Beyond the Farthest Suns

  Aryz made his connection and felt the brood mind’s emergency cache of knowledge in the mandate grow up around him like ice crystals on glass. He stood in a static scene. The transition from living memory to human machine memory had resulted in either a coding of data or a reduction of detail; either way, the memory was cold not dynamic. It would have to be compared, recorrelated, if that would ever be possible.

  How much human data had had to be dumped to make space for this?

  He cautiously advanced into the human memory, calling up topics almost at random. In the short time he had been away, so much of what he had learned seemed to have faded or become scrambled. Branch inds were supposed to have permanent memory, but human data, for one reason or another, didn’t take. It required so much ef­fort just to begin to understand the different modes of thought.

  He backed away from sociological data, trying to remain within physics and mathematics. There he could make conversions to fit his understanding without too much strain.

  Then something unexpected happened. He felt the brush of an­other mind, a gentle inquiry from a source made even stranger by the hint of familiarity. It made what passed for a Senexi greeting, but not in the proper form, using what one branch ind of a team would radiate to a fellow; a gross breach, since it was obviously not from his team or even from his family. Aryz tried to withdraw. How was it possible for minds to meet in the mandate? As he retreated, he pushed into a broad region of incomprehensible data. It had none of the characteristics of the other human regions he had examined.

  —This is for machines, the other said. —Not all cultural data is limited to biologic. You are in the area where programs and cyber designs are stored. They are really accessible only to a machine hooked into the mandate.

  —What is your family? Aryz asked, the first step-question in the se­quence Senexi used for urgent identity requests.

  —I have no family. I am not a branch ind. No access to active brood minds. I have learned from the mandate.

  —Then what are you?

  —I don’t know, exactly. Not unlike you.

  Aryz understood what he was dealing with. It was the mind of the mutated shape, the one that had remained in the chamber, beseech­ing when he approached the transparent barrier.

  —I must go now, the shape said.

  Aryz was alone again in the in­comprehensible jumble. He moved slowly, carefully, into the Senexi sector, calling up subjects familiar to him. If he could encounter one shape, doubtless he could encounter the others—perhaps even the captive. The idea was dreadful—and fascinating. So far as he knew, such intimacy between Senexi and human had never happened before. Yet there was something very Senexi-like in the method, as if branch inds attached to the brood mind were to brush mentalities while searching in the ageless memories.

  The dread subsided. There was little worse that could happen to him, with his fellows dead, his brood mind in flux bind, his purpose uncertain.

  What Aryz was feeling, for the first time, was a small measure of freedom.

  The story of the original Prufrax continued.

  In the early stages she visited Clevo with a barely concealed anger. His method was aggravating, his goals never precisely spelled out. What did he want with her, if anything? And she with him? Their meetings were clandestine, though not precisely forbidden. She was a hawk one now with considerable per­sonal liberty between exercises and engagements. There were no monitors in the closed-off reaches of the cruiser, and they could do whatever they wished. The two met in areas close to the ship’s hull, usually in weapons blisters that could be opened to reveal the stars there they talked.

  Prufrax was not accustomed to prolonged conversation. Hawks were not raised to be voluble, nor were they selected for their curi­osity. Yet the exhawk Clevo talked a great deal and was the most curious person she had met, herself included, and she regarded her­self as uncharacteristically curious.

  Often he was infuriating, especially when he played the “leading game,” as she called it. Leading her from one question to the next, like an instructor, but without the trappings or any clarity of purpose.

  “What do you think of your mother?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Then why ask?”

  “Because you matter.”

  Prufrax shrugged. “She was a fine mother. She bore me with a well-chosen heritage. She raised me as a hawk candidate. She told me her stories.”

  “Any hawk I know would envy you for listening at Jayax’s knee.”

  “I was hardly at her knee.”

  “A speech tactic.”

  “Yes, well, she was important to me.”

  “She was a preferred single?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have no father.”

  “She selected without reference to individuals.”

  “Then you are really not that much different from a Senexi.”

  She bristled and started to push away. “There! You insult me again.”

  “Not at all. I’ve been asking one question all this time, and you haven’t even heard. How well do you know the enemy?”

  “Well enough to destroy them.” She couldn’t believe that was the only question he’d been asking. His speech tactics were very odd.

  “Yes, to win battles, perhaps. But who will win the war?”

  “It’ll be a long war,” she said softly, floating a few meters from him. “They fight well.”

  He rotated in the blister, blocking out a blurred string of stars. The cruiser was preparing to shift out of status geometry again. “They fight with conviction. Do you believe them to be evil?”

  “They destroy us.”

  “We destroy them.”

  “So the question,” she said, smiling at her cleverness, “is who began to destroy?”

  “Not at all,” Clevo said. “I suspect there’s no longer a clear answer to that. Our leaders have obviously decided the question isn’t impor­tant. No. We are the new, they are the old. The old must be super­seded. It’s a conflict born in the essential difference between Senexi and humans.”

  “That’s the only way we’re different? They’re old, we’re not so old? I don’t understand.”

  “Nor do I, entirely.”

  “Well, finally!”

