Symbionts

by William H. Keith

  Come to think of it, the same could be said of ShraRish, since all of the local biology appeared to be more or less artificial. Besides, most native life wouldn’t find a human appetizing, any more than a liver fluke would be able to parasitize an Alyan.

  But still, there were so damned many unknowns.…

  The farther Dev walked into the facility, the angrier he got. Who did Katya think she was, pulling a stunt like that… then grandstanding his arrival on base, sending her number two to meet him. She could be cold as an ammonia glacier when he saw her, but damn it, he was going to tell her what he thought Let her be as cold or as officiously formal as she liked. He was going to give her one hell of a lecture.…

  “She took over Kosaka’s office,” Hagan said as they walked into an outer work area, where several officers lay in open ViRcom modules, jacked into the base AI or to remotes in the field. He gestured toward an inner office door. “This is it, sir. She knows you’re coming. I’ll wait out here.”

  Dev walked up to the door, which dissolved as he approached.

  “Hello, Dev,” Katya said, smiling a bit ruefully as he stepped inside and the door sealed at his back. “No virtual reality to hide behind this time, huh?”

  Dev tried to suppress his shock but didn’t entirely succeed. Katya’s naturist excursion had exacted a price, one that hadn’t been visible during their ViRcom exchanges. Alya A radiated much of its energy in the ultraviolet, and the ShraRish atmosphere, though it did possess a substantial ozone layer, was only three-quarters as thick as Earth’s. Even though she’d insisted that she’d been careful to find a well-shaded patch of deep woods for her meeting with the DalRiss, enough ultraviolet had been mixed with the visible sunlight scattering through the forest canopy to give her a savage sunburn.

  She stood there naked. The skin that had been covered by her air mask, PLSS strap, and boots stood out startlingly white against the flaming, blistered scarlet of her burn, a color mottled in various places by the ugly white patches where dead skin was already peeling away.

  “Lovely, huh?” she asked, spreading her arms and looking down at herself. She grinned as she looked up again, meeting his eyes. “Close your mouth, Dev. You’ll inhale more floating shreds of charred epidermis than are good for you.”

  The lecture he’d been rehearsing was forgotten. “Good God, Katya! Are you all right?”

  She gave a small grimace. “Nanomeds are taking care of it fine,” she told him. “It doesn’t hurt much at all now.”

  “That’s sunburn?”

  She nodded. “Exposure to the atmosphere didn’t hurt me at all. It was just uncomfortable, mostly because of the heat. But there was enough UV in the light to fry me in, oh, less than an hour.”

  “Damn it, Katya. You could have—”

  “First- and second-degree burns over ninety percent of my body, Dev. Believe me, I know. The somatechs told me in no uncertain terms that without the medical nano I would have been dead. As it was, I was in shock, only half conscious, by the time I got my strider back to the base. They had to come in and peel me out of the slot, and I think I left half of my skin on the couch. Anyway, I’ll have a complete new skin in another couple of days.” She plucked gingerly at a flaking bit of skin on her shoulder. “In the meantime, I’m shedding a lot… and it’s damned irritating wearing clothes, especially those goking, snug-fitting skinsuits and shipsuits our nanofactories are programmed to turn out.”

  “And I was going to chew you out for not meeting me up at the receiving lock. What an idiot!…”

  “Huh. I’d look mighty dignified greeting you up there like this.”

  “I had no idea.…”

  “That,” she said primly, “is why we have virtual communications. So you can look at my electronic analogue instead of at me. Well? Are you going to say it?”

  “Say what?”

  “ ‘I told you so.’ ”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think I’d better.”

  “Wise man.” She picked up a filmy length of synthsilk draped over a chair and dropped it again. “I had this run off special, for when I absolutely have to go out in public and don’t want to scandalize the sexual conservatives, but it’s easier just to go around like this when I can. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Normally,” he said with a half grin, “I’d be delighted, though I have to admit that I don’t find overcooked meat all that appetizing. What worries me right now is what kind of precedent you’ve established. We can’t burn ourselves raw every time we want to talk to the DalRiss!”

