Netlink
Page 8
Their mental conversation slipped into the military aspects of the discovery. Communications were one of the key factors in any combat situation. Clearly, with I2C the Imperials would possess an overwhelming advantage if they faced the Confederation in any military showdown.
“Really!”
People linked directly with each other were not entirely cut off from the outside world; one of the reasons for using comm modules in long-distance linkages was to cut off external distractions in order to help build the virtual reality world within the participants’ brains. In full linkage, of course, all external stimuli could be filtered out by the AI managing the session. In a simple one-to-one like this, however, a loud voice could still work its way into her perception, grating and annoying. Kara opened her eyes, blinking.
“Oh… really!” a woman standing with the group a few meters away exclaimed again, louder this time, loud enough that the murmur of conversation in the room momentarily faded away, and carrying a distinct edge of shock and unhappiness.
Arra Thornton was a substantial woman, the wife of a general on Vic’s planning staff. She was wearing a diaphanous gown and a tasteful, golden halo holographically projected above her head. She was staring at the far side of the atrium with something akin to horror on her face.
“Arra?” Katya called sweetly. “Whatever is the matter?”
“Oh, Senator!” the woman said, turning. “I didn’t see you there!”
“You sounded upset, dear.”
“Oh, dear, I was just wondering who had invited her.”
Kara looked toward the atrium. A woman was there, a Japanese woman, wearing a conservative gray sheath. Daren was at her side.
“That is my son and his guest, Ms. Thornton,” Katya said, her voice a trifle chillier than liquid nitrogen. “Is there a problem?”
“Oh!” The woman’s eyes bulged and the corners of her mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. “Oh, my, well, I mean, of course not! You can invite whatever you want to your party, dear, of course.…”
“I do, Ms. Thornton.” After all, I invited you.
The big woman turned away hastily and began talking with the people near her in hushed, flustered tones.
Katya grinned at Kara. “You know, that was fun! I’ve always wanted to do something like that.”
“I agree with her,” Kara said. “How the hell could Daren bring—”
“Kara!” Katya’s tone was sharp. “I take people one at a time, not as monolithic wholes.”
She stood as her son approached them.
“Mother!” Daren said. “Sis! I didn’t think you’d mind if I brought a guest. I’ve told you about my colleague from the University? Dr. Taki Oe.”
“Dr. Oe,” Katya said formally, bowing. “Konichiwa.”
“Konichiwa, Senator Alessandro,” the woman replied, returning the bow. “Thank you so much for having me.”
“Dr. Oe,” Kara said, frowning, “I wonder if it was a good idea, your coming here tonight. There’s a certain amount of tension—”
“Between the Japanese and the New Americans, lately. Yes, Lieutenant, I am very much aware.” She looked at Katya. “And I assure you, Senator, that I am New American. Whatever shape my eyes might be.”
Katya sighed. “You’re welcome in this house. You should be aware, though, that some of my other guests may not draw the same distinction between nationality and phenotype.” She looked pointedly at Kara. “But I will have my guests treated with hospitality.”
Kara heard the anger just beneath her mother’s men.
“We won’t be staying long, in any case,” Daren said, a bit hastily. “Mostly just wanted to drop by and link in. Nice party.”
Kara was furious. Damn Daren, anyway! He could get so wrapped up in himself sometimes, completely oblivious to everyone and everything outside his immediate circle of awareness. Here she was getting psyched to go out and kick Nihonjin ass, and her brother had the nerve to bring one to the party! Insane! She scanned the room until she caught sight of Ran walking toward her with two drinks in his hands.
“Here’s your icecaf, Mums. Ran and I have to go now,” she told her mother. “It was nice to see you.” She walked away without another word.
* * *
Katya watched her go with a sinking feeling inside.
“I’m sorry,” Taki said. “Daren? Maybe we should go—”
“Nonsense,” Katya said, addressing her son and his guest. “Stay as long as you like. You can at least have something to eat before you go.”
