Phaze Doubt

He got up. His shoulders were aching; he had concentrated so hard he had been hunching over. “Where is the Chief?” he asked Mischief.

“On the way, Lysan.”

Indeed, in a moment Chief Oresmite appeared. “Thou has need o’ me?”

“I can solve your problem. But I need to know the mode of communication between the—“

“The flutes.”

“The indium flutes? But mere sound will not—“

“They use music to marshal magic.”

“Oh. Yes. But only two folk play them, and it would take a hundred to—“

“Nay, two suffice. The harmonics and the beats, guided by the Hectare aspect, will bear the signals.”

“Chief, it isn’t physically possible for just two to—“

“They will play the flutes only for practice. The true melody will be in their minds, guided by Mischief—an thou allow it. The iridium flutes be mere decoys; the ultimate flute be in Weva’s fancy.”

Lysander nodded. “Now I understand. I will key the pattern of solutions in to music, so that it will work—if I allow it.”

“An thou wish to talk to any, in the interim, any will talk to thee. If not, not. We trust in thee, and in the prophecy.”

“You have a lot of trust, Chief,” he said wryly.

14 - Duet

The time passed seemingly swiftly, though this bore no relation to the ratio beyond the Pole. Lysander worked hard on the algorithm, using Mischief to make supplementary calculations. It was an irony, he thought, that he finally had complete access to this computer, as he had wanted at the outset, but wasn’t bothering with either games or machine consciousness. Instead he was working out a program that would defeat his purpose in being on this planet (shell). But what a glorious challenge it was!

He could not work all the time; even his Hectare brain could handle only so much at one sitting, and then he had to take time off. The community was eager to entertain him. There were indeed a number of human men and women, and to his eye there was a certain resemblance between some of the women and Tania, their long-gone ancestor. He dated them, and they were barely restrained in their eagerness to get him into a breeding mode, though he told them plainly that he was infertile. “Aye, but mayhap with magic...” one suggested as she seduced him.

He thought about that. Magic did phenomenal things, here. It was responsible for Flach/Nepe and Weva/Beman. (He had grown quite interested in Weva, until she teasingly showed him her other aspect: she too was a male/female composite. That turned him off, as perhaps she intended.) Surely it could make a full man of an android, if properly applied.

“Aye, ‘Sander, it could,” Nepe replied when he asked her. She had grown into a charming young woman, her charms no accident, because of course her amoebic flesh could be shaped to any form she chose. She showed a certain physical interest in him, but he thought of Flach, present as her alternate self, and did not reciprocate. It was obvious that however much those two composites played around, it was each other they were destined for. Whether it would be Flach-Weva or Beman-Nepe wasn’t certain; so far both male versions seemed more interested in relating to the eager young females of the colony than to their opposite numbers, while the females were more reserved. It was an interesting situation.

“If Phaze survives?” he asked.

She smiled teasingly. “Aye.”

And of course there would be little point, if it did not, for he could sire no offspring, fertile or not. This made him think about his position, as perhaps Nepe had intended. The choices were simple. Either he held to his mission, and torpedoed the plan by refusing to release the computed figures, and the worlds of Proton and Phaze perished, along with the Hectare who were here. It was already too late to warn them; in less than a day they would not be able to evacuate. So they were doomed. Or he could cooperate with the enemy, and save the frames, and render the Hectare into subservient status. He would incidentally save himself, too.

But his mission was clear. It was not his place to judge its merit. It was his place to fulfill it without question. His judgment was confined to questions of compromise necessary in order to facilitate his mission, as when he helped Nepe fetch the Hectare seed. That had indeed enabled him to discover the Adepts’ plan, so carefully implemented here by Clef and Tania and Mischief and the elves. Now he had simply to act to complete his mission—and he could do that by inaction.