Rebellion (24 page)

Self might be able to comprehend. »Self« could not understand the images that seemed to arise through direct contact with the not-Self thing, but perhaps the far greater mental powers of Self would assimilate and interpret them. »Self« was all too aware of its own limitations.

Besides, it was necessary to transmit to Self an account of what had happened in the Void, so that it could refine its strategies, its weapons, and its purpose so that it could deal with the strange not-Self opponents that had been encountered there. »Self« felt the growing hunger for Unity and increased the pace of its descent.

The rock grew warmer with depth.

Chapter 19

We can imagine hierarchies of Xenophobe awareness, then, with thousands of separate cells networked together like so many unintelligent computers into a low-level kind of consciousness. We know that vast Xeno communities exist far below the surfaces of worlds they’ve infested. Perhaps these, with millions or hundreds of millions of interconnected cells, have more powerful, more intelligent minds, minds of human or even superhuman scope and power. Finally, when all of the Xenophobe communities of a world join together in the contemplative stage, we can imagine that they entera new and higher state of consciousness, the “One,” the World Mind we encountered within the depths of Alya B-V.

What, I wonder, do such minds dream of?

—from a report given before the

Hegemony Council on Space Exploration

Devis Cameron

C.E.
2542

Katya tumbled from her prison in a wet gush of tarry liquid. The darkness surrounding her was still absolute, a primal night unrelieved by the slightest trace of illumination. She could sense the space surrounding her, though, a hot
and steaming void. She could hear things—drippings, rustlings, unnameable slitherings and squishing sounds—that sounded close and helped describe the unseen emptiness around her.

There was atmosphere here, at least. She’d wondered about that during the descent, since the Xenophobes’ underground highways weren’t literal tunnels, and their deep caverns didn’t necessarily open to the outside air. Her mask wouldn’t have been able to handle vacuum. She’d imagined, though, that the air underground would be the same mix as on the surface, or else it might be the gaseous product of some Xeno-related chemical reaction. Either way, she wouldn’t be able to breathe it. She pressed her fingertips against her mask, checking the pressure seal.

Secure. Next, she tried exploring this new prison by touch. Her outstretched right hand met soft and yielding surfaces in one direction, empty space in another. The floor was soft too, as though she stood on small and somewhat lumpy cushions beneath a few centimeters of some liquid with the consistency of thick syrup. Reaching above her head she could not feel a ceiling, but there was an impression—possibly psychosomatic, perhaps the workings of some latent human sense beyond the normal five—of a vast and crushing weight balanced precariously above her head.

This was worse, far worse than the Alyan vault where Dev had encountered the Xeno World Mind, for there’d been other people there, the troops of Cameron’s Commandos who’d followed Dev into the bowls of the planet, and there’d been light from Dev’s Scoutstrider and there’d been Dev himself, emerging from the wet cocoon of Xeno cells that had pinned him temporarily against the living wall of the cavern. She knew she was in a similar cavern far below Eridu’s surface.

Grimly, she wrestled again with her claustrophobia. It had receded for a time during her descent, but it reemerged now, plucking at her tautly strung nerves, a devil’s music of heart-thumping terror throbbing at the ragged edge of sanity itself.

The heat made it infinitely worse. Where it touched bare-skin, the air was stiflingly hot, hotter by far than the equatorial jungle west of Babel. A fragment of geological data from her cephlink RAM reminded her that, in general, the temperature increased by twenty-five degrees celsius for every kilometer of depth beneath an Earthlike world’s surface. Eridu’s surface temperature was something over forty degrees, and though she didn’t know the temperature here, she guessed that she must be between five hundred and a thousand meters down, with a mountain range of solid rock pressing down above her head.

Until now, she’d been afraid that her air supply might give out; now the question was which would get her first, running out of air or collapsing from heat stroke. Her bodysuit’s multiple layers and microcircuitry were designed to cool or warm as needed, but she was quickly reaching the point where the suit would fail her. Her face and neck were slick with sweat, and it felt as though she was standing inside an oven.

She drew a deep, shuddering breath. She was going to die. There was no way around that now, if only because the monster that had dragged her down here would never be able to get her back to the surface before her air supply ran out.

Strangely, that didn’t seem to matter.

Katya felt preternaturally calm. Had she, in fact, gone insane? Was this clarity of thought and of every sense save vision some kind of madness-engendered hallucination?

Shock,
she told herself shakily.
You’re still dizzy from the shock.

All she could do now was try to make the best of the situation. She’d approached the Xeno Cobra to communicate, and communicate with the Xenos was what she would try to do. She doubted that her kidnapper had brought her all the way down here just to terrify her. It was intelligent, even if that intelligence was different from hers. There had to be,
had
to be, reasons for the things it did.

Once again, she stretched out her arm, probing this time with her left hand, the one still encased in the cool slickness of the DalRiss comel. The soft shapes she’d felt on the wall, on the floor beneath her feet must be Xenophobe cells; like the cavern on Alya B-V, the cave walls around her must be covered with hundreds, with thousands of the things. If she could touch them…

Self had reunited with »self«, receiving the flow of data from its scout with an emotion that combined feelings of happiness and completion with the succoring warmth of success. As the »self« fragment of Self merged back into the whole, stored memories of the great Void flooded through Self’s tens of millions of networked cells, a self-aware mass that spread like a vast, gelatinous web through nearly a hundred cubic kilometers of not-Rock.

As expected, the edge of the great, not-Rock Void was colder than the depths of Mother Rock, poorer in life-sustaining warmth. The blaze of heat hanging in the Void, however—a phenomenon remembered still from the time ages before when the first of Self’s cells had crossed the Void and penetrated this part of the universe—was still there, It would provide heat enough to sustain life along the precarious interface between Rock and Void.

