Battlemind (19 page)

“It’s done what life does everywhere, including us. It’s adapted itself.”

There were numerous species of the order Paralabyrin-thulomycota, unprepossessing organisms that had insinuated themselves everywhere within the Dantean ecosystem. This species they were looking at, as yet unknown and unnamed, might well hold the key to the entire Commune mystery.

Swiftly, Daren downloaded a file of background information and scanned through it rapidly and systematically, checking to be certain he’d missed nothing in his earlier review. The labyrinthulids of Earth were commonly called slime nets or slime net amoebae, though there was nothing at all amoebic about them. Like their better-known relatives, the humble slime molds, they were members of Kingdom Protoctista—meaning they were living organisms that were not animals, plants, fungi, or prokaryotes. They were eukaryotes, meaning they possessed cell nuclei and mitochondrial respiration. To the naked eye, they looked like transparent blobs of slime or mucus, sometimes several centimeters across and usually found on certain marine grasses, where they fed on yeasts or colonies of bacteria. Microscopically, they consisted of spindle-shaped cells migrating endlessly back and forth through slime tunnels laid down by the cells themselves, which ran through the tunnels like tiny maglev trains in their tubes. Though their motion seemed random, they were organized into supercolonies that could slowly extend themselves through their environment in search of food.

On Dante, cellular evolution had followed much the same course as on Earth, with genetic transmission that used analogues of both DNA and RNA. As a result, convergent evolution had molded most classes of life into forms resembling their earthly counterparts, at least to a point. The Communes, for instance, looked much like insects with their multi-jointed legs and segmented bodies, though they breathed with lungs and could be as large as a meter in length. The Dantean slime nets studied so far looked as though they could easily have been transported from Earth… except that here for some reason they’d branched into far more numerous and complex forms, a spectacular diversity that lived symbiotically or parasitically on or in thousands of species of more advanced Dantean life.

And apparently one form, at least, had parasitized the Communes, adapting itself to live in and on the host’s nerve tissue.

“Do you see it?” he asked Taki. “At this level, we could spend centuries following all of the interconnections here, but those tubes must interpenetrate the entire cortex… maybe even the entire central nervous system. And it possesses a complexity that’s way, way higher than the inter-connectivity of the host brain’s own neurons.”

“I’m not sure you can say that,” Taki said. “The scales are different. Those tubes, and the cells moving around inside them, are a lot larger than the neurons that make up the cortex mass.”

“C’mon, Tak. Look at it! The parasite is using the neuron connections and adding more of its own. I think it may have increased the neural pathways beyond the Threshold.”

He sensed Taki’s quick intake of breath. “Nakamura’s Number?”

“If not here, inside one brain, then if we combine it with other Commune organisms…”

“Wait! How is that possible?”

He used the probe’s spotlight to stroke one of the tubules and the oddly shaped, glistening cells sliding along inside. “Taki, I think what we’re looking at here are slow thoughts.”

Tetsu Nakamura was a twenty-fourth-century Nihonjin scientist who’d calculated the basic density and number of component parts required to elevate a complex order to a higher level of organization and function. The number, 1.048576 × 10
¹¹
, was less a precise figure than a place marker in calculating thresholds in interconnective operating systems. Approximately Nakamura’s Number of molecules working together formed a cell, a living organism that operated independently of and on a plane far above that of any of its component molecules. Nakamura’s Number of cells… when they were the specialized neurons of the central nervous system, together formed a brain capable of memory, planning, self-awareness, and abstract thought, something far beyond the capabilities of a single nerve cell.

The brain of a Dantean Commune worker contained roughly 3 × 10
⁹
neurons with the connections vastly increased, however, by the paralabyrinthulid infestation.…

“We’ll have to calculate the increase in neural linkages,” Daren said. “My guess, though, is that individual Communes have their base intelligence levels raised significantly by the parasites.”

“Dog level?” Taki asked.

“Maybe.Maybe more. But, don’t you see? It’s a
slow
intelligence. Those moving cells in the tubes. Those replace electrochemical activity, synaptic relays, and all of that.”

“How could two systems operating at such different speeds possibly interact?”

