by Ian Douglas
Daren was alone.
Frowning, he turned slowly on his boulder perch, scanning the coastline north and south. As a precaution, he set his Companion to recording the scene in full sensory detail. The world was slightly smaller than Earth, with eight tenths of Earth’s gravity. It was younger, too, and with a hotter core; vulcanism was extensive, plate tectonics active. The Airy Mountains to the west topped twelve thousand meters; there were mountains at the equator half again taller.
At the same time, the atmosphere, at 1.2 bars, was slightly denser than Earth’s and had a much higher carbon dioxide content, nearly two percent. The seas and air were warmer, the storms vaster, wetter, and longer-lived. Erosion proceeded at a faster rate, wearing down mountains and using them to thicken the coastal oceans with silt. There were eight rivers on Dante the length and breadth of Earth’s Nile, four Amazons, five Mississippis. The seas, shallower, smaller, and more landlocked than Earth’s, carried higher concentrations of sediments and dissolved chemicals washed down from the highlands.
North lay his destination, a clustered and interlocking series of gleaming white towers, rising stepwise from sea and beach, with curving sides and curiously twisted, angular faces, the tips of the highest fully a kilometer above the surf breaking at their feet. The cluster looked much like images of arcologies or large-scale hab units in one of the more modern cities on Earth.
And so they had looked to the planet’s first explorers. The men and women of the initial Japanese survey team to visit Dante over two centuries before had been convinced they’d discovered another sapient species. Eighteen years of unrelenting work to establish communication had ended in frustration and failure. Private groups and foundations had continued the work, which was proceeding even today. After more than two hundred years, however, it still wasn’t possible to know for sure whether the Communes, as they ultimately became known, were intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word. Like the ants and termites of Earth, the Communes were social creatures, living in vast lime-cement structures accreted out of seawater, rising like terraced buildings above the shores of Dante’s shallow, brackish seas.
They appeared to be a littoral species, limited by their adaptation to their environment to the planet’s coastal regions. Extensively researched by terrestrial xenozoologists, they carried the scientific name Architectus communis, the social builders, though individuals came in so many different shapes and sizes that the scientists were still arguing over whether the Communes were one species with hundreds of extreme variants or hundreds of different species living in close communal symbiosis.
Each of those towers enclosed thousands of kilometers of hollow tubes, and intricate nonmechanical valves and pumps driven by differences in temperature between air and sea. Seawater drawn in at the base was circulated throughout the tower; calcium carbonate and other dissolved chemicals were precipitated out along the way and used as building materials where needed. The towers were elegantly cast, their faces angled to take best advantage of the moving sun, the walls stronger than conventional concrete.
And yet the creatures that had built them were small, few larger than Daren’s hand, most the size of his thumb, not counting the legs. They reminded most humans of insects—spindle-legged, spiny, and iridescently delicate—though most had but two body sections and they breathed with lungs. Warriors could be deadly; some were the length and breadth of a strong man’s arm. With dozens of clawed legs and powerful tripartite jaws armed with acid sacs, they appeared by the millions when the nest was threatened, and they could strip a human to the bone and then dissolve the bones in something less than ten seconds.
The question remained: were they intelligent? They cooperated and they built; so did terrestrial ants, though perhaps not on so grand a scale. They communicated with one another, if not with human zoologists, using sophisticated pheromones and scents; so did Earth’s social insects. They controlled their environment, adjusting the temperatures inside their towers with a precision measured in tenths of a degree; so did termites and, to a lesser extent, bees. At times they were capable of astonishing group collaborations, moving and acting like a single organism, extending immense pseudopodia across kilometers of open ground; the same could be said of Earth’s driver and army ants.
There were many who continued to insist that the Communes were an intelligent and self-aware species, that they were simply too different for humans to find common ground sufficient for communications. Most now held that their monumental engineering achievements were purely instinctive, honed and polished by the hand of Darwin across some twenty million years.
Daren had been studying the Communes for only four years now, as part of his ongoing postdoctoral research at the University of Jefferson, and he was trying to keep an open mind. It was impossible to watch Commune activities closely, however, and not get the clear if subjective impression that they acted with a conscious and self-aware volition.
There’d been that time a year ago, for instance, as he’d been moving through the swamp west of the main group of towers, picking his way carefully across a narrow ribbon of solid ground, when he’d encountered the leading tip of a questing Commune pseudopod. For several moments, he’d stood there, unmoving, watching the writhing mass of tiny shapes a few meters in front of him. Abruptly, then, the pseudopod had heaved itself erect, forming a pillar two meters tall composed entirely of the interlocking, finger-sized creatures. For moments more, the two, human and colony, had regarded one another, each using senses indescribable to the other. For Daren, it had been a transcending moment, an instant of certainty that he was confronting intelligence.
Then the pillar had dissolved, the pseudopod had retreated, and he’d been alone in the swamp once more, with no solid proof at all, nothing, in fact, but his personal and highly subjective impressions.
The AI running that simulation had later informed him that lone encounters with Commune ‘pods initiated such reactions some twelve percent of the time.
