Battlemind (18 page)

Not for the first time, Kara was glad that her leadership skills were limited to the bossing of a single warstrider company.

The conversation shifted after that, to things less threatening, less confrontational. Later, Katya paid for their meal. With the shifting light of a brightening dawn, but much faster, the spectacular vista around them faded away, replaced by a more conventional restaurant. Viewalls looked out over the city of Jefferson, with a view south toward spaceport and sea. Other patrons sat at their meals, lost in their own private world, oblivious to all of the other patrons. The two women walked toward the central lift tube that would take them back to ground level.

“You know, Mums,” Kara said as they rode the capsule down the restaurant tower, “there is one thing that justifies war.”

“Yes? What’s that?”

“The only thing that counts in the long run for any culture, any civilization, any
species
for that matter.” She was thinking about the impossibility of the Confederation facing the Empire one-on-one, and about what might happen if they failed.

“Survival,”
Kara said. “In the long run, we’re fighting for our own survival, and it may be that that’s all that really matters.”

Chapter 11

The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it’s queerer than we
can
imagine.

—J. B. S. H
ALDANE

British biochemist

mid-twentieth century
C
.
E
.

Revelation held Dr. Daren Cameron in a trembling grip that was close to ecstasy. Slowly, slowly, he let out a long breath.
My God,
he thought, and he had to stifle the impulse to laugh out loud.
My God, that’s it! It’s
got
to be!

He seemed to be hovering above a vast, fluid-filled canyon, with gray-yellow walls that gave anchor to a vast and gently waving forest of indistinct growths, like endlessly trailing fronds of kelp in a darkening sea. The object of his interest, though, seemed an obvious intruder in this aqueous realm, a tangled, three-dimensional mass of glistening and translucent threads adhering to one of the nearby walls, sprouting filaments that at this scale looked like gleaming, transparent tubes. Clearly visible within those tubes, dark-colored, elongated cells, pointed at front and back, slipped along nose to tail in endless, gliding processions. The tubes crisscrossed everywhere through the murk but were concentrated here within this nexus, in the silvery-gray mass growing from the canyon wall. The web of filaments stretched off in every direction, their meanderings swiftly lost in the distance.

Carefully, Daren changed position, moving closer to the nexus, watching the cells sliding through their slime tunnels in eerie mimicry of blood cells slipping single-file through a capillary. Several globe-shaped crystals hovering nearby provided a dazzlingly brilliant illumination. At his mental command they moved apart and back slightly to reduce the glare from clouds of tiny particles suspended in the liquid; the shafts of silver-blue light cast wavering, vast shadows like living things in the translucent liquid.

At closer range, the cliff resolved itself into a densely matted forest of gray-yellow and gray-purple strands, like a forest of seaweed. In a sense, Daren was exploring an alien sea aboard a mind-linked submarine… but the submersible was in fact a nanotech probe, a tiny and complex assembly of organic molecules and interlocking carbon atoms seven microns across, about the size of a human blood cell, and not much larger than a single bacterium. The “sea” around him was actually the cranial cavity of a half-meter-long creature known as a Dantean Commune, while the “cliff-side” was a tiny portion of the creature’s cerebral cortex, made up of a densely intertwining mass of individual neurons.

Daren was teleoperating the nanoprobe from his console aboard the
Gauss
over twelve hundred light years away, using an I2C link to continue his long-running researches into the Commune mystery. The probe itself was far too small to provide full sensory input for Daren’s linked mind. In fact, he was networked with the research computer at the research station on Dante, which in turn controlled the probe in response to his relayed mental commands.

Carefully, he nudged closer to the fibrous object adhering to the tangle of cortex neurons. The moving cells nestled in their transparent tubes clearly still lived, though the larger organic structures around them were lifeless. The Commune worker, he knew, lay dead on a dissecting table in a refrigerated laboratory in Dante’s main research facility. Even so, there was still life in here… and activity beyond the biochemistry of decay.

He initiated another command series, and a cloud of smaller objects sprayed from the probe’s belly, subprobes too small for direct neural linking; each was composed of no more than a few tens of thousands of molecules and could provide little more than the bare essentials of simple data acquisition and telemetry. Trailing faintly luminous streaks of turbulence through the fluid, the subprobes vanished into the grayish mass.

The space surrounding Daren felt enormous, but that sense of space was illusory. The creature’s brain, a lump of ganglia located in the central body cavity just above the heart, was in fact smaller than Daren’s clenched fist, and the space between its convoluted surface and the surrounding cartilage walls measured less than half a centimeter across.

Working in the depths of that half-centimeter of liquid, however, it was easy to forget the realities of scale, thinking instead of cliffs and vast, dark, and unplumbable ocean depths. The Commune worker, Daren knew from long experience, was a half-meter-long segmented creature with a vaguely spiderlike appearance. Socially, the Communes were in many ways similar to the termite communities of Earth. Indeed, Daren had spent a year of undergraduate work on Earth, at the University of Nairobi, researching African termite mounds as background and preparation for his studies of his primary interest, the Communes of Dante.

Dante, the second world of DM-58° 5564, was not a pleasant place by human standards, though a small scientific community had been established on its surface. With an average surface temperature of nearly forty degrees Celsius, only the polar regions and high mountains were easily habitable for Man. The Communes, however, were a littoral species, living on the narrow margin between ocean and the mountainous interior. In fact, their castle-like colonies rose out of the seacoast shallows and tidal flats, apparently grown to specific shape and design from minerals drawn up with sea water and plated out as the water evaporated through their high, fluted columns.

