Symbionts

by William H. Keith

  Evidently, the Imperials had been thinking along the same lines, though they hadn’t yet dared to do anything about it. According to the personal journal he’d kept in the base computer net, Kosaka had been trapped in an agony of indecision after the DalRiss attack. Unwilling to demand an evacuation—fleeing after that one incident would have resulted in a considerable loss of face—he’d nonetheless feared doing anything that might trigger another assault. He’d not repaired the perimeter fence because some of the civilian scientists had speculated that the DalRiss might be sensitive to the flow of electric current, that they’d therefore deliberately knocked part of the fence down while inflicting only minor damage to other parts of the facility.

  Katya was pretty sure now that it hadn’t been the fence that had provoked the attack. Indeed, it was likely that the “attack” had been pure accident. The southeastern corner of the Dojinko base happened to lie directly between the former site of the nearby DalRiss city and the immense gathering known as the Migrant Camp a thousand kilometers to the southwest. The DalRiss were blind by human standards, lacking even vestigial eyes. They “saw” using a kind of sonar, like terrestrial bats or dolphins, and possibly through other senses for which humans had no referents.

  Was it possible that they’d begun moving toward the Migrant Camp in pursuit of some logic or instinct unknown to the human observers… and simply blundered into something they hadn’t even seen? The mesh of that perimeter fence was composed of extremely fine conducting wires, wires so fine that they might well be below the resolving threshold of the DalRiss senses.

  Katya had carried her reasoning farther. Brenda Ortiz had told her once that the DalRiss actually claimed to sense life, to be aware of it as humans were aware of light, that they thought of themselves as moving through a three-dimensional sea of interlocking, living systems, from the haze of bacteria adrift in the air to fellow DalRiss. Assuming that was literally true and not an artifact born of differences in language and culture, was it possible that the DalRiss sensed human structures, buildings, say, as dead space, as a kind of emptiness defined only by the life pressing in around it?

  Was that how they perceived a warstrider… or a human encased in a plastic and ceramic E-suit?

  Katya was determined to find out, and she’d come here to do it. Carefully, she studied her met and environmental readouts. The temperature outside was a sultry forty-two Celsius, the humidity stood at seventy percent. The concentration of sulfuric acid was running about eight hundred parts per million, enough to irritate unprotected eyes or mucus membranes over a period of time, but too weak, she was sure, to damage exposed skin. Being caught in the open by a sudden rainstorm would be bad, but she ought to have time to get to cover before she was burned. More dangerous by far, she thought, would be the ultraviolet from the sun. Exposure to Alya A’s direct rays would burn unprotected human skin in minutes. This far into the shade of the forest, though, she should be safe enough.

  Methodically, she ran through the Swiftstrider’s checklists, shutting down systems and putting the machine into a standby doze. The communications center she left switched on and primed to relay any incoming messages. Then she broke linkage with it, waking inside the Ares-12’s slot. Holding back the familiar, smothering feeling of claustrophobia, she jacked a compatch into her right T-socket. If a radio call came in while she was outside, she would hear it. Then, moving carefully in the padded near-darkness, she donned mask and PLSS pack, then opened the hatch.

  Golden light filtered through the forest canopy, bathing her in sauna heat. Swiftly, before she could lose her nerve, she climbed down the rungs set against the strider’s armored leg, then stepped off onto mossy ground. She stood there for another moment or two, watching the surrounding woods. Then, taking a deep breath, she began to strip off her clothing.

  She left on her mask, of course, which included built-in goggles that protected her eyes both from sulfur compounds in the air and from the high levels of ultraviolet in the light. Her PLSS pack was small and light enough to be worn slung from her left shoulder. She also kept her boots on. She was willing to risk exposing bare skin to the ShraRish atmosphere, but the vegetation was something else. If it was anything like plants on New America or Earth, it would concentrate water in its tissues… and possibly other compounds as well, such as the sulfuric acid that tainted everything here. For now, at least, she would keep her feet modestly covered.

