Parker Interstellar Travels 4: The Trilisk Hunt

by Michael McCloskey

  “How can we change the world without killing people? Without imprisoning them?”

  “Maybe you can’t. At least you’re thinking about that guy and feeling guilty. You think one of the hundred people in charge back home would blink an eye at it?”

  “It starts small. Power corrupts, right?”

  Magnus nodded. “When I was a kid I used to dismiss that line. But the older I get, the more I see it. I say we just topple the United Nations and let the individual districts run themselves. It won’t be us. That way, they’ll be just like frontier planets. Everyone can make their own local rules, and there’s a place for everybody.”

  “I try to tell myself those top one hundred are terrible people. That they deserve what they get.”

  “Life is not black and white. You’re old enough to know it. You can still make an improvement. We’re not acting lightly. Don’t turn back. Someone has to do something, and we have the power to do it. And what if you find out some of them are Trilisks?”

  “If I knew they were Trilisks, then I would be able to do it. I could give it my all without guilt holding me back. And if there are Terrans who know…”

  “Probably no Terran back home knows. Why would a Trilisk reveal itself to a subject?”

  Telisa shook her head. “It’s all crazy. I have to tell you something about Cilreth.”

  “Yes?”

  “Telisa, Magnus. Come here please,” Cilreth urged.

  “Telisa. Did you know Cilreth has copied herself?” Imanol sent to her at the same time.

  Magnus lifted an eyebrow. Perhaps Imanol was talking to him, too.

  They went to the training gathering room, where everyone seemed to be having a confrontation. Caden and Siobhan were just arriving. Telisa saw no sign of Maxsym. Two copies of Cilreth were present. Even knowing about it already, Telisa felt shock to see both of them standing together.

  When he saw the new arrivals, Imanol pointed an accusing finger at Cilreth. “As you can see, there are two Cilreths now,” he said. “And I do mean now; they’re both awake.”

  “How did you find out?” Magnus asked.

  “Just ask Clacker for a crew manifest,” Imanol said. “You’ll see them both. Wait. Did you already know?” Imanol’s voice rose.

  “No,” Magnus snapped. “But we all decided for ourselves whether or not to get copies. Our problem is different from that. We now believe the Trilisk can control the supersedure copies.”

  Caden’s face showed his reaction to the revelation. He looked surprised, then relieved.

  He was wondering why he turned on us. Feeling guilty about it.

  “Put her back into a Trilisk column!” Imanol demanded.

  “We haven’t all had a chance to think or talk about this,” Cilreth said.

  “We’re out there risking our lives, and you’re in here playing with yourself. Literally,” Imanol said. “She has to go away!”

  Literally? Is he guessing that? Telisa thought. But I guess I figured as much myself…

  “I said give us a second, asshole!” Cilreth said. She turned to confront Imanol. She looked as if she might attack him.

  “Give her some room, Imanol,” Telisa said sharply. She walked over to Cilreth.

  “How do we even know the right one is going back in?” Imanol persisted.

  “Shiny will know,” Telisa said.

  “He’s copied too!”

  “I’ll verify it myself,” Telisa said. “We can test the strength of her muscle tissue with an electric shock. The Trilisk versions of ourselves are considerably stronger, I can spot it. Ask Maxsym to do the examination if you have to. Surely you would trust his conclusion?”

  Imanol finally seemed to acquiesce.

  It is a little odd, Telisa thought. Can you really fall in love with yourself?

  Telisa shook her head. Terrans could no longer keep up with the ramifications of their own technology, much less when they discovered whole new problems from alien tech overnight.

  “We know she has to go back,” Cilreth said quietly. “You’re right, Imanol. You’re just also a nissniss.” Telisa had heard the NSNS insult before: a noisy source/null sink. It basically meant he was a loudmouth waste of air that could not listen or learn.

  Imanol is actually none of those, but he’s rude and insensitive, no doubt about that.

