by Ian Douglas
That imagery did her no good. Again, she very nearly vomited, and claustrophobia gibbered insanely somewhere behind her disorientation and fear.
Katya concentrated on what she knew. It seemed the only way to hold madness at bay.
She was moving downward, and that meant the Cobra had gulped her down and bolted for its tunnel. What, she wondered, had Vic and Georg made of that? Though the cell-body of the thing holding her had completely engulfed her, it hadn't hurt her, at least not yet. Its grip was paralyzingly strong. She couldn't move, couldn't even free her right hand enough to reach her holstered pistol. She had the impression that, had the Xeno chosen to do so, it could have exerted a tiny fraction of its potential strength, and she would have been pulped into a homogeneous mass of blood, tissue, and splintered bone.
But it hadn't, it hadn't. What did that mean?
That it was taking her somewhere.
Where?
Underground, obviously. Back to . . . wherever it was that Xenophobes came from when they emerged from their lightless deeps.
So little was known about them.
What? Review the data, girl! Work it out! Your life depends on knowing the answers!
But damn it, what's the question?
Dev's brief contact with the World Mind of Alya B-V had revealed the Xenophobe's racial cycle. That Xeno—it had called itself the One—had been a single mind embracing some trillions of Xeno "cells" networked throughout the planet's crust. That was the so-called "contemplative" phase of the Xenophobe, when it could expand no more and had settled down to a lifetime that might well be measured in geological ages, absorbing heat from the planet's core and . . . thinking, thinking about whatever it was that such minds thought about.
The Xenophobes of Eridu, and of every other human-colonized world where they'd been encountered, had not yet reached that stage. They were still in the "acquisitive" phase, active, growing, and scattered as hundreds or thousands of separate organisms, each consisting of millions or billions of head-sized cells. Until this moment, no one had even been certain that the acquisitive Xeno stage was intelligent. Rational thought, it was suggested, might arise only after the One had ejected planet-seeding bits of itself on the magnetic winds of the "great void" which they thought lay at the center of their universe of rock. Only then, perhaps, did they settle down to become a peaceful, nonaggressive, and intelligent world mind.
That, Katya realized, was not entirely true. She had felt . . . something when her comel had first touched that black pseudopod, and she felt something now. The impressions were vague, more instinct and blind hunger than anything else, but there were flashes of something else.
. . . expectation . . .
. . . urgency . . .
. . . Unity . . .
That last tugged at Katya's awareness, and at her curiosity. There were—were they truly memories?—yes, distance-dimmed memories of . . . of completion. Of wholeness. Of something called "Self."
What would a finger feel, given a mind of its own, when it was sliced from its hand? This was like that, an urgent need to reunite with something far larger, far more powerful than the mind Katya felt in the black, rippling mass around her. She sensed intelligence there, a curiosity . . . and, weirdly, a fear of her that was at once both reassuring and disquieting.
If it was afraid of her, what might it do to her to protect itself?
Other impressions were clearer, but at the same time more jumbled, confused, and fragmentary. There was a memory-picture of the battle, shapes that might have been thermal images that were almost unrecognizable: they would have been unrecognizable had it not been for the landscape that gave her a sense of up and down, of moving across terrain. The—call it the sky—was black and cold and empty save for a vague white flare of warmth and radio noise that must be Marduk. It carried with it a sense of horror and dread: lonely-deep-Void-emptiness-not-Rock. Opposite was Rock: warm-solid-shelter-food-safe. She sensed »self« clinging to Rock, drawing security from it. She sensed . . . others, things not-Self and not-Rock and bewildering in their contradictions—and those others were threat, pillars of intense heat, moving across rock, hurling death and pain.
Is that how Xenos see us? She shuddered. It was a wonder it hadn't just crushed her and fled.
