Symbionts

by William H. Keith

  “Our new friends have been busy,” Katya said, linked into the net with Dev. “Do they really intend to abandon both their worlds?”

  “I don’t think so,” Dev told her. “The impression I get when I’m talking to them is that individual death doesn’t matter that much to them, that even if they knew precisely when their suns were going to explode, any one of them would just as soon stay and take notes as leave. But they do value, oh, call it experience. Knowledge. Viewpoint, even. They try to save that… the way life saves particular combinations of DNA, I suppose.”

  “You know, Dev, I get the feeling that you get a lot more out of your conversations with them than the rest of us do.”

  Dev hesitated before answering. Katya had just touched that part of his new self he’d most been questioning during the past few hours.

  “I guess I do. But I seem to be getting a lot more out of everything lately.”

  “It’s the Xenolink, isn’t it?”

  “I… I think so. I think it must be.” Absently, he reached for a bit of planetary data he knew to be stored in an ephemeris stored in his personal RAM, then realized with a small start that the data was already there in his mind… without his having had to frame a coded search request. That sort of thing had been happening more and more lately, as though subprograms were running in his implanted hardware that had been placed there by some unconscious part of himself.

  “When I linked with the Naga on Herakles,” he went on, thoughtfully, “part of it, about a kilogram of its tissue, entered me, mingled itself with my body. Most of that tissue, I’m pretty sure, was Naga nanotech. Molecule-sized living machines that interact with each other like tiny computers in a very, very large network.”

  “That’s how you shared minds, right?”

  “I suppose so, though I’m still not quite sure what ‘mind’ really is. If you can picture ‘mind’ as a series of computer programs overlapping one another, running in parallel, yeah. The Naga’s programs were definitely mixed up with mine, and I could sense what it was thinking. Well, some of it, anyway. Remember, a planetary Naga masses as much as a small moon. But for a while there, the part that I was relating to and I were… joined. Part of the same organism. Or set of nested programs. While I was… changed, I sensed, I don’t know. A quickening. My thoughts were faster. My time sense was accelerated… I think I was processing data as quickly as the Naga. At least, when we shared thoughts, there was no sense of it having to wait for me to catch up. There was no sense of difference at all. We weren’t just linked. We were one.”

  There’d been more besides, things that he still didn’t quite dare tell anyone. He’d sensed an actual increase in his intelligence, or possibly it had simply been that the speed and the certainty of… call it his intuition had increased. The somatic technicians and monitor AIs that had checked him out afterward had speculated that, at least temporarily, there’d been an increase in the number of connections between the left and right hemispheres of his cerebrum through his corpus callosum.

  Now, though, Dev was beginning to suspect that the increase had not been temporary. It had taken him this long to arrive at that conclusion, possibly because the connections had been growing throughout these past months, possibly because it had taken him this long to learn—all unconsciously—how the new equipment worked. Had the Naga made permanent, physical changes to his brain during its brief tenancy? Or, after he’d ordered it to withdraw, had it left some small part of itself, perhaps a few million molecule-sized nanobiomachines to continue the work begun by the planetary Naga as a whole?

  He was pretty sure that a physical scan of his brain now would reveal what had not been there eight months ago: a host of new connections between the left side and the right. He knew of no other way to account for the leaps of reason and insight, the speed and accuracy of thought, the sudden flashes of information that seemed to drop out of nowhere. In many ways, it was like being constantly linked to an AI, with information available for the asking, though it was not as dependable, and the information it provided was limited to that available to his ordinary human senses.

  “At first,” he told Katya, “I suspected the cornel, thought that it was doing something to me, because it wasn’t until I put one on that things started to fall in place for me. Now, though, I’m pretty sure that it was just that the change in me became clearer… came into sharper focus, let’s say, while I was talking to the DalRiss.” The increased level of intuition that allowed him to pick up more of the meaning behind the Aryans’ many-leveled speech than was possible for other people had only been revealed when he’d been speaking with them… and intuition or no intuition, he still needed a cornel to communicate with the Alyans.

  “It’ll be okay, Dev. I know it will. You must’ve retained, somehow, that flash of genius you said you experienced during the Xenolink. Maybe it’s only now getting to the point where you can control it.”

  Through the cephlinkage, Dev could sense Katya’s concern, a warm, soft stirring, a reaching out. A detached part of his mind noted that this, too, was a new ability, for the cephlink wasn’t supposed to transmit emotions the way a direct link with a Naga did, for instance. He suspected that what he was feeling was a highly increased sensitivity to Katya’s moods, expressed by subtle inflections in her mental voice.

  “I think you’re right. The question is whether I can handle the additional information.”

  “What additional information?”

  “Let’s say I’m just processing the same information, the same input more completely than I was before. It’s a lot like being linked, but without having much control on what’s coming through on a download. My vision is sharper, and my hearing and sense of touch. What I’m getting is overtones, secondary meanings, special insight on the same input my senses have always been giving me. That’s how I can, oh, hear a DalRiss word and guess at more of the meaning behind it than you can… and know that I’m right.”