  “Maxsym, please meet us in one of the tube rooms,” Cilreth sent publicly. Telisa walked them to the rooms. The others remained behind to discuss the situation. Telisa wanted to hear it, but Cilreth needed her more at the moment. Magnus would fill her in later.

  Cilreth embraced Cilreth2. Finally they parted.

  What did she tell herself? Most likely: I’ll get you back out of there. As soon as I can.

  Cilreth2 walked into an open Trilisk tube. The clear barrier rose, surrounding her. Then the opaque part of the tube followed suit until Cilreth2 was out of sight and presumably in stasis.

  “Shiny, you have to stay back here and keep a low profile. If the Trilisk becomes aware of you here, you’re a threat, and he can shut you down or just have you kill the rest of us—maybe even yourself.”

  “Affirmative, correct, agreement,” Shiny said.

  “Can you lock yourself out of Clacker? If you are enslaved over on Thumper, maybe Cilreth can run Clacker here.”

  “Negotiation, time sequenced events: Shiny locks out, deauthorizes, disconnects Shiny from Clacker; Terrans kill Trilisk, free Shiny. Shiny access returns.”

  “I promise, Shiny.”

  “Beginning, embarking, launching.”

  “Cilreth,” Telisa said.

  Cilreth sent Telisa a private response. “Just a sec. I’ve got to watch him do this…”

  Exactly. Good, Telisa thought.

  Maxsym arrived.

  “Is this an original?” she asked him. Maxsym froze a second, blinked, and then got out the analyzer he had received from PIT.

  “You know what? Let’s not trust that thing. Just in case,” Telisa said.

  Now I’m getting really paranoid.

  Maxsym took her new suggestion without comment.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, and scrambled away.

  “I’ll have to examine this for a while,” Cilreth said. “What now?”

  “Let’s go see what we missed,” Telisa said. “Wait a sec. Maxsym is coming back.”

  Maxsym arrived. Telisa did not see any new piece of equipment.

  “I need your arm out of the suit,” he said stiffly.

  Maxsym needs to relax. It will take him awhile to know us, I guess.

  Cilreth told her suit to unclasp along the front. One side of her suit fell aside, and she pulled her arm out. One breast lay exposed, covered only by her super-thin undersheers.

  Maxsym looked uncomfortable. He cleared his throat and then proceeded.

  Something of a prude? Telisa wondered.

  “Lie down, please,” he said.

  I feel like a doctor’s assistant here to observe.

  Cilreth looked around for something to lie on. This part of the ship was mostly empty, so she shrugged and dropped to the deck.

  Maxsym knelt beside her. “I need your hand,” he said. Cilreth lifted it.

  Maxsym took her arm and brought it perpendicular to the floor. Then he took a device out of a pocket and touched it to Cilreth’s arm. Telisa heard a soft snap. Cilreth bucked.

  “OUCH!” Cilreth yelled. She recoiled. “Could Cthulhu please perform the examination instead?” she said sharply.

  “This is the original,” Maxsym said. “An augmented arm would have contracted much more forcefully.” He stood and took out his analyzer. “The suspect device confirms my informal conclusion.”

  Suspect device.

  Telisa nodded. “Okay. Sorry, Cilreth.” To Maxsym, she said, “It’s not really suspect. But we were bitten by Trilisk technology recently. As you probably guessed, we produced that with a Trilisk trick.”

  Maxsym nodded but asked no questions.

 
Cilreth seemed mollified by his assertion she was the original. She replaced her arm into the suit. “That’s okay,” she said. “No hard feelings, Maxsym. I’m not Imanol,” she added with vitriol.

  “I find him very irritating,” Maxsym said frankly.

  “Okay, Magnus is waiting for us back by his room. Come along, let’s see if any decisions were made without us!”

  The three of them walked to meet Magnus. He looked surprised to see so many of the crew show up.

  Maybe he wanted to get me alone, Telisa thought.

  “What did we miss?” Telisa said aloud.

  “Mostly worry about the other copy: Shiny2,” Magnus said. He met Cilreth’s gaze. “And some gossip about the Cilreths. You’re all the rage on the local grapevine.”

