by Ian Douglas
"This is one of our Perceivers," the voice told the humans. "We first designed them when we realized there were radiations in the natural world that we could not sense directly, but which could potentially carry a great deal of information about the world around us."
"Is it . . . intelligent?" Its strange gaze certainly felt intelligent to Dev.
"Is it self-aware?" Katya added.
"Of course. It must be, to process information which we, the Riss, are not designed to sense. It is what you would call symbiosis, where they feed upon the Riss as the Riss feeds upon them."
"Feeds?" The word held a queasy fascination for Dev. Did the parasite-descended DalRiss see their relationships with all of their created creatures in terms of masters and . . . food?
There was a moment's hesitation, as though the being were reconsidering its words. "A holdover from our past," it said, finally. "You might say instead, 'as the Riss links to them.' "
"Ah."
Still he felt an unpleasant stirring. Man had only recently reached a crossroads of biological development that the Riss had passed millennia before by genegineering artificial intelligence. For a long time, research in this area had been restrained by certain ethical concerns, by the question of whether it was morally right to create a sentient and reasoning being for some particular purpose—as research animal or slave or even as objet d'art.
Eventually, though, the power to do a thing had found the will to do it, despite ethical considerations, and the genies had been the result. Mingling various animal and even artificial genes with the human genome had resulted in a number of species, subspecies, and types, from miners and heavy laborers to the startlingly beautiful ningyo, the delicate but fully human-looking sex toys that were a mark of distinction among Earth's elite. There were even rumors of sentient beings created as art, living sculptures unable to move, unable even to die, designed only to experience sensations programmed by their designers and to be self-aware. That, for Dev, represented perhaps the fullest possible horror of a technology used without ethical constraint.
Evidently, the DalRiss had passed that point in their technological evolution long ago, for now they incorporated intelligence into many of their biological tools with a casual nonchalance that Dev found chilling. He'd heard, for instance, that the comels were intelligent but not self-aware, a concept he'd found hard to imagine at first until he'd remembered certain human computer systems were designed within the same limitations, and probably for the same reasons.
Other Riss inventions, though, seemed to incorporate both intelligence and self-awareness. The creatures they called "Achievers," for instance, played a role in the DalRiss version of a faster-than-light drive. If what he'd heard was true, they died after completing the task for which they'd been engineered . . . "became empty," as their Riss masters put it. Presumably, the Achievers had also been designed to be content with their deliberately abbreviated lives; they wouldn't feel cheated or mistreated if they'd been made to anticipate the emptiness that ended their existence as the culmination of their lives. "I got us where we were going; now I can die content." Dev had navigated plenty of starships in his day, and the thought gave him a shudder of sympathy.
"The Perceivers opened the sky to the Great Dance," one of the DalRiss was saying. "Without them, the next step in the Dance would be the emptiness that will follow. Instead, we can become Sky Dancers."
"Sky Dancers?" Brenda repeated. She turned to Ozaki, who shrugged and shook his head.
"A few of us take the Great Dance to the stars," the radio voice explained. "Many have already left for our ancestral home. Others will be leaving soon, before emptiness claims our suns."
Several of the humans gasped surprise. "What?" Vic Hagan said sharply.
"Please." Brenda shook her head. "What do you mean, emptiness claims your suns?"
"Emptiness," Dev repeated. Somehow, he'd heard the connotations behind that single word and felt its full meaning. "They're leaving," he told the others. "They're moving their whole ecosystem off world, taking it to the stars."
"Of course," one of the DalRiss said, and its voice sounded almost cheerful. "We'd thought that you humans had remained here to help with this new part of the Dance. That was why the actions of those you call the Imperials seemed so bizarre, why we cut off all contact with them.
"But we still need your help. We've been wondering if that was why you came."
"But why are they leaving?" Ozaki wanted to know. "In three years of study, we'd thought this migration they were talking about had to do with their religion. Or with some obscure use of metaphor."