Then she realized that, though it was hard to judge scale in those alien memories, the pillar-things she was "seeing" were the heat images of warstriders. Individual humans were little more than shimmering patches of warmth and—taste?—chemicals, nearly invisible, indistinguishable from unmoving pillars of warmth that might be Eriduan vegetation, easily overlooked.
Why did the Xeno fear her? She was sure that she detected that emotion in that confused bundle of comel-relayed impressions. Indeed, it felt as though fear might be the one emotion she had with a clear counterpart in the Xeno's thoughts. No amount of questioning or concentration or inward listening revealed the answer, however. She did get the impression that her captor was trying its best to be gentle with her, to protect her from harm.
Nice of it, she thought. Maybe it's saving me as a snack for later. But she dismissed that, an undisciplined thrust of black, gallows humor.
One thing's for damned sure. Katya told herself. When this is over, girl, you're either going to be cured forever of claustrophobia or you're going to be drooling on the carpet.
When this is over? She had no way of telling how long she'd been trapped in this black shroud, but she did know that she'd started out with two hours' worth of air in her life support pack . . . and that was two hours based on a slow and regular breathing rate. In the past few minutes, she'd been panting and gasping like a beached fish, driven by panic to gulp down air at a far higher than normal rate. If her support pack hadn't been automatically monitoring the CO2 in her breathing and constantly adjusting the gas mix accordingly, she'd have swiftly hyperventilated herself into unconsciousness.
It's got to want to talk to me, she thought, thrusting away unpleasant specters of suffocation, alone in the depths of cold, crushing rock. I came here to communicate with one of these things, and by God, I'm going to communicate!
I just hope I don't run out of air first.
The thought images that had reached »self« from the not-Self thing it had captured were disturbingly like the impressions exchanged between two »selves« in momentary direct contact, except that they were . . . strange, so distorted as to be almost unintelligible. There were no impressions at all relating to such primary senses as magnetic field or electrical flux or chemical composition or even direction.
Of the thoughts that did come across, strongest, perhaps, was the feeling of being enclosed and trapped and surrounded, of being buried beneath a vast and crushing mass of rock. What was puzzling about that image was that the feelings of security and warmth and life and union that were normally associated with the sense of being closed in were missing, replaced instead by a gnawing, scrabbling, frantic urgency that tasted like raw fear.
Fear of being closed in? For »self«, that was an oxymoron, a statement as paradoxical as, say, enjoyment of the aching, yawning emptiness of the central Void.
Self might be able to comprehend. »Self« could not understand the images that seemed to arise through direct contact with the not-Self thing, but perhaps the far greater mental powers of Self would assimilate and interpret them. »Self« was all too aware of its own limitations.
Besides, it was necessary to transmit to Self an account of what had happened in the Void, so that it could refine its strategies, its weapons, and its purpose so that it could deal with the strange not-Self opponents that had been encountered there. »Self« felt the growing hunger for Unity and increased the pace of its descent.
The rock grew warmer with depth.
Chapter 19
We can imagine hierarchies of Xenophobe awareness, then, with thousands of separate cells networked together like so many unintelligent computers into a low-level kind of consciousness. We know that vast Xeno communities exist far
below the surfaces of worlds they've infested. Perhaps these, with millions or hundreds of millions of interconnected cells, have more powerful, more intelligent minds, minds of human or even superhuman scope and power. Finally, when all of the Xenophobe communities of a world join together in the contemplative stage, we can imagine that they enter a new and higher state of consciousness, the "One," the World Mind we encountered within the depths of Alya B-V.
What, I wonder, do such minds dream of?
—from a report given before the
Hegemony Council on Space Exploration
Devis Cameron
C.E. 2542
Katya tumbled from her prison in a wet gush of tarry liquid. The darkness surrounding her was still absolute, a primal night unrelieved by the slightest trace of illumination. She could sense the space surrounding her, though, a hot and steaming void. She could hear things—drippings, rustlings, unnameable slitherings and squishing sounds—that sounded close and helped describe the unseen emptiness around her.
