by Ian Watson
“Yes,” said Andrik. “Have your people no mechanical transportation of their own?”
“For the most part we travel with our minds,” it replied. “Otherwise, our legs do lift us lightly where we wish to go.”
“Pistons,” said Sixkiller. “Their legs are pistons.”
“They’ve told us that they’re born,” Keiko heard herself saying. “Not made or engineered, Farrell, but born.”
“They took up watch here a while back, that’s all I know—first the one, and then the other. Neither the floater’s radio nor its pulse engine would operate while they were standing here. Finally—finally I got out and told them to beat it. They didn’t budge, they didn’t blink.”
“You tried to leave us?” Keiko cried.
“Not you, damn it—them! After first attempting to radio.”
Keiko’s student cocked its head to one side. “I wished to greet you again, Lady Kei. My sibling spouses informed me of your presence in the palace, and this one,” nodding at the other Kyber, “came out to divest me of a portion of that which I have foraged on our family’s behalf.”
At that, the alien removed from a hooklike chip of bone or metal at its waist the carcass of one of the planet’s mottled snailies. This it handed past Sixkiller to its sibling, who had already relieved it of several of the glistening shells.
Food, Keiko told herself; food, perhaps, for metathought …
“They eat,” she said to the floater pilot. “They’re born, and they eat. What other proof of their organic nature do you want, Farrell?”
“I don’t want any proof. I want to get out of here.”
Andrik turned to Keiko’s student, who was suddenly the same height as the human beings, its posture both poised and expectant. “What is the Rite of Conjoining?” the xenologist asked. “Just before everyone down there,” gesturing toward the crater, “froze up on us again, we were invited to attend a ceremony by that name.”
“Yes. Do come. At Onogoro’s decoupling.”
“But what is it?”
“A sharing of data preparatory to transit. A celebration of conceptions. An obeisance to the forces of delivery.”
“It has to do with birth, then?”
“Birth, resurrection, renewal, and life—all at strata of consciousness inaccessible to the unconjoined.”
“Then how the hell are we going to be able to participate?” Sixkiller demanded of Andrik and Keiko. “Do we bring our own extension cords and plug into the nearest faintly humming Kyber?”
The Kyber tore a piece of sailcloth flesh from its right arm and offered it to Sixkiller. “Eat thou this in remembrance of what thou hast never been,” it said, not untenderly.
The floater pilot struck aside the alien’s outstretched fingers, cursing beneath his breath. The torn flesh fluttered to the rime-embroidered rocks.
Keiko retrieved the spurned offering and tried to examine it in the failing light. Here was, at last, a long-awaited biosample—even if Sixkiller vandalistically ignored the fact. Actually, it looked no more edible than a canvas boot string. While she inspected it, Sixkiller yanked back the floater’s outer hatch, insulted by her attention to such rubbish, and swung himself acrobatically up from the ground to clamber up the recessed steps back into his cockpit.
Andrik scarcely even noted his defection. “Why have you been in kybertrance—death-sleep—these past several days?” he asked, rephrasing a question that the aliens in the labyrinth had pointedly ignored, whatever its wording.
“To conceive of ourselves anew,” said the Kyber cryptically. “To issue a programme for transit. To programme our issue for Laevo-light.”
Keiko rose from where she had been kneeling. She had in mind a question so incongruous that it had to be spoken aloud. “Is each of you,” she began, “well, pregnant?”
“Two of us are,” the former septa-prime replied. “The two whom you observed lying in paracybergamic union on a common birthbed. Yes, inseminated with the grace notes of our psalm to the God-Behind-the-Galaxies, they are pregnant with data. And in every septa-commune, Lady Keiko, are two such pregnant Kybers linked in death-sleep for the long gestation.”
“And linked, too,” surmised Andrik, a sweep of his hand taking in the vast, forbidding landscape of the Kyber plain, “with every other death-sleeping member of your species, no matter where they are.”
“We must go,” the alien told him. “Awaiting our return are three who hunger and two who process information toward its most apt embodiment.”
