Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  It wasn’t the danger of falling, however, that threatened her. It was the enveloping blackness, imperfectly dispelled by the lamp clipped to her helmet, and the closeness of her surroundings, made smaller by the dark and by her own adrenaline-charged apprehensions.

  Secured to the prow of the parked and anchored Crab, her cable was playing out from a small spool attached to her harness. Keeping one hand on the spool’s pressure plate, she was able to control the speed of her descent. She felt clumsy, though, and the four bobbing lights below her feet proved that Dev’s Commandos were a lot better at this than she was. One boot caught on a projection, knocking her sideways. She swung in a dizzying arc, returned, and crashed her shoulder painfully against the wall. Her subgun jammed against her hip and the weight of her PLSS hanging from her back. She stopped her descent, steadied herself, adjusted her harness and weapon, then began the descent again.

  She was blind… as blind as she’d been hanging in the Dark between worlds years before. The knowledge that she could still see… the half circle of light overhead, the four bobbing helmet lights of her companions below… could not banish the fear of that palpable night.

  Worse, though, was the knowledge that the Xenophobes might be all around her, hidden in the dark. Nightmares she’d had as a child, imagined monsters in the shadows, returned with vivid force and reality.

  But she kept her hand on the spool’s touchpoint, lowering herself steadily into the depths. She was getting the hang of the thing now, controlling her descent with gentle kicks off the wall.

  Somehow, she kept the monsters at bay.

  Chapter 34

  Even the most alien of beings, though, must share some definite perceptual biases, understandings, stimuli, even emotions. If it doesn’t, communication is impossible and demonstration of sentient self-awareness is impossible.

  I wonder if that hasn’t been our problem with the Xenophobes all along. Perhaps the one emotion we have in common with them is fear.

  —Dr. Paul Hernandez

  Hearings on the DalRiss,

  Terran Hegemony Space Council,

  C.E. 2542

  The heat inside the strider had been bad. Outside, it was like a furnace. Dev clung to the open hatchway, head reeling, before he managed to release the ladder and start down the rungs. The Ghostrider’s lights illuminated a tiny world of silver light and slick-surfaced, slow-gliding Xenos. Elsewhere was blackness.

  The ground felt slick beneath his feet. Looking down, he saw he was standing on a thin layer of jelly—Xeno cells smeared by the Ghostrider’s foot when he’d righted it after the fall.

  Careful of each step, he approached the nearest wall, right hand out. He could feel the cornel quivering against the flesh of his forearm, as though in anticipation.

  What would it be like, communicating with the Xenophobes? With the DalRiss, he’d simply heard their voice inside his head, thanks to the cornel’s translation and the interface through his link. But the Xenos were different enough to make DalRiss and humans look like brothers. Dev didn’t know what to expect.

  He placed his gloved hand against the wall, bringing the cornel into direct contact with the glistening mass of Xeno cells layered across the rock in their veneer of translucent jelly.

  Threat… fear… threat… but the invader looked nothing like the dimly remembered Selves-that-were-Not-Self that had vanished from the world so very long ago. The Self moved with crippling slowness; the speed of its thought was the speed of microelectronic circuitry and relays, of individual switching units the size of single molecules. But movement, reaction, the dim memories of old fears and drives and needs, were slowed a billionfold by the inefficiencies of the Self’s haphazard design. The One could think very quickly when it had something to think about, but its reactions were painfully slow.

  Curiosity.Fear. The Not-Self had approached, was touching one subunit of the Self. The One prepared to discard the subunit to avoid contamination, yet in a shock of awareness, Self and Not-Self were merging, blending, communicating at blinding speed. The electronic currents that passed for thoughts, currents describing mode and existence and being and memory, had been picked up by the Not-Self and returned, and when they returned, they brought…images.

