Battlemind (20 page)

But if the aliens had a lot to teach humanity—as had the Naga and the DalRiss—it wasn’t likely that the Empire would be eager to share with their former colonies much of any new information the aliens might offer. In fact, this could make the whole problem of potential war with the Empire that much scarier.

“At least the Imperials won’t be able to keep it all to themselves.” Daren though about it for a moment, then shook his head, his excitement over the Communes giving way to a new and more urgent eagerness to learn about this new species. “Another sapient life form! Never rains but it pours, eh, Taki?”

“This does seem to be the day for making such discoveries.”

“Enrico.Any details on their morphology? Their language?”

“It’s pretty strange, what I’ve downloaded so far. From the sound of things, you xenologists are going to have your work cut out for you. The Gr’tak are another group organism, a superorganism, I guess, though not on the same scale as your Communes. Apparently a number of dissimilar creatures have created an extremely close symbiosis.”

“Like the Dal and the Riss?”

“Maybe, though what I heard is that all of the components of a Gr’tak associative are intelligent. With the DalRiss, of course, only the Riss are intelligent. The Dal are just gene-tailored legs and arms for them, right?”

“That’s right,” Daren agreed. The Riss, with their civilization’s emphasis on biotechnology and genetics, had engineered a number of species into life forms that they literally rode on or in, guiding them through direct connections with the mounts’ nervous systems. The Gr’tak must have a similar linkage, but among several intelligent forms. How had
that
system evolved… and why?

“You know,” Taki said softly. “Such a mind, an associative of linked minds, that would have interesting applications for us.…”

Daren saw it in the same moment, a flash of revelation. A species that had evolved mental symbiosis would have a lot to teach humanity, which was just learning to cope with mind-to-mind symbiosis with other, alien species… and with alien cultures within his own.

Daren considered himself completely apolitical. When his romance with the Nihonjin-descended Taki—she was, in fact, a native New American—had caused comment in the past, he’d always either ignored it or been delighted when he incited it. For Daren, the constant state of war or near-war between Empire and Confederation had always been little more than a source of irritation and inconvenience, especially when military and political priorities overrode his needs for more funding for xenobiological research.

Suddenly, however, it seemed very important that the Imperials not have that information all to themselves.

“What the hell is this going to mean for the Confederation?” he wondered. “And for the Empire?”

Chapter 12

Sometimes what we need most is a different perspective on things. Consider. The Greek city states, thanks to the mountainous geography of the Greek peninsula, developed in relative isolation from one another, with different cultures, different arts, different philosophies and gods. Only gradually, over the course of centuries as roads were built and sealanes established, were the cities of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and the rest able to begin exchanging ideas.

And once the exchange had begun, the inevitable result was an explosion of art, science, and culture, of thesis and antithesis yielding brilliant and unanticipated synthesis of new ideas ranging from democracy to atomic theory. It seems we need alien ideas every so often to stir things up.…

—
The Heritage of Immanuel Kant

P
ROFESSOR
R
OLLIN
S
MYTHE
H
AUSER

C
.
E
. 2006

Dev Cameron used his God’s-eye view to watch the Gr’tak arrival.

He’d learned to make use of the constant flow of data through the network that lined the scattered worlds and systems of humanity, and that including the images collected by medes and ViRnews reporters and uploaded onto the Net. The discovery of a new and alien species was big news, and most current exchanges on the Net were discussing it in one way or another. By switching from one mede upload to another, he could choose his own view of the event as it unfolded in space midway between the world of High Frontier and her inner moon.

The scene he was watching now was being transmitted from High Orbital, the space station complex that served as the planet’s starport and interface point in the absence of a sky-el. High Frontier was a brand new colony, raw and primitive yet, and though survey work was under way, the forty-thousand-kilometer-long thread of her first sky-el had yet to be grown. Until the new world had a space elevator and synchorbital in place, High Orbital would serve as her transshipment point, starport, and space-ground interface facility.

