Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  Katya crossed the room to lay her hand on his shoulder. "Devis, if you can look at me the way I look right now, tatters and all, and still think of, um, that 'physical demonstration' you mentioned a moment ago, I'd say you're still human. And male. And very much a part of the human species."

  "I suppose so. It doesn't say anything about my sanity, though."

  She arched one eyebrow. "I'll assume that you're not talking about your sanity as it relates to your relationship with me. We do still have a relationship, don't we?"

  "It's changed."

  "I know. People change. It doesn't mean they're . . . turning into something else."

  "I've felt like I've been drifting apart from you, too. But . . . well, out of everybody I've ever known, Katya, you're the one I want most to hold on to."

  She leaned forward, offering her lips. He kissed her for a long, lingering moment. As he drew back, he found himself thinking that, despite everything, it was Katya who was most helping him cling to his humanity just now. The Xenolink had . . . not created, exactly, but unleashed something inside that vaguely shaped center of existence he thought of as self, something very much larger than he was, and far stronger. It . . . wanted things, things that he could not provide.

  Katya was damned near his only reason for holding the thing, the monster, at bay.

  "I'm glad your lips didn't burn," he told her.

  "Let's hear it for Mark VII adjustable polynanoform, full-face breathing masks. We can try something a little closer in another day or two."

  "I'm looking forward to it."

  "Right now, come on. We have a staff meeting scheduled to fill you in on what's been going on down here. And tomorrow, at first light, a delegation of the DalRiss is going to be here. We all have to meet them."

  He eyed her burned skin doubtfully. "That doesn't include you, too, I hope. You can't go out again like that."

  "I'm afraid it does. But by tomorrow, I ought to be a lot less tender, enough so that I can slip into an E-suit, at least. I'll manage."

  "Is this some sort of diplomatic get-together with the DalRiss?"

  "More than that. We've told them you were coming. I was right, by the way. They do remember you, Dev. You specifically. They're coming tomorrow just to see you."

  "Huh? Me? How come?"

  "Because you are . . ." She paused, her eyes closed as she pulled an unfamiliar word from her RAM. "You're Sh'vah. And because of that, it just could be that you're the real key to their helping us."

  "Sorry. That just went . . ." He gestured with his hand, a short, sharp stab past the top of his head. "What's 'shevah'?"

  "Sh'vah," she corrected him, pronouncing the word with a short, hard glottal stop. "And maybe I'd better let one of them translate that. I'm not sure that I can."

  Chapter 25

  Ancient Greece was not a single state, but a collection of dozens of tiny and fiercely independent city-states, separated one from the next by the rugged mountains and inlets that characterize that land. It was this very separation, and the resultant cross-fertilization of ideas as trade between alien cultures was established, that led to the flowering of science, art, and culture.

  Indeed, some of the most shining examples of Greek scientific thought arose not in Greece proper, but in colonies such as Abdera, where Democritus pondered the atom, and Samos, where Anaximander suggested a scheme that sounds to modern ears startlingly like evolution. Mankind requires diversity, the freedom to experiment, if he is to achieve his full potential. It is natural to wonder if future ages will see similar leaps in the advancement of Mind when the cross-fertilization occurs, not between cities, but between the products of mutually alien evolutions.

  —On Human Freedom

  Travis Sinclair

  C.E. 2538

  The word Sh'vah, it turned out, was the closest pronounceable equivalent available to a three-level stack of hissing and clicking sounds that referred to a particular concept in the Alyan worldview. For the DalRiss, evolution was viewed as a complex and aeons-old dance; the Sh'vah was a particular, pivotal organism that evolved by chance or design at the right place and the right time in order to profoundly influence all future evolution. Examples in the evolution of life on Earth might have included the long-necked sauropods of the Jurassic, which had prompted the explosive increase in height of hardwood trees, a kind of evolutionary race between taller and taller dinosaurs, and the taller and taller trees upon which they fed. Better examples, perhaps, were those species of fish first able to use their swim bladders as lungs . . . and which opened up the land to conquest by the sea.