There was atmosphere here, at least. She'd wondered about that during the descent, since the Xenophobes' underground highways weren't literal tunnels, and their deep caverns didn't necessarily open to the outside air. Her mask wouldn't have been able to handle vacuum. She'd imagined, though, that the air underground would be the same mix as on the surface, or else it might be the gaseous product of some Xeno-related chemical reaction. Either way, she wouldn't be able to breathe it. She pressed her fingertips against her mask, checking the pressure seal.
Secure. Next, she tried exploring this new prison by touch. Her outstretched right hand met soft and yielding surfaces in one direction, empty space in another. The floor was soft too, as though she stood on small and somewhat lumpy cushions beneath a few centimeters of some liquid with the consistency of thick syrup. Reaching above her head she could not feel a ceiling, but there was an impression—possibly psychosomatic, perhaps the workings of some latent human sense beyond the normal five—of a vast and crushing weight balanced precariously above her head.
This was worse, far worse than the Alyan vault where Dev had encountered the Xeno World Mind, for there'd been other people there, the troops of Cameron's Commandos who'd followed Dev into the bowls of the planet, and there'd been light from Dev's Scoutstrider and there'd been Dev himself, emerging from the wet cocoon of Xeno cells that had pinned him temporarily against the living wall of the cavern. She knew she was in a similar cavern far below Eridu's surface.
Grimly, she wrestled again with her claustrophobia. It had receded for a time during her descent, but it reemerged now, plucking at her tautly strung nerves, a devil's music of heart-thumping terror throbbing at the ragged edge of sanity itself.
The heat made it infinitely worse. Where it touched bare skin, the air was stiflingly hot, hotter by far than the equatorial jungle west of Babel. A fragment of geological data from her cephlink RAM reminded her that, in general, the temperature increased by twenty-five degrees celsius for every kilometer of depth beneath an Earthlike world's surface. Eridu's surface temperature was something over forty degrees, and though she didn't know the temperature here, she guessed that she must be between five hundred and a thousand meters down, with a mountain range of solid rock pressing down above her head.
Until now, she'd been afraid that her air supply might give out; now the question was which would get her first, running out of air or collapsing from heat stroke. Her bodysuit's multiple layers and microcircuitry were designed to cool or warm as needed, but she was quickly reaching the point where the suit would fail her. Her face and neck were slick with sweat, and it felt as though she was standing inside an oven.
She drew a deep, shuddering breath. She was going to die. There was no way around that now, if only because the monster that had dragged her down here would never be able to get her back to the surface before her air supply ran out.
Strangely, that didn't seem to matter.
Katya felt preternaturally calm. Had she, in fact, gone insane? Was this clarity of thought and of every sense save vision some kind of madness-engendered hallucination?
Shock, she told herself shakily. You're still dizzy from the shock.
All she could do now was try to make the best of the situation. She'd approached the Xeno Cobra to communicate, and communicate with the Xenos was what she would try to do. She doubted that her kidnapper had brought her all the way down here just to terrify her. It was intelligent, even if that intelligence was different from hers. There had to be, had to be, reasons for the things it did.
Once again, she stretched out her arm, probing this time with her left hand, the one still encased in the cool slickness of the DalRiss comel. The soft shapes she'd felt on the wall, on the floor beneath her feet must be Xenophobe cells; like the cavern on Alya B-V, the cave walls around her must be covered with hundreds, with thousands of the things. If she could touch them . . .
Self had reunited with »self«, receiving the flow of data from its scout with an emotion that combined feelings of happiness and completion with the succoring warmth of success. As the »self« fragment of Self merged back into the whole, stored memories of the great Void flooded through Self's tens of millions of networked cells, a self-aware mass that spread like a vast, gelatinous web through nearly a hundred cubic kilometers of not-Rock.
