Warstrider 06 - Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  “Do you see it?” he asked Taki. “At this level, we could spend centuries following all of the interconnections here, but those tubes must interpenetrate the entire cortex… maybe even the entire central nervous system. And it pos­sesses a complexity that’s way, way higher than the inter-connectivity of the host brain’s own neurons.”

  “I’m not sure you can say that,” Taki said. “The scales are different. Those tubes, and the cells moving around in­side them, are a lot larger than the neurons that make up the cortex mass.”

  “C’mon, Tak. Look at it! The parasite is using the neuron connections and adding more of its own. I think it may have increased the neural pathways beyond the Threshold.”

  He sensed Taki’s quick intake of breath. “Nakamura’s Number?”

  “If not here, inside one brain, then if we combine it with other Commune organisms…”

  “Wait! How is that possible?”

  He used the probe’s spotlight to stroke one of the tubules and the oddly shaped, glistening cells sliding along inside. “Taki, I think what we’re looking at here are slow thoughts.”

  Tetsu Nakamura was a twenty-fourth-century Nihonjin scientist who’d calculated the basic density and number of component parts required to elevate a complex order to a higher level of organization and function. The number, 1.048576 × 1011, was less a precise figure than a place marker in calculating thresholds in interconnective operating systems. Approximately Nakamura’s Number of molecules working together formed a cell, a living organism that op­erated independently of and on a plane far above that of any of its component molecules. Nakamura’s Number of cells… when they were the specialized neurons of the central nervous system, together formed a brain capable of memory, planning, self-awareness, and abstract thought, something far beyond the capabilities of a single nerve cell.

  The brain of a Dantean Commune worker contained roughly 3 × 109 neurons with the connections vastly in­creased, however, by the paralabyrinthulid infestation.…

  “We’ll have to calculate the increase in neural linkages,” Daren said. “My guess, though, is that individual Com­munes have their base intelligence levels raised significantly by the parasites.”

  “Dog level?” Taki asked.

  “Maybe. Maybe more. But, don’t you see? It’s a slow intelligence. Those moving cells in the tubes. Those replace electrochemical activity, synaptic relays, and all of that.”

  “How could two systems operating at such different speeds possibly interact?”

  “I think…” Daren felt the quickening pulse of his ex­citement. “I think that the paralabyrinthulids primarily serve to connect the individual Commune creatures. Workers, sol­diers, all of the other single Communes.”

  “Daren.…”

  “It’s got to be that way. Look at it, Tak! Those tubules are paralleling the whole neural network… and then some. And it’s also intimately associated with the worker’s circulatory system. That tells me these slime nets can communicate bio­chemically. Each of those moving, spindle-shaped cells could carry chemical tags that are being routed through the network the way electrochemical impulses are routed through the brain’s neural net.”

  “That’s a big leap, Daren.”

  “Not at all. I’ll even go one further. We’ve seen workers exchanging food directly mouth to mouth… and there are those reports of things like large slime molds found growing inside ruined commune colonies. I’ll bet that those large molds are a primary food source for the Communes, and that they’re part of our paralabyrinthulomycota. Maybe the Communes even cultivate the stuff, like harvester ants grow­ing fungus inside their colonies on Earth. They infect them­selves by ingesting it, and at the same time become carriers for biochemical signals being shared throughout the labyrin-thulomycota network!”

  “Wait. Are you saying that the slime net is the real in­telligence here?” She shook her head. “I don’t see—”

  “No, no, no. It takes both organisms working together. I think the slime net has learned how to parasitize the Com­munes in such a way that it fosters intelligent activity… activity that benefits the net directly and the Communes by association.”

  “You know, Daren, all along, xenologists have been looking for some sort of brain caste in the Communes,” Taki pointed out. He could still sense her reluctance. “Your idea sounds plausible, but it’s a big jump from cultivated eukaryote colonies to intelligence. What you’re suggesting, that a parasite has learned how to increase the host species’ intelligence… that sounds pretty wild.”

