Analog SFF, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "That little lightshow may have impressed you,” the superintendent continued, “but all I saw was you talking to your mission assistant. If you think the Consortium's going to hold up a mining operation just because Tobias here wrote a program that assigns word values to flashes of light, you've got another thing coming.” He glared at the worms as they glided back and forth behind the glass. “Half of what they said didn't make any sense, anyway."

  "That's because we haven't had the time to teach them enough of our language,” Tobias said calmly. “We only learned they could communicate two days ago."

  "Nevertheless, Superintendent Cantrell does have a point,” Advocate Lassiter said. “All we really know is that your mission assistant can assign words to the worms’ light patterns. If we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we aren't really hearing their voices at all."

  "Exactly,” Cantrell said. “Make it say something right now."

  "It can't, because it's feeding,” Liz said. “You know that."

  "Then it really isn't intelligent, is it?” he snapped back. “In fact, it isn't even an it. It's a them—a bunch of worms."

  "The fact that the individual worms don't exhibit intelligent behavior doesn't mean the colonies lack intelligence,” she said. “If we put one of your neurons out here on the table, it wouldn't have much to say, either."

  Cantrell leaned forward, thrusting out his chin. “Yeah? Well, here's the bottom line,” he growled. “Now that my ships are here, we're going to start digging, and there's nothing you can do to stop us."

  Liz's green eyes narrowed. “In other words, not only are you going to destroy a world where the Anunnaki themselves modified the ecology, you're also going to destroy the species they lifted to consciousness."

  "That's ridiculous,” Cantrell snarled back at her. “You need to come back to the real world."

  Liz turned abruptly toward Advocate Lassiter. “Have you told the Council you're going to throw away the best chance we've ever had to find out where the Anunnaki were headed?"

  She'd hoped to catch the advocate off guard, to see at least a flutter of nervousness at the corner of his mouth, but Lassiter only smiled back at her.

  "Actually, we've discussed our plans with the Council in considerable detail,” he said. “In fact, they're the ones who suggested a solution—a compromise that will allow you to continue your investigation, while the superintendent here gets on with the business of delivering the raw materials the Fleet needs to continue our mission."

  "What compromise?” Liz asked warily.

  The advocate's smile brightened. “You'll be please to learn that the Council has negotiated an arrangement with the Consortium to transport a representative sample of these . . . creatures . . . to a suitable location, where you and Dr. Tobias can spend as much time with them as you like."

  Tobias leaned forward, his bushy eyebrows tightening. “Transport them where?"

  "Paradise,” Superintendent Cantrell said. “We're going to ship the whole lot of you back to Paradise."

  "Paradise!” Liz exclaimed. “You sucked the life out of that planet months ago. There's nothing left."

  Paradise was a blue ocean world that the Consortium had mined for heavy metals as the Fleet passed by a few months before. The Consortium claimed that the indigenous life forms would regenerate the environment—at some undefined point in the future—but at the time they left, human beings couldn't even descend to the surface without breathing masks.

  "Hey, it's no worse than Slag,” Cantrell said. “In case you don't remember, the air down there is full of hydrogen sulfide."

  "Yeah, well, the air on Paradise is full of sulfur dioxide, now that you're through with it,” Liz said. “And in case you don't remember, that's different from hydrogen sulfide. Every time it rains, you end up taking a bath in sulfuric acid."

  Cantrell shrugged. “Toxic chemicals are toxic chemicals. What difference does it make?"

  "The difference is that the Anunnaki didn't re-engineer the worms to survive on Paradise,” Tobias said. “The environment there could kill them."

  Cantrell laughed. “Yeah? Well, that's the best offer you're going to get. If you're smart you'll take it while you can get it."

  Liz's jaw tightened and her eyes narrowed as she leaned forward, preparing to tell Cantrell where he could stick his compromise, but then she felt Tobias’ hand on her arm, restraining her.

  "Look,” he said, nodding toward the tank at the far end of the table.

