The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [142]
And if the Nine-Limbeds looked bizarre—well, face it, they really were quite bizarre enough for any normal purpose—the next contestants down the runway were markedly weirder still. The second species displayed most suggested something like a skinned baby rabbit, though one of an unhealthy pale lavender color instead of the more familiar pink. (The accompanying commentary referred to them as the One Point Fives, though it was some time before any human being knew why.) The third was the nearest to human-looking (though not very) of mankind’s newly discovered galaxy mates. Some of the species displayed later in the broadcast enjoyed up to a dozen limbs or perhaps even more tentacles (it was sometimes hard to be sure). This third species, though, oddly termed the Machine-Stored, had only the familiar two arms, two legs, and single head. There was no way of judging scale. It could have been marmoset-tiny or circus-freak huge, but it was certainly not the kind of thing one would like to meet on a dark night. It was hideous. In fact the kindest adjective any of the world’s news commentators used to describe it was “diabolical.”
Then the displays got weirder still. The creatures that followed were of every imaginable color, and often of many colors clashing against one another in eye-aching camouflage-like patterns. They had scales or sparse and wispy feathers; they were of every imaginable architecture; and those were only the carbon-based forms. The ones that looked, more than anything else, like stubby alligators in old-fashioned divers’ suits were not that comprehensible, until it was revealed that they came from a world with an atmosphere as brutal as an earthly sea bottom, and the working fluid of their biologies was supercritical carbon dioxide.
Actually, the display that Myra couldn’t help calling “the freak show” didn’t stop with displaying all fifty-five of the galaxy’s most advanced races. It was a continuous performance. Once every one of the species had had its moment of fame on Earth’s screens, the procession started over, again with the Nine-Limbeds. The difference was that this time there was a context. The aliens were displayed along with their banana-shaped spacecraft and other parts of their world, and there was a different running commentary.
It was all interesting, of course. By the third time around, the Subramanians had learned that, measured against the approximate size of one of their spacecraft, the average Nine-Limbed couldn’t be much more than eighteen or twenty centimeters long. And, according to the commentary with the second showing of the Machine-Stored, that name described precisely what they were. They were machine-stored. The biological bodies shown were a historical fact, but now every member of that race survived only in electronic storage. So Myra informed Ranjit as he returned from carrying the sleeping Robert off to bed.
“Huh,” he said, returning to his favorite armchair. “That’s convenient. I guess then you can live pretty much forever, wouldn’t you say?”
“Probably so,” she agreed. “I’m going to make myself a cup of tea. Want some?”
He did. When she came back with the two cups, the screen was displaying one of the Nine-Limbeds removing the fabric from between two of another’s hip joints and then rubbing the exposed flesh with his own ninth limb. “Hey,” Myra said, setting a cup before her husband. “What’s he doing, giving the other one a bath?”
“Maybe changing his oil,” Ranjit said. “Who knows? Listen, all this is recorded, so why don’t we turn it off for now and we can come back to it when we want to?”
“Good idea,” Myra said, reaching out and doing it for him. “I wanted to ask you something anyway. What is it that we haven’t seen in this parade?”
Ranjit nodded. “I know. The ones they were talking about. The ones they call the Grand Galactics.”
“They’re the ones, and they sound important. And yet they’re not showing them to us.”
41
HOME AGAIN
By the time Natasha, the real Natasha, was back in her own bed at the Colombo house,