by Ian Douglas
Carefully, Daren changed position, moving closer to the nexus, watching the cells sliding through their slime tunnels in eerie mimicry of blood cells slipping single-file through a capillary. Several globe-shaped crystals hovering nearby provided a dazzlingly brilliant illumination. At his mental command they moved apart and back slightly to reduce the glare from clouds of tiny particles suspended in the liquid; the shafts of silver-blue light cast wavering, vast shadows like living things in the translucent liquid.
At closer range, the cliff resolved itself into a densely matted forest of gray-yellow and gray-purple strands, like a forest of seaweed. In a sense, Daren was exploring an alien sea aboard a mind-linked submarine . . . but the submersible was in fact a nanotech probe, a tiny and complex assembly of organic molecules and interlocking carbon atoms seven microns across, about the size of a human blood cell, and not much larger than a single bacterium. The "sea" around him was actually the cranial cavity of a half-meter-long creature known as a Dantean Commune, while the "cliff-side" was a tiny portion of the creature's cerebral cortex, made up of a densely intertwining mass of individual neurons.
Daren was teleoperating the nanoprobe from his console aboard the Gauss over twelve hundred light years away, using an I2C link to continue his long-running researches into the Commune mystery. The probe itself was far too small to provide full sensory input for Daren's linked mind. In fact, he was networked with the research computer at the research station on Dante, which in turn controlled the probe in response to his relayed mental commands.
Carefully, he nudged closer to the fibrous object adhering to the tangle of cortex neurons. The moving cells nestled in their transparent tubes clearly still lived, though the larger organic structures around them were lifeless. The Commune worker, he knew, lay dead on a dissecting table in a refrigerated laboratory in Dante's main research facility. Even so, there was still life in here . . . and activity beyond the biochemistry of decay.
He initiated another command series, and a cloud of smaller objects sprayed from the probe's belly, subprobes too small for direct neural linking; each was composed of no more than a few tens of thousands of molecules and could provide little more than the bare essentials of simple data acquisition and telemetry. Trailing faintly luminous streaks of turbulence through the fluid, the subprobes vanished into the grayish mass.
The space surrounding Daren felt enormous, but that sense of space was illusory. The creature's brain, a lump of ganglia located in the central body cavity just above the heart, was in fact smaller than Daren's clenched fist, and the space between its convoluted surface and the surrounding cartilage walls measured less than half a centimeter across.
Working in the depths of that half-centimeter of liquid, however, it was easy to forget the realities of scale, thinking instead of cliffs and vast, dark, and unplumbable ocean depths. The Commune worker, Daren knew from long experience, was a half-meter-long segmented creature with a vaguely spiderlike appearance. Socially, the Communes were in many ways similar to the termite communities of Earth. Indeed, Daren had spent a year of undergraduate work on Earth, at the University of Nairobi, researching African termite mounds as background and preparation for his studies of his primary interest, the Communes of Dante.
Dante, the second world of DM-58° 5564, was not a pleasant place by human standards, though a small scientific community had been established on its surface. With an average surface temperature of nearly forty degrees Celsius, only the polar regions and high mountains were easily habitable for Man. The Communes, however, were a littoral species, living on the narrow margin between ocean and the mountainous interior. In fact, their castle-like colonies rose out of the seacoast shallows and tidal flats, apparently grown to specific shape and design from minerals drawn up with sea water and plated out as the water evaporated through their high, fluted columns.
Though they'd been studied for many years, the Communes were still very much of an unknown. The most puzzling mystery about them had been plaguing xenologists ever since the species had been discovered by the first human explorers to reach the planet. Were the damned things intelligent? Like the termites of Earth, the Commune organisms appeared to be highly differentiated anatomically. There was a specific type identified as a soldier caste, charged with defending the colony from outside threat. There were workers of several types, some for repairing the Commune towers, some for gathering food, or for digging, or for scouting, while still others for engaging in activity apparently senseless and even random to human observers. The whole functioned together so smoothly that the entire population of a Commune colony could be considered a superorganism, not that far removed biologically from, say, a human being composed of trillions of separate, closely networked cells; workers and foragers seeking food could from a distance appear to be a single, fluid pseudopod moving across the ground with purpose, cunning, and seeming intelligence.
So often did the Communes act in ways that suggested purposeful, even sapient behavior, that xenologists had been trying for years to answer that one question. Were they—the colonial superorganisms, that is—intelligent? Individuals almost certainly were not. Their brains massed only a few tens of grams, and the average intelligence of a typical worker was probably not much higher than that of, say, a rabbit or a Chironian chewthrough. And yet a mass of billions of them could track food, dam rivers, divert water flows into makeshift spillways, erect barriers to create tidal pools, and clear debris that might be shifted by storm waves and damage a Commune castle's walls. That showed not merely intelligence, but problem-solving intelligence, rational and self-aware. An intelligence with which it might be possible to establish communication.
