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“The local conditions are considerably more severe than that,” a voice responded in his head.

He turned, studying the speaker, the movement a trifle clumsy. The speaker also wore a temporary body, one grown specially to withstand cold and vacuum. A cold-adapted Perceiver had been grafted in with the sensor cluster; its eyes regarded him emotionlessly.

“Actually, I thought that would be a decent name for the planet,” »
DEVCAMERON
« replied.

“The word ‘frost’ describes a meteorological condition in which a thin layer of ice forms on cold surfaces exposed to a particular gas, usually water vapor or carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. There is no atmosphere here, save for the trace subliming from the surface ice, and—”

“Never mind,” he interrupted. “It was just a thought. Not important.”

“Thoughts give shape, content, and meaning to the universe,” the DalRiss said. “None are unimportant.”

»
DEVCAMERON
« didn’t want to discuss it further. He’d not thought he would miss his own kind in this form of existence. He had plenty of sims stored in his replicated memory that he could relive at need, but there were times…

The DalRiss were good traveling companions, all in all, but they took things so damned literally. They understood wonder, certainly, but they were baffled by such a simple thing as poetry. Or… »
DEVCAMERON
« thought ruefully, perhaps poetry was not such a simple concept after all. Sometimes he marveled that he still appreciated the art, even now, after losing his humanity.

But the DalRiss were
so
different, and in so many ways. The Frost misunderstanding was a case in point. They didn’t understand the human need to give names to places. Hell, they didn’t even have names for one another… or if they did, they were names based on their individual life energies, as untranslatable as an EEG tracing, or a fingerprint. Their name for him was sort of a mentally shouted impression of being, one filtered through his Naga’s brain—»
DEVCAMERON
«, a kind of instantly recognizable “Hey, you!”

Trying to explain to the DalRiss that he was referring to a name, Robert Frost, that he wanted to have a name for the world instead of the vague, chilly impression of lifelessness they were using, that Frost had been a poet speaking of human emotions, that emotions were…

Just the thought of it made him tired, and there was still a lot to do.

For »
DEVCAMERON
,« though, this world would remain “Frost,” a memorial to the twentieth-century poet who’d pronounced the world’s epitaph.

“There is nothing here alive,” the DalRiss voice reminded him after a time. Was it impatient? “This world is empty.”

He turned slowly, once again, facing the speaker. “Possibly. But I’m curious about whether anyone used to live here. It would… it would tell us about the beings who destroyed this world’s suns.”

“We are wondering about something, »
DEVCAMERON
«.”

“Yes?”

“Why is it that you turn your body when you wish to speak with a Riss who is physically present? Are you having difficulty with your Perceivers?”

“No.” »
DEVCAMERON
« chuckled to himself, deep within his thoughts. One of his problems in adjusting to these temporary bodies was the fact that, where real DalRiss rarely thought in terms of front or back, he retained a human preference for one direction which he still thought of as “forward.”

For some time now, »
DEVCAMERON
« had not been a corporeal entity; and wearing a body again, even a strange one in a strange and hostile environment, was a relief, as if it reminded him of an anchor he’d mislaid.

His original human brain had been destroyed with his body, of course, at Herakles, but its patterns, including all of its memories, its identity of self, its perceptions and knowledge, had been retained by small communications-trained Nagas occupying other living ships of the DalRiss fleet. When the ship holding his physical body had been incinerated, his mind—the set of software running on his wetware that constituted his thoughts, his memories, his sense of
self
—had been resident in those other ships, riding in a Naga copy of his brain. Aboard ship, his “body” was the ship itself, or any of the multiple ships of the fleet, wherever Nagas were resident; during the fleet’s rare planetfalls, one of the small Naga subsets that had patterned his brain flowed into a carefully designed niche inside his artificial and temporary skull. »
DEVCAMERON
« could not sense any real difference… save for the trouble he had navigating, or when he forgot and turned the radially symmetrical body without need.

