by Ian Stewart
So many species. Sam remembered his childhood priest explaining how much the Church valued a diversity of cultures and species. Universal tolerance involved having something definite to be tolerant toward. It was not enough to love one’s fellow species in the abstract. They had to be present in the flesh—or whatever else they were made of. The Church made sure that they were present, by creating a suitable mixture of species on every converted world and in every space-going vessel that it operated.
There were, of course, no exotics—no plasmoids, no neutron-star crystallines. As yet, no way had been found to include them in such company without destroying it, the ship, and anything else within lethal range. That was beyond even the Precursors, or at least beyond the known capabilities of any of their gadgetry that had yet been discovered.
It was a serious theological embarrassment to Cosmic Unity that some of its adherents were so incompatible with planet-dwellers that there was no conceivable form of protection that could permit them to coexist, and the paradox had inspired several heresies. The orthodox view was that somewhere in the Galaxy there must exist powerful, compact Precursor force fields, antigravity hypergenerators, or whatever, that would permit even these entities to join the planet-dwellers in Full Convocation.
Without a doubt, the Lifesoul-Giver would have arranged this, and it was only a matter of time before suitable devices were discovered. Until then the planet-dwellers, even though they were a minority, necessarily represented all other fellow participants in the One.
As a compromise, several exotics were always present as holograms, and the entire ceremony would be broadcast by ansible to selected audiences—three stars that hosted converted plasmoid colonies, a band of nomadic believers herding their magnetotori across the cold and dark of the interstellar vacuum to solar-wind pastures, and four orphan planets, worlds without any accompanying stars. Such planets, long ago expelled from nascent stellar systems, were common in the celestial voids. Typically, they possessed high-pressure atmospheres, in which a kind of greenhouse effect could sustain life for tens of billions of years. On one of these orphan worlds, flat creatures like pancakes had evolved an advanced culture beneath a high-pressure atmosphere of molecular hydrogen that retained nearly all the heat from decaying thorium and other radioactives. Cosmic Unity planned to help them spread to the other three orphan worlds, as soon as appropriate inducements could be found.
They were working on it.
No challenge was too great to prevent dissemination of the Memeplex and the way of life that went with it. Cosmic Unity would not be denied to any sentient creature, however great the challenge.
The blimp spread her tentacles, and the Assembly fell silent save for the gentle hiss of air pumps here and there and a gurgle of body fluids from those unable to suppress this evidence of their material nature. Those who spoke in light toned down their emissions. Pheromone production was contained within barrier fields produced by specially duplicated generators.
The representative selection of acolytes positioned themselves in various rest poses at the high acolyte’s feet. The last to settle was the Illensan, which hesitated before deciding to sit down on its powerball.
All attention now focused on the high acolyte.
The light from No-Moon’s sun filtered down onto the reef, refracted into ever-changing caustic patterns by the ripples and waves that coursed across the lagoon of Crooked Atoll. Corals were wedged in huge convoluted mounds or scattered haphazardly across underwater clearings of open sand. Giant purple fans sprouted from thick lumps of pale jelly, undulating in the gentle currents. Shoals of brightly colored fish gathered in clefts between the rocks or patrolled the open waters alongside the reef, alert for any hint of a predator. The predators took them anyway, but enough survived their attentions to keep their species in business.
Here, faint traces in the sand told of a lurking trapdaw buried under the lagoon floor, waiting for its open jaws to be sprung by any unwary crustacean that walked into the trap. There, just visible behind fronds of algaweed, was the double snout of a rigid eel. Tiny free-swimming polyps created huge semiopaque clouds, often forming spontaneously into grotesque shapes.
The reef formed a huge dented ellipse, broken in four or five places as the result of bleaching by too-warm seas during unusually hot summers. It was about three miles from end to end, half that from side to side. It contained roughly fifty million corals.
One, not distinguished in any notable way from any of the others, was Second-Best Sailor’s wife.
Unconnected, as she was right now, her mental abilities were rather weaker than those of a desert cactus. She could feed, transduce energy, and—when the night was luminous and the mood was right—breed with her husband. She could compete for territory with her neighbors, exuding toxins to keep them away, or—if that failed—to kill them. Some of her neighbors had another weapon: They could turn themselves inside out and eject their stomachs, still attached to their main bodies, toward any suitable victim . . . and eat it. When satisfied, they would draw their stomachs back into their more usual position.
This was how Second-Best Sailor’s wife got on with the other reefwives—who also had the brains of a cactus, so it worked out fine. Every coralline reef is a battleground, but the unending guerrilla warfare has a positive consequence. The reef thrives. In a web of mutual enemies there must be many accidental cooperations. As the old saying goes, “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” In literal terms, the saying is nonsense, for my enemy’s enemy can perfectly well have a go at me, too, but whenever it has a go at my enemy, it does help me. When the webs become more complex, ecological support groups cannot avoid coming into existence. Wars cannot be fought on too many fronts at the same time.
