Searcher did not comment on her desire to find humans and would not help track them, though she suspected the procyon could sense the smallest animals which swung or padded through the layers of green. For three days they worked their way along the lake, stopping only to swim and, when the wind rose, to body surf. This zone of Leviathan was spinning, driving curious spiral waves in the lake that worked up and down the shore.
Two more days, by Dawn's inner clock, brought them to the skin. Again Dawn could not sense when they left the region of spin-gravity. Fogs had hampered their way, blowing into the Leviathan's recesses. They blew through wide shafts that admitted to the interior great blades of reflected sunlight.
Searcher taught her a favorite game. They perched in one of the translucent bubbles in Leviathan's outer reaches, waiting. In the utter vacuum outside, a mere finger's width away, strange forms glided and worked. Shelled silvery things like abalone attached themselves to Leviathan's skin. From there, a steady perch, they could snag wandering prey.
But sometimes they mistakenly triggered a Leviathan reflex. In a convulsive gulp, the slick skin double-folded inward. Abruptly the predator became prey, in a gassy world it had never known. Disoriented, it would flail about.
When one slipped inside, Searcher would snatch it, crack it open between her hard-soled feet, and gulp the shell's inhabitant with lip-smacking relish.
"Yes!" Searcher cried. Dawn applauded and turned down any offered tidbits.
Long, black creatures crawled over Leviathan, grazing on the photosynthetic mats that grew everywhere. Dawn could see these dark algae mottling the carbuncled skin, occasionally puffing out spores. The grazers slurped up the brown sun-worshipping goo of mat-life and moved on, the cattle of the skies.
Searcher tried to entice one close to the translucent layer, whirling and grimacing to attract its attention. The vacuum cow turned its slitted dark eyes toward this display. Bovine curiosity brought it closer.
Searcher grabbed for it, stretching the tough, waxy wall with her paw-hands and feet. Grunting, she managed to hang on to the grazer through the thin skin. Searcher was strong enough to pluck the struggling cow inward against the atmospheric pressure pushing the envelope out. For a moment Dawn thought the growling Searcher would manage to drag the grazer far enough in, despite all logic, to trigger the folding instability and pluck it through. Smelling victory, Searcher yelped with tenor joy. But then the vacuum cow spurted steam, wriggled and jetted away.
Searcher gnashed her teeth. "Devilish things."
"Yeah, looked appetizing."
"They are a great delicacy. I have been trying to taste one for a very long time."
"Pretty resistant, though. How long?"
"Three centuries."
It took a while for Searcher to stop laughing at the expression on Dawn's face. Before Dawn could recover she glanced to the side—and was startled to find standing there a human form. But only a form, for this was like nothing she had ever seen.
The face worked with expression—frowns and smiles and wild flaring eyes, all fidgeting and dissolving. The thing seemed demented. Then she saw that she had been imposing her own need to find a facial expression, to impose order. In fact the skittering storms rippled and fought all through the body. Colors and shapes were but passing approximations.
The form took a tentative step toward Dawn. She bit her lip. Could not breathe.
The body jiggled and warped like a bad image projected on a wobbly screen. But this was no illusion. Its lumpy foot brushed aside a stem as it took another step. The fidgeting skin seemed like a mulatto wash that blurred and shifted as the body moved.
She realized that she could see through the thing. Plants behind it appeared as flickering images. She heard a slight thrumming as it raised an arm with one unnaturally smooth motion—a swoop, not the hinged pull of muscles at the pivots of shoulder and elbow.
"Aurronugh," it said, a sound like stones rattling in a jug.
Dawn still could not breathe. She was frozen.
"It is imitating you, as it did before," Searcher said.
A gasp. "What—what is it?"
"You wanted to meet it. The Captain."
"But—it's—"
"Not all of the Captain, of course."
"What does he—does it—want?"
"I do not know. Often it manifests itself in the form of a new passenger, as a kind of politeness. To learn something it cannot otherwise know."
