by David Brin
“Hey!” he croaked. “What d’you mean I can’t be a—”
Harry stopped suddenly, unable to move further or speak. He could only stare at the arm in front of him. His own arm … covered with sparse fur.
Glossy white fur.
His hair was the color of frost on a windowsill during winter mornings on Horst.
Harry’s chest pounded. Worse, a sharp pain stabbed his spine, just above the buttocks, like a numbed hand or foot coming back to life.
“Watch out,” the young female cried. “It’s gettin’ up!”
Fighting panic, Harry scrambled to his feet, clutching at his body, checking it for wounds, for missing parts. To his great relief, all the important bits seemed still attached. But his eyes roved wildly, out of control, seeking to find out what else was wrong.
White fur … white fur … I … I can live with that … assuming it’s the only thing that’s changed.…
One of the humans reentered his fear-limned field of vision. The male, wearing tattered rags, with several weeks’ stubble on his chin. Mixed up by anxiety and confusion, Harry could only snarl reflexively and back away.
“Hey there,” the youth said in soothing tones. “Take it easy, mister. You asked for water. I’ve got some, in this here canteen.”
There was an object in his hand. It looked like a dirty gourd or pumpkin, stoppered with a cylinder of wood.
What is this, Harry thought. Some sorta joke? Or more E Space mind garbage?
Still retreating across the deck of his battered scout station, he glimpsed through a window that the scenery outside had changed. The vast plain of fuzzy carpet was now yellow, instead of beige, and the mist had grown thicker, obscuring everything except a nearby mound of metal rubble, smoldering as it slowly dissolved into the surrounding greedy strands. He wanted to ask what had happened, how long he had been out, where these humans had come from, and how they had gotten inside his ship. Perhaps he owed them his life. But caught in a flux of near hysteria, it was all he could do right now to keep from screeching at them.
White fur … but that’s not all. Something else is wrong! Those mites did more to me than that, I know it!
Now both humans were in clear view. The female — not much more than a girl — had a nasty scar down one side of her face. She gripped a crowbar, brandishing it like a weapon. The boy held her back, though he too was clearly dismayed and confused by Harry’s appearance.
“We’re not gonna hurt you,” he said. “You saved us from the monsters. We came over and patched your hull for you. Look, my name is Dwer and this is Rety. We’re humans … Earthlings. Can you tell us who — and what — you are?”
Harry wanted to scream. To ask if they were blind! Shouldn’t patrons know their own clients? Even with white fur, a chimp was still—
He felt a sudden tickle behind him. Of course the bulkhead was back there and he could back up no farther. But the sensation came just an instant too soon, in too strange a fashion, as if the wall was brushing an extension of his spine.
My spine.
That was where — the last thing he recalled — a little predatory memoid had attacked and chewed its way into his flesh, filling his mind-body with waves of turmoil and disorientation.
“I mean … you look like you might be some sort of a relative,” the youth went on, babbling nervously. “And you spoke Anglic just now, so maybe …”
Harry wasn’t listening. Nervously, with a rising sense of dread, he groped around behind himself with his left hand, brushing the bulkhead, then moving downward.
Something started rising up to meet the hand. He sensed it clearly. Something that was part of himself.
A snakelike tendril, covered with hair, planted itself assuredly into his palm. It felt as natural as scratching his own ass, or pulling on his thumb.
Oh, he thought, with some relief. It’s just my damned tail.
His mouth went round.
Breath froze in his throat … then whistled out with a long, mournful sigh.
The two humans edged away nervously as the sigh underwent a metamorphosis, transmuting like some eager meme with a mind all its own, turning into coarse, hysterical laughter.
The effect, when he finally got around to examining his reflection calmly, wasn’t half as bad as he had feared. In fact, the white fur seemed rather — well — charismatic.
As for his new appendage, Harry was already resigned to it.
Surely it must have uses, he thought. Though I’m not looking forward to the tailoring bills.
Things could have been much worse, of course. The memoid parasite that invaded his body had been dying, moments after its parent exploded from brief contact with Material Reality. With a final gasp, it must have latched on to some random thought in Harry’s mind, using that to force a quick shift in self-image. In E Space, the way you pictured yourself could sometimes have dramatic effects on who and what you became.
One thing was certain — he could never go to Earth looking like this. To be called a “monkey” would be the last insufferable humiliation.
When I joined the Navigation Institute, I figured it meant I’d probably live the rest of my life apart from my kind. Now I belong to Wer’Q’quinn more than ever.
At his command, the station was now striding alongside the great, shining Avenue, limping at maximum safe speed, retracing its earlier path to pick up the instrument packages and finish this assignment before anything else went wrong.
One good thing about Wer’Q’quinn. The old squid will hardly notice any difference in my looks. All he cares about is getting the job done.
That left him with one more problem.
The young humans.
Apparently, Rety and Dwer had been the “organic cargo” carried by the hapless machine entity. Their little habitat was about to be attacked and torn open by a ravenous meme-raptor when Harry arrived. From their point of view, he was like the proverbial cavalry. A knight from some storybook, galloping to the rescue just in the nick of time.
