Object Lambda was getting perceptibly closer - not to the eye, to be sure. No eye on the ship was in a position to see it anyway. But the cameras were able to make out more and more detail - not easily or well because its intrinsic luminosity was so very low, and in the low-energy long-wave part of the spectrum at that. They had even discovered that Lambda was not alone in space. Huge as it was, nearly two AU in diameter, it carried with it little orbiting fleas. The biggest of them was not much more than a mile through and the distance was still enormous; but the T’Worlie instruments managed to detect them, even identify them. The longest periods of free-fall were when the T’Worlies deployed their photon mirrors at the end of a tether, far from even the vibration of a footstep or shifting weight of robot mass in the ship; then their optical emulsions greedily drank up the scant flow of photons from Lambda and converted them into images.
If they had had a great deal of time, they could have answered all questions from there, or nearly all. They were in intergalactic space, and there was no such thing as haze, beyond the advance scattering of their own rocket ejecta. But they had no time: the delta-V equation still ruled them, and one of its tricky parentheses said that deceleration early was worth twice much deceleration late, since it gave them more time for deceleration before they reached the neighbourhood of Lambda. And then there was the mere fact of their rapid approach. The image did not remain still in the T’Worlie mirrors. It grew, minutely, to be sure, but enough that an exposure for more than an hour or so began to fuzz.
Even so, they learned. The nearest thing to pleasure Pertin ever found in a T’Worlie was when a particularly fine series of photographs had been taken, and it was discovered that they showed a hint, a shadow, finally an orbital line for the biggest of the objects that circled Lambda. The pleasure was spoiled for Pertin when the calculations of orbit and time turned out to be impossible; Lambda would have had to have the density of the solar wind to have so slow a satellite. But the T’Worlies didn’t mind. Explanations would come. If not then, later. If not to the present generation, to the next. Meanwhile they were accruing information.
Between the hours of thudding acceleration and the briefer periods of frenzied activity, darting about the ship, Pertin was nearly always bone-weary and aching. Sleep did not rest him.
Communication with Sun One was more and more an effort.
The twelve-hour wait between transmission and reply - often it was more, when the other beings on the ship had queued up for their own transmissions - destroyed the rhythm of the communication; by the time he had a response to his report of the attack on the instrument chamber, he was already relaxing in the continued comfort of the experience that the attack had not been repeated. Once it was himself, or anyway that other self named Ben Charles Pertin, who reported to him. That put him in a tailspin that only a carefully metered dose of tranquillizers from the cocoon’s store could deal with. From the expression on the other Ben Pertin’s face, it was some strain for him too. But the worst from Sun One was not from his other self, it was from Gerald York Bielowitz, who acknowledged a report, suggested some additional instrument readings that would be desirable, started to sign off, hesitated, and then added: “Oh, you’ll be interested, I think. Zara Doy and Ben Charles were married three hours ago.”
Pertin did not remember cutting the stereo stage or seeing the little figure collapse. He lay there for a long time while the cocoon stroked and soothed him, lifted him, lowered him, gently massaged what pains it could from his limbs. At some point he fell asleep. In his dream Ben Charles Pertin married Zara Doy, but he was Ben Charles, and the two of them, intoxicated with the wine they drank and with each other, spoke sadly and wistfully about the other Ben Pertin who was busy about the task of dying on an alien spaceship a Galaxy away. When he woke up and discovered he was the other Ben Pertin he was in an instant unfocused rage.
It was Doc Chimp who woke him. “Boss,” he whined. “Listen, wake up. I’ve been limping around this hellhole of a ship looking for the Scorpian robot, and—”
“Shut up,” snarled Pertin through the outside communicator of his cocoon. His tone took the chimp aback. He slumped on his haunches, staring at Pertin’s cocoon. He was in bad shape, Pertin saw, unwilling to care about what he saw: the bright green plume was sagging under the thrust of the rockets, the paws and knuckles were scarred and stained. That was why he was there, of course: feet and paws, he could withstand the constantly varying G-force of the thrusters with only a good deal of pain, so it was his job to do what Pertin could not when he was bound to the cocoon. A part of Pertin’s brain told him that if he tried he probably could find ways of making the job easier.
The chimp’s expression was no longer woebegone, it was angry.
“Sure,” he said thickly, “I’ll shut up. Why not? We’ll all shut up before long. Dead beings are all pretty quiet.”
Pertin fought to control his own anger. “We’ll be dead all right. What difference does it make? Do you think this is a real life, what we’re doing here? Back on Sun One we’re alive and well; this is only a dream!”
The chimp wailed, “Ben James, I’m tired and I hurt. I’m sorry if I said something wrong. Look, I’ll go away and come back, only—”
“Do that,” snapped Pertin, turning off the outside communicator.
His agitated hairy face stared dolefully in at him. Doc Chimp was by no means a jungle primate. The shape of his skull was different, the structure of his respiratory system was different, the very chemicals that flowed in his blood were different. But he was not human, either. Doc Chimp – his formal name was not that, but it was all Pertin had ever called him - was one of the mutated animals who had been constructed for special purposes in the molecular biology plants on Earth.
His quadridexterous hands and feet made him particularly useful even in free fall, where he could fling himself about with perfect ease from toe-rest to hand-hold, while humans like Pertin clumsily sprawled and spun. But he had his drawbacks.
A chimpanzee is simply not a human. His physiology is one count against him. He cannot develop the brain of a human because his skull is the wrong shape, and because the chemistry of his blood does not carry enough nourishment to meet the demands of abstract thought. He cannot speak because he lacks the physical equipment to form the wide variety of phonemes in human language. The molecular-biology people knew how to deal with that: things like widening the angle of the cranium called the “kyphosis”, thus allowing the brain to round out full frontal lobes, restructuring tongue and palate, even adding new serum components to the blood like the alphas-globulins that bind human haemoglobin.
In practical terms what had been done to Doc Chimp and his siblings was to speed up evolution. But that was not quite enough. Two generations back Doc Chimp’s ancestors could form only one or two of the simplest words and learn rote tricks; they lacked conceptual thought entirely. Doc Chimp had capacity. He did not have background or tradition. His sixty-degree kyphosis was close to the human average, so that his skull was domed; he possessed a forehead; he could remember complicated instructions and perform difficult tasks; he was capable of assimilating the equivalent of a trade-school education in skill and of conducting the equivalent of cocktail-party conversation in performance. What he lacked was ego. His psychological profile was high in cyclothymia but also in ergic tension; his moods shifted drastically, and he was always adventurous, always afraid. His emotional index was about equal to that of a human five-year-old. Frightened, he ran. Angered, he struck out. Baffled, he wept.