Ian Douglas - Dark Mind

“So what do we do about it?”

“Unknown. Improved lines of communication will help.”

“Of course it would. The problem is we can’t even understand them now .”

The ephemerals try to deceive us …

The ephemerals are of no consequence …

We should investigate the Rosette intelligence …

Who’d said that? Gray checked the datastream, and had Konstantin-2 tease out the tagline on the statement. It was the Sjhlurrr.

The Sjhlurrr posed an interesting problem for those studying the Sh’daar Collective of species, Gray thought. According to the data acquired twenty years ago, the red-golden slugs appeared to be less psychologically attached to a particular body image than were humans. Evidently, they’d used advanced genetic techniques to alter their ponderous and often inconvenient forms, transferring their considerable intellects into other, smaller and more mobile organic bodies in myriad shapes and sizes.

“I wonder,” McKennon said, “if that’s the Sjhlurrr’s real shape.”

She seemed to be reading his thoughts. “I thought the Refusers rejected the idea of genetic manipulation.”

“Some did. But just as not all of the ur-Sh’daar went along with the technologies that kicked off their singularity, not all members of a species buy into a single ideology or meme. Think of how diverse human beliefs are.”

“I guess so. It’s easy to see all aliens as alike …”

“There are some. One F’heen is pretty much identical to every other F’heen in its swarm, both genetically and in its worldview. They form telepathic group minds, so they kind of have to all look at the world the same way, not only within their home swarm, but among all swarms. But for most other species? No, they’re as much individuals within their own groups as are humans.”

Gray thought about that statement for a moment. While he agreed in principle, he was not completely convinced. For a long time, humans had assumed that the near-mythic Sh’daar were a single alien species, the monolithic power behind an alliance of galactic species within the T primeepoch that they’d set to attacking humans. When the America battlegroup had first traveled back in time to the N’gai Cluster, Humankind had discovered that the Sh’daar were, in fact, an assembly of several dozen star-faring species working together … an empire of sorts, spanning both space and time, united in the need to stop other species from entering their own technological singularities.

And something about that idea simply did not make sense. Gray felt like he was tantalizingly close to seeing a larger picture, a motive behind Sh’daar decisions and actions, something that humans had not yet grasped. It had to do with what McKennon had just said about diversity within the separate species … but he couldn’t quite grasp it.

With a mental shrug, he decided to look at it later. Maybe Konstantin-2 would be able to help pin down what was bothering him.

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