The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  After another brief interchange the commander turned to Afriel. “The symbiote is not pleased with your arrival,” she told Afriel in the Investor language. “There has apparently been some disturbance here involving humans, in the recent past. However, I have prevailed upon it to admit you to the Nest. The episode has been recorded. Payment for my diplomatic services will be arranged with your faction when I return to your native star system.”

  “I thank Your Authority,” Afriel said. “Please convey to the symbiote my best personal wishes, and the harmlessness and humility of my intentions—” He broke off short as the symbiote lunged toward him, biting him savagely in the calf of his left leg. Afriel jerked free and leapt backward in the heavy artificial gravity, going into a defensive position. The symbiote had ripped away a long shred of his pants leg; it now crouched quietly, eating it.

  “It will convey your scent and composition to its nestmates,” said the commander. “This is necessary. Otherwise you would be classed as an invader, and the Swarm’s warrior caste would kill you at once.”

  Afriel relaxed quickly and pressed his hand against the puncture wound to stop the bleeding. He hoped that none of the Investors had noticed his reflexive action. It would not mesh well with his story of being a harmless researcher.

  “We will reopen the air lock soon,” the commander said phlegmatically, leaning back on her thick reptilian tail. The symbiote continued to munch the shred of cloth. Afriel studied the creature’s neckless segmented head. It had a mouth and nostrils; it had bulbous atrophied eyes on stalks; there were hinged slats that might have been radio receivers, and two parallel ridges of clumped wriggling antennae, sprouting among three chitinous plates. Their function was unknown to him.

  The air lock door opened. A rush of dense, smoky aroma entered the departure cabin. It seemed to bother the half-dozen Investors, who left rapidly. “We will return in six hundred and twelve of your days, as by our agreement,” the commander said.

  “I thank Your Authority,” Afriel said.

  “Good luck,” the commander said in English. Afriel smiled.

  The symbiote, with a sinuous wriggle of its segmented body, crept into the air lock. Afriel followed it. The air lock door shut behind them. The creature said nothing to him but continued munching loudly. The second door opened, and the symbiote sprang through it, into a wide, round stone tunnel. It disappeared at once into the gloom.

  Afriel put his sunglasses into a pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pair of infrared goggles. He strapped them to his head and stepped out of the air lock. The artificial gravity vanished, replaced by the almost imperceptible gravity of the Swarm’s asteroid nest. Afriel smiled, comfortable for the first time in weeks. Most of his adult life had been spent in free fall, in the Shapers’ colonies in the Rings of Saturn.

  Squatting in a dark cavity in the side of the tunnel was a disk-headed furred animal the size of an elephant. It was clearly visible in the infrared of its own body heat. Afriel could hear it breathing. It waited patiently until Afriel had launched himself past it, deeper into the tunnel. Then it took its place in the end of the tunnel, puffing itself up with air until its swollen head securely plugged the exit into space. Its multiple legs sank firmly into sockets in the walls.

  The Investors’ ship had left. Afriel remained here, inside one of the millions of planetoids that circled the giant star Betelgeuse in a girdling ring with almost five times the mass of Jupiter. As a source of potential wealth it dwarfed the entire solar system, and it belonged, more or less, to the Swarm. At least, no other race had challenged them for it within the memory of the Investors.

  Afriel peered up the corridor. It seemed deserted, and without other bodies to cast infrared heat, he could not see very far. Kicking against the wall, he floated hesitantly down the corridor.

  He heard a human voice. “Dr. Afriel!”

  “Dr. Mirny!” he called out. “This way!”

  He first saw a pair of young symbiotes scuttling toward him, the tips of their clawed feet barely touching the walls. Behind them came a woman wearing goggles like his own. She was young, and attractive in the trim, anonymous way of the genetically reshaped.

  She screeched something at the symbiotes in their own language, and they halted, waiting. She coasted forward, and Afriel caught her arm, expertly stopping their momentum.

  “You didn’t bring any luggage?” she said anxiously.