“That’s an idea,” Daren said. “We haven’t had much to eat today. I’ll get something for us from that ’vot over there.”
As her son walked away, Katya looked at Oe, unsure what to say. “So, Dr. Oe. Have you known my son long?”
“We’ve been working together on several projects for about a year and a half now, Senator. He is very good at research.”
“I know.” He was good, if a bit single-minded in his pursuit of his own interests and projects, sometimes.
Katya studied Taki Oe as they chatted, measuring her. Daren had introduced the woman as his colleague, but Katya was both a mother and a human being with an unusually fine-tuned set of perceptions. She could look at Daren and the Oe woman, look at the way they stood, the way their eyes made contact with one another, and in that moment she knew, that these two were more than friends, more even than partners in casual sex.
“Mother,” Daren said brightly as he returned with two plates of food. “I was hoping to get some time with you tonight. I, I mean, we need to talk to you about the survey project.”
Katya shook her head. “This is a bad time, Daren.”
“I’m beginning to think there is no good time.”
“I don’t mean now, the party. I mean it’s a bad time for the Confederation. I don’t think you have a prayer of getting the appropriations you’d need. Or the ships.”
“Yeah, but if you could just push a little for us.…”
“Damn it, Daren! Do you think my political career exists so that you can run surveys? Look for aliens? It doesn’t work that way!”
He looked stricken. “If you just knew how important this was—”
“I’ve heard the arguments, Daren. Believe me. I even believe most of them. But there are political and economic realities, military realities, too, that won’t simply vanish because we want them to. I’m flattered that you think I possess so much power, but I don’t, and I’m sick of hearing your whining!”
She was angry with herself for losing her temper, but the anger was tempered by the realization that she was already upset by the possibility of losing Kara.
Oh, Dev! she thought, a little wildly. Where are you now, and why didn’t you stay here with me, with us? I need you!
It was all she could do to keep her men in place.
Chapter 7
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.…
—Fire and Ice
ROBERT FROST
C.E. 1923
Frost had it right, he thought. Some chance crossing of memories had led him to download the ancient poem during the flight toward Nova Aquila’s orphaned, inner world. Now, standing on the ice plain beneath a black and star-strewn sky, »DEVCAMERON« recited the lines to himself once more.
Some say the world will end in fire…
The planet was as dead as he had expected. As his walker stepped off the grounded DalRiss ship, his upper body sensors took in a dim panorama of ice and broken, blackened rock. The two suns were only just visible, a close-set pair of bright but minute pinpoints close to the zenith. With a thousandth of the luminosity of Earth’s sun, they were by far the brightest of the sky’s stars, twin beacons casting eerie shimmers of light across the rolling plain of ice, with a radiance carrying no warmth at all. Though it was nearly local noon, the landscape was so poorly lit, only by the stars, that even with enhanced vision »DEVCAMERON« found it difficult to penetrate the shadowy landscape.
He remembered a popular expression from his human life: iceworld. It meant… be calm. Be cold. Don’t let it bother you. Standing here on an icy plain, impressed by the preternatural stillness of the place, he knew more than ever what that expression meant.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great…
This world had perished twice, first in fire as its twin suns exploded nearly two thousand years ago, then in ice as those stars dwindled away to hot but tiny fractions of their former light and warmth. The expanding shell of gas from the nova had probably widened the planet’s orbit, but more, white dwarfs simply didn’t have the surface area to provide the heat necessary for life.
He began moving away from the grounded DalRiss ship. The rest of the fleet remained in orbit over the planet or near the Device, watching for further appearances of the mysterious spacefarers who’d built—or who at least presumed to use—the Device for their own ends.
