by Greg Bear
“Brief you before my immediate overs?”
“I have the authority,” he said. No one had ever lied to her; she didn’t even suspect he would. “You’re eager?” “Very.”
“You’ll be doing what?”
“Engaging Senexi fighters, then hunting down branch inds and brood minds.”
“How many fighters going in?”
“Twelve.”
“Big target, eh?”
She nodded.
“While you’re there, ask yourself what are they fighting for? Understand?”
“I—”
“Ask, what are they fighting for. Just that. Then come back to me.” “What’s your name?”
“Not important,” he said. “Now go.”
She returned to the prep center as the sponge space warning tones began. Overhawks went among the fighters in the lineup, checking gear and giveaway body points for mental orientation. Prufrax submitted to the molded sensor mask being slipped over her face. “Ready!” the overhawk said. “Hardfought!” He clapped her on the shoulder. “Good luck.”
“Thank you, sir.” She bent down and slid into her fightsuit. Along the launch line, eleven other hawks did the same. The overs and other crew left the chamber, and twelve red beams delineated the launch tube. The fightsuits automatically lifted and aligned on their individual beams. Fields swirled around them like silvery tissue in moving water, then settled and hardened into cold scintillating walls, pulsing as the launch energy built up.
The tactic came to her. The ship’s sensors became part of her information net. She saw the Senexi thornship twelve kilometers in diameter, cuckoos lacing its outer hull like maggots on red fruit, snakes waiting to take them on.
She was terrified and exultant, so worked up that her body temperature was climbing. The fightsuit adjusted her balance.
At the count of ten and nine, she switched from biologic to cyber. The implant after absorbing much of her thought processes for weeks became Prufrax.
For a time there seemed to be two of her. Biologic continued, and in that region she could even relax a bit, as if watching a fib.
With almost dreamlike slowness, in the electronic time of cyber, her fightsuit followed the beam. She saw the stars and oriented herself to the cruiser’s beacon, using both for reference, plunging in the sword flower formation to assault the thornship. The cuckoos retreated in the vast red hull like worms withdrawing into an apple. Then hundreds of tiny black pinpoints appeared in the closest quadrant to the sword flower.
Snakes shot out, each piloted by a Senexi branch ind. “Hardfought!” she told herself in biologic before that portion gave over completely to cyber.
Why were we flung out of dark
through ice and fire, a shower
of sparks? a puzzle;
Perhaps to build hell.
We strike here, there;
Set brief glows, fall through
and cross round again.
By our dimming, we see what
Beatitude we have.
In the circle, kindling
together, we form an exhausted Empyrean.
We feel the rush of
igniting winds but still
grow dull and wan.
New rage flames, new light,
dropping like sun through muddy
ice and night and fall
Close, spinning blue and bright.
In time they, too,
Tire. Redden.
We join, compare pasts
cool in huddled paths, turn gray.
And again.
We are a companion flow
of ash, in the slurry,
out and down.
We sleep.
Rivers form above and below.
Above, iron snakes twist,
clang and slice, chime,
helium eyes watching, seeing
Snowflake hawks,
signaling adamant muscles and
energy teeth. What hunger
compels our venom spit?
It flies, strikes the crystal
flight, making mist gray green
with ammonia rain.
Sleeping, we glide,
and to each side
unseen shores wait
with the moans of
an unseen tide.
She wrote that. We. One of her our poems.”
Poem?
A kind of fib, I think.
—I don’t see what it says.
—Sure you do! She’s talking hardfought.
The Zap? Is that all?
—No, I don’t think so.
Do you understand it?
Not all…
She lay back in the bunk, legs crossed, eyes closed, feeling the receding dominance of the implant the overness of cyber and the almost pleasant ache in her back. She had survived her first. The thornship had retired, severely damaged, its surface seared and scored so heavily it would never release cuckoos again.
It would become a hulk, a decoy. Out of action. Satisfaction / out of action / Satisfaction…
Still, with eight of the twelve fighters lost, she didn’t quite feel the exuberance of the rhyme. The snakes had fought very well. Bravely, she might say. They lured, sacrificed, cooperated, demonstrating teamwork as fine as that in her own group. Strategy was what made the cruiser’s raid successful. A superior approach, an excellent tactic. And perhaps even surprise, though the final analysis hadn’t been posted yet.
Without those advantages, they might have all died.
She opened her eyes and stared at the pattern of blinking lights in the ceiling panel, lights with their secret codes that repeated every second, so that whenever she looked at them, the implant deep inside was debriefed, reinstructed. Only when she fought would she know what she was now seeing.
She returned to the tunnel as quickly as she was able. She floated up toward the blister and found him there, surrounded by packs of information from the last hardfought. She waited until he turned his attention to her.
“Well?” he said.
“I asked myself what they are fighting for. And I’m very angry.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know. I can’t know. They’re Senexi.”
“Did they fight well?”
