Sweet Their Blood and Sticky | Page 2

elders. But these small creatures were the ones who scampered most of all after they had fed. Joyously they danced back toward the mountain. A few of medium height went back in pairs, firm taffy fingers intertwined in each other.
"They mate," said Creno. "It is their custom."
"How tiring they are," said Harta. "I have lost interest. We have seen thirty-one worlds with such customs and these creatures are too simple to be interesting. Let us go home or try some other system."
"Not yet," Creno insisted. "We passed through the ocean and surveyed the lands of this tiny planet. Nowhere else has there been the tiniest unit of life. Why at this one spot should something exist?"
"But we have several parallel situations," Harta protested. "They were colonies landed in one spot by the civilization of another planet. They landed here with their feeder machine. And that is the explanation."
"Your mind does not function well in a four-dimension continuum, Harta. You will need more training--"
"But these cases are rare, and, Creno--"
"I know they are rare, my child. But still they exist. You will have to learn eventually, a little at a time. Now then, it is a rule of such limited dimensional realms that the movement of matter and events from place to place is highly difficult. Certain compacting procedures must be observed. To transport a machine this size across their space would have required enormous effort and an intelligence they do not yet have. More than that, it would have been unnecessary. A smaller device would have supplied them with food. I am forced to conclude that--somehow--we are approaching this problem backwards."
"Backwards? You mean they made the machine here after they came?"
He did not reply to that. "We must concentrate together on thinking ourselves into their functioning in their manifold."
Harta followed his suggestion, and soon their thoughts were moving among and within the striped creatures. The insides of their bodies consisted of fundamentally the same taffy substance; but it had been modified by various organic structures. All, though, were built of the same fundamental units: elongated, thin cells which readily aligned themselves in semi-crystalline patterns.
"Enough," Creno said, "back to the hill."
Their rows of thin limbs rested on the ridge crest once more. "We have seen such cell crystals before," she sighed. "The inefficiencies in such a poverty of dimensions! Do you still think we have looked at it backwards?"
"Of course we have. They did not bring the machine or make it--the machine made them!"
"That is not possible, Creno, great as you are in these matters. We have never seen life created by a machine before. No one ever has, from the millions of reports I have seen at home."
"Maybe we have and not known it. The life we have seen always evolved through enormous eons and we could not see its origins clearly in most cases. Here we are dealing with something that has taken comparatively little time." He stopped, shocked that he, an elder, had said so much. "No, disregard such theories. You are still too young to bother with them. Here is the important thing--this machine was left by an earlier race that disappeared. Everything else was destroyed but it went right on producing its substance."
"The substance is not life."
"It is only four-dimensional matter, right. But over a long enough time--you know this as well as I do--random factors will eventually produce a life form. By some trick of radiation this process has been speeded up here. The substance the machine produces has in turn produced life!"
* * * * *
Creno sensed with a tremor some dangerous shifting in Harta's consciousness. As an elder it was his duty to prevent a premature insight in the young. It had been a mistake to bring this up. He must go no further.
It was not necessary. Harta took it up for him.
"Then any substance producing life and modified by it could--if you go far enough back--be the product of a machine. But it would have taken so long to produce life that the original matter, that bore the direct imprint of the machine, would have disappeared."
"An error," said Creno desperately. "There is just this case."
"By the time these creatures have arrived at self-knowledge the machine will be gone. They will not know it ever existed, and--"
"That is all it means. There is just this one case. Now we must leave this unimportant example of minor dimensions!"
He strained consciousness to a forward movement but Harta remained behind. He had to pull back. "Start," he ordered.
Her mind's obstinately frozen stance made him freeze too. He applied all his force to bring her back into control, but she still held fast.
"Something more is hidden from me. I will be back," she said. And she disappeared from the ridge.
He had never faced such a quandary before