  Dev felt the alien thoughts, a flood surging through his skull, a cascade of images, concepts, strangeness… seeing heat and equating it with comfort and completeness, understanding space as the taste of Self crowded unit by unit into an unimaginable body that laced through a million kilometers of tunnels riddling the planetary crust from the chill void of the inner surface to the warm glow of the outer fires, spanning the globe… no… the universe… a hollow shell… inside out…

  He struggled to understand, to comprehend, fighting a sluggish mental vertigo that threatened to turn his world inside out. It was like rebirth; worse, it was as though everything he’d ever learned in his life was wrong, wrong, wrong and he had to learn everything anew.

  The universe is Rock, endless Rock going on forever, surrounded by warmth. Somewhere deep within the Rock and far away from the warmth, there is Not-Rock, Void, an immense bubble of emptiness pervaded by strange phenomena, by heat that fluctuates according to a seemingly meaningless pattern, a heat source that seems unreachable, violating any reasonable hypothesis of the universe.

  The One would be content to remain close to the surrounding warmth, but the compulsion remains to seek the Void and the warmth beyond the Void and populate it with extensions of the One.

  But from the Void come the Not-Self units that do not obey any laws at all, but that disrupt the One and seek its destruction, but these become part of the One, turned to good. …

  Dev tried to clear his mind, staggered by the data flowing through it from outside. And there was more, echoes in the thunder in his brain.

  I always wanted to be a star pilot, wanted it so bad, it hurt. I remember the summer Mom and I went to see Dad off when he went up the sky-el on his way to the Imperial Palace and his new job. The sky-el is anchored on a promontory on the north coast of Pulau Lingga, a forty-kilometer island smack on the equator a hundred kilometers southeast of Singapore proper, and you reach it by tube magtrains that run beneaththe waters of the strait. Sometimes you can see the sky-el from Singapore, a thread-thin vertical scratch against the sky that catches the sun with a silver gleam just after sunrise, like sunlight on a strand of spider’s silk.

  The place to really see it is from the visitors’ gallery close by where the magtrains unload, but the gallery was closed that day and all I could do was cling to the wire mesh fence that closed off the service access areas from the public and look up and up and up and up at that silver tower arrowing into the zenith and know that that tower is the first step on the road to the stars and that’s where I want to go, into the Galaxy and out among the stars and bathed in the blue glory of the godsea and when will I see Dad again and why does it hurt so much, oh God—

  Dev knew he was rambling in his thoughts but couldn’t stop, as the pain and fear of years were released as though by the smashing of a dam, a cascade of feeling and memory.

  His hurt when his father left, the betrayal. The agony when he learned his father was dead and that there could never be reconciliation. His frustration at losing his chance to be a starpilot, the humiliation of being consigned to the enlisted ranks…

  … and the warm and easy camaraderie of yujo, the warrior’s bond, a new family, acceptance, self-mastery, victory…

  My God, he thought, shaken by the intensity within himself that he’d never known was there. What’s the Xeno think of all of this?

  He heard an answer, though not in words. The two sets of experiences and backgrounds and worldviews, his and the One’s, were too mutually alien. But he could sense the Xenophobe’s intense curiosity, could sense questions streaming through his awareness like the systems readout when he was linked to his strider. …

  What is mesh fence?

  What is island?

  What is sunlight
?

  What is planet?

  What is stars?

  What is God?

  And more, many more. He could sense that the Mind behind those questions was very large and very, very old, that it was cycling through what it had sensed in Dev’s uncontrolled rush of thoughts with the speed of a supercomputer, matching words with images, concepts with understanding. It was fast, but hampered by its own perceptions. Dev had glimpsed some of those twists and recoiled, unable to comprehend them.

  But memories continued to surface. Dev had just experienced a direct RAM feed. There was new data in his permanent memory, like the note passed to him by Katya, but containing files and files of uncounted millions of bytes of memory.

  All he had to do was… remember.

  He remembered being a Child of the Night, half-formed, knowing warmth and darkness and the taste of brothers. He remembered before that, crossing the Inner Void in a tiny sphere flung from the Rock at some unimaginably distant time in the past. He remembered…

  Dev knew what the Xenophobes—

  No, not Xenophobes. That was human misperception, born of fear and ignorance. They did not fear strangers; they simply did not know them, did not recognize them as a part of the universe not bound up with Self.

