is queer.”
“I suppose so,” Gala Tropile said, looking upward at the display. She sighed.
Over their heads, a formed Eye was drifting slowly about, but neither of the women noticed it. The shifting lights in the sky obscured it.
“I wonder what causes that stuff,” Gala Tropile said idly.
Citizeness Germyn made no attempt to answer. It was not the sort of question that would normally have occurred to her and therefore not a sort to which she could reply.
Moreover, it was not the question closest to Gala Tropile’s heart at that moment—nor, for that matter, the question closest to Citizeness Germyn’s. The question that underlay the thoughts of both was: I wonder what happened to my husband.
It was strange, but true, that the answers to all their questions were very nearly the same.
The Alla-Narova mind said sharply: “Glenn, come back!”
Tropile withdrew from scanning the distant dark street. He laughed soundlessly. “I was watching my wife. God, we’re giving them fits down there! The Pyramids must be churning things up, too—the sky is full of auroral displays. Looks like there’s plenty of h.f. bouncing around the atmosphere.”
“Pay attention!” the Alla-Narova mind commanded.
“All right.” Obediently, Tropile returned to the war he was waging.
It was a strange conflict, strangely fought. Tropile’s mind searched the abysses and tunnels of the Pyramid planet, and what he sensed or saw was immediately communicated to all of the awakened Components who were his allies.
It was a godlike position. Was he sane? There was no knowing. Sanity no longer meant anything to Tropile. He was beyond such human affairs as lunacy or its reverse. An insane man is one who is out of joint with his environment. Tropile was himself his environment. His mind encompassed two planets and the space between. He saw with a thousand eyes. He worked with a thousand hands.
And he struck mighty blows.
The weakness of a network that reaches everywhere is that it is everywhere vulnerable. If a teletype repeater in Omaha garbles a single digit, printing units in Atlanta and Bangor will type out errors. Tropile, by striking at the Pyramids’ net at a thousand points, garbled their communications and made them nearly useless. More, he took the Pyramid network for his own. The Tropile-pulse sped through the neurone guides of the Pyramid net, and what it encountered it mastered, and what it mastered it changed.
The Pyramids discovered that they had been attacked.
Frantically (if they felt frenzy), the Pyramids replaced Components; the Tropile-pulse woke the new ones. Unbelievingly (did they know how to “believe”?), the Pyramids isolated contaminated circuits; the Tropile-pulse bypassed them.
Desperately (or joyously or uffishly—one term fits exactly as well as another), the Pyramids returned to shove-and-haul, and there was much destruction, and some Components died.
But by then, the Components had reprogrammed themselves.
The first job had been the matter of finding hands for the Tropile-brain to work with. Bring hands in, then! Tropile commanded the Pyramids’ network and obediently it was done. The Translation mechanism, the electrostatic scythe that had harvested so many crops from the wristwatch mines, suffered a change and went to work not for the pickers but for the fruit.
The essential change in the operation of that particular pneuma had been simple; first, to “harvest” or “Translate” the men and women Tropile wanted as fighters instead of the meditative Citizen kind. Second, to divert the new arrivals to where they would not go straight to deep-freeze. It happened that the only alternate space Tropile could find was a sort of foundry that was nearly Hell, but that was only a detail. The important thing was that new helpers were arriving, with minds of their own and the capacity to move and act.
Then Tropile needed to communicate with them. He found the alien, ropy-limbed Component whose name vaguely approached “Joey.” Joey’s limited sense of telepathy was needed and so, with enormous difficulty, Tropile and Alla Narova, combined, managed to reach and wake it.
And so he had an army, captured humans for troops, an awakened Joey for liaison.
Tropile was lord of two worlds. Not only the Pyramids were under his thumb, but his own fellow humans whom he had drafted into his service. They ate when a captured circuit he controlled fed synthetic mush into troughs for them. They breathed because a captured circuit he directed created air. They would return to Earth when—and only when—a captured circuit he operated sent them home.
Sane?
By what standards?
And what difference did it make?