The Mandel Files, Volume 2: The Nano Flower

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘There’s some power sources up ahead,’ Carlos’s voice said in Greg’s earpiece. ‘Electromagnetic emissions, magnetic patterns. The works.’

  Greg nodded once, without turning round. His mind had felt it already, a slackening of psychic pressure. The eye of the hurricane.

  Red-raw tumours were bulging out from the tunnel walls, fist-size, as if the disseminator plant was suffering an outbreak of hives. Some of them had distended up through the blisters, puncturing the skin; waxy yellow fluid had dripped down the wall below them, pooling on the floor.

  The drone stopped, and extended a waldo arm. Metal flexi-grip fingers closed round one of the tumours, chrome-black ceramic nails cutting into the plant flesh. Severed from the wall, the tumour looked like a ripe apple.

  Greg nearly dropped it when the drone handed it to him. It was impossibly heavy. He peeled the mushy flesh away to reveal a kernel of whitish metal.

  ‘Pure titanium,’ Royan said.

  Greg passed the nugget to Rick, who whistled.

  ‘Is it worth very much?’ Sinclair asked hopefully.

  ‘You’d need a lot more before you can buy a desert island full of geishas,’ Royan said. ‘But the system which produces it is priceless. Though not in monetary terms. The value comes from what it can provide.’

  ‘A plant, you call all this?’ Sinclair looked round the tunnel sceptically.

  ‘It was to start with.’ The drone turned sharply, heading up the tunnel again.

  Sinclair tucked the nugget into a pocket, and gave the tumours a long, measured assessment.

  They came into another hemispherical cave, with just the one tunnel entrance. The disseminator plant had grown scales of rough pale-brown bark around the walls, only the floor was clear of them. A thick tangle of hairy creepers was clinging to the bark, like an old grape vine which had been allowed to run wild. Some of the free-hanging loops were swaying slowly. But there was no air movement. They must have some kind of sap inside, Greg decided. Greenish light was coming from a circle of knobs overhead; they lacked symmetry, as if they had melted at some time, drooping under gravity. Very fine creepers had spread across them, making it look as though they were hanging inside string bags.

  A couple of hexagonal cargo pods lay in the middle of the floor, seals flipped open. One of them had a plant on top, growing out of an ordinary red clay pot. There was a central corm sprouting five tall flat leaves with tapering tips; their edges were serrated and ruffed, lined with small furry buds. The ones near the bottom had bloomed into long trumpet flowers, coloured a delicate purple.

  Greg and Julia exchanged a glance.

  ‘Where are you?’ Julia said.

  There was a drawn out splintering sound as part of the bark wall split open, revealing a tunnel.

  ‘Just you and Greg, Snowy.’

  ‘Hey,’ Rick protested. He ignored the filthy look Julia threw him. ‘You can’t keep me out of this, Royan. Not if the alien is here. I helped you with Kiley. Damn it, I want to meet the alien. You owe me that, at least.’

  ‘I’m not sure you can handle the disappointment, Rick,’ Royan said.

  ‘It’s not here?’ Rick asked, appalled.

  ‘Oh yeah, it’s here all right.’

  ‘Then I want in.’

  ‘OK, but I warned you.’

  Greg turned to the three crash team members. ‘Keep monitoring us. And if I shout, come fast.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Jim Sharman.

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ Royan said.

  ‘I taught you better,’ Greg said.

  ‘Yeah, sure, sorry.’

  Greg went first, letting his espersense flow ahead of him. Royan was there all right, his thought currents wound into a compact astral sphere. Greg perceived all the familiar themes, the deep injury psychosis, buoyant self-confidence, bright notes of arrogance and contempt. It was all shrouded by a grey aura of resignation, the scent of failure.

  Then there was the other, the alien. Not a mind as Greg knew them, nothing remotely human, there was no focus, just a hazy presence wrapped around Royan’s mind. But for all its ethereal quality, it possessed a definite identity. And it was brooding.

  The tunnel was circular, high enough for him to stand in, and this time it was easy to believe he was inside a living creature. It was made from convex ring segments stacked end to end, translucent amber, as smooth and hard as polished stone. Fluid was circulating on the other side, a clear gelatin with shoals of orange-pink blobs floating adrift, like dreaming jellyfish. Either the walls or the fluid beyond was giving out a soothing phosporescence, there were no shadows as he walked along.