  Katya draped the suit from one of the ladder rungs on the strider, then moved away from the looming machine. The ground vegetation—might as well call it moss, which it resembled more than not—didn’t move and writhe the way some Alyan vegetation in the open did, probably because it received less light in the shade of the forest. Each step, however, launched surges of scarlet color against the gold that flowed out from her feet like ripples in a pond, fading with distance. The rock outcropping was dry and empty of native vegetation. She would wait there for a time and see what happened.

  Nudity had never been a requirement for communicating with the DalRiss before, certainly. During previous meetings, she’d usually worn an E-suit with either an air mask or a helmet, and it hadn’t seemed to pose any problem for communications, either perceptually or diplomatically.

  But if her guess about the DalRiss and the way they perceived humans was right, they would be curious about beings that went about wrapped up in nonliving material. Possibly, humans were only visible as empty shapes against the background of DalRissan life, or as disembodied fragments of living skin when they actually dared to remove helmets or gloves. For their parts, DalRiss never wore clothing, though some had been seen to wear a kind of harness, which was itself a living, gene-crafted organism of some kind.

  Given that the trouble with the Imperials almost certainly stemmed from their deliberate separation from the surrounding tapestry of life, they might interpret Katya’s gesture as courtesy; at the very least they should be curious enough to initiate a conversation.

  And the gesture served a second, conscious purpose, too, a means of showing the DalRiss that she was somehow different from the duralloy-shrouded strangers that had occupied the base before.

  At least, that was the idea, but the longer Katya sat on the rock and waited, the more foolish she felt. She had no reason beyond a rather vague intuition to think that any DalRiss might be nearby and watching. Had they been humans, they certainly would have left scouts nearby to keep an eye on the—to them—alien base, but the DalRiss were not human, and what seemed reasonable to Katya might be utterly beyond their ken. Consulting her cephlink for the time, she decided to give them thirty minutes. After that, well, she would have to think of something else.

  If she waited much longer than that, she might find herself having to explain what the hell she was doing to whoever came out here looking for her.

  Minutes passed, with no response from the woods. The heat was overwhelming, sapping her reserves, draining her as sweat dripped around her mask and trickled down her bare back. She wondered about the ultraviolet here… and about the acid in the steamy atmosphere. After a while, the sensitive skin of her breasts began prickling, then itching, enough so that she wondered if the droplets of acid floating in the air were irritating her after all. The itching spread, to shoulders and throat, belly and thighs, and it was all she could do to keep from scratching… or giving up and fleeing for the shelter of the warstrider. When she glanced down at herself, though, she saw no redness or other sign of irritation.

  In fact, the sheen of sweat covering her entire body was reassuring in a way. Any acidic droplets of water floating in the air would become so diluted when they mingled with the moisture coating her skin that she would never feel it. With that realization, much of the itching faded away, the product, she decided, of an overactive imagination.

  When this was over, though, she was definitely going to enjoy a long and luxurious shower back at the base.

  She’d almost decided it was time to give up when she became aware of the Aly
an standing among the dancing shapes of light and shadow, some twenty meters to her right. How long had it been there? Seconds or hours, there was no way to tell. She recognized the usual incarnation of the DalRiss, however, a six-armed starfish body, measuring perhaps three meters from armtip to armtip, but standing on the ends of those arms in a most unstarfishlike way. Sprouting from the top of the body was the complicated cluster of body parts and tentacles that was the Riss portion of the symbiosis.

  The joining was complete enough that it looked as though the two life forms were one. Katya was reminded of a download she’d taken once in Earth history describing the arrival on the American continent of European explorers and conquerors. The population of that continent had never seen horses and had imagined the alien soldiers on their strange mounts to be hybrid monsters combining the body parts of men and deer in one enormous creature.

