by Ian Douglas
An elongated casing that looked like hard leather extended back from behind the face, and Dev took that to be the DalRiss's braincase. Underneath, tucked in between the head and the starfish body, was a spidery complexity sprouting meter-long appendages, bone-hard on the outside, but with joints making them as flexible as whips. They ranged in size from finger-thick branches to flickering threads, always in motion and impossible to count.
Looking at the arrangement, Dev could not understand how the DalRiss could use those digits as fingers; they were fingers without arms, and much too short to reach past the thing's massive body. He said as much to Katya.
"I can demonstrate, if you wish," the voice in their minds said. There was neither accent nor inflection, and the Inglic grammar and vocabulary seemed perfect. "Give me something to pick up."
"Here," Katya said. She held out her hand and called a hundred-yen coin into being. The AI simulation picked up her thought and gave it reality within the simulation as she dropped it to the shiny deck.
One of the creatures shuffled forward—Dev estimated it must mass over three hundred kilos—with an incongruous grace. The upper body extended itself, body sections telescoping as fingers unfolded, reaching down and plucking up the coin between three hair-thin tips and handing it back to Katya. The movement was smooth, dextrous, and utterly inhuman. Even after the DalRiss repeated the act for Dev, he could not be sure of what he'd just seen.
Some aspects of the DalRiss, he decided, were so inhuman that the human mind had trouble grasping them.
Katya, bolder than Dev at this first encounter, stepped closer, staring up into the folds of a DalRiss face. "I'd like to know how they see," she said. "It saw the coin. But I don't see anything like eyes."
"That is because mutation and natural selection on our homeworld never led to the evolution of light-perceiving organs," the DalRiss said. It was disconcerting talking about these beings as though they were a simulation—which they were, of course—and then being addressed by them as though they were physically present. Dev considered tailoring the sim so that the DalRiss were simply exhibits, but he decided not to. He enjoyed watching their movements, seemingly random, but lightning-quick and effortlessly precise.
"How do you sense your surroundings, then?" he asked.
"Sound," the DalRiss replied. "And other senses for which you have no corresponding name."
The whales and dolphins that once had swum Earth's oceans had navigated by sonar. Like them, the DalRiss could "see" reflected sound waves with detail enough to tell lead from copper, solid from hollow, rough from smooth. Like the dolphins, the DalRiss could actually see inside other organisms; they could look at Dev, both "see" and hear the beating of his heart, and know whether or not he'd eaten breakfast. The DalRiss "head" was mostly sound equipment; the crescent shape was filled with dense fluid that acted as a focusing lens for intense bursts of sound. The knobby extrusions to either side contained the receptors, widely spaced to give the being a stereo-audio, 3-D perspective.
But other senses came into play as well. Something like the lateral line in a fish sensed minute changes in air pressure, infrared sensors in the head detected subtle gradations in heat up to several kilometers away, and, most alien of all, the DalRiss seemed to somehow perceive the chemical and electrical processes of life itself.
Darwin's scientists were still arguing over just what that meant. Some felt that this "life sense" was simply a refinement of IR sensing or keen hearing. The DalRiss themselves insisted that their world, as they perceived it, was a blend of the rischa, the life fields of countless organisms, a kind of tapestry within which inorganic matter—rocks, say, or the spiky, metallic shape of a Xenophobe war machine—was dull, dark, sound-reflective voids.
They perceived the entire universe as life, and themselves as a small part of a larger whole. When Dev asked them to explain this, the AI stepped in. "I'm sorry, but that information has not yet been made available to Darwin's researchers."
The scientists must be having trouble grasping that one, too.
But Dev was staggered. How could a species that could not perceive light have ever reached for the stars?
And that, Dev realized, was only the beginning of the mysteries surrounding the DalRiss.
Later, Dev downloaded all that was known about the DalRiss into his cephimplant RAM, then reviewed the data with Katya in the privacy of Yuduki's com modules.
He was not surprised to learn that he'd misinterpreted much of what he'd seen aboard the Darwin.
