Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  The Great Leap was an apt name. The world that DalRiss Translators called Home, it turned out, was well beyond the farthest regions explored thus far by Man—115 light years from Altair, 130 from Sol. Despite its distance, the DalRiss sun was a naked-eye star long known to Earth-based astronomers as Theta Serpentis; tenth-century Arabs had called it Al Haiyi, the serpent, and this had come down to modern sky watchers as Alya.

  To be visible at all at such a range, Alya had to be bright. Dev felt an uncomfortable inner twist akin to disorientation when he learned that Alya was a double star, with Alya B a class A7 nearly identical to Altair save for its slower rotation, while Alya A was brighter still, an A5. It looked as though he was going to have to relearn much of what he’d thought he’d known. That such a star should have worlds and life, intelligent life, contradicted most of what Dev had assimilated on planetary bioevolution back in his starpilot days.

  Fiercely radiating, white stars squandered their hydrogen reserves far more quickly than their more sedate F-, G-, and K-class brethren. Where a G-class star like Sol could expect to remain on the main sequence for ten billion years, stars like Altair or Alya A had less than two billion years before their spendthrift ways caught up with them and they collapsed, after a spectacular and planet-killing series of stellar pyrotechnics, into white dwarfs. On Earth, it was believed, life had appeared less than a billion years after the planet’s crust formed, but it was another three billion years before those first primitive organisms learned to join into multicelled creatures. Another half billion years passed after that before those cells’ remote descendants began clinking pieces of flint together to make tools and fire.

  So how could intelligent life evolve on a world less than two billion years old?

  The best guess any of the scientists who accompanied IEF-1 could manage was that evolution on such a planet proceeded at a frantic rate, at least compared with any of the life-bearing worlds so far investigated by Man. A-class stars, brighter and hotter than Sol, radiated far more energy. Ultraviolet and X-rays would be more intense in such a star system, as would the thin, hot proton soup of the solar wind. With lots more energy available for early biotic systems to draw on, mutations would appear more often, and natural selection, the great driver of evolution, would proceed far more quickly.

  But it bothered Dev that his understanding of how things worked could have been so wrong. He wasn’t alone. Two hundred astronomical, planetary, and biological scientists, half from Earth, half from other worlds of the Shichiju, were accompanying IEF-1 aboard the Imperial Research Ship Charles Darwin. Rumor had it that they all were in a collective state of near panic as they struggled to make sense of what the DalRiss emissaries had already revealed.

  It was nearly ten more days before Dev and his companions aboard the Yuduki began to learn anything more about the DalRiss themselves. Most vessels capable of interstellar travel had an upper limit of two to three weeks before rising shipboard temperatures forced them to translate back to normal fourspace from the blue-fired fury of the godsea to radiate the excess heat. Since ship-to-ship communication was impossible within the K-T Plenum, Yuduki’s passengers could learn nothing about what was going on aboard the Darwin until both ships emerged into normal fourspace. The journey had been planned as a series of twelve ten-day hops, with a day of coasting between each hop for cool-down and data exchange.

  Each scrap of new data was eagerly devoured by every one of Yuduki’s passengers as soon as it was available. Simulations beamed across from the Darwin allowed them to “meet” a DalRiss during their scheduled recjacking time and even question it, though most questions were turned aside by the simulation’s AI with a polite “I’m sorry, but that information has not yet been made available to Darwin’s researchers.”

  Dev scheduled his first meeting with a DalRiss simulation so that he could share the experience with Katya. Linked to each other and Yuduki’s ViRsim AI, they entered Lab One aboard the Darwin, a gleaming room of sterile whites and silvers and mirrored surfaces. The atmosphere, Dev learned through his link, was predominantly carbon dioxide, with unhealthy percentages of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and suspended droplets of liquid sulfuric acid. The composition might have mimicked the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, but the air pressure was low enough—less than one atmosphere—that the temperature hovered around a balmy forty degrees Celsius.

