by Ian Douglas
The being stopped a few meters away and seemed to be regarding them patiently through the jeweled facets of what must be compound eyes. Slowly, avoiding any threatening movement, Taki lowered the cylinder she was carrying to the ground, palmed its touchplate, and let the end dissolve.
Inside was a Naga communicator.
Thirty years ago, the DalRiss had engineered organic communicators, called comels, that had first enabled humans to communicate directly with the bizarrely alien Naga. Later, though, the Naga themselves learned to duplicate that trick; they were very good at patterning the molecular arrangements of another living creature's brain, permitting the direct transference of thought through an appropriately programmed intermediary. The only real difficulty, of course, was that when those thoughts were alien enough, they didn't make much sense. Even perfect understanding of a common language didn't help in communicating thoughts for which another culture had no thoughts . . . or words describing ideas totally beyond that culture's ken.
The programmed Naga fragment slid out of its container and onto the ground with a wet plop. Dev recognized the gray-black, sluglike shape . . . a single Naga cell, budded off from a planetary Naga that had already established communications with humans and understood—as much as was possible for that species—human thought processes.
Slowly, the Naga crawled toward the waiting Gr'tak. The enigmatic being seemed to watch its approach stoically, with no outward emotion—none, at least, that was recognizable to me humans. The Naga fragment moved to within a meter of the creature, and after the briefest of hesitations, something began uncoiling from the back of the huge arch, a single tentacle that must usually have been kept folded away unseen inside a pouch or recess within the thing's body. The tentacle reached down and touched the Naga fragment, which immediately began dwindling as its microcellular structure dissolved into the Gr'tak, filtering through the cells of its skin like hydrogen molecules diffusing through the rubber skin of a balloon.
The trio waited, watching as the huge creature digested the morsel; it seemed to show no surprise at the Naga fragment's intrusion into its body. Dev well remembered the first time he'd seen Naga material melting into his skin, and the panic he'd felt. It was not precisely a reassuring means of first contact. . . .
But the Gr'tak had seemed at ease with the idea. Indeed, the Naga fragment would have worked nearly as well if the two, Gr'tak and human, had simply each touched the Naga, using it as a physical bridge like the old comels, but it would be far better and faster if the Naga could pattern the alien creature's brain and allow a full merging of minds.
Unlike the two hubots, Dev's biomechanical DalRiss body possessed a Naga implant similar to the Companion carried by humans, and that elected him as the point man for first contact. Slowly, so as not to give alarm, he stepped closer to the huge creature, one of his alien body's arms stretched out, manipulators wide. Unfurling like a coiled line, the Gr'tak's tentacle dropped until the tip hung, twitching, a half meter from Dev's outstretched hand.
He waited a moment, making certain of the invitation, then closed that last narrow gap. The touch was cold . . . flickering . . . strange. The sensation of contact with an alien mind through a Naga intermediary was not as sharp or as overwhelming as he remembered it being in his flesh-and-blood body, long ago, but it was dazzling in its intensity nonetheless, and bewildering with its heady rush of alien sensations.
He sensed . . . memories. Countless memories, most a jumble of shapes and colors, odors and sensations that he simply could not sort out or catalogue. Some of those memories were clear attempts at communication, he knew, but it was difficult to sort them out. For a dizzying moment, Dev hung poised above a black and bottomless abyss, a whirling, shrieking nightmare of rushing alien thoughts and concepts, nested concepts, one inside another like nested woodcarved Russian dolls. The voices he heard were echoes of one another . . . and also, in a way he could not quite give shape to, were nested, one inside another in an infinitely repeating series receding into blackness.
For a moment, Dev was looking through alien eyes—weirdly faceted, multiply imaging eyes, like those of an insect—at something . . . something black and sleek and familiar if he could just learn to see in this strangely shattered and echoing way. . . .
His Naga, sensing patterns and familiarities, helped, sorting through the images, bringing fragmented pieces together, melding dozens into one.
The shape was familiar, chillingly so. Dev watched the ebon black, egg-smooth sleekness of a Web probe descending into the heart of a solar system. He saw it split, saw part descend on a warm and sunlit world, with vast geometries of light patterned across the continents of its night side. He saw glimpses—fragments, really—of a civilization's collapse, of nuclear fireballs and destruction unimaginable, of weirdly glittering, insectlike machines that devoured everything in their path, of something going hideously wrong with a sun, and the silent, actinic flash that spelled the doom of an entire world, its population, its culture, everything that it was and might one day be.
Emotions rode the alien currents of those images. He sensed deep sorrow . . . and urgent need.
"I/we are associative Sholai of Associative HaShoGha," the thought ran, sliding warm-wet through Dev's mind, the echoes and reiterations damped out by his Naga. Funny. It was as though he could hear the capitalizations, slight differences of stress in the unfamiliar words. There was a distinct difference between associative and Associative, for instance, the former clearly referring to the entity Sholai, while the latter seemed to indicate something larger and more complex . . . a community, perhaps. The feel of that concept was similar to the Naga ideas of »self« and Self, referring to detachable fragments of a much larger and more complete complex.