  The colony of worms that Liz had come to think of as Glimmer was again flashing. Bright pastel waves flowed over the intertwined bundle.

  "What is it?” she said to Tobias. “What's he saying?"

  Tobias pointed his mission assistant at the tank. It processed for a moment, recording the waves of light. Then a voice droned from the small speaker in an emotionless monotone.

  "We agree . . .” it said.

  "Agree . . . ?” Liz said. “Agree to what?"

  "To Cantrell's offer,” Tobias said. “They agree to Cantrell's offer."

  "But they can't—” She turned toward Glimmer. “You'd be condemning thousand of your own kind to die. Tens of thousands.” For all she knew there could be millions of worms in the lakes and tunnels under the ice sheet.

  "We agree . . .” the voice repeated. “The offer is acceptable."

  "But you don't know what you're saying . . .” she protested. “You don't understand . . .” She tried to think of some way to explain, but they were worms. They couldn't understand.

  "Hey, if you're so worried, you can ride along with them,” Superintendent Cantrell snorted. “How's that for an offer? You can get down there in the hold and grovel around in all the worm slime you want.” He turned to Advocate Lassiter. “It'll be the chance of a lifetime, right, Advocate?"

  Advocate Lassiter smiled at Liz, the mindless grin of a man who was right with his world.

  Liz glared back at the pair of them. If she'd had any kind of weapon in her hands—a knife, a gun, anything—she would have killed them both on the spot. But there was nothing she could do. The worms had sealed their fate.

  "I don't trust them,” Liz said to Tobias after the meeting broke up. “Cantrell is up to something."

  "There's no question about that,” Tobias said, nodding. “The Consortium isn't going to offer up a transport ship for a bunch of worms—not if it doesn't put money in their pockets."

  They were still seated at the table in the conference room. The wreckage of the Anunnaki ship drifted five miles off their bow, the shards of metal glinting in Slag's pale orange glow. They could also see two of the four mining transports that Cantrell had ordered in. They hung in the darkness like predatory insects, waiting for their chance to suck the life out of the moon below.

  "I don't understand why Glimmer would agree with Cantrell,” Liz said. She glanced down the table at Glimmer's tank, where the worms had again disbursed. “Why would he want to go along with something this crazy? They'll all be killed."

  Tobias shook his head. “He doesn't know what he's getting himself into. Like Cantrell says, he's only a bunch of worms."

  * * * *

  Liz and Tobias watched the loading operation through the wide curved window of the Arrow's mess. First, one of the large transport ships lumbered into position above Slag's surface. It hung motionless for a moment, the struts and protuberances along its underside opening outward like segmented limbs preparing to grasp its prey. Then a tight red beam shot down from the ship's forward end, knifing down through the thin atmosphere to carve a steaming circular hole in the ice sheet. As the ice melted away, the beam gouged a bubbling orange pit more than five hundred feet deep out of the underlying crust. Water from beneath the ice sheet roared into the pit, cooling the magma as it carried thousands of worms out of the surrounding crevasses and tunnels. As the pit filled, a tractor beam engaged, sucking up a thick column of gray water. The beam maintained the integrity of the column itself, but as the water rose, it
pulled along a torrent of greenish-gray foam that spilled thousands of additional worms out into the vacuum of space.

  "I don't understand how the Council could allow something like this to happen,” Liz said. She gazed out at the scene with an anguished grimace. “These creatures were created by the Anunnaki. They're . . .” She looked up at Tobias. “They're just as entitled to life as we are."

  "There was probably a time when the Council felt that way,” Tobias said. He turned, looking back at the foam of worms falling away from the rising column of water. “But I'm afraid that time is long gone."

  * * * *

  Once the transport ship had filled its hold, it spun up its FTL drive for the long haul back to Paradise. During their shuttle ride from the Arrow to the larger vessel, Liz and Tobias learned that Superintendent Cantrell would be accompanying them. Both the Council and the Consortium were apparently pleased with the manner in which he'd resolved the issue with the worms, and he was being offered a promotion. Which meant that they would be making a detour back to the Fleet to drop the superintendent off before they continued on to their final destination.

