Federations

by Orson Scott Card

  “What?”

  “I think the warning’s on its way.”

  I stared at her blankly for a moment, before registering what she had already seen: arcing from the splinter was something too fast to stop, something against which our minimally armored thickship had no defense, not even the option of flight.

  Yarrow started to mouth some exotic profanity she’d reserved for precisely this moment. There was an eardrum-punishing bang and Mouser shuddered—but we weren’t suddenly chewing vacuum.

  And that was very bad news indeed.

  Antiship missiles come in two main flavors: quackheads and sporeheads. You know which immediately after the weapon has hit. If you’re still thinking—if you still exist—chances are it’s a sporehead. And at that point your problems are just beginning.

  Invasive demon attack, Mouser shrieked. Breather manifold compromised . . . which meant something uninvited was in the thick. That was the point of a sporehead: to deliver hostile demons into an enemy ship.

  “Mm,” Yarrow said. “I think it might be time to suit up.”

  Except our suits were a good minute’s swim away, into the bowels of Mouser, through twisty ducts that might skirt the infection site. Having no choice, we swam anyway, Yarrow insisting I take the lead even though she was a quicker swimmer. And somewhere—it’s impossible to know exactly where—demons reached us, seeping invisibly into our bodies via the thick. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment; it wasn’t as if there was a jagged transition between lucidity and demon-manipulated irrationality. Yarrow and I were terrified enough as it was. All I know is it began with a mild agoraphilia: an urge to escape Mouser’s flooded confines. Gradually it phased into claustrophobia, and then became fully fledged panic, making Mouser seem as malevolent as a haunted house.

  Yarrow ignored her suit, clawing the hull until her fingers spooled blood.

  “Fight it,” I said. “It’s just demons triggering our fear centers, trying to drive us out!”

  Of course, knowing so didn’t help.

  Somehow I stayed still long enough for my suit to slither on. Once sealed, I purged the tainted thick with the suit’s own supply—but I knew it wasn’t going to help much. The phobia already showed that hostile demons had reached my brain, and now it was even draping itself in a flimsy logic. Beyond the ship we’d be able to think rationally. It would only take a few minutes for the thick’s own demons to neutralize the invader—and then we’d be able to reboard. Complete delusion, of course.

  But that was the point.

  When something like coherent thought returned I was outside.

  Nothing but me and the splinter.

  The urge to escape was only a background anxiety, a flock of stomach butterflies urging me against returning. Was that demon-manipulated fear or pure common sense? I couldn’t tell—but what I knew was that the splinter seemed to be beckoning me forward, and I didn’t feel like resisting. Sensible, surely; we’d exhausted all conventional channels of attack against the defector, and now all that remained was to confront her on the territory she’d staked as her own.

  But where was Yarrow?

  Suit’s alarm chimed. Maybe demons were still subjugating my emotions, because I didn’t react with my normal speed. I just blinked, licked my lips, and stifled a yawn.

  “Yeah, what?”

  Suit informed me: something massing slightly less than me, two klicks closer to the splinter, on a slightly different orbit. I knew it was Yarrow; also that something was wrong. She was drifting. In my blackout I’d undoubtedly programmed suit to take me down, but Yarrow appeared not to have done anything except bail out.

  I jetted closer. And then saw why she hadn’t programmed her suit. Would have been tricky. She wasn’t wearing one.

  I hit ice an hour later.

  Cradling Yarrow—she wasn’t much of a burden in the splinter’s weak gravity—I took stock. I wasn’t ready to mourn her, not just yet. If I could quickly get her to the medical suite aboard the defector’s ship there was a good chance of revival. But where the hell was the wreck?

  Squandering its last reserves of fuel, suit had deposited us in a clearing among the graveyard of ruined wasps. Half-submerged in ice, they looked like scorched scrap-iron sculptures, phantoms from an entomologist’s worst nightmare. So there’d been a battle here, back when the splinter was just another drifting lump of ice. Even if the thing was seamed with silicates or organics, it would not have had any commercial potential to either side. But it might still have had strategic value, and that was why the wasps had gone to war on its surface. Trouble was—as we’d known before the attack—the corpses covered the entire surface, so there was no guessing where we’d come down. The wrecked ship might be just over the nearest hillock—or another ten kilometers in any direction.