  “Parasites can do incredible things when it comes to re­ordering the lives of their hosts in order to suit their needs. There’s a parasitic worm on Earth I remember reading about…” Daren paused, turning inward for a moment as he ran a quick search through his RAM, then downloaded the key information. “Yeah. Leucochloridium paradoxum is its name. It spends much of its life inside a certain species of snail, but in order to reproduce, it has to get inside the gut of a bird. So what it does is migrate to the eyestalks of its snail host, which does two things. It makes the snail nearly blind—until all it can see is light—and it also turns the eyes themselves bright red. The snail crawls up the stalk of a plant, following the brightest light up to where it can see better… and at the very top of the plant those bright red eyes attract the attention of a hungry bird.”

  “Hell of a dirty trick to play on the snail.”

  “It does the job and lets the worm complete its life cy­cle.”

  “And you think this might be a similar manipulation of one species by another? One that instills intelligence in the host?”

  “I’m thinking in that direction.” He considered the slime net a moment longer. “Here’s another example from Earth. Septobasidium. That’s a kind of fungus that grows over the back of a small, mothlike creature called a scale insect, trap­ping it against the bark of the tree it’s feeding on. The fun­gus covers the insect over completely in a remarkably short time, then inserts its hyphae into the insect’s body and be­gins sucking its juices. Now, you’d think that would kill the host, but in fact, it turns out the insect lives longer than it would on its own.”

  “If you call that living.” Taki put in.

  Daren chuckled. “There is that. Anyway, the scale insect keeps sucking on the plant’s sap, which in turn feeds the fungus. And if the critter lives longer, it produces more young, which is good for the scale insect from a genetic point of view. There’s a case where the host actually benefits from the parasitism.”

  “Yes? So how does intelligence help the Communes?”

  “I don’t know. How does intelligence help any species?” He remembered discussions he’d had in the past about whether or not intelligence could be considered a survival trait. “Maybe it started as a way of getting the Communes to nourish colonies of slime nets, but once it started there was no turning back and no way to stop the process. And there’s the stuff the Communes do. Clearing debris away from the beach, so their colonies aren’t damaged by flotsam in a storm. There’s got to be some survival value in that.”

  “Mmm. At least this tells us a bit about why communi­cating with them has been so difficult. Speed.”

  “Exactly. If I’m right, individual Communes are dumb by human standards. Self-aware, maybe. But not capable of abstract thought. But with biochemical messages being passed along the network from individual to individual, the entire community becomes a giant brain with enough neural interconnectiveness to out-think Einstein. The only trouble is, forming a given thought, ‘hello, how are you,’ say, might take a couple of days or more, and understanding the answer might take even longer.”

  “I wonder how it perceives the world around it?” Taki wondered. “I wonder how it perceives us?”

  “As blurs, perhaps. Shadows that flick in and out of ex­istence too quickly to allow it to react. Likely, its thoughts are attuned to slower, more regular phenomena, like tides and seasons.”

  “It also suggests a strateg
y for learning to talk with them. If, of course, they even have that sort of mind. A mind based on the physical movement of cells bearing chemical tags… that’s got to be the weirdest basis for intelligence I’ve heard of yet.”

  “Remember Haldane, Taki my dear. The whole universe is predicated on weird. Let’s surface. I want to start planning out a new line of research.”

  He keyed in a thought, withdrawing their awareness from the nanoprobe, just as the tiny artifact and its subprobes and light sources dissociated into clouds of component mole­cules and scatterings of free-floating carbon atoms.

  Daren blinked his eyes, adjusting to the higher levels of light. He was lying in a reclining chair in one of Gauss’s science labs, a small forest of life support tubes and data feed optical fibers growing from the Companion-shaped jackpoints on his head and chest. His Companion broke the connections, his skin reverting to normal as the tubes and cables retracted themselves into seat back and ceiling. A few meters to his left, Taki was just sitting up, resealing the front of her shipsuit.

