by B. V. Larson
He considered the insects he was trying to infiltrate. They didn’t have any aural communication and pheromone levels had stayed constant the previous mission—so, he believed, what remained was that they were extraordinarily sensitive to any abnormal behavior, which is why they detected his presence in the creature so quickly and killed it.
Probably.
This time, to work around that issue, he was going to insert himself into one of the hairy crawling things he had seen and manipulate it to explore the area as long as it seemed safe.
He polished the platinum side of the contact, attached it, and gathered his concentration. The important thing was to be ready to eject himself at the first hint of a threat.
One more quick test of the retrieval unit... and it worked perfectly.
He took one last breath and hit SEND.
Turtle’s mind was projected to another place.
Chapter ELEVEN
His head buzzed, and in his brain, his optic receptors formed the image of the alien landscape as seen through the eyes of a crawling thing.
Again, the dense atmosphere made visibility poor.
While his host crawled toward a shadow in a jumble of boulders, Turtle noted two things right away. The thing was not stupid, for one, and for two, it showed neither surprise nor concern at his presence.
Turtle made no effort to control the animal. For the moment, he would settle in and observe.
His host seemed to be having a lot of trouble moving itself in one direction. Was this host damaged or defective?
Turtle probed a little deeper, letting his presence push a little here, nudge there, trying to get some minimal response from the animal—but there was none; it apparently knew he was there but was content to ignore him entirely.
This had never happened before: The thing should show some kind of response. Something was wrong. Even jellyfish responded to a psych probe.
Turtle pushed deeper. Nothing. Not the slightest variation in affect. Steadily, the animal continued to half-thrash half-crawl toward the darkest shadow in the pile of rocks.
Turtle felt something anomalous moving into his consciousness, something about to move within his reach.
“Wish...” the thing said clearly into Turtle’s consciousness. “We wish you hadn’t found us.”
Turtle felt a surge of something like shock and panic. The emotion should have been enough to cause the automatic retrieval system to kick in—but it didn’t
There wasn’t supposed to be anything out here with this level of intelligence. It had been drummed into him from the beginning of his training that alien animals were just animals, and Tarassis had never found anything smarter than a terrestrial house cat.
But this thing was talking to him. It was aware of him and logically, itself.
Turtle mentally recited the eject code and nothing happened. And again.
Nothing...
He gave a savage thanks to Lt. Gomax and his goddamned discounted equipment.
“Too bad,” the animal thought, with gloom attached to concept. It came up to the darkness in the rocks, moved into it, and continued its awkward progression along a down-slanting tunnel.
“Don’t worry,” the thing thought to him.
Underground, with no exit strategy, Turtle had no choice but to ride along with the animal and be alert to its blurred perceptions. It awkwardly stumbled into the walls as it seemed to be hurrying, but Turtle couldn’t tell—the thing was concealing every thought and emotion from him, and now that he did a psychic survey, he saw it was confining him to a very small portion of its consciousness.
Once more, the thing staggered and rolled on the floor of the corridor, but this time, it didn’t get up. It began to pluck at its skin, at its underside.
All at once, through the thing’s eyes, he saw what was happening. The animal was awkwardly unfastening and slipping out of its hair suit. It was, from what Turtle could see through the owner’s eyes, a weasel-like creature, something between mammal and reptile, forty to fifty kilos—and with considerable intelligence evident in its movements.
Once free of its disguise, the weasel stood on four legs and shook itself. It stretched several ways and then nimbly scampered down the tunnel. The floor dropped precipitously but, now unencumbered, the alien was sure-footed and could easily see in near darkness. As it hurried further, the tunnel turned only slightly several times.
At a dark metallic door, the thing chittered. Alien speech? Turtle assumed it was.
The door opened, and inside was a long, brightly lit corridor stretching into the distance. Many cross-corridors were in sight down its length.
Turtle recognized machines uncannily similar to the psych outputs back at the probe lab, where, at this moment, he knew his physical body sat entranced and twitching inside his Spang suit.
This alien’s machines, however, apparently did not need any organic life form hooked up to them.
Turtle’s alien host stood erect and began strolling down one hallway and into another, meeting others of its kind along the way. They greeted each other with chirps and nose-touches. Sometimes the exchange was extended and involved a complex range of staccato whistling, clicks, and breathy snorts.
“Why did you bring me here,” Turtle wondered, attempting to project the words into his host’s mind, “if you didn’t want us to know about this?”
“We knew we would be discovered sooner or later. We hoped the insects above, with their dull, primitive minds, would discourage you.”
“Are you using these probe units to gather technology as well… from us?”
The alien didn’t respond. From Turtle’s perspective, its mind seemed remarkably quiet.
After strolling on two legs among the outputs for several minutes, the weasel stopped in front of one of the probe units.
“Here,” it said. “Notice.”
It placed its naked muzzle into a V-shaped indentation. With its paw-hands it touched several sensor pads and adjusted the sliders.
“Notice,” it repeated.
Turtle had no choice. He wasn’t in control of his alien host, he was its prisoner.