  I felt the ground rumble under me. Hunting for the source of the vibration, I saw a quill of vapor reach into the sky, no more than a klick away. It was a geyser of superheated ice.

  I dropped Yarrow and hit dirt, suit limiting motion so that I didn’t bounce. Looking back, I expected to see a dimple in the permafrost, where some rogue had impacted.

  Instead, the geyser was still present. Worse, it was coming steadily closer, etching a neat trench. A beam weapon was making that plume, I realized—like one of the party batteries aboard ship. Then I wised up. That was Mouser. The demons had worked their way into its command infrastructure, reprogramming it to turn against us. Now Mouser worked for the defector.

  I slung Yarrow over one shoulder and loped away from the boiling impact point. Fast as the geyser moved, its path was predictable. If I made enough lateral distance the death-line would sear past—

  Except the damn thing turned to follow me.

  Now a second flanked it, shepherding me through the thickest zone of wasp corpses. Did they have some significance for the defector? Maybe so, but I couldn’t see it. The corpses were a rough mix of machines from both sides: Royalist wasps marked with yellow shell symbols, ours with grinning tiger-heads. Generation thirty-five units, if I remembered Mil-Hist, when both sides toyed with pulse-hardened optical thinkware. In the seventy-odd subsequent generations there’d been numerous further jumps: ur-quantum logics, full-spectrum reflective wasp armor, chameleoflage, quackdrive powerplants, and every weapon system the human mind could devise. We’d tried to encourage the wasps to make these innovations for themselves, but they never managed to evolve beyond strictly linear extrapolation. Which was good, or else we human observers would have been out of a job.

  Not that it really mattered now.

  A third geyser had erupted behind me, and a fourth ahead, boxing me in. Slowly, the four points of fire began to converge. I stopped, but kept holding Yarrow. I listened to my own breathing, harsh above the basso tremor of the drumming ground.

  Then steel gripped my shoulder.

  She said we’d be safer underground. Also that she had friends below who might be able to do something for Yarrow.

  “If you weren’t defecting,” I began, as we entered a roughly hewn tunnel into the splinter’s crust, “what the hell was it?”

  “Trying to get home. Least that was the idea, until we realized Tiger’s Eye didn’t want us back.” Wendigo knuckled the ice with one of her steel fists, her suit cut away to expose her prosthetics. “Which is when we decided to head here.”

  “You almost made it,” I said. Then added: “Where were you trying to get home from?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Then you did defect.”

  “We were trying to make contact with the Royalists. Trying to make peace.” In the increasingly dim light I saw her shrug. “It was a long shot, conducted in secrecy. When the mission went wrong, it was easy for Tiger’s Eye to say we’d been defecting.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I wish.”

  “But you sent us.”

  “Not in person.”

  “But your delegate—”

  “Is just software. It could be made to s
ay anything my enemies chose. Even to order my own execution as a traitor.”

  We paused to switch on our suit lamps. “Maybe you’d better tell me everything.”

  “Gladly,” Wendigo said. “But if this hasn’t been a good day so far, I’m afraid it’s about to go downhill.”

  There had been a clique of high-ranking officers who believed that the Swirl war was intrinsically unwinnable. Privy to information not released to the populace, and able to see through Tiger’s Eye’s own carefully filtered internal propaganda, they realized that negotiation—contact—was the only way out.

  “Of course, not everyone agreed. Some of my adversaries wanted us dead before we even reached the enemy.” Wendigo sighed. “Too much in love with the war’s stability—and who can blame them? Life for the average citizen in Tiger’s Eye isn’t that bad. We’re given a clear goal to fight for, and the likelihood of any one of us dying in a Royalist attack is small enough to ignore. The idea that all of that might be about to end after four hundred years, that we all might have to rethink our roles . . . well, it didn’t go down too well.”

