The Uplift War

by David Brin

  Athaclena shook her head, her corona forming a glyph of appreciation, a simple one which he might kenn. “No, Robert. They aren’t so dumb. But they have missed at least one human, so their worries aren’t over yet.”

  The little neo-chimp messenger glanced from Tymbrimi to human and sighed. It all sounded scary to her, not funny. She didn’t understand why they smiled.

  Probably, it was something subtle and convoluted. Patron-class humor … dry and intellectual. Some chims batted in that league, strange ones who differed from other neo-chimpanzees not so much in intelligence as in something else, something much less definable.

  She did not envy those chims. Responsibility was an awesome thing, more daunting than the prospect of fighting a powerful enemy, or even dying.

  It was the possibility of being left alone that terrified her. She might not understand it, when these two laughed. But it felt good just to hear it.

  The messenger stood a little straighter as Athaclena turned back to speak to her.

  “I will want to hear Lieutenant Benjamin’s report personally. Would you please also give my compliments to Dr. Soo and ask her to join us in the operations chamber?”

  “Yesser!” The chimmie saluted and took off at a run.

  “Robert?” Athaclena asked. “Your opinion will be welcome.”

  He looked up, a distant expression on his face. “In a minute, Clennie. I’ll check in at operations. There’s just something I want to think through first.”

  “All right.” Athaclena nodded. “I’ll see you soon.” She turned away and followed the messenger down a water-carved corridor lit at long intervals by dim glow bulbs and wet reflections on the dripping stalactites.

  Robert watched her until she was out of sight. He thought in the near-total quiet.

  Why are the Gubru persisting in gassing the mountains, after nearly every human has already been driven out? It must be a terrific expense, even if their gasbots only swoop down on places where they detect an Earthling presence.

  And how are they able to detect buildings, vehicles, even isolated chims, no matter how well hidden?

  Right now it doesn’t matter that they’ve been dosing our surface encampments. The gasbots are simple machines and don’t know we’re training an army in this valley. They just sense “Earthlings!”—then dive in to do their work and leave again.

  But what happens when we start operations and attract attention from the Gubru themselves? We can’t afford to be detectable then.

  There was another very basic reason to find an answer to these questions.

  As long as this is going on, I’m trapped down here!

  Robert listened to the faint plink of water droplets seeping from the nearest wall. He thought about the enemy.

  The trouble on Garth was clearly little more than a skirmish among the greater battles tearing up the Five Galaxies. The Gubru couldn’t just gas the entire planet. That would cost far too much for this backwater theater of operations.

  So a swarm of cheap, stupid, but efficient seeker robots had been unleashed to home in on anything not natural to Garth … anything that had the scent of Earth about it. By now nearly every attack dosed only irritated, resentful chims—immune to the coercion gas—and empty buildings all over the planet.

  It was a nuisance, and it was effective. A way had to be found to stop it.

  Robert pulled a sheet of paper from a folder at the end of the table. He wrote down the principal ways the gasbots might be using to detect Earthlings on an alien planet.

  OPTICAL IMAGING

  BODY HEAT INFRARED

  SCAN RESONANCE

  PSI

  REALITY TWIST

  Robert regretted having taken so many courses in public administration, and so few on Galactic technologies. He was certain the Great Library’s gigayear-old archives contained many methods of detection beyond just these five. For instance, what if the gasbots actually did “sniff out” a Terran odor, tracing anything Earthly by sense of smell?

  No. He shook his head. There came a point where one had to cut a list short, putting aside things that were obviously ridiculous. Leaving them as a last resort, at least.

  The rebels did have a Library pico-branch he could try, salvaged from the wreckage of the Howletts Center. The chances of it having any entries of military use were quite slim. It was a tiny branch, holding no more information than all the books written by pre-Contact Mankind, and it was specialized in the areas of Uplift and genetic engineering.

