Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  “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 table, 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.”

  “Old idea,” Daren said with a tight smile. “That was outdated centuries ago. Parasites have to be specialized, yeah. And the traditional idea was always that when a parasite learns to live off of its host species, life gets easier for it. It’s true that some forms lose a lot of adaptations for getting along in the outside world because they simply don’t need them. A tapeworm, for instance, is nothing much more than a head with jaws to hang onto the inner surface of the host’s gut. The rest of it, all several meters’ worth, is body segments that detach one by one, pass out of the host’s body, and serve to reproduce the beast by hatching out new parasites inside new hosts that happen to ingest them. It’s not quite that simple, of course. Most parasitic species actually have fairly complex life cycles, some of them extremely so, requiring a large number of successive, species-specific hosts. Anyway, on the face of things, intelligence simply isn’t something that you would expect a parasite to need.

  “But we’ve learned that there is intense competition among parasitic species for host living space, just as there is among other species… and any time you have competition, there’s the chance that it will foster, well, anything that will give the species an evolutionary edge in the race. Back to those terrestrial wasps.”

  “What are you,” Gresham asked. “An expert on parasitic wasps?”

  “My doctoral download was on terrestrial insects, yes,” Daren said. “Especially social forms, and that included the Hymenoptera, even though not all wasps are social insects. Anyway, there’s one kind of wasp that lays several eggs on a host caterpillar. All but one hatch early and cruise through the caterpillar’s body killing every other parasitic wasp larva they find. That ensures that when the last egg hatches, the larva has no competition from other species.”

  “That’s not intelligence,” Kara pointed out.

  “No, that’s adaptation,” Daren agreed. “Intelligence would be another kind of adaptation and a useful one if evolved in a hostile, high-competition environment. Hell, scientists are still arguing over whether or not you can even call intelligence a survival trait, since the technology that comes out of it does seem to get us into increasingly difficult situations.

  “The Gr’tak, though, are different,” he continued. “We haven’t learned much about their life cycle yet… and we can’t even begin to speculate about how they evolved to where they are today. But we have learned how they’re put together.”

  He gestured at the floating, three-D image of the Gr’tak hanging above the conference table. “The largest part of the organism, that high-standing arch, is what they call a ‘receiver.’ That’s the main host, the foundation for the rest. Now, these three organisms on the back. They look like flat, black plastic bags or oversized leeches. Those are external parasites, and the Gr’tak refer to them as ‘greaters.’ Those independent flying creatures, like big insects, are called ‘lessers.’ They, actually, are parasites of the greaters. They live inside the greaters’ bodies and emerge through those holes in its back. As near as we can tell, the lessers are kind of like mobile scouts for the whole organism, flying around the area, checking out the surroundings, and flying back to report. There’s a fourth parasite, something they call a ‘deeper.’ We’re not sure what that is like, actually, though we think that that thing like a tree with very skinny branches growing out of the top might be a part of it. Deepers live inside the receiver. They may serve as an intermediary for the greaters and the receiver, and we’re pretty sure they’re important in the reproductive cycle.”

  “How do these things reproduce?” Katya wanted to know.

  “Haven’t sorted that out yet,” Daren said.

  “We’re working on it,” Taki added. “The greaters share a certain symmetry with the recei
vers, and we think that’s because the greaters and the receivers are two different sexes of the same organism, though there’s so much room for misunderstanding here, we could easily be mistaken about that. We do know that the reproductive systems of all four species are very closely interconnected. We think the young of the next generation already carry their symbionts when they’re born.”

  “The DalRiss started out as parasites, didn’t they?” Mishima said. “Is this the fashion trend of the Galaxy, now?”

  Gresham laughed. “What’s next, intelligent tapeworms?”

  “The DalRiss fusion arose from a symbiotic relationship,” Dev pointed out. “Possibly some parasitism was involved in their early history, but from what we’ve been able to learn, the dominant Riss organisms started off feeding on the larger Dal creatures, which were big, herd-dwelling, six-legged grazers, but they provided a survival advantage as well, probably by helping the Dal spot dangerous predators.

  “With the Gr’tak, the relationship is deeper, and a lot stranger. The lessen; probably started off as outright parasites of the greaters, while the greaters may have started out as parasites, or they could have been part of a sexual dependency, like male angler fish, on Earth. Maybe they both represent part of a more complex life cycle. You know, the parasite lives as a larva in one host, then gets passed to a different host where it matures into something else. Somewhere along the line, though, the cycle of each of the four got so wrapped up with the reproductive cycles of the others that now none of the four can reproduce without the active participation of other three. The receivers appear to be what we call a parasex of the greaters, same species but with a much different morphology.”

  “You think they developed in a hostile environment, though?” Vic asked. “That that was what forced them to evolve intelligence?”

  “I’m not sure I see what other explanation there could be,” Daren said. “My working hypothesis now is that they’ve evolved from several codependent species inhabiting littoral zones on their original homeworld.”

  “Littoral zones?” Mishima asked.

  “Coastal areas. Specifically, salt marshes, swamps, tidal zones, places like that. They’re not really amphibious, but they do prefer wet environments, high humidity. That miniature world we visited is a weird cross between a sauna bath and a greenhouse. They like it at forty degrees or more and often conduct business from their wading pools. And that kind of environment is often a Darwinian forcer. That’s a place with lots of competition for limited resources, and lots of other species on the lookout for a meal.”

  “This is all quite interesting,” Mishima said with a carefully shuttered expression. “I, and my government, of course, are most concerned, however, in what has brought these creatures here.”

  “That seems pretty obvious,” Dev said. “It’s in the report I uploaded onto the Net last week. They were victims of the Web. Like the DalRiss.”