  It opened into a simple rock chamber. The disseminatory plant had been at work here, but something had halted it in the middle of the conversion. Long strings of rubbery vegetation twined their way round the rock walls and ceiling, anchored by a root skin similar to lichen. White dendritic reefs flowered in the interstices. A tenuous silver-hued weave of gossamer fibres had crept up the lower half of the wall; underneath it, the sharper ridges and snags had been digested, smoothed down, while cavities had been filled with a cement-like paste. He could see the start of the curve that would end with a domed roof. There were dense knots of the vegetative strings along the top of the weave, baby light knobs were germinating inside, silk-swaddled imagoes, casting whorl shadows all around.

  The floor had already been levelled, coated in the usual grey-green mat of cells. Various hardware modules were scattered about, linked with power cables and fibre optics; there was a customized terminal, a couple of lightware memory globes, domestic giga-conductor cells, a hologram projector disk, some white cylinders that he didn’t understand, tall circuit wafer stacks with nearly every slot loaded. All of it top-range gear, sophisticated and expensive. The only things he was really certain about were the four silver bulbs fixed to the rock roof: gamma-pulse mines. The military used them for urban counter-insurgency; the energy release, converted to gamma rays, would sterilize an area two hundred metres in diameter. Completely wiped of life, including soil bacteria down to a depth of two metres. They were in the top ten of the UN’s proscribed weapons list; production and trading carried automatic life sentences.

  Four of them in a cave barely twenty metres across was a typical Royan overkill.

  But when he saw what was in front of him, Greg was swamped with the terrible conviction that this time they might just be necessary. The skin chill of his dissipater suit reached in to grip his belly.

  Royan and the alien were in the middle of the chamber. The alien was shaped like a single gigantic egg; elliptic, fat, four metres high, three wide. It had a pellucid shell which seemed to be vibrating; watery refraction patterns slithered around it, clashing and merging. The first layer, the white, was a clear band of cytoplasm about a metre thick. Inside that was the nucleus, ice-blue, contained within a rumpled ovoid membrane.

  Royan was encased within the nucleus. A solid-shadow adult foetus, naked, legs apart, arms by his sides, head tilted back. Greg peered at the silhouette; Royan had no feet or hands, his limbs tapering away to nothing. The nucleus matter about them was thicker, cloudy, preventing full resolution. There was something wrong with his face, the eyes and nostrils were too large, he had no hair left. Large sections of skin were missing, along with their subcutaneous layers. Greg could see several naked ribs, and most of the skull.

  ‘Jesus!’ Rick grunted in shock.

  A moan escaped from Julia’s lips, a sound of pure anguish and horror, forced up from deep inside her chest. Her hands came up impotently, and she took a couple of hurried steps towards the alien.

  ‘Do not attempt physical contact,’ a voice said from the terminal on the floor. It was perfectly clear, without any inflection, a neutral synthesis.

  Julia stopped dead. ‘What happened?’ she squealed. ‘Oh, darling, what …’

  ‘Confidence and carelessness,’ Royan said, his voice coming from the terminal. ‘Or to put it bluntly: hubris. Good word for my l
ife.’

  ‘Are you hurt?’ Julia asked.

  ‘Only my pride.’ The terminal chuckled.

  Julia swung round to face Greg. ‘Is that truly him talking?’

  Greg nodded silently. The mental activity matched, and the bitter spike of humour.

  ‘Let him out,’ Julia said.

  ‘You are unaware of the implication inherent in that statement,’ the bland voice said.

  ‘Royan?’ she pleaded.

  ‘The Hexaëmeron is correct,’ Royan said. ‘That’s why you were summoned.’

  Rick tilted his head on one side, frowning. ‘Hexaëmeron? That’s a human term, biblical, the six days it took God to make the Earth.’

  ‘I have no language of my own. Obviously I have to use human terms. Royan seemed to think this was appropriate.’

  ‘What are you?’ Rick asked, his voice raised.

  ‘My planet’s evolutionary terminus, and progenitor,’ said the Hexaëmeron.

  ‘And that’s the problem,’ said Royan.

  ‘Did you come on a starship?’ Rick asked.

  ‘No.’

  Rick let out a hiss of breath. ‘Then how did you get here?’ it was almost a shout.

  ‘By my mistake,’ said Royan. ‘Have you reviewed the personality programs I left for you, Snowy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you know my original edit for the disseminator plant was a symbiotic arrangement; terrestrial landcoral and the alien microbes working in tandem.’

