“Indeed,” she replied. “They are the larger of the two species, are they not? The ones that call themselves the kzin? But they are not the issue that most concerns the Hindmost, Little Talker, nor me. It is these… humans. Perhaps you recognize their morphological type.”
Diplomat fluted confusion, then fell silent as more data flowed across his screens. He shuddered, and his own forked left tongue touched his lip-fingers repeatedly. He stopped dead, tonguing the left screen to freeze mode.
Ah, Guardian thought. The hoof strikes home.
Diplomat wailed a sudden musical siren of alarm.
Guardian's heads looked at one another again in the puppeteer expression of humor. “I was wondering,” she softly sang to Diplomat, who was making sounds like a demented calliope, “when you would make the connection.”
Diplomat swiftly wrapped his necks around his body, still keening in fear. The screens froze and then blanked for lack of an operator.
“These… humans are clearly Pak breeders, though they do appear different in many ways.” Guardian reached over with a long neck into her own medical bag, and removed a hypospray of sedative.
Guardian considered the petite puppeteer quivering before her. His necks were tucked so tightly around his body that he looked like a foal's plaything.
She swallowed in sequence, considering. Despite appearances, this cowardly little Diplomat had saved an entire puppeteer colony world from destruction by the Q'rynmoi. Guardian knew of few of her caste Herdmates who were willing to face the personal dangers that Diplomat had. It was a difficult story to believe, however, seeing him in this state.
It was said by the Hindmost's psychists that Diplomat's corrective mindsculpting after that event had been incomplete; they had advised more memory flensing before releasing him to active status.
A Hindmost's Command remained exactly that, however. The Deepest Council had concurred.
She considered that perhaps there was more to this delicate little talker than met her own Guardian eyes. She couldn't put her lips quite on it, but there was something different. Something almost brave, despite his periodic catatonic states and whining manner. He would clearly need her help to complete this mission, as well as the reverse.
“You remember the Pak, my little Diplomat, don't you?” She spoke almost conversationally as she calmly injected the near catatonic puppeteer in the right neck. The hypospray made a hissing sound, loud in the tiny lifebubble. Guardian made adjustments to the ventilation system, flushing out Diplomat's fear pheromones with fresh, Herd-conditioned air. Diplomat stopped screaming, trembled for a moment and then seemed to fall asleep. She tightened his forceweb harness remotely.
Guardian looked at her own heads again. “Yes. The Pak are not extinct, after all. Despite the efforts of three sentient races and ten thousand years of effort.” She deopaqued a small portion of the hull directly in front of her console, made a few further course corrections.
Guardian settled back into her own forceweb harness and whistled a duet with herself softly. The tune soothed her, and reminded the soldier puppeteer of her first days in crèche.
It was a marching song, ancient beyond measure. The music was said to be common when Guardian's ancestors had led entire herds of Diplomat's forebears to new grazing grounds with the turn in seasons. The arpeggios sang volumes about order, confidence, and glowing success.
After a few moments, she reached over with a head, and fondly patted the back of the sleeping puppeteer next to her.
“Two warrior races,” she sang quietly. Forked tongues flicked over both sets of lip-fingers. “Two threats to the security of the Race.” Warrior paused, watching their blinking course plot intently on the hullscreen.
“Or perhaps three,” she added, after reflection.
The Outsider ship grew still larger as the Wisdom of Retreat approached rendezvous.
CHAPTER FOUR
In its youth, the universe was very different. They Who Passed observed the strange fresh wilderness through a window less than an atom wide.
Gravity had made its rule known over vast clouds of gas and dust. Many had coalesced, contracted, and at last collapsed. The gravity-squeezed gas became hotter and hotter, atoms thrusting together in the rough romance of nuclear reactions, releasing energy and transmuting elements. These glowing clouds became hot youthful stars of the first stellar generation, their fusion fires spendthrift with the bounty of gravity's first clasp.
Still, that initial blaze of starlight was but a dim reminder of the first moments of creation, when all of reality had been hotter by many orders of magnitude.
Clouds of glowing gas, hot young suns set within them like jewels in oil. Twists and spirals of electromagnetic fields. Ions and charged particles streaked along paths appointed by the fresh laws of this space-time continuum. The early days.
Such were the alien vistas observed by They Who Pass, peering through the distorted interdimensional windows of the cosmic strings.
The minds suspended in the other universe were fascinated, in their way, with this strange space-time continuum. They wished to study and examine these new laws roughly ruling the brawling new universe, as if in haste.
But how? They Who Pass were ironically named; they could not pass, through the tortured windows between realities, into such an exotic and alien place. Even if such an act were possible, the laws of existence in the other universe were sufficiently different to make their own survival improbable. But complex data had passed from within the alien universe into their own. Surely the reciprocal would be found to be the case as well.
They Who Pass knew that Mind was only a sufficiently complex pattern of information. Sentience would inevitably arise in such patterns, regardless of the embedding medium and environment.
Though they themselves could not physically traverse their atom-thin window between universes, the entities knew that there were ways in which patterns could be imposed from afar. Near one of the cosmic strings within the new universe, they observed a vast cloud of charged gases, with filigrees of glowing electromagnetic fields running throughout.
Perfect for their purposes.
By something very like induction, yet much more potent, They Who Pass reached through the distorted crack into this reality. Stark pattern imposed on the charged cloud. A structure wrestled into shape — striations of virulent light and murky dust, threads of magnetic fields and inductive heating. Imbalances of electromagnetic force flexed within the cloud, shoving clots of dust and gouts of prickly gas within the structure.
The glowing cloud reacted as They Who Pass challenged it from afar. Networks of dusky plasma sparkled, pinching into new shapes.
The cloud moved, learned, grew. Primitive reflexes drank in new patterns beamed through the twisting aperture of the cosmic string. The cloud stored information, manipulated data, and sent it back through the window between realities to They Who Pass. The cloud finally copied itself into fresh gas clouds, imposed its own patterns in response to the new universe around it.
Such clouds acted like living things. Communication and complexity among the clouds increased exponentially as time unspooled. They Who Pass nudged and directed, moving the plasma clouds toward more capacity and capability.
Eventually, these minds built of hot plasma and cold dust awoke to sentience.
They Who Pass now had intelligent agents within the new universe, semi-autonomous explorers ready to travel throughout the strange reality and report back what they found, The clouds developed a society, a culture, as they spread throughout the new universe, unraveling basic laws. They roved the spaces around dead suns, ventured near blazing new-birthed stars.