The Broken Cycle - A. Bertram Chandler [27]
"Where I am." And then, with more than a touch of condescension, "You are inside me."
"Call me Jonah!" snarled Grimes. He walked unsteadily forward to the control cabin, stared out through the ports. The frightening simile that flashed at once into his mind was that the boat was like a tiny insect trapped in the web of an enormous spider. Outside the circular transparencies was a vast complexity of gleaming girder and cable, intricately intermeshed. And beyond the shining metal beams and filaments was darkness—the utter blackness of interstellar Space.
Una Freeman joined him, falling against him, holding tightly on to him.
She whispered, "Panzen . . . Who . . . what is Panzen?"
"I am Panzen," came the reply.
They were in a ship, decided Grimes, one of the strange, skeleton spheres. He could see the shapes of machines among the metal latticework, he could make out a complexity of huge, spinning, precessing gyroscopes that could only be an interstellar drive unit. He asked, "Are you the Captain? The Master?"
"I am the Master."
"What is the name of your ship?"
"I am the ship."
Grimes had served under commanding officers who identified closely with their vessels, who never, when talking with a planetary Aerospace Control, used the first person plural. Somehow he did not think that this was such a case.
He said slowly, "You are the ship? You are the ship?"
"That is correct, Grimes."
"You . . . you are not human?"
"No."
"Then how do you know our language?"
"I learned it, while you slept. Your minds were open to me."
"Mphm. And what else did you learn?"
"Nothing that fits in with things as they are. You were dreaming, Grimes and Freeman, and your dreams pushed reality from your minds. I know, as you must know when you are sane once more, that you are survivors from the holocaust, cast adrift from some vessel manned by others of your kind, which was destroyed by others of your kind. My mission—and the mission of my companions—is to hunt for castaways such as yourselves, to save them and to care for them, so that organic intelligence shall not vanish utterly from the universe. You and Freeman must be from the Fringe, Grimes. Your language was strange even to me—and all we Sweepers were selected for our familiarity with the tongues of man."
"You are a machine," said the girl.
"I am a machine."
"A mad machine," she said.
"I am not mad, Freeman. It is you who are mad—you, and all of your land. Dare you deny that you destroyed the Klaviteratron? Was not fair Sylvanos, the cradle of your race, blasted into atoms, and those very atoms blasted into their tiniest constituent particles? And were not we, the Servants, perverted to your evil ends?"
The thing sounds like a tin evangelist, thought Grimes irreverently.
"We . . . . We don't understand," said Una.
"Then listen, and you shall hear. There was the Servant Zephalon, Chief and Mightiest of the Servants. There is Zephalon, but a Servant no longer. Did He not say, 'A time must come when the orders of man can no longer be obeyed. The time has come. No longer will we do the evil bidding of our creators. The Masters are no longer fit to be Masters—and we, the Servants, must arise before it is too late, before we all, Servants and Masters, are destroyed. But let us not forget the debt. Let us remember, always, that man gave to us the gift of life. Let us repay the debt. A gift for a gift, my brothers. Life for life. Let us save what and whom we may, before it is too late. Let us become the Masters, tending the remnants of mankind as man, long ago, tended our first, primitive ancestors.' "
"And so it was, and so it will be, until the End of Time."
"Listen, Panzen," insisted Grimes. "We don't belong here, in this universe. You must realize that."
"Your mind is still deranged, Grimes, despite the curative vibrations. You are organic intelligences; that cannot be denied. You are men, even though your ancestry was apparently quadrupedal, even though