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.
Finally exhausted, after Neuronius was left far behind, he stopped. He had left the path and had been plunging through dense vegetation, ripping it out by the roots when it would not yield otherwise. He stood there, recharging his reserve pack. Inthe wild scramble, he had used all the output of his microfusion reactor and more, bleeding his reserves until he was forced to stop.
Then he slowly began to transform from one imprint to the next, trying to find peace of mind, going back from Jacob to Synapo to Wolruf to Derec and finally to KeenEye, to the form in which he had first known being and BeastTongue.
Inthe wolf-like KeenEye imprint, using only a fraction of the output from her reactor, she began loping easily through the forest, finding and following the animal trails that had been created by the natural denizens of Oyster World. She found a measure of peace in the pleasant natural scents left there by those very basic creatures, creatures much lower in the scale of life than LifeCrier, but still so like him in their familiar but dissimilar musky scent.
The night passed as she roamed aimlessly through the Forest of Repose.
Dawn found her at the edge of the forest below The Cliff of Time, back at the trail that led to the clearing where Neuronius had lectured her. The night had served to clarify one thing. She must talk to Synapo again before she could make a final judgment of the humanity of Neuronius.
She could find Synapo by radio, but the only tactful way to talk to him was on the wing. She could not ask him to come to her. He had left the clear impression he did not want to talk to her further. She must go back to the Synapo imprint in order to talk to him on his terms.
When SilverSide finished the transition to blackbody form, the sun was just rising over The Cliff of Time. There was a Ceremyon circling high over the dome in Synapo's accustomed station. SilverSide wobble-hopped into the air and climbed in a long, slanted rise, gaining the necessary altitude to reach the alien in the course of spanning the distance from The Cliff of Time.
When SilverSide arrived above the dome, the alien's hook was pointing aft, so he must be amenable to conversation.
With his hook also pointing aft, SilverSide quietly glided up beside the alien and said, “Leader Synapo, I need to resolve a matter of…”
“Sarco,” the alien said. “Synapo will arise late this morning.”
Talking to Sarco might be better than talking to Synapo. Sarco knew both Neuronius and Synapo and was a leader himself. Who better to judge between the two?
“I must get a matter of extreme urgency resolved, leader Sarco, a matter of understanding Synapo better so as to compare him with Neuronius-and properly place him in a hierarchy of intelligence relative to Neuronius-who claims to be the most intelligent creature on this planet.”
“Neuronius? By the Great Petero,” Sarco hissed, emitting a small green flame simultaneously.
“Neuronius says further that he is a human, and not a Ceremyon, that there are no others of his species on this planet.”
“I hesitate to term him a Ceremyon myself,” Sarco said, “but unfortunately he is-a paranoid Ceremyon suffering delusions of grandeur. He is certainly not more intelligent than Synapo, take my word for it. He wouldn't have been ejected from the Cerebron elite if he were.”
“He has been a member of Ceremyon society then?”
“Most certainly. Something we all regret now, but did little about at the time, because Neuronius was so insidiously clever. Cleverness, however, does not equate to wisdom and intelligence.”
“Thank you for your help. You have been of great assistance. I will take my leave now.”
SilverSide balled and dropped.
Chapter 21. Reprieve
They had posted Jacob and Mandelbrot on the balcony of the apartment to watch throughout the night for premature closing of the dome.
“This reminds me of another night before you came,” Jacob said to Mandelbrot. “I spent it much as we are destined to spend this night, but I did not have your company.”
“I trust nothing untoward happened that night,” Mandelbrot said.
“No. But that was the last night Miss Ariel spent under a dome that might imprison her inescapably. She spent the next night in the lorry, sleeping on the back seat. The next morning that first crisis with the aliens was resolved. “
“Let us hope this crisis will be similarly resolved with a pleasant ending. What are the chances of the wild one, do you think?”
“As you observed earlier, he is unpredictable,” Jacob said, “but I wished him a great deal of success for Miss Ariel's sake. It would seem that wish has gone astray. His return is long overdue.”
“I fear you are right,” Mandelbrot said. “Master Derec observed that the alien leaders returned in midafternoon to their normal stations, though that was not altogether clear to me, since one looks so much like another.”