  “The Senexi,” Clevo continued, unperturbed, “long ago needed only gas-giant planets like their homeworlds. They lived in peace for billions of years before our world was formed. But as they moved from star to star, they learned uses for other types of worlds. We were most interested in rocky Earth-like planets. Gradually we found uses for gas giants, too. By the time we met, both of us encroached on the other’s territory. Their technology is so improbable, so unlike ours, that when we first encountered them we thought they must come from another geometry.”

  “Where did you learn all this?” Prufrax squinted at him suspiciously.

  “I’m no longer a hawk,” he said, “but I was too valuable just to dis­card. My experience was too broad, my abilities too useful. So I was placed in research. It seems a safe place for me. Little contact with my comrades.” He looked directly at her. “We must try to know our enemy, at least a little.”

  “That’s dangerous,” Prufrax said, almost instinctively.

  “Yes, it is. What you know, you cannot hate.”

  “We must hate,” she said. “It makes us strong. Senexi hate.”

  “They might,” he said. “But, sometime, wouldn’t you like to … sit down and talk with one, after a battle? Talk with a fighter? Learn its tactic, how it bested you in one move, compare—”

  “No!” Prufrax shoved off rapidly down the tube. “We’re shifting now. We have to get ready.”

  —She’s smart. She’s leaving him. He’s crazy.

  —Why do you think that?

>   —He would stop the fight, end the Zap.

  —But he was a hawk.

  —And hawks became glovers, I guess. But glovers go wrong, too.

  —?

  —Did you know they used you? How you were used?

  —That’s all blurred now.

  —She’s doomed if she stays around him. Who’s that?

  —Someone is listening with us.

  —Recognize?

  —No, gone now.

  The next battle was bad enough to fall into the hellfought. Prufrax was in her fightsuit, legs drawn up as if about to kick off. The cruiser exited sponge space and plunged into combat before sponge-space supplements could reach full effectiveness. She was dizzy, disori­ented. The overhawks could only hope that a switch from biologic to cyber would cure the problem.

  She didn’t know what they were attacking. Tactic was flooding the implant, but she was only receiving the wash of that; she hadn’t merged yet. She sensed that things were confused. That bothered her. Overs did not feel confusion.

  The cruiser was taking damage. She could sense at least that, and she wanted to scream in frustration. Then she was ordered to merge with the implant. Biologic became cyber. She was in the Know.

  The cruiser had reintegrated above a gas-giant planet. They were seventy-nine thousand kilometers from the upper atmosphere. The damage had come from ice mines—chunks of Senexi-treated water ice, altered to stay in sponge space until a human vessel integrated nearby. Then they emerged, packed with momentum and all the re­sidual instability of an unsuccessful exit into status geometry. Un­successful for a ship, that is—very successful for a weapon.

  The ice mines had given up the overness of the real within range of the cruiser and had blasted out whole sections of the hull. The launch lanes had not been damaged. The fighters lined up on their beams and were peppered out into space, spreading in the classic sword flower.

  The planet was a cold nest. Over didn’t know what the atmo­sphere contained, but Senexi activity had been high in the star sys­tem, concentrating on this world. Over had decided to take a chance. Fighters headed for the atmosphere. The cruiser began planting singularity eggs. The eggs went ahead of the fighters, great black grainy ovoids that seemed to leave a trail of shadow—the wake of a birthing disruption in status geometry that could turn a gas giant into a short-lived sun.

  Their time was limited. The fighters would group on entry sleds and descend to the liquid water regions where Senexi commonly kept their upwelling power plants. The fighters would first destroy any plants, loop into the liquid ammonia regions to search for hidden cuckoos, then see what was so important about the world.

  She and five other fighters mounted the sled. Growing closer, the hazy clear regions of the atmosphere sparkled with Senexi sensors. Spiderweb beams shot from the six sleds to take down the sensors. Buffet began. Scream, heat, then a second flower from the sled at a depth of two hundred kilometers. The sled slowed and held station. It would be their only way back. The fightsuits couldn’t pull out of such a large gravity well.

  Prufrax descended deeper. The pale, swollen beacon of the red star was dropping below the second cloudtops, limning the strata in orange and purple. At the liquid ammonia level she was instructed to key in permanent memory of all she was seeing. She wasn’t “seeing” much, but other sensors were recording a great deal, all of it duly processed in her implant. “There’s life here,” she told herself. In­digenous life. Just another example of Senexi disregard for basic de­cency: they were interfering with a world developing its own complex biology.

  The temperature rose to ammonia vapor levels, then to liquid water. The pressure on the fightsuit was enormous, and she was draining her stores much more rapidly than expected. At this level the atmosphere was particularly thick with organics.

  Senexi snakes rose from below, passed them in altitude, then doubled back to engage. Prufrax was designated the deep diver; the others from her sled would stay at this level in her defense. As she fell, another sled group moved in behind her to double the cover.

  She searched for the characteristic radiation curve of an upwelling plant. At the lower boundary of the liquid water level, below which her suit could not safely descend, she found it.