“A Kyber infant? One to each family; a child with two dams and at least five sires? Or should that be ‘processers’ and ‘programmers’, conception among you being at least as much an intellectual as a sexual act?”
“Good night, Lady Kei.” The former septa-prime instantly regained its most imposing height. With the other Kyber picking its way after, it tottered along the ridge toward the sunken palace. Two metallic storks on a rocky beach, at length disappearing down into their citadel of stones.
Impulsively Keiko tasted the strip of flesh from her former student’s arm. It was bitter, alumlike, its texture reminiscent of chewing-gum or pickled octopus. It flavoured her saliva with alien molecules. Before she could spit the taste away, a thin gruel of Onogorovan trace elements slid down her throat. Then, at last, she spat, wiped her mouth with the back of her mitten, and plunged the remaining bit of kyberflesh into the pouch on her parka.
Andrik laughed mirthlessly. “You’re going to save that? As a memento? After the way it apparently tasted?”
“Think, Andrik.” Keiko glared at the xenologist, wondering at a mind that could soar after ultimate truths but blithely overlook the essential details of daily field work. “I’m going to give this to Eshleman and Naomi. For analysis. In all the time we’ve been here, we’ve never had from the Kybers the equivalent of even a fingernail clipping to put under our microscopes.”
The bitter taste lingered in her mouth. She waited for pastel optical illusions to bloom in her head, for a fire like liquid ice to flicker across the membranes of her gut. Neither of these things happened.
The taste faded, a memory in her nostrils.
“Of course,” Andrik said. But he had spoken with archangels, and his smile was as distant as it was seraphic.
They flew back to the Platform as earlier that day they had flown out to the Onogorovan plain—in a mutually enforced silence.
TEN
Seven days passed, a week if you counted by Earthly standards and ignored the fact that Onogoro had no moon but Il Penseroso.
The examination of the bit of kyberflesh that Keiko had brought back revealed that its cellular composition resembled that of human skin, at least insofar as the presence of chromosomes and nucleic acid went. Even thirty-seven light-years from home, DNA was DNA—a fact that Naomi Davis and Heinrich Eshleman had already confirmed with their experiments on other local life forms. Still, certain anomalies and differences did exist.
In addition to the helical DNA molecules in the nucleus of each Kyber cell—molecules that, teased out to full length, would have made a strand nearly four times as long as those coiled in a human cell—Naomi and Heinrich found minute, free-floating latticework structures that Keiko’s friend dubbed “cryptosomes”, all of which possessed crystaloid properties. What were these tiny crystals doing at the heart of that most basic of all organic units, the cell? Not even the snailies and the mock-tortoises of the planet had exhibited such an arrangement at this fundamental level, whether their cell samples were scraped from the fleshy portions of their bodies or chipped from their organic shells. In this respect, then, the Kybers were different from every other life form whose genetic biology had come under the scrutiny of expeditionary scientists. But because the cryptosomes in the Kyber cells appeared to be inert bodies without identifiable purpose or function, Naomi was at a loss to explain the meaning of the difference.
“It must have something to do with the way they are,” Keiko said, treading water in the big
, plastic tub braced beneath the decking of the Platform’s bathhouse. Overhead, through a taut polyethylene film, the interthreading pinks and violets of an alien sunset.
Naomi was opposite her in the languidly swirling water, both arms extended along a support rail. “Oh, assuredly,” she replied, her face flushed and her eyes bright with decaying fatigue. “Here are creatures who seem to be made half of skin and half of old clothes hangers and aluminium closet poles, and they’ve got neat little crystals swimming around in their cells. It points to a blending of the supposedly unmixable, just as does the outward form of their big, clunking bodies.”
“They don’t clunk,” Keiko corrected Naomi gently.
“No? Well, perhaps they don’t. Heinrich thinks the cryptosomes may be evidence in the Kyber physiology of some sort of insidious environmental contaminant. Yes. A contaminant having to do with Dextro’s getting ready to go nova, he thinks.”
“You don’t think that?”