“We lost eight. Eight.” She cleared her throat.
“Did they fight well?” he repeated, an edge in his voice.
“Better than I was ever told they could.”
“Did they die?”
“Enough of them.”
“How many did you kill?”
“I don’t know.” But she did. Eight.
“You killed eight,” he said, pointing to the packs. “I’m analyzing the battle now.”
“You’re behind what we read, what gets posted?” she asked.
“Partly,” he said. “You’re a good hawk.”
“I knew I would be,” she said, her tone quiet, simple.
“Since they fought bravely—”
“How can Senexi be brave?” she asked sharply.
“Since,” he repeated, “they fought bravely, why?”
“They want to live, to do their…work. Just like me.”
“No,” he said. She was confused, moving between extremes in her mind, first resisting, then giving in too much. “They’re Senexi. They’re not like us.”
“What’s your name?” she asked, dodging the issue.
“Clevo.”
Her glory hadn’t even begun yet, and already she was well into her fall.
Aryz made his connection and felt the brood mind’s emergency cache of knowledge in the mandate grow up around him like ice crystals on glass. He stood in a static scene. The transition from living memory to human machine memory had resulted in either a coding of data or a reduction of detail; either way, the memory was cold not dynamic. It would have to be compared, recorrelated, if that would ever be possible.
How much human data had had to be dumped to make space for this?
&nbs
p; He cautiously advanced into the human memory, calling up topics almost at random. In the short time he had been away, so much of what he had learned seemed to have faded or become scrambled. Branch inds were supposed to have permanent memory, human data, for one reason or another, didn’t take. It required so much effort just to begin to understand the different modes of thought.
He backed away from sociological data, trying to remain within physics and mathematics. There he could make conversions to fit his understanding without too much strain.
Then something unexpected happened. He felt the brush of another mind, a gentle inquiry from a source made even stranger by the hint of familiarity. It made what passed for a Senexi greeting, but not in the proper form, using what one branch ind of a team would radiate to a fellow; a gross breach, since it was obviously not from his team or even from his family. Aryz tried to withdraw. How was it possible for minds to meet in the mandate? As he retreated, he pushed into a broad region of incomprehensible data. It had none of the characteristics of the other human regions he had examined.
This is for machines, the other said. Not all cultural data is limited to biologic. You are in the area where programs and cyber designs are stored. They are really accessible only to a machine hooked into the mandate.
—What is your family? Aryz asked, the first step question in the sequence Senexi used for urgent identity requests.
—I have no family. I am not a branch ind. No access to active brood minds. I have learned from the mandate.
Then what are you?
—I don’t know, exactly. Not unlike you.
Aryz understood what he was dealing with. It was the mind of the mutated shape, the one that had remained in the chamber, beseeching when he approached the transparent barrier.
I must go now, the shape said. Aryz was alone again in the incomprehensible jumble. He moved slowly, carefully, into the Senexi sector, calling up subjects familiar to him. If he could encounter one shape, doubtless he could encounter the others perhaps even the captive.
The idea was dreadful—and fascinating. So far as he knew, such intimacy between Senexi and human had never happened before. Yet there was something very Senexi like in the method, as if branch inds attached to the brood mind were to brush mentalities while searching in the ageless memories.
The dread subsided. There was little worse that could happen to him, with his fellows dead, his brood mind in flux bind, his purpose uncertain.
What Aryz was feeling, for the first time, was a small measure of freedom.
The story of the original Prufrax continued.
In the early stages she visited Clevo with a barely concealed anger. His method was aggravating, his goals never precisely spelled out. What did he want with her, if anything?
And she with him? Their meetings were clandestine, though not precisely forbidden. She was a hawk one now with considerable personal liberty between exercises and engagements. There were no monitors in the closed off reaches of the cruiser, and they could do whatever they wished. The two met in areas close to the ship’s hull, usually in weapons blisters that could be opened to reveal the stars there they talked.
Prufrax was not accustomed to prolonged conversation. Hawks were not raised to be voluble, nor were they selected for their curiosity. Yet the exhawk Clevo talked a great deal and was the most curious person she had met, herself included, and she regarded herself as uncharacteristically curious.
Often he was infuriating, especially when he played the “leading game,” as she called it. Leading her from one question to the next, like an instructor, but without the trappings or any clarity of purpose. “What do you think of your mother?”
“Does that matter?”
“Not to me.”
“Then why ask?”
“Because you matter.”
Prufrax shrugged. “She was a fine mother. She bore me with a well chosen heritage. She raised me as a hawk candidate. She told me her stories.”
“Any hawk I know would envy you for listening at Jayax’s knee.”
“I was hardly at her knee.”
“A speech tactic.”
“Yes, well, she was important to me.”
“She was a preferred single?”
“Yes.”
“So you have no father.”
“She selected without reference to individuals.”
“Then you are really not that much different from a Senexi.”
She bristled and started to push away. “There! You insult me again.”