A humming cloud entered the alien’s mind in a microsecond. Turtle then saw what no human had ever seen: He saw the looping lines of force reach out from these caves, out far from the parent star, past other galactic stars and clusters until they converged on an infinitesimal speck.
The point of view then zoomed in on the tiny object. It grew until the dog-bone shape of the asteroid was unmistakable. There, scudding along in the endless dark, was Tarassis.
The zooming continued. Soon, he could see the probe lab which protruded in an artificial blister on the asteroid, the home of its thousands of lives. And there inside the ship, through the cryoplast corridors, the weasel’s lines converged toward a man sitting at one of the outputs.
The man was psychonaut Turtle. The loop was completed, and Turtle’s consciousness fell into a circling void that encompassed only empty space.
In these faint lines of force, he saw the sparse pastel streaks of his and the alien’s few memories and how tenuous they were. He saw, in short, how little there was of either of them. He saw how little there was of anything. Space was beyond incomprehensible, like any ocean might be to the brain of a brine shrimp.
The alien removed its muzzle from the machine and the loop was broken.
Still, Turtle’s emergency retrieval unit hadn’t responded. He was surprised that he was still having coherent thoughts and hadn’t been double-zerked or terminally flashed.
“See?” the alien was telling him. “We see great pretense of power by those who fear non-existence. Your species wants more power always, such as you. You are here searching for new technology, new power. Greed in life makes humans dangerous.”
Turtle tried to put two thoughts together, but his mind was stunned by what he was witnessing. No human, to his knowledge, had ever held a conversation with an intelligent alien before.
“We use our pr
obe units,” the alien told him. “We must migrate, and for this we use humans aboard your ship.”
Turtle couldn’t disagree about humans being greedy—but the aliens were migrating by using the humans on Tarassis? Was this the cause of the occasional madness he’d witnessed among others, the pseudo-psychosis?
These weasel aliens were, in effect, doing to humans what United Tarassis was doing to them. Secretly probing and investigating. Spying on us through our own eyes.
Turtle couldn’t guess what he should ask, but the first question came out on its own: “What do you mean, you ‘must’ migrate?”
“Evil has spread in our direction. Our god tells us that we are to enter humans and our colony must move. Humans will have bicameral consciousness until otherwise.”
“Uh…” Turtle thought. “By evil spreading… are you talking about human colony ships? Are we the evil you speak of?”
There was a long pause. Then, at last, a simple reply came back to him.
“Yes.”
Chapter TWELVE
Memories of Turtle’s trashlife swept over him, of the cruelty and death dealt out by the orders of someone’s idea of what the Singularity wanted, how he and Scarn thought they had escaped that—but here it was again... right here on Tarassis.
“You’re invading our minds? You can’t do that to us.”
“Of course we can, we already have. And it’s best for you. You’re nasty things, always using force. Any given colony of humans will eventually succeed in self-destruction, but we will revise you as long as we need you. Then you can eliminate yourselves if you wish.”
“You’re going to live in humans… as parasites?” Turtle asked.
“In this you have experience. What are you when you inhabit another creature?”
“That’s only temporary.”
“If my colony doesn’t move, we will be eliminated by waves of humans coming from Earth. Understand? We have no choice. Our god tells us this.”
Through the alien’s eyes, Turtle had been watching the probe booths and the walls around them, but now something hummed in his head.
He could no longer hear the alien’s thoughts. The air became silvered, fragmented, and effervescent.
Ensign Braxton’s face solidified before him. He was holding the platinum-faced contact in one of his short-fingered hands. Lonna stood behind Braxton, staring past his shoulder at Turtle. She rested her hand on Braxton’s upper arm and then whispered in his ear.
Braxton was suddenly energized. “You don’t have to pretend with me, Turtle. I know you watched the memcube of us. I know you did that and so what?” His head jutted forward. “That wasn’t a rhetorical a question, Turt: ‘So what?’”
At first, Turtle thought the words he was listening to had been disarranged by his confusion, but when he got enough of his wits together, he realized Braxton thought he was saying something meaningful.
Lonna pulled back Braxton’s collar and put her lips on his neck. Watching her, Turtle was angry, but not as angry as he had been. After all, Lonna had been a serious pain in the ass to him lately. She was programmed to find men, seduce men, and to fawn over them. Maybe Braxton was doing him more of a favor than he knew by taking her off his hands.
But sending Turtle out to get flashed, using Lonna to torment him—in short, pissing all over Turtle’s back and calling it rain—that was going a bit too far. In Turtle’s mind, it was just a matter of timing.
“I guess she’s your plastic lover now,” Turtle said. “Don’t forget to plug her in at night.”
Still sitting at his console, he began disconnecting his Spang suit. He would be calm, until he wasn’t. “Braxton, the emergency retrieval unit on this thing is dead again, and I recorded a new species.”
Turtle got to his feet and was unhappy to discover his legs were still rubbery.
Braxton ignored the read-outs as Turtle punched a few buttons to run the diagnostics. “I brought you back,” Braxton said, “because you were hiding down there to get out of any real work. You were squatting in a hole somewhere, weren’t you?”
“Look,” Turtle said, “if you want Lonna so much, go for it. You don’t have to get me flashed to do it.”