  Maybe we can apply to the District Central Library on Tanith for a literature search. Robert smiled at the ironic thought. Even a people imprisoned by an invader supposedly had the right to query the Galactic Library whenever they wished. That was part of the Code of the Progenitors.

  Right! He chuckled at the image. We’ll just walk up to Gubru occupation headquarters and demand that they transmit our appeal to Tanith, … a request for information on the invader’s own military technology!

  They might even do it. After all, with the galaxies in turmoil the Library must be inundated with queries. They would get around to our request eventually, maybe sometime in the next century.

  He looked over his list. At least these were means he had heard of or knew something about.

  Possibility one: There might be a satellite overhead with sophisticated optical scanning capabilities, inspecting Garth acre by acre, seeking out regular shapes that would indicate buildings or vehicles. Such a device could be dispatching the gasbots to their targets.

  Feasible, but why were the same sites raided over and over again? Wouldn’t such a satellite remember? And how could a satellite know to send robot bombers plunging down on even isolated groups of chims, traveling under the heavy forest canopy?

  The reverse logic held for infrared direction. The machines couldn’t be homing in on the target’s body heat. The Gubru drones still swooped down on empty buildings, for instance, cold and abandoned for weeks now.

  Robert did not have the expertise to eliminate all the possibilities on his list. Certainly he knew next to nothing about psi and its weird cousin, reality physics. The weeks with Athaclena had begun to open doors to him, but he was far from being more than a rank novice in an area that still caused many humans and chims to shudder in superstitious dread.

  Well, as long as I’m stuck here underground I might as well expand my education.

  He started to get up, intending to join Athaclena and Benjamin. Then he stopped suddenly. Looking at his list of possibilities he realized that there was one more that he had left out.

  … A way for the Gubru to penetrate our defenses so easily when they invaded.… A way for them to find us again and again, wherever we hide. A way for them to foil our every move.

  He did not want to, but honesty forced him to pick up the stylus one more time.

  He wrote a single word.

  TREASON

  33

  Fiben

  That afternoon Gailet took Fiben on a tour of Port Helenia—or as much of it as the invader had not placed off limits to the neo-chimp population.

  Fishing trawlers still came and went from the docks at the southern end of town. But now they were crewed solely by chim sailors. And less than half the usual number set forth, taking wide detours past the Gubru fortress ship that filled half the outlet of Aspinal Bay.

  In the markets they saw some items in plentiful supply. Elsewhere there were sparse shelves, stripped nearly bare by scarcity and hoarding. Colonial money was still good for some things, like beer and fish. But only Galactic pellet-scrip would buy meat or fresh fruit. Irritated shoppers had already begun to learn what that archaic term, “inflation,” meant.

  Half the population, it seemed, worked for the invader.

  There were battlements being built, off to the south of the bay, near the spaceport. Excavations told of more massive structures yet to be.

  Placards everywhere in town depicted grinning neo-chimpanzees and promised plenty once again, as soon as
enough “proper” money entered circulation. Good work would bring that day closer, they were promised.

  “Well? Have you seen enough?” his guide asked.

  Fiben smiled. “Not at all. In fact, we’ve barely scratched the surface.”

  Gailet shrugged and let him lead the way.

  Well, he thought as he looked at the scant market shelves, the nutritionists keep telling us neo-chimps we eat more meat than is good for us … much more than we could get in the wild old days. Maybe this’ll do us some good.

  At last their wanderings brought them to the bell tower overlooking Port Helenia College. It was a smaller campus than the University, on Cilmar Island, but Fiben had attended ecological conferences here not so very long ago, so he knew his way around.

  As he looked over the school, something struck him as very strange.

  It wasn’t just the Gubru hover-tank, dug in at the top of the hill, nor the ugly new wall that grazed the northern fringe of the college grounds on its way around town. Rather, it was something about the students and faculty themselves.

  Frankly, he was surprised to see them here at all!

