Battlemind (23 page)

“Yuk,” Katya said with some decisiveness. “Dark ages stuff. Obviously that was before nanofactories could grow meat to order.”

“When it comes to lack of empathy, I’ll give you one better, Mums,” Kara put in. “The Imperials with their
inochi-zo.
They turn torture of a gene-tailored life form into art.” She shivered. She’d forgotten Mishima’s presence. A glance in his direction, though, showed him listening impassively.

Daren shifted in his chair. “Well, the point of all this is that there’s a broad spectrum of skills, talents, and mental traits, both within each species, and among all of the species we know, that comprise what we call intelligence. They overlap, but they never quite match.”

“So how does this apply to our friends the Gr’tak?” Ambassador Mishima wanted to know.

“The Gr’tak, Your Excellency,” Taki told him, “appear to be geniuses compared to us when it comes to social organization. If language provides any clue, you only need to look at the words they have for things like ‘government,’ ‘friendship,’ or ‘society.’ ”

“The Gr’tak,” Dev added, “have twenty-three different words that we would translate as ‘government.’ ”

“You mean, like, democracy, theocracy, monarchy, stuff like that?” Gresham asked.

“No.
That
gets even more complicated, and since they don’t have them, as far as we can tell, they probably don’t have words for theocracies or monarchies. From what we’ve been able to record in these past few weeks, though, they have something like eighty words simply describing different types of governments where the ordinary citizens participate in their own self-rule, what we would call democracy. No, just the concept of
government,
an organization or group or corporate body that makes laws, administers justice, and provides direction for society as a whole,
that
has twenty-three different words in Rashind, the principal Gr’tak language, and to tell you the truth, we haven’t even begun to sort out the shades of meanings attached to each. The point, I think, is that they perceive more variety and richness in the concept than we do and have come up with more words to describe that richness because it’s important to them.”

“Sure,” Daren said. “There used to be a certain culture on old Earth, a hunter-fisher nomad group, a long time ago, before Nihon started running everything there. They lived in the near Arctic, where there was snow on the ground much of the year, and did their hunting out on one of Earth’s polar ice caps. I ViRed once that they had some obscene number of words that all meant ‘snow.’ ‘Light snow,’ ‘fluffy snow,’ ‘hard-packed snow,’ that sort of thing.”

Taki shrugged. “It’s a handy reference to what is important to a culture. In Nihongo, we have a very large number of words differentiating different types of winds and breezes, usually with poetic overtones. ‘The wind that makes a flag snap,’ ‘the wind of an arrow’s flight,’ ‘the wind from the sea,’ the wind—’ ”

“Are you saying these Gr’tak creatures think government is important?” Mishima said abruptly, cutting her off.

“They think
all
social interaction is important. Government is just one aspect of how people, how intelligent beings, rather, interact.”

“They have a large number of words for various types of sexual liaison,” Dev added. “Of course, their sex relationships tend to be a lot more complicated than ours.”

“How come?”

“Well, to start with, we’re not really dealing with a single species. A single ‘Gr’tak’ is what they call an associative of a number of different creatures living on and in one another. Parasites, in fact.”

Mishima leaned back from the table, giving a small hiss through his teeth.
“Inosho,”
he said quietly. Dev’s linguistic program gave an immediate translation, but it lacked the sharp emotion behind the word.
“Parasites.”

“There is a species of parasitic wasp on Earth,” Daren said. “It lays its eggs on the skin of certain caterpillars. The eggs hatch, and the larva eat the living caterpillar from the inside out, then use its skin as a cocoon for their phase change to adult wasps. Well, it turns out that these wasps are themselves parasitized by a smaller species of parasitic wasp. And
they
in turn are parasitized by an even smaller species of wasp. In fact, researchers discovered that there were no less than five different species of wasp, each nested in the last like a whole series of those little carved and painted wooden dolls. What are they called?”

“Matreshka
dolls,” Katya offered.