The shape said, "Yooou waaanteed by maaaany."
Dawn took a deep breath and made herself say, "Yes. Many want to find me."
"Yooou musssst lee—vah."
"I, I can't leave. And why should I?"
"Daaaanger. To meeee."
"You? What are you?"
The shape stretched its arms up to encompass all the surrounding growth. Its arms ended in stumps, though momentarily a stubby finger or two would sprout at the ends, flutter, and then ease back into the constant flow of the body.
"Everything? You're everything?" Dawn asked.
"Wooorld."
Searcher said, "It is the Leviathan. Composite intelligence. This directs its many parts and lesser minds."
Dawn gaped. "Every part of it adds to its intelligence?"
"Rin thought the phylum Myriasoma was extinct," Searcher said. "He would be happy to see that he was wrong yet again."
Dawn smiled despite her tingling fear. "Supras don't like news like that."
As she watched, the Captain's legs dissolved into a swarm of bits. Each was the size of a thumb and swam in the air with stubby wings. The Captain was an assembly that moved incessantly, each flyer brushing the other but capable of flitting away at any moment. The individual members looked like a bizarre mixture of bird and insect. Each had four eyes, two on opposite sides of their cylindrical bodies and one each at top and bottom. Hovering. Each thinking, in its own tiny way.
Dawn heard the Captain then in her mind. The thrumming whisper of wings she had heard was echoed by a soft flurry of thoughts in her mind.
You are a danger to me.
"You? The ship?"
I am The World.
And so it must seem to this thing, she realized. It governed the entwined complexity of the Leviathan and at some level must be the Leviathan, its dispersed mind instead of merely its brain. Yet each moment a flying thumb shot away on some buzzing mission and others flew in, to merge with the standing, rippling cloud.
Beneath its clear message she felt the darting of quicksilver thought. She sensed this as a thrumming echo of the infinitude of transactions the Leviathan must make to keep so vast an enterprise going. It was as though she could listen to the individual negotiations between her own blood cells and the walls of her veins, the acids of her stomach, the sour biles of her liver.
Dawn thought precisely, slowly, How can you be self-aware? You change all the time.
The shape let its right arm fall off, scattering into fluttering clumps that then departed on new tasks. I do not need to feel myself intact, as you do.
"So how do I know who's talking?" Dawn countered aloud.
The Captain answered, I speak for the moment. A little while later I shall speak for that time. Only the I will change, not the me.
Dawn glanced at Searcher, who watched with bemused interest. Maybe in three centuries it all got dated. She thought, Will that be the same you?
How could you tell? Or I? I always find that your kind of intelligence is obsessed with knowing what you are.
Dawn smiled. Seems a reasonable question.
The thing shook. Not reasonable. Reason cannot tell you deep things.
What can, then?
Those come through the body. Always the body.
Dawn watched as the shape gradually, with pops and sighs and slow moans, decomposed into an oblong cloud of the thumb-things. It had made its polite gesture and now relaxed into a wobbly sphere, perhaps to bring its individual elements closer while lowering its surface area.
Are
you afraid of me? she asked impishly.
My parts know fear. Hunger and desire, as well. They are a species, like you. I am another kind of being, able to elude attack by dispersing. I do not know fear for myself but I do know caution. I cannot die but I can be hurt.
Dawn thought of the honeybees she had tended in the forest—satisfying, sweaty labor that now seemed to have happened a very long time ago. Bees had fewer than ten thousand neurons, she knew, yet did complex tasks. How much more intelligent would be a single arm of this cloud-Captain, when its thumb-things united to merge their minds?
Not hurt by anybody like me, I assume?
The swarm churned. Yes. I am not vulnerable to destruction of special parts, as are you. Merely by taking away your head, for example, I could leach life from you, rob you of all you know. But each part of me contains some of my intelligence and feels what a part of the world feels.
