No Life But This (27 page)

And believe it
or not, it was even more interesting from my point of view.

The first moment when I touched the water was static, it shorted me out completely. I was gone. There was cold, weighty emptiness. Then, with an awareness as startling as a meteor in the dark, there was a deep, throbbing
concept
in my mind. There were no words. There had never been any need for words. But the concept by itself was so shocking and so radical to that consciousness,
that it created something akin to a word almost by itself. And that word, that concept, was,

You!

It remembered creatures like me. It had touched them before, but they were hollow, empty, unconnected parasites. But this was different. This was change. Until I had touched it, there had never been anything else. There was only the one, the self, the
I
. I had touched it and it had become aware
of me, but I was not part of it. I was not of the
I
. I was something else. And that something else was
You
.

The idea that there could even be a ‘you’ was beyond the very concept of existence for the
I
. The
I
was ancient, ageless, blind, yet completely aware. The
I
was a lifeform. The
I
was of the water. The
I
was existence itself. And the
I
was terrified. Because the
I
was dying.

What was the
I
? Europa, whole and entire, a world itself alive with awareness on a level that I myself, with my five pitiful human senses, could barely begin to contemplate.

The
I,
as I encountered it then, was like an infant. Unaware of anything beyond itself. Unaware even that itself was something other than what had always been. Compared to the
I
, I was puny, insignificant, limited. I was so painfully weak,
and terribly mortal. And yet I was so much more aware – of everything. I had been raised with the concept of
you.
And with
you
came,
us
and
them,
mine
and
theirs,
there
and
here
,
then
and
now.
With the concept of the
other
there came a reason for names, and with names came words, and with words came reason, and with reason came knowledge, and I
knew
. And because I
knew
, the
I
could know.

The
I
wanted
everything.
Everything I was, everything I had ever been, everything I had ever known. It nearly killed me with a desperate grab for everything I was, but it was ancient, and it had been trying to understand what
humans
were, for … well, for the
I
it was a blip of time, but for a human it was more than sixty years. Ever since the first human probe had breached the ice skin and dropped its
researchers and its submarines and its icebreakers and eventually its city ships.

And because the
I
wanted to understand me, it gave me what it could of what it knew.

The
I
was a single entity, distributed across the whole ocean of Europa, following the veins of the geothermal fissures, making ice-sculptures and farming parts of itself to feed other parts, always changing, always the same, always
eternal. The
I
was the plankton. The whole of the plankton. It was made up of dozens if not hundreds of different types of creatures, but all of them were moved together and manipulated by the
I
. The M9 microbes that had been used to create the Europa Project children were what, if the
I
was a being as we understood it, would be termed as brain cells. The rest of the creatures of the plankton
were maintained and moved by these cells. These cells communicated with each other the way the cells in a brain interacted, and the brain in turn interacted with the body.

And then the parasite had come. There had been no word to describe it, because it was not of the
I
. At first, the
I
had not been bothered, or even noticed, when the scientists, and later the city ships, had begun harvesting.
Portions of the
I
die all the time, disconnected, lost in the ice. When portions of the
I
were lost in the current, they died, the way that cells cut from our bodies die. Eventually these dead cells would drift back into the veins of the living, and their bodies were eaten and absorbed, but the
I
was never bothered by this – any more than a human being is bothered by the dead cells that form their
hair.

But the parasite had begun to capture vast sections of the
I
. Entire heat-veins were all but eviscerated. And when the cells that had not been harvested were left behind, there were not enough of them to remerge with the
I
. They had died. The three massive harvesting ships travelled slowly about the planet, lobotomizing, cannibalizing, slowly killing the being that was the
I
.

There was
no way to stop it. The
I
did not have arms and legs to remove the worm from its watery flesh. It did not have weaponry or the equivalent to antibodies to kill the ships where they stood. While it could heal itself, and did, the surviving cells dividing and reproducing, the ships did not give it ample time. Before a heat-vein was properly repopulated, another ship would bear down, scooping up the
nascent cells, wounding it all over again. The
I
was already losing memory. It had forgotten the pattern of the ocean floor, lost the memory of how to carve certain ice-sculptures. If something was not done to stop it, the
I
would not survive.

The concept of
death
, a final death of consciousness, had never before occurred to the
I
. It was a concept as world shattering as the idea of an
other.
It began to look for ways to escape the destruction. But there was no place to go – there was no other place but
beneath the ice
. It could not escape, any more than a human could escape its own skin.

This was a feeling I knew. I too was dying, and I too was terrified. But the
I
wanted nothing more than to destroy the disease that was killing it. Every single microscopic portion of the
I
had been
directed to one goal – destroy.

But there was no way to do this. It would take several hundred years of evolution before the many cells of the
I
evolved enough to attack the alien newcomers who had invaded its waters.

