Symbionts (35 page)

“Kuso!
Since when do I require a formal reception?”

Hagan gestured at the receiving area, where a number of Rangers were at work unloading supplies brought down aboard Dev’s ascraft. “It’s just that she felt it would be more appropriate for her to see you in a less public area.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I think you will when you see her. Would you like to talk to her now, or meet with the members of the science team first?”

“I think I’d better see Katya.” It certainly wouldn’t do to have the expeditionary force’s two senior people feuding.

“Very well.If you’d care to come with me, sir?”

Dev hesitated, then nodded. He was still sensing the distance between himself and people who’d once been close friends, comrades. Worse, he had the feeling that he was the source of that distance. How many times, recently, had he misunderstood something one of his people was trying to tell him? The trouble wasn’t with them, but with him.

And now, there was this argument with Katya.

During their last ViRcom exchange, he’d tried to catch some trace of sarcasm in her voice, or some hint of anger, but he’d detected only a neutral, slightly chilly formality, and he’d not expected her to give him an official snub upon his arrival. The ViRcom session before that had not been pleasant, a disagreement that had not degenerated into an out-and-out fight only because he’d ended up pulling rank.

Well, he thought ruefully, he’d been the one to start it by scolding her for what he’d called her “nullheaded, exhibitionist stunt” and telling her that she could have gotten herself killed. She’d bristled, then rather sharply reminded him that
she
was in command of ground operations, and that she had simply exercised her best judgment in arranging, as quickly as possible, direct communications with the DalRiss Collective.

The worst of it was, she was right. He’d gone into this project assuming that it might be weeks before they could arrange a meeting with the DalRiss, and that it might prove impossible to convince them that the Confederation was substantively different in their philosophy than the Empire.

And Katya had managed to do both within a few hours of her victory over the Imperial ground forces, simply by wandering off alone into the woods and stripping herself down. God, what had she been thinking of? There were still so many unknowns, so many complete blanks in the human understanding of this environment, this alien ecology. She could have been horribly burned… or killed by some quirk of the local ecosystem that no human yet even knew existed. Send an alien research team to Earth; put them down at some random point on the surface. How long would it take them to discover rattlesnakes or liver flukes, toxic decon dumps or the Uralsk meltdown site, high-speed maglev traffic or tidal surges during a storm in Florida? And Earth was a tame place compared to ShraRish. Most natural predators were extinct, most hazards man-made.

Come to think of it, the same could be said of ShraRish, since all of the local biology appeared to be more or less artificial. Besides, most native life wouldn’t find a human appetizing, any more than a liver fluke would be able to parasitize an Alyan.

But still, there were so damned
many
unknowns.…

The farther Dev walked into the facility, the angrier he got. Who did Katya think she was, pulling a stunt like that… then grandstanding his arrival on base, sending her number two to meet him. She could be cold as an ammonia glacier when he saw her, but damn it, he was going to tell her what he thought Let her be as cold or as officiously formal as she liked. He was going to give her one hell of a lecture.…

“She took over Kosaka’s office,” Hagan said as they walked into an outer work area, where several officers lay in open ViRcom modules, jacked into the base AI or to remotes in the field. He gestured toward an inner office door. “This is it, sir. She knows you’re coming. I’ll wait out here.”

Dev walked up to the door, which dissolved as he approached.

“Hello, Dev,” Katya said, smiling a bit ruefully as he stepped inside and the door sealed at his back. “No virtual reality to hide behind this time, huh?”

Dev tried to suppress his shock but didn’t entirely succeed. Katya’s naturist excursion had exacted a price, one that hadn’t been visible during their ViRcom exchanges. Alya A radiated much of its energy in the ultraviolet, and the ShraRish atmosphere, though it did possess a substantial ozone layer, was only three-quarters as thick as Earth’s. Even though she’d insisted that she’d been careful to find a well-shaded patch of deep woods for her meeting with the DalRiss, enough ultraviolet had been mixed with the visible sunlight scattering through the forest canopy to give her a savage sunburn.

