It began with one component — an apparently arbitrary one — hovering in mid air with its purple-and-black body vertical. A ring of pale green eyes on the head stared all around, as though assessing the situation, while the wings fluttered too fast to see. After a moment another component flew in to attach at the head end, and a third one settled into position beneath. Thin, whiplike antennae reached out and connected heads to tails. The triplet hovered, wines vibrating. A fourth and fifth element new over to join the nucleus of the group.
After that the aggregation grew too fast for Chan to watch individual connections. As new components were added the Composite extended outward and downwards, to make contact with and derive support from the cabin floor. Within a minute the main body was complete. To Chan’s surprise — something not pointed out in the briefings — most of the individual components still remained unattached. Of the total who had entered the cabin, maybe a fifth were now connected to form a compact mass; the remainder stood tail-first on the cabin floor or hung singly from the walls using the small claws on the front of their shiny leather-like wings.
The mass of the Tinker Composite began to form a funnel-like opening in its topmost extremity. From that aperture came an experimental hollow wheeze. “Ohhh-anhh-gggghh. Hharr-ehh-looo,” it said. Then, in an oddly accented variety of solar speech, “Har-e-loo. Hal-loo.”
Kubo Flammarion had warned that this was inevitable. “Imagine,” he said, “that somebody took you apart every night and put you back together every morning. Don’t you think it would take a little while to get your act together? So make allowances for the Tinkers.”
Chan couldn’t imagine it. But he suspected that the little captain, a long-time alcoholic and a recent Paradox addict, knew that morning-after where’s-the-rest-of-me feeling rather too well.
“Hello,” he said, in response to the Tinker’s greeting. “Hello.”
As he had been advised to do, he waited.
“We-ee arre-eh,” said a whistling voice. There was a substantial pause, then, “We are … Shikari.”
“Hello. You should call me Chan.”
This time it was the Tinker who waited expectantly. “Shikari is an old Earth word,” it said at last when Chan did not respond. “It means hunter. We think that it is appropriate. And perhaps also amusing? But you did not laugh.’
“I’m sorry. I never heard the word before.”
“Yes.” The funnel buzzed briefly. “You see, we were making a joke. We do not think that you are amused. You do not look it.”
Look it. Chan wondered if the Tinker could actually see him. The individual components had in total many thousands of eyes, but how were they used for vision by the Composite? He gestured to the myriad of components still scattered around the cabin.
“Are all of you Shikari? Or only the ones who are connected?”
There was a buzzing pause. An indication of contusion? “We think that we understand your question, but we are not sure. We all in past time have been Shikari. We all in future time will be Shikari; and we all in now-time can be Shikari. But in now-time we are not all Shikari.”
“I understand. But why are you not all Shikari now? Don’t you think better when you are all connected?”
The Tinker had taken on- a roughly human outline, with arms, legs, and head. When it moved forward in the cabin it was propelled by two different actions, the turning of body connections and the movement of thousands of component wings.
“Chan, you ask a many-questions-in-one question,” said the whistling voice. “Listen carefully. First, if we wish we can join all together at any time.”
“And you have more brainpower when you do it?”
“Yes, and no. When we join we certainly have more thinking material available — which you may call brainpower. But we are also less efficient. We are slower. We have a much longer integration time — the time it takes for us to complete a thought and reach a decision. That time grows fast-as-growth-itself — as you say, exponentially — with the number of components. When there is much, much time available, and the problem is large, we combine more units in us. More join, to make one body. But then the integration time can become so long that individual components begin to starve. We cannot, when connected, search for food. So components must leave, or die.
“What you see now is the most effective form, our preferred compromise between speed of thought and depth of thought. The free components that you see now will eat, rest, and mate. When the right time comes there will be exchange. Rested-and-fed-of-us will take the place of tired-and-hungry-of-us.”
Chan had a score more questions, although they were already late for take-off. How did a Composite decide when and how to form? Was it adopting a human shape only for his convenience? How intelligent were the components, if at all? (He had the feeling that question had been answered during his early briefings on Horus, but anything told to him before the Tolkov Stimulator worked its miracle felt vague and unreliable.) How did the components know whether to join the Composite or stay away? Most important of all, if a Tinker was varying its composition all the time, how could there possibly be a single self-awareness and a specific personality? Shikari had all that, and claimed a sense of humor, too.
So many questions, and every one of them surely vital to the Pursuit Team’s success — not to mention Chan’s personal curiosity. But they would have to wait until the rendezvous with the other team members.
Chan prepared to take off, then decided he ought to consult Shikari. After all, if they were to be called a team, they ought to act as one.
“Shikari, are you ready to go?”
“We are very ready.
“Then would you like to move up front? If you want to study the landscape, you’d be better off sitting” — ( Could a Tinker sit?) — “next to me.”
“That will be very good.” The Tinker changed shape. It came slithering forward like a giant purple-black pancake, over and around the back of the passenger seat and around Chan’s legs. The speaking funnel emerged briefly from the center.
“And perhaps when we are on our way,” Shikari said, “we can talk some more. When opportunity arises, we have innumerable questions concerning the strange form and functions of humans.”
Chapter 19
To a visitor, all the inhabitants of a foreign country are apt to look the same.
The Sargasso Dump was as foreign a place as Phoebe Willard had ever been. For her first week or two, the brain-shattered guards at Sargasso were distinguished by little more than their sex. Two things changed her attitude. The first was Luther Brachis’s insistence that the two of them attend the guard review and follow it by a formal reception and dinner. It was possible to regard men and women as identical and anonymous when you merely passed them in corridors or took trays of food from them, but it was far more difficult when you stood or sat face to face and made (or attempted) conversation.
Many of the guards found speech beyond them. Luther Brachis ignored that fact. He knew every one of the hundred residents, he talked to them easily, and he told Phoebe of the deeds that had brought them to the Dump. It was a shock for her to realize that many of the blank-eyed dreamers at the long table were true heroes, the derelict remnants of daredevil men and women who had saved ships from disaster and whole colonies from collapse. They wore their medals at the dinner, but most of them seemed oblivious to former glories. Only a couple brightened and smiled when Brachis called them by their old titles.