Symbionts

by William H. Keith

  The Confederation ships, content to hold what they’d won in orbit, did not pursue.

  Against all odds, the Confederation—and their DalRiss allies—were victorious.

  But at what cost?

  Katya stared at the fuzzy, glowing cloud that was keeping pace with the Karyu on its outbound orbit—Daghar’s funeral pyre, still radiating the fierce heat of its brief, furious ignition. The debris from that explosion continued to drift out from the center of the blast, retaining the velocity it had had before the explosion. Since they’d already achieved escape velocity from Herakles, it would no doubt fall into an extended and highly elliptical orbit around Mu Herculis.

  Katya had already probed that cloud with her Warlord’s radar. The largest piece she’d been able to find measured perhaps a meter across… one meter, out of a structure that once had been two thousand meters across.

  “Oh, Dev!” She cried out, suddenly overcome by a devastating loneliness. “Dev!”

  “I’m… here, Katya.”

  The jolt nearly knocked her off-line. She said nothing, but stared wildly into the glowing mist left from the explosion, here thoughts racing. Oh, God oh God I’m going mad he’s dead I must’ve brain-burned oh dear God he’s dead oh God—

  “Please, Katya. You’re not crazy. And… I don’t think I am, either.”

  “Dev… Dev…” She stopped, groping for feelings that were whipcracking through her brain. Dev you goker don’t do this to me you can’t possibly be alive!

  But she ran a quick systems check, looking for the source of the feed that was carrying that voice, so eerily like Dev’s on-line speech.

  It was coming through the Naga.

  “You know how we’ve speculated about the Naga?” Dev’s voice asked her. “About how their subcellular makeup is an awful lot like networks of human neurons… but it’s also like a computer network, in a way, with lots and lots of separate processors. That’s how they can encode memories that, that go back billions of years, in matrices of nanotechnic subcells.”

  You’re dead I saw you die oh Dev, Dev, Dev I miss you so much!

  “I miss you too, love. And I guess I am dead, in a way. My body certainly died in that explosion.”

  That jolted her too, but the shock smashed the chain of uncontrollable thoughts racing through her brain, made her stop and pull her thinking back into some semblance of rational cause and effect, stimulus and response.

  “Dev?”

  “Yes, Katya.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I… I think I’m in the network of Naga fragments in the DalRiss fleet. I find… yes. I find I can shift from ship to ship. I’m in your warstrider now. With you. At least a part of me is.”

  The thought was at once bizarre, almost horrible… and reassuring.

  “We’ve known for a long time that Nagas are very good at patterning things. And they can think… very quickly. Faster than the DalRiss. Somehow, I’m still not sure how, they, they patterned my thoughts. Made a replica of me, I guess, but as an electronic pattern, stored within the matrix of their organic computers.”

  “Are you… are you real? Or a copy?” The questions hurt, brutally direct.

  “Kat, that question is meaningless. I remember myself as Dev Cameron. I remember my whole life… better, I think, than I ever could with a brain of flesh and blood. I remember… oh, God. Things from when I was little. My mother. My father…”

  “Dev…”

  “I remember making love with you in that ascraft.” She felt him smile. “Twice.”

  “I saw Daghar explode.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your body was destroyed.”

  “Yes. But, well… where is your mind, Katya?”

  “Mind is the interaction of all of the patterns of neural stimuli in the active brain, Dev. There’s no such thing as a mind apart from body. There’s no such thing as a soul.”

  “I used to believe that. I’m not so sure now. The DalRiss know a hell of a lot more about how brain and body work than we do, and I think, I think that they believe in souls. Spirits, if you like.

  “Maybe all we need to know at this point, though, is that mind, whatever it is, must work over teleoperational distances, somehow. Look, it doesn’t matter whether you see over optic nerves a few centimeters long, or by way of optic sensors and a lasercom link a few million kilometers long, right?”

  “Of course. That’s the whole point behind teleoperation. Or warstriders, for that matter.”

