Cormac closed up his spacesuit’s visor, hit purge, and unstrapped himself while a pump rapidly drew the cockpit air into a storage cylinder aboard the craft. He touched a panel beside him and a wing door rose, while his seat swung towards the opening. Stepping out, then down onto the polished ceramal, he looked to one side and saw a row of pseudopods silhouetted against the ice giant, waving like cilia. Considering his previous encounters with other incarnations of this entity, it surprised him that the pseudopods did not all gather around him menacingly, for Dragon loved to play such games. He wondered what the game would be this time, and if Dragon really understood how the odds were stacked against it.
He trudged the few yards up to the nearest wall of the building. The airlock there consisted of an outer metal door and an inner shimmer-shield. Quickly going through, he entered the single room of which the building consisted. It looked like the housing for a small swimming pool, only the pool itself contained scaled flesh. Controlling his spacesuit via his gridlink, Cormac retracted the visor down into the neck ring, then collapsed the segmented helmet back over his head so it settled into a collar at the back of his neck. He sniffed: familiar terrarium smell, cloves and something slightly putrid. Moving around the edge of this minor expanse of Dragon’s surface, he finally came to a small area off to one side containing VR and laboratory equipment. These were intended to be used by those who wanted to get this close—Mika being foremost of thousands aboard the Jerusalem who had volunteered. He sat in a VR chair, right elbow resting on the chair arm and chin cupped in his hand, and contemplated Dragon.
‘Are we all sitting comfortably?’ he asked over his gridlink.
‘I do not sit,’ Jerusalem replied.
‘Oh, get on with it,’ said Mika impatiently.
Only these two, excepting Dragon itself, could speak to him directly while he was here. Many thousands of others listening in could lodge requests, ideas or questions, which were filtered through Jerusalem and stored ready in Cormac’s gridlink should he require them. Through that same device he checked his access to many files and to the controls of the equipment within the building. The holographic projectors specifically interested him.
‘Dragon, I think it is time for our little chat,’ he said out loud.
How many words of dialogue had that Dragon expert Darson recorded all those years ago when Dragon stood as four conjoined spheres down on the surface of Aster Colora? Millions? And how few solid facts. As far as they went, Cormac had learnt so much more in his own brief exchanges with the alien entity. It was all about exigency: it seemed that the less critical the situation Dragon found itself in the more Delphic its pronouncements tended to be. Cormac supposed that having nowhere to run and having many CTDs attached to its surface would be making it feel pretty exigent right now. However, its lies might be even more convoluted. He needed to judge the answers behind the answers.
‘Dragon?’ he began again.
The smell of cloves grew stronger and there seemed a sudden stormy intensity to the atmosphere.
‘Activity below you,’ Jerusalem told him. ‘An incursion developing through the underlayers and a pseudopod tree coming up.’
Cormac scratched his earlobe, rested his hands on the chair arms. Shortly a split began to unzip in the scaled skin extending before him, revealing a red cavity from which he felt a warmth against his face. The edges folded down, seemingly flowing inside. Then a cobra pseudopod speared into the air, then another, then three more. Amidst them a thick loop of neck appeared, which straightened to bring into view a head. This was not one of the usual pterodactyl heads, but something sleeker, lacking a crest, with a more expressive mouth and slotted pupils in its sapphire eyes. It blinked, then surged forwards and down resting a loop of neck on the rim of the cavity, so the head was now poised only a few yards away from him, its eyes directly level with his own. The other cobra pseudopods spread out like a peacock fan behind it, and Cormac wondered if he should read anything into these choreographed actions. Though the head itself was like that of a flesh-ripping predator, it did not rear threateningly above him as usual. And was it looking more expressive to enable better communication or just more convincing lies?
Cormac powered up the holoprojector. To one side, hanging in midair, appeared a dracoman, then beside it one of the by-blows this dragon sphere had created on Culclass="underline" a melding of human and sleer, a chimera, the body of a woman attached waist upwards in place of the head of something that resembled a scorpion.
‘When I talk to just one dragon sphere, do I talk to Dragon entire?’ Cormac asked.
Two cobra heads turned towards the holoprojections, the main head remained focused on Cormac. ‘No and yes,’ it replied.
Cormac sighed. ‘Do you remember part of you dying at Samarkand?’ Cormac had used a CTD to destroy one of Dragon’s four spheres there—retribution for the tens of thousands of human deaths it caused on that cold world.
‘I do not.’
Not perpetually connected, then.
‘How much of that particular sphere’s experience is your own?’
‘We are distinct entities, yet we are not. We do not share what we are not, but we share what we all are.’
‘Some AIs do this,’ Jerusalem interjected for Cormac alone. ‘A shared pool of knowledge, understanding and personality, whilst retaining individuality.’
‘But how often do they share, and do they share equally? It must be by U-space com, which, in this situation with USERs all around, means this sphere here has been isolated from the remaining other sphere for some time.’
‘Irrelevant to our present purposes’
Cormac pointed to the two holograms. ‘Why?’
‘You do not accept change swiftly enough,’ Dragon replied. ‘You’ evidently meaning the human race.
‘Adapt or die?’ Cormac wondered.
‘Precisely.’
‘When I first came to you on Aster Colora, as an ambassador, your ostensible purpose was to deliver a warning to the human race, the usual credo, smarten up your act or die, because the big boys are watching.’ Cormac glanced at the holograms. ‘The dracoman was then part of that warning. A rather unsubtle demonstration of the precariousness of human existence—demonstrating how, but for cosmic mischance, the descendants of the dinosaurs could be where we are now.’
Cormac paused and studied the ophidian face before him. He remembered all his own previous speculations about what Dragon might be, or, more importantly, what its purpose might be.
He continued, ‘After Samarkand we marked you down as a bio-engineered device sent by the Makers to observe only, but one that developed a god-complex and started interacting with us. The Maker was sent to retrieve you and, in attempting to kill it, you caused the deaths of thousands of people. Which story is true?’
‘Neither,’ Dragon replied.
‘Tell me about Jain technology,’ Cormac countered.
‘It is an ancient weapon.’
‘And its relation to the Makers?’
At this Dragon showed some agitation, swinging its head from side to side.
‘We’re getting some very odd readings from inside Dragon,’ interjected Mika.
Jerusalem added, ‘Power transferences and much shifting of internal organs.’
Cormac absorbed all that and quite concisely asked, ‘What is the relationship between Jain technology and the Makers?’
‘I must not lie to you,’ said Dragon.
‘Then don’t.’
Mika: ‘Shit! What was that?’
Jerusalem: ‘Massive contraction of some inner diaphragm—something tensing up for a blow, perhaps?’
‘Will three times break the spell?’ Cormac wondered. Out loud he asked again, ‘What is the relationship between the Makers and Jain technology?