  Cilreth laughed. “I guess so.”

  “Does Shiny know about the Trilisk control problem?” Telisa asked.

  “I doubt it. Suppose you are Shiny2. Do you want Shiny to know you’re a potential Trilisk mind slave? I bet Shiny would just kill his copy,” Cilreth said.

  “We need to put Shiny2 away and get Shiny back here,” Telisa said.

  “It’s a risk having Shiny2 awake,” Magnus agreed. “One good thing is that our copies didn’t know about it.”

  “Oh, yes. I forgot about that. Do you think the Trilisk has access to their knowledge?”

  “No way to know,” Cilreth said. “I’m going to try to get a message out to Shiny. Get him to come help us.”

  “Don’t hold your breath. He’s a long way away,” Telisa said.

  Chapter 22

  Maxsym stared up at the jagged buildings in the sky. They were amazing.

  I’ve seen these before. My other self. Do I remember that?

  Maxsym decided he did not. Their familiarity came from the scout robot feeds he had watched during his review.

  The rest of the team must have been having similar thoughts. They stared up at the sky for long moments. Everyone wore a flat parachute pack on their back. A squad of twenty or thirty Vovokan attendant spheres flew out of the port behind them and spread out into the sky.

  Our friendly alien searching for our not-so-friendly alien.

  “We don’t know if the Trilisk moved or not,” Magnus said. “We lost vision in the area after the last battle. I don’t want to make any assumptions. We’ll move forward to a point halfway between here and the center of the habitat and gather more intelligence.”

  “Learning more about the Blackvines might help somehow,” Maxsym said. He could not help but try to get himself some more time to study the creatures. He worried his plug might be too transparent, but despite his motivation, what he said might be true.

  “I agree,” Telisa said. “You keep learning about them. Cilreth is still learning about the networks of the habitat, so work closely with her.”

  Maxsym nodded enthusiastically.

  Anything to focus on these amazing creatures rather than fight the other, so deadly one.

  He heard a new noise. He looked down into the depression that surrounded the lock. Four large walking machines stomped up through the entrance. Each was the size of a land car.

  “Those don’t look like any of Magnus’s machines,” Siobhan noted.

  “They’re Vovokan walkers. War machines. Shiny can fit inside, but they can run themselves as well,” Telisa said. The walkers hopped out of the depression on powerful legs. Then they jumped into the sky. Maxsym felt a sense of wonder watching them fly up among the houses, growing smaller and smaller until they disappeared into the distance.

  He looked across the flat, lit surface on the interior of the habitat.

  Those black creatures created all this? Hard to believe.

  Maxsym went over what he knew of them. Slow moving creatures, seemingly solitary, perhaps phobically so. They pretended to be sessile in the presence of strangers. Or else they were somehow gripped by panic or overcome by an instinctual need to freeze. He suspected from his analysis so far they used both asexual and sexual reproduction. Obviously, the creatures were intelligent.

  “So how does a society function without communication?” he said aloud.

  “They communicate. Not directly,” Telisa said. “They change the environment around them. That is a kind of communication, really. They put entries into their shared travel reservations. They leave behind machines that can be conveniently used or cannibalized.”

  “It seems so very… less efficient than direct communication.”

  “Perhaps. Yes, I think so. The other creatures we’ve met made more use of communication. I’d say it is an advantage. Just not one that every type of creature in the universe enjoys.”

  “What could be the evolutionary pressure for such extreme individualism?”

  “Disease,” Imanol said. “They have to stay away from each other.”

  Maxsym nodded. “Possible, I suppose.”

  “Perhaps they’re very violent,” Caden said. “Or maybe there isn’t enough food for all of them.”

  “Sunlight? Should be plenty.”

  “Here, yes,” Caden continued. “What if their home planet had only a few sunny spots in dense jungles and they had to fight to the death over them?”

  “If only we could just ask one,” Siobhan said.

  “I bet they don’t even know,” Maxsym said. “Would any of them serve as historian? They each only acknowledge and accept themselves. They would have to be immortal.”