Naomi pooched out her lips, comically. “Neither does Heinrich, if you want to know the truth. He’s guessing. Everybody’s guessing.”
“What’s your guess, Naomi?”
“My guess is that the cryptosomes have a great deal to do with the reproduction of Kyber body cells and maybe even that of Kyber individuals. In fact, I think cryptosomes—which, by the by, haven’t done diddly for us in the laboratory, even though that bit of skin you brought us isn’t really dead yet—yes, well, the cryptosomes just may replicate themselves in the context of DNA replication. They do a little dance together.”
“Crystals and nucleic acid?” asked Keiko sceptically. “That isn’t possible, is it?”
Naomi closed her eyes, pinched her nostrils together with one hand, and dunked herself. She came up blowing, streaming. Droplets flew from her matted cap of hair, which she shook from side to side. “Whew! Wow!” She opened her eyes: diamonds dripped down her lashes, and her pupils contracted to graphite points.
“Not on our own bonny green planet,” she managed. “So far as we know. But out here, Keiko, out here I think the four different nitrogen compounds in DNA somehow affect the atomic bonding capabilities of the cryptosomes and draw them into heredity’s pretty helical molecule. Once in there, why, they’re part of the programme. They dictate inherited characteristics just as do the adenine-thymine and cytosine-guanine matchups. That’s what I think.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“Neither do I. But it’s interesting that there are four nitrogen compounds in DNA and four types of latticework bondings among crystals, don’t you think? Let Earthbound geneticists smirk—the Kybers’ cellular biology suggests they’ve evolved a means to encode so much inheritable data in a single skin cell that all the libraries and knowledge centres ever built couldn’t hold a fraction of it, not even in their combined microfiche files.”
“Naomi!” Keiko caught the rail behind her and hung on to it with one hand.
“I’m not exaggerating. Not much, anyway.”
“Why such complexity? The Kybers are human scale, relatively speaking. They certainly aren’t planet-sized creatures with oceans for brains and mountains for backbones. Some of that cellular information must be redundant.”
“Indeed. And think of the possibility for genetic mistakes, for mutations, considering all these half-way-to-infinite base-pair steps, each one asterisked with some sort of niggling crypto-somatic footnote. Criminy!” Naomi, like a child in a wading pool, put her face into the water and snorted horsily. Gasping, she bobbed back up shaking her short sodden grey tresses. “Incredible that they’re all so uniform in appearance, isn’t it?”
Keiko took up a piece of bathing pumice and rubbed it between her breasts. “As if they’ve come off an assembly line. Which is just what Sixkiller continues to claim—in spite of the living flesh I gave you and their own counterclaim that they’re born.” She smiled wistfully. “Born in Bethlehem; every one of them a god.”
“Well, maybe the seeming redundancy of all that genetic information isn’t a redundancy at all, Kei. Only a portion of it goes to dictating their physical makeup, say, while the remainder—the majority, I’d bet—encodes data about everything from the devil to the deep blue sea.”
Despite the soothing roil of the waters, Keiko’s pulse quickened. She recalled that Andrik had once spun out a brief fantasy about the aliens using kybertrance to process the data with which their waking lives periodically overloaded them. Data. Like a marked card or a dud coin, that word kept turning up. And Andrik—well, the last time they had spent the night together had been the night of the thousand shimmering bodhisattvas of Mercy, before their first joint outing to the plain.
Since then, well, he had hurt her …
“Data?” she heard herself echo Naomi.
“Absolutely. It’s a kind of paradox, really. The Kybers may have incorporated extrasomatic data—facts, if you like—into their cellular physiology. Of course, those encoded facts wouldn’t be worth a brass farthing if the Kybers didn’t also have some innate means of breaking the code and encompassing its information intellectually. Which they do. Kybertrance is probably the biological agency of the transfer.”
“Andrik said something like that a week ago.”
“Andrik’s very sharp, Kei. He damn well understands the Kybers at least as well as he does himself … or you.”
Keiko tossed the bathing pumice on to the decking and eased herself out into the centre of the tub, her heart a hammer under her naked breast.