“What are you suggesting?” Braxton demanded.
“I’m suggesting that you tampered with my kit. I was trying to get out. The automatic fail-safes all failed, and the ejection system didn’t work, either.”
Braxton stiffened. “So that’s how you’re going to do it, huh? With false claims? That’s how you’ll get your breather’s revenge? I expected it would be more physical.”
Turtle snorted. “You messed with my equipment. Why not admit it?”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Braxton said venomously. “All your readouts said you were having a good time so hook-up again and do your job.” He shoved the platinum contact into Turtle’s face as though he might hit him with it. “Get this on and get back down there with those bugs. Tonight, I want to watch a replay of your visit. With wine and candlelight.”
From behind Braxton, Lonna flicked his earlobe with her tongue.
Braxton jerked his head up and stared into the ceiling lights. Then he crouched, looked very puzzled and sniffed the air. With tiny shuffling steps, he hurried up the corridor, stopped, did a one-eighty, and made quick little scooting steps till he got back to them.
“We’ve both got it pretty bad,” Lonna said wistfully as she watched Braxton’s face for his eventual return to consciousness. “That’s his third time today,” she said idly. “But the intervals seem shorter.”
“What do you know about this?”
Lonna looked at him with some amusement. “We synths are all connected to the Singularity, you know. Don’t you think it wants to understand who these new players are aboard Tarassis?”
Turtle thought that over while Braxton came back to his senses. The ensign stood up from his crouch, wavered, focused, and then turned on Turtle.
“Got that?” he demanded. “You understand what I’m telling you?”
Lonna patted his back.
“Maybe you could go over it again,” Turtle said. “I got distracted by some zerked idiot who wandered through here sniffing the corridor walls.”
Lonna looked momentarily offended. She gave Turtle a don’t-be-naughty shake of her head, but he no longer cared what she thought about anything.
Braxton showed Turtle his tight fist. “I have you, Turtle. I have your nuts, and I have Lonna. I’m going to give you one scum run after another till you flash terminal. If you refuse an assignment, I’ll give you a grade ten damage report with an addendum recommending obedience training.” He smirked. “Welcome to the ass-end of United Tarassis, son.”
Back in their below-decks days, Scarn had once pointed out to Turtle that if a person threatens to kill you, you should never wait to see if he is serious. So, if he had Scarn’s ice cubes rattling in his veins, what would he do?
Scarn would carefully and methodically put his hands on the console and stand up, which Turtle did. Then, as Scarn would do, Turtle moved the formchair aside, and as accurately as he could, he kicked Braxton in the groin. The man’s feet almost came off the ground.
It was a deep and satisfying experience.
Braxton lost his air, bugged his eyes, and dropped to his knees.
“You hurt him! Stop!” Lonna fluttered her hands.
Turtle took Braxton by the shoulders and lifted and dropped him into his formchair. It activated and snuggled around him.
Lonna kept flapping her hands and looked both dismayed and confused. “You’re cruel...! You...!”
From Braxton’s sweaty hand, Turtle took the contact and pressed it onto Braxton’s forehead. The IC3 program was already set up, and if he didn’t have his Spang suit on… Well, sometimes that’s how it was done if a person wanted just a taste of the experience. It probably wouldn’t kill him.
Turtle hit SEND and watched Braxton’s face go slack. In a few moments, he would be finding himself walk
ing on six legs. Other nearby insects would observe the irregularity of the one possessed, they would grab him by the neck, and they would throw him in the oily lake.
Chapter THIRTEEN
Turtle wondered how long Braxton could keep his brains in one place. Without a Spang suit to feed him the full shot, at worst, he would be only moderately deranged when he returned. They usually recovered.
Lonna was making breathy squeaks. “You hurt him. You kicked him!”
She reached for Turtle, but he swept her hands aside.
“Don’t,” he said. “This isn’t a good time to expand your programming.”
She stopped and looked unsure of what to do next. She hesitated, and then turned to stare at Braxton who still sat slack-faced and mute.
“What’s happening to him?” she demanded. “Can I take that off of him?”
“It’ll make him crazy if you pull it off midway,” Turtle said. He thought she might believe that for another minute or two.
Turtle went to the adjacent unit, 905, and told it to reset his previous program from 906. While the machine worked, Turtle kept an eye on Lonna for whatever she did next. Synths weren’t very smart, and that made her less predictable.
Something moved in Turtle’s peripheral vision—was that Petty Officer Jamison? Yes. He was coming up the corridor in spacer’s blues. He had new stripes on his sleeves, and he seemed proud of that. He was all pleasantry and big smiles.
“Brought your charming spouse in to take a look at the business?” he asked when he reached them.
“We broke up,” Turtle said.
“Oh really?” Jamison rocked on his feet with his hands behind his back and his dark eyebrows danced up and down as he spoke. “What’s with Ensign Braxton?”
“He’s taking a first-hand look at my assignment. He’s the expert, and we amateurs have been having trouble with this mission.”
Braxton drooled a little, and one of his hands quivered.
“Why is he doing it without a Spang suit?”
“He was in a hurry.”
