by Greg Bear
“Can you talk about it?” she asked. Information about the ship not accessible in certain rates was excellent barter.
“Not sure,” he said, frowning. “I’ve been told caution.”
“Well, I’m listening.”
He could come from glover stock, she thought, but probably not from technical. He wasn’t very muscular, but he wasn’t as tall as a glover, or as thin, either.
“If you’ll tell me about gloves.”
With a smile she held up her hands and wriggled the short, stumpy fingers. “Sure.”
The brood mind floated weightless in its tank, held in place by buffered carbon rods. Metal was at a premium aboard Senexi ships, more out of tradition than actual material limitations. From what Aryz could tell, the Senexi used metals sparingly for the same reason—and he strained to recall the small dribbles of information about the human past he had extracted from the memory store—for the same reason that the Romans of old Earth regarded farming as the only truly noble occupation—
Farming being the raising of plants for food and raw materials. Plants were analogous to the freeth Senexi ate in their larval youth, but the freeth were not green and sedentary.
There was always a certain fascination in stretching his mind to encompass human concepts. He had had so little time to delve deeply—and that was good, of course, for he had been set to answer specific questions, not mire himself in the whole range of human filth.
He floated before the brood mind, all these thoughts coursing through his tissues. He had no central nervous system, no truly differentiated organs except those that dealt with the outside world: limbs, eyes, permea. The brood mind, however, was all central nervous system, a thinly buffered sac of viscous fluids about ten meters wide.
“Have you investigated the human memory device yet?” the brood mind asked.
“I have.”
“Is communication with the human shapes possible for us?”
“We have already created interfaces for dealing with their machines. Yes, it seems likely we can communicate.”
“Does it occur to you that in our long war with humans, we have made no attempt to communicate before?”
This was a complicated question. It called for several qualities that Aryz, as a branch ind, wasn’t supposed to have. Inquisitiveness, for one. Branch inds did not ask questions. They exhibited initiative only as offshoots of the brood mind.
He found, much to his dismay, that the question had occurred to him. “We have never captured a human memory store before,” he said, by way of incomplete answer. “We could not have communicated without such an extensive source of information.”
“Yet, as you say, even in the past we have been able to use human machines.”
“The problem is vastly more complex.”
The brood mind paused. “Do you think the teams have been prohibited from communicating with humans?”
Aryz felt the closest thing to anguish possible for a branch ind. Was he being considered unworthy? Accused of conduct inappropriate to a branch ind? His loyalty to the brood mind was unshakeable. “Yes.”
“And what might our reasons be?”
“Avoidance of pollution.”
“Correct. We can no more communicate with them and remain untainted than we can walk on their worlds, breathe their atmosphere.” Again, silence. Aryz lapsed into a mode of inactivity. When the brood mind readdressed him, he was instantly aware.
“Do you know how you are different?” it asked.
“I am not …” Again, hesitation. Lying to the brood mind was impossible for him. What snared him was semantics, a complication in the radiated signals between them. He had not been aware that he was different; the brood mind’s questions suggested he might be. But he could not possibly face up to the fact and analyze it all in one short time. He signaled his distress.
“You are useful to the team,” the brood mind said. Aryz calmed instantly. His thoughts became sluggish, receptive. There was a possibility of redemption. But how was he different? “You are to attempt communication with the shapes yourself. You will not engage in any discourse with your fellows while you are so involved.” He was banned. “And after completion of this mission and transfer of certain facts to me, you will dissipate.”
Aryz struggled with the complexity of the orders. “How am I different, worthy of such a commission?”
The surface of the brood mind was as still as an undisturbed pool. The indistinct black smudges that marked its radiating organs circulated slowly within the interior, then returned, one above the other, to focus on him. “You will grow a new branch ind. It will not have your flaws, but, then again, it will not be useful to me should such a situation come a second time. Your dissipation will be a relief, but it will be regretted.”
“How am I different?”
“I think you know already,” the brood mind said. “When the time comes, you will feed the new branch ind all your memories but those of human contact. If you do not survive to that stage of its growth, you will pick your fellow who will perform that function for you.”
A small pinkish spot appeared on the back of Aryz’s globe. He floated forward and placed his largest permeum against the brood mind’s cool surface. The key and command were passed, and his body became capable of reproduction. Then the signal of dismissal was given. He left the chamber.
Flowing through the thin stream of liquid ammonia lining the corridor, he felt ambiguously stimulated. His was a position of privilege and anathema. He had been blessed—and condemned. Had any other branch ind experienced such a thing?
Then he knew the brood mind was correct. He was different from his fellows. None of them would have asked such questions. None of them could have survived the suggestion of communicating with human shapes. If this task hadn’t been given to him, he would have had to dissipate anyway.
The pink spot grew larger, then began to make grayish flakes. It broke through the skin, and casually, almost without thinking, Aryz scraped it off against a bulkhead. It clung, made a radio-frequency emanation something like a sigh, and began absorbing nutrients from the ammonia.
Aryz went to inspect the shapes.
