Jackers (32 page)

“It is that,” Dev agreed. “Especially when they never, like we do, just lie back and look up and wonder. What gets me is the idea of their actually bridging such gulfs.”

“Hurling bits of themselves at the stars. The energies involved must be… staggering.”

“Nothing less. You know, on the way here, I ran some calculations, based on what we know, what we
think
we know, from our Xeno links. Assuming one-ton projectiles—”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “A guess, frankly. The actual payload, the seed from which they populate a new planet, is probably all nano and no more massive than my fist. But the pod that carries it must sense other stars, must pick out worlds of proper temperature and magnetic field and, oh, whatever else is important to such a being. And it tacks and steers, somehow, on the Galaxy’s magnetic field. Anyway, the world-Naga must pack one hell of a punch behind those pods when it launches them. Like a magnetic railgun, it must shoot the things skyward with tremendous speed. Not just vee-sub-ee for the planet, but escape velocity for the entire star system. Otherwise the pod would fall short and just orbit in the dark between the stars forever.”

Katya shivered and drew closer. “That can’t be a natural adaptation. It seems to be part of the Naga’s life cycle now, the way it extends itself from world to world, but it couldn’t have been so always.”

“Sure. Picked up along the way, how many billions of years ago? From the little I’ve seen, felt rather, the technology was absorbed from some unlucky, spacefaring culture assimilated early on, maybe from the same source as they acquired their nanotechnic parasites.”

“Parasites?”

“Symbionts, then. Of course, once you get down to nanotech scales, words like ‘organic’ and ‘artificial’ start to lose their meaning.”

“They do, don’t they?” Katya said. “Still, reaching for the stars was never part of their original, their organic evolution. That had to have come later.”

“And why not? The same could be said of us, now that we’re free of Earth.”

“Free?”

He grinned. “Thus speaks the New American revolutionary. Free physically, Kat, if not yet in spirit. That will come. We’re already too different in culture, in ways of thought, for the Empire to hold onto us much longer.”

“And we have the Galaxy as inheritance now.”

“Shared with folk like the Naga and the DalRiss, yes. Both are so different, from each other and from us. I wonder how different the others we’ll meet out there one day might seem?”

“We share starfaring, the three of us.”

“Yeah, only the Xenos do it without even knowing there are such things out there as stars. I wonder how many of those pods are adrift out there, falling forever between the worlds because they didn’t happen to be pointed in the right direction?”

Katya shivered again and he put his arm around her, drawing her close. She’d come out into the night without her accustomed bodysuit, clad only in the white bootslacks and pale blue vest she’d worn to dinner. The vest was open in front, secured only by a silver cord just above her breasts and sheer enough that even in this dim light Dev could make out the oval duskiness of her nipples showing underneath. Though the material contained the same microcircuitry for thermal control as did Dev’s bodysuit, the costume exposed a fair amount of skin and the Heraklean night was distinctly chilly.

“You want to go back inside?”

“No. I want… want to linger here. To enjoy Starrise. And you.”

An hour passed, the heavens wheeling slowly. West, the zodiacal light was fading. East, however, the sky glowed red and pale gray through a band of clouds hugging the horizon, as though with the light of approaching dawn. Minutes passed in long silence, the east growing slowly lighter. Then the clouds vanished and the false dawn was revealed for what it was. Bright, brighter by far than Zeta Herculis, the dazzling star cleared the eastern horizon and touched mountain peaks with blue and silver.

From Mu Herculis, Vega lay but three and a half light-years distant, a diamond-hard, blue-white beacon outshining everything in the sky, bright enough to read by, bright enough to cast distinct shadows on the ground and drown the night’s other stars in glorious luminosity.

But Katya was looking north, toward the dimly seen bulk of the atmosphere generator.

“Dev…”

“Don’t, Katya.” He knew what she was thinking, what she was about to say. “Let’s just say it’s orders—”

“Orders!” Her anger flared, and he felt her tense beneath his arm. “How much death have orders caused already?”

“All right.Duty, then.”

“That’s worse.
I
could be the one going down into the Xeno’s lair tomorrow, as well as you.”

“Could be, but I’d rather that it was me and Vic. You had the last go-round, on Eridu, and it nearly killed you.”