The sac behind the crescent head housed, not a braincase, but digestive and storage organs; the brain was well protected in a bony shell close to the armored branching of the ringers. Perhaps Dev's biggest mistake was in the nature of the creature itself, which was not one organism, but two, living together in gene-manipulated symbiosis.
The six-legged starfish shape was called a Dal, an artificially engineered mount for the smaller creature that rode its back. The combination could be thought of as a partnership like that of horse and rider, save that in this case the rider was actually imbedded within the horse's flesh, tapping directly into its circulatory and nervous systems. At need, the riders could separate from their steeds, but the Dal had been custom-tailored for their role and could not live long independently.
As for the Riss—the word appeared to mean masters—they could plug themselves into dozens of other species engineered for the purpose over millennia. Evolving on a world defined by life, which they could sense all around them as a kind of translucent sea, the DalRiss had pursued the biological sciences almost to the exclusion of all else. Before they learned how to make fire, they'd begun domesticating other species; they'd never developed atomic fission, but they could tailor organisms to fulfill precise needs with a deftness that surpassed anything human biologists had even dreamed of.
Chemistry had grown out of biology. Life, all life, depends on chemical reactions to sustain them. The DalRiss studied these and eventually learned to gene-tailor organisms that would generate the reactions they wanted to study. Living factories produced chemicals, even manufactured goods in an organic approach to nanotechnic engineering. Earth technology had learned to manufacture submicroscopic machines, growing them in vats or assembling them through hierarchies of progressively smaller handlers. The DalRiss had ultimately learned to do much the same, but by controlling enzymes and biochemical processes.
Man and DalRiss had used two radically different approaches to arrive at the same destination.
The DalRiss did not build their cities, they grew them, as humans grew RoPro buildings, gene-tailoring large, energy-drinking, sessile organisms on their energy-rich homeworld to create the living spaces they desired. The Dal themselves were an example of an entirely new species created by the Riss as symbiotic legs and strength. For millennia the Riss had been able to directly tap the nervous systems of their artificial symbionts, feeling what they felt, knowing what they knew.
They were aware of radiation. Their planet was awash in energy from their sun—visible light, ultraviolet, infrared—and it was that energy that drove all organic processes on their homeworld. Requiring a way to further study this radiation, they addressed the problem in the only way they knew. They designed organisms that could sense light for them; where nature had never evolved eyes, the Riss had invented them.
Living, symbiotic eyes. The Riss called them "Perceivers." The DalRiss didn't need them for everyday activities any more than a human might need a portable radar, but they'd used them first to develop the science of biological microscopy . . . and later to look at the stars. Astronomy had led to an understanding of how the universe works—of the laws of gravity and motion.
Ultimately they'd learned how to grow huge creatures that used the explosive combustion of hydrogen and oxygen to reach planetary orbit.
And from there, the nearest star was right next door.
Their star was a double, an A5-A7 pair that orbited each other with a mean separation of 900 astronomical units—f
ive light-days—more than enough distance for separate planetary systems to exist around each member of the system. The DalRiss homeworld, which they called GhegnuRish, circled the smaller of the two, which the Earth astronomers called Alya B. With no reason to think that planets orbiting A-class stars were rare, the DalRiss made the crossing to Alya A, a voyage that took many years.
Both stars, it turned out, had planets. Only GhegnuRish had life, but the sixth planet of Alya A, which they called ShraRish, had an atmosphere and surface conditions that might be molded to suit DalRiss tastes. They already had a history of growing life to meet their needs; now they proceeded to grow an entire ecology.
Although Darwin's researchers were still working on understanding the DalRiss time scales, it appeared that ShraRish had been reworked in GhegnuRish's image nearly twenty thousand years ago. The DalRiss had been living on both worlds ever since.
Until recently.
According to the DalRiss emissaries, an enemy had appeared on GhegnuRish perhaps two centuries before, an enemy unlike anything ever encountered. They rose from solid ground in devices that could be sensed only by heat and sonar. Sometimes the enemy could be sensed directly, but vaguely, distantly, almost as though the life force was somehow diluted. Usually they remained undetectable behind walls of dead metal. The DalRiss called them Gharku—the Chaos.