  They were all chims, of course. Fiben had come to Port Helenia expecting to find ghettos or concentration camps, crowded with the human population of the mainland. But the last mels and fems had been moved out to the islands some days ago. Taking their place had been thousands of chims pouring in from outlying areas, including those susceptible to the coercion gas in spite of the invaders’ assurances that it was impossible.

  All of these had been given the antidote, paid a small, token reparation, and put to work in town.

  But here at the college all seemed peaceful and amazingly close to normal. Fiben and Gailet looked down from the top of the bell tower. Below them, chens and chimmies moved about between classes. They carried books, spoke to one another in low voices, and only occasionally cast furtive glances at the alien cruisers that growled overhead every hour or so.

  Fiben shook his head in wonder that they persevered at all.

  Sure, humans were notoriously liberal in their Uplift policy, treating their clients as near equals in the face of a Galactic tradition that was far less generous. Elder Galactic clans might glower in disapproval, but chim and dolphin members deliberated next to their patrons on Terragens Councils. The client races had even been entrusted with a few starships of their own.

  But a college without men?

  Fiben had wondered why the invader held such a loose rein over the chim population, meddling only in a few crass ways like at the Ape’s Grape.

  Now he thought he knew why.

  “Mimicry! They must think we’re playing pretend!” he muttered half aloud.

  “What did you say?” Gailet looked at him. They had made a truce in order to get the job done, but clearly she did not savor spending all day as his tour guide.

  Fiben pointed at the students. “Tell me what you see down there.”

  She glowered, then sighed and bent forward to look. “I see Professor Jimmie Sung leaving lecture hall, explaining something to some students.” She smiled faintly. “It’s probably intermediate Galactic history.… I used to TA for him, and I well recall that expression of confusion on the students’ faces.”

  “Good. That’s what you see. Now look at it through a Gubru’s eyes.”

  Gailet frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Fiben gestured again. “Remember, according to Galactic tradition we neo-chimps aren’t much over three hundred years old as a sapient client race, barely older than dolphins—only just beginning our hundred-thousand-year period of probation and indenture to Man.

  “Remember, also, that many of the Eatee fanatics resent humans terribly. Yet humans had to be granted patron status and all the privileges that go along with it. Why? Because they already had uplifted chims and dolphins before Contact! That’s how you get status in the Five Galaxies, by having clients and heading up a clan.”

  Gailet shook her head. “I don’t get what you’re driving at. Why are you explaining the obvious?” Clearly, she did not like being lectured by a backwoods chim, one without even a postgraduate degree.

  “Think! How did humans win their status? Remember how it happened, back in the twenty-second century? The fanatics were outvoted when it came to accepting neo-chimps and neo-dolphins as sapient.” Fiben waved his arm. “It was a diplomatic coup pulled off by the Kanten and Tymbrimi and other moderates before humans even knew what the issues were!”

  Gailet’s expression was sardonic, and he recalled that her area of expertise was Galactic sociology. “Of course, but—”

  “It became a fait accompli. But the Gubru and the Soro and the other fanatics didn’t have to like it. They still think we’re little better than animals. They have to believe that, otherwise humans have earned a place in Galactic society equal to most, and better than many!”

  “I still don’t see what you’re—”

  “Look down there.” Fiben pointed. “Look with Gubru eyes, and tell me what you see!”

  Gailet Jones glared at Fiben narrowly. At last, she sighed. “Oh, if you insist,” and she swiveled to gaze down into the courtyard again.

  She was silent for a long time.

  “I don’t like it,” she said at last. Fiben could barely hear her. He moved to stand closer.

  “Tell me what you see.”

  She looked away, so he put it into words for her. “What you see are bright, well-trained animals, creatures mimicking the behavior of their masters. Isn’t that it? Through the eyes of a Galactic, you see clever imitations of human professors and human students … replicas of better times, reenacted superstitiously by loyal—”

  “Stop it!” Gailet shouted, covering her ears. She whirled on Fiben, eyes ablaze. “I hate you!”

