Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  "You of the Confederation seem to share our interest in maintaining a diversity of cultures," the first DalRiss said. "From what we were able to understand in our exchanges with the representatives of the Empire, this is not a philosophy they share. If we were to provide aid to your Confederation in this war, it would be on this philosophical basis."

  "After a while I'll recite the Declaration of Reason for you," Dev told them. "It's a statement of what we believe, what we're fighting for. You might be interested in hearing it."

  Dev wondered if, when he was crafting that document, Travis Sinclair had known that it would be used to persuade alien listeners of the rightness of the Confederation cause as well as humans. The theme at which that document hammered again and again and again was that humanity, in the variety of the peoples and cultures, races and religions living on the far-scattered worlds of the Hegemony, was too diverse to be ruled by a single government located on far-off Earth. Under Japan's Imperial rule, the very characters of those hundreds of separate peoples were stifled at best, and at worst were twisted into a mocking imitation of the shallow and elitist Shakai, the upper-class society of Dai Nihon.

  If there was any one aspect of Japanese life and culture that singled it out as different among all of the other cultures bom of Earth, Dev thought, it was the outward need for conformity. That was not to say that other human cultures didn't from time to time view difference as a disruption of the natural order; Jews, blacks, and the unusually bright or gifted, among many others, all had had reason to fear whatever it was that set them apart from their neighbors at one point or another in the long and often bloody history of Civilization.

  But the need to be different, the need to express one's individuality, had long ago become a luxury that the crowded Japanese islands could ill afford.

  Each Nihonjin thought of him-or herself as an individual, of course—indeed, they were often frustrated by the realization that gaijin didn't seem to understand that—but social pressures served to embarrass any Japanese person who stood out within the crowd, especially anybody perceived as unwilling to work for the common good of company, of community, of nation, of race. It was a social emphasis radically different from that of the West, where voluntary cooperation for the common good tended to come behind the needs of the individual.

  "Any information on Confederation beliefs would be welcome," the third DalRiss told him. The Perceivers on the Riss-symbiont's body all appeared to have their pupils focused on Dev.

  "Then I propose a trade," Dev said. "An exchange of information. I would like to learn more about what you're doing with the GhegnuRish Naga, and these spacecraft you mentioned. Both could have a very direct application in our war with the Imperium. In exchange, one of us will read and explain our Declaration of Reason and answer any questions you may have about why we're fighting to be free of the Empire."

  "That seems reasonable, though we don't understand why you expressed it that way. We would have answered your questions without this exchange."

  "Perhaps. Consider this another means of learning about us, about how we think."

  "For you to learn about the Fleet of the Great Dance," the DalRiss said slowly, "it will be necessary for you to come with us to GhegnuRish. Does this interest you?"

  "It certainly does," Katya put in. She glanced at Dev, then looked back to one of the DalRiss . . . not the one that had been speaking, Dev noticed. "We'd like that a lot."

  "We certainly would," Dev added. "And we'd like to see how your stardrive works, if that's possible."

  "Of course. We will arrange for you to see one of our ships in the company of an expert in directing the Achievers. Also, we will arrange for you to commune with the planetary Naga, which can give you details of our control and communications systems. Perhaps you could make use of some of these ships in your war to good advantage."

  Dev started to reply, then stopped, unable to speak, afraid that he was going to reveal the surge of emotion he was feeling. It looked as if everything Farstar had been designed to do was about to be handed him.

  Despite that, though, he was anticipating a trip to GhegnuRish with mingled joy and dread. The secret of the DalRiss instantaneous drive might well be the weapon that would make the Confederation victorious.

  But at GhegnuRish, he knew, too, he would be facing another planetary Naga. A capricious fate, it seemed, was pressing him hard toward a second Xenolink.

  Fate . . . or was it daltahng?

  Chapter 27

  It has been well established for at least three centuries that humans possess the equivalent of two brains apiece, the left and right hemispheres of their cerebrum. In general, the left side of the brain appears more closely associated with mathematical and analytical abilities, while the right side directs those applications requiring visual-spatial and artistic skills. One possible explanation for differences in individual intelligence, incidentally, involves the number of cross connections within the corpus callosum between these two brains, with a greater degree of cross connectivity being associated both with a smoother overall processing of information and with that curious something-from-nothing spark of creativity known as intuition.

  In line with this is a curious datum of comparative anatomy: women, by and large, tend to have a greater number of connections between the two halves of their brain, explaining, possibly, that largely anecdotal phenomenon known as "woman's intuition."

  —The Science of Mind

  Dr. Harvey Carpenter

  C.E. 2285

  The system of Alya B was much like that of Alya A, a young retinue of worlds circling through a dust-and meteor-choked volume of space centered upon a dazzling, type A star. The fifth world out closely resembled ShraRish in most respects, its land surfaces showing more vacant stretches of lifeless dun and ocher, but tinted here and there with the mottled shades of pink and orange that marked emergent Alyan life. Its seas shone violet and copper-sulfate blue in the hard white light of its sun, just as they did on ShraRish, and the clouds dazzled the electronic eye in swirls of white highlighted in blues and purples.

