by Mel Keegan
“Gangway,” he called ahead as the chair bucketed this way and that. “Coming through.” He was still ghost-pale, blue-shadowed about eyes and mouth, but Grant would have given him a month’s worth of vitamins, minerals, stimulants. The simple fact that he was not in pain had brought him halfway back; his mind could function while his body continued to heal.
His left side was fractionally more responsive – enough for Grant to place the lower leg and ankle in a garish blue air cast, and to bind the left arm to his chest with two broad straps. Vaurien could feel nothing from either limb; he could reinjure them without realizing it. His organs were functioning adequately, the lung was good enough, so long as he let the technology work for him, undertook no exertion. Medical nano had removed even the bruising and edema from his head, so he was in no pain, merely exhausted.
“Just park yourself,” Jazinsky remonstrated. “What could you eat?”
“Not hungry,” he growled.
“Tough. You’re allowed a little solid food now, so you’re going to bloody eat,” she informed him.
Vaurien looked along at Travers with a half-smothered smile, and Neil saluted him in coffee. He was back. That was the old Richard Vaurien grumbling about the green tea being too weak and the croissants being over-baked, the eggs tasting of nothing recognizable – who in hell configured this autochef? – until Mark called the assembly to order.
The screen was already bright with vids captured by the gundrones, and Travers was as ravenous for information, answers, as he had been for food. From the look on Mark’s face, he had seen some of the data; but he was not about to give anything away too soon. Behind him, Dario and Midani were done setting up the sound system, and Lai’a was in control of the presentation. They went to the ’chef as Mark said,
“Thank you all for being here. The information you’re about to view is an infinitesimal fraction of the data transferred from the core AI of the Zunshu city, but we believe it’s the right fraction. It’s been filtered, collated, contextualized, cross-referenced, and checked against every benchmark we could identify as a standard. We’re very, very sure of this information. Some of it will surprise you; some will shock.” He was looking directly at Harrison Shapiro as he added, “Some is not at all what you wanted to hear. Lai’a, go ahead.”
He stepped aside with that. The lights dimmed a little and the screen began to cycle images, vids, graphics, with scrolling text and a commentary laid by the AI itself. Travers had been of a mind to return to the ’chef for another plate, but within moments he forgot about food as the background of the planet and its dominant life form unfolded.
Zunshu 161-D was a chemical paradise in which the molecules necessary for life formed early and in profusion. For twenty million years the giant planet had maintained ‘forbidden zones’ where life was impossible because its building blocks fell apart in the corrosive chemistry, as well as clement zones the size of entire small planets, in which life evolved in an easy, buoyant, fertile environment. Some creatures flew, some swam. The Zunshu never walked or crawled – the only firm surface they ever experienced was the vast rafts of algae, which grew forty meters thick and were the rich pasture on which scores of creatures lived and throve. And the Zunshu were born hunters.
Inside the mid-body was a system of valves and chambers and muscles enabling rapid jet-like propulsion, and the fantastic, intricate shells they wore like parasols were natural buoyancy compensators. In their backs were glands which filtered water, filched minerals; and the multi-celled shells might become enormous, filled with hydrogen, giving the Zunshu the ability to rise above their native liquid environment. They shared a sky filled with ‘birds’ whose flat, hollow bones were similarly hydrogen-filled for lift.
The Zunshu had no bones, but were far from simple cephalopods. The body was rigged with a framework of cartilage; the six articulated members around the sensor-rich snout were formed of ridges of muscle around spars and ‘knuckles’ of gristle, providing dexterity far in advance of rigid hands and fingers. Each of their six eyes was four-lidded, with two nictitating membranes, and sensitive to very low light.
With six eyes ranged around the ‘head’ they saw in almost any direction, and their brains developed enormous complexity, to process the visual input – but the Zunshu never relied solely on vision. Primitive ancestors had sonic location which did not atrophy as the species evolved; and they retained an even more ancient neural sensor, like a fish’s lateral line, making them extraordinarily perceptive.
They wore calcium shells of every shape, every color, extruded at whim by glands designed ten million years before. Some shells were thick as armor, tough with metals filtered out of the updrafts from the planet’s deep furnace and embedded in calcium matrix. Other shells were light, delicate, huge, filled with the hydrogen that was generated so easily from water, and by manipulating the minerals rising from the super-hot depths of the planet on thermal plumes many kilometers high.
The Zunshu were chemists and engineers before they even began to think – to reason why they explored the air, how the hydrogen cells lifted them above their ocean, how they respired in air by bleeding compressed gas – stored in thick, many-chambered shells which terrestrial creatures might have termed ‘tanks’ – into little pockets of water carried in their own shells.
Sub-species of Zunshu across a million years exploited their buoyancy and developed gliding membranes which stretched out from their flanks like vast parachutes. Others developed handling members specific to holding, manipulating, crushing; but the most useful development was the ability of much later generations to extrude materials, weave vast cocoons, incorporating materials from their rich, liquid environment.
Whether by natural selection or conscious trial and error, the later generations developed structural materials as strong as aluminum, and lighter. Using these aeroshells and the bivalve pumps they understood so well, since they were part of their own biology, they stumbled over sophisticated methods to vent pressurized gas for propulsion. They learned to control hydrogen for calculated lift, around the time a complex language formed.
