The Ghost Brigades omw-2

by John Scalzi

  "But they saved Zoe, you said," Jared said.

  Boutin smiled. "While they were going through the station, the Obin did a tour of the science labs to see if there were any ideas worth stealing," he said. "They're excellent scientists, but they're not very creative. They can improve on ideas and technology they find from other places, but they're not very good at originating the technology themselves. The science station is one of the main reasons they were interested in Omagh at all. They found my work on consciousness, and they were interested. They found out I wasn't on the station, but that Zoe was. So they kept her while they were looking for me."

  "They used her as blackmail," Jared said.

  "No," Boutin said. "More as a goodwill gesture. And I was the one who demanded things from them."

  "They held Zoe, and you demanded things from them," Jared said.

  "That's right," Boutin said.

  "Like what?" Jared asked.

  "Like this war," Boutin said.

  Jane Sagan edged closer to the eighth and final gun emplacement. Like the others it tracked her and then warned her the closer she got to it. As near as she could tell if she got closer than about three meters, the gun would fire. Sagan picked up a rock and threw it directly at the gun; the rock struck and bounced off harmlessly, the gun's systems tracking but otherwise ignoring the projectile. The gun could differentiate between a rock and a human. That's some fine engineering, Sagan thought, not very charitably.

  She found a larger rock, stepped up to the edge of the safe zone, and chucked it to the right of the gun. It tracked the rock; farther to her right another gun trained on her. The guns shared targeting information; she wasn't going to get past them by distracting one of them.

  The bowl they were in was shallow enough that Sagan could see over the lip; as far as she could see there weren't any Obin soldiers in the area. Either they were hiding or they were confident the humans weren't going anywhere.

  "Yes!"

  Sagan turned and saw Daniel Harvey coming toward her with something squirmy in his hand. "Look who's got dinner," he said.

  "What is that?" Sagan asked.

  "The hell if I know," Harvey said. "I saw it slithering out of the ground and caught it before it went back in. Put up a fight, though. I had to grab its head to keep it from biting me. I figure we can eat it."

  By this time Seaborg had limped over to look at the creature. "I'm not eating that," he said.

  "Fine," Harvey said. "You starve. The lieutenant and I will eat it."

  "We can't eat it," Sagan said. "The animals here aren't compatible with our food needs. You might as well eat rocks."

  Harvey looked at Sagan as if she had just taken a dump on his head. "Fine," he said, and bent down to let the thing go.

  "Wait," Sagan said. "I want you to throw that."

  "What?" Harvey said.

  "Throw that thing at the gun," Sagan said. "I want to see what the guns will do to something living."

  "That's kind of cruel," Harvey said.

  "A minute ago, you were thinking about eating the damn thing," Seaborg said, "and now you're worried about cruelty to animals?"

  "Shut up," Harvey said. He cocked his arm back to throw the animal.

  "Harvey," Sagan said. "Don't throw it directly at the gun, please."

  Harvey suddenly realized that the trajectory of the projectiles would lead directly back to his body. "Sorry," he said. "Stupid of me."

  "Throw it up," Sagan said. "Way up." Harvey shrugged and launched the thing high into the air, in an arc that took the thing away from the three of them. The creature writhed in midair. The gun tracked the creature as far up as it could, roughly fifty degrees up. It rotated and shot the thing apart as soon as it came back into its range, shredding it with a spray of thin needles that expanded on contact with the poor creature's flesh. In less than a second there was nothing left of the thing but mist and a few chunks falling to the ground.

  "Very nice," Harvey said. "Now we know the guns really work. And I'm still hungry."

  "That's very interesting," Sagan said.

  "That I'm hungry?" Harvey said.

  "No, Harvey," Sagan said, irritated. "I don't actually give a damn about your stomach right now. What's interesting is that the guns can only target up to a certain angle. They're ground suppression."

  "So?" Harvey said. "We're on the ground."

  "Trees," Seaborg said, suddenly. "Son of a bitch."

  "What are you thinking, Seaborg?" Sagan asked.

