Netlink

by William H. Keith

  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 world-view 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 DalRiss; 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.

  Sometimes Daren wondered if half of the reason behind his drive to meet new species wasn’t the knowledge—the hope, really—that the problems and hatreds separating humans might be forgotten in the face of something, someone really different. He couldn’t think of anything else that stood a chance in hell of making the human race unite.

  “Well?” Taki said at last, looking up at him from within the circle of his arms. “We are scheduled to watch the Communes this afternoon.”

  “Um. Correlations of observed Commune behavior with physical expressions of Nakamura’s Number,” he said, reciting with distaste the title of their current research project. “Wonderful.”

  “Come on! You’re not demonstrating the proper enthusiasm requisite for an up-and-coming xenosophontologist!”

  “I don’t know, Taki,” he said, letting his hand rove across her body. “I’m more interested in another kind of research right now. And so far as physical expressions go—”

  She squealed and playfully batted his hand away. “You know, Daren, if I didn’t know you better, I’d think you just might have had some ulterior motives when you suggested we share this sim.”

  “Who? Me?”

&nbs
p; “You. Never mind giving me the mock innocent look and the big gray eyes. Come on. Let’s try those rocks up the beach.”

  They found a sheltered niche walled by house-sized boulders, floored by soft sand. Their hands, moving with urgent, yearning haste, found the touch seals on one another’s coveralls, and in another few moments they both were naked, exploring one another eagerly with hands and mouths. Their clothing spread out beneath them would keep the sand from irritating the more sensitive parts of their bodies, though Daren wasn’t certain if the sim loaded that much reality. Most ViRsex subroutines boasted in being indistinguishable from the real thing, however, and he didn’t want to take any chances.

  There was reality enough for him in Taki’s image, though, as he lowered her to the ground and eased himself down on top of her.

  And the hell with what his family would think.…

  Chapter 6

  Contagious magic is based upon the assumption that substances which once were joined together possess a continuing linkage; thus an act carried out upon a smaller unit will affect the larger unit even though they are physically separated.

  —The Golden Bough

  SIR JAMES FRAZIER

  C.E. 1923

  The floater car hummed quietly, slipping through one impeller field after another as it flashed through the late evening sky toward Cascadia. Derived from the QEC nanofields first employed by the military, impeller fields were projected by stabilized clouds of nano spaced along the traffic routes to and from the various cities of New America.

  The vehicle was controlled by its AI, interacting with the far larger artificial intelligence at the traffic control complex in Jefferson. Kara could have linked in with the machine if she’d wanted to exercise a measure of control over the flight—she nearly always did—but this time she had a passenger with her, and she was enjoying the conversation.