  Eagle had dropped out of K-T space several hundred million kilometers out and approached cautiously. Their informants on ShraRish had indicated that there were no Imperial forces at GhegnuRish, not so much as an orbiting observer station, but Dev still wasn't sure how sophisticated DalRiss technology was, especially in the—to them—new medium of space.

  As they neared GhegnuRish, however, his doubts were fading. There were no Imperial ships or stations in the Alya B system, but the region close to the DalRiss homeworld was thick with objects, with ships. Over a thousand had been counted by Eagle's AI through the ship's sensor suite, and there were more yet masked by the bulk of the planet.

  DalRiss vessels tended to be large, measuring anywhere from five hundred meters—twenty percent longer than Eagle herself—to monsters like the starfish shape at the Migrant Camp, two kilometers or more across and massing many millions of tons. Perhaps half were starfish shaped, flat and round, with varying numbers of thick arms; Dev was struck by their outward similarity to the Dal, until he realized—again, that unexpected flash of intuition—that he was looking at genetically altered Dal, enormous life forms grown from the tissues of creatures normally no more than three or four meters across.

  The rest were, Dev supposed, descended from the ambulatory house-organisms of the DalRiss, albeit grown enormous. They tended to assume cylindrical, spherical, or flat-headed mushroom shapes, and some, as Dev watched them through Eagle's navsim link, appeared to change shape slowly from one form to another. Though any comparison with human technology was dangerous, he knew, he couldn't help but think of the starfish shapes as the DalRiss equivalent of human military vessels, uniform in appearance, faster, more maneuverable than the others, while the ships grown from buildings were the freighters, the tankers, the heavy-hauler logistical arm of the Alyan fleet.

  "Our new friends have been busy," Katya said, linked into the net with Dev. "Do
they really intend to abandon both their worlds?"

  "I don't think so," Dev told her. "The impression I get when I'm talking to them is that individual death doesn't matter that much to them, that even if they knew precisely when their suns were going to explode, any one of them would just as soon stay and take notes as leave. But they do value, oh, call it experience. Knowledge. Viewpoint, even. They try to save that . . . the way life saves particular combinations of DNA, I suppose."

  "You know, Dev, I get the feeling that you get a lot more out of your conversations with them than the rest of us do."

  Dev hesitated before answering. Katya had just touched that part of his new self he'd most been questioning during the past few hours.

  "I guess I do. But I seem to be getting a lot more out of everything lately."

  "It's the Xenolink, isn't it?"

  "I . . . I think so. I think it must be." Absently, he reached for a bit of planetary data he knew to be stored in an ephemeris stored in his personal RAM, then realized with a small start that the data was already there in his mind . . . without his having had to frame a coded search request. That sort of thing had been happening more and more lately, as though subprograms were running in his implanted hardware that had been placed there by some unconscious part of himself.

  "When I linked with the Naga on Herakles," he went on, thoughtfully, "part of it, about a kilogram of its tissue, entered me, mingled itself with my body. Most of that tissue, I'm pretty sure, was Naga nanotech. Molecule-sized living machines that interact with each other like tiny computers in a very, very large network."

  "That's how you shared minds, right?"

  "I suppose so, though I'm still not quite sure what 'mind' really is. If you can picture 'mind' as a series of computer programs overlapping one another, running in parallel, yeah. The Naga's programs were definitely mixed up with mine, and I could sense what it was thinking. Well, some of it, anyway. Remember, a planetary Naga masses as much as a small moon. But for a while there, the part that I was relating to and I were . . . joined. Part of the same organism. Or set of nested programs. While I was . . . changed, I sensed, I don't know. A quickening. My thoughts were faster. My time sense was accelerated . . . I think I was processing data as quickly as the Naga. At least, when we shared thoughts, there was no sense of it having to wait for me to catch up. There was no sense of difference at all. We weren't just linked. We were one."

  There'd been more besides, things that he still didn't quite dare tell anyone. He'd sensed an actual increase in his intelligence, or possibly it had simply been that the speed and the certainty of . . . call it his intuition had increased. The somatic technicians and monitor AIs that had checked him out afterward had speculated that, at least temporarily, there'd been an increase in the number of connections between the left and right hemispheres of his cerebrum through his corpus callosum.

  Now, though, Dev was beginning to suspect that the increase had not been temporary. It had taken him this long to arrive at that conclusion, possibly because the connections had been growing throughout these past months, possibly because it had taken him this long to learn—all unconsciously—how the new equipment worked. Had the Naga made permanent, physical changes to his brain during its brief tenancy? Or, after he'd ordered it to withdraw, had it left some small part of itself, perhaps a few million molecule-sized nanobiomachines to continue the work begun by the planetary Naga as a whole?

  He was pretty sure that a physical scan of his brain now would reveal what had not been there eight months ago: a host of new connections between the left side and the right. He knew of no other way to account for the leaps of reason and insight, the speed and accuracy of thought, the sudden flashes of information that seemed to drop out of nowhere. In many ways, it was like being constantly linked to an AI, with information available for the asking, though it was not as dependable, and the information it provided was limited to that available to his ordinary human senses.