  He shook his head. “We got your warning before I was sent out. I have only the clothes I’m wearing and a few items in my pockets.”

  She looked at him critically. “Is that what people are wearing in the Rings these days? Things have changed more than I thought.”

  Afriel glanced at his brocaded coat and laughed. “It’s a matter of policy. The Investors are always readier to talk to a human who looks ready to do business on a large scale. All the Shapers’ representatives dress like this these days. We’ve stolen a jump on the Mechanists; they still dress in those coveralls.”

  He hesitated, not wanting to offend her. Galina Mirny’s intelligence was rated at almost two hundred. Men and women that bright were sometimes flighty and unstable, likely to retreat into private fantasy worlds or become enmeshed in strange and impenetrable webs of plotting and rationalization. High intelligence was the strategy the Shapers had chosen in the struggle for cultural dominance, and they were obliged to stick to it, despite its occasional disadvantages. They had tried breeding the Superbright—those with quotients over two hundred—but so many had defected from the Shapers’ colonies that the faction had stopped producing them.

  “You wonder about my own clothing,” Mirny said.

  “It certainly has the appeal of novelty,” Afriel said with a smile.

  “It was woven from the fibers of a pupa’s cocoon,” she said. “My original wardrobe was eaten by a scavenger symbiote during the troubles last year. I usually go nude, but I didn’t want to offend you by too great a show of intimacy.”

  Afriel shrugged. “I often go nude myself, I never had much use for clothes except for pockets. I have a few tools on my person, but most are of little importance. We’re Shapers, our tools are here.” He tapped his head. “If you can show me a safe place to put my clothes…”

  She shook her head. It was impossible to see her eyes for the goggles, which made her expression hard to read. “You’ve made your first mistake, doctor. There are no places of our own here. It was the same mistake the Mechanist agents made, the same one that almost killed me as well. There is no concept of privacy or property here. This is the Nest. If you seize any part of it for yourself—to store equipment, to sleep in, whatever—then you become an intruder, an enemy. The two Mechanists—a man and a woman—tried to secure an empty chamber for their computer lab. Warriors broke down their door and devoured them. Scavengers ate their equipment, glass, metal, and all.”

  Afriel smiled coldly. “It must have cost them a fortune to ship all that material here.”

  Mirny shrugged. “They’re wealthier than we are. Their machines, their mining. They meant to kill me, I think. Surreptitiously, so the warriors wouldn’t be upset by a show of violence. They had a computer that was learning the language of the springtails faster than I could.”

  “But you survived,” Afriel pointed out. “And your tapes and reports—especially the early ones, when you still had most of your equipment—were of tremendous interest. The Council is behind you all the way. You’ve become quite a celebrity in the Rings, during your absence.”

  “Yes, I expected as much,” she said.

  Afriel was nonplused. “If I found any deficiency in them,” he said carefully, “it was in my own field, alien linguistics.” He waved vaguely at the two symbiotes who accompanied her. “I assume you’ve made great progress in communicating with the symbiotes, since they seem to do all the talking for the Nest.”

  She looked at him with an unreadable expression and shrugged. “There are at least fifteen different kinds of symbiotes here. Those
that accompany me are called the springtails, and they speak only for themselves. They are savages, doctor, who received attention from the Investors only because they can still talk. They were a spacefaring race once, but they’ve forgotten it. They discovered the Nest and they were absorbed, they became parasites.” She tapped one of them on the head. “I tamed these two because I learned to steal and beg food better than they can. They stay with me now and protect me from the larger ones. They are jealous, you know. They have only been with the Nest for perhaps ten thousand years and are still uncertain of their position. They still think, and wonder sometimes. After ten thousand years there is still a little of that left to them.”

  “Savages,” Afriel said. “I can well believe that. One of them bit me while I was still aboard the starship. He left a lot to be desired as an ambassador.”

  “Yes, I warned him you were coming,” said Mirny. “He didn’t much like the idea, but I was able to bribe him with food….I hope he didn’t hurt you badly.”