As expected, the edge of the great, not-Rock Void was colder than the depths of Mother Rock, poorer in life-sustaining warmth. The blaze of heat hanging in the Void, however—a phenomenon remembered still from the time ages before when the first of Self's cells had crossed the Void and penetrated this part of the universe—was still there. It would provide heat enough to sustain life along the precarious interface between Rock and Void.
And there was more than reason enough for Self to extend itself in that direction, for »self's« samplings of that interface confirmed the vague hints and traces Self had detected from within the rock; there were concentrations of pure metals there, of undreamed-of alloys and materials unlike anything tasted within Mother Rock. The chemist within Self's being quivered with anticipation at what could be grown from such a treasure trove.
Within those memories, too, were stranger things, moving things that might be rocks on the interface between Rock and Void that demonstrated volition, yet were patently not »selves« spawned from Self. Selves that were not of Self?
Incomprehensible.
Selves-that-were-not-Self, they had attacked, destroying many of the »selves« as they emerged from the rock. Threat . . . These things would have to be neutralized if the treasures of the Rock-Void interface were to be exploited.
And finally, there was a particular mystery, the sample »self« had brought within its damaged rock threader.
Self's thoughts, relayed through nanotechnic switches and organically grown microcircuitry, moved with lightning speed and precision, but its physical reactions were ponderously, laboriously slow. The . . . thing lay within a hollow formed by the encircling cells of Self's own mass, a not-Self tasting of salts and carbon, of oxygen and water. As yet. it had made no threatening move. Indeed, »self's« memories, merging now through Self's entire mass, recorded its tentative attempt at communication.
The thing, apparently, was as terrified of »self« as »self« had been terrified of it. It stood now, a trembling pillar of radiant heat somewhat cooler than its surroundings, a dimly sensed, almost invisible specter unlike anything in Self's long, long memory.
No . . . that was not quite true. Before Self had crossed the great Void, eons past, there had been memories of other parts of the universe of Rock, of other confrontations with volitional selves-that-were-not-Self. The forms of rock threaders and defenders both had been copied from such entities, though the forms of the entities themselves were long forgotten and lost.
Curiosity . . . mingled with fear. Did this entity think; was it self-aware, as Self was Self-aware; or was it a natural and mindless phenomenon of the Rock-Void interface?
It seemed to
be reaching out, and Self extended a subunit of its own cells to meet it. . . .
Images, memories flooded through Katya's awareness, cascading thoughts, ideas, strangeness.
She saw heat . . . and tasted the warm comfort of Self, a node of life and thought and awareness within an infinite universe of rock. She struggled to retain her human perspective in a swirl of alien concepts.
A universe inside out . . . infinite Rock with a central core of emptiness, a vast, vast bubble of nothingness. Was there a center to infinity? There must be, for Rock extended endlessly in every direction from the Void at the center of All, growing hotter and hotter with distance.
Need . . . not for food, but for the raw materials necessary for propagation . . . and the need to spread through Mother Rock, opening not-Rock bubbles within the warm encompassment nurturing thought and being.
There was only Rock and not-Rock and Self.
Confusion . . . Self was by definition the knowing of Self. Could there be . . . an outside awareness like the fragmented points of view called »self«, another Self?
Memories, stronger now, of not-Self units that once, eons past, attempted to destroy Self. The defenders once were manifestations of those not-Self units, now long vanished. Their knowledge had become part of Self, their molecules utilized in the endless propagation of Self.
Katya struggled to remain standing. This is what Dev saw, what he felt. Two mutually alien worldviews, hers and the Xeno's, were colliding, and the shock very nearly overwhelmed her.
Somehow, she hung on, calling in her mind to the alien awareness surrounding her. This . . . this war between your kind and mine is an accident! Was any of this making sense to the monster she sensed beneath her hand and clinging to the night-hidden walls around her? We thought you were an enemy when you attacked our cities and vehicles and space elevators but now I don't even think you knew we were there. We're human and we make mistakes and you are not human at all but you make mistakes too and . . .