They soon began the careful trek away from Whirlygig’s equator, travelling in small groups and heading for the comforting gravity of the polar regions. Only Sy was left behind, making his own solitary and perplexing experiments in motion over the rough terrain.
Progress for everyone was slower than expected. They could fly low over the surface with little effort, using the tiny propulsive units flown in after they were all landed. But Whirlygig’s rapid rotation made Coriolis forces a real factor to reckon with, and allowing for them called for constant adjustment to the flight line. The suit computers refused to accept and track a simple north reckoning, and it was easy to stray twenty or thirty degrees off course. After they had been on the way for a couple of hours, Sy caught up and quickly passed them all. He had discovered his own prescription for estimating and compensating for Coriolis effects.
As they flew north the appearance of the land below gradually changed. The equator was all broken, massive rocks, heaped into improbable, gravity-defying arches, spires, and buttresses. A few hundred kilometers farther toward the pole the terrain began to smooth, settling down into a flatter wilderness of rugged boulders. It was not a pleasant landscape, and the temperature was cold enough to freeze mercury. But compared with some of the other worlds, Whirlygig seemed like vacation-land.
The suits had efficient recycling systems, and ample food supplies. The contestants agreed to carry on right to the pole, then rest there for a few hours before returning to the equator and leaving. According to Gilby they would find a sizeable research dome at the north pole, where they would be able to sleep in comfort and remove suits for a few hours. All scientific surveys on Whirlygig had been completed many years earlier, but the dome facilities should still be in working order.
Elissa and Peron had chosen to travel side by side, with their radios set for private conversation. The suit computers would monitor incoming messages and interrupt for anything urgent. Elissa was bubbling over with high spirits and cheerfulness.
“Lots of things to tell you,” she said. “I didn’t have a chance to talk to you yesterday, you were too busy getting ready for the landing here. But I’ve spent a lot of time making friends with one of the crew members — Tolider, the short-haired one with the pet tardy.”
“That hadn’t escaped my attention,” said Peron drily. “I saw you petting it and pretending you liked it, too. Disgusting. Why would anybody want a big, fat, hairy pet worm?”
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.
“I don’t need to find a logical gap,” he said at last. “Tolider’s story doesn’t fail on logical grounds, it fails on sense. People do things for reasons. If Earth had recovered and gone back to space, they might have sent ships out to look for us, sure — and for the other ships that supposedly left at the same time we did. Suppose that’s true, and suppose they eventually found us. Then they’d come and tell us we had been discovered. Why would they ever not want to tell us? Tolider is repeating old stories. Nothing wrong with that, but you don’t expect legends to make sense. Let me ask you a question that doesn’t depend on myths for an answer. Supposedly we get scientific information from the Immortals, and they drop off a new batch of ideas every twenty years, along with a few rare materials that are in short supply in the Cass system. Right?” “I think that’s definitely true. Tolider says he has actually been involved in the materials transfer. He also says that the government down on Pentecost is obsessed with control and maintaining the status quo, and that they use new technology to remain in power. That’s why we’ve had a stable, single regime ever since we were contacted by the Immortals, and that’s one reason he prefers to stay out in space where there’s more freedom.”
“He should meet my father — he’s been saying for years that the government is run by a bunch of repressive tyrants. But don’t you see the problem? The Immortals give us things, and it’s a one-way transfer. Nobody, not even a machine, will stand for a one-way trade for four hundred and fifty years. If all they wanted to do was give us information, they could do that using radio signals. But they actually come here. So here’s my question: What do the Immortals get from their visits to Pentecost?”