“Not at all. I’ve been asking one question all this time, and you haven’t even heard. How well do you know the enemy?”
“Well enough to destroy them.” She couldn’t believe that was the only question he’d been asking. His speech tactics were very odd.
“Yes, to win battles, perhaps. But who will win the war?”
“It’ll be a long war,” she said softly, floating a few meters from him. He rotated in the blister, blocking out a blurred string of stars. The cruiser was preparing to shift out of status geometry again. “They fight well.”
“They fight with conviction. Do you believe them to be evil?”
“They destroy us.”
“We destroy them.”
“So the question,” she said, smiling at her cleverness, “is who began to destroy?”
“Not at all,” Clevo said. “I suspect there’s no longer a clear answer to that. Our leaders have obviously decided the question isn’t important. No. We are the new, they are the old. The old must be superseded. It’s a conflict born in the essential difference between Senexi and humans.”
“That’s the only way we’re different? They’re old, we’re not so old? I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I, entirely.”
“Well, finally!”‘
“The Senexi,” Clevo continued, unperturbed, “long ago needed only gas giant planets like their homeworlds. They lived in peace for billions of years before our world was formed. But as they moved from star to star, they learned uses for other types of worlds. We were most interested in rocky Earth like planets. Gradually we found uses for gas giants, too. By the time we met, both of us encroached on the other’s territory. Their technology is so improbable, so unlike ours, that when we first encountered them we thought they must come from another geometry.”
“Where did you learn all this?” Prufrax squinted at him suspiciously.
“I’m no longer a hawk,” he said, “but I was too valuable just to discard. My experience was too broad, my abilities too useful. So I was placed in research. It seems a safe place for me. Little contact with my comrades.” He looked directly at her. “We must try to know our enemy, at least a little.”
“That’s dangerous,” Prufrax said, almost instinctively.
“Yes, it is. What you know, you cannot hate.”
“We must hate,” she said. “It makes us strong. Senexi hate.”
“They might,” he said. “But, sometime, wouldn’t you like to…sit down and talk with one, after a battle? Talk with a fighter? Learn its tactic, how it bested you in one move, compare—”
“No!” Prufrax shoved off rapidly down the tube. “We’re shifting now. We have to get ready.”
She’s smart. She’s leaving him. He’s crazy.
—Why do you think that?
—He would stop the fight, end the Zap.
—But he was a hawk.
—And hawks became glovers, I guess. But glovers go wrong, too.
?
Did you know they used you? How you were used?
—That’s all blurred now.
—She’s doomed if she stays around him. Who’s that?
—Someone is listening with us.
Recognize?
No, gone now.
The next battle was bad enough to fall into the hellfought. Prufrax was in her fightsuit, legs drawn up as if about to kick off. The cruiser exited sponge space and plunged into combat before sponge space supplements could reach f
ull effectiveness. She was dizzy, disoriented. The overhawks could only hope that a switch from biologic to cyber would cure the problem.
She didn’t know what they were attacking. Tactic was flooding the implant, but she was only receiving the wash of that; she hadn’t merged yet. She sensed that things were confused. That bothered her. Overs did not feel confusion.
The cruiser was taking damage. She could sense at least that, and she wanted to scream in frustration. Then she was ordered to merge with the implant. Biologic became cyber. She was in the Know.
The cruiser had reintegrated above a gas giant planet. They were seventy nine thousand kilometers from the upper atmosphere. The damage had come from ice mines chunks of Senexi treated water ice, altered to stay in sponge space until a human vessel integrated nearby. Then they emerged, packed with momentum and all the residual instability of an unsuccessful exit into status geometry. Unsuccessful for a ship, that is—very successful for a weapon.
The ice mines had given up the overness of the real within range of the cruiser and had blasted out whole sections of the hull. The launch lanes had not been damaged. The fighters lined up on their beams and were peppered out into space, spreading in the classic sword flower.
The planet was a cold nest. Over didn’t know what the atmosphere contained, but Senexi activity had been high in the star system, concentrating on this world. Over had decided to take a chance. Fighters headed for the atmosphere. The cruiser began planting singularity eggs. The eggs went ahead of the fighters, great black grainy ovoids that seemed to leave a trail of shadow—the wake of a birthing disruption in status geometry that could turn a gas giant into a short lived sun.
Their time was limited. The fighters would group on entry sleds and descend to the liquid water regions where Senexi commonly kept their upwelling power plants. The fighters would first destroy any plants, loop into the liquid ammonia regions to search for hidden cuckoos, then see what was so important about the world.
She and five other fighters mounted the sled. Growing closer, the hazy clear regions of the atmosphere sparkled with Senexi sensors. Spiderweb beams shot from the six sleds to down the sensors. Buffet began. Scream, heat, then a second flower from the sled at a depth of two hundred kilometers. The sled slowed and held station. It would be their only way back. The fightsuits couldn’t pull out of such a large gravity well.