  "At first," he told Katya, "I suspected the comel, thought that it was doing something to me, because it wasn't until I put one on that things started to fall in place for me. Now, though, I'm pretty sure that it was just that the change in me became clearer . . . came into sharper focus, let's say, while I was talking to the DalRiss." The increased level of intuition that allowed him to pick up more of the meaning behind the Alyans' many-leveled speech than was possible for other people had only been revealed when he'd been speaking with them . . . and intuition or no intuition, he still needed a comel to communicate with the Alyans.

  "It'll be okay, Dev. I know it will. You must've retained, somehow, that flash of genius you said you experienced during the Xenolink. Maybe it's only now getting to the point where you can control it."

  Through the cephlinkage, Dev could sense Katya's concern, a warm, soft stirring, a reaching out. A detached part of his mind noted that this, too, was a new ability, for the cephlink wasn't supposed to transmit emotions the way a direct link with a Naga did, for instance. He suspected that what he was feeling was a highly increased sensitivity to Katya's moods, expressed by subtle inflections in her mental voice.

  "I think you're right. The question is whether I can handle the additional information."

  "What additional information?"

  "Let's say I'm just processing the same information, the same input more completely than I was before. It's a lot like being linked, but without having much control on what's coming through on a download. My vision is sharper, and my hearing and sense of touch. What I'm getting is overtones, secondary meanings, special insight on the same input my senses have always been giving me. That's how I can, oh, hear a DalRiss word and guess at more of the meaning behind it than you can . . . and know that I'm right."

  "It must be . . . a little frightening."

  "And by that," Dev said gently, "you mean that you're wondering whether I can handle it, wondering if I might not, in fact, be insane . . . or at least just a little unbalanced."

  "No!"

  "And now you're wondering if you should relieve me of command, since there's no way of anticipating how I'll react under pressure. Oh, yes. I can pick up more from human speech than I could before too, especially if I can see your face and body. I think I must be capable of processing very subtle clues from, oh, lots of things. Posture. Subtle movements of muscles in face and hands and body. I feel . . . I feel much the same way that I did in the Xenolink. Not as complete, not as whole. I still feel . . . incomplete. Empty, in the way the DalRiss mean the word. It's not as bad as it was when the Naga withdrew from me. Maybe I'm just learning how to handle it. Or maybe I'm still . . . changing."

  "I don't want to have you relieved," Katya said. "Dev, you've always been a tactical genius, especially in space combat. It's, I don't know. A gift. A talent. If your brain is working at a higher level now, faster, more smoothly, with greater insight, well, that could be a real advantage for us, couldn't it?"

  "You're trying to talk yourself into believing that." Dev gave a mental sigh. What was best . . . for the mission? And for the people under his command? "I think we're going to have to work closely together, you and I."

  "With me as your keeper?"

  He heard the flash of anger in her voice. "If you like. Or as my human judgment and reason."

  "You're as human as I am, damn it!"

  "Maybe. I hope so."

  But he was surprised to note that he didn't really care, one way or the other, about his humanity anymore.

  And that change in his thinking was perhaps the most disturbing of all.

  Eagle had made the passage from Alya A to Alya B in a single, short hop through K-T space. The mean separation between the two suns was nine hundred astronomical units, about five light days, and the passage lasted only a few minutes. The DalRiss Dev had been talking with at Dojinko, however, had made the trip instantaneously and were waiting for the Confederation destroyer as it approached.

  DalRiss starships employed a means of overcoming the limita
tions of the speed of light totally different from that employed by Man. Just as they grew the bodies of their ships, they bred and grew the means of shifting from point to point in space, semi-intelligent creatures known to the DalRiss as Achievers. Human researchers still didn't understand how Achievers did what they did; the best explanation suggested that they somehow tapped into the half-magical potential of quantum theory, literally imagining the ship and its contents to be in a distant place, and transporting it there instantly by sheer force of will. Magic . . . yet no more magical, perhaps, than the K-T drive that allowed human starships to skim along the interface between the Quantum Sea and normal fourspace. The biggest problem was that in three years of study, the Nihonjin researchers at ShraRish had been unable to even come up with a testable hypothesis as to how the Achievers accomplished their space-bending trick, much less find a way to apply it to human spacecraft designs.

  As Eagle slipped into orbit around GhegnuRish, one of the smaller DalRiss ships took up station close alongside. Longer than Eagle by nearly two hundred meters, the four-armed starfish shape appeared to be maneuvered not by plasma jets, as with human spacecraft, but by manipulating the local stellar and planetary magnetic fields. The alien ship glowed brightly in Dev's navsim view, a representation of the magnetic forces bathing the vessel as it matched course and speed.

  "Commodore?" the voice of Eagle's communications officer sounded in his mind. "We're picking up a transmission from the Alyan ship. Standard radio."

  With neither computer systems or transmission codes in common with those employed by human ships, the DalRiss could not talk to Eagle through the usual ViRcommunication links. They did employ radio, however, and with comels aboard both vessels tied into the comnet, the two could speak with one another, using audio alone.