by Ian Douglas
He couldn't tell. The comel itself was quite literally a translator and nothing more, a means of retrieving vocalized thoughts from one, then reshaping and transmitting them to the other. It was composed of little more than modified nervous tissue cloned from Riss brain cells, grown together with the microscopic components of an organic radio transceiver. From what he'd been told when he'd first encountered them three years before, they were grown already programmed for specific languages; those given to humans apparently contained the keys for both Nihongo and Inglic, for as the DalRiss spoke, Dev heard the words in Inglic, but with a faint echo in Japanese. Presumably, if he'd been Nihonjin, he would have heard the translation in that language instead.
Direct access to Dev's mind was established through his cephlink by way of the circuitry implanted in his left hand and arm, and as he used the comel, he occasionally could feel it drawing on his personal RAM for meanings and definitions. It communicated with the DalRiss over the radio circuit; they heard his vocalized replies through a natural and inborn radio sense, something apparently possessed by many forms of Alyan life. Dev wondered if the DalRiss talked to one another by radio in a kind of natural telepathy. Certainly, their radio links through an active comel gave them considerable information about humans . . . more, Dev was pretty sure, than humans had been able to learn about them.
By far the greatest wonder of the comels, though, had been realized in their use to achieve communication with the Nagas, a one-individual-to-a-world species that didn't even have a spoken language, which thought in terms of communication only as it related to wordless exchanges of information between different parts of its single, massive, far-flung body. Somehow, the DalRiss, who'd fought the Nagas on two worlds for millennia, had figured out how to program certain comels to translate Naga emotional content and memories into something humans could make at least fragmentary sense of . . . and human memories into something intelligible to the Naga. Comels had been the key to understanding the Xenophobes, to communicating with them, and to effectively ending what the Nagas had believed to be problems with natural phenomena, and what humans had thought was a forty-three-year-long war with xenophobic aliens.
The technology involved in that development seemed like sheer magic to Dev. Human computers, even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems, still needed to be specifically programmed for their tasks, and while they were tremendously flexible, it was a flexibility only within sharply delineated boundaries. Too, how was a comel able to interpret the flicker of electrochemical impulses through the human nervous system?
True, the DalRiss must be masters of deciphering alien neural impulses, learning how to attach meaning to them and even how to control them; somehow, they'd learned to do as much with the Dal millennia ago, when they'd taken the first steps in converting the Dal from food animals to symbiotic partners. Perhaps, for the Riss, reading the signals of an alien nervous system was no more difficult than was puzzling out the meaning of a foreign language for a human equipped with a translation sequence downloaded to his personal RAM. With the right tools, the most formidable language became a simple substitution code, easily deciphered.
The sequence of thoughts, about Nagas, comels, programming, and DalRiss bioengineering techniques, flickered through Dev's mind with bewildering rapidity. The comel, he was certain now, was affecting his thoughts, affecting them in ways he'd not experienced before, or, at least, it was affecting him in ways he'd never before noticed. The voice had mentioned that it had been longer for the DalRiss than for Dev since he'd been here, a simple statement of fact for beings who experienced life—metabolic rates, chemical reactions, thoughts—faster than was normal for living systems evolved beneath a cooler, less energetic sun. It was as if the pace of his thinking had increased, almost as though he were thinking now at the same speed and level as the DalRiss.
But that was impossible, wasn't it?
"Do you know why we came back?" Dev asked.
"Katya Alessandro told us something about your mission," the DalRiss voice replied. "You had evidence of fighting between us and the humans, the . . ." Again, Dev felt the touch of the comel searching his cephlink RAM. "The Empire," it concluded. "You hoped to gain our help in your war and felt that help might be forthcoming if we were at war with the Empire of Dai Nihon as well."
"A logical reasoning sequence," another DalRiss voice said. "In fact, however, we are not at war with them . . . if we understand what you mean by the concept 'war.' We never were."
"You fought a war with the Naga, both here, and on GhegnuRish."