  “Don’t worry, we won’t have to,” she told him. “They’ve known all along that we need protection from their environment, just as they can’t enter ours without becoming uncomfortably cold and sluggish.”

  “Ah. So we can talk to the DalRiss and still wear E-suits, at least?”

  She laughed. “Of course!” She moved her hands, outlining the shape of her breasts and torso without touching the damaged skin. “This was just to get their attention.”

  “Well, I never thought it would affect other species,” he said, grinning at her, “but it certainly gets mine. But since I’m sure you’d rather I didn’t do anything about it, just now, I’ll forgo any physical demonstrations.”

  She quirked a smile at him. “Good. I really appreciate that, at least until my skin grows back. And even my skin was a small enough price to pay for what we got.”

  “And that is?…”

  “A fresh look at the DalRiss, things that the Imperials didn’t learn in three years of working with them. Dr. Ozaki and the other Imperial scientists are still in shock, I think. And there’s other stuff that the Imperials knew but haven’t been sharing with the rest of us. Did you know the DalRiss have a government?”

  “I assumed they must have but never heard what it was like.”

  “Don’t make any assumptions about the DalRiss. Nine times out of ten you’ll assume wrong. But they do have a social structure that combines government, what for lack of a better name we’re calling religion, and music, of all things. They call it something that translates as the Collective.”

  “Communism?”

  “Not quite. Or maybe it’s what communism was supposed to be like, before Lenin and Mao and the other early dictators got through with it. There’s certainly a sense of everybody working together toward a common good, and a common racial goal, though we haven’t quite figured out what that is, yet. The Communists wanted to create the ideal Soviet Man through applied sociology and economics. The DalRiss are moving toward a perfect DalRiss. You’ve heard the old expression, ‘better things through chemistry’?”

  “In history sims.”

  “Well, for the Riss, it’s better things through biology.”

  “Gene tailoring.Nothing new there. Humans have been arguing about the ethics of improving their own species for five hundred years at least.”

  “That’s a very small part of it. The Collective part refers to all life on the planet. The DalRiss see themselves as the caretakers of that life.”

  “Um. Caretakers for who?”

  “That we don’t know yet. We’re not even sure they have anything like a religion. Some of what they say sounds like belief in spirits or souls. If this was a human culture we were studying, I’d say they worshiped some kind of supreme principle or force of life. But they’re not human, and we don’t know enough yet to tell whether they’re talking about mythology, religion, or a genuine understanding of the physical world that extends into what we would call metaphysics. I’ll tell you this much, though. DalRiss biological sciences are going to transform what we think of as biology… and probably nanotechnology and our overall view of the physical world as well. Some of what they’ve been telling us about quantum mechanics, and how belief shapes the universe, rather than the other way around…”

  Dev shook his head. “Sounds like I have a lot of catching up to do. You’ve done a great job, Katya. And…” He stopped, floundering for the right words.

 
“And?”

  “And I’ve been the nullhead lately, not you. I’m just realizing that I came down here ready to chew your ass, like you were some shiny-socketed, newbie striderjack fresh out of recruit training. If we can build on what you’ve accomplished already with the DalRiss, get them to help us, then the Rebellion might actually have a chance. And it’ll all be due to you.”

  Katya flushed at the compliment, her face coloring, her already reddened throat and breasts darkening slightly. “That’s nice of you to say that, Dev. But it’s been a group effort. You know that as well as I do. Or it was. You’ve been awfully distant lately.”

  Jerkily, he nodded, accepting the blame and the implied criticism. “You’re right, of course. I’m beginning to realize that, too. But… it’s like I don’t fit anymore. I want to, but I simply don’t.”

  “Because of the Xenolink?”

  “I think so. It must be. I don’t know what else could have… changed me so much. Changed the way I think and feel. I’ve always had some trouble getting close to people. Now, well, it’s as though I have nothing in common with them at all.”