  “A scratch,” Afriel said. “I assume there’s no chance of infection.”

  “I doubt it very much. Unless you brought your own bacteria with you.”

  “Hardly likely,” Afriel said, offended. “I have no bacteria. And I wouldn’t have brought microorganisms to an alien culture anyway.”

  Mirny looked away. “I thought you might have some of the special genetically altered ones….I think we can go now. The springtail will have spread your scent by mouth-touching in the subsidiary chamber, ahead of us. It will be spread throughout the Nest in a few hours. Once it reaches the queen, it will spread very quickly.”

  She jammed her feet against the hard shell of one of the young springtails and launched herself down the hall. Afriel followed her. The air was warm and he was beginning to sweat under his elaborate clothing, but his antiseptic sweat was odorless.

  They exited into a vast chamber dug from the living rock. It was arched and oblong, eighty meters long and about twenty in diameter. It swarmed with members of the Nest.

  There were hundreds of them. Most of them were workers, eight-legged and furred, the size of Great Danes. Here and there were members of the warrior caste, horse-sized furry monsters with heavy fanged heads the size and shape of overstuffed chairs.

  A few meters away, two workers were carrying a member of the sensor caste, a being whose immense flattened head was attached to an atrophied body that was mostly lungs. The sensor had great platelike eyes, and its furred chitin sprouted long coiled antennae that twitched feebly as the workers bore it along. The workers clung to the hollowed rock of the chamber walls with hooked and suckered feet.

  A paddle-limbed monster with a hairless, faceless head came sculling past them, through the warm reeking air. The front of its head was a nightmare of sharp grinding jaws and blunt armored acid spouts. “A tunneler,” Mirny said. “It can take us deeper into the Nest—come with me.” She launched herself toward it and took a handhold on its furry, segmented back. Afriel followed her, joined by the two immature springtails, who clung to the thing’s hide with their forelimbs. Afriel shuddered at the warm, greasy feel of its rank, damp fur. It continued to scull through the air, its eight fringed paddle feet catching the air like wings.

  “There must be thousands of them,” Afriel said.

  “I said a hundred thousand in my last report, but that was before I had fully explored the Nest. Even now there are long stretches I haven’t seen. They must number close to a quarter of a million. This asteroid is about the size of the Mechanists’ biggest base—Ceres. It still has rich veins of carbonaceous material. It’s far from mined out.”

  Afriel closed his eyes. If he was to lose his goggles, he would have to feel his way, blind, through these teeming, twitching, wriggling thousands. “The population’s still expanding, then?”

  “Definitely,” she said. “In fact, the colony will launch a mating swarm soon. There are three dozen male and female alates in the chambers near the queen. Once they’re launched, they’ll mate and start new Nests. I’ll take you to see them presently.” She hesitated. “We’re entering one of the fungal gardens now.”

  One of the young springtails quietly shifted position. Grabbing the tunneler’s fur with its forelimbs, it began to gnaw on the cuff of Afriel’s pants. Afriel kicked it soundly, and it jerked back, retracting its eyestalks.

  When he looked up again, he saw that they had entered a second chamber, much larger than the first. The walls around, overhead, and below were buried under an explosive profusion of fungus. The most common types were swollen barrel-like domes, multibranched massed thickets, and spaghetti-like tangled extrusions that moved very slightly in the faint and odorous breeze. Some of the barrels were surrounded by dim mists of exhaled spores.

  “You see those caked-up piles beneath the fungus, its growth medium?” Mirny said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not sure whether it is a plant form or just some kind of complex biochemical sludge,” she said. “The point is that it grows in sunlight, on the outside of the asteroid. A food source that grows in naked space! Imagine what that would be worth, back in the Rings.”

  “There aren’t words for its value,” Afriel said.

  “It’s inedible by itself,” she said. “I tried to eat a very small piece of it once. It was like trying to eat plastic.”

  “Have you eaten well, generally speaking?”

