‘What’s to stop the grubs reading messages earlier than they were sent, and figuring out how to avoid future events?’
Again, Ferris had seen that one coming. ‘They can’t. The device’s messages are all encoded - without the key, you can’t get at them. That’s the clever part. The key itself, so far as the grub understood it, would appear to be the instantaneous gravitational background radiation of the universe. When the grubs put a message into the communicational device - this is how they store them, as well - the device senses the gravitational heartbeat of the universe - the ticks of pulsars spiralling towards each other; the low moans of distant black holes devouring stars at the hearts of galaxies. It hears them all, and creates a unique signature: a key with which it encrypts the incoming message. Every device carries those messages, but they can’t be read out until the device satisfies itself that the gravitational background is the same. Or nearly the same - it has to allow for the spatial position of the message recipient, of course. That gives the devices an effective range of a few thousand light-years, apparently - once they get separated beyond that distance, they just don’t recognise the background signature as being correct any more. And any attempt to fake that background, to try and predict what the future gravitational signature of the universe will be like, based on the known contributions - well, it never seems to work. The devices just fold up and die, apparently.’
For centuries, then, the grub must have been able to keep in some kind of contact with its remote allies. Then it had begun to approach the message-store limit of its own communicational device and had begun to transmit only sparingly. The enemy, it was said, had access to those messages as well - their own copies of the devices - so there was always a danger in using them. The creature had imagined that it had been lonely before, when it was being chased, but now it began to understand that it had never really known solitude. Solitude was a hard crushing force, akin to the mountains of rock above it. Yet it had stayed sane, allowing itself to talk to its allies every few tens of years, maintaining a fragile sense of kinship, that it still played a small role in the greater arena of grub affairs.
But Ferris had removed the grub from its ship, severing it with the communicational device. That must have been the start of the creature’s true descent into grub madness.
‘You milk it, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Milk it for Dream Fuel. And more than that. You use its terror and loneliness. You distil those impressions and sell them.’
Ferris piped, ‘We’ve got probes sunk into his brain, reading his neural patterns. Run them through some software up in the Rust Belt, and we get to distil it into something a human can just about handle.’
‘What’s he talking about?’ Zebra asked.
‘Experientials,’ I said. ‘The black kind, with a small maggot motif near the top. I tried one, as a matter of fact. I didn’t know quite what to expect.’
‘I’ve heard of them,’ Zebra said. ‘But I’ve never tried one, and I wasn’t even sure they weren’t an urban myth.’
‘No, they’re for real.’ I remembered the welter of emotions that the experiential had fed into my brain, when I’d tried it aboard the Strelnikov. The predominant feelings had been of awful, crushing claustrophobia and fear - yet underpinned with the gut-churning sense that no matter how oppressive the claustrophobia was, it was preferable to the predator-haunted void beyond. I could still taste the terror that the experiential had instilled in me; subtly alien in flavour, yet recognisable for all that. At the time I’d had trouble understanding why people would pay to experience something like that, but now it all made much more sense. It was all about extremes of experience; anything that would blunt boredom’s edge.
‘What does he get for doing it?’ Zebra asked.
‘Relief,’ said Ferris.
I saw what he meant. Down in the black slime which filled the tank, grey-suited workers were sloshing around with what looked like huge cattle-prods. They were knee-deep in the black stuff. Now and then one of them would run the tip of his prod across the grey side of the maggot, causing a shiver of pain to run along its blimplike length. Pale red stuff squirted out of pores in his mottled silvery skin. One of the workers moved to catch it in a flask.
At the other end, a high, shrill squeal sounded from his mouth parts.
‘I guess he isn’t making Dream Fuel like he used to,’ I said, feeling sickened. ‘What is it? Some kind of organic machinery?’
‘I suppose so,’ Ferris answered, managing to convey the minimum of interest as he did so. ‘He brought the Melding Plague here, after all.’
‘Brought it?’ Zebra said. ‘But he’s been here thousands of years.’
‘Yes. And for all that time he was dormant, until we arrived, scurrying around on the surface with our pathetic little settlements and cities.’
‘Did he know he had it?’ I asked.
‘I very much doubt it. The plague was probably something he carried without even knowing it; an old infection to which he had long since adapted. Dream Fuel might have been only slightly younger; a protection they evolved or engineered for themselves: a living stew of microscopic machines constantly secreted by their bodies. The machines were immune to the plague and held it in check, but they did much more than that. They healed and nourished their host, conveyed information to and from his secondary grubs . . . eventually, I think, it became so much a part of them that they could no longer have lived without it.’
‘But somehow the plague reached the city,’ I said. ‘How long have you been down here, Ferris?’
