The Swarm

by Orson Scott Card

  “That’s kind of you to say,” he managed. There was a moment of silence between them, then Bingwen asked. “So the hull, you figured it out?”

  “No. I still have no idea how to breach it, but I floated a theory that intrigued them, I suppose.”

  “Which is what?” he asked.

  She hesitated.

  “I’m not some executive at a rival company, Wila, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “This was a very public initiative. It’s just … I think it would bore you. Most people your age aren’t interested in this kind of thing.”

  “Believe me,” Bingwen said. “I have a keen interest in all things Formic.”

  She looked at him strangely, as if seeing him for the first time. “Yes. I think you do.” She rotated in her seat slightly to face him. “All right. When we look at the Formic scout ship from a distance, we see a perfectly smooth bulbous shape, right?”

  “Right.”

  “The surface appears flawless. Very delicately engineered. And yet when you go inside the ship, the interior walls in the tunnels are starkly different. The metal looks poorly processed, almost like raw harvested ore. And there are imperfections in it everywhere.”

  “That has always bothered me,” said Bingwen. “The exterior was perfect as you say, but inside, it’s like an entirely different ship. Totally incongruent. Ugly metal, little regard for symmetry. The landers that set down in China were the same way. Their tops were made of that same polished hull material. But the sides of the landers seemed crude and slapped together as if the Formics had no sense of aesthetics.”

  “Right,” said Wila. “The smaller Formic crafts were just as ugly, their metal just as crude. Nothing like the indestructible hull of the scout ship.”

  “It’s like the hull was built by someone else entirely,” said Bingwen.

  Wila nodded. “Yes. You say that flippantly, but that’s precisely my theory.”

  “That someone else built the hull? Someone other than Formics? Who?”

  “Let me back up for a moment,” said Wila. “We’ve always assumed that the hull was constructed in the same way that we construct the hulls of our ships, which is to say with plates, large sections of metal that are fastened together piece by piece like a patchwork puzzle to eventually form the shape of the ship. For big ships that’s how we do it. And when we do, each of those plates must be made to mathematically precise specifications. Their measurements can’t be off by a hundredth of a millimeter. Width, thickness, the curvature of their surface, it all has to be perfect. Otherwise the plate won’t fuse properly with adjacent plates and you’ll have a domino effect of mistakes. If plate A is imprecise, for example, then plate B is off and won’t fuse properly with plate C and so on. It would be a mess. No shipbuilder would tolerate that.”

  “True,” said Bingwen. “Shipbuilders would go nuts.”

  “Well, if you look at the Formic hull from a distance,” said Wila, “it appears to be perfectly symmetrical. But if you get really, really close to the surface, you begin to see slight imperfections. Thousands of them, in fact. Juke Limited surveyed the surface of the ship for the first time recently with lasers for another reason entirely, but the results were surprising. The surface has slight undulations and variations all over it. It’s imprecise. So they can’t have used plates. Because if they had, and if the plates had all these imperfections, the plates would never align. We would see edges where plates didn’t quite fit. But we don’t. We only see these slight, nearly imperceptible undulations. Which leads me to only one possible conclusion. The Formic hull is a single piece of metal.”

  “How is that possible?” said Bingwen. “How could something that big be one piece of metal? How could a machine forge that?”

  “My first guess was that it was made from a mold,” said Wila. “Under high pressure. But if that were true, then we should see at least one seam, the seam of the mold. But again, we don’t. And anyway, it would be incredibly difficult to generate enough heat in space to fuse that much metal together and produce that much pressure, particularly on that grand scale. The hull is enormous.”

  “Just because there are undulations and imperfections in the hull doesn’t mean the hull is a single piece of metal,” said Bingwen. “Maybe the undulations weren’t made during construction. Maybe they came afterwards, formed by tiny impact craters, when the hull was struck by micrometeorites as it moved toward our solar system at a fraction of the speed of light.”

  Wila smiled. “Very astute. I’m impressed. I thought the same thing initially. But it doesn’t add up. A, there is the ship’s generated shield already protecting the hull from such collisions. B, there is the fact that nothing Juke engineers have done has made any such dent in the surface, suggesting that a micrometeorite, even one hit at high speed, wouldn’t damage it either. Then there’s C: The undulations aren’t shaped like impact craters. And D, if these had been caused by impacts while moving at high speed, the damage would be congregated on the nose of the ship where the ship is most vulnerable to particles. But that’s not the case. There are imperfections even in the rear of the ship. Stranger still, they go in various directions. They move around apertures and ports, for instance. They curve with the circle. No way is that impact damage.”

  “So these imperfections were created during construction,” Bingwen said.

  “I believe so, yes. They had to have been.”

  “But this is an engineering question,” said Bingwen. “And you’re a biochemist. They didn’t offer you a job simply because you read their data better than they did. There’s more to it that that. You think you know how the Formics did it, and you think it was biochemical.”

  “How much do you know about the Hive Queen theory?” asked Wila.

  “Some,” said Bingwen. “I know the prevailing belief is that the Formics are led by a single leader who has telepathic powers somehow. She can command her army from a safe distance, sending them messages mind to mind, and they obey her without hesitation. It all feels a little mystical to me, but it’s substantiated by what we saw in the war, so I can’t exactly argue against it.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “How old are you?”

