Even the four survival team members looked right. The Have-It-All’s stripped-down robodoc hadn’t been able to do much more than hold the status quo. Teri Dahl wore a body cast and was clearly paralyzed below the waist, Ben Blesh had a neck brace and his face was a swollen mass of purple-yellow blotches surrounding sunken bloodshot eyes, Torran Veck’s upper body was a mass of bandages, and Sinara Bellstock was relatively intact but had the expression of someone in need of about a year’s sleep. Instead of being neat and clean and fresh-faced and enthusiastic, each one was bedraggled and filthy. Louis could for the first time believe that the group might actually be earning its keep.
Archimedes was sprawled along one whole wall of the room. Nenda went to sit on the Zardalu’s meter-thick mid-section, and Kallik at once hurried over to crouch at his feet.
E.C. Tally was standing at the far end of the room, next to the captured beetleback. It had been in poor shape when it reached the Have-It-All, and recent treatment had done nothing to improve that. The dark ventral body plates had been ripped open along their center line and folded back. The interior was exposed, and parts of it had been removed.
It was now obvious to everyone what Atvar H’sial’s ultrasonic vision had seen at once. The recent evisceration had not killed the beetleback, because it had never been alive. Its innards were a tangle of wires, tubes, junction boxes, and hydraulics. When Nenda entered the room, E.C. Tally had just pulled out a valve. He was apparently in the middle of a lecture describing how the mechanism was constructed, and how it functioned. From the restless look of his audience, he had been at it for some time.
After three more minutes, Julian Graves said, “This is all very interesting, E.C. But some of us would rather hear what the beetlebacks did, rather than how they did it.”
“But these data are of great potential value.”
“I’m sure they are. So why don’t you download everything—later—into the Have-It-All’s computer. Describe all that you have discovered about the way a beetleback is built and functions. But tell us, now, what you have learned about what the beetlebacks were doing, and why.”
“I have learned a great deal, and I conjecture even more. I will rank and present these findings in order of their estimated interest to this particular audience. First, regarding the beings who are extinguishing suns and removing all heat from them and their planets in a region of the Sag Arm: they are not, in their own terms, destroying these systems. They are rather, with the assistance of their own constructs, the beetlebacks, modifying star systems for their own use. The beetlebacks, much like Builder constructs, possess notions regarding their own creators that are of questionable validity. However, it seems clear that those creators require extremely cold temperatures if they are to survive and function. The name we have been using, Masters of Cold, appears entirely appropriate. It is my conjecture, although not that of the beetlebacks, that the Masters of Cold are some composite and sentient form of Bose-Einstein Condensates.”
Graves objected at once, “E.C., that is nonsense and you should know it. Bose-Einstein Condensates exist only with ambient temperatures within a few hundred billionths of a degree of absolute zero. No place in the natural universe is so cold.”
“Councilor, I of course do realize that.”
“So there is no possible way that the Masters of Cold could ever have developed in the first place.”
“They did not develop. Everything in the data bank of the beetlebacks points to a different origin. The Masters of Cold are themselves a creation—a creation of the Builders. They are a form of artifact.”
Tally’s audience had been listening quietly, but this was too much for Darya Lang. Sitting opposite Louis Nenda, she jumped to her feet and burst out, “E.C., that’s impossible. You were not on Iceworld with us, so you wouldn’t know this. But a Builder construct there assured us that the coming of extreme cold destroyed both that world and a complicated transportation system established by the Builders. It’s not reasonable to suggest that constructs which are themselves Builder creations would destroy Builder works.”
“I offer only the most probable answer, not a final one. The Masters of Cold are artifacts, created by the Builders. But they are constructs over which the Builders themselves have lost control.”
That stopped everyone, even Louis, who had divided his attention between watching the reactions of others and listening to E.C. Tally’s explanation as closely as he listened to anything that was no more than a theory. For thousands of years everyone had assumed that the Builders were super-beings who could do anything they liked. That something could challenge or defy Builder technology—people just didn’t think that way.
But E.C. was not people. He was an embodied computer, following the implications of the given data by strictly logical processes to wherever it might lead.
Tally continued, “Professor Lang, you yourself proposed the presence in the Sag Arm of two different kinds of superior forms, adversarial to each other. Others here objected strongly to your suggestion, on probabilistic grounds. What are the odds, they said, of two such forms arising? However, those objections disappear at once if one superior form is the creation of the other.
“This"—Tally pointed to the gutted beetleback at his side—"is a secondary product, the creation of a creation. Marglot was once a special world, a nexus to many worlds established by the Builders. Had we not arrived there, the whole Marglot system would also have become the domain of the Masters of Cold. They had already taken the first steps, with the extinction of life on Marglot and the draining of energy from M-2. Halting the fusion reaction within the parent star would come next. That order of processes appears different from what we observed in the system where we first arrived in the Sag Arm. It is a disturbing thought, but I conjecture that the Masters of Cold are still learning the fastest and most effective ways of accomplishing their changes.”
“So who brought us here?” Julian Graves asked. “Here, all the way from the Orion Arm.”
“I am forced to assume that it was the Builders, since a variety of paths constructed by them all led to Marglot.”
“Wrong question,” Hans Rebka said. “Forget who. Why? Why were we brought here?”
“Again, I am obliged to conjecture. We were brought here so that we could be warned of danger, far in the future, to our own spiral arm.”
“No, no, no.” Claudius was sitting as far away from Archimedes as he could get. The Have-It-All had been stripped of spare reactor capacity, along with everything else, but somewhere on the ship the Chism Polypheme had managed to find a source of enough hard radiation to turn his corkscrew body a pleasant pale green. “No, no, no,” his croaking voice repeated, while his single slate-gray eye rolled to survey everyone in the room. “That’s not the way the real world wags. I don’t know about the Orion Arm, but in the Sagittarius Arm you don’t bring people a long way to warn them. You bring them a long way only if they can help you.”
Louis, about to agree vigorously, decided it was wiser to keep quiet. Let Claudius be blamed for a suggestion that anybody in his right mind would think reasonable.