She stood there naked. The skin that had been covered by her air mask, PLSS strap, and boots stood out startlingly white against the flaming, blistered scarlet of her burn, a color mottled in various places by the ugly white patches where dead skin was already peeling away.

“Lovely, huh?” she asked, spreading her arms and looking down at herself. She grinned as she looked up again, meeting his eyes. “Close your mouth, Dev. You’ll inhale more floating shreds of charred epidermis than are good for you.”

The lecture he’d been rehearsing was forgotten. “Good God, Katya! Are you all right?”

She gave a small grimace. “Nanomeds are taking care of it fine,” she told him. “It doesn’t hurt much at all now.”

“That’s sunburn?”

She nodded. “Exposure to the atmosphere didn’t hurt me at all. It was just uncomfortable, mostly because of the heat. But there was enough UV in the light to fry me in, oh, less than an hour.”

“Damn it, Katya. You could have—”

“First- and second-degree burns over ninety percent of my body, Dev.
Believe
me, I know. The somatechs told me in no uncertain terms that without the medical nano I would have been dead. As it was, I was in shock, only half conscious, by the time I got my strider back to the base. They had to come in and peel me out of the slot, and I think I left half of my skin on the couch. Anyway, I’ll have a complete new skin in another couple of days.” She plucked gingerly at a flaking bit of skin on her shoulder. “In the meantime, I’m shedding a lot… and it’s damned irritating wearing clothes, especially those goking, snug-fitting skinsuits and shipsuits our nanofactories are programmed to turn out.”

“And I was going to chew you out for not meeting me up at the receiving lock. What an idiot!…”

“Huh. I’d look mighty dignified greeting you up there like
this.”

“I had no idea.…”

“That,” she said primly, “is why we have virtual communications. So you can look at my electronic analogue instead of at me. Well? Are you going to say it?”

“Say what?”

“ ‘I told you so.’ ”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I’d better.”

“Wise man.” She picked up a filmy length of synthsilk draped over a chair and dropped it again. “I had this run off special, for when I absolutely have to go out in public and don’t want to scandalize the sexual conservatives, but it’s easier just to go around like this when I can. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Normally,” he said with a half grin, “I’d be delighted, though I have to admit that I don’t find overcooked meat all that appetizing. What worries me right now is what kind of precedent you’ve established. We can’t burn ourselves raw every time we want to talk to the DalRiss!”

“Don’t worry, we won’t have to,” she told him. “They’ve known all along that we need protection from their environment, just as they can’t enter ours without becoming uncomfortably cold and sluggish.”

“Ah. So we can talk to the DalRiss and still wear E-suits, at least?”

She laughed. “Of course!” She moved her hands, outlining the shape of her breasts and torso without touching the damaged skin. “This was just to get their attention.”

“Well, I never thought it would affect other species,” he said, grinning at her, “but it certainly gets mine. But since I’m sure you’d rather I didn’t do anything about it, just now, I’ll forgo any physical demonstrations.”

She quirked a smile at him. “Good. I
really
appreciate that, at least until my skin grows back. And even my skin was a small enough price to pay for what we got.”

“And that is?…”

“A fresh look at the DalRiss, things that the Imperials didn’t learn in three years of working with them. Dr. Ozaki and the other Imperial scientists are still in shock, I think. And there’s other stuff that the Imperials knew but haven’t been sharing with the rest of us. Did you know the DalRiss have a government?”

“I assumed they must have but never heard what it was like.”

“Don’t make any assumptions about the DalRiss. Nine times out of ten you’ll assume wrong. But they do have a social structure that combines government, what for lack of a better name we’re calling religion, and music, of all things. They call it something that translates as the Collective.”

“Communism?”

“Not quite. Or maybe it’s what communism was supposed to be like, before Lenin and Mao and the other early dictators got through with it. There’s certainly a sense of everybody working together toward a common good, and a common racial goal, though we haven’t quite figured out what that is, yet. The Communists wanted to create the ideal Soviet Man through applied sociology and economics. The DalRiss are moving toward a perfect DalRiss. You’ve heard the old expression, ‘better things through chemistry’?”