  “Old enough to read what’s on the nets. You think the Hive Queen was involved in the construction of the ship somehow?”

  “I think the Hive Queen dictates everything that happens in the Formics’ universe. Not just with her own species, but with other species as well. We humans are a mechanical society. We build machines to accomplish tasks for us. Machines build our ships, our skimmers, our homes, our ovens. Machines are all around us. We rely on them for communication, agriculture, education, manufacturing, everything.”

  “The Formics have machines as well,” said Bingwen.

  “Some machines, yes,” said Wila. “But not to the degree that we do. They are mostly a biochemical society. Consider the Formic foot soldiers that marched across China. They carried no communication devices. No radios, no transmitters. All communication was done biochemically somehow, as you said, mind to mind. Or consider their weapons. They sprayed gases. Chemical warfare. And their doily weapons are not lasers. They’re living organisms. Their projectiles are organic matter. And inside the scout ship, did they have machines moving cargo around or making repairs? No, they had Formics pulling carts. An archaic system in our minds, but this is how Formics operate. Their food on their ship was a small creature that was bred and raised in their garden habitat. We call the creatures lichen eaters, because, well, that’s what they did. They ate lichen. Another, larger creature in this garden habitat harvested these lichen eaters and delivered them to vats where they were melted down and turned into a slurry the Formics ate. Why did the creatures do that? Were they domesticated? Had Formics trained them to collect these lichen eaters like we might train a dog to jump through a hoop? I don’t think so. There was a level of intelligence there. The harvesters had to know when to kill and bring in a lichen eater.
They had to let the lichen eaters develop and mature and reach an age of ripeness, whenever that might be.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Bingwen asked. “That the Hive Queen dictates all that? That she sends commands to these creatures as easily as she does to her own species?”

  “Why not?” said Wila. “If the Hive Queen knows how to communicate instantaneously across vast distances from her mind to the mind of one of her own, why couldn’t she do so with other creatures as well? Particularly species that she has bioengineered. Take the doily again for instance. We strongly suspect that the doily is bioengineered to overexpress a peroxide polymer and thus generate the violent reaction that it does. Who could have engineered it other than the Hive Queen? And if she did, and if her communication mechanism is biochemical, then it stands to reason that she engineered it with the capacity to hear her voice. That’s how it might work with all of her creations. She created them with the mechanism that allows them to communicate with her mind to mind.”

  “Which would explain why she can’t communicate with us,” said Bingwen. “Because she didn’t engineer us. She didn’t endow us with whatever biological mechanism is required to connect to her mind.”

  “Precisely,” said Wila. “That’s my theory anyway. But I believe that somehow we eventually will be able to communicate with her. Or at least I hope we can.”

  “So what does this have to do with the hull?” Bingwen asked. “You think the Hive Queen engineered an organism to make the hull?”

  “I think it’s certainly a possibility. We would consider the idea absurd. We would use machines. But in a society wherein organisms are engineered to perform tasks, it’s not that farfetched of a premise. And it would explain why the hull of the ship is different from the interior. This organism, whatever it is, is engineered to make this indestructible hull and nothing else.”

  “And it would explain the imperfections in the construction as well,” said Bingwen. “This hull-building organism would make mistakes along the way, as all organisms do. It would not have the precision of a machine.”

  “Exactly,” said Wila. “Hence the tiny imperfections.”

  “But you’re contradicting yourself,” said Bingwen. “You said the hull was a single piece of metal. How could an organism construct a single piece of metal that large? How could an organism construct anything made of metal, for that matter?”

  Wila frowned. “I don’t know. I can’t prove any of this. Which is why I was surprised they offered me the job. But consider this: When we print something metal, we use lasers to melt micron layers of metal powder on top of each other on a build platform. Perhaps the Formics have engineered a creature that can do something similar. It would have to be a very small creature that adds tiny layers of dust or power to the metal, growing it centimeter by centimeter until the hull forms. How the creature would do this, however, I don’t know, but I suspect it would be a biochemical process. I posited the idea to Juke, sent them my dissertation on the Hive Queen, and the next thing I know there was someone knocking on my door.”

  The captain’s voice came over the intercom. “Good morning, everyone. We’ll be going hot here in just a moment. Please make sure you remain in your seats and that your seatbelt and shoulder harness are securely fastened. Thank you.”

  Wila frowned and turned to Bingwen. “Going hot?”

  “We fly like a plane until we reach a certain altitude and then we engage the rockets to escape Earth’s gravity well. That’s why we have little cargo and a small passenger cabin. Most of our weight is our huge fuel payload.”

  “It’s probably best that I didn’t know that before we set out,” said Wila, pressing herself back into her seat and facing forward.

  “We’ll be fine. I did a thorough study of the ship’s schematics yesterday. It’s a well-designed spacecraft.”

  “You studied the schematics? How?”

  “Everything is on the nets, Wila. You just have to know where to look and how to get access.”