The DalRiss had fought back, creating an arsenal of living weapons, creatures that sounded like heavily armored dinosaurs, living warstriders. But what the Chaos touched, it destroyed. The DalRiss of ShraRish had lost contact with the homeworld nearly fifty years before.
And now the enemy had appeared on ShraRish.
For centuries, the DalRiss had been aware of radiations coming from a certain part of the sky. They'd long been able to detect radio through living receivers—Dev thought of the Maias and their natural-occurring radio—and determined that the source must be a civilization spanning many stars so distant that the radio signals themselves had traveled over a century to reach GhegnuRish. At the time, the discovery had been hailed as one of the most incredible of DalRiss history. Life, as certain Riss philosophies had suggested, truly was universal!
But contacting that life directly seemed out of the question.
Then the Xenophobes had appeared, and contacting this other civilization became a matter of life or death. This civilization, it was argued, might know of the Xenophobes. Certainly their radio network appeared to indicate that they spanned many suns, while the DalRiss occupied the worlds of only two.
A special ship was grown, one employing a new theory of travel. Special creatures were evolved, semiintelligent forms called Achievers that could open space by force of mind, allowing travel from point to point simply by envisioning it.
As with nanotechnology, the DalRiss had achieved the same ends as had humans, but by totally different methods. Their means of traveling faster than light sounded more like magic to Dev than like science.
But it worked. The DalRiss ship had arrived at the star closest to the radio civilization that was also closest in mass and radiation to their own, home star.
And there they'd met the occupants of the Altair Deep Space Research Facility.
Five months later, Interstellar Expeditionary Force One had departed for ShraRish. Allies now in the fight against the Chaos, neither humans nor DalRiss knew where that alliance would lead.
But for the first time, there was hope of understanding that enemy, of knowing it as it had never been known before.
Chapter 25
It was a completely serendipitous event. If we'd not had the facility at Altair, a station, incidentally, devoted to pure research, we should in all probability never have encountered the DalRiss. After all, they had no way of knowing that we were native to the worlds of far milder suns.
—Dr. Paul Hernandez
Hearings on the DalRiss,
Terran Hegemony Space Council,
C.E. 2542
Four months later, IEF-1 dropped out of the godsea for the final fourspace leg of the voyage. For three days more the ships fell through space toward their destination, bathed in the arc-bright light of Alya A. ShraRish appeared first as a pinpoint of light almost lost in the star's fierce glare, but day by day it swelled from pinpoint to crescent, attended by a pair of mediocre moons.
Excitement aboard the troopship ran so high that heat, crowding, and discomfort all were forgotten. Most Thorhammer personnel had all but lost interest in the DalRiss during the grueling voyage out, but now that their destination was in sight, they again spent much of their allotted RJ time linked with Yuduki's AI, gazing at the spectacle unfolding before them. Alya A was a tiny, dazzling disk nineteen times brighter than Sol, set like a jewel in a soft haze of zodiacal light. Alya B was a pinpoint beacon against the far stars, more brilliant than Venus at its brightest in Earth's night sky.
The Inglic-speakers had long since given up on the DalRiss transliterations of the two suns' names. They were simply Alya A and Alya B, names quickly shortened by familiarity to the letters alone. The worlds of ShraRish and GhegnuRish became, respectively, "the DalRiss colony" and the "DalRiss homeworld" or, simpler still, "A-VI" and "B-V," and the DalRiss themselves were often called Alyans . . . or Aliens, picking up on the coincidental Inglic pun.
Then for two days all RJ privileges were suspended and the Thorhammers were ordered to remain strapped in their bunks. The spin modules, no longer rotating, unfolded like the petals of a flower so that "down" remained "down" as the ship decelerated stern-first toward the destination at nearly two gravities. Men and women rose only to eat or use the toilets, moving carefully where a fall could break bones.
When deceleration ceased and spin gravity resumed, they were allowed to link for outside views again. The red-gold-violet-white glory of a world turned beneath them. They were in orbit.
