Guardian of Night

by Tony Daniel

  “Captain, I have listened patiently,” said Talid. “And I appreciate the position of Lamella. But I still do not understand why we cannot bring this weapon to the Mutualist enclaves and turn the tide in the long pogrom.”

  Ricimer sat up straight in his chair, fingered his ampoule, shook his head. “Because, with the greatest of respect to your deep convictions, Hadria, I must tell you—the resistance is over. The Mutualists are all but defeated. Those who remain are a fleeing remnant.”

  “But this is impossible!”

  “Hadria, I’m sorry, but it was never an even fight. Mutualists have no military of any strength, and what they have we have decimated. What have we been engaged in for the past two cycles if not that? We’ve attacked and destroyed Mutualist habitats, all of us in this chamber. If somehow we thought this would give us immunity from the pogrom at home, we were mistaken.” Ricimer paused, breathed a long drag from the nebulizer. He sighed, then spoke again. “They came for my family anyway, cut off my ancestral line. I made these sacrifices to my conscience, believing at least I was keeping my loved ones safe—and were they? No. I was betrayed by the Administration. There was no mutual protection compact, only the expectation that I would do what I was told. That I would accept all Administration judgments, including the judgment on my family—”

  Revenge us! sang the ancestors. Revenge our broken line!

  Ricimer paused again, steadied himself. Perhaps he’d taken in too much of the aromatic. Find the control, he told himself. You are no good to anyone as an emotional mess. No good to yourself. To your lust for revenge.

  And then a single voice among the ancestors. Familiar.

  Ricimer recognized it as his mother’s.

  They are fearful. But you are the living edge, my son. Do as you always have—find your way to the stars. Remember your favorite stories as a child. They were not tales of revenge, but of exploration. Broken-onyx and the Singbeast, The Bright-Dust of Teshinaw. Let these guide you.

  I do, Mother.

  Then you will do what is right.

  “I tell you, Hadria, the Mutualists are beaten and scattered. The Administration has been very effective, very effective.”

  “This is . . . bad news.” Talid sank back into her chair and dribbled a foot thoughtlessly into the feeding basin. “I had thought to move on from Earth. To find them. End the tyranny of the Administration. That is . . . was . . . my greatest hope.”

  Ricimer crumpled the remains of the naphthalene ampoule and tossed it into the spent footbath of his cabin’s nutrient basin. The housekeeping churn would see to its elimination after the meal was through.

  “You must understand, Hadria. We must have no illusions. The Guardian empire is far from weakened and failing. On the contrary, it is on the rise. Of course, ultimately, as you Mutualists believe, it will be undermined by plurality and the thirst for freedom, as all totalitarian regimes must be. But this will not occur before it does massive damage to its own citizens and its neighbors.”

  “Which brings us back to the humans,” said Cadj.

  “When the Regulators killed my family, I fell into sorrow. And then I raged. Because I saw its greater meaning. This was not an isolated atrocity. This is a part of the final working out of Regulation polity. We are parasitizing ourselves.”

  Ricimer considered. It was important for the others to believe that they were involved in a higher cause, that their actions meant something beyond individual caprice.

  This is the Guardian way. The corporate response is literally built into us, Ricimer thought.

  Guardian individuals were part of a limited group mind. Guardians did not have “brains” as organs. Normal thought processing was system-wide, carried on via a neuron-like network of organelles similar to mitochondria. This portion of the Guardian nervous system was, in fact, the evolutionary remnant of a separate species that had combined symbiotically with another to form the Guardian’s distant fungus-animal-like ancestor. But there was a separate Guardian nervous-system component, as well: the gid hanesheh. This was a branching network with a controlling organ-like cluster. Both components were in the chest.

  The gid represented the ancestral memories of the Guardian’s family line, its hypha. In effect, a Guardian had a two-sided nervous-system control, like a human, but one side came fully formed, filled with information and abilities bequeathed by an individual’s parents.