"That was 'war'? We knew it as part of the Dance of Life. You might call it 'survival.' "
"The . . . the buildings of the city that used to be over there," Katya said, pointing back toward the empty field to the east of Dojinko. "They accidentally destroyed part of the Imperial base. That was it, wasn't it? An accident? They didn't even see that the base was standing in their way."
"You humans have the habit of shrouding yourselves in materials invisible to our ri-sense. We knew about the things you call buildings, of course. Great, hollow, immobile caves composed of various, artificial ri-empty substances. We could sense them as, as hollows within the Yashra-ri and avoid them."
Ri was what the DalRiss called life, though the word had so many additional connotations for the Alyans that it was rarely fully translated by the comels. The Yashra-ri might have translated as "the Ocean of Life" and referred to the three-dimensional sea of living emanations in which the DalRiss lived and moved. "Empty" things were dead or artificial objects—like man-made buildings, warstriders, or a person in a sealed E-suit.
"We sense your buildings that way," the first DalRiss added, "as we sense you humans when you . . . wear? Yes, wear those garments you call E-suits for protection from our atmosphere. But there was something around your base invisible to us, something charged with electricity. We broke through that barrier by accident and with considerable hurt to several of our own. We were then fired upon . . . without provocation, so far as we could tell."
"Still, that is no reason for us to involve ourselves in your war," a third DalRiss said. "The movement of that city had nothing to do with you or with the Imperials."
"We recognize now the need to employ our Perceivers when dealing with humans," the second voice said. Each voice was distinctive, but Dev was finding it difficult to determine which particular DalRiss was speaking at any given time. The sounds his comel was translating were generated deep within those crescent-shaped heads, and there was no external change in posture or gesture or in the arrangement of those leather folds to suggest which one was making them.
"A Perceiver was present when Katya Alessandro came to us three days ago. By shedding those ri-opaque garments, however, it allowed our Watchers, those left to watch the human settlement, to see it as more than emptiness within the Yashra-ri. We recognize the physical discomfort that act must have caused. It is why we are here, knowing that you humans wish to participate in our version of the Dance."
"These Perceivers," Brenda put in suddenly. "Are they here now?"
In answer, one of the DalRiss gestured with several of its smaller tentacles, slender threads that quivered and flickered with such energy that it took Dev a moment to realize that the being was gesturing, pointing to one of the "parasites" on its body.
There were several different species of smaller life-forms living on the larger, Dev realized now, and possibly some of them were combs or baby DalRiss. The particular creature the Riss was pointing to, however, was as wide as Dev's hand and half again longer. Superficially, it resembled an octopus, gray-green mottled skin glistening with some mucuslike secretion, but with five short tentacles instead of eight long ones. Nearly the whole of the upper surface of that body was taken up by a single, external organ very much like a fist-sized eye, one made of some glassy, yellow-translucent stuff and covered over by a clear membrane.
Within the translucence, varying numbers of inky holes opened, dr
ifted, then closed over again, seemingly at random, though there were never fewer than two nor more than six. These, Dev realized, were the multiple pupils of a single eye, their mobility and separation providing excellent depth perception, their numbers permitting greater light-gathering power in low-light conditions. It joined the group, three pupils focusing on Dev as it braced itself on three splayed tentacles. One of the DalRiss stood behind it, a single black tentacle snaking down from atop the Dal-symbiont's back and attaching itself to the creature's head, somewhere behind the eye.
"This is one of our Perceivers," the voice told the humans. "We first designed them when we realized there were radiations in the natural world that we could not sense directly, but which could potentially carry a great deal of information about the world around us."
"Is it . . . intelligent?" Its strange gaze certainly felt intelligent to Dev.
"Is it self-aware?" Katya added.
"Of course. It must be, to process information which we, the Riss, are not designed to sense. It is what you would call symbiosis, where they feed upon the Riss as the Riss feeds upon them."
"Feeds?" The word held a queasy fascination for Dev. Did the parasite-descended DalRiss see their relationships with all of their created creatures in terms of masters and . . . food?