  "In training, Dirac and I won a war game by sneaking up on the opposing side in the trees," he said. "They were expecting us to attack from the ground. They never bothered looking up until we got right up on them. Then I almost fell out of the tree and nearly got myself killed. But the idea worked."

  The three of them turned to look at the trees inside their perimeter. They weren't real trees, but the Aristian equivalent: large spindly plants that reached meters high into the sky.

  "Tell me we're all having the same bugshit crazy thought," Harvey said. "I'd hate to think it was just me."

  "Come on," Sagan said. "Let's see what we can do with this."

  "That's insane," Jared said. "The Obin wouldn't start a war just because you asked them to."

  "Really?" Boutin said. A sneer crept onto his face. "And you know this from your vast, personal knowledge of the Obin? Your years of study on the matter? You wrote your doctoral thesis on the Obin?"

  "No species would go to war just because you asked them to," Jared said. "The Obin don't do anything for anyone else."

  "And they're not now," Boutin said. "The war is a means to an end—they want what I can offer them."

  "And what is that?" Jared asked.

  "I can give them souls," Boutin said.

  "I don't understand," Jared said.

  "It's because you don't know the Obin," Boutin said. "The Obin are a created race—the Consu made them just to see what would happen. But despite rumors to the contrary, the Consu aren't perfect. They make mistakes. And they made a huge mistake when they made the Obin. They gave the Obin intelligence, but what they couldn't do—what they didn't have the capability of doing—was to give the Obin consciousness."

  "The Obin are conscious," Jared said. "They have a society. They communicate. They remember. They think."

  "So what?" Boutin said. "Termites have societies. Every species communicates. You don't have to be intelligent to remember—you have a computer in your head that remembers everything you ever do, and it's fundamentally no more intelligent than a rock. And as for thinking, what about thinking requires you to observe yourself doing it? Not a goddamned thing. You can create an entire starfaring race that has no more self-introspection than a protozoan, and the Obin are the living proof of that. The Obin are aware collectively that they exist. But not one of them individually has anything that you would recognize as a personality. No ego. No 'I.'"

  "That doesn't make any sense," Jared said.

  "Why not?" Boutin said. "What are the trappings of self-awareness? And do the Obin have it? The Obin have no art, Dirac. They have no music or literature or visual arts. They comprehend the concept of art intellectually but they have no way to appreciate it. The only time they communicate is to tell each other factual things: where they're going, or what's over that hill or how many people they need to kill. They can't lie. They have no moral inhibition against it—they don't actually have any real moral inhibitions against anything—but they can no more formulate a lie than you or I could levitate an object with our mind power. Our brains aren't wired that way; their brains aren't wired that way. Everybody lies. Everybody who is conscious, who has a self-image to maintain. But they don't. They're perfect."

  "Being ignorant of your own existence is not what I'd call 'perfect,' " Jared said.

  "They are perfect," Boutin insisted. "They don't lie. They cooperate perfectly with each other, within the structure of their society. Challenges or disagreements are dealt with in a prescribed manner. They
don't backstab. They are perfectly moral because their morals are absolute—hardcoded. They have no vanity and no ambition. They don't even have sexual vanity. They're all hermaphrodites, and pass their genetic information to each other as casually as you or I would shake hands. And they have no fear."

  "Every creature has fear," Jared said. "Even the non-conscious ones."

  "No," Boutin said. "Every creature has a survival instinct. It looks like fear but it's not the same thing. Fear isn't the desire to avoid death or pain. Fear is rooted in the knowledge that what you recognize as yourself can cease to exist. Fear is existential. The Obin are not existential in the slightest. That's why they don't surrender. It's why they don't take prisoners. It's why the Colonial Union fears them, you know. Because they can't be made afraid. What an advantage that is! It's so much of an advantage that if I'm ever in charge of creating human soldiers again, I'm going to suggest stripping out their consciousness."

  Jared shuddered. Boutin noted it. "Come now, Dirac," Boutin said. "You can't tell me that awareness has been a happything for you. Aware that you've been created for a purpose other than your own existence. Aware of memories of someone else's life. Aware that your purpose is nothing more than to kill the people and things the Colonial Union points you at. You're a gun with an ego. You'd be better off without the ego."