“I remember. How could I forget? But Dev… Love… I don’t want to lose you. Not now. I feel like you’re all I have left.”

The words were at once joy and sadness. She loved him! As he, with newfound certainty, loved her. And yet…

“One of us has to go,” he said reasonably. “We’ve had the most experience with the Xenos, you and I, and we can’t both go, not when we might… uh, might have to make a second try.”

She turned suddenly inside the reach of his arm, putting her own arms around him, embracing him tightly.
Bright, Cameron,
he thought to himself savagely as he hugged her back.
Real bright. Just the right thing to say!

After a time, she pulled back. Her wet face glistened in the luminous diamond glare of Vega.

“It doesn’t matter which of us goes, does it?” she asked. “Let me.”

“You still have trouble with enclosed places, Katya.” He said it bluntly, saw the pain at the truth in her eyes. “General Sinclair knows that too. He probably thought it would go better if the first person to make contact didn’t have… other things on her mind.”

“Maybe. I’m beginning to think Travis Sinclair is a cold, hard man. An AI programmed for political philosophy and military tactics.”

“Because he didn’t let you stay behind on New America? You can do a hell of a lot more good here. Besides, wouldn’t you rather be here with me?”

The attempted lightness fell flat. “I don’t know what I want, Dev. Not anymore. I used to think the rebellion was everything, that it was my reason for being alive. Maybe it still would be, if I wasn’t always seeing people I cared for being sent off to face Imperials or Xenos or God knows what while I’m ordered to safety. I used to think I was doing something, that I was making a difference, somehow. Now I’m beginning to think the Nagas have the right idea. Everything is Self and not-Self, Here or not-Here. What you are and where you are’re all that matter, and nothing else and nobody else in the universe is worth a two-byte download.”

“Delete that,” Dev said. “You’ve got bad data there. Besides, I always had the feeling that the Nagas were missing some of the subtleties of life.”

“What… do you mean?”

“Have you noticed, when you’re linked with one, how ordinary rock takes on a complexity you never noticed before?”

“Yes.…”

“It’s all Rock and not-Rock, sure, but the rock takes on a, I don’t know, a
flavor
you never noticed before. It seems to be tied in with the direction and intensity of the local magnetic field, the temperature, the actual chemical composition of the rock, lots of things I can’t even put names to.”

“The Nagas have senses we can’t even understand,” Katya said. “It only makes sense they’d be aware of things that we’re not.”

“Exactly. But the same is true, the other way around. A Naga misses an awful lot that might seem obvious to us.” He drew closer, tipping her head back with a finger beneath her chin. “Things like this.”

A long time later, they broke the kiss. “Still want to think like a Naga?”

“Mmm. No. I never did, not really. That was just… me. I tend to charge off sometimes before that little
DATA TRANSFER COMPLETE
sign winks on. God, Dev, you be careful down there tomorrow, okay?”

“I will. Remember, each time we’ve run into wild Xenos in the past, they haven’t reacted much to our presence, have let us get right up next to them, in fact. I’m not even sure they’re aware of us at all, save maybe as some sort of natural phenomena, moving rocks, or something. Certainly, they don’t have the same sense of personal space we do, or the flight-or-fight-if-you’re-too-close response of most Earth-born critters. Their evolution must never have included things like a nasty predator sneaking up too close, or an unpleasant neighbor who might whack you over the head with a club and drop you in the stewpot.”

“Nagas don’t have a head to whack.”

“True enough. And it’d take a damned big pot to hold one. But you get the idea.”

Katya was silent for a long time after that. “Dev?” she asked finally.

“Yeah?”

“What good’s it going to do, anyway?”

“What?”

“Talking with the Nagas.”

“You mean besides convincing them not to eat us? To leave our cities and stuff alone?”

“Well, that much is obvious.” Despite her mood, she smiled. “But Sinclair is fixed on this idea of his for enlisting the Nagas, the DalRiss too, for that matter, as allies. I’ve spent a lot of the past few weeks wondering just what good such allies would do. Dev, the Nagas don’t even understand the concept ‘enemy.’ For all that they’ve pushed us off one world after another over the past forty-some years, they don’t understand the idea of ‘war.’ Hell, Fred just barely understands the idea of multiple individuals—that’s what we want him to communicate to the Heraklean Naga, after all—and I think the idea of one individual killing another must he as alien to it as, as, I don’t know. As a Naga’s ideas about the shape of the universe are to us.”