Language was the catalyst permitting an explosion of development. Ideas were shared now, theories discussed. A process over which nature would have taken another million years was compressed into a few centuries. The early Zunshu aeroshells grew larger and, buoyant with hydrogen, floated explorers into dangerous environments where the engine of the planet was observed by proto-engineers who already understood chemistry and physics.
Around the time poetry was born in a mythological tradition of great sagas chronicling the adventures of the pioneers, the principles of gas exchange, buoyancy, displacement, fluid mechanics, ballistics and chemistry, were explored, recorded, understood.
Great cities began to appear, immense platforms of spun calcium, shining like mother-of-pearl and riding buoyancy chambers the size of cathedrals. Using pressurized chambers and gas venting, the cities could be moved at will to avoid atmospheric turbulence from the storms rampaging in the depths of the planet. At the height of their civilization, more than ten thousand cities floated in the ocean that was home to the Zunshu, sheltering and nurturing a population measuring in billions.
Their large brains had developed intricate systems of language, vast capacities for communication, and true eidetic memory. Those brains were already wired by their environment for physics, chemistry, metallurgy, mathematics, lensing; and rather than being limited by the size of a skull –which in turn was limited by the girth of the pelvic girdle in female vertebrates – their body structure allowed their brains to grow as required. Zunshu never stopped generating brain cells. The more they were stimulated intellectually, the more brain matter grew, until the organ extended far back from the snout and eyes, and under the glands which effervesced as they filtered water, filched minerals, spun calcium carbonate into fantasy shapes and hues.
In a century they were using the super-hot plumes and atmospheric deeps for forging, developing improbable al
loys, learning about volatiles, explosives, propellants, fuels. They had no need to mine. The planet provided every metal, mineral and element in an endless harvest. Exploration took them into the depths, where they experimented with density and heat, and in these same decades they rode their super-buoyant aeroshells to the edge of space.
And there, they discovered their own sun, their world’s many moons, and the stars. They spun silicone dioxide into crystal lenses of enormous precision, suspended them on the very edge of the atmosphere, and looked outward into the universe. Within fifty years, networks of observatories floated in the upper atmosphere, and the Zunshu woke to cosmology.
Elsewhere, others were expanding on their own biological method of locomotion: they had begun to build engines. Zunshu were instinctive gliders in any atmosphere, and with their natural jets, it was only a matter of time before an engineer spun a crystal wing under a hydrogen lift body, rigged a tank of pressurized gas which vented at a controlled rate, and actually flew. The first airplanes were so simple, Zunshu had understood the principles for many years. The next planes vented high-pressure steam, while chemical fire and water were controlled in various shell chambers; the next generation of engines explored exploding gases venting from bell-shaped exhausts.
Due to their environment, the Zunshu had understood the volatile nature of gases since before they evolved a complex language. Now, they consciously experimented with gas mixes; rockets and true jet engines were just a few decades away. To them, the rocket engine was simple, and their fuels far outstripped anything human technology knew. Ships were spun to travel above the atmosphere, and one great saga told of the first Zunshu who visited 20 of their moons, all within easy reach of spacefarers from the clement pockets of the gas giant.
They never had cause to colonize the moons, because their world was vast beyond measure. They lived in ‘cubic space’ rather than square space, and the planet was a thermo-chemical engine providing every treasure essential to technology. The Zunshu would never run out of space or resources.
Decades before, still other engineers had invested generations in studying the world’s immense electrical storms. They used the furnace depths to forge metals, spun wire in the buoyant updrafts. The chemistry of batteries was second nature to creatures who evolved inside a chemical engine, and soon they were storing the power of lightning discharges in cubic kilometers of power cells riding buoyancy chambers.
Thinking machines were slow to appear, since the Zunshu brain was, itself, so complex and gifted with the ability to grow throughout life. Computers remained unnecessary for many decades, but when cities floated on the edge of space and Zunshu chemists ventured deeper into the dense, hot atmosphere of their world, searching for new fuels, the first rudimentary computers appeared. Three decades later, they were no longer simple.
Fluorine abounded on the far side of the gas giant, and soon enough engineers recognized its potential. Starship fuels were tested in the same few years when the first true computers awoke. Artificial intelligence, patterned after the Zunshu’s own labyrinthine brain structure, arose twenty years later.
A starship any human would have called ‘Einsteinian’ took the first pioneers to the nearest stars, and on their own back doorstep they discovered their Drift, and the black hole. The study of gravity and time absorbed them. With their capacity to reason and remember, their readiness to network a million minds on a single problem, the region the Resalq called Elarne opened readily to them.
Within two generations their whole technology was based on gravity physics, and their power became so vast, they believed themselves masters of the universe. They explored every world they could reach, returned home with the fruits of science, and enjoyed almost a century of peace and prosperity such as had never been known before.
And then an exploration ship – a driftship – encountered a very different intelligent species. For the Zunshu, first contact with the civilization spelled doom, though they did not suffer ruin alone, and for them it was a long time coming.