  “Okay. While I was linked through the Nagas in the DalRiss fleet, I was… I was touching the other ships. At one point, I looked for you. I could feel you over the link. Was that, that sensation traveling to my mind aboard Daghar? Or was my mind traveling to you, here aboard your warstrider?”

  “I think the question is meaningless.”

  “Don’t be so sure, Kat. When someone says his mind is elsewhere…” He stopped, and she heard his chuckle. She shivered. It was as though he really was right there beside her. “Anyway, the Naga on one of the other ships must have picked up the pattern of my mind when the Daghar exploded.”

  “Dev, you’re not a pattern. People aren’t patterns!”

  “Maybe not. But if you can call mind a set of programs run in parallel…” The voice stopped, pausing for a moment. “Here’s one way to think of it, Kat. We’ve talked before about the Nagas being like an enormous computer network. Each fragment is a node, itself a collection of some trillions or quadrillions of molecule-sized computers. Organic nanotechnics.”

  “Yes.…”

  “The whole could be considered to be a massively parallel networked system, a widely distributed processing network with one hell of a lot of redundancy. I, the important part of ‘I,’ anyway, was distributed throughout a large part of the whole system when Daghar blew. It patterned my mental software, copied everything that I was… or saved it, or whatever term you want to use. Think of it…” and she’d felt him grin. “Think of it as having me permanently jacked in. The important thing is, I’m alive… sort of, anyway. And that’s enough for me right now.”

  “Are you, Dev?” Dev I want to see you want to hold you be held oh Dev I want you inside me again oh please—

  “I’m afraid I can’t, my love. Not anymore. But I’m here. With you. For as long as you want me.”

  Her thoughts were crumbling again, veering into chaotic nonsense. She battled for control. She felt as though she was going to cry… she wanted to cry, and yet, linked into the Warlord’s AI, she couldn’t.

  Warstriders, she found, couldn’t cry.

  Epilogue

  Many wonders there be, but none more wondrous than man.

  —Antigone

  Sophocles

  Fifth century B.C.E.

  Travis Sinclair, it turned out, had made it safely to Liberty. It wasn’t necessary, though, for the Confederation fleet to track him from system to system, as planned. Ten hours after the battle, a Confederation frigate, the Freedom, jumped back into the outskirts of the Heraklean system in order to check on what the Imperial fleet was doing. When Darlene Vonnegut, Freedom’s skipper, found Miyagi’s battlefleet scattered and fled, his flagship still broadcasting its surrender call, she jumped back to Liberty to summon a task force, scraped together from those ships that had managed to flee the debacle at Herakles. And a good thing, too, Katya thought, for the only ships able to enter K-T space in the entire Confederation fleet were Tarazed, Mirach, and Vindemiatrix, and sending those lightly armed starships hopping from system to system in search of the missing Confederation fleet would have verged on foolhardiness. Eagle and the other Confederation survivors of Second Herakles might be jump-capable again someday, depending on how the repairs went… but it wouldn’t be soon.

  “I was damned sorry to hear about Dev,” Sinclair told her. It was nearly three months after the battle. They were on Liberty, in the new Confederation headquarters in the capital city of Lincoln. They sat alone together, in Sinclair’s office. A viewall
looked out over the city, and the sullen, ember-bright glow of Liberty’s sun, 70 Ophiuchi A.

  She nodded and managed a smile. “Thanks, General.”

  “Are you all right?”

  Again, she nodded.

  “That’s the Katya I know. There’s a hell of a lot to do yet, even now. I’m going to miss Dev. I would miss you, if we lost you as well.”

  “I’m not sure what you need me for now. The war, well, the war’s over, isn’t it?”

  “If the truce holds.If the Emperor ratifies the new agreement. If hotheads on one of the occupied Confederation worlds don’t launch an attack on the Imperials during the next few weeks. A lot of ifs… but yes, I think the war is over.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Yes. And thank the people who bought that victory for us. People like Dev.”