  Bingwen looked down the aisle. Captain Li had been talking with several other officers. Rather than return to Bingwen’s row, he remained in his seat in the front near the others and buckled in.

  A minute later the engines ignited and Bingwen was thrust back into his seat as the shuttle rocketed forwarded. He saw Wila clinging to the armrests, a look of terror on her face. His heart went out to her, but fortunately the acceleration was over in a few minutes. The engines quieted, and Bingwen felt himself rise a little in his seat.

  “I think we’ve left Earth’s gravity well,” Wila said, floating upward as well until her seatbelts restrained her.

  Bingwen laughed, loosening his seatbelt and floating a little higher. “See? Not bad,” he said.

  Wila smiled. “No. I suppose it isn’t. Better than the sensation of thinking we’re going to plummet to Earth.”

  Far down the aisle, Captain Li lifted away from his seat, having made his rounds and presented himself to the other officers there. He turned and floated back down the aisle toward Bingwen.

  “The colonel’s returning,” Bingwen said to Wila. “He won’t like that we’re having a conversation. Good luck.”

  She looked at him intently and dropped her voice. “Do you need help, Bingwen? Are you being held against your will?”

  The question surprised him and he hesitated. Then he gave her a smile. “No, Wila. But thank you.”

  Captain Li returned and squeezed back into his seat beside Bingwen and busied himself with his wrist pad, oblivious that Bingwen had had any conversation. Bingwen kept his eyes to the front and remained silent. There were a hundred more questions he wanted to ask Wila, but the window of opportunity had closed. Was she right? Had the Formics engineered creatures to construct their ships for them? Did Juke Limited know something that validated that belief, and that’s why they had hired her so quickly? Or were they casting a wide net and bringing in any theories, however odd or nonconventional they may be? And was it true that the Hive Queen had the power to communicate her will to another creature so strongly that the other creature obeyed absolutely? If so, she suddenly seemed far more frightening than Bingwen had imagined her.

  And then another idea struck him. What if there is no Hive Queen? What if the Formics are no different than the lichen eaters or doilies or any of the other creatures following unseen commands? Maybe they’re all slaves to another, stronger creature entirely, one that uses animal slaves to conquer worlds.

  Is that what I am? Bingwen thought. An organism engineered for a purpose? I may not be bioengineered for my task, but I’m molded and shaped and refined in a similar process. Maybe humans and Formics are more alike than we care to admit.

  The pilot’s voice came over the speaker. “Ladies and gentlemen, just bear with us. We’re having a little trouble here setting our coordinates for our shuttledock. Please be patient.”

  Bingwen glanced at Li who looked up from the tablet he was reading, a concerned look on his face.

  “Is this bad?” Wila asked.

  Bingwen glanced at Li again, as if to ask if he could answer. Li nodded his permission.

  “The shuttle is guided by a computer,” said Bingwen. “That computer takes us to a dock at one of the Lagrange points, where we’ll get on a much bigger and roomier moonshuttle that will take us to Luna. But everything is in constant motion. So we have to coordinate our approach precisely, taking into consideration the shuttle’s orbital elements and velocity, as well as the dock’s orbit and velocity. If we get any of that wrong, we could miss the dock and have all kinds of problems. So when the pilot says we’re having difficulty getting coordinates, he probably means this is an issue of quadration.”

  “Quadration?” Wila asked.

  “Short for quadrangulation.”

  “That didn’t clarify.”

  “On earth, you locate yourself with triangulation,” said Bingwen. “It takes three reference points to get your exact location on the surface. But in three-dimensional space, it t
akes four points. So, quadrangulation. But it’s not fun to say a lot, so pilots shorten it to ‘quadration.’ Or ‘quadding’ when they’re in a hurry.”

  “So if we can’t quad,” said Wila, “what does that mean? We’re stuck?”

  “It means we’re flying blind,” said Bingwen. “The ship can’t compute our necessary direction and velocity.”

  The captain came out of the cockpit and began speaking with one of the officers, who Bingwen had identified as the most senior member of the Fleet on board, as if looking for his counsel on how to proceed.

  “Stay here,” said Li. He unbuckled his harness and pulled himself forward in zero G. Bingwen strained to hear what was being said, but the group was speaking in hushed tones. After a moment, Li looked back down the aisle and waved Bingwen forward. “Bingwen, come up here.”

  Bingwen undid his harness and flew to the group. The men were all gathered in the aisle. A few were high-ranking senior officers. They regarded Bingwen with a look of confusion, as if they were surprised to discover a child on board.

  “Explain to Bingwen what you just explained to me,” Li said to the captain.

  The captain hesitated. “Why?”

  “Because no one here knows how to fix the problem, including you, and maybe he can,” said Li.

  “This isn’t something a boy can solve,” said the captain.

  “Do you know this young man?” Li asked the captain, gesturing to Bingwen.

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Do you know what his capabilities are?”

  “This is a complex issue,” said the captain.

  “And this is a Chinese-engineered vessel,” said Li. “And I am a colonel of the International Fleet, giving you an order. I don’t care if you’re the captain of this vessel or not. This Chinese boy is the best-qualified person on this ship to solve the problem. Tell him.”