  They, it… was the One, all there was in a universe that held no One else.

  A clatter of falling rocks sounded twenty meters behind him. Dev half turned in time to see rubble spilling across the crouched form of Morgan’s Hold, like some huge, motionless crustacean dimly visible behind the four-eyed glare of its lights and the swirling dust. Seconds later, four figures descended through the misty light and dropped to the ground at the Ghostrider’s side, two men and two women in black and red combat armor hitting the releases on their harnesses and unslinging their weapons in one smooth movement.

  “Lieutenant Cameron!” Sergeant Wilkins advanced on him like an avenging Valkyrie, a vicious-looking Steyr-Hitachi submachine gun in her hands. “Oh my God, what’s it done to you?…”

  Behind her, Corporal Bayer raised a hand torch as the other two unslung their sleekly vicious-looking Toshiba laser rifles, but hesitated, uncertain where to direct their fire.

  Dev blinked against the light, suddenly aware that he was still standing next to the cavern wall, aware that the One had flowed down to engulf almost half of his entire body, as more and more of the One’s subunits moved in to make contact through the comel. With a sudden twist of insight, he realized that he must look like part of this living wall. There was no pain, no compulsion.

  Merely…Oneness.

  “Hello, Sarge.” His voice sounded strange, muffled by the mask over his face. Dev almost couldn’t trust himself to speak. The images, the thoughts… Strangeness still galloped through his skull, threatening to trample him into the ground. “Don’t shoot. It hasn’t hurt me. I’m okay… really okay. …”

  Reluctantly he pulled himself free from the wall with a wet, sucking sound. The comel remained with him, trembling gently against his bare skin. The One had felt cool where it touched him. The heat of the cavern washed over him again like a hot blast from an oven.

  With another, louder clatter, a fifth figure descended into view, legs kicking at the wall. Dev’s eyes widened with surprise. This figure was clad in black skintights and wore an E-suit helmet.

  Katya.

  She almost got hung up trying to unhook the spool attached at the chest of her descent harness, but she got free at last, unslung her subgun, and strode toward him, stiffly determined. “Dev?”

  “I’m okay, Katya.” With sudden insight, he knew what that descent into the dark had cost her. “What… what are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you.” He saw her eyes go wide behind her helmet visor. Her helmet light swept past him, gleaming against the living wall. “Is that, that thing behind you what I think it is?”

  Dev managed a smile. “This, people, is a Xenophobe.” His smile broadened. “Bad name. It isn’t afraid of us. Doesn’t hate us. For it, life is nothing but tunneling and expanding and reproducing and growing and always, always, always seeking warmth, filling the Rock, turning Not-Self into Self. But then you meet someone who makes you stop and think. …”

  Wilkins stepped closer, but cautiously, the muzzle of her Steyr-Hitachi wavering uncertainly. “Lieutenant, you are making no sense whatsoever. Maybe you’d like to start over?”

  “To think,” Dev said slowly, “that all we had to do was explain things. I mean, part of it died, and suddenly the universe just didn’t look the same anymore.” Sobering, he shook his head, painfully aware of how disjointed his words sounded as he tried to assimilate the… strangeness. His head hurt. “ ‘It’… that’s the wrong word. Too impersonal. Maybe we just don’t have the right words.”

  He paused, blinking as another thought occurred to him. “Better put your guns down, people,” he said. “I think our war may be over.”

  Katya turned her full attention on Dev. “Can we trust it?” she asked. And Dev heard the unspoken question: Can we trust you? Has it done something to your mind?

  “We can trust it,” he said with careful deliberation. Too much revelation, too soon, and they would be convinced that it wasn’t Devis Cameron speaking. Contact with it had changed him, but not in the way they feared. He took a deep breath, worked to steady his voice. “It’s a machine. A very large, very complex machine made up of God knows how many trillions of computers, each the size of a bacterium. Electrochemical computers manufactured—grown—from the equivalent of nucleoproteins.”