Every attempt to communicate with the creatures, however, had so far failed. Most observers felt that if the creatures were intelligent, it would be with an order of intelligence far different from that of humans. The most popular theory was that there was some kind of brain caste in the Commune hierarchy, another and as yet unseen morphological form that coordinated the superorganism's actions from the relative security of the home colony.
But Daren thought he was on to something now . . . something that might well change forever how scientists looked at the Communes and at how they related to the environment within which they lived.
"What did you find?" Taki Oe asked. She was not visible in the scene projected within Daren's brain, but he could sense her presence nonetheless, piggybacked with his into the data stream coming in from the nanoprobe. She'd been in on this project with him from the very beginning . . . back in the frustrating early days when funding for such a simple thing as a research trip to Dante was out of the question. Now he was further from Dante than ever, but the advent of I2C had made possible a direct investigation of that world and its life that was very nearly as good as actually being there . . . and perhaps better. Dante, after all, was an unpleasant place, with limited habitat space and few creature comforts.
"There," Daren told her. He threw a spot of illumination on the structure he was looking at "Below that neural ganglia. See it?"
"The gray, fuzzy mass? I see it, but I don't know what I'm looking at."
"Check the readout." The probe was receiving a steady flow of data, most of it from a fleet of even tinier micro-submersibles moving through the fluid nearby. Information scrolled down the side of the screen, relayed from probes that had penetrated the gray mass.
" I . . . don't understand. The biochemistry is different."
"Completely different."
"A different organism."
"Yup. Different DNA. It looks to me like another species of labyrinthulomycota. Para-labyrinthulomycota, I should say."
She chuckled. "Easy for you to say."
He smiled at the old joke. Xenologists had adopted the idea of giving life forms that closely paralleled given classes or species on Earth the prefix para, for "like." Thus, a parafungus was something very much like terrestrial fungi . . . save for the fact that it was not even distantly rela
ted to anything that had ever been within light years of Earth.
"You think it's a parasite?" Taki asked.
"Parasite or symbiont," he replied. "It certainly feeds on its host. See the way those tubules burrow their way down into the brain tissue? The question is how much, if anything, it gives the host back in return. And I think I just might have the answer to that."
At his command, the nanoprobe began moving ahead, leaving the faceted illumination globes behind and swiftly flying through the shadowed liquid, gliding just above one of the long and twisting mucus tubes. As the view went dark, he switched on the nanoprobe's own light. At their current scale, of course, ordinary light waves would have been invisible, but the AI handling the probe interface could shift reflections from hard-ultraviolet radiation—at wavelengths of around 800 angstroms—up into the visible spectrum—between 7700 and 3900 angstroms. The colors had a sullen, purplish-gray cast to them, however, as the scene explosively shifted past Daren's point of view, the colors rippling like iridescence from an oil slick from the surfaces of the tube and the dead nerve tissue around it. After a few moments of undulating gently up and down, the slime trail they were following arced sharply to the right, then descended toward a cliff wall . . . and another of the glistening, gray-silver nexus clumps of tubules.
Bringing the nanoprobe to a halt, Daren slowly rotated in place. The glow from the first nexus was clearly visible, a hazy patch of white-purple light in the extreme distance . . . all of one tenth of a millimeter away.
Daren nodded to himself. The evidence pointed to an incredible complex of these nexi, interconnected by the slime tubes to one another and to the host's brain tissue.
Taki didn't sound convinced. "You're sure this isn't part of the decay process in the specimen?"
"Positive. It's freshly killed and being kept refrigerated at the south polar colony research station."
It had been a big break for the research team, finding the body of a Commune worker. Since whether or not the creatures qualified as intelligent life was still an open question, hunting the things was strictly forbidden.
But when one had been found dead in a rockslide, it had been flown directly to the south polar station for autopsy and remote exploration.
"Some fungi can start breaking down dead organic matter within a few hours, sure," Daren continued, "but you can tell by the organization of this thing that it's been in place here a lot longer than that."
"It could be the disease that killed it."
"I don't think so. We'll need to autopsy some more to see if this kind of infestation exists in all of them, but . . . I really don't think this is a disease. Look. No signs of inflammation. No signs of tissue rejection or antibody formation. This . . . this growth moved in and made itself at home. And the body allowed it to do so."
"So what does . . . ?" He could hear her turning the thought over in her mind. "Wait. You think this is linked somehow to the intelligence question?"
"It's possible."
"We've never seen anything like this on Dante," Taki said. "Not in any of the other paralabyrinthula."
"It's done what life does everywhere, including us. It's adapted itself."
There were numerous species of the order Paralabyrinthulomycota, unprepossessing organisms that had insinuated themselves everywhere within the Dantean ecosystem. This species they were looking at, as yet unknown and unnamed, might well hold the key to the entire Commune mystery.
