Nebula Award Stories - 1983 #18

by Robert Silverberg (ed)

  Later they left the tunneler and floated on by themselves. The woman moved with the ease of long habit; Afriel followed her, colliding bruisingly with squeaking workers. There were thousands of them, clinging to ceiling, walls, and floor, clustering and scurrying at every conceivable angle.

  Later still they visited the chamber of the winged princes and princesses, an echoing round vault where creatures forty meters long hung crooked-legged in midair. Their bodies were segmented and metallic, with organic rocket nozzles on their thoraxes, where wings might have been. Folded along their sleek backs were radar antennae on long sweeping booms. They looked more like interplanetary probes under construction than anything biological. Workers fed them ceaselessly.

  Their bulging spiracled abdomens were full of compressed oxygen.

  Mirny begged a large chunk of fungus from a passing worker, deftly tapping its antennae and provoking a reflex action. She handed most of the fungus to the two springtails, which devoured it greedily and looked expectantly for more.

  Afriel tucked his legs into a lotus position and began chewing with determination on the leathery fungus. It was tough, but tasted good, like smoked meat—a Terran delicacy he had tasted only once. The smell of smoke meant disaster in a Shapers colony.

  Mirny maintained a stony silence. “Foods no problem,” Afriel said cheerfully. “Where do we sleep?”

  She shrugged. “Anywhere. . . . there are unused niches and tunnels here and there. I suppose you’ll want to see the Queen’s chamber next.”

  “By all means.”

  “I’ll have to get more fungus. The warriors are on guard there and have to be bribed with food.”

  She gathered an armful of fungus from another worker in the endless stream, and they exited through another tunnel. Afriel, already totally lost, was further confused in the maze of chambers and tunnels. At last they exited into an immense lightless cavern, bright with infrared heat from the Queens monstrous body. It was the colony’s central factory. The fact that it was made of warm and pulpy flesh did not conceal its essentially industrial nature. Tons of predigested fungal pap went into the slick blind jaws at one end. The rounded billows of soft flesh digested and processed it, squirming, sucking, and undulating, with loud, machinelike churnings and gurglings. Out of the other end came an endless conveyorlike blobbed stream of eggs, each one packed in a thick hormonal paste of lubrication. The workers avidly licked the eggs clean and bore them off to nurseries. Each egg was the size of a man’s torso.

  The process went on and on. There was no day or night here in the lightless center of the asteroid. There was no remnant of a diurnal rhythm in the genes of these creatures. The flow of production was as constant and even as the working of an automated mine.

  “This is why I’m here,” Afriel murmured in awe. “Just look at this, doctor. The Mechanists have computer-run mining machinery that is generations ahead of ours. But here—in the bowels of this nameless little world, is a genetically run technology that feeds itself, maintains itself, runs itself, efficiently, endlessly, mindlessly. Its the perfect organic tool. The faction that could make use of these tireless workers could make itself an industrial titan. And our knowledge of biochemistry is unsurpassed. We Shapers are just the ones to do it.”

  “How do you propose to do that?” Mirny asked with open skepticism. “You would have to ship a fertilized queen all the way to the solar system. We could scarcely afford that, even if the Investors would let us, which they wouldn’t.”

  “I don’t need an entire colony,” Afriel said patiently. “I only need the genetic information from one egg. Our laboratories back in the Rings could clone endless numbers of them.” “But the workers are useless without the rest of the colony to give them orders. They need the pheromones to trigger their behavior modes.”

  “Exactly,” Afriel said. “As it so happens, I possess those pheromones in concentrated form. What I must do now is test them. I must prove that I can use them to make the workers do what I choose. Once I’ve proven it’s possible, I’m authorized to smuggle the genetic information necessary back to the Rings. The Investors won’t approve. There are, of course, moral questions involved, and they are not genetically advanced. But we can win their approval back with the profits we make. Best of all, we can beat the Mechanists at their own game.” “You’ve carried the pheromones here?” Mirny said. “Didn’t the Investors suspect something when they found them?”