  As soon as their shuttle docked, Liz and Tobias took Glimmer down to the hold to join the new worms that had been uploaded from Slag.

  "Are you sure this is a good idea?” she asked Glimmer as she and Tobias set his tank on the catwalk just above the murky water that now filled the hold.

  The catwalk ran from the small hatch through which they'd entered to the far bulkhead. The hold itself was nothing more than a rectangular cargo container, roughly sixty yards long and twenty yards across—one of twenty locked onto the underbelly of the transport ship's superstructure. The other nineteen containers, which Liz had assumed would be filled with worms, were in fact filled with ore that had been sucked up from deeper in Slag's interior after the crew had finished loading the worms.

  "No need for worry,” Glimmer flashed. “All will be well."

  "But won't the others . . .” She started to ask if the other worms wouldn't be angry or upset by his decision to leave most of their number on Slag to die, but then she broke off, turning to Tobias.

  "I think he knows what he's doing,” Tobias said. “Besides, he can't spend the rest of his life in a tank."

  As they prepared to dump Glimmer into the water, a glowing bundle of worms rose out of the depths in front of them. It was Neon, who began flashing back and forth with Glimmer.

  "I can't believe it,” Liz said. “How, out of all that chaos, could Neon have gotten himself into the mix? We left him more than a mile from the site where the crew uploaded the worms. How could any of them have gotten to the upload site?” Yet it was clear that they had, because as she watched, dozens of glowing bundles rose toward the surface of the dark water. Neon, Limelight, and all the rest had somehow managed to get themselves onto the transport.

  Tobias squinted thoughtfully down at the glowing bundles. “I'm not sure it's as amazing as you think."

  "How can you not be amazed?” Liz asked. “The statistics are . . .” She started to say that the statistics were more than improbable, but in truth they were outright impossible.

  * * * *

  Despite the rescue of Glimmer and the others, Liz spent a restless night worried about the worms and what was going to happen to them on Paradise. She tried to tell herself that she'd exaggerated the hardships, that somehow they would adjust; but when she reached the hold the next morning, she saw that the conditions on Paradise were the least of the worms’ problems. The glowing colonies that she'd watch rising toward the light the day before had dissolved into gelatinous masses that drifted aimlessly. Even the individual worms that had circulated between the bundles were dying. Those that still moved were now floating on the surface, their contorted bodies slowly coiling and uncoiling in the murky water.

  "This is horrible,” she cried when Tobias reached the hold. “We have to do something. We have turn the ship around and take them back to Slag."

  "Even if we could convince the crew, Cantrell would never stand for it,” Tobias said. “Besides, I'm not sure Slag is still there. At least not in anything like its original form. With the ships cutting down through the crust, the surface will be nothing but molten magma by now."

  "But the worms didn't understand what would happen,” she said. Fighting back her tears, she knelt beside the water. “They had no idea what the trip would be like. No way of knowing."

  "Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to make any difference to Cantrell,” he said grimly. “This is a Consortium transport. There's no one we can appeal to."

  "We can tell the crew,” she said. She rose to her feet, thrusting out her chin. “We can make them and Cantrell look at what they've done."

  She knew it would do no good, of course, and in the end, she simply sat on the catwalk, watching as the last of the worms ceased to move and their bodies slowly putrefied amid the darker masses that had once been the colonies. With no hope of changing the situation, her anguish gradually gave way to numb resignation. Finally, too tired to think, she climbed to her feet and made her way slowly back through the ship's winding corridors to her quarters.

  The next morning Liz almost decided not to return to the hold. She wasn't sure she could face the scene that would be waiting for her, but she felt that she had an obligation to go—if only to grieve over the corpses of the beings she'd been unable to save.

  When she arrived, however, there were no corpses. The amorphous masses that she'd left drifting just beneath the surface had solidified—they looked like rubbery, translucent cocoons—while the individual worms floating between them had dissolved away to nothing, turning the water into a clear, organic broth.