ShraRish looked nothing like Earth or Loki. The local equivalent of plants utilized a complex sulfur compound to turn radiant energy into stored energy; instead of the familiar chlorophyll hues of Earth, the colors ranged from pale orange to deep red-brown. There were oceans, but they gleamed purple in the light of Alya A instead of blue, and reports from sampling probes sent down as scouts indicated that the seawater was mixed with sulfides as well as salt and included dilute solutions of carbonic and sulfuric acids. Over the night hemisphere, the polar areas shone forth with the shifting, ghostly dance of auroras, driven by solar radiations far more energetic than Sol's. The flash and spark of meteors was common as well, more common than the throb of lightning beneath aurora-lit night clouds; this was a young system, and a lot of dust and debris remained in the ecliptic. The impression was of a raw, new world still in the making and not yet tamed by the red-pigmented life that had taken hold of its surface from pole to iceless pole.
"Actually, we could survive on the surface of A-Six without a lot of protective gear," Dr. Phillip DuChamp's image said. He was a tall, lanky, blond man, one of the planetary scientists off the Darwin, and his ViRpersonality had been programmed as guide for the men and women who linked with Yuduki's AI to explore the new world turning below the orbiting troopship's keel. "It's hotter than we normally like it, forty to fifty degrees on the average, and we'd need oxygen masks in order to breathe, and goggles of some sort to protect our eyes from the ultraviolet. But don't let anybody scare you about getting burned by all that acid. Swimming in the oceans would be a bad idea, but the actual concentration of corrosives in the atmosphere is quite low, less than a few parts per million. It wouldn't do your lungs any good . . . but I doubt that you'd even notice it on your bare skin."
"I think I'll stick with an environmental suit just the same," Sergeant Wilkins said over the link circuit.
"Yeah," Erica Jacobsen added. "Or a warstrider!"
"Will there be a problem with the striders?" Katya wanted to know. "Corrosion eating the hull, fouling circuits, that sort of thing?"
"Your ship factories ought to be cooking up nanofilms that will take care of that
, Captain. Over a period of time, and without nanofilms to counteract the acid, yes, the environment could be pretty rough on machinery. That may be one reason why the DalRiss haven't done any building with, oh, steel, say. Ever hear the term 'acid rain'?"
"No, sir."
"One of the by-products of large-scale industrialism before the nanotechnic revolution. The rainwater on A-VI is acidic enough to dissolve zinc or tin over a period of months. On old Earth it was a man-made problem. Here, though, it's natural. Sulfur and sulfur products—like H2SO4—are part of the life cycle."
"You mean life here is sulfur-based instead of carbon-based?" Rudi Carlsson wanted to know.
"No, it's carbon chemistry, like us. From the little we've learned so far, sulfur seems to play the same role in DalRissian biology that phosphorous plays in ours. I say 'seems.' The nucleic acids that make up our DNA are phosphates, but we don't bathe in the stuff the way the DalRiss bathe in sulfuric acid." DuChamp's image shrugged. "This is a whole new twist to carbon chemistry. We still have an awful lot to learn.
"In any case, the environment, though strange, shouldn't pose any special problems for you. Your machinery will corrode over a period of time, but then, wind-blown sand didn't do it that much good on Loki."
Dev caught Katya's sardonic murmur. "You got that right."
"On the whole, atmospheric conditions on ShraRish are mild compared to Loki. I imagine a suit breach was a rather serious event in Loki's atmosphere, with such a high concentration of ammonia."
Mental chuckles rippled through the audience, edged by dark, soldier's humor. Dev remembered the bite of ammonia when his own suit had been breached. A rather serious event? Yeah, you could say that. . . .
"If your suit is breached here," DuChamp said, pressing ahead, "the atmosphere CO2 level is high enough to poison you, but the air won't burn your lungs the way Loki's atmosphere would. Air pressure at the surface is actually a bit below one bar. Keep your oxygen-nitrogen mix flowing in your helmet and you'll be okay until you can get to safety."