Someday, Daren told himself, he would have the money, the backing, and the status to organize an expedition of his own to Dante. He slid down off the rock; it felt hard and wet, and it scraped at his seat as he rode it, but then, these full ViRsimulations were designed to be as lifelike and as realistic as possible, right down to the whiff of sulfur in the breeze. All that was edited out were some of the more unpleasant consequences that would have accompanied standing on the real Dante—such as the fact that a two-percent CO2 level in the air would have killed him in short order had he actually been breathing it.
But damn it, sims added nothing to the total of human knowledge. Every detail was there because it had been programmed into the AI running the show. It was a splendid training device, but it lacked the possibilities of broader discovery. You couldn’t learn anything new.
Turning, he eyed the towers in the distance. There was so much to be learned yet, so many worlds to explore that couldn’t be explored from inside a goking simulation.
At its greatest extent, before the Confederation Rebellion, the Shichiju had embraced a ragged-boundaried sphere a hundred light years across, seventy-eight worlds in seventy-two star systems so far terraformed and colonized by Man, as well as several hundred outposts, mining colonies, research stations, military bases. In all those worlds, Humankind had encountered three species showing behavior that might be interpreted as intelligence. There were the Nagas, of course; everyone knew about them. The other two were more mysterious—the enigmatic Maias of Zeta Doradus, and the Communes, and it still wasn’t known for certain whether either of those was even self-aware. Beyond the Shichiju, one other intelligent species had been encountered, the undeniably intelligent and self-aware DalRiss, but they were in the process of leaving, abandoning their world in a great ongoing migration that humans still didn’t fully understand.
Man needed to see a wider cross-sampling of intelligent species . . . needed more friends, a broader outlook on the cosmos.
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
Daren started, then spun. “Taki! Where the gok have you been?”
The woman was tiny, her delicate frame turned small and masculine by the khaki bodysuit she wore. Dark eyes regarded Daren through a shuttered expression. “I have to be careful. You know that. It took more time to set up the shell than I expected.”
His heart beat a bit faster. “Were . . . were you able to pull it off it then?”
She smiled, the expression dazzling. “Of course. You don’t think I’d miss an opportunity like this! Of course, if I’d known you were going to bite my head off the moment I jacked in—”
“I’m sorry, Tak. I was just . . . worried.”
Her smile widened. “It is hard, meeting like this.”
Dr. Taki Oe was one of Daren’s colleagues at Jefferson University, a professor of exobiology. She was twenty-six standard, with short, glossy black hair, a pixie’s sense of humor, and an intelligence rating of at least eighty, maybe eighty-five, which gave her a healthy edge over Daren’s seventy-eight.
She was also Japanese, and on New America, at times, that could be a problem.
Daren wiped his hands on his coveralls, then glanced down, embarrassed by the unthinking gesture. His hands were, of course, quite clean. It was impossible to actually get dirty in a simulation, unless the AI had been programmed to simulate dirt as well as the other more mundane aspects of a virtual reality. He held out his arms. “I’m awfully glad to see you, Tak.”
“I’m happy to see you. I was in agony until I could get away.”
She melted into his arms. They stood there on the black sand beach for a long time, savoring one anothers’ touch.
ViRsims were often used for personal meetings like this, with the AI running the sim feeding the same environmental stimuli to both of their brains. Though their bodies were unconscious, jacked into separate ViRcom modules in the huge U of J comm center, their minds were here, sharing the same program. Taki’s delay in joining him had been caused by her need to create a programming shell for herself, a false identity that masked her presence here. So far as the monitor AI was concerned—or anyone else who might be interested in a record of who Daren was simming with—she was Ann Gallsworth, an assistant xenogeneticist with the university staff. The shell wouldn’t hold up under a close scrutiny, but there was no reason yet to think that they were under suspicion.
Daren detested the politics that made secrecy necessary. For himself, he would have contracted with Taki in an instant, broadcast their relationship on the planetary net, hell, made love to her on the front steps of the Sony Building . . . but for the unfortunate fact that his mother was a Confederation senator and his sister was a warjacker with a class Blue-one security rating. He didn’t care what people thought of him, but he was well aware of how much trouble he could cause for the rest of his family, trouble that would not be appreciated.
He drew his lips back from hers. “Damn, I wish we didn’t have to sneak around like this,” he told her.
She shook her head. “It won’t be forever, lover.”
“No? Seems like it, sometimes.”
“After we get our own survey, nobody’ll care what we do together!”
“Maybe.” He gnawed his lip. “Though the chances of that aren’t looking so good now.”
She drew back a little, her eyes dark, questioning. “You heard something? Your last proposal?”
He nodded. “Sanders downloaded a reply this morning. All deep space plans are on hold right now. “The possibility of imminent hostilities,’ ” he said. He snorted, disgusted. “Staticjack! The whole goking Confederation is going nullhead!”
“Iceworld, Daren,” Taki said. “Don’t burn out your feeds. If there’s a war, there’s a war, and there’s nothing we can do about it. When it’s over, we’ll have our survey.”
