Neal Asher - The Gabble

‘You can only communicate with the submind directly. Who will communicate with Geronamid when you have withdrawn,’ said Hera. ‘But you know that.’

Daes felt the network gathering behind him like a looming shadow. Geronamid had chosen this location because of the spider creatures outside. He saw in an instant that their braincases possessed sufficient room for primitive intelligence, and that their mouthparts were sufficiently complex for the fast development of tool-using ability. Nothing would be lost, as the bulk of each of the thousands of Csorian intelligences he contained could be stored as a picotech construct in each insectile mind. But those intelligences would be unable to immediately bloom.

Transferred down the generations whilst the creatures were subtly impelled towards development of more complex brains, it would be millennia before the Csorian race could be reborn. This option was unacceptable to the multitude whilst such viable intelligences as Daes himself and these AIs were available. He must take Geronamid, subsume that AI.

‘Yes, I do know that,’ he said.

The planetwide network had stalled, all his mentality now focused on this moment. He felt the link establish to the orbital submind, and replayed Hera’s words: Who will communicate with Geronamid when you have withdrawn. This meant that the submind possessed some way of linking with the AI Geronamid in total. There had to be a way for himself to get through before the submind was destroyed.

The comlink to the orbital submind opened, and Daes slid into it like syrup into a sore throat. The safety controls and trips he had observed on his first attempt, he easily circumvented as his awareness flooded up into orbit, subversion programs uncoiling in the silicon logic of the submind like tight-wound snakes. In a nanosecond he found the underspace link to Geronamid in total and prepared himself to storm that bastion. Then something flooded out of the link; vast and incomprehensible. His subversion programs began to consume themselves. He felt a huge amused awareness bearing down on him with crushing force. Then that force eased.

I offer you only two choices.

Through allowable awareness Daes saw the massive geosat poised above the planet.

There was no possibility of mistaking its purpose. It was one long internally polished barrel ringed by the toroid of a giant fusion reactor. In some areas the weapon had acquired the name ‘sun gun’, which seemed an inadequate description for something that could raise square kilometres of its target to a million degrees Celcius in less time than it took to blink — a blink that would see all the stored intelligences gone.

Destruction?

Geronamid replied: Is one choice. I have known for long enough that the Csorian node contains the zipped minds of some members of that race, ready to be implanted and unzipped in another race that has the capacity to take them. That second race will not be the human race. I could have destroyed the node, but that is not my wish. When you reattain your full capability the human race will be on an equal if not superior footing to you.

It will take thousands of years, Daes replied.

You have slept for longer than that.

Almost with a subliminal nod Daes drew back down the informational corridor of the comlink, flooded through Hera, and back into his human body. For a moment he gazed at Hera, then he turned to the door of the house and stepped through and outside. She followed him as he walked into the jungle and stood observing the spider creatures in the trees.

‘This then, is completion of my sentence,’ said Daes.. just him.

‘More life than you would have enjoyed,’ she replied.

He inspected his hand as the skin began to peel and the substance of his flesh began to sag. Quickly seating himself he pushed those hands into soft cold ground. Inside him the intelligences separated and began transmitting into the network established in the area. In the transference they took with them the substance of his body, widening channels through the ground to the nanoscopic then microscopic, up the trunks of the trees, penetrating the hanging spider creatures through clinging complex feet. His own awareness breaking apart, Daes felt the subliminal agony he would have felt at his execution, as he similarly disintegrated. Csorian minds occupied primitive braincases, and spider creatures crawled down from the trees with ill-formed ideas, hopes and ambitions.

Hera gazed up into the sky at the descending shuttle, then returned her attention to the creature crouching by the scaled bulb of a large cycad. It was gnawing away with the intricate cutlery of its mouthparts — behaviour that had never before been observed. But then there was a lot of that now. Some had begun to build spherical nests around their egg-clusters and to defend them from other predators whilst the eggs ripened and hatched, still others plucked hard thorns from the leaf tips of cycads and used them to spear their prey.

As the shuttle landed in the jungle behind her, she watched the creature back off from what it was doing and turn towards her, waving its forelimbs in the air. The noise of the shuttle engines then sent it scuttling into the undergrowth. She walked over to the cycad and inspected the creature’s work. Neatly incised into the scales of the cycad was an ‘8’ turned on its side — the sign for infinity.

She did not know if that was a suitable remnant to bequeath.

‘Goodbye, Daes,’ she said, and turned away.

A sand shark broke through the top face of the dune only to be snatched by a crab-bird and shredded in mid-air. Hirald squatted down, turned on her chameleonwear and faded into the violet sand, only her Toshiba goggles and the blunt snout of her singun visible. The crab-bird was a small one, but she had quickly learnt never to underestimate them. If the prey was too large for one to take, it would take pieces instead. No motile source of protein was too large to attack.

The shame was that all the life-forms on Vatch were based on left-helix proteins, so to a crab-bird human flesh was completely without nourishment. The birds did not know this and just became irritable as their hunger increased. The circle was vicious.

The bird stripped the shark of its blade-legs and armoured mandibles and flew off with the bleeding and writhing torso, probably to feed to its chick. Hirald stood up and faded back into existence; a tall woman in a tight-fitting body suit webbed with cooling veins and hung with insulated pockets. On her back she carried a desert survival pack, for the look of things. The singun went into a button-down holster that looked as if it might hold only a simple projectile weapon, not the formidable device it did hold. She removed her goggles, mask and hat, and tucked them away in one of her many pockets before moving on across the sand. Her thin features, blue eyes and long blonde hair were exposed to oven temperatures and skin-flaying ultraviolet. Such had been the way of things for many weeks now. Occasionally she drank some water; a matter of form, just in case anyone was watching.

He was called, inevitably, Snow, but with his plastron mask and dust robes it was not immediately evident he was an albino. The mask, made from the shell of an Earth-import terrapin, was what identified him to those who knew of him — that, and his tendency to leave corpses behind him. At last count the reward for his stasis-preserved testicles was twenty thousand shillings, or the equivalent value in precious metals like copper or manganese. Many people had tried for the reward and their epitaph was just that: they had tried. Three people at the water station, on the edge of the Menilar flat, were waiting to try. They had weapons, strength and skill, balanced against the crippling honour code of the Andronache. Snow had all the former and no honour code. Born on Earth so long ago even he doubted his memories of the time, he had long since dispensed with anything that might get in the way of plain survival.