"It has nothing to do with religion," Dev said bluntly. Carefully, he glanced up toward the eastern sky, where Alya A was an intensely glaring point of light that caused his protective goggles to darken as his head turned that way. "Or with metaphor. They've simply decided to leave before the Alyan suns explode."
Chapter 26
Our G-class sun lies conveniently in the comfort of middle age, with mass enough to keep it on the Main Sequence for another five or six billion years at least. The orange Ks and red-dwarf Ms, less massive stars, are misers, hoarding their much smaller reserves against the cold of the Ultimate Night. Some may be burning unchanged ten or twenty billion years hence.
As for those stars more massive than Sol, the Fs and the still hotter and more spendthrift As, they are wastrels consuming their hydrogen capital at a rate that will leave them bankrupt in a fraction of the time left to Sol. For an A-5, for example, a measly billion years might be extreme old age.
—The Stars: A Speculative Odyssey
Dr. Sergei Ulyanov
C.E. 2025
"We do not expect it to happen anytime soon," one of the DalRiss told them, "even by your standards. But by the standards of the Great Dance, it is clear that our next step must be to the sky."
"Our understanding of the physics behind the stellar fusion process is still primitive compared to yours," another said. "We were not even aware of the danger until after our first contacts with humans."
The Alyan suns, younger by far than cooler stars like Sol, must have already reached the point where helium ash was concentrating in their cores. Soon—at least in cosmic terms—that accumulation of helium would force them off the main sequence. Briefly, they would burn hotter but grow so much larger that their surface temperature would drop, and for some millions of years they would shine as red giants before they began their final and inevitable collapse into white dwarfs.
By that time, of course, their respective planetary systems would have been absorbed or charred lifeless. Dev wondered how a race so life-centered as the DalRiss perceived such an ultimate and absolute extinction.
"The DalRiss were most interested in our understandings of physics and cosmology," Ozaki said. "We never stopped to consider that it had an, ah, a practical application for them."
"Evidently it did," Brenda said. "How long do they have?"
Numbers flickered through Dev's awareness, drawn from ephemeral data on the Alyan suns. "There's really no way to come up with an exact figure," he told the others. "Not unless they have more precise data on their stars' neutrino fluxes. It could happen any moment. On the other end of the scale, I'd say that fifty million years is a reasonable upper limit."
"Fifty million years is a long time," Hagan said, "at least for a civilization. And didn't you say these guys think and live faster than we do? Hell, for these guys, fifty million years is forever!"
Katya laughed. "I don't know. Hey, we're facing the heat death of the universe in just a hundred billion years or so. We'd better get busy now and figure out where we're going to go when that happens!"
"Cute, Katya," Dev said. "But remember that the DalRiss think in terms of the transfiguration of entire species." He hesitated, choosing his words. It was as though he could see DalRiss reasoning, plans tracing particular sets of genes and chromosomes across countless generations. The DalRiss did not have a technically based nanotechnology
as the humans did; all of their research and manufacturing on any ultrasmall scale had to be carried out by the original nanotech—the biochemistry of cells and enzymes and living systems. With his newly found depth and speed of insight, Dev could see the monumental patience the Alyans needed to carry out even a simple nanotech-scale experiment using tools designed and bred from carefully controlled mutations, which themselves were the products of long, long lines of genetic experimentation, and he felt a surging rush of admiration, even wonder. Kuso! Why couldn't Katya and the others see the miracle of it?
"I suspect," he said slowly, "that the DalRiss have research programs extending tens of thousands of years into the future. They may have long-range plans, plans encompassing the creation of new species or the alterations of whole worlds, plans that won't see fruition for millions of years. These people take the long view. To suddenly be told that their suns could grow hot enough to cook them all at any time between tomorrow and a couple of geological ages from now and interrupt everything they've been working on would place a pretty rough strain on any long-range ideas they might have."