"I/we are refugees," the thought continued, "fleeing a terrible danger that has all but destroyed our Associatives. We are looking for Community and coupled thought."
Dev wasn't sure what "coupled thought" might be, but the sense of community seemed important to the being. Dev decided to push a bit on that idea and see what response he could raise.
"We are representatives of a community . . . of an Associative of three different races," he told it. "Human, Naga, and DalRiss. We are facing a danger like the one you've just shown me. I think it's the same . . . a threat we call the Web."
The outstretched tentacle coiled back suddenly, a sharp flick of motion that momentarily broke the contact. Dev waited patiently, unmoving, as the creature before him shuddered with some nearly convulsive emotion. At first he thought the thing was afraid; mention of the Web, certainly, would be enough to terrify if these people had fled here from a home world destroyed by Web engineering.
Then the Gr'tak extended the tentacle again, and Dev once more slipped into that bewildering symphony of voices, sounds, and shifting mental images. He concentrated on the emotions, trying to find those that he could recognize, trying to block out the alien cacophony that was becoming painful in its intensity.
Yes, there was a recognizable emotion, but it wasn't the one that Dev had expected to find. There was fear, yes . . . a sour, sharp shuddering underlying the creature's mental processes.
But the immediate, the overwhelming emotion that Dev was sensing from the Gr'tak was not fear . . . but joy.
Chapter 13
Utter resolve is necessary when you are fighting an enemy. In order to beat him you must control the situation, regardless of the method you use. If you do not control the enemy, the enemy will control you.
— "Fire Scroll"
The Book of the Five Spheres
MIYAMOTO MUSASHI
seventeenth century B.C.E.
"The Gr'tak don't possess the same kind of intelligence humans do," Taki said. "Or the DalRiss, for that matter, or even the Naga. Some of us are beginning to think that intelligence may be common in the universe, but no two specific types of intelligence are quite the same."
Dev's visual representation of himself nodded. "Certainly, we've found e
nough differences in the intelligent species we've already studied to support such an idea."
It was two weeks since their initial contact with the Gr'tak. They were meeting in Cascadia . . . or, rather, in a virtual-world Cascadia, a shared illusion generated within the local Net back on New America. The familiar Alessandro-Hagan estate's conversation room had been altered with the addition of a conference table. A life-size image of a Gr'tak floated silently above the table's holoprojector, adding a surreal touch, complete with a pair of hovering, darting dragonfly creatures. Lessers, they were called, according to the lexicon of Gr'tak terminology still being hammered out. Present at the table were Dev, Daren, and Taki, of course, as well as Katya Alessandro and Vic Hagan. At Vic's suggestion, Kara was also present, turning the assembly into a family gathering . . . which left Dev feeling just a bit the outsider. He accepted that, however, since his disembodied state generally left him an outsider no matter where he was.
Also present, and also evidently feeling like outsiders, were two others who'd attended the ViRconference at Katya's suggestion. One was Kazuhiro Mishima, tall, elegantly dressed in formal red diplomatic robes, assigned by the Imperial government as the senior ambassador to the Confederation. The other was Dr. Frances Gresham, of the Confederation Senate Science Council. In another two hours, Katya and Vic were scheduled to present a full report to the Science Council, and they were using this opportunity to go over what Dev, Daren, and Taki had witnessed at High Frontier and to distill some of what they'd learned.
Gresham looked puzzled. "I'm not sure I understand. I mean, you're intelligent or you're not, right?"
"It's not that simple, Doctor," Daren told her. "For one thing, there are at least seventy different aspects of thought, memory, knowledge, and awareness that we've been able to categorize so far as distinct subsets of what we call sapience. Most authorities can't even agree on the exact number, but it is large."
"That's right," Taki added. "Some people have a talent in, oh, let's say, math. They can do complex calculations in their heads, retain long chains of numbers and manipulate them without having to write them down, even think in terms of equations and numeric series, without putting the thoughts into words. You follow?"
Kara tossed Daren a wry grin. "Yeah. My brother over there's like that. Frightening. Rattle off a string of numbers at me and I'll be lucky to tell you the first two in order. He can do it with commo numbers, access codes, whatever. Read him a number and he's got it forever."
Taki nodded. "Skill at working with numbers and numeric concepts is one type of intelligence. Working with words is another, either through direct articulation, or in using them to describe complex actions or thoughts. Artistic talent—being able to think in terms of color or tone or texture, that's, well, actually that's a whole cluster of intelligence types, at least the way we use the concept today. Others have to do with abstract reasoning, with drawing conclusions from data, with getting along with other people, or manipulating them, or even just understanding what they're feeling. All of these things go together to create that composite attribute we call intelligence."
"Intelligence clusters are the preferred way of looking at the whole idea of intelligence," Dev said. "You can be a genius at some things, an idiot at others, and everything taken together generally averages out. Now that's just with the human population. We think that other sapient species may have more or less the same general mix of talents—with exceptions of course. A species that was blind wouldn't have an artistic color sense, for instance. But by and large, the individuals of all intelligent species are going to need to deal with numbers, with communicative concepts, with others of their kind, and so on."