  An individual Guardian’s gid hanesheh did change over the course of its lifetime, but very slowly. It was, in effect, “write-once; read-only.” A Guardian both consciously and unconsciously deposited the most treasured memories of his or her lifetime into the gid, where they could not be forgotten—or changed. Each Guardian’s gid was eventually bequeathed to his or her children shortly after birth. Both parents “nursed” for a short time as the infant formatted its gid with parental and ancestral memories and skills.

  So, when Ricimer’s children were killed, so was his contribution to the millennia-long “log” of his family’s gid. He had spent his years before having children trying to load his gid with choice memories that would represent to his children who their father was and what he believed. The amazing things he’d seen in his travels.

  He was the last of his line. The last of a hypha that stretched back for millennia. He could feel them all inside him, could access some of their memories—and could wander through them at will during his rest cycle.

  The Administration’s goal was to wipe out all tainted hypha. If you had an ancestor who had Mutualist tendencies, then you were as good as a Mutualist yourself.

  This had been the sin of his wife and children.

  “When they assigned me to this vessel, gave me the artifact, I suspected the order would be to destroy the Agaric. Of course it would be. It fits perfectly with the Administration’s brutal logic, after all. Knowing this, I decided the time had come to follow the ancestral voices, to listen to my gid as all my hyphae lines shouted: ‘Enough! No more!’”

  “But Captain,” said Brank, Ricimer’s chief engineer. “They surely know we’ve gone missing by now. What if the Sporata track us down? What will have been the use?”

  “They may try, but I did not merely choose you as a crew because of your beliefs or tainted hyphae. Each of you has served under me before. Each of you has been trained by me.”

  Most, Ricimer reflected, had been part of the little group of mateless officers he and his wife had taken in after voyages. Talid, especially, had been a favorite of Del’s. At least three he had taught during his adjunct stint at the Academy.

  They were a varied lot. Contor, the weapons officer, was as solid as could be, but had a forebearer nearly a thousand cycles removed who was a founder of the ancient Lineage Heresy, one of the philosophical ancestors to Mutualism. Frazil, the craft internal-systems officer, had always been committed to Regulation but had grown bitter when he was dragged before his fourth loyalty-board inquisition. Each inquisition came precisely when he was up for promotion, and each had doomed his advancement through the ranks. All because of a distant speck on his pedigree.

  And there was Galeat, who was a bigger Mutualist than Talid but had managed to keep her secret better. She was along not because of polity, but because she was slated for the DDCM Institute for Receptors Training. One did not turn down an appointment to become a political officer, but it ended any hopes of becoming a real craft commander for Galeat.

  And it meant you must spend the rest of your career despised by those who were once your friends, and with good reason. Your job became to inform on them, research their hypha—and to send them to the dismemberment knives, or go there yourself if you shirked your duty.

  “I know that none of you will fail me or this vessel. The danger lies only in the gamble we are taking.”

  “But even if we make it to the rendezvous at Sol system, what will we do?” asked Talid. “The humans have every reason to hate us.”

  “I thought you would be leaving us at that point, Lieutenant Comman
der Talid. Off with your Mutualists.”

  “I have not made that decision, Captain.”

  Ricimer settled his feet back into the basin for a final pull on the nutrient bath. “What happens then depends very much on the humans,” Ricimer said. “You are the Mutualist, Hadria.” Ricimer’s nostrils tightened into a thin smile. “It will be time to practice what you preach. For all of us. We will all become good symbiots then.”

  FIFTEEN

  10 January 2076

  Vicinity of 82 Eridani

  USX Joshua Humphreys

  Griff Leher tugged his beard and surveyed V-CRYPT, the vessel xenology station. His work cubicle, decked out in puce and vomit-green fiber-coated separators, was not much smaller than his desk back in the New Pentagon. But there the similarity to CRYPT HQ ended. Instead of nearly fifty people working for him, and they in turn bossing dozens of other expers and civilians among them, he had exactly two fresh-from-IAS ensigns under him, one seemingly experienced warrant officer, Branton, as his station manager, and three exper specialists.