Several thousand kilometers out from the station, under the unblinking gaze of mede ViRnews broad spectrum sensors aboard teleoperated drones, DalRiss cityships were materializing one by one as they arrived from New America and elsewhere. An enormous fleet had gathered here at High Frontier already, consisting of both Confederation and Imperial vessels of all classes. Time being a key concern, the human vessels were being piggybacked in by the DalRiss.

Each cityship, resembling a mottled, rough-skinned starfish from Earth’s seas, measured two kilometers or more from arm tip to arm tip and was home to some tens of thousands of Riss and their gene-tailored, living tools. Unlike human starships, which traveled with pseudovelocities of around a light year per day, the DalRiss had learned to engineer intelligent, living creatures, their “Achievers,” that could visualize two separate points in space and bring them together, allowing vast distances to be spanned instantly. Human scientists still weren’t sure how Achievers performed that trick, though the assumption was that the DalRiss had managed to snag hold of quantum physics’ infamous observer effect in a way that let them briefly and temporarily alter reality.

In his downloaded state, Dev had lived for twenty-five standard years with the DalRiss, working extensively with their Achievers, but their method of shifting from one location to another still seemed little short of magic to him. The cityships could leap enormous interstellar distances instantly, and they were large enough to engulf human vessels, enfolding them within their ventral grooves and carrying them along. The technique had been used by both Imperial and Confederation militaries more than once to move their fleets great distances in a short time; in the two years since the destruction of their homeworlds by the Web, the surviving spaceborne DalRiss had tied themselves closely to the human interstellar community, paying their way, in a sense, by providing humanity with a means of much faster and more efficient passage between the stars.

Even so, there weren’t nearly enough DalRiss vessels—there were only a few hundred in all—to handle the entire volume of interstellar traffic throughout Shichiju and the breakaway republics of the Periphery. Dev suspected, given the frantic I2C messages shutting back and forth across the Net, that every DalRiss cityship that could be found was being pressed into service, moving human ships, Confederation and Imperial, here to the High Frontier system.

Dev hadn’t needed to worry about securing a means of transport, of course, one of the advantages of being a complex computer program operating within the Shichiju-wide network. Using the University of Jefferson’s I2C facilities, he’d transferred himself into the
Rassvak,
a DalRiss cityship already in position near High Frontier. He was currently residing in the Naga network growing within the living DalRiss ship, a part of the structure’s command navigational computer system.

In a strange way, he was more at home here than he’d been in the human network back in Jefferson; Dev had spent his first twenty-five years as a downloaded digital ghost in this environment, working with his DalRiss hosts, helping them navigate their fleet in an extended search for new life, new intelligence. As he surveyed the incoming Gr’tak fleet, he could sense the excitement of the other minds linked with his, alien though they were.

“New partners in the Dance.…”

“And they share with us the Quest. They seek new partners among the stars, as do we.…”

“Their harmonies are strange. But they seek a communion of Mind. We can learn much from them.…”

“New patterns in the Dance. A new richness to be savored.…”

For the DalRiss, life was a kind of dance, one that unfolded, changed, and evolved, dynamic and always new, always surprising. They would be awaiting full contact with the Gr’tak with a keen anticipation, despite an outward, patient calm that at times bordered on a rather rigid, cold, and emotionless stoicism.

Another DalRiss ship materialized out of nothingness… and another, then still another. Nested within the ventral grooves of each incoming starfish shape was a human star-ship, most of them military vessels, ranging from destroyers and frigates up to a few of the huge, kilometer-long ryu, or dragon-class carriers. The Imperial Navy had lost heavily at the Battle of Nova Aquila, but in the past two years they’d been engaged in a massive building program aimed at replacing their losses, and Imperial tactical doctrine still relied heavily on large warships that could carry hundreds of space-mobile warflyers.