Dormant neural connections activated. With no warning, Second-Best Sailor’s wife, and millions like her, suddenly became united to create the reefmind.
The reefmind determined that she was in need of multiple viewpoints, and she segregated herself into four separate conscious modules: North, South, East, West.
North: You will remember from our recent-immediate unison that I/we expressed concern about a potential threat on the fringes of our joint perception?
East: Agreed.
South: Confirmed.
West: I would kind of go along with that, yes.
East: And now we are all distinctly apprehensive, for the threat is no longer potential. Our males send news from the ports. The disturbing activity is migrating toward the center of our perceptions.
North: Am I justified in sensing invasion of our territory?
West: Too true. And I am sure that I speak for us all.
East: I believe we would do well to unite for a moment and pool our resources and recollections. I want to make certain . . .
. . . Yes, it is as I suspected. I/we have encountered such a threat before.
South: Many times. A benevolent memeplex, perhaps already turned malignant. And now we have a name for it: Cosmic Unity.
North: The name alone is worrying. How can a diverse cosmos ever become united?
South: Unified.
West: Uniform. Regimented.
South: That is what I fear. It is a pattern as old as the Galaxy. Apologies, I exaggerate. Almost as old as the Galaxy.
West: I think it’s older. There are other galaxies.
East: But no means of transport between them.
West: That we know of. Yet.
North: Whatever—it is an ancient pattern. More ancient even than the Precursors. And a precondition for its appearance is infestation by extelligent life forms.
South: The only precondition.
West: You realize, it was just this threat that forced us to leave our beloved Three-Moons and flee across the void to this unpleasantly moonless world, where only the light of sporadic meteor showers exists to stimulate our mating urges?
East: Agreed.
South: Affirmed.
West: Right on.
For a moment the re
efmind remembered the great evacuation as if it had happened yesterday—the bargaining to secure allies, the transfer of males and females, the restructuring of their new home’s ecology. And the war that had destroyed their original world.
West: So, uh, we ourselves may be at risk—again.
North: Permit a minor correction, West. The dynamic of history is emergent. No algorithm can predict its long-term course. It can only be left to unfold. However, some courses are more probable than others, and there are heuristic procedures to compute those probabilities.
West: And your point is?
North: The risk to me/us cannot yet be quantified.
South: Ah, yes . . . I/we am/are not at risk as long as my/our existence remains unsuspected by Galactic civilization, and as long as the incursion follows its less malign course. My/our own destruction would occur only if there were widespread disruption of our planet, such as the release of a pan-oceanic biotoxin.
North: Correct. But I perceive no such activity.
West: Yet.
South: Pessimist! Let us assume the less malign course. It is still a disaster. But not, directly, for us.
North: No. It is for our husbands that we must fear.
East: For they are individuals, and recognizable as such.
North: And evidently sentient.
West: There are times when I would beg to differ. Consider the example of Second-Best Sailor! But technically speaking, you are right. So our polypoid husbands are obvious targets for the approaching memeplex.
East: We must protect them from the coming menace. Look, even now it becomes more central in our perceptions!
West: Yes. We will speed up our implementation of the usual contingency plans, then, fellow reefwives? Vaccinations against viral attacks, the formation of covert guerilla groups? Large-scale plans to mobilize the husbands? An improved capacity to wage ecological warfare on a planetary scale?
East: Affirmed.
South: Emphasized.
North: Obligatory.
By the time the wild magnetotorus herd passed close by No-Moon, it was definitely speeding up. Ahead was the orbit of Chromatistes, a smaller, predominantly purple world. This was home to a complex ecology of archoid pseudobacteria and Belousov perennials—mobile meadows that formed patterns of concentric rings.
As the herd sensed good grazing up ahead, the herders made final careful adjustments to its trajectory, let slip the magnetic reins, and concentrated on positioning their improbable ceramic craft in a stable, high-radiation orbit. The magnetotori ignored the innermost planet of the system, technically classed as a slag asteroid. They stampeded toward the designated areas in the photosphere of Lambda Coelacanthi, guided by solar flares lit by the indigenous plasmoids. Down, down, down the gravity gradient the herds plunged, sensing the granular magnetic patterns of ripe vortex-fields. They plunged into the star in a spectacular light show. As the last of the chains disappeared, strange ripples coursed through the hot plasma of the photosphere, sending short-lived flares looping out into the corona and temporarily disrupting electromagnetic communications throughout the system. Soon, only the plasmoids and the herders would know that the herds were there.
The herders adjusted the orbits of their ceramic homes, the better to keep watch over their beasts. Soon the magnetotori would start broadcasting radio-pheromones, which would trigger the strange topological dances of mating. Until then, the herders could leave their beasts to browse on magnetic field-lines while their owners floated in the health-giving radiance of the solar wind.
After a long journey between the stars, it was good to relax, sunbathe, and recharge one’s frequencies.