  “About as welcome as a fart in a vac-suit, right?”

  Wendigo nodded. “I think you understand.”

  “Go on.”

  Her expedition—Wendigo and two pilots—had crossed the Swirl unchallenged. Approaching the Royalist cometary base, they had expected to be questioned—perhaps even fired upon—but nothing had happened. When they entered the stronghold, they understood why.

  “Deserted,” Wendigo said. “Or we thought so, until we found the Royalists.” She expectorated the word. “Feral, practically. Naked, grubby subhumans. Their wasps feed them and treat their illnesses, but that’s as far as it goes. They grunt, and they’ve been toilet-trained, but they’re not quite the military geniuses we’ve been led to believe.”

  “Then . . . ”

  “The war is . . . nothing we thought.” Wendigo laughed, but the confines of her helmet rendered it more like the squawking of a jack-in-the-box. “And now you wonder why home didn’t want us coming back?”

  Before Wendigo could explain further, we reached a wider bisecting tunnel, glowing with its own insipid chlorine-colored light. Rather than the meandering bore of the tunnel in which we walked, it was as cleanly cut as a rifle barrel. In one direction the tunnel was blocked by a bullet-nosed cylinder, closely modeled on the trains in Tiger’s Eye. Seemingly of its own volition, the train lit up and edged forward, a door puckering open.

  “Get in,” Wendigo said. “And lose the helmet. You won’t need it where we’re going.”

  Inside I coughed phlegmy ropes of thick from my lungs. Transitioning between breathing modes isn’t pleasant—more so since I’d breathed nothing but thick for six weeks. But after a few lungfuls of the train’s antiseptic air, the dark blotches around my vision began to recede.

  Wendigo did likewise, only with more dignity.

  Yarrow lay on one of the couches, stiff as a statue carved in soap. Her skin was cyanotic, a single, all-enveloping bruise. Pilot skin is a better vacuum barrier than the usual stuff, and vacuum itself is a far better insulator against heat loss than air. But where I’d lifted her my gloves had embossed fingerprints into her flesh. Worse was the broad stripe of ruined skin down her back and the left side of her tail, where she had lain against the splinter’s surface.

  But her head looked better. When she hit vac, biomodified seals would have shut within her skull, barricading every possible avenue for pressure, moisture, or blood loss. Even her eyelids would have fused tight. Implanted glands in her carotid artery would have released droves of friendly demons, quickly replicating via nonessential tissue in order to weave a protective scaffold through her brain.

  Good for an hour or so—maybe longer. But only if the hostile demons hadn’t screwed with Yarrow’s native ones.

  “You were about to tell me about the wasps,” I said, as curious to hear the rest of Wendigo’s story as I was to blank my doubts about Yarrow.

  “Well, it’s rather simple. They got smart.”

  “The wasps?”

  She clicked the steel fingers of her hand. “Overnight. Just over a hundred years ago.”

  I tried not to look too overwhelmed. Intriguing as all this was, I wasn’t treating it as anything other than an outlandish attempt to distract me from the main reason for my being here, which remained killing the defector. Wendigo’s story explained some of the anomalies we’d so far encountered—but that didn’t rule out a dozen more plausible explanations. Meanwhile, it was amusing to try and catch her out. “So they got smart,” I said. “You mean our wasps, or theirs?”

  “Doesn’t mean a damn anymore. Maybe it just happened to one machine in the Swirl, and then spread like wildfire to all the trillions of other wasps. Or maybe it happened simultaneously, in response to some stimulus we can’t even guess at.”

  “Want to hazard a guess?”

  “I don’t think it’s important, Spirey.” She sounded as though she wanted to put a lot of distance between herself and this topic. “Point is, it happened. Afterward, distinctions between us and the enemy—at least from the point of view of the wasps—completely vanished.”

  “Workers of the Swirl unite.”

  “Something like that. And you understand why they kept it to themselves, don’t you?”

  I nodded, more to keep her talking.