Dawn felt suddenly the strangeness of this thing. Hanging before her, bulging and working with sluggish energy, its misshapen head turned at impossible angles as it seemed to ponder the Leviathan's intricacies. Another phylum? No, something more—another kingdom of life, a development beyond beings like her, forever separated into inevitable loneliness.
In a way she envied it. Each thumb-flyer knew the press of competition, of hunger and longing, but the composite could rise above that raw turbulence, into realms she could not even guess. She glanced at Searcher again and saw that her expression was not truly of indifference, but of reverence.
Searcher had not wanted her to seek the Captain because it was, even for Searcher, a holy being. Beyond even three centuries of learning.
I speak to you now because the world cannot tolerate you, the Captain sent.
"How come you ran away before?" Dawn asked.
I needed time to speak to my brothers.
Other Leviathans? As she framed the thought the Captain's answer came lightning-fast: Other worlds.
Is there something beyond Leviathans? Something— Dawn had never literally had a thought interrupted in her own mind. Running right over her own sentence-forming, the Captain imposed, I now grasp many recent events. Your connection with them. There is an entity called the Malign and it reaches for you.
I know.
Then know this—
In a flooded single moment a torrent of sensations, ideas and conclusions forked through her. She had for an instant the waterfall perception of what the mind before her was truly like. The layers of its logic were translucent, like a building of softly lit glass. Every fact shone up through floors of stacked detail, breaking through to illuminate the denser lattice-lacing of concepts on a higher level. And that piercing light in turn refracted through the web of mind, shedding its fitful glow on assumptions lying buried in a shadowy web beneath.
She staggered with the impact, trying to wrench away.
A realization came, a thin reed tossing on the crackling surge that swamped her. She sagged with the weight of what the Captain had given her, stunned. She was dimly conscious of Searcher leaping forward to cradle her. Then the air clouded with ebony striations and she felt herself dwindling, falling beneath a towering, dark weight.
* * *
"You can speak?" Searcher asked, her tilted chin and rippling amber fur patterns showing concern.
"I, I think so." Dawn had slept for many hours, awakening with only a groggy sense of herself. When she revived, Searcher had brought her a banquet of berries and fruits and thick, meaty leaves like slices of spongy bread. Now she tried to explain what she had sensed in the brief collision of minds. The Captain sent information faster and at greater depth than Dawn could handle.
"It was . . . thought without any human filter."
"Um. I get that all the time."
"No, I meant really strange, not like you."
Searcher grinned. "You truly have no idea, my dear human."
"No, I mean, it was—like being licked with a rasping wet tongue that wouldn't quit!" Her voice had gotten away from her at the end, letting out the brittle, heart-stopping fear she had felt.
Searcher looked unimpressed. "Humans are not good at diving into the pools of others' minds."
"Especially Originals?"
"I was not going to mention . . ."
"Okay, and I'm not an Original anyway, right?" She held up her fingers and extruded two bony tools. "These don't look like anything that got worked out on the plains of Afrik."
"These fingers are tekky, not evolved. I'll bet the Captain's a product of engineering, too."
This even little children learned. That rapid selection pressure operated on what already existed. It added capability to minds rather than snipping away parts which worked imperfectly. The human brain was always retrofitted, and showed its origins in its cumbersome, layered workings. The Captain had arisen from some engineering she could not imagine.
Searcher shrugged. "Perhaps the Supras know."
"They know so much, let them fight the Malign. I want out of it."
"There is no way out."
"Well, moving further from the sun sure doesn't seem so smart. That's where the Malign is accumulating itself."
Searcher studied the stars, bright holes punched in the pervading night. "Your Talent made you too easy to find on Earth. Here you blend into the many mind-voices."
"I can hear one voice in my head," Dawn said suddenly. "Supras. They're alongside."
The Supras boarded the Leviathan after protracted negotiation. The Captain appeared before Searcher and Dawn, humming and darting madly, alarmed for some reason Dawn could not understand. She had to reassure the Captain three times that she was indeed the primitive human form the Supras sought.