  Katya crossed the room to lay her hand on his shoulder. “Devis, if you can look at me the way I look right now, tatters and all, and still think of, um, that ‘physical demonstration’ you mentioned a moment ago, I’d say you’re still human. And male. And very much a part of the human species.”

  “I suppose so. It doesn’t say anything about my sanity, though.”

  She arched one eyebrow. “I’ll assume that you’re not talking about your sanity as it relates to your relationship with me. We do still have a relationship, don’t we?”

  “It’s changed.”

  “I know. People change. It doesn’t mean they’re… turning into something else.”

  “I’ve felt like I’ve been drifting apart from you, too. But… well, out of everybody I’ve ever known, Katya, you’re the one I want most to hold on to.”

  She leaned forward, offering her lips. He kissed her for a long, lingering moment. As he drew back, he found himself thinking that, despite everything, it was Katya who was most helping him cling to his humanity just now. The Xenolink had… not created, exactly, but unleashed something inside that vaguely shaped center of existence he thought of as self, something very much larger than he was, and far stronger. It… wanted things, things that he could not provide.

  Katya was damned near his only reason for holding the thing, the monster, at bay.

  “I’m glad your lips didn’t burn,” he told her.

  “Let’s hear it for Mark VII adjustable polynanoform, full-face breathing masks. We can try something a little closer in another day or two.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Right now, come on. We have a staff meeting scheduled to fill you in on what’s been going on down here. And tomorrow, at first light, a delegation of the DalRiss is going to be here. We all have to meet them.”

  He eyed her burned skin doubtfully. “That doesn’t include you, too, I hope. You can’t go out again like that.”

  “I’m afraid it does. But by tomorrow, I ought to be a lot less tender, enough so that I can slip into an E-suit, at least. I’ll manage.”

  “Is this some sort of diplomatic get-together with the DalRiss?”

  “More than that. We’ve told them you were coming. I was right, by the way. They do remember you, Dev. You specifically. They’re coming tomorrow just to see you.”

  “Huh? Me? How come?”

  “Because you are…” She paused, her eyes closed as she pulled an unfamiliar word from her RAM. “You’re Sh’vah. And because of that, it just could be that you’re the real key to their helping us.”

  “Sorry. That just went…” He gestured with his hand, a short, sharp stab past the top of his head. “What’s ‘shevah’?”

  “Sh’vah,” she corrected him, pronouncing the word with a short, hard glottal stop. “And maybe I’d better let one of them translate that. I’m not sure that I can.”

  Chapter 25

  Ancient Greece was not a single state, but a collection of dozens of tiny and fiercely independent city-states, separated one from the next by the rugged mountains and inlets that characterize that land. It was this very separation, and the resultant cross-fertilization of ideas as trade between alien cultures was established, that led to the flowering of science, art, and culture.

  Indeed, some of the most shining examples of Greek scientific thought arose not in Greece proper, but in colonies such as Abdera, where Democritus pondered the atom, and Santos, where Anaximander suggested a scheme that sounds to modern ears startlingly like evolution. Mankind requires diversity, the freedom to experiment, if he is to achieve his full potential. It is natural to wonder if future ages will see similar leaps in the advancement of Mind when the cross-fertilization occurs, not between cities, but between the products of mutually alien evolutions.

  —On Human Freedom

  Travis Sinclair

  C.E. 2538

  The word Sh’vah, it turned out, was the closest pronounceable equivalent available to a three-level stack of hissing and clicking sounds that referred to a particular concept in the Alyan worldview. For the DalRiss, evolution was viewed as a complex and aeons-old dance; the Sh’vah was a particular, pivotal organism that evolved by chance or design at the right place and the right time in order to profoundly influence all future evolution. Examples in the evolution of life on Earth might have included the long-necked sauropods of the Jurassic, which had prompted the explosive increase in height of hardwood trees, a kind of evolutionary race between taller and taller dinosaurs, and the taller and taller trees upon which they fed. Better examples, perhaps, were those species of fish first able to use their swim bladders as lungs… and which opened up the land to conquest by the sea.