  “Maybe they are,” Siobhan said.

  Maxsym nodded. He doubted the creatures were immortal, but he had not managed to perfect any models of their internal metabolism to try to find out. Perhaps if they would let him sit out the hunt… but they would just assume he was afraid now because his superior copy died.

  And they would be right, to some degree, he thought. But truly, I could do Terra more good learning about the Blackvines than playing space mercenary. Telisa seems happy to let me study them. She understands.

  Yet Maxsym knew he was also part of the combat team. In a group so small, everyone needed more than a specialty. They were each scientist, explorer, soldier, and… entrepreneur? Maxsym sincerely hoped he would not have to actually play businessman.

  I think I’d rather face the Trilisk than sell an artifact to anyone on the frontier.

  Chapter 23

  Cilreth received a link request from Telisa as she showered at the beginning of her shift. She welcomed the chance to talk, since she was not absorbed in work yet and she had been lonely since the PIT team had relegated Cilreth2 back to the Trilisk column that created her.

  “Hi, Cilreth. We need to understand the Blackvine’s systems here better,” Telisa said. “Shiny thinks we could track the Trilisk that way. Maxsym is studying them as well. Can you try to find out what Shiny knows so we’re in the loop?”

  “Will do,” Cilreth said. “I’ll put my studies of Clacker on hold. I need a break anyway.”

  “What do we know so far? Their technology is kinda mix and match?”

  “Yes. I think of a race of brilliant but isolated geniuses, like a collection of Da Vincis, Einsteins, and Cardires who hate each other.”

  “Not hate each other, really,” Telisa said. “Because then they would fight or secure their discoveries against the others. It’s as if they’re plain oblivious to each other.”

  “Yes, but not oblivious either. They use that reservation system to avoid running into each other.”

  “Afraid of each other?” Telisa suggested.

  “Maybe. Who knows? Maybe there isn’t even a human word for what they are to one another. They’re freakin’ aliens.”

  “We can build a model of them once we have enough information. No matter how strange they are, we’ll figure out how to predict their behavior better. Right now, I’m thinking they’re afraid of anything alive other than themselves. Xenophobic of anything other.”

  “Okay. Well, that’s out of my league. You figure them out, and I’ll just try to understand their networks.”

&n
bsp; “You said networks. I’m guessing there’s more than one because different Blackvines made different ones.”

  “Yes, I believe so. About half of them use one, and there are two other minority networks and a few other experiments that probably never took off.”

  “Let us know if you find the Trilisk,” Telisa said and disconnected. The communication was a bit abrupt, but Cilreth had grown used to that. People in the field had other things to worry about. They did not mean to be rude or bossy; they were just trying to stay alive.

  Cilreth considered waking Cilreth2 to help. Then she went even further in her imagination.

  Should I make a third copy? She could study the Blackvine system, and I could stay focused on the Clacker. Of course, the copy will be just like me and be pissed to get stuck with the other job.

  Cilreth decided it was too soon to make another copy. Besides, what would the others say when they found out?

  They did the same thing. They just run with one asleep, is all. This is better.

  Cilreth left her little control room to wake up her copy.

  ***

  Only a day later Cilreth contacted the team to give them an update.

  “Shiny has done most of the work here. I’ve learned a lot, but he’s way ahead. He’s started passive monitoring of the networks, and he’s analyzing it all real time. We think the Trilisk is still inside the central buildings of the habitat.”

  “No reason for it to leave. It easily deflected us before,” Arakaki said.

  “Can you shut it down? Keep it out of the Blackvine systems?” Telisa asked.

  “Can we take over?” Magnus said.

  “No, and we wouldn’t want to anyway,” Cilreth said. “We would tip our hand. This way we can track it. The Trilisk only shows up for a few hours at a time. It’s weird. During those few hours, it’s all over the Blackvine systems like crazy. Then it goes away for most of a day. I should add there’s no way for us to keep it from knowing where we are the same way. It probably saw you coming before.”