They later returned the favor, after the final memoid fled the scene, bloated on stolen atoms. After talking the dying mech into using its last resources to build an airlock bridge, they boarded Harry’s station, saving him from asphyxiation while he sprawled on the deck, stunned and unconscious.
The mech then expired, contributing its mass as temporary fertilizer to this matter-parched desert.
“We never could figure out where we were, or why it took us here,” Dwer explained, while wolfing down a triple helping of Harry’s rations. “The machine never spoke, though it seemed to understand when I talked in GalTwo.”
Harry watched the boy, fascinated by Dwer’s mixture of the savage and gentleman. He never denied being a sooner — descended from criminal colonists who had abandoned technology over two centuries ago. Yet, he could read half a dozen Galactic languages, and clearly grasped some implications of his situation.
“When the mech took us aboard, near the red giant star, we thought we’d had it. The scrolls say machines that live in deep space can be dangerous, and sometimes enemies to our kind of life. But this one made a shelter for us, improved our air, and fixed the recycler. It even asked us where we wanted to go!”
“I thought you said it never spoke,” Harry pointed out.
Rety, the teenager with the scarred cheek, shook her head.
“One of its drones came aboard with a piece of metal that had words scratched on. I dunno why it used that way to talk, since we had a little tutor unit that could’ve spoken to it. But at least the robot seemed to understand when we answered.”
“And what did you say?”
Both humans replied at the same time.
Dwer: “I asked it to take us home.”
Rety: “I told it to bring us to the most important guys around!”
They looked at each other, a smoldering argument continuing in their eyes.
Harry pondered for a long moment, before finally nodding with understanding.
&nbs
p; “Those sound like incompatible commands. To you or me, it would call for making a choice between two options, or negotiating a compromise. But I doubt that’s what a machine would do. My best guess is that it tried to combine and optimize both imperatives at the same time. Of course its definition of terms might be quite different from what you had in mind at the time.”
The young humans looked confused, so he shook his head.
“All I can tell for sure is that you were definitely not heading back toward your sooner colony when I found your trail.”
Rety nodded with satisfaction. “Ha!”
“Nor were you aimed at Earth, or a base of the Great Institutes, or any of the mighty powers of the Five Galaxies.”
“Then where—”
“In fact, the mech was taking you — at lethal risk to itself — into dimensions and domains so obscure they are hardly named. It seemed to be following the cold trail of two—”
A warning chime interrupted Harry. The signal that another of Wer’Q’quinn’s little camera packages lay just ahead.
“Excuse me awhile, will you?” he asked the humans, who seemed to understand that he had a job to do. In fact, even Rety now treated him with respect that seemed a little exaggerated, coming from a member of Harry’s patron race.
He got busy, using the station’s manipulators to recover the final probe, then spraying it with a special solvent to make sure no memic microbes clung to the casing, before stowing it away. Nearby, the Avenue gleamed with starlight. The realm of material beings and reliable physical laws lay just a few meters away, but Harry had no intention of diving through. His chosen route home was more roundabout, but also probably much safer.
While finishing the task, he glanced back at Dwer and Rety, the two castaways he had saved … and who in turn had rescued him. They were fellow descendants of Earthclan, and humans were officially Uplift-masters to the neo-chimp race. But legally he owed them nothing. In fact, as an official of one of the Great Institutes, it was his duty to arrest any sooners he came across.
And yet, what good would that accomplish? He doubted they knew enough astrodynamics to be able to tell anyone where their hidden colony world lay, so nothing could be gained by interrogating them. From what they had said so far, their settlement was highly unusual, a peaceful blending of half a dozen species that were mostly at each other’s throats back in civilization. It might be newsworthy, in normal times. But right now, with all five galaxies in a state of uproar and navigation lanes falling apart, they seemed likely to fall between the cracks of bureaucracy, at Kazzkark Base.
Anyway, Harry was surprised to learn how pleasurable it was to hear voices speaking native wolfling dialects. Though a loner most of his life, he felt strangely buoyed to have humans around, who were very nearly his own kind.
The camera slipped into its casing with a satisfying clank. Checking his clipboard, Harry felt a glow of satisfaction. The last one. I know some other scouts were betting against my ever returning, let alone achieving success. I can’t wait to rub their noses — and beaks and snouts and other proboscides — in it!
With a heavy limp, his battered station turned away from the Avenue at last, heading toward a cluster of slender towers that he now knew to be legs of several huge, metaphorical chairs and a giant table. His best route home.
I wonder how long this zone will stay coalesced around my viewpoint seed. Will it melt back into chaos when I’m gone? Or is that a symptom of what Wer’Q’quinn keeps warning me against — an inflated notion of my own self-importance?
In fact, Harry knew he wasn’t the first material outsider to pass through this zone in recent times. Before he came, and before the hapless mech, two other spacecraft had passed through — one chasing another.
Could all of this — he looked around at the vast furniture and other chachkis of an emblematic parlor — have already taken shape before I arrived? I sure don’t consciously recall ever being in a room like it before, even as a child. Maybe one of those vessels that preceded me provided the seed image.
