by Ian Stewart
It was a filthy weapon. The effect had cascaded along the missionaries’ nerve fibers in a catalytic chain reaction. The damage inflicted on the nerve cells was not immediately fatal, but it slowed down the transmission of neural signals to a snail’s pace. The Fyx were unable to think, or to react, at their normal speeds. In particular, they were unable to control their muscles. Limp, immobile, unable to grasp or feed, unable even to speak, they quickly died from a deficit of hydrocyanic acid, without which their circulation could not convey vital sulfur compounds to their brains.
The technicians reported their findings to the commander of the No-Moon mission fleet, Archstrategist Oot’PurBimlin of the mother ship Virtuous Confrontation. The archstrategist wondered where the polypoids had obtained such a sophisticated bioweapon. As far as he could find out, the creatures were known only for their ceramic electronics. Did they have a secret ally? He would have to revise his plans. He called a council with his defense advisers, and new orders went out: Employ Strategy #8,442.
The reefwives had anticipated—not that this was quite the word, given their unusual attitude toward time—that their viral weapon would quickly be countered. They could see that happening in several timechunks, two weeks before the actual event, and by the time a further week had passed, every timechunk showed the same scenario.
The same thing had happened in past engagements, and they knew exactly what to do next. Cosmic Unity had evidently developed, or soon would develop—it was all the same to the reefmind—a vaccine against a key viral fragment, which locked one of the genetic switches into the “inactive” state. As a further precaution, antiviral femtomachines had been introduced into the missionaries’ circulatory systems. The virus trick, even with modifications, would not work a second time.
The reefwives’ perceptions told them that having countered this antipersonnel weapon, Cosmic Unity would concentrate on rounding up the remaining free mariners, to prevent more overt military action.
Their memories contained a method for mounting a highly effective counterattack.
The telescopes of the mission fleet had spotted a shoal of polypoids, one of several thousand detected that morning. This particular shoal was heading for the Straits of Ingratitude, and it looked dangerous. The polypoids had come under fire from small weapons, but significant casualties had not deterred them.
A substantial missionary force had been based just beyond this narrow waist of water, where the seabed fell away into the depths and the land receded to form a wide, fertile plain. The shoal was obviously an attack force, and although the polypoids’ weaponry was primitive, Cosmic Unity had no wish to lose any more missionaries than it already had. Over the past few days, the polypoids had become much more aggressive. The Church had underestimated the natives of No-Moon once; it would not do so again.
The shoal was too deep to be attacked from the surface, and the local commanders were under pressure to achieve results by capturing as many mariners as they could, so waiting for them to pass through the shallows of the Strait was not an option. Shock bombs would kill the heathens, but that was not the objective: Only if the polypoids lived could their lifesouls be healed and cherished as they deserved. So the missionaries were obliged to risk their own lifesouls and take prompt and decisive military action. By so doing, they demonstrated their boundless love for their fellow sentients, even heathens. If the Lifesoul-Stealer took any of the missionaries, then the sacrifice would be in a just cause. All missionaries knew that their lives might be forfeit for the sake of the Church—this was, after all, the content of the First Great Meme. They drew a sense of quiet pride from this knowledge, but of course it would be sinful to express such an emotion, so they transformed it into a sense of humility in the face of the awesomeness of the cosmos.
A multispecies raiding party of two hundred aquatics was rushed to the scene in a small convoy of light cruisers, accompanied by a prison raft that was little more than a floating net. The aquatics were specialists, highly trained in the art of subfluid combat, and their battlesuits had been preprogrammed for a watery environment. They descended on the free-swimming mariners, wary now that the creatures had gained in courage and ferocity. Protected by sonic cannon that could blow their opponents to pieces using focused shock waves, the Church’s subaquatic forces drove the mariners toward the surface, where more conventional weapons would destroy them. The aquatics began congratulating themselves on how smoothly the operation was proceeding.
And then it wasn’t.
From the darkness of the deep ocean, miles beneath the polypoid shoal, something sleek and deadly emerged with breathtaking speed. Its skin changed color to match its background, rendering it all but invisible to the naked eye. The aquatics had equipment that could detect this swift enemy and fight it, but the attack was so sudden that they never got to use it.
At the surface, the cruisers waited for the raiding party to return. When the appointed time for rendezvous had passed and there was still no sign of any returning aquatics, they cautiously sent down a slow but virtually indestructible benthosphere to find out what had gone wrong. The benthosphere returned with the bodies of two members of the raiding party—all it had room for. There had been plenty to choose from.
Once more, the corpses were analyzed. This time, the biochemists had to try virtually every trick they knew before they found a few almost negligible traces of the degradation products of powerful neurotoxins—a different toxin for each species in the raiding party.
Computer enhancement of visual recordings, made by the raiding party’s autoscribes, revealed the shape but not the nature of the invisible killers. Computational filtering techniques exaggerated the inevitable errors that the killers had made when matching themselves to their backgrounds; other methods tracked the vortices they shed as they surged through the water, and reconstructed the shape that must have created such patterns. By a combination of such methods, Cosmic Unity’s analysts satisfied themselves that their aquatic raiding party had been attacked by some kind of jellyfish.