  The heat, of course, was not accurately presented in the simulation, any more than was the corrosively poisonous air. As Dev and Katya stepped into the DalRiss habitat, the air felt dank and steamy, with just a trace of the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide, and the light was just harsh enough to make things unpleasantly bright. The air seemed to shimmer a bit, like the mirage above a hot stretch of ferrocrete, but it felt no more uncomfortable than a tropical bioenclave hothouse back on Earth.

  There was little in that room that Dev could relate to anything on Earth. What waited for the two of them was definitely alive; it, no, they moved with a quivering, eager jerkiness. There were three of them, though at first they’d been so close together that Dev had trouble separating them in his mind.

  “These are the DalRiss emissaries.” The inner voice belonged to their AI guide, which would be there to lead them through the simulation. “If you wish to converse with them, you will need Translators.”

  A white-topped table appeared next to Dev. On it were two… creatures, black and glistening. He was reminded at first of the slugs he’d seen emerging from the travel spheres at Norway Ridge, but these were clearly something else.

  What, he wasn’t quite sure yet.

  “The DalRiss create, through genetic and subcellular manipulation, life forms the way we create machines,” the guide’s voice said. “The organisms on the table are called cornels. They are artificially created beings that the DalRiss call Translators. All you need do is touch one.”

  Dev hesitated, then, ashamed of his reluctance in front of Katya, stuck out his hand. The Translator’s skin was wet but not slimy or unpleasant. It quivered, then began sliding up his fingers.

  “The process is painless,” Dev was told as he watched, morbidly fascinated. He was not reassured. The thing looked like a blunt, flat-bodied leech.

  “Is it intelligent?” Katya asked, holding out her hand for the second Translator.

  “Not in the way humans would understand the term. Like certain AI systems, it is intelligent but not self-aware. Its sole purpose is to serve as a bridge between a human and its makers by attuning itself to the human nervous system while at the same time maintaining communication with the DalRiss.”

  “Communication?” The creature had embraced Dev’s hand now, a thin, translucent membrane that fit like a rubber glove. He looked from it to the patiently waiting… things a few meters away. “Telepathy?”

  “Of a sort. The Translators consist of little more than modified DalRiss nervous tissue and an organic radio transmitter. An analogous organ exists in the Maias of Zeta Doradus IV.”

  “Consider them to be an extension of ourselves,” another voice, high-pitched, almost feminine, said in his mind. “A way for our thoughts to touch.”

  Dev jumped. Katya, whose hand had not been fully engulfed yet, was startled. “Dev? What is it?”

  He shook his head, unable to explain, unable to speak. A thousand questions chased one another through his head. How had these creatures acquired the symbology to understand him and to make themselves understood? How had they tapped into his implant?… For that, surely, was the only way they could speak in his mind. If the Translator was actually tapping his nervous system somehow, was there a danger of infection, or of an allergic reaction to alien tissue?

  Dev’s thoughts raced, stirred by fear of the unknown. He had to remind himself that this was a simulation, that he was not really aboard the Darwin, but still tucked away safe and sound in a link module aboard the Yuduki.

  But the questions remained. Someone, obviously, had already gone through th
is for real.

  “The cornels are quite safe for your species,” the voice continued. “Long ago we learned how to tailor servants such as the Translator to other body chemistries. There is no danger.”

  Dev’s eyes were adjusting now to both the light and the strangeness. Picking the closest of the DalRiss towering above him, he focused on it alone. Working step by step, he began to recognize general anatomical features and relate them to things he knew.

  Those, for instance, were legs. The lower body resembled a starfish, with six blunt, flexible appendages that held a spiny orange belly a meter or so off the deck, and a red-brown, leathery hide studded with bony lumps the size of Dev’s thumb.