  The sheer strangeness of Alyan biology had fooled the first human researchers for some time. The Riss were all but helpless without their mounts, shriveled creatures, all tentacles and spines, bent beneath the weight of that massive, crescent shape of fat and bone. According to Brenda, they’d started off as arboreal parasites infesting various of the semimobile trees of ancient GhegnuRish. Eventually, perhaps two million years before, they’d learned to parasitize the forerunners of the Dal, huge, fully mobile, herd-grouped life forms that combined features of both plants and animals. The Dal had provided more than sources of food to the parasites. Their mobility had given the Riss a far greater range, while their herd instincts had created a sense of social order among creatures that had existed as strictly one-to-a-tree individualists before. Nor had the relationship proven one-sided. As Riss intelligence improved, they learned to guide their herds to good grazing areas and to protect them from a variety of nasty predators. With time, parasitism became true symbiosis.

  So far as Katya was concerned, the being before her was a single individual, standing over two meters tall, the upper horn of its bony crescent reaching perhaps half a meter above her eyes. She thought of that crescent as the DalRiss’s head, though, as she studied it, she realized it could as easily be the Riss-symbiont’s main body, rising from the bristle of spines and tentacles that grew from the horny skin of the Dal-symbiont’s back. Two appendages extended from either side of the crescent, like eye stalks… or like withered arms? Analogies with more familiar creatures simply broke down. Those appendages, she knew, were closer to ears in function, serving to catch returning echoes from the creature’s sonar broadcasts with the aural equivalent of binocular vision, and as organs of balance.

  Katya watched the ungainly head angle toward her slightly, then shift up and down, and had the impression that it was staring at her hard. Despite the DalRiss’s nonhuman form and the knowledge that she’d deliberately chosen to meet it this way, the fact was that she felt a brief, sharp pang of embarrassment. Katya was from a culture that did not consider casual nudity to be taboo, but there was something about sitting like that beneath the being’s inhuman scrutiny that made her feel uncomfortably vulnerable. Suppressing the feeling, she rose from her perch on the rock and stood so that the DalRiss could scan her from head to toe and back again. For a moment, she imagined that she sensed a faint buzzing, something felt more than heard, like a tickling somewhere deep inside her body as it probed her with focused beams of sound generated within those bony horns, but, once again, that was almost certainly her imagination.

  Abruptly, almost as though it had suddenly made up its mind, it started toward her.

  The Dal moved with far more grace than such an ungainly-looking beast should have been able to muster, walking on armtips with delicate, lightly flickering steps that kept its spiny body a full meter off the ground. It stopped a short distance in front of her, and the rider leaned forward as if to inspect her more closely. The concave portion of the vertical crescent was lined with leathery folds of skin that reminded Katya vaguely of a face, though there were no eyes or evident facial features. A swelling at the back of the structure, she knew, was the braincase.

  Katya remained motionless as it studied her, save to slowly move her arms out from her sides to show that her hands were empty. She didn’t know enough about DalRiss protocol or society to know what gesture might be interpreted as friendly, and what might offend.

  With surprising flexibility, the Riss-symbiont dipped one tentacle, one more massive than the others, into a kind of iridescently scaled pouch slung from the joint between Dal and Riss. When it emerged again, something black and glistening hung from the partly coiled tip. Like the unfolding of a pocket telescope, the tentacle lengthened toward her.

  Strangeness kept her from recognizing what it was holding at first, but then the shimmering gel moved in the tentacle’s hold. A cornel! The DalRiss was offering to communicate!

  Excitement made Katya’s heart leap, and she almost had to sit down again. Somehow, she kept her composure, though, extending her left arm until her fingertips touched the offered cornel. The gel quivered at the contact, then rapidly flowed across her hand and up her arm, its touch like living ice. Tar black thinned to translucent gray as the cornel, a living, gene-tailored organism, spread itself to paper thinness from her fingers to her elbow.

  “You are not like the others.” The voice, high-pitched, almost feminine, sounded in Katya’s mind, just as if she were receiving a radio call through her jacked-in compatch.