  By DalRiss standards, Man himself was Sh'vah in the Great Dance of Life, having reworked the face of his own world for both good and ill, then providing the technological means for vaulting to other worlds and seeding them with life. And the DalRiss, who'd left few of the life-forms on GhegnuRish as they'd found them, were perhaps the most accomplished dancers of all.

  But Dev, it seemed, held a special place within the framework of the DalRiss concept. He had been the first, within the depths of GhegnuRish, to join the separate dances of Naga, DalRiss, and human. It was, Katya had pointed out, not only a singular mark of distinction for Dev. It was the key to the Confederation's hoped-for alliance with the DalRiss.

  Dev stood with Katya, Brenda Ortiz, Vic Hagan, and a number of others, both military staffers and civilians, on a plant-covered slope nearly a kilometer from the former Imperial base. Dr. Ozaki, the chief of the Imperial civilian team, was there as well, along with several of his people. The Nihonjin scientists were working under Professor Ortiz's direction now, as the expedition tried frantically to catch up with three years of largely classified Imperial research. All of them wore lightweight E-suits and masks for protection from the heat and atmosphere but had bared their left arms to the chilly embrace of DalRiss comels.

  The DalRiss, five of them, had met the human party as promised, bringing comels—Translators, as the name was rendered over the organic linkage—with them to the site. The DalRiss stood before them now a few meters away, silent, utterly enigmatic in their lack of readable emotions, face or body expressions, or gestures. Dev had seen DalRiss from close up many times during his first visit to the Alyan system, but each time he met with them he was surprised by their sheer alienness, each time noticing details that he'd missed before, each time having trouble putting the confused tangle of comparisons, thoughts, and impressions that was his perception of the DalRiss into a coherent and meaningful whole. Those slippery, leechlike creatures sliding in and out among the leathery folds of the Riss portion of the body . . . he'd never noticed them before. Each the size of a dinner plate, they appeared to nest between the horns of the crescent, and among the wrinkles of loose skin connecting the "head" to the lower body. What were they, parasites on the skin of beings that were themselves parasites? A snatch of doggerel tugged at his memory, something about greater fleas with lesser fleas upon their backs to bite them.

  With the DalRiss outlook on life, though, Dev doubted that those organisms were chance infestations of Alyan body lice. More likely they were young . . . or, for all he knew, they were the DalRiss equivalent of the handkerchief or the comb.

  "We welcome you back to this round of the Great Dance," a voice said in Dev's mind, jerking his attention from the small creatures to the alien symbiosis in its entirety. "It was daltahng that you return."

  "Daltahng?" Involuntarily, he glanced down at the comel glistening on his arm. Was it working?

  "The Translator cannot always find exact parallels in the concepts necessary for communication between your people and ours," the voice said. "Daltahng . . ." It hesitated, as though searching for another word. "What you call 'destiny' or, possibly, 'fate' is one part of it. What is necessary for the completion of a great task is another. That which is in harmony with the universe is a third."

  "Daltahng might be easier to say at that," Dev said, smiling behind his mask. He wondered if the DalRiss were even aware of human fac
ial expressions. Probably not, since sound waves couldn't provide detail enough to resolve the upward twitch of the corner of a mouth . . . and they wouldn't know what they were looking at anyway.

  He also wondered at the word itself. Was the "dal" part of it a root word, related somehow to the word for the Dal-symbionts? Dev thought that likely, that it might have something to do both with the fact that the Dal gave both direction and power to the otherwise helpless Riss-symbionts, and that the Dal provided completion for the DalRiss organism as a whole. Daltahng, indeed. Power-direction-giver, he thought, might be the literal sense of the word, and there would be more and deeper meanings in the fully sounded, native-spoken version of the term.

  "It's good to be back," Dev told them. "It's been a long time, and I wasn't sure you'd remember me."