“There was an old comic poem to that effect,” Dev said. “Something about ‘Big fleas have little fleas…’ and ending with the line ‘and so
ad infinitum.’ ”

“Yes. Well, the surprising thing about the Gr’tak,” Daren continued, “is that they are composed of several mutually parasitizing species. Not as a serial regression, like those terrestrial wasps I mentioned, but with at least four different creatures living in close association with one another. Add to that their form of AI, what they call artificials, and you end up with a pretty complex joint life form.”

“Wait a minute,” Gresham said, shaking his head. “I don’t think I buy this. I downloaded my doctorate in biology a long time ago, and I was a pretty fair xenobiologist before I ended up on bureaucratic panels. Parasites are essentially regressive species.
Primitive,
because they only need to adapt to their hosts. There wouldn’t be any drive to develop intelligence, and if they had it to begin with, they’d lose it when life got easy.”

“Old idea,” Daren said with a tight smile. “That was outdated centuries ago. Parasites have to be specialized, yeah. And the traditional idea was always that when a parasite learns to live off of its host species, life gets easier for it. It’s true that some forms lose a lot of adaptations for getting along in the outside world because they simply don’t need them. A tapeworm, for instance, is nothing much more than a head with jaws to hang onto the inner surface of the host’s gut. The rest of it, all several meters’ worth, is body segments that detach one by one, pass out of the host’s body, and serve to reproduce the beast by hatching out new parasites inside new hosts that happen to ingest them. It’s not quite that simple, of course. Most parasitic species actually have fairly complex life cycles, some of them extremely so, requiring a large number of successive, species-specific hosts. Anyway, on the face of things, intelligence simply isn’t something that you would expect a parasite to need.

“But we’ve learned that there is intense competition among parasitic species for host living space, just as there is among other species… and any time you have competition, there’s the chance that it will foster, well, anything that will give the species an evolutionary edge in the race. Back to those terrestrial wasps.”

“What are you,” Gresham asked. “An expert on parasitic wasps?”

“My
doctoral download was on terrestrial insects, yes,” Daren said. “Especially social forms, and that included the Hymenoptera, even though not all wasps are social insects. Anyway, there’s one kind of wasp that lays several eggs on a host caterpillar. All but one hatch early and cruise through the caterpillar’s body killing every other parasitic wasp larva they find. That ensures that when the last egg hatches, the larva has no competition from other species.”

“That’s not intelligence,” Kara pointed out.

“No, that’s adaptation,” Daren agreed. “Intelligence would be another kind of adaptation and a useful one if evolved in a hostile, high-competition environment. Hell, scientists are still arguing over whether or not you can even call intelligence a survival trait, since the technology that comes out of it does seem to get us into increasingly difficult situations.

“The Gr’tak, though, are different,” he continued. “We haven’t learned much about their life cycle yet… and we can’t even begin to speculate about how they evolved to where they are today. But we have learned how they’re put together.”

He gestured at the floating, three-D image of the Gr’tak hanging above the conference table. “The largest part of the organism, that high-standing arch, is what they call a ‘receiver.’ That’s the main host, the foundation for the rest. Now, these three organisms on the back. They look like flat, black plastic bags or oversized leeches. Those are external parasites, and the Gr’tak refer to them as ‘greaters.’ Those independent flying creatures, like big insects, are called ‘lessers.’ They, actually, are parasites of the greaters. They live inside the greaters’ bodies and emerge through those holes in its back. As near as we can tell, the lessers are kind of like mobile scouts for the whole organism, flying around the area, checking out the surroundings, and flying back to report. There’s a fourth parasite, something they call a ‘deeper.’ We’re not sure what that is like, actually, though we think that that thing like a tree with very skinny branches growing out of the top might be a part of it. Deepers live inside the receiver. They may serve as an intermediary for the greaters and the receiver, and we’re pretty sure they’re important in the reproductive cycle.”

“How
do
these things reproduce?” Katya wanted to know.

“Haven’t sorted that out yet,” Daren said.

“We’re working on it,” Taki added. “The greaters share a certain symmetry with the receivers, and we think that’s because the greaters and the receivers are two different sexes of the same organism, though there’s so much room for misunderstanding here, we could easily be mistaken about that. We do know that the reproductive systems of all four species are very closely interconnected. We think the young of the next generation already carry their symbionts when they’re born.”