There was a moment's hesitation, as though the being were reconsidering its words. "A holdover from our past," it said, finally. "You might say instead, 'as the Riss links to them.' "
"Ah."
Still he felt an unpleasant stirring. Man had only recently reached a crossroads of biological development that the Riss had passed millennia before by genegineering artificial intelligence. For a long time, research in this area had been restrained by certain ethical concerns, by the question of whether it was morally right to create a sentient and reasoning being for some particular purpose—as research animal or slave or even as objet d'art.
Eventually, though, the power to do a thing had found the will to do it, despite ethical considerations, and the genies had been the result. Mingling various animal and even artificial genes with the human genome had resulted in a number of species, subspecies, and types, from miners and heavy laborers to the startlingly beautiful ningyo, the delicate but fully human-looking sex toys that were a mark of distinction among Earth's elite. There were even rumors of sentient beings created as art, living sculptures unable to move, unable even to die, designed only to experience sensations programmed by their designers and to be self-aware. That, for Dev, represented perhaps the fullest possible horror of a technology used without ethical constraint.
Evidently, the DalRiss had passed that point in their technological evolution long ago, for now they incorporated intelligence into many of their biological tools with a casual nonchalance that Dev found chilling. He'd heard, for instance, that the comels were intelligent but not self-aware, a concept he'd found hard to imagine at first until he'd remembered certain human computer systems were designed within the same limitations, and probably for the same reasons.
Other Riss inventions, though, seemed to incorporate both intelligence and self-awareness. The creatures they called "Achievers," for instance, played a role in the DalRiss version of a faster-than-light drive. If what he'd heard was true, they died after completing the task for which they'd been engineered . . . "became empty," as their Riss masters put it. Presumably, the Achievers had also been designed to be content with their deliberately abbreviated lives; they wouldn't feel cheated or mistreated if they'd been made to anticipate the emptiness that ended their existence as the culmination of their lives. "I got us where we were going; now I can die content." Dev had navigated plenty of starships in his day, and the thought gave him a shudder of sympathy.
"The Perceivers opened the sky to the Great Dance," one of the DalRiss was saying. "Without them, the next step in the Dance would be the emptiness that will follow. Instead, we can become Sky Dancers."
"Sky Dancers?" Brenda repeated. She turned to Ozaki, who shrugged and shook his head.
"A few of us take the Great Dance to the stars," the radio voice explained. "Many have already left for our ancestral home. Others will be leaving soon, before emptiness claims our suns."
Several of the humans gasped surprise. "What?" Vic Hagan said sharply.
"Please." Brenda shook her head. "What do you mean, emptiness claims your suns?"
"Emptiness," Dev repeated. Somehow, he'd heard the connotations behind that single word and felt its full meaning. "They're leaving," he told the others. "They're moving their whole ecosystem off world, taking it to the stars."
"Of course," one of the DalRiss said, and its voice sounded almost cheerful. "We'd thought that you humans had remained here to help with this new part of the Dance. That was why the actions of those you call the Imperials seemed so bizarre, why we cut off all contact with them.
"But we still need your help. We've been wondering if that was why you came."
"But why are they leaving?" Ozaki wanted to know. "In three years of study, we'd thought this migration they were talking about had to do with their religion. Or with some obscure use of metaphor."
"It has nothing to do with religion," Dev said bluntly. Carefully, he glanced up toward the eastern sky, where Alya A was an intensely glaring point of light that caused his protective goggles to darken as his head turned that way. "Or with metaphor. They've simply decided to leave before the Alyan suns explode."
Chapter 26
Our G-class sun lies conveniently in the comfort of middle age, with mass enough to keep it on the Main Sequence for another five or six billion years at least. The orange Ks and red-dwarf Ms, less massive stars, are misers, hoarding their much smaller reserves against the cold of the Ultimate Night. Some may be burning unchanged ten or twenty billion years hence.
