"Oh, yes," Moon said gladly. "Only 'poet' isn't quite the word. He told me the right word for Earth people to use was 'aiodos'—it's an old Earth word, he said, from the Mycenae-ans. Whoever they were. It means a kind of a bard; Homer, he said, was an aiodos." Thrayl stirred in his sleep. She scratched the warm, broad skull, and the Taur made a sleepy rumbling sound and was asleep again.
"Some poet," Krake observed. "He tamed those Sh'shrane without even working up a sweat."
"I guess they're not just poets, Francis." She looked up at him wonderingly. "It's like a fairy tale, isn't it? When he was talking to me, it almost felt as though he should have started with 'once upon a time'. ..."
Once upon a time, the aiodos had said, or almost said. . . .
Once upon a time, a long time ago (but, really, all time was one, the aiodos had also said), the aiodoi were organic creatures who lived on a planet in a galaxy within a universe very far from Earth's—the very universe they had just left, in fact.
"They were living people, like us?" Krake asked.
Moon shook her head. "He never said they were like us," she corrected him. "Only that they were biological creatures, the same as we." In physical appearance, she said, they hadn't looked at all like human beings. In other ways, though, they were very much like us. As with the human race, these people had been ingenious and forceful, and also sometimes thought-fill and sometimes wise.
But, as with the human race, the active and ingenious ones were not necessarily the same ones who were both thoughtful and wise.
These beings had evolved, as living things always do. They had sharpened their intelligence. As the millennia drifted by they discovered fire, and agriculture, and machinery—just like human beings—and, like human beings, they built cities and prospered immensely. When they had reached a stage of burgeoning science and technology, the wise ones among them studied the stars and planets out in space. The ingenious ones took that knowledge and used it. They built ships to venture out to explore these other worlds—and not just to explore them, but to own them.
"Those were the Sh'shrane?" Krake guessed.
"And the others the aiodoi? Not yet, Francis," Moon said, "but that's what they became—over a long, long time."
It took a long time. During all that time many things were happening. Among others, the explorers and conquerors went farther and farther into space. Now and then, at this time and that, their explorations encountered other races of beings, some of them almost as intelligent as themselves. The stay-at-home wise ones welcomed these discoveries with delight. The adventurers had other views. The other races they found were sometimes absorbed into their own growing empire. More often they were brushed aside ... or simply destroyed.
The ones who became the Sh'shrane were great destroyers. Ultimately they even destroyed their own bodies. Simple organic flesh was not hard enough or strong enough to meet their desires.
At first they had sought out warm and fertile planets like their own, but those were rare. There simply were not enough of that kind to suit the wishes of the voracious Sh'shrane. That problem had a solution, though. The ones who became the aiodoi helped them find it; they showed the conquerors how to change themselves to adapt to harsher environments, with prostheses and mechanical supplements, until they were more than half machine—humans would have called them "cyborgs." Now they were truly fitted for the work of conquest and subjection they had chosen for themselves. They were exempt from the needs of flesh and blood. They could survive in any gravity or atmosphere, or even in none at all.
Ultimately (Moon Bunderan told the captain wonder-ingly) the Sh'shrane lost the organic component of their bodies entirely. Their minds were machine-stored, in rustless, ageless, computer-like things, and the machine bodies they were housed in never died. The Sh'shrane doubled in numbers, and doubled again and again, until one single galaxy was too tiny to hold them all—until, at the last, they came to believe that not even a single universe was large enough to contain the mighty and irresistible Sh'shrane.
While the aiodoi. . . .
The aiodoi, too, had transcended flesh and blood.
They chose a different pathway. Not into inorganic matter; not into matter at all. The intelligences who were becoming the aiodoi had long ago discovered the principles of the wave-drive. They had given it to the Sh'shrane, as they gave so much else—of course, for without the wave-drive the Sh'shrane could hardly have ventured outside their birthright solar system. But the aiodoi found a different use for the wave-drive.
As the wave-drive ships became more and more sophisticated, they no longer depended entirely on mechanical components. Finally they required no mechanical components at all. The aiodoi learned from their ships the freedom of mat-terless existence. They transformed themselves. From organic beings tied to a benign environment, they came to exist as standing waves of pure energy, self-sustaining assemblages that
Earthly scientists would have called solitons. They were continually in motion; and they, too, became immortal.
Learning and learning, always learning, the aiodoi began to comprehend the mysteries of the quantal realm. They had long since recognized the plurality of universes. Now, bound by neither space nor time, the aiodoi reached out to them. Through the manipulation of their own energy spectra, through the fluctuating creation of new wavicles in the false vacuum that underlay everything, everywhere, the aiodoi were always in touch with each other. More than that. The aiodoi were always one great chorus, hymning the praise of the majestic wholeness of all.
The aiodoi were never alone. There was no space and no time between universes, and so the aiodoi in the far past were in intimate contact with those in the far future—though, to them, there was no past or future. They were the aiodoi, and they were everywhere and everywhen.
They knew that when they themselves reached out to other universes the hard, hostile ships of that worser half of themselves, the Sh'shrane, would be quick to follow. Follow the Sh'shrane did. And when they discovered that race of beings that humans called "Turtles" they did as they had always done.
They waged war against them.
But that, in the end, the aiodoi would not permit. They could not allow the great plexus of universes to be polluted by the viciousness of those alter-ego personalities they had left behind. The aiodoi acted. They abandoned that birth universe to the Sh'shrane. They drove the Sh'shrane ships back inside it, and closed off its wormholes, quarantining it. . . . For a time.
Francis Krake listened to all she said, hardly able to believe, even less able to doubt. He asked, "So the Sh'shrane wouldn't let it go at that? They just bided their time, and then they tried again?"
Moon nodded somberly. "They didn't forget the Turtles. They couldn't forget the only war they hadn't won. This time they attacked the Mother planet itself. They dragged it through the wormhole and destroyed it. I suppose then they thought it would be easy enough to mop up the rest of the Turtles. . . . But the aiodoi would not let that happen, Francis."
"They did, though. They let them wreck the Mother planet."
She nodded earnestly. "I think he was sorry about that. He said, 'We were listening to other songs.' But they've made up for it. It's really over for the Sh'shrane now. The aiodoi won't ever let them out of their own universe again. Not ever."
When they were back in the control room Krake took his place at the board, listening to the fourth or fifth repetition of Moon Bunderan's story. Naturally she had to repeat it for everyone else on The Golden Hind—once to each handful of them as they returned from sleep, or wherever they had been, and several times over for all of them, to answer questions— or, more often, to tell them what questions she couldn't answer. Krake listened without speaking, but at the other board Litlun was full of agitated questions. "That's all I know," the girl said at last, almost cross. "I've got to take care of Thrayl. Anyway, it makes no sense to keep on asking about things I don't know anything about. I think what I've said already is all the aiodos wanted us to know."