‘The better part of four interminable centuries, ever since I discovered him. The plague meant nothing to me, of course - I had nothing in me that it could harm. Conversely, his Dream Fuel - his very blood - kept me alive, without access to any other life-extension procedures.’ He fingered the silver blanket over his frame. ‘Of course, the ageing process has not been totally arrested. Fuel is beneficial, but it is emphatically no miracle cure.’
I asked, ‘Then you’ve never seen Chasm City?’
‘No - but I know what happened.’ He looked hard at me; I felt my body temperature drop under the scrutiny of his gaze. ‘I prophesied it. I knew it would happen; that the city would turn monstrous and fill itself with demons and ghouls. I knew that our cleverest, swiftest and tiniest machines would turn against us; corrupting minds and flesh; bringing forth perversities and abominations. I knew there would come a time when we would have to turn to simpler machines; to older and cruder templates.’ He raised a finger, accusingly. ‘All this I foresaw. Do you imagine that I engineered this chair in a mere seven years?’
At the other end of the maggot I saw a worker leaning from a catwalk with something that looked like a chain-saw. He was carving off a huge iridescent scab from the back of Gideon.
I looked at the mottled patch on my coat.
‘That’s good, Ferris,’ Zebra said. ‘You mind if I ask you one final question, before we get on our way?’
He punched his answer into the chair. ‘Yes?’
‘Did you prophesy this?’
Then she took out her gun and shot him.
On the way back up I thought about what Ferris had shown me and what I had learned from Sky’s memories.
The grubs had observed a massive release of energy in the vicinity of the Earth system: five sparks of fire which bore the signature of matter-antimatter annihilation. Five void warrens being pushed up to a speed which would cause no indignation to the Jumper Clowns: a mere eight per cent of light. It was, nonetheless, quite an achievement considering that the primates had still been bashing each other around with bones only a million years earlier.
By the time the five human ships were noticed, the grubs had suffered terrible losses themselves. Their once mighty void warrens had been smashed and shattered by skirmishes with the enemy. In a period which the long-lived grubs looked back upon with sorrow, the warrens had been sundered; split into tinier, nimbler sub-warrens. The large grubs were social creatu
res and the sundering caused them immense pain, even though they were able to stay in limited contact with their siblings using the Jumper Clowns’ superluminal signalling system.
Eventually, one of the sub-warrens latched onto the five human ships. The sub-warren reshaped itself to match one of the ships it was following. Statistical analysis of ten million years of encounters had shown that the tactic benefited the grubs in the long run, even though it could be disastrous in any single meeting.
Travelling Fearlessly’s plan was simple enough in grub terms. He would study the humans and decide what must be done about them. If they showed signs of expanding massively into this volume of space, creating the kind of disturbance which the eaters would find it hard to miss, then it might prove necessary to cull them. Amongst the surviving species, there were some which had taken it upon themselves to perform such painful-but-necessary cullings.
Travelling Fearlessly hoped that it would not come to that. He hoped that the humans would remain a low-level nuisance that did not require immediate culling. If all they planned to do was settle one or two immediate solar systems, they could probably be left alone for now. Culling was itself an act which ran the risk of attracting eaters, so it was never to be performed unless there was excellent reason. As decades passed and the humans made no move, hostile or otherwise, Travelling Fearlessly moved the void warren closer and closer to the cluster of human ships. Perhaps the thing to do was make his presence known; establish dialogue with the humans and explain the awkwardness of the situation. The grub had been working out how to make the first move when one of the ships had blown up.
The explosion was consistent with the complete detonation of several tonnes of antimatter. Travelling Fearlessly’s void warren had caught much of the blast, damaging the ship’s camouflage integument and killing many of the grubs who had been working near the skin. Their death agonies had reached Travelling Fearlessly through their secretions. He had absorbed what he could of their individual memories, even as the wounded helper grubs were dissolved back down into their organic constituents.
In pain, with half his memories lacerated, Travelling Fearlessly had moved the void warren away from the Flotilla.
But someone had noticed. Oliveira and Lago had arrived shortly afterwards, not really sure what to expect, half believing the old story of a ghost ship; a sixth original member of the Flotilla which had been expunged from history.
That, of course, was not what they had found.
Oliveira had sent Lago in first, to find the fuel they needed to get back, and Lago had quickly realised that he was not in any human ship. When the helper grubs had brought him to Travelling Fearlessly’s chamber, things had gone poorly. Travelling Fearlessly had only been trying to help the creature by pointing out that he did not need to use his spacesuit; that they both breathed the same air. But perhaps the way he had done this - by having helper grubs eat the man’s suit away - had, in hindsight, not been ideal. Lago had become upset and had begun to hurt the helper grubs with the cutting torch. As the fire burned the helpers, Travelling Fearlessly drank in their agonised secretions as if the pain was his own.
