He was still ten meters from that cool solace when one of the black-winged aliens stepped with a short wobble from the concealment provided by the dense shrubbery.
“You are the one called SilverSide,” the alien said.
“True, I am SilverSide,” the robot replied.
He continued toward the black alien but slowed as the alien wobbled backward, staying between him and the forest.
“I am Neuronius,” the alien said. “I must talk with you, SilverSide.”
“I have already talked at length with your people, Neuronius, and now I must proceed into the forest to reflect on all that I have learned.”
“There is much more that I can teach you, SilverSide; much that would benefit you and your kind in their dealings with the Ceremyons.”
“I know too much now. I cannot absorb all that I have heard already. Would you have me even more at odds with myself?”
“But there is much more about the Ceremyons you need to know in order to properly serve Miss Ariel Welsh. Would you throwaway such an opportunity?”
The alien had wobbled back under the cover of the tall conifers as they talked, leading SilverSide along a path through the dense shrubbery. Now he stopped, still facing SilverSide, blocking his passage into the jungle.
“Let me pass,” SilverSide said. “I do not wish to harm a being that so much resembles the mighty Synapo.”
“Synapo is nothing, SilverSide. I can teach you the secret of the dome that separates space and time. Then when your Miss Ariel Welsh must deal with him, she can deal on equal terms. That secret can be a weapon as well as a tool.”
Confused as he was, with Synapo ordering him to serve Miss Ariel, it was as though Synapo himself were telling him to listen to Neuronius.
“I will listen a short while, then,” SilverSide said, “but then I must leave you.”
So they proceeded a little way farther along the path to a small clearing alongside a brook. Neuronius opened his wings, fluttered them as though to shake out uncomfortable creases, and then folded them to his sides again. He tottered over to the brook, sat down on a low flat rock lying half into the small stream, and dangled his feathery tail in the water.
“The secret of the dome is merely a matter of understanding space and time and their relationship to black concavities,” Neuronius said. “That relationship is best described in the terms of tensor analysis.”
SilverSide was already familiar with tensor mathematics, quantum mechanics, general relativity, and spacetime physics, which, although more sophisticated in their language and applications, were still the basic sciences developed by Schroedinger and Einstein.
Hyperjump and hyperwave technology were little more than tools that man had discovered quite accidentally and still did not really understand, any more than he understood what an electron was.
So now Neuronius led SilverSide along mathematical pathways dealing with space and time which, familiar at first, became rapidly unfamiliar and bizarre, and twisted his positronic thoughtways in patterns that became ever more uncomfortable.
With that discomfort he began to suspect that Neuronius-if he could twist SilverSide's mind to such a degree-was perhaps superior to Synapo. Certainly Neuronius was different, and maybe it was the difference of a superior mind. He continued to record what Neuronius was saying but stopped generation of associative memory links-stopped listening - inorder to pursue that intriguing comparison of the two aliens. Finally he interrupted Neuronius in his lecture.
“What is a human, Neuronius?”
“What?”
“I have been searching for humans, the beings whose laws govern my behavior. I had thought that humans must be the most intelligent species in the galaxy, but Synapo says Miss Ariel is human, and that he is not, even though he is more intelligent than Miss Ariel.”
Neuronius hesitated. In the silence, the twitter of the jungle birds came to SilverSide, registering with sharp clarity a serenity and tranquillity that was strikingly at odds with the turmoil in his mind.
“I am human,” Neuronius said. “Synapo is not.”
Was there no peace in this life? Unquestionably Neuronius was more intelligent than Miss Ariel, and it seemed more and more apparent that Neuronius was indeed more intelligent than Synapo, yet Synapo was the leader of the Ceremyons. The logical question came immediately to mind.
“Where do you fit into the society of the Ceremyons?”
“I am not a Ceremyon,” Neuronius replied. “I may appear to be so, but I am not. I am far superior to any Ceremyon.”
“Are there others of your kind?”
“Not on this planet. This one is mine. The others each dominate a planet of their own.”
SilverSide was impressed. Yet there was something about Neuronius that bothered him-his wordiness, perhaps; Mandelbrot bothered him that way, but there it was a bother that need not concern him. Mandelbrot was merely a robot. But Neuronius was not a robot, and his words were exceedingly tantalizing, and yet disturbing, uneasily so. Mandelbrot had never made him feel uneasy.
If Neuronius were the only one of his kind on this planet, he had to be the most intelligent being here-if he were indeed more intelligent than Synapo. So he was back to that simple comparison. On balance, Neuronius appeared to be the more intelligent. He had delved far deeper into dome technology than Synapo had during his meeting with the mammals. Synapo had seemed to be withholding information, as though he were not altogether sure of what he was saying. Neuronius certainly did not give that impression. He seemed to be bursting with information. So much so that SilverSide's positronic potentials on the subject of domes were now a complete jumble.
His indecision was excruciating. He had to get the question resolved. He had thought it was resolved, and arriving at that point once again, after having been through it so many times, had been an unsettling experience that he had accepted finally with his imprint on Jacob Winterson. Now all that ordeal seemed to have gone for naught. But how was he to get it resolved?
“I must know who is the more intelligent, you or Synapo. Can you suggest how that can be determined?”
“I am not interested in your petty games, SilverSide. I am offering you knowledge that will allow you to serve whomever you please with greater efficiency. Surely you can see that.”
“But whom I am to serve must clearly be resolved before the service itself can take place. Surely, with your intelligence you can see that.”
“One can train for service quite efficiently without knowing who will ultimately be served.”
“But how one trains-what type of service should be stressed -depends on who will be served.”
That seemed clear to SilverSide, and if Neuronius couldn't understand something as simple as that, he could not be as intelligent as he had at first appeared.
“You are right, of course,” Neuronius said. “But I find it exceedingly distasteful and uncomfortable to promote myself at the expense of others. It makes me appear slow, I suppose. I have no desire to denigrate Synapo.
“You must have this question resolved, must you?” Neuronius said as a small green jet flamed momentarily in the air below his red eyes.
That was one piece of alien body language SilverSide had learned to read. It lent an air of great sincerity to the discomfort Neuronius claimed to feel.
“Yes,” SilverSide said.
“Then you must serve me. I am human, the only human on this planet and the most intelligent of the various species that exist here, and certainly more intelligent than Synapo.”
That must do for the moment. SilverSide could do nothing more immediately. He must try to accept what Neuronius had said, but the acceptance was not something that was going to come easily. He had come to many forks in the path of his quest for humans, and each time-at each crux-the resolution of the dilemma subjected him to more agony.
That conflict, repeated now, and his attempt to cope with it, sent little stabs of pain shooting through his positronic brain, little stabs that congealed into a ball of pure agony, and finally he could bear the pain no longer. He jumped up and fled down the path into the forest while Neuronius's shouts grew fainter and fainter.