Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

Time: Something clicked and in the nebula shaped like a spirochete, a bolt of energy moved from one side to the other, seventeen light-years, and then vaulted into pure space. Pure space was another two hundred thousand light-years, and the energy, now compacted, whisked through it like a fish through water, accelerating, the inside curiously static.

Time: Something attacked the energy, some cosmic turbulence or another intelligence, impossible to tell, and the energy felt itself being squeezed, became sentient then, and fought back. Somewhere in the Crab cluster, the attacker and the intelligence fought, and the battle lasted for fifteen thousand years. Then the attacker fell away like ash and the energy continued on its journey. Intelligence withdrew. At some subliminal level it meditated.

The system rotated around a small Class B star, the star almost a dwarf, in a far sector of the Milky Way. The sun in normal cycle would approach nova in fifteen billion years, burn out then and consume the system. Now it was still on the upswing. The radiance from this star drew the approaching energy to life once again and it became sensate. It probed through channels of recollection in a way that both was and was not conscious.

It landed on the third planet.

Although the energy, long compressed for the journey, was only the size of a small stone now, three inches across, six inches wide and deep, the impact tore at it as it skittered through the sands, and for a long, long time it existed in a state of nonconsciousness. At some base level, it struggled for survival, to combat the injury of the impact, and it did not seem that it would survive, but the traveler was strong—its makers had prepared it for this—and after an inconceivably long time, it began to gather strength once again. It had passed the point of survival. Moistened by rain, sheltered by the sands, the energy slowly returned to its full awareness, and then it broke free of the stone, probing with fine tentacles of consciousness for contact.

Contact: It found the minds that it was seeking. The minds were vegetative, possessed intelligence unlike any conventional notions of reason… but they were linked in a clear dependency, a fine network of connection spreading from one mind to the next, and in the midst of those connections the stone sent, for the second time in its journey, a bolt of energy, much weaker, but sufficient to do the necessary. Under the thrust of that bolt, the minds quickened. Something happened to them, the connections became broader, richer, deeper in stroke. They keened to one another. Connection became a fine mesh.

Now under the guidance of the stone, the quickened intelligences were working. From various parts there was a gathering: instructions were passed and with precision the next part of the project, one that could only be accomplished through directed effort, was started. The minds scurried.

The stone beneath them extended visual centers to see what was happening, and all was going as it should and it felt pleasure. Available to it was a welter of emotions, but it discarded all but the pleasure, worked upon it, then sent it on a narrow thread to those it controlled. They throbbed with gratification.

The slabs grew. Seven of them on the desert, white, six feet in height, cunningly hollowed out, where at the stone’s orders, their horrid secrets began to pulsate. Complex readjustments were made in the biological system of the intelligences; from those changes came something that both was and was not like them. One within a slab, guarded from the landscape, those things grew.

At length, the stone on the desert felt the vast weakness that comes when a task is completed, knowing this without questioning. Although it was very complex and subtle, it was ultimately only a tool, and when a tool’s work is done, it must be put away. Without remorse, regret, or a sense of loss, the thing encapsulated in the stone considered the fact of its death and then, almost casually, shut down certain intricate facets. The energy within it flickered, flamed, and perished.

The thing died, and at the instant of its death, a hundred million light-years away, in a checking-center that had been wailing since the journey began, a message was received. OPERATIVE the message said, although in no language that could be understood, for it was a language not composed of sound but of light and distance.

Inside the towers, things grew.

The ants were breeding now, and what came out of the queens in the slabs were ants of a different sort, inheriting the new method of connection. The older ants, some of them, clung tenaciously to their own habits, but the life cycles of ants are quite short, and those that emerged from the queens were strong. The larvae burst from the eggs, rested awhile, and then foraged out into the desert on their complex but ultimately simple task.

An old worker ant, stumbling through one of the slabs, passed into the queen’s belly and attempted to rupture it. The queen screamed without sound and in a few seconds there were one hundred, two hundred soldiers that entered the slab and tore the worker ant apart before it had time to flee. But the martyrdom of the worker seemed to inspire a horde of other workers, the older ones, the ones who had been there before something (which their intelligences could only understand as an intrusion) had happened, and they fought fiercely, desperately, the green and red of their bodies locked into the black and white streaked forms of the new soldiers.

The battle went on inside the slab under the strange, hollow eyes of the great queen, five feet high, who watched implacably from a hundred pinpoints of light, and for a while it seemed that the older workers might actually win because they were fighting with the inheritance of a hundred million years of knowledge. For them and their ancestors it had always been this way, and their cilia and mouths stroked out vicious patterns…

but the battle turned, it would have to turn, the soldiers were faster and cleverer than the older workers, and they had, under the eyes of the great queen, a seeming contempt toward death that the workers simply could not match. Five hundred, a thousand of the black and white ants fell, but more were spewed forth into the slab, the unmoving queen watching, and soon enough the older workers began to fall, first in hundreds and then thousands, red and green bodies covering the bottom of the slab like ash, spilling out into the desert, their juices mingling into and spotting the sands and—

—The soldiers carried their dead out of the slab and buried them with the corpses of the enemy and in the other five slabs the same thing, at intervals, was happening.

Soon there were very few red and green ants left, and those that were had merely inherited pigmentation.

All of this took about six years that, to the queens, were negligible. Time was no factor. No one noticed the slabs.

The rabbit sprang from a clump of bushes, seeing something that its brain registered as terrible danger, then attempted to break free and run the length of the strip, past the slabs, into a clump of mesquite that looked safe. Ants appeared in its path, leapt upon it, but the rabbit brushed them off, one foot, then the other clearing its hindquarters, throwing off the bodies of the ants, spewing them from its mouth. The ants were small, and although the rabbit was possessed with fear, it did not seem that they posed any danger; but they kept on coming, emerging from the sands to seize the rabbit’s throat, some of them getting into the corners of its eyes.