  "Longer for us than for you. But we remember. You are Sh'vah of our dance with what we once called Chaos."

  Chaos was what the DalRiss had called the Naga, which they'd envisioned as a kind of embodiment of death, a reasonable enough view to a civilization that rejoiced in the order, art, and purpose of life. Somehow, Dev found he was able to sense a hidden unfolding of the meanings behind DalRiss terms and concepts, even those that were untranslatable. Was that facility derived somehow from the comel, or was it some new and developing sensibility or sensitivity within himself?

  He couldn't tell. The comel itself was quite literally a translator and nothing more, a means of retrieving vocalized thoughts from one, then reshaping and transmitting them to the other. It was composed of little more than modified nervous tissue cloned from Riss brain cells, grown together with the microscopic components of an organic radio transceiver. From what he'd been told when he'd first encountered them three years before, they were grown already programmed for specific languages; those given to humans apparently contained the keys for both Nihongo and Inglic, for as the DalRiss spoke, Dev heard the words in Inglic, but with a faint echo in Japanese. Presumably, if he'd been Nihonjin, he would have heard the translation in that language instead.

  Direct access to Dev's mind was established through his cephlink by way of the circuitry implanted in his left hand and arm, and as he used the comel, he occasionally could feel it drawing on his personal RAM for meanings and definitions. It communicated with the DalRiss over the radio circuit; they heard his vocalized replies through a natural and inborn radio sense, something apparently possessed by many forms of Alyan life. Dev wondered if the DalRiss talked to one another by radio in a kind of natural telepathy. Certainly, their radio links through an active comel gave them considerable information about humans . . . more, Dev was pretty sure, than humans had been able to learn about them.

  By far the greatest wonder of the comels, though, had been realized in their use to achieve communication with the Nagas, a one-individual-to-a-world species that didn't even have a spoken language, which thought in terms of communication only as it related to wordless exchanges of information between different parts of its single, massive, far-flung body. Somehow, the DalRiss, who'd fought the Nagas on two worlds for millennia, had figured out how to program certain comels to translate Naga emotional content and memories into something humans could make at least fragmentary sense of . . . and human memories into something intelligible to the Naga. Comels had been the key to understanding the Xenophobes, to communicating with them, and to effectively ending what the Nagas had believed to be problems with natural phenomena, and what humans had thought was a forty-three-year-long war with xenophobic aliens.

  The technology involved in that development seemed like sheer magic to Dev. Human computers, even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems, still needed to be specifically programmed for their tasks, and while they were tremendously flexible, it was a flexibility only within sharply delineated boundaries. Too, how was a comel able to interpret the flicker of electrochemical impulses through the human nervous system?

  True, the DalRiss must be masters of deciphering alien neural impulses, learning how to attach meaning to them and even how to control them; somehow, they'd learned to do as much with the Dal millennia ago, when they'd taken the first steps in converting the Dal from food animals to symbiotic partners. Perhaps, for the Riss, reading the signals of an alien nervous system was no more difficult than was puzzling out the meaning of a foreign language for a human equipped with a translation sequence downloaded to his personal RAM. With the right tools, the most formidable language became a simple substitution code, easily deciphered.

  The sequence of thoughts, about Nagas, comels, programming, and DalRiss bioengineering techniques, flickered through Dev's mind with bewildering rapidity. The comel, he was certain now, was affecting his thoughts, affecting them in ways he'd not experienced before, or, at least, it was affecting him in ways he'd never before noticed. The voice had mentioned that it had been longer for the DalRiss than for Dev since he'd been here, a simple statement of fact for beings who experienced life—metabolic rates, chemical reactions, thoughts—faster than was normal for living systems evolved beneath a cooler, less energetic sun. It was as if the pace of his thinking had increased, almost as though he were thinking now at the same speed and level as the DalRiss.

  But that was impossible, wasn't it?

  "Do you know why we came back?" Dev asked.

