by Allen Steele
He smiled slightly, shaking his head. ‘But what he didn’t anticipate was the ability of the pseudo-Cooties to grow a defensive system which was too powerful for our ECM to defeat. The…ah, minotaurs, if you wish to use my term…seemed to have been grown in advance of whatever threat we might have…’
‘Whoa. Wait a sec, Shin-ichi.’ Boggs held up a hand. ‘I’m not the swiftest kid on the block, but I know a buzz-word when I hear it. You just said grow twice now. Don’t you mean manufacture!’
Kawakami slowly shook his head. ‘No, Waylon, I chose the word quite deliberately. I meant grow.’ He stood up from his stool and turned to the workbench behind him. ‘Miho, perhaps it’s time to show our friends our most recent discovery, hmm?’
Miho nodded and began to carefully unwrap the fragment they’d retrieved from the destroyed minotaur. ‘Normally we would keep this under quarantine in the AEL,’ she explained, ‘but we considered the threat to be minimal. Besides, it seems that Commander L’Enfant does not wish to have us separated any longer, so we…’
‘Hush, Miho.’ Kawakami gestured for Nash and Boggs to come to the bench as he telescoped a large magnifier-lens close to the fragment and switched on its light. ‘Take a look, gentlemen. I’ll attempt to explain.’
Nash put down his squeezebulb and walked over to the bench. Under the lens was what appeared to be a large, four-foot fragment of one of the minotaur’s arms; each end was raggedly severed, violently torn apart by a salvo of 30mm shells from the F-210 Hornet’s cannon. He noted, now that he could see it more closely, that the arm was multi jointed and accordion-like, similar to the segments of a worm, with each segment only a few inches apart from the next. He was immediately struck by the precision of its manufacture…or growth, if one wanted to use Kawakami’s mysterious phraseology.
Kawakami beamed at him. ‘You’re already intrigued, Mr Nash. Here, see…?’ He picked up the fragment and, with little apparent effort, flexed it between his hands. The arm bent smoothly, like a fine-tooled machine. ‘And observe its sides, around the joints,’ he continued. ‘No seams, no welds. Not one. Totally solid-state, as if it had been built as one complete piece. The best-made microcircuitry we possess doesn’t have this sort of refinement. And see here…’
He pulled one severed end into the light, exposing the inside of the arm. Under the lens, Nash could see that its interior was astonishingly detailed and compact: no dangling wires, no servomotors, no solenoids or cog-and-wheel linkages. It reminded him uncomfortably of a severed human limb. ‘It’s…almost like…’
‘Like organic tissue,’ Miho finished. ‘Yes, it’s integrated that way, isn’t it? But it’s not organic’ She gently prodded the inner workings of the arm with her fingertip; it pushed inward slightly, but not in the way animal flesh might react. ‘Without a complete chemical breakdown, we can only speculate what this is made from, but our best guess is that it comes from various ferrous oxides, silicates and carbonaceous polymers, just as the outer shell is chiefly composed of iron and carbon. All native Martian elements.’
‘I don’t get it.’ Boggs was staring through the lens at the fragment, at once fascinated and bewildered. ‘I mean, it ain’t like anything I’ve ever seen, but if it wasn’t built…’
‘The point is,’ Kawakami said impatiently, ‘that this machine was neither manufactured nor built. It was grown, as a single corporate entity, much as you and I grew in our mothers’ wombs. Yet this was part of an unliving being. It is a mechanism.’
‘Biomechanical,’ Sasaki said, ‘although even that’s a clumsy term for what we’re seeing here.’ She let out her breath and stepped away from the counter, sweeping her long ebony hair back from her shoulders. ‘There’s only one sort of technology that can accomplish something like this, and it’s…’
‘The form!’ Kawakami interrupted. He dropped the arm back on the bench and pointed at it; his voice rose with excitement as he spoke rapidly. ‘We have been here for three years and, except for the Face, this is the first time we have seen something which resembles a human being! It is completely anthropomorphic! It’s bipedal, it has two manipulative limbs, it’s oriented toward forward movement, it has binocular vision…nothing about it resembles a Cootie! Not only that, but its exoskeleton resembles a CAS! Look at it! It’s…!’