  “Welcome back,” a technician said from the main con­sole. “Good trip?”

  “Splendid, Enrico,” Daren said. “Absolutely splendid!”

  Enrico de la Paz was the senior AI systems technician aboard the Gauss. As Daren stood up, he noticed that the tech seemed a bit hurried in his movements, that he was breathing a little quickly and seemed distracted, as though he was excited or agitated about something else. Daren no­ticed these things… and as quickly dismissed them. The excitement of his own discovery was far more pressing than anything Enrico might have to say.

  Taki, however, must have picked up the same distraction. “Enrico?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

  He looked up and grinned. There was a strange light in his dark eyes. “Wrong, Dr. Oe? Well, it’s a little early to tell. But some news just came in over the main I2C link from New America.”

  “What news?” Taki asked.

  “A new alien contact.”

  That caught Daren’s attention. “When?”

  “Several days ago, at least, though it was kept quiet until just a few hours ago. We were wondering whether or not to get a message to you two, but decided it would keep.”

  “A new alien contact!” Taki said, and now her eyes were brighter too. Mankind had established full and two-way con­tact with only two other sapient species so far, the DalRiss and the Naga; the Web hardly counted in this context, since the only exchange so far with that intelligence involved combat. With both the DalRiss and the Naga, however, the free exchange of information, philosophy, and technology had caused literal revolutions in Man’s understanding of the universe and generated a new Renaissance in learning and in science.

  “Where was this?” Daren demanded.

  “High Frontier,” he said. “The Gr’tak—that’s what the aliens call themselves. Apparently they were following Earth’s radio emissions, but they stumbled into one of our periphery systems on the way. I gather they just came cruis­ing in from deep space, traveling at sublight velocity. Prob­ably gave the Confederation Defense Fleet there group coronaries.”

  “Sublight!” Taki exclaimed. “They don’t have FTL?”

  “1 guess not. The word is they arrived in a big fleet, several hundred ships at least, and some of them rivaling the DalRiss cityships in size.”

  “So,” Daren said, “our people contacted them.”

  Enrico looked uncomfortable, and Daren saw him give Taki’s expressionless. Oriental features a hard, quick glance. “It was a mixed fleet that met them,” he said. “Elements of the Third Imperial Fleet, and some of our own CDF. I, uh, guess they’re still trying to sort things out.”

  Daren began to understand Enrico’s distraction. High Frontier was a relatively new world among those colonized by Man. Third planet of DM+19°, a G-class star fifty-two light years from New America and forty-five light years from Sol, it was a member of the Confederation rather than of the Terran Hegemony, but Imperial fleets had been ag­gressively patrolling the star systems of the Confederation ever since the Web had become a threat. In fact, there was little the far smaller and weaker Confederation Navy could do to stop such patrols, and common sense said that it would be good to have Imperial forces handy if the Web made a sudden appearance.

  But if the aliens had a lot to teach humanity—as had the Naga and the DalRiss—it wasn’t likely that the Empire would be eager to share with their former colonies much of any new information the aliens might offer. In fact, this could make the whole problem of potential war with the Empire that much scarier.

  “At least the Imperials won’t be able to keep it all to themselves.” Daren though about it for a moment, then shook his head, his excitement over the Communes giving way to a new and more urgent eagerness to learn about this new species. “Another sapient life form! Never rains but it pours, eh, Taki?”

  “This does seem to be the day for making such discov­eries.”

  “Enrico. Any details on their morphology? Their lan­guage?”

  “It’s pretty strange, what I’ve downloaded so far. From the sound of things, you xenologists are going to have your work cut out for you. The Gr’tak are another group organ­ism, a superorganism, I guess, though not on the same scale as your Communes. Apparently a number of dissimilar crea­tures have created an extremely close symbiosis.”

  “Like the Dal and the Riss?”

  “Maybe, though what I heard is that all of the compo­nents of a Gr’tak associative are intelligent. With the DalRiss, of course, only the Riss are intelligent. The Dal are just gene-tailored legs and arms for them, right?”