  By DalRiss standards, Man himself was Sh’vah in the Great Dance of Life, having reworked the face of his own world for both good and ill, then providing the technological means for vaulting to other worlds and seeding them with life. And the DalRiss, who’d left few of the life-forms on GhegnuRish as they’d found them, were perhaps the most accomplished dancers of all.

  But Dev, it seemed, held a special place within the frame-work of the DalRiss concept. He had been the first, within the depths of GhegnuRish, to join the separate dances of Naga, DalRiss, and human. It was, Katya had pointed out, not only a singular mark of distinction for Dev. It was the key to the Confederation’s hoped-for alliance with the DalRiss.

  Dev stood with Katya, Brenda Ortiz, Vic Hagan, and a number of others, both military staffers and civilians, on a plant-covered slope nearly a kilometer from the former Imperial base. Dr. Ozaki, the chief of the Imperial civilian team, was there as well, along with several of his people. The Nihonjin scientists were working under Professor Ortiz’s direction now, as the expedition tried frantically to catch up with three years of largely classified Imperial research. All of them wore lightweight E-suits and masks for protection from the heat and atmosphere but had bared their left arms to the chilly embrace of DalRiss cornels.

  The DalRiss, five of them, had met the human party as promised, bringing cornels—Translators, as the name was rendered over the organic linkage—with them to the site. The DalRiss stood before them now a few meters away, silent, utterly enigmatic in their lack of readable emotions, face or body expressions, or gestures. Dev had seen DalRiss from close up many times during his first visit to the Alyan system, but each time he met with them he was surprised by their sheer alienness, each time noticing details that he’d missed before, each time having trouble putting the confused tangle of comparisons, thoughts, and impressions that was his perception of the DalRiss into a coherent and meaningful whole. Those slippery, leechlike creatures sliding in and out among the leathery folds of the Riss portion of the body… he’d never noticed them before. Each the size of a dinner plate, they appeared to nest between the horns of the crescent, and among the wrinkles of loose skin connecting t
he “head” to the lower body. What were they, parasites on the skin of beings that were themselves parasites? A snatch of doggerel tugged at his memory, something about greater fleas with lesser fleas upon their backs to bite them.

  With the DalRiss outlook on life, though, Dev doubted that those organisms were chance infestations of Alyan body lice. More likely they were young… or, for all he knew, they were the DalRiss equivalent of the handkerchief or the comb.

  “We welcome you back to this round of the Great Dance,” a voice said in Dev’s mind, jerking his attention from the small creatures to the alien symbiosis in its entirety. “It was daltahng that you return.”

  “Daltahng?” Involuntarily, he glanced down at the comel glistening on his arm. Was it working?

  “The Translator cannot always find exact parallels in the concepts necessary for communication between your people and ours,” the voice said. “Daltahng…” It hesitated, as though searching for another word. “What you call ‘destiny’ or, possibly, ‘fate’ is one part of it. What is necessary for the completion of a great task is another. That which is in harmony with the universe is a third.”

  “Daltahng might be easier to say at that,” Dev said, smiling behind his mask. He wondered if the DalRiss were even aware of human facial expressions. Probably not, since sound waves couldn’t provide detail enough to resolve the upward twitch of the corner of a mouth… and they wouldn’t know what they were looking at anyway.

  He also wondered at the word itself. Was the “dal” part of it a root word, related somehow to the word for the Dal-symbionts? Dev thought that likely, that it might have something to do both with the fact that the Dal gave both direction and power to the otherwise helpless Riss-symbionts, and that the Dal provided completion for the DalRiss organism as a whole. Daltahng, indeed. Power-direction-giver, he thought, might be the literal sense of the word, and there would be more and deeper meanings in the fully sounded, native-spoken version of the term.