‘Please, Shin-ichi-san.’ Sasaki closed her eyes. She said something admonishing to him in Japanese, and Kawakami stopped himself, although his mouth trembled with anticipation. When he was silent, she opened her eyes and looked straight at Nash.
‘This is a…a paradigm of a human being,’ she said, carefully selecting her words. ‘Just as much as the pseudo-Cooties are imitations of the real Cooties, this was a construct of a true human…or, at very least, the closest they had seen to a living human being—a combat armored suit.’
Nash glanced at Boggs. Although the airship pilot still seemed confused, Nash was beginning to catch on. ‘You started to say…?’
‘Yes,’ Sasaki finished, ‘it was made to perform like a human being. And before you ask, it was made by nanotechnology. Alien nanotech, far beyond the rudimentary nanites we’ve developed thus far. Nothing else is capable of this sort of precision.’
She looked up at Boggs and favored him with a wry, humorless smile. ‘And if that’s the case, Waylon, then our nuclear bombs really are something which we can use to blow our noses.’
Kawakami crossed the compartment to the computer terminal where Boggs had been sitting. ‘The fact that this thing was grown…or biomechanically manufactured, if you prefer…is only part of the solution,’ he explained as he quickly typed instructions into the keyboard. ‘First, we have to look at the pseudo-Cooties themselves and why they…ah, yes, here we go.’
Nash walked across to the terminal and peered over Kawakami’s shoulder at the screen. The physicist had interfaced the terminal with the base’s mainframe; the flatscreen was divided in half, the left-hand side showing a diagram of a Cootie, the right a scale-model of a pseudo-Cootie. As Sasaki and Nash gathered around, Kawakami rotated the two images on an imaginary three-dimensional axis.
‘When we first encountered the pseudo-Cooties,’ he said, ‘I assumed that they were mere robotic copies of the original aliens, mainly because they so closely resembled the remains I had unearthed in the D & M Pyramid of one of the aliens…“Hirohito”, remember?’
Boggs nodded vaguely, but the reference was completely lost upon Nash. ‘I also assumed that the robots were self-replicating,’ Kawakami explained, ‘but I did not go any further than that. After all, the only persons who had come in contact with the pseudo-Cooties and survived to tell about it were Ben Cassidy and Arthur Johnson, and neither had been in Room C4-20 long enough to make any detailed observations. Nor had we ever been able to capture a pseudo-Cootie and subject it to detailed examination. So my assumption was that they were simple-minded, mechanical analogs, no more complex than our own factory-line robots which are programmed to interact with each other, but nonetheless are no more intelligent than grasshoppers.’
He coughed into a fist and pointed at the screen. ‘I now believe that I was partially in error. Yes, the pseudo-Cooties are self-replicating, but they are neither simple-minded nor mechanical.’
He cocked a thumb over his shoulder at the fragment of the minotaur. ‘Like that monster over there, they were grown by nanites…microscopic robots, much like the nanosurgeons we use in hospitals, yet far more intricate. In theory, at least, they can construct complex objects from whatever raw materials are at hand. The nanosurgeons are the first step we’ve made in that direction, but…’
‘Wait a sec,’ Boggs interrupted. ‘You’re telling me that nanites built that thing?’
‘Not ones like we have, no,’ Sasaki said, shaking her head. ‘This is apparently the end-product of nanites which are presently in use…’
‘But not humans,’ Nash said.
‘Yes.’ Sasaki looked at him and slowly nodded. ‘If this is true, then the nanotechnology of
the aliens is far advanced from anything we’ve developed so far. Our nanosurgeons can repair internal tissue damage, like broken blood vessels and so forth…the way your own wounds were healed last night, in fact…but what Shin-ichi-san has postulated goes far beyond that.’
Listening to his protégé with obvious pride, Kawakami nodded his head in agreement. ‘Indeed. The Cooties seem to have mastered nanotechnology to a degree we’ve only imagined so far. The robots that attacked us earlier are an example. Yet there’s an important difference. What we encountered today resembled a human being, not a Cootie.’
‘So?’ Boggs shrugged. ‘They’re copying us instead of one of them.’
