Between the Strokes of Night

Elissa laughed. “If I were to tell you what some people want with it, I’d shock your innocent soul. But Tolider just likes it for company, and he looks after it well. Love me, love my tardy, that’s what he seems to think. Once he thought I was a tardy-lover, too, he was ready to bare his soul. Now, are you going to spend the next few hours sounding jealous, or do you want to know what he said?” “Oh, all right.” Peron’s curiosity was too great to allow him to maintain an aloof tone, and he knew from his own experience how good Elissa was at winkling information out of anyone. “What did he tell you?”

“After he felt comfortable with me we talked about the Immortals. He says they aren’t a hoax, or something invented by the government. And they aren’t human, or alien, either. He says they are machines.”

“How does he know?”

“He saw them. He’s been working in space for over twenty years, and he remembers the last time the Immortals came. He said something else, too, once I’d softened him up — shut up, Peron — something that he says the government doesn’t want anyone down on Pentecost ever to know. He told me because he wanted to warn me, because he feels sorry for me. He says that some of the winners of the Planetfest games who go off-planet are sacrifices to the Immortals. They — that means us — will become machines, themselves.”

“Rubbish!”

“I agree, it sounds like it. But he made a lot of good points. You hear about the Immortals, but you never hear a description of one — no stories that they’re just like us, or that they’re big or little, or have green hair, or six arms. And you tell me: what does happen to Planetfest winners when they go off-planet?”

“You know I can’t answer that. But we’ve seen videos of them, after they won the games. How could that happen if they had been converted to machines?” “I’ll tell you what Tolider says — and this is supposed to be common rumor through the whole space division. It’s like an old legend that goes back to the time we were first contacted by the Immortals. We know that the computer records on The Ship were destroyed, but there’s no real doubt that it left Sol over twenty thousand years ago, and travelled around in space until five thousand years ago when it found Pentecost.”

“No one will argue with that, except maybe your old aunt who thinks we’ve been on Pentecost forever. We were even taught it in school.”

“But the old records say that everything on Earth was wiped out, and everyone died in the Great Wars. Suppose that’s not true — partly true, but exaggerated. Suppose there were enough people left to start over again, says Tolider, and suppose they survived the bombs and the Long Winter. They wouldn’t be starting from scratch, the way we began on Pentecost. They’d be able to breed back quickly — it took us less than five thousand years to grow from The Ship’s people to over a billion. Earth would have had at least fifteen thousand years to develop their technology, beyond anything we can imagine, while we were wandering round on The Ship, looking for a home. They would have machines hundreds of generations better than our best computers. Maybe they would have reached the point where the dividing line between organic and inorganic would be blurred. We definitely know they have better computers — did you realize that the Immortals, not Pentecost, control space travel through the Cass system, because their computerized tracking system is enormously better than ours? Sy told me that, and he got it from Gilby. Anyway, that’s what Tolider believes: the Immortals are intelligent computers, maybe with biological components, sent here from Earth. There. You’re the smart one — so find a hole in that logic.” They flew along in silence as Peron thought it over.