  Katya looked doubtful. “Who grew them? Where did it come from?”

  Dev hesitated, choosing his words. “We have a kind of symbiosis with our machines, right? With nanotechnology, we can grow computers inside our brains, inside our skin, make them a part of us, a way for us to interact with the rest of the world. So much so, it’s hard to imagine life without them.

  “Okay, now imagine a… a life-form. I can remember a little of it, like fragments of a grainy, two-D film. Evolved on a very old planet, circling a red dwarf sun, deep underground, maybe in a pocket of water warmed by the planet’s molten core. A primitive organism, but evolved to its absolute highest potential over billions of years. Imagine what it would have been like if tunicates or molluscs had evolved to intelligence on Earth.

  “Locked away deep in the rock, it…they were cut off from the rest of the universe. Evolution must have been slow, slow, with nothing but the natural radioactivity of the rocks to cause mutation and change. But there would have been competition for raw materials. For warmth. They were thermovores, always seeking heat. It doesn’t seem possible, but maybe that was enough stimulus for them to evolve intelligence. To become self-aware.

  “Imagine how they perceived the universe. There was Self. There was Rock. There were the openings in the Rock they made… Emptiness. Not-Rock. Everything else—water, heat—was variations of Rock.”

  “Sounds like the old idea of elements,” Katya said. “Earth, Air, Fire, Water.”

  Dev nodded. “Kind of a simplistic cosmology. But it fit what they were aware of. Eventually they developed nanotechnics.”

  “Whoa there,” Wilkins said. “How could they go straight from stone age to nanotechnics?”

  Dev smiled. “For them, their ‘stone age’ was nanotechnics.

  Their first tools. They must’ve learned to manipulate molecules inside their own bodies, probably to get raw materials for growth from the rock. Or to tunnel out larger living spaces for themselves. Or to break hydrogen and oxygen out of certain rocks to make more water. Millions of cell-sized machines, made from minerals drawn from the rock, could be joined together into larger structures. Machines that could carry the organic components of this symbiosis, keep them wet and alive even when the underground seas dried up, or tunnel deeper as the planet’s core cooled. If they worked at it long enough, for billions of years…

  “My guess is that they evolved with the Galaxy’s first generation of Populatio
n 1 stars, ten or twelve billion years ago. It must have been eight or ten billion years more—twice as long as Earth or any of the other worlds we know have even existed—before they finally made it to the stars.

  “And when they did, they carried with them a view of the universe that was completely inside out.”

  Dev tried to explain what he had picked up from the One only in fragments of passed-on memory, pictures and sensations imperfectly understood, imperfectly transmitted.

  For most of those billions of years, the Xenophobes had slowly developed side by side with their submicroscopic technology, utilizing tailored proteins as computers, with the equivalent of nucleic acids as records, enzymes as encoders and readers, viral bodies as packets of tightly encoded data, a mimicry of biological life but deliberately shaped and molded for ever-increasing efficiency. Separate organisms communicated with one another, exchanging data packets first by chemical, later by electrical means.

  Organism and machine were utterly dependent on each other. The dual organism expanded to utilize the entire crust of its homeworld. Ultimately the original life-form that had used nanotechnics to secure its place within its world was absorbed by its own technology. Cells patterned succeeding generations of cells, and what did it matter whether the original pattern was natural or artificial? As the distinction between organic and inorganic vanished, so, too, did distinctions between individuals. Like separate neurons linked together into a vast network capable of acquiring, processing, and storing data, the multitude of individuals, linked together through the millions of kilometers of chambers and tunnels that filled the planet’s crust, became the One.

  As with any life-form, change forced adaptation. The underground seas dried up; the One manufactured its own water and, ultimately, adapted the subunits of its form to the harsher environment by wrapping each in gelatinous, water-filled shells. The planetary core continued to shrink and cool; the One expanded its caverns, learned to use electromagnetic fields to warp rock into easily traversable paths, learned to remake rock, atom by atom, into shapes that suited its needs.