Sam relished the familiar words as the high acolyte recited the central tenets of the Church of Cosmic Unity. Its high-pitched squeals were translated into comprehensible signals by a variety of electronic aids so that all could understand.
The origins of his religion were uncertain; according to the best scholars it had appeared about twenty-five thousand years ago on a small number of solar systems closely associated with the System of the Original Sun. Three or four sentient species had stumbled upon the first intimations of a new, species-transcendent philosophy—that no sentient being was superior to any other. It followed that cooperation, rather than mutual antagonism, was the righteous way to live. The model for this form of coexistence was symbiosis, a universal evolutionary trick familiar to all sentient species on their own worlds. The resulting belief system encouraged a multicultural, multispecies vision of the future. And it was so evident that this system was right that its main objective naturally became its own propagation and expansion.
“The many shall become the One,” the blimp intoned solemnly. “The ways of the many shall become the way of the One.”
The assembled creatures all performed one of the few motions that most of them had in common, a brief ducking movement. The Wymokh acolyte flattened slightly and then returned to its normal, slightly oblate spheroidal shape. The metallomorphs on the wall twitched. Sam bowed his head momentarily. He understood the meaning of the words: that every species should recognize the existence of every other and respect its ways. That was the entire basis of Cosmic Unity: mutual respect and tolerance.
“This is the inevitable course of the Lifesoul-Giver, and none shall be excluded from the Fellowship of the All,” said the high acolyte. “The Memeplex of the One is all, and the Memeplex of the One shall be conveyed to all. And all shall receive the Memeplex, and believe, and obey.”
Sam translated this as “Every sentient species must be persuaded to adopt the beliefs and ways of Cosmic Unity. It is the duty of every servant to ensure that no species fails to be converted to the sole true religion, with its morally uplifting focus on mutual tolerance. It is the duty of every servant to promote the pan-specific symbiosis.”
And the servants had not flinched in their duty. From Cosmic Unity’s early beginnings, with the conversion of a few solar systems in one remote corner of the Galaxy, it had spread like wildfire. The Memeplex of the One had succeeded beyond the Founders’ wildest dreams. The evangelists had expected resistance, possibly violent resistance. It had not materialized, not then, back when it all started. There had been dissenters, of course—there are always dissenters. But they were few and easily overcome. The Memeplex was so strong, so sensible, so self-evidently right. Who could argue against tolerance and respect? Who could support intolerance or non- cooperation?
The Memeplex had been partly designed, had partly evolved. At first by accident, later by intent, Cosmic Unity’s Founders had laid down a collection of memes—concepts that could propagate themselves in the medium of intelligent minds—so attractive that it traveled between stellar systems like a celestial gale. The more sophisticated designer memes of the Church’s main expansion phase were proof against the commonest antimemetics, and only very unusual cultures could resist them. Paramount among these were the wandering Neanderthals, whose lack of any spiritual dimension rendered them immune to all religions.
Instead of wasteful, terrible interstellar wars, the priesthood of Cosmic Unity preached the word of peace. And that made sense, because any intelligent organism can understand that there is no way to protect a planet. A single large asteroid, set on a rough collision course, could destroy a world. And it could come from any direction, anywhere in the celestial sphere. Once diverted into a planet-bound orbit, an asteroid would be virtually unstoppable, especially one protected by an armed escort. Attempts to change its trajectory could be wrecked by a hundred easy tactics—biological weapons, booby traps, or merely surrounding the weapon with a cloud of smaller rocks and gravel so that nothing could approach it. Even if the planet possessed gravitic repulsors, these clumsy, slow-moving devices could be overwhelmed, taken out, or sabotaged. And defending against such an attack by preventing the enemy from gaining control of an asteroid was almost impossible. Most solar systems had their own version of an asteroid belt, and if necessary the invaders could bring their
own rocks with them.
And that was just one tactic, the most primitive. There were others. Suicide squads of plasmoids could turn a star into a giant laser and sterilize its system. Organisms causing virulent diseases could rain down from the darkness of space, as virtually undetectable spores tailored to the sentient inhabitants. Seas could be poisoned, icefields melted, acid oceans neutralized, mountains flattened, forests set ablaze. Atmospheres could be infiltrated with corrosive oxygen or stripped away with blasts of energetic particles. Protective magnetic fields could be stolen. Stabilizing moons could be abducted.
A planet was a fragile place to live if someone wanted you and all your kind dead.
The only defense—if that was the word—was a preemptive strike. Kill your fellow being before it kills you. And that philosophy would get everybody killed.
It would rid the Galaxy of its infections. But the infections didn’t want that.
Mutual coexistence, pan-specific symbiosis—it was such an obvious idea. There was no rational alternative. For perhaps the first time in history, anywhere in the Galaxy, a religion had arisen with an entirely rational basis. Its dissemination was a precious trust, and no effort, however extreme, would be spared in bringing it to every corner of the Galaxy.