  The Senexi were tapping the gas giant’s convection from greater depths than usual. Ten kilometers above the plant, almost undetectable, hung an­other object with an uncharacteristic curve. The power plant was feeding its higher companion with tight energy beams.

  She slowed. Two other fighters, disengaged from the brief skir­mish above, took backup positions a few dozen kilometers higher. Her implant searched for an appropriate tactic. She would avoid the zero-angle phase for the moment, go in for reconnais­sance. She could feel sound pouring from the plant and its com­panion—rhythmic, not waste noise, but deliberate. And homing in on that sound were waves of large vermiform organisms, like chains of gas-filled sausages. They were dozens of meters long, two meters at their greatest thickness, shaped vaguely like the Senexi snake fight­ers. The vermiforms were native, and they were being lured into the uppermost floating structure. None were emerging. Her backups spread apart, descended, and drew up along her flanks.

  She made her decision almost immediately. She could see a pat­tern in the approach of the natives. If she fell into the pattern, she might be able to enter the structure unnoticed.

  —It’s a grinder. She doesn’t recognize it.

  —What’s a grinder?

  —She should make the Zap! It’s an ugly thing; Senexi use them all the time. Net a planet with grinders, like a cuckoo, but for larger op­erations.

  The creatures were being passed through separator fields. Their organics fell from the bottom of the construct, raw material for new growth--Senexi growth. Their heavier elements were stored for later harvest.

  With Prufrax in their midst, the vermiforms flew into the separator. The interior was hundreds of meters wide, lead-white walls with flat gray machinery floating in a dust haze, full of hollow noise, the dis­tant bleats of vermiforms being slaughtered. Prufrax tried to retreat, but she was caught in a selector field. Her suit bucked and she was whirled violently, then thrown into a repository for examination. She had been screened from the separator; her plan to record, then destroy, the structure had been foiled by an automatic filter.

  “Information sufficient.” Command logic programmed into the im­plant before launch was now taking over. “Zero-angle phase both plant and adjunct.” She was drifting in the repository, still slightly stunned. Something was fading. Cyber was hissing in and out; the over logic-commands were being scrambled. Her implant was mal­functioning and was returning control to biologic. The selector fields had played havoc with all cyber functions, down to the processors in her weapons.

  Cautiously she examined the down systems one by one, deter­mining what she could and could not do. This took as much as thirty seconds—an astronomical time on the implant’s scale.

  She still could use the phase weapon. If she was judicious and didn’t waste her power, she could cut her way out of the repository, maneuver and work with her escorts to destroy both the plant and the separator. By the time they returned to the sleds, her implant might have rerouted itself and made sufficient repairs to handle defense. She had no way of knowing what was waiting for her if—when—she escaped, but that was the least of her concerns for the moment.

  She tightened the setting of the phase beam and swung her fight­suit around, knocking a cluster of junk ice and silty phosphorescent dust. She activated the beam. When she had a hole large enough to pass through, she edged the suit forward, beamed through more walls and obstacles, and kicked herself out of the repository into free fall. She swiveled and laid down a pattern of wide-angle beams, at the same time relaying a message on her situation to the escorts.

  The escorts were not in sight. The separator was beginning to br
eak up, spraying debris through the almost-opaque atmosphere. The rhythmic sound ceased, and the crowds of vermiforms began to disperse.

  She stopped her fall and thrust herself several kilometers higher—directly into a formation of Senexi snakes. She had barely enough power to reach the sled, much less fight and turn her beams on the upwelling plant.

  Her cyber was still down.

  The sled signal was weak. She had no time to calculate its direc­tion from the inertial guidance cyber. Besides, all cyber was unre­liable after passing through the separator.

  Why do they fight so well? Clevo’s question clogged her thoughts. Cursing, she tried to blank and keep all her faculties available for run­ning the fightsuit. When evenly matched, you cannot win against your enemy unless you understand them. And if you truly under­stand, why are you fighting and not talking? Clevo had never told her that—not in so many words. But it was part of a string of logic all her own.

  Be more than an automaton with a narrow range of choices. Never underestimate the enemy. Those were old Grounds dicta, not entirely lost in the new training, but only emphasized by Clevo.

  If they fight as well as you, perhaps in some ways they fight-think like you do. Use that.

  Isolated, with her power draining rapidly, she had no choice. They might disregard her if she posed no danger. She cut her thrust and went into a diving spin. Clearly she was on her way to a high-pres­sure grave. They would sense her power levels, perhaps even pick up the lack of field activity if she let her shields drop. She dropped the shields. If they let her fall and didn’t try to complete the kill—if they concentrated on active fighters above—she had enough power to drop into the water vapor regions, far below the plant, and silently ride a thermal into range. With luck, she could get close enough to lay a web of zero-angle phase and take out the plant.

  She had minutes in which to agonize over her plan. Falling, buf­feted by winds that could knock her kilometers out of range, she spun like a vagrant flake of snow.

  She couldn’t even expend the energy to learn if they were scan­ning her, checking out her potential. Perhaps they had unwritten rules of conduct like the ones she was using, taking hunches into account. Hunches were discouraged in Grounds train­ing—much less reliable than cyber.