But there was something odd about the parasite. Something inside it similar to the
I
. It felt similar – tiny fingers of something that was almost, but not quite,
thought
, as the
I
thought of it. It would reach out, trying to enter that thought, become part of it, make it part of itself in the hopes that, if nothing else, the
I
might survive in some form. But until the
I
had encountered myself, a human being with the skill to both share and receive information the same way the
I
did within itself, it had not occurred to it that this
danger
, this parasite, was another creature.
A separate creature. A whole colony of creatures, with individuality and language and
otherness.

And the
I
wanted more of this – desperately. It wanted to
understand
.

I took all of this in, and I had to interpret it. The
I
was so loud and so overwhelming that it was hard to find my own thoughts inside it. But it realized this, and quieted its thoughts, and shrank its being as small as it could
in the hopes that I could encompass it. I couldn’t – I hadn’t a prayer. I could have stayed inside that vast alien consciousness for a thousand years and only barely begun to understand it. But eventually it was quiet enough that I could at least hear myself think.

The plankton was a being – a single, diffuse being – and the Europan city ships were systematically slaughtering it. The harvesters
– those different and odd people who had become a caste within themselves, who had become rebels, who were trying to destroy the other humans on this planet – had been in lifelong contact with the living plankton. And some of this plankton, separated from itself, had tried to bond with the living thing that held it – and that was the harvesters. And the one thing that it had been able to do was
send a message. A very distinct message: destroy.

Yes, human society on Europa was flawed by its very make-up. But the
I
had been feeding the dissonance at every step. That was why the violence had never abated. That was why neither side was ever willing to negotiate. It had no concept of compromise, because it had no concept of other. And every human being that had been in contact – mostly the
harvesters who captured and processed the plankton, but every human being that had ever touched the water, was being shouted at by the goddess of the planet as a whole – destroy.

I knew I could control people. Not very effectively, not very well. But I had convinced the bouncer at the club to let me, an underage madman, into the u
Night
ed. I had convinced Penny to calm herself. I helped Rose find
herself. The
I
was doing the same. It was influencing everyone on the planet, the wealthy and the workers alike, to destroy each other.

And there was something else I knew. I knew it the same way the plankton knew it. I could not survive without the
I
.

We had died, 42, my siblings, all of them had died because we were disconnected. All disconnected plankton might as well have been dead. Just
as any cell cut from our human flesh might as well be dead already. Each and every cell had their own self-destruct, a saving grace from being thoughtless, only a fraction of itself. Before puberty our EP cells had been in development, not fully mature. But the adult hormones had acted like an igniter, and the self-destruct inherent in our DNA was activated.

And I had been saved. I had been saved
only because 42 had died for me. She had self-destructed, and dragged me down with her, and my cells had thought it was over. They had performed their duty, and did not need to activate their own self-destruct. It was not until I fell truly in love with Rose, and my hormones had changed – or maybe it was the contact with her highly-developed mind, I would never know – that my cells had realized
again that they were disconnected, and had begun, slowly, to destruct. Nabiki had been right. Rose was killing me. But it was likely that it would have happened eventually anyway. 42’s death would not have fooled my DNA forever.

That was why stasis had made me feel better. The tiny death I had undergone had stayed the self-destruct for a few days, as well. But eventually, even that reprieve would
have failed.

I needed the
I
. And the
I
needed me. It needed me to speak for it. If there was a
you
, and a
them
and
words,
then it had to be possible to – ‘
become
one
’ was the way the
I
thought of it, but I personally thought of it as ‘communicate’. The
I
was still a little shaky on the concept of the
other
. It kept trying to make me think in terms of
oneness
, while I was trying to get it to think
in terms of
cooperation
. Humans functioned as a whole as a society. The
I
functioned as a whole as a single being. It was going to be a trick playing ambassador.

And then I was taken from the water. I had no sense of time when in contact with the
I
, but Rose told me later that the entire exchange – the intellectual birth of an entirely new form of consciousness – had taken less than seven minutes.
That was how long it took Rose to drag me through the icy water.

It took another forty minutes before Quin had the chance to tell her that Xavier wasn’t dead.

I sensed his mind before I really regained consciousness. I opened my eyes to find Quin sitting by my bedside, my hand held in a steady grip. His left hand was heavily bandaged, probably from a burn, and there was a deep cut on his cheek.
The red against the blue looked like the red striations across Europa’s icy surface. He held himself stiffly – the wound in his side itched more than ached, they had him so drugged up. ‘Otto?’ Quin said when he saw me looking at him. His voice was very gentle. Surprisingly so.

So was his mind, come to think of it. ‘Otto? Is that you?’

I couldn’t find my way to answer him. My thoughts were still
twisted and weighted down by the overwhelming communication of the
I
. I gazed at his face.

‘Have you come out of it yet?’ His voice was shaking. ‘Give me a sign. Anything. Send me something.’ I understood, but I couldn’t find a word to send him. Any words. They were gone. Buried. Lost in the torrent that had been the
I
. ‘This is the third time you’ve opened your eyes,’ Quin told me. ‘You’ve been
sending the weirdest things. I can’t read them. Rose can’t, either. It’s not human …’ He sighed. ‘At least you’re not screaming this time.’