In the years at the zenith of their technology, the Zunshu were liberated from work of any kind. Automata created and ran everything, designed the new generations of artificial intelligence as well as the new hardware, developed and performed the arts, crafted the structure of technology and science. Magnificent automata of every form imaginable took their directives from the Zunshu, but the constructs of artificial intelligence soon left behind the technology the Zunshu understood.
In three generations the skills were rusty; in five they were lost. Liberated from any necessity to think about machines, much less how to build or repair them, the Zunshu turned to poetry, art, philosophy. In these years, their philosophy soared through spiritual realms never even imagined before; as a species they became less and less interested in a physical universe that had already given up its secrets, and utterly consumed by the unknown, the seductive promise of what lay beyond.
For centuries before the driftship encountered another civilization, science and technology had been inconsequential to increasingly vast sections of the Zunshu community. No one cared what a machine was, how it worked, where it came from, what replaced it. Machines were simply there, everywhere, doing everything. In these years the Zunshu spirituality blossomed as fast as their science had blossomed half a millennium earlier, because spirituality – the quest for what lay beyond physical life – was the last great adventure left for a people who had done everything.
A college of theologians rose out of the most gifted generation of philosophers and poets. Like shamans, they tranced and traveled to higher dimensions where they communed with both the ancestors of the Zunshu and their descendants, in realms outside of linear time, where past and future were one.
The message they brought back shocked the species to its core.
There, Lai’a let the screen lapse back into a looping series of images recorded in the city. “It would seem,” it said musingly, “that while many of the Zunshu were enjoying the products of science and regressing into much simpler minds, many more were developing a theory of religion which crossed dimensional boundaries. A priest caste increasingly flourished, becoming extremely powerful at the level of government, in the same years when the Zunshu were exploring their region of near transspace. By the time of first contact, the belief was deeply ingrained in them.
“Their priests had traveled to the higher realms, conferred with the ancestors and learned the destiny of the Zunshu, from the earliest of their primordial kind to the last born in the distant future. Sound evidence shows that, like the Resalq, their personality does survive the death of the physical body. Unlike the Resalq, however, the Zunshu do not reincarnate. They simply are, either in this dimension, or in the higher continuum, which appears to be a ‘brane,’ that is, a membrane universe which intersects our own at an acute angle.
“Resalq and human theorists have speculated about the existence of such a brane since before humans developed a robust enough interplanetary engine to visit the neighboring worlds in their own solar system. The physics, while compelling, were never empirically provable. Such speculation passed into the realm of philosophy.”
Mark’s voice was quiet and yet cut like a shard of glass. “Stop there, Lai’a. The Zunshu priests actually visited this brane? In fact?”
“It is likely they did; it was no empty claim,” Lai’a told him. “The Zunshu consciousness is connected to other Zunshu via a disused, largely dormant organ in the brain.” The screen shifted to a cross-section of the virtual dissection of the strange, elongated brain, as it had been deep imaged. A cone-shaped gland illuminated in blue. “As a species, they are marginally empathic rather than telepathic. According to their scientific record, they were always subliminally aware of the continuum, or brane, in which the Zunshu personality endures in coherent form after life functions terminate in the biological body. Zunshu shamans spent twenty generations selectively breeding a mere handful of adepts who could deliberately use the organ.”
/> “All right – I can accept all this,” Jazinsky said slowly. “I know Resalq don’t talk about the vestigial memories they retain of past lives. It’s taboo, like humans being caught whacking off in a public place! But, taboo or not, it’s very real – they are reborn.”
“Whether we want to be or not,” Mark added ruefully. “It’s not a decision we make, and it can be extremely inconvenient. It just happens … just as the Zunshu, apparently, don’t return. They live here; they live there, wherever ‘there’ is.”
“Oh, I’ve grasped that part,” Jazinsky assured him patiently. “I just don’t understand what this has to do with the downfall of their species, or their burning desire to slam every other thinking, reasoning species into extinction.”
“You procreate,” Lai’a said simply.
“Of course we procreate!” Dario protested. “Every species does!”
“Your numbers increase,” Lai’a went on, “into billions, with the real potential for trillions, given time and the opportunity afforded by the orderly colonization of limitless other worlds. And each individual is born with, for want of any more suitable term, a soul: a personality which will, or at least may, survive the death of the host body.”
The silence around the crew lounge was profound until at last Vidal – with the Daku sense of spirituality harnessed to the Fleet veteran’s coarse pragmatism – demanded, “So freakin’ what? Okay, so some of us, somewhere, somehow, manage to meditate our way to the gates of Nirvana. Humans have been trying to peek under the skirts of immortality for ten thousand years, it’s the reason our ancestrals built pyramids with their bare hands! Well, suppose some of us actually managed it – you want to talk to Robert Chandra Liang about this. He’ll tell you about elevated levels of consciousness, the function of the pineal gland, access to the Akasha, helical time flow … I don’t understand more than a fraction of it. But open your mind for one split second. Suppose we do catch up with the Resalq, meditate our way to a place where personality can, and does, survive the death of the body – how in any freakin’ hell does this concern the Zunshu?”