  "Horseshit," Jared said.

  Boutin smiled. "Well, fair enough," he said. "I can't say I'd want to be without self-awareness, either. And since you're supposed to be me I can't say that I'm surprised you feel the same way."

  "If the Obin are perfect I don't see why they would need you," Jared said.

  "Because they don't see themselves as perfect, of course," Boutin said. "They know they lack consciousness, and while individually it might not matter much to them, as a species, it matters a great deal. They saw my work on consciousness—mostly on consciousness transference but also my early notes on recording and storing consciousness entirely. They desired what they thought I could give them. Greatly."

  "Have you given them consciousness?" Jared asked.

  "Not yet," Boutin said. "But I'm getting close. Close enough to make them desire it even more."

  "'Desire,'" Jared repeated. "A strong emotion for a species who lacks sentience."

  "Do you know what Obin means?" Boutin asked. "What the actual word means in the Obin language, when it's not being used to refer to the Obin as a species."

  "No," Jared said.

  "It means lacking," Boutin said, and cocked his head, bemusedly. "Isn't that interesting? With most intelligent species, if you look back far enough for the etymological roots of what they call themselves, you'll come up with some variation or another of the people. Because every species starts off on their own little home world, convinced they are the absolute center of the universe. Not the Obin. They knew right from the beginning what they were, and the word they used to describe themselves showed they knew that they were missing something every other intelligent species had. They lacked consciousness. It's just about the only truly descriptive noun they have. Well, that and Obinur, which means home of those who lack. Everything else is just dry as dust. Arist means third moon. But Obin is remarkable. Imagine if every species named itself after its greatest flaw. We could name our species arrogance."

  "Why would knowing they lack consciousness matter to them?" Jared asked.

  "Why did knowing that she couldn't eat from the tree of knowledge matter to Eve?" Boutin said. "It shouldn't have mattered but it did. She was temptable—which, if you believe in an all-powerful God, means God intentionally put temptation into Eve. Which seems like a dirty trick, if you ask me. There's no reason the Obin should desire sentience. It'll do them no good. But they want it anyway. I think it's possible that the Consu, rather than screwing up and creating an intelligence without ego, intentionally created the Obin that way, and then programmed them with the desire for the one thing they could not have."

  "But why?"

  "Why do the Consu do anything?" Boutin said. "When you're the most advanced species around, you don't have to explain yourselves to the rock bangers, which would be us. For our purposes, they might as well be gods. And the Obin are the poor, insensate Adams and Eves."

  "So this makes you the snake," Jared said.

  Boutin smiled at the backhanded reference. "Maybe so," he said. "And maybe by giving the Obin what they want, I'll force them out of their egoless paradise. They can deal with that. In the meantime, I'll get what I want from this. I'll get my war, and I'll get the end of the Colonial Union."

  The "tree" the three of them looked at stood about ten meters high and was about a meter in diameter. The trunk was covered with ridges; in a rainfall these could funnel water into the inner part of the tree. Every three meters, larger ridges sprouted a circular array of vines and delicate branches, decreasing in circumference as they increased in altitude. Sagan, Seaborg and Harvey watched as the tree swayed in the breeze.

  "It's a pretty light breeze to make the tree sway this much," Sagan said.

  "The wind's probably faster up there," Harvey said.

  "Not by that much," Sagan said. "If at all. It's only ten meters up."

  "Maybe it's hollow," Seaborg said. "Like the trees on Phoenix. When Dirac and I were doing our thing, we had to be careful which of the Phoenix trees we walked across. Some of the smaller ones wouldn't have supported our weight."

  Sagan nodded. She approached the tree and put weight on one of the smaller ridges. It held for a reasonable amount of time before she could snap it off. She looked up at the tree again, thinking.

