"I will display the information gathered so far on Cuckoo."
In the center of the chamber a stereostage display quickened into life. It showed a deep red sphere, floating in nothingness. There was no hint of size, because there was nothing nearby to compare it with; but the voice accompaniment to the display began to give the values for its physical characteristics, and all the Pmal translators faithfully relayed the information to their owners. Radius, slightly under one A.U. Mass, about equal to Sol. Density, very low—less than what in some Earthly laboratories was considered a hard vacuum. And yet the thing had a solid surface.
This was a familiar wonder to Ben Line and the other beings, but they listened anyway. So much about Cuckoo was still unbelievable, even now. Not only did it have a surface, but on that surface creatures lived. The sphere grew and broke off a section, which expanded, turning slowly to present itself to each of the creatures in the room. It grew larger, and they were looking down on a landscape between two enormous mountains, and there was the strangest thing of all. Not only did creatures live there; they were creatures biologically close to some races of the Galaxy itself.
That was impossible.
Cuckoo had never been part of the Galaxy. Its present course was aimed arrow-straight at the Orion arm of the Galaxy. It had clearly been on that course for a very long time, and it had originated somewhere else, from some starcloud other than our own.
Ben Line Pertin, listening and watching, realized something was touching him. He turned, and it was the woman of the Purchased People who was there as proxy for some water-breathing race from a star on the far side of the Galaxy, always invisible to Earth and never named by it. She said tonelessly, "While you were sleeping, Ben Line Pertin, this came addressed to you with the last lot of supplies."
He nodded thanks—not to her, heaven knows; the imprisoned personality inside the skull neither expected thanks nor would know what to do with it; but to the distant mollusklike creature that owned her and operated through her body.
He was about to turn back to the hologram, when he realized what the woman had given him. It was a message cassette. There was no reason for anyone to send him a sealed cassette unless it was private; there was only one person who would want to send him a private message.
That person was Zara.
Suddenly Ben Line wanted nothing so much as he wanted that meeting to end so that he could put that cassette in his private stereostage. But it wouldn't end, and he could not leave, now that the topic had toned to one of his own specialties, the meteorology of Cuckoo. Long since the orbiter had dropped automatic weather stations all along its trail, and they had begun to show tentative patterns for the climatology and air- mass movements of the enormous sphere. It was only a beginning. In that immense ocean of air, the seeded stations sketched out only a line, but still Ben Line had to summarize what was known.
As he finished, the FARLINK screens lit up with an overriding message:
"ATTENTION, PROGRESS REPORTED ON TACHYONIC
INTERFERENCE. FOLLOWING SAMPLE ANALYZED."
The computer blanked out, then displayed shaped waves glowing on the screens, followed by endless strings of binary numbers, while bird chirps sounded in the speakers. "Conjecture," whispered the T'Worlie that hung beside him, a vinegary scent of excitement showing that its equivalent of adrenalin was flowing. "Analysis shows message!"
But Nammie's conjecture was wrong. The curved screens flashed again with the all-stations call indicating urgency, then lit up with the message in half a hundred scripts:
"LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF THIS SAMPLE NEGATIVE.
TECHNICAL STUDIES, HOWEVER, IDENTIFY SIGNAL AS
COMMUNICATION OF TUNING DATA FOR TACHYONIC
REPLICATION TRANSMISSION. PRESUMPTION: SOME
MATTER IS TO BE REPLICATED FROM CUCKOO TO
SOURCE."
"Ben Line," the silvery girl chimed in sudden comprehension, "do you understand what that means? It means we can replicate our own matter at the source of this transmission. We can send a copy of one of us! We can see where this signal comes from, by sending someone there who can report back, in a language we can understand!"
"If he lives long enough," Pertin grunted. He understood the importance of what was being said, but in his personal scale of values there was nothing quite so important as the cassette he had been clutching all this long while in his hand.
And at last he was able to excuse himself, hurl himself through the passages of the orbiter to his private cocoon, squirm in, seal, and then slip the cassette into the sterostage.
A silvery glitter of cloud sprang up before him and condensed into the face and form of Zara, his wife, looking meltingly beautiful and overpoweringly sad.
She gazed at him silently for a moment, as if unsure of what to say. And then—
"Dear Ben," she said, "I don't know how to tell you this. I'm sorry to answer you this way. The truth is, I just can't face you."
She paused, biting her lip.
"You see," she said, "I'm not going to come to join you. I know how disappointed you will feel— disappointed in me, because I promised. But I can't.
"I'm pregnant, dear," she said. She hesitated, and added, "You know that Ben and I—I mean, you and I wanted to have a child. We got permission before— before you left. Well, now we're going to, in about five months.
"So you see I can't come now. It would be one thing for you and me to live on the orbiter and to know that we'll die there. Being together would make all that worthwhile. But not our baby, Ben! I just can't do that.
"Of course, after the baby is born ... if you still want me—
"Well, well talk about it then. I promise you, Ben, dear, I want to be with you. All of me wants to be with all of you! There must be a way!
"But for now I can't see what it is. I—" She hesitated, then said in a rush, "I'm going to stop now, Ben, because I'm going to have to cry. I do love you! Oh, God . . ."
And the image faded and was gone, leaving Ben Line Pertin more alone than he had ever been.
SIX
Org Rider washed his torn garments in a rain pool and spread them on a rock to dry, but the death-weed stench of the Watchers was still in his nostrils. He was out of the storm area now, the rock where the stranger had been killed and where the Watchers had treated him with such contempt far out of sight in the rain clouds. He was cold, and his aches and pains were enormous; but he was alive and free. It was more than he expected.
He fished bare-handed in the pool for horny brown scuttling creatures and kindled a small fire to broil them. They were quite like pond-dwellers he knew from his own mountain, and when they were cooked they tasted as good. He was overpoweringly weary, but he forced himself to catch more of the scuttlers and prop them over the fire to smoke for his pack.
Then he wrapped himself in his wings, and was immediately asleep.
When he awoke the first thing he felt was the black weight of the Watchman's eye against his throat.
His fingers closed around it, and he was close to ripping it off and throwing it in the pool. But it could not harm him while he was wearing it, he thought, and he had not forgotten the warning about what would happen to him if he took it off.