  “That’s right,” Daren agreed. The Riss, with their civ­ilization’s emphasis on biotechnology and genetics, had en­gineered a number of species into life forms that they literally rode on or in, guiding them through direct connec­tions with the mounts’ nervous systems. The Gr’tak must have a similar linkage, but among several intelligent forms. How had that system evolved… and why?

  “You know,” Taki said softly. “Such a mind, an asso­ciative of linked minds, that would have interesting appli­cations for us.…”

  Daren saw it in the same moment, a flash of revelation. A species that had evolved mental symbiosis would have a lot to teach humanity, which was just learning to cope with mind-to-mind symbiosis with other, alien species… and with alien cultures within his own.

  Daren considered himself completely apolitical. When his romance with the Nihonjin-descended Taki—she was, in fact, a native New American—had caused comment in the past, he’d always either ignored it or been delighted when he incited it. For Daren, the constant state of war or near-war between Empire and Confederation had always been little more than a source of irritation and inconvenience, especially when military and political priorities overrode his needs for more funding for xenobiological research.

  Suddenly, however, it seemed very important that the Im­perials not have that information all to themselves.

  “What the hell is this going to mean for the Confedera­tion?” he wondered. “And for the Empire?”

  Chapter 12

  Sometimes what we need most is a different perspec­tive on things. Consider. The Greek city states, thanks to the mountainous geography of the Greek peninsula, developed in relative isolation from one another, with different cultures, different arts, different philosophies and gods. Only gradually, over the course of centuries as roads were built and sealanes established, were the cities of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and the rest able to begin exchanging ideas.

  And once the exchange had begun, the inevitable result was an explosion of art, science, and culture, of thesis and antithesis yielding brilliant and unantic­ipated synthesis of new ideas ranging from democracy to atomic theory. It seems we need alien ideas every so often to stir things up.…

  —The Heritage of Immanuel Kant

  PROFESSOR ROLLIN SMYTHE HAUSER

  C.E. 2006

  Dev Cameron used his God’s-eye view to
watch the Gr’tak arrival.

  He’d learned to make use of the constant flow of data through the network that lined the scattered worlds and sys­tems of humanity, and that including the images collected by medes and ViRnews reporters and uploaded onto the Net. The discovery of a new and alien species was big news, and most current exchanges on the Net were discussing it in one way or another. By switching from one mede upload to an­other, he could choose his own view of the event as it un­folded in space midway between the world of High Frontier and her inner moon.

  The scene he was watching now was being transmitted from High Orbital, the space station complex that served as the planet’s starport and interface point in the absence of a sky-el. High Frontier was a brand new colony, raw and primitive yet, and though survey work was under way, the forty-thousand-kilometer-long thread of her first sky-el had yet to be grown. Until the new world had a space elevator and synchorbital in place, High Orbital would serve as her transshipment point, starport, and space-ground interface fa­cility.

  Several thousand kilometers out from the station, under the unblinking gaze of mede ViRnews broad spectrum sen­sors aboard teleoperated drones, DalRiss cityships were ma­terializing one by one as they arrived from New America and elsewhere. An enormous fleet had gathered here at High Frontier already, consisting of both Confederation and Imperial vessels of all classes. Time being a key concern, the human vessels were being piggybacked in by the DalRiss.

  Each cityship, resembling a mottled, rough-skinned star­fish from Earth’s seas, measured two kilometers or more from arm tip to arm tip and was home to some tens of thousands of Riss and their gene-tailored, living tools. Un­like human starships, which traveled with pseudovelocities of around a light year per day, the DalRiss had learned to engineer intelligent, living creatures, their “Achievers,” that could visualize two separate points in space and bring them together, allowing vast distances to be spanned instantly. Human scientists still weren’t sure how Achievers per­formed that trick, though the assumption was that the DalRiss had managed to snag hold of quantum physics’ in­famous observer effect in a way that let them briefly and temporarily alter reality.