Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  Katya laughed. "Evidence of an alien invasion of Earth?"

  "Not quite. Evidence that the course life takes as it evolves is subject to abrupt and unexpected twists and changes. But for an accident that we can't even guess at today, intelligence on Earth could have evolved from one of those Burgess monsters, maybe something like Opabina, with five stalked, compound eyes and a long, flexible trunk equipped with pincers on the end."

  "Are you saying those Burgess creatures had a DalRissan chemistry?"

  "Not at all. They didn't. But, well, look at it this way. There's life on Earth today living in the deep ocean next to volcanic vents, called 'smokers.' Life based on photosynthesis—and that includes us, of course—can't exploit those hot, mineral-rich, energy-rich resources next to deep thermal vents, because there's no light down there at all. Instead, life next to the smokers is chemosynthetic, with an ecology based on bacteria that metabolize sulfur released by the vents. Maybe once, during Earth's first billion years or so, a sulfur-based, DalRissan type of life evolved, only to be replaced later. Maybe sulfur-based life requires a lot more incident energy than is available anywhere on Earth except near those volcanic vents, which is why it thrives on worlds like ShraRish.

  "I'm not really saying anything except that, given half a chance, life will appear, sooner or later, and it will adapt and evolve and diversify to fill every available niche, including some that staid and boring, carbon-based, oxygen-metabolizing, phosphate-transferring, old stickin-the-muds like us can't even imagine. Life has a will to be that just can't be stopped."

  Katya was silent for a long time, staring at the panorama of ShraRish. Alya A had vanished behind the planet's curved horizon in a final flash of blue-gold fire. They were in night now, though the world's horizon still showed a curved smear of clouds, bloodstained red and scarlet. Below, the mysterious fires of lightning storms and volcanoes silently glared and pulsed, together with the intermittent flash of meteors. Aurorae illuminated the poles with ghost-pale blue-and-green radiance.

  "I hope you're right, Brenda," Katya said after awhile. "Sometimes it feels as though the end purpose of evolution is us . . . and all we're good for is killing one another. It would be kind of ironic if the final scene of a five-billion–year play was nothing but ruined cities and radioactive deserts and the dead hulks of derelict starships."

  Brenda shook her head. "Well, I suppose we might possibly exterminate ourselves . . . but life will continue, one way or another. A billion years from now Earth will be populated by somebody, maybe descended from us, and maybe not. Whatever it is, it'll probably be something that makes Hallucigenia look like a close relative. I guarantee that it won't look like us, though, because change is one of the foundations of all living systems. It might not even be that old standby, 'life as we know it.' "

  Katya reached up and tapped the side of her head, indicating the hardware nesting within her brain. "Maybe the machine component will get the upper hand. Lots of us are already hybrids of human and machine. Maybe someday the machine part of ourselves will just decide to discard whatever fragments of the animal are left."

  "That's been suggested before. But saying that we're going to change into machines is missing the point. Whether life is based on carbon and subunits called cells, or on silicon and subunits called switches is immaterial. Cells are small machines. Nanomachines act like cells. Where's the difference? It's all life, of one kind or another, and it will ultimately fill the universe."

  "I wonder," Katya said after a long silence, "if when it reaches that point, it will think the journey was worthwhile?"

  Chapter 19

  Our contacts with alien species thus far, with the Xenophobes and with the DalRiss, strongly suggest that the logic of nonhuman intelligence does not necessarily conform to human logic. This bit of tautology masks a deeper truth: if we have difficulty accepting the logic—the worldview, the point of view, the view of self—of other human cultures, then we may never be able to communicate on any but the most fundamental level with those other minds that we must someday meet among the stars. Somehow, somehow, we must transcend our ego-delineated limitations, must give ourselves a godlike view that incorporates the human sense of independence, the Xeno concept of Self, and the DalRiss view of life.

  —Alien Minds: A Human Perspective

  Dr. Paul Hernandez

  C.E. 2543

  The Imperial forces on the surface of ShraRish continued to ignore the presence of the Confederation ships in orbit, despite repeated attempts to raise them on all space-to-ground laser, radio, and ViRcommunications channels. Scans both from orbit and by ascraft dipping into the upper levels of the atmosphere detected only the one Imperial facility at Dojinko.