  “Yes. Our biochemistry is quite similar to the Swarm’s. The fungus itself is perfectly edible. The regurgitate is more nourishing, though. Internal fermentation in the worker hindgut adds to its nutritional value.”

  Afriel stared. “You grow used to it,” Mirny said. “Later I’ll teach you how to solicit food from the workers. It’s a simple matter of reflex tapping—it’s not controlled by pheromones, like most of their behavior.” She brushed a long lock of clumped and dirty hair from the side of her face. “I hope the pheromonal samples I sent back were worth the cost of transportation.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Afriel. “The chemistry of them was fascinating. We managed to synthesize most of the compounds. I was part of the research team myself.” He hesitated. How far did he dare trust her? She had not been told about the experiment he and his superiors had planned. As far as Mirny knew, he was a simple, peaceful researcher, like herself. The Shapers’ scientific community was suspicious of the minority involved in military work and espionage.

  As an investment in the future, the Shapers had sent researchers to each of the nineteen alien races described to them by the Investors. This had cost the Shaper economy many gigawatts of precious energy and tons of rare metals and isotopes. In most cases, only two or three researchers could be sent; in seven cases, only one. For the Swarm, Galina Mirny had been chosen. She had gone peacefully, trusting in her intelligence and her good intentions to keep her alive and sane. Those who had sent her had not known whether her findings would be of any use or importance. They had only known that it was imperative that she be sent, even alone, even ill equipped, before some other faction sent their own people and possibly discovered some technique or fact of overwhelming importance. And Dr. Mirny had indeed discovered such a situation. It had made her mission into a matter of Ring security. That was why Afriel had come.

  “You synthesized the compounds?” she said. “Why?”

  Afriel smiled disarmingly. “Just to prove to ourselves that we could do it, perhaps.”

  She shook her head. “No mind games, Dr. Afriel, please. I came this far partly to escape from such things. Tell me the truth.”

  Afriel stared at her, regretting that the goggles meant he could not meet her eyes. “Very well,” he said. “You should know, then, that I have been ordered by the Ring Council to carry out an experiment that may endanger both our lives.”

  Mirny was silent for a moment. “You’re from Security, then?”

  “My rank is captain.”

  “I knew it….I knew it when those two Mechanists arrived. They were so polite, and so suspi
cious—I think they would have killed me at once if they hadn’t hoped to bribe or torture some secret out of me. They scared the life out of me, Captain Afriel….You scare me, too.”

  “We live in a frightening world, doctor. It’s a matter of faction security.”

  “Everything’s a matter of faction security with your lot,” she said. “I shouldn’t take you any farther, or show you anything more. This Nest, these creatures—they’re not intelligent, Captain. They can’t think, they can’t learn. They’re innocent, primordially innocent. They have no knowledge of good and evil. They have no knowledge of anything. The last thing they need is to become pawns in a power struggle within some other race, light-years away.”

  The tunneler had turned into an exit from the fungal chambers and was paddling slowly along in the warm darkness. A group of creatures like gray, flattened basketballs floated by from the opposite direction. One of them settled on Afriel’s sleeve, clinging with frail whiplike tentacles. Afriel brushed it gently away, and it broke loose, emitting a stream of foul reddish droplets.

  “Naturally I agree with you in principle, doctor,” Afriel said smoothly. “But consider these Mechanists. Some of their extreme factions are already more than half machine. Do you expect humanitarian motives from them? They’re cold, doctor—cold and soulless creatures who can cut a living man or woman to bits and never feel their pain. Most of the other factions hate us. They call us racist supermen. Would you rather that one of these cults do what we must do, and use the results against us?”

  “This is double-talk.” She looked away. All around them workers laden down with fungus, their jaws full and guts stuffed with it, were spreading out into the Nest, scuttling alongside them or disappearing into branch tunnels departing in every direction, including straight up and straight down. Afriel saw a creature much like a worker, but with only six legs, scuttle past in the opposite direction, overhead. It was a parasite mimic. How long, he wondered, did it take a creature to evolve to look like that?