“I think…” Daren felt the quickening pulse of his excitement. “I think that the paralabyrinthulids primarily serve to connect the individual Commune creatures. Workers, soldiers, all of the other single Communes.”

“Daren.…”

“It’s got to be that way.
Look
at it, Tak! Those tubules are paralleling the whole neural network… and then some. And it’s also intimately associated with the worker’s circulatory system. That tells me these slime nets can communicate biochemically. Each of those moving, spindle-shaped cells could carry chemical tags that are being routed through the network the way electrochemical impulses are routed through the brain’s neural net.”

“That’s a big leap, Daren.”

“Not at all. I’ll even go one further. We’ve seen workers exchanging food directly mouth to mouth… and there are those reports of things like large slime molds found growing inside ruined commune colonies. I’ll bet that those large molds are a primary food source for the Communes, and that they’re part of our paralabyrinthulomycota. Maybe the Communes even cultivate the stuff, like harvester ants growing fungus inside their colonies on Earth. They infect themselves by ingesting it, and at the same time become carriers for biochemical signals being shared throughout the labyrin-thulomycota network!”

“Wait. Are you saying that the slime net is the real intelligence here?” She shook her head. “I don’t see—”

“No, no, no. It takes both organisms working together. I think the slime net has learned how to parasitize the Communes in such a way that it fosters intelligent activity… activity that benefits the net directly and the Communes by association.”

“You know, Daren, all along, xenologists have been looking for some sort of brain caste in the Communes,” Taki pointed out. He could still sense her reluctance. “Your idea sounds plausible, but it’s a big jump from cultivated eukaryote colonies to intelligence. What you’re suggesting, that a parasite has learned how to increase the host species’ intelligence… that sounds pretty wild.”

“Parasites can do incredible things when it comes to reordering the lives of their hosts in order to suit their needs. There’s a parasitic worm on Earth I remember reading about…” Daren paused, turning inward for a moment as he ran a quick search through his RAM, then downloaded the key information. “Yeah.
Leucochloridium paradoxum
is its name. It spends much of its life inside a certain species of snail, but in order to reproduce, it has to get inside the gut of a bird. So what it does is migrate to the eyestalks of its snail host, which does two things. It makes the snail nearly blind—until all it can see is light—and it also turns the eyes themselves bright red. The snail crawls up the stalk of a plant, following the brightest light up to where it can see better… and at the very top of the plant those bright red eyes attract the attention of a hungry bird.”

“Hell of a dirty trick to play on the snail.”

“It does the job and lets the worm complete its life cycle.”

“And you think this might be a similar manipulation of one species by another? One that instills intelligence in the host?”

“I’m thinking in that direction.” He considered the slime net a moment longer. “Here’s another example from Earth.
Septobasidium.
That’s a kind of fungus that grows over the back of a small, mothlike creature called a scale insect, trapping it against the bark of the tree it’s feeding on. The fungus covers the insect over completely in a remarkably short time, then inserts its hyphae into the insect’s body and begins sucking its juices. Now, you’d think that would kill the host, but in fact, it turns out the insect lives longer than it would on its own.”

“If you call that living.” Taki put in.

Daren chuckled. “There is that. Anyway, the scale insect keeps sucking on the plant’s sap, which in turn feeds the fungus. And if the critter lives longer, it produces more young, which is good for the scale insect from a genetic point of view. There’s a case where the host actually benefits from the parasitism.”

“Yes? So how does intelligence help the Communes?”

“I don’t know. How does intelligence help
any
species?” He remembered discussions he’d had in the past about whether or not intelligence could be considered a survival trait. “Maybe it started as a way of getting the Communes to nourish colonies of slime nets, but once it started there was no turning back and no way to stop the process. And there’s the stuff the Communes do. Clearing debris away from the beach, so their colonies aren’t damaged by flotsam in a storm. There’s got to be some survival value in that.”

“Mmm. At least this tells us a bit about why communicating with them has been so difficult. Speed.”

“Exactly. If I’m right, individual Communes are dumb by human standards. Self-aware, maybe. But not capable of abstract thought. But with biochemical messages being passed along the network from individual to individual, the entire community becomes a giant brain with enough neural interconnectiveness to out-think Einstein. The only trouble is, forming a given thought, ‘hello, how are you,’ say, might take a couple of days or more, and understanding the answer might take even longer.”