  “Thank you,” she replied at once, and with considerably more confidence than she felt. “I was hoping you’d notice.”

  And the two of them began to talk.

  Chapter 24

  We take for granted that alien life, when we encounter it, will be the product of a different evolutionary structure than our own. Their bodies, their means of manipulating their environment, even the way they perceive that environment through senses other than the five we take for granted, all will be different.

  With different origins, different organs of perception, won’t, too, the way they look at the world be different from the way we view it? What new view of the universe might we gain, what new insights into our ownnature might arise from a free exchange of mutually alien thoughts and philosophies?

  —Life in the Universe

  Dr. Taylor Chung

  C.E. 2470

  Dev stepped off the ascraft’s debarkation ramp and into the steaming, late afternoon heat. Alya A shone low above the bare-topped ridge to the west, a dazzling, shrunken disk with the eye-aching brilliance of the flare from a laser cutting torch. Swiftly, he walked across a narrow stretch of the rooftop landing apron and into the base receiving lock, which waited for him with open door. Moments later, the lock cycled him through, and he was greeted by a small coterie of Confederation military officers.

  Katya was conspicuous by her absence. She was represented, however, by Vic Hagan, her number two, and several of the Ranger platoon leaders.

  “Welcome to ShraRish, Commodore,” Hagan said, saluting. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “Thank you, Vic. Where’s—”

  “Ah, the colonel’s waiting for you in her office, Commodore. She sends her regrets, but she’s unable to receive you formally just now.”

  “Kuso! Since when do I require a formal reception?”

  Hagan gestured at the receiving area, where a number of Rangers were at work unloading supplies brought down aboard Dev’s ascraft. “It’s just that she felt it would be more appropriate for her to see you in a less public area.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think you will when you see her. Would you like to talk to her now, or meet with the members of the science team first?”

  “I think I’d better see Katya.” It certainly wouldn’t do to have the expeditionary force’s two senior people feuding.

  “Very well.If you’d care to come with me, sir?”

  Dev hesitated, then nodded. He was still sensing the distance between himself and people who’d once been close friends, comrades. Worse, he
had the feeling that he was the source of that distance. How many times, recently, had he misunderstood something one of his people was trying to tell him? The trouble wasn’t with them, but with him.

  And now, there was this argument with Katya.

  During their last ViRcom exchange, he’d tried to catch some trace of sarcasm in her voice, or some hint of anger, but he’d detected only a neutral, slightly chilly formality, and he’d not expected her to give him an official snub upon his arrival. The ViRcom session before that had not been pleasant, a disagreement that had not degenerated into an out-and-out fight only because he’d ended up pulling rank.

  Well, he thought ruefully, he’d been the one to start it by scolding her for what he’d called her “nullheaded, exhibitionist stunt” and telling her that she could have gotten herself killed. She’d bristled, then rather sharply reminded him that she was in command of ground operations, and that she had simply exercised her best judgment in arranging, as quickly as possible, direct communications with the DalRiss Collective.

  The worst of it was, she was right. He’d gone into this project assuming that it might be weeks before they could arrange a meeting with the DalRiss, and that it might prove impossible to convince them that the Confederation was substantively different in their philosophy than the Empire.

  And Katya had managed to do both within a few hours of her victory over the Imperial ground forces, simply by wandering off alone into the woods and stripping herself down. God, what had she been thinking of? There were still so many unknowns, so many complete blanks in the human understanding of this environment, this alien ecology. She could have been horribly burned… or killed by some quirk of the local ecosystem that no human yet even knew existed. Send an alien research team to Earth; put them down at some random point on the surface. How long would it take them to discover rattlesnakes or liver flukes, toxic decon dumps or the Uralsk meltdown site, high-speed maglev traffic or tidal surges during a storm in Florida? And Earth was a tame place compared to ShraRish. Most natural predators were extinct, most hazards man-made.