Warstrider 06 - Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  The creature’s head attached to the body between those enormous eyes; a smooth and slightly rounded crest thrust back from this, however, so that the entire head was larger than three human fists stacked together. Instead of legs, a cluster of slender tendrils nervously twitched beneath the eyes, but Dev couldn’t tell if they were mouth parts, sensory organs, manipulators, or all three. The abdomen, again, long and slender like a dragonfly’s, was flexible, tapering, and tightly coiled; when Daren’s hubot moved slightly, the hov­ering creature drifted back half a meter and the abdomen uncoiled, then recoiled in a flash, demonstrating a marvelous precision of strength and control. A manipulative organ of some sort, like a tentacle or a hand?

  “Is this one of our hosts?” Taki wondered aloud. “Or part of the native fauna?”

  “One of our hosts, I should think,” Dev replied. “In a closed, tightly controlled environment like this, I doubt that the wildlife wanders around free.”

  “How do you know that?” Daren said sharply. “This could be the equivalent of a domesticated pet. Or a gene-tailored, roving eye. Or—”

  Something moved ahead, a thrashing in the shadowed un­dergrowth. The vegetation parted then, and another creature moved into the clearing. This time, there was no doubt, in Dev’s mind, at least, that this was one of the Gr’tak.

  One? Or more than that? The main body of the thing was easily four meters tall, a bulk of gray-brown flesh that tow­ered above the three human machines. Beyond the initial impression of bulk and mass, though, it was at first hard to nail down details of the thing’s structure, so little was it like anything in Dev’s experience. It was fairly simple in its overall design, a massively large and fleshy base reminiscent of the foot of a conch or some other marine cephalopod, rising in a thick and muscular column of flesh and muscle that looped over sharply at the top, then descended to a smaller, second foot on the body’s front end that seemed to incorporate the head as part of its structure. The head grew forward out of the leading edge of the second foot, an oddly bumpy and wrinkled gray ovoid festooned with tendrils, cilia, and prismatic surfaces that might have been various sense organs or manipulative appendages or both. The thing’s movement, as it edged its way into the clearing, was almost comically like that of a terrestrial inchworm; the head-foot reached forward in a two-meter stride, then clung to the ground as the more massive tail-foot glided after it on powerful, muscular contractions.

  The creature wore clothing of a sort, a bright pink skirt with rich violet and green ornamentation worked in glisten­ing bands and spirals into the material, open at the top and bottom and girdling the looped body, leaving both feet and the upper part of the arch bare. The only other ornamenta­tion was a gleaming, brass-colored plate or brooch that seemed to be embedded in the thing’s thick hide just above and behind the head-foot.

  The upper opening of the thing’s skirt revealed three meter-long objects, flat, black, and glistening wet, adhering to the top of the arch. At first, Dev took them for some sort of external organs on the creature’s body, but then one re­leased its hold at what Dev took to be its leading end, and a blindly questing, circular mouth gaped for a moment be­fore reattaching itself to its large mount. The three black shapes, then, were a trio of glistening creatures like enor­mous leeches attached to the larger being’s dorsal surface, two riding side by side with the third slightly ahead of and overlapping the other two. The upper sides of the riders were pocked with half a dozen fist-sized craters that ap­peared to be the source of the moisture covering them; a gray and slender, many-branched growth sprouted more than a meter up from the thick skin of the larger creature beneath them, though which organism that structure belonged to, if either, Dev honestly couldn’t tell.

  Dev immediately had the impression, though, of several creatures working together, the big, arched body ridden by the three leeches in much the same way that a Riss rode a six-legged Dal. The union suggested that the Gr’tak was not an interstellar federation after all, but an evolutionary join­ing of several sapient species. The hovering insect, Dev no­ticed, was definitely a part of that superorganism or at least shared a close symbiosis with it. As he watched with fas­cination, the flyer abruptly darted back to the larger creature, folded up its wings, and vanished into one of the holes in one of the leech-riders with a ripple of glistening black flesh to mark its movement beneath the skin, while another, ap­parently identical flyer crawled free of a different hole and took to the air with a soft hiss of vibrating, transparent mem­branes. Dev was put in mind of scout warflyers maintaining a constant CAP around their carrier, serving as early warn­ing for approaching danger, perhaps, as well as a mobile extension of eyes and other sense organs.

  The being stopped a few meters away and seemed to be regarding them patiently through the jeweled facets of what must be compound eyes. Slowly, avoiding any threatening movement, Taki lowered the cylinder she was carrying to the ground, palmed its touchplate, and let the end dissolve.

  Inside was a Naga communicator.

  Thirty years ago, the DalRiss had engineered organic communicators, called comels, that had first enabled humans to communicate directly with the bizarrely alien Naga. Later, though, the Naga themselves learned to duplicate that trick; they were very good at patterning the molecular ar­rangements of another living creature’s brain, permitting the direct transference of thought through an appropriately pro­grammed intermediary. The only real difficulty, of course, was that when those thoughts were alien enough, they didn’t make much sense. Even perfect understanding of a common language didn’t help in communicating thoughts for which another culture had no thoughts… or words describing ideas totally beyond that culture’s ken.