  “Now its you who has made an error,” Afriel said calmly. “You assume that they are infallible. You are wrong. A race without curiosity will never explore every possibility, the way we Shapers did. ” Afriel pulled up his pants cuff and extended his right leg. “Consider this varicose vein along my shin. Circulatory problems of this sort are common among those who spend a lot of time in free-fall. This vein, however, has been blocked artificially, and its walls biochemically treated to reduce osmosis. Within the vein are ten separate colonies of genetically altered bacteria, each one specially to produce a different Swarm pheromone.”

  He smiled. “The Investors searched me very thoroughly, including x-rays. They insist, naturally, on knowing about everything transported aboard one of their ships. But the vein appears normal to x-rays, and the bacteria are trapped within compartments in the vein. They are indetectable. I have a small medical kit on my person. It includes a syringe. We can use it to extract the pheromones and test them. When the tests are finished—and I feel sure they will be successful, in fact I’ve staked my career on it—we can empty the vein and all its compartments. The bacteria will die on contact with air. We can refill the vein with the yolk from a developing embryo. The cells may survive during the trip back, but even if they die, they won’t rot. They’ll never come in contact with bacteria that can decompose them. Back in the Rings, we can learn to activate and suppress different genes to produce the different castes, just as is done in nature. We’ll have millions of workers, armies of warriors if need be, perhaps even organic rocket-ships, grown from altered alates. If this works, who do you think will remember me then, eh? Me and my arrogant little life and little sacrifice?”

  She stared at him; even the bulky goggles could not hide her new respect and even fear. “You really mean to do it, then.”

  “I made the sacrifice of my time and energy. I expect results, doctor.”

  “But it’s kidnapping. You’re talking about breeding a slave race.”

  Afriel shrugged, with contempt. “You’re juggling words, doctor. I’ll cause this colony no harm. I may steal some of its workers’ labor while they obey my own chemical orders, but that tiny minority won’t be missed. I admit to the murder of one egg, but that is no more a crime than a human abortion. Can the theft of one strand of genetic material be called ‘kidnapping’? I think not. As for the scandalous idea of a slave race—I reject it out of hand. These creatures are genetic robots. They will no more be slaves than are laser drills or bulldozers. At the very worst, they will be domestic animals.” Mirny considered the issue. It did not take her long. “It’s true. It’s not as if a common worker will be staring at the stars, pining for its freedom. They’re just brainless neuters.” “Exactly, doctor.”

  “They simply work. Whether they work for us or the Swarm makes no difference to them.”

  “I see that you’ve seized on the beauty of the idea.”

  “And if it worked,” Mirny said, “if it worked, our faction would profit astronomically.”

  Afriel smiled genuinely, unaware of the chilling sarcasm of his expression. “And the personal profit, doctor. . . . the valuable expertise of the first to exploit the technique.” He spoke gently, quietly. “Ever see a nitrogen snowfall on Titan? I think a habitat of one’s own there—larger, much larger than anything possible before. ... A genuine city, Galina, a place where a man can scrap the rules and discipline that madden him. ...”

  “Now it’s you who are talking defection, captain-doctor. ” Afriel was silent for a moment, then smiled with an effort. “Now you
’ve ruined my perfect reverie,” he said. “Besides, what I was describing was the well-earned retirement of a wealthy man, not some self-indulgent hermitage. . . . there’s a clear but subtle difference.” He hesitated. “In any case, I conclude that you’re with me in this project?”

  She laughed and touched his arm. There was something uncanny about the small sound of her laugh, drowned by a great organic rumble from the Queens monstrous intestines.

  . . . “Do you expect me to resist your arguments for two years? Better that I give in now and save us friction.” “Yes.”

  “After all, you won’t do any harm to the colony. They’ll never know anything has happened. And if their genetic line is successfully reproduced back home, there’ll never be any reason for humanity to bother them again.”

  “True enough,” said Afriel, though in the back of his mind he instantly thought of the fabulous wealth of Betelguese’s asteroid system. A day would come, inevitably, when humanity would move to the stars en masse, in earnest. It would be well to know the ins and outs of every race that might become a rival.