Dev thought about the question for a long moment before answering. “I could download to you the usual platitudes about synergy between alien cultures,” he said after a while. “You’ve heard that sort of thing from Sinclair often enough. Diversity is good precisely because two cultures have different ways of thinking. Together they come up with things undreamed of by either.”

“Sure, but we’re not talking about a culture here, Dev. We’re talking about a lump of black, sentient tissue mixed with God knows how many trillions of nanotech constructs that lives in the dark, eats rock, and thinks about stuff that no human could even imagine. Where’s the synergy going to come from in that? Humans from different cultures
are
still human, after all. They have something in common. They talk and sing and make love and want good things for their children. They look at the sky and wonder. The Nagas are just too different.”

“Hmm, maybe. Still, I have the gut feeling that no matter how alien the beasty is, putting us and it together is going to be like tuning in the microsingularities in a starship QPT. You’re going to get one hell of a lot of energy out of the system that just wasn’t there before. More than you’d expect from something so tiny.”

Dev wondered if he’d chosen the right simile. In a starship’s QPT, the resonance between two neutron-sized black holes yielded tremendous energy, true… energy enough to vaporize the largest starship and everything within several thousand kilometers if it avalanched.

What energies might the pairing of Xeno and human liberate… and would they be any easier to control?

Katya stirred, restless. “How… far down do you think you’ll have to go tomorrow?”

“Wish I knew. Depends on the Naga, doesn’t it?” He could feel her trembling.

“Here…” Reaching out, he took her left hand in his, the circuitries embedded in the heels of their palms touching. They kissed again, the tingle of their shared sensations racing up their arms and melding them more closely as one.

Dev had heard that some within the
Shakai
—that blend of culture, lifestyle, and class that encompassed the upper strata of Japanese society—had circuit implants grown in lips, genitals, and other erogenous zones in order to boost physical sensation. He’d always scorned such peripherals. They were hardly needed, and any increase in sensation was most likely psychosomatic in any case. Neural implant circuitry was not primarily designed to enhance sensation, but to carry data to and from the cephlink. Psychosomatically enhanced or not, the kiss went on for a long, long time and continued after Dev broke contact with her palm to let both hands stray beneath her opened vest.

“I want you,” she whispered. “Let’s go back.”

“There’s nothing but the ViRcom modules,” Dev replied. “We might try linking through a two-slotter warstrider.…”

“No. Not ViRsex. I want reality. I want
you.”

Dev blinked. Most couples with full-link capabilities preferred virtual sex when they could arrange it. Despite occasional claims to the contrary, there was absolutely no way to distinguish sensations generated within the brain from those generated without, and there was the advantage of being able to create any desired romantic backdrop, drawn from memory or from purest fantasy. Dev knew of people, men and women both, who claimed never to engage in animal grapplesex, as they called it, at all. Children were more safely conceived in clinics, and ViRsex was cleaner, more comfortable, and less prone to stress, and in general more “real” than the real thing.

Dev wasn’t sure he agreed with that philosophy. He’d engaged in both types of play, finding advantages and delights in both. He’d never engaged in real sex with Katya, however, and the intensity of her need surprised him.

“It, uh, it might be hard finding privacy.”

“We’ll find it. Please, Dev. Tonight I don’t want to feel you against me,
in
me, through some God-damned machine.”

And later, lying together in the narrow and frankly uncomfortable cot in her quarters back in the hab dome, Dev had to admit that he agreed completely.

There was a psychological technique made possible by cephlinks and personal analogues, a way of literally talking to one’s self. The Japanese called it
jigano hanashi-ai,
the “ego-discussion.” On the Frontier it was known as “jigging.” A person could literally call up fragments of his own personality to discuss problems. Dev’s included analogues he thought of as The Tactician, that cold and analytical part of himself that planned and executed battles; The Warrior, a frightening incarnation exuding the confidence of technomegalomania; The Kid, who was Dev at seventeen. There were others.