“I wonder how it perceives the world around it?” Taki wondered. “I wonder how it perceives us?”

“As blurs, perhaps.Shadows that flick in and out of existence too quickly to allow it to react. Likely, its thoughts are attuned to slower, more regular phenomena, like tides and seasons.”

“It also suggests a strategy for learning to talk with them. If, of course, they even have that sort of mind. A mind based on the physical movement of cells bearing chemical tags… that’s got to be the weirdest basis for intelligence I’ve heard of yet.”

“Remember Haldane, Taki my dear. The whole universe is predicated on weird. Let’s surface. I want to start planning out a new line of research.”

He keyed in a thought, withdrawing their awareness from the nanoprobe, just as the tiny artifact and its subprobes and light sources dissociated into clouds of component molecules and scatterings of free-floating carbon atoms.

Daren blinked his eyes, adjusting to the higher levels of light. He was lying in a reclining chair in one of
Gauss’s
science labs, a small forest of life support tubes and data feed optical fibers growing from the Companion-shaped jackpoints on his head and chest. His Companion broke the connections, his skin reverting to normal as the tubes and cables retracted themselves into seat back and ceiling. A few meters to his left, Taki was just sitting up, resealing the front of her shipsuit.

“Welcome back,” a technician said from the main console. “Good trip?”

“Splendid, Enrico,” Daren said. “Absolutely splendid!”

Enrico de la Paz was the senior AI systems technician aboard the
Gauss.
As Daren stood up, he noticed that the tech seemed a bit hurried in his movements, that he was breathing a little quickly and seemed distracted, as though he was excited or agitated about something else. Daren noticed these things… and as quickly dismissed them. The excitement of his own discovery was far more pressing than anything Enrico might have to say.

Taki, however, must have picked up the same distraction. “Enrico?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

He looked up and grinned. There was a strange light in his dark eyes. “Wrong, Dr. Oe? Well, it’s a little early to tell. But some news just came in over the main I2C link from New America.”

“What news?” Taki asked.

“A new alien contact.”

That caught Daren’s attention. “When?”

“Several days ago, at least, though it was kept quiet until just a few hours ago. We were wondering whether or not to get a message to you two, but decided it would keep.”

“A new alien contact!” Taki said, and now her eyes were brighter too. Mankind had established full and two-way contact with only two other sapient species so far, the DalRiss and the Naga; the Web hardly counted in this context, since the only exchange so far with that intelligence involved combat. With both the DalRiss and the Naga, however, the free exchange of information, philosophy, and technology had caused literal revolutions in Man’s understanding of the universe and generated a new Renaissance in learning and in science.

“Where was this?” Daren demanded.

“High Frontier,” he said. “The Gr’tak—that’s what the aliens call themselves. Apparently they were following Earth’s radio emissions, but they stumbled into one of our periphery systems on the way. I gather they just came cruising in from deep space, traveling at sublight velocity. Probably gave the Confederation Defense Fleet there group coronaries.”

“Sublight!” Taki exclaimed. “They don’t have FTL?”

“1 guess not. The word is they arrived in a big fleet, several hundred ships at least, and some of them rivaling the DalRiss cityships in size.”

“So,” Daren said, “our people contacted them.”

Enrico looked uncomfortable, and Daren saw him give Taki’s expressionless. Oriental features a hard, quick glance. “It was a mixed fleet that met them,” he said. “Elements of the Third Imperial Fleet, and some of our own CDF. I, uh, guess they’re still trying to sort things out.”

Daren began to understand Enrico’s distraction. High Frontier was a relatively new world among those colonized by Man. Third planet of DM+19°, a G-class star fifty-two light years from New America and forty-five light years from Sol, it was a member of the Confederation rather than of the Terran Hegemony, but Imperial fleets had been aggressively patrolling the star systems of the Confederation ever since the Web had become a threat. In fact, there was little the far smaller and weaker Confederation Navy could do to stop such patrols, and common sense said that it would be good to have Imperial forces handy if the Web made a sudden appearance.