  The close-range survey also began to positively identify concentrations of DalRiss, which had gone unnoticed for the most part during the initial probe flybys. DalRiss cities were hard to pick out from orbit in any case, for their buildings and other structures were themselves living organisms, seemingly designed to blend into the background of ordinary forest growth. It was, one New American computer technician informed Dev, unnervingly like searching not for a needle in a haystack, but for one particular strand of hay.

  Dev, raised on Earth instead of an agricultural world like New America, wasn't sure what a haystack was . . . or a needle either, for that matter, but he could appreciate the tech's frustration. Life of one sort or another blanketed the surface of ShraRish in a bewildering profusion of growths, most with metabolic processes more energetic than those of typical plant life Dev was familiar with. The only areas on the surface not covered with living material were the most rugged portions of the highest mountains and the surfaces of the seas, and even there Eagle's scanners detected tangled mats of growth thousands of kilometers square, floating on the waves and soaking up the high-energy sunlight.

  Despite the background noise, as the scanner techs charged with searching for signs of intelligent life called the planet's living blanket, DalRiss cities were spotted. By far the largest concentration of DalRiss-related organisms, meaning their buildings and the various gene-tailored creatures they used as mounts or for other purposes, appeared to be in a single area perhaps a thousand kilometers southwest of Dojinko, close by the shore of a large, landlocked sea.

  An interesting point observed by the orbital scanning teams was made evident through contrast photography and computer enhancement. Most of the mobile dwelling-creatures concentrated at that site, soon dubbed "the Migrant Camp" by human observers, had recently arrived there from elsewhere on the planet's surface. The marks and trails left by the passage of tens of thousands of huge, slow-crawling creatures remained visible in the bruised ground vegetation and in the barren stretches of rock, soil, or gravel scoured clean by their passage. The vanished DalRiss city that had existed just to the east of the Imperial base had apparently taken a straight-line trek across one thousand kilometers of low, rolling hills, a prairie, and a major river . . . not to mention one corner of the human base facility. Other city groups had evidently crossed much vaster distances, circumnavigating seas and crossing or bypassing entire mountain ranges to reach the new site.

  The Migrant Camp was enormous. Conservative estimates suggested that twenty million DalRiss might be living there, an enormous number by their standards, at least as humans understood them. Most of their buildings were relatively small, a few tens of meters long, perhaps, and half that in height. Some retained their sluglike traveling shape; many more had adopted the more characteristic mushroom shape of most personal DalRiss structures.

  There were plenty of other structures as well, though, including huge domes, spires, towers, and structures for which there was simply no apt and easy description. What, for example, was to be made of the single largest structure in the entire city, one that appeared to be the focal point of all DalRiss activity in the area? Shaped like a huge, seven-armed starfish, it sprawled near the shores of the sea. So thick at its center that it rose like a hill in the middle of
the city, and with a diameter of over two kilometers from arm to opposite arm, it rested on the ground surrounded by living DalRiss structures pressing so close to one another that there was scarcely room at all between any one building and its neighbor. The starfish shape appeared to be connected to the water by a vast tangle of what might have been pipes or tubes, or possibly they were clumps of roots each as thick as the trunk of a good-size tree. Like all DalRiss structures, it was obviously alive, grown in place, but what its purpose might be was unguessable.

  Adding to the mystery were indications that numerous other DalRiss concentrations had abruptly decided to pack up and move elsewhere. Dozens of sites were identified and catalogued that were identical to the barren area near Dojinko, areas several hectares in extent possessing little or no vegetation, with craters and scars showing in the bare earth or rock, and with pathways trampled through the surrounding forest suggesting that the town's buildings had simply decided to walk away. Many of those trails led to the Migrant Camp. Others led to other villages, or else dwindled away and were lost in the forest. There were even a few sites, relatively fresh-looking ones, that showed starfish-shaped markings in the ground reminiscent of the big, central creature at the Migrant Camp. Smaller versions of that creature, with numbers of arms ranging from four to nine, had rested in those towns for considerable periods of time, then vanished, complete with the DalRiss that had tended them. Why? And where had they gone?