  And that must be a head, an erect crescent on a slender, jointed neck rising from the center of the body, with fleshy, horizontal folds down the concave side that might have been a kind of face, and a pair of rubbery-looking protrusions to either side like those on a hammerhead shark. As Dev and Katya approached, the assembly swung their way as though it were watching them, a disconcerting effect because, so far as Dev could see, the thing possessed nothing like eyes.

  An elongated casing that looked like hard leather extended back from behind the face, and Dev took that to be the DalRiss’s braincase. Underneath, tucked in between the head and the starfish body, was a spidery complexity sprouting meter-long appendages, bone-hard on the outside, but with joints making them as flexible as whips. They ranged in size from finger-thick branches to flickering threads, always in motion and impossible to count.

  Looking at the arrangement, Dev could not understand how the DalRiss could use those digits as fingers; they were fingers without arms, and much too short to reach past the thing’s massive body. He said as much to Katya.

  “I can demonstrate, if you wish,” the voice in their minds said. There was neither accent nor inflection, and the Inglic grammar and vocabulary seemed perfect. “Give me something to pick up.”

  “Here,” Katya said. She held out her hand and called a hundred-yen coin into being. The AI simulation picked up her thought and gave it reality within the simulation as she dropped it to the shiny deck.

  One of the creatures shuffled forward—Dev estimated it must mass over three hundred kilos—with an incongruous grace. The upper body extended itself, body sections telescoping as fingers unfolded, reaching down and plucking up the coin between three hair-thin tips and handing it back to Katya. The movement was smooth, dextrous, and utterly inhuman. Even after the DalRiss repeated the act for Dev, he could not be sure of what he’d just seen.

  Some aspects of the DalRiss, he decided, were so inhuman that the human mind had trouble grasping them.

  Katya, bolder than Dev at this first encounter, stepped closer, staring up into the folds of a DalRiss face. “I’d like to know how they see,” she said. “It saw the coin. But I don’t see anything like eyes.”

  “That is because mutation and natural selection on our homeworld never led to the evolution of light-perceiving organs,” the DalRiss said. It was disconcerting talking about these beings as though they were a simulation—which they were, of course—and then being addressed by them as though they were physically present. Dev considered tailoring the sim so that the DalRiss were simply exhibits, but he decided not to. He enjoyed watching their movements, seemingly random, but lightning-quick and effortlessly precise.

  “How do you sense your surroundings, then?” he asked.

  “Sound,” the DalRiss replied. “And other senses for which you have no corresponding name.”

  The whales and dolphins that once had swum Earth’s oceans had navigated by sonar. Like them, the DalRiss could “see” reflected sound waves with detail enough to tell lead from copper, solid from hollow, rough from smooth. Like the dolphins, the DalRiss could actually see inside other organisms; they could look at Dev, both “see” and hear the beating of his heart, and know whether or not he’d eaten breakfast. The DalRiss “head” was mostly sound equipment; the crescent shape was filled with dense fluid that acted as a focusing lens for intense bursts of sound. The knobby extrusions to either side contained the receptors, widely spaced to give the being a stereo-audio, 3-D perspective.

  But other senses came into play as well. Something like the lateral line in a fish sensed minute changes in air pressure, infrared sensors in the head detected subtle gradations in heat up to several kilometers away, and, most alien of all, the DalRiss seemed to somehow perceive the chemical and electrical processes of life itself.

  Darwin’s scientists were still arguing over just what that meant. Some felt that this “life sense” was simply a refinement of IR sensing or keen hearing. The DalRiss themselves insisted that their world, as they perceived it, was a blend of the rischa, the life fields of countless organisms, a kind of tapestry within which inorganic matter—rocks, say, or the spiky, metallic shape of a Xenophobe war machine—was dull, dark, sound-reflective voids.

  They perceived the entire universe as life, and themselves as a small part of a larger whole. When Dev asked them to explain this, the AI stepped in. “I’m sorry, but that information has not yet been made available to Darwin’s researchers.”

  The scientists must be having trouble grasping that one, too.

  But Dev was staggered. How could a species that could not perceive light have ever reached for the stars?

