"Right?
"Wrong. There is a way in which a watch can spring from completely random materials—in fact, that's how all your watches came to be.
"It happens all the time. Random dust and gas clouds collapse into stars; big stars explode into supernovas; new stars and planets form out of the supernova residue—life appears— intelligence appears—watchmakers appear, and make your watch for you. But disorganized matter became organized, and thus entropy is violated—right?
"Wrong again.
"There's nothing in the entropy concept that says that some part of a system can't become temporarily more highly organized, only that the whole system must become more disordered with time. And the whole system, if you allow baby universes and all that other Hawking stuff, is very large indeed.
"That's an example of Treiman's theorem.
"Sam Treiman was a Princeton scientist, whose best-known theorem is 'Impossible things don't usually happen.'
"But some things we would like to believe impossible actually do happen now and then, and you can sometimes get a special dispensation from even the law of entropy.
"For instance, there is Bell's Theorem.
"John Stewart Bell says that there aren't any purely local effects in the quantum universe. Every last electron, no matter where it is located, is connected with every other one. As Nick Herbert puts it, in the cosmological model of Bell's Theorem, 'an invisible field informs the electron of environmental changes in superluminal response time.' Which means that Einstein's speed limit does not apply in the quantum universe as far as information is concerned.
"Startling enough for you? Then let's go a step farther. If you want a real exemption from the laws of entropy—and just about everything else—remember that 'superforce' we talked about a while ago. That will cheerfully break just about any law you can think of. Why not? It's a superforce. Within its own domain, entropy means nothing to it. The superforce will do anything at all, you remember, even reversing the flow of entropy. Even allowing time travel. Bell's Theorem lets you postulate that some kind of instrument, or person, somewhere, can be in instantaneous contact with everything else . . . but the superforce lets you be in contact with everywhen."
And the aiodoi, who knew well of the wholeness of all, sang on. Their song welcomed the one from among them who had gone but is gone no more, and the glad smallsongs sounded against their own song, and the harsh and hostile smallsongs of the others were no longer heard.
19
Once the world of Captain Francis Krake had made sense to him, but that time was long gone. Now his world had been turned topsy-turvy into a bewildering jumble of killer robots, alien visitors inhabiting the body of a docile Taur, ships that did what he had been quite certain that no ship could ever possibly do. The only sanity left for him was to be at the controls of his ship . . . and it was a measure of how crazy things had become that what he was doing with The Golden Hind was plunging it into the heart of a wormhole!
He had drafted Litlun for the second board. The Turde was fidgety with the cranky nervousness of unexpected hope— over and over he was muttering to himself, disjointed phrases that the transposer picked up as references to the Mother planet, to the death of his Elder Brother. There was no problem with pilotage or navigation. The sweep of Sh'shrane vessels was like a firing-range target, aiming Krake direcdy into the shimmering distortion at their center.
Going through was almost routine. Krake breathed a long, silent sigh when he saw that on the other side of the worm-hole was a normal sky—stars and distant galaxies, nothing threatening, nothing bizarre and unexpected. He sat back, almost at ease at last. He looked around the control room and beckoned to Daisy Fay. "Take this board over," he ordered. "I'm going to see if I can get Sue-ling to get some sleep for a change."
Litlun twisted quickly around to turn both eyes on Francis Krake. "Relieve me too, Captain," he asked. "One must place the remains of the Elder Brother in proper storage."
"Sure. Marco?" And when the machine-man had replaced the Turtle at the second board, Krake turned to Moon Bunderan. "Will you come with me?" he asked.
"Of course, Captain," she said, her mood lightened since her Taur was himself again. She took Thrayl with her to the operating room, of course. She wasn't willing to let him out of her sight, though it wasn't easy to wake him up long enough to make the move. Thrayl's tour of duty as host to— to whatever you might call the visitor which had taken his body over—had used up a lot of reserve strength. All the Taur wanted to do was to eat and sleep, by choice curled up against the feet of Moon Bunderan.
But when they reached the room the girl gasped, staring at the operating table. There was only one form on it, swathed in bandages that covered most of the head, even the eyes. "What happened?" she asked. "Did—did Kiri die?"
Sue-ling raised her head to look at her. She had long since removed the memo disk, and she was glassy-eyed with fatigue. She had to lick her lips before she was able to answer. "Kiri's body did," she said. "But Kiri's still alive—or part of him is, anyway—in Sork's head."
"Sleep," Krake ordered, taking her by the arm and leading her to the door. She hesitated, but obeyed, stumbling away. He turned to Moon Bunderan. "They're both in there," he told her, looking at the swathed head. "Part of both brains— the parts that weren't destroyed."
"But you can't transplant a Ms!"
"You can if you're Sue-ling Quong with a memo disk, and if you have a Turtle with a disk of his own helping you," he said. "At least, he's alive now—or they are, whichever way you can say it. Sue-ling says there's no rejection problem because they're identical twins. They have exactly the same genetic chemistry."
Moon swallowed, and gazed apprehensively at the figure on the table. It did not look reassuring. The only proof that there was still life in the motionless body was the constant background sound of purrings and chucklings from the jury-rigged life-support machinery and the instruments monitoring vital signs. "And he'll—they'll—be all right now?"
Francis Krake crossed his fingers. "That's right," he said, hoping it was true. But Sue-ling had seemed sure of what she was doing under the memo disk. Even Litlun, wearing an identical disk as he shared the surgery with her, had never hesitated or shown any doubt that the procedure would work.
Moon caught him off guard with a sudden chuckle. Krake gave her a swift look, wondering if hysteria had finally caught up with her, but her smile seemed genuinely amused. "I'm sorry, Francis," she said, "but I can't help thinking that that solves one problem, anyway, doesn't it?" And explained: "Now Sue-ling doesn't have to worry about making her mind up between them any more."
"I suppose that's true," Krake said after a moment, and his tone was icy.
Moon gave him a startled look, then a remorseful one. She said quickly, "I mean, if she really still wants one of them—or wants him, I mean ... I don't know what I mean, exacdy," she said, knowing she was making a mess of what she had meant to be an apology. She thought for a moment, and decided to give it up. She sat down on a crate that had once held medical machinery, next to the sleeping Taur, and si-lendy stroked the close-cropped fur between Thrayl's gendy glowing horns.
It was Krake who changed the subject, as uncomfortable as Moon herself. "Tell me about that—what did you call him, a 'poet'?"