  The programmed Naga fragment slid out of its container and onto the ground with a wet plop. Dev recognized the gray-black, sluglike shape… a single Naga cell, budded off from a planetary Naga that had already established com­munications with humans and understood—as much as was possible for that species—human thought processes.

  Slowly, the Naga crawled toward the waiting Gr’tak. The enigmatic being seemed to watch its approach stoically, with no outward emotion—none, at least, that was recognizable to the humans. The Naga fragment moved to within a meter of the creature, and after the briefest of hesitations, some­thing began uncoiling from the back of the huge arch, a single tentacle that must usually have been kept folded away unseen inside a pouch or recess within the thing’s body. The tentacle reached down and touched the Naga fragment, which immediately began dwindling as its microcellular structure dissolved into the Gr’tak, filtering through the cells of its skin like hydrogen molecules diffusing through the rubber skin of a balloon.

  The trio waited, watching as the huge creature digested the morsel; it seemed to show no surprise at the Naga frag­ment’s intrusion into its body. Dev well remembered the first time he’d seen Naga material melting into his skin, and the panic he’d felt. It was not precisely a reassuring means of first contact.…

  But the Gr’tak had seemed at ease with the idea. Indeed, the Naga fragment would have worked nearly as well if the two, Gr’tak and human, had simply each touched the Naga, using it as a physical bridge like the old cornels, but it would be far better and faster if the Naga could pattern the alien creature’s brain and allow a full merging of minds.

  Unlike the two hubots, Dev’s biomechanical DalRiss body possessed a Naga implant similar to the Companion carried by humans, and that elected him as the point man for first contact. Slowly, so as not to give alarm, he stepped closer to the huge creature, one of his alien body’s arms stretched out, manipulators wide. Unfurling like a coiled line, the Gr’tak’s tentacle dropped until the tip hung, twitch­ing, a half meter from Dev’s outstretched hand.

  He waited a moment, making certain of the invitation, then closed that last narrow gap. The touch was cold… flickering… strange. The sensation of contact with an alien mind through a Naga intermediary was not as sharp or as overwhelming as he remembered it being
in his flesh-and-blood body, long ago, but it was dazzling in its intensity nonetheless, and bewildering with its heady rush of alien sensations.

  He sensed… memories. Countless memories, most a jumble of shapes and colors, odors and sensations that he simply could not sort out or catalogue. Some of those mem­ories were clear attempts at communication, he knew, but it was difficult to sort them out. For a dizzying moment, Dev hung poised above a black and bottomless abyss, a whirling, shrieking nightmare of rushing alien thoughts and concepts, nested concepts, one inside another like nested woodcarved Russian dolls. The voices he heard were echoes of one an­other… and also, in a way he could not quite give shape to, were nested, one inside another in an infinitely repeating series receding into blackness.

  For a moment, Dev was looking through alien eyes—weirdly faceted, multiply imaging eyes, like those of an in­sect—at something… something black and sleek and fa­miliar if he could just learn to see in this strangely shattered and echoing way.…

  His Naga, sensing patterns and familiarities, helped, sort­ing through the images, bringing fragmented pieces to­gether, melding dozens into one.

  The shape was familiar, chillingly so. Dev watched the ebon black, egg-smooth sleekness of a Web probe descend­ing into the heart of a solar system. He saw it split, saw part descend on a warm and sunlit world, with vast geometries of light patterned across the continents of its night side. He saw glimpses—fragments, really—of a civilization’s col­lapse, of nuclear fireballs and destruction unimaginable, of weirdly glittering, insectlike machines that devoured every­thing in their path, of something going hideously wrong with a sun, and the silent, actinic flash that spelled the doom of an entire world, its population, its culture, everything that it was and might one day be.

  Emotions rode the alien currents of those images. He sensed deep sorrow… and urgent need.

  “I/we are associative Sholai of Associative HaShoGha,” the thought ran, sliding warm-wet through Dev’s mind, the echoes and reiterations damped out by his Naga. Funny. It was as though he could hear the capitalizations, slight dif­ferences of stress in the unfamiliar words. There was a dis­tinct difference between associative and Associative, for instance, the former clearly referring to the entity Sholai, while the latter seemed to indicate something larger and more complex… a community, perhaps. The feel of that concept was similar to the Naga ideas of »self« and Self, referring to detachable fragments of a much larger and more complete complex.

  “I/we are refugees,” the thought continued, “fleeing a terrible danger that has all but destroyed our Associatives. We are looking for Community and coupled thought.

  Dev wasn’t sure what “coupled thought” might be, but the sense of community seemed important to the being. Dev decided to push a bit on that idea and see what response he could raise.

  “We are representatives of a community… of an Asso­ciative of three different races,” he told it. “Human, Naga, and DalRiss. We are facing a danger like the one you’ve just shown me. I think it’s the same… a threat we call the Web.”

  The outstretched tentacle coiled back suddenly, a sharp flick of motion that momentarily broke the contact. Dev waited patiently, unmoving, as the creature before him shud­dered with some nearly convulsive emotion. At first he thought the thing was afraid; mention of the Web, certainly, would be enough to terrify if these people had fled here from a home world destroyed by Web engineering.