  Kneeling on the platform, she peered into the depths. The cocoons were pale yellow in color, with what looked like darker masses inside. Sometimes one or another of the darker masses appeared to shift, to turn ever so slightly, but she could determine nothing about their shapes.

  "Not quite what you'd expect, is it?” a voice said, startling her.

  She turned, rising to her feet to find Tobias gazing past her into the water.

  "What do you think is happening?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  "I thought you had a theory,” she said. “When we first brought Glimmer down here, I couldn't figure out how Neon and the others got here, but you seemed to think it all made sense."

  "I thought it did,” he said. “But now . . .” He sighed. “Now, I have no idea what's going on."

  During the day, the shapes inside the cocoons began to coalesce, extruding small nubs that reminded Liz of limbs or fins. By late afternoon, when the masses had coalesced completely, they began to twist and turn, sometimes abruptly, as though alternating between sleep and sudden bouts of restlessness. As a result, when evening came, neither she nor Tobias were ready to return to their quarters. Instead, they remained in the hold, waiting. For what, Liz wasn't sure, but there was no question in her mind—new life was taking shape in the dark water before her.

  * * * *

  Liz didn't realize she'd fallen asleep until she awoke, slumped against the bulkhead behind the catwalk. For a moment, her eyes refused to focus on the figure standing in front of her. Then she realized the problem wasn't her eyes; it was the figure itself. It wasn't human.

  The creature stood upright on a pair of segmented appendages that were too slender to be human legs. It also had two sets of thin, multijointed arms arrayed up the sides of its chest. Its body was divided into three large segments, like a human-sized crustacean with a flexible, translucent exoskeleton. Instead of eyes and ears, it had two branched antennae, along with a short, hooked beak. As the filaments on the ends of its antennae slowly fluttered, waves of pastel color moved over its body in patterns similar to those she'd seen on the bundles of worms. Two more of the creatures stood further along the catwalk, their pliant exoskeletons glistening in the pale light. The creature directly in front of Liz hung over her, its antennae wavering back
and forth just a few feet from her face.

  Instinctively, she lurched backward, pulling herself against the bulkhead with her knees drawn up to her chest.

  "I don't think they're dangerous,” Tobias said in a bemused voice. He sat just beside her, his legs also pulled up to his chest, though his hands hung loosely over his knees rather than clutching them as Liz's did.

  "What are you?” she asked, gazing uncertainly up at the creature.

  The creature swayed unsteadily from side to side. “Not sure,” it whispered. “Our metamorphosis . . . not yet complete . . .” It's voice issued from its beak in a ragged hiss. As it spoke, the waves of pastel color flowing over its body followed the cadence of its voice.

  Tobias squinted up at the large crustacean. “The Anunnaki modified your DNA, didn't they?” he said. “They knew hydrogen sulfide wouldn't provide enough energy for your higher neurological functions."

  The creature swayed again. “The Anunnaki . . . ?” it whispered. “I . . . we . . . not sure what you mean . . ."

  "Can you remember from before?” Liz asked. “From when you were under the ice? Back on Slag?"

  "You gave me name . . .” the creatures said, straightening slightly. “We spoke . . ."

  "Glimmer,” she said, struggling to her feet. “I called you Glimmer."

  "You can call that thing whatever you want,” a voice growled from behind her, “but I call it an abomination!"

  She spun around to see Superintendent Cantrell standing on the catwalk with two guards. Each of the guards held a pulse rifle pointed at the crustaceans.

  "What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  He barked a laugh. “What? You thought you had the ship to yourselves? You and these . . .” He waved a hand toward the creatures on the catwalk. “These oversized roaches."

  "They're intelligent beings,” Liz said. “They were created by the Anunnaki."

  "Don't be ridiculous,” Cantrell said. “They're vermin."

  "And that gives you just the excuse you need, doesn't it?” Tobias said.

  "What excuse?” Liz said. “What are you talking about?"