Symbionts (37 page)

“Still, that is no reason for us to involve ourselves in your war,” a third DalRiss said. “The movement of that city had nothing to do with you or with the Imperials.”

“We recognize now the need to employ our Perceivers when dealing with humans,” the second voice said. Each voice was distinctive, but Dev was finding it difficult to determine which particular DalRiss was speaking at any given time. The sounds his cornel was translating were generated deep within those crescent-shaped heads, and there was no external change in posture or gesture or in the arrangement of those leather folds to suggest which one was making them.

“A Perceiver was present when Katya Alessandro came to us three days ago. By shedding those
ri
-opaque garments, however, it allowed our Watchers, those left to watch the human settlement, to see it as more than emptiness within the
Yashra-ri.
We recognize the physical discomfort that act must have caused. It is why we are here, knowing that you humans wish to participate in our version of the Dance.”

“These Perceivers,” Brenda put in suddenly. “Are they here now?”

In answer, one of the DalRiss gestured with several of its smaller tentacles, slender threads that quivered and flickered with such energy that it took Dev a moment to realize that the being
was
gesturing, pointing to one of the “parasites” on its body.

There were several different species of smaller life-forms living on the larger, Dev realized now, and possibly some of them
were
combs or baby DalRiss. The particular creature the Riss was pointing to, however, was as wide as Dev’s hand and half again longer. Superficially, it resembled an octopus, gray-green mottled skin glistening with some mucuslike secretion, but with five short tentacles instead of eight long ones. Nearly the whole of the upper surface of that body was taken up by a single, external organ very much like a fist-sized eye, one made of some glassy, yellow-translucent stuff and covered over by a clear membrane.

Within the translucence, varying numbers of inky holes opened, drifted, then closed over again, seemingly at random, though there were never fewer than two nor more than six. These, Dev realized, were the multiple pupils of a single eye, their mobility and separation providing excellent depth perception, their numbers permitting greater light-gathering power in low-light conditions. It joined the group, three pupils focusing on Dev as it braced itself on three splayed tentacles. One of the DalRiss stood behind it, a single black tentacle snaking down from atop the Dal-symbiont’s back and attaching itself to the creature’s head, somewhere behind the eye.

“This is one of our Perceivers,” the voice told the humans. “We first designed them when we realized there were radiations in the natural world that we could not sense directly, but which could potentially carry a great deal of information about the world around us.”

“Is it… intelligent?” Its strange gaze certainly felt intelligent to Dev.

“Is it self-aware?” Katya added.

“Of course. It must be, to process information which we, the Riss, are not designed to sense. It is what you would call symbiosis, where they feed upon the Riss as the Riss feeds upon them.”

“Feeds?” The word held a queasy fascination for Dev. Did the parasite-descended DalRiss see their relationships with all of their created creatures in terms of masters and… food?

There was a moment’s hesitation, as though the being were reconsidering its words. “A holdover from our past,” it said, finally. “You might say instead, ‘as the Riss links to them.’ ”

“Ah.”

Still he felt an unpleasant stirring. Man had only recently reached a crossroads of biological development that the Riss had passed millennia before by genegineering artificial intelligence. For a long time, research in this area had been restrained by certain ethical concerns, by the question of whether it was morally right to create a sentient and reasoning being for some particular purpose—as research animal or slave or even as
objet d’art.

Eventually, though, the power to do a thing had found the will to do it, despite ethical considerations, and the genies had been the result. Mingling various animal and even artificial genes with the human genome had resulted in a number of species, subspecies, and types, from miners and heavy laborers to the startlingly beautiful
ningyo,
the delicate but fully human-looking sex toys that were a mark of distinction among Earth’s elite. There were even rumors of sentient beings created as art, living sculptures unable to move, unable even to die, designed only to experience sensations programmed by their designers and to be self-aware. That, for Dev, represented perhaps the fullest possible horror of a technology used without ethical constraint.

