Harry had been one of those rescued castaways. He had been one of the first to arrive on Arabella, too. He was a strong, adventurous young man when he landed on the catastrophic disappointment that was the planet of Arabella. By the time the rescue ship got there, forty-five years later, he had become both old and very feeble. Harry managed to squeeze out another couple of years of organic life, mostly in the intensive-care units of the nearest medical facility. But by then his physical body had deteriorated past the point where repair was possible, and so he had been vastened as a machine intelligence. At some point it was decided that he might be considered to have some value as an expert, if not on the Kugels, at least on what the Kugels could do in the way of destruction. So he was brought out here.
Harry had told me this story before, of course—in fact, he told it quite frequently, with special emphasis on how little variety they had had in what they had to eat. Probably, he said, the planet had once had lots of plants and animals, but the Kugels bad been pretty thorough.
What interested me was that there would be some of those same Kugels in our party.
That was really unusual. I had never seen any Kugels up close. No one else on the Wheel had, either. The Kugelblitz itself was perfectly visible at all times from the Wheel; that's what the Wheel was there for. The Kugelblitz wasn't just one thing. It was a congeries of yellowish blobs surrounded by a screen of black holes (so that if any stray bit of matter, say a wandering comet, threatened to fall into one of the Kugelblitzes it would be drawn into one of the black holes instead). Usually there was no contact with it except through the Dream Seat operators whose job was to "watch" the object day and night.
Apparently the watching had gone much farther than I had known.
While I was checking Arabella out, one of my more annoying clients had suddenly requested a dinner of samphire salad with naan. I wasn't surprised. This was one of the ones who were always trying to stump me with unusual orders—Savoie dishes from the thirteenth-century court of Amedee VIII, fried squid ink, oddities of all sorts. What made this one annoying was that he was a living organic human, so my effectors had to prepare real physical food.
This meal was fairly easy. Naan is just a flat wheat bread from Afghanistan, and I had the recipe in my datastore. Samphire took a little more work. It's a kind of salad green from England's midland bogs that people ate in the Middle Ages because they didn't have anything better. I had no record of it, and there was no way to get a sample to analyze, because it's been extinct for centuries. So I made up some spinach with a few bok choy genes and sent it along. He didn't question it. He'd never seen the real thing either.
That was when Breeze showed up, looking frazzled. "I've got about twenty milliseconds. Got my eggs?" she demanded. I had, of course. "Good, they're nice and hot," she said, tasting. Of course they were. That's one advantage of preparing meals for customers like her. My simulated dishes for machine-stored intelligences are at whatever temperature I order them to be, and they stay that way, with no loss of freshness or flavor, until I order them to be otherwise.
I had set a little table for her, a single white rose in a crystal vase, a damask napkin in the peacock fold, heavy silver tableware and Spode china—Breeze liked these human fripperies. "Pretty busy at the Authority?" I asked, politely.
She gave me a shrewd look. Between bites she said, "You know we are. Right about now—" She paused, as though listening for something. When it came I felt it too. Not a full-fledged alarm, because there would have been no mistaking that, but a sort of hiccough of the alarm systems, quickly aborted. "There it is," she said with satisfaction, "so I'd better get back."
I was already checking all my sensors to find out what had happened. I stopped long enough to ask her, "What should I be doing right now?"
She swallowed a final bite, dabbed at her thin Heechee lips with the napkin, said, "Pack," and was gone.
She was right about that, so I decided to get ready for the trip. Neither she nor I was talking about packing a bag, of course—machine intelligences don't have anything to pack—but about something a bit more personal.
It isn't hard to duplicate a machine intelligence like me. All you need to do is copy the programs, one by one, onto an assembler. That took only a few dozen microseconds, and then there were two of us in my surround.
"Hello, Marc Antony Two," I said to my double, and my double responded at once:
"Why do you call me Two? You're the one who's a copy."
That's the sort of thing you always get among us programs when you make us into precisely identical copies. We always solve it the same way, too. The other Marc Antony and I each generated three random prime numbers, fairly big ones of three or four hundred digits each. Then we added all six of them together. The new number wasn't a prime anymore. It obviously couldn't be, right?, since as a minimum it had become even when we added six odd numbers together. Then it was a simple matter to factor out its divisors. One of which turned out to be closer to one of my original primes than to any of Marc Two's, so I won.
"Conceded," Marc Two said philosophically. "Well, have a good— hey! What's that?"
I had been about to say much the same thing, because my sensors were finally letting us know that what had almost, but not quite, triggered an alarm had been an emission from the Kugelblitz. I said, "I think I'd better go talk to Thor Hammerhurler."
"Of course. It's what I would have done, too." So I left him checking the temperature of the pudding in the oven and assembling some pommes de terre frites for Semyon Larbachev and the three hungry grandsons he was baby-sitting while their parents were at work. I put in a call to a person I have mentioned earlier, Thor Hammerhurler.
Thor does not actually ever hurl any hammers. He has much more powerful weapons at his disposal. He is not an entity you will lightly disturb. We're on the same team, though; if there were ever any real war against the Kugels I would be the first system he would call up. When he displayed himself for me it wasn't as a god from Valhalla but as some kind of human Army officer from maybe the mid-twenty-first century, with light-up decorations all across his chest and projectile weapons in holsters at his waist. "Hello, Marc," he said pleasantly. "What can I do for you?"
"Almost a second ago there was an emission from the Kugelblitz. Was that related to my proposed mission to Arabella?"
Thor grinned at me. "It was. The emission was to transmit a packet of Kugels to the Wheel. They will go with you on your mission."