  Then the Gr’tak extended the tentacle again, and Dev once more slipped into that bewildering symphony of voices, sounds, and shifting mental images. He concentrated on the emotions, trying to find those that he could recognize, trying to block out the alien cacophony that was becoming painful in its intensity.

  Yes, there was a recognizable emotion, but it wasn’t the one that Dev had expected to find. There was fear, yes… a sour, sharp shuddering underlying the creature’s mental processes.

  But the immediate, the overwhelming emotion that Dev was sensing from the Gr’tak was not fear… but joy.

  Chapter 13

  Utter resolve is necessary when you are fighting an enemy. In order to beat him you must control the sit­uation, regardless of the method you use. If you do not control the enemy, the enemy will control you.

  —“Fire Scroll”

  The Book of the Five Spheres

  MIYAMOTO MUSASHI

  seventeenth century B.C.E.

  “The Gr’tak don’t possess the same kind of intelligence humans do,” Taki said. “Or the DalRiss, for that matter, or even the Naga. Some of us are beginning to think that in­telligence may be common in the universe, but no two spe­cific types of intelligence are quite the same.”

  Dev’s visual representation of himself nodded. “Cer­tainly, we’ve found enough differences in the intelligent species we’ve already studied to support such an idea.”

  It was two weeks since their initial contact with the Gr’tak. They were meeting in Cascadia… or, rather, in a virtual-world Cascadia, a shared illusion generated within the local Net back on New America. The familiar Alessan­dro-Hagan estate’s conversation room had been altered with the addition of a conference table. A life-size image of a Gr’tak floated silently above the table’s holoprojector, add­ing a surreal touch, complete with a pair of hovering, darting dragonfly creatures. Lessers, they were called, according to the lexicon of Gr’tak terminology still being hammered out. Present at the table were Dev, Daren, and Taki, of course, as well as Katya Alessandro and Vic Hagan. At Vic’s sug­gestion, Kara was also present, turning the assembly into a family gathering… which left Dev feeling just a bit the outsider. He accepted that, however, since his disembodied state generally left him an outsider no matter where he was.

  Also present, and also evidently feeling like outsiders, were two others who’d attended the ViRconference at Kat­ya’s suggestion. One was Kazuhiro Mishima, tall, elegantly dressed in formal red diplomatic robes, assigned by the Imperial government as the senior ambassador to the Con­federation. The other was Dr. Frances Gresham, of the Con­federation Senate Science Council. In another two hours, Katya and Vic were scheduled to present a full report to the Science Council, and they were using this opportunity to go over what Dev, Daren, and Taki had witnessed at High Frontier and to distill some of what they’d learned.

  Gresham looked puzzled. “I’m not sure I understand. I mean, you’re intelligent or you’re not, right?”

  “It’s not that simple, Doctor,” Daren told her. “For one thing, there are at least seventy different aspects of thought, memory, knowledge, and awareness that we’ve been able to categorize so far as distinct subsets of what we call sapience. Most authorities can’t even agree on the exact number, but it is large.”

  “That’s right,” Taki added. “Some people have a talent in, oh, let’s say, math. They can do complex calculations in their heads, retain long chains of numbers and manipulate them without having to write them down, even think in terms of equations and numeric series, without putting the thoughts into words. You follow?”

  Kara tossed Daren a wry grin. “Yeah. My brother over there’s like that. Frightening. Rattle off a string of numbers at me and I’ll be lucky to tell you the first two in order. He can do it with commo numbers, access codes, whatever. Read him a number and he’s got it forever.”

  Taki nodded. “Skill at working with numbers and nu­meric concepts is one type of intelligence. Working with words is another, either through direct articulation, or in using them to describe complex actions or thoughts. Artistic talent—being able to think in terms of color or tone or tex­ture, that’s, well, actually that’s a whole cluster of intelli­gence types, at least the way we use the concept today. Others have to do with abstract reasoning, with drawing conclusions from data, with getting along with other people, or manipulating them, or even just understanding what they’re feeling. All of these things go together to create that composite attribute we call intelligence.”

  “Intelligence
clusters are the preferred way of looking at the whole idea of intelligence,” Dev said. “You can be a genius at some things, an idiot at others, and everything taken together generally averages out. Now that’s just with the human population. We think that other sapient species may have more or less the same general mix of talents—with exceptions of course. A species that was blind wouldn’t have an artistic color sense, for instance. But by and large, the individuals of all intelligent species are going to need to deal with numbers, with communicative concepts, with oth­ers of their kind, and so on.”

  “So,” Vic said. “What you’re saying is that some of the aliens we meet are going to be really great at painting pic­tures, but downright stupid when it comes to making friends.” He considered the thought. “I’ve known people like that.”

  “The DalRiss are better than we are at interpersonal re­lationships,” Katya said. “But they lack, well, call it em­pathy. They can’t understand the outrage some humans feel at the way they use their gene-tailored life forms. The Dal. Or the Achievers.”