“Sorry,” apologized Naomi off-handedly. “Did Andrik also say that a Kyber infant must be born a veritable genius by human standards?”
“No.” She released the word grudgingly, not wanting even to think about what Andrik had or had not said.
“That’s where the genetic aspect comes in, you see. Compared with the Kybers, a human baby is a blank piece of paper ready to be written on, nobody knowing whether it’s going to be given over to scribbles or elegant heroic couplets. From the outset, though, a Kyber baby is an encyclopedia of extrasomatic data just waiting to be applied to the challenges of life in its particular bailiwick, meaning, of course, the Gemini system. It holds its experience in common with every other Kyber.”
Keiko finned herself about. “Challenges like switching back and forth between suns every few thousand years? Challenges like Dextro’s getting ready to go nova?”
“Well, that’s the situation, isn’t it? Still, I think one of the Kybers’ biggest challenges may have been the advent of the Heavenbridge and all us twitchy creatures who jumped down from it in hopes of understanding them. That’s why one of them came to us for language lessons, through which it also absorbed a smacking lot of human history, literature, and scientific thought. Their metabolisms may require abstract data at least as much as they do organic foodstuffs.”
“You make them sound—once in possession of the necessary amounts of data—sufficient unto themselves.” Keiko, again treading water, faced the middle-aged ecologist, relishing her own buoyancy and studying Naomi’s amiable, puttylike features. “But when we went down to the Kyber palace last week, one of them talked about appealing to a higher power.”
“I listened to the tape, you know.”
“Yes, I guess you did. But to what sort of ‘higher power’ would a knowledgeable species like the Kybers appeal?”
“The most proper one, I’d wager,” said Naomi Davis, bobbing up and down while submerging herself no deeper than her chins. Under the water her breasts lifted and fell languidly. “They talked of prayers and souls and suchlike, didn’t they?”
“My former student even mentioned a ‘God-Behind-the-Galaxies’, but we weren’t recording then.”
“Well,” said Naomi, ceasing to bob.
So oddly inflected was this word that Keiko and Naomi burst into grins. Tension seeped out of the muscles in Keiko’s lower back, and the warm water suddenly had a womblike cosiness. Andrik, whom she genuinely loved, had never made her feel as comfortable and seren
e as had dowdy Naomi Davis with a single ambiguous syllable. …
“What else didn’t get recorded?” Naomi asked.
“That the Kyber infant has seven parents and issues from the bodies of two rather than merely one of this number. But, of course, they can’t all contribute genetical material.” Keiko grinned again. “Can they?”
“Who knows? I’d bet that the two birth-parents provide the stuff of heredity while the others act as guides, shaping that stuff in kybertrance. Maybe this superredundant control system is what ensures that the umpity-billion base-pair steps of their DNA replication don’t go awry and result in mutations or aborted Kyber foetuses. That could also explain why they all look so deucedly much alike, in spite of the chances for biological snafus.”
“And why there are so few of them, too.”
“Absolutely.” Naomi dog-paddled toward Keiko, swinging her head from side to side—an outright amateur at water sports. Then she halted. Treading in place after having swum only a couple of body lengths, she tried to catch her breath. “Which—altogether—solves the mystery of—the Kybers,” she wheezed, reaching for Keiko’s shoulder. “Let’s—talk about—something—important.”
“Very well.” Keiko caught the older woman and supported her under the arms while scissoring gently with her feet. Their naked bodies were a hand apart, but the water circulating about and between them was a unifying bond. “Like what, Naomi? Astrophysics? Religion? Politics?”
“No, no. Like—like Andrik, Kei”
“There’s nothing to talk about.” Keiko released the older woman and averted her face. “The Kybers have ‘died’ again. Andrik goes out every day looking for one who will awaken to his voice, and nothing happens. Four days ago I went back with him to the crater of my former student, to see if I couldn’t trigger one or more of them into consciousness—our kind of consciousness—and that didn’t work, either.” She looked back at Naomi. “I am not Prince Charming, nor was meant to be.”