  And that, Dev realized, was only the beginning of the mysteries surrounding the DalRiss.

  Later, Dev downloaded all that was known about the DalRiss into his cephimplant RAM, then reviewed the data with Katya in the privacy of Yuduki’s com modules.

  He was not surprised to learn that he’d misinterpreted much of what he’d seen aboard the Darwin.

  The sac behind the crescent head housed, not a braincase, but digestive and storage organs; the brain was well protected in a bony shell close to the armored branching of the fingers. Perhaps Dev’s biggest mistake was in the nature of the creature itself, which was not one organism, but two, living together in gene-manipulated symbiosis.

  The six-legged starfish shape was called a Dal, an artificially engineered mount for the smaller creature that rode its back. The combination could be thought of as a partnership like that of horse and rider, save that in this case the rider was actually imbedded within the horse’s flesh, tapping directly into its circulatory and nervous systems. At need, the riders could separate from their steeds, but the Dal had been custom-tailored for their role and could not live long independently.

  As for the Riss—the word appeared to mean masters—they could plug themselves into dozens of other species engineered for the purpose over millennia. Evolving on a world defined by life, which they could sense all around them as a kind of translucent sea, the DalRiss had pursued the biological sciences almost to the exclusion of all else. Before they learned how to make fire, they’d begun domesticating other species; they’d never developed atomic fission, but they could tailor organisms to fulfill precise needs with a deftness that surpassed anything human biologists had even dreamed of.

  Chemistry had grown out of biology. Life, all life, depends on chemical reactions to sustain them. The DalRiss studied these and eventually learned to gene-tailor organisms that would generate the reactions they wanted to study. Living factories produced chemicals, even manufactured goods in an organic approach to nanotechnic engineering. Earth technology had learned to manufacture submicroscopic machines, growing them in vats or assembling them through hierarchies of progressively smaller handlers. The DalRiss had ultimately learned to do much the same, but by controlling enzymes and biochemical processes.

  Man and DalRiss had used two radically different approaches to arrive at the same destination.

  The DalRiss did not build their cities, they grew them, as humans grew RoPro buildings, gene-tailoring large, energy-drinking, sessile organisms on their energy-rich homeworld to create the living spaces they desired. The Dal themselves were an example of an entirely new species created by the Riss as symbiotic legs
and strength. For millennia the Riss had been able to directly tap the nervous systems of their artificial symbionts, feeling what they felt, knowing what they knew.

  They were aware of radiation. Their planet was awash in energy from their sun—visible light, ultraviolet, infrared—and it was that energy that drove all organic processes on their homeworld. Requiring a way to further study this radiation, they addressed the problem in the only way they knew. They designed organisms that could sense light for them; where nature had never evolved eyes, the Riss had invented them.

  Living, symbiotic eyes. The Riss called them “Perceivers.” The DalRiss didn’t need them for everyday activities any more than a human might need a portable radar, but they’d used them first to develop the science of biological microscopy… and later to look at the stars. Astronomy had led to an understanding of how the universe works—of the laws of gravity and motion.

  Ultimately they’d learned how to grow huge creatures that used the explosive combustion of hydrogen and oxygen to reach planetary orbit.

  And from there, the nearest star was right next door.

  Their star was a double, an A5-A7 pair that orbited each other with a mean separation of 900 astronomical units—five light-days—more than enough distance for separate planetary systems to exist around each member of the system. The DalRiss homeworld, which they called GhegnuRish, circled the smaller of the two, which the Earth astronomers called Alya B. With no reason to think that planets orbiting A-class stars were rare, the DalRiss made the crossing to Alya A, a voyage that took many years.

  Both stars, it turned out, had planets. Only GhegnuRish had life, but the sixth planet of Alya A, which they called ShraRish, had an atmosphere and surface conditions that might be molded to suit DalRiss tastes. They already had a history of growing life to meet their needs; now they proceeded to grow an entire ecology.