She was intrigued by Clevo, but the kind of interest she felt was new to her. She was not particularly receptive. Rather, she felt a mental gnawing as if she were hungry or had been injected with some kind of brain moans. What Clevo told her about the mandates opened up a topic she had never considered before. How did all things come to be—and how did she figure in them?
The mandates were quite small, Clevo explained, each little more than a cubic meter in volume. Within them was the entire history and culture of the human species, as accurate as possible, culled from all existing sources. The mandate in each ship was updated whenever the ship returned to a contact station. It was not likely the Mellangee would return to a contact station during their lifetimes, with the crew leading such short lives on the average.
Clevo had been assigned small tasks—checking data and adding ship records—that had allowed him to sample bits of the mandate. “It’s mandated that we have records,” he explained, “and what we have, you see, is man-data.” He smiled. “That’s a joke,” he said. “Sort of.”
Prufrax nodded solemnly. “So where do we come from?”
“Earth, of course,” Clevo said. “Everyone knows that.”
“I mean, where do we come from—you and I, the crew.”
“Breeding division. Why ask? You know.”
“Yes.” She frowned, concentrating. “I mean, we don’t come from the same place as the Senexi. The same way.”
“No, that’s foolishness.”
She saw that it was foolishness—the Senexi were different all around. What was she struggling to ask? “Is their fib like our own?”
“Fib? History’s not a fib. Not most of
it, anyway. Fibs are for unreal. History is overfib.”
She knew, in a vague way, that fibs were unreal. She didn’t like to have their comfort demeaned, though. “Fibs are fun,” she said. “They teach Zap.”
“I suppose,” Clevo said dubiously. “Being noncombat, I don’t see Zap fibs.”
Fibs without Zap were almost unthinkable to her. “Such dull,” she said.
“Well, of course you’d say that. I might find Zap fibs dull—think of that?”
“We’re different,” she said. “Like Senexi are different.”
Clevo’s jaw hung open. “No way. We’re crew. We’re human. Senexi are …” He shook his head as if fed bitters.
“No, I mean …” She paused, uncertain whether she was entering unallowed territory. “You and I, we’re fed different, given different moans. But in a big way we’re different from Senexi. They aren’t made, nor do they act as you and I. But …” Again it was difficult to express. She was irritated. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
A tellman walked down the path, not familiar to Prufrax. He held out his hand for Clevo, and Clevo grasped it. “It’s amazing,” the tellman said, “how you two gravitate to each other. Go, elfstate,” he addressed Prufrax. “You’re on the wrong greenroad.”
She never saw the young researcher again. With glover training underway, the itches he aroused soon faded, and Zap resumed its overplace.
The Senexi had ways of knowing humans were near. As information came in about fleets and individual cruisers less than one percent nebula diameter distant, the seedship seemed warmer, less hospitable. Everything was UV with anxiety, and the new branch ind on the wall had to be shielded by a special silicate cup to prevent distortion. The brood mind grew a corniculum automatically, though the toughened outer membrane would be of little help if the seedship was breached.
Aryz had buried his personal confusion under a load of work. He had penetrated the human memory store deeply enough to find instructions on its use. It called itself a mandate (the human word came through the interface as a correlated series of radiated symbols), and even the simple preliminary directions were difficult for Aryz. It was like swimming in another family’s private sea, though of course infinitely more alien; how could he connect with experiences never had, problems and needs never encountered by his kind?
He could speak some of the human languages in several radio frequencies, but he hadn’t yet decided how he was going to produce modulated sound for the human shapes. It was a disturbing prospect. What would he vibrate? A permeum could vibrate subtly—such signals were used when branch inds joined to form the brood mind, but he doubted his control would ever be subtle enough. Sooner expect a human to communicate with a Senexi by controlling the radiations of its nervous system! The humans had distinct organs within their breathing passages that produced the vibrations; perhaps those structures could be mimicked. But he hadn’t yet studied the dead shapes in much detail.
He observed the new branch ind once or twice each watch period. Never before had he seen an induced replacement. The normal process was for two brood minds to exchange plasm and form new team buds, then to exchange and nurture the buds. The buds were later cast free to swim as individual larvae. While the larvae often swam through the liquid and gas atmosphere of a Senexi world for thousands, even tens of thousands of kilometers, inevitably they returned to gather with the other buds of their team. Replacements were selected from a separately created pool of “generic” buds only if one or more originals had been destroyed during their wanderings. The destruction of a complete team meant reproductive failure.
In a mature team, only when a branch ind was destroyed did the brood mind induce a replacement. In essence, then, Aryz was already considered dead.
Yet he was still useful. That amused him, if the Senexi emotion could be called amusement. Restricting himself from his fellows was difficult, but he filled the time by immersing himself, through the interface, in the mandate.
The humans were also connected with the mandate through their surrogate parent, and in this manner they were quiescent.
He reported infrequently to the brood mind. Until he had established communication, there was little to report.