  Clearly, the Empire, the entire Hegemony, had been shaken from Frontier to Core Worlds to Earth herself by the Battle of Second Herakles. The knowledge that the Confederation had allied with the DalRiss had proven to be at least as critical for this revolution as an alliance with the nation of France had been in another revolution, over 760 years before. A cease-fire had gone into effect almost at once, and so far it had lasted, even on New America, where armed guerrillas continued to share the world with Imperial occupation forces. Negotiations were under way, both on Earth and on Liberty. Imperial recognition of the Confederation was widely accepted as fact; all that remained was to map out the actual extent of their victory. Rebel worlds currently unoccupied by Imperials, like Liberty and Rainbow, would certainly receive full independence. Occupied planets, those like New America and Eridu, would probably be allowed to go, or the question might be put to a vote ratifying the decision on each world. Other worlds that had indicated their desire to be free by signing the Declaration of Reason, but which had not joined in the fighting, planets like Loki and Juanyekundu and Deseret… well, their fates still had to be worked out.

  But peacefully.

  Both sides were sick of war.

  As for the DalRiss, they would be all right as well. She’d heard later that the long-expected Imperial fleet had, indeed, arrived at ShraRish some weeks after the fight at Herakles. They’d dropped out of K-T space, taken up orbit… and vanished.

  Could Achievers make other things go away? Or bend space in unexpected ways? Gods, so little was known yet about these beings, able to bend reality with a thought. It was a dreadful mistake to underestimate them.

  “Actually, General, I think what I need most right now is work.”

  “That’s the spirit. I’m sure Dev would approve.”

  She almost laughed out loud. No one but her knew of Dev’s curious survival.

  They’d talked about it a long time, after she’d been picked up and returned to the Eagle. When she’d jacked in to ViRcom a message to Freedom and the other Confederation reinforcements, he’d been there.

  She’d seen him… touched him. And they’d made love together on a nameless, deserted beach with the ocean surf crashing nearby. All of the myriad and intricate programming that had been Dev, it seemed, had been saved, and that included the far cruder programs that had once been resident in his now vaporized RAM. What was a program but saved information? The information was still there, distributed through the DalRiss fleet.

  They made love, and she tried not to think about the fact that his touch, the feel of him on her and around her and inside of her, was not real.

  What was “real,” anyway? She closed her eyes and downloaded the scene to her biological memory once again.

  “They want me to go with them,” Dev told her afterward, as they lay together on the wet sand. “I’ll be gone a long time.”

  “What? Who?” She’d been wondering about Dev’s body. It was just information, after all, and the Naga might have preserved a pattern of that as well.…

  “The DalRiss, of course.”

  “Can’t you… stay? We could talk with Sinclair, maybe see about having the DalRiss migrate to human space.…”

  “Uh-uh, Kat. They sacrificed a lot to help us here. And I sure as hell don’t want anyone trying to lay claim to their fleet just because the… call it the soul of one human striderjack is somehow trapped inside their communications network.”

  “What… so you’re going with the DalRiss exodus? Where are they going?”

  Again, she felt the warmth of his infectious smile. He couldn’t be dead, he couldn’t. She couldn’t be imagining his warmth, his humor, his smell, his presence in this much detail, and it had none of the hollow emptiness of a recorded encounter. He, everything about him, was too real. Somehow, the Naga link had preserved so very much more of his personality than words and thoughts alone.

  “You know what the DalRiss think about life,” he said. “It’s damned near a religion for them.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re going… out there. Beyond human space. Jumping from star to star, looking for life. They believe—and I believe with them—that the galaxy, the whole universe is chock brim full to overflowing with life… and tidal theories and prebiotic matrices be damned. They want me to navigate for them.”

  “But you haven’t been out there. I thought you had to have been to a place, to pass its feel on to the Achiever.”

  “Maybe what they really want is a human viewpoint. A human outlook on the universe. Remember, both the DalRiss and the Naga are blind to the visible spectrum. They’ve both learned to see, in the same way that we’ve learned to ‘hear’ radio with artificial receivers, but we have a clearer perspective on the universe than they do, the way it’s made, the way it really is… at least in some ways. I can help them.”