Swiftly, Daren downloaded a file of background information and scanned through it rapidly and systematically, checking to be certain he'd missed nothing in his earlier review. The labyrinthulids of Earth were commonly called slime nets or slime net amoebae, though there was nothing at all amoebic about them. Like their better-known relatives, the humble slime molds, they were members of Kingdom Protoctista—meaning they were living organisms that were not animals, plants, fungi, or prokaryotes. They were eukaryotes, meaning they possessed cell nuclei and mitochondrial respiration. To the naked eye, they looked like transparent blobs of slime or mucus, sometimes several centimeters across and usually found on certain marine grasses, where they fed on yeasts or colonies of bacteria. Microscopically, they consisted of spindle-shaped cells migrating endlessly back and forth through slime tunnels laid down by the cells themselves, which ran through the tunnels like tiny maglev trains in their tubes. Though their motion seemed random, they were organized into supercolonies that could slowly extend themselves through their environment in search of food.
On Dante, cellular evolution had followed much the same course as on Earth, with genetic transmission that used analogues of both DNA and RNA. As a result, convergent evolution had molded most classes of life into forms resembling their earthly counterparts, at least to a point. The Communes, for instance, looked much like insects with their multi-jointed legs and segmented bodies, though they breathed with lungs and could be as large as a meter in length. The Dantean slime nets studied so far looked as though they could easily have been transported from Earth . . . except that here for some reason they'd branched into far more numerous and complex forms, a spectacular diversity that lived symbiotically or parasitically on or in thousands of species of more advanced Dantean life.
And apparently one form, at least, had parasitized the Communes, adapting itself to live in and on the host's nerve tissue.
"Do you see it?" he asked Taki. "At this level, we could spend centuries following all of the interconnections here, but those tubes must interpenetrate the entire cortex . . . maybe even the entire central nervous system. And it possesses a complexity that's way, way higher than the interconnectivity of the host brain's own neurons."
"I'm not sure you can say that," Taki said. "The scales are different. Those tubes, and the cells moving around inside them, are a lot larger than the neurons that make up the cortex mass."
"C'mon, Tak. Look at it! The parasite is using the neuron connections and adding more of its own. I think it may have increased the neural pathways beyond the Threshold."
He sensed Taki's quick intake of breath. "Nakamura's Number?"
"If not here, inside one brain, then if we combine it with other Commune organisms . . . "
"Wait! How is that possible?"
He used the probe's spotlight to stroke one of the tubules and the oddly shaped, glistening cells sliding along inside. "Taki, I think what we're looking at here are slow thoughts."
Tetsu Nakamura was a twenty-fourth-century Nihonjin scientist who'd calculated the basic density and number of component parts required to elevate a complex order to a higher level of organization and function. The number, 1.048576 X 1011, was less a precise figure, than a place marker in calculating thresholds in interconnective operating systems. Approximately Nakamura's Number of molecules working together formed a cell, a living organism that operated independently of and on a plane far above that of any of its component molecules. Nakamura's Number of cells . . . when they were the specialized neurons of the central nervous system, together formed a brain capable of memory, planning, self-awareness, and abstract thought, something far beyond the capabilities of a single nerve cell.
The brain of a Dantean Commune worker contained roughly 3 X 109 neurons with the connections vastly increased, however, by the paralabyrinthulid infestation. . . .
"We'll have to calculate the increase in neural linkages," Daren said. "My guess, though, is that individual Communes have their base intelligence levels raised significantly by the parasites."
"Dog level?" Taki asked.
"Maybe. Maybe more. But, don't you see? It's a slow intelligence. Those moving cells in the tubes. Those replace electrochemical activity, synaptic relays, and all of that."
"How could two systems operating at such different speeds possibly interact?"
"I think . . ." Daren felt the quickening pulse of his excitement. "I think that the paralabyrinthulids primarily serve to connect the individual Commune creatures. Workers, soldiers, all of the other single Communes."
>
"Daren. . . ."
"It's got to be that way. Look at it, Tak! Those tubules are paralleling the whole neural network . . . and then some. And it's also intimately associated with the worker's circulatory system. That tells me these slime nets can communicate biochemically. Each of those moving, spindle-shaped cells could carry chemical tags that are being routed through the network the way electrochemical impulses are routed through the brain's neural net."
"That's a big leap, Daren."
"Not at all. I'll even go one further. We've seen workers exchanging food directly mouth to mouth . . . and there are those reports of things like large slime molds found growing inside ruined commune colonies. I'll bet that those large molds are a primary food source for the Communes, and that they're part of our paralabyrinthulomycota. Maybe the Communes even cultivate the stuff, like harvester ants growing fungus inside their colonies on Earth. They infect themselves by ingesting it, and at the same time become carriers for biochemical signals being shared throughout the labyrin-thulomycota network!"
"Wait. Are you saying that the slime net is the real intelligence here?" She shook her head. "I don't see—"
"No, no, no. It takes both organisms working together. I think the slime net has learned how to parasitize the Communes in such a way that it fosters intelligent activity . . . activity that benefits the net directly and the Communes by association."
"You know, Daren, all along, xenologists have been looking for some sort of brain caste in the Communes," Taki pointed out. He could still sense her reluctance. "Your idea sounds plausible, but it's a big jump from cultivated eukaryote colonies to intelligence. What you're suggesting, that a parasite has learned how to increase the host species' intelligence . . . that sounds pretty wild."