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Commander Leonidas will take us there.

We leave tomorrow — for the home planet of the High Ones.

SIXTEEN

May 1, 2376 Mirt.

Now I know that I have been talking only to myself all the time I’ve been dictating these cubes. Lorie will never play them. What I have been composing over these past nine months, imagining I was writing letters to my sister on Earth, is actually a memoir of my own adventures, a diary for my own amusement.

In that case, I suppose I should complete the record by setting down the outcome of this phase of the story. The story doesn’t end here; it’s really only beginning. What is yet to come is the real research, the sorting out of the immense treasury of new knowledge that we’ve acquired. But that promises to be at once more exciting and less dramatic, if I follow what I’m trying to say. I mean, the next phase of discovery won’t unfold in such a fantastic rush of events — I hope.

* * *

The Pride of Space brought us to Mirt by early April. Dihn Ruuu, Commander Leonidas, and Nick Ludwig plotted our course together, after sighting the hidden star by infrared. Cautiously the cruiser pulled up ten light-minutes away from the dark shell that houses the High Ones. There was no telling what defensive weapons might go into action against a ship that came closer without permission.

The shell that is Mirt is the most awesome thing I have ever seen. From a distance of ten light-minutes it appears to fill half the sky, a great dark curving shield with a diameter greater than that of Earth’s whole orbit. Even while Saul had been explaining Dyson spheres to us, I hadn’t really considered in serious practical terms what it means to build a sphere big enough to contain a sun. I know now.

Dihn Ruuu, using High Ones broadcast equipment acquired on McBurney IV, put through a signal to Mirt and requested entry permission for us. The robot needed three and a half hours to get its message across. Because of our distance from the sphere, there had to be a lag of ten minutes between the time any audio signal was transmitted and the time it was received, but this alone couldn’t account for Dihn Ruuu’s seeming difficulties in persuading Mirt to let us in. The incomprehensible exchanges of alien words went on and on.

Finally Dihn Ruuu rose and told us, “It is done. They will admit us.”

I asked, “Were you having trouble communicating with them because of changes in the language?”

“The language of the Mirt Korp Ahm,” said the robot coolly, “is not susceptible to change.”

“Not ever} Not even over millions of years?”

“Not a syllable has altered since I was manufactured.”

“That’s incredible,” I said. “That a language won’t change at all in almost a billion years.”

“The Mirt Korp Ahm have never admired continuous evolution,” said Dihn Ruuu. “They seek perfection, and, when they have attained it, seek no more.”

“But how can they tell when they’ve attained it?”

“They can tell.”

“And then they stop trying to improve anything?”

“It is the difference, Tom, between your race and the one I serve. From what I have seen of you, I realize that you Earthfolk are never satisfied; by definition, you will never be satisfied. You are perpetual seekers. The Mirt Korp Ahm are capable of contentment when they reach perfection in any endeavor. You would try to improve on perfection itself.”

I saw now why the 250 million years of our archaeological record of the High Ones had registered so little change. And why they had endured across a billion years.

A supercivilization, yes. But a supercivilization of supertortoises… never sticking out their necks. Achieving greatness and pulling into their shells. Literally building a shell around their own sun.

Jan said, “If the Mirt Korp Ahm aren’t seekers, why did they colonize half the galaxy?”

“It was,” said Dihn Ruuu, “a long time ago, when there still was much for them to learn. As you see, the colonies were long ago disbanded. The Mirt Korp Ahm reversed their outward thrust and returned to their native planet.”

Dr. Schein broke in. “Just now, when you were calling Mirt — did you speak with any Mirt Korp Ahm?”

“I spoke only with my own kind,” said the robot.

“But the Mirt Korp Ahm — do they still survive inside the shell? Or are we heading for another world of robots?”

“I do not know,” Dihn Ruuu said. “Something strange has happened, I fear. But they would not give me any information about the Mirt Korp Ahm.”

We approached the shell of Mirt and it opened for us. A huge hinged section of the dark, dully gleaming sphere swung out, a section at least the size of Ohio, and we plunged through, not under our own power but once again in the grip of the force with which the planets of the Mirt Korp Ahm control spaceships.

It was our good luck to be aboard a military vessel, not an ordinary passenger-and-freight ultradrive cruiser; thus our ship was equipped with viewscreens and we were able to watch our own entry into the sphere of Mirt. We saw the vast outer skin of the shell, and the colossal hinged gateway, and the hint of a bright gleam within. Then we sped into the sphere, into a dazzling realm of light. In the center of everything was the sun, white, no larger than Earth’s own star, sending forth radiation that danced and glittered over the fantastic sprawl of the sphere’s inner surface.

A single giant city covered that surface. Spidery towers stabbed hundreds of meters into the sky — solar energy accumulators, I learned later. Bright blue points of flame blazed here; giant booms swung and pivoted there; highways sparkled like tracks of fire; somber pyramids of black metal occupied immense areas. Everything seemed in motion, expanding, conquering adjoining territory, sucking in life and power, growing, throbbing. It was not what I expected the world of the conservative, progress-hating Mirt Korp Ahm to resemble.

But were there in fact any Mirt Korp Ahm here? Or were the robots of the High Ones keeping this unbelievable world alive, obediently carrying on the functions and traditions of their extinct creators?

We landed, coming down in a target area ten times as large as the one on McBurney IV, and bordered by pulsating generators and accumulators of terrifying complexity and size. Robots who might have been the twins of our Dihn Ruuu greeted us. We were taken from our ship, placed aboard a vehicle shaped like a teardrop of amber, and our tour began.

“An extended recitation of wonders,” according to the Paradoxians, “makes the merely commonplace seem noble and strange.” Perhaps so. I will offer no catalog of the miracles of Mirt. Why wrestle into words what everyone will see so vividly in the tridim images? We viewed all the splendour of a billion-year-old civilization; let that bald statement be enough. Our robot hosts were eager to reveal everything. And, like wanderers in a dream, we who had known the High Ones only by the scraps and potsherds of the inconceivably remote past now journeyed — unbelievably, and only half believing — through the living heart of this vanished empire.

“Where are the Mirt Korp Ahm themselves?” we kept asking. “Do they still exist?”