"So," Vic said. "What you're saying is that some of the aliens we meet are going to be really great at painting pictures, but downright stupid when it comes to making friends." He considered the thought. "I've known people like that."
"The DalRiss are better than we are at interpersonal relationships," Katya said. "But they lack, well, call it empathy. They can't understand the outrage some humans feel at the way they use their gene-tailored life forms. The Dal. Or the Achievers."
"Gok," Daren said with a sour expression. "You could say the same about the human domestication of animals. How much empathy did humans expend on cows?"
"What's cows?" Vic asked.
"An earth animal gene-tailored by millennia of domestication. The original form was completely wiped out by breeding programs, and the new forms deliberately altered for milk and meat production."
"Yuk," Katya said with some decisiveness. "Dark ages stuff. Obviously that was before nanofactories could grow meat to order."
"When it comes to lack of empathy, I'll give you one better, Mums," Kara put in. "The Imperials with their inochi-zo. They turn torture of a gene-tailored life form into art." She shivered. She'd forgotten Mishima's presence. A glance in his direction, though, showed him listening impassively.
Daren shifted in his chair. "Well, the point of all this is that there's a broad spectrum of skills, talents, and mental traits, both within each species, and among all of the species we know, that comprise what we call intelligence. They overlap, but they never quite match."
"So how does this apply to our friends the Gr'tak?" Ambassador Mishima wanted to know.
"The Gr'tak, Your Excellency," Taki told him, "appear to be geniuses compared to us when it comes to social organization. If language provides any clue, you only need to look at the words they have for things like 'government,' 'friendship,' or 'society.' "
"The Gr'tak," Dev added, "have twenty-three different words that we would translate as 'government.' "
"You mean, like, democracy, theocracy, monarchy, stuff like that?" Gresham asked.
"No. That gets even more complicated, and since they don't have them, as far as we can tell, they probably don't have words for theocracies or monarchies. From what we've been able to record in these past few weeks, though, they have something like eighty words simply describing different types of governments where the ordinary citizens participate in their own self-rule, what we would call democracy. No, just the concept of government, an organization or group or corporate body that makes laws, administers justice, and provides direction for society as a whole, that has twenty-three different words in Rashind, the principal Gr'tak language, and to tell you the truth, we haven't even begun to sort out the shades of meanings attached to each. The point, I think, is that they perceive more variety and richness in the concept than we do and have come up with more words to describe that richness because it's important to them."
"Sure," Daren said. "There used to be a certain culture on old Earth, a hunter-fisher nomad group, a long time ago, before Nihon started running everything there. They lived in the near Arctic, where there was snow on the ground much of the year, and did their hunting out on one of Earth's polar ice caps. I ViRed once that they had some obscene number of words that all meant 'snow.' 'Light snow,' 'fluffy snow,' 'hard-packed snow,' that sort of thing."
Taki shrugged. "It's a handy reference to what is important to a culture. In Nihongo, we have a very large number of words differentiating different types of winds and breezes, usually with poetic overtones. 'The wind that makes a flag snap,' 'the wind of an arrow's flight,' 'the wind from the sea,' the wind—' "
"Are you saying these Gr'tak creatures think government is important?" Mishima said abruptly, cutting her off.
"They think all social interaction is important. Government is just one aspect of how people, how intelligent beings, rather, interact."
"They have a large number of words for various types of sexual liaison," Dev added. "Of course, their sex relationships tend to be a lot more complicated than ours."
"How come?"
"Well, to start with, we're not really dealing with a single species. A single 'Gr'tak' is what they call an associative of a number of different creatures living on and in one another. Parasites, in fact."
Mishima leaned back from the ta
ble, giving a small hiss through his teeth. "Inosho," he said quietly. Dev's linguistic program gave an immediate translation, but it lacked the sharp emotion behind the word. "Parasites."
"There is a species of parasitic wasp on Earth," Daren said. "It lays its eggs on the skin of certain caterpillars. The eggs hatch, and the larva eat the living caterpillar from the inside out, then use its skin as a cocoon for their phase change to adult wasps. Well, it turns out that these wasps are themselves parasitized by a smaller species of parasitic wasp. And they in turn are parasitized by an even smaller species of wasp. In fact, researchers discovered that there were no less than five different species of wasp, each nested in the last like a whole series of those little carved and painted wooden dolls. What are they called?"
"Matreshka dolls," Katya offered.
"There was an old comic poem to that effect," Dev said. "Something about 'Big fleas have little fleas . . . ' and ending with the line 'and so ad infinitum.' "
"Yes. Well, the surprising thing about the Gr'tak," Daren continued, "is that they are composed of several mutually parasitizing species. Not as a serial regression, like those terrestrial wasps I mentioned, but with at least four different creatures living in close association with one another. Add to that their form of AI, what they call artificials, and you end up with a pretty complex joint life form."
"Wait a minute," Gresham said, shaking his head. "I don't think I buy this. I downloaded my doctorate in biology a long time ago, and I was a pretty fair xenobiologist before I ended up on bureaucratic panels. Parasites are essentially regressive species. Primitive, because they only need to adapt to their hosts. There wouldn't be any drive to develop intelligence, and if they had it to begin with, they'd lose it when life got easy."