It bothered him that he still had no idea why the mech had brought Dwer and Rety here.
Combining two request-commands. Taking the humans “home,” and bringing them to “the most important guys around.”
He shook his head, unable to make sense of it.
One thing, though. I know the Skiano missionary is gonna plotz when he sees the three of us Earthlings — two actual living humans and a transformed chimp — striding along the boulevards of Kazzkark. It oughta make a sensation!
A table leg loomed just ahead, the one Harry hoped to ascend back toward his chosen portal, assuming it remained where gut instinct told him it must.… And if the station was still capable of climbing. And if …
Pilot mode popped into space nearby, a cursive P rotating in midair.
“Yes?” Harry nodded.
“I am afraid I must report movement, detected to the symbolic left of our present heading. Large memoid entities, approaching our position rapidly!”
Harry groaned. He did not want another encounter with the local order of life.
“Can we speed up any?”
“At some modest increased risk, yes. By twenty percent.”
“Then please do so.”
The station began moving faster … and the limp seemed to grow more jarring with each passing step. Harry glanced at Rety and Dwer, who as usual were bickering in a manner that reminded him of some married couples he had known — inseparable, and never in accord. He decided not to tell them quite yet. Let ’em think the danger’s over, for a while longer at least.
Stationing himself near a portside window, Harry peered through the murk.
We only need a few more minutes. Come on, you memoid bastards. Leave us alone just that long!
Harry’s back itched, and he started reaching around with a hand to scratch it … but stopped when the job was handled more conveniently by his new appendage. His tail, lithely curling up to rub and massage the very spot. At once, it felt both natural and surprising, each time it moved to his conscious or unconscious will.
He caught the two young humans staring at him. Dwer at least had the decency to blush.
Eat yer hearts out, Harry thought, and used the tail to smooth his pelt of sleek, ivory fur. Poor humans. Stuck with those bare skins … and bare butts.
Then he had no more time for whimsy.
Out there amid the haze, he spied movement. Several dark gray entities. Huge ones, far larger than the megapedes he had fought before. Through the mist, these looked sleek and rounded, nosing along the vast carpet like a herd of great elephants.
Then Harry realized. That was the wrong metaphor. As they drew nearer, he recognized their rapid, darting motions, their earlike projections and twitching noses.
Mice … goddamn giant mice! Ifni, that’s all I need.
He felt a shiver of dismay as he realized — they had spotted the station.
To the pilot mode, he gave an urgent, spoken command. “Increase speed! We’ve got to climb the leg before they reach us!”
Amber and red lights erupted across the control board as the jarring pace accelerated. A great woodlike pillar loomed before them, but Harry also sensed the memes scurrying faster in pursuit. Self-sustaining conceptual forms far more sophisticated and carnivorous than any he had seen. It was going to be tight. Very tight indeed.
God. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
PART FOUR. CANDIDATES OF TRANSCENDENCE
OUR UNIVERSE of linked starlanes — the Five Galaxies — consists of countless hierarchies. Some species are ancient, experienced in the ways of wisdom and power. Others have just begun trodding the paths of self-awareness. And there are innumerable levels in between.
THESE are not conditions in which nature would produce fairness. There would be no justice for the weak, unless some code moderated the raw impulses of pure might.
WITH this aim, we inherit from the Great Progenitors many traditions and r
egulations, formalizing the relationships between patrons and their clients, or between colonists and the nonsapient creatures that inhabit life-worlds. Sometimes these rules seem so complex and arbitrary that it taxes our patience. We lose sight of what it is all about. Recently, a savant of the Terran starfaring clan — (a dolphin) — suggested that the matter be viewed quite simply, in terms of respect for the food chain.
ANOTHER Earthling sage — (a human) — put it even more simply, expressing what he called the Meta Golden Rule.
“TREAT your inferiors as you would have your superiors treat you.”
From the Journal of Gillian Baskin
I WISH TOM COULD HAVE BEEN HERE. HE WOULD love this.
The mystery.
The terrifying splendor.
Standing alone in my dim office, I look out through a narrow pane at the shimmering expanse of raw ylem surrounding Streaker — the basic stuff of our continuum, the elementary ingredient from which all the varied layers of hyperspace condensed, underpinning what we call the “vacuum.”
The sight is spine-tingling. Indescribably beautiful. And yet my thoughts keep racing. They cannot settle down to appreciate the view.
My heart’s sole wish is that Tom were sharing it with me right now. I can almost feel his arm around my waist, and the warm breath of his voice, urging me to look past all the gritty details, the worries, the persisting dangers and heartaches that plague us.
“No one said it would be safe or easy, going into space. Or, for that matter, rising from primal muck to face the heavens. We may be clever apes, my love — rash wolflings to the end. Yet, something in us hears a call.
“We must rush forth to see.”
Of course, he would be right to say all that. I’ve been privileged to witness so many marvels. And yet, I answer his ghost voice the way a busy mother might chide a husband so wrapped up in philosophy that he neglects life’s messy chores.
Oh, Tom. Even when surrounded by a million wonders, someone has to worry about the details.