It always felt strange having a body, familiar but with odd and sometimes contradictory sensations. »DEVCAMERON« took a cautious step on the ice and then another, still working to get the proper feel and balance for his radially symmetrical body. The ice was not as slippery as it looked; it was far too cold and was as hard as granite. Too, »DEVCAMERON’S« new feet, all six of them, possessed stubby, rubbery projections that gripped even the smoothest surface and gave him excellent traction. He was aware of the cold through various sensors embedded in his skin, but his brain registered the temperature as chilly only and not as a cold bitter enough to liquefy oxygen.
The walker was a biological construct specially grown for him by the DalRiss’s master biologists, but it was not even remotely human. It resembled one of the DalRiss themselves, a starfish shape two meters across, supported well off the ground by six blunt, spiny arms, and with a crescent-shaped sensory package and a forest of delicate manipulatory tendrils perched on top.
»DEVCAMERON’S« original human brain and nervous system had evolved to handle only two legs, two arms, and two eyes; the DalRiss had written a special software package that let him handle six of everything, downloading it into his Naga-patterned brain.
The basic Dal form had been modified in several ways for his convenience, however. It possessed the visual sensors and nervous system of a Perceiver, giving »DEVCAMERON« sight, and it had been designed with a particularly thick and impermeable hide, one that would retain its metabolic warmth and internal pressure despite the frigid temperatures and hard vacuum of the world’s surface. In a sense, it was a living environmental suit, capable of surviving for days at temperatures below minus two hundred Celsius, with oxygen stored as hyperoxygenated fatty tissue padding his legs.
The ice gave way to black and crumbling rock. “Frost,” he said, transmitting on his inner radio circuit.
“The local conditions are considerably more severe than that,” a voice responded in his head.
He turned, studying the speaker, the movement a trifle clumsy. The speaker also wore a temporary body, one grown specially to withstand cold and vacuum. A cold-adapted Perceiver had been grafted in with the sensor cluster; its eyes regarded him emotionlessly.
“Actually, I thought that would be a decent name for the planet,” »DEVCAMERON« replied.
“The word ‘frost’ describes a meteorological condition in which a thin layer of ice forms on cold surfaces exposed to a particular gas, usually water vapor or carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. There is no atmosphere here, save for the trace subliming from the surface ice, and—”
“Never mind,” he interrupted. “It was just a thought. Not important.”
“Thoughts give shape, content, and meaning to the universe,” the DalRiss said. “None are unimportant.”
»DEVCAMERON« didn’t want to discuss it further. He’d not thought he would miss his own kind in this form of existence. He had plenty of sims stored in his replicated memory that he could relive at need, but there were times…
The DalRiss were good traveling companions, all in all, but they took things so damned literally. They understood wonder, certainly, but they were baffled by such a simple thing as poetry. Or… »DEVCAMERON« thought ruefully, perhaps poetry was not such a simple concept after all. Sometimes he marveled that he still appreciated the art, even now, after losing his humanity.
But the DalRiss were so different, and in so many ways. The Frost misunderstanding was a case in point. They didn’t understand the human need to give names to places. Hell, they didn’t even have names for one another… or if they did, they were names based on their individual life energies, as untranslatable as an EEG tracing, or a fingerprint. Their name for him was sort of a mentally shouted impression of being, one filtered through his Naga’s brain—»DEVCAMERON«, a kind of instantly recognizable “Hey, you!”
Trying to explain to the DalRiss that he was referring to a name, Robert Frost, that he wanted to have a name for the world instead of the vague, chilly impression of lifelessness they were using, that Frost had been a poet speaking of human emotions, that emotions were…
Just the thought of it made him tired, and there was still a lot to do.
For »DEVCAMERON,« though, this world would remain “Frost,” a memorial to the twentieth-century poet who’d pronounced the world’s epitaph.
“There is nothing here alive,” the DalRiss voice reminded him after a time. Was it impatient? “This world is empty.”
He turned slowly, once again, facing the speaker. “Possibly. But I’m curious about whether anyone used to live here. It would… it would tell us about the beings who destroyed this world’s suns.”