Evidently, the DalRiss had passed that point in their technological evolution long ago, for now they incorporated intelligence into many of their biological tools with a casual nonchalance that Dev found chilling. He’d heard, for instance, that the cornels were intelligent but not self-aware, a concept he’d found hard to imagine at first until he’d remembered certain human computer systems were designed within the same limitations, and probably for the same reasons.

Other Riss inventions, though, seemed to incorporate both intelligence and self-awareness. The creatures they called “Achievers,” for instance, played a role in the DalRiss version of a faster-than-light drive. If what he’d heard was true, they died after completing the task for which they’d been engineered… “became empty,” as their Riss masters put it. Presumably, the Achievers had also been designed to be content with their deliberately abbreviated lives; they wouldn’t feel cheated or mistreated if they’d been made to anticipate the emptiness that ended their existence as the culmination of their lives. “I got us where we were going; now I can die content.” Dev had navigated plenty of starships in his day, and the thought gave him a shudder of sympathy.

“The Perceivers opened the sky to the Great Dance,” one of the DalRiss was saying. “Without them, the next step in the Dance would be the emptiness that will follow. Instead, we can become Sky Dancers.”

“Sky Dancers?” Brenda repeated. She turned to Ozaki, who shrugged and shook his head.

“A few of us take the Great Dance to the stars,” the radio voice explained. “Many have already left for our ancestral home. Others will be leaving soon, before emptiness claims our suns.”

Several of the humans gasped surprise. “What?” Vic Hagan said sharply.

“Please.” Brenda shook her head. “What do you mean, emptiness claims your suns?”

“Emptiness,” Dev repeated. Somehow, he’d heard the connotations behind that single word and felt its full meaning. “They’re leaving,” he told the others. “They’re moving their whole ecosystem off world, taking it to the stars.”

“Of course,” one of the DalRiss said, and its voice sounded almost cheerful. “We’d thought that you humans had remained here to help with this new part of the Dance. That was why the actions of those you call the Imperials seemed so bizarre, why we cut off all contact with them.

“But we still need your help. We’ve been wondering if that was why you came.”

“But why are they leaving?” Ozaki wanted to know. “In three years of study, we’d thought this migration they were talking about had to do with their religion. Or with some obscure use of metaphor.”

“It has nothing to do with religion,” Dev said bluntly. Carefully, he glanced up toward the eastern sky, where Alya A was an intensely glaring point of light that caused his protective goggles to darken as his head turned that way. “Or with metaphor. They’ve simply decided to leave before the Alyan suns explode.”

Chapter 26

Our G-class sun lies conveniently in the comfort of middle age, with mass enough to keep it on the Main Sequence for another five or six billion years at least. The orange Ks and red-dwarf Ms, less massive stars, are misers, hoarding their much smaller reserves against the cold of the Ultimate Night. Some may be burning unchanged ten or twenty billion years hence.

As for those stars more massive than Sol, the Fs and the still hotter and more spendthrift As, they are wastrels consuming their hydrogen capital at a rate that will leave them bankrupt in a fraction of the time left to Sol. For an A-5, for example, a measly billion years might be extreme old age.

—
The Stars: A Speculative Odyssey

Dr. Sergei Ulyanov

C.E.
2025

“We do not expect it to happen anytime soon,” one of the DalRiss told them, “even by your standards. But by the standards of the Great Dance, it is clear that our next step must be to the sky.”

“Our understanding of the physics behind the stellar fusion process is still primitive compared to yours,” another said. “We were not even aware of the danger until after our first contacts with humans.”

The Alyan suns, younger by far than cooler stars like Sol, must have already reached the point where helium ash was concentrating in their cores. Soon—at least in cosmic terms—that accumulation of helium would force them off the main sequence. Briefly, they would burn hotter but grow so much larger that their surface temperature would drop, and for some millions of years they would shine as red giants before they began their final and inevitable collapse into white dwarfs.

By that time, of course, their respective planetary systems would have been absorbed or charred lifeless. Dev wondered how a race so life-centered as the DalRiss perceived such an ultimate and absolute extinction.

