“I was born on Earth. I was a commoner, with a contract. This gave me a way out, and when it’s over I’ll be free to do as I like.”
It was close to the truth, and the pilot was nodding sympathetically. “Ah, I’ve heard about Earth. Everything’s relative. Maybe after that, Barchan don’t seem so much like the ass-end of the universe. I know that Leah Rainbow seemed pleased enough to be here. Did you get recruited the same way she did?”
“Pretty much. We were both recruited by Commander Mondrian.”
“Good enough. You’ve answered my questions, now I’ll answer yours. I’ll up your odds of success from one in four to fifty-fifty. Mondrian’s as hard as Tinker-shit and cold as Angel-heart, but he’s one sharp son of a bitch. And he don’t pick losers.” She swung the door closed and grinned at him through the window. “I mean, usually,” she shouted. “But there’s exceptions to everything. Fifty-fifty! Good luck!”
She gave him a wave and set off for the cluster of service buildings. Chan sat quietly in the car, inspecting the landscape around him. They were in Barchan’s low polar regions, where winter temperature would allow a human to survive without a suit except around noon. The vegetation, such as it was, was deep-rooted and covered in waxy blue-green foliage. At the pole itself it would grow in Barchan’s half-g surface gravity to fifty meters or more; here it sat low to the ground, tight-wrapped to conserve moisture. The soil beneath the plants was dry, dark,” and basaltic, rising in slow, brooding folds away from the landing area. Gusty surface winds lifted the top layer of soil up and about the parked aircar in twisting dust-devils of dark grey. Near the equator that sand layer was hundreds of feet deep. The constant winds blew it into the miles-long crescent-shaped barchan dunes that gave the planet its name.
Eta Cassiopeiae’s twin suns hung close to the horizon. They lit the scene with orange, dust-filtered light. This dour landscape, according to Chan’s briefings, was the most attractive part of the planet.
He wondered where the Artefact might be hiding. According to those same briefings, it would have no trouble living anywhere on Barchan — even in the scorching equatorial regions where only micro-organisms survived.
The three service buildings stood a kilometer away from the parked aircar. As Chan watched, a swirling veil of dark purple emerged from one of the buildings and blew like a rolling cloud of dust towards the car. When it was fifty yards away Chan opened the door. The individual components of the cloud could now be resolved. They were purple-black winged creatures, all identical and each about as big as his finger. They approached with a whirring of wings. In less than thirty seconds every one of them had entered the aircar door and settled all over the rear of the main cabin.
Chan closed the door and turned to watch. He had seen the next phase in briefing displays, but this was his first exposure to the real thing.
It began with one component — an apparently arbitrary one — hovering in mid air with its purple-and-black body vertical. A ring of pale green eyes on the head stared all around, as though assessing the situation, while the wings fluttered too fast to see. After a moment another component flew in to attach at the head end, and a third one settled into position beneath. Thin, whiplike antennae reached out and connected heads to tails. The triplet hovered, wines vibrating. A fourth and fifth element new over to join the nucleus of the group.
After that the aggregation grew too fast for Chan to watch individual connections. As new components were added the Composite extended outward and downwards, to make contact with and derive support from the cabin floor. Within a minute the main body was complete. To Chan’s surprise — something not pointed out in the briefings — most of the individual components still remained unattached. Of the total who had entered the cabin, maybe a fifth were now connected to form a compact mass; the remainder stood tail-first on the cabin floor or hung singly from the walls using the small claws on the front of their shiny leather-like wings.
The mass of the Tinker Composite began to form a funnel-like opening in its topmost extremity. From that aperture came an experimental hollow wheeze. “Ohhh-anhh-gggghh. Hharr-ehh-looo,” it said. Then, in an oddly accented variety of solar speech, “Har-e-loo. Hal-loo.”
Kubo Flammarion had warned that this was inevitable. “Imagine,” he said, “that somebody took you apart every night and put you back together every morning. Don’t you think it would take a little while to get your act together? So make allowances for the Tinkers.”
Chan couldn’t imagine it. But he suspected that the little captain, a long-time alcoholic and a recent Paradox addict, knew that morning-after where’s-the-rest-of-me feeling rather too well.
“Hello,” he said, in response to the Tinker’s greeting. “Hello.”
As he had been advised to do, he waited.
“We-ee arre-eh,” said a whistling voice. There was a substantial pause, then, “We are … Shikari.”
“Hello. You should call me Chan.”
This time it was the Tinker who waited expectantly. “Shikari is an old Earth word,” it said at last when Chan did not respond. “It means hunter. We think that it is appropriate. And perhaps also amusing? But you did not laugh.’
“I’m sorry. I never heard the word before.”
“Yes.” The funnel buzzed briefly. “You see, we were making a joke. We do not think that you are amused. You do not look it.”
Look it. Chan wondered if the Tinker could actually see him. The individual components had in total many thousands of eyes, but how were they used for vision by the Composite? He gestured to the myriad of components still scattered around the cabin.
“Are all of you Shikari? Or only the ones who are connected?”
There was a buzzing pause. An indication of contusion? “We think that we understand your question, but we are not sure. We all in past time have been Shikari. We all in future time will be Shikari; and we all in now-time can be Shikari. But in now-time we are not all Shikari.”
“I understand. But why are you not all Shikari now? Don’t you think better when you are all connected?”
The Tinker had taken on- a roughly human outline, with arms, legs, and head. When it moved forward in the cabin it was propelled by two different actions, the turning of body connections and the movement of thousands of component wings.
“Chan, you ask a many-questions-in-one question,” said the whistling voice. “Listen carefully. First, if we wish we can join all together at any time.”
“And you have more brainpower when you do it?”
“Yes, and no. When we join we certainly have more thinking material available — which you may call brainpower. But we are also less efficient. We are slower. We have a much longer integration time — the time it takes for us to complete a thought and reach a decision. That time grows fast-as-growth-itself — as you say, exponentially — with the number of components. When there is much, much time available, and the problem is large, we combine more units in us. More join, to make one body. But then the integration time can become so long that individual components begin to starve. We cannot, when connected, search for food. So components must leave, or die.
“What you see now is the most effective form, our preferred compromise between speed of thought and depth of thought. The free components that you see now will eat, rest, and mate. When the right time comes there will be exchange. Rested-and-fed-of-us will take the place of tired-and-hungry-of-us.”
Chan had a score more questions, although they were already late for take-off. How did a Composite decide when and how to form? Was it adopting a human shape only for his convenience? How intelligent were the components, if at all? (He had the feeling that question had been answered during his early briefings on Horus, but anything told to him before the Tolkov Stimulator worked its miracle felt vague and unreliable.) How did the components know whether to join the Composite or stay away? Most important of all, if a Tinker was varying its composition all the time, how could there possibly be a single self-awareness and a specific personality? Shikari had all that, and claimed a sense of humor, too.