  “It must be… a little frightening.”

  “And by that,” Dev said gently, “you mean that you’re wondering whether I can handle it, wondering if I might not, in fact, be insane… or at least just a little unbalanced.”

  “No!”

  “And now you’re wondering if you should relieve me of command, since there’s no way of anticipating how I’ll react under pressure. Oh, yes. I can pick up more from human speech than I could before too, especially if I can see your face and body. I think I must be capable of processing very subtle clues from, oh, lots of things. Posture. Subtle movements of muscles in face and hands and body. I feel… I feel much the same way that I did in the Xenolink. Not as complete, not as whole. I still feel… incomplete. Empty, in the way the DalRiss mean the word. It’s not as bad as it was when the Naga withdrew from me. Maybe I’m just learning how to handle it. Or maybe I’m still… changing.”

  “I don’t want to have you relieved,” Katya said. “Dev, you’ve always been a tactical genius, especially in space combat. It’s, I don’t know. A gift. A talent. If your brain is working at a higher level now, faster, more smoothly, with greater insight, well, that could be a real advantage for us, couldn’t it?”

  “You’re trying to talk yourself into believing that.” Dev gave a mental sigh. What was best… for the mission? And for the people under his command? “I think we’re going to have to work closely together, you and I.”

  “With me as your keeper?”

  He heard the flash of anger in her voice. “If you like. Or as my human judgment and reason.”

  “You’re as human as I am, damn it!”

  “Maybe. I hope so.”

  But he was surprised to note that he didn’t really care, one way or the other, about his humanity anymore.

  And that change in his thinking was perhaps the most disturbing of all.

  Eagle had made the passage from Alya A to Alya B in a single, short hop through K-T space. The mean separation between the two suns was nine hundred astronomical units, about five lig
ht days, and the passage lasted only a few minutes. The DalRiss Dev had been talking with at Dojinko, however, had made the trip instantaneously and were waiting for the Confederation destroyer as it approached.

  DalRiss starships employed a means of overcoming the limitations of the speed of light totally different from that employed by Man. Just as they grew the bodies of their ships, they bred and grew the means of shifting from point to point in space, semi-intelligent creatures known to the DalRiss as Achievers. Human researchers still didn’t understand how Achievers did what they did; the best explanation suggested that they somehow tapped into the half-magical potential of quantum theory, literally imagining the ship and its contents to be in a distant place, and transporting it there instantly by sheer force of will. Magic… yet no more magical, perhaps, than the K-T drive that allowed human starships to skim along the interface between the Quantum Sea and normal fourspace. The biggest problem was that in three years of study, the Nihonjin researchers at ShraRish had been unable to even come up with a testable hypothesis as to how the Achievers accomplished their space-bending trick, much less find a way to apply it to human spacecraft designs.

  As Eagle slipped into orbit around GhegnuRish, one of the smaller DalRiss ships took up station close alongside. Longer than Eagle by nearly two hundred meters, the four-armed starfish shape appeared to be maneuvered not by plasma jets, as with human spacecraft, but by manipulating the local stellar and planetary magnetic fields. The alien ship glowed brightly in Dev’s navsim view, a representation of the magnetic forces bathing the vessel as it matched course and speed.

  “Commodore?” the voice of Eagle’s communications officer sounded in his mind. “We’re picking up a transmission from the Alyan ship. Standard radio.”

  With neither computer systems or transmission codes in common with those employed by human ships, the DalRiss could not talk to Eagle through the usual ViRcommunication links. They did employ radio, however, and with cornels aboard both vessels tied into the comnet, the two could speak with one another, using audio alone.

  “Patch it through.”

  “Dev Cameron. This is the DalRiss.” Again, that odd lack of individual identification. Dev wondered if the DalRiss even had names for each other. “We thought you would appreciate a chance to see our fleet at close range.”

  “I’m… astonished,” Dev replied, “to say the least.” And he was. The Alyans must have been growing and launching ships constantly for the past three years.

  Katya still linked in, spoke into the momentary silence. “Is this one of the DalRiss we were speaking with on the surface of ShraRish?”

  “It is,” the voice said, “though that scarcely matters. So long as the information is the same.”

  “I understand,” Katya said. “But I’m curious. These starships we’re seeing… they’re identical to shapes we observed on ShraRish from orbit. Do your Achievers jump them straight from the surface of the planet into space? Or do you use the magnetic drive we’re observing in your vessel now?”

  “We can enter space either way. In our case, this ship was on the ground near where we talked with you. We entered it before your ground-to-orbit shuttle had reached orbit, and our Achiever brought us here to await your arrival.”

  If the Confederation could master that trick!…

  “How are you generating the magnetic fields to drive your ships?” Dev asked.

  “That is one of the things we have the Naga to thank for. As you must know well, they are masters at creating and manipulating magnetic fields.”