“The DalRiss were most interested in our understandings of physics and cosmology,” Ozaki said. “We never stopped to consider that it had an, ah, a practical application for them.”

“Evidently it did,” Brenda said. “How long do they have?”

Numbers flickered through Dev’s awareness, drawn from ephemeral data on the Alyan suns. “There’s really no way to come up with an exact figure,” he told the others. “Not unless they have more precise data on their stars’ neutrino fluxes. It could happen any moment. On the other end of the scale, I’d say that fifty million years is a reasonable upper limit.”

“Fifty million years is a long time,” Hagan said, “at least for a civilization. And didn’t you say these guys think and live faster than we do? Hell, for these guys, fifty million years is
forever!”

Katya laughed. “I don’t know. Hey, we’re facing the heat death of the universe in just a hundred billion years or so. We’d better get busy now and figure out where we’re going to go when
that
happens!”

“Cute, Katya,” Dev said. “But remember that the DalRiss think in terms of the transfiguration of entire species.” He hesitated, choosing his words. It was as though he could see DalRiss reasoning, plans tracing particular sets of genes and chromosomes across countless generations. The DalRiss did not have a technically based nanotechnology as the humans did; all of their research and manufacturing on any ultrasmall scale had to be carried out by the
original
nanotech—the biochemistry of cells and enzymes and living systems. With his newly found depth and speed of insight, Dev could see the monumental patience the Alyans needed to carry out even a simple nanotech-scale experiment using tools designed and bred from carefully controlled mutations, which themselves were the products of long, long lines of genetic experimentation, and he felt a surging rush of admiration, even wonder.
Kuso!
Why couldn’t Katya and the others see the miracle of it?

“I suspect,” he said slowly, “that the DalRiss have research programs extending tens of thousands of years into the future. They may have long-range plans, plans encompassing the creation of new species or the alterations of whole worlds, plans that won’t see fruition for millions of years. These people take the long view. To suddenly be told that their suns could grow hot enough to cook them all at any time between tomorrow and a couple of geological ages from now and interrupt everything they’ve been working on would place a pretty rough strain on any long-range ideas they might have.”

The other humans were staring at him. Presumably, the DalRiss were as well, though it was impossible to know for sure where their attentions were directed at any given moment. He spread his hands, pleading. “Good God, people, don’t you understand? Don’t you
see?
Over the past few million years or so, the Riss have taken over every aspect of their ecosystem, every detail. How many native species are there on New America, Katya? How many on Earth? Not just humans or horses or dogs, but insects, fish, grass, nematodes, plankton, amoeba, bacteria. Hell, even viruses, if for no better reason than that I suspect these people use tailored viruses to transmit genetic information when they’re tinkering up a new species. If you assume that all life in a given biome is interdependent with all the rest, if you change even one species, you ultimately change them all. The one thing they can’t control, though, is arguably the most important… the power plant that keeps the whole system running. If they think in terms of control of their environment, the fact that they can’t control their own sun would be intolerable!”

Brenda was first to break the silence. “Frankly, Commodore, we haven’t seen any evidence that they control their environment to the degree you suggest. If they were capable of doing what you claim, then surely the Naga wouldn’t have posed the threat to them that they did.”

“Sure,” Hagan said. “They could have introduced a virus that reproduced within Xeno supracells and made them wipe themselves out. Biological warfare. But from what we learned in the first expedition, the DalRiss had been fighting the Xenos for thousands of years. They’d been pushed off GhegnuRish entirely and were on the verge of losing ShraRish too. They needed us to come along and give them a high-tech edge.”

“Because,” Dev explained, “the Naga live and work and experience on a nanotech scale. If the DalRiss are expert biologists, remember that the Naga are expert chemists… and when you get down to molecular and submolecular scales, there’s no difference whatsoever between the two. I’m guessing, but I would imagine that the DalRiss spent a lot of effort trying to create viral or bacterial weapons for use against the Nagas, and the Nagas just assimilated each weapon and made it harmless… or else turned it on its creators.”