  “I’ll help you as best I can,” she said. There was a moment’s silence. “Have you seen enough of this area?”

  “Yes.” They left the Queen’s chamber.

  “I didn’t think I’d like you at first,” she said candidly. "I think I like you better now. You seem to have a sense of humor that most Security people lack.”

  “It’s not a sense of humor,” Afriel said sadly. “It’s a sense of irony disguised as one.”

  There were no days in the unending stream of hours that followed. There were only ragged periods of sleep, apart at first, later together, as they held each other in free-fall. The sexual feel of skin and body became an anchor to their common humanity, a divided, frayed humanity so many light-years away that the concept no longer had any meaning to them. Life in the warm and swarming tunnels was the here and now; the two of them were like germs in a bloodstream, moving ceaselessly with the pulsing ebb and flow. They tested the pheromones, one by one, as the hours stretched into months and time grew meaningless.

  The pheromonal workings were complex, but not impossibly difficult. The first of the ten pheromones was a simple grouping stimulus, causing large numbers of workers to gather as the pheromone was spread from palp to palp. The workers then waited for further instructions; if none were forthcoming, they dispersed. To work effectively, the pheromones had to be given in a mix, or series, like computer commands; number one, grouping, for instance, together with the third pheromone, a transferral order, which caused the workers to empty any given chamber and move its effects to another. The ninth pheromone had the best industrial possibilities; it was a building order, causing the workers to gather tunnelers and dredgers and set them to work. Others were annoying; the tenth pheromone provoked grooming behavior, and the workers’ furry palps stripped off the remaining rags of Afriels clothing. The eighth pheromone sent the workers off to harvest material on the asteroids surface, and in their eagerness to observe its effects the two explorers were almost trapped and swept off into space.

  The two of them no longer feared the warrior caste. They knew that a dose of the sixth pheromone would send them scurrying off to defend the eggs, just as it sent the workers to tend them. Mirny and Afriel took advantage of this and secured their own chambers, dug by chemically hijacked workers and defended by a hijacked airlock guardian. They had their own fungal gardens to refresh the air, stocked with the fungus they liked best, and digested by a worker they kept drugged for their own food use. From constant stuffing and lack of exercise the worker had swollen up into its replete form and hung from one wall like a monstrous grape.

  Afriel was tired. He had been without sleep recently for a long time; how long, he didn’t know. His body rhythms had not adjusted as well as Mirny’s, and he was prone to fits of depression and irritability that he had to repress with an effort.

  “The Investors will be back sometime,” he said. “Sometime soon.”

  Mirny shrugged. “The Investors,” she said, and followed the remark with something in the language of the springtails, that he didn’t catch. Despite his linguistic training, Afriel had never caught up with her in her use of the springtails’ grating jargon. His training was almost a liability; the springtail language had decayed so much that it was a pidgin tongue, without rules or regularity. He knew enough to give them simple orders, and with his partial control of the warriors he had the power to back it up. The springtails were afraid of him, and the two juveniles that Mirny had tamed had grown into fat, overgrown tyrants that freely terrorized their elders. Afriel had been too busy to seriously study the springtails or the other symbiotes. There were too many practical matters at hand.

  “If they come too soon, I won’t be able to finish my latest study,” she said in English.

  Afriel pulled off his infrared goggles and knotted them tightly around his neck. “There’s a limit, Galina,” he said, yawning. “You can only memorize so much data without equipment. We’ll just have to wait quietly until we can get back. I hope the Investors aren’t shocked when they see me. I lost a fortune with those clothes.”

  “It’s been so dull since the mating swarm was launched. And we’ve had to stop the experiments to let your vein heal. If it weren’t for the new growth in the alates’ chamber, I’d be bored to death.” She pushed greasy hair from her face with both hands. “Are you going to sleep?’’

  “Yes, if I can.”