  To call it a step down in prestige would be a massive understatement. He was now managing a xenology McDonalds.

  There were also geists—many more aboard the craft than ever appeared on Earth, even in the relatively geist-friendly New Pentagon. One, DON, in charge of the local network and liaison with the vessel’s other internal-operations programs, got a kick out of appearing as a grizzled older man with a naval tattoo on one forearm. Leher was sure there was a story there but hadn’t checked into it yet.

  The other, VIKI, was a low-level persona that did most of the janitorial work and added an extra level of security to chroma operations. The only words she and Leher ever exchanged was when she asked for his password when he came on duty, salted up, and wiied into the chroma.

  The salt basin was a small ceramic sink protruding from the wall near the entrance portal. It held a scoop full of the granular material that carried the military acronym Nanotechnologically Interactive Reciprocal Communication and Environmental Interaction Substrate but was called “salt” by everybody, civ and military alike.

  You shook a handful of it over your head as if you were sprinkling yourself with baby powder. You blew it into your ears with a bulb on the end of a whiffer. You dissolved it in saline (conveniently supplied nearby in a small bottle complete with dropper next to the salt basin) and dripped it in your eyes.

  Ludicrously low-tech, Leher had always thought.

  After that, you were wiied into virtual reality: the chroma.

  The chroma was based on the same method as those old special effects in movies and television weather reports. The salt on top of your corneas filtered out a small segment of frequencies of incoming light. You hardly felt the lack in your color perception. And the salt that had migrated to the inside of your cornea projected the virtual environment in precisely those deleted colors.

  The chroma fit over the real like a finely crafted mask. You knew there was a physical substrate under there, but what you interacted with was the mask. At this point, any room, corridor, or even empty space might come alive with keyboards, joysticks, floating files and folder icons, pull-down toolbars—there was scarcely any limit to possible designs. But the most important things you were able to see and interact with were geists.

  Like all things in the chroma, geists appeared partially see-through, semiopaque. To make matters more confusing for the uninitiated, there were also geist representations of regular humans in other parts of the vessel who occasionally showed up in the chroma. When a vessel com message call came through, the geist of the caller would appear, and you could, if you wished, have a face-to-face conversation. Or not, if you just wanted intercom. In visual com, the human geists that appeared in the chroma were as transparent and ghostly as the a.i. personas.

  Leher’s crew, geists and humans alike, were crammed into a square workspace that looked to be about twenty-five feet on each side. The bulkheads, ceiling, and deck were animated with crunch-crawl—traveling, semiautonomous swarms of nanotech bots. The ceiling came equipped with roving lights that followed you around and attempted, as best the crawl programming could manage, to provide more light for whatever you happened to be working on at the moment. If you were doing nothing, as was Leher at the moment, they hovered above you indecisively in groups of three or four like nervous fireflies.

  The V-CRYPT walls were scarily transparent. Each wall had only a glint of semiopacity here and there worked precisely into its structure so that humans wouldn’t constantly walk into them. The floors—decks, everyone in the Extry called them, even on Earth—were semitransparent, as well. For all intents and purposes, he worked in a glass box floating in space.

  Vertigo city for Leher.

  The sceeve printer from his apartment was shoved into one corner. It was useless for now, but he was in the process of wiiing it to the Humphreys’s network and teaching DON how to communicate with it.

  “So the point of the enzyme lacrimates is to provide a kind of patina to the esters,” Leher explained to DON, whose geist hovered nearby with an intent look painted on his blue-green ghostly face. “It’s a final coat of paint, if you want to look at it that way.”

  “I get it,” DON replied. “But what is the chemical patina’s function in speech?”

  “It creates conditionality. Something like a subjunctive. ‘If I were,’ ‘if he were.’ That sort of thing. It normally makes the whole thought-block subjunctive, but sometimes it’s only applied to one or two esters or an ester phrase. That’s when the meaning gets tricky.”

  “Out of curiosity,” DON said, “how do we know any of this is true about the sceeve language? I mean, it is entirely smell-based.”