  Fiben wondered. This was hard on her. Was he simply getting even for the hurt and humiliation he had suffered over the last three days, partly at her hands?

  But no. She had to be shown how her people were looked on by the enemy! How else would she ever learn how to fight them?

  Oh, he was justified, all right. Still, Fiben thought. It’s never pleasant being loathed by a pretty girl.

  Gailet Jones sagged against one of the pillars supporting the roof of the bell tower. “Oh Ifni and Goodall,” she cried into her hands. “What if they are right! What if it’s true?”

  34

  Athaclena

  The glyph paraphrenll hovered above the sleeping girl, a floating cloud of uncertainty that quivered in the darkened chamber.

  It was one of the Glyphs of Doom. Better than any living creature could predict its own fate, paraphrenll knew what the future held for it—what was unavoidable.

  And yet it tried to escape. It could do nothing else. Such was the simple, pure, ineluctable nature of paraphrenll.

  The glyph wafted upward in the dream smoke of Athaclena’s fitful slumber, rising until its nervous fringe barely touched the rocky ceiling. That instant the glyph quailed from the burning reality of the damp stone, dropping quickly back toward where it had been born.

  Athaclena’s head shook slightly on the pillow, and her breathing quickened. Paraphrenll flickered in suppressed panic just above.

  The shapeless dream glyph began to resolve itself, its amorphous shimmering starting to assume the symmetrical outlines of a face.

  Paraphrenll was an essence—a distillation. Resistance to inevitability was its theme. It writhed and shuddered to hold off the change, and the face vanished for a time.

  Here, above the Source, its danger was greatest. Paraphrenll darted away toward the curtained exit, only to be drawn short suddenly, as if held in leash by taut threads.

  The glyph stretched thin, straining for release. Above the sleeping girl, slender tendrils waved after the desperate capsule of psychic energy, drawing it back, back.

  Athaclena sighed tremulously. Her pale, almost translucent skin throbbed as her body perceived an emergency of some sort and prepared to make ad
justments. But no orders came. There was no plan. The hormones and enzymes had no theme to build around.

  Tendrils reached out, pulling paraphrenll, hauling it in. They gathered around the struggling symbol, like fingers caressing clay, fashioning decisiveness out of uncertainty, form out of raw terror.

  At last they dropped away, revealing what paraphrenll had become … A face, grinning with mirth. Its cat’s eyes glittered. Its smile was not sympathetic.

  Athaclena moaned.

  A crack appeared. The face divided down the middle, and the halves separated. Then there were two of them!

  Her breath came in rapid strokes.

  The two figures split longitudinally, and there were four. It happened again, eight … and again … sixteen. Faces multiplied, laughing soundlessly but uproariously.

  “Ah-ah!” Athaclena’s eyes opened. They shone with an opalescent, chemical fear-light. Panting, clutching the blankets, she sat up and stared in the small subterranean chamber, desperate for the sight of real things—her desk, the faint light of the hall bulb filtering through the entrance curtain. She could still feel the thing that paraphrenll had hatched. It was dissipating, now that she was awake, but slowly, too slowly! Its laughter seemed to rock with the beating of her heart, and Athaclena knew there would be no good in covering her ears.

  What was it humans called their sleep-terror? Nightmare. But Athaclena had heard that they were pale things, dreamed events and warped scenes taken from daily life, generally forgotten simply by awakening.

  The sights and sensations of the room slowly took on solidity. But the laughter did not merely vanish, defeated. It faded into the walls, embedding there, she knew. Waiting to return.

  “Tutsunacann,” she sighed aloud. Tymbrim-dialect sounded queer and nasal after weeks speaking solely Anglic.

  The laughing man glyph, Tutsunacann, would not go away. Not until something altered, or some hidden idea became a resolve which, in turn, must become a jest.

  And to a Tymbrimi, jokes were not always funny.