The other humans were staring at him. Presumably, the DalRiss were as well, though it was impossible to know for sure where their attentions were directed at any given moment. He spread his hands, pleading. "Good God, people, don't you understand? Don't you see? Over the past few million years or so, the Riss have taken over every aspect of their ecosystem, every detail. How many native species are there on New America, Katya? How many on Earth? Not just humans or horses or dogs, but insects, fish, grass, nematodes, plankton, amoeba, bacteria. Hell, even viruses, if for no better reason than that I suspect these people use tailored viruses to transmit genetic information when they're tinkering up a new species. If you assume that all life in a given biome is interdependent with all the rest, if you change even one species, you ultimately change them all. The one thing they can't control, though, is arguably the most important . . . the power plant that keeps the whole system running. If they think in terms of control of their environment, the fact that they can't control their own sun would be intolerable!"
Brenda was first to break the silence. "Frankly, Commodore, we haven't seen any evidence that they control their environment to the degree you suggest. If they were capable of doing what you claim, then surely the Naga wouldn't have posed the threat to them that they did."
"Sure," Hagan said. "They could have introduced a virus that reproduced within Xeno supracells and made them wipe themselves out. Biological warfare. But from what we learned in the first expedition, the DalRiss had been fighting the Xenos for thousands of years. They'd been pushed off GhegnuRish entirely and were on the verge of losing ShraRish too. They needed us to come along and give them a high-tech edge."
"Because," Dev explained, "the Naga live and work and experience on a nanotech scale. If the DalRiss are expert biologists, remember that the Naga are expert chemists . . . and when you get down to molecular and submolecular scales, there's no difference whatsoever between the two. I'm guessing, but I would imagine that the DalRiss spent a lot of effort trying to create viral or bacterial weapons for use against the Nagas, and the Nagas just assimilated each weapon and made it harmless . . . or else turned it on its creators."
"Dev Cameron shows remarkable intuition," the third DalRiss said, "and an excellent grasp of the nature of our struggle. Few of the weapons we were able to design had any significant effect on the Chaos. A few weakened the enemy, and on numerous occasions we were convinced that we had eradicated the threat. Each time, however, a small reserve of uninfected Naga tissue survived hidden somewhere within the recesses of the planet's crust. Within a few hundreds or thousands of your years, however, they would strike again and with an immunity to the weapons that had stopped them before."
"I submit, Vic," Dev said, "that you compare the scale of their Xeno war with ours. They fought the Nagas on two worlds to a standstill over the course of . . . what was it? Ten thousand years? Something like that. At the end of that time, the Nagas had the upper hand on both worlds—they'd won on one and were coming damned close on the other—but that was after ten thousand years. In our case, we'd been fighting the Nagas on six worlds for forty-odd years. We'd lost completely on four of them, and two of those worlds, Herakles and Lung Chi, had significant planetary populations. In all four cases, we'd been smacked right off the planet within one year. One year! On Loki, we won . . . or, at least, we think we won. What do you want to bet, though, that there are still isolated bits of viable Xeno cells and nano hidden away 'way down deep, where the nuke penetrators couldn't reach them? The only place we know we won is Eridu, and that's because we made friends with the thing instead of trying to kill it!"
"Scary thought," Katya said. She stamped her boot on the ShraRish soil. "That also suggests we didn't win here like we thought, either. That the ShraRish Naga will be back someday."
"It is their nature to survive," the first DalRiss said. "And to expand their influence from world to world. Fortunately, we no longer have to fight with them for mastery of the Yashra-ri. Though we learned, through a very long process of trial and error, the key to direct communication with the Chaos, it was Dev Cameron who actually made that breakthrough. The . . . the Naga of GhegnuRish is now our ally. We will take part of it with us when we carry our Great Dance to the stars."
"I'd think the DalRiss and the Naga would have a lot to offer one another," Dev said.