“We are wondering about something, »DEVCAMERON«.”
“Yes?”
“Why is it that you turn your body when you wish to speak with a Riss who is physically present? Are you having difficulty with your Perceivers?”
“No.” »DEVCAMERON« chuckled to himself, deep within his thoughts. One of his problems in adjusting to these temporary bodies was the fact that, where real DalRiss rarely thought in terms of front or back, he retained a human preference for one direction which he still thought of as “forward.”
For some time now, »DEVCAMERON« had not been a corporeal entity; and wearing a body again, even a strange one in a strange and hostile environment, was a relief, as if it reminded him of an anchor he’d mislaid.
His original human brain had been destroyed with his body, of course, at Herakles, but its patterns, including all of its memories, its identity of self, its perceptions and knowledge, had been retained by small communications-trained Nagas occupying other living ships of the DalRiss fleet. When the ship holding his physical body had been incinerated, his mind—the set of software running on his wetware that constituted his thoughts, his memories, his sense of self—had been resident in those other ships, riding in a Naga copy of his brain. Aboard ship, his “body” was the ship itself, or any of the multiple ships of the fleet, wherever Nagas were resident; during the fleet’s rare planetfalls, one of the small Naga subsets that had patterned his brain flowed into a carefully designed niche inside his artificial and temporary skull. »DEVCAMERON« could not sense any real difference… save for the trouble he had navigating, or when he forgot and turned the radially symmetrical body without need.
There were other things as well, he was realizing. He missed intelligent human companionship. He missed conversations where he didn’t have to explain concepts like “poetry” or “names.” He missed specific people, individuals whose differences sparked and fired his own thoughts, generating new ideas that let him know that he was alive.
And, oh, God how he missed sex, despite the fact that he didn’t have a body. He was no longer aroused by hormones triggered by thoughts, of course… but the thoughts remained, and the habit patterns of desire remained closely linked wi
th them. Even a decent ViRsex simulation would have helped, but for that a sophisticated AI was needed, an AI with a better understanding of what it was to be human than these Nagas and DalRiss had.
Hell, even just the sensation of another human’s touch, fingertip feather-light on skin, or hearty clap on the shoulder, or hand squeezing arm, with no thought of sex in the contact at all…
He’d lost so much. He’d thought that, given time enough, he would forget.
Resigned, he focused his attention on the task at hand. He was looking for some sign of intelligence.
Normally, such a search would have been doomed to failure, if only because a planet was immense, the indicators of intelligence tiny and scattered and, in the case of Frost, at least, flooded first by fire, then by ice. The DalRiss, even with the help of their Perceivers, still had trouble recognizing nonliving organization or artifacts; it had to be alive for them to understand it, to really know it in the sense that humans knew and understood something by seeing it.
But he had scanned the surface as they’d approached, absorbing the configurations of black rock and white ice, then feeding the patterns through a set of programs loaded onto his borrowed Naga brain that tested those shapes for fractals. In nature, most forms were either random, or they unfolded in repeating iterations that followed the mathematical language of fractal patterns. Shapes that showed order without the iterations of fractals were, most likely, artificial.
And he’d seen such. Even without the fractal detection routine, he’d seen certain regular spacings of rock on ice that had reminded him of photos of cities taken from orbit. There was no proof in that observation alone, of course. Lots of natural phenomena could mimic the regularity or the geometry of artificial structures.
But it was highly suspicious, and the fractal routine had agreed, returning a probability of eighty-two percent that what he’d glimpsed was not a natural formation. The DalRiss ship had landed close to what he suspected was an enormous structure mostly submerged in ice. Accompanied by the lone DalRiss, he walked toward an upthrust black cliff a few tens of meters distant. Behind him—he really could see it without turning with his all-round visual organs—the DalRiss ship rested where its Achievers had materialized it on blue-white ice, a black starfish shape the size of a small city.