  “You won’t come with me? I keep telling you that this new growth is important. I think its a new caste. It’s definitely not an alate. It has eyes like an alate, but it’s clinging to the wall.” “It’s probably not a Swarm member at all, then,” he said tiredly, humoring her. “It’s probably a parasite, an alate mimic. Go on and see it, if you want to. I’ll be here waiting for you.” He heard her leave. Without his infrareds on, the darkness was still not quite total; there was a very faint luminosity from the steaming, growing fungus in the chamber beyond. The stuffed worker replete moved slightly on the wall, rustling and gurgling. He fell asleep.

  When he awoke, Mirny had not yet returned. He was not alarmed. First, he visited the original airlock tunnel, where the Investors had first left him. It was irrational—the Investors always fulfilled their contracts—but he feared that they would arrive someday, become impatient, and leave without him. The Investors would have to wait, of course. Mirny could keep them occupied in the short time it would take him to hurry to the nursery and rob a developing egg of its living cells. It was best that the egg be as fresh as possible.

  Later he ate. He was munching fungus in one of the anterior chambers when Mirny’s two tamed springtails found him. “What do you want?” he asked in their language.

  “Food-giver no good,” the larger one screeched, waving its forelegs in brainless agitation. “Not work, not sleep.”

  “Not move,” the second one said. It added hopefully, “Eat it now?”

  Afriel gave them some of his food. They ate it, seemingly more out of habit than real appetite, which alarmed him. “Take me to her,” he told them.

  The two springtails scurried off; he followed them easily, adroitly dodging and weaving through the crowds of workers. They led him several miles through the network, to the alates’ chamber. There they stopped, confused. “Gone,” the large one said.

  The chamber was empty. Afriel had never seen it empty before, and it was very unusual for the Swarm to waste so much space. He felt dread. “Follow the food-giver,” he said. “Follow smell.”

  The springtails snuffled without much enthusiasm along one wall; they knew he had no food and were reluctant to do anything without an immediate reward. At last one of them picked up the scent, or pretended to, and followed it up across the ceiling and into the mouth of a tunnel.

  It was hard for Afriel to see much in the abandoned chamber; there was not enough infrared heat. He leapt upward after the springtail.

  He heard the roar of a warrior
and the springtail s choked-off screech. It came flying from the tunnels mouth, a spray of clotted fluid bursting from its ruptured head. It tumbled end over end until it hit the far wall with a flaccid crunch. It was already dead.

  The second springtail fled at once, screeching with grief and terror. Afriel landed on the lip of the tunnel, sinking into a crouch as his legs soaked up momentum. He could smell the acrid stench of the warriors anger, a pheromone so thick that even a human could scent it. Dozens of other warriors would group here within minutes, or seconds. Behind the enraged warrior he could hear workers and tunnelers shifting and cementing rock.

  He might be able to control one enraged warrior, but never two, or twenty. He launched himself from the chamber wall and out an exit.

  He searched for the other springtail—he felt sure he could recognize it, it was so much bigger than the others—but he could not find it. With its keen sense of smell, it could easily hide from him if it wanted to.

  Mirny did not return. Uncountable hours passed. He slept again. He returned to the alates’ chambers; there were warriors on guard there, warriors that were not interested in food and opened their immense serrated fangs when he approached. They looked ready to rip him apart; the faint reek of aggressive pheromones hung about the place like a fog. He did not see any symbiotes of any kind on the warriors’ bodies. There was one species, a thing like a huge tick, that clung only to warriors, but even the ticks were gone.

  He returned to his chambers to wait and think. Mirny’s body was not in the garbage pits. Of course, it was possible that something else might have eaten her. Should he extract the remaining pheromone from the spaces in his vein and try to break into the alates’ chamber? He suspected that Mirny, or whatever was left of her, was somewhere in the tunnel where the springtail had been killed. He had never explored that tunnel himself. There were thousands of tunnels he had never explored.

  He felt paralyzed by indecision and fear. If he were quiet, if he did nothing, the Investors might arrive at any moment. He could tell the Ring Council anything he wanted about Mirny’s death; if he had the genetics with him, no one would quibble. He did not love her; he respected her, but not enough to give up his life, or his factions investment. He had not thought of the Ring Council in a long time, and the thought sobered him. He would have to explain his decision. . . .