"I thought the film made that clear."
"Not to me," Cathay put in. "I didn't understand that, or just what the alternatives are to the human race if we don't cooperate."
"Ah." William pursed his lips. "Perhaps we need to make some changes in the final sections before we release it. You see how valuable this can be to us? I'll turn you over to our Minister for Assimilation. Alicia?"
If William seemed stilted and slightly unreal in his mannerisms, Alicia was little more than a manikin. Lilo could imagine strings leading to her arms and legs. She wondered just what kind of beings these Traders were. Alicia soon answered her.
"As I hope you understood from the film," she said, "what you see before you is not the result of Trader culture or Trader genes. This room and our bodies were tailored for this meeting. We had been studying you for nearly eight hundred years, listening to your radio and television broadcasts. We have been here much longer than that; our first visit to Earth was twenty thousand years ago. Since then we have waited for you to come to us.
"We have been learning how to be humans."
She spread her hands. "It is an impossible task to do at a distance, but this station is an experimental laboratory for the assimilation of human cultures. There are two hundred environmental cells below us, duplicating the conditions of various human societies of the present and past. In addition, we are prepared to conduct crossbreeding experiments, merging cultures already in our possession with what we learn of human culture. As you can see, we have at this time only an imperfect grasp of the essential outlooks and mind-sets that make a human a human."
"Yes, I understand that," Lilo said. "Or I think I do, anyway. You're saying that you have no culture of your own, that you lost it, or it was assimilated into others so thoroughly that you can't separate it out any more."
"True," Alicia said, "so far as it goes. But this was not accidental. We had observed in the other races around us that the vitality tends to be sapped from a people when they are forced to live a million years of a transitory and nomadic existence. That spark that each race possesses—each one of them different—is extinguished, and they vanish. This had happened to many races. So we have made the deliberate effort to change ourselves at every opportunity. Individuals persist—I myself am over two million years old as a group consciousness. I think it would be futile to try and explain to you what that means."
"Yes, you said that in the film," Javelin said, impatiently. "What you still haven't told me is what you want to do. With us. The human race."
"It's very simple. We wish to coexist with some of you for a time. The only way to learn a culture is from the inside out. There are techniques—very like the memory recording that you developed independently, and which we helped you refine—for the superposition of one mind over another. We wish to hitchhike in your minds for a few years. After that time, we will be as human as you are, not the imperfect constructs that you see."
"Do you think this idea will be accepted?" William asked.
"You mean do I think people will buy it?" Javelin asked. She sighed. "I can think of easier things to sell. What will it be like? Like a symb?"
"No, no, nothing so drastic as that. We will be unnoticed observers. After a few years we will leave you to your own devices. But you don't have very long. The Invaders will not give you more than a century before they exterminate you from all your Eight Worlds."
"And how many... ah, how many hosts would you need?"
"A few thousand. To get a representative sample. After that, we can learn humanity from each other." He paused. "We know this is a strange request. The fact is, it is the only thing your race has to offer us. It is the only reason we have bothered to send you the things we have discovered and collected over seven million years. We don't need your gold and silver, your paper money, or anything you would see as wealth. We know all your technology. We don't need you as slaves, as a source of food, or as another link in our chain of empire. And we're not interstellar philanthropists. In point of fact, we are invaders. Your race has experienced a second invasion, and this time you welcomed it."
"What do you mean?" It was Vaffa, always alert to danger.
"This has been a long-distance invasion. We now come to the core of the matter, the penalties for nonpayment we mentioned in the first message. Have you ever heard of the Trojan Horse?"
Lilo looked at her friends. Only Javelin was nodding.
"If you were not of a mind to give value for value received you should have been slower to accept us when we came bearing gifts. But we saw no reluctance. We seldom do. It is a nearly universal trait among races to accept what looks to be free.
"The symbs. They were never a great success, but they've been in the Rings for a long time now, and they breed prolifically. There are now upward of one hundred and ninety million symb-human pairs in Saturn's Rings. Each one is a time bomb. If we were to send the proper signal each pair would be fused into a single being, and it would belong to us, not you. They would be ready to carry out the missions they were programmed for many years ago. They can travel from planet to planet, in hibernation, and when they reach human worlds... well, I leave it to your imagination." He sat back, and so did all the others.
Lilo had no trouble imagining it.
Humans lived underground everywhere but Venus and Mars. Those two places would probably be safe, since they had an atmosphere, but everywhere else the symbs could wreak havoc with the surface life-support facilities.
The possibilities multiplied in her mind. It was easy to forget in the day-to-day existence in secure warrens beneath the surface, but the space environment was constantly at war with air-breathing animals. The one advantage had always been that, though the environment was hostile, it was not malevolent. It did not seek with a will to destroy humans. With proper precautions it could be held at bay.
But with millions of saboteurs, soldiers perfectly adapted to the space environment...
She felt sick when she thought of Parameter. She knew a little of the complexities built into a symb which allowed a pair to survive in space. Solstice could change her body at will to meet the needs of almost any situation. It was not hard to believe that she could dissolve the thin dividing line between her own body and that of Parameter, fusing the two of them into one supremely efficient organism. But what would be left of Parameter as a human being? Parameter had told Lilo that though a pair was very close and could almost be thought of as one being, there always remained some part of each that maintained a separate identity. That would be gone now, if the Traders carried out their threat. There would be only Solstice, and on some level Lilo had never completely trusted the symb.
Was that distrust justified? The Traders had not really said so. Was Solstice as much a puppet to the Traders as Parameter, an unwitting potential ally?
Lilo was about to try to find out, but a loud noise interrupted her. It was a siren of some sort, and all the Traders looked up in consternation. Or at least they made the attempt to look worried, though Lilo shivered again to see just how alien they could look while looking just like human beings.
"Just a minute," said William. "Just a minute. There seems to be a problem. I'll..." He stopped, briefly, and suddenly did not look very human at all. His eyes closed, and all his muscles relaxed. Javelin was on her feet, looking anxiously at the walls around them. Vaffa had knocked over her chair and stepped back from the table. Lilo found herself on her feet, too.