There were other things as well, he was realizing. He missed intelligent human companionship. He missed conversations where he didn’t have to explain concepts like “poetry” or “names.” He missed specific people, individuals whose differences sparked and fired his own thoughts, generating new ideas that let him know that he was alive.

And, oh,
God
how he missed sex, despite the fact that he didn’t have a body. He was no longer aroused by hormones triggered by thoughts, of course… but the thoughts remained, and the habit patterns of desire remained closely linked with them. Even a decent ViRsex simulation would have helped, but for that a sophisticated AI was needed, an AI with a better understanding of what it was to be human than these Nagas and DalRiss had.

Hell, even just the sensation of another human’s touch, fingertip feather-light on skin, or hearty clap on the shoulder, or hand squeezing arm, with no thought of sex in the contact at all…

He’d lost so much. He’d thought that, given time enough, he would forget.

Resigned, he focused his attention on the task at hand. He was looking for some sign of intelligence.

Normally, such a search would have been doomed to failure, if only because a planet was immense, the indicators of intelligence tiny and scattered and, in the case of Frost, at least, flooded first by fire, then by ice. The DalRiss, even with the help of their Perceivers, still had trouble recognizing nonliving organization or artifacts; it had to be alive for them to understand it, to really
know
it in the sense that humans knew and understood something by seeing it.

But he had scanned the surface as they’d approached, absorbing the configurations of black rock and white ice, then feeding the patterns through a set of programs loaded onto his borrowed Naga brain that tested those shapes for fractals. In nature, most forms were either random, or they unfolded in repeating iterations that followed the mathematical language of fractal patterns. Shapes that showed order without the iterations of fractals were, most likely, artificial.

And he’d seen such. Even without the fractal detection routine, he’d seen certain regular spacings of rock on ice that had reminded him of photos of cities taken from orbit. There was no proof in that observation alone, of course. Lots of natural phenomena could mimic the regularity or the geometry of artificial structures.

But it was highly suspicious, and the fractal routine had agreed, returning a probability of eighty-two percent that what he’d glimpsed was not a natural formation. The DalRiss ship had landed close to what he suspected was an enormous structure mostly submerged in ice. Accompanied by the lone DalRiss, he walked toward an upthrust black cliff a few tens of meters distant. Behind him—he really could see it without turning with his all-round visual organs—the DalRiss ship rested where its Achievers had materialized it on blue-white ice, a black starfish shape the size of a small city.

He wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for, but he found it almost at once. The rock cliff, extending several meters above the ice, was rough-hewn and rugged, split in places by deep cracks, and could easily have been natural after all,
could
have been… except for the corroded, outstretched fingers of metal embedded in the rock’s face.

Gently, he reached out one of his manipulatory tendrils, stroking the length of one of those bars. It felt like metal—bitterly cold, of course, and so brittle from millennia-old oxidation that parts of the surface flaked away at his touch. There were six curved, flat bars, appearing eerily like rust-brown human ribs protruding from the stone. What had they been like, the people who had built here once? Nothing remotely like humans, he was certain of that much. He wished they could take the time to excavate and explore, and knew it was impossible. He wanted to know them, know something concrete about them.

This much they’d had in common with the children of Earth, he knew already: they’d been builders, manipulators of their environment. And perhaps that was kinship enough, for it made them more like humans in at least that way than humans were like either the DalRiss or the Naga.

He wished there were some way of running an analysis on the metal. The ribs might be highly oxidized iron, or they could be the remnants of some more sophisticated alloy, but he couldn’t tell by touch alone, and the DalRiss weren’t very good with nonbiological assays or tests. A Naga might be able to tell—they were superb at chemical analysis—but a Naga unprotected in this environment would freeze solid in seconds. Perhaps he could break a piece off and give it to a one aboard ship later.

Breaking a chunk of the metal off, though, seemed like sacrilege, a defacing of a monument that had stood here unchanging for two millennia. There was no other way to tell what the things were, no way to even guess at what they might once have been a part of… but he didn’t want to commit that desecration.

But there was no denying the fact that they were artificial.