  "Katya Alessandro told us something about your mission," the DalRiss voice replied. "You had evidence of fighting between us and the humans, the . . ." Again, Dev felt the touch of the comel searching his cephlink RAM. "The Empire," it concluded. "You hoped to gain our help in your war and felt that help might be forthcoming if we were at war with the Empire of Dai Nihon as well."

  "A logical reasoning sequence," another DalRiss voice said. "In fact, however, we are not at war with them . . . if we understand what you mean by the concept 'war.' We never were."

  "You fought a war with the Naga, both here, and on GhegnuRish."

  "That was 'war'? We knew it as part of the Dance of Life. You might call it 'survival.' "

  "The . . . the buildings of the city that used to be over there," Katya said, pointing back toward the empty field to the east of Dojinko. "They accidentally destroyed part of the Imperial base. That was it, wasn't it? An accident? They didn't even see that the base was standing in their way."

  "You humans have the habit of shrouding yourselves in materials invisible to our ri-sense. We knew about the things you call buildings, of course. Great, hollow, immobile caves composed of various, artificial ri-empty substances. We could sense them as, as hollows within the Yashra-ri and avoid them."

  Ri was what the DalRiss called life, though the word had so many additional connotations for the Alyans that it was rarely fully translated by the comels. The Yashra-ri might have translated as "the Ocean of Life" and referred to the three-dimensional sea of living emanations in which the DalRiss lived and moved. "Empty" things were dead or artificial objects—like man-made buildings, warstriders, or a person in a sealed E-suit.

  "We sense your buildings that way," the first DalRiss added, "as we sense you humans when you . . . wear? Yes, wear those garments you call E-suits for protection from our atmosphere. But there was something around your base invisible to us, something charged with electricity. We broke through that barrier by accident and with considerable hurt to several of our own. We were then fired upon . . . without provocation, so far as we could tell."

  "Still, that is no reason for us to involve ourselves in your war," a third DalRiss said. "The movement of that city had nothing to do with you or with the Imperials."

  "We recognize now the need to employ our Perceivers when dealing with humans," the second voice said. Each voice was distinctive, but Dev was finding it difficult to determine which particular DalRiss was speaking at any given time. The sounds his comel was translating were generated deep within those crescent-shaped heads, and there was no external change in posture or gesture or in the arrangement of those leather folds to suggest which one was making them.
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br />   "A Perceiver was present when Katya Alessandro came to us three days ago. By shedding those ri-opaque garments, however, it allowed our Watchers, those left to watch the human settlement, to see it as more than emptiness within the Yashra-ri. We recognize the physical discomfort that act must have caused. It is why we are here, knowing that you humans wish to participate in our version of the Dance."

  "These Perceivers," Brenda put in suddenly. "Are they here now?"

  In answer, one of the DalRiss gestured with several of its smaller tentacles, slender threads that quivered and flickered with such energy that it took Dev a moment to realize that the being was gesturing, pointing to one of the "parasites" on its body.

  There were several different species of smaller life-forms living on the larger, Dev realized now, and possibly some of them were combs or baby DalRiss. The particular creature the Riss was pointing to, however, was as wide as Dev's hand and half again longer. Superficially, it resembled an octopus, gray-green mottled skin glistening with some mucuslike secretion, but with five short tentacles instead of eight long ones. Nearly the whole of the upper surface of that body was taken up by a single, external organ very much like a fist-sized eye, one made of some glassy, yellow-translucent stuff and covered over by a clear membrane.

  Within the translucence, varying numbers of inky holes opened, drifted, then closed over again, seemingly at random, though there were never fewer than two nor more than six. These, Dev realized, were the multiple pupils of a single eye, their mobility and separation providing excellent depth perception, their numbers permitting greater light-gathering power in low-light conditions. It joined the group, three pupils focusing on Dev as it braced itself on three splayed tentacles. One of the DalRiss stood behind it, a single black tentacle snaking down from atop the Dal-symbiont's back and attaching itself to the creature's head, somewhere behind the eye.