  In a simulation compiled from hundreds of accumulated hours of orbital observation and unmanned probes, Dev studied the three-dimensional image of the Migrant Camp and its mysterious center, hoping to stumble across some clue to DalRiss behavior. With him were his battle staff, including Captain Canady, and Katya and her senior staff, flown over from the Mirach and the Trixie. Also present were Brenda Ortiz and her Contact Team people, experts on the DalRiss who more and more frequently were answering questions with frank we-don't-knows.

  "Might it have a military function?" Vic Hagan asked, referring to the creature that by now was known as "the giant starfish." Hagan, an old comrade of Katya's who'd only recently received his new rank of lieutenant colonel in the Confederation ground forces, was her current number two in the 1st Confederation Rangers. During the trip from Herakles, he'd been CO of the 3rd Battalion troops aboard Mirach, while Katya had remained with the 1st and 2nd Battalions on Vindemiatrix.

  "What . . . like a fortress?" Katya asked.

  "Maybe it's mobile," Lisa suggested. "The Dal part of the DalRiss symbionts, they're kind of starfish-shaped, aren't they? Maybe this is just a very large Dal."

  "I doubt that," Brenda said. "It's two kilometers across and must weigh a hundred million tons at least. I don't care what kind of metabolism it has, it wouldn't be able to generate enough energy to move. My guess is that it's some kind of large building."

  "Yes? How do we tell?" Sergei Androyev replied, clearly frustrated. The bushy-haired linguist from New America's Ukrainian colony was one of Ortiz's best people. "If it has weapons, we can't see them. It's clearly hollow because the DalRiss appear to be moving inside, but there is quite frankly no way of determining its function."

  "Not from up here, at any rate," Brenda said. "It's a strange idea for a bunch of xenolinguists, I know, but we could go down and ask them."

  "Do they know we're here, do you think?" Dev asked.

  "Almost certainly," Androyev replied. "We know the DalRiss have radio. In fact, they appear to be quite sensitive to radio emissions, the way we are to light."

  "That's right. They have some kind of radio-sensitive organs, don't they?" Lieutenant Commander Fletcher said.

  "According to our interviews with them," Brenda said, "going back to First Contact, they first became aware of Hegemony civilization through our radio emissions. We know they can understand our language now, and we've been beaming messages at them over several radio frequencies, both in Inglic and in Nihongo. They know we're here and they know we're fighting against the Empire. They just haven't answered us as yet."

  "Maybe broadcasting radio at them isn't such a good idea," Lisa Canady suggested. "For them it might be like a bright light in the eyes would be for us."

  "Anything's possible," Ortiz admitted. "But they seemed to respond well to radio dialogues beamed at them by 1-IEF three years ago. And presumably, that's how the Imperials have been talking with them lately. The Japanese don't much enjoy communication through the comels, I gather."

  "The ones in the Expeditionary Force certainly didn't like getting their hands dirty," a senior programmer tech pointed out. "It had to do with actually wearing a living creature, I think. They tended to be pretty fastidious about sticking bare skin into anything that looks as nasty as a comel."

  Several people in the linkage chuckled at that, including Dev, who'd worn the DalRiss translators on numerous occasions. Comels, the living creatures designed by the DalRiss to facilitate direct emotional communication between wildly divergent species, were disconcerting to people who hadn't used them before. Many refused point-blank to touch the things, which resembled nothing so much as soft, black or gray pools of tar or thick jelly imbued with a quivering, greasy-slick life of their own.

  No one was sure where the name "comel" had come from originally. Some thought it sounded like the DalRiss word for them, though the DalRiss spoken language was so complex, involving parallel sounds and voices, that it was difficult to isolate individual chains of sounds from any single spoken phrase. Others preferred the more mundane suggestion that the genegineered organisms had originally been designated "Communicators, Living" by Imperial military scientists who studied them, a term that in Inglic readily shortened to "com-L." Whatever the origin of the name, however, they'd proven invaluable, not so much for bridging the language gap between humans and the DalRiss, which the DalRiss themselves didn't seem to regard as much of a problem, but for allowing communication between humans and the utterly inhuman Nagas.

