"Literally?" He stared. "You mean to say the rings themselves can't be destroyed?"
"Conclusion unwarranted. Hypothesis implies that rings are vulnerable."
"To what?"
"To intelligent application of the same advanced science by which they were created. They are artifacts. Process of creation, however unknown, is irrelevant to hypothesis. In common experience, many processes can be reversed." With a burnt-toast scent of apology, it was gliding away.
"Care, Mimmie," he whispered after it. "Better not trust anybody. Your hypothesis could be true, but it could also get you killed. Maybe all of us."
SIXTEEN
Te'ehala Tupaia, paramount king-warrior of the forces of Free Polynesia, stumbled out of the tachyon-transmission chamber with his eyes downcast and his step shambling, carrying on the masquerade of a Purchased Person— Into what?
He shouted in sudden rage and fear. Polynesian theology had no hell, but the missionaries had told him about theirs. Heat, noise, pain, bewilderment—had they been right? Was he in it?
Tupaia had no way of saying that this tachyon transfer was any worse than the earlier ones, for he had no memory that there had been any earlier; but he knew that this experience was gut-knottingly, mind-wrenchingly terrible. Everything was wrongl Even the man in front of him was wrong—was no longer the same man he had followed in the prisoners' file. Was no longer a human being at all! Tupaia stumbled in the queerly lit gravity of this awful place and crashed into him—or into it. Certainly this could not be a person! It was something queer, hideous, red-lit. It was a troubled dreamlike memory from childhood, for in the whiteskins' preprimary school there had been fairy-tale books, with goblins and elves. One of tiny Te'ehala's first shocks of betrayal had come when he learned that these creatures were lies. No such beings had ever existed—
But they did, and he was surrounded by them! The man ahead of him was now wearing the exact shape of a kobold—gnarly limbs, squat frame, craggy face. It was the most horrid creature Tupaia had ever seen, worse by far than the scuttling or writhing creatures at the bottom of his home lagoon, worse than a nightmare, for it bore human features. It turned toward him, and the eyes were the eyes of a person as vulnerable as Tupaia himself to shock and pain, as filled with terror; it spoke, and the voice was the voice of a human being, bleating for help. It was a diabolical mixture of monster and man . . .
And so was Te'ehala Tupaia.
For he himself had been changed in the same way.
In that moment Tupaia nearly went mad.
He could find nothing familiar, nothing that related to any previous part of his existence. He was in a gnome's body, inhabiting a devil's cavern, surrounded by creatures queerer than any demons. He was seeing by a light that was redder than red—it stood in the same relation to red that indigo does to blue—and it had no source. He was on a balcony of sorts, and far below him was a tangle of machines and pipes, with queer figures scuttling around and over them. And he was surrounded by a sea of raucous sound, like the middle of an April typhoon, but deeper and slower. The other Purchased People, as shocked and maddened as himself, were milling around in disarray.
Then, above all the tumult, came a call in a crackly, raspy sort of language that, incredibly, Tupaia understood. "Purchased People!" it grated. "You have been selected for labor in edited form for purposes of scientific research!"
The creature speaking was more hideous than Tupaia itself; it was a thing like a great blood-red eye, glittering like a ruby, that hung above them. The enslaved kobolds fell silent and it continued: "Reimbursement will be made to your owners. You have been edited in a stress-resistant form capable of functioning readily in this environment, and given optical systems capable of seeing by the heat sources all around us, with language faculties adequate to understand our orders. You need no more!"
It paused, and crackling tendrils of electrostatic force leaped from its ruby surface to sting Tupaia and some of the nearest others. "You eight! Follow me! Your first task will be to ascertain what other members of our first party survived!"
* * *
Stumbling up a steep corridor, with the lash of the ruby eye's electrostatic lightnings to spur him and the others on, Tupaia felt his mind racing out of gear. He was staring around this hellish place in terror in one moment, in another reliving the days when he drove a bulldozer for the island's new airstrip to pay his college tuition, when he plucked red hibiscus for the tourists' breakfast tables, ran errands at the Chinese store, lit spirals of pyrethrum to kill mosquitoes because a bug-zapper would not have looked authentic enough for the hotel's whiteskin manager. Bug- zapper! Suddenly the parts of his memories came together. All around them swarmed a huge cloud of tiny beings, larger and faster than any mosquito and far more dangerous. Boaty-Bits, he knew.
And suddenly wondered how he knew. And that weird being with the whip was a Sirian eye. Those other horrid beings had names too: the great doughy creature inside a crystal shell was a Sheliak; the clattering, hissing metal thing a Scorpian robot. But how did he know that?
Although Tupaia knew something about tachyon transportation because everyone did, he had had no direct experience of it—this Tupaia had not—and little knowledge of its refinements. They had not seemed relevant to the prime goal of freeing Polynesia from its whiteskin conquerors, nor had it been discussed in his school classes. "Editing" was a concept he grasped only dimly, and that more by seeing what had happened to himself and the other Purchased People than from any theoretical knowledge. He did not need to be told that he had changed. His own hands, as they swung by his sides, testified to that most inarguably. And he could not fail to know that he now had faculties he had never owned before. He knew the names of these outlandish beings. He seemed to understand every communication addressed to him, in whatever language; he saw in colors he had never seen before.
"Halt!" cried a voice—not a voice, but a rattling like drumbeats; but Tupaia understood it, and knew that it came from the robot. The grotesque gnomes stopped, whispering to each other; they had passed through a vaulted chamber and were now on another balcony, higher up. Tupaia edged away from the being that rattled and the being that stung as they conferred, and found himself near a precariously low railing, looking down on the immense cavern itself. Now he could see that the things that scuttled around the machines and pipes were less unfamiliar than anything else in this wholly alien place; they looked exactly like the crystalline crabs that had begun to appear on Earth before he was transported. What they were doing, he could not make out. Repairing the machines? Perhaps so. A great plume of liquid was arching slowly out of some ruptured pipe, breaking up into a sort of rainbow spray, but the rainbow was made all of gradations of red, from almost orange to that newer, deeper red that he had never seen before. As he watched the plume dwindled and stopped, and he saw that the crystal crabs were swarming over the place it had come from.
Over Tupaia's head the great ruddy eye dived past with a crackle of static electricity, and the Sheliak and the flying metal cube just behind. They plunged over the low railing and dropped like meteors to the far floor. They were after a huge translucent block with a keyboard at one edge. Something about the device troubled Tupaia— something not quite a memory, more than a dream—he could not pin it down. But the slave drivers had no doubts. Even at that great distance, even through the barrier of their queer shrieks and rattles, he could see that this object was something important to them.