  “But this happened a long time ago, right?” Gresham asked.

  “We’re still working on their concept of time and how they measure it,” Dev admitted. “But if we’re on the right track, the Web showed up in their home system and turned their star into a nova well over four thousand years ago. We think their home star was spinward and coreward of Sol, out beyond Nova Aquila. Another in the Aquilan Cluster, in fact.”

  One of the more haunting mysteries of astronomy had been the odd fact that a disproportionate number of novae, historically, had appeared in a single tiny patch of the sky as seen from Earth… roughly in the direction of the constellation Aquila, the Eagle. During a single, forty-year period early in the twentieth century, twenty-five percent of all of the recorded novae had appeared within an area measuring one quarter of one percent of the entire sky. Two had appeared there in one year alone—1936—and Nova Aquila, in 1918, had been the brightest recorded exploding star in three hundred years, a dazzling jewel-point outshining every star in the heavens except Sirius.

  That clustering in time had been an odd, statistical anomaly, of course, since the stars involved ranged from relatively close to extremely distant, and it was chance that had the wavefronts of all of those stars arrive in the vicinity of Earth in the same four-decade period. But that anomaly had called astronomers’ attention to the disproportionate number of novae in that one direction. Not until Dev—downloaded into the DalRiss explorer fleet—reached Nova Aquila had the truth been suspected, that many of those stars, if not all, had been deliberately exploded by the entities humans knew as the Web. Apparently, the Web was working toward a specific agenda, moving out from the Galactic Core where they’d first appeared along a grand spiral, following one of the Galaxy’s spiral arms out into the stellar hinterlands. They’d been slowly approaching Sol’s position in space for millennia, coming from the direction of Aquila, Ophiuchus, and Serpens.

  “They’ve been traveling since something like 1500 B.C.E.,” Taki said. She shook her head slowly, wonderingly. “They left the fiery wreck of their home planet a thousand years before Confucius was alive on Earth. They have been wandering for that long.”

  “Looking for what?” Gresham wanted to know. “How many of these Gr’tak ships are there, anyway?”

  “The fleet is… large,” Dev admitted. Sholai had told him it consisted of ten thousand ships, but he’d not yet admitted that officially. So far, only a few hundred had arrived at High Frontier, and he wanted to give them a chance to get reunited and to gather in stragglers before passing such alarming news on to others.

  Particularly to the Imperials, who were already nervous about so many strangers turning up on the borders of the Shichiju.

  “What weapons do they have?” Mishima demanded. “What new technology?”

  “We’re still looking at that question, Ambassador,” Katya said.

  “Their move into space was apparently prompted by a prevalence of comets in their home system,” Dev pointed out. “I’ve… lived some of their remote history. Civilization fell a number of times when comets or small asteroids hit their world. They never fought wars among themselves, apparently. The only weapons they developed were laser banks designed to protect their planet from infalling debris.”

  “Pah.” Mishima made a dismissive gesture. “We have the same ourselves already, on Luna.” He was referring to Fudo-Myoo, the huge arrays of solar-power beam weapons based on Earth’s moon; deployed in the late twenty-first century against the remote but deadly chance of a comet impact on Earth such as the one that had annihilated the dinosaurs sixty-five million years earlier, the gigajoule laser and particle beam system had never been used… though it remained a formidable part of Earth’s defenses.

  Dev studied Mishima. The ambassador looked troubled, his image frowning with the blank, far-away look that generally meant the person was accessing his personal RAM, or listening to some private message relayed through his Companion. No, Dev reminded himself, Mishima was Kansai no Otoko, a “Man of Completion,” a member of the Dai Nihon political-social-religious party advocating human purity and a single, united government for all Mankind. He would have one of the old-fashioned cephlinks, not an isoro Companion.

  “Mr. Ambassador?” Katya said. “Are you all right?”

  His face cleared, but he still looked troubled. “Please excuse me,” he said. “There is… something most urgent I must attend to.” His image vanished from the virtual setting.

  “I wonder what that was all about?” Daren said.

  But Dev was aware of something new, a quickening in the flow of information around him. Exactly what he sensed of that information was difficult to express in words, but living and moving within the electronic environment of the Net was often described in metaphor and simile, with the informational matrix likened to a sea, vast, three-dimensional, and alive with powerful currents of moving data and flashing, myriad schools of fish representing individual communications packets. Had the metaphor been given form and substance, Dev knew he would have just seen vast and crowded schools of fish in the clear,
sunlit shallows wheel about in an explosion of color and activity… then swell in numbers as new schools came swarming in out of the deeps beyond the shadowy reef in the distance.

  Reaching out, he sampled one of the nearer “fish.…”

  … at this time still do not know where the intruders are coming from, but it is feared that these small vessels are representatives of the so-called “Web Intelligence” that was decisively defeated at Nova Aquila two years ago.…

  Surprise jolted Dev, followed swiftly by a stab of fear. The language was Nihongo, the speaker a well-known ViRnews mede broadcasting on the Net from Singapore Synchorbital.

  From Earth… and the very seat of the Imperial government.

  Swiftly, Dev sampled another incoming packet of communications… then another… then a hundred more in rapid succession. Most were coded military or government communiqués, but others were being uploaded in the clear and relayed throughout the human network via I2C.

  “Excuse me,” Dev told the others. “Something is happening. Something… very dangerous. I think. I’ve got to leave, too.”

  “What is it, Dev?” Katya wanted to know. She’d picked up on the urgency in his voice, put it together with Mishima’s sudden departure, and sounded worried.

  “Earth is under attack,” he told his startled listeners. “It sounds like the Web has come out to play.”

  Before they could respond, Dev was gone.

  Chapter 14

  No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

  —Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, XVII

  JOHN DONNE