  ‘You said it was a prototype, and that geneticists could splice together a single genetic structure once you had proved the concept.’

  ‘Yeah. The prototype started to work out pretty good. You saw what I’ve done with the fault zone. Then something happened.’

  ‘Consciousness initiation,’ said the Hexaëmeron.

  ‘Too bloody true,’ Royan said. ‘The alien microbes achieved a rudimentary kind of sentience. I said nothing like that gene sphere could exist naturally, and I was right. It was designed, for fuck’s sake, a very deliberate design. The core of the sphere doesn’t have anything to do with genetics, it’s a molecular circuit with a function similar to a neurone, but considerably more sophisticated. And there’s a threshold level; clump enough of the microbes together and they develop a processing capacity. For want of a better description, they start thinking for themselves. And of course, I grew them in their billions for the disseminator plant.’

  ‘Dear Lord,’ Julia gazed at the alien. ‘This is it, the sentient microbe cluster?’

  ‘No, unfortunately. The thought-processing organism is only stage one. That’s where the real trouble starts. These aliens have the ability to control their own genetic heritage, they can consciously switch individual genes on and off. Christ knows where that ability comes from. Whoever heard of instant evolution?’

  ‘I am protean by nature,’ said the Hexaëmeron. ‘Internal cellular modification to fulfil a specific function requirement is inherent, what I am.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Royan said. ‘Anyway, this was the chamber where the microbes went critical. After that, the Hexaëmeron started to grow entirely new types of cells for itself, and shifted its consciousness into them. That’s what you’re looking at now, a protean entity capable of fashioning itself to operate in any environment.

  ‘I thought the disseminator plant was mutating at first, some kind of transgenic process with the microbes infecting the landcoral; which actually was a pretty good guess. You get that in really complex bioware sometimes; chromosome deletion or translocation, the growth pattern is distorted out of recognition. That’s why I rigged up the gamma mines, as a last resort. Christ, alien cells with an exponential growth rate, who knows what it would have ended up as. A cancer the size of an arcology eating its way down Hyde Cavern. I could just see me trying to explain that away to you, Snowy. I was trying to track down the nature of the mutation so it could be isolated when the bugger went for me.’

  ‘You would have destroyed me,’ the Hexaëmeron said impassively.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Royan. ‘But not straight away. I want to learn, to understand. Barbarians destroy without reason. We might not be as far along the evolutionary scale as you, but I’d like to think we’re above that.’

  ‘What do you mean, it went for you?’ Greg asked.

  ‘Exactly what you see, Greg. Every protean cell this new consciousness had produced coagulated together like God’s own amoeba, and swallowed me whole. It was going to crush me into a pulp and digest me, use me as food for new protean cells.’

  Greg gave Julia a quick glance. She had turned pale, staring up at Royan’s shaded face. Waves of guilt and revulsion were punishing her mind. The idea was making him feel pretty queasy as well.

  ‘So how did you stop it?’ Rick asked.

  ‘Hey, you’re talking to Son, you know,’ Royan said with his old swagger. ‘I was one of the best fucking hotrods that ever plugged into the circuit back home. When the Hexaëmeron pulled its Jonah stunt, I glitched its command procedures. See, any sentient entity, however freaky, functions in the same fashion: observation, analysis, response. Intelligence is the processing of data, that means networks and routines. Which in turn means it can be disrupted with the right sort of disinformation. With ’ware it’s easy, viruses have been around as long as integrated circuits. Organic brains are a little trickier to break; high-frequency light can induce epilepsy, but that’s crude; psychics use eidolonics to corrupt memories and perception directly; the military have developed a whole range of disorientation techniques. It was just a question of finding something appropriate.

  ‘The Hexaëmeron was processing data in a homogeneous cellular array, halfway between a bioware processor and a neural network. I loaded in my glitch virus, and stopped the cells which were attacking me dead in their tracks. Then I substituted my own management routines and took control. Trouble was, I didn’t get all of the cells in time. The main Hexaëmeron consciousness saw what I was doing, and isolated all the cells I’d usurped, cut them straight out of its command procedure. So now I control the cells directly around me; I’ve organized them into a life-support mechanism, feeding me nutrients and oxygen, siphoning out piss and carbon dioxide. But the Hexaëmeron retains its integrity throughout the other cells, those are the ones surrounding mine. What we’ve got here is a very delicately balanced stand-off.’