“In history sims.”

“Well, for the Riss, it’s better things through biology.”

“Gene tailoring.Nothing new there. Humans have been arguing about the ethics of improving their own species for five hundred years at least.”

“That’s a very small part of it. The Collective part refers to all life on the planet. The DalRiss see themselves as the caretakers of that life.”

“Um. Caretakers for who?”

“That we don’t know yet. We’re not even sure they have anything like a religion. Some of what they say sounds like belief in spirits or souls. If this was a human culture we were studying, I’d say they worshiped some kind of supreme principle or force of life. But they’re not human, and we don’t know enough yet to tell whether they’re talking about mythology, religion, or a genuine understanding of the physical world that extends into what we would call metaphysics. I’ll tell you this much, though. DalRiss biological sciences are going to transform what we think of as biology… and probably nanotechnology and our overall view of the physical world as well. Some of what they’ve been telling us about quantum mechanics, and how belief shapes the universe, rather than the other way around…”

Dev shook his head. “Sounds like I have a lot of catching up to do. You’ve done a great job, Katya. And…” He stopped, floundering for the right words.

“And?”

“And I’ve been the nullhead lately, not you. I’m just realizing that I came down here ready to chew your ass, like you were some shiny-socketed, newbie striderjack fresh out of recruit training. If we can build on what you’ve accomplished already with the DalRiss, get them to help us, then the Rebellion might actually have a chance. And it’ll all be due to you.”

Katya flushed at the compliment, her face coloring, her already reddened throat and breasts darkening slightly. “That’s nice of you to say that, Dev. But it’s been a group effort. You know that as well as I do. Or it
was.
You’ve been awfully distant lately.”

Jerkily, he nodded, accepting the blame and the implied criticism. “You’re right, of course. I’m beginning to realize that, too. But… it’s like I don’t fit anymore. I want to, but I simply don’t.”

“Because of the Xenolink?”

“I think so. It must be. I don’t know what else could have… changed me so much. Changed the way I think and feel. I’ve always had some trouble getting close to people. Now, well, it’s as though I have nothing in common with them at all.”

Katya crossed the room to lay her hand on his shoulder. “Devis, if you can look at me the way I look right now, tatters and all, and still think of, um, that ‘physical demonstration’ you mentioned a moment ago, I’d say you’re still human. And male. And very much a part of the human species.”

“I suppose so. It doesn’t say anything about my sanity, though.”

She arched one eyebrow. “I’ll assume that you’re not talking about your sanity as it relates to your relationship with
me.
We do still have a relationship, don’t we?”

“It’s changed.”

“I know. People change. It doesn’t mean they’re… turning into something else.”

“I’ve felt like I’ve been drifting apart from you, too. But… well, out of everybody I’ve ever known, Katya, you’re the one I want most to hold on to.”

She leaned forward, offering her lips. He kissed her for a long, lingering moment. As he drew back, he found himself thinking that, despite everything, it was Katya who was most helping him cling to his humanity just now. The Xenolink had… not created, exactly, but unleashed something inside that vaguely shaped center of existence he thought of as self, something very much larger than he was, and far stronger. It…
wanted
things, things that he could not provide.

Katya was damned near his only reason for holding the thing, the monster, at bay.

“I’m glad your lips didn’t burn,” he told her.

“Let’s hear it for Mark VII adjustable polynanoform, full-face breathing masks. We can try something a little closer in another day or two.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“Right now, come on. We have a staff meeting scheduled to fill you in on what’s been going on down here. And tomorrow, at first light, a delegation of the DalRiss is going to be here. We all have to meet them.”

He eyed her burned skin doubtfully. “That doesn’t include you, too, I hope. You can’t go out again like
that.”

“I’m afraid it does. But by tomorrow, I ought to be a lot less tender, enough so that I can slip into an E-suit, at least. I’ll manage.”

“Is this some sort of diplomatic get-together with the DalRiss?”

“More than that. We’ve told them you were coming. I was right, by the way. They
do
remember you, Dev. You specifically. They’re coming tomorrow just to see you.”