“This is what you sought?” the voice said in his mind.

“Yes. Someone built here, once.”

“I… don’t understand what I am seeing.”

He moved a tendril along one of the metal ribs. The DalRiss were at a serious handicap here. They could directly sense unliving metal only through their Perceivers, and their own experience did not include building large structures. They grew everything they needed, from houses to entire cities to starships. How to explain? “There is no natural process I know that could have caused this. I think it may be part of the framework of a building.”

“Like a skeleton?”

“Like a skeleton, exactly.”

“And those who grew it were native to this world?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it could have been a colony, or an outpost. But the fractal images suggest that this planet was fairly heavily built up. Lots of very large structures. That means a large population.”

A large population that had been incinerated.

Deliberately?

There were still too many unanswered questions. The builders of this structure on Frost might have been long gone by the time their stars exploded; there was even the possibility that they had been the builders of the Device, that the Device itself was unrelated to the nova.

But »
DEVCAMERON
« could not shake the feeling, as cold and as chilling and as bleak as the glacial landscape about him, that the double sun had been deliberately exploded to feed the Device, that someone was feeding it now for reasons only its builders knew… and that whoever had done the deed had done so either in complete ignorance of, or with a complete lack of concern for, the beings living on Frost.

And »
DEVCAMERON
« wasn’t sure which possibility was the more terrifying.

Chapter 8

Perhaps the most surprising discovery of the mid-twenty-sixth century was the incredible diversity of separate evolutionary systems. And this diversity was expressed not simply in alien biologies, but in mutually alien philosophical outlooks as well. Human, DalRiss, and Naga, it was clear, each possessed worldviews that diverged remarkably from one another, in part because of differences in their physical senses, in part because of their origins and their environments. And in some ways, the Web’s picture of the universe proved more disparate still.

—
Reflections of Intelligence

D
R
. C. N
ELSON
B
RYCE

C
.
E
. 2575

»
DEVCAMERON
« had remained on Frost for the equivalent of several standard days, probing among those ruins that were free of the vast plains of encroaching ice. He’d found nothing that told him more about either the inhabitants of the dead world or the calamity that had overtaken them; and, in the end, he’d been glad to shed his artificial DalRiss body and return to the freer, more spacious life within the DalRiss cityship.

An Achiever died; the immense vessel vanished from the ice plain, rematerializing in space a few thousand kilometers from the enigmatic Device.

The Device remained in space, midway between the two white dwarf suns, still funneling the infalling streams of glowing star stuff into nothingness. The other DalRiss cityships were where he’d left them, watching. There were no answers here, either, it seemed. Not yet.

“Five more spacecraft have emerged from an area close to the Device,” a DalRiss voice said in »
DEVCAMERON’S
« mind. “They traveled directly toward one or the other of the dwarf stars.”

“Was there any reaction to your presence?”

“None. We tried again to communicate on a wide variety of channels. It is possible, however, that they use frequency bands unavailable to us.”

“And no sign of life on the vessels themselves?”

“No. Of course, we would not be able to sense life hidden behind dead matter.”

“I understand.”

Still, it was curious. Surely those vessels could sense the strange fleet slowly orbiting the Device, eighty flat disks, each one hundreds of meters across, sprouting multiple arms and radiating energy signatures that spoke emphatically of life.

»
DEVCAMERON
« decided to do some research.

Each DalRiss vessel possessed a sizable fragment of a full-grown planetary Naga, a kind of organic communications network that invisibly bound the fleet together. When linked by radio or lasercom beams, each fragment became one node of a massively parallel organic computer with impressive stores of memories. He’d spent considerable time after his return interrogating that organism, which he thought of as the fleet Naga. While not nearly so massive as a planetary Naga, and with only a fraction of a planetary Naga’s hand-me-down memories, the being possessed enough memory chains among its far-flung nodes to enable »
DEVCAMERON
« to trace back through several generations of the being, searching for some link between the Naga and the ships glimpsed traveling between the Device and the white dwarf suns.