by Greg Bear
Aryz drew himself tall and rigid with confusion. He had studied them too long. They had truly infected him. But here at least was a hint of purpose. A question needed to be answered.
He made preparations. There were signs the brood mind’s flux bind was not permanent, was in fact unwinding quite rapidly. When it emerged, Aryz would present it with a judgment, an answer.
He realized, none too clearly, that by Senexi standards he was now a raving lunatic.
He would hook himself into the mandate and improve the somewhat isolating interface he had used previously to search for selected answers. He, the captive, and the shapes would be immersed in human history together. They would be like young suckling on a Population I mother-animal—just the opposite of the Senexi process, where young fed nourishment and information into the brood mind.
The mandate would nourish, or poison. Or both.
—Did she love?
—What—you mean, did she receive?
—No, did she—we—I—give?
—I don’t know what you mean.
—I wonder if she would know…
Love, said the mandate, and the data proceeded.
Prufrax was twenty-nine. She had been assigned to a cruiser in a new program where superior but untested fighters were put into thick action with no preliminary. The program was designed to see how well the Grounds prepared fighters; some thought it foolhardy, but Prufrax found it perfectly satisfactory.
The cruiser was a million-ton raider, with a hawk contingent of fifty-three and eighty regular crew. She would be used in a second-wave attack, following the initial hardfought.
She was scared. That was good; fright improved basic biologic, if properly managed. The cruiser would make a raid into Senexi space and retaliate for past cuckoo-seeding programs. They would come up against thornships and seedships, likely.
The fighting was going to be fierce.
The raider made its final denial of the overness of the real and pipsqueezed into an arduous, nasty sponge space. It drew itself together again and emerged far above the galactic plane.
Prufrax sat in the hawks’ wardroom and looked at the simulated rotating snowball of stars. Red-coded numerals flashed along the margins of known Senexi territory, signifying old stars, dark hulks of stars, the whole ghostly home region where the Senexi had first come to power while the terrestrial sun was still a mist-wrapped youngster. A green arrow showed the position of the raider.
She drank sponge-space supplements with the others but felt isolated because of her firstness, her fear. Everyone seemed so calm. Most were fours or fives—on their fourth or fifth battle call. There were ten ones and an upper scatter of experienced hawks with nine to twenty-five battles behind them. There were no thirties. Thirties were rare in combat; the few that survived so many engagements were plucked off active and retired to PR service under the polinstructors. They often ended up in fibs, acting poorly, looking unhappy.
Still, when she had been more naive, Prufrax’s heroes had been a man-and-woman thirty team she had watched in fib after fib—Kumnax and Arol. They had been better actors than most.
Day in, day out, they drilled in their fightsuits. While the crew bustled, hawks were put through implant learning, what slang was already calling the Know, as opposed to the Tell, of classroom teaching. Getting background, just enough to tickle her curiosity, not enough to stimulate morbid interest.
—There it is again. Feel?
—I know it. Yes. The round one, part of eyes-open…
—Senexi?
—No, brother without name.
—Your … brother?
—No … I don’t know.
—Can it hurt us?
—It never has. It’s trying to talk to us.
—Leave us alone!
—It’s going.
Still, there were items of information she had never received before, items privileged only to the fighters, to assist them in their work. Older hawks talked about the past, when data had been freely available. Stories circulated in the wardroom about the Senexi, and she managed to piece together something of their origins and growth.
Senexi worlds, according to a twenty, had originally been large, cold masses of gas circling bright young suns nearly metal-free. Their gas-giant planets had orbited the suns at hundreds of millions of kilometers and had been dusted by the shrouds of neighboring dead stars; the essential elements carbon, nitrogen, silicon, and fluorine had gathered in sufficient quantities on some of the planets to allow Population II biology.
In cold ammonia seas, lipids had combined in complex chains. A primal kind of life had arisen and flourished. Across millions of years, early Senexi forms had evolved. Compared with evolution on Earth, the process at first had moved quite rapidly. The mechanisms of procreation and evolution had been complex in action, simple in chemistry.
There had been no competition between life forms of different genetic bases. On Earth, much time had been spent selecting between the plethora of possible ways to pass on genetic knowledge.
And among the early Senexi, outside of predation there had been no death. Death had come about much later, self-imposed for social reasons. Huge colonies of protoplasmic individuals had gradually resolved into the team-forms now familiar.
Soon information was transferred through the budding of branch inds; cultures quickly developed to protect the integrity of larvae, to allow them to regroup and form a new brood mind. Technologies had been limited to the rare heavy materials available, but the Senexi had expanded for a time with very little technology. They were well adapted to their environment, with few predators and no need to hunt, absorbing stray nutrients from the atmosphere and from layers of liquid ammonia. With perceptions attuned to the radio and microwave frequencies, they had before long turned groups of branch inds into radio telescope chains, piercing the heavy atmosphere and probing the universe in great detail, especially the very active center of the young galaxy. Huge jets of matter, streaming from other galaxies and emitting high-energy radiation, had provided laboratories for their vicarious observations. Physics was a primitive science to them.
