"Of course it is," Babylon said soothingly.
But of course it wasn't. He recalled enough undergraduate science to be certain of that. No solid body of any such size could possibly exist. Or even a thousandth this size. The gravitation of its own enormous mass would squeeze it down into a black hole with no size at all, squeeze it finally out of the physical universe.
But—
What was it? How had it come to be, and what strange new science could explain it? What sort of beings had lived on or around it? Maybe still lived? What had those orbital forts been built to defend? What had brought down the one they had entered?
Again he grappled with those perplexities, and again he saw no answers.
The chimp scratched his leathery cheek. "The Boaty- Bits you can understand, a little," he said. "They're so different, being a collective entity and all—they don't have the same feelings as individual organisms like the rest of us. They think we individuals are almost like amputees— they're sorry for us, would you believe it? But the Sirians! They have no real sense of time—if it won't happen in the next week they couldn't care less, and that makes them dangerous . . ." He paused. "What's the matter, Dr. Babylon? You're giving me a funny look."
"I'm wondering," Babylon said, "why you're telling me all this right now. I get the feeling you're just making conversation to keep me here."
Surprisingly, the chimp grinned. "Right you are, Dr. Babylon," he agreed. "And I guess it worked, because the people I want you to meet are here now. Come in, folks! Let me present, direct from Earth, the Galaxy's foremost expert in quantum-dynamic linguistics and heaven knows what else, Dr. Jen Babylon!"
The pair that gently launched themselves into Doc Chimp's chamber were almost more surprising than any of the monsters Babylon had seen. Human, yes, undoubtedly. But what humans! They were a man and a woman, each more than two meters tall, and slimmer than human beings had any right to be. "This is Org Rider, Dr. Babylon," the chimp said proudly. "He's a real person, not a tachyon dupe like the rest of us." He didn't look real to Babylon, he looked grotesquely stretched—like a normal man of a hundred and seventy-five centimeters or so who has been pulled thin, like taffy. He wore a cache-sex, a belt with pockets and loops, a few straps of harness, and nothing else. "Of course," Doc Chimp went on meditatively, " 'real' is a kind of comparative word, isn't it? I mean, Org Rider isn't 'real' Earth primate in the sense that you and I are, or anyway used to be—he doesn't come from Earth. He comes from here. And this is his good lady, Zara, who I think you may have met before."
Babylon was staring. "Zara Gentry!" he exclaimed.
The wraith-thin woman laughed—a solid, human laugh, regardless of her appearance. "As good a name as any," she acknowledged.
"No, no. I mean I've met you before. You're a famous newscaster, back on Earth, Mrs. Gentry."
"Just Zara, please. I was born Zara Doy, then I married and I was Zara Doy Gentry—I understand that on Sun One I'm Zara something else—but here my husband and I don't share the same name. He is Org Rider. I am simply Zara—an edited version of myself," she added wistfully, "but still the same person."
Babylon said humbly, "I really don't know very much about what an 'edited' version of a person is—in spite of the fact that it happened to me, and I'm reminded of it every time I wake up and reach for the glasses I don't have anymore."
Doc Chimp laughed. "Let me tell him, Zara," he volunteered. "Dr. Babylon hasn't been here long enough to learn all our little ways. But it's simple enough. When you're tachyon-transmitted, you know, all that really gets sent is a sort of blueprint of what you are. Then it gets put together at the other end, out of whatever odds and ends of matter happen to be about; and you can always edit the blueprint Change it, you see? Adapt the pattern to special needs. Suppose you want to live on a water world; well, it's easy enough to modify your blueprints to let you breathe water. It takes gills, o' course, and some changes in your metabolism, but that's easy enough. Lots of the folks you see around the orbiter are edited copies—chlorine-breathers, changed to an oxygen atmosphere. Light-gravity people— well, you don't see them changed much here, because it isn't necessary, but there are plenty of them rebuilt for heavy duty, as you might say, back on Earth. So, in order to make Zara less conspicuous when she was first sent down to Cuckoo, minglin' with the aborigines, as you might say, she was just stretched out a little."
Babylon listened thoughtfully, but his mind was working. "Doc," he said at last, "you're an absolute gold mine of information today, but I still get the idea that you're talking to keep me from asking questions."
Zara answered for him. "It's true, Jen," she said. "There's something we don't want to talk about yet, and it's true that we came here just to see you."
"All right, so when are you going to stop being mysterious?"
She laughed. Her dimples were just as attractive on a face stretched thirty percent beyond its norm as they would have been on the original, Babylon decided. "As to what we don't want to talk about, that will have to wait a day or two. As to what we came here for—tell him, Org Rider."
"Very well, I will tell it," said the man with her, pulling a small glittering sphere from one of his belt pockets. "This is for you, Jen. It does not directly relate to your linguistics, but it will, I think, be of interest. It is the record of certain investigations Zara and I made." He tossed the sphere to Doc Chimp, who retrieved it nimbly from the air and fitted it into his stereostage. "Display the first view," Org Rider ordered, and obediently a landscape filled the stage, dominated by an immense, distant mountain. Org Rider said, "That is my home. That is Knife-in-the-Sky, as it is seen from my tribe's mountain. My ancestors have lived there for as long as the oldest singer can say. But when Zara comes, and I see her, I ask questions. Why are we so alike? Are my people once from that little planet where she comes from? How can I find out these things. So I ask Zara, and she tells me, 'paleontology.' And I ask her, how can we get 'paleontology'?"
Zara grinned. "I explained what it meant—digging down for fossils and so on—and we imported texts and manuals from Earth and made ourselves paleontologists. We started digging. Our work is very sloppy by Earth standards, of course. But it's also a lot easier. We don't have to mark geologic formations with precision, because there haven't been any big faults or earth shifts. Just a gradual deposition of silt and sand and clay from the rivers that run off Knife-in-the-Sky. The dating was hard—well, I'll be honest. It was impossible. We tried radio-carbon dating ourselves, working out of a textbook—forget it! For one thing, there were too many unknowns that might contribute radioactivity from the Cuckoo atmosphere, but the worst part was we just didn't know what we were doing. But then we were lucky."
She hesitated, and glanced at her husband. "I guess we were lucky," she amended. "What I mean is we got some help from the Sirians. They were interested too, because there are analogs of Sirians on Cuckoo as well, just as of the Boaty-Bits and the Sheliaks and lots of others. Most of them don't seem to care. The Sirians care. They are a very vain, proud race, and working with them was no pleasure. Have you ever seen a Sirian? Looks just like a large, floating eye? Almost all soft tissue, nothing to leave fossils? Yes. Well, that's why they came to us for help. They're very good at potassium-argon dating; they can pinpoint the argon-isotope balance to within almost a century or so, and that goes back much farther than the carbon procedures. And so we dug. Show him, Org Rider," she said to her husband, who nodded and punched out commands on the stereostage. A virtual image of the skeleton of a hand appeared. "This is the earliest we found, Dr. Babylon. Thirteen thousand years ago, according to the Sirians. And as soon as they got that dated they suddenly lost interest, wouldn't even talk to us anymore."