Across A Billion Years

Jan said, “If the Mirt Korp Ahm aren’t seekers, why did they colonize half the galaxy?”

“It was,” said Dihn Ruuu, “a long time ago, when there still was much for them to learn. As you see, the colonies were long ago disbanded. The Mirt Korp Ahm reversed their outward thrust and returned to their native planet.”

Dr. Schein broke in. “Just now, when you were calling Mirt — did you speak with any Mirt Korp Ahm?”

“I spoke only with my own kind,” said the robot.

“But the Mirt Korp Ahm — do they still survive inside the shell? Or are we heading for another world of robots?”

“I do not know,” Dihn Ruuu said. “Something strange has happened, I fear. But they would not give me any information about the Mirt Korp Ahm.”

We approached the shell of Mirt and it opened for us. A huge hinged section of the dark, dully gleaming sphere swung out, a section at least the size of Ohio, and we plunged through, not under our own power but once again in the grip of the force with which the planets of the Mirt Korp Ahm control spaceships.

It was our good luck to be aboard a military vessel, not an ordinary passenger-and-freight ultradrive cruiser; thus our ship was equipped with viewscreens and we were able to watch our own entry into the sphere of Mirt. We saw the vast outer skin of the shell, and the colossal hinged gateway, and the hint of a bright gleam within. Then we sped into the sphere, into a dazzling realm of light. In the center of everything was the sun, white, no larger than Earth’s own star, sending forth radiation that danced and glittered over the fantastic sprawl of the sphere’s i

A single giant city covered that surface. Spidery towers stabbed hundreds of meters into the sky — solar energy accumulators, I learned later. Bright blue points of flame blazed here; giant booms swung and pivoted there; highways sparkled like tracks of fire; somber pyramids of black metal occupied immense areas. Everything seemed in motion, expanding, conquering adjoining territory, sucking in life and power, growing, throbbing. It was not what I expected the world of the conservative, progress-hating Mirt Korp Ahm to resemble.

But were there in fact any Mirt Korp Ahm here? Or were the robots of the High Ones keeping this unbelievable world alive, obediently carrying on the functions and traditions of their extinct creators?

We landed, coming down in a target area ten times as large as the one on McBurney IV, and bordered by pulsating generators and accumulators of terrifying complexity and size. Robots who might have been the twins of our Dihn Ruuu greeted us. We were taken from our ship, placed aboard a vehicle shaped like a teardrop of amber, and our tour began.

“An extended recitation of wonders,” according to the Paradoxians, “makes the merely commonplace seem noble and strange.” Perhaps so. I will offer no catalog of the miracles of Mirt. Why wrestle into words what everyone will see so vividly in the tridim images? We viewed all the splendour of a billion-year-old civilization; let that bald statement be enough. Our robot hosts were eager to reveal everything. And, like wanderers in a dream, we who had known the High Ones only by the scraps and potsherds of the inconceivably remote past now journeyed — unbelievably, and only half believing — through the living heart of this vanished empire.

“Where are the Mirt Korp Ahm themselves?” we kept asking. “Do they still exist?”

“They still exist,” Dihn Ruuu told us at last, having learned it from the other robots. “But they have changed. They are no longer as I knew them.”

“Where are they?”

“They receive special care.”

“When will we see them?”

“In time,” said the robot. “At the proper moment.”

We doubted that. We all were sure that the High Ones had died out long ago; and that the robots, unwilling to accept the hard truth of that, had been living a weird pretense, masterless for millions of years. We were wrong. In their own good time the robots allowed us to meet the Mirt Korp Ahm. It was on the ninth day of our visit. A vehicle of a kind we had not used before called for us and took us down a sloping track into the depths of the sphere, a dozen levels beneath the surface, into a cool green world of silence, where floating globes of light drifted ahead of us down intricate webworks of corridors.

Dihn Ruuu said, “The current Mirt Korp Ahm population of Mirt, I have been told, is 4,852. There has been no significant change in that figure in the past hundred thousand years. The last actual death was recorded here 38,551 years ago.”

“And the last birth?” Mirrik asked.

Dihn Ruuu stared at him a long moment and replied, “Approximately four million years ago.” After that their fertility was exhausted.”

I tried to comprehend the nature of a race whose last baby had been born in the epoch of the subhuman man-apes, whose last death had occurred in the time of the cave painters.

A sliding panel rolled back and we peered through a thick crystal wall at a member of the Mirt Korp Ahm. In a cavernous six-sided room that reminded me of the rock vault in which we had found Dihn Ruuu, a cluster of massive machinery converged on a cup-shaped couch of glossy blue metal. Enthroned on the couch sat a being of great size, perhaps twice the size of a human, dome-headed, four-armed, covered with scales, indeed a High One such as we had seen in the projections of the globe.

Life-support mechanisms surrounded and practically engulfed it. A dozen small cubical structures were fastened to its limbs; a complex device was strapped about its chest; wires ran from its skull, its body, its wrists. This entire immense room was a nest of equipment that served to sustain the flicker of life in this creature, to nourish it and keep its organs pumping and drain off the poisons of age.

For this High One was old. Hideously, frighteningly old.

Its body was wrinkled and pouchy; its scales no longer overlapped, but had spread apart to show folds of soft grayish skin, and in places the scales had flaked off altogether; the eyes were dull; the expression was slack.

The High One did not move. It gave no indication that it was aware of us. It might have been a waxen image of itself, except for the faint sign of the rise and fall of its breath. Locked within its cradle of cables and conduits and muscle-stimulators and energizers, the prisoner of its own hunger to survive, it seemed lost in a dream of bygone thousands of centuries. We stared at it as if it were a royal mummy come to life, or the last of the dinosaurs.

Commander Leonidas had brought one of his TP people along from the ship. “Can you read it?” Leonidas asked. “Do you pick anything up?”

TPs are not ordinarily supposed to be able to communicate with nonhuman species. But sometimes an alien race carries a strong residual load of latent TP — maybe not strong enough to let members of that race read each other, but enough so that a good Earth TP can pick up stray scraps of thought. Nothing coherent, just flickering impressions rather than full phrases. The TP with us, a man named Davis, pressed close against the crystal wall, closed his eyes, entered into deep concentration. When he turned away moments later, his face was pale and furrowed in disgust.

“A vegetable,” Davis said softly. “The

mind of a vegetable… but an insane vegetable.”

“Ozymandias,” Mirrik murmured. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”

Dihn Ruuu said, “They are all like that. Their bodies will endure until the end of time, perhaps. But their minds… their minds…”

“More dead than alive,” Dr. Schein said. “And yet they live on.”

“It is no favor to them,” muttered Dr. Horkkk. “This death-in-life is an indecency! Their time is over. Let them rest.”

Yes, let them rest, I say.

And so a billion years of greatness comes down to this: empty creatures rotting in crystal cages, while bustling robots thrive and multiply and eagerly serve. Our quest is over. We have found the High Ones, we have intruded on what should have been private, we have peered into the nightmare of the galaxy’s loftiest race in extreme old age.