‘Exactly!’ Kawakami jabbed a finger at the pilot. ‘The minotaurs were inexact copies of ourselves! Like the Face, they are approximate imitations of human physiology, constructed through nanites!’
‘The Face?’ Boggs remained skeptical. ‘But if they used these…whatchamacallit, nanities…to make the Face, then they must also have used them to make the pyramids…’
‘Not beyond their capability,’ Kawakami agreed. ‘They could have used them to transform pre-existing mesas and mountains into the forms they desired. It explains much about their construction techniques.’ He turned around in his chair and spread open his hands. ‘Yes? So it becomes apparent, does it not?’
‘No.’ Nash folded his arms above his chest. ‘No, it doesn’t. I don’t get it either.’
‘Think!’ Kawakami demanded. ‘We were lured to this location by an edifice which was a copy of a human face, which in turn led us to structures which were copies of the ancient Egyptian pyramids. When we passed a rudimentary intelligence test…a test designed to prove that we were not only a sapient species, but capable of innovation and creativity as well…the pseudo-Cooties were awakened from their sleep.’
He held up a hand before Nash could interrupt. ‘Yes, that’s what I believe it was…a long sleep, perhaps lasting for millennia. Our final, correct response to the Labyrinth activated a long-dormant program within their slaves, the pseudo-Cooties.’
‘Like a…’ Boggs shrugged. ‘I dunno. A wake-up call?’
Sasaki covered her mouth with her hand to disguise a laugh, but Kawakami vigorously nodded his head. ‘Yes, if you want to call it that. A wake-up call.’ He stood up impatiently from his chair and paced past them, his hands clasped together behind his back. ‘Yet when we failed to make an immediate response, they locked us out of the catacombs.’
‘Why?’ Nash asked.
‘This I do not know.’ Kawakami rocked his head back and forth. ‘Perhaps we failed to make the next appropriate response. Nevertheless, when we finally did investigate further, they captured all manned and unmanned probes we sent down there. This is the reason why we’ve never found any remains of the combat armor or spiders we’ve sent down there.’ He held up a finger. ‘However, when we were attacked today, it was by human-like robots, not insect-like pseudo-Cooties…and even then, they attempted to salvage the CAS which Marks had been wearing. I saw that on the monitors in the command module.’
Boggs sputtered and looked at the ceiling. ‘Jesus, Shin-ichi, I still don’t get what you’re…’
Kawakami whirled around and glared at him. ‘Don’t be stupid!’ he snapped. ‘Don’t you see? They’re imitating us!’
Nash found his mouth dropping. ‘God,’ he whispered as he suddenly realized the point Kawakami was attempting to make. ‘They’re mimes.’
Kawakami let out his breath and briefly shut his eyes. ‘Yes. Mimes. Like some species of insects on Earth…and, after all, the Cooties are highly-evolved insects. They mimic the abilities of other creatures, such as those species that camouflage themselves to resemble their prey, or emit identical phenomes to capture their attention. In this instance, the Cooties used advanced nanotechnology to accomplish their goals, imitating things on Earth which they once observed very long ago—a sculpture of a human face like the Sphinx, a form of architecture like the Egyptian pyramids—to attract our attention.
He hunched his narrow shoulders. ‘Who knows for certain? It may even be that they didn’t develop nanotechnology on their own, but simply copied it from another alien race which they previously encountered. This may be their basic tropism, the inherent behavioral pattern of their race—attracting another race to their worlds, then pirating their technology through entrapment.’
Nash remembered the conversation he’d had the night before with L’Enfant, here in this same room. ‘L’Enfant said something to me about sundew plants. He told me that you thought…’
‘That the Face was a lure.’ Kawakami sighed as he rested against the examination table. ‘Yes, I did think so then, as I do now…but for entirely different reasons from those he believes. He sees everything in terms of hostile invasion from space, like a plot from an old science fiction movie. But I believe we’re onto something much more complicated, if not more benign, than his paranoid conjecture.’
‘Yeah,’ Nash agreed, ‘but you haven’t answered the question. Is this a trap?’