“I hope so, Taki. I hope so. I worry about you a lot, though.”
She grinned. “Don’t stress-test to destruct, round-eyes. I can take care of myself!”
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Western powers, obsessed with social and economic problems, had abandoned space . . . this despite the fact that the old United States had been first to reach Earth’s moon. The Japanese had never lost sight of their ultimate goal, however, and their domination of the Shichiju for the next six centuries was due almost entirely to the fact that they’d managed to secure the high ground of space, pioneering the technologies that had opened the stars to Man: nanotechnology, the quantum power tap, the cephlink, the K-T drive. As a result, the Terran Hegemony was little more than a puppet for Japan’s Imperium, and sizable Nihonjin populations lived on most of the worlds of the Shichiju, whether they had anything to do directly with the Imperium or not.
During the revolution, large numbers of Nihonjin had fled the rebellious worlds of the frontier, seeking refuge among the safe worlds of the Shichiju’s core. Those who stayed did so because they considered themselves New Americans—or Liberties, or Eriduans, or humans—first, and Japanese only by accident of birth and genome. Taki’s traditionalist parents had fled New America during the war, returning several years after the Imperium’s recognition of Confederation independence to work with Mitsubishi-Newamie Industries. They’d left once more two years ago, as tensions between the Imperium and the breakaways had continued to increase; Taki, however, had refused to go. She had her tenure at U of J to consider, for one thing . . . and for another, she, like Daren, was hoping for a chance at a slot on a survey expedition, and such chances were rare on Earth.
Galactic Survey, deep exploration, alien contact—that was where the future of mankind lay, so far as Daren was concerned. In the ten years since he’d begun high-level downloads, training to be a xenosophontologist, the need for new surveys into the dark beyond Man’s handful of worlds in known space had become something of a crusade for him. For Taki, too; that was what had drawn them together in the first place. Both were convinced that Man’s future, even his survival, depended on establishing communications with as wide a range of intelligent civilizations and cultures as possible.
Unfortunately, deep surveys were rather in short supply just now, and most xenologists on the Frontier had been reduced to training exercises and simulations, shuffling through old data. Known data.
When there was so much more to be learned through reality.
“I haven’t given up, Taki,” he said. “Sanders doesn’t have the last word.”
“He’s head of the field research department.”
“But Eileen Zhou is his boss.”
“How can R&D help us?”
“For one thing, Madam Zhou controls Sanders’s budget. For another, my mother knows her.”
“Ah. That again.”
“Yes. Again. She’s a senator. If she pushes for this, we’re going to get it.”
“Your mother hasn’t been willing to help so far.”
“No. But there’s got to be a way. If nothing else, I’ll wear her down through damned stubborn persistence.”
“You’ve been trying for three years.”
“Then I’ll try for three more! Damn it, Taki, something’s going to give!”
She smiled, and held up her hand. “Pericles, Daren.”
He took her hand, squeezed it, and drew her closer once more. “Pericles.”
It was a kind of code phrase they used between themselves, a promise that what they were doing was right.
Ancient Greece had been a patchwork of tiny city states, each evolving on its own, isolated from its neighbors by Greece’s rugged terrain. Once contact was established, however, and trade begun, the result was the flowering of the golden age of Pericles, the birth of democracy, and a worldview that postulated and discussed atoms, a round Earth, and life on other worlds. The crossing of cultures, of ideas, of worldviews and ways of thinking and looking at things led inexorably to synergy, with results that no one could guess at beforehand.
Communications with the Naga had first been made possible by contact with the Dal
Riss; soon after, exchanges with both species had resulted in an explosion of new understanding, new science, new technologies—especially in the fields of nanotechnology and biotechnics—leading to a genuine renaissance in the biological and linkage sciences. The Naga, with their literally inside-out worldview, had given Man a whole new way to look at the universe; the ability to link closely with pocket-sized Nagas was transforming the way Man looked at himself.
But Daren was seeking more than just new races, new ideas, or new ways of thinking, and he certainly had more in mind than new forms of Naga-expressions or more convenient ways of linking with machines. Misunderstanding and lack of communication had resulted in a fifty-year war with the Naga, a war fought with weapons that could devastate entire worlds. If each new contact brought with it the possibility of knowledge about still other races, an ever-widening web of contact and communication could be created. The fact that three species coexisted within a hundred light years or so of one another suggested that the galaxy must be positively teeming with life and Mind. Daren was convinced that it would be good to find out about those other near neighbors, and to do so before there were any more misunderstandings.
Wars could be avoided that way.
But the university was not willing to even consider organizing an expedition beyond known space. Nor were any of the usual science foundations and corporate R&D facilities. War with the Imperium was too real a possibility just now. It would be foolish to invest some tens of millions of yen in an expedition that might be canceled at any time because the ships were needed for conversion to military purposes.
And that was the worst of it. Compared to the DalRiss or the Naga or any other thinking, technic species that man might encounter out there, the differences between New American and Terran, between native Japanese and descendant of North American colonists were insignificant to the point of absurdity.