  ‘Which you hope we can break,’ Greg said. He’d been studying the Hexaëmeron, it would be easy enough to kill with the rip guns; the trick would be extracting Royan alive. Maybe they could set the Tokarev lasers to longburn, char the outer layer of cells away. He wondered how the Hexaëmeron would react if they started doing that.

  ‘You have already broken our stasis,’ said the Hexaëmeron. ‘As we intended you to.’

  ‘Summoned,’ Julia murmured. ‘You said we were summoned.’

  ‘You and Clifford Jepson,’ said the Hexaëmeron. ‘That is correct. Our situation outline is a simple one: Royan can still trigger the gamma mines, destroying all life in this chamber, and I retain the capacity to physically ingest the cells under his authority. Neither of us is capable of dominating the other. Mutual suicide is all we can achieve by ourselves. Clearly, this cannot be allowed to continue.’

  ‘Clearly,’ Julia said.

  ‘We came to an arrangement,’ Royan said. ‘Each of us would call someone who would terminate the stand-off in our respective favour. I chose you, and used Charlotte Fielder to deliver my warning message.’

  ‘How did you find her?’ Greg asked.

  ‘I’m still plugged in to New London’s datanet,’ Royan said. ‘So I knew who was up here, and of course she’s listed in Event Horizon’s security files as one of Baronski’s girls. Simple cross-referencing gave me her name.’

  ‘If you’re plugged into the asteroid’s datanet, then why didn’t you just phone us, for Christ’s sake?’ Greg demanded.

  ‘I will not permit that,’ the Hexaëmeron said. ‘I will not allow my existence
to be compromised prior to negotiations. Humans have a dangerously xenophobic nature; your leadership would find it difficult to resist public pressure concerning me. If Royan had tried to open a direct communication link with his allies, then I would have been forced to initiate my consumption routine.’

  ‘And if that happened, I’d have no choice but to use the gamma mines,’ said Royan. ‘What we needed was a throw of the dice, a method of breaking the stand-off which gave us an equal chance of coming out trumps. Logically, such a stand-off had to be interrupted by an external factor. So we gave each other one opportunity to call for help. A sharp game, but the only one in town. I believed in you, Snowy, I knew you’d come hunting as soon as you received the flower. The Hexaëmeron thought Clifford Jepson would have the edge – which makes it quite a judge of human character; Victor’s file on Clifford isn’t very complimentary, a real low-life. Talbot Lombard was given the atomic structuring data, and promised more tonight. If Jepson’s people had arrived before you, the Hexaëmeron would have made a deal with them.’

  ‘But you said atomic structuring technology doesn’t exist,’ Greg said.

  ‘No, it doesn’t, not in hardware form. The equations make sense, but they’re just a thought experiment, problematical: what could be done if a strong nuclear force generator did exist. It was a lure, the mythical dragon’s hoard. Designed to be irresistible to the right sort of mind. Clifford Jepson would do anything to get the generator data, and that includes setting the Hexaëmeron free. It was love against greed. The two human fundamentals. I trusted to love, Snowy.’

  ‘Why not simply let it go?’ Rick asked. ‘Are you so xenophobic?’

  ‘The Hexaëmeron should have called for you, Rick,’ Royan said. ‘Trusting and naive. There’s nothing people can’t solve by sitting round a table and talking rationally. Right, Rick? I can’t let it go. There’s the third stage to consider.’

  ‘The flower,’ Greg said automatically.

  ‘That’s right,’ Royan said. ‘The Hexaëmeron can edit its own genes, decide which toroid sequences to activate. Do you understand now, Rick? Why I call it the Hexaëmeron? The reason the alien gene sphere is so large in comparison to terrestrial DNA is because the shells contain the genetic codes for over six thousand different species – plants, insects, animals, sentient creatures. Survivors of life’s endgame. The Hexaëmeron is an intermediate stage, an artificial midwife. Left alone, it can engender an entire planet’s ecology. That’s its sole purpose; what it was designed for. Where would you put it, Rick? Where would you let it loose to breed? Earth? Cambridge maybe? Mars? Put it on Mars, and what happens in a thousand years’ time after the planet’s been bioformed? When the aliens have run out of expansion space? And they will, Rick. Their metabolism is orders of magnitude above ours, efficient, strong, potent. We wouldn’t stand a chance, Rick.’