Kawakami slowly nodded. ‘Yes, it’s a trap of sorts, like the sundew. We were deliberately lured to this place.’ He shook his head again. ‘But for what reason…I still don’t know.’
Everyone was silent for a few moments as this sank in.
Boggs winced and sat down. ‘Shit, this is giving me a migraine.’ He rubbed his eyes with his hands. ‘Okay, I’m getting it so far, but…I dunno, maybe I’m stupid, but why did they start so long ago? I mean, if they began by copying the Egyptians, did they think a bunch of Arabs would eventually come to Mars? I mean, it ain’t like the Pharaohs were into building spaceships.’
Sasaki picked up the thread. ‘Look, Waylon, this is all strictly theoretical, but…’
She sat down on the table next to Nash. ‘It could have been that, when the Cooties first explored this Solar System and discovered the existence of the human race on Earth, they may have assumed too much of us.’
‘Sounds like one too many assumptions on everyone’s account,’ Boggs interrupted. ‘You know what “assume” means? It stands for making…’
‘An ass out of you and me,’ she finished. ‘Yes, I know. You’ve told me countless times.’ Kawakami lowered his face and snickered, and Nash had to hide his grin before Boggs spotted it. ‘But let’s suppose that the Cooties found our species more than two thousand years ago,’ she said. ‘If they were shipwrecked on this planet, they might have…ah, assumed, for lack of a better word…that our technological progress would be in an unbroken upward curve.’
With her fingertip, she traced a line in the air, rising along a ninety-degree angle from the floor toward the ceiling. ‘Perhaps this was the way it was with their ancestors, if they were indeed natural mimes. Given the technological prowess of our own ancestors, they may have determined that we would also be capable of interplanetary travel within a few centuries…a single millennium at most…and that our civilization would continue to use the same basic forms of architecture throughout our cultural ascent.’
‘And they planned accordingly,’ Kawakami continued. He extended a hand toward the unseen City and the Face. ‘They copied the Face and the pyramids to resemble the largest man-made structures on ancient Earth, believing that modern man would immediately recognize these edifices as being similar to his own.’ He glanced at Sasaki. ‘Correct?’
She nodded. ‘And they were right, to a certain extent,’ she said. ‘But they didn’t anticipate that our progress would take so long. Perhaps the Cooties made the technological jump to spaceflight as a straight, even line, but we…’
Again, Miho traced an upward line in the air, but this time as a ragged series of dips and halts. ‘We were not so fortunate. Our history has been retarded by many factors. Wars, plagues, famines, politics—the long Dark Ages in which the western world lost most of the science of the Greeks and Romans…’
‘The destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria,’ Nash supplied, ‘the Crusa
des…’
‘The rise of a stifling feudal culture in the Eastern world, the isolationism of China and Japan,’ Sasaki supplied. ‘Yes, and so on. After the Renaissance and the rediscovery of the Solar System, it still took several centuries for the first liquid-fuel rocket to be launched…and even after the Viking probe initially sighted the Face and the City, it was another half-century still for the first manned expedition to arrive at this site.’
She looked at Boggs and smiled. ‘Don’t feel so stupid, Waylon. If we’re right, the Cooties had been waiting for you to come for more than two thousand years.’
He grinned and stared her straight in the eye. ‘Hey, Miho, I usually come a lot quicker than that.’ Her face reddened as she quickly glanced away. Kawakami appeared to be embarrassed, although he pretended not to catch the cheap joke.
Nash had no time for innuendo. ‘That’s all very interesting,’ he said, ‘but that still doesn’t answer the basic question. Why did the Cooties…?’
He was cut off, not wholly unexpectedly, by the sound of the hatch opening. Nash turned around and watched as Swigart pushed the hatch open and stood out of the way to let Terrance L’Enfant step into the compartment.
‘Why did the Cooties cross the galaxy?’ he asked, not completely without a trace of humor. ‘Why, to get to the other side…’
L’Enfant looked hollow, as if something vital had been sucked out of him in the last few hours. His eyes were shadowed as if he hadn’t slept in days; his shoulders were slightly stooped, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his jumpsuit. Swigart silently followed him into the lab, not bothering to close the hatch behind her; she stood with her back to it, her Steyr cradled in her arms.