  "Going for a climb, Lieutenant?" Harvey asked. Sagan didn't answer; she gripped the ridges on the tree and hoisted herself up, taking care to distribute her weight as evenly as possible so as not to put too much strain on any one ridge. About two-thirds of the way up, with the trunk beginning to taper, she felt the tree begin to bend. Her weight was pulling down the trunk. Three-quarters of the way up, and the tree was significantly bent. Sagan listened for the sounds of the tree snapping or cracking, but heard nothing except the rustle of the tree ridges scraping against each other. These trees were immensely flexible; Sagan suspected that they saw a lot of wind as Arist's global ocean generated immense hurricanes that lashed over the planet's relatively tiny island continents.

  "Harvey," Sagan said, moving slightly back and forth to keep the tree balanced. "Tell me if the tree looks like it's going to snap."

  "The base of the trunk looks fine," Harvey said.

  Sagan looked over to the nearest gun. "How far do you think it is to that gun?" she said.

  Harvey figured out where she was going with that. "Not nearly far enough for you to do what you're thinking of doing, Lieutenant."

  Sagan wasn't so sure about that. "Harvey," she said. "Go get Wigner."

  "What?" Harvey said.

  "Bring Wigner here," Sagan said. "I want to try something." Harvey gawked in disbelief for a moment, and then stomped off to get Wigner. Sagan looked down at Seaborg. "How are you holding up?" she asked.

  "My leg hurts," Seaborg said. "And my head hurts. I keep feeling like I'm missing something."

  "It's the integration," Sagan said. "It's hard to focus without it."

  "I'm focusing fine," Seaborg said. "It's just that I'm focusing on how much I'm missing."

  "You'll make it," Sagan said. Seaborg grunted.

  A few minutes later Harvey appeared with Wigner's body in a fireman's carry. "Let me guess," Harvey said. "You want me to deliver him to you."

  "Yes, please," Sagan said.

  "Sure, hell, why not?" Harvey said. "Nothing like climbing a tree while you've got a dead body over your shoulder."

  "You can do it," Seaborg said.

  "As long as people don't distract me," Harvey growled. He shifted Wigner and began to climb, adding his weight and Wigner's to the tree. The tree creaked and dipped considerably, causing Harvey to inch along to keep his balance and to keep from losing Wigner. By the time he
got to Sagan, the trunk was bent at nearly a ninety-degree angle.

  "What now?" Harvey said.

  "Can you put him between us?" Sagan said. Harvey grunted, carefully slid Wigner off his shoulder, and positioned his body so it was prone on the tree. He looked up at Sagan. "Just for the record, this is a pretty fucked-up way for him to go," Harvey said.

  "He's helping us," Sagan said. "There are worse things." She carefully swung her leg over the trunk of the tree. Harvey did the same in the other direction. "Count of three," Sagan said, and when she reached three they both jumped out of the tree, five meters to the ground.

  Relieved of the weight of two humans, the tree snapped back toward perpendicular and then beyond it, flinging Wigner's corpse off the trunk and arcing it toward the guns. It was not an entirely successful launch; Wigner slipped down the trunk just prior to launch, compromising the total energy available and positioning him off-center just before he became airborne. Wigner's arc dropped him directly in front of the closest gun, which pulverized him instantly as soon as he fell into firing range. He dropped as a pile of meat and entrails.

  "Christ," Seaborg said.

  Sagan turned to Seaborg. "Can you climb with that leg?" she asked.

  "I can," Seaborg said. "But I'm not in a rush to get all shot up like that."

  "You won't," Sagan said. "I'll go."

  "You just saw what happened to Wigner, right?" Harvey asked.

  "I saw," Sagan said. "He was a corpse and he had no control over his flight. He also weighs more, and it was you and me in the tree. I'm lighter, I'm alive and the two of you mass more. I should be able to clear the gun."

  "If you're wrong, you'll be pate," Harvey said.

  "At least it'll be quick," Sagan said.

  "Yes," Harvey said. "But messy."

  "Look, you'll have plenty of time to criticize me when I'm dead," Sagan said. "For now, I'd just like all of us to get up this tree."

  A few minutes later Seaborg and Harvey were on either side of Sagan, who was crouched and balancing on the bent trunk.

  "Any last words?" Harvey said.

  "I've always thought you were a real pain in the ass, Harvey," Sagan said.