Blood and Fire (3 page)

Williger noted Korie's deliberate change of subject with a curt “Fine.” Then she added, “I'm going with you. And I'll want Brian Armstrong too.”

“No, you aren't,” Korie said. “The captain doesn't want to risk you.”

“But she'll risk you ...?”

“I'm expendable. You're not. You'll monitor from the Bridge, or from Med Bay. You can still have Armstrong, if you want.”

“I suppose this is not negotiable.”

“That's correct.”

“Well ... all right.” She sighed acceptance. “I tried. Listen, if the situation is really bad over there, we'll need to use the forward bay as an auxiliary receiving room. I assume you'll be docking at the nose?”

“That's the recommended procedure.”

“I want enhanced scanners on your helmets, with high-med software. I'll give you Chief Pharmacist's Mate Berryman as your senior corpsman. Hodel and Easton are also certified. Take them. You won't reconsider Armstrong?”

“Not this time, no. I was thinking Bach and Shibano.”

Williger frowned. “Shibano's a cowboy—and Bach hasn't been certified yet for medical missions.”

Korie ran a hand through his hair. How to say this without sounding paranoid? There was no way, so he just said it. “We don't know what's over there. I need security people.”

“Yeah, I heard about your itch. Half a dozen people came in asking for skin-rex lotion.” Her expression was wry. “It must be catching, eh?”

“I certainly hope so.”

Armstrong sat alone in the mess room. Thinking. His cup of chocolate sat cold and forgotten in front of him. On some unspoken level, he understood what his problem was. And now, today, for some reason, he was almost ready to speak it—if not to anyone else, at least to himself.

It wasn't loneliness. It was that thing on the other side of loneliness.

He could talk to people, he could make friends, he could get people to spend time with him, and he usually didn't have any problems with women either. He'd had more than his share of sexual exercise. And even a relationship or two. So, no, it wasn't loneliness.

It was that
other
thing. About
belonging
. About being a part of something—not just a plug-in module, replaceable, discardable—but something more essential. Something with identity. He wanted to know that what he did was useful and important, and even necessary to the success of the ship. And the war.

It was a need that he couldn't explain, and he felt frustrated every time he thought about it—this feeling that he had to be something more. But there was nothing particularly special about Brian Armstrong. He was big, good-looking, a little goofy, likable, mostly capable, and just like several billion other men in this part of the galaxy. If he died right now, there would be no evidence that he was ever here, except a few records in the Fleet rolls. There would be no artifact, no object, no person, no heritage, nothing remarkable to indicate that Brian Armstrong had passed this way; nothing to say that Brian Armstrong had left the universe a better place than he found it. And despite his genial, easy-going nature, Brian Armstrong found this thought intolerable. It wasn't death he feared; it was being
insignificant
.

He just wanted to ... make a difference. That was all.

Quilla Delta sat down opposite him. She placed one blue hand on top of his. He glanced up, met her eyes, forced a half-smile, pulled his hand away, then looked back down at his lap.

“You are not happy, Brian,” she said. “That makes us sad.”

Armstrong didn't answer. To answer would have meant discussing the things that he didn't discuss with anyone. If Lambda had lived, maybe he would have. He had thought about it a lot, what he wanted to say to Lambda. Lambda had seemed to know something of his confusion—

“Lambda is not dead,” Delta said. “Everything that Lambda was, everything that Lambda knew—it still lives inside us. Only the body is gone. Not the soul. Not the spirit.”

“I can't believe that,” said Armstrong. “I've studied a little bit about Quillas. About massminds. I know that there's a kind of synergy that happens. But there's no way the soul of an individual can leave a body and take up residence in a networked collection of other bodies. It's just not possible.”

“Yes, it is,” said Delta in a different voice. A voice that Armstrong recognized in spite of himself, and he looked up with a start. “Everything that I was when I was alive I still am. I'm just living inside a different body now. I told you that Quillas are immortal, Brian. This is why I became one. Because I was like you. And I was unhappy that way.”

Armstrong started to lower his eyes again, then changed his mind and looked into Quilla Delta's face. Her skin was the most beautiful shade of blue. Her eyes were shadowed with magenta; her lips were almost the same shade. Her quills were a bright red Mohawk across her bald blue scalp. She had a slim, boyish quality and yet she was as feminine as a rosebud. He thought she was the most beautiful and the most irresistible female he had ever seen. She was also the most affectionate—he knew that there were no personality differences between one member of a Quilla cluster and another, but nevertheless he still felt she was the most
affectionate
. Maybe he was projecting his own feelings, maybe not. It didn't matter. He couldn't deny her anything.

He licked his lips uncomfortably. They were dry. His whole mouth was dry. “I, um, have to go.” He started to rise. But as he did, he saw that they were no longer alone. Quilla Beta, Quilla Alpha, Quilla Gamma and the two new ones, Quilla Theta and Quilla Omega.

Omega was a tall, blue man, taller even than Lambda had been. He stepped forward now. “Brian Armstrong, we know the source of your unhappiness. We are sorry for having caused you pain.”

“It's not your fault,” Armstrong said.