  Katya sighed. “I find it hard to believe that humans can see anything clearly.”

  “I know what you mean. But, well, the perspective of seeing things from someone else’s vantage point, that always makes things clearer in the end. Don’t you think?”

  “Dev, I don’t want to lose you. Not again.”

  “I’ll be back. But I think you need some time on your own. Time to get used to…”

  “To you being a ghost? Maybe so. And maybe those DalRiss biological wizards can do something about a body for you, someday.”

  “Maybe. Right now, I don’t want to even think about it. Katya, I want this. You know, since my memories have been coming back, from my childhood, I… I’d forgotten how much I wanted the wonder of it all. The stars. Katya, the stars…”

  “You always wanted to be a shipjacker, didn’t you? Until you got sidetracked into the warstriders.”

  “It was a good sidetrack. I met you there, right? I wouldn’t have missed that for anything.”

  “I’m glad I knew you, Dev.”

  “Me too.And… I will be back.”

  She’d not told him, even then, that when she’d last seen a DalRiss, aboard one of their ships, the being had “looked” at her with the curiously scanning crescent of its head… and mentioned the new life growing deep in her belly.

  Katya had deliberately kept a piece of Dev for herself, that last time aboard the ascraft, by switching off the part of her cephlink that regulated her sexual rhythms.

  “I love you, Dev,” she’d told him.

  And, through the Xenolink, she’d felt his lips brush hers, as warm and as sweet as reality.

  TERMINOLOGY AND GLOSSARY

  AI: Artificial Intelligence. Since the Sentient Status Act of 2204, higher-model networking systems have been recognized as “self-aware but of restricted purview,” a legal formula that precludes enfranchisement of machine intelligences.

  Alpha: Type of Xenophobe combat machine, also called stalker, shapeshifter, silvershifter, etc. They are animated by numerous organic-machine hybrids and mass ten to twelve tons. Their weapons include nano-D shells and surfaces, and various magnetic effects. Alphas appear in two guises, a snake-or wormlike shape that lets them travel underground along SDTs, and any of a variety of combat shapes, usually geometrical with numerous spines or
tentacles. Each distinctive combat type is named after a poisonous Terran reptile, e.g., Fer-de-Lance, Cobra, Mamba, etc.

  Alya: Naked-eye star Theta Serpentis (63 Serpentis) 130 light years from Sol. A double star with a separation of 900 All (5 light-days), Alya A is an A5 star, Alya B an A7. Alya B-V is the homeworld of the DalRiss, who know it as GhegnuRish. Alya A-VI is known as ShraRish, a DalRiss colony.

  Analogue: Computer-generated “double” of a person, used to handle routine business, communications, and duties through ViRcom linkage.

  Annaisha: “Guide.” Term for Imperial liaison officers who coordinate military or political activity between the Empire and Hegemony military forces.

  AND Round: Anti-nano disassembler. Tube-launched NCM round that bursts almost as soon as it is fired, releasing an NCM cloud.

  Antigenics: Nanotechnic devices programmed to hunt down and destroy disease bacteria and parasites inside the body.

  APW: Armored Personnel Walker. Any of several large, four-legged striders designed to carry unlinked passengers. VbH Zo (“Elephant”) can carry fifty troops. Kani (“Crab”) can carry twenty.

  Ascraft: Aerospace craft. Vehicles that can fly both in space and in atmosphere, including various transports, fighters, and shuttles.

  Beta: Second class of Xenophobe combat machine, adapted from captured or abandoned human equipment. Its weapons are human-manufactured weapons, often reshaped to Xeno purposes. They have been known to travel underground.

  Bionangineering: Use of nanotechnology to restructure life-forms for medical or ornamental reasons.

  CA: Combat Armor. Light personal armor/space suit providing eight hours’ life support in hostile environment.