‘Impressive,’ he said.
‘It is,’ Wade agreed. ‘The designs for such vessels have been around since before we left Earth, and improved upon considerably over that time. But, with abundant energy and gravmotors, there’s never been the need to actually build one.’
‘Until now.’
‘Yes.’
They continued down to the deforested area, where Janer observed huge open crates from which equipment was being lugged across to the ship by treaded robotic handlers. This was the big stuff that needed to be placed inside the hull before the Golem bonded the last hull-planks into place. He paused to watch this work, letting Wade get ahead of him.
‘What do you think?’ he subvocalized.
No reply from the hive mind. Janer peered down at his shoulder box, then after a moment tapped it with his finger. One of the two hornets inside toppled over. Janer removed the box, pressed an indentation along the edge to flip up the lid. He prodded both hornets with his fingertip. They were both dead. He closed the box and transferred it to his pocket.
‘Your hornets dying should not disconnect the com-link,’ he said quietly. He reached up, pulled the hivelink from his earlobe, and dropped that into his pocket too. ‘I think I’m exactly where you want me to be, but it would seem you and I are not the only ones to know that.’
He walked on after Wade.
On the planet Hive, the ancient hive mind sensed the probing presence of one of its brethren, but ignored it, aware that its own gradual fragmentation made it vulnerable to such inspection. The schisms inside it were becoming difficult to bridge or heal. It realized that this had happened to an earlier aspect of itself some time in a past immensely dim and distant. It had also happened to one of its ancient brethren a mere ten thousand years ago and—that event occurring during an ice age—all but one of the fragments of the mind concerned had died. The remaining fragment had then, over the intervening time, grown into the new mind—the youngest and most coherent of them all, and the most naive. The one now trying to make contact.
‘What are you doing?’ was the essence of the young mind’s question, though hive mind communication was not so easily amenable to human translation.
Ignoring it, the old mind considered its own future, or lack of one.
This was the way hive minds procreated: the networks of hives grew large and unwieldy, began to divide, as did the consciousness that spread across them, those portions of consciousness warring with each other as they sought self-definition, ego. In any other time the mind would have had to accept the death of self, but now it seemed the humans and their technologies offered alternatives. But were they real? Only just managing to still hold itself together, the mind could not decide.
‘You cut my link. (What are you doing?) Why did you cut my link? (What are you doing?)’ The younger mind was growing more insistent; linking itself closer in through the gaps growing in the old mind.
‘Stop interfering. Go away.’
But the young mind kept asking questions—kept probing. The old mind tried to shut out the babble as it again returned to introspection.
If it loaded itself to crystal, memcorded itself, would it truly continue? Even humans, whose technology this was, were undecided. The reifications were a prime example of this indecision. They believed the body sacred, and that there could be no real life without it. They claimed their cult was not a religion, for they did not believe in souls or an afterlife, yet the foundation of their cult was just as irrational. The mind itself badly wanted to live, but was now truly divided over the issue: both accepting the inevitability of physical death and wanting to load to crystal, yet not accepting Death in any form. The latter attitude arose from the more physical aspect of it, and the most visceral and emotional. Reality did not impinge one wit. That part of the mind railed against Death, wanted to bring it down and sting it into oblivion. It viewed Death as some entity that needed to be fought, as a personification like the Grim Reaper which, if defeated, would remove any ending to life. That part was insane, but nevertheless its presence deadlocked the mind’s more logical side. Internalized, the dispute would not end, would only become the source of a greater splitting of the mind’s mentality.
‘I know you‘re going after sprine. You’ll get yourself killed, then the AIs will restrict us further.’
Despite its concerns for its own mortality, this evinced amusement in the old mind.
‘Naive,’ it told the other.
‘No, just not senile,’ the youngster spat back.
The old mind’s amusement grew.
‘Don’t do this. Recall your agent,’ the young mind begged.
The old mind groped for internal perception, located some information in partially dislocated memory, and showed reams of code to the younger mind.
‘What? What?’
‘Child, it is the genome of the Spatterjay leech.’
The young mind retreated in confusion: ‘(What are you doing?) (What are you doing?)’
Amusement faded as the old mind perceived how very little time it had left. Isolating its less sane aspects had accelerated the process of its internal division elsewhere. And loading itself to crystal in its present state would not halt that process, for it would merely then be mirrored in crystal. It needed instead the schematic for sanity that could only be created quickly enough in the faster outside world. The two recordings—one of this self and one of the isolated self—must clearly find that schematic soon. It was unfortunate that the less sane self, which had departed first, still believed it possible to kill Death, and had created the means…
7
Hammer Whelks:
the hammer whelk is close kin to the frog whelk, but is also its chief predator. Like their kin, the large adult hammer whelks breed in the ocean trenches, releasing eggs to float up to the surface and hatch. The baby whelks, washed inshore, settle in island waters and congregate in packs. Physically, hammer whelks differ from frog whelks in two main respects. Their single foot, rather than used for leaping, terminates in a large bony hammer used for smashing shell, and they possess a tubular sucker for capturing prey. Their mouths are equally as nightmarish. Every year they decimate the frog whelk peregrination out to the depths, but, just as the frog whelks are vulnerable to the hammers, the hammer whelks themselves are vulnerable to the crushing jaws of the rhinoworm —
The day was growing oppressive, cloud hanging in a jade ceiling above them, as threatening in its aspect as was the reality of life aboard the Vignette.
‘They’re all lash-happy,’ said Silister, leaning over to whisper into Davy-bronte’s ear. ‘Take that Drooble.’ He nodded towards the foremast where the man named was tied, the wounds in his back already healing after the thrashing Orbus had earlier given him. ‘Orbus flogged him three times on that last trip, and I heard he has keelhauled him twice before that.’
‘Keep your voice down, and your head down,’ said Davy-bronte. ‘With luck we can jump ship at the Sargassum—get some other Captain to take us on.’
Silister eyed his companion. ‘We should have left with the rest of them.’
‘Yeah, but we were greedy and foolish.’
‘We weren’t greedy. We wanted what was owed us.’ Silister winced as he said it. Orbus had fed them enough seacane rum to pickle a rhinoworm, then brought them aboard on the pretext of finding them their wages, where he commenced being profligate with even more rum. The next thing they knew they were waking up from a drunken coma with the Vignette out of sight of any port. ‘You realize we’re the only normal ones aboard,’ he added.