Since little or no knowledge was lost in breeding cycles, cultural growth was rapid at times; since the dead weight of knowledge was often heavy, cultural growth often slowed to a crawl.
Using water as a building material, developing techniques that humans still understood imperfectly, they prepared for travel away from their birthworlds.
Prufrax wondered, as she listened to the older hawks, how humans had come to know all this. Had Senexi been captured and questioned? Was it all theory? Did anyone really know—anyone she could ask?
—She’s weak.
—Why weak?
—Some knowledge is best for glovers to ignore. Some questions are best left to the supreme overs.
—Have you thought that in here, you can answer her questions, our questions?
—No. No. Learn about me—us—first.
In the hour before engagement, Prufrax tried to find a place alone. On the raider this wasn’t difficult. The ship’s size was overwhelming for the number of hawks and crew aboard. There were many areas where she could put on an environs and walk or drift in silence, surrounded by the dark shapes of equipment wrapped in plexerv. There was so much about ship operations she didn’t understand, hadn’t been taught. Why carry so much excess equipment, weapons—far more than they’d need even for replacements? She could think of possibilities—superiors on Mercior wanting their cruisers to have flexible mission capabilities, for one—but her ignorance troubled her less than why she was ignorant. Why was it necessary to keep fighters in the dark on so many subjects?
She pulled herself through the cold g-less tunnels, feeling slightly awked by the loneness, the quiet. One tunnel angled outboard, toward the hull of the cruiser. She hesitat
ed, peering into its length with her environs beacon, when a beep warned her she was near another crew member. She was startled to think someone else might be as curious as she. The other hawks and crew, for the most part, had long outgrown their need to wander and regarded it as birdish. Prufrax was used to being different—she had always perceived herself, with some pride, as a bit of a freak. She scooted expertly up the tunnel, spreading her arms and tucking her legs as she would in a fightsuit.
The tunnel was filled with a faint milky green mist, absorbing her environs beam. It couldn’t be much more than a couple of hundred meters long, however, and it was quite straight. The signal beeped louder.
Ahead she could make out a dismantled weapons blister. That explained the fog: a plexerv aerosol diffused in the low pressure. Sitting in the blister was a man, his environs glowing a pale violet. He had deopaqued a section of the blister and was staring out at the stars. He swiveled as she approached and looked her over dispassionately. He seemed to be a hawk—he had fightform, tall, thin with brown hair above hull-white skin, large eyes with pupils so dark she might have been looking through his head into space beyond.
“Under,” she said as their environs met and merged.
“Over. What are you doing here?”
“I was about to ask you the same.”
“You should be getting ready for the fight,” he admonished.
“I am. I need to be alone for a while.”
“Yes.” He turned back to the stars. “I used to do that, too.”
“You don’t fight now?”
He shook his head. “Retired. I’m a researcher.”
She tried not to look impressed. Crossing rates was almost impossible. A bitalent was unusual in the service.
“What kind of research?” she asked.
“I’m here to correlate enemy finds.”
“Won’t find much of anything, after we’re done with the zero phase.”
It would have been polite for him to say, “Power to that,” or offer some other encouragement. He said nothing.
“Why would you want to research them?”
“To fight an enemy properly, you have to know what they are. Ignorance is defeat.”
“You research tactics?”
“Not exactly.”
“What, then?”
“You’ll be in a tough hardfought this wake. Make you a proposition. You fight well, observe, come to me and tell me what you see. Then I’ll answer your questions.”
“Brief you before my immediate overs?”
“I have the authority,” he said. No one had ever lied to her; she didn’t even suspect he would. “You’re eager?”
“Very.”
“You’ll be doing what?”
“Engaging Senexi fighters, then hunting down branch inds and brood minds.”
“How many fighters going in?”
“Twelve.”
“Big target, eh?”
She nodded.
“While you’re there, ask yourself—what are they fighting for? Understand?”
“I—”
“Ask, what are they fighting for. Just that. Then come back to me.”
“What’s your name?”
“Not important,” he said. “Now go.”
She returned to the prep center as the sponge-space warning tones began. Overhawks went among the fighters in the lineup, checking gear and giveaway body points for mental orientation. Prufrax submitted to the molded sensor mask being slipped over her face.
“Ready!” the overhawk said. “Hardfought!” He clapped her on the shoulder. “Good luck.”
“Thank you, sir.” She bent down and slid into her fightsuit. Along the launch line, eleven other hawks did the same. The overs and other crew left the chamber, and twelve red beams delineated the launch tube. The fightsuits automatically lifted and aligned on their individual beams. Fields swirled around them like silvery tissue in water, then settled and hardened into cold, scintillating walls, pulsing as the launch energy built up.