One of the giant ryu dragonships present, however, was not Imperial, but Confederation. The CMS
Karyu,
the Dragon-Killer, had taken up position at the heart of the growing cloud of Confederation vessels, including her own circling warflyer formations deployed on CAP, or combat aerospace patrol. Dev noted that the incoming human vessels were beginning to pool in two separate groups, one Confederation and one much larger for the Imperial Navy vessels.

Quickly, Dev checked other flows of data. The Imperial fleet remained in parking orbit, watchful, silent, on full alert but not engaged in any operations that could be construed as actively hostile. Tensions now between Imperial forces and the Confederation were running higher than ever, and the arrival of the aliens hadn’t helped one damned bit.

For their part, the DalRiss cityships had been gathering in a kind of no-man’s land between the two human forces. Dev wondered if that had been a deliberate decision on the part of the Riss to help avoid untoward incidents… or if they even understood the level of tension that existed between the Confed and Imperial crews. Dev doubted that they did. Human politics had always been something of a mystery to the alien DalRiss. They knew about politics, they knew about the wars fought between the various human political states and had even participated in some of them, but the DalRiss concept of life as a kind of mutual dance so colored their perceptions of other species that they clearly had difficulty understanding why members of the same species would want to fight with one another.

If the DalRiss, after some twenty-five years of experience with Dev, didn’t understand human politics, then what would these alien newcomers think about it? As human and DalRiss ships continued to arrive in-system, the Gr’tak fleet waited silently well beyond the gathering pools of human vessels. Initial contact had already been established, using high speed computers on both sides to begin generating communications protocols. Elements of the Gr’tak language had been recorded; evidently, and fortunately, they used a spoken language and not some more elusive mode of communication like odors or color changes or wig-wagging tentacles. So far, human contact experts had determined that Gr’tak was a group name, either for themselves as a species or for this particular group of ships, and that the name seemed to include a number of allied intelligent species. The assumption now was that the basic unit in Gr’tak society was the
taak,
a plural term that seemed to imply a union of diverse beings or minds working to a common goal. There was speculation that the Gr’tak might actually be representatives of some kind of interstellar federation. The information downloaded into human AI systems so far, however, was far too vague and fragmented to allow anything more than speculation.

With luck, they would learn more when they established a direct Naga linkage.

The Gr’tak ships, Dev noted, were huge, sleek, aesthetically pleasing things, all curves and smooth lines. They were also large, some a kilometer long, and with vast arrays of lighted ports among the towers and bulbous swellings near their prows that suggested vast cities. Oddly, some of the larger vessels looked less like spacecraft than like space stations of some kind; several were obviously planetoids or small moons that had been partially or completely excavated within and looked more like mobile space colonies. Was that, Dev wondered, a reflection of some quirk of Gr’tak psychology? Or did they mean, as some exchanges on the Net were speculating, that the Gr’tak fleet was in fact a migration of all or part of their civilization?

There was no way of knowing, short of learning how to talk with them directly.

One aspect of Gr’tak technology was clear enough. They’d apparently never developed faster-than-light travel, though their power plants reportedly generated thrust enough to take them to something like 0.5 c. That was fast enough to cover the distances between the stars within reasonable times, but too slow to make much use of General Relativity and time dilation. Either the Gr’tak were from some as yet undiscovered habitable world within a few light years of High Frontier, or they went in for generational travel. Some observers had already dismissed the Gr’tak as relative primitives and discounted them as a threat to the standoff between Empire and Confederation. In terms of weapons or new ship technology, that was probably true, but Dev knew better than to assume that they would have nothing to contribute to human science. The DalRiss had proven that science and technology could evolve along radically different routes with different cultures. The Gr’tak might well have insights into some branches of science that so far had been overlooked by both Imperial and Confed researchers; even if all human technology was superior to the newcomers, though, the mere fact that this was a different people, with different arts, philosophies, history, and ways of looking at things was enough to guarantee that they would have an impact on human civilization.