  “They needed us, of course. They still lacked something. Creativity, I guess you’d call it. They could evolve themselves incrementally, but they couldn’t make the kind of sweeping evolutionary jumps we’d been feeding them.”

  “So we had to keep thinking there was a war on.”

  Wendigo looked pleased. “Right. We’d keep supplying them with innovations, and they’d keep pretending to do each other in.” She halted, scratching at the unwrinkled skin around one eye with the alloy finger of one hand. “Clever little bastards.”

  We’d arrived somewhere.

  It was a chamber, large as any enclosed space I’d ever seen. I felt gravity; too much of the stuff. The whole chamber must have been gimbaled and spun within the splinter, like one of the gee-load simulators back in Tiger’s Eye. The vaulted ceiling, hundreds of meters “above,” now seemed vertiginously higher.

  Apart from its apex, it was covered in intricate frescos—dozens of pictorial facets, each a cycling hologram. They told the history of the Swirl, beginning with its condensation from interstellar gas, the ignition of its star, the onset of planetary formation. Then the action cut to the arrival of the first Standardist wasp, programmed to dive into the Swirl and breed like a rabbit, so that one day there’d be a sufficiently huge population to begin mining the thing; winnowing out metals, silicates, and precious organics for the folks back home. Of course, it never happened like that. The Royalists wanted in on the action, so they sent their own wasps, programmed to attack ours. The rest is history. The frescos showed the war’s beginning, and then a little while later the arrival of the first human observers, beamed across space as pure genetic data, destined to be born in artificial wombs in hollowed out comet-cores, raised and educated by wasps, imprinted with the best tactical and strategic knowledge available. Thereafter they taught the wasps. From then on things heated up, because the observers weren’t limited by years of timelag. They were able to intervene in wasp evolution in realtime.

  That ought to have been it, because by then we were pretty up-to-date, give or take four hundred years of the same.

  But the frescos carried on.

  There was one representing some future state of the Swirl, neatly ordered into a ticking orrery of variously sized and patterned worlds, some with beautiful rings or moon systems. And finally—like medieval conceptions of Eden—there was a triptych of lush planetary landscapes, with weird animals in the foreground, mountains and soaring cloudbanks behind.

  “Seen enough to convince you?” Wendigo asked.

  “No,” I said, not entirely sure whether I believed myself. Craning
my neck, I looked up toward the apex.

  Something hung from it.

  It was a pair of wasps, fused together. One was complete, the other was only fully formed, seemingly in the process of splitting from the complete wasp. The fused pair looked to have been smothered in molten bronze, left to dry in waxy nodules.

  “You know what this is?” Wendigo asked.

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Wasp art.”

  I looked at her.

  “This wasp was destroyed mid-replication,” Wendigo continued. “While it was giving birth. Evidently the image has some poignancy for them. How I’d put it in human terms I don’t know . . . ”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  I followed her across the marbled terrazzo that floored the chamber. Arched porticos surrounded it, each of which held a single dead wasp, their body designs covering a hundred generations of evolution. If Wendigo was right, I supposed these dead wasps were the equivalent of venerated old ancestors peering from oil paintings. But I wasn’t convinced just yet.

  “You knew this place existed?”

  She nodded. “Or else we’d be dead. The wasps back in the Royalist stronghold told us we could seek sanctuary here, if home turned against us.”

  “And the wasps—what? Own this place?”

  “And hundreds like it, although the others are already far beyond the Swirl, on their way out to the halo. Since the wasps came to consciousness, most of the splinters flung out of the Swirl have been infiltrated. Shrewd of them—all along, we’ve never suspected that the splinters are anything other than cosmic trash.”

  “Nice décor, anyway.”

  “Florentine,” Wendigo said, nodding. “The frescos are in the style of a painter called Masaccio; one of Brunelleschi’s disciples. Remember, the wasps had access to all the cultural data we brought with us from GE—every byte of it. That’s how they work, I think—by constructing things according to arbitrary existing templates.”

  “And there’s a point to all this?”

  “I’ve been here precisely one day longer than you, Spirey.”