They did not know that the jellyfish were female polypoids—a few of the reefwives remodeling their own biology and “going predator.” Emerging from the comparative safety of their calcareous homes, a few ninesquares of the females could merge together to form a single macroorganism, and in this case the reefmind had ordained that this should be a particularly nasty form of jellyfish. She had also envisioned the makeup of the raiding party, species by species, and secreted suitable toxins for each of them.
Know your enemy. That was the reefwives’ motto.
The archstrategist issued new orders. This was almost getting interesting. He’d expected the war to be a pushover, but the polypoids’ organization was proving surprisingly effective and, if anything, getting better. They must have a more advanced ally. But the ally’s tactics were nothing new to him, so it mattered little who the ally was.
There was a routine response:
Employ Strategy #2,515.
The reefmind consulted her timechunk, and her apprehension grew. The enemy’s tactical choices had been foreseen, of course, but the rapidity and sureness of Cosmic Unity’s replies to the reefmind’s defensive gambits was worrying. That, too, had been foreseen, but not in all timechunks. Now even the most highly resolved perception showed that the reefwives were losing the battles, and would probably lose the war unless they did something radical and unpredictable. The strategists of Cosmic Unity were more practiced than the reefwives—the Church fought such wars all the time, and it had evolved strategies to combat every defense yet imagined. The reefwives had fought maybe half a dozen wars since they had first evolved collective sentience; their memories were sharp, and their intelligence was unparalleled, but their experience was limited. And they were up against a professional, well-oiled war machine. Or “meme disseminator,” as Cosmic Unity preferred to call it.
There were several techniques that the reefwives had yet to use, but from now on each would generate dangerous side effe
cts. They could win the war but lose the planet, and that would be a futile victory. Nonetheless, if pushed, they would use every weapon they possessed—even the suicidal Last Resort, if no other option remained.
Reviewing progress thus far, Oot’PurBimlin decided that early in the invasion he had made a slight mistake. The forces of Cosmic Unity under his command had not employed a preemptive strike against No-Moon. Now the archstrategist was beginning to regret that decision. His original reasoning had been straightforward: There seemed to be no indigenous cultural minorities on the watery world. The wide availability of sea transport for thousands of years had pulled all polypoid cultures together into a single global multiculture.
A preemptive strike always worked best when there was a small, easily identified, widely despised minority. Better still, one that had inflicted its own limited brand of monoculture on all and sundry, convinced that it alone knew the right way to behave and the right things to believe. Like those Huphun he’d been hearing about. That campaign was turning into a textablet model. Hammering a hated minority group into the ground was a swift way to win over the lifesouls of those they had oppressed, while sending a terribly clear message to everyone else.
However, in the absence of any such hate figures, the Church could simply have chosen to victimize a random subset of the population. They had not done so, and it had been a mistake. They had overestimated the receptiveness of the polypoids to the Memeplex, and underestimated their stubbornness.
No more Mr. Nice Guy.
The reefwives had come to the same decision, subject to a change of gender. No longer did small groups of reefwives join forces, and bodies, to go predator. Now entire reefs were dissolving into swarms of jellyfish. The oceans were infested with monstrous creatures, viciously aggressive, tenacious beyond belief, and deadly to the touch. Some could spit poison into the air over a distance of several miles; Cosmic Unity lost thousands of troops that way. Others spat a thick goo that burst into flame when it contacted living flesh, or corrosive acids that ate away at even the most resistant metals.
Employ Strategy #304.
Having exhausted their standard tactics, the reefwives invented a new one. Once more they modified their polyps, and started budding off biological warfare machines. These microorganisms were highly mobile and could penetrate any form of protective covering. Once inside, they tunneled their way into whatever organism they found there, and took samples. Then they returned to the reef, to be chemically reprogrammed and sent back. The new molecular programming, of course, was highly disruptive to the normal biology of the victim.
For a few hours, the new tactic caused havoc.
Employ Strategy #4,431.
Now entire reefs were dying as Cosmic Unity’s missionary forces hit back with ever more disregard for sentient life—indeed, life of any kind. Monks and missionaries on the ground were becoming a growing target for ever more massive strikes by the polypoid resistance; they were reinforced with roving machines, backed up by the combined firepower of the mission fleet.
Cosmic Unity was blowing up islands and closing sea channels with fusion bombs. All over the planet, forests were ablaze, to choke off sunlight and demoralize the remaining polypoid combatants. The missionary forces dumped volatile chemicals into the seas and set them on fire, pumped nerve gas into the air.
By now the Church had not only given up its original plan A to convert the inhabitants of No-Moon voluntarily to the Memeplex of Universal Tolerance; it had also given up on plan B, which was to enforce love and tolerance whether the polypoids wanted it or not. Now Cosmic Unity was completely committed to plan C, which was to batter the planet with every weapon that the Church possessed, until not a single living thing stirred on its surface. Yes, it was a pity, but that was what happened to hopelessly intolerant species, and the strategy banks contained ample evidence that total destruction was the only sensible way to handle such cases.