  Dev suppressed a start of surprise. For all of his improved powers of intuition and observation, he’d not seen that one coming. It made splendid sense, however. The Naga could directly sense magnetic fields, and they used them extensively for moving about the surface of their planet, even for flinging bits of themselves into the void at velocities of up to thirty percent of the speed of light. That was how they seeded other worlds across the cosmos; that was how the Naga he’d been Xenolinked with had destroyed the ships of the Imperial battlefleet at Herakles.

  He was about to ask about their power source but decided not to. There would be time later, and he didn’t want to irritate his hosts with what might be annoying or imbecilic questions.

  “You have a Naga fragment aboard your ship?” Katya asked.

  “Aboard every one of the ships you now perceive, yes. They provide each with its ability to maneuver, to fight, to repair itself. They are also quite useful for helping to maintain the necessary environment.”

  They would be, at that. Dev turned his gaze briefly on the planet turning slowly below. Birthworld of DalRissan life, GhegnuRish had been abandoned by them after centuries of near-incessant war with the Xenophobe lurking beneath the planet’s crust. At some time after the last DalRiss evacuated the world, the Xenophobe had undergone a transition natural for that species, from what human researchers called its acquisitive phase to its contemplative phase. By that time, much of the planet’s surface had already been altered by the dark interloper. Whole DalRissan cities had been assimilated within the Naga’s plastic embrace, and the atmosphere itself was slowly being changed, not, it turned out, in any deliberate attempt to render the world uninhabitable, but simply as the vast Naga in its subsurface tunnels and caverns had drawn on cities, on rock, on the atmosphere itself as building materials for its own use.

  After Dev had established contact with the Xeno, however, a dialogue between the Naga and the DalRiss had begun. Even before the First Expeditionary Force had departed for Earth, DalRiss had returned to the surface of their homeworld and had begun guiding the planetary Naga in reconstructing the demolished environment. For three years, the Naga had been absorbing air from the GhegnuRish atmosphere, converting it to the standard gas mix favored by the DalRiss, and releasing it again. DalRiss biologists had even been using the Naga’s ability to pattern living forms absorbed by it and piece together replicas literally atom by atom to begin repopulating the planet’s surface with the plant and animal species that long before had been driven to extinction by the original war.

  Oh, yes. If the Naga could do all of that, they would be real wizards at creating and maintaining specific environments!

  “Could you modify your ships to carry humans?” Katya wanted to know.

  “Creating an area within a ship that supplied your range of temperature and gas mix would present no problem,” the DalRiss replied after a moment. “There would be difficulties, though, in control.”

  “I imagine,” Dev added, “that you, the Riss part of you, anyway, tap into the ship’s nervous system directly.”

  “That is essentially correct. We receive input directly from the ship’s senses. Our thoughts guide the ship just as they guide our Dal. With this new construction, there is actually a three-way linkage between the ship, the Riss piloting it, and the Naga fragment that makes up part of the ship’s nervous system.”

  “It sounds very much like the way we do things,” Dev said. “Humans are linked electronically to the artificial intelligence, the computer network that serves as a kind of nervous system for our ship. We do electronically what you do through some very advanced biology.”

  “We had surmised as much, from our studies with the Japanese observers. Your electronic systems, the implants you call cephlinks, would not be directly compatible with our biological systems. Some sort of direct connection would be necessary, too, in order for you to pass on navigational commands to the ship’s Achiever. The Achiever, you see, must visualize the desired destination. That is simple if the Achiever has been at the target destination before. It can be accomplished if the target can simply be seen, by picking out a particular star, say. That is how we first made contact with your species, as you may know. We’d been receiving radio signals from that volume of space occupied by humans for some time. We were aware of a particular star quite similar in age and mass to our own, the star you humans call Altair. Basically, we pointed out Altair to an Achiever and told it
to go there.

  “The system works best, however, if the pilot has been to the destination and can pass on his impressions to the Achiever first. It allows a much finer focus and more accuracy when you emerge on the other side.”

  “Jumping blind, you could end up inside your target sun,” Dev said. “Or so far away you might have to make several more small jumps to zero in on your target. I can see that.”

  “Precisely.”

  “You know,” Dev said slowly, the hesitation dragging at his mental voice, “a cornel is nothing but a translator and not always a completely accurate one at that. It doesn’t provide enough of a bridge between humans and DalRiss for the level of linkage required for this type of navigation.”

  “It is not fast enough, either.”

  “Right. But a human could link directly with the Naga aboard one of your ships. The Naga would then be linked to the ship and to the Achiever. In that way, humans could pilot your vessels.”

  There was a long silence over the radio link, as though the DalRiss were considering this. “That could well be. Would you consider participating in the experiment?”

  “Dev,” Katya said, alarmed. “I don’t—”

  “I would,” Dev told the DalRiss, interrupting her. He then sent her a private message over the navlink. “Don’t worry, Kat. I know what I’m doing.”

  “You’re thinking about doing another Xenolink!”

  “Not quite. This won’t be the same thing. The Nagas in these ships are buds off a planetary Naga, fragments massing a few tons… well, a few thousand tons, maybe, in the case of their biggest ships. Still, it won’t be like tapping into that monster on Herakles.”