It was all interesting, of course. By the third time around, the Subramanians had learned that, measured against the approximate size of one of their spacecraft, the average Nine-Limbed couldn’t be much more than eighteen or twenty centimeters long. And, according to the commentary with the second showing of the Machine-Stored, that name described precisely what they were. They were machine-stored. The biological bodies shown were a historical fact, but now every member of that race survived only in electronic storage. So Myra informed Ranjit as he returned from carrying the sleeping Robert off to bed.
“Huh,” he said, returning to his favorite armchair. “That’s convenient. I guess then you can live pretty much forever, wouldn’t you say?”
“Probably so,” she agreed. “I’m going to make myself a cup of tea. Want some?”
He did. When she came back with the two cups, the screen was displaying one of the Nine-Limbeds removing the fabric from between two of another’s hip joints and then rubbing the exposed flesh with his own ninth limb. “Hey,” Myra said, setting a cup before her husband. “What’s he doing, giving the other one a bath?”
“Maybe changing his oil,” Ranjit said. “Who knows? Listen, all this is recorded, so why don’t we turn it off for now and we can come back to it when we want to?”
“Good idea,” Myra said, reaching out and doing it for him. “I wanted to ask you something anyway. What is it that we haven’t seen in this parade?”
Ranjit nodded. “I know. The ones they were talking about. The ones they call the Grand Galactics.”
“They’re the ones, and they sound important. And yet they’re not showing them to us.”
41
HOME AGAIN
By the time Natasha, the real Natasha, was back in her own bed at the Colombo house, one would have expected that the running commentary delivered to the world by the not-Natasha would be long over. Well, it was…sort of. That is, all sixty-two hours of it had been repeated three times and then stopped, but for reasons of their own the Nine-Limbeds gave encore performances every few days.
The human race did not consider this a blessing. The Nine-Limbeds’ voice-over was not delivered in English only. It was repeated in just about every language and dialect used by any group of people large enough to command some broadcast time somewhere. That was a large number, large enough to tie up much of the world’s satellite links to the detriment of human affairs.
The other effect this had was to give young Natasha plenty of time to study her simulated self as it appeared on the screen—skimpy halter top and errant curl over her left ear and all. It never changed. It wasn’t a spectacle Natasha enjoyed watching, either. “Gives me the cold shivers,” she admitted to her parents. “There I am, saying things I know I never said, and it’s me!”
“But it isn’t, hon,” her mother said reasonably. “They just somehow copied you, I guess so that they could have someone to speak for them who didn’t look like a nightmare.”
“But where was I while they were doing that? I don’t remember a thing! I saw Ron Olsos trying to steal my solar wind, and then all of a sudden I was—Well, I don’t know where. Sort of nowhere at all. Only warm and comfortable—possibly the way I was when I was still inside you, Mother.”
Myra shook her head in puzzlement. “Robert told us you were happy.”
“I guess I was. And then the next thing I knew I was sitting at the controls, yelling for help, with Diana all collapsed around me.”
Myra patted her arm. “And you got help, love, because here you are. And speaking of the Olsos boy, there are four more texts that came in from him while you were sleeping. All saying how sorry he was and asking if he can see you to apologize.”
That made Natasha grin at last. “Sure he can,” she said. “Just not right away. And right now, is there any breakfast?”
For most of the human race those senseless repetitions of the alien roll call were a terrible waste of time and communications facilities. Not for all, though. The tiny church of satanists had seen the pre-storage images of the Machine-Stored and immediately decided that the spiky-furred humanoid was indeed the image of the devil—just as a few million other viewers had at once decided—but, they argued, that wasn’t a bad thing. His Satanic Majesty was to be worshipped, not loathed. Scripture proved it, if read with proper understanding, for Lucifer had been driven from heaven because of character assassination by rival angels. “He isn’t our enemy,” said one of their bishops rhapsodically. “He is our king!”
What the church’s scrawny handful of members, mostly in the American Southwest, chose to believe would not have greatly concerned most of the human race—except for two factors. First, there was that worrisome remark about “sterilizing” Earth. That implied that those alien horrors did have the capacity to wipe humanity out if they chose, and that was not a thing easy to forget. And, second, the satanists weren’t just a handful of nutcases anymore. Even a nutcase knew what the sound of opportunity knocking at the door was like. They grasped their chance. Every satanist who had any status in the organization higher than pew-polisher went immediately on every talk program that would have them. Their hope was that the world was full of other nutcases like themselves who just had never been recruited to Satan worship because they had not yet been convinced there actually was a Satan. The satanists hoped these nutcases would be swung into line by the sight of the demonic Machine-Stored.
They were right. By the third showing of the horrid creatures called Machine-Stored, nearly a hundred thousand instant converts were begging for Satan’s sacraments. By the time of the first rerun, the congregation of the church of satanists was already in the high millions, and two competing—that is to say, heretical—satanist churches were already battling them for membership. Other cults and pseudo-religions prospered as well, but none prospered nearly as much as the satanists.
They were all, of course, crazy. “Or the next thing to it,” Ranjit told Gamini Bandara when he called. “Why are you worrying about it?”
“Because even a crazy person can pull a trigger, Ranj. Isn’t it true that Natasha has had death threats?”
Ranjit thought that over for a moment before he answered. His daughter had been very emphatic about not telling anyone about that, but still—“Well, yes,” he admitted. “Stupid stuff. She doesn’t take them seriously.”
“Well, I do,” Gamini informed him, “and so does my father. He’s ordering twenty-four-hour guards around your house and to go with any of you who goes out.”
Ranjit was shaking his head. “I don’t think that’s necessary—” he began.
“Doesn’t matter what you think,” Gamini said cheerfully. “Dad’s the president now, so he’s the one who gives the orders. Anyway, if it wasn’t the Feds, it’d be somebody else. Your pal Joris Vorhulst is getting threats, too. He’s already got a bunch of armed guards around the Skyhook base. Now he’s talking about putting Skyhook security forces around everybody connected with the project. You included.”
Ranjit opened his mouth to protest—not as much because he couldn’t stand the idea of being guarded twenty-four hours a day as because he anticipated his daughter’s reaction—but Gamini didn’t give him the chance. “So you see, Ranj,” he said reasonably, “it’s going to happen. There’s no sense in fighting it. And, you know, it just might save all your lives.”