And throughout his turmoil, like the others he could sense a fight was coming. It could determine the success or failure of all their work in the nebula. In the grand scheme, failure here might not be crucial. But the Senexi had taken the long view too often in the past. Their age and experience—their calmness—were working against them. How else to explain the decision to communicate with human shapes? Where would such efforts lead? If he succeeded.
And he knew himself well enough to doubt he would fail.
He could feel an affinity for them already, peering at them through the thick glass wall in their isolated chamber, his skin paling at the thought of their heat, their poisonous chemistry. A diseased affinity. He hated himself for it. And reveled in it. It was what made him particularly useful to the team. If he was defective, and this was the only way he could serve, then so be it.
The other branch inds observed his passings from a distance, making no judgments. Aryz was dead, though he worked and moved. His sacrifice had been fearful. Yet he would not be a hero. His kind could never be emulated.
It was a horrible time, a horrible conflict.
She floated in language, learned it in a trice; there were no distractions. She floated in history and picked up as much as she could, for the source seemed inexhaustible. She tried to distinguish between eyes-open—the barren, pale gray-brown chamber with the thick green wall, beyond which floated a murky roundness—and eyes-shut, when she dropped back into language and history with no fixed foundation.
Eyes-open, she saw the Mam with its comforting limbs and its soft voice, its tubes and extrusions of food and its hissings and removal of waste. Through Mam’s wires she learned. Mam also tended another like herself, and another, and one more unlike any of them, more like the shape beyond the green wall.
She was very young, and it was all a mystery.
At least she knew her name. And what she was supposed to do. She took small comfort in that.
They fitted Prufrax with her gloves, and she went into the practice chamber, dragged by her gloves almost, for she hadn’t yet knitted her plug-in nerves in the right index digit and her pace control was uncertain.
There, for six wakes straight, she flew with the other glovers back and forth across the dark spaces like elfstate comets. Constellations and nebula aspects flashed at random on the distant walls, and she oriented to them like a night-flying bird. Her glovemates were Ornin, an especially slender male, and Ban, a red-haired female, and the special-projects sisters Ya, Trice, and Damu, new from the breeding division.
When she let the gloves have their way, she was freer than she had ever felt before. Did the gloves really control? The question wasn’t important. Control was somewhere uncentered, behind her eyes and beyond her fingers, as if she were drawn on a beautiful silver wire where it was best to go. Doing what was best to do. She barely saw the field that flowed from the grip of the thick, solid gloves or felt its caressing, life-sustaining influence. Truly, she hardly saw or felt anything but situations, targets, opportunities, the success or failure of the Zap. Failure was an acute pain. She was never reprimanded for failure; the reprimand was in her blood, and she felt like she wanted to die. But then the opportunity would improve, the Zap would succeed, and everything around her—stars, Senexi seedship, the Mellangee, everything—seemed part of a beautiful dream all her own.
She was intense in the Mocks.
Their initial practice over, the entry play began.
One by one, the special-projects sisters took their hyperbolic formation. Their glove fields threw out extensions, and they combined force. In they went, the mock Senexi seedship brilliant red and white an
d UV and radio and hateful before them. Their tails swept through the seedship’s outer shields and swirled like long silky hair laid on water; they absorbed fantastic energies, grew bright like violent little stars against the seedship outline. They were engaged in the drawing of the shields, and sure as topology, the spirals of force had to have a dimple on the opposite side that would iris wide enough to let in glovers. The sisters twisted the forces, and Prufrax could see the dimple stretching out under them—
The exercise ended. The elfstate glovers were cast into sudden dark. Prufrax came out of the mock unprepared, her mind still bent on the Zap. The lack of orientation drove her as mad as a moth suddenly flipped from night to day. She careened until gently mitted and channeled. She flowed down a tube, the field slowly neutralizing, and came to a halt still gloved, her body jerking and tingling.
“What the breed happened?” she screamed, her hands beginning to hurt.
“Energy conserve,” a mechanical voice answered. Behind Prufrax the other elfstate glovers lined up in the catch tube, all but the special-projects sisters. Ya, Trice, and Damu had been taken out of the exercise early and replaced by simulations. There was no way their functions could be mocked. They entered the tube ungloved and helped their comrades adjust to the overness of the real.
As they left the mock chamber, another batch of glovers, even younger and fresher in elfstate, passed them. Ya held up her hands, and they saluted in return. “Breed more every day,” Prufrax grumbled. She worried about having so many crew she’d never be able to conduct a satisfactory Zap herself. Where would the honor of being a glover go if everyone was a glover?
She wriggled into her cramped bunk, feeling exhilarated and irritated. She replayed the mocks and added in the missing Zap, then stared gloomily at her small narrow feet.
Out there the Senexi waited. Perhaps they were in the same state as she—ready to fight, testy at being reined in. She pondered her ignorance, her inability to judge whether such feelings were even possible among the enemy. She thought of the researcher, Clevo. “Blank,” she murmured. “Blank, blank.” Such thoughts were unnecessary, and humanizing Senexi was unworthy of a glover.