“The DalRiss started out as parasites, didn’t they?” Mishima said. “Is this the fashion trend of the Galaxy, now?”

Gresham laughed. “What’s next, intelligent tapeworms?”

“The DalRiss fusion arose from a symbiotic relationship,” Dev pointed out. “Possibly some parasitism was involved in their early history, but from what we’ve been able to learn, the dominant Riss organisms started off feeding on the larger Dal creatures, which were big, herd-dwelling, six-legged grazers, but they provided a survival advantage as well, probably by helping the Dal spot dangerous predators.

“With the Gr’tak, the relationship is deeper, and a lot stranger. The lessen; probably started off as outright parasites of the greaters, while the greaters may have started out as parasites, or they could have been part of a sexual dependency, like male angler fish, on Earth. Maybe they both represent part of a more complex life cycle. You know, the parasite lives as a larva in one host, then gets passed to a different host where it matures into something else. Somewhere along the line, though, the cycle of each of the four got so wrapped up with the reproductive cycles of the others that now none of the four can reproduce without the active participation of other three. The receivers appear to be what we call a parasex of the greaters, same species but with a much different morphology.”

“You think they developed in a hostile environment, though?” Vic asked. “That that was what forced them to evolve intelligence?”

“I’m not sure I see what other explanation there could be,” Daren said. “My working hypothesis now is that they’ve evolved from several codependent species inhabiting littoral zones on their original homeworld.”

“Littoral zones?” Mishima asked.

“Coastal areas. Specifically, salt marshes, swamps, tidal zones, places like that. They’re not really amphibious, but they do prefer wet environments, high humidity. That miniature world we visited is a weird cross between a sauna bath and a greenhouse. They like it at forty degrees or more and often conduct business from their wading pools. And that kind of environment is often a Darwinian forcer. That’s a place with lots of competition for limited resources, and lots of other species on the lookout for a meal.”

“This is all quite interesting,” Mishima said with a carefully shuttered expression. “I, and my government, of course, are most concerned, however, in what has brought these creatures here.”

“That seems pretty obvious,” Dev said. “It’s in the report I uploaded onto the Net last week. They were victims of the Web. Like the DalRiss.”

“But this happened a long time ago, right?” Gresham asked.

“We’re still working on their concept of time and how they measure it,” Dev admitted. “But if we’re on the right track, the Web showed up in their home system and turned their star into a nova well over four thousand years ago. We think their home star was spinward and coreward of Sol, out beyond Nova Aquila. Another in the Aquilan Cluster, in fact.”

One of the more haunting mysteries of astronomy had been the odd fact that a disproportionate number of novae, historically, had appeared in a single tiny patch of the sky as seen from Earth… roughly in the direction of the constellation Aquila, the Eagle. During a single, forty-year period early in the twentieth century, twenty-five percent of all of the recorded novae had appeared within an area measuring one quarter of one percent of the entire sky. Two had appeared there in one year alone—1936—and Nova Aquila, in 1918, had been the brightest recorded exploding star in three hundred years, a dazzling jewel-point outshining every star in the heavens except Sirius.

That clustering in time had been an odd, statistical anomaly, of course, since the stars involved ranged from relatively close to extremely distant, and it was chance that had the wavefronts of all of those stars arrive in the vicinity of Earth in the same four-decade period. But that anomaly had called astronomers’ attention to the disproportionate number of novae in that one direction. Not until Dev—downloaded into the DalRiss explorer fleet—reached Nova Aquila had the truth been suspected, that many of those stars, if not all, had been deliberately exploded by the entities humans knew as the Web. Apparently, the Web was working toward a specific agenda, moving out from the Galactic Core where they’d first appeared along a grand spiral, following one of the Galaxy’s spiral arms out into the stellar hinterlands. They’d been slowly approaching Sol’s position in space for millennia, coming from the direction of Aquila, Ophiuchus, and Serpens.