A single small rock, released from orbit, could devastate a port, even a major one. And Cosmic Unity had weapons far more effective than rocks.
It dropped the rocks anyway. Small ones, for now.
The Church still did not understand that its real enemy was the reefs of No-Moon. It thought that the defending forces were being organized by polypoid males. Only the males had enough intelligence; the females, Cosmic Unity’s bioweapons experts knew, were mere corals, without a single brain cell among them. But the experts also knew that the males were reproduced by the females, within the warm shallows of lagoons, so Cosmic Unity’s mission fleet had bombed the lagoons as a matter of course, following Strategy #7,421. And the males were marine organisms, so the Church had systematically poisoned the oceans (Strategy #658).
They had no compunction in so doing. Had not the polypoids attacked them with biological weapons? Whatever the strategic council and its decision banks recommended, the mission fleet carried out.
Cosmic Unity’s strategies were paying off, even if that was sometimes an accidental side effect. By attacking the lagoons, the Church was inadvertently attacking the reefwives themselves, without ever knowing what the true enemy was. By poisoning the polypoids in the seas, they also poisoned the reefwives.
Now the reefmind’s worst fears were coming true. She herself was suffering serious damage. She began to worry that she was losing so many components that her timechunks were becoming unreliable. Her computational abilities, which underlay her unique sense of distributed time, were becoming ever more compromised as her connectivity came to bits. That made the reefmind’s strategic decisions less well thought out, and less effective.
Reefwives died in their millions, blown to bits by nuclear fusion, boiled by concentrations of heat rays, melted by lava from volcanoes that had started to spurt from the cracked floor of the ocean, where incoming asteroids had brushed the waters aside like a ’viathan ridding itself of a rash of suckermouths, smashing a path through the crust to the mantle beneath. For a split second, reefwives on one side of the world shared their sisters’ agonizing deaths through their shared neural connections. Then those connections were gone forever.
The severely impaired reefmind split herself into two parts, the most she could afford without the parts’ becoming too stupid, to review the remaining possibilities.
Night: Sister, I fear that we have no other option left.
Day: Last Resort?
Night: But we should use that only as a last resort! (Pause.) I am playing devil’s advocate, you realize. One of us must.
Both: Your advocacy meets with limited success. I/we shall hold back. But not for long.
14
AQUIFER HEAVEN
The biggest mistakes in history have been made by people who knew exactly what they were doing.
The Wisdom of Chalz
So engrossed had Sam been with his search for the Nether Ice Dome’s Vestibule of Heaven that he had not been quite as cautious as he had imagined. He had evaded Cosmic Unity’s monks, menials, and security, but he had not evaded the triplex eyes of Second-Best Sailor.
The mariner was pretty sure that he recognized the tall priest in the maroon cloak. When you are completely defenseless and someone shoots you with a laser and then takes charge of dumping you in the desert to die, you don’t forget them. One glimpse was enough to arouse Second-Best Sailor’s curiosity, and his desire for revenge. The priest was a landlubber, like a Neanderthal but thinner, so that it looked half-starved. Humen, that’s what they were called. The size was right, the color of the clothing was right, and there was that indefinable awkwardness about the landlubber’s gait.
Second-Best Sailor followed the priest as it slipped furtively from corridor to corridor. If the mariner was to find his missing compatriot, he would need to interrogate one or more of the locals. What better choice than the flouncer that had tried to kill him? He felt no qualms about taking whatever measures might be required to extract the information he needed.
Second-Best Sailor watched from behind an angle of roughly d
ressed ice as the human inserted a qubit crystal key into a door lock. In his furtive haste, the priest had left the door slightly ajar, and the mariner slipped inside, having first made sure that the coast was clear. He watched from concealment as the priest activated a console and flipped through hundreds of glyphics. He was clearly looking for something, and by the way he glanced nervously around, it wasn’t anything that he was entitled to.
Second-Best Sailor found all this intriguing enough to resist the urge to activate one of the suit’s antipersonnel weapons. He needed the priest alive in any case, but for once it occurred to the mariner to wait and gauge the situation before rushing in. When the priest gave a quickly suppressed shout of excitement, Second-Best Sailor guessed that he’d found whatever he was seeking. And when he used the same qubit crystal to open what was evidently a hidden trapdoor, Second-Best Sailor decided he might not get lucky twice. The door had been left ajar, but the trapdoor might not be—and he didn’t have a crystal.
As the priest bent over the trapdoor, peering at whatever lay behind it, the mariner pounced. One of the features of his battle suit was enhanced physical strength, as the suit sensed the movements of his limbs and adjusted its mechanical properties to reinforce them. He selected this option on a small display that was sensitive to eye movements, and had the priest pinned facedown before the human even knew that Second-Best Sailor was in the room.