Only then did the Captain let the Supras board. It was some time before one Dawn had known before, a tall man called Rin appeared alone, thrashing his way through the luxuriant greenery. He was tired and disheveled, his usually immaculate one-piece suit stained and dirty.
Rin waved his hand dismissively. "We must talk."
"You've been after me?" Dawn asked.
Rin said to Searcher, "You promised you would help keep her safe."
Searcher yawned. "I did."
"But you did not have permission to take her away from us. And certainly not to escape into the system solar."
Dawn had expected anger, not this air of precise displeasure. Both he and Searcher glanced at her, as if she was the most likely to explode. Not so, she realized suddenly. She was not surprised that Searcher had struck some kind of deal with them back on Earth. Their escape had gone far better than it should have.
Searcher said, "I did not need permission."
"I should think—"
"After all, who could give it?" Searcher asked lazily.
"She is of our kind. That gives us species rights."
"You are Homo Technologicus. She is Ur-human, several species removed from you."
Rin pursed his lips. "Still, we are more nearly related than you."
"Are you so sure?" Searcher grinned devilishly. "I span the genetic heritage of many earlier forms."
"I am quite confident that if I read your helix I could easily find many more differences in—"
"Listen, you two," Dawn broke in. "I wanted to get away—Searcher was just along for company."
Rin blinked, looked at her for a long moment and then said calmly, "At least you are safe and have made the journey to where we need you."
"You intended to bring me here yourself?" Dawn asked.
Rin's mouth played with amused shapes. "Yes, in a ship. Comfortably."
Dawn's temper flared despite her efforts to maintain the easy calm of a Supra. "What? I could have zipped out here in a ship?"
"Well, yes." Rin seemed surprised at her question.
She whirled to confront Searcher. "You made me go through all this?"
Searcher worked her mouth awkwardly. "I perceived that as the correct course."
"My God! It was damned dangerous. And you didn't even consul
t me!"
"You did not know enough to judge," Searcher said uncertainly.
"I'll decide that!"
Searcher backed away. "Perhaps I erred."
"Perhaps? You—"
"Do not be hasty," Rin said mildly. "This animal is clever, and in this case it showed foresight. It was lucky for you that I did not convey you outward by our planned route. We thought it intact. Yet several craft carrying needed Ur-human passengers were destroyed after leaving Earth, and you could well have been among them."
"What?" Dawn's flare of anger guttered out. "My people?" Dawn was so excited she lost her grip on a vine and had to catch herself.
"Not exactly. We grew them from your helix."
"You mean they're—they're me?"
"Some, yes. Others we varied slightly, to get the proper mix of abilities. We shall use them, like -amplifiers—of you."
Dawn shook her head, trying to clear it. "I can't possibly amount to much in all this."
"So I would have said as well, once." Rin had settled on a branch and even in the low spin-gravity the lines in his face sagged. "But you do matter. You Ur-humans had a hand, along with more advanced human forms and alien races, in contributing to both these entities."
"Us? Originals? Impossible."
Rin looked rueful. "I admit it seems extremely unlikely. Yet the deep records of the Library are clear, if read closely."
"Well, even if we helped make the Multifold, what's that matter now? I don't know anything about it."
Rin looked at Searcher, but the big creature seemed unconcerned. Dawn got the feeling that all this was running more or less as Searcher expected, and she was never one to trouble herself with assisting the inevitable.
Rin spread his hands. "Deep in the Multifold lies a set of assumptions, of worldview. They depend on the kinesthetic senses of Ur-humans, upon your perceptual space."
Dawn bit into a piece of ruby fruit. "Um. What's that?"
Rin looked at her solemnly. "What matters is that we cannot duplicate such things."
"Come on," Dawn said. "I know I'm dumber than anyone here, but that doesn't mean you can—"
Rin said, "We find communicating with the Multifold exceedingly difficult. We have struggled for centuries to no avail."
Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System Page 37