Though they’d been studied for many years, the Communes were still very much of an unknown. The most puzzling mystery about them had been plaguing xenologists ever since the species had been discovered by the first human explorers to reach the planet. Were the damned things intelligent? Like the termites of Earth, the Commune organisms appeared to be highly differentiated anatomically. There was a specific type identified as a soldier caste, charged with defending the colony from outside threat. There were workers of several types, some for repairing the Commune towers, some for gathering food, or for digging, or for scouting, while still others for engaging in activity apparently senseless and even random to human observers. The whole functioned together so smoothly that the entire population of a Commune colony could be considered a superorganism, not that far removed biologically from, say, a human being composed of trillions of separate, closely networked cells; workers and foragers seeking food could from a distance appear to be a single, fluid pseudopod moving across the ground with purpose, cunning, and seeming intelligence.

So often did the Communes act in ways that suggested purposeful, even sapient behavior, that xenologists had been trying for years to answer that one question. Were they—the colonial superorganisms, that is—intelligent? Individuals almost certainly were not. Their brains massed only a few tens of grams, and the average intelligence of a typical worker was probably not much higher than that of, say, a rabbit or a Chironian chewthrough. And yet a mass of billions of them could track food, dam rivers, divert water flows into makeshift spillways, erect barriers to create tidal pools, and clear debris that might be shifted by storm waves and damage a Commune castle’s walls. That showed not merely intelligence, but
problem-solving
intelligence, rational and self-aware. An intelligence with which it might be possible to establish communication.

Every attempt to communicate with the creatures, however, had so far failed. Most observers felt that if the creatures were intelligent, it would be with an order of intelligence far different from that of humans. The most popular theory was that there was some kind of brain caste in the Commune hierarchy, another and as yet unseen morphological form that coordinated the superorganism’s actions from the relative security of the home colony.

But Daren thought he was on to something now… something that might well change forever how scientists looked at the Communes and at how they related to the environment within which they lived.

“What did you find?” Taki Oe asked. She was not visible in the scene projected within Daren’s brain, but he could sense her presence nonetheless, piggybacked with his into the data stream coming in from the nanoprobe. She’d been in on this project with him from the very beginning… back in the frustrating early days when funding for such a simple thing as a research trip to Dante was out of the question. Now he was further from Dante than ever, but the advent of I2C had made possible a direct investigation of that world and its life that was very nearly as good as actually being there… and perhaps better. Dante, after all, was an unpleasant place, with limited habitat space and few creature comforts.

“There,” Daren told her. He threw a spot of illumination on the structure he was looking at. “Below that neural ganglia. See it?”

“The gray, fuzzy mass? I see it, but I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

“Check the readout.” The probe was receiving a steady flow of data, most of it from a fleet of even tinier micro-submersibles moving through the fluid nearby. Information scrolled down the side of the screen, relayed from probes that had penetrated the gray mass.

“I… don’t understand. The biochemistry is different.”

“Completely different.”

“A different organism.”

“Yup.Different DNA. It looks to me like another species of labyrinthulomycota. Para-labyrinthulomycota, I should say.”

She chuckled. “Easy for
you
to say.”

He smiled at the old joke. Xenologists had adopted the idea of giving life forms that closely paralleled given classes or species on Earth the prefix
para,
for “like.” Thus, a parafungus was something very much like terrestrial fungi… save for the fact that it was not even distantly related to anything that had ever been within light years of Earth.

“You think it’s a parasite?” Taki asked.

“Parasite or symbiont,” he replied. “It certainly feeds on its host. See the way those tubules burrow their way down into the brain tissue? The question is how much, if anything, it gives the host back in return. And I think I just might have the answer to that.”

At his command, the nanoprobe began moving ahead, leaving the faceted illumination globes behind and swiftly flying through the shadowed liquid, gliding just above one of the long and twisting mucus tubes. As the view went dark, he switched on the nanoprobe’s own light. At their current scale, of course, ordinary light waves would have been invisible, but the AI handling the probe interface could shift reflections from hard-ultraviolet radiation—at wavelengths of around 800 angstroms—up into the visible spectrum—between 7700 and 3900 angstroms. The colors had a sullen, purplish-gray cast to them, however, as the scene explosively shifted past Daren’s point of view, the colors rippling like iridescence from an oil slick from the surfaces of the tube and the dead nerve tissue around it. After a few moments of undulating gently up and down, the slime trail they were following arced sharply to the right, then descended toward a cliff wall… and another of the glistening, gray-silver nexus clumps of tubules.

Bringing the nanoprobe to a halt, Daren slowly rotated in place. The glow from the first nexus was clearly visible, a hazy patch of white-purple light in the extreme distance… all of one tenth of a millimeter away.

Daren nodded to himself. The evidence pointed to an incredible complex of these nexi, interconnected by the slime tubes to one another and to the host’s brain tissue.

Taki didn’t sound convinced. “You’re sure this isn’t part of the decay process in the specimen?”

“Positive. It’s freshly killed and being kept refrigerated at the south polar colony research station.”

It had been a big break for the research team, finding the body of a Commune worker. Since whether or not the creatures qualified as intelligent life was still an open question, hunting the things was strictly forbidden.

But when one had been found dead in a rockslide, it had been flown directly to the south polar station for autopsy and remote exploration.

“Some fungi can start breaking down dead organic matter within a few hours, sure,” Daren continued, “but you can tell by the organization of this thing that it’s been in place here a lot longer than that.”

“It could be the disease that killed it.”

“I don’t think so. We’ll need to autopsy some more to see if this kind of infestation exists in all of them, but… I really don’t think this is a disease. Look. No signs of inflammation. No signs of tissue rejection or antibody formation. This… this growth moved in and made itself at home. And the body allowed it to do so.”

“So what does…?” He could hear her turning the thought over in her mind. “Wait. You think this is linked somehow to the intelligence question?”

“It’s possible.”

“We’ve never seen anything like this on Dante,” Taki said. “Not in any of the other paralabyrinthula.”