As for those stars more massive than Sol, the Fs and the still hotter and more spendthrift As, they are wastrels consuming their hydrogen capital at a rate that will leave them bankrupt in a fraction of the time left to Sol. For an A-5, for example, a measly billion years might be extreme old age.
—The Stars: A Speculative Odyssey
Dr. Sergei Ulyanov
C.E. 2025
"We do not expect it to happen anytime soon," one of the DalRiss told them, "even by your standards. But by the standards of the Great Dance, it is clear that our next step must be to the sky."
"Our understanding of the physics behind the stellar fusion process is still primitive compared to yours," another said. "We were not even aware of the danger until after our first contacts with humans."
The Alyan suns, younger by far than cooler stars like Sol, must have already reached the point where helium ash was concentrating in their cores. Soon—at least in cosmic terms—that accumulation of helium would force them off the main sequence. Briefly, they would burn hotter but grow so much larger that their surface temperature would drop, and for some millions of years they would shine as red giants before they began their final and inevitable collapse into white dwarfs.
By that time, of course, their respective planetary systems would have been absorbed or charred lifeless. Dev wondered how a race so life-centered as the DalRiss perceived such an ultimate and absolute extinction.
"The DalRiss were most interested in our understandings of physics and cosmology," Ozaki said. "We never stopped to consider that it had an, ah, a practical application for them."
"Evidently it did," Brenda said. "How long do they have?"
Numbers flickered through Dev's awareness, drawn from ephemeral data on the Alyan suns. "There's really no way to come up with an exact figure," he told the others. "Not unless they have more precise data on their stars' neutrino fluxes. It could happen any moment. On the other end of the scale, I'd say that fifty million years is a reasonable upper limit."
"Fifty million years is a long time," Hagan said, "at least for a civilization. And didn't you say these guys think and live faster than we do? Hell, for these guys, fifty million years
is forever!"
Katya laughed. "I don't know. Hey, we're facing the heat death of the universe in just a hundred billion years or so. We'd better get busy now and figure out where we're going to go when that happens!"
"Cute, Katya," Dev said. "But remember that the DalRiss think in terms of the transfiguration of entire species." He hesitated, choosing his words. It was as though he could see DalRiss reasoning, plans tracing particular sets of genes and chromosomes across countless generations. The DalRiss did not have a technically based nanotechnology as the humans did; all of their research and manufacturing on any ultrasmall scale had to be carried out by the original nanotech—the biochemistry of cells and enzymes and living systems. With his newly found depth and speed of insight, Dev could see the monumental patience the Alyans needed to carry out even a simple nanotech-scale experiment using tools designed and bred from carefully controlled mutations, which themselves were the products of long, long lines of genetic experimentation, and he felt a surging rush of admiration, even wonder. Kuso! Why couldn't Katya and the others see the miracle of it?
"I suspect," he said slowly, "that the DalRiss have research programs extending tens of thousands of years into the future. They may have long-range plans, plans encompassing the creation of new species or the alterations of whole worlds, plans that won't see fruition for millions of years. These people take the long view. To suddenly be told that their suns could grow hot enough to cook them all at any time between tomorrow and a couple of geological ages from now and interrupt everything they've been working on would place a pretty rough strain on any long-range ideas they might have."
The other humans were staring at him. Presumably, the DalRiss were as well, though it was impossible to know for sure where their attentions were directed at any given moment. He spread his hands, pleading. "Good God, people, don't you understand? Don't you see? Over the past few million years or so, the Riss have taken over every aspect of their ecosystem, every detail. How many native species are there on New America, Katya? How many on Earth? Not just humans or horses or dogs, but insects, fish, grass, nematodes, plankton, amoeba, bacteria. Hell, even viruses, if for no better reason than that I suspect these people use tailored viruses to transmit genetic information when they're tinkering up a new species. If you assume that all life in a given biome is interdependent with all the rest, if you change even one species, you ultimately change them all. The one thing they can't control, though, is arguably the most important . . . the power plant that keeps the whole system running. If they think in terms of control of their environment, the fact that they can't control their own sun would be intolerable!"