The tactic came to her. The ship’s sensors became part of her information net. She saw the Senexi thornship—twelve kilometers in diameter, cuckoos lacing its outer hull like maggots on red fruit, snakes waiting to take them on.
She was terrified and exultant, so worked up that her body temperature was climbing. The fightsuit adjusted her balance.
At the count of ten and nine, she switched from biologic to cyber. The implant—after absorbing much of her thought processes for weeks—became Prufrax. For a time there seemed to be two of her. Biologic continued, and in that region she could even relax a bit, as if watching a fib.
With almost dreamlike slowness, in the electronic time of cyber, her fightsuit followed the beam. She saw the stars and oriented herself to the cruiser’s beacon, using both for reference, plunging in the sword-flower formation to assault the thornship. The cuckoos retreated in the vast red hull like worms withdrawing into an apple. Then hundreds of tiny black pinpoints appeared in the closest quadrant to the sword flower.
Snakes shot out, each piloted by a Senexi branch ind. “Hardfought!” she told herself in biologic before that portion gave over completely to cyber.
Why were we flung out of dark
through ice and fire, a shower
of sparks? a puzzle;
Perhaps to build hell.
We strike here, there;
Set brief glows, fall through
and cross round again.
By our dimming, we see what
Beatitude we have.
In the circle, kindling
together, we form an exhausted Empyrean.
We feel the rush of
igniting winds but still
grow dull and wan.
New rage flames, new light,
dropping like sun through muddy
ice and night and fall
Close, spinning blue and bright.
In time they, too,
Tire. Redden.
We join, compare pasts
cool in huddled paths, turn gray.
And again.
We are a companion flow
of ash, in the slurry,
out and down.
We sleep.
Rivers form above and below.
Above, iron snakes twist,
clang and slice, chime,
helium eyes watching, seeing
Snowflake hawks,
signaling adamant muscles and
energy teeth. What hunger
compels our venom spit?
It flies, strikes the crystal
flight, making mist gray-green
with ammonia rain.
Sleeping, we glide,
and to each side
unseen shores wait
with the moans of
an unseen tide.
—She wrote that. We. One of her—our—poems.
—Poem?
—A kind of fib, I think.
—I don’t see what it says.
—Sure you do! She’s talking hardfought.
—The Zap? Is that all?
—No, I don’t think so.
—Do you understand it?
—Not all…
She lay back in the bunk, legs crossed, eyes closed, feeling the receding dominance of the implant—the overness of cyber—and the almost pleasant ache in her back. She had survived her first. The thornship had retired, severely damaged, its surface seared and scored so heavily it would never release cuckoos again.
It would become a hulk, a decoy. Out of action. Satisfaction / out of action / Satisfaction…
Still, with eight of the twelve fighters lost, she didn’t quite feel the exuberance of the rhyme. The snakes had fought very
well. Bravely, she might say. They lured, sacrificed, cooperated, demonstrating teamwork as fine as that in her own group. Strategy was what made the cruiser’s raid successful. A superior approach, an excellent tactic. And perhaps even surprise, though the final analysis hadn’t been posted yet.
Without those advantages, they might have all died.
She opened her eyes and stared at the pattern of blinking lights in the ceiling panel, lights with their secret codes that repeated every second, so that whenever she looked at them, the implant deep inside was debriefed, reinstructed. Only when she fought would she know what she was now seeing.
She returned to the tunnel as quickly as she was able. She floated up toward the blister and found him there, surrounded by packs of information from the last hardfought. She waited until he turned his attention to her.
“Well?” he said.
“I asked myself what they are fighting for. And I’m very angry.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know. I can’t know. They’re Senexi.”
“Did they fight well?”
“We lost eight. Eight.” She cleared her throat.
“Did they fight well?” he repeated, an edge in his voice.
“Better than I was ever told they could.”
“Did they die?”
“Enough of them.”
“How many did you kill?”
“I don’t know.” But she did. Eight.
“You killed eight,” he said, pointing to the packs. “I’m analyzing the battle now.”
“You’re behind what we read, what gets posted?” she asked.
“Partly,” he said. “You’re a good hawk.”
“I knew I would be,” she said, her tone quiet, simple.
“Since they fought bravely—”
“How can Senexi be brave?” she asked.
“Since,” he repeated, “they fought bravely, why?”
“They want to live, to do their … work. Just like me.”
“No,” he said. “They’re Senexi. They’re not like us.”
She was confused, moving between extremes in her mind, first resisting, then giving in too much. “What’s your name?” she asked, dodging the issue.
“Clevo.”
Her glory had yet to begin, and already she was well into her fall.