“But it is our
responsibility
. We know that you felt
distanced
when we expanded our cluster. We know that you felt shut out of our closeness. This makes us sad. Our closeness should not be a barrier. It is not a prize that we keep to ourselves; it is a gift that we share with others.”

“You can't help it,” Armstrong said to all of them, trying to avoid looking at Omega. “It's just the way you are. You're all one mind. And I'm not. I'm not part of you. I'm just me. So just by existing the way you are, I'm automatically shut out. It's my fault for presuming that I could ever be anything more than another John. I was stupid.”

“No,” said Delta. “Not stupid.”

“Whatever. Listen, thanks for all the ... attention. It was fun, okay? But like the song says ... I was looking for love on all the wrong planets. It was a mistake. I'm sorry that Lambda's gone. I liked him. I like all of you, but uh ... can't we just be friends now, something like that?”

Omega blocked his exit. “Lambda lives in me too, Brian. Listen. This is what Lambda wants to say to you. ‘Ever since the first day you have been running from us. Your few conversations with Lambda were the only time you stopped running. It was the only time you treated any of us like a person. The rest of the time you acted like we were bodies, here only for your sexual pleasure. Did you think your callous behavior wasn't hurtful to us? Perhaps it is you who owe us an apology.'”

“Yeah, well—maybe I do. I'm sorry for treating you all like—like objects. Sex toys. Freaks. I dunno. Whatever. I was wrong. May I go now?”

“Brian—” This time Gamma stepped in front of him. “We ask only one thing. Just please stop running from us.”

“Okay. I'll stop running. May I go now?”

Quilla Delta stepped in close. “We miss Lambda too,” she said. “His body fit right. Almost as nice as yours. Sometimes we cry for him—for that missing piece of ourselves. Do you cry for him, Brian? I think you want to. If you do, it's all right.” Without waiting for his answer, she put her arms around him and gently pulled him to her. He stiffened, but she refused to let go. He closed his eyes, but she still refused to let go. Instead she held him—and held and held and held him. Did she want him to cry? He didn't know. He didn't feel like crying now. He didn't know what he felt—this wasn't a familiar situation.

The other Quillas wrapped their arms around them, and now Armstrong felt himself being passed from body to body. He couldn't tell which of them was holding him. He opened his eyes only once and saw that he was being hugged by Omega, then closed them again until it didn't matter anymore whose arms were wrapped around him. And still they passed him around.

“Listen to me,” a soft voice whispered in his ear. It sounded like Lambda again. “When you're ready to talk ... we'll be ready to listen. Give us that chance, Brian? Please?”

Despite himself, he nodded.

And that was enough. That was all he needed to do. When they finally let him go, he felt different—and he was different. He looked from one to the other of them and realized he'd taken on a terrifying new responsibility. Honesty.

Contrary to popular expectations, the invention of faster-than-light travel did not create an age of enlightenment. Quite the opposite.

Imagine the human species as a vast stew of ideas, opinions, neuroses, ideologies, beliefs, religions, pathologies, illnesses, cults and paradigms—a sea of competing world-views, models of reality at war with each other; an ecology of memes, each one struggling for living space in the heads and hearts of human beings.

The introduction of cost-effective FTL access to other worlds gave each of these memes access to the living space it wanted. The result was an explosion of humanity in all directions: each ship filled with idea spores and belief cuttings and world-view seed-carriers—all those little ships filled with infectious opinions and belief systems, each and every person a host for his part of the larger energizing meme. It wasn't humanity that emigrated to the stars;
it was the memes
.

Humans live and breed for their beliefs; often they sacrifice everything for the thoughts they carry. History is a chronicle of human beings dying for their convictions, as if the continuance of the idea is more important than the continuance of the person. The ideology becomes more important to the carrier than his own ability to be human.

All the disparate models of reality, each one demanding its own space to dominate and thrive, drove their bearers outward—the memes drove men like parasites riding in their minds—and the human species spread its motes across space like a field of dandelions exploding in a tornado, creating a million new places for memes to thrive and a billion new memes to live in them.

Interstellar travel fractured and fractionated the human race. A thousand new religions. A hundred thousand new schools of scientific thought. A million new worlds, each one with its own dominant meme. Most of the memes were benign: “Love one another. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” Some were not: “Our book is the only true book. Our God is the only true God. Our belief is the only true belief. All others are false ... and must be eradicated.” Some were untested: “We need a place to live where we won't have the oppressions of others keeping us from being who we really are.”

The problem that each of these colonizing memes ran into was
reality
. Every single world that human beings stepped out onto presented its own particular set of challenges—capping the volcanoes for geothermal energy, cracking the ice to make oceans, releasing water from the mantle to make air, mining heavy metals for industry, securing a power supply from the wind and the water and the sun, getting enough oxygen into the air, cooling the atmosphere with shadow fields, warming the seas with core taps, designing crops that could survive, dealing with hostile organisms, determining both long- and short-range weather patterns, constructing safe shelters, putting up satellites, establishing global communications, designing a working government.... Compared to the last challenge, of course, all the others were easy. You could always tell when a planet was viable—but nobody was ever convinced that a government was fine.
Any
government.