And there was more than reason enough for Self to extend itself in that direction, for »self’s« samplings of that interface confirmed the vague hints and traces Self had detected from within the rock; there were concentrations of pure metals there, of undreamed-of alloys and materials unlike anything tasted within Mother Rock. The chemist within Self’s being quivered with anticipation at what could be grown from such a treasure trove.

Within those memories, too, were stranger things, moving things that might be rocks on the interface between Rock and Void that demonstrated volition, yet were patently not »selves« spawned from Self. Selves that were not of Self?

Incomprehensible.

Selves-that-were-not-Self, they had attacked, destroying many of the »selves« as they emerged from the rock. Threat… These things would have to be neutralized if the treasures of the Rock-Void interface were to be exploited.

And finally, there was a particular mystery, the sample »self« had brought within its damaged rock threader.

Self’s thoughts, relayed through nanotechnic switches and organically grown microcircuitry, moved with lightning speed and precision, but its physical reactions were ponderously, laboriously slow. The… thing lay within a hollow formed by the encircling cells of Self’s own mass, a not-Self tasting of salts and carbon, of oxygen and water. As yet, it had made no threatening move. Indeed, »self’s« memories, merging now through Self’s entire mass, recorded its tentative attempt at communication.

The thing, apparently, was as terrified of »self« as »self« had been terrified of it. It stood now, a trembling pillar of radiant heat somewhat cooler than its surroundings, a dimly sensed, almost invisible specter unlike anything in Self’s long, long memory.

No… that was not quite true. Before Self had crossed the great Void, eons past, there had been memories of other parts of the universe of Rock, of other confrontations with volitional selves-that-were-not-Self. The forms of rock threaders and defenders both had been copied from such entities, though the forms of the entities themselves were long forgotten and lost.

Curiosity… mingled with fear. Did this entity think; was it self-aware, as Self was Self-aware; or was it a natural and mindless phenomenon of the Rock-Void interface?

It seemed to be reaching out, and Self extended a subunit of its own cells to meet it.…

Images, memories flooded through Katya’s awareness, cascading thoughts, ideas,
strangeness.

She saw heat… and tasted the warm comfort of Self, a node of life and thought and awareness within an infinite universe of rock. She struggled to retain her human perspective in a swirl of alien concepts.

A universe inside out… infinite Rock with a central core of emptiness, a vast, vast bubble of nothingness. Was there a center to infinity? There must be, for Rock extended endlessly in every direction from the Void at the center of All, growing hotter and hotter with distance.

Need… not for food, but for the raw materials necessary for propagation… and the need to spread through Mother Rock, opening not-Rock bubbles within the warm encompassment nurturing thought and being.

There was only Rock and not-Rock and Self.

Confusion… Self was by definition the knowing of Self. Could there be… an
outside
awareness like the fragmented points of view called »self«, another Self?

Memories, stronger now, of not-Self units that once, eons past, attempted to destroy Self. The defenders once were manifestations of those not-Self units, now long vanished. Their knowledge had become part of Self, their molecules Utilized in the endless propagation of Self.

Katya struggled to remain standing.
This is what Dev saw, what he felt.
Two mutually alien worldviews, hers and the Xeno’s, were colliding, and the shock very nearly overwhelmed her.

Somehow, she hung on, calling in her mind to the alien awareness surrounding her.
This… this war between your kind and mine is an accident!
Was any of this making sense to the monster she sensed beneath her hand and clinging to the night-hidden walls around her?
We thought you were an enemy when you attacked our cities and vehicles and space elevators but now I don’t even think you knew we were there. We’re human and we make mistakes and you are not human at all but you make mistakes too and…

She knew her thoughts were babbling on, almost beyond her control. Somehow, somehow, she had to establish meaningful communication with the Xenophobe.…

No! Not “Xenophobe,” It thought of itself as “Self,” or as “the One,” or, in some twisted sense just barely within Katya’s comprehension, as the means by which Rock knew itself. She caught another image:
Child of the Night.
Did it understand night? She doubted that. Perhaps that was her own interpretation of something not expressible in words, a sense that it perceives itself as having been spawned by the night-black gulf of the Void.

“There are humans
—
things like me
—
that want to destroy you.”

Denial. Not possible. Rock protects. The Child of the Night survives.

“It
is
possible. There is a weapon that… that changes rock into energy. Radiation. Great heat. They will do this to reach you even in the rock. To destroy you. They’ve already tried it, not long ago, at a place south of here.”

Understanding. Not “weapon” or “place” or “south,” concepts that Self could not easily assimilate. But Self remembered pressure waves rippling through Rock, remembered Rock boiling, remembered the sharp pain of separation as a portion of Self, a far-outlying portion of Self, had been lost.

Still, that incident had been no more important to Self than the frequent loss of bits of itself in the »self« probes it continuously sent into its surroundings.

Far more keenly felt was something else, an astonishing emotion that threatened to overwhelm Self as it communicated with this dazzlingly not-Self point of view. The not-Self thought, reasoned, felt as Self did.

Wonder!

Katya had expected an argument. Self seemed to accept her statement about the nukes, however, without question. Did it read her urgency as an indication of truth? Or might this strange organism not understand the difference between the truth and a lie?

There are humans called Imperials,
she tried to explain.
Humans who want to destroy you. There are other humans, humans like me, who don’t want to do this. They want to communicate with you instead.

Confusion.Paradox. How can not Self-thinking-thing both want and not want destruction of Self?

“There are… fragments of yourself. They leave you, travel to the surface
—”

What is “surface” ?

“To the, uh, interface, then.The interface between Void and Rock. Those fragments—”