It was unpleasant, but he had no choice but to dismantle Lago. Lago, of course, hadn’t taken to that very enthusiastically either, but by then it was too late. The helper grubs had detached most of his extremities and the more interesting components from inside Lago, learning how the various bits of him worked and fitted together, before dissolving his central nervous system into the secretion. Travelling Fearlessly had ingested as many of Lago’s memories as he could make sense of. He had learned how to make the same kinds of sounds as Lago, and how to impart meaning to those sounds, and - copying Lago - he had made a mouth for himself. Other grubs had copied Lago’s sensory organs, or even incorporated bits of him into themselves.
Now, having come to a greater understanding, Travelling Fearlessly understood why Lago had not taken well to his first view of the maggot-ridden chamber. He felt sorry for what he had been forced to do to Lago and tried to make amends by using as much of Lago’s memory and component parts as he could.
He was sure the humans would appreciate this gesture.
‘After Lago came, it was very lonely again,’ the mouth said. ‘Much lonelier than before.’
‘You didn’t grasp loneliness until you ate him, you fucking stupid maggot.’
‘That is . . . possible.’
‘All right - listen to me carefully. You’ve explained to me that you feel pain. Good. I needed to know that. You presumably have a well-developed instinct for self-preservation, too, or you wouldn’t have survived until now. Well, I have a harbourmaker with me. If you don’t understand the concept, look it up in Lago’s memory. I’m sure he knew.’
There was a pause while the maggot shifted uncomfortably; red fluid sloshing around like seawater under a beached whale. Harbourmakers were nuclear warheads; equipment carried by the Flotilla to assist in the development of Journey’s End.
‘I understand.’
‘Good. Perhaps you can use that gravity trick to stop it from working, but I’m willing to bet that you can’t generate arbitrarily strong fields that easily, or you’d have used something similar to immobilise Lago when he started giving you difficulties.’
‘I told you too much.’
‘Yes, you probably did. But I still want to know more. About this ship, mainly. You were engaged in a war, weren’t you? You may not have been winning it, but my guess is you wouldn’t have survived until now without weapons of some description.’
‘We don’t have weapons.’ The grub’s mouth looked affronted. ‘Only armouring skein.’
‘Armouring skein?’ Sky thought about it for a few moments, trying to get his head into the grub’s mode of thinking. ‘Some kind of projected force technology, is that it? You can put up some kind of field around this ship?’
‘We could, once. But the necessary parts were damaged when the fifth void warren was destroyed. Now only a partial skein can be created. It’s no use at all against an adept enemy like the grub eaters. They see the holes.’
‘All right, listen to me. Do you sense the two small machines approaching us?’
‘Yes. Are they also friends of Lago?’
‘Not quite.’ Well, the shuttle crews might be, he thought - but they were very unlikely to be friends of Sky Haussmann, and that was all that really mattered. ‘I want you to use your skein against those machines - or I use the harbourmaker against you. Is that clear?’
The grub seemed to understand. ‘You want me to destroy them?’
‘Yes. Or I’ll destroy you.’
‘You wouldn’t do that. It would kill you.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Sky said amicably. ‘I’m not Lago; I don’t think like him, and I certainly don’t act like him.’
He selected one of the nearer grubs and unloaded part of the machine-gun’s clip into the creature. The slugs punched thumb-sized holes in the creature’s pale-pink integument. He watched the red stuff drain out and then heard an awful shrill cry come from some part of the creature. Except he was wrong about that, now that he paid attention. The shrill cry was coming from the large grub; not the one that he had shot.
He watched the injured one collapse down into the sea of red, until only part of it was showing. Several other helper grubs undulated towards it and began to prod it with their feelers.
Gradually, the keening sound of anguish died down to a low moan.
‘You hurt me.’
‘I was just making a point,’ Sky said. ‘When Lago hurt you, he hurt you indiscriminately because he was scared. I’m not scared. I hurt you because I want you to know exactly what I’m capable of.’
A couple of helper grubs were thrashing their way ashore only metres from where Sky and Norquinco were standing.
‘No,’ Sky said. ‘Don’t come any closer or I’ll shoot another one - and don’t try any funny tricks with gravity, or I’ll make the harbourmaker go off.’
; The grubs halted, their fronds waving hysterically.
The yellow light - the light that bathed the whole chamber - died for a second. Sky was not expecting darkness. For an instant the terror of it was total. He had forgotten that the grubs controlled the light. In darkness, they could do almost anything. He imagined them emerging from the red lake, dragging him into it by his heels. He imagined being eaten by them, the way Lago had been. There might come a point where he could no longer tell the harbourmaker to go off; could no longer erase his own agony.
Perhaps he should do it now.
But the yellow light returned.
‘I did as you asked,’ Travelling Fearlessly said. ‘It was hard. It took all our power to push the skein out to that distance.’
‘Did it work?’
‘There are two more out there - smaller void warrens.’
The shuttles. ‘Yes. But they won’t be here for a little while. Then you can do the same trick again.’ He called Gomez. ‘What happened? ’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 132