  "I certainly think our best chances lie with using the comel," Ortiz said. "It was their invention, after all."

  "And if the Imperials haven't been using them," Katya pointed out, "that's an important distinction between us and them. It might make the DalRiss more sympathetic to us."

  "Okay," Dev said. "Face-to-face contact is always best, I'd agree to that. Whatever we decide to do, though, whatever approach we use to make contact, I suggest we do it fast. We only have a limited amount of time to try to communicate with these people, remember."

  "How long?" Ortiz asked.

  Dev shrugged, then remembered that his analogue was not visible in the simulation, that the others could hear but not see him.

  "At the very best, six to eight months," he told her. "That's how long it will take that destroyer and the freighters that escaped after the battle to get back to Shichiju space and tell the Imperial Staff Command that we're out here. The Imperials can't afford to let us have exclusive communications with the DalRiss. Even if we haven't figured out how to go about doing it yet.

  "At the worst, well, they could be breaking out of K-T space at the edge of the ShraRish system right this moment. The Imperials in the Shichiju would've learned about Dojinko, about the problems with the DalRiss, before we did. They'll have been taking their time about assembling a relief fleet, but that fleet will be here, and I'd be willing to bet it'll be here damned soon. We'll have to be ready to up stakes and clear out just as quick as it takes to load our people aboard an ascraft and get them up to orbit."

  "And abandon the DalRiss?" Katya said, anger flaring. "When are we going to stand and fight for a change?"

  "When we have a chance of winning," Dev told her bluntly. He'd heard the pain of the unhealed wound in her voice but ignored it. This wasn't the time or place to discuss the ethics of war.

  "We should probably go straight for comel communications," Hagan suggested, verbally insinuating himself between Dev and Katya. "At least that will show them that we want to communicate. They might not recognize our current rad
io broadcasts as anything more than 'hello, how are you.' "

  "Commander Hagan has a good point," Androyev said. "We know that the DalRiss understand our language, the actual words, but we're still not sure how much of the meaning they attach to those words corresponds with the meaning we attach to them."

  "You're saying 'Hello, how are you' could be a ritual death threat for them?" Katya asked.

  "Maybe not that, exactly, but that's the idea. Most human greetings convey certain social postures and attitudes. 'I am friendly. I have no weapon in my hand. I care about your well-being.' Such sentiments tend to lose their meaning over a long period of time and become little more than a social ritual. But we have no idea what they would mean to a DalRiss."

  "Ah," Dev said. "Maybe for them 'I have no weapon' means 'Hi there, I'm your breakfast.' Or, 'I care about your welfare' means 'Hey, how would you like to mate?' "

  Most of the others laughed. "That," Androyev said, a little stuffily, "is perhaps the general idea."

  "The next question we have," Dev said, "is where do we make contact?

  "We seem to have a choice there," Katya pointed out. "The original plan called for going in and taking down the Imperials at their surface base first, then talking to the DalRiss who were on the site. That might not be practical at this point, though, since all the DalRiss at Dojinko appear to have uprooted, literally, and moved elsewhere. Alternatively, we could ignore the Imperials—they don't seem to be much of a threat now—and try a landing close to Migrant Camp. At least we know we'll find the DalRiss there."

  "I think," Dev said slowly, "that our best course of action will be to stick to the plan as written. We could be violating some taboo or law by showing up uninvited at Migrant Camp, and if that starfish in the middle of town is some sort of military structure, our arrival could be seen as a threat. We'd be better off, I think, grounding near the Impie base. If the DalRiss are feuding with the Japanese, it won't hurt to show the natives that we are too. And I think it'll be important to try talking to them at the same place where the Imperials have been working with them. We still don't know how unified DalRiss society is, or if it even corresponds well to what humans think of as a social structure. If we land at Migrant Camp, we might discover that none of the locals know about humans."