  “That’s not exactly true,” Leher said. “You should think of them more as chemical sensors. As near as we can tell from the autopsies, a sceeve nasal ganglion is able to perform analysis on chemical markers it encounters. It contains a structure that’s a little p-chem spectrometer of amazing complexity, among other things. Lots of Earth animals have an analogous structure, although it is far less advanced in Earth fauna. It’s called a vomeronasal organ. Ever noticed how dogs will sometimes lift their lips up in that smiley-grimace when they meet a new animal or person?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve never had a dog, sir,” DON replied without the least trace of irony. “But I know what you mean.”

  “Yes, well, there’s a little organ on the top part of their gum that takes in pheromones, specialized nonvolatile chemical messengers, that kind of thing. They say the VNO is what gives some mammals their sixth sense and ability to smell fear and such. Homo sapiens is underdeveloped as a species when it comes to smell. So are most old-world apes and monkeys. We do have our moments, of course.” Leher glanced at DON, who blinked, nodded that he understood.

  Am I that dry, that I bored a computer program? Leher tugged his beard. No trim yet. Maybe a couple of days until he’d need one.

  “Anyway, snakes have VNOs, too. That’s why they’re always flicking out their tongues. It gathers scents and delivers them to the VNO in the snake’s mouth when the tongue is retracted.”

  “Interesting, Lieutenant Commander,” DON replied. DON flickered for a moment, as if he were losing the ability to remain in existence—

  “Sorry to go off on this stuff,” Leher said apologetically. “I realize it fascinates me a lot more than most—”

  DON’s geist disappeared entirely. It was replaced by DAFNE, the vessel-wide servant and the craft XO.

  “Pardon me for interrupting, Lieutenant Commander Leher, but the captain has requested your immediate presence on the bridge,” she said.

  Leher huffed. “Can you tell him I’m busy setting up the most important piece of equipment on his vessel and I would very much like not to be disturbed?” he said.

  DAFNE was silent for a moment, with the implication that she was conveying his request to Coalbridge—although Leher very much doubted she actually was. As far as he could tell, DAF
NE was not outranked by anyone aboard except for Coalbridge. Definitely not by himself, the lowly “craft creep.”

  “I’m afraid Captain Coalbridge insists,” DAFNE answered after a moment. “He says we’re nearing our destination and, besides, he thought you might enjoy familiarizing yourself with other parts of the vessel since you’ve hardly left V-CRYPT for the past ten days.”

  Leher reflected that he had no desire to familiarize himself with anything. He knew the way from his workspace to his cabin and back, and that was terrifying enough. Even though the cabins in the craft were opaque for privacy, the connecting passageways and accessways were not. The decks had the transparency of frosted glass, and the bulkheads and ceiling were invisible. They were Q-built, fields of force with no material being.

  Leher pictured the vessel’s Central Operations Area, the CORE, as a giant carbuncular diamond, shot through with empty cracks for passageways. The cracks could be reconfigured, however, and were shifted around like moving erector parts to best facilitate crew movement.

  Moving cracks, Leher thought. He had a recurring mental image of himself making a misstep while traversing one of those crack-corridors and walking right out into the void. Dropping immediately into N-space. Choking, his lungs exploding. Eyeballs inflating from interior pressure, popping out like cueballs.

  He knew this was hardly possible. The servants were well in control of the internal environment. Nobody had ever been accidentally spaced in the whole history of the Extry. Still, who was to say that Griff Leher might not be the first?

  His hand moved to his jacket pocket, his fingertips touching the edge of a protruding postcard.

  If I have to, I’ll stop right here and write, Leher thought. Mail went out yesterday in the drone, but I should still be able to get it in today’s MDR.

  No. Continuance approved. Go on.

  The way to the bridge proved to be particularly heinous. DAFNE guided him with a pale pink line that lit along the left side of the passageway at eye level and then faded back to nothingness as he passed. Even though the occasional crew member bustled past him, reminding Leher that he was in a working vessel, still he felt as if he were following a will-o’-the-wisp into the Fairy Dark.