It was curious. As they'd been talking, he found he was learning how to tell one of the beings from another. He wasn't sure how . . . but there was something about the manner of each as it stood in the semicircle of DalRiss before the human party that communicated itself to him as it spoke. It was like reading the body language of a human during an ordinary conversation, something normally automatic and even unnoticed.
To his considerable surprise, Dev was aware of this accelerated level of communication and understanding with the other humans in the party as well. The facility, he realized now, had been growing for some time but had remained unnoticed behind the churning wall of fear and stress that had occupied more and more of his thoughts over the past months.
He could tell by looking at her, for instance, that Katya was still struggling with the idea that humanity's long war with the Xenophobes had not been won after all. The friendly relations achieved with the Nagas of Eridu and Mu Herculis seemed to guarantee mutually useful cooperation between Man and Naga from now on, but no one who'd spent as many years as Katya had fighting the Xenophobes could shake the feeling that the Xenos still didn't really understand what people were, that human and Naga viewpoints were so mutually alien that a new misunderstanding—and war—were possible at any time. Dev noticed the look Katya exchanged with Hagan, and even through their air masks he could read the new fear that the two of them were sharing. As for Ortiz and Ozaki, they were lost in strangeness, more concerned with the new insights into DalRiss history and biotechnology than with any merely theoretical concern about the Naga.
"We are initiating a new symbiosis," the second DalRiss said. "We have been working closely with the Naga of GhegnuRish, the Naga you first made peaceful contact with, Dev Cameron. It has been induced to bud portions of itself, which we are learning to incorporate into the biological matrix of our space vessels. These buds will serve a wide variety of purposes within the new aspect of the Great Dance, as what you would call the computer network of our ships, as a means for storing and using data, as a means for repairing damage."
"It sounds like we could learn a hell of a lot from all this," Dev said. "I'd like to see how you blend Naga and DalRiss biologies."
"The sharing between two mutually alien ri is basic to our philosophy," the third DalRiss said. "The two together accomplish more than either apart." Dev felt the touch of his comel searching for data. "Yes," the DalRiss continued. "You humans call this synergy."
"There could be a tremendous synergy if there was a similar sharing of what you know and what we know," Dev s
aid. "We need your help, but there may be much we could offer you in exchange."
"We see one point of philosophy that binds the DalRiss to you humans of the Confederation as opposed to those of the Empire," the first DalRiss said. "We respect diversity, in particular as it applies to the life of a world. But we could argue the need for cultural diversity as well. Just as a large number of interacting species are necessary for the viability and security of an ecosystem, a large number of interacting cultures is important for the life and health of a species."
" 'Interacting cultures,' " Ozaki put in. "Do you mean war?"
"Not at all. War is the attempt by one culture to suppress another, not to encourage its flowering. We refer to the interaction of ideas. Of philosophy. Of science and scientific discoveries. Of the products of research by one group shared with another to the improvement of both."
"Trade," Katya said.
"Trade does not occupy the place in our culture that it seems to hold in yours," the DalRiss told her. "But that, too, would be a factor."
A lot more study was needed on the DalRiss social structure and how it worked, Dev reflected. The Collective appeared to operate without such human social constructs as trade because each individual DalRiss provided for its own needs. Groups of DalRiss worked together on such projects as the creation of a new life-form, but the benefits of those life-forms were available to all.
Trade among humans had begun, it was believed, when agriculture had become so efficient that individual humans could specialize in their work, exchanging such skills as, say, pottery making for a share of the grain grown by the community's farmers. The DalRiss had never needed to specialize to that degree; each Riss fed off his Dal or from the living, mobile plant shell that was its home. The Dal ate the gene-tailored "moss" that covered so much of the open landscape, while DalRiss buildings drew nourishment from sunlight and directly from the ground. Cities were temporary groupings that dissolved when the mineral content of a given area was leached away. Since food and most other necessities